“Self-sufficiency – individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own. If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn’t wait for a BD person to become available. You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn’t wait for a designer to become available. You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn’t wait for a content writer.”

- Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal

I said, since these are early adopters, one of these people is going to be the mayor of Flickr–you never know. Georgina (George) Oates, an early employee of Flickr, and I greeted everyone who came into the instant messaging conversations or posted on the site. We said, “Oh you know, I notice you’re into Norwegian Metal and I noticed you live in Pittsburgh–here’s another person from Pittsburgh. Communities take on the kind of character of a party at the outset and you need to be a good host.

- From an interview with Adam Peneberg in Fast Company

Yeah, that is correct. I actually initially used the word PROGRESS. I felt like if Obama were elected, then he would shift what was the status quo, and then that would be progress. I did the poster without any input from the campaign—I just did it as a grassroots thing. I figured the campaign wouldn’t want my help because I’m too controversial, kind of like the [Louis] Farrakhan endorsement, where they said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” But when I heard that they did like the image, my friend who was sort of the liaison said, “They love the image, but they really like the word HOPE or CHANGE better. . . .” I was told that progress leads to progressive, which leads to socialism. So I chose hope as the word, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that people are complacent and apathetic when they’re hopeless, and so hope leads to action. It’s also hard to be anti-hope. It’s one of those bulletproof things.

From an interview with Shepard and Iggy Pop in Interview Magazine

“Can we do the job of those 6 parts with just one?” – Objectified

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry – my lost careers were being a writer, artist or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all. There’s no money in poetry, but then again, there’s no poetry in money either.

- Caterina Fake

Apple builds Beautiful, Photojojo builds Fun, Billykirk builds Handemade, 37 Signals builds Simple, BestMadeCo builds Adventure and Heritage, WholeFoods builds Health.

Microsoft builds software, Dell builds computers, Canon builds cameras, Salesforce builds CRMs, Safeway builds grocery stores.

If you build an adjective you can shift what you describe, you can grow, and you have fans not customers. If you build a noun you get competitors, you get backlash with change, you get worry, your definition rarely moves.

Adjectives are movements by their descriptive nature. Nouns are purpose fillers.

Is it really that obvious which type of niche to choose?

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

- Mark Twain

Dan Chaon writes a first draft on color-coded note cards he buys at Office Max. Ideas for his books come to him as images and phrases rather than plots, characters or settings, he says. He begins by jotting down imagery, with no back story in mind. He keeps turning the images over in his mind until characters and themes emerge.

His most recent novel, “Await Your Reply,” which has three interlocking narratives about identity theft, started out as scattered pictures of a lighthouse on a prairie, a car driving into the arctic tundra under a midnight sun and a boy and his father driving to the hospital at night with the boy’s severed hand, resting on ice. He described each scene on a card, then began fleshing out the plotlines, alternating among blue, pink and green cards when he moved between narratives.

Wikipedia: Dan Chaon

When he’s in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he’s reading a book by someone else.

Other times, when he’s re-reading a bit of dialogue or trying to tweak a character’s voice, he’ll reduce the computer font to eight-point Times New Roman. “It forces me to peer at the words and examine why they’re there,” Mr. McCann wrote in an email message.

Changing the way the words look physically gives him more critical distance, he says.

Wikipedia: Column McCann

To write “Lowboy,” which takes place in the New York City subway, Brooklyn-based novelist John Wray rode trains all over the city while pecking out a first draft on his laptop computer. He mainly rode the F, C and B trains, though “there was a time when I was really into the G,” he says. He often sat in a corner near the conductor’s booth with his headphones on. He worked like this, often for six hours a day, for nearly a year.

Granta Best of Young American Novelists: John Wray

Read the Full WSJ Article…

“How do you get those uneven edges in your illustrations?”
“I draw them, unevenly.”

“What’s the best way to get this to look like it’s cut out of paper?”
“Cut it out of paper.”

“What typeface are you using? It looks so much like handwriting.”
“That’s my handwriting.”

These are all real questions I’ve been asked by folks. At lectures, in class, over email. It makes me feel like I’m in the business of serving up plain, glaring answers.

“Care to shed some enlightenment, Frank?”
“Hm, I don’t know. How about a big pile of obvious?”

Sorry folks, the most evident way of doing something is typically the way that I do it. No secret labs, no special tools, no computer gee-whizzery…

Read the rest: Faking It
Also great by Frank: Why vs. How

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

- William Morris