Minimalist Tees

You Don’t Need Another Camera

Zach — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:40:49 +0000

The same could be said about almost everything…

Lack Of Resources Is Why We Succeed

Zach — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:45:39 +0000

Blake Mycoskie, Chief Shoe Giver at TOMS says the key to their success is a lack of resources. “Being comfortable can hurt your creative entrepreneurial spirit. An early and unearned sense of security can be the worst thing that can happen to a business. If you have a little money and have to bootstrap and improvise to pull things together, that becomes embedded in your company’s DNA forever – so as you scale up, you maintain the frugality and the efficiency that helped you survive your earliest days. For instance, now that TOMS is an established, successful business, we could throw resources around with a little less care than we used to, but we don’t . We still emphasize creative problem-solving and are scrupulous with our expenditures. Out culture is lean and mean – well, maybe not mean. But being creative and resourceful are skills we honed in our hungry days, and they are just as useful now. It’s an impulse that can lead to extraordinary success.”

-From his book Start Something That Matters

Ideas Come From Constraints

Zach — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:42:16 +0000

“Good ideas are inevitibly contstained by the parts and skills that surrond them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breackthrough innovations, imagining mommentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detruis. We take ideas we’ve inheritied or that we’ve stumbled across, and jigger them together into some new shape.”
-Steven Johnson, Where Ideas Come From

More Space For More Stuff

Zach — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:35:52 +0000

In 1950, the average new house was less than 1,000 square feet; in 2000, the average new house was over 2,000 square feet. Owning less space so were forced to own less stuff is not only more affordable and conducive to being more creative, it’s totally possible.

Creation Starts With Constraints

Zach — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:08:46 +0000

By David C. Foster

“Great cathedrals start with bricks, great paintings start with paint, and great novels start with words. No one ever castigated F. Scott Fitzgerald for failing to invent new words – his brilliance lay in how he used the exact same twenty six letters we all use in English. No one ever complained that Picasso failed to invent new colors – his brilliance was in the way he combined colors that already exist to form something new and original. And while Gaudi may have come close, even he didn’t invent new shapes – he “merely” used the existing constraints of three dimensions in ways we’d never seen before.” Les Mckeown, End Malaria

Tyranny of Choice

Zach — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:05:12 +0000

We generally tend to think that more freedom is always better than less, and that more choice always means more freedom. We seek to keep options open in our lives because more options mean more happiness. Every day the options expand – more choice in cars, cell phones, tv stations. We continue to operate on the assumption that because some choice is good, more choice must be better.
But, in fact, the opposite is true. Psychologically too many options leaves many of us paralyzed with indecision. And when we do manage to decide, we are often dissatisfied with even good choices because we’re convinced that a different option would have been better. Deliberately and consciously minimizing aspects of our lives can lead to more happiness.
Watch Barry Schwartz explain this Paradox Of Choice.

What’s Your Definition Of Necessity?

Zach — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:18:46 +0000

Things that start out as luxuries eventually become necessities in time. People in different circumstances have different needs but I think its worth looking at yourself and figuring out what you could live without – what luxury is creeping up on becoming a necessity. Then see if you couldn’t live without it.

Minimalist TV

Zach — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:22:42 +0000

The Constraints That Led To The Invention Of The Internet

Zach — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:25:01 +0000

By larskflem under creative commons

The beautifully open and creative internet that we all love was designed, not out of sheer genius, but out of the constraints that forced it’s engineers to creatively make it work. As explained in The Master Switch by Tim WU,

“The internet’s creators, mainly academics operating within and outside the government, lacked the power or ambition to create an information empire, they faced a world in which the wires were owned by AT&T and computing was a patchwork of fiefdoms centered on the gigantic mainframe computers, each with idiosyncratic protocols and systems. Now as then, the salient reality – and one that too many observers don’t grasp or overlook – is that the internet works over an infrastructure that doesn’t belong to those using it. The owner is always AT&T. The internet founders built their unifying network around this fundamental constraint. Consequently, their network was from its beginning beholden to the power and autonomy of its owners. It was designed to link human brains, but it has no more control over the activities than that, an egalitarianism born of necessity, and one which would persist as the network grew over decades to include everyone. It was truly a first in human history: an electronic information network independent of the physical infrastructure over which it ran. The invention of the encapsulation also permitted the famous layered structure of the internet, whereby communications functions are segregated, allowing the network to negotiate the differing technical standards of various devices, media, and applications. But, again, this was an idea born not of design but of the practical necessity to link different types of networks.“

The internet’s founders were forced to be creative under the constraints of inventing a protocol that took account of the existence of many networks, over which they had limited power, and as a result of those constraints, we have the internet which has allowed for more personal expression and creativity than any other medium ever.

More Stuff Doesn’t Equal More Happiness

Zach — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:19:13 +0000

By ghz

In the book Your Money and Your Brain, author Jason Zweig explained:

“In 1957, the average American earned about $10,000 (adjusted for inflation) and lived without a dishwasher, clothes dryer, television. or air conditioner. But 35% of people surveyed said they were “very happy” with their lives. By 2004, personal income had nearly tripled after inflation, and the typical house was bursting with consumer goods. Yet just 34% of people now said they were “very happy”. Somehow, almost tripling our wealth has made Americans a little less happy – and still we want more.”