Quotes & Wisdom

Life Is…
Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air.
You name them: work, family, health, friends, and spirit, and you´re keeping all of them in the air.
You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.
But the other four balls - family, health, friends, and spirit are made of glass.
If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same.
You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.

How?
Don´t undermine your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special.
Don´t set your goals by what other people deem important. Only you know what is best for you.
Don´t take for granted the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as your life, for without them, life is meaningless.
Don´t let life slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live ALL the days of your life.
Don´t give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
Don´t be afraid to admit that you are less than perfect. It is this fragile thread that binds us together.
Don´t be afraid to encounter risks. It is by taking chances that we learn to be brave.
Don´t shut love out of your life by saying it´s impossible to find. The quickest way to receive love is to give; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Don´t run through life so fast that you forget not only where you’ve been, but also where you are going.
Don´t forget that a person´s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.
Don´t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved.
Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way.
Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery, and Today is a gift; that´s why we call it - the Present…

Art boundaries
I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

- Federico Fellini

Stifled Creativity
Creativity tends to be flattened when we are harried, when we need to boil it down fast, get it done, get it good enough, and then move on to the next crisis, to the next item on the agenda, to the next project that must be completed in typical under-budgeted, under- resourced, under-timelined fashion.

This puts powerful pressures on us to deliver without going out on a limb, without tapping the true wellsprings of our creativity, doing just enough to get by. In fairness, speed ultimately disconnects us from the passions that fuel our creativity. One might call it “succeeding by not screwing up too badly.”

Finally, and increasingly frequently, it results in that unenviable state known as perpetual burnout and Survival of the Fastest turns into the need for Revival of the Fastest.

- http://www.creativelatitude.com/articles/article_200610_swanson.html

Achieving A+
In considering how to achieve an A+, we must revisit the idea that technology siphons creativity out of the innovation process by depriving us of sleep and demanding ever more speed, which ultimately leads to heightened stress, anxiety, and eventually burnout.

Stefan Sagmeisters Things I Like About My Job
- Thinking about ideas and content freely - with the deadline far away (no anxiety)
- Working without interruption on a single project (immersion)
- Using a wide variety of tools and techniques (don’t get bored)
- Travelling to new places (get out of the studio)
- Working on projects that matter to me (important projects to me)
- Having things come back from the printer done well (enjoy end results)

Stefan Sagmeisters Things I Have Learnt
- Complaining is silly. Either act or forget.
- Thinking life will be better in the future is stupid, I have to live now.
- Being not truthful works against me.
- Helping other people helps me.
- Organising a charity group is suprisingly easy.
- Everything I do always comes back to me.
- Drugs feel great in the beginning and become a drag later on.
- Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted.
- Money does not make me happy.
- Travelling alone is helpful for a new perspective on life.
- Assuming is stifling.
- Keeping a diary supports my personal development.
- Trying to look good limits my life.
- Worrying solves nothing.
- Material luxuries are best enjoyed in small doses.
- Having guts always works out for me.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/commentary/theluddite/2007/04/luddite_0426
So we’re doomed. We will continue inventing exquisite new ways of killing each other, and justifying the need to do so, until we succeed in destroying everything. Which, in the name of somebody’s god or somebody’s country or somebody’s way of life, we will. You have a nice day, now.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-to-become-a-creative-genius.html
“Schools have crushed creativity. We were told to color within the lines. We were taught to follow instructions. The goal ins chool is to get the ‘right’ answer. Unfortunately, if you’re afraid to be wrong, you’ll never be creative or original.”

http://miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/essays/es3.html
When you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

Style is not to be trusted.
I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvelous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty.

On Aging
Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’

http://miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/essays/es5_pop.html
Perhaps the most obvious loss is what we call our sense of reality. Television combines news about the war, Paris Hilton’s career, global warming and Geico commercials into events of equal importance. The result is an enormous population that believes nothing matters.

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/000121.html
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns. In design this means “draw what you know.” Start by putting down what you already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height, the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as “Be where you are.” It works.

6. Don’t forget your goal.
Definition of a fanatic: Someone who redoubles his effort after forgetting his goal. Students and young designers often approach a problem with insight and brilliance, and subsequently let it slip away in confusion, fear and wasted effort. They forget their goals, and make up new ones as they go along. Original thought is a kind of gift from the gods. Artists know this. “Hold the moment,” they say. “Honor it.” Get your idea down on a slip of paper and tape it up in front of you.

8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to facilitate the worst. It doesn’t depend on brilliance or innovation because if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/resources/type_advice.htm
Think more, design less.
Many desperate acts of design (drop shadows, gradients and the gratuitous use of transparency) are committed in the void left by a strong concept.

The cornerstone of this place is a work ethic. A hungry, passionate, intense work ethic. You look at Steven Spielberg, hardest working man in

Wieden + Kennedy
Hollywood. Kobe Bryant, hardest working man in the NBA. Anyone who has gotten to that level of success, works their *expletive* ass off.

Muhummad Ali
I hated every second of training, but I kept thinking, ‘Put in the work now, and live the rest of your life a champion.’

The Elements of Style - Boxes and Arrows
The seduction of fashion, the desire to impress or stretch your skills are all pitfalls unless you temper them with your natural skills and temperament. That said, talent is not enough.

It’s painful when a client or a boss rejects your first design. Sometimes that initial effort seems perfect. But revision is a way to reach a better design. Or sometimes and only sometimes shed light on the perfection of the first. When this odd event occurs, it’s best not to be upset because no one recognized your initial brilliance. Instead, remember that design is as much process as result, and part of your job is to get everyone participating in the design to the end goal.

Here White speaks to fashion. Just because Jeffrey Zeldman did it doesn’t mean you should. Or Jason Freid. Or IDEO. When you see a hyper-simple site, or one with scrolling photos, or one with 64 point type, ask yourself if you can and if you should pull it off.

A lesson I have learned by working with web search is: if you want people to notice something useful, the worst thing you could do is adorn it with lines, colors, or animation. A light touch actually indicates to users that this is worth paying attention to; blue and underlined is often the most effective. The most usable is often also the most used.

In art school, I was asked to copy master works. I didn’t understand why, until I began copying them; when you imitate you do actually learn. You don’t just copy, you understand why the brushstrokes went left then right, you know why bright green was used in a face. And when writing, I always wrote with the voice of whomever I was reading. Hemmingway made me economical, Salinger verbose.

- http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/the_elements_of

The Art of Thinking Through Making - Jessica Helfand
Drawing is the point of contact in which idea begins to approximate form. There is a kind of transcendent energy in the sketchbook, or the tissue, or even the napkin upon which the simplest of doodles begins its long, twisted road to realization. It’s all grist for the mill, and the studio is its incubation chamber: not the studio with the white board and the IT guy and the phones ringing and the incessant emails, but the studio in which the ideas seek, and ultimately start to find, their burgeoning, fledgling form. Cezanne once wrote that the painter must enclose himself within his work, and it is true that such investment & physical, spiritual, and deeply intentional is, in fact, what making work is all about.

Drawing, as the primary gesture of making, reopens the doors of the imagination and recasts the process as something completely different. Scary, because you don’t always know where you’re going. But somehow, you know when you get there.

There’s time, later for logic, for editing, for justifying all that type, for putting up those responsible roadblocks that we all must, on some level, choose to embrace. The studio, at least a little piece of it, is not the place for such duty-bound thinking. Somewhere, somehow, it must be the place for thinking through making.

- http://www.designobserver.com/archives/013819.html

Advice for hotrodders (quotes taken from www.rgruppe.org)
01. Stay clear of trends, that is unless you are the one starting them.
02. Never let popular opinion or trends dictate what colour you paint your car.
03. Help younger rodders in any way you can.
04. Learn how to draw flames.
05. Never rush a project, it will always show.
06. If you are going to do a burnout, do it where nobody will see you.
07. Don’t be ashamed if you didn’t build your car. There are very few people out there who can do it all.
08. At the same time never take more than a decade to build a car. Trends seem to cycle every five to seven years.
09. Build your car for YOU, not for the fame and glory. Fame and glory fade with time but YOU will be around as long as you live.
10. If you get your car in a magazine, buy only one or two extra copies, not fifty. If you buy all the copies up, no one will ever know you were in a magazine.
11. Remember, your painted car is no better than a primered one. Maybe the owner of that primered car likes it that way.
12. Remember, opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.
13. Listen to constructive criticism. But remember, there are people out there who enjoy to see you get angry. If you learn to tell the difference between the two, you are wise.
14. Take someone over age 65 for a ride in you rod. They can remember when these cars were used as everyday transportation and it will most likely trigger a fond memory that they will share with you.
15. Likewise, take a child or teen for a ride. Young opinions are forming, and who knows, they may become the next generation’s rodders.
16. Work on forming your own opinion, and don’t be afraid to voice it.
17. Be modest.
18. Never try to outrun a cop.
19. Always wear sunscreen in a roadster.

Taken from ‘Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking’, David Bayles and Ted Orland.
A ceramics teacher, at the beginning of the semester, split the class in two. One half was told they would be graded on the quantity of work: the more a student produced, the higher the grade. The second group would be graded on quality: to get an A, a student only needed to produce one pot, but it had to be perfect.

It turned out that at the end of the semester, the works of highest quality were all produced by the students in the ‘quantity’ group. That group was constantly learning and improving, while the other group ’sat theorizing about perfection’ and did not progress in their actual work.

How To Be Creative
So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years:

01. Ignore everybody.
02. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.
03. Put the hours in.
04. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
05. You are responsible for your own experience.
06. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
07. Keep your day job.
08. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
09. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
16. The world is changing.
17. Merit can be bought. Passion can’t.
18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
19. Sing in your own voice.
20. The choice of media is irrelevant.
21. Selling out is harder than it looks.
22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
23. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.
24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
25. You have to find your own schtick.
26. Write from the heart.
27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
28. Power is never given. Power is taken.
29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.
30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

- http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html

How To Feel Miserable As An Artist (or what not to do, underline any that currently apply)
01. Constantly compare yourself to other artists.
02. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on.
03. Base the success of your entire career on one project.
04. Stick with what you know.
05. Undervalue your expertise.
06. Let money dictate what you do.
07. Bow to societal pressures.
08. Only do work that your family/friends would love.
09. Do whatever the client/customer/gallery owner/patron/investor asks.
10. Set unachievable/overwhelming goals. To be accomplished by tomorrow.