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I very much admire the beneficial nation-wide influence of the ready-made clothing industry upon the maintenance of good taste in masculine attire — and the industry’s capability of making clothes available at reasonable prices. The reason most of my clothes are custom-made is because, due to my measurements, I encounter considerable difficulty in the matter of sizes. If I find a ready-made jacket that fits me around the shoulders, there would be enough room in the trousers and in the rest of the jacket to accommodate several others besides myself.
Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr.
By George Frazier, Esquire, September 1960
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Move fast and learn things
I moved from an advertising agency to a startup for a few reasons. Among other things, I wanted to help make a beautiful, functional product. Something that people might love to use everyday.
I didn’t want to work in a silo. I wanted to make big decisions with my team, experiment with different features, build it with developers, and test it in the wild, planing and polishing until it was perfect.
Quickly iterate and learn from usage data. Move fast and learn things. If I could do that, I’d be happy.
But, just because I scribbled something on a sticky note, didn’t mean my work was over.
As you might know if you’re a few years out of college, the workplace is chaotic, senseless and random. Unseen forces lash and whip your office into what you see every Monday morning.
It would be foolish to think you could control it. What you want, and what others want can’t always be fulfilled. Even if you share the same goals.
But that doesn’t mean you become a doormat and crumple at the thought of hard work or a bad turn of events.
If you find yourself off course, be this guy. The captain.
Don’t get angry, don’t get defensive and don’t panic. Recognize your position, and remember what you were meant to be doing in the first place. Remember your purpose. Move fast and learn things.
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The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Art and Fearundefined
