The Heart To Start: Win the Inner War & Let Your Art Shine

York Times bestselling The Lean Startup, which debuted on the exact same
day.
In the crowded world of web-design books, there’s not another book out there
just like Design for Hackers. The book was only possible because I had
followed my curiosity. If I had concentrated only on being a designer, I
wouldn’t have had the technical know-how to communicate to programmers,
I wouldn’t have had the entrepreneurial background to understand the
audience, and I wouldn’t have had the writing skill to communicate it all in a
clear and engaging way.
I don’t hold any illusions that writing that book compares in scale to what
Steve Jobs accomplished after dropping in on that calligraphy class. I didn’t
build a company that would reinvent the world or approach a trillion dollars
in value. That wasn’t what I was going for. What I did do was find the right
combination of exploitation and exploration. I gave myself as much time and
space as I could to follow my curiosities.
When Steve Jobs started building the Mac, nobody was thinking about
beautiful typography. They were just focused on building computers.
When I was a graphic designer, most graphic designers resisted learning how
to program. Few of them were thinking about entrepreneurship, and almost
nobody was thinking about combining those things, and working hard on
writing about it clearly.
If you’re looking for the fuel to get started, there’s no fuel more powerful than
your own curiosity. Following your curiosity can be scary, but if you give
yourself space and time, eventually curiosities converge. Then you become
untouchable.
Even if you have enough curiosity to fuel a strong start, things will go much
better if your ideas resonate with someone else. Next, we’ll talk about a fuel

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source that can help your ideas spread like wildfire.

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C H A P T E R 5
T H E VO I C E
If you simply try to tell the truth (without
caring twopence how often it has been told
before) you will, nine times out of ten,
become original without ever having noticed
it.
—C.S. Lewis