Don’t Expect Applause
Seth Godin:
If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it’s no longer your work—the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.
Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn’t deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer your forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. But we don’t blame the nail for breaking the hammer or the water for leaking from the pot. They are part of the system, just as the market embracing your product is part of marketing.
I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.
Haruki Murakami (via lprecords)
But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.” Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being.
Jon Gertner, Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle (via rachelmercer)
The nie nie zu (the “crush-crush tribe”) are so named because they go into supermarkets and take out their frustration by standing in the aisles crushing packets of instant noodles.
Who knew China was tribal? The diversification of Chinese society has seen a flowering of a new vocabulary. Perhaps most fascinating has been the division of people into tribes (zu in Mandarin). (via theeconomist)
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that’s odd, isn’t it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
From The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. (via lprecords)
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
John Stienbeck, on how nothing good gets away. (via rachelmercer)
