You can’t over-engineer success
🍾 It’s Friday, y’all! We made it through another industrial-revolution-inspired five-day workweek. Any fun weekend plans? Drop a line in the responses.
Today: Minimalist icons, creativity wisdom, and fraudulinguistics. Written by Harris Sockel
Medium employees don’t just work here — sometimes we’re writers, too. At risk of being self-promotional, I’m going to use today’s Daily Edition to share a few of my favorite coworker-written stories of recent (and less recent) vintage.
Up first: Our SVP of Product and Engineering, Luke Millar, recommends being a little less precious about what you put into the world. If you’ve been making stuff for any length of time, you probably know what it feels like to work super hard on a story, a song, an app… and hear crickets on launch day. Likewise, some of the things we dash off super quickly end up being runaway hits. Case in point: KT Tunstall performed “Black Horse & The Cherry Tree” on late-night TV only because another artist dropped out — she’d never sung it live before, and sort of created the song on the spot. Luke’s advice: Just make a lot of things! Put more of yourself into the world. You can’t over-engineer success.
Speaking of making things: Ariel Meadow Stallings teaches us how to turn an old typewriter into a family-wide poetry project, and Helena Zhang (who created the Phosphor icon library) rounds up the best new icons of 2023, reminding us there is so much beauty in simplicity.
Lastly, here’s Marcin Wichary, who designed Medium’s minimalist story editor — the tool we all use to make things — obsessing over how to create link underlines in a post from 2014. Marcin recently published a two-volume tome about the history of typewriters. Did you know the first typewriters were actually writing balls, invented in late-1800s Sweden, where the keys were arranged in a sphere? Me neither. Typewriters are the ancestors of keyboards, which were instrumental in the creation of early computers. So, in a sense, typewriters are what we have to thank for our ability to make lots of things — and put more of ourselves into the world — today.
May we all make something (small, big, or medium) this weekend.
What else we’re reading
- Baltimorean Ryan Fan speaks up for the immigrant workers repairing the Key Bridge in Baltimore when it collapsed last week. Francis Scott Key, the bridge’s namesake, wrote our national anthem — a testament to freedom and equality. Yet, most reporters ignored the stories of the men who immigrated from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico to repair a bridge in the middle of the night so everyone else could have a smooth commute the next day. Fan writes, “I think this is a plea for all of us to be more understanding and compassionate of immigrants who do the jobs no one else wants to do, in search of a better life for themselves and their families.”
- Have you experienced amoroxime (falling in love with the only other person at the grocery store who is around your age)? No? What about respilateral (the relief of mutually canceled plans)? Learn these and more words that should exist — but don’t — at Ellen Liebenthal’s school of fradulinguistics. And if you’ve coined a word of your own, share it in a reply to this email.
From the archive
I cannot stop thinking about these immersive (and somewhat terrifying) photos from atop Montana’s 10,000-foot-tall Bitterroot Mountains. Intrepid photographer Aaron Teasdale gives us a play-by-play of what happened when he was nearly caught in an avalanche (miraculously, he missed the most hazardous sections by several feet). There’s life wisdom in here too, drawn from skiing: “You never decide a slope is safe from the top. You continually look for clues and interpret the slope as you descend.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom (about punctuation)
Many writers worry they overuse emdashes — but they shouldn’t! In the words of Clive Thompson, these beloved punctuation marks add rhythm and panache to any piece of writing.
Learn something new every day with the Medium Daily Edition.
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb, Jon Gluck, & Carly Rose Gillis
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