Overview
This week I discovered the writing and work of Steph Ango. Steph is the CEO of Obsidian, has a background in biology and industrial design, and has some really interesting ideas around design, consumption, and creativity that I’ve enjoyed diving into.
He hosts a blog here and the Dialectic podcast from Notion has a great long-form interview with Steph about how he views work, building teams, products, and more.
What I really appreciated about Steph was his clear and concise communication around the values (in my own words now) of building with intentionality and not for markets, consumption of goods that don’t consume you, and stripping away unnecessary complexity. Below are some highlights from that interview along with some articles of his that I resonated with. Enjoy!
Dialectic: Steph Ango - Tools for Amplifying our Light
A good tool turns what you can do into what you want to do
I loved this line from the podcast “a good tool turns what you can do into what you want to do”. Steph talks about the example of a hammer in relation to this. How you want to put a nail into something but you’re constrained by what you can do on your own and then along comes a hammer which take your ability to swing but then converts that into a centralized point of force to drive in the nail. All around us there are tools (computers, handles, buttons) shaped to our abilities that enable us to do things we could not otherwise.
The best tools allow us to shape them to our use and don’t shape us to them.
This is semi-related but not from Steph. I recently came across the saying idea that it’s best to avoid tools that solve a class of problems that did not exist before that tool. The ones that both create and solve a problem are those which most often take advantage of you.
Paint the back of the cabinet
Take the time to build what matters to you. Do the work that doesn’t pay economic dividends. Write the blog nobody will read. Paint the back of the cabinet that nobody but you will ever see. Don’t forget that you create for yourself and not just others. If you really love something chances are other people will too and not everything needs to be Amazon scale.
File over App
Data is what’s most important and lasts. Not the tools used to facilitate its transfer. The hieroglyphs are still around and more important than the tools used to make them. Prefer simple mediums for digital artifacts which can be read on systems 50 years old and in 50 years over complex, locked in formats. Own your data in a format you control.
Build the tool you want to use
Don’t just use the tool because you’ve built it. Build the tool you want to use. This goes back to point 1 above. In the podcast Steph talks about how some users complain that he spends more time using Obsidian than developing it but at the end of the day he wants to build what provides him value. I think this ties into the next point as well…
More is Less: There’s an Art to Culling and Constraints
Sometimes you need to let things sit for a long period of time under reflection and there’s a natural cutting away of what does and doesn’t have value provided by the perspective which that time gives. At other points you need to set constraints that force you cut away cruft so that you can ship the minimal best thing. This helps you avoid producing so much or so little that you lose any signal from others. It also helps you produce what you most intend to by stripping away the excesses.
Steph talk about this with the example of tacking a sailboat against the wind…sometimes you set a constraint against a large amount of time (i.e. wait a year and see how you feel about this), and at other times you set a constraint against a short amount of time (i.e. this has to go out tomorrow. what can be removed to make that happen).
Articles
Here’s a sample of articles From Steph’s blog: