Below is all of my content that has been tagged with the term philosophy. Browsing it should be very exciting for you. Enjoy.
I'm M. Jackson Wilkinson, a technologist, designer, speaker, educator, and writer in San Francisco. I'm the CEO and Founder of WeSprout, which is coming soon. I'm from Philadelphia, went to Bowdoin College in Maine, root for the Phillies, and love to sing.
John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:
That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.
I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.
Though simplicity is the darling of the web, we’ve now long outgrown it. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life’s complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.
Jay Heinrichs on the difference between fighting and arguing, and why he’s spent years teaching his kids to argue effectively:
I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.
I share his disappointment in our culture’s fear of a good, constructive argument. It’s reason and good argumentation that can help produce the best work, yet it’s all too common that we shy away and do only things that will be least likely to rub people the wrong way for fear of argument.
John Siracusa:
Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with. This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent.
It’s like the professor who tore apart your papers. Hated at the time, but now you look back and think about how much better a writer you are.
I don’t think any creative business can succeed without serious (and sometimes harsh) criticism coming either externally or internally. It has less to do with measurement than it has to do with this editing eye.