*Typing*

There is a reason your grandmother's recipes never taste the same when you make them. It's because there is a transfer of energy happening that her recipes don't account for. Love is an invisible force that has as dramatic of an effect on the work we create as skill and process. The Greek word for this is Meraki. It means to leave a piece of yourself behind in your work. Meraki can be something of a mantra for anyone striving to pack grandmotherly love into their work. When tempted to cut corners, compare yourself to others or obsess over the wrong metrics (likes, followers and engagement), just repeat the word "Meraki" aloud to yourself until you become re-grounded in the true intention of your work: Love.

One day an art dealer by the name of Ivan Karp showed up to Andy Warhol's studio to see what all the fuss was about. He noticed Warhol was playing the same record over and over again. It was Dickey Lee's "I Saw Linda Yesterday".

After a half-a-dozen spins, Karp asked Warhol if ever played anything else.

Warhol responded...

"Well, I play a record for a long time until I learn to understand it."

This habit of repetition eventually bled into Warhol's creative process, which he described as...

"I started repeating the same image because I liked the way the repetition changed the same image. Also, I felt at the time, as I do now, that people can look at and absorb more than one image at a time."

You've got to spend some time with something in order to really understand it.

Dennis Rodman is considered the greatest rebounder the game of basketball has ever seen.

Over his career, Rodman averaged 18 rebounds a game.

But, what a lot of people don't realize is that what would become his greatest strength was actually birthed from weakness.

Rodman was undersized––especially for his position––so he obsessed over perfecting the art of the rebound.

He would often have his friends meet him at the Bull's practice gymnasium. He would ask them to shoot around as he sat and studied how the ball would bounce off the rim. With time, he learned to anticipate where the ball was going based on the shot.

Rodman would then try and snatch the ball from the air one-handed (recognizing he wasn't tall enough to get both hands on the ball). He would even wear a blind-fold, forcing himself to rely strictly on his sense of sound to locate the ball.

Rodman single-handedly made rebounding fashionable by romanticizing a difficult, gritty aspect of the game of basketball that so many overlooked. There's a lesson there, somewhere.

Jerry Lawson was a black engineer that became something of a pioneer in modern gaming.

He headed the gaming division at Fairchild Semiconductor that rolled out The Fairchild Channel F. It was the first of its kind. Not only did Channel F use game cartridges––previously games had to be coded into the actual device prior to manufacturing in order to be played––but it was the first gaming console that allowed users to "pause" their game mid-play.

While this might seem like a small feature, it's inspiring to consider the influence Lawson has had on the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of gamers over the years. Lawson's Pause is a constant reminder that when shit hits the fan, it's okay to stop, take a step back and consider the best path forward.

In an interview with Vintage Computing and Gaming Magazine back in 2009, Lawson shared the following...

You've gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground, cover it, it's brand new, you're on your own—you're an explorer. That's about what it's going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways—not relying on everyone else's way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing.

It seems the "pause" was more than just a feature to Lawson. It was a philosophy.

Shel Silverstein was dyslexic. Johnny Cash sung off-pitch. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was not designed to lean, it was an architectural fuck-up. David's widely celebrated, unorthodox stance was Michelangelo's way of working around a hole an amateur sculptor had bored in the block of marble the statue was birthed from. Emily Dickinson was painfully shy and spent most of her life in her room writing poetry (after she died, her litter sister found 1,800 poems in a trunk in her closet). Imperfections don't take away from the art. They make the art.