“We’ll pass your book around and I’ll get back to you.” I wasn’t sure he believed me.

But he said thank you, shook my hand and offered a good-bye. I waited with him for the elevator. He entered and pressed the lobby button.

As the doors slid closed, he stared straight at me and with a half smile added, “Good luck with your next meeting.”

Wait a minute, I thought. Wasn’t that Roger’s line?

It’s clear that Apple’s designers have done the same thing: their focus has shifted towards content. I can’t wait to see what happens to the iOS ecosystem when other designers and developers follow their lead. That path forward won’t be easy, but it will take the platform to a whole new level.

Yet another example of “can’t innovate any more, my ass”.

“People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

Now of course LinkedIn offers protocols and features that the open Net doesn’t, at least not yet, and the same is true for all the specialized overlays that we call social networks.

But there’s a ton of duplication in those layered protocols and features. If we can’t factor out a bunch of the duplication, I think social network fatigue becomes the major hurdle standing in the way of reaching critical mass.

O.K., and now to explain how it’s done. Well, it’s a little like trying to hit a bottle cap with a wire coat hanger.

Every day a songwriter rows out into the deep waters in search of his own personal Loch Ness monster. (Just a matter of time, we insist.)

Being a weary subscriber to the old inspiration-perspiration theory, I must say that minus the former, you’ll hit a sweaty dead end every time, yet without this purging of what I call “brain vomit,” you’ll never drain the 99 pieces of hooey before one of pure inspiration writes itself for you.

But the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story.

We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us.

This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices.

Ideation in a clientless vacuum; devoid the realities of real life (inside an agency or any company for that matter). Feasibility. Budgets. Client bureaucracies. The fact is that big ideas take time to sell. They die. They have to be reborn. And that it’s your role to breath the life back in. But only if you really give a shit.

The “idea” is the tip of a gigantic, shit stained iceberg of work. And if you aren’t ready for what it takes, or worse, you think “that it’s someone else’s job” to push your idea from ether to reality—reconsider your profession.

My advice is simple: don’t be the entitled kid. The kid who over indexes in ambition but lacks any real passion—any real drive other than a new title at a new agency.

Be the kid who wants to learn even when he doesn’t have to—the designer who wants to learn to write, to code, to understand business because it makes the design better.

Generally, what Tumblr needs, and what Tumblr has always needed, is to get support and maintenance roles off of David’s plate so he can focus on the product.

David’s perfectly able to worry about money and operations, but I bet he really doesn’t want to. At best, it would be a tremendous waste of his time and talent.

We — internet users, creative people, publishers, socializers — will be much better served if David can focus on his product’s features, design, and messaging instead of worrying about server architecture and raising more money.