Another use of an old photo I took in college. This photo pops up in some news article about once a month. Another instance of people using photos because they are under CC0.

I love that these aren’t minified. Ordered a copy!

TIL about Trigonometric functions in CSS!

At age 24, I spent a lot of time thinking about writing and drawing, signif­i­cantly less time actually writing and drawing. I had finished exactly one (1) short story, several years prior. This event expanded my ouvre by a signif­i­cant percentage. It was a tiny revolution.

When you start a creative project but don’t finish, the expe­ri­ence drags you down. Worst of all is when you never deci­sively abandon a project, instead allowing it to fade into forgetfulness. The fades add up; they become a gloomy haze that whispers, you’re not the kind of person who DOES things.

When you start and finish, by contrast — and it can be a project of any scope: a 24-hour comic, a one-page short story, truly anything — it is powerful fuel that goes straight back into the tank. When a project is finished, it exits the realm of “this is gonna be great” and becomes instead something you (and perhaps others) can actually evaluate. Even if that eval­u­a­tion is disastrous, it is also, I will insist, thrilling and productive. A project finished is the pump of a piston, preparing the engine for the next one.

Unfinished work drags and depresses; finished work redoubles and accelerates.

Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste it’s consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

At Teenage Engineering now we are about 60 and I understand that if you are involved in every little part of the business, it destroys you. So a few years ago I started to rebuild the organisation to essentially shoot me out of daily operations so now I can work on my own projects, and try to stay focused on the things I want to do. 

I try not to share a vision but work on what may inspire people and teach them values to live a life they are happy with. If you’re not happy working with a specific subject, experiment, do something else, that’s why a lot of people in our company have moved within the organisation. I’m always pushing people to find a way to be happier going to work. And I’ve always questioned why people have hobbies, why can’t life just be one entity, why do you have to separate family from work? It’s very common that you go to work doing something you don’t like, that’s why you need to have hobbies as a substitute to make you happy.

I don’t stop, I bring the family into the process, as much as I can when I travel. When our daughter Ivana was little I brought her with me into meetings, on film sets, and when that happened in the u.s. back then I could see such a big difference in approaches, where culturally, perhaps they never experienced something like it, having a kid in a meeting sitting in the background colouring with pen and paper, so it was a learning experience for each other for sure.

h/t Jeremy Felt