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The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbie or jet jockey. Because this is war, baby. And war is hell.
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
Britain could not pursue Germany’s economic policy of autarchy. As exports declined with the switch to war-production (taking 1938 as 100, British exports had fallen to 29 per cent by 1943, imports only to 77 per cent), gold and dollar reserves disappeared. The Roosevelt administration was verbally sympathetic to the Allies but in practice unhelpful. Pitiful French calls for help in early June 1940 were coldly dismissed by Cordell Hull as ‘a series of extraordinary, almost hysterical appeals’. For some time Britain fared no better. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, another Roosevelt campaign contributor, did not even provide verbal support: ‘From the start I told them they could expect zero help. We had none to offer and I know we could not give it and, in the way of any material, we could not spare it.’107 By the end of 1940 Britain had run out of convertible currency: she had only $12 million in her reserves, the lowest ever, and was obliged to suspend dollar
Modern Times
Paul Johnson
The Working Backwards process is all about starting from the customer perspective and following a step-by-step process where you question assumptions relentlessly until you have a complete understanding of what you want to build. It’s about seeking truth. Sometimes the Working Backwards process can uncover some surprising truths. Some companies, in a rush to get a project to market, ignore that truth and keep building according to the original plan. In their attachment to the modest gains of that plan, they motivate the team to pursue it aggressively, only to realize much later that there was a much bigger gain to be had if they’d taken the time to question their own assumptions. The cost of changing course in the PR/FAQ writing stage is much lower than after you’ve launched and have an operating business to manage. The Working Backwards process tends to save you from the expensive proposition of making a significant course change after you’ve launched your product. One example that illustrates this point is an issue that came up with S3. In the FAQ there was a simple question that read something like, “How much does S3 cost?” One of the first versions of the answer was that S3 would be a tiered monthly subscription service based on average storage use, with a possible free tier for small amounts of data. Customers would choose a monthly subscription rate based on how much data they typically needed to store—Simple Storage Service with simple pricing. We hadn’t worked out the exact details of the tiers and the prices for each tier, but you don’t have to do that in early iterations of the Working Backwards process. The engineering team was ready to move on to the next question. Except that day we never got to the next question. We kept discussing this question. We really did not know how developers would use S3 when it launched. Would they store mostly large objects with low retrieval rates? Small objects with high retrieval rates? How often would updates happen versus reads? How many customers would need simple storage (can easily be re-created, stored in only one location, not a big deal if you lose it) and how many would need complex storage (bank records, stored in multiple locations, a very big deal if you lose it)? All those factors were unknown yet could meaningfully impact our costs. Since we didn’t know how developers would use S3, was there a way to structure our pricing so that no matter how it was used, we could ensure that it would be affordable to our customers and to Amazon? Thus, the discussion moved away from a tiered subscription pricing strategy and toward a cost-following strategy. “Cost following” means that your pricing model is driven primarily by your costs, which are then passed on to your customer.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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