Feb
3
ARTeliance
Jan
3
“With this in mind, I have compiled the following cheat sheet for finding the willpower to keep your 2009 New Year’s resolutions – assuming you haven’t broken them already. 1. Prepare your mind Steeling your resolve mentally before things get tough is essential to keeping resolutions, Rangel told me. “That way, when you experience the pain, instead of saying, ‘Oh my God,’ you say, ‘I’ve been expecting this,’ and it becomes part of the process.” He adds ominously that, “If the first time you encounter adversity it sets you off, then you’re probably not ready to take on the challenge.” 2. Create black-and-white rules for yourself Self-discipline becomes easy once habits are formed. Rangel uses the example of brushing your teeth. When you were a child, the rule was “Brush your teeth before bed.” Now it comes automatically and most of us brush our teeth on autopilot. 3. Preserve your energy for when you need it Don’t waste time and mental energy internally debating over life’s trivial decisions – just make a choice and be done with it. Or as William Johnson said, “The more we struggle and debate, the more we reconsider and delay, the less likely we are to act.” So don’t wait until you feel better to go to the gym. Go to the gym and you will feel better. 4. Practice In his massive holiday-season bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the 10,000-hour rule, a neurological theory that it takes 10,000 hours of hard practice to become a world-class expert – at anything. By this standard, if your resolution is to quit smoking, it will take you roughly a year of doing anything but in order to become good at not doing the thing you are trying to avoid. As for my resolution, things look a bit less hopeful. If practice makes perfect, I should be an expert early riser by the year 2036.”
globeandmail.com: Get up, stay up, don’t give up the fight
Nov
25
“A good tattoo or a good design solution is a matter of trust. The more you trust the person to do their very best to interpret your ideas and to let them have a degree of ownership over the final product, the happier you will both be.”
The Design You Deserve « Thinking for a Living™
choose (via m-c)
Jan
7
“Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you.”
Maeda’s SIMPLICITY: Why Being Creative Is Good
“After Christmas, I took a bookstore giftcard and purchased a cookbook and Wikinomics. I started reading it and got to chapter 3, which is a fairly interesting discussion of how IBM came to embrace Linux (among other topics). Then, the authors were writing about a successful female computer scientist/businesswoman, explaining her accomplishments and how much she was respected. But then, they said, “… and her looks didn’t hurt either.” And I closed the book and I’m not going to finish it. Look, asshats, if you’re going to write about the looks of the people you’re profiling, fine, but do so equally. You didn’t say anything about Linus Torvald’s looks or Steve Jobs or any of the other men you discussed in the preceding pages (and there were lots!). When you said that about this obviously talented woman, it became clear to me that you’re pretty shocked that an attractive woman is also smart or that it doesn’t matter how smart a woman is, but damn, she has to be attractive. And you probably have no idea why women don’t read your books or pursue careers in your field. Possibly because they don’t want to work with asshats like you.”
Geeky Mom: Why I didn’t finish reading Wikinomics
“This has to start with truly interdisciplinary courses - in education we have to stop using ‘the portfolio’ as the entrance requirement (especially at postgraduate level) because that will stop the scientists, medics, athletes, lawyers, accountants and so on studying design. We also have to reassess what we consider to be ‘core’ skills for a designer.
I think there’s a fear that opening up our gene pool to others will produce unpredictable mutants, and that there’ll be a loss of the ‘traditional’ designer. That’s actually the point.”
A Word In Your Ear: Design skills need to be expanded
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