thoughts

The Failure Paradox: You have to fail more to succeed more. Our greatest moments of growth often stem directly from our greatest failures. Don’t fear failure, just learn to fail smart and fast.

“You are afraid to die, and you’re afraid to live. What a way to exist.”  ― Neale Donald Walsch

you'll only find your rhythm when you realize that even the steps backwards are part of the dance

The fastest way to kill something special is to compare it to something else.

I’d love to be able to detach my work and my life. To be able to view my career as a job like a lot of my friends do. To be able to entirely switch off at 6pm and enter ‘personal life’ mode. Please send advice! I do have a problem with working too much, but mostly because I love it…but it’s also important to switch off, to touch grass, to swim in the sea, to wander the streets of Lisbon aimlessly without a phone for six hours on a Saturday afternoon.

The ultimate tip is to observe — sunrise, dusk, the lighting and shades of buildings and objects.

Observe and appreciate, and you will internalize them, which will reflect on your designs.

Natural’s Not in It — Real Life

It’s a tragedy that life is taken so seriously. This is a result in the belief that we are limited, we are in danger, and that consciousness comes to an end.

You are the open field of Awareness. Thoughts and beliefs of being limited are just that - fleeting things…

When you feel the emotions of your future BEFORE it happens - you're actually priming your brain and body to look like the event has already occurred. When that happens, there is a match between your energy and the desired reality - when that match happens... Vibrational resonance takes place and you will start to notice synchronicities in your life.

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

Overwhelming imagery, content, chaos of clutter in our lives. Filling our time, mind and space.

Moodboard social accounts are so successful because they allow people the fantasy of experiencing creative thoughts. A micro simulation of how an artist or creator might experience the world – their mind generating interesting ideas, aesthetics, visions of product or spaces.

"With a theme, happiness becomes more about how you behave rather than what you achieve. Life is not a series of wins and losses. Though our highs and lows may shock us, lift us up, and forever shape our memories, they do not define us. Most of life happens in the in-between, and what we want in life must be found there.” — Niklas Göke

Everyone wants to succeed immediately and without pain or effort. Bad advice is everywhere. Build a following. Establish a platform. Learn how to scam the system. In other words, do all the surface stuff and none of the real work it takes to actually produce something of value. The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We're like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you're writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.

One of the most simple yet profound things you can do is speak up. Your interests and unique experiences will have a greater impact than you can possibly imagine, even when it feels like you’re going through something in isolation.  When we speak up, we can help others feel less alone, celebrate wins, and overcome losses—together.  The things that feel most personal are also the most universal.

It can be easy to fall prey to the limiting belief that we are stagnant beings, separate from the constant metamorphosis that is unfolding all around us. When we widen our perspective, we expand our potential. In the words of Joseph Campbell, "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe. To match your nature with nature."

You don't *have* a soul—You *are* a soul. What you have is a temporary body.

A gardener does not dig up a seed the day after it’s planted to see if it has grown. For many days, it will appear that you are giving such care to a pile of dirt, until one day, break-through happens.

Great knowledge often comes from the humblest of origins.

Why do we close our eyes when we pray, cry, kiss, or dream? Because the most beautiful things in life are not seen but felt by the heart

"The philosopher Paul Virilio talks of a ‘rushing standstill’, which seems to describe contemporary culture well. The cult of speed can sometimes feel overwhelming, but in the cracks of the system, a slower, more reflective pace is gaining traction. Whereas Virilio’s phrase appears aimed at a heedless velocity that, despite its speed will forever return you to your starting point, slowness by contrast allows you to advance at a pace that encourages contemplation and observation. To be slow is far from remaining static; instead, slowness is a temporal notion that prioritizes the journey over the destination." — Anja Aronowsky Cronberg⁠

Beauty Is a Method - Journal #105 December 2019 - e-flux

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” —Teilhard de Chagrin

To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail.

If you want to create something but feel it has already been done 1000 times, remember:

There is always room for quality.

“When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. Some of them are bent, some of them are straight, some are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘you’re too this, or i’m too this’. That judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”


—Ram Dass

Suffering a creative block? I love Ursula's advice to Kiki:
"Stop trying. Take long walks. Look at scenery. Doze off at noon. Don't even think about flying. And then, pretty soon, you'll be flying again."

"The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place."

— Alan Watts

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Paradox: The more we consume, the more we desire.

the danger of maps, carefully managed agendas, capable assistants, and thoughtful planning is that you may end up living your life as planned.

2023 resolution: don’t make the unexpected too inaccessible

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Simplicity is difficult because most of us are overcompensating for uncertainty. It takes a deep understanding of beauty and emotional awareness to look at something, long before most people would say it is complete, and say “This is enough.”

be confident in the depth of your curiosity not in the depth of your expertise

The most effective communicators are ones who most consistently show up as themselves in every form.  Write the same way you talk to your friends at a bar.  Make art that provides a point of view on things you care about.  Exist online the same way you do in real life.

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

A basic tenet of somatics holds true for better or worse:  we become what we practice and we’re always practicing something.

1\. You must let the pain visit.

2\. You must allow it to teach you.

3\. You must not allow it to overstay.

What’s so beautiful about creating products is that saying it in a poetic way, if you have that passion it naturally starts waves and those waves connect people. Then you don’t know where it’s going to end up, anything can happen, but if you don’t do anything, if you don’t write that text, if you don’t draw that picture or design that object, you can’t expect anything to happen. You need to start that chain reaction in life. 

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

“We are all made of energy and that’s all there is to it. Energy cannot be made nor destroyed. It can only change forms.”

Add through subtraction.

Burnout often manifests itself as stagnancy. When you do too much you kneecap your mental and creative capacity.

Audit your commitments and aggressively cut out the things from your life that are siphoning your energy.

“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write."

## *“ Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again ”*

–Joseph Campbell

Pause and take a breath.

Burnout pre-dominantly plagues high-achievers. Even if you are pursuing that which you love it's possible that you still need a break.

Give yourself permission to pause, get away, re-focus, and then comeback stronger than ever.

Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.

Stack Wins

Release from your mind the idea that you must provide top-tier results and progress every day or else it was a waste. That's unrealistic and draining. 

Crawl if you must but don't stop. Progress, no matter how small, is still progress.

"It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom." — Aristotle

If you can stay positive in a negative situation, you win.

You will receive a body. You may like it or not but it is yours for the entire time you’re on Earth. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called “life.” Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much as the process as the experiment that ultimately works. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. Then you can go on to the next lesson. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that is, again, better than “here.” Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need – what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust. You will forget all this. You can remember whenever you want.