Fascinating article in the NY Times that explores how language shapes the way we think about the world. Different languages, different ways of experiencing it.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

Similar to my observations about how language affects meaning from years ago.

That is, addiction in general and information/Internet addiction in particular.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40…

My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption…

We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness.

I’ve written about this before, but two great articles recently said it even better:

Don’t try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky, glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn’t neat. – Bill Coyne of 3M, via Bob Sutton

If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer…

But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation…

Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one’s creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life. – Diego Rodriguez

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one — Michael Forbes

It’s better to fail with your own vision rather than following another man’s vision. — Johan Cruyff

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take a game winning shot….and missed. I have failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed — Michael Jordan

Apparently creative people share a brain structure with schizophrenics:

“We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia…Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.” – Dr. Fredrik Ullén

Well, that would explain Dr. NakaMats:

(This just keeps getting better…)

“Creativity is just connecting things…[but] a lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” – Steve Jobs, 1996

Seems worth keeping around as reminders. A Visual Study Guide to Cognitive Biases | Scribd.

From Ed Catmull’s talk at the Economist Ideas conference:

I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.

One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.

We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.

This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of Sum, which I greatly enjoyed.

I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.

Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.

I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.

I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.

This is basically my New Year’s Resolution every year. But he actually did it.

Here’s the Bear McCreary talk at Google that I mentioned earlier. Great stuff.

My new favorite artist. Selected projects include: copyrighting his mind, paintings by trees, a mobile ringtone based on John Cage’s 4’33″, a travel documentary for houseplants, and an antimatter bank.

That, folks, is divergent thinking.

Michael Beirut, partner at Pentagram, describes his real design process:

“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!”

As much as we like to tell ourselves (and others) about our robust, repeatable, formal design process, great work usually comes down to a little bit of magic.

“Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams–daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing–are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.” – L. Frank Baum

“Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care…The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.” – The Science of Success

It seems that if you hope to design things that cut to the heart of the human experience, you’re better off drawing inspiration from classical stories and literature than contemporary work. Something that remains relevant hundreds or thousands of years after its writing is a better foundation for meaningful work than the latest tech blog post.

Again: read not the Times; read the Eternities.

When I’m lazy, I get busy–my schedule fills up indiscriminately. When I’m busy, I know I’ve been lazy.

A mentor advised that “you have to continually fight off those predators that are trying to eat time away from your calendar.” A woman in Choosing Simplicity said that she wrote “NO” on the top of every week’s listing in her agenda so that she’d think hard before accepting something to do that day.

One technique recommended by author Jim Collins for simplifying your schedule is to create a “stop doing” list.

One year ago I wrote that to be innovative, it’s sometimes more important what you don’t do than what you do. That extends even to removing things that no longer are working.

You have to make room for good things to happen to you.

“Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind…but for [creative tasks] you want to be looking around.” – Dan Pink

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.

- Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com.

via.

Update: more here, in Portuguese