The house painter and the architect

We don’t design a book until after it’s written.

Or cast the movie until the screenplay is complete.

The house painter has an important job, but it makes no sense to plan for the painting before the house is designed.

This makes a lot of sense because some parts of a project have high variability which can lead to very different outcomes.

There are more than a billion ways to write a book, but fewer than 100 distinct categories of interior book design.

We desperately need house painters, gaffers and book designers. If they don’t deliver on their work, the entire project falls apart. But they don’t go first.

The job of the house painter is to amplify the architect’s vision, not vice versa.

So there are a few questions worth asking:

First, which one of the tasks is the dominant variable, the one where simply doing ‘a pretty good job’ is going to be insufficient (no one talks about the roofer on a Frank Lloyd Wright house–until it leaks).

Second, which job do you want? We need both, but we should choose the path that suits our goals.

[To be clear, it’s a role, not a job title. There are plenty of designers and painters who act as architects, and some architects that are not the pivot point for the project.]

May 3, 2023

The list of compromises

All the no-compromise solutions have failed. If there was a way to solve our problem without giving something up, we would have done that already.

So, if a persistent problem is important, the question is not: Should we compromise or not?

The question is: Which changes are we going to make first?

May 2, 2023

On to the next thing

Vitally important, rarely taught, easily messed up.

In order to go onto the next thing, which we all do (unless you’re still wearing pajamas with feet and taking ballet lessons), we need to walk away from the last thing.

Wrap it up, learn from it, leave it in good hands.

And we also need to have an idea of what the next thing is. But if we spend too much time focusing on the next thing, we’ll neglect the thing we’re currently doing, to ill effect.

Trapeze artists spend all of their time focusing on transitions, as they’re a matter of life and death.

If we begin by acknowledging that there’s going to be a next thing, perhaps we can learn to develop the skills and focus we need to get there.

May 1, 2023