Form.

For most of my life, I have carried a set of loves and obsessions: design, architecture, fashion, dance, rhetoric, protocol, and etiquette. A few years ago, I had a realization. These weren’t parallel interests, they were all expressions of the same fixation: form. In each of these disciplines, form is primary.

Form isn’t something a system has. Form defines what it is. It’s the core of the thing—the structure that gives it identity and determines what it can do.

There is a maxim that refuses to die: form follows function. I have never hated anything more. Form does not follow function. Form makes function possible.

Rhetoric makes this especially clear. Persuasion doesn’t succeed because the arguments are well-founded; it succeeds because the structure creates cadence, emphasis, and momentum. Order, framing, repetition, silence, escalation—these are formal properties. They determine what can be heard, what can be resisted, and what can move. You can put strong arguments into bad form and watch them fail. You can put mediocre arguments into good form and watch them travel. The content hasn’t changed. The form has.

Humans are remarkably good at sensing form. We have an internal feel for elegance, balance, and coherence. Systems with strong form feel more powerful, more engaging, more legible. They can carry greater complexity with less strain. They feel calm. They feel complete. That sensation—that nothing is extraneous, nothing is missing, everything is in the right place—isn’t aesthetic garnish. It’s the perception of a system whose form is doing real work. That’s what people mean when they say something just makes sense.

This is also why I tend to think in metaphor, layers, and gesture. If you nail the form, you don’t need to understand the details. You can return to it later, enter it from a different angle, or focus on a different part entirely. Whatever you encounter next—an implication, a decision, a next step—makes sense because it’s emerging from a structure that already holds. Understanding unfolds rather than being forced. Beauty, in this sense, isn’t decoration; it’s integration. It’s the signal that the system is internally consistent and therefore trustworthy. That trust matters. It removes the need to grip or pre-solve everything. You know you can rely on the form and be coherent.

Once the baseline form is right, execution stops being speculative. What should happen next becomes obvious. How the system should evolve becomes clear. Which moves are necessary, which are premature, which are distractions—these are no longer open questions. You don’t argue your way to action; it presents itself. Not because you mapped every path in advance, but because the structure constrains the space tightly enough that the right moves emerge naturally.

Focusing on form makes execution faster, stronger, and cleaner. It’s not abstraction, complication, or theory. It’s efficiency.

This is why form matters to me. Not as a preference or a theory, but as a responsibility. Get the form wrong, and everything downstream inherits the mistake. Get it right, and much of the work becomes inevitable.