Design / Tech / Business / Humanity

If you are pursuing an idea just to make money, then stop right now. Money can be a great motivator, but it won’t get you through the dark times of being an entrepreneur.

Scientists have another name for failure: data. Expecting that your first stab at a big project will succeed is not only unrealistic, but a bit lazy. We should consider ourselves “tinkering scientists” on our quest to create, with each failure just another data point.

Training teaches how to carry out a specific task more efficiently and reliably. Education, on the other hand, opens and enriches a person’s mind. To train a person, you need know nothing about who they really are, or what they love, or why. Education reaches out to embrace the whole person. Historically, we have treated money as a matter of training, rather than education in its wider and more dignified sense.

The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.

Be sure to ‘notice’ ideas when you have them. Stop. Take the time to consider them seriously. And if your gut tells you they’re compelling, be fearless in their pursuit.

It is in our nature to need stories. … Any story we tell of our species, any science of human nature, that leaves out much of what and how we feel is false. Nature shaped us to be ultra-social, and hence to be sharply attentive to character and plot. We are adapted to physiologically interact with stories. They are a key way in which our ruly culture configures our nature.

When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.

Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature, it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.

There’s been a lot written about the evolution of creativity. One hypothesis is that creativity comes from our need to make things special. And this relates to worship because worship allows us to identify things in order to make them special.

We know very little about the symbolic life of animals, but one of the most fascinating aspects of human beings is our great capabilities to create and interpret symbolism, as well as our ability to make abstractions concrete. In many ways, this is the genesis of creativity.

The notion of making things special and the identification of something as special or unique — and the relationship to that thing as special and unique — are the heart of worship and the heart of creativity itself.