Link tags: purpose

Winnie Lim » on leading a purposeless life

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I think it is beautiful if people have a purpose. But it should be valid to lead a purposeless life too. … Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being.

Open source beyond the market - Signal v. Noise

The transcript of David Heinemeier Hansson keynote from last year’s RailsConf is well worth reading. It’s ostensibily about open source software but it delves into much larger questions.

Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift

If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.

A deep dive into deep time:

Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.

“The Only-ness Statement,” an article by Dan Mall

A useful design strategy exercise from Marty Neumeier.

From Purpose to Patterns // Speaker Deck

A great slide deck from Alla, all about design principles. From purpose to principles to patterns.

Finding the Exhaust Ports | Jon Gold’s blog

Perhaps when Bush prophesied lightning-quick knowledge retrieval, he didn’t intend for that knowledge to be footnoted with Outbrain adverts. Licklider’s man-computer symbiosis would have been frustrated had it been crop-dusted with notifications. Ted Nelson imagined many wonderfully weird futures for the personal computer, but I don’t think gamifying meditation apps was one of them.

Why I love working with the web

I love this. I really love this. Remy absolutely nails what makes the web so great.

There’s the ubiquity:

If the viewer is using the latest technology beefy desktop computer that’s great. Equally they could view the website from a work computer, something old and locked in using a browser called IE8.

Then there’s the low barrier to entry—yes, even today:

It’s the web’s simplicity. Born out of a need to connect documents. As much as that might have changed with the latest generation of developers who might tell you that it’s hard and complex (and they’re right), at the same time it is not complicated. It’s still beautifully simple.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can publish content to the web, be it as plain text, or simple HTML formed only of <p> tags or something more elaborate and refined. The web is unabashed of it’s content. Everything and anything goes.

I might just print this out and nail it to the wall.

If you sit back for a moment, and think about just how many lives you can touch simply by publishing something, anything, to the web, it’s utterly mind blowing.

Jerry Seinfeld’s Clio Acceptance Speech - YouTube

I feel that this is relevant to that discussion I had with Malarkey on his podcast about advertising.

Slash Purpose

I like the idea of a /purpose page: I should add one to The Session and Huffduffer.

Dmitry Baranovskiy’s Web Log: Mermaids & Fishermen

I am a mermaid.

» 24 February 2012, baked by Ben Ward @ The Pastry Box Project

A beautiful reminder from Ben of the scale-free nature of the web.

We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is admired, respected, and praised for its actual success. All of those could be sustainable, profitable ventures. If TechCrunch doesn’t care to write about you, all the better.

If you are fortunate enough to work on your own product, with your own idea, and build it, and ship it, and reach enough people willing to sustain you financially for that immense amount of work, you should be applauded. You have poured in inordinate effort, and succeeded in making something that improved lives.

Frank Chimero’s Blog - The Storm and The Line

A beautiful dose of perspective from Frank.