Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal

Your dreams one hour at a time

There is the way you think the world is, and then there is the way the world really is. This is the ongoing battle for all of us: to live in the real world, the world where we get to choose what we want to do, even if it’s only for one hour a day.
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Do you have a special goal? Going on a dream vacation, writing a book, becoming a YouTuber? 

How many hours do you have a day to make your dreams come true? For most people I would say it’s about 1 hour a day, which is seven hours a week, or 15 whole days a year. 

Now, one hour does not sound like much so let me break down how I came to that number. 

Let’s take a typical day for me.

Sleep 8 hours 
Cooking/Eating 2 hours 
Work 8 hours 
Family/ Friends time 2 hours 
Admin 1 hour 
Travel 1 hours 
That is 2 hours left out of 24 hours 

That leaves you two hours a day to make it happen. Let’s round down to be realistic and absorb all the tiny, random elements of life I haven’t been able to account for in my breakdown. 

When people set a monthly budget for spending, too often they start with how much they earn rather than how much is left after all their fixed costs are accounted for. It turns out that for most regular people, that bit that’s left is not much. 

In time budgeting, what’s left over is one hour a day if nothing else goes wrong, and you don’t have to work any extra. It doesn’t seem like much. But constraints are essential for creativity. And you can let go of the guilt of thinking you haven’t spent enough time on your dream project. You only ever really had one hour each day, so you should feel great at the end of the day if you get in a solid hour of work toward your dream. 

So how do you use that one hour a day?

Try this exercise and see if it works for you. 

Divide your one hour into four fifteen-minute blocks. Now find 4 small objects, 4 dice, 4 marbles, 4 playing cards. Each one of these represents a fifteen-minute block. Place those four objects on the left side of your work desk. Now, during the course of your day, note when you do an activity that is one of your one-hour future goal activities, such as making a drawing, writing to a friend, or planning your weekend break. 


Every time you do one of these activities, move one of the small objects on your desk from the left side to the right side of the desk. At the end of the day, see how many objects now live on the right side of your desk. Two, three, four… however many, this is a way of showing that you are using your precious one hour a day in the way that you want rather than just on your fixed tasks for the day. Even if you only move one item from the left of your desk to the right of your desk, it shows progress.


There is the way you think the world is, and then there is the way the world really is. This is the ongoing battle for all of us: to live in the real world, the world where we get to choose what we want to do, even if it’s only for one hour a day. 


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Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal

Buckets of experience

Experiences fill your experience bucket, otherwise known as your life.

You are born with an experience bucket. It's with you from your very first breath.

From that first moment, you start filling it with experiences—the first sounds you hear, your first touch, the things you see and taste. Each tiny grain of experience fills your experience bucket, otherwise known as your life.

But the one thing that you don't know is that your experience bucket has a hole in the bottom. As a child, you don't really notice the hole. Every day is full of experiences, big and small, and they are constantly filling your bucket, so you don’t hear the sound of the experiences draining away.

But after a while, as you become a teenager, you start to realize that it's harder to keep filling the bucket; you begin to forget things, and you have to start working at filling the bucket. Throughout your childhood, you might also notice that not all experiences are the same. Watching TV or scrolling through social media or webpages are very small grains of experience; they don’t stay with you, they slip right out of your bucket.

Reading books, starting a friendship, writing, and drawing seem to be more substantial pebbles of experience that don't drain away so easily. The more effort you put into something, the longer it seems to hang around, but if you stop practicing, eventually, even these pebbles will disappear down the hole in your experience bucket.

You also start to realize that if your bucket feels full, then life seems better. You might even be able to share some of the pebbles of experience with other people, and in return, they share some of their pebbles to fill your bucket even further.

On the flip side, when you feel like your bucket is getting more and more empty, life seems smaller and less fulfilling. Trying to fill your experience bucket can start to seem harder and harder, so you might just stop trying.

Luckily, some people have help filling their buckets; your parents, friends, and even a like-minded stranger can help. But that is not true of everyone. Sometimes, people empty your bucket.

You can always fill the bucket by practicing a skill, but often, your practice is in a single dimension, and you repeat things you have done in the past. This temporarily fills your bucket with small grains of experience, but that never lasts.

So what do you do? I would say that you need to think of building experiences that are multi-dimensional. In other words, one-dimensional practice leads to very small grains of experience, but multidimensional experiences lead to much larger pebbles (or even rocks) of experience, which, in some cases, will never fall out of the hole in the bottom of your experience bucket.

So, how do you create multi-dimensional experiences?
The first step is, in fact, that one-dimensional experience of practice, but the second step is to create a tool for yourself — a meeting agenda template or a plan for getting fit. Creating your own tool helps build a more robust experience in two dimensions. 

Yet, to really make something substantial, it needs to be three-dimensional. You need to share your tools and your experience with others to form a connection to build understanding. This can take the form of making something, books, movies, videos, poems, blog posts, music groups, drawings, anything that allows other people to take part in your experience. These three-dimensional experiences — these bigger pebbles and rocks — don’t so easily slip through the hole in your bucket, and if lots of people start to connect with your three-dimensional experience, then they can form movements and organizations that last the test of time. 

Filling your experience bucket is the work of a lifetime, and keeping it full can determine how much you enjoy that life. It's a never-ending process with no endpoint. The more multi-dimensional experiences you create, the less you need to fill your bucket with repetitive experiences like watching TV or scrolling through your Instagram feed, experiences that just slip through the hole in your experience bucket like so many grains of sand.


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My non-fiction books of 2024

I take my time and embrace the role of randomness.

By asking questions, I learn. Writing down what I have learned helps me explore, and some explorations become pictures. At every step, I take my time and embrace the role of randomness.

Learning to question by Paulo Freire

”I have the impression - and I don't know whether you will agree with me - that today teaching, knowledge, consists in giving answers and not asking questions.”

“Because, I repeat, knowledge begins with asking questions. And only when we begin with questions, should we go out in search of answers, and not the other way round.”

On Writing Well by Willian Zinsser

“I then said that the professional writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.”

“That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen.”


Thinking in Pictures
by Michael Blastland

“How do we do this in practice? One of the best ways is with the most simple, naive questions: 'And is that a big number?' Naive maybe, but powerful. I made half a career from asking that question, and plenty of important people looked silly trying to answer it.8
Here's £10 million for school singing lessons, says a government minister, riding the wave of a popular TV show about choirs. And is that a big number? Context: there are about ten million school kids. What's that when it's mapped? It's £1 each a year, or £30 for a teacher for one class a year, if you're lucky.”

”We tolerate complexity by failing to recognize it. That's the illusion of understanding, say Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.”

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton

“People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement.”

“Have you noticed how much easier it is for you to tell me about your failures than your successes?”

“This neural model also makes it clear why creativity favours not just a relaxed mind, but also one that is well-but not over-informed.”

“Time spent discovering things for yourself, even though someone could have simply told you the answer or given you the information, may be time well spent if the outcome is greater confidence and competence as an explorer.”


Fooled by Randomness
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“But there is a more severe aspect of naive empiricism. I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it. For instance, the statement
The episode taught me a lot.
Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure.”

“Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have.”


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Suffering is optional

Open yourself to the idea that progress and learning are infinite.

"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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Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal

Where do ideas come from?

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

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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Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal

Listening is the first step



Listening and curiosity are two vital skills for creativity to thrive.

“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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Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal Culture, Teams, Ideas kaushik panchal

Teaching critique

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

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

Find your people on your “team for life.” They will open endless doors of insight, discovery, and motivation.

“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.

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Look outside yourself 

“But the greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul.” - Seneca

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


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