goals
You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye
Let the goals suggest themselves
Lost purposes
So many tactics, so well entrenched
I won't get
People I'd like to meet
At least everything was important
A Quote by Mads MikkelsenMy approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
Theory of Change
An Essay by Aaron SwartzA theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”
The Circus
Endurance
For Alfred North Whitehead, a car accident and the exposure of a pyramid to the sun on any given day are equivalent events:
We are accustomed to associate an event with a certain melodramatic quality. If a man is run over that is an event comprised within certain spatio-temporal limits. We are not accustomed to consider the endurance of the Great Pyramid throughout any definite day as an event. But the natural fact which is the Great Pyramid throughout a day, meaning thereby all nature within it, is an event of the same character as the man's accident, meaning thereby all nature with spatio-temporal limitations so as to include the man and the motor during the period when they were in contact.
There it is again
Apparently architecture does the same job as set design, "it creates units of environment, atmosphere, or events"—whatever you wish to call them—but with more weight, carrying more material, slower. This is why it can raise the curtain more times and repeat "there it is again" for longer. Perhaps for this and other reasons there are periods in the history of architecture in which stage design or the folly, for example, have been an effective field of experimentation for serious architects.
Preparing a stage
When a client arrives at my studio, my job consists of preparing a "stage" for the length of time he desires, whether it be for a day or years, it is irrelevant in the end. A stage in which he can move under the sun "as if he were at home," though he walks stuttering at first before learning what will come in the script, be it kind or not, and which he will repeat a thousand times until he tires. When he tires, a panel is disassembled to readapt the children's room, the roof is demolished to make a study, the façades are decorated and life continues unperturbed.