“I think you need to be a little in love—not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps—but to be in love with the reality of your own life in order to produce beautiful and meaningful and intelligent things creatively.”
Maria Popova, from this fantastic interview on The Great Discontent
“Great art is when you come across an object and you have a fundamental, personal, one-on-one relationship with it, and you understand something you didn’t already understand about what it means to be alive. That’s why people with loads of money want to possess it. That’s why it’s worth so much fucking money. But it isn’t. They want to possess it. But they can’t. Throw money at art, you get nothing back. You die.”

—Damien Hirst

(via ubuwaits)

“What I am interested in seeing (and making) is a synthesis of concept and form, of meaning and realization, of the syntactic and the semantic. I want to see work where the meaning is reinforced by the form, and the form is reinforced by the meaning.”
Mitch Goldstein on form
“[N]o one has time for nuance. I am trying to bring that back a little bit. That comes back to a certain formality and a certain reserve. I don’t know if I’ll succeed at it, but nuance is something that I think about. No one takes time to contemplate words and the meaning of words. When you send a text, sometimes they’re not even words, just letters and abbreviations. But there was a time when you really chose your words carefully, and almost everything had some sort of double meaning, and when you sent flowers to someone, certain flowers meant something…”
Tom Ford on the loss of mystery and a desire for nuance.
“Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this never ending non-stop distraction, addles the brain and prevents us from being productive. Not quite. The danger is not distraction, the danger is the ability to hide.”

—Seth Godin on being lost in a digital world.

Having inboxes sitting there with new information all the time lets us hide from the work that really matters. How much of the time that we spend networking, connecting, and responding is really just a way to stop us from the real work? Seth goes on:

Ten years ago, no one was lost in this world. You had to play dungeons and dragons in a storm pipe to do that. Now there are millions and millions of us busy polishing our connections, reaching out, reacting, responding and hiding. What happens to your productivity (and your fear) when you turn it off for a while?

A scene towards the end of Woody Allen’s (beautifully shot) Manhattan where Woody’s character asks what makes life worth living.

Me? My family makes life worth living. My friends make life worth living. Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, a hot cup of coffee in the morning, books by Rob Bell and Donald Miller, a good home cooked meal shared with loved-ones, sunsets, unexpected smiles, messy sketchbooks, nature, conversations, Jesus…

“Within the first year or two of working as a professional designer, you will question if you want to do this any more. You will get beat up and overworked, you will produce a giant pile of work that you are not proud of. You will be lucky if you get out of the first year with a feeling of pride in or ownership of anything you make. You will look back after the first year and not remember most of what kept you busy. You will make work that you question the use of, and you will do things that make you feel like a cog in some sort of awful, wasteful machine. There will be times that you will be just merely a tool for someone else. You will question what all this work is for and you will need to re-convince yourself at some point as to whether or not you love this practice.”

Well said, Frank, well said.

I loved Frank Chimero’s insightful piece on the quarter-life of the designer. I love it because I know what’s he’s talking about. I’ve been there. I’m not even out of school yet and I wonder if it’s all worth it. If I’ve ever created anything meaningful or worthy or something I’ll be proud of years from now.

I’m at an interesting transition period in my design career. I’m gearing up to start my last year of school. I’m working as designer at an international record label working on some big-name projects. I need to start thinking about what comes next. Where do I want to live. What kind of work do I want to produce after I’m out of school. I look at my portfolio now and I’m not sure I’m proud of anything in it and I wonder if I even have any talent in this field at all. It’s scary.

But like Frank, I always come back to it. And as I’m in the middle of this transition from student to professional, I’m nervous and excited and ready to grow and expand and fall in love with design all over again.

“Simplicity isn’t a goal or an end result. Simplicity is a means to an end, with the ultimate destination being a remarkable life focused on what matters most to you. You don’t practice simplicity for simplicity’s sake, you practice simplicity to clear the distractions that get in the way of the life you desire.”
Practicing Simple Living

The politics of happiness

bobulate:

A think tank and environmental organization in Finland published a manifesto on happiness (Finnish), but really it’s on managing time, public space, and doing meaningful work:

Time is a unique resource: it cannot be stored. We all have it, but most of us have too little of it. We say that it’s important to be able to make one’s own decisions concerning how to use our free time. The significance of free time has grown in the past two decades. At the same time, the issue of free time is paradoxical. For a busy person, free time may be the key to happiness, but happiness can equally easily be lost in not having anything to do.

But it’s not easy:

The politics of happiness is not only a matter of balancing work and free time, and initiatives such as the four-day work week or civic salary do not automatically resolve the problems we have regarding our use of time. People are often performance-oriented even in their free time. Our free time is also diminished by growing distances between home, the workplace and services, not to mention the ecological effects of increasing distances. Free time easily becomes subordinated to work and is spent on recharging one’s battery.

Scheduling “nothing” is an acute a warning perhaps as scheduling “something.” Time is an unique resource, a pause, a silence; we store it, measure it, accumulate it, but it’s not being saved for tomorrow. All you have is what you choose today.

[via]

In a lot of the reading I’ve done, I’ve noticed a strange correlation between time and happiness, but it make sense. I’m happiest when I’m spending my time doing something that is meaningful to me, whether that means spending it with people I love, working on projects that are important to me, and even those times where I’m just laying on my bed, face up, doing nothing. We can all be happier if we simply reorganize our time.

Frank Chimero points me towards this terrific video from Daniel Pink on economic incentives and producing thoughtful work. In addition to being a great talk, it’s also a delightful presentation that’s just plain fun to watch.

The topics discussed here go right along with some of things I’ve been writing about lately regarding producing meaningful work, bringing light to a dark world through art, and making the world a better place and fits right in with the goal of this blog which is “to make people happy on the internet.”

Less, but Better (Or, how to make time for meaningful work)

So I read this article this morning from Unclutterer on living the life you want and it really resonated with a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.

You should go read it.

This paragraph really struck a chord with me:

When was the last time you sat down and asked yourself what you really want from life? What makes you happy? What matters — really matters — to you? Maybe it is home ownership and 2.1 children that you want? Or, maybe instead of the suburban life, you would rather travel the world on your own and work only when you need a little cash?

What do you actually enjoy doing? What inspires you?

As I’ve mentioned multiple times the past few months, this has easily been the busiest season of my life (This is the last week of busiest semester of college I’ve even been though) and this got me thinking about all sort of topics like the importance of keeping busy versus the importance of rest, and how to focus your time and attention to get things done.

There was something about that busyness that drove me towards simplification. As I found myself getting to bed later and later, finding it harder and harder to get up each morning, and drinking more and more cups of coffee, I realized I need to make some changes because it was physically impossible to keep up at this pace and I was dangerously close to burning out.

So I asked myself those very questions over and over. What kind of life do I want? What matters to me? What do I want to do? And I concluded that in the end, I really just want to make meaningful creative work. I want to work on things that I’m immensely passionate about. When I can clearly define what’s most important to me, nothing else matters and I can start making changes to make sure the things I say are important get the time and attention they deserve.

Because you can easily say that family is most important. Or friends. Or some cause. But would your calendar reflect that? If we tracked how you spent your time, how much time are you spending doing things with and for your family or friends or that cause? I bet if we looked at how your time was spent to gauge what was most important to you, we’d think Facebook was the most important part of your life.

I know it sounds like I’m getting all self-help with this “be-a-better-you” crap, but really, I think this is all part of the creative process. I’d argue things like this will help you make the really cool stuff you’ve always wanted to create more than a blog of design tips and tricks.

My favorite design maxim; the one I refer to more than any other, is from the industrial designer Deiter Rams who says “less, but better.” To me, that’s the key to good design. And, ironically, it’s probably also the key to good living. Just like in the design process, you remove all the unnecessary elements, in life you need to remove everything that doesn’t matter so you can focus on the few things that do so you can start living that life you envision and producing the work you want to.

So spend time with friends and family. Work on things that are meaningful and important to you. Go take a walk. Read a good book. You’ll work will be better. You’ll feel better. It worked for me.

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