To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea - “cruising,” it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Men who ache allover for tidiness and compactness in their lives often find relief for their pain in the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat at anchor in a sheltered cove. Here the sprawling panoply of The Home is compressed in orderly miniature and liquid delirium, suspended between the bottom of the sea and the top of the sky, ready to move on in the morning by the miracle of canvas and the witchcraft of rope.
For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
In Holland, we have two words for design. One is vormgeving; in German formgeben. And the other word is ontwerpen; in German entwurf. In the Anglo-Saxon language there’s only one word for design, which is design. That is something you should work out. Vormgeving is more to make things look nice. So for instance, packaging for a perfume or for chocolate in order to make things fashionable, obsolete and therefore bad for society because we don’t really need it. While ontwerpe means, and the Anglo-saxon word, but its stronger, means engineering. That means you as a person try to invent a new thing—which is intelligent, which is clever, and which will have a long-life. And that’s called stylistic durability. It means you can use it for a long time.
(Source: banquethall, via ubuwaits)
I am troubled by the devaluing of the word ‘design’. I find myself now being somewhat embarrassed to be called a designer. In fact I prefer the German term, Gestalt-Ingenieur.
Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worthwhile?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.
What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy, a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a shrinking middle class. The same devil’s bargain stabilizes the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives—its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace autonomy and its job security—in return for acquiescing to the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly, the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise.
To be a good mathematician, or a good gambler, or good at anything, you must be a good guesser.
The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much that falls between the courses.
[…a] goal of this course is to reveal the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area, you are not apt to use information that is relevant but which occurred in another course.
A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too “easy”. When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth—otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.
What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience, scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few mathematicians and social scientists do, too.
Most serious thought in our time deals with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other.
Susan Sontag, The Anthropologist as Hero
And so our writers parse Rebecca Black and our young men, listless and well-heeled, shop for meaning in the fashion and facial hair of their fathers and grandfathers.
As a writer and a thinker, and maybe as a human, I am critical to a fault. All too many of my efforts, imaginings, and relationships have collapsed under the weight of punishing over-analysis and self-defeat.
A younger me drew pride from impossible standards, viewing them as demonstrations of my (surely considerable) abilities. But this was no more than a convenient lie with which to buffer myself from criticism and failure.
To be paralyzed by an obsession with perfection is an abscess of vanity. This life is but a draft of a draft, and I have been a small-minded, fearful boy. We are born to make and in the end, the makings are all that matter.
So forget yourself in work and build, build like a demon, fashioning a temple of your wastebasket, stacking each crumpled, insufficient effort so the next might sit a little higher and that one day their pinnacle, supported by the entirety of your labor, will tower high above the rim, visible for miles.
The trick is never in building the best possible implementation — the trick is in building the implementation that will provide the best possible future.
Guy English, Regarding Simplicity (via Buzz)
Guy’s argument is being made within the context of software development, but I believe is equally applicable to all work.
Restated somewhat differently: Abandon perfection for generativity. Perfection is without your grasp, but collective greatness is not. To do this, you must understand the interconnected, cumulative nature of your (and all) work and you must build with the specific intent of benefitting your future self (and posterity in general.)
I have always been convinced of my genius, my greatness, my originality. But they are only words. I sought freedom. And so I am free to sail endlessly back and forth across the empty sea and read books I could more easily have read on land. I thought I would make the sea my home as no man ever has. Nonsense. I would become the greatest solo sailor the world has known. Foolishness. I came to sea to find solitude and grandeur and victory. Instead I have myriad petty breakage and despair and defeat. My vision of myself has formed my life. I have benefited by it, and now I suffer from it. Through a process of self-deception for twenty years, I am become a victim of my grandiloquent dreams.
