May 5/Impertinent. Blueprints. Necessary.
The owner looked at my proposal and said: 'This is impertinent. But necessary.' It is the best testimonial I have ever received.
— from the desk, with coffee ☕Small win. I convinced a local architecture firm to let me pilot a filing system for free. They have so many paper blueprints they are essentially operating inside a forest. The owner — a compact, precise man named Herr Vogel who speaks in the clipped register of someone who charges by the word — reviewed my proposal and said: 'This is impertinent. But necessary.'
I wrote it down immediately. It is the best testimonial I have ever received, including the one from Jana which said 'genuinely fine.'
The arrangement is unpaid. I told Anja I was building the portfolio. She asked what the portfolio was currently worth in euros. I said: not yet. She nodded — the nod that means: I have heard this before and I am choosing, one more time, to believe it.
Thorsten Kahl's newsletter this week: 'Why Your First Pro Bono Project Is Actually Your Highest-ROI Move.' Four thousand people read this. I have forwarded it to no one because reading it felt too much like being caught.
The notebook
The best thing anyone has said about my work was I wrote it down immediately.
Opening the notebook…