NICK NG

We often ask people about the tools they use to get the job done. We’re curious about their work routines, their schedule, their priorities, etc. But we rarely ask them what they are doing to stay sharp. What do they do in their off time? What hobbies to they keep? What does their family life look like? How do they spend their free time? Who we are and what we do when we are away from our most important work is just as important as the energy and focus we give to doing that work. Because we are who we are, everywhere we are. Eating a healthy meal, having a good night’s sleep, telling our spouses that we love them — all these things impact the quality of the work we produce. The lines between work and life are much more blurry than we like to imagine.

To study the arts is to allow yourself to go to a place of uncertainty. And, in doing so you become your own person, brave and confident. What parent wants their child to be unprepared or unable to navigate uncertainty, when parents, as adults, know that it is uncertainty that characterises most of life.

That lack of fear about sucking and continuing to improve is what punk is all about...The punk scene was thing thing where people would get up on the stage and they would play and they were terrible. They were absolutely terrible. And then you saw them next week, and they were a little bit better and then you saw them the next week, and they were a little better. And then you saw them in a year, and they were the Ramones."

Anyone can learn to code. But very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does or convince other people to use it and help them build it. These are all essential human skills that have everything to do with the art of communicating with other people, and nothing at all to do with the writing code that a computer can understand. Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people—well … you’ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out. And from my perspective, the sooner you start, the better. I want my children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically.

To this day, the street achieves for me what I so often cannot achieve for myself: composition. When it does I never fail to realize that this is my deepest need—to know not the peace and excitement of love, marriage, or continental adventure, but of composition. The promise of narrative that flashes repeatedly out of the mass of swiftly moving figures—always leaving in its wake scraps of conversation, profiles of dramatic beauty, gestures of humor and despair—that, again and again, restores me not necessarily to meaning but to an affection for life that fills me—stomach, arms, chest, and brain—with peace and joy and the longing to dive.

After meeting many cities, and having a limited amount of time in which to get to know them, I’ve come to the conclusion the best way to know a city is to meet it in the early morning before dawn. That’s when the real city begins to come alive. The people who make it work are up and moving, but the veneer of tourism hasn’t been applied yet, and you can see the raw energy and personality, with all its charm and flaws, that tells you who the city truly is. You can always grab those moments. And they always reflect back to you who you are here and now.

The makers of our world would be better off mimicking scientists with their work. Harp on deliberate practice. Reinvent their processes daily. Share every discovery. And most importantly, try new things often.

...one of Austin’s secrets is its collaborative nature. Instead of 'oh, you shouldn’t do X because Joe Smith is already doing it' the conversation is 'oh, Jane Smith is working on X too, y’all should talk—let me introduce you two!' That mentality has stuck with me and is integral to how I try to interact with the world.

I recently realized that if I’m too busy to take something on, I shouldn’t say “I don’t have the time”. In fact, I often do have the time. It’s not that hard to squeeze in some extra time for someone. What I don’t have–and what I can’t squeeze in–is more attention. Attention is a far more limited resource than time. So what I should say is “I don’t have the attention”. I may have 8 hours a day for work, but I probably have 4 hours a day for attention.

Having the confidence to start and restart over and over is powerful. The best part about starting over and over for 100 days is that you’re not only practicing your craft, but you’re also practicing the art of getting started. By the end of 100 days, you become a little less scared of the blank page. I don’t think it’s like riding a bike, though: starting and creativity are more like muscles, and they need to be exercised. Getting started is often the hardest part. What’s your best advice to those who are struggling to get started? It’s easy to look at people who are making things happen and think, “I wish I was like that. I wish I could be involved in interesting projects and take those sorts of risks.” But the thing is: we all have that in us. Those people aren’t superheroes—they’ve just had practice. They’ve leveled up, and it’s not fair to compare our progress with their high score. My advice is that the more you practice starting, the easier it gets. I’m big on celebrating process. The awkward first drafts are the warriors that bring us to the finish line. If we can celebrate the process, then we can give ourselves permission to fail. When we have permission to fail, we have nothing to lose. And when we have nothing to lose, there’s nothing stopping us from giving it a go.

The recognition you do or don’t receive is mostly out of your control, but the effort and care you put into what you make is entirely within your control. That’s where your focus should be. You don’t need to be famous to succeed. You do need to be good at what you do though. Sometimes focusing entirely on that, on your craft and connecting to a tiny number of the right people, is all you need.

A decisive individual who is an active listener—someone who comes into the project with focus and clarity on the goals, but few expectations about the methods to achieve them.

So, here’s how I screwed up: because everything was so antagonistic, and because I flatly didn’t know any better, I didn’t approach my first client-facing projects with kindness. I didn’t assume the client was right in any way. I thought the client was somebody who had to be corrected, not educated. That was a stupid move on my part, and I continue to regret it. I remember when Mike Monteiro got up on stage and proclaimed “we love our clients.” For someone who only knew variations of the Polycom Waggle Dance for five years, I cannot possibly overstate how seismic this was for me. You can… _like_ your clients? My god, how? Ad people taught me to be suspicious of my clients, and it took years for me to unlearn this. Clients are people, just like you and me. They care about the success of their projects, just like you and I do. I believe you should like working with your clients, especially if you have a fake invented job like I do and have any say in the sales process – because it sure as heck beats any alternative. We all go into a new gig with the best of intentions, and it’s how we deal with things going wrong that really defines who we are and how we work. And things will go wrong. With that in mind, what will you do about it?

Freelancers have a bad reputation. Many clients learn to see us as unreliable and only interested in racking up those billable hours. How many clients have told you that they've had a bad experience with another freelancer? I hear it all the time. Here's why that happens. Because of fear, we book any project we possibly can, and in the process, take on work that's not good for the client. The project inevitably doesn't get results, which adds to the bad reputation. But if you can master your fear and truly be an expert—even when it's better for the client than for you—you'll be able to distance yourself from that bad reputation. You'll get the respect you deserve as an expert. All because you acted like one.

I was always building stuff with my hands growing up. Like always. Wood projects, go-karts, radio-controlled airplanes, that sort of thing. I think we underestimate sometimes just how much those kinds of activities, the ones that seem completely unrelated to our careers, play a vital role in shaping who we become and what we do with our working lives. The tools I use now in business are totally different from those I used in my garage twenty years ago, but in the end they’re all the same. They’re just tools that facilitate synthesis and creativity. And ten or twenty years from now, those tools will be totally different again. Mastery of creation and composition is much more important than mastery of tools.

Three weeks ago we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary, and I can't tell you how many people have asked us: how did you do it? In many settings, we have both quoted our favorite aphorism: you have to fall in love many times with the same person!

This is why many of our youth turn to technology. They aren’t addicted to the computer; they’re addicted to interaction, and being around their friends. Children, and especially teenagers, don’t want to only socialize with parents and siblings; they want to play with their peers. That’s how they make sense of the world. And we’ve robbed them of that opportunity because we’re afraid of boogeymen. We’re raising our children in captivity and they turn to technology to socialize, learn and decompress. Why are we blaming the screens?