The Practical Creator
The Creator's Arc, Company Culture, and Web3 (of course)
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
👩🎨 The Arc of the Practical Creator:
This is the Arc of the Practical Creator. It balances the passion of creativity with the practicality of money, and encourages you to consider both to make your endeavor sustainable. While patience is still the primary virtue, you can cultivate it without the anxiety that typically accompanies financial pressures. By lessening the survival instinct of money, you provide yourself with the clarity of mind required to create your best work.
32-minute read by Lawrence Yeo
👨🎤 Company Culture & How It Can Be Worth $150 Million:
One-off decisions made for the first time today may not seem that important. But, they put a company onto a particular trajectory that compounds over time [..] If you have a culture of ownership where everyone gets 1% better at their job every week, it won’t really make a difference in the short run. But, if you have an organization that has been around for a decade where everyone is always getting better at their job, it is likely to be a category leader.
28-minute read by Taylor Pearson
🤷♀️ The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question:
[D]ecentralization’s value is in genuinely empowering people to act decisively within their social contexts [..] This is in contrast to the current technical landscape, where decisionmaking agency over information, computation, moderation, and so on is increasingly in the hands of authorities “distant” from the relevant groups—for example, platform content moderation processes try to be cross-community and cross-cultural, and largely fail at both
14-minute read by Divya Siddarth, Danielle Allen, Glen Weyl in Wired
🎧 Listening
🤓 Steve Jobs President & CEO, NeXT Computer Corp and Apple:
Seriously, I don't think there's anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something over an extended period of time—like a few years—where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see through one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.
72 minutes with Steve Jobs on MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series
😎 Optimism in Technology:
Prediction is not really useful. There is nobody who can tell what's gonna happen next [..] Nobody can tell you this is going to be a major crash that's going to last for five years; nobody can tell you it's going to be over tomorrow. A lot of the thinking should be less prediction-based and should be more scenario-based and contingency planning-based.
92 minutes with Marc Andreessen on The Good Time Show
🧐 Rethinking Economics for A Sustainable & Prosperous World:
There is a lot of inertia in institutional arrangements. So we got arrangements that were pretty good for the mid-20th century. And the character of the economy has changed so much that we need to evolve some new institutions which can accommodate the ways that our individual decisions affect each other, and we build that into thinking about what better outcomes look like and have that period of institutional innovation for the digital economy
50 minutes with Eric Beinhocker & Diane Coyle on Complexity
📬 Suggestions?
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