Stick like hell When the Wizard of Menlo Park called invention 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, he was speaking not only about the creative act of inventing but also about the whole inventive process needed to bring more than intellectual success. Edison warned against discouragement during the perspiration phase in the following way, reminding us that we get things to work by the successive removal of bugs: Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! Any other bright-minded fellow can accomplish just as much of he will stick like hell and remember nothing that's any good works by itself. You've got to make the damn thing work!...I failed my way to success. Thomas Edison, The Evolution of Useful Things inventionsuccess
Unborable The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King successboredombureaucracy
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice