What I'm Reading...

Apple is positioning itself as a company who cares for your privacy. (Not necessarily for your budget, though…)

I believe in “earning” any best-in-class tools; start out cheap and move up through use.

-- Kevin Kelly, Recommendo Issuue #215, August 23, 2020.

Good educators ensure we remember and apply one core idea they shared for the rest of our lives. Great educators make us fall in love with the subject. Outstanding educators – a rare breed – make us fall in love with learning.

— Rohan Rajiv, What Great Educators Do

Talking Heads was a great band from 1975 to 1988. Their lyrics were evocative and mysterious specific but vague and made you wonder what they were really about. David Byrne, the main songwriter of Talking Heads, later said that most of their lyrics were just random. He would write little phrases on pieces of paper, throw them into a bowl, and shuffle them. Then he’d randomly pull some out of the bowl and put them into the song. He did this because he liked how the listener creates meaning that wasn’t intended. Hearing one phrase next to another makes you assume they’re connected in a meaningful way. But nope. It was just random. You made that meaning yourself.

-- Derek Sivers. Hell Yeah or No, Projecting Meaning

Seth Godin on Stolen ideas

The internet is a copying machine. Ideas morph and change and spin as they move from one end to the other. Ripping ideas off wholesale and violating intellectual property rights is nothing to be proud of–each of us can do better than that. But holding ideas too tightly in fear of the ripples and echoes they’re going to cause is the real problem. Being original is an opportunity to advance the conversation. Building something of utility with persistence and grace is truly generous, though, and it’s not related to whether or not anyone has ever heard your idea before.