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Paul Graham and Walt Disney
Here's more of an opinion piece than a convention report. Needless to say, everything here is my own opinion alone and I'm not speaking for anybody else running Penguicon. I like to think that Penguicon is an incubator of Imagineers. This is a combination of artistic and literary imagination with engineering know-how, a word coined by one of my lifelong inspirations, Walt Disney:
- zach 19y agoWell, Paul's coming at it from an artist's perspective. Don't get in business to do art - beautiful algorithms, a movie that has a message for modern America, a meditation on the color blue. Forget about doing that to make money. L'art pour l'art. That's what I get out of it, anyway. Walt Disney, whom I never thought much about until I read a biography a few years back and I now consider a unique American genius, certainly wouldn't disagree with that. But his alternative wasn't "get money," it was to give people a certain kind of experience. But, in a sense, that's a great business plan too. So it works out.
- greendestiny 19y agoThis inspired me to write a bit about creativity vs usefulness, which I subbed to hacker news as this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850
- far33d 19y agoWalt is probably the most successful businessman ever to follow the mantra "Make Something People Want". He wasn't a big fan of budgets, business models, and the like. He built things he wanted, and believed other people wanted too. He was a workaholic and a visionary, and never settled for just good enough. It shows in his work and it shows in the work that happened at Disney after his death.