> What is context? It’s the operating framework in which the content occurs — the goal, one might say. For example, the design of the Apollo lunar module was content. The goal of landing a man on the moon in nine years was the context. You will get a completely different result from engineers working on a lunar module if the context is "some day we might go to the moon" than if its "were going in nine years.” – Dan Pallotta.
I’ve been trying hard to focus my work energy on deciding context first, rather than immediately jumping to content.
For people to listen to you, they have to trust you, and that requires you spend a lot of time listening to them first.
> Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.
> Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.
– Dan Pallotta
> “Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” – [Clayton Christensen](http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/pr).
Another excerpt:
> “It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
I’ve written about this before, but two great articles recently said it even better:
Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton
If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…
But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…
Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – Diego Rodriguez
From [Ed Catmull’s talk](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/inside-pixars-leadership/) at the [Economist Ideas conference](http://ideas.economist.com/):
> I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.
> One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.
> We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.
“The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good.” – Origami artist, [Between the Folds](http://www.truefilms.com/archives/2009/12/between_the_fol.php)
A friend, currently in her surgical residency program, describes what “scrubbing in” feels like:
> Once you’re scrubbed in, you can’t really do anything else until the procedure is over. If someone calls for you, all you have to say is “I’m scrubbed in”. You can’t touch your pager. You can’t touch anything. And you yourself are literally *untouchable*.
Is there benefit in “scrubbing in” for the rest of us, in other types of work? What might it look like for designers?
But with many similarities.
“I actually would’ve gotten a lot of stuff done Friday if the whole universe hadn’t been against me,” Olson said. “I took my car in to get my tires rotated, but the guy said he couldn’t get to it until the following Tuesday, so I was like, ‘Screw that.’ I also went to Staples to pick up the computer desk I’d had on layaway for the last month, but I forgot to bring my receipt. They wouldn’t give the stupid thing to me, even after arguing with the guy for almost an hour. The whole day was a colossal waste. Except I got a new belt I needed for work.”
– Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results – The Onion