[gb] Studio

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent.

Self-control doesn’t get much airtime these days. It ranks right up there with personal responsibility and doing the right thing. We tend not to like these terms because they place emphasis on our ability, and oftentimes we fail.

Because you’re busy, you probably find yourself rushing. Running from desk to meeting, to a dinner, to a lecture, to a train. But rushing is unnecessary. Missing the allotted time is only “missed” if you define it that way. If you match your metric of success to what some other timeline dictates, you’ll never be leading your own way. Of course, respect for others is foremost, so be respectful above all. But enter every situation on your own terms, without running.

Rules are not constraints, they are optimizations and they are clarifications. They are designed to describe what is possible or allowable and rules are not fixed in stone.

Every full-time employee also receives stock options and takes part in our bonus system called Unicorn. The way Unicorn works is that twice a month we deposit money into the Unicorn system as a revenue share with all employees. The system automatically splits it evenly amongst all employees. However, no one can simply take the money out. You can only “invest” it in other employees as a thank you and bonus for accomplishments. This means that bonuses are paid where the company (being the employees) thinks they are due.

There is a large portion of the population that operates as though they are owed something. Because they got a degree, they deserve a job. Because they logged the hours, they deserve a raise. Because they didn’t screw up, they deserve a promotion.

So much here about how the work gets done. First, the concept of negative space with time and allowing oneself to not feel bad about doing things other than the work. Second, waking up early, third, the sense of a routine, and fourth the idea of a uniform. And, most importantly, I’d say the larger practice of not being too hard on oneself. The creative work is supposed to help us live more fully and feel more alive, not suck the daylights out of us, especially if it is self-initiated.

Running from things isn’t a sustainable driving force. The gravitational pull of that thing “behind you” will eventually slow you down and wear you out. We aren’t built to find long term sustainable motivation from running away from things, but by running toward them. When you find something to run toward you’re much more likely to create a sustainable motivation to be in business and succeed.

These black and white arguments don’t hold water. The idea that there are three simple levers that define a feature or a product is passive-aggressive professional absurdity. There are myriad levers the team can adjust, but to understand them you need to understand the people who are actually building the software.

It’s incredibly easy to lose focus when working in an industry that revolves around the very things we may be trying to avoid. I think of my friend, Shawn Hatfield, who runs a highly regarded mastering studio in Oakland called Audible Oddities. Email, phone and other distractions are off the table while he’s working — he has to listen. Mastering requires his undivided attention in getting his job done and to do it right. Many other professions are similar. Focus. Breathe. Do what you intend to do, and don’t stop until you’re ready to.

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these 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 it.

Thing two that I think is special is that there’s very little friction here. There’s no commutes; we’re living in a world where it doesn’t matter whether you’re sitting at your desk in your office, you’re sitting in your home, you’re sitting in a coffee shop, you can get work done. Especially with software and Internet-related things, you’re always connected, and as a result, the integration and probably the ability to sustain a level of intensity that’s required is higher.

We agreed that a lot of what we then considered “working hard” was actually “freaking out”. Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn’t have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn’t—and other time-consuming activities.

Design collaboration is good, but design responsibility needs a home and it must live with a single individual.

…a much larger issue with interactive design — we don’t go far enough. We make elegant, wonderful deliverables (strategy guides, designs, templates, full websites) that solve goals at a fixed point in time, but we rarely stay involved after those items have been delivered. It’s not often that we see agencies becoming deeply involved and entrenched in their client’s success after the work is complete.

If it’s a good idea and it gets you excited, try it, and if it bursts into flames, that’s going to be exciting too. People always ask, ‘What is your greatest failure?’ I always have the same answer—We’re working on it right now, it’s gonna be awesome!

If your old work doesn’t shame you, you’re not growing.

It’s nice to look back and feel that you’ve made progress. When you look at old work, it should suck glaringly and you should cringe painfully. But there should also be some germ within it that you’re not ashamed of—some spark of talent or inspiration that connects to what you do now.