Passion and Vision

Delicious Monster, a company with perhaps one of the coolest names in the business, has just released what is perhaps one of the coolest products in the business. It’s a media organization thingy called Delicious Library, and it allows you to create a computer catalog of all your stuff: books, CDs. movies, tapes, games, whatever. Once your stuff’s suitably cataloged, you can sort, peruse, examine, eyeball, annotate, behold, and just generally gaze upon it. You can “check stuff out” when you lend it to your friends (”A Library of One”); you can ask the program to recommend other stuff you might like; you can even get it to put your stuff up for sale on Amazon when you’re tired of it. The interface is as beautiful as it is functional, and the design follows the Mac creed: as much as you need, and no more.

Notice I didn’t say that this is one of the most useful products in the world. Media libraries are something your average person can probably live without. But this one is very, very cool. Even cooler, though, is the ode to passion and vision that the company’s founder, Will Shipley, sneaks onto the site under the guise of a mission statement:

I believe the best software is written by small groups of people who have both passion and vision. Passion is easy to define; you care so deeply about something that it wounds you if it’s done poorly. Vision can mean different things, but I mean the ability to not just come up with new ideas, but to actually be able to see how they would integrate with people’s lives. Vision without passion gives you a guy who sitting on couch saying, “Flying cars! Wave of the future! Mark my word, the guy who invents that’s going to be rich… pass the chips.” Passion without vision gives you America’s current political situation, where we allow huge companies to destroy the world but pass laws to make sure nobody marries a turtle.

I just love that. I think it’s what all of us want: a job that does more than bring in the bacon, that melds so seamlessly into our own hopes and dreams and ideals that it becomes an expression of ourselves. I used to believe that this kind of transcendent job satisfaction is the exclusive domain of artists, but now understand that it applies to every profession, everywhere: from software development to widget fashioning to haberdashery. If passion informs everything you do, then you’re more than happy: you’re satisfied, you’re fulfilled, you’re content. You’re cool.