17 Oct 2012
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Art
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Review
Max Richter—a pianist and neoclassical composer squarely in my top five—has released a new project called Vivaldi Recomposed. Every single work by Richter, and I mean every single bit, is writing-, contemplation-, and coding-worthy. When I discovered Richter, it was as if his taste in composition and instrumentation had been designed specifically as a gift to me. If you aren’t familiar with his work, the most likely place you have heard him is via several pieces toward the end of Stranger Than Fiction.
Being someone who has performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons multiple times on violin, Richter’s reinterpretation of Vivaldi is delightful and inspiring. It is provocative and deliberate, completely avoiding the feeling that he’s just randomly messing with the original. It has the Richter aesthetic all over it.
Check out Vivaldi Recomposed on Spotify, Amazon, or iTunes.
Here is an 8-minute interview with Richter about the project.
Out of his catalog, I would recommend you check out the follow albums: Blue Notebooks, 24 Postcards in Full Color, Memoryhouse, Infra, Songs from Before… You get the idea. Listen to all of it.
17 Oct 2012
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Quotes
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Writing
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
14 Oct 2012
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Productivity
James Somers in More People Should Write:
You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. […] When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me.
He also repeats an argument I’ve made to many friends:
I have a selfish reason for my demand: I have a lot of friends who are thoughtful, but keep their thoughts to themselves. I imagine finding notebooks under their bed, tens of composition books packed with little print. I think about what sort of a treasure that would be.
Yes.
14 Oct 2012
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Learning
Here is Kevin Rose interviewing Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal). Along the lines of Clay Christensen’s comments on welcoming critical feedback, I couldn’t help but share Elon’s response to the question of his most important advice to entrepreneurs:
TODO: Find video
To paraphrase:
It’s very important to actively seek out and listen very carefully to negative feedback. And this is something people tend to avoid because it’s painful, but it’s a very common mistake. When friends get a product, I don’t say “Tell me what you like,” I say “Tell me what you don’t like.” Your friend doesn’t want to offend you, so you really need to coax negative feedback. Underweight positive feedback, and overweight negative feedback.
The video is cued up to the moment of the above question, but the whole interview is interesting.
12 Oct 2012
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Learning
Over the last several months I’ve been picking up more signal online about Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor well-known for his ideas on innovation and disruption. To learn more about Christensen, I listened to an interview conducted with him by former student Horace Dediu on The Critical Path.
The whole interview was great, but what impacted me was the way Dediu calls Christensen “his teacher.” The whole conversation was marked with humility and an obvious two-way foundation of seeking to learn from the other, marked by admissions like “I always learn so much when I talk to you.”
I haven’t consciously used the phrase “teacher” in over a decade—it’s been supplanted by words like professor, instructor, advisor, or lecturer. Teacher, for me, became an institutional term with institutional implications.
That’s really sad.
I started asking myself: Who are my teachers? Who has taught me? I have (and have had) many—including various professors, family members, friends, even strangers—who have profoundly impacted me, taught me lessons, and honed skills in me. This world is full of people who can teach me if I am humble enough to listen.
It’s easy to become cynical and defensive of your own right view of the world. You can start to think you have much to give or share, and that it’s your job to get the message out.
But what if, instead of believing you have figured out so much and have so much to give, you came to view every person you encounter as someone who you can learn deeply from. Assuming that each person you encounter has a more deeply honed perspective than you. That they have approached life or a specific topic with more care and thought than you have. Not everyone has, but why not start from that assumption? Like the Covey adage: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
What a generous way to live your life.
At the end of Dediu’s interview, Christensen shares his email address and closes with this (I’m paraphrasing):
Please feel free to contact me, especially if you’ve read my work and noticed an inconsistency or example where my ideas don’t work. That would give me the greatest opportunity to learn something new.
Most of us are too concerned with protecting our reputation and being right to honestly desire this type of critical response. Christensen is operating on a completely higher plane here. His goal is to learn, and his ego isn’t threatened by the possibility of correction—instead, he views it as the best possible outcome.
So I am trying to adopt this “seek to learn first, possibly teach later” mindset. I hope to document the process here and will try to approach it with this level of humility and generosity.