Jony Ive constantly refers to ideas as "fragile beings". There is not a single
interview in which he does not bring up this "fragile" word. That has been stuck
with me ever since. And we have to understand how private he is. In this modern
age, his firm's webpage only shows a pretty bear walking over the LoveFrom logo
and out of the screen.
I think about this fragility and the private nature of Ive and every single
creative person ever. To me they go hand in hand. And think about it, if ideas
are fragile, we must keep them private and nurture them so they grow. A fragile
idea has to first become something and then be shared others. It has to become
something first. This makes me remember maestro Murakami as he writes in the
introduction of "Absolutely on Music":
Creative people have to be fundamentally egoistic. This may sound pompous, but
it happens to be the truth. People who live their lives watching what goes on
around them, trying not to make waves, and looking for the easy compromise are
not going to be able to do creative work, whatever their field. To build
something where there was nothing requires deep individual concentration, and
in most cases that kind of concentration occurs in a place unrelated to
cooperation with others, a place we might even call dämonisch.
It is brilliant. And I fundamentally believe in this. Yet, I also remember
Hamming's "You and Your Research" as he says:
[The one] who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but
[they] also occasionally get clues as to what the world is and what might be
important.
Hamming also says in the same speech that:
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great
scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts
and had the courage to pursue them. For example, Einstein, somewhere around 12
or 14, asked himself the question, “What would a light wave look like if I
went with the velocity of light to look at it?”
It is also true for Einstein that he had a decade exercising a career that did
not mean to him anything, and as to how mundane he found it, it gave him the
space to work on his ideas. Fragile ideas must grow somewhere.
I have had plenty of thoughts, sharing a very new idea is always bound to be
crushed by others. And I see it as logical. Every new idea is built upon many
different previous works. Doing so the impact of a new idea is perhaps in the
range of a percent to less than one percent of change to the previous works.
Therefore, a new idea has to be preserved in isolation and only be trusted to
the minds of a few who can nurture it, and build upon it, until the time the
impact grows and the difference as well. Then the new idea is ready to be made
public.
If you get the single ideas of Engelbart's work, they don't mean that much. When
you connect them, it becomes the deepest of revolutions. Could this work be
carried in public? Of course not. Could it be done in an individual's isolation?
Hardly. But could it be carried out by a team of only geniuses, who could
nurture it? It did. Could Ive single handedly do all the design work at Apple?
never. But with a team of super private geniuses? Yes.
Fragile ideas must be grown in isolation, in safe places.