“You’re damn talented. But in your eagerness to prove it, you sometimes rush toward a solution. You pluck an idea from the branch and throw it onto the plate before it has time to ripen. Don’t mistake speed for precocity: the world doesn’t need wrong answers in record time.”
http://alistapart.com/column/letter-to-a-junior-designer
Some good advice for younger folks regardless of profession.
“Herein lies the catch-22 of stress. You get stuck in a feedback loop: you’re stressed, which propels you to succeed, which validates your stress. When you fail, you simply weren’t worried about the right things—you didn’t stress enough.”
https://the-pastry-box-project.net/marie-connelly/2014-March-24
“This is the era of cross-platform digital services, fast networks, and mobile devices. Sounds like the ideal time to be a person who makes websites. So why do we feel frustrated so often? Why do we experience burnout or depression? What makes it difficult to do work that has meaning, that satisfies us? The problem is that we need to collaborate, but we haven’t focused on developing our people skills.”
“…every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job…The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.“
http://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-auditions-to-build-a-strong-team/ar/pr
Automattic seems like a cool place to work.
“In research for her book, Steiner-Adair interviewed 1,000 children between the ages of 4 and 18, asking them about their parents’ use of mobile devices. The language that came up over and over and over again, she says, was “sad, mad, angry and lonely.” … There was one girl who said, “I feel like I’m just boring. I’m boring my dad because he will take any text, any call, anytime — even on the ski lift!”“
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/21/304196338/for-the-childrens-sake-put-down-that-smartphone
I’ve been bad about this, but with Kari and the second on the way I’m getting much better about putting the phone away around family.
NPR has been running many stories about parents, distraction, and technology this week. Here’s another good one.