What’s the biggest misconception people have about your work – that drives you mad?
I have the sense that some may think that I work more than I actually do. I've ran into people blinded by the apparent output, and whom worked themselves up to an unreal expectation of productivity. I've ran into this interesting problem where, the more data I made public, and the more explicit it is that I really only seldom actually sit to do deep work, the less people read the numbers, and blindly presupose that I must be at it endlessly, tirelessly each day of every week.
You mentioned that you always set up the purpose of the next day; but do you also set up experimentation spaces?
Of course, they go hand in hand. I usually begin by experimenting as part of the process. You can see my development workflow here, and it seems to pretty much the same for any project. Maybe I should graph the different ratios for each task, and see how much time I spend doing frameworks, planning and tooling, against actual release output.
What advice you’d give to people who may be interested in your field/career path – that others usually may miss or forget?
If you're sitting in a classroom somewhere, pack up, leave. — Find yourself a mentor.
Speaking about mentors, did you have any when starting your path?
Well, I did not come about in a vaccuum. I had mentors who've helped me build the frameworks to reflect, and mentors who've helped me build the skills to earn a living. In regards to arts and design, I grew up with Depthcore, and Angelworld, where the level of constructive criticism and discourse was kept to very high standards.
Which is (for you) the purpose of a mentor, and which that of a student?
A mentor will save the student mistakes to be done by being very open and explicit about their process, as opposed to a teacher, who will deliver content outside of its context. The task of the student is to decide which mistakes to replicate and to move past the mentor.
If you lost all of your following, and had to reduce your new promotion tools to one activity, which one would you choose?
I would still use Twitter. It's a nightmare but it's where battles are fought. Where people learn to discourse, get burnt, rise again, change their mind about things. It's the place people go to talk. Facebook and the more private ones, are for people who've had enough, or have been injured by public discourse. I might retread to the more passive social spaces someday myself.
And lastly, what other people professionally and artistically inspire you?
On my sail to Fiji, I devoured countless hours of EA podcasts and books. I've been feeling increasingly like I should be finding ways to use my work for good. I've been connecting with the Effective Altruism projects, and am trying to find applications where I could help.