Brandon James Scott

Abe Burmeister of Outlier gives an inspiring talk at PSFK. In short:

• Have an idea.
• Make it.
• Put it online.
• Sell it to your customers directly.
• Congratulations, you have a business.

And you don’t need to know what the hell you’re doing in order to get started.

So maybe you’re like all of us and you come home after your workday or wake up early before it, and you want to start something for yourself. A business, a project, a book, a website, a (whatever). Why not? Making things is addictive.

But how do you do it? How do you find the creative energy to start something else when you already have such a big commitment taking up your day? Well, first, care.

And then you can look at this Quora thread.

From Kah Keng Tay:

Biting off only what can be chewed. Related to above, I make sure I tackle only what seems reasonably possible within the time I have. If I took on too big a task and didn’t manage to finish, and only got back to it a few days later, I would have forgotten by then some of the reasons why I did things in a certain way. This would cost me time that is spent rethinking and refactoring my design unnecessarily.

From Venkatesh Rao:

Regularity on Main Stuff: You have to put your main life on autopilot to the extent possible. This means putting all your energy into just 1-2 projects, minimizing interactions to just the critical few people, and putting all the work there on a very steady routine. This does not mean slacking off. It means reducing meta-thinking at your day job as near to zero as you can. This does not mean you become a dumb cog though. It mostly means picking allies carefully, cutting off time wasters, developing extraordinarily strong noise filters, not picking pointless fights, and going for quick, decisive wins when you do fight.

What a beautiful website.

The Internet will become a religion, in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions, but mostly because it will be the first platform for true otherness to appear on the planet. Not other as in other variety of human or other variety of animal, but other as in Other, an agent not like us yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part.

Although this sounds far-fetched, current discourse about the Internet confirms the general prediction. We may not discuss the Internet as a planetary consciousness from on high, but we increasingly reify it as if it were a singular, invisible agency like God. This discourse heralds not the return to explicit belief that Kelly hoped for; instead, belief in Web divinity appears more subtly, slipping into everyday language in enthusiastic, worshipful comments like “This is why I love the Internet!”

This is why I love the internet.

I like to talk about making things - so here’s an interview with someone who makes things everyday: My amazing girlfriend, Jessica.

While I like to think I often struggle to write a good story or make a good picture, I certainly never have to deal with this sort of thing:

What’s the secret to making a good cake?

Premium ingredients and following a really great recipe. Any recipe you find in a book or on the internet is rarely going to be perfect based on your conditions, your altitude, or even what baking powder you’re using because it’s all going to modify what you’re baking.

We spent weeks sourcing the right flour for our cakes because none of the ones that we found were suitable. You have to practice according to your oven’s temperature and the humidity in your shop. Baking elsewhere always poses challenges for those reasons.

seekandspeak:

These days, it feels like the internet has treated minimalism as a trend to be exploited for short term notoriety and profit, and its overexposure has ultimately diluted a perfectly rational means of bringing to life an idea. It’s become a bandwagon to hop on to because the formula, however broad and far reaching that is, has become tired and true.

People cling to what they miss the most in their lives, and for all of our advancements, modern times remain anything but simple. At the end of the day, maybe that means minimalism’s proliferation couldn’t be helped.

Love this take on a visit to a craft show. He hits a point I’ve been thinking about recently:

In fact, all the craft-as-lifework theory really explains is why everyone at the show’s so polite and pleasant-seeming. Notwithstanding the endless things to pick up and touch—toys to manipulate and try, pepper mills to heft, jewelry to finger—no one seems to be doing that, or at least not with the cavalier abandon people in malls or regular stores seem to handle the merchandise. I’m thinking of being in someone’s home—their living room—where it would be obscene to randomly touch things, to start treating someone else’s stuff like it’s mine. What’s missing from the show is any pretense of vendors as courtiers to customer royalty. Aside from in the food court, nobody here’s at anybody else’s service, which realization strikes me as both redemptive and kind of sad.

So, as makers, who do we make stuff for? For ourselves, or for others?

I think this is something that’s messed me up a lot over the years. I have a tendency to zone out and just start making things that are fun for me and end up being decorative stuff. No heart, no meaning behind it, no umph. It’s like painting a tree and worrying about how “correct” the lighting on the trunk looks. But why? Why am I painting the tree in the first place? Who’s it for?

I think the more I make things, the more I realize I should always be thinking of the end game. The audience, the reader, the viewer. When you make something, do you want to people to laugh, cry, think, be inspired, or feel thankful for their life? When you figure this out, it can be incredibly powerful in giving your work direction.

This isn’t selling out.

It’s just creating something for the good of the world. I think we can all make that a priority.