Embracing habits; Bell curves; Decentralisation
💡Think
I wanted to introduce you all to a concept called "time confetti" this week.
It might sound like something I just made up, but I'm sure it's familiar. It's where we break down, or shred, our time down into little pieces and then ultimately become overwhelmed with everything we're trying to do at once.
A piece of confetti in itself is small and harmless, but a lot of confetti at once will be distracting at least and stressful at most.
Now relate this to something practical like quality time. If this time is also spent juggling social media, WhatsApp chats, reading emails, and watching TV, then you can quickly see that your quality time quickly becomes distracted, disjointed, and the opposite of quality.
Try to take on less.
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ Embracing habit in an automated world
Is your life a series of routines? Do you eat breakfast at the exact same time every day? Does that inspire you or make life feel mundane? Maybe the world's obsession with automation, productivity, and technological approaches to, well...everything, is exactly the reason why we need to be creating more boring, "human" habits in our lives.
❷ We need to let go of the bell curve
Mostly because of our education system, we mostly think that everything in life should fall into an average. Height, weight, what about wealth? Should there be an average to everything? Technically, yes, but think about this for a second. Bezos and Musk are not in the middle of the Bell Curve, they are at the end of the hockey stick. We need to let go of expecting everything to be levelled out, and realise that we're more likely to see Pareto distribution —the 80/20 rule.
❸ Nobody cares about decentralization - They just want to get rich
This article is a bit of a dig at the web3/blockchain movement, but does offer some serious things for us to think about. A lot of the pros for this trend align with how powerful decentralisation will be for us all, but the unfortunate reality is that for this to all happen we need to centralise some parts of it. For example, to run a website you need a server. This server needs to be managed by someone, therefore centralising the thing you're trying to decentralise. It's a mind bender.
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Bonus round
"Visualising the evolution of the alphabet" —for all you word nerds
Part 2 of my "10 tips for aspiring designers" article was published in Smashing Magazine this week
🎧 Listen
Exploring how technology collides with politics, culture and society
I really enjoyed this podcast, because the guest and the host confront the reality that billionaires could and definitely should be doing more to try and push humanity forward. The guest interrogates the way philanthropy works at the moment, both praising people like the Zuckerbergs for their foundation, but criticising The Gates Foundation for not being radical enough.
The podcast starts a bit slow, but once they get into their swing the conversation is fascinating.
Listen to this podcast (...)
👀 Something else
If you're looking for a new job in design, I've started a "talent collective", which will ultimately become a list of people I can recommend to companies. You can sign up for free here.
If you are hiring, you can post your jobs here.