Dear wonderers,
I’m writing this edition to you while drinking a hot, freshly ground coffee (remember my experiment?) and trying to enliven a cold, dimly lit day. I’m in my kitchen, as always, pondering questions big and small.
And here’s what I have for you:
On life & creative projects
The Marginalian (former Brain Pickings) has been my go-to source of philosophy, musings, and the heavy thoughts of the world for too many years to count.
Well, its 16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian is a treat and a master in doing retrospectives. I feel like quoting everything in there, but I’ll just leave you with this:
11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
For me, it’s a reminder that the map is not the territory and an invitation to think about what I’m taking for granted, at face value, without questioning it from various angles.
On personal branding
Let’s acknowledge that great positioning and specialization can lead to ambiguous work.
Looking back to more than 15 years of a “career”, this contrarian view from Rejecting Specialization rings very, very true.
I struggled a lot with all the societal pressures urging me to be an expert of sorts, to only talk about one thing, to only be one thing, to choose.
This essay is an invitation to build a voice instead of a specialization. How about that?
On social media and the self
Apparently, I’m all for contrarian views today. But here’s another opinionated essay that invites us to unself our social networks. A more humanistic approach, really…
Would you be willing to do this exercise?
As an experiment, for one continuous month, make the focus of one in every three things you share on social media — wherever you normally share, however regularly or irregularly you do, however many people you reach — something other than yourself or your own work: a friend’s art project, a stranger’s poem, a record by a musician you love, the tree shimmering with majesty and mystery in the low morning light, someone in your community you admire, a bygone pioneer of something you value, a book that spun you on your axis, the lost cat sign crayoned by a neighbor’s child, the new community garden a few blocks over, news of the dazzling galaxy discovered by the dazzling new space telescope a few million lightyears over.
On empowered product teams
My journey of understanding the world of product continues. And so I discover, again and again, the work of Marty Cagan.
Today I’m sharing a short and punchy one on The Foundation of Product about the value of great ideas at the intersection of direct access to users, access to stakeholders, and access to engineers.
In a nutshell:
It is in fact the direct, ongoing access to these three constituencies that enables the product team to discover innovative solutions, and to make good decisions.
Tiny Thought
In life like in archery, the goal is the target we want to achieve, while the aim is the course we set to reach that target. A goal fixates on the finish line, while an aim considers the trajectory. When we focus on our aims, the process becomes the goal. And we’re more likely to reach our goal when we become fully aware of our aim. from Everything is Aiming
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Let me know if something resonates. I’m always happy to read your comments, suggestions, and replies. They make me a better writer and curator of sorts :)
On life & creative projects -> the reality in which we are actually living is generated by our consciousness , our mind chooses to believe some maps, discard many others and stitch them together to create our own map (made of maps made of maps); it's a lot of work and it doesn't make sense to throw it all out and start again from scratch so we always, at best, try to integrate new sub-maps (if we believe them to be true) in our existing map; when we fail, we end up in a state of unpleasant cognitive dissonance, when we succeed we update our reality; we don't interact directly with the territory but through the user interface our mind creates (out of maps), only when things go wrong we may decide we need an interface update
What's one contrarian view you embrace?-> D. Dennett has a long list of contrarian views like: "Yes, we have X but it's not what you think it is", i will pick just one: Yes, we have a soul but it's made of lots of tiny robots -> https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/191761-some-years-ago-there-was-a-lovely-philosopher-of-science ; please, if you know any literature or movies that get this right (instead of insisting that there's something special and forever incomprehensible from which our soul is made of), let me know!