Taking pride in ignorance First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results. Second, work on improving your strengths. Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it...First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths. Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself ignorancearrogance
Stepping out of the firehose An Article by Benedict Evans www.ben-evans.com In 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual? ...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore. Things that don't scaleDark satanic mills hypermediaprogresssocietytechnology