It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
From Linus’ make things with love:
Love, I think, is also the necessary ingredient of any truly great long-term project. Whether you’re engineering a particular software feature, building a community, or designing a dress, over and over I’ve seen that there is no replacement for simply caring more than everybody else, and pouring your love into that process of creation.
There are two, related mindsets about creative craft here:
- Treat a multi-decade project as a process of building a long-lasting asset rather than simply a way to get the most value at any given moment
- Create something of unreasonable quality by investing your love into the craft
From Ali:
Choices are cheap. What we don’t acknowledge is the high cost of a life without commitment.
Jobs further explained to Playboy in 1985: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
This is the opposite of shipping a “minimum viable product.” This is the opposite of “move fast and break things.” Jobs cared. He was committed to craftsmanship. Excellence. Quality. His name is on the patent for the glass staircase at Apple stores. It’s on more than 350 other patents, too.
related: options are worthless if not exercised, explore exploit tradeoff