Don’t build widgets

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Don’t build widgets.

Was a car built to go from a to b? After all, humans had been able to do that by foot and horse for thousands of years

It was built to create opportunity that fast and independent travel could give individuals. The opportunity to have freedom.

If you create for functional reasons at best it will be just that.

There is already a mass of average functional low-value stuff, so no point in creating more.

People buy and keep buying creations that touch their emotion. Something that stands out and makes a difference.

Think about the cause, the passion, the mission not the function, even if you’re in the widget business.

Craft

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100’s of years ago before the mechanisation that the industrialised world brought to the human race, we were involved in work, art, music, or writing that involved craft.

We wrote letters with a quill dipped in ink on a scroll. We spent our time crafting beautiful letters.

We shaped wood into amazing things, we hammered iron into all manner of items, we made and created things with our hands, often made with joy and intimate knowledge and skill of how to.

Whatever we did it mainly involved concentration and often deep work with passion and feeling. It had a meaning.

In our world of email, social media, and instant gratification, we are desperately short of doing anything of meaning, substance and passion.

In order to fulfil ourselves and gain meaning to our existence, we need to add craft to whatever we are doing.

That requires attention and the removal of distraction. It needs us to learn focus and forget the shallow pings of the insubstantial world we have created.

Craft something remarkable and enjoy every moment.

There is a brilliant quote ‘we who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals’. We must envision something deeper rather than simply be adding yet another piece of digital content to the vast digital dustbin of much of the internet.

There is more.