“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to the big differences we often cannot foresee.”

On Wrong

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - Buckminster Fuller

(via paulisakson)

On Prudence and Work

“A short piece of work means as much to me as a long piece of work.”

- Harold Pinter, from his Nobel Speech

On Creative Growth

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

- Ira Glass 

On Passion & Clients

“The best clients are rarely easy to please because they’re only pleased by the same things we are.”

- Lee Clow

On Process

“Beauty exists only in struggle.”

- The Futurist Manifesto 

On the fall of Rome and the complexity of any given society

“The distances, now no longer adjacent to easily accessible coastline, were making the cost of conquest prohibitive. More to the point, the enemies Rome faced as it grew larger were vast empires themselves and were more than capable of defeating the Roman legions.

It was at this point that Rome had reached a turning point: no longer would conquest be a significant source of revenue for the empire, for the cost of further expansion yielded no benefits greater than incurred costs. Conjointly, garrisoning its extensive border with its professional army was becoming more burdensome, and more and more Rome came to rely on mercenary troops from Iberia and Germania.

The result of these factors meant that the Roman Empire began to experience severe fiscal problems as it tried to maintain a level of social complexity that was beyond the marginal yields of it’s agricultural surplus and had been dependent upon continuous territorial expansion and conquest.”

- Jospeh Tainter, from the book “The Collapse of Complex Societies”