Suffering is optional

"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional."
This famous quote from the Dalai Lama might sound slightly harsh, yet I think that what he is saying, in part, is if you set unattainable goals, such as having the perfect job, marriage, children, or education, you will suffer the disappointment of never perfectly attaining those goals. 

So, how do you make progress in your life if your unattainable goals can cause suffering?

One popular approach is to set less challenging goals: I want a new smartphone or car. These goals avoid the suffering of disappointment but don’t help you progress because there is nothing more to do once they are attained. As Neil Postman said, "You cannot get better at watching TV."

Set a practice, not a goal.

The first step is to change your mindset, to move away from achievement and finite endpoints, and to open yourself to the idea that progress and learning are infinite. This means that you will be focused on doing new things you are not good at and practicing them daily for 15 minutes. Once you have confidence in one element of whatever skill you are practicing, move on to something else that challenges you. There is no end point; practice is forever.

Many companies have an annual ritual of getting people to set goals at the start of the year. By doing this, they enter what could be a growth opportunity with instead a finite mindset. If your goals are not attained, then everything else you did that year is a failure.

This excellent video clip from basketball star Giannis Antetokounmpoperfectly illustrates the difference between a finite and infinite mindset. "Failures are steps to success."

This year, instead of setting a goal, set a practice. If the skill you want to practice is improving how you present ideas, give yourself 30 minutes each week to give a short presentation to one of your peers. Each person will be different, and that is the challenge. Real practice involves failure, which a goal-based mindset cannot understand.

There are no shortcuts, just practice and consistency. Try to find joy in that. There is no buzz every day, but over time, a quiet confidence that allows you to know that you are capable of most things you set your mind to. Most importantly, you make suffering optional.

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Where do ideas come from?

Ideas are different from thoughts. Thoughts are everywhere and are as common as grains of sand. They are fleeting and often out of context. An idea, on the other hand, is “what exists in the mind as a representation (as of something comprehended) or as a formulation (as of a plan).” - Merriam-Webster definition. 

Ideas go beyond thoughts because they are formulated in a way that allows them to become real.

Here are some inspirations for ideas to try, read, and think about. 

• In A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young, the author outlines his method for the production of ideas, underscoring that they don’t just arrive, but must be made.
  “As I said before, what I am now about to contend is that in the production of ideas the mind follows a method which is just as definite as the method by which, say, Fords are produced.”

• There are many ways to have ideas, Creators on Creating is a great book that outlines how many of the most creative people develop their ideas.

• One practical way of creating ideas is the 9-box method. Get a piece of paper, draw a three-by-three grid of boxes, Write your problem statement at the top of the page, and then fill each box with an idea that might solve the problem you are trying to tackle. This method allows for a breadth of thinking and comparison between ideas.

• One of the best apps I have found for gathering ideas is Readwise. It allows you to highlight quotes from Kindle or other online readers and organize those ideas to act as a springboard for your own ideas.

• Musician Brian Eno is famous for being an ideas person. He believes in a concept called Scenius, which means that ideas are not just generated by individuals but by groups of people all thinking independently and then coming together to make an idea.

• I will leave you with this thought about ideas from the excellent book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind.
  “One of the strongest forces that prevents the discovery of these new avenues may be the habit of thinking fast: of taking your first intuitive assessment of the situation for granted, and not bothering to stop and check.”

A question…
How do you come up with ideas? Please take a moment to share your thoughts on what works for you.

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Listening is the first step

“Today, in conversation, I try to constantly remind myself: only react, only intervene, when invited or when it will obviously be welcome. This takes practice, possibly endless practice.” - Carl Rogers

This quote inspired me to create a design exercise with my team. How can you practice active listening? What is active listening?

For me, it’s the ability to let go of your thoughts and feelings and formulate questions about what you hear. In other words, to be actively curious. This means going from a passive state of absorbing knowledge to an active state of thinking about what you heard and formulating questions based on that new knowledge—a practice driven not by self-interest but by curiosity.

This unlocks a whole new world where you can move beyond your thoughts into someone else’s ideas.

The exercise I devised for my team was to watch three videos and, after each video, spend 5 minutes writing down the questions that arose for each of them from watching each video.

Here are the three videos I used.

Andy Goldsworthy on the work of art
Lewis Hamilton on teamwork
Brian Eno on culture and creativity

After 30 minutes of this exercise, we generated over 60 questions as a group. This started a wide range of conversations among the team. For me, this is a victory for listening and curiosity, two vital skills for creativity to thrive.

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Teaching critique

A critique session is often a moment to teach. But what does it mean to teach?

I found this quote recently, which resonated.

“It means that your students can look at the work and make similar decisions without you being there.” - Dr Samuel Holtzman

Not only do we need to offer criticism, but we need to provide tools to help people critique their own work.

To that end, I wrote this article, “Design proofreading.” It offers a tool to help you understand how I critique UX design work. I hope it proves helpful to you as you work through your next project. There are no magic solutions to making great designs, no secret methods other than spending time understanding the problem, trying out a variety of ideas to see what fits, and then critiquing those ideas.

Every critique teaches you something, and the trick is to be open, to listen, to let go of your preconceived ideas, and to be ready to move on to the next idea.

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Fear is the motivation-killer

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” - Frank Herbert, Dune.

In today’s culture, we are constantly afraid. What will be the next disaster for yourself or your community? Cybercrime, subway muggings, bridge collapses, wars, and global pandemics. 24-hour news coverage of all these fearful events is constant. Ẽven observing them from the edges, it would be reasonable to feel fear. I certainly do.

The problem is that this fear robs us of our agency. If you allow it to overwhelm your mind, you become passive, waiting for the next disaster rather than living your life. So, how do you fight this? How do you find the motivation? How do you face your fear and permit it to pass over and through you?

One approach is to change the rules of the game. Right now, there are more sources of news and information than ever before in human history. In previous eras, people didn't know what they should be afraid of because they didn't know about events on the other side of the city, let alone the globe. Now, you can access everything immediately through your magic rectangle, always within arm’s reach.

But what if you changed the rules of the game? What if you went from being a passive information sponge to diving deeper into the ideas that speak to you? Rather than feeling fear, you pick the type of information and make it work for you instead of against you, providing you with a source of courage and motivation.

Find your people
Have you ever felt deeply connected with an idea you have read, watched, or listened to? An author or artist that you could not stop thinking about? What if we thought of that person as part of your “team for life” — a group of people who would help inspire and motivate you for the rest of your life?

It's fine to have a small team to start, and your team might change over your lifetime as you discover new people and ideas and as you yourself change. You might say, but I’ve read that book and listened to that music a thousand times. How do I keep getting motivation from that one person? This is where the internet in that magic rectangle can instead come to the rescue. We live in a time when a large part of human creation is accessible (or at least a large part of human knowledge). If you like a particular person, chances are so do a lot of other people. Those other people might have written a book, conducted an interview, or made a movie about your inspirational person. Luckily for you, all of that stuff is now only one click away. Apple podcasts or YouTube are excellent starting points.

Everyone’s “team for life” is unique to them. So it’s easy to be self-motivated to find this information because these are ideas and people you have picked. The deeper you dive into the people who get you, the more you learn. Your “team for life” is always there for you, showing you new places to explore, books to read, and things to listen to. This is also an excellent antidote to information overload, a filter on the internet.

You could pick from some of the usual suspects: Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, or the Beatles. But the people you pick don’t have to be famous; they just have to get you. Appeal to your particular way of thinking, the thing that motivates you. For example, I like Shakespeare, Neil Postman, Adam Curtis, and Georges Simenon. Now, that’s just me, but when I watch a Shakespeare scene or listen to an interview with Neil Postman, it motivates me to keep exploring. That motivation turns into things like starting to write this article.

Pick your team for life
Take 10 minutes, sit down, and write a list of people that you really enjoy reading, listening to, or watching. Don't worry if it’s hard at first or if you pick the wrong people. Your team is going to change and evolve as you do, and that's a wonderful thing. Once you have two or three people jotted down, open up a podcast app or YouTube, visit your local library, and look for anything about that person: interviews, music, movies, books, articles, anything that allows you to explore their ideas further, and make a playlist. The next time you’re bored or lack motivation, just pick something off your "team for life" list and enjoy.

Introduce other people to your team and share their ideas with your work colleagues or with your friends. It might fall flat, or it might be the opportunity for someone to find a new member of their own “team for life.” Find your people on your “team for life,” and they will open endless doors of insight, discovery, and motivation. This will allow the fear to pass over and through you, and what will remain is the most motivated version of you.

Look outside yourself

Have a problem at work? Try a mindfulness app. Have a family conflict? Feeling sad? You guessed it, try a mindfulness app.

What if instead of using an app to look inward for solutions, we looked outward?

If you feel your attention is scattered, you can practice meditation, breathe, and build your focus skills.

You can also make a coffee date with a friend once a week and sit and listen. Resist the temptation to offer quick fixes or anecdotes from your past experiences; just listen. I would argue that this would build your focusing skills just as much as any mindfulness app might. Sitting and listening also provide a new perspective on your own issues.

Modern culture has gone from a collective sense that we are interconnected to an almost robotic individualism, which is leading to record levels of anxiety, loneliness, and worse. The BBC writes, “suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among Americans under the age of 35, according to the Centers for Disease Control, America's health protection agency.”

Meditation and mindfulness clearly have a place but even monks talk to each other, they share ideas, problems, and chores.

If you want to get fit, get a personal coach. If you want to improve your mental health, get a therapist; if you want to learn a language, take a course with a teacher and class full of fellow learners.

While you can improve all these things by yourself with a smartphone, doing them with other people helps not only with learning a new skill, it also helps with the more intangible social learning which neither a device nor your inner voice can provide alone.

I am not advocating for returning to offices five days a week or only getting fit at a gym, but there needs to be some counterbalance to the relentless message that everyone fixes themselves alone, which seems to erode our culture one person at a time.

Even my favorite stoic, famously inward-looking, wrote,
“But the greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul.” - Seneca

The power of archives

Ramesses II died in 1213 BC. Venerated, he lived 90 years, a ripe old age by modern standards. But when you realize that the average Egyptian at the time died by the age of 25, that would be the equivalent of a person today who lived to 400. You can see why he seemed like a deity.

I found this cultural gem in a story about the British Museum's giant statue of King Ramesses II in an archive called A History of the World in 100 Objects, created by the British Museum and the BBC. It's a 100-part podcast series that views the history of the world through the lens of objects from the British Museum.

This kind of archive is not just a collection of items or stories; it is a carefully curated collection with a function, purpose, and vision.

I love archives; they connect with our past and help us understand our present and future. These invaluable resources are often collected and curated by driven individuals to ensure we maintain this connection with the past and its rich source of culture and knowledge. 

Here are some archives I have found and created that have captured my imagination. Please check them out and share any archives you have found with me. I would love to see, hear, and watch them.



History of the World in 100 Objects 

This fantastic collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum tells the story of civilization through objects curated from the British Museum's catalog.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
This one-person odyssey of an archive tells the story of rock and roll through 500 songs, providing a rich cultural history.

The Studs Turkel Archive
A brilliant author in his own right, Studs Turkel had a radio show for 45 years, and the archive of his interviews allows you to listen to fascinating regular people and some of the most influential people in the culture of the twentieth century: the juxtaposition makes this collection unique.

Over the years, in collaboration with various organizations, we at Buscada have created archives covering multiple topics and ideas. These are some of my favorites:

This Triangle Fire Open Archive
Following this significant tragedy for working people over a hundred years ago, the archive collects political, cultural, and personal objects and stories that show how much this event has shaped our modern world.

Working with People
This video archive examines words like collaboration, community, power, and representation and allows individuals to express their diverse perspectives on the meanings of these words. They are creating a space for dialogue and nuance around some of the most critical issues of our time.

Family List
This is our project to curate activities for kids to try, make, and play. It focuses on diverse books, play activities, and cultural ideas to help kids and adults understand the world around them through play.

Investigating design

A software product designer is often given a problem like this:
“People cannot figure out how to share a document using our current software experience.”

It’s natural for that designer to want to talk to end consumers of the software and ask them what the issues are with the software experience. When they do, they often hear responses like, "It’s just not clear," or "I don't even know where the button is,” or "This is not how it works on Microsoft Word." These conversations might offer valuable insight, but they don't really help a designer understand the whole problem; the feedback is about specific parts of the problem but doesn’t form a complete picture of the experience.

But what if this was a mystery?
What if there was a crime, a murder! it happened in the middle of the day, and there were several witnesses, but none of them actually saw the dirty deed.

Interview the witnesses
You would interview the witnesses - just like in our software design problem when the designer talked to the users. But where would you be if you just stopped there without examining the crime scene or forensics?

The crime scene
At the murder scene, we’d investigate the details of the space. Too often, in software, we overlook those spaces where it all happens: the software screens, the buttons, menus, fields, and workflows. There is much to be learned from those old screens, like from a crime scene.

Forensics
Where did people click? Could they understand the labels? Was it clear that this item could be shared? What is all the functionality that's available? In other words, let’s establish the facts so we can see the whole problem.

Put the pieces together...
Once you’ve interviewed the witnesses, investigated the crime scene, and have all the facts in place, you can recreate the sequence of events that led to the crime (the user experience). You can see what is happening and why it's going wrong. You can take all those eyewitness statements (user interviews), put them in context, and make sense of them.

Once you can see what happened in a design, unlike a crime, you can change what will happen. As a designer, you can change the sequence of events and alter the facts to make the outcome something that engages your users and helps them get things done. In other words, you can create a design that is no longer a crime.

Reactive vs Proactive work

A recent official report on Fostering Innovation by the British Psychological Society, having surveyed all the relevant research, concludes that: ‘Individuals are more likely to innovate where they have sufficient autonomy and control over their work to be able to try out new and improved ways of doing things’ and where ‘team members participate in the setting of objectives’.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind - Guy Claxton

Office workers now have more autonomy than ever, and it’s clear that people feel that autonomy is important to them—yet understanding how to use this newfound freedom is often challenging. Autonomy needs a new mindset.

To take advantage of your newfound freedom, you need to consider the balance of reactive versus proactive work that you do.

How do you know if you are doing reactive work?

Are you executing on work set out in the project plan and primarily responding to other people’s requests?

How do you know if you are doing proactive work?

Are you planning how you’ll approach your work?

Here’s an example of choosing one of these two ways to work in response to the same scenario. Your boss briefs you on a new project. You can:

A: Wait for your boss’s project plan and for someone else to schedule a kickoff meeting.

B: Make your own project plan, research the subject matter, and schedule meetings with end users of this project.

While plan B sounds like a lot more work, it has the benefit of being proactive, putting your needs out in the world, and communicating what you want to achieve with the project. Even if you don’t get everything you want, you might get more than you imagine. In addition, you will be much more motivated to do a task you set yourself rather than being told what to do.

Balance is essential. You don’t need to control everything, but you do want control over some aspects of what you do. Doing proactive work can help you achieve this balance.

No matter what your level in your organization is, proactive work can have an impact. If you are an intern, it’s a way to ensure you get a chance to do more exciting work. If you are mid-level in your career, it lets you set the tone for a project, and if you are a leader, it enables you to control your most precious asset, your time.

My books of 2023

Change is the one constant in life; it’s also the key theme in some of my favorite books from this year.

Maybe you are like spy George Smiley, looking forward to retirement before having your world turned upside down, or maybe you are like John Cleese, discovering the power of your subconscious mind and its ability to change how you think. The artist Wayne Thiebaud recalls his ability to change between being an acclaimed artist and a teacher. Peter Ackroyd details the amazing roller coaster ride of change that is British history.

Adapting and changing is a crucial ability in life, and W. Timothy Gallwey’s great book The Inner Game of Work helps you find ways to focus on the change you want.

I hope you find a book here to take into the new year that can help you focus on the change you want in 2024!

The Inner Game of Work
W. Timothy Gallwey 

The spy who came in from the cold
John Le Carre

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
John Cleese

Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors
Peter Ackroyd

Wayne Thiebaud: Draftsman
Isabelle Dervaux

Give as few orders as possible

“82% of employees and 62% of HR directors believe that workers will need to hone their current skills or acquire new ones at least once a year in order to maintain competitive advantage in a global job market.”
- HBR What Your Future Employees Want Most

As a leader in an organization, your first priority is often to deliver results, complete projects, and meet deadlines. Doing the essential work of helping individuals and teams acquire new skills is often left to employees’ own self-motivated efforts or mandated training courses. 

I think there’s a better way to help people hone and gain skills. I recently read the book The Inner Game of Work by W. Timothy Gallwey, which focuses on a coaching approach. Gallwey’s coaching system involved not giving specific instructions to the people he worked with but instead suggesting specific things for them to focus on that could lead them to improve a skill. This coaching method is not about filling people with new information like a training course might; it is about helping them improve and optimize what they already have. 

In one example, Gallwey writes about his work with call center employees, who do a job that is often challenging and thankless. Instead of having them learn pre-determined scripts or evasion tactics, Gallwey asked the call center workers to focus on the tone of a caller’s voice. By learning to listen carefully to a caller’s tone of voice, the call center workers evolved a skill they already had; over time, they became better able to understand the emotional state of the person on the other end of the line, which allowed them to approach the conversation in the right frame of mind. Gallwey’s book is full of examples like this wherein coaching helped people better understand their jobs and increased their ability to handle most situations—all without giving them step-by-step instructions.

To put this coaching style of management in context, I made this diagram to show the spectrum of different team management styles. 

Order
Direct & results 
This is the most familiar management style: telling people what you need and when you need it, directing them about the results you need.  

Lead
Suggest & results 
This style requires a person to convince an entire company or group to follow a particular path without giving specific orders but rather through suggestions. This requires a very different set of skills. Communication and persuasion are the critical skills required.

Teach
Direct & learn
Teaching involves helping people learn something new; it requires structure, tools, and materials to help people learn a new skill. The goal of a teacher is to achieve understanding, not results. 

Coach
Suggest & learn 
Coaching is often the most misunderstood of all the categories. It is a subtle skill set. Coaching is about trying to get people to level up the skills they already have without micro-managing the process. 

Management styles are rarely delineated like this; worse, managers are often expected to use all of them. Yet, managers may find it hard to master all these different styles, and switching between them can confuse managers and teams. If you give orders and demand results one day and then offer open-ended suggestions the next, people often don’t know what to expect—or what is expected of them. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the hero receives some good advice: “‘Give as few orders as possible,’ his father had told him... ‘Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.’”

Following the “order” style of management can get results, but it often leads to teams feeling like they learned very little in the process of getting that desired result. When people on teams don't learn, they get bored, which makes getting quick results even harder. While “coaching” is often the least used management style, it may in fact, be the most effective at giving employers and employees what they each want: growth and new skills for employees and proactive, motivated employees for employers. Seems like a win-win.

Tomorrow is another world

“Never mind.” He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.".
- Wolf Hall
 | Hilary Mantel

Feeding my subconscious

Design is a process, not an outcome.

The process of exploring a problem will always lead to better results compared to creating the first thing that pops into your head.

I recently read John Cleese's book on creativity, and it reinforced this notion of design and creativity as a process of discovery.

In the book, Cleese notes that there are two parts to the process: first, the conscious effort you put into thinking about a problem, and second, the way your subconscious takes over as you daydream or sleep. It’s this subconscious time that makes sense of the tangle of issues with a problem and allows you to unwind your thinking and often to come up with a solution you could not think of when you were struggling consciously. Your subconscious mind is a mysterious place, and you are not entirely in control of it, which leads to these happy insights.

As I read this, I had a thought. If I am not in control of my subconscious mind, then what happens if instead of feeding my subconscious brain with fun, creative ideas, I provide it with, let’s say, reading hundreds of posts about negative things, a disaster here, a negative comment about my ideas there. What if I’m feeding these thoughts into my mind 2-3 hours a day in a constant visual and text stream? What will my subconscious make of that? Will it emerge with something positive or negative?

I am not in control of what my subconscious does. But I am in control of what I feed my subconscious. The diet I feed my mind is as important as the one I provide my body. I find that every day, I need to eat my mental greens to feed my mind with challenging and nourishing ideas and that maybe I should take a break from those Instagram Big Macs.

Think like a designer

"In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem solving".
- Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Designing Your Life

The small things in life

A quote from the Design + Culture article The Danish way. Please take a read and let me know what you think.

Are you directing or acting?

“Cut! Let’s try that one more time!” 

You’re on a movie set, and the director didn’t see exactly what they were looking for in a particular take. The lighting was off, the costumes looked wrong, or the expressions on the actors’ faces didn’t match the dialogue. Directors like David Fincher are famous for doing forty or fifty takes to get what they want. Everybody involved takes this process in their stride because they expect this to happen; they just set up and try again. This might seem like a super annoying—or incredibly inefficient—way to work. But this seemingly slow method can lead to great results for creative work. 

Doing multiple takes while everything is set up and everyone is in the right frame of mind is, in fact, very efficient and creative. 

Let's take another scenario. Let's say a designer spends some time creating a poster for a design team review. They present a couple of ideas, but something is not quite right. The structure is wrong, or the content does not quite work. What happens next? The people trying to decide if the design makes sense (the “directors”) cannot say, “Okay, let's try it again” in real time because the designer cannot just make another idea for the poster on the spot. It takes another 2-3 days to make a meaningful version, which, once again, might not be quite right. 

Suddenly, it’s our standard process for designing that looks pretty inefficient and emotionally bruising compared to the film process of repeatedly trying. 

To avoid this situation, a lone designer will often try to both act out the scene (create a design) and direct the scene (decide which of their ideas is the right one to show). But this is difficult. I know there have been a few actor/directors, but I would say that they are the exception, not the rule. 

In films, the audience never sees all the takes, just the final cut; in design, a client or internal stakeholders only need to see two or three versions of a design, but a design team’s internal process needs to be much more expansive to come up with those few strong ideas. 

If you are designing something, you are an actor. So, don’t edit yourself. Come into an internal team design review with a range of different concepts. This is where it’s helpful to think in concept models. What is a concept model? For example, cars, trains, and bicycles are different concept models of transport that can get you from A to B. They require very different elements to make them work. Cars require roads, insurance, driver’s licenses etc. Trains need stations, tickets, timetables etc. They each provide the same outcome of getting from A to B but go about it in very different ways. Their concept models are clearly different. 

One simple rule for crafting different concept models of an idea is to take your first idea and then make the complete opposite version. (Car vs. Train) Another method is to take your initial model and then take everything out of it apart from the essential elements (Car vs. Bicycle).

Finding the right concept model is the hard work of design. Once the concept model is transparent, creating the sketch or image of the design is usually pretty fast. Bring a variety of concept models to your “director”—now they can see a breadth of options, leading to better outcomes and a much richer conversation about the problem you are trying to solve.

If you are a design director, then you are like the film director; you cannot be involved with creating individual concept models/ideas. It’s not impossible of course, but you do have to flick a switch in your brain and let go of any attachment you have to an idea and look at it as if you were seeing it for the first time. This sounds logically possible, yet it’s often emotionally very difficult to do; the effort it takes to make something makes it hard to let go of, clouding your ability to understand the problem and see the right solution. 

I can hear the outcry from designers now: “Why can’t we do both?”

I would reply there is no harm in being an actor. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Angela Bassett … are all great actors; they have considerable influence over the creative process, but they don’t edit and direct the final movie. They play their part. A considerable part, and they seem very happy with that role. 

Design is the ability to make sense of things. It is often a collaborative activity, and even the “crazy ones” have their own creative collaborators. Brain Eno, famous for his creativity, has a term for this. He calls it scenius, his term which describes “the creative intelligence of a community.” In these collaborations, we all have a role. Sometimes those roles are interchangeable, but great ideas are often formed when people focus on a single role, allowing the design process to work and creating something beyond a single imagination.

Efficiency is overrated

It’s 7 am, and it’s a school day. That means getting our son to school on time. For the longest time, it has been a tricky task, that is until we wrote a checklist. Every morning, he has to do seven things to be ready for school. He checks them off the list, and we are out the door on time. A model of efficiency, checklists are great for activities in life that don’t need much consideration. The issue occurs when you start applying the checklist mentality to parts of your life that require real consideration. 

“When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.” - Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig

Checklists, timers, stand-ups, speed reading, book summaries, and workflows are some of the efficiency tools that have come to dominate our lives. They are great tools for production and for getting things done. Yet, when we apply these same tools to the creative parts of our lives (arguably the more important parts of our lives), they are destructive and rob us of much of the value of these creative moments. 

What matters when you slow down is the experience and emotions you feel when you enter this state; it is quite different from the momentary fix of the dopamine you get from checking something off a list. 

In the next few posts, I will highlight several examples of how slowing down improves creativity and makes activities more enjoyable.
To get started, I’ll share an example from music and one from conversation.

Music: Slow, Slow, Quick 
Recently I noticed that while practicing his guitar my son was playing the same songs as usual, but very slowly. I asked him why he was doing that. It turns out that his guitar teacher had recommended this slow playing to improve his technique. Playing slowly leads to better form, so when he plays at full speed, the notes he produces sound clearer, more exact, more pure.

Conversation: Repeat after me
A while ago, I read a great book called Non-violent Communication by Marshal Rosenberg. It’s an essential book on asking for what you need and listening for what others need. One important exercise in the book helps reduce conflict in conversations. Practice accurately repeating back to your conversation partner precisely what they just told you. This sounds simple, but it is a deceptively challenging thing to do. It requires you to stop jumping ahead in a conversation to what you want to say and to slow down and really listen to the thoughts and feelings of the person sitting across from you.

In the sci-fi classic Dune, Duke Atredies gives his son Paul Atreides (the hero of the book) the following advice.

“Use the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for a quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurances of success. Take your time and be sure.” - Dune by Frank Herbert

This rings true. Slow down to ensure not only success but also enjoyment in the parts of your life that are most important to you.

Designing the inevitable sequence

You walk down the stairs of the subway station. Pay at the turnstiles, step onto the platform, and your train arrives. Once on the train, you remind yourself to switch at 59th Street for the uptown express. You pull in at 59th Street, and the uptown express is waiting, doors wide open. 

You made your connection. Next stop, home. 

A perfectly arranged set of moments makes for a satisfying experience. 
But what happens when things don’t line up quite so well?

Frustration, questions, anger?

To me, good design is often a matter of sequencing experiences to result in an inevitably great outcome. Arrangement not reinvention can lead to the most satisfying of experiences. 

Recently, I came across two thoughts that highlight this theme, and they come from radically different perspectives, fields, and time periods. 

First, I was listening to how John Williams describes composing the iconic Indiana Jones theme song. He said,

“A very simple little sequence of notes, but I spend more time on those little bits of musical grammar to get them just right, so they seem inevitable, they seem like they’ve always been there they’re so simple. And I don’t know how many permutations I will go through with a six-note motif like that — one note down, one note up — and spend a lot of time on these little simplicities, which are often the hardest things to capture.” 

And then, after youtube, I was reading  Plato, as you do ;-) and the following idea struck me as connected. In The Apology, Plato wrote,

“I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”

Taking the time to arrange experiences an order, and with connections between experiences, that feel, as Williams says, “inevitable” can lead to lasting satisfaction, maybe even “success,” over time.

A better way to write comments

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”
- Marshall McLuhan

You’ve just finished a design or a piece of writing that you’ve been working on for a while now. 

You welcome feedback from your team because it helps you improve the work. Yet, you also have an uneasy feeling that comments can often generate. How big is the change that someone is suggesting? How crucial is it? Will you understand it well enough and have enough time to make it?

Without a clear understanding of the amount of work suggested, all you see is a stream of comments, which range from notes about small details to concerns about large sections of the work. Each comment requires time to understand and interpret.

It can be overwhelming. 

So how can you avoid feeling overwhelmed?

I have written in the past about giving feedback and how you can “Contribute more than you comment.” Feedback comes in all shapes and sizes, and often that feedback should not come in the form of a comment at all. But if feedback needs to be in the form of a comment, then there’s something you can ask your commenters to do, which will help you avoid being overwhelmed and will also help your commenters to contemplate and clarify their feedback. 

Ask your commenters to make one small change that can make a big difference. Ask them to add a prefix to their comment. 

This prefix is using the words small, medium, or large.  

Small: for changes that are minor errors or updates. 

Medium: For issues that require a bit more thought or collaboration. 

Large: For fundamental issues with the idea. 

Ideally, the moment someone adds the prefix “Large” to a comment, they should realize that large comments are not comments; they are opportunities for the commenter to contribute an idea or set up a conversation to help improve the situation. 

Adding one of these three small words at the start of a comment provides some much-needed context and gives the receiver of the comment a sense of priority in their feedback. 

Try this with your work collaborators, and let me know how it goes. 

Of course, this kind of change takes time, so to begin with, try the exercise yourself. Read through the comments people have made on your work, and tag them small, medium, and large. Then, try it when you comment on other people’s work–how does it feel to explain your comments as small, medium, or large? 

Commenting tools are helpful for collaboration, but we must make sure we control our tools rather than them controlling us. 

Practice makes satisfaction

“Practicing invites a kind of intimacy, a moment of mindfulness that we can cut and paste into our daily routines. Once we appreciate that practice is not an endgame, our ego disappears, and we enter the experience with complete commitment.”

– Xenia Hanusiak 

“Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur”Psyche Ideas

Every week I practice a new soccer skill. My most recent skill is called around the world.
Check it out ;-)

Many people would see this as a habit. Habits as a topic have taken off in the last few years; everywhere you look, there’s a new book about making better habits for health, wealth, eating, and writing... The list is endless, and yet I would say working on soccer skills each week is not a habit but a practice—an intentional practice of skill-building. 

This distinction may seem subtle, but let me explain. Here’s a typical series of events that starts with an intentional practice and ends up with a habit. 

Step 1: Start with an intention. Let’s say you want to get fit. You begin to practice by going for a run. 

Step 2: You decide you will go for a run every other day. 
Step 3: You become used to it, and it becomes a habit of running. Now, no matter what, you are going to go for a run. 

I would say stop at step 1.

Once running becomes a habit, it can become less about intention; you can lose track of why you were doing it in the first place, much like a video gamer loses track of time so he can have one more boss battle or a wine drinker forgets precisely what that great taste was in their mouth from the first glass.

The habit of running is no longer a practice; practice is based on improvement, regular challenges, trying something you can't do, and not repeating something you can.

An example of intention-based practice turning to habit is artist Johnathan Harris’s project “One photo a day.” His initial intent was to be more present to capture the moment by taking a picture daily and posting it to his website. But over time, the intent was lost; the practice turned into a habit. He found he was taking pictures every day and wondering not about the feeling he was trying to capture but what subscribers to his website would think about the image. An almost compulsive need to take the kind of pictures that would get a reaction from the audience, he was habitual in making photos he knew could please an audience rather than challenging himself to create images that intentionally captured his thoughts. He was on autopilot. 

So if that’s not it, what is a practice?
Popular wisdom says that if you get into a habit of doing something, you will improve over time and gain mastery. Ten thousand hours of practice, and you can master any skill. Yet if this were true, all those who run for fun would be elite athletes after 15 years of running, and all the bloggers would be excellent writers. What’s missing from the conversation is that each of those magical 10,000 hours must be highly focused deliberate practice hours where you focus on improving a specific weakness or trying something beyond the repetition.

An example of intentional practice in my own life was teaching my son how to play football (soccer). In “Setting challenges, not goals”, I reflected on how we worked on intentional practice this way: “By making a target that was challenging, all his other skills were improving. He was improving overall even if he was only hitting the “top bins” targets once in every ten attempts. On the other attempts, he almost always found the rest of the goal. Creating this artificial constraint allowed a range of other skills to improve. The actual goal of the exercise became almost irrelevant, he would shoot 100, 120, and 150 shots every session. He could sense the improvement, so not hitting our artificially created targets was not a disappointment but a challenge.”

This intentional practice led to him getting much better at football. He could have just carried on kicking the ball into an open net or getting to take three shots in a 30-minute game on a team. Instead, he intentionally focused on hitting top bins (the upper 90s), which seemed challenging, but was very satisfying once attained. But it is still a challenge and always will be. He knows he will lose this ability if he stops intentionally practicing this skill. 

A practice is not a singular act; it requires help and challenges. While turning up is a good start, getting better at something is the thing that keeps you going. You often need other people to help you and challenge you to improve, to realize that practices are not about making progress in your life toward an end goal; as Adam Curtis, one of my favorite authors and filmmakers, said, “One of the most radical things you could do today is make something amazing and not tell anyone else about it.”

A practice is not about the endpoint; it’s about being in the moment and enjoying kicking a ball, writing a sentence, or even the act of making a mark on a blank piece of paper.