"Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel and makes complex sugars as food, creates microclimates, changes sugars with the seasons, and self replicates... Why don't we knock that down and write on it?"
Makes you think doesn't it?
Quote from William McDonough at TED, read more at Howies.
The brilliant David Pogue sings a musical ode to the iPhone. 'I Want An iPhone' to the tune of 'I Did It My Way'. Fantastic. Make sure you watch it here.
Sometimes I have that rather embarrassing experience of meeting people who only know me through this blog. I say embarrassing because there isn't really official Crown approved etiquette for "Ahhh yes, you write that blog don't you?". Especially as, for the most part, people don't know what I look like.
When meeting readers of this esteemed tome very quickly they ask me, "Where do you find the time to write all those posts?". (As a general rule the older they are the quicker they ask that question, which is probably a generational digital continuous partial attention thing, but I'm not a planner so I have no idea about that kind of stuff.) I normally answer, "I have no idea" or "it doesn't take that much time" or "you sort of get into a rhythm" but to be honest none of those answers is 100% correct.
Today I think I've found a proper answer.
Here's Alistair Campbell talking about the famous diaries he wrote whilst working at Number 10. "I kept a diary every day I worked for TB, and the total word count runs to well over two million words. In common with every other person who has seen them, I occasionally wonder how on earth I found the time. Perhaps it is true that the busier you are, the more time you find to get things done. I had a very busy, very demanding job, and a young family. Yet somehow I found time, sometimes just a few minutes, other days a lot longer, to record something of the day just gone."
That's exactly how blogging feels to me.
I especially love this bit, "the busier you are, the more time you find to get things done". I completely agree with this and it fits in with loads of other theories I've got stored up in my beautifully shaped head. Like successful people always get up earlier than unsuccessful people and when you're not winning the first thing you need to do is get winning again.
But the thing I love most about that quote is that it dovetails beautifully with another one of my favourite quotes which was written by someone who is the complete opposite of Alistair Campbell and thus we have that lovely circle thing that journalists and writers and bloggers crave for so much.
The quote is, "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it." and it was said by Margaret Thatcher.
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