I don’t think that is tough, because if you have an idea of something meaningful to communicate, you can move forward on that. You might not be successful in communicating what you want to communicate, but at least you have an idea of something that needs to be said, or something that you think should be said, and I think you go from there.

I would say I feel stuck more often than I feel creatively flowing. It’s about not beating yourself up about that, not getting on your own case for long periods of not being productive, because it can happen in a big sudden burst. And usually, forcing it too much has never really resulted in good stuff. So, it’s a lot of being patient and forgiving of yourself. I watch a movie every night and listen to a lot of music. I’m constantly surrounding myself with stimuli, that anything could be the spark that gets the creative juices flowing again. I have experienced times, though, where I’ve found it’s not happening, and I get tired of movies and music and I need something else. So, then I’ll go to an art museum or go see an orchestra perform and see if that helps.

It’s very challenging working through it, but I think my stutter teaches me how to work through it. One of the things that it teaches me is when the block is happening, it presents an opportunity for another kind of encounter, another kind of beauty, and another kind of intimacy. The story that I often tell, and it’s just one of many examples, but this one time I was at a Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Brooklyn. I was in line and I went up to order my food. I got through my order, it’s very busy, there’s people lined up behind me and then the person asked me my name, and I block on my name. The person taking my order just stood there and waited so kindly, very gently. I felt so safe with them. I’m blocking, I’m blocking, and there’s nothing coming out. At a certain point, they were like, “You can just tell me the first letter if you want.” And I couldn’t say that. So we just stood there, I don’t know maybe 15, 30 seconds, and then I said my name, and then we went on. To me, it was so beautiful. Me and this person who I may never see again, whose name I do not know, we shared this interval of silence. It was just so beautiful and so intimate and so vulnerable. Vulnerable probably because other instances I have people will say, “Oh, did you forget your name?” Or they’ll laugh. There are many ways that people react to me stuttering up my name, some of which have been very painful. With that particular interaction, the block enabled this specific exchange between the two of us that probably would not have happened if I didn’t stutter my name.

I’ve never felt blocked, but when I get burnout it means it’s time to switch to another medium—I jump around, don’t stay still. I do know that when I spend too much time talking about my work, the new ideas recede. What I mean is, I find that the process of making brings more ideas, there’s constant momentum.

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. That's going to break people's hearts. I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die.

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young. It didn't know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We're not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We're dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.