Learning to Deal With the Impostor Syndrome

Carl Richards in The New York Times: 

Two American psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, gave it a name in 1978: the impostor syndrome. They described it as a feeling of “phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” While these people “are highly motivated to achieve,” they also “live in fear of being ‘found out’ or exposed as frauds.” Sound familiar?

Once we know what to call this fear, the second step that I’ve found really valuable is knowing we’re not alone. Once I learned this thing had a name, I was curious to learn who else suffered from it. One of my favorite discoveries involved the amazing American author and poet Maya Angelou. She shared that, “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock—a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas.

The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems.

The Internet Lives in a Huge Hotel in Manhattan

A great photo series by Taylor Glascock in Wired, showing the very real places that make the internet and the cloud:

Garritano always knew the Internet is as much a place as it is a thing, one where vast networks in frigid rooms move enormous amounts of data around the world. But he didn’t have a real understanding of how all that info moves from one place to another, and he wanted to find out. He’s spent the last few months doing just that, shooting at five “carrier hotels” where many networks converge to form a single, larger network. That’s why they called it the Internet. It allows an unlimited number of different networks to come together as one.

How to Sound Design Your Life

The Foley Artist sees a master sound designer at work on a fashion film. If you’ve ever wanted to see the chasm between the finished product and the extraordinary lengths taken to produce it, this short is for you. 

Michael Bierut On Learning Graphic Design

Michael Beirut seems to be everywhere promoting his new book How To and answered 20 Odd Questions for The Wall Street Journal, including his advice for learning graphic design: 

To learn about graphic design: go to a flea market in Paris, Marrakesh, Tokyo or anywhere. Almost every matchbook, record cover or junky paperback book you’ll see is likely to have more interesting graphic design than what you will find in a museum.