Beauty matters.

For years I had a problem with the word “creative.” I was building products, drawing screens, spending nights on details nobody would probably ever notice, and yet if someone had called me a creative person I would have corrected them. Real creators, I thought, made things out of nothing. I didn't. I took a bit of this, a bit of that, something I'd seen in another app, a rhythm from a song, a layout from a magazine, and I put them together until it felt right. It felt like cheating.

Then a book landed in my hands: The Creative Act: A Way of Being, by Rick Rubin. I didn't expect much from a music producer writing about creativity, and it ended up changing the way I look at my own job. The first thing it did was take the weight off. Almost nobody creates from nothing. Everyone borrows, steals a little, remixes, and the people we admire are often simply the ones who were paying closer attention. Being creative isn't a gift you either received or didn't; it's a choice, and above all a kind of thirst: to see beautiful things, to hear beautiful sounds, to feel something deeper than our habits usually allow.

That thirst starts with looking, and most of us have stopped. We walk around with our heads down. I'd bet you couldn't describe your own living room in detail: you'd place the sofa and the table, but dozens of things would escape you, even though you live there every day. Now spend a day in a forest and you'll see something new every second, because nothing there repeats itself. Or look at the sea, which seems to be always the same, and notice that you never get tired of it, because every time you look is a moment of its own. Wonder is where inspiration begins, and almost anything around us can be wonderful, provided we're a little less jaded. Building a product is exactly the same exercise. Sitting next to someone while they use what you've made, really watching instead of seeing, really listening instead of hearing, is almost always where the detail nobody noticed shows up, the one that changes everything.

Something beautiful

What has always driven me isn't just making things. It's making something beautiful. People say everyone has their own taste, and that's true, but it doesn't change the fact that beauty has standards, and that nature sets them. Harmony is a matter of proportion: some proportions simply bring a kind of calm, a pyramid, a symphony, the curve of a shell, and you don't need to be a musician to feel the harmony in a song. You feel it first, like a vibration, and only afterwards does the mind come in and try to explain it. A well-composed screen works exactly the same way. Nobody can quite say why an interface feels right, but everyone feels it instantly, and everyone feels just as quickly when it doesn't.

Most of the time, that harmony doesn't come from what you add. It comes from what you had the courage to remove. When you build a product, the temptation is always to add: one more field, one more option, one more tab, because each one has a good reason to exist, until nobody knows where to start anymore.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

The best judge

This is where the book touched something I had been uneasy about for a long time in my own field. In product, everyone insists on backing every decision with data: an A/B test, a conversion rate, a dashboard that turns green. Data is precious for understanding what is happening, and I use it every day. But it says nothing about what is beautiful, because there is no rational measure of beauty. A test never really compares two things with everything else equal, and by keeping only what can be measured, we slowly end up building products that look like everything else, because everything else was measured too.

There's a moment every maker knows, when you look at something you've built and think: “I don't love it, but people will.” Or worse: “I don't love it, but the numbers say people will.” That's the moment you stop crafting and start selling. It doesn't mean it won't work. It just means your odds are worse, because the products that last were almost always made by someone who wanted them a certain way, to their own taste, with their own idea of what beautiful meant. We often say great companies are born from a founder solving their own problem. That's true, but it's only half of it. They solved it the way they liked it, and that is what nobody else could copy.

That doesn't mean deciding at random, and it doesn't mean ignoring the people you build for. It means accepting that there is another kind of knowledge besides dashboards, quieter, faster, and often more accurate, one I've followed my whole career even when people advised against it. It has a name, and it deserves its own story: intuition.

Until then, if you write, if you code, if you build anything at all, and even once the project is finished something keeps pulling at you, don't fight it. Keep going. Pull the all-nighter, and capture it.