More from Abhishek Chakraborty
If your wife asks you if she looks overweight, you will utter “no” without flinching, whatever you actually think. On the other hand, all of us consider it morally wrong (under all circumstances) to make sexual advances on children. This fuzziness however creates some interesting dilemma.
There are times when you may not know for sure if this is the right decision. There are times when you don’t know anything about something, and you’re still asked to do something about it. These kinds of situations are in fact more common than others. What do you do then?
The recurring advice for writing any good story: keep the interesting parts, remove everything else. If you watch a good biopic, you wouldn’t want to know about their boring afternoon visit to the doctor unless it contributed to the screenplay of the movie.
There are certain events in life, after which, everything changes irreversibly. There’s no way to get back to the old way of things. For me, it when I got the call from the hospital.
More in life
When we make something new, people often ask "why don't you just add that to Basecamp?" There are a number of reasons, depending on what it is. But, broadly, making something brand new gives you latitude (and attitude) to explore new tech and design approaches. It's the opposite of grafting something on to a heavier, larger system that already exists. The gravity of existing decisions in current systems requires so much energy to reach escape velocity that you tend to conform rather than explore. Essentially you're bent back to where you started, rather than arcing out towards a new horizon. New can be wrong, but it's always interesting. And that in itself is worth it. Because in the end, even if the whole new thing doesn't work out, individual elements, explorations, and executions discovered along the way can make their way back into other things you're already doing. Or something else new down the road. These bits would have been undiscovered had you never set out for new territory in the first place. Ultimately, a big part of making something new is simply thinking something new. -Jason
"Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done"
Contributing to a chosen culture via running