Entrepreneur
A compromise is pictured as a point on a line between two positions, reached by each side giving up a proportion of what it wanted. The foundation I work from says there is no such line: two conditions are two complete forms, not two ends of one scale. A settlement is one mark serving one of them, and the shortfall against the other is placed somewhere rather than paid off. … readWhat Is a Compromise
Perfection is supposed to be the top of the scale: the state a thing reaches when nothing more could be improved, and the state nothing ever quite reaches. The foundation says perfection is not a state of a thing at all. It is the exemplar — the complete and exact form of a condition, prior to the first attempt at it — and a mark cannot be it, because a mark and a form are two kinds of thing. That is why you can spot a bad circle without having seen a perfect one, why a perfect storm is not a good storm, why “nothing is perfect” needs no survey, and why “perfect”, said as praise, is a fact about the praiser. … readWhat Is Perfection
A copy is supposed to be measured against the original. But the original is an artifact too, and every artifact is a miss — so the standard was never the original, which makes “better than the original” the ordinary case rather than a paradox, and leaves originality as a timestamp rather than a merit. … readWhat Is a Copy
Taste is usually called preference, and preference cannot explain the most common experience in any craft: knowing your own work is short while being unable to fix it. Derived from exemplarity instead, taste is a reading of the angle between an artifact and the exemplar it was made against. … readWhat Is Taste
You were taught that practice closes a gap. But a made thing carries two numbers, not one, and only the second decides fidelity — which is why a plateau is what progress feels like from the inside, and why growing skill is a multiplier on an angle you did not set. … readWhat Is Practice