Overall, quite a heart warming story of someone being very successful yet also being happy and not killing themselves with work and pressure.
BTW, I hope Mr. Karp is not offended, but he definitely has some asperger tendencies. For example, he found it necessary to describe exactly which brand and type of pen he uses to write notes in his notebooks.
> BTW, I hope Mr. Karp is not offended, but he definitely has some asperger tendencies. For example, he found it necessary to describe exactly which brand and type of pen he uses to write notes in his notebooks.
I don't think it's that weird to know what type of pen you use, especially if you write a lot. For example, I use a Pilot G2 (or a G2-ex, depending on what I'm writing).
I'm a big fan of the Pilot G-Tec-C 0.4mm (also known as the Hi-Tec-C if you buy from Japan). I don't think I can ever go back to another pen. I'm still in search for the perfect notebook, my next candidate is a notebook from a Crumpler store in Amsterdam--as soon as I'm done the last few pages of my Moleskine sketchbook whose pages are far too yellow.
I'd say that's more "hipster" than Asperger's. The search for the perfect pen for your moleskine (or filing cards, aka.'hipster pda') was quite popular in the, erm, blogosphere a couple of years ago. Productivity minutiae can be quite amusing.
Huh? I'm not one of those guys who thinks "hipster" is automatically an insult, and I didn't even call him one, just that carefully selecting your pens is more a fashionable ("hip") thing to do than a sign of mental condition.
And I just sorted and took out the trash, so I'm very satisfied with myself, thankyouverymuch.
I found that one of the more interesting parts of the article, and made a note to find one and give it a try. I take a lot of notes too, but have never found a pen I with which I was entirely happy - these days I use a pencil.
I'd suggest giving the Zebra F-301 a try. I've used them for years and they're cheap, write extremely smooth and don't smudge. And I can fill 1 1/2 to 2 notebooks on a single ink cartridge.
Maybe you should consider that this is an interview that was turned into a first person essay. So it is very possible that the follow up question to his note taking was " what pen do you use?"
"Every feature has some maintenance cost, and having fewer features lets us focus on the ones we care about and make sure they work very well. For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don't do that, and it's a problem."
21 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadhttp://www.inc.com/magazine/201106/the-way-i-work-david-karp...
Overall, quite a heart warming story of someone being very successful yet also being happy and not killing themselves with work and pressure.
BTW, I hope Mr. Karp is not offended, but he definitely has some asperger tendencies. For example, he found it necessary to describe exactly which brand and type of pen he uses to write notes in his notebooks.
I don't think it's that weird to know what type of pen you use, especially if you write a lot. For example, I use a Pilot G2 (or a G2-ex, depending on what I'm writing).
I'm a big fan of the Pilot G-Tec-C 0.4mm (also known as the Hi-Tec-C if you buy from Japan). I don't think I can ever go back to another pen. I'm still in search for the perfect notebook, my next candidate is a notebook from a Crumpler store in Amsterdam--as soon as I'm done the last few pages of my Moleskine sketchbook whose pages are far too yellow.
And I just sorted and took out the trash, so I'm very satisfied with myself, thankyouverymuch.
I don't generally mention this, but it seemed like it might give you pause to think about how you deal with people.
Very well put.
Me: "So what do you do?"
Karp: "I work at Tumblr."
Me: "What do you do there?"
Karp: "...I'm an engineer"
Me: "What kind of engineer?"
Karp: "...A little of everything."
One of my friends had to tell me he was the goddamn CEO. I've never met a CEO who was that modest.