Jordan Stella

“It’s the love of the thing that’s essential.”
— John Williams

When people ask what I do, the honest answer takes a while. I’m interested in more things than is generally advised, which has been useful professionally and hard on introductions. The question assumes a single answer, and I’ve rarely had one.

I’ve mostly stopped asking what things are for before I do them. Attention has a way of turning into ability if you give it long enough, and ability has a way of finding uses you couldn’t have planned. Following my interests has never led me astray. It has, however, made a fairly convincing case against my ability to predict where they’ll lead.

The line at the top of this page is John Williams on Stoner, my favorite novel, explaining why he thought its quiet, unremarkable hero was a hero at all. I’ve always liked how unspecific it is. Williams doesn’t say the love of success, or of being good at something, or of being recognized for it. He says the thing: the work itself, whatever it happens to be, loved for what it is and not for what it might turn into. It’s a strange standard for a life. The more of mine I spend, the more it seems like the right one.

It’s also an odd thing to believe when your job title has the word “growth” in it. Most of my career has been in work measured almost entirely by what it produces: rankings, pipeline, revenue. But the numbers were almost never where the good work started. It started with a problem I couldn’t leave alone, one that wasn’t strictly mine, until it became difficult to pretend it belonged to someone else. You can do exactly what a brief asks and leave the actual problem untouched. A website gets redesigned, the copy gets rewritten, everyone delivers their part, and somehow the thing still doesn’t work. I’ve spent a good part of my career inside that “somehow,” and the only reliable way in has been to care about the whole thing more than my piece of it. The results came. They usually do, eventually. But they came from the thing.

Which brings me to the current moment in AI, which suits me unusually well and also worries me a little. For most of my career, turning an idea into something real meant assembling people: writers, developers, designers, contractors, at one point more than twenty of them. Now I can get a great deal further on my own, fast enough to find out whether I still care about an idea once it exists.

The worry is simple. When making things gets this cheap, there will be a great deal more of everything, and much of it will have been made by someone who didn’t particularly care. Output stops being scarce. What stays scarce is the thing Williams was talking about: someone who loves the work enough to stay with it after it stops being new.

The frontier moves fast enough that keeping up could be a full-time job, and I try to keep up anyway. But I don’t want keeping up to become the whole of it. My interests keep their own time. Some stay with me. Others go quiet and come back, unannounced, when I’m in the middle of something else. I’ve learned not to treat every pause as a verdict on the project.

This site is a place for what comes out of all these interests, at whatever point I’ve reached. Some of it is finished. Some is an experiment, or something I mean to return to when the interest does. Some of it will take far longer to arrive than I’d like. And if something never gets finished at all, I’d still rather have it, half-made and mine, than another thing I talked myself out of making.