Work at a Scale That Resonates With You

28 August 2021

In 2017, Craig Mod was interviewed by Offscreen Magazine, and in it he gives a deeply insightful response to a question about his time at Flipboard. I’ve clipped the relevant part below, but the whole interview is worth reading.

Question

Some time after writing those essays you took on a design role at Flipboard, but you eventually went back to being independent so that you could focus on writing. Was working for a tech company not what you expected?

Answer

It was everything I expected. Working with Marcos Weskamp and the team at Flipboard is one of the highlights of my life. They were outstanding humans and outstanding designers and engineers. I’ve never been in a room with more talent. And all of us were moving in synchronicity, with aligned goals, during the headiest time of digital publishing, the iPad fresh, infinite possibility with a nearly infinite budget — nothing was constrained except for our imaginations. Truly. A once in a millennium moment in an ancient industry. And we spent some acid-trip like adventures exploring bizarro interface tendrils that never made it out into the world. I learned a lot. I learned how vital a strong mythology was for leading a company, for raising a huge sum of money. You need product, you need market-fit, but you also need a helluva story. It was all a high. And I have gratitude for everyone on the team.

We launched Flipboard for iPhone and instantly — boom! — had millions of new users. But I didn’t feel my heart move. Not an inch. It was just an observation, a truth. You have to acknowledge these truths. It came with no judgment. My heart didn’t move. I loved the people and the work, but the object, the artifact, did not move my heart. By that point in my career I had worked on enough projects that had moved me to understand what was happening. I had archetypes to lean on.

Simultaneously, as we made the app I made a meta-book about our making of the app — the design detritus, the engineering commits — and presented that to the team. Jesus, my heart moved a mile. It was difficult not to cry. I realized in that moment that scale is secondary to grace or movement.

1 How do you even ask yourself this question? I have some simple heuristics. Some more or less concrete than others. In reflection on a past year, I often ask: Did I acquire a new skill? Did I feel challenged in my craft or life choices? Did I push myself out of my comfort zone? Did that struggle result in a better understanding of myself or others? Did I make material progress on a big project? Answers to those questions can sometimes be hard to quantify. One of my favorite quantifiable heuristics is to maximize the number of days I spend with people I love and respect and whose work moves my heart. In essence I’m trying to “collect” good people in the way someone may acquire a stock portfolio. The greater number of people near to you for whom you have deep respect strengthens archetypes. Stronger archetypes means being shown more paths for life potentialities. Life potentialities writ clear before your very eyes demystifies them and means a higher chance of success that you, too, will be able to realize those potentialities. I’ve found the best way to increase these people in life is to work hard, be kind, empathetic. Good begets good, amplifies good, inspires diligence.

Does affecting one hundred lives turn you on? A thousand? A million? A billion? Why? What does it mean to have a positive impact on a life? How intimate does that connection need to be? Understanding your scale — the scale that moves you — is critical to understanding with whom and how you should work, how you should live.

I spend a lot of time making time, and then protecting that time. And through it all I fill my days with work based around return on investment. I don’t mean that coldly or even financially. I mean that in the context of — and I recognize this sounds a little crazy — respect for life itself. We are alive. We have consciousness. We are capable of a great understanding and empathy via creative and intellectual output.

So I ask myself regularly: Am I maximizing this so-called respect for my being alive or not?1 Does my work pay dividends in making me more empathetic, more curious, kinder, smarter? And the best way I’ve found to say ‘yes’ to this somewhat ridiculous question is to ask if the work, my day to day, moves my heart. And I’ve found the most reliable way to get there is by putting what’s in my head into words. Codifying an experience in a way to multiply the impact of that experience.