Experiments

I make things nobody asked for. Small things, mostly. Things with no client, no brief, no deadline, and frequently no point — except the point, which is that I needed to understand something and the only way I know how to understand a thing is to build it.

Client work has a quiet cost: it teaches you to be right. You learn to defend, to ship, to deliver. What it doesn’t make room for is being wrong on purpose — following a curiosity past the point of usefulness just to see where it goes. Experiments are where I do that. They’re where I test an idea before I trust it, where I fail somewhere cheap so I don’t fail somewhere expensive.

I’m including this chapter because I think it’s the most honest thing I can show you. The finished work tells you what I concluded. The experiments tell you that I’m still moving — that I explore before I conclude, and that the conclusions in the rest of this book were earned by a lot of small, unglamorous trying that you’ll never see.

A mind that has stopped experimenting has usually stopped thinking.

I’d like to keep doing both for as long as I can.

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