The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not.
– Art director Linds Redding in a classic viral essay about his 30 years in advertising. Following his cancer diagnosis, Redding passed away at the age of 52.
Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again. Winnie the Pooh said, “I always get to where I am going by walking away from where I have been.” What I’m doing here now on this site has a lot to do with where I have been.
I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.
A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.
When you experience something in life–and as much as I’ve experienced in the game of basketball–the beautiful part of it for me is to give back. You don’t experience things to keep. You experience it to give it back.
– Basketball great Teresa Weatherspoon on what she brought from her start as a player in the inaugural season of the WNBA to coaching today.
Lately I’ve noticed a clear and consistent pulse of an old feeling I haven’t had for a long time: I want to share more of how I think, what I learn, and what I like online. That is, I want to give it back. But not on cookie-cutter content platforms where we’ve all signed up to work a data entry job feeding an LLM. On my own webpages, on my own domain names, with my own code. Let’s do this.