A short time after I sent in my letter of resignation, it was my final day and I said goodbye to my friends and colleagues. They all brought in all sorts of homemade food. A great time and a great send-off - it made me wonder again whether I was making the right decision. But I walked out of the door for the last time as an employee nevertheless. The same door I had walked through for over 10 years! After the door closed behind me, I felt such an unusual feeling. Tomorrow there was nothing to do except what I’d choose. And I knew what I would choose would excite me. I love fantasy and sci-fi… it felt like those worlds. Somewhat uneasy, maybe a little fear of the unknown, but also that innate urge to explore and be a curious human.
When I got home, I felt like getting right to work. I sat back down with the mess of circuit attempts and pages and pages of schematics in front of me. As I looked them and the curves I had drawn, it came to me in the most surprisingly casual way. There was no strain or pressure. No bouts of frustration or even heavy thinking. The idea just came in - like a tractor beam…
It was wearing sweatpants. And it was so simple! I laughed and laughed as I thought to myself why the hell I hadn’t thought of this in any of the long, painful, frustrating months before!
I went quick to work and that night I had a new prototype that gave me the curves I wanted and across all decay lengths. Poof! Just like that. I wish there was more to the story about how it came to be, to me, but that was it! It was effortless - the idea just came and it was unprovoked. The key point is that the idea came by itself and it truly was casual.
Of course there is a lot more to tell as to why it happened… but I didn’t uncover the reasons in any formalised way till much later. This here was mostly an accident. And while most of our lives are full of happy accidents, we aren’t necessarily paying attention to capture them nor do we have the bandwidth to process them. To curate them for ourselves. In this case, I was paying attention. And something remarkable happened! It produced measurable results, which isn’t always the case for feelings and moods and all of that stuff.
I guess I forgot to mention the details of what the idea actually was… but I will say that it doesn’t matter. These are stories of journeys, not destinations! The message is that if your mind is clear, you can think. It's why we spend so much time make sure our heads are in the right place before doing anything creative. It cannot be forced. As a matter of fact, it was this same reason our artistic output was very limited... we are (hopefully, were, moving forward) inherently 'heavy' biased people - we have and feel the weight. We didn't have a good balance of Tereza to Sabina - or at least the lite perspective to view the positive qualities of this weight.
And this wasn't a rare occurrence or matter of coincidence... since this design, I came up with 2 new designs to do the same thing in what I consider more elegant ways. One of which is actually used to do several of the envelopes in our Portal Kick voice!
Now we are cookin'. Stay tuned for Part 3 as we get into the woods with this thing :)
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