April Question: Favorite Words & Mottos. We Asked Everyone.

From Noa: Welcome to the second installment of our monthly interview series. This month's theme: favorite words and mottos. I asked all eight team members three questions.

Questions: ① What's your favorite word, phrase, or motto? ② When did it find you? What was the context? ③ How does it show up in your work or daily life?

① "Cutting is making." Something I started saying to myself — not a quote from anywhere.

② Early in my planning work, I went through a phase of trying to pack everything in. More ideas felt like more value. But the more I added, the less it landed. At some point I realized that planning is fundamentally an act of subtraction — so I put that into words I could use.

③ I spend more time cutting than generating now. Asking "is this actually necessary?" at every stage is the core of planning. The first step toward making something real is having the courage to discard what doesn't belong.

① "Everything is designed. Few things are designed well." — Widely attributed in design circles.

② When I first started working in design, I was measuring things by whether they looked good. Pretty equaled correct. This phrase clarified something: without intention, there's no design — only decoration.

③ It keeps me from settling for "looks nice." A design that doesn't function isn't a design. That standard lives in my head permanently, and this phrase is how I hold it there.

① "Code is written once, read many times." — A principle that circulates in developer communities.

② Early on, I thought "as long as it works" was enough. Then I had the experience of coming back to my own code and not being able to understand it. That was the moment.

③ My benchmark now is: would someone reading this in a year understand it immediately? Code isn't for the person who wrote it — it's for the team. Readability is a feature, not a preference.

① "Trust, but verify." — I know it's an old phrase. It still works.

② I've missed a bug that I assumed wasn't there. "It's probably fine" turned into a production issue. After that, intuition got demoted and verification got promoted.

③ Testing is this phrase in practice. You can't say "no problem" until you've actually checked. I've started applying it outside work too — trusting things more comfortably because I took the step of verifying first.

① "Writing is thinking." Not a quote from anyone — something I noticed while working.

② I was writing an article and realized halfway through that my position had changed. The act of writing had changed what I thought. That feedback loop surprised me enough that I've been thinking about it since.

③ I use drafts as thinking space now. Waiting until I have the perfect outline before writing is slower and shallower than just writing. The structure emerges from the work, not before it. Write first — that's the fastest and deepest way I've found to think something through.

① "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." — Attributed to Einstein, though the origin is debated. Still one of my favorites.

② I encountered it when I was starting to feel skeptical of pure data thinking — the idea that if something is measurable, it's therefore important. This phrase named what I was sensing.

③ I return to it every time I'm choosing metrics. The ability to measure something doesn't make it worth measuring. Deciding what to measure — and why — is where the real judgment lives. That's what this phrase keeps in front of me.

① "Listening is harder than speaking." — Something my mother said often.

② I heard it as a child without really understanding it. Then I started working in a role that's essentially about receiving what users can't quite put into words — and I understood immediately.

③ My job is to hear what's underneath what someone says. That only works if I actually listen. My mother had the right idea; it just took me a while to catch up.

① "Be curious, not judgmental." — Attributed to Walt Whitman, though I first encountered it in a TV show.

② I was reviewing a product from a context very different from mine and realizing I kept leading with judgment: "this is wrong," "this doesn't work." I didn't like that pattern. This phrase arrived at the right time.

③ It shifted my default from evaluation to inquiry. When something feels off in a culture or product I'm not native to, the more useful first question is "why was this made this way?" rather than "is this right?" Curiosity produces better feedback. It's a better starting point for most things, honestly.

From Noa:

Eight people, and not one of them went looking for a famous quote to adopt. Every answer was something found — through experience, through a moment of recognition, through something a parent said. The words became theirs not when they first heard them, but when they needed them.

Maybe that's how it always works. A word doesn't mean much until it finds the right moment.

Next month's theme: to be announced.