Theme 43: Broken

It is 100% possible to have it all, but first you must know what your own all is.

I realized that you can be successful and unhappy at the same time.

Hütet euch vor Menschen, die zu viele Abkürzungen benutzen – das ist immer ein bisschen geizig. Auch bei Straße und bei Adresse: schreibt’s lieber aus! Außerdem vermisst ihr sonst die Gelegenheit für ein schönes ß.

I've learned that words can create spells. And words can even breake spells.

I share my story so that people who are going through what I've been through don't feel alone.

All I ever wanted was for people to be proud of me. And the only ones who matter are my family.

I've heard so many stories of other peoples lives and all I ever wanted to to was to share a piece of mine.

You, me... we are not broken people in my mind. We are experienced, we are used for reminders and examples of what and what not to do.

I always knew. Since I was born, I've had this deep feeling that I was special. But I didn't know that part of that uniqueness was attributed to the colour of my skin.

Because nothing moves as slow as the moment you feel lonely.

Isn't a smile itself enough to strike even the slightest licking both of happiness.

Основная проблема в том, что мы как человечество хотим неограниченный рост — экономический, демографический — в условиях ограниченной планеты

Diversity is a responsibility, not an accident. It's something that we have to actively choose to foster.

Are you prepared to pay five dollars for something you're used to paying two dollars for? It's very easy for us to say we want to change the criminal justice system until you realize that your favorite cups that you buy your coffee in are made in a jail. Are you willing to spend that extra dollar to destroy systems like this? I can't answer that question. Only you can.

There's a difference between what they say, and what they actually mean. Too often we get caught on the surface level of things and we don't go deeper. I go deep now. I go super deep.

Successful people are able to distinguish the obvious from the important.

Things shouldn't be surprising because we should always expect change.

The brokenness reveals a part of functionality.

To say “it’s broken” implies it only ever had a single purpose.

If we only focus on the moment that the glass smashed, we forget everything else that led up to that moment and everything else that comes afterwards.

The moment which the glass breaks reveals what was always there. It reveals the continuity.

Context is always equal to or greater than the instance in which something happens. Saying “it’s broken” only focuses on the one instance.

‘Broken’ allows us to ask those fundamental questions by looking at what we would normally discard and seeing what it has to tell us about something.

It's in the things that we throw away that actually most of our knowledge exist, the knowledge of context.

Broken is actually an engageable aesthetic.

The way that we heal is to tell the truth and to tell our stories.

I am not the result of an all-white father or an all-black mother, which is the common idea. I am the result of a great American horror story and a great American love story.

Being blonde and black is a sort of metaphor for my story.

El único error es quedarse con las ganas de hacer

Hay sólo tres cosas que no debemos romper: los corazones, las promesas y los condones

Aceptar lo inaceptable, esperar lo inesperado

Cuando uno muestra influye y se deja influir

Es importante mostrar lo que hacemos

Proponer belleza desde donde ustedes la sientan 💙

Si quieren hacer algo nuevo no lo van a encontrar en ningún lado. Lo van a tener que inventar ustedes.

Salir del paquete. ¿Qué paquete? ¡El paquete de Adobe!

Si queremos romper con lo que ya estamos haciendo, tenemos que buscar nuevas herramientas, salir de la caja.

Así como hay que romper un huevo para llegar a una tortilla, hay que romper la realidad para llegar a una nueva fantasía

Para hacer algo nuevo hay que romper las cosas perfectas, mezclarlas con otras, y que surjan nuevas cosas

Esa perfección de alguna manera es una zona de comfort

...duran muy poco. Primero es un error, y al poco tiempo es aprendizaje

El error es parte del camino de la vida, es obligatorio. Todos tenemos que errar en algún momento para aprender. Y eso es la belleza del error

El error es parte de una contracultura

De alguna manera estamos viendo el alma de la máquina

When I was a kid, I felt like a penguin in a pigeon's world...Everybody else just seemed to fly with ease, and I was just a chubby awkward thing, bumbling around.

Indignación transformada en realidad

Él que quiere "tapar el sol con un dedo" es aquel que solo quiere ver lo malo

It's much more about celebrating small wins, short circuiting feedback loops, or reducing the latency between effort and meaningful feedback, than it is about fixating upon distant goals and targets.

Goals narrow our focus, we fixate on one destination in the future which robs us of our ability to explore tangential opportunities along the way.

No one sets out to become irrelevant, but many of us find ourselves there when we become too busy for meaningful progress.

While the journey ahead is still tough, we still have the opportunity to keep going and keep working and keep fighting.

But this is where brokenness led me... it led me to this idea of using what we've been given. Using our gifts and talents and our hopes and our dreams to make a difference.

We have to be broken to be put back together, so once we're back together, we can laugh at how we broke.

We can use comedy as a weapon to become better people

I’m tired of culture asking women to be brave and share their trauma stories in order to be validated.

Feminism is still considered a sub culture, a radical notion.

We are in an echo chamber where it feels like the world is changing, but it isn't. The bros don't care.

The internet is still the wild west; The final frontier of information and experience. Clicks and shares are the only metrics we have and, in many ways, have become a currency of disaster and a currency of pain.

Use what you learn to adjust the reality that you live in, day to day.

We’re meant to internalize the effects of these systems of power on other people and we’re meant to feel and then, on the back of that feeling, we can change and make change.

Learning about systems of oppression isn’t meant to feel good, it’s just meant to feel.

It was books that taught me that the things that torment me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

Just because you’re woke, doesn’t mean you’re not still in bed.

We’re in an echo chamber, where it feels like the world is changing, but it isn’t.

Here, in the cold water, I am seeing the same gang of mermaids singing as I always do.

Clicks and shares are the only metrics we have and in many ways become a currency of disaster and a currency of pain.

I love the object, but to be free from it, I have to kill it.

I was destroying most of the work I was doing and it felt really good. There was a real freedom there. It was like, this thing I created I can kill and it becomes a new thing.

I've long believed that the known imposes constraints on creativity, so the more that we know and understand about what we do, the tighter and tighter our focus becomes and we stop exploring.

Whenever I get comfortable creating, whenever I get a pat on the back from mom or someone, or I have a good successful show or make some money, it's like hang a left, break it, right, because this comfort is the most dangerous thing to the creative process.

Our defaults are the options we choose automatically in the absence of viable alternatives.

The more specific a design idea is the greater its appeal is likely to be.

The things that are broken are not just things that you can see or touch.

You only live once, so, let’s spend more time on the work that matters.

If you let go of the assumption that someone expects you to say yes, it actually becomes significantly easier to say no.

The idea is to invent progress hacks that make your creative work as addictive as email or social media.

It’s very difficult to avoid distraction when you’re not extremely clear on what you would rather be doing.

Once we understand why we’re so addicted to distraction, we can be more conscious about how we confront it in the future.

It's incredibly easy to be busy, but it's incredibly difficult to be deliberate, to stay focused. And the thing is, you can’t actually produce anything of value without being focused.

"Out of all that positive feedback, the one that matters is, of course, that one that says `that wasn`t really as constructive as I was hoping`"

The more specific a design idea is, the greater its appeal is likely to be.

What I realized was that the things that are broken are not just things that you can see or touch.

I realized that designers talk quite a lot about things being broken

The biggest thing is helping others.

Balance is bullshit.

When you live your life for you, you can feel less broken and more whole.

No one can quiet the mean voice in your head except for you because no one can hear it except for you.

I think as a society we should move away from acts of balance and more toward acts of wholeness.

It is 100% possible to have it all, but first you must know what your own all is.

If you are leading your life and running your life to impress other people or make other people proud of you, it is the path to nowhere happy.

You can be successful and unhappy at the same time.

I was putting my essential self aside and I was living my life through my social self—the part of me that learned to value what the people around me valued.

My achievements always felt great on the surface, but they were always temporary and they were never enough.

La comedia es tragedia mas tiempo. Esta parte de romperse para luego pegarse y ahí hay comedia.

La comedia la podemos utilizar todos como arma para convertirnos en algo mejor.

What makes you you is so much less than you think it is.

Great value creators lead with empathy.

If you really wanted to make an impactful change on South African society at large, we would have to start by influencing culture.

So I decided to turn that force outwards. To turn shame into anger and to turn anger into change.

Embracing difference and otherness – that we believe is not only the key to innovation within healthcare; it's also something that art and design brings to the table to improve and perhaps even fix medicine.

How long before a doctor interrupts you after they first meet you? 10 minutes? No, it's 23 seconds.

Most doctors choose to die at home peacefully, surrounded by their memories and loved ones, whereas 75% of the rest of us will die in a machine-filled sterile environment, often alone and connected to one or more tubes.

Design dictates how well we live and die.... and if that is broken, then we must fix it.

Creatives are a valuable commodity that the world is looking for but doesn't know how to recognize it.

Creativity is not purely subjective. There is a real return on investment for businesses.

Businesses know they need creativity, but some businesses fail to see that they need creativity at its core.

Maybe people like Steve Jobs aren't as rare as we think that they are. Maybe we don't have the metrics and tests to recognize, foster, and utilize these people's amazing value.

If everything in your life has told you that you are average/below average or all the tests say you are broken then I think it's better to assume the test is broken.

Even if you're a penguin, you can believe that you can fly.

Everything can be improved upon.

If it ain't broken, improve it. If it is broken, learn, then improve.

An escalator of success!

Stuff this, fuck that. We're going to start a school.

Fuck you, to the man.

I've made it. Hang on a second, this is not what it's cut out to be!

I used to love this whole idea of doing something that challenges the status quo.

Growing up in the 90's...I definitely thought I was going to be Tupac and then he died. Then I was like shit, i'm not going to be him.

Most creatives see the word broken as an opportunity.

"Stay in your present moment." Namaste. ✨

"I figured it out! I don't need to keep chasing money, I need to keep chasing happiness."

You don’t need permission to make a difference, just go out there and do something.

The rock bottom for me, was that I started looking at business books.

I honestly spent a lot of time face down on my living room floor...

You must say NO to opportunities, in order to say YES to your priorities.

Ideas are easy, execution is hard

People who are now my friends told me that they wrote me off when they saw me. And I crushed that guys time. :)

So I leave you with my story, and good luck to those folks who are working on causes that are filling gaps that are broken.

Without you, things remain BROKEN. Your victories are the compilations of small wins.

And I think having those visual indicators of progress is really powerful.

So because of advances in technology, it's really easy to see progress when we're doing relatively meaningless, short-term tasks like processing our email...While it's incredibly difficult to see our progress when we're engaged in the long-term creative projects that are really going to have an impact on our lives. And the upshot is that we end up spending an inordinate amount of time on distractions and busy work because it feels like we're making progress, but that progress is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. So what do we do?

Finishing big projects takes so much time that we often kind of lose sight of how far we've come in the process. And unfortunately there's no built in progress bar.

When times get tough, think about persevering. Ultimately, the right resources will come to you.

When they told me it was the fastest time of the season, I was shocked. I was thrown so many challenges, I still get emotional talking about it.

I'm not gonna be the first one to quit. I thought about all the people who became vested because I kept trying harder and harder and I said "no way." I just put my head down and I kept going.

This was really the lesson: the more people heard my story, the more people came out of the woodwork and became vested in my success. It was overwhelming. Such a great thing.

How did I do it? I crawled.

It's 7 months to the English Channel, we went through our annual process of creating an Intention Wall. It's a lot more meaningful than a New Year's resolution. The first thing my partner Carol wrote on there was "Bob swims the English Channel." So that was it. It was written. It was going to happen.

The mental part is the tougher part of the two. Because it's the mental part that tells the physical part to go or not.

"Emotional literacy is the bridge between degrees and the streets."

"When I share my joy I multiply my happiness. When I share my pain I divide my sadness. When I embrace the two I become whole."

"Creation is in large part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions." - E.B. White

If you know me. I'm someone that; I can figure out anything, just give me some time.

There's a quote that they say, "Faith without works is dead," and I had that faith, I just needed to get to work.