Dear wonderers,
There’s been a part of me that always felt lost. A restless seeker. But without a real compass at hand. Or a specific land in sight.
I hope that’s one of the many sources of my creativity. I know it’s one of the wells of my anxiety.
So what better way to start the year than with a new quest? To make friends with the uncertain, to trust the possibility, and to try before deciding it will fail. It might sound a bit cliched, but I promise you that the resources which follow are anything but:
On embracing the unfamiliar
This essay is a gem: Pay attention to your awareness, or your capacity to notice the world around you. Awareness of the world tends to recede the more you fall into strongly held notions that you know the right answer, which prevents you from seeing that things might be another way, or even that you’re in this position in the first place.
With practical exercises you can use, the author makes a case for building your beginner’s mind and always entertaining the possibility you are wrong. Just like a researcher being open to what the experiment unfolds, not fitting the data to prove a hypothesis.
And, yes, before you think it’s only for specific circumstances, the article offers solutions for business meetings and the professional debates that we all participate in.
On (not) knowing
We always make decisions for our future selves. But what if we change a lot? That’s what this TED talk is all about:
I call this the illusion of continuity. And I think one reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear. We can see it so clearly that we have become different people. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little older, a little grayer, but we don't imagine, fundamentally, that we're going to have a different outlook or perspective, that we're going to be different people. And so those changes seem more amorphous.
On creativity
…you already know it’s one of my favourite subjects :)
Researchers generally believe that creativity is a two-part process. The first is to generate candidate ideas and make novel connections between them, and the second is to narrow down to the most useful one.
Read the full article to discover how to make use of divergent thinking, why memory plays a big role, and how to get better at making the familiar un-familiar once more.
Shorts
See The Banshees of Inisherin for a tale of friendship and uncertainty where two men decide to become strangers to each other after a presumed lifetime of companionship.
How about setting anti-goals to control the number of unknowns in your life?
Listen to this conversation with Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma) to lower product development anxiety — even the “greats” struggle. They just learn from their mistakes.
Tiny thought
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.
###
What is one uncertainty you’ve befriended lately?
Jump in the comments and let’s all support one another :)