More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don’t win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Far from it. Understanding how someone else sees things doesn’t imply that you’ll act in his interest; in some situations — in war, for example — you want to do exactly the opposite.
most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics.
The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.
“The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.”
There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you’ll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.
I’ve seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. In high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the time. Now high school kids could write software or design web sites. But only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping ice cream.
In architecture and design, this principle means that a building or object should let you use it as you want: a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it, instead of making them live as if they were executing a program written by the architect.
Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. SUVs, for example, would arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel that would never run out and generated no pollution. SUVs are gross because they’re the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.)
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you’re running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average big company — that is, to grow about ten percent a year. The same thing will happen if you’re running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means you’ll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you’re running a startup, you had
...more
You’re most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn’t include you, it tends to be for people you consider less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. And looking down on the user, however benevolently, always seems to corrupt the designer. I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them.
If you think you’re designing something for idiots, odds are you’re not designing something good, even for idiots.
