“Building a new technology company is really, really hard. In order to do it successfully, you have to sweat the details, worry about all the things that might go wrong, and suffer more than a few sleepless nights (either from working through the night or just worrying through the night). All of those things that you go through—a boiling stomach, lack of sleep, waves of paranoia, and vivid visions of your own demise—turn out to be good things.” – Ben Horowitz

“Courage is a funny thing. It is continuing to function calmly and purposefully when the environment suggests otherwise and discourages continuing… There are people who can simply ignore the fray sufficiently to continue to operate. They seem to have ice water in their veins but in reality they simply have a high tolerance for chaos and can continue to focus on the issues at hand.

In the business world, I think this virtue or characteristic is a critical element in being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur has the courage to continue to operate when lesser (?) folks would be disuaded from acting. Founders had the original courage to start the company and continue to have a reservoir of courage which they can call upon at difficult times.”

-JLM, via a comment on Fred Wilson’s blog

On questioning the value of ancient tenets passed down through the generations:

“So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation… Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well – for this reason especially – wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative imagination of a wide variety of alternatives.”

On the Earth as a lifeboat:

“When you look at Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It’s like living in a lifeboat. We breath the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question – in a certain sense the only question – is, will we?”

On why our planet is in conflict over ideologies:

“We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can’t convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I’m putting this in personal terms so that I don’t say “you,” so that I’m not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa. I’m trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it’s important and worrisome.

“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies an inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?”

On the impression we give to the universe through our transmissions:

“Very nearby civilizations can detect our presence, and that is because television gets out. Not just television but radar. Radar and television get out. Most of AM radio, for example, doesn’t. So let’s just look at the television for a moment. Large-scale commercial television broadcasting on Earth begins when? In the late 1940s, mainly in the United States.

“So forty years ago there’s a spherical wave of radio signals that spreads out at the speed of light, getting bigger and bigger as time goes on. Every year it’s an additional light year away from the Earth. Now, lets say that it’s forty years later, so that expanding spherical wave front is forty light-years from Earth, containing the harbingers of a civilization newly arrived in the galaxy. And I don’t know if you know about 1940s television in the United States, but it would contain Howdy Doody and Milton Bearle and the Army-McCarthy Hearings and other signs of high intelligence on the planet Earth. So I’m sometimes asked, if there are so many intelligent beings in space, why haven’t they come. (I’m just joking.) But it’s a sobering fact that our mainly mindless television transmissions are our principal emissaries to the stars. There is an aspect of self-knowledge that this implies that I think would be very good for us to come to grips with.”

“The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. He must anchor his special job in the complex whole. The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. He must know that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated…

There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’.

Wish I had this quote for the presentation I gave last week. Thanks to 37Signals: Signal vs Noise for this one.

Norman quotes Sergio Zyman, former CMO for Coca Cola:

“Emotional branding is about building relationships; it is about giving a brand and a product long-term value… Emotional branding is based on that unique trust that is established with an audience. It elevates purchases based on need to the realm of desire. The commitment to a product or an institution, the pride we feel upon receiving a wonderful gift of a brand we love or having a positive shopping experience in an inspiring environment where someone knows our name or brings an unexpected gift of coffee – these feelings are at the core of Emotional Branding.” (pg 60)

“The principles for designing pleasurable, effective interaction between people and products are the very same ones that support pleasurable and effective interaction between individuals.”

Author Unknown: “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

William Drenttel: “Great design does not, in fact, come from compromise; it comes from strength of character, persistence of vision, and expertise.”

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912): “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”

Tim Brown: “Inspiration. Where do ideas come from? Insights are the fuel of inspiration. You don’t get ideas from sitting at your desk. Use the world as a source of inspiration (not as a source of validation). It starts with empathy and seeing things from other people’s viewpoints, not yours. Aim to understand people on multiple levels: physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and culturally.”

Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

Andy Rachleff: “Well I don’t believe that entrepreneurs are created, I think they are born… You can always hire execution, you can never hire vision.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: “To be human means to be creative.”

Edward Albee: “Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of their way to come back a short distance correctly.”

Pablo Picasso: “[Work] below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

David Cabianca: “Rules are used as a substitute for skills of observation.”

Steve Jobs: “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

Frank Gehry: “Is starting hard? You know it is.”

Richard Schoenwald: “I can’t lead the life of the mind in solitude, and neither can you, and together we defy the tyranny of change, and we escape being imprisoned by falseness and triviality, and we jointly venture onward.

Unknown: “To be bound to our own mistakes is the ultimate expression of freedom.”

From John Maeda’s Blog: “Your expression of anger … belies the qualities … of a lesser man.”

“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?” – Michael Bierut

So much of what designers do is intuitive, tricky, and not rational. I think that’s probably why we do what we do. But can you tell that to someone who isn’t a designer, who is uneasy with that kind of ambiguity?

At IDEO, they say that to work there you must thrive in ambiguity. I think that’s a quality of good designers… being comfortable with the ambiguity of the process.