Mmm, Peaches

The Adoration was commissioned in March 1481, when Leonardo was twenty-nine, by the monastery of San Donato, which was just outside the walls of Florence. Once again his father helped. Piero da Vinci was a notary for the monks and bought his firewood from them. That year he was given two chickens for work he had done, which included negotiating a complex contract for his son to paint the Adoration as well as to decorate the face of the monastery’s clock.

His father was clearly worried, like the parents of many twenty-somethings over the ages, about his talented child’s work habits. The monks were as well. The elaborate contract was designed to force Leonardo, already known for leaving paintings unfinished, to buckle down and produce a completed work. It stipulated that he had to supply from his own pocket “the colors, the gold and all other costs arising.” The painting had to be delivered “within thirty months at the most,” or Leonardo would be forced to forfeit whatever he had done and get no compensation. Even the payment plan was odd: Leonardo would receive some property near Florence that had been donated to the monastery, have the right to sell it back to the monastery for 300 florins, but would also have to pay a young woman’s dowry of 150 florins that had been part of the land bequest.

It was clear within three months that these badly laid plans were going awry. Leonardo was unable to pay the first installment on the dowry, and he thus went into debt to the monastery for it. He also had to borrow money to buy paint. He was paid a bundle of sticks and logs for decorating the monastery’s clock, but his account was debited for “one barrel of vermilion wine” that he got on credit. Thus one of history’s most creative artists found himself decorating a clock for firewood, borrowing money for paint, and cadging wine.”

“The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.” — Socrates

Kurt Vonnegut is good for the soul. Below excerpt from his book Bluebeard, told from the perspective of an older artist looking back on his life.

“How good were those pictures of mine which
Dan Gregory looked at so briefy before he shoved
Marilee down the stairs? Technically, if not spiritually, they were pretty darn good for a kid my age – a kid whose self-imposed lessons had consisted of copying, stroke by stroke, illustrations by Dan Gregory.

I was obviously born to draw better than most people, just as the widow Berman and Paul Slazinger were obviously born to tell stories better than most people can. Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

I think that could go back to the time when people
had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at
night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

That’s what I think. And of course a scheme like
that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world’s champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with
maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an “exhibitionist.'”

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say
to him or her the next morning, “Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!”

“You must avoid at all costs the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.”

– Robert Greene

“I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They’ve all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember that we took turns describing what our little company was, what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.”

-Shoe Dog, Pat Knight

I’ve noticed when something seems oddly difficult, it’s usually because I’m conceptualizing & approaching it the entirely wrong way.

Ex) with descriptions on Product Pages in shopify (liquid not being allowed – only html)

Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his PHD program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become known for designing computer programs that made 3-D maps of mouse brains. It was cutting-edge work. but Jobs pooh-poohed it: “What you’re doing is always going to be two years behind. Think how fun it is to surf on the front of a wave, and how not fun it is to dog-paddle on the tail edge of that same wave.” Atkinson wanted to surf. Two weeks later, he was at Apple, where he soon became Jobs’s regular dinner partner and sounding board, and a star engineer on Apple’s follow-up to the Apple II, the Lisa.

Jobs’s main way of motivating people wasn’t merely fear, but rather capriciousness, which was both scarier and far more magnetic. “Steve would say you were great one day, and an idiot the next,” recalled Bruce Horn, part of the team that went on to create the drag-and-drop method of moving files around. Atkinson seemed to float above Jobs’s ire, and below it too. buried in his work. Peers would tell him that Jobs was using him, exploiting Atkinson’s obvious talents and energies. But Atkinson mostly didn’t notice. He was working too hard. “A good tube toothpaste wants to be totally squeezed out,” Atkinson told me with a shrug.

– User Friendly, Cliff Kuang

From The Systems Bible, by John Gall:

There is a man in our neighborhood who is building a boat in his back yard. He knows very little of boat-building and still less of sailing or navigation. He works from plans drawn up by himself. Nevertheless”. he is demonstrably building a boat and can be called, in some real sense, a boatbuilder.

Now if you go down to Hampton Roads or any other great shipyard and look around for a ship-builder, you will be disappointed. You will find in abundance welders, carpenters, foremen, engineers, and many other specialists, but no ship-builders. True, the company executives may call themselves ship-builders, but if you observe them at their work, you will see that it really consists of writing contracts, planning budgets, and other administrative activities. Clearly, they are not in any concrete sense wilding ships. In cold fact, a SYSTEM is building ships, and the SYSTEM is the shipbuilder. In brief:

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

“Fall in love with problems, not solutions. As a PM, it’s easy to see a problem and snap to a solution. That’s what product management is, after all. But if rather than falling in love with the solution, you learn to love problems, you’ll find a steady stream of opportunities for innovation. Even better, you’ll be open-minded and let the problem guide your solution.”

– Ken Norton’s Bring the Donuts blog