Inventing on Principle

From Bret Victor’s closing remarks in his talk:

A principle can’t just be any old thing you believe in. You’ll hear a lot of people say that they want to make software easier to use. Or they want to delight their users. Or they want to make things simple. That’s a really big one right now. Everyone wants to make things simple. And those are nice thoughts and maybe kind of give you a direction to go in but they’re too vague to be directly actionable.

Larry Tesler likes simplicity. But his principle was this specific nugget of insight: No person should be trapped in a mode. And that is a powerful principle because it gave him a new way of seeing the world. It divided the world in right and wrong in a fairly objective way. So, he could look at somebody selecting text and ask: Is this person in a mode? Yes or no? If yes, he had to do something about that.

There are many ways to live your life. That’s maybe the most important thing you can realize in your life, is that every aspect in your life is a choice. but there are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path that’s been laid out for you.

You can choose to accept the world as it is, but you don’t have to. If there is something in the world you feel is a wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and you can fight for a cause.

Similarly, we’re shaped just as much by the experiences we didn’t have (good or bad) as by the ones we did, and by the time we realize the effects, it’ll be too late to change course. So choose wisely and intentionally.