Successful treaties calm things down and let us get back to what’s really important. Sometimes, the fight becomes the entire point.
Not surprisingly, when we’re busy fighting a war in our head about a previous injustice or slight, we can effectively consummate a treaty without the other person even knowing about it.
We spend much of our worrying time on crises. Our media is filled with warnings, coverage and fear of cataclysms. The big boom, the sudden end, the crash.
In fact, rot is far more common.
Things decay unless we persistently work to support them. Organizations, reputations, systems, health, investments… even our teeth. For every hockey player who lost a tooth in a game, there are a million people who lost one over time.
Fear the rot, the explosions are merely a distraction.
That’s unlikely.
You’re rarely going to get the freedom and resources to do your best work unfettered.
The hard part (and the opportunity) is to figure out how to get comfortable with fettered.
Because fettered is what’s on offer.
Boundaries and scarcity aren’t simply impediments. They’re leverage points and opportunities.
Roller coasters are one of the safest ways to travel (they end up where they begin, but that’s a different story).
People pay to ride on them because they feel risky, even if they’re not.
Air travel is really safe, and the airlines work overtime to reduce the perception of risk as well. That’s why turbulence is so jarring–it’s not actually risky, but it breaks the facade.
On the other hand, we regularly engage in activities and behaviors that are risky without perceiving the risk. The cigarette companies worked hard to make smoking feel macho, sophisticated and part of the crowd at the same time that they seduced people into feeling like they weren’t taking a risk with their health.
The most resilient path in most activities is to offer perceived risk to people who seek risk, while also creating resilient systems that aren’t actually risky. Because dancing with perceived risk creates growth, connection and emotional resonance, whereas actual risk leads to outcomes we don’t want.
And it changes over time.
You and I know what to do when we see a revolving door, or to speak quietly in a library. We have expectations of how the world works and what designers are saying with their work.
Here’s a photo of a device with two controls. We’ve been taught our whole lives that the bottom one, the faucet, is designed to control the amount of water flowing through a pipe. And the top one is generally used to divert water from one pipe to another, often used to control the temperature in a shower.
Unfortunately, this design has a typo. The bottom faucet was chosen by the designer to control the temperature and the top one turns the shower on and off. There’s no way to control the volume.
When you make a typographical error in your design language, you’re either being careless or seeking to lead toward a new way of interpreting the work of anyone in your field.
Over time, the meaning of something changes. It used to be that offering plenty of disposable plastic bottles was a way for a designer to communicate surplus, luxury or sanitation. Now, it simply feels wasteful and short-sighted.
It used to be that affordances in design for people with less range of motion or other disabilities was seen as grudging and mandatory, but now it communicates awareness, openness and thought…
In New York, designing a fancy restaurant to be quiet was a sign of luxury, now, restaurant designers seek to signal scarcity by making restaurants noisy.
Kerning your type is a form of communication through design, and the rise of social media has added new meaning to poorly set type as well.
A list of rules isn’t helpful. Looking for and understanding the language as it changes is.
We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to teach responsibility. Because if you get the responsibility taken care of, often the freedom will follow.
When someone points out a lack of responsibility, it can feel like an affront on freedom, when it’s actually a chance to create more freedom for the rest of the community.
You can drive as fast as you want. But you are also responsible for not running over someone in a school zone…
The speed limit is not taking away our freedom, it’s reminding us of our responsibility.
When we build a culture of people who eagerly seek out and take responsibility, we build a culture that enables a special kind of resilient freedom.
It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go.
But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before.
AI plods along into the future, using machine learning to closely examine the past.
And radical visionaries often slam into unforeseen obstacles precisely because they failed to do the reading.
Somewhere in between is a useful set of tactics.
One of the spokespeople for the new milk marketing campaign confessed that she doesn’t really like drinking milk. Sales are way down, and an entire generation is drinking other beverages.
Other than the people who are paid to sell or lobby for milk sales, few people are concerned. Milk isn’t going away, but it certainly isn’t growing.
Marketing isn’t the act of getting people to buy what you’re paid to sell them. Good marketing is the craft of understanding what people want and need and helping them achieve it.
There’s no need to sign up for the endless uphill battle of marketing against a positive trend. Sell something you believe in, to people who are eager to believe in it as well.
You’ll do your best work on behalf of an audience and a cause that deserves it, appreciates it and applauds it. If it’s just a job, you’ve sacrificed your best energy for a paycheck.
Pick your client, pick your future.
More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed.
And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us down.
It’s not easy to say, “I was wrong.” And so people live in stress, sticking with something that used to work longer than they’re comfortable with. Our challenges in shifting perspective keep us stuck in the past. These are sunk costs, decisions we can’t unmake, but they don’t have to be forever commitments.
One way forward is to rename this moment and change the story. Instead of “I was wrong,” perhaps it’s useful (if less satisfying to others seeking victory) to say, “It’s time to make a new decision based on new information.”
That’s not weakness. That’s not flip-flopping or even embarrassing.
That’s practical, resilient and generous.
A useful metaphor for freelancers and small businesses.
Every good restaurant should have two different salads on the menu.
The boring salad is the regular kind. It’s there for people who know that they want a reliable, repeatable, unremarkable salad. It’s the safe part of a safe meal. It might remind them of their childhood or it’s simply the foundation for a nice evening without any tension around the food.
The fascinating salad is a chance for the restaurant to bring surprise, delight and care to the person who orders it. It’s remarkable in the way it combines unexpected elements, and even though the ingredients it uses make it accessible to people who have careful diets, it’s still extraordinary, and worth what it costs.
A fascinating salad is a marvel. It’s not that hard to create, but it demonstrates the passion of the person who produced it in a memorable, almost emotional way.
Too often, freelancers end up offering just a boring salad. It feels safer than getting rejected. Or they pretend to offer a fascinating salad, but at the end, they lose their nerve and simply charge more than they should for a boring salad that’s pretending to be fascinating.
