Running out of time. Meeting deadlines. Getting stuff done. All at once. It’s like a race sometimes.
Without knowing who your competitors are exactly, you have no option but to try as hard as you absolutely can. Are you lapping the last racer? Are you overtaking the leader? Going all out all the time isn’t the most sustainable strategy.
Opponents must be identified first. Without knowing their characteristics, you’re racing against yourself.
Uniqueness in itself is becoming increasingly less valuable. Take the “storyfication” trend. Every platform has them now. When one social media platform came up with the idea, others followed suit. Shamelessly.
Training as a painter in the east means years of copying works of the masters. In the Western world, originality is more encouraged. Some consider imitation the greatest form of flattery. Others consider it to be piracy. Yet, copying has gained momentum. During the rise of the pop art movement, artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein embraced the concept of printing, and consequently, reproduction.
Copying is an art form. As the old saying goes: speed trumps perfection. Today, copying speed trumps perfection, as well as originality.
Slow (digital) services are annoying. Who has the time to wait? Nobody. However, some of them have to be deliberately slow.
According to the (Walter) Doherty threshold, people are most productive when interactions with a computer take less than 400 milliseconds. Any longer, and we feel like we have to wait for the machine, thus limiting our productivity.
Contrarily, when something looks laborious and takes longer, it increases trust. Human resources -, travel – and medical technology often craft delays on purpose while returning reports. Referred to as the labor illusion; we tend to value results more when they’re presented to us with a small delay.
Timing is everything. Sometimes 400 milliseconds more or less is all it takes.
The amazing feeling immediately after you get what you asked for — emphasis on immediately.
When people ask to be famous, subsequently do everything to chase their goal, and eventually end up as a star, they can suffer tremendously. The celebrity can no longer speak freely. Every statement has to be pre-approved by a manager or publisher. To name one of the undoubtedly many downsides.
A small price to pay? When we ask for something, we usually don’t take secondary effects into account.
Think the ask (or desire) you’re manifesting completely through. Remember that a bump in the road today might be a secondary effect of something you asked for a long time ago.
Sometimes third ends up first.
The first batch of search engines and social media sites is no longer around. The same goes for the second batch.
It’s almost as if two sacrificial lambs have to precede the actual winner. Maybe the third time really is a charm?
Throughout the history of humanity, progress wasn’t always perceived as a good thing. Now it seems progress is the way forward. Health and defense, among many other domains, appear to need innovation daily. Either to push a nation forward or to beat adversaries in a race towards a certain goal.
Some cultures are inherently more progressive than others. Yet, even in forward-thinking places, innovation is sometimes hindered in an attempt to maintain the status quo.
There is a first time for everything. There has to be.
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, among many others, helped overcome discrimination at NASA as women and as African Americans. They helped the United States of America succeed in the space race. Paving the way for others to follow in their footsteps.
Here is to the pioneers who take the punches and let ridicule roll off their backs.
Don’t let the barrel of frustration overflow. That’s one of the first principles I learned during a (web) accessibility class, part of ux (user experience) course, years ago.
Imagine spending time on a slow website that a machine has translated, that only works in one particular browser, unoptimized for mobile, a search function in a place where you’d never expect it… Every issue along the way adds frustrations to the proverbial barrel until it’s full.
When the barrel overflows, we quit trying and potentially have an emotional reaction — not the good kind — to boot.
Customers’ barrels of frustration aren’t necessarily empty when they start making use of your product. Maybe, due to lack of sleep, their barrel can only hold two additional drops of frustration.
Remove all frustrating hurdles so your customer can get the most out of using your product or service. Keeping their barrels in check in the process.
It’s not like it’s written in stone (anymore). At one point, things were actually written in stone or chiseled in clay, for that matter. Today, undoing is just a keyboard shortcut away.
Making a typo while writing in stone is irritating. Since writings in stone preserve relatively well, you’d better have a solid understanding of what you want to relay before putting pen to paper, or should I say, hammer to tablet.
Today, stories disappear. Encrypted messages can be seen once, provided they’re not screenshotted. The ability, and more importantly, the speed with which we can publish, recall, delete, edit items is bonkers.
That’s not a bad thing. It provides us with the possibility to do more testing. “Build, measure, learn,” the foundation for lean business, encourages us to launch experiments (early), analyze the impact and reiterate. Significantly harder to do with writings in stone.
A strategy no longer has to be crystal-clear upfront. Publish early, revisit.
Sometimes you have to ignore the warning signs. I imagine the instrument panel in an airplane performing a zero-gravity flight lights up like a Christmas tree. Yet, the pilots have to disregard the signals to perform the stunt.
Not for long, though. The warning signs are there for a reason.
Enabling a company for (hyper) growth is bound to make the dashboard light up. If you don’t have a dashboard, make one first where you track your KPI’s.
Growing is natural. Growing super fast isn’t. Ignoring the warning lights is allowed, but only temporary.
Companies’ lifespans are becoming increasingly shorter. Beating this statistic is tough. Partly due to more and more companies being founded, and the battle for customers is rough.
Growth is a very long-term, never-ending process. If you’re in it for the long haul, working on — and investing in — growth is a daily activity.
Integrity is a crucial asset in this struggle. Not just a hollow word being carved into marble in your skyscraper lobby, actual, end-game integrity.
It starts with you, your first hire, your first team. Emphasize integrity from a company culture’s point of view. If not, growth and longevity will be compromised.