Radical Candor is one of the most impactful articles I read last year. It's one I foresee revisiting frequently. Here are several of my key takeaways:

Focus on guidance.

The single most important thing a boss can do, Scott has learned, is focus on guidance: giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it. Guidance, which is fundamentally just praise and criticism, is usually called "feedback," but feedback is screechy and makes us want to put our hands over our ears. Guidance is something most of us long for.

Aim for radical candor.

Picture a basic graph divided into four quadrants. If the vertical axis is caring personally and the horizontal axis is challenging directly, you want your feedback to fall in the upper right-hand quadrant. That's where radical candor lies.

Avoid ruinous empathy.

The vast majority of management mistakes happen in the quadrant that I call ruinous empathy

Being critical is a moral obligation.

Challenging others is difficult for many people; saying anything short of positive feels impolite. But once you become a boss, it's your job to do be equally clear about what's going wrong, and what's going right. […] I would argue that criticizing your employees when they screw up is not just your job, it's actually your moral obligation.

HHIPP!

HHIPP: "Radical candor is humble, it's helpful, it's immediate, it's in person — in private if it's criticism and in public if it's praise — and it doesn't personalize." That last P makes a key distinction: "My boss didn't say, 'You're stupid.' She said, 'You sounded stupid when you said um.' There's a big difference between the two."

Care personally, but be willing to piss people off.

Caring personally makes it much easier to do the next thing you have to do as a good boss, which is being willing to piss people off.

A gem from 2014 that illustrates the difference between:

"Design" is a tall ivory tower.

versus

Ideas are cheap; execution and results are everything.

Props to Julie Zhuo.

Some helpful links for living small:

Inspiration

• Less stuff, more happiness — 5-minute TED talk by Graham Hill
• Shoebox Dwelling — One of my favorite blogs: "finding comfort, style & dignity in small spaces." Mostly products, but some spaces.
• Tiny House Swoon — Small space inspiration.

Furniture

• Milano Smart Living — purchased a wall bed from here
• Resource Furniture — where Graham Hill sourced furniture for his Life-Edited apartment

Spaces

• Space-saving studio in Milan
• LifeEdited2

Last month, my evening bicycle commute up 8th avenue was interrupted by the face of Pope Francis emerging from the whitewashed side of a building. I pulled to the curb, snapped a picture with my iPhone, and continued home. I repeated this ritual four times the following week, thus documenting the painting of a wall mural advertising the Pope's visit to the USA.

Why did I stop and take notice? Years ago, before living in New York, I watched the short film Up There, which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the rare individuals who hand paint walls for a living. It fascinated me. The opportunity to see many hand-painted walls – and their progress – first-hand is one of the unique joys of living in New York.

Before this week, I had assumed that the Nelson Marshmallow Sofa and the Nelson Ball Clock were designed by their eponym, George Nelson.^[1] This is untrue, as I learned in an epitaph written by Michael Bierut this week:

RIP Irving Harper, quiet designer behind George Nelson's iconic products

Irving Harper, the designer responsible for these objects, passed away last week at the age of 99. An obituary in the New York Times describes his role working with Nelson:

Mr. Harper was famously obscure, working as an industrial designer from 1947 to 1963 for George Nelson, who was often credited with the company's creations for the Herman Miller furniture line.

Researching Harper's career reveals a body of work that is as diverse as it is inspiring. For example, he designed the iconic Herman Miller "M" logo, without necessarily intending to do so. DWR's profile of Harper describes the circumstances:

One of his early projects for Nelson was Herman Miller's first-ever ad. There was not yet any photography of the furniture, so Harper instead rendered a large "M" – for "Miller" – which is essentially the same logo design that the company uses today. "There was no project to do a logo," he says. "It was probably the cheapest logo campaign in advertising history."

Harper described himself as a generalist and executed an impressive body of graphic design work in addition to his industrial design work. Perhaps even more astounding is the world of sculptures Harper created within his home over the span of 40 years. These works are incredible and prompted both a gallery exhibition and a book. However, this was never Harper's intention. His sculptures were private works created as an antidote to the stressful projects he worked on during the day. He initially considered knitting, but the medium of paper proved a more natural fit for his hands. In a video made for the exhibition, he describes the effects of his work:

Many of the things I do require repetitive behavior, and then they build up to something else. The reason I like the repetition is that I found it relieves stress, and it was very soothing. (5:12)

He didn't think of himself as an artist:

I never thought in terms of being an artist. I never envisioned myself as an artist. I just made them as they occurred to me and then I went on to the next after it was all done until I ran out of space and I stopped. (6:12)

And he never stopped to think of the commercial value of his creations, as quoted in Herman Miller's WHY:

"I never sold any of my pieces," Harper says today. "I had all the money I wanted. Then I would have lost my sculptures and just had more money. I just wanted to have them around."

If Harper was born of this generation, I can't imagine him ever tweeting or Instagramming his work. I don't think it would have occurred to him. In a world where over-sharing is the norm and every creative act is seemingly purposed to exhibit, sell, or self-promote, not only is Harper's incredible body of work inspiring, but his quiet approach is a fresh breath of air.

Also, be sure to read Sam Grawe's personal remembrances of Harper in the last years of his life. Taken together with Herman Miller's video, it offers a heartwarming glimpse into Harper's home and life.

Some friends recently purchased a Chemex coffee maker, prompting me to remember that it was created in the 1940s (1941 to be exact). Details from the story of the design and its designer, Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, are fascinating and include:

• Its design was influenced by Bauhaus principles: "A table must be a table; a chair must be a chair; a bed must be a bed. … A coffee maker must make coffee."
• Ironically, Macy's initially rejected it because it did not look like a coffee maker.
• President Roosevelt played a hand in the success of the Chemex. He granted access to production materials during wartime, after being personally persuaded by a Latin pun written by Schlumbohm.

These details are not to be found on the History page of Chemex's website. Instead, they're found in One Hundred Great Product Designs (1970) by Jay Doblin. Doblin corresponded with Schlumbohm to get the full story. As the book is out of print, I scanned the relevant pages. View the PDF.

Here's a simple, well-designed app that I've found myself using recently: Moment: Overcome Procrastination With The Pomodoro Timer.

It's based on the Pomodoro Technique, and I've found it to be surprisingly effective in helping me to focus and make good use of my time.

Though a fruitful exercise, it is difficult to examine one’s failures. The process begins unpleasantly enough, with the admission that success has not been achieved. The thing that was intended has been left undone. The fault lies close to home.

Delving deeper, patterns of failure and contributing behavior emerge. The temptation is to despair and give up. However, lack of success is not the same as utter defeat. Failure often leads to more insight than success.

An insight from my own failure: frequency is a powerful tool that I underutilize. In Manage Your Day-to-Day, Gretchen Wilson lists seven benefits of frequency. Two in particular stand out:

• Frequency keeps ideas fresh.
• Frequency keeps the pressure off.

The idea of frequency is this: do a small amount of work in short intervals instead of large amounts of work in long intervals. My modus operandi, unfortunately, is the latter. As a result, I forget where I left off and rework the same parts of a project. My ideas have grown stale. When a deadline comes, much work is left to be done in a condensed period of time. The pressure is high. Stress, and at times incompleteness, results.

Interestingly, frequency also provides the power to move forward. Success doesn’t have to be achieved in one, monumental effort. It can be reached one small, frequent step at a time.

It’s a new year. Though it’s somewhat artificial, I feel the optimism of a fresh start and the possibilities for change. It’s time to simplify and reduce the cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the past year. It’s time to imagine what can be accomplished and reshape my routine. It’s time to say no.

Last year was characterized by massive change – a new city, a new job, a new baby. All of these were very positive but also incredibly disruptive. Now the dust has settled. Now there is space to pick up what was put down. Now is the time to renew failed efforts.

Regular, intentional writing is the first effort to be revived. I intended to write once a week for two years. I wrote consistently for three quarters of one year instead. I failed, yet I also experienced success. Here’s to starting again.

Since last June, I have followed an arbitrary, self-imposed schedule to write four articles each month. I've kept to this schedule and haven't broken from it – until last week.

I didn't even realize I had broken my schedule until it was a day too late. The day following the deadline, it dawned on me for no apparent reason. Being preoccupied with a move to a new city, I completely forgot to write. The streak was over.

Coincidentally, that same week, I read an article on the topic of failure. Specifically, it talked about the benefits of letting kids fail. The opening paragraph summarizes its recommended view of failure:

[…] first, to give ourselves the permission to take on challenges where we might very well fail; second, to pick ourselves up as quickly as possible and move on when things don’t work out. This is, I argue, vital on a personal level, as well as vital for the economy, because that’s where innovation and growth come from.

What would the world look like if we never tried anything unless we knew we would succeed? In short, we would not reach our full potential because we'd never push against its boundaries. This is what the author observes happening to kids in our current culture. One B in high school might doom their chances at the perfect college which will in turn doom their chances to a perfect career and any hope of a good life. Or so the thinking goes.

We need permission to be imperfect. As designers, we need it doubly so. There is no great design that is not preceded by failure. It's a lesson I wish I had learned sooner.

Before learning to embrace failure as part of the design process, the natural inclination is to hide our work. Don't let anyone else see it until it's finished and perfect.

We feel this way because, like it or not, designers are judged by their work. It's not the resume that counts, it's the work. This is how it should be. However, the worth of our work is too easily confused with the worth of our selves. When these two things are confused, critiques on our work feel too close and too personal for comfort. We seek to hide our imperfection.

Ironically, however, imperfection is where the best design comes from. You have to try, fail, and try again. Each time you try, you get closer to a more elegant solution. The term is iteration in design jargon. The sooner you can get something out on paper, the sooner you can begin refining the idea or realizing you need to start with a different idea altogether.

It's the same with writing. First drafts are almost always terrible. But the first draft gets the ideas out. It's a whole lot easier to edit a poorly written text with the seeds of good ideas than it is to edit a blank piece of paper. Getting out those first, scattered thoughts provides a crude outline of what one is actually writing about and trying to say. That's not always apparent at the start.

It's the same for design: the solution only becomes clear through a process of creation and failure. The only way to arrive at a great product is to travel down the path of imperfection.

Have I followed my schedule of four articles a month perfectly? No. Have all the articles I have written been perfect, even good? No again. But am I closer to reaching my potential as a writer? Yes. If I waited to write until I could do it perfectly, I never would. I'm getting better because I'm writing. Not the other way around.