Allegory of the Cave is one of my favorite stories in philosophy. This visual essay is an interesting interpretation of it.

I would not have guessed what it was inspired by if I hadn’t been told.

via Laughing Squid

Seth Godin on software (and everything else in life):

The reason it’s so difficult to test and improve is that it requires you to acknowledge that your original plan wasn’t perfect. And to have the humility and care to go ahead and fix it.

Making shit work is the easy part.

Making sure it doesn’t break is the hard part.

Art director Matilda Kahl wears the same thing to work every day:

To state the obvious, a work uniform is not an original idea. There’s a group of people that have embraced this way of dressing for years—they call it a suit. For men, it’s a very common approach, even mandatory in most professions. Nevertheless, I received a lot of mixed reactions for usurping this idea for myself. Immediately, people started asking for a motive behind my new look: “Why do you do this? Is it a bet?” When I get those questions I can’t help but retort, “Have you ever set up a bill for online auto-pay? Did it feel good to have one less thing to deal with every month?”

I’ve started on this path too.

I creative direct and art direct all day. When I get up in the morning the less I have to think creatively about what I wear, the better for my brain.

Jenna Kutcher

via this isn’t happiness

—taken from “You Have Too Much Shit.” by Chris Thomas

One of the things I try to show my students is that historical grounding does not exclude being contemporary. The future is not the opposite of the past. It’s easy to think that, because language sets it up that way: Day is the opposite of night, up is the opposite of down, and therefore the future must be the opposite of the past. But it doesn’t actually work like that.
—Tobias Frere-Jones, Surface Magazine No. 109
via The Made Shop

—Paul Rand

Just keep going.

said in an episode of 99% Invisible

—Greg McKeown
via Minimal Mac

From Wikipedia:

Kintsugi (金継ぎ?) (Japanese: golden joinery) or Kintsukuroi (金繕い?) (Japanese: golden repair) is the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with lacquer resin dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy it speaks to breakage and repair becoming part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

What an amazing philosophy.
via Colossal

Wow, my new favorite word, antifragile (via Bombtune):

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet. And antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk.
As much as I have order in my life, with my various daily routines and habits, I think I’m fairly antifragile.
I studied print design in college, became a web designer and taught myself web development after college then moved into mobile/app design in 2008 (all the while returning to web & graphic design along the way).
I lived in New York City for 4 years, then Miami for 1 year, then back to NYC for 6 years, then Los Angeles for 1 year, and now San Francisco.
I takes a lot to throw me off-balance.

—Shunryu Suzuki

Instead of an “About” page Malcolm Gladwell has a great disclosure statement on his site, where he goes off on fascinating tangents about his job at the New Yorker and that of a writer and speaker.
A good portion of the page describes the differences between being biased and having an opinion and how they affect or don’t affect the journalists and writers:

Do any of these opinions rise to the level of bias? I don’t think so. They don’t cohere in a single identifiable ideology. And they aren’t predictive, in the sense that they lead me inexorably towards writing in a pro-God, pro-Democratic, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-free trade, pro-higher taxes, anti-Iraq war kind of way. If you look at my articles, in fact, you’ll see that I rarely even write about the subject areas where I have the most strongly held opinions. What’s more, when I interview or profile people I don’t ask them for their opinions on these same subjects–so there’s very little chance for any conflict or agreement in our attitudes to become an issue. I should also say that, by the time you read this, any number of the opinions I’ve stated above may well have changed. That’s another important difference between biases and opinions. Biases are pretty stable. Opinions come and go.
Gladwell’s disclosure statement is pretty long, but well worth the time it takes to read it.