Steve Jobs

This time the rumors weren't exaggerated.

My dad called me while I was boarding my plane to San Francisco to tell me that Steve died. It was the right way to get bad news.

Steve taught us that the things we make reflect the people we are. He taught us to care deeply about the things we do, and the people those things impact. He brought craftsmanship to world-scale production.

Steve Jobs made me a better person. He made a lot of my friends better people. And he helped us find each other and come together around a set of values that may have been forgotten without him.

The Pursuit of Big Excellence

The infinite scalability of the internet means the "pursuit of excellence" and the "pursuit of bigness" are now overlapping.

In the past it was a choice.

The artists and artisans pursued excellence that satisfied fewer people more deeply. They refined their craft their whole lives. They were personal, knowing their customers and respecting that relationship. They told stories – both in person and through their products – and people listened. Their work was designed and redesigned. Built, destroyed, and built again, but better this time.

The businesses chose the pursuit of bigness. Mass-produced products that filled the needs of society, but not the wants. Their work didn't touch people. They didn't excite or delight. These companies created to fill, not nourishing. A bag of pretzels in the airport, not a peach in the park last Summer.

Virtual services and products scale to the hundreds of millions nearly instantly. You can iterate at mass-scale for free. A better product replaces a predecessor far more quickly than before. The focus isn't on maximizing profits from the supply chain, but on creating delightful experiences. And loyalty is won through excellence, not size.

 

Thoughts on Life and Happiness

Learn weird skills – get caught on a flying trapeze, make a mess learning to juggle apples and oranges in your kitchen with a friend, take your grandparents curling at an ice rink, go rock climbing – Memories matter more than anything else you can do.

Be generous to everyone. Give important things away to friends; they'll always remember you for it. See the infinite potential in everyone you meet. Ask for help more than you offer advice. People love to offer advice, but are usually uncomfortable asking for it. You'll help balance the world. 

Remember that any two people can be perfect together, as long as both people are focused on each other happy. Don't believe nonsense about anyone being out of your league. Actively pursue people who excite you, and ignore people who don't see what you do. People see things differently. While you're thinking "But she's chewing with her mouth open!" he's thinking, "Waking up next to her makes me forget my dreams."

Help people take away the stressful and boring parts of their days, and help them fill that time with things that make them smile uncontrollably. Take friends to places with lots of sunshine and ocean; give them a zen moment. Create stories. Listen to stories. Meet people from all over the world and discover what they care about. Compulsively offer help to people you don't know, and actively do things today that you planned to do later. Stay in shape, eat fresh vegetables, and cook with people who love food more than you do. Talk to old people who lived great lives, they'll inspire you.

Thoughts on Money and Wealth

As a fiscal conservative, I've enjoyed a number of arguments with more liberal-leaning friends, and the word "fair" comes up too often when talking about wealth distribution. There's a fundamental misconception that money is taken. Let me clear this up:

The money you have is an IOU from Society.

If you are rich, it's because other members of society have given you their wealth in exchange for something you gave them. Money is another form of social value. When you generate value for others, they give you money. When you want value from society, you pay money. Here's the beautiful part: You give less money than the value you receive when you buy something (or else you wouldn't purchase) and you gain more money than the value you assign to the work you sell (or else you wouldn't do the work.) In this system, everyone wins. Social value is created where there was none before.

Unfortunately, when you create a very large amount of value for society, people who have not created value start to accuse you of theft. Theft is when you take more value than you create, or mooch off of someone else's value. Ironically, this is usually how these accusers acquire their wealth. I believe these people should be ignored and given zero consideration, as they keep you from helping greater society.

One thing to note: societal values are not the same as personal values. You may really love small painted coins, but if the members of society loves them less than you, they'll pay you less than you feel they are worth. That is not the fault of society, it is the fault of the individual. When you make or do things that people want, they'll support you and you can support them back.

Capitalism is a win-win system, and people who are wealthy from legitimate value creation should be honored, not attacked.

[Update from 2012: While in the grand scheme I haven't changed my views here, there are a number of caveats. The economy, like all complex systems, is nuanced and subject to manipulation by those in power. I'm far more liberal than I used to be.]

Yerba Mate

I'd been a tea fanatic for a while when a friend introduced me to Yerba Mate.

She had spent a semester abroad in Argentina and told me stories of families and friends sitting together with an unusual wooden cup, a metal straw, and a thermos of hot water. The host would carefully prepare the tea for everyone, taste it to make sure it was right, and pass it on before joining in on the conversation. They would drink mate and talk for hours on end, day after day.

When she left for the airport after visiting, my friend gave me her wooden mate cup from Argentina. It looks hand-carved, it smells wonderful, and it adds a perfect, subtle flavor to tea. It is far more interesting than any store-bought mug could have be, but eventually nature caught up. Today, months later, my friend's cup started leaking and I have to retire it.

I no longer know the friend who gave me the cup. But given the chance to go back and start over, I'd change nothing about meeting her, the conversations we had, or the short time I spent with her.

There's a strange romanticism about losing something while it's still new and amazing. Losing something before the flawed reality catches you and you can no longer see the infinite potential it once had.
I could easily buy a more sturdy replacement cup, but I'm going to take the time to find another wooden one. If I'm lucky maybe this one will last forever.

Semi-developed Thoughts

I'm really bad at fully developing ideas. These are a bunch of snippets of things that I've written down lately. They've rattled in my head, but never really got to that satisfying point we call insight, but maybe they'll be a good starting point for someone else to figure out. 

Identity Diversification

It's funny how you hear a lot about diversification of your assets to minimize risk, but you never hear about diversifying your passions for the same reasons. If you tie your identity to one project, social group, girlfriend, or boyfriend, you risk becoming lost when that thing changes or falls apart. If you're involved and passionate about a number of different things, you're much more secure in your life and happiness. This relates well to work-life balance.

Clouds on planes look like fantastic icebergs

They're really beautiful - more than almost anything I've seen in nature - yet we rarely care enough to look. Maybe we're jaded because flying 600 mph in a metal tube is normal now, but those vistas are incredible and I wish I could see those views more.

Facebook Friends

I have over 900 Facebook friends, but I don't feel a bit more understood. My mom once told me that you will be able to count the true friends you have in your life on one hand. That depressed the hell out of me, and I don't think it's true. But I think it's really close.

Make Life like a Great Game

People love clear indications of progress and failure. The most addicting part of a game is working toward a clear and measurable goal. Games are competitive with defined measures for success. Why aren't work and real life designed like this? Why don't we explore introducing more competition and feedback into education?

Hedging Conversation

I've noticed we hedge our conversations to avoid insulting people. We use qualifiers and shift attribution to avoid blame. I wish we had a higher tolerance for blunt criticism. Things like "your work is bad" and "why did you do it like that?" shouldn't result in insult or defensiveness. Why not just look into the work and trying to improve it? I noticed this kind of blunt criticism a lot in Silicon Valley, and I loved it because it made me much better.

Thinking and Time

To think and be present all the time is impossible, but avoiding routine is so rewarding. Think back to summer camp, and how it felt like it was as long as the school year because you were always so involved. Think about that office job you had, and how little of it you really remember. Think about dates you've gone on with a person you fell in love with, and how all the details come alive even years later.

People Who Write Journals

She talked about life in analogies to lightning storms and 4-leaf clovers. The most interesting people I've ever met have all kept some kind of a journal.

Serendipity

I this wrote for myself a month ago. Heavily edited to protect the guilty.

Serendipity. Like a butterfly that pauses on your shoulder on a beautiful day;  that time you catch a shooting star or a sky-shattering bolt of lighting; the 4-leaf clover that appears when you're laying in the grass; catching the clock as it turns 11:11; or the smile a stranger flashes at you when you can use it the most.

I've learned so much these past 4 days. I learned that perfection exists and you should obsess over it. We can't accept anything less. I learned that outwardly and shamelessly being who you are is an unbelievably attractive trait – especially when you're not cool. I learned how to make great meals on the cheap and dirty. I learned that quality comes from the nuanced parts of everything – jokes, business, food, friendship – and that the big-picture stuff is easy if you get the small things right.

Me at 20

I will begin eating string cheese in the grocery store before I pay for it. I'm more of a roller-coaster than a rock. I believe it's okay to romanticize things every once in a while to give yourself hope. I think that a lot of love is seeing the infinite potential in somebody. An ideal workplace lets me spend time with people who are much smarter, more ambitious, harder working, and funnier than I am. I believe discomfort is the quickest path to learning. I think the difference between kindness and niceness is sincerity, and I'd like to spend more time with kind people and less time simply being nice.

That's about everything I know so far.

Producers versus consumers

At least 90% of our population are consumers. They take the work of others and get sharp bursts of excitement and pleasure from those creations. But these moments are short lived.

The others are producers. They question the ways things are, devote their lives to solving problems, answering critics, and creating the things we all use and interact with every day. Their excitement and pleasure comes slowly over time, but it never fades and only gets stronger as they create more and more.