Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.
Jim Jarmusch
…we’re really trying very hard to avoid this becoming just another programmer’s tool. Whenever I’ve seen people, I mean, we have a product called fog bugs, which is bug tracking obviously and whenever I’ve seen the people with all the sticky notes on the boards there’s always one sticky note that says fix bugs for version three and that’s really the idea here This is sort of the meta big picture like, what are the three things that everyone’s working on?
Joel Spolsky on Trello
Outcome: ‘creative technologists’ who think that their daily use of social media, “passion for digital” and pile of half-baked ideas about QR codes, mobile integration and Facebook apps constitute an entitlement to have those ideas brought to life by the still-downtrodden developers, still languishing in the dungeons of overworked production companies and in-house development teams.
http://blog.wk.com/2011/10/21/why-we-are-not-hiring-creative-technologists/
Working for months on some damn project that gets watered down and compromised and eats up your time and your soul until when you’re all done with it you realize you’re not proud of it and you don’t even want to show it to anyone… well, there’s no amount of money that is going to make that feel better.
Jim Coudal, on SvN