Do something with what you love:

Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The Future. They are not there for the plucking. They don’t exist in some natural state. They must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing.

Don’t mope in your room.

Go invent something.

It’s always time to start again.

Over your life, you will become many different people, and the journey from one person to another is one of discovery and excitement. But there are also moments and places where youll long to return, memories youll wish to fold up and place in a bag next to each other. And then someday, youll find yourself no longer who you were, really, and that bag of what you wished to hold on to will be all you have left. And you, too, will head off into the unknown.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while, and to become us.

Sing together, sing often. Make music with the people you love.

Merlin broke through my computer screen and made me cry. Go watch this, please.

“This is what I want to build. This is classy. This is inspiring. This is limitless. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous. . . . So your homework this weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.”

“Good design is communicating messages that you believe in to the people that you care about.”

This is what we believe in.

There’s a lot to takeaway from this this article by Austin Kleon. Here’s a sample:

Devoting yourself to something means shutting out other things.

What makes you interesting isn’t just what you’ve experienced, but also what you haven’t experienced.

The same is true when you make art: you must embrace your limitations and keep moving.

Go read it now.

“The people that I respect the most, the people who are doing great things, are people who care so much about what they do that they can’t stop.”

— Liz Danzico

Writing is chasing a question—an inquiry of the mind. Forward is better than every direction at once. It’s not really writing until you feel something; until you choke up at a thought, until you start fidgeting in your seat in excitement, until you feel the twinge of pain that happens when a thorn is pulled out of your side. Go back. Delete everything before you started fidgeting or crying or deflating like a balloon. Then, write some more.

When I hear about some news event, rather than think about it for days — what caused it, why would they do that, what can we do to stop it — I Google the event, read a number of news stories about it, read the Wikipedia page on anyone I’m not familiar with, and then… And then my desire to learn is sapped, and no critical thinking has happened at all. I haven’t formed a position on it, I haven’t conceptualized what happened and why, because my involvement is merely passive. I just read news articles and biographies. No true understanding is needed when all the world’s information is at your fingertips.

via Access, at the Expense of Creativity | TightWind.

Well executed Helvetica designs for Google’s already utilitarian interfaces are beautiful, particularly the use of that Swiss red. This is why Helvetireader goes on every new machine I use. And, now, Google Calendar can get a facelift too.

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