What if you did nothing, the biggest pivot in human history, and commercialised minimalism.
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Hey, there!
I’m sure you have a million things on your plate right now and then some on that link post-it you keep stuck at the back of your notebook. No? Just me then.
Try this powerful exercise: Ask yourself what would happen if you did nothing. What would breakdown immediately and beyond repair? And what would keep chugging along even if you took your hand if it for a while?
It’s worth knowing your real priorities - the things that can’t work without you. They deserve your full attention.
This and 17 other questions about finding problems worth solving by Debbie Widjaja in IRL Product.
Scott Galloway gives a peak into the future as the Gulf states pivot from oil money to “building the next generation of civilisation from scratch. Scratch, plus a few trillion dollars.” I’m not excited, are you?
Mike Grindle explains how minimalism became a commercialised lifestyle aesthetic of replacing things with other things. He writes, “Real change requires something far less self-centered, and more significant than tidying your room and saving up for your tiny house because a YouTuber convinced you that only a complete change of lifestyle will make you happy. Instead, we need a minimalism that addresses privilege and circumstance - a form of minimalism that teaches us to savor what we have right now, rather than inspiring more envy and desire.”
Maybe because I’ve had an unusually draining week or because I love pan fried pizza, either way I loved Sophie Lucido Johnson’s tips on getting things done, “(1) it’s hard to get things done when you’re using the word “maybe”; and (2) the thing that Dale Cooper said on “Twin Peaks” about how you should “every day, once a day, give yourself a present” is good advice. But it helps to regulate it.”
We’re still finding our ‘sea legs’ with returning to the office after the lockdown. In between talks of employer surveillance and productivity, we’ve missed the elephant in the room: Awful meetings and poor team dynamics. Raoul Flaminzeanu writes that “When groups struggle to work together, it’s often due to an imbalance between task and maintenance, or an issue with their equilibrium.” And the way to address it we need two types of meetings 1. Task-oriented meetings where the team is focused on achieving a shared objective.
And maintenance-oriented meetings when the team comes together to build interpersonal connections and to improve the group overall wellbeing.
Can you imagine how much UX design will change once being able to talk to your app goes mainstream? I had no idea. Hal Wuertz explains that before AI interacting with a software was a static interaction. You give an input and get a programmed output. With AI “The machine is learning, and therefore, changing. In parallel, the human is learning, and therefore, changing.” Wuertz explains that this changes the whole design process because in this continuous human-machine interaction the design process “never stops even after the design is released (when learning must be tracked and revisions need to be made.)”
Thanks for reading and stay curious!
Aliyar