The interesting thing about constraints is that they are never on you. They are constraints on your context, shaping the space of possibilities you allow yourself to consider. You can’t change anyone’s mind (have you noticed?), but you may be able to change how they perceive their context. If you succeed, they may be able to step out of the criteria by which they enumerate their options.[…]

With each step backward, you distinguish your self one by one from bodily sensations, from emotions, from opinions, from thoughts, from principles, from values, from systems, from goals. They are all tools, to be taken up and put down again when no longer needed.

This backwards movement, if we are not afraid to embrace it, even accelerate it, starts to take on a pattern of its own once again. It starts to consume itself, emerging inward into a deeper, more complex flow. Moving backward with increasing speed, we start to feel as if we’re falling, the former selves flying by like the floors past a runaway elevator. There is no way to look down, to see where we’re going, only where we’ve been. But this provides just enough information to allow us to steer: toward discomfort, toward fear, toward our best guess of where the next bottleneck may lie.

You’ve likely been asked how you see the proverbial glass: half full or half empty? Your answer allegedly reflects your attitude about life—if you see it half full, you’re optimistic, and if you see it half empty, you’re pessimistic.

Implied in this axiom is the superiority of optimism. Culturally, we’re obsessed with positivity—our corporations measure worker glee, nations create happiness indices, and the media daily touts the health and social benefits of optimism. Thus, the good answer is to see the glass half full. Otherwise, you risk revealing a bad attitude.

Rarely—if ever—is the complete answer to the question considered, however. Actually, the glass isn’t half full or half empty. It’s both, or neither. The glass is in a state of continual change, so no need to feel some type of way. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Things aren’t mutually exclusive, awesome or awful. Mostly they’re both, and if we poke around our thoughts and feelings, we can see multiple angles. To Hamlet, Denmark was a dungeon. But the real prison was his thinking, as he admitted.

Neutrality sets us free. It helps us see something more like the truth, what’s happening, instead of experiencing circumstances in relation to expectations and desires. This provides clarity and eliminates obstacles, making things neither awesome nor awful but cool.

Very compelling read. I’d actually want to see this scale. I thought her point here is well-articulated:

My practice has basically been an emergent phenomena: What if a doctor decided to optimize health instead of just fixing illness? The first thing I’ve done differently is I’ve positioned myself as a doctor who is aiming to improve the human condition rather than just get you from sick to not-sick.

There’s this spectrum of disease. Most people are in the sick-to-average part of that spectrum. The athletes and movie stars of the world are at the opposite end at the optimal part of the spectrum.

There’s this space between average and optimal that is a very grey area. It’s been sort of commandeered by the wellness industry: the people who perpetuate mindfulness, fitness, and nutrition, but maybe don’t have any rigorous medical training. And, as such, haven’t actually learned the basic science of the human body and how biology, physics, and chemistry works.

To be honest, if I could get a 360-degree personalized view of how to optimize my health, I’d jump on that too if I could afford it.

Loved these two quote. First:

“If you have to put a label on it, I guess it would be a portrait artist, but when I ask myself what is it that I do, I have to answer that I do everything I can. I just like to take photographs of moments and try everything else I can to make the culture into something that has depth and value besides the ‘hype’.”

Second:

“My favorite brands will always be CDG, Junya Watanabe, Yohji, and Céline. I feel like these brands really understand me. I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but these designers make art out of their silhouettes and fits and I understand the passion that goes into creating something almost strange yet simple and beautiful.”

Allan Yu, sharing the impetus for his Mars Maiers project—one illustration a day for a whole year:

And to that end, I want to tell you about 2016. After half a year of being broken, in a gutter, I knew I needed to slowly climb back up, someway, somehow. It’s not original but it’s okay. I was inspired by other people’s one a day project so I began my own. For the past year, I’ve been making a composition a day under the name of Mars Maiers. The first hundred days of these were based on content from existing magazines, the rest are more free formed. This continuous project is about finding myself and my voice in design, however slowly, however unoriginal, one day at a time.

Vulnerable and eye-opening.

On pyschological capital:

First, [psychological capital] claims that the amount of “reserves” we have at any given time is primarily a result of our perception (appraisal). This would imply that we can increase our psychological capital just by seeing things differently.

Second, it is not only our perception of “how things are going” (real circumstances) that matters, but our expectation of “how things will probably go” (probability of future success). As we saw previously, this expectation is represented in the mind by moods—when you’re in a bad mood, you expect everything to go terribly. When you’re in a good mood, you expect everything to be great.

What this means is that we don’t have to “convince” our rational minds that the future is rosier than we think. That is a futile undertaking anyway, since it is difficult to use the rational mind to convince the rational mind of anything. Instead, we can change our expectations of the future at a more fundamental level, by creating a series of unexpected rewards to prime more positive moods, essentially “faking” momentum until it becomes real.

On the Goal Gradient Hypothesis:

The idea is simple: we speed up as we get near our goal, and then slow down afterwards. This is as true of rats in a maze, as humans approaching a deadline.

This theory adds another element to our framework: the “sources of reward” have to come quickly, one after another in rapidly accelerating succession, to have the psychological effect of creating momentum.[…]

By creating benefits both now and in the future, I’m building reserves of hope, resilience, optimism, and efficacy—I’m building psychological capital. Work becomes intoxicating when you have the confidence that everything adds value, and everything will eventually get used.

On using the energy of emotions:

…it points to a deeper principle: emotions contain tremendous energy. For all the talk about the importance of sleep, exercise, a good diet, and rest, I believe that all these pale in comparison to the energy made available by our emotions. Some of my most productive days ever lacked sleep, healthy food, or exercise, but kept me going with the excitement of a new idea or approaching milestone.

His example of using emotion as a means to productivity is live-tweeting notes from books/PDFs/podcasts (which I love doing as well):

First, knowing that I will share these insights in the near term holds me accountable to taking good notes in the first place. This gives me the motivation to transcribe notes from difficult sources like podcasts, audiobooks, and PDFs. Second, knowing that people will see my summary without the original context forces me to explain it very clearly, which helps me understand it myself. Third, I get feedback on how interesting or impactful the ideas are, on a sentence-by-sentence level. And fourth, I gain a loyal following, because there is so much insight condensed into each tweetstorm.

Summary:

I’ve been on a journey to discover what that third level of performance looks like in modern knowledge work. Mood-First Productivity, and in particular structured procrastination, mood accelerators, intermediate packets, and progressive summarization, are the best ways I’ve found to “create my own earthquakes.” These methods rely on the understanding that human creativity and motivation are driven primarily by emotions and moods, not cold, calculating logic.

Justin O’Beirne, who has both helped Google Maps and Apple Maps, and now writing a book titled Maps for the Masses: Designing Cartography for a Global Audience:

With everything Google has added over the years, you’d think the map would’ve become hopelessly cluttered. And yet that hasn’t been the case.

Similar to how a software engineer refactors their code before expanding it, Google has repeatedly refactored the styling of its map as it has added new datasets. And we see this in the evolution of Google Maps’s cartography:

As Google has added more and more datasets, it has continually rebalanced the colors, weights, and intensities of the items already on its map – each time increasing its map’s capacity for more.

So when Google introduced a new dataset last Summer (Areas of Interest), it wasn’t too surprising to learn that Google had once again refactored its map. After all, without the refactoring, the new feature wouldn’t have been legible.

I love extremely geeky design stuff like this. So fascinating how Google has been quietly transforming the design of its maps app ever so subtly to make it more powerful, informative, and helpful for users.

A conventional truth can be important—it’s essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example—but it won’t give you an edge. It’s not a secret.

Remember our contrarian question: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? If we already understand as much of the natural world as we ever will—if all of today’s conventional ideas are already enlightened, and if everything conventions secrets mysteries easy hard impossible has already been done — then there are no good answers. Contrarian thinking doesn’t make any sense unless the world still has secrets left to give up.

Recall the business version of our contrarian question: what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world‐changing companies yet to be started.

It seems that the traits that set one up for exceptional success in high school and college — “self-discipline, conscientiousness and the ability to comply with rules” — are not the same traits that lead individuals to start disruptive companies or make shocking breakthroughs.

“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” says Arnold. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

Many valedictorians themselves believe that they weren’t the smartest student in their class but rather simply the hardest worker. Others confessed a strong preference for giving their teachers what they seemed to want, as opposed to truly absorbing the material.

In fact, Arnold’s research demonstrates that students who truly enjoy learning the most often struggle in school, where students must balance attention given to subjects about which they’re truly passionate with the demands of their other coursework. While intellectual students struggle with this tension, valedictorians excel.

But, after graduation, that drive only gets them so far.

Meanwhile, lots of mediocre students thrive outside a scholastic environment. A survey of over 700 American millionaires that found that their average college GPA was 2.9. “College grades,” Barker writes, “aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice.”

“School has very clear rules,” Barker says, “but life doesn’t. Life is messy.”

I already knew this in a spiritual way. Nothing against valedictorians, I’m sure they’re smart people. But the smartest people I know struggled with the rigidity of school.

Can’t shake the system if you just accept the system.

“One of our metrics of success is quality visits — people who come and return within seven days — these people are more likely to become subscribers,” said Alana Coates, audience engagement editor at the Financial Times. The likelihood that readers from WhatsApp will return to the FT within the next seven days is 40 percent higher than the average (a global benchmark set by the FT)[…]

This research also told the FT that 80 percent of the people it reached through WhatsApp were non-subscribers. The audience skewed a little younger too, with 36 percent between the age of 26 and 35. They also had more European readers than the FT’s usual footprint: 35 percent were from the U.K., 33 percent from Europe.

“People liked the convenience of having it come through to their phone, pushed to them where they are, without having to go to our site, on a service they are already signed up to,” said Coates, adding that WhatsApp has 1.2 billion users. “The hope was that we get a smaller but more engaged audience.” Publishers, like Spanish newspaper El País and The Sun, are finding chatbots’ more specific content leads to higher engagement.

Very interesting take on new distribution channels and how they can be leveraged to attract new readers and subscribers.

I haven’t really used any chatbots but I do love contextual push notifications and being able to know what’s happening without having to manually open an app or a social feed or a newsletter.

Five years ago our President (then Editor), Bob Cohn, reflected on the role of the homepage in 2012. He noted that “the homepage is the single best way for editors to convey the sensibilities and values of their websites […] the homepage is, as the marketing team would put it, the ultimate brand statement.”

I think those words still ring true. A “brand statement” for The Atlantic in 2017 meant that we should focus on the stories, make it easy for people to find something to read, and get out of the way. While obvious in retrospect, aligning the company around that vision takes a lot of upfront work, but in the end is worth it. However, despite our research, prototyping, and deep focus on our users, I suspect we got some things wrong. We already have multiple A/B tests planned for launch and I’m excited to see how the design evolves.