![fastcompany:
World Trade Center High Wire Artist Philippe Petit’s Colorful Advice For A Career On The Edge
On a summer day in 1974, a 24-year-old Frenchman stepped onto the world stage with one of the most astonishing performances in modern history—walking back and forth on a wire illegally rigged across the void between New York’s World Trade Center Towers, three quarters of a mile above spellbound onlookers.
Petit has gone on to perform many other spectacular wire walks, authored over half a dozen books, was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Man on Wire, and singlehandedly built a barn using eighteenth-century tools and design. Whether on the high wire or not, Petit’s philosophy is epitomized in his response to reporters shouting “Why?” after his dramatic Twin Towers crossing. Petit’s answer: “The beauty of it is, there is no ‘why.’”
When we spoke to Petit about how he walks the high wire, our conversation expanded to Petit’s philosophy of how he lives his life on the high wire. We found that his improvisatory, chaos-courting, risk-managing principles could be applied to anyone’s work or personal life.
Here they are in his own (colorful) words:
1. Let life be your teacher.
How can you achieve greatness if you haven’t experienced the hard lessons of life? To become a great theatrical director, a great actor or a Renaissance man, you have to do all the jobs most people don’t want to do, like washing dishes and shoveling horseshit.
2. Court disaster.
If you go where trouble is you will find a magnificent transformation. After all, if I had followed the rules, would I have traveled across the ocean to a foreign country and illegally snuck into and then wire-walked across a building a quarter mile above the ground?
3. Make your art a joyful adventure.
If I were to sit at a desk, write a list, make a schedule, and go and meet the building and then make a plan to do a high wire walk in the most safe and intelligent way, I would not have that sense of adventure and exploration. And, there would be no point in living.
4. Be a madman of detail.
Before I walked the Twin Towers, I gathered information with cunning and precision. This door in this place opens to the left this wide with this many steps of a certain thickness, the 450-pound cable must be brought up this way to avoid detection, and so on. There were at least a thousand other details to solve. When it comes to doing my homework, I’m obsessed. I want to live to be very old. A half a millimeter of mistake, a quarter second’s miscalculation, and you lose your life.
5. Improvise.
Improvisation is turning away from a well-polished plan within a millisecond because there’s no such thing in life as a well-polished plan.
Check out this great story here!
[Image: Flickr user Carolina Pastrana]
Man On Wire is a fantastic doc. Very worth the watch.
That picture gives me vertigo.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/381c0e4bf7b368517777af74b91504bc/tumblr_miua6hZ9iH1qzt7h7o1_500.jpg)
It’s been said and agreed upon that the state of web development in the Palm Springs valley is 2 years behind larger markets elsewhere. Studying to learn new things. As long as I live here I endeavor to bring us up to speed. Maybe change some minds about the constant practices we have here. Basically not be boring. – Read on Path.
World Trade Center High Wire Artist Philippe Petit’s Colorful Advice For A Career On The Edge
On a summer day in 1974, a 24-year-old Frenchman stepped onto the world stage with one of the most astonishing performances in modern history—walking back and forth on a wire illegally rigged across the void between New York’s World Trade Center Towers, three quarters of a mile above spellbound onlookers.
Petit has gone on to perform many other spectacular wire walks, authored over half a dozen books, was the subject of the acclaimed documentary Man on Wire, and singlehandedly built a barn using eighteenth-century tools and design. Whether on the high wire or not, Petit’s philosophy is epitomized in his response to reporters shouting “Why?” after his dramatic Twin Towers crossing. Petit’s answer: “The beauty of it is, there is no ‘why.’”
When we spoke to Petit about how he walks the high wire, our conversation expanded to Petit’s philosophy of how he lives his life on the high wire. We found that his improvisatory, chaos-courting, risk-managing principles could be applied to anyone’s work or personal life.
Here they are in his own (colorful) words:
1. Let life be your teacher.
How can you achieve greatness if you haven’t experienced the hard lessons of life? To become a great theatrical director, a great actor or a Renaissance man, you have to do all the jobs most people don’t want to do, like washing dishes and shoveling horseshit.
2. Court disaster.
If you go where trouble is you will find a magnificent transformation. After all, if I had followed the rules, would I have traveled across the ocean to a foreign country and illegally snuck into and then wire-walked across a building a quarter mile above the ground?
3. Make your art a joyful adventure.
If I were to sit at a desk, write a list, make a schedule, and go and meet the building and then make a plan to do a high wire walk in the most safe and intelligent way, I would not have that sense of adventure and exploration. And, there would be no point in living.
4. Be a madman of detail.
Before I walked the Twin Towers, I gathered information with cunning and precision. This door in this place opens to the left this wide with this many steps of a certain thickness, the 450-pound cable must be brought up this way to avoid detection, and so on. There were at least a thousand other details to solve. When it comes to doing my homework, I’m obsessed. I want to live to be very old. A half a millimeter of mistake, a quarter second’s miscalculation, and you lose your life.
5. Improvise.
Improvisation is turning away from a well-polished plan within a millisecond because there’s no such thing in life as a well-polished plan.
Check out this great story here!
[Image: Flickr user Carolina Pastrana]
Man On Wire is a fantastic doc. Very worth the watch.
That picture gives me vertigo.
Bane shows the panicked citizens of Gotham his new Profound Programmer poster.
“When the debugger is in ashes, you have my permission to halt execution.”
Made a small page with links to things I’ve found to be useful and educating, or something I’ve committed to learning. You know, in case I launch my browser and intend on screwing off. Life’s too short for bs internet. See also: stay away from 99% of Reddit.
I get incredibly excited just thinking about how much there is out there, free or low cost education. You can be anything if you look and try.
(Source: neverdrinkturpentine)
More tour details, including venues and presale info, are up now on our new tour page.
Only dates in southern California are at Coachella where tickets are incredibly expensive and sell out ridiculously quickly. Not to mention you have to buy into a bunch of other bands to see them.
Suck it, fans.
Every time.
Aspire to know everything. Be ready to admit when you’re wrong.
In a highly unintuitive result, bigger but more highly-compressed images look better, and use less bandwidth. /via @smcbride
pdc:
One more thing to avoid doing with our web site …
Been on several websites lately that have perfectly navigable mobile sites that try to tell me to get their app.
Not everything needs a goddamn app.
I posted a tiny tiny piece of simple JS that basically calculated a score for blackjack, it was a joke, but the project wasn’t.
I started this to get better at it, to learn and use it because that’s what makes you learn things. Read the books of course, but get away from them and get your hands dirty and write it to your brain.
This project grew from tiny, to longer, and more complex, not only as I add components for a better experience- like the ace in your hand collapses from 11pts to 1pt if your hand will bust with your next card because of it- but to figure out just how robust an experience I can build. It grew from 20 lines of code, to 30, then 100, and it’s now at 300 lines of code (and counting). It now writes to an HTML/CSS game table with a full graphic 52 card deck.
I never intended it to be a simple game- I wanted the bells and whistles- what surprised me was how much different it came out to get it to work. And this is just one way of doing it- the next guy will no doubt do it differently, maybe better, maybe worse. I’m building this using the newer ‘use strict’; mode to tighten up and kill the leniency to just be sharper at JS. All of this aside, I’ve inadvertently entered the Douglas Crockford debate, thanks to JSlint.
The game mechanics are built and I just have to string the functions together to build turn based play, and work in the betting. Then will it be done? Likely never, maybe someday. I mean, it will play, and it will play well- but I’ll always be refining and tinkering and learning new and better ways to level up my skills and using this as a test bed.
It’s the most fun way to learn ever.
Me, at my desk, writing code, all day.
(Source: onlybloodypeepshow, via ilovebritishtv)
// shit tyrone
Building a Blackjack game in JavaScript, because why not.
Pug and a book before bedtime. – View on Path.
