We work because it’s a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

—Charles Eames

via Frank Chimero who has some interesting words in reaction to the quote:

The Eames were sharks. One just has to read what Charles said. In work, it’s not that one project leads to the next, it’s that one subject leads to the next. If we’re really sniffing out solutions to the problems of people, then we’ll be going down some serious rabbit holes.

We don’t need to say “multi-disciplinary designer” any more. If we’re truly trying to make things that help all of us to live better, it’s implied and redundant.

Frank Chimero is changing his focus from image-making to writing for his book:

A hammer has two ends: one to drive the nail, another to remove it. One can not use both ends at the same time. I believe the relationship between images and text is much like this, especially for those of us who make both. Writing and image-making intermingle and sometimes negate one another in the name of progress. For those that I know that seriously pursue both, the relationship between the word-work and the image-work is tidal. I will always make images, but for now I need to use the other end of my hammer, because there is a thorn that needs to be pried out of my side and a story that needs to be told that doesn’t leave much room for images.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

—Ira Glass
via Daring Fireball

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

—Jessica Hische
via The Brooks Review

Seth Godin: The realization is now:

I regularly hear from people who say, “enough with this conceptual stuff, tell me how to get my factory moving, my day job replaced, my consistent paycheck restored…” There’s an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It’s not an idea, though, it’s a myth.

Richard Florida on What Makes Nations Thrive:

Our results indicate that the factors that contribute to happiness differ in high- and low-income countries. In low-income nations (defined as those with less than $11,000 in per capita GDP), happiness turns on income. But it matters much less in high-income countries. In these countries, people are affluent enough to cover the basics which are essential to a base level of happiness. Two factors matters in particular over and above income in these more well-off nations. The first is the nature of the job market: people are happier in affluent nations where more of them work in knowledge-based, creative, and professional jobs and fewer work in blue-collar working class jobs. Values matter too, especially openness and tolerance toward ethnic and racial minorities and toward gay and lesbian people.

NYTimes: Unpaid Interns, Complicit Colleges

ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.

Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.

Unless you’re being subsidized by your parents or crashing on couches, unpaid internships are impossible.
I was lucky enough to intern at an art gallery on 57th & Madison from 1996-1998 when in college. When the second summer came around I insisted that they pay for my transportation from New Jersey in addition to the whopping $7 an hour they paid me.
Realizing the bargain they were getting for someone who could hang all the paintings and photography for shows, deliver packages to clients and purchase and configure all the computers in the gallery, they agreed.
Internships are extremely valuable for kids starting out their careers but while the head start they provide in establishing relationships and acquiring practical skills is great, many employers aren’t meeting students halfway when they don’t pay them.

WSJ: Is Your Job an Endangered Species?

Tellers, phone operators, stock brokers, stock traders: These jobs are nearly extinct. Since 2007, the New York Stock Exchange has eliminated 1,000 jobs. And when was the last time you spoke to a travel agent? Nearly all of them have been displaced by technology and the Web. Librarians can’t find 36,000 results in 0.14 seconds, as Google can. And a snappily dressed postal worker can’t instantly deliver a 140-character tweet from a plane at 36,000 feet.

So which jobs will be destroyed next? Figure that out and you’ll solve the puzzle of where new jobs will appear.

Forget blue-collar and white- collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity–writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It’s no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.

My father used to say this to me whenever we were working on a project in his workshop. The object was usually made of wood, and the tool was usually his table saw.
Physical projects, as opposed to the virtual ones on the Web, have much different and permanent ramifications when you make decisions. Once you cut a piece of wood, it’s cut. Done. There’s no Command-Z.
Today though, I discovered a place in the virtual world where this mantra makes perfect sense – email messages. While I’m a fast and efficient multi-tasker, I’m also a great maker of typos. It’s most obvious in my messages to clients.
So now I read twice (or three times) and send once.

This article by Matt Mullenwag is a must-read for anyone who creates anything. I’m talking about painters, designers, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians – any creator.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

I’ve taken this mentality with Daily Exhaust. The site, as it is right now, is not what I would consider finished. The overall design is still in progress. I’m not even sure I would call it a 1.0 release candidate. I still have a lot of work to do, but having it up and live puts pressure on me to work on it, improve it.
It’s a cliché, but seriously, if you have an idea, just do it.

PSFK: Why Some Cities Make You Happier

Florida narrowed down the sources of this relative happiness to income, the type of work we do, and our level of education. He explained that cities with more knowledge, and more professional and creative jobs have a lower unemployment rate and higher level of income. Cities with more blue collar jobs, that were hit hardest by the economic crisis, are experiencing increasing unemployment rates and lowering incomes and residents don’t have the means to relocate. This puts a serious damper on the ability of those cities’ populations to be happy under Florida’s criteria.

What he found was that, over time, America has increasingly become unequal and divided in terms of income, jobs, education, politics and culture. The difference between being happy and unhappy has come to revolve around geographical location and urban environment.

This was the first thing that popped in my head when I saw my coworker Victor‘s mouse:

I’m just waiting for a little Batman to bust out of the mouse on a little mouse wheel Bat Bike and drive across my keyboard.

What’s going on with LinkedIn these days?
Can someone tell me what value it brings to the site by allowing people to like and comment on alerts that your connections have updated their profiles?
Are there seriously people out there with enough free time on their hands that after they’re done trolling through Facebook they go over to LinkedIn and say, “Ooooh look! Jimmy updated his Experience to include ‘wasting work hours watching the World Cup.’ I LIKE that! I’m going to click the LIKE link. Big ups, Jimmy! You da man!”
You’re not even seeing the actual Profile update on this screen either. So how are you going to react to something you need to drill down into to understand?

I’m all about the cross-pollination of ideas between different industries and trades, but some things just aren’t appropriate.