Designer Stefan Sagmeister tells a story as part of his strangely wonderful 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' about a commission he was once given by a magazine editor. Given no brief and a long deadline, the unlimited freedom becomes something of a curse, until he rereads his diary and picks out a sentence that becomes the basis for his work. Once published, it sets off a chain of events that leads to the publication of 'Things I Have Learned…'.
That sentence was: 'Everything I do always comes back to me'. In Stefan's case, it ended up proving its own content. In my case, it is one of those maxims that you come back to again and again. A bit like this Harry S Truman quote I came across (via a comment on this post from Rory Sutherland):
“Everything is possible, just so long as you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Indeed.
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