The Luckiest Era to Be Curious

“People only remember your weird.” — George Mack

Last Friday night, I wanted a place to find charts that aren’t boring as hell.

I use them all the time for the jAI newsletter, but couldn’t find one…

So I built it.

By Sunday, I had Chart Studio AI.

A working site where you paste your data, pick a style, and get back something that doesn’t look like it was made in Excel in 2007. Woodcut charts. Comic book charts, hand-drawn napkin sketches. The whole thing came together in a weekend.

But here’s the thing…

I didn’t set out to build anything connected to my actual work. I just wanted cool charts.

And look at what showed up anyway.

* A random owl mascot. (Why an owl? I don’t know. I just wanted an owl.)

* Error text that says “Whoa there, Picasso.”

* A blog section with articles like “The Con Man Who Invented the Pie Chart.” Because how do you make data visualization interesting? You tell the story of the criminal who created it.

None of this was best practice. None of it was necessary. All of it was a signal.

The Luckiest Era

We live in a strange time.

Building used to require permission. Capital. Teams. Months of planning. If you wanted to make something, you had to know what you were making before you started. The cost was too high to “figure it out” as you went.

That’s over.

You can build a working product on a weekend now. With AI. With no-code tools. With whatever you have lying around. For me, the barrier has dropped so far that building stopped being a decision and became a reflex.

* The old model: Think first, then build.

* The new model: Build first, then think.

When there’s nothing on the line except your time, you can build loose. Follow what’s interesting. Let it be weird.

That’s when you learn what you’re actually drawn to.

And that’s when you build something that could only come from you.

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Let it be weird.

That’s when you learn what you’re actually drawn to.

And that’s when you build something that could only come from you.

When Best Practices Are Worst Practices

Here’s advice you won’t find in a LinkedIn carousel.

If you want to discover what makes you different, the worst thing you can do is build “correctly.”

I wrote last week about defaults, the invisible settings that shape your behavior before you even make a choice. Best practices are the defaults of your space. The expected way things look, sound, and work. The templates everyone follows without questioning.

Every space has them.

Data visualization tools are supposed to look like enterprise software.

* Clean logos.

* Stock photos of people pointing at charts in meetings.

* Blog posts titled “5 Best Practices for Effective Data Visualization.”

* Error messages that say “Invalid input. Please check your data format.”

The owl, the Picasso line, the con man article…none of it belongs in a data tool. That’s why it’s a signal.

When I built it, none of these felt like bold creative choices. They just felt like what the thing wanted to be. The owl showed up. The Picasso line made me laugh. The con man article was interesting to me, so I wrote it.

So why does the weird stuff feel so natural when you’re making it? Jay Acunzo spent years trying to figure that out. (His book Break the Wheel is the best thing I’ve read on this.)

The difference, he found, is always context. Best practices strip out the specific details of your situation and replace them with generalized wisdom that worked for someone else, somewhere else, at some other time. Without your context, you’re making decisions that are “close enough.” And close enough leads to work that is, at best, good enough.

When you follow the defaults, you’re invisible. Not because you’re bad. Because you match expectations perfectly, and the brain skips right over things that match expectations. You don’t notice defaults. That’s what makes them defaults.

There’s a story about Thomas Edison that captures this perfectly.

When interviewing candidates for his research lab, he’d take them out for a meal and order soup. Then he’d watch. Anyone who salted their soup before tasting it was rejected on the spot.

Edison didn’t want people who made assumptions before collecting data. He wanted people who tasted first, then decided what the soup needed.

Best practices are salt before you taste. You’re seasoning your work with other people’s preferences before you’ve even discovered your own.

Derek Sivers has a phrase for the invisible force that makes us do this anyway: The Invisible Jury. We build as if a panel of professionals is watching and scoring our decisions. We add what we think they’d approve of. We remove what might make them raise an eyebrow.

The jury doesn’t exist. But we perform for it anyway.

But your expertise is shy. It doesn’t announce itself. It sneaks into the unexpected additions, the “why did I even include this” details, the stuff you almost removed because it wasn’t professional enough.

That’s where you live. In the moments that break the defaults.

Close enough leads to work that is, at best, good enough.

The Cost of Fitting In

Here’s what’s interesting about this.

Jonathan Courtney runs AJ&Smart, a design consultancy that works with some of the biggest banks and corporations in the world. The clients most people assume want buttoned-up professionalism.

He recently spoke at a conference in Oslo. Instead of slides, he did an improv session. There was music. He reviewed chocolate on stage. The whole thing was modeled after a stand-up comedy set.

“If I had to go up there and do slides and just do it in the way everyone else was doing it,” he said on his podcast, “it really would make me feel depressed. It would make me feel like this is pointless.”

Full video here

When you edit out the weird stuff, you don’t just lose signal. You lose energy. You lose the feeling that the work is yours. You start to wonder what the point is.

But here’s where it gets fun for anyone worried that being weird costs you clients.

Courtney’s team faces pressure constantly. A new employee joins, sees something “weird” in the brand, and says, “We should take that out because that’s not going to be okay for the corporation.” They keep it in. The corporations are also humans. They also might find it funny.

And the result? Those same companies keep booking them.

“Other CEOs see me doing this, and they’re like, ‘that wouldn’t work for my clients,’” Courtney said. “Our clients are all the biggest banks and corporations. The clients you want? They’re watching, and they’re booking us. You just don’t get it. People can tell that we are being real. And that’s the thing that becomes attractive.”

The weirdness isn’t a liability. It’s the protection. Especially now, when AI can generate anything generic in seconds, the stuff that’s unmistakably you is the only stuff that stands out.

And here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable: that instinct to remove, to smooth over, to professionalize? That’s the same instinct that would have killed the owl. The con man article. The “Whoa there, Picasso.”

Best practices don’t just hide your patterns from others. They hide them from you.

The weirdness isn’t a liability. It’s the protection. Especially now, when AI can generate anything generic in seconds, the stuff that’s unmistakably you is the only stuff that stands out.

What Chart Studio Revealed About Me

I didn’t realize until later that the whole project pointed somewhere.

Making invisible things visible. (Data into beautiful charts.) Personality in utility. (The owl. The jokes.) Making boring things interesting. (Criminal history of pie charts.)

These patterns have nothing to do with data visualization. They have everything to do with what I actually care about.

A week after I built Chart Studio, I started sketching Framework Studio. A tool to help people visua…

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