Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn.
It’s been a difficult few days. If you’re looking to hire curious, kind and insanely talented humans, this is your chance.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
🌀 Memento Mori: A week before I started working at Google, my friend who was already working there confessed something really big was about to be announced. It was going to be a game-changer. That thing was Google+. In retrospect, like many other products spawned by the tech industry, it disappeared into oblivion. But at the time it felt huge. David Gasca’s look back on a decade working in tech brought this memory back to mind. The break-neck speed of tech is deceptive. We think we are perpetually going through a revolution. In reality tech is not not more impervious to the cyclical nature of things than any other industry. That’s a humbling thought.
🤷 Collaboration: “Collaboration” is one of those words that gets used so much the brain treats it more like background noise than meaningful signal. It continues to be touted as a necessary feature of a healthy organization. A closer look at the evidence seems to suggest that, used indiscriminately, it can have an adverse effect on creativity and generate mediocre ideas. We should stop blindly embracing it as the gospel and ask ourselves when it is actually helpful, what form it should take and when we should avoid it like the plague.
🦉 Ikigai: You should pursue what’s at the intersection of “what you love”, “what you’re good at” and “what the world needs”. You might know this popular piece of wisdom that litters the internet in the form of a three-way Venn diagram by its name: Ikigai. Like millions of others, I too was convinced that it was rooted in ancient Japanese philosophy. But the truth is somewhat less glamorous. Buckle up, Ikigai fans.
Lateral Thought
“But I sometimes think of my journey through adulthood to date as one of incrementally discovering the truth that there is no institution, no walk of life, in which everyone isn’t just winging it, all the time. Growing up, I assumed that the newspaper on the breakfast table must be assembled by people who truly knew what they were doing; then I got a job at a newspaper.”
Oliver Burkeman
As an artist I hear the word collaboration as a means to call out for other artists to work at a project delegated by a single ego.