You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
chrbutler.com
chrbutler.com
The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.
Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.
Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.
I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.
That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
How can you be either of those without any experience under your belt?
But, of course, at least for the motivational speaker, a back of experience doesn't matter, because that's not what people are paying for. They're paying for a few hours where they can get pumped up, and give them an energy which will carry them until the next session, not requiring them to actually do any of the hard work to change their lives.
I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion.
If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them.
In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.
Changed an industry, made a lot of money, and pretty much nobody knows who I am (which I'm completely fine with). Not looking for fame, don't want it.
But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware).
I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3O9y7KvDkmr9eRZ1i9IQXZ?si=AA...
The band was L.T.D.M.S. (https://thomasturine.com/bands/ltdms/)
My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.
Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band name or whatever.
I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters, and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.
So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public information. They're hardly household names.
If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.
And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps the show running.
We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of this blindside.
Which search engine was better than Google when Google came out?
The idea of album sales or concert sales or youtube views or whatever being indicitave of music "quality" is a horrid historical perversion which is antithetical to the role music has played and still could maybe play in human life.
The worst thing about the modern commercial music industry, from my perspective, isn't the music that gets produced, but rather this made-up binary of professional music-salespeople ("musicians") on the one hand, and music-consuming plebs on the other.
The professional musician is measured by their album sales and ticket sales and spotify/chart success and their views on the big platforms, and that's it, end of story. The public is allowed an "opinion" on which "superstar" is "better", i.e., they pick kendrick or drake, or one k-pop band or the other, and that's it, you vibe to your type of playlist on spotify and fork over the money for the big shows and that's your musical existence.
I'm not sure how to say it in a way that doesn't sound like stale traditionalism or toothless hippie nostalgia, but I mean it in a real hard sense: "real music" happens when real people express themselves musically, on their own or in a communal setting.
It can be a kid doing her fifth piano class and you play two chords repeatedly and ask her to pick something in the room and say something about it and then you both take turns throwing out a melody and see where you end up. It can be three people hungover around a kitchen table who swap instruments for a few tunes, 5 friends in a garage screaming about their feelings, 10 friends in a cacophonous and smoky practice studio somewhere.
Your friend who never played any instrument who came along to hang out who starts chanting melodically and repetitively into a spare microphone at some stage can be the one who pushes the thing to some new level no one saw coming, and then there you all are, in this new musical moment.
Anyway. I didn't mean to rant there, but maybe you get my point.
While there are charlatans that are all talk, it's extremely common among genuinely brilliant people to work too much and don't do enough talking about it. Talking about what you're doing opens doors. It connects you with other people. It gets you funded. Being brilliant in obscurity does not.
Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger won the nobel prize the same year. Both are fairly brilliant theoretical physicists and the prize was well deserved, but only one of them was charismatic and loved to talk about himself and what he was doing, and as a result, is much more of a household name even today.
In that context, doing the work would refer to creating social media posts and the subject of those posts is secondary.
Attention comes mainly from understanding. And all people are in the mid to low-tier of understanding things outside their own specialization, and too often even within their own specialization.
So to understand something great, you have to have enough insight into that area to see the greatness. And on the other side, there is also the false perception of thinking something is great, while you are just too low in your understanding, to see why it's just mid. Isn't this also basically what Dunning-Kruger-effect is about?
Neanderthal: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"
Midwit: "If I tweet enough I'll get well known and become great"
Monk: "I know I'm a great designer but no one understands me"
> I sometimes brought home the paper I purchased at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteemed an industrious, thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom
He went out of his way to get positive attention, and it worked.
It made me realize that there's an innumerable amount of talented people out there, who are most definitely capable enough or willing to grow enough, that can produce something that makes you think that Ubisoft could have made it, because those people were always right there!
And if they weren't motivated enough to risk it all, because you're only starting from a mere idea, we would never have seen the fruits of their labor.
I'm not claiming that they're comparable with the greatest artists of our time but, the probability of someone out there becoming great will be silenced and squashed before it even has a chance to show up, either because they must conform to the job market to survive day to day, or because of office politics, or out of their own temperament avoiding risks. Especially if that risk is unemployment and homelessness.
As a fan of John Carmack, for example, I have to wonder if he would've ever hit the status he achieved if Doom wasn't this fun to play, or if he kept shipping monthly video games by mail instead. I'm not talking about whether he would be this intelligent or not, but whether he would be known.
I’d rather do the thing than talk about it. Or, frankly, watch/listen/read others.
That is fine if you're doing it for yourself, but rather unhelpful if you hope to make a living out of doing the thing. The people I know who make a living off their art are those who sink a lot of time into selling their art (and themselves). Those who sit and home and just make (often much better) art languish in obscurity.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Instead of our attention being taken up by creatives who are mostly competent, it is taken up by everyone who wants to short circuit the system. (This would be even more interesting if I could find that article that suggests our taste in music is actually created by exposure.)
There used to be editors of various sorts, whether it be in writing, art, or music, who would be the arbiters of taste. You could indeed take issue with who they decided to elevate, but they definitely provided a useful function.
There a things that I immediately replace when they break or get lost: bolt cutters, dremel, leatherman. There's software like IDEs, Zim, Inkscape.
It's very much like losing a limb when any of it is unavailable and it's absolutely true that there are folks out there who did their job so well as to make them indispensable.
Great post.
Who got attention? People who spent 20% of their time making and 80% self-promoting.
The world is full of amazingly talented and hard working people. Almost all of them are not on social media.
if I'm understanding correctly the implications of Emily Noether's work, its an absolute travesty that she isn't famous in the same breath as Einstein and Feynman. Yet this video was the first time I had even heard of her.
I think a parallel would be if some random guy, outside of academia, completely and cleanly solved the dark energy/matter mystery in his spare time, with a revolutionary way of thinking, and it completely reshaped our understanding of not only the cosmos but of physics itself.
Becoming well known for advanced works in science requires a once in many centuries type level of achievement - which is what Einstein was. Feynman is a great example of this. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of all time and made many important contributions to science, yet he would probably be relatively unknown if not for his excessive public outreach and his exceptional ability to explain complex concepts in an extremely intuitive and clear fashion. A talent which he put to extensive use.
Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia".
Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model.
Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope.
I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things.
She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be.
I don't think this is at all true. The reason you've heard of Grace Hopper or Ada Lovelace is precisely because they're women. No man who achieved similar levels of significant work is remembered outside of some niche publications.
> subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things
It just seems unlikely that Noether has several times done what Newton and Einstein did and she's so unknown. Why do I know about much less prolific women and not her, if sexism is the actual reason, and not just a thought-terminating word?
Maybe the same could be argued for Einstein's work, but knowledgeable people, recognizing its importance, have found ways of explaining it in a relatable way... ?
And you can't really compare Einstein's achievement to anybody else, literally. The reason is not even because of the science itself, which really isn't that complex in hindsight, but a mixture of him solving such a pressing question that nobody else had "seen" as a possibility, alongside with its impact expanding far outside the academic world. Before Einstein our understanding of the universe was one of relative normality. He made it clear that the universe is unimaginably weird.
I do think the comparison with dark energy/matter is appropriate. Imagine a complete unknown, outside of academia, came out with something that not only completely cleanly explained these mysteries, but did so in a way that essentially required discarding everything we thought we knew about the universe. And by we I don't mean some people working in an abstract esoteric field that 99.999% of people have no idea even exists, but humanity. That is literally the level of what Einstein achieved, and it may not even be possible again - because it's sort of a 'right time, right place' type combination.
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And this gets back to the point. Science, so far as persisting in the public mind, isn't about pushing some esoteric field forward, but about advancing humanity. If Einstein instead lived today, it's entirely possible he'd be just another competent academic making some advances, mostly of academic value, in some abstract and esoteric field. And people in 100 years would be none the wiser he even existed. The only way to escape this fate is to engage extensively in outreach. E.g. - Carl Sagan lives on not because of his achievements, but because of his public outreach. To a lesser degree the same is true of Feynman.
I suspect that combinations like that, are, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.
Many great talents probably couldn't be arsed to play the rat race game, and keep their domain humble, or they piss off other people so much, that they never get a break.
In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.
Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.
I preferred the rude ones.
Seeking social cues to describe greatness is exactly what the grift preys on.
I’d rather know, up front, that someone isn’t open to my PoV, so I don’t waste time, trying to give help, where it is not wanted.
One thing that I've learned, over the years, is that folks don't take me seriously. I'm pretty sure that it's my affect. I come across as a bit "goofy," and open, which is often interpreted as "naive," or "stupid." Used to really bug me, but I've learned to deal with it.
Anyway, I'm pretty good at "playing the tape through to the end," and anticipating long-term ramifications. These are often unwelcome observations, in the planning phase of things.
I've learned to start quietly preparing remediations, for when the wheels inevitably come off. I guess that it's nice to be a "hero of the day," but it would have been even better, if we hadn't gotten to this point in the first place. Remediation is not as good as Prevention or Mitigation.
Yes. I feel that insecure upper managers are a pox on the tech industry (probably other industries, as well). They create a really toxic culture.
I used to work for a Japanese company. My manager didn't speak English, and was 7,000 miles away, but was willing to listen to me. However, I had to deal with the way my interaction developed. Sometimes, the Japanese can be quite ... strident ... when they feel as if they are not being approached with respect.
They had a consensus-based style, which welcomed input from all levels, but would also be pretty brutal, to bad input.
Helped me to develop a habit of making sure all my ducks were in a row, before opening my mouth.
Where X is any vocation, skill, talent, etc…
about the lack of AppleTV marketing support for one of its shows, called La Maison).
That opens an interesting discussion: the role of their influencers. Their choices can either bless or curse anyone’s work just by manipulating the word of mouth.
[which reminds me of that absolutely brilliant speech by Alan Moore, on « magic » : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1qACd0wHd0]
the last anecdote is a true story. one of the original owners of Alinea (Chicago) did just that and the guy who developed the site is quite literally set for life if he doesn't do anything else but also has this incredible in within the fine dining world now.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
Of course they'll never get credit for this.
everyone needs to internalize this. its similar to the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect) if someone in your domain is famous but their "quality" is weak, assume by default this is true for all other type of famous.
Many great artists died in complete obscurity (eg van Gogh). Some have found their fame posthumously (eg van Gogh). I'm sure many who were even more ahead of their time remain in obscurity.
it is a perfect example of what it does without any deference to other design languages. instead of po-mo symbolism, it really is just the sufficient metal and glass to do the thing. an essential truck is unsentimental working capital. its not a duck, its an undecorated shed.
i think the design will age very well because there's nothing to add to it.
No, I think it's to get the cost of an electric truck down. I've never heard anyone from Tesla say it looks that way because it'll sell better. It doesn't look like the other Teslas, which all look really nice, but are more expensive.
Their design is all about aesthetics, but a type of aesthetics that is non-conventional in the car industry.
No, they're not. The price of a Cybertruck is in line with the price for a Model S or Model X, and significantly higher than a Model 3.
The model S is literally the only car they got right.
Let's not even talk about the CT. I can't even bring myself to utter that horizontal fridges name ...
-- Wolfgang Pauli