Dear reader,

You may know that I have stopped using the meditation app I had been using for a long time so I am looking for replacements. Please let me know if you have any recommendations. For now I am trying out the Plum Village app which has a lot of guided meditations and talks. The first guided meditation which I tried out yesterday was recorded during the pandemic. It’s interesting to hear the teacher talk about the challenges everyone was facing, isolation, working from home, unable to meet others and so the memories from that time came rushing back and I realized just how quickly I had forgotten about those times that seem so long ago but were extremely demanding and tough for everyone. I’m grateful we were the lucky ones to get through those testing times.

We strong enough to face whatever life throws our way! ✊🏽

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Escape the Algorithm: Get Aggressively Curious

2. The Mindful Designer: How to Talk to Someone Who’s Lost in Nonsense

3. Humor: Please Return to Your Seat | A Long Haul Flight Essay

Escape the Algorithm

Get Aggressively Curious

We’re products of our environment. Which is fine and normal, until you realize everything you’re doing is being decided for you.

We are creatures of comfort and the system knows this. As a result we are inundated with “easy” and “quick” choices, it’s how our culture operates now.

We will be shaped by culture, unless we break out of the algorithms and go against the grain.

Confuse your music app by listening to songs from other countries and genres you’ve never tried. Throw off YouTube by diving into a topic you’ve never learned about. Fake out Instagram by following people and brands far outside your usual circle. Bewilder Facebook by reading articles that oppose your typical point of view. Then, once the algorithm catches up, do it again.

Why spend a little bit more time, energy and effort engaging with your curiousity and going down rabbit holes that only matter to you?

This is how artists find their niche. It’s how new discoveries are made. It’s how people question what the world wants for and from them, and discover a universe out there waiting for them. They’re aggressively curious. They’re paying attention enough to feel compelled

Now excuse me as I go dive into the world of Gertrude Jekyll, the British horticulturist and garden designer mentioned at the beginning of the article to learn how she applied color theory in gardening, which sounds fascinating.

It’s time to get aggressively curious. :)

Source: MyMind

The Mindful Designer

How to Talk to Someone Who's Lost in Nonsense

Although this article is aimed at talking to people who believe in nonsense, and by people I mean MAGA cultist Trump supporters.

This is also a communication lesson for designers in how to prevent stakeholders from becoming defensive in conversions. People have beliefs about how things should be even if sometimes those are ill informed beliefs. When conveying our ideas to people we can lean into our curiosity to overcome pushback.

You’re not there to win.
You’re there to talk.
You’re there to be curious.

The good example given is how Jordan Klepper, of The Daily Show, interacts with people who have strongly held view but haven’t tested them.

Jordan says:

“My goal is to gain their confidence, to make them feel comfortable and talk to me like they talk to their best friend at a bar.”

Become curious instead of challenging.

Ask them to explain what they exactly mean, how does their belief work. Ask them how they believe what they believe.

Then reflect but don’t rebut.

Once they see the hole in their argument they are more likely to change their mind.

Ok, maybe this was a stretch to push this example into the design realm but I believe there is something there.

Don’t ask me how I know!

Source: The Healing Delusion

Humor

Please Return to Your Seat | A Long Haul Flight Essay

By the time I reach 40C, my overhead bin space has been taken by someone three rows ahead who brought a bag the exact dimensions of a small refrigerator. There is nothing to be done about this. We are a miniature society now, and the injustices began before takeoff.

Travel is a trauma inducing activity we must take part in because we have no other choice. We need to go from point A to point B and to do that we have to endure the almost comedic experiences along the way.

This post definitely kicked up my ptsd in a fun way but it’s comforting to know that we are all in the same boat or plane in this case and looking back all you can do is find the humor in it instead of getting upset, that is until the next time we find ourselves in a flight with awkward and comedic experiences. ✊🏽

Source: Scott Monaco

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Dear reader,

The struggle with is real when it comes to working with AI. On the one hand it is a great tool for activities such as summarizing meeting notes and deceptively harmful when we ask it to do the actual craft work for us. The challenge is knowing the boundaries and keeping AI in its lane. For me some days are better than others but the more I read about how people are dealing with this struggle in their work, the more I realize just how important the pushback is to keep AI away from the craft of design. How are you dealing with AI in your work? What works for you? I would love to know. Please share your experience in the comments for all of us to learn from. Thanks!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Personal Mastery: Learning by doing: lessons from new hobbies

2. The Mindful Designer: From Human Hands

3. Motivation: How to imagine a better future for yourself

Personal Mastery

Learning by doing: lessons from new hobbies

Chances are you like to learn by doing instead of someone just showing you how it’s done. Watching a presentation is not the same as a hands-on activity. When we are given the space and trust to observe, try, fail, learn, and repeat it again, we learn best. We internalize our learnings the information sticks with us. We gain knowledge and we grow so we can apply the newly learned skill in real-world situations. This is why finding hands-on courses is not enough, we need to see how much time is given to being able to practice what we learn.

As Emma shared two of her experiences, one where the teacher took over when Emma had questions and needed help and the other where the teacher created a safe space by acknowledging their own struggles in learning and have the students learn through repetition and by being kind to themselves.

The pottery wheel reminded me that watching someone else demonstrate perfection doesn’t translate to personal mastery. The dance studio showed something different: that learning happens when we’re given permission to stumble, ask questions, and build skills incrementally in a supportive environment.

So the next time you need to create a learning experience or are looking for one yourself, remember Emma’s advice:

the most powerful learning happens when people can practise in spaces that feel safe enough to fail—and supportive enough to try again.

Source: Emma Blomkamp in New Know How

The Mindful Designer

From Human Hands

The origins of typography go back thousands of years. From cave drawings in France, to movable type in China, to the Gutenberg Press, to current modern typefaces, the process of the craft continues till this day. Now when AI is used in typography or any craft it dilutes and cheapens the work because ChatGPT doesn’t share the knowledge, the skills, the history, the friction that the human knows and feels.

When we turn design over to generative AI, we remove the human element from the process. When we ask Midjourney to draw an ox, it does not think of home. ChatGPT will never invent a new calligraphy technique, because it has no wrists to feel uncomfortable. A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.

In typography as in any other craft, the process is the journey and when we remove the process what else is left?

Source: Mass-Driver

Motivation

How to imagine a better future for yourself

Pause for a moment and think about what you want in your life. If you are clear about what you want, great. If like me you’re not clear of where you’re headed and the picture you imagine is blurry then perhaps it’s time to deliberately construct a vision of where you want to go by doing an exercise called Best Possible Self.

The best possible self (or BPS) exercise was introduced by Laura King in the early 2000s, and researchers have found that it produces significant boosts in positive mood and optimism.

Instead of focusing on our problems and failures, this exercise helps us practice envisioning things going well for us which in turn helps us feel optimistic, not in a fake way that denies our problems but gives our minds a break to reflect on the good parts and to not overlook them.

Thinking about the future in this way can also crystallise what you value. It’s surprisingly hard to articulate what you actually want until you’re forced to describe it in detail. What does a fulfilling day look like? Who are you with? How do you behave? The specificity required by the exercise cuts through the fog.

By taking the time to focus our attention on what we want, what fulfills us, who we want to be with, how we want to show up helps us cut through the doubt to see a path forward so we can make the decisions we need to achieve our goals.

One question we can keep on top of mind when we’re working towards our goals is ‘Does this move me toward my best possible self?’

Give this approach a try and see if it helps bring clarity to your future. Wishing you the best.

Source: Psyche

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Baking bread is a fun, wholesome, mindful, creative, whole body and all senses, comforting, challenging, and an alchemical craft that is just wonderful.

I love baking bread, eating bread, and sharing the bread for others to enjoy.

What is it about baking bread that makes it so special?

Let’s look at the process to find out

Here are the steps involved:

• Clearing and cleaning up the counter because it both helps me clear my work area and most importantly my mind to be present and in the moment

• Doing the prep work by getting the bowls, containers, pans, and ingredients out and ready so I don’t have to look for them while I’m busy baking

• Weighing each ingredient precisely to help me stay true to the recipe and help me move through the recipe confidently

• Getting the mixer out, gathering the accessories and assembling it to help me develop the dough to the right consistency

• Placing the ingredients in the order they need to be added to the mixer to prevent any mistakes

• Mixing the dough, scraping down the sides of the bowl, and adding each ingredient carefully and thoughtfully and seeing it disappear within the dough

• Patiently mixing the dough until it passes the window pane test and seeing the beautifully smooth and light dough and the feel of it as I put it in a container to proof

• Making space for the dough in the fridge knowing the dough will develop a deeper flavor overnight which starts the hardest part of baking, the waiting

• Taking out the cold bowl from the fridge the next day and letting the dough come to room temperature

• Rolling the dough out on the counter and feeling it’s lightness and tackiness and taking a whiff of the wonderful small of the dough

• Slicing pieces of the dough with the dough scraper and feeling the weight and texture of each piece

• Weighing each piece of cut dough and realizing that the weight is a few grams short of exaxtly what I needed (My wife and I have a running challenge on who can get it exactly the right weight on the first try)

• Shaping the pieces of cut dough into rounds by rolling it between your hand and the counter in circular motion

• Letting the round dough pieces rest by putting a kitchen towel on top and waiting

• Rubbing the bread pans with butter to make it easier for the bread to release once baked

• Taking each round dough and rolling it, degassing it and hearing the air bubbles pop and shaping the dough

• Rolling the dough into a tight log and positioning it in the right place in the pan

• Spraying saran wrap with an oil spray and rubbing the oil across the whole plastic piece and covering the bread pan with the dough so it doesn’t stick to the dough

• Putting the pans in the oven for the final proof in a warm area

• Seeing the dough rise above the top of the pan and doing the poke test by pressing my finger into the dough to see how it bounces back

• Removing the pans from the oven and setting the oven temp to the right temperature for baking the loaves

• Removing the plastic wrap from the pans and placing them so they all fit in the oven on one rack

• Spraying the hot oven with mist of water to make steam for the “oven spring” of the bread

• Watching the bread rise in the oven as it bakes

• Smelling the wonderful aroma of bread spreading throughout the kitchen

• Hearing the beeping of the alarm on my phone to go check the bread in the oven

• Using the thermometer to check if the bread has reached the right internal temperature

• Taking the hot bread pan out of the oven and putting it on the counter to brush it with butter and letting it sit for a few minutes

• Carefully removing the bread from the pan and placing it on the wire rack to cool

• Impatiently waiting a few hours to let the breads cool but failing to wait because my family wants bread right now and just can’t wait so I have to sacrifice one loaf for our immediate consumption

• Slicing a loaf of bread to make sure the crumb and crust looks great

• Slathering butter on a warm steaming slice of bread and eating it as I fall into a state of bliss

• Enjoying delicious, wholesome, homemade bread for the rest of the week

As I wrote this list I realized each step of the baking process is a tiny ritual that brings its own satisfaction while a complete focus is needed to successfully complete it.

Also, all my senses are involved when baking. Sight, taste, smell, touch, and hearing help reduce stress, stay present, and improve my focus for when any problems pop up.

The baking process also alternates between control and surrender. So the perfectionist in me gets its moment while also the letting go of control teaches me to go with the flow and trust the process because bread baking can’t be forced.

Baking is my me time. I get to work on something I love and it energizes me after a busy week.

Most of all baking is delightful. It is an activity that calls me in a low voice throughout the week and then on the weekend I can spend the time I need for baking.

What do you love about baking? Is it the prep, the precision, the challenge, or the enjoyment of the baked bread?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

The Way of The Baker is a new series within the Low Fidelity newsletter.

If you missed it you can read the introductory post below:

Stay curious!

Rizwan

Hello dearest reader,

My last post was announcing the new series The Way of the Baker, in which I explore my journey in baking. I struggled to start the series because initially I felt it wasn’t what the you the reader signed up for and wouldn’t be interested in but as I thought about it I realized that it is a natural extension of the Low Fidelity newsletter because one of my core beliefs that how we do one thing is how we do anything and baking is no exception. Baking is an activity that helps us practice mindfulness by being present in the moment instead of being lost in thought. Baking helps me be a better designer, dad, and human and vice versa, those roles help me be a better baker because I can bring creativity, responsibility, and care into my baking practice. I hope you will join me and share your experiences as well.

No worries if baking is not your cup of tea. You can always opt out of receiving The Way of the Baker posts by going to your account settings and toggling the notification for this series. See

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. The Mind: The Side Door Has No Bouncer

2. The Mindful Designer: Reading in the Age of AI

3. Mindfulness: You are here

The Mind

The Side Door Has No Bouncer

You have been turning it over for weeks. The thing that is stuck. You have defined it, you have broken it into parts, you have made the list and worked the list, and it has not moved, or it moved an inch and came back, and you are starting to wonder what is wrong with you that you cannot solve a thing you can see this clearly.

Do you remember the last time you solved a problem you were stuck with? How did the solution come to you? Most likely it wasn’t by staring the problem down and forcing the solution instead the solution may have come to you as you were doing something completely unrelated such as while walking or running (my favorite approach) or you were doing the dishes or read a passage in a book that reminded you of an approach you can try to solve the problem. That Aha! moment came during a totally unrelated activity. Those moments of Zen when the weight of the problem drops and you instantly feel light and can’t wait to work through the solutions

This experience is what Anna means by the “side door has no bouncer”. When we are gripped by a problem and force a solution head on our minds shut down and go into protective mode to keep things as they are because for our minds change is risky and bad so it is protecting us for danger. When we approach the problem obliquely by not even thinking about it and going on with our lives, the guard/bouncer of the mind relaxes and a side door opens to possible solutions.

This is a good question to sit with next time you’re struggling with a problem:

What if, for a while, you stopped trying to answer the question and lived inside it instead?

Source:

The Mindful Designer

Reading in the Age of AI

Reading is becoming less often a solitary exchange between reader and text. As artificial intelligence is increasingly stepping in to summarize, interpret, and even “read” on our behalf. What does this shift mean for how we learn and engage with the world?

This post is a conversation with Naomi Baron, author of Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why it Matters and the main question asked was what do we risk losing when we rely on AI to do read for us?

AI is everywhere, in every company, in every app, wherever you look AI is there. For students and workers alike. It’s a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation. If you don’t use AI and resist it or deny it, you will be out of a job, if you do use AI the downsides are many. That is unless we understand exactly how AI affects us negatively we won’t be able to prevent or even undo the damage it has already done.

“If we take away the impetus for doing things like reading to relax, escape, empathize, or analyze by letting AI do it for us, then we undermine our motivations as well,” said Naomi “And we end up weakening our analytical skills.”

Reading is a skill that helps us make sense of our world and is an activity that brings us joy and helps us experience new ideas, make connections, and understand our world.

Naomi’s guidance is to use AI in ways that support rather than replace active reading and use AI for what it is good at while keeping the deeply human activity or reading for ourselves. Naomi recommends

• Using AI as a Co-reading tool to navigate complex novels

• Simplifying texts for younger or non-native speakers

• Providing overviews of technical or informational texts before diving into the content yourself.

• Actively reading and engaging with text either digital or online

• Using AI to support understanding and accessing information that otherwise would be challenging

• Think, analyze, and make meaning independently from AI

Preserving the depth and richness of human reading is not about resisting technological change, but about making deliberate choices that keep readers actively engaged with ideas, texts, and the world around them

The key thing to remember is that yes, AI is great at summarizing text and bringing insights to us, it doesn’t have the context we have so reading is still a critical skill we cannot afford to hand over.

Reading is human. ✊🏽

Source: The University of Chicago - Graham School

Mindfulness

You are here

Oof! This distraction is something I need to be reminded of every single moment because thinking about the past or future creeps up in subtle ways and by the time you realize it you’re deep in overthinking with stress and worry.

Text from the image above:

“Here’ is wherever you are. Helpful maps in big parks and gardens inform you, with an arrow, that “You are here”.

But when I say ‘here’ in the context of meditation, I don’t mean only your physical location. I mean whatever situation you are in: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. Much of the trouble we bring on ourselves is caused by being somehow distracted or absent from our real-life situation.

We tend to think more about what we haven’t than about what we have, more about where we aren’t than about where we are; more about the past and future than about the present... This is normal enough, even though we know it can be a bit crazy and self-defeating.

We have to keep on coming back to ourselves - to ‘here’ - every day, because we become so easily distracted. *I’m not myself at all today,” the old people used to say.

They were right: if you are not mentally where you really are, you are not yourself.

Timely words by Donagh O’Shea, Irish Dominican friar, writer & potter.

Source: MyMind Newsletter

An all too familiar experience at work but nature is there to remind us that we will get through challenging times.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Like many people during the pandemic, I turned to baking to stay sane through those difficult times.

I wasn’t very good at baking. In fact, after a string of disappointing loaves, I almost gave up.

But one day I decided to slow down.

Instead of rushing toward the finished loaf, I paid attention to each step of the process. I watched the dough more closely. I noticed what my hands were feeling. I stopped trying to force the outcome.

To my surprise, I finally baked a loaf that was not only edible, but good.

Something changed that day, there was hope and I started enjoying baking.

Baking gradually shifted from being a hobby to becoming a practice. Every loaf taught me something about patience, observation, and the value of paying attention. I realized baking wasn’t simply a way to make bread, it had become a way to practice mindfulness in everyday life. Also, it is a great way to make something with our hands. For those of us sitting at our desks all day in a digital world, this is a welcomed analog activity.

As I’ve continued to learn, I’ve found that every time I bake, I discover new questions, new opportunities, new skills to develop and every mistake becomes an invitation to slow down and look a little closer.

That’s why I’m starting a new series within Low Fidelity called The Way of the Baker.

Here are a few of my recent bakes

This series is a record of my journey to become a better baker. I’ll document my experiments, my mistakes, my discoveries, and the unexpected paths that open up along the way. Think of it as a notebook about baking, craftsmanship, deliberate practice, and learning to observe with curiosity and wonder.

These are the principles that will guide my journey:

• Share both the successes and the failures.

• Seek to understand principles, not just recipes.

• Treat every bake as an experiment and an opportunity to learn.

• Follow curiosity wherever it leads.

• Remember that paying attention is the most important ingredient.

Is baking, not your cup of tea? No worries, you can remove notifications for these posts by following the instructions below.

To unsubscribe from a section:

1. Navigate to your account Settings page via www.substack.com/settings and click on Low Fidelity to make changes to.

2. Slide the toggle next to each section you’d like to stop receiving emails or app notifications from. A gray toggle indicates that notifications will be off for that section.

My hope is that, together, we can embrace curiosity and craft to become better observers, learners, bakers, and ultimately, better humans, welcome to 🍞 The Way of the Baker.

Until next time, keep baking!

Rizwan

I’m a big fan of baking teacher and author Andrew Janjigian because he doesn’t pretend baking exists in a vacuum. He pays attention to the world around him, and when he recommended Existential Bread by Jim Franks, I was curious enough to pick up a copy and I was hooked from the first page.

Before talking about flour, fermentation, or technique, Franks talks about privilege, which got my attention:

The ability to make these decisions
and the education needed
to even know we have a choice
is a privilege
based on money
energy
and time

Most baking books begin with ingredients. This one begins by acknowledging that the ability to care deeply about baking is itself a luxury.

The freedom to experiment, buy specialty ingredients, replace failed loaves, and spend hours learning a craft isn’t available to everyone. It exists because we have time, money, stability, and access to education.

While I want people who have this privilege
to make better choices
I also want to acknowledge
that most people on this planet don’t
have such freedom

I enjoy that privilege too.

I spend my weekends baking shokupan, testing recipes, and learning techniques simply because I can. Those are opportunities that exist because my basic needs are met while many people in the US are struggling with everyday expenses and around the world children and women are trying to survive genocides.

Remembering that changes how I think about baking.

It shifts the focus from accomplishment to gratitude.

Later, Franks writes:

We live in a system based on earned capital
where we produce enough
for everyone on earth to be fed
and we waste more than half of what we make
while people die from starvation every day

Bread doesn’t exists apart from the world that produces it.

That’s what I appreciated most about the opening of Existential Bread. Before teaching us how to make better bread, Jim Franks reminds us to see more clearly.

It’s a reminder I want to carry gratitude, humility, and an awareness that having the freedom to choose is itself a gift into every loaf I bake.

A small practice: The next time you’re about to bake, pause for a moment. Remember that the freedom to bake is a privilege. Hold in your thoughts those who don’t have that same freedom, and let that awareness fill your loaf with gratitude, humility, and care.

Make bread, not war! 🍞

Rizwan

Hello dear readers,

With the World Cup under way and vying for attention, it’s time to reconnect with the real football. The opening round has been exciting with many underdogs like Ivory Coast, Morocco, Iran, Columbia, and Ghana tying and even winning against the behemoths like Brazil, England, and Spain.

My dream is to see one of the underdogs win to unseat the top seeded teams. One can only hope. :)

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Technology: ‘Think outside the bots’: How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush

2. The Mindful Designer: An Introductory Systems Thinking Reading

3. Creativity: The Creative Misogi

4. Tools: The most underrated tool, Occlupanids 🤔

Technology

‘Think outside the bots’: How to stop AI from turning your brain to mush

"What's happening with AI is that it's giving us, for the first time, an easy way to trade process for product," Green says.

The essay can sound better. The presentation can look sharper. The retirement party joke can land perfectly. But the mental work, the struggle, the false starts and that moment when something finally clicks is exactly what your brain needs.

"It's like you're at the gym and a robot lifts the barbell for you," he says.

"You get nothing."

Companies are pushing their employees to use AI but do they understand the negative effects it has on people?

A few of the negative effects which are not as obvious include cognitive friction where we miss critical learning opportunities when the friction is removed by using AI and digital dementia, which is the cognitive decline when we excessively rely on digital devices, and then there is the memory loss that happens because we don’t connect with the information at a deeper level.

So what can we do to mitigate the downsides with having to use AI?

• Pretest yourself on the information you’re about to ask AI.

• Engage with the information you get from AI. Write it down, use sticky notes to write down key information. Break down the information in logical grouping. This repetition will help you slow down to better retain the information you learn.

• Sketch out your ideas or write them down on paper however rough they are before you enter the prompt for AI.

• Deliberately slow down and enjoy any friction along the way so you can better connect with the information.

It’s not easy when the expectation is faster turnaround and quick results but it’s important to take care of yourself first so you don’t lose your creativity and critical thinking.

Source: BBC

The Mindful Designer

An Introductory Systems Thinking Reading List

Systems thinking is a superpower. Most of us spend our days putting out small urgencies. Systems thinking allows you to look past the “event” to see the “pattern”. It teaches you to find leverage points—the specific places where a small, well-placed change can shift the entire structure.

Life is a collection of systems interacting with each other. We are made of systems and live in systems small and large. From the systems in our body to our families, our work, our community, all the way out to the universe we are surrounded by systems.

Each day we interact and are affected by systems in both good and bad ways so it’s important to better understand the mechanics, methods, and vocabularies of systems so we can get a holistic view of how they work.

In this post Monica Storss shares an approachable list for anyone to dip their toes or dive into the world of systems thinking.

I love the connection she made with movies to better understand the systems we live in. +1 to The Wire TV series and Jurassic Park, which are great examples that show how complex and unpredictable systems are.

In short: Systems thinking is the art of seeing the invisible connections that hold the world together. Once you start seeing them, you never go back to seeing just the parts.

Source:

Creativity

You should plan a really hard creative project this year

There's a Japanese Shinto practice called misogi​ which literally translates to "water cleansing." Misogi involves ritual purification of the mind, body, and spirit through physical and mental challenges

The challenges we face define us. The bigger the challenge the more we are changed in the process because it gets us out of our comfort zone and trying new things. Failure is a part of the learning process. The more we are open to pushing our creative boundaries the bigger the reward awaits us on the other side.

Having a word for this practice, misogi is good because we can apply it to any part of our lives, creative, athletic, or anywhere in between.

Think back to the moments in your life where you can clearly see the challenges that defined the direction of your life to where you are now.

Let’s become more intentional and make our dreams come true by choosing the direction we want to move towards. Let’s practice misogi to get out of our comfort zone to design our best life.

Source: Jake’s Desk

An now you know…

Occlupanids are generally found as parasitoids on bagged pastries in supermarkets, hardware stores, and other large commercial establishments. Their fascinating and complex life cycle is unfortunately severely under-researched. What is known is that they take nourishment from the plastic sacs that surround the bagged product, not the product itself, as was previously thought. Notable exceptions to this habit are those living off rubber bands and on analog watch hands.

Source: Andrew Jangjigian’s newsletter Word Loaf

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

There you are, using AI at work because that is what is expected of you. You were on the fence about AI but you are practical, so you give it a try. On a design research project you interviewed a few participants and decided to prompt AI for insights.

What you get back is a long output, paragraphs of text that seem to go on forever. You feel overwhelmed by all the results. With a click of a few keys you saved hours, but you feel a disconnect from the results.

You remember nothing.

In psychology there is a phenomenon called the Generation Effect, the idea that information is better remembered when your mind generates it rather than simply receives it. This explains the distance you feel from AI output.

You haven’t done the work yourself. So how do you make sense of it all?

Before, you used your own process of extracting insights by methodically examining statements and actions, building your mental map of the information along the way. But now you have results without the map.

There is a coldness to this experience. All of a sudden you feel distant from the very information you were once so close to.

How do you internalize the results?

One approach is to move the information into a physical or digital whiteboard such as Miro or FigJam, where you can reconnect with it once again. By writing each insight and making connections visually, you start to rebuild your mental map, internalize the findings, and close the distance.

Visual thinking is the key to reconstructing your mental models so the information actually sticks and you can challenge or confirm what AI gives you.

There you are again, staring at paragraphs of AI output but this time you don’t paste it into a doc and forget it, instead you open a whiteboard and start visually mapping the information to internalize it and once again make it yours.

May curiosity be your guide.

Rizwan

This week, I deleted the Waking Up app.

I’ve been a Waking Up user since the beginning. I purchased the lifetime membership because I believed deeply in its mission of helping improve people’s live by seeing each moment clearly.

The app introduced me to teachers and ideas that genuinely improved my life. It helped me become more mindful, more present, and more aware.

For that, I am grateful, but gratitude does not require silence.

Recently, I watched Sam Harris discuss what is happening in Gaza and argue that it could not possibly be considered a genocide since the US bombing of Japan was not considered a genocide. Another claim he makes for this not being a genocide is that if Israel wanted to it could eradicate Gaza and everyone within it in an instant so because Israel is holding back it couldn’t possibly be considered a genocide. As I listened, I felt a knot forming in my stomach.

What disturbed me was hearing someone whose work centers on awareness, compassion, and seeing reality clearly appear unwilling to recognize the reality unfolding before the eyes of the world.

This is not an abstract political issue for me.

Every day we see images of the utter destruction in Gaza that I wish I could forget.

Entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble.

Families living among the ruins of their homes.

Children killed and maimed. Schools and hospitals destroyed.

People trying to survive amid a level of devastation that defies comprehension.

These are real human beings.

When I look at the destruction of Gaza, the mass displacement of its people, the systematic destruction of homes, schools, universities, hospitals, and critical infrastructure, the daily shootings and killings by Israeli settlers and IDF, I cannot escape the conclusion that we are witnessing a genocide.

Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights goes into the exact reasons why this is a genocide by the Israeli government.

Others may disagree with that conclusion. They may argue over legal definitions, historical comparisons, or political context.

Debates over technicalities and terminology are designed to be a distraction from the crimes and the suffering itself.

Jewish voices calling this a genocide

Voices within Israel are also calling it as they see it. B’Tselem, an Israeli Information Center for Human Rights states:

“Since the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel has acted in a coordinated and deliberate manner to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip, committing genocide against its residents.”

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart and author Peter Beinart discussed the Genocide and the pushback they have received for calling out the genocide as they see it.

If an entire population is being bombed, displaced, starved, and deprived of the basic conditions necessary for life, what exactly are we arguing about?

Mindfulness and compassion cannot be separated

Mindfulness teaches us to observe reality without immediately retreating into stories, justifications, or abstractions.

To see clearly. To stay present. To remain open to what is actually happening.

The deeper lesson, however, is that awareness and compassion cannot be separated.

For years, Waking Up helped me cultivate the capacity to pay attention.

Ironically, it is that very capacity that led me to leave.

Because when I pay attention to what is happening in Gaza, I do not see a difficult geopolitical puzzle that is too technical or complicated for us to understand or solve.

I see human beings.

I see traumatized children.

I see displaced and broken families.

I see suffering on a scale that should utterly horrify anyone who values human life.

And when I hear people like Sam Harris dismiss or minimize that reality, I cannot simply nod along and continue supporting them as though nothing has changed.

But there comes a moment when your conscience knows continuing to support a person, platform, or institution is out of alignment with your deepest values.

For me, that moment is now, which is why I decided to delete the Waking Up app and will not support the app moving forward.

Free Palestine!🇵🇸

Rizwan

Hello dear readers,

I’m a bit late in publishing this week’s Friday Gems so I’ll keep it short. Have you ever come across an article or a post that you needed in a specific moment in your life? The first gem this week, The Stability of Uncertainty, was that article for me.

When you’re world is swirling around and you feel like you’re in a whirlwind of emotions, it’s good to remind yourself that there is opportunity to be still and reconnect with yourself and show up with inner strength to make the most of each moment, whether good or bad.

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Mindfulness: The Stability of Uncertainty

2. The Mindful Designer: The Anatomy of an Exhibition

3. The Mindful Designer: Introducing UX Smells

4. Color: Mindfully curated color palettes

Mindfulness

The Stability of Uncertainty

When you have an attitude that resists change that wants things to always be the same, this attitude rubs against the natural processes of reality, creates a lot of friction and upset simply because we want and desire things to be one way (certain and fixed) when in reality they are fluid and changeable.

Change is a constant, we know that, but still when we are face to face with change our inclination is to resist it and push back on it. We want things to go our way otherwise we aren’t satisfied.

To ride the waves of change without them blowing us over we need to bend and be flexible so we ourselves don’t break.

Uncertainty, change, failing, feeling out of control, and nervous about what will happen are part of life and not only happening to us. Instead of pushing back we can learn to harness that energy to use it for our benefit.

We can find the good in the bad. The strength within the fear. The aliveness in the uncertainty to become like the seagulls above the whirlpool knowing we have weathered so many storms and will stay grounded through the next.

In the sky and above the whirlpool you live, confident in your ability to find what you need to survive, and able to enjoy what comes your way in the moment. You have made tension your friend, and so you feel free, relaxed, the sovereign of your world. You are connected to your natural intelligence and dignity.

Source: Toby Ouvry

The Mindful Designer

The Anatomy of an Exhibition

Awareness is the first step to change.

Looking at anything from the outside makes things seem like magic but once we spend a little time learning about how things function, the shared vocabulary, and the method to the madness we step into the realm of understanding and grow as a result.

In Anatomy of an Exhibition, takes us casually looking from the outside to inside her world of exhibition design to better understand…

the sheer volume of thought, time, work, and resources that go into putting a show together.

Exhibition designers, artists, and curators orchestrate a wide range of elements to create the wonderful symphony we experience when we visit a show.

Just look at everything that goes into the planning of a successful show. From the placement of the art, the flow of traffic inside, the color of the walls behind the art, temporary walls, the objects used to display the art which include pedestals, vitrines, platforms, the lighting. Then there are the people critical to the show which include the registrars, conservators, exhibition managers, construction team, fabricators exhibition designers, artists, and curators, phew!

Alya helps us appreciate all the work done behind the scenes by dedicated professionals who make it possible for us to enjoy an artist’s creation.

And to remind us

Nothing here happened by accident. Nothing here happened by magic. Every single detail was someone’s job.

Source: in

The Mindful Designer

UX Smells

Imagine you’re in a design review looking at a design being presented. As the designer walks you through the design you get a sense that something is off. The design fits the story requirements but still you can sniff an issue with the design.

Maybe there are too many modals, or too much reading for the user, too many form fields or maybe too many steps in a process.

Even though the solution being presented works in isolation you have this nagging sense that over time this would degrade the overall experience.

In the coding world there is a term for similar situations when something just feels off in the code, it’s called a code smell. Code smells aren’t wrong in and of themselves, they only hint at something being wrong. Ideally the code smell would be fixed before the code is reviewed, tested, and put in production, saving time, effort, and rework.

Perhaps we can apply the coding smell metaphor to the UX process?

We could call it a UX smell to indicate something is off in the design and define a UX smell as a design solution that appears to solve a problem but ends up undermining the user’s task.

I’ll explore the idea of a UX smell, it’s boundaries, what it is and isn’t, what sets it apart from similar concepts some more in an upcoming post but I wanted to share the early concept with you to see what you think about it.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Color

Mindfully curated color palettes

Color makes me happy. It’s soothing to the soul and scrolling through this collection of curated color combinations is a joyful and heartwarming experience.

Check it out.😍

Source: MyMind

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe?”

― Scott Turow

A few years ago I was asked to apply for a job at a tech company I admired. My confidence in my abilities was at a low point and I didn’t think I could get the job so I talked myself out of applying.

When I think back to that opportunity, I realize I was stuck in a story for a long time, of my own making, and should have just gone for it. It’s easy for me to say that now but at that time I am sure I was deep into that story about not being “qualified enough” that I couldn’t step back to see the opportunity clearly or objectively.

We don’t see reality.

We see our own specific version of it.

We miss a goal, feel tense, and think to ourselves, “I’m not good enough”. Done multiple times, our minds turn that feeling and thought into a belief which becomes a lens we experience life through. The belief feels real because we feel it in our body along with the thought.

The doubt we carry ends up talking ourselves out of opportunities that could be great for us.

In the example, the layers I was seeing reality through were:
Past failure made me feel tense and think negatively which repeated often enough became a belief and ends up in me avoiding the opportunity because I didn’t feel confident in myself.

Cutting through that layers of doubt to see clearly

The first step is to catch the layer you’re seeing through the moment your mind moves from what happened to what you think it means.

In my example, I probably didn’t pursue the opportunity because of something that happened before but the layer, the meaning, I added on was “I’m not good enough.”. At that very moment that I had the thought, I needed to pause. By catching the thought and any feelings associated with it, we can create some space between ourselves and the belief. We can see the belief for what it is, an automatic response, or signal to examine the situation objectively.

The next step is making space.

In my example, I could have explored this thought through writing or even sketching it out. By externalizing the thought I could have looked at my skills and the job requirements to see how well they matched up. I would have realized that I did in fact qualify and that the thought I had was not real.

Once we see the belief from a distance, we can examine it, question it, and choose a response that aligns with how we want to show up.

We can choose to look at what happened without the pull of our emotions. We can use the information we learn and take positive steps to do something about the situation instead of getting lost in an unhelpful story of our own making to be able to see things clearly and how we respond.

It’s much easier to look back and think I could have looked past the story I was telling myself but as you know once you’re deep in a story, it’s hard to see any alternatives.

This isn’t an easy process by any means and we will fall into the stories a few times along the way but each time we practice catching the stories our minds create by making space to look at situations objectively we will develop our muscles to begin cutting through the layers of meaning we add on to what is actually happening.

So the next time you’re facing an opportunity, don’t push it away or negate it automatically. Take a step back to make some space where you can think through it, examine it objectively, and then choose the step you want to take with thoughtfulness and intention.

May curiosity be your guide.

Rizwan

As we move throughout the day from one task to the next, it’s good to slow down to observe the what that is right in front of us, to notice the vivid details and the wonder in the ordinary moments.

Ordinary everyday moments. They pass us by with a blink of an eye.

A couple sitting in the background. A red bike with its front wheel turned left. The walking stick on the green bench. These details bring the moment alive but we can easily overlook them.

We glance, we categorize, assuming we know it already, and then we move on.

By being present and noticing we can show up in each moment with intentionality, curiosity, and creativity to pay attention to what we hear, see, feel, and make sense of the world around us.

This exercise is an invitation to practice something different, to notice the details

Instructions:

1. First Look (10 seconds)
   Glance at the image. Write down everything that comes to mind immediately. Don’t filter.

2. Slow Look (10 minutes)
   Now really look. Go edge to edge, corner to corner, top to bottom, front to back.

   
   Reflect on these questions:

   1. What else is here?

   2. What details live outside the obvious?

   3. What did you assume was in this image that you never actually verified?

Now think about your last meeting or design review. What were you so sure you already understood that you stopped listening?

What details did someone offer that you filed away as not important and moved past?

Train yourself to see beyond the obvious to notice everything else.

Every time we practice slowing down in this practice, we build the muscle for slowing down for a moment of noticing out there, when needed.

May curiosity be your guide. ✊🏽

Rizwan

Artwork
Title: From Scenes Unseen: From the Summer of ‘78
Date: 1978
Artist: D. Gorton
Medium: Photograph
Source: The New York Times

Hello dear readers,

There is a lot of news about bad things happening to humans by humans every day which can easily bring us down. But there is also goodness around us that lifts our spirits up even in the darkest moments.

If we step back and look at our lives, the people around us, the beauty of the flowers, the grass, the birds chirping, which helps us realize, every day is a good day.

How?

We are alive to experience it.

When we bring our attention to our breath and the the moment we are in we can actually take action. We can change our lives and the lives of others for the better. We can appreciate this one life we have and the new day in front of us and remember that every day is a good day.

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Mindfulness: 9 Things to Write in a Pocket Notebook Every Day

2. The Mindful Designer: Prompting for a Human Designer

3. Listening: What You’re Listening For (And What You Might Be Missing)

4. Mindfulness: A Mantra For Anxiety

Mindfulness

9 Things to Write in a Pocket Notebook Every Day

How can we be more present, aware, and intentional in our day instead of rushing from one task to the next?

By noticing and writing daily in a pocket notebook.

I love this idea by from Myth and Meaning because it helps us notice those things that add meaning to our lives and which we often overlook.

Mark presents a list of things he adds to his notebook such as the weather, sunrise/sunset time, gratitude list, among other things that are important for him and good starting points for anyone. You could also use your own list of things to track and be more aware of throughout the day such as:

• one thing that caught your eye

• what you ate for breakfast

• a highlight of your day

As you start writing daily you will inevitably come up with more ideas to bring more mindfulness into your day.

Source: in Myth and Meaning

The Mindful Designer

Prompting for a Human Designer

We don’t need quick polished answers by the AI tools, we need designers who will use their judgement, expertise, craft, and skill to question the answers AI provides.

Defending our design decisions because we have more information, more context, and a more human understanding of the problem we are designing for.

Listening

What You’re Listening For (And What You Might Be Missing)

We can notice our filters, experiment with new choices, and adapt our listening to what the moment requires.

Listening isn’t a fixed trait. Like creativity, it’s a skill we can develop and grow. But the first step is to become aware of how we listen.

It turns out that we fall into habits for how we listen, what we pay attention to and what we leave out.

When we have disagreements we’re usually listening for different things, our listening habits are different so we miss what is important for each other which causes breakdowns in communication.

Here is an example of the different types of listeners:

For example, imagine a teammate says, “I’m worried we’re moving too fast. Some people in the group looked uncomfortable, and I don’t think our plan will land the way we want it to.”

A connective listener may pick up first on the relational signal—people looked uncomfortable—and think, Who needs follow-up? What would help people feel safer or more seen?

A conceptual listener may go to possibilities: What’s another way to structure this so it invites more buy-in?

A reflective listener may quietly compare it to past experience and try to make meaning: I’ve seen this dynamic before—what helped then?

And an analytical listener may want clarity and evidence: What exactly tells us we’re moving too fast? What information do we have?

There are no right or wrong listening styles instead think of these as entrypoints into the conversation.

We don’t need to be set in our ways of listening, we can experiment and change things up so we can make the most of our moments together.

When people take time to truly listen, they’re far more likely to act in ways that restore dignity, reduce harm, and strengthen trust.”

Source: Juliana Tafur in The Greater Good

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

As we move throughout the day from one task to the next, it’s good to slow down to observe the what that is right in front of us, to notice the vivid details and the wonder in the ordinary moments.

There are three boats in this painting. People in them. And Mount Fuji is hiding in plain sight.

I’ve seen this image a hundred times but never noticed those details until I stopped and paused to look slowly at the details. I was moving past the image too fast assuming a wave was all there was to it.

The wave registers but everything else disappears.

That’s not just how we see art.

That’s how we move through our days, our meetings, our design reviews.

We glance, we categorize, assuming we know it already, and then we move on.

By being present and noticing we can show up in each moment with intentionality, curiosity, and creativity to pay attention to what we hear, see, feel, and make sense of the world around us.

This exercise is an invitation to practice something different, to notice the details

Instructions:

1. First Look (10 seconds)
   Glance at the image. Write down everything that comes to mind immediately. Don’t filter.

2. Slow Look (10 minutes)
   Now really look. Go edge to edge, corner to corner, top to bottom, front to back.

   
   Reflect on these questions:

   1. What else is here?

   2. What details live outside the obvious?

   3. What did you assume was in this image that you never actually verified?

Now think about your last meeting or design review. What were you so sure you already understood that you stopped listening?

What details did someone offer that you filed away as not important and moved past?

Train yourself to see beyond the obvious to notice everything else.

Every time we practice slowing down in this practice, we build the muscle for slowing down for a moment of noticing out there, when needed. ✊🏽

May curiosity be your guide.

Rizwan

Artwork
Title: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave)
Date: 1831
Artist: Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
Medium: Woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Just this week I sent an email to my client to share some designs and to get their feedback.

The very next morning, my anxiety kicked in.

I woke up way too early and my mind started playing catastrophic scenarios of them not liking what I shared.

I imagined they would send back a harshly worded email demanding that I redo everything.

Sounds a bit over the top right? That’s my brain on anxiety.

It may be trying to keep me safe but all it’s bringing me is apprehension, worry, and stress, nothing helpful.

There are effective ways to keep our worrying minds from taking over that help in the moment such as meditation to create space between our thoughts and reactions, mindfulness techniques to ground ourselves in the moment, breathing exercises to slow our heart rate and signal safety to our brain.

For me quotes by philosophy, Zen, Budhism, Stoicism, and spiritual teachers are also helpful reminders in the moment I am deep in the anxious episode, which is why when I read the quote below by philosopher Alan Watts, his words pierced through the layers of worrying my mind puts me through and helped me see what was going on.

The quote by Alan Watts is:

“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

This is one of those reminders that gets to the core of our experience and cuts through the layers of meaning we add to reality. It is definitely one that I struggle with as I let anxiety about something that is going to happen stress me out. I’m keeping this quote as reminder and printing it out so I can see it right in front of me on my office wall.

My own experience has been that all the anxiety I go through ends up being for nothing because the event that I had been stressting out about wasn’t as bad as my mind made it out to be. It came and and it passed without the world ending or something catastrophic happening. I feel a sense of relief for a few moments and my mind latches on to something else to become anxious about.

The cycle continues.

Until now.

This quote is a good reminder that we can stop the constant anxiety because it will not matter in the end. No matter how much we stress out, no matter how much we worry, no matter how much time we spend thinking about the event, the calories we spend overthinking about the event will not affect the outcome at all.

So the next time find yourself worrying about an outcome, pause and remind yourself “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

Let those words cut through the story playing in your mind so you can get back to reality and be your best so you can do your good work.

May curiosity be your guide!

Rizwan ✌🏽

Hello dear readers,

How can something that is ephemeral, has no physical weight, and can’t be seen have so much power over us? Our thoughts have the power to lift us up or keep us locked into a small box. This week I explored this phenomena in What Gives a Thought Its Power?

By better understanding the process of how a thought develops within us we can manage it more effectively. We can create space

between the thought and our reaction

between the thought and our identification with it

between the thought and mistaking it for reality

Awareness is the first step to true freedom.

May curiosity be your guide!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Life: Tiny Experiments vs Setting Goals

2. Resistance: A Manifesto for Monstrous Times

3. Mindfulness: The Mirror

4. Brain: What gives a thought its power?

Life

Tiny Experiments vs Setting Goals

Usually, when we modern humans want to experience change in our lives, we set goals. Goals can work really well in many life circumstances, but in a developmental process like matrescence [becoming a mother], goals are pretty useless. In a developmental process, you are, by definition, growing and changing at the very marrow of who you are. The self that creates a goal will not even be the same self that reaches it, thereby likely rending the goal itself irrelevant.

Life is anything but predictable so why commit to something big that doesn’t fit our reality. Instead of creating big audacious goals, why not create tiny experiments to help guide us through life? I guess we could still have goals as an overarching theme but it’s the details that matter. The day to day test and learn, the exploration of what we like and don’t like, what fits and what doesn’t fit how we want to live that makes tiny experiments less burdensome and confining.

Tiny Experiments are the opposite of broad, sweeping changes, the opposite of On Monday Things Will Be Different, the opposite of a pill that fixes everything. Tiny Experiments are just that: little incremental changes and explorations that might inch you closer to the shift you’re trying to make.

The last line is key, “little incremental changes and explorations that might inch you closer to the shift you’re trying to make.” Making tiny incremental changes feels right. Taking small steps forward, sideways, or even backwards feels less intimidating than big leaps that can take time to recover from.

Perhaps you can hold your goals loosely while you try tiny experiments along the way to make sure that goal you set when weeks, months, or years ago is in fact what you want since you will not be the same person as the one who set the goal in the first place.

Here’s to living in the present with tiny experiments.

Source: Harma-Mae Bott Smit

Resistance

A Manifesto for Monstrous Times

We are in monstrous times. Chaos is being used as a tool to undermine and dismantle everything that brings us together.

But we are not powerless.

We are powerful!

We will resist!

We will overcome!

Sharon Frances’ zine is a good reminder of our collective and individual power we must work hard to keep. Inspired by Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny, Sharon has created this handy zine you can print out, fold, and share with everyone so we can work together and protect ourselves during these monstrous times. ✊🏽

A Manifesto For Monstrous Times

1.23MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Source: Sharon Frances

Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Rules on Tyranny

1. Do not obey in advance

2. Defend institutions

3. Beware the one-party state

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world

5. Remember professional ethics

6. Be wary of paramilitaries

7. Be reflective if you must be armed

8. Stand out

9. Be kind to our language

10. Believe in truth

11. Investigate

12. Make eye contact and small talk

13. Practice corporeal politics

14. Establish a private life

15. Contribute to good causes

16. Learn from peers in other countries

17. Listen for dangerous words

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives

19. Be a patriot

20. Be as courageous as you can

Mindfulness

The Mirror

If our circle of friends see us as the clown of the group, or we imagine they do, then we may double down on that aspect of our personality. To cement our position within our community (survival instinct) or receive validation, we crack more jokes. We become The Clown.

As interconnected beings our personality emerges through the interaction we have with the groups we are a part of. We validate ourselves by how others see us, creating either a positive or negative feedback loop that can lift us up or hold us down.

The persona we create helps may help us survive by being a part of a larger group but what if we stepped away from it to understand who we are without it.

Who are we without the mirror of other people’s expectations and assumptions about us?

What is our identity in a vacuum, when no one is around to witness it? Who are we when no one’s watching?

How can we grow and become who we are meant to be?

We can shut the door to the outside world to make space for our own voice, our own light to shine the path forward. We could try tiny experiments and learn from them without announcing them to the world. We can find out what we want without the weight of other people’s expectations.

Who are you without the mirror? Who could you become?

It’s time we learned more about ourselves to find the gems hidden within.

Source: Mind Palace

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

I can’t do it!

It’s a common thought we all have at some point in time. The weight of those words can keep us from moving forward even if we know it is better for us.

How can a simple thought hold us back?

Our thoughts can influence us more than we realize.

Thoughts can lift us up or keep us down effectively controling how we feel about ourselves, how we interact with others, and how we show up in the world.

That’s strange when you think about it because a thought doesn’t have a physical form yet it can stop you in your tracks.

A thought can’t hold you down physically but it can become a seemingly solid barrier for you in moving forward.

So what is a thought?

At the most basic, biological level, a thought is a pattern of electrical and chemical activity in our brains caused by networks of neurons firing off together.

But, how can a thought have so much power over us?

If we zoom out a level, once we have a thought, our brains turn that mental activity into both chemical and physical reactions.

When the brain interprets a thought as meaningful, it triggers chemical signals like dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, or adrenaline. These shift the state of the body. The body then feeds that state back to the brain as a feeling.

In other words, a thought doesn’t just stay in the mind. It becomes something you feel in your body, biologically shaping your hormones, heart rythym, and muscles.

And once you feel it, it starts to feel true, it physically feels real.

At that critical moment we can either believe the thought as a fact and let it decide what we do or we can create distance from it and see the thought for what it is, an electrical event that has no objective truth and not confuse it with reality.

By understanding what a thought is at a biological level, we can remove the mystery behind the process which helps to loosen its grip on us, we stop listening and following them blindly, and most importantly we stop mistaking our thoughts for reality.

The next time you thing, “I can’t do it!”, pause to make space between your thought and the action you take and ask yourself, is this a fact or just a thought feels true?

May curiosity be your guide!

Till next time,

Rizwan ✌🏽

Hello dear readers,

Another week of AI everywhere all the time and the daily chaos brought on by the current US regime. It’s enough to take what was low level anxiety about our future and push it into our faces.

This seems to be the norm and the speed at which we are moving and consuming can dial our anxieties up to max.

But there is one tool we can use to fight back, our intentionality.

We can choose what we give our attention to. Instead of being swept away by it all we can be intentional in what we work on, how we work, what we consume, and how we use the information coming at us in a thoughtful and mindful way.

Never forget, we hold the power!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Work: Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?

2. The Mindful Designer: The AI Vampire

3. Mindfulness: 38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume

Work

Is anyone taking lunch breaks anymore?

Humans have been hungry and time-strapped for as long as we’ve existed. So why haven’t we sanctified the concept of a lunch break like folks in Europe, Latin and South America, or China?

Will the real lunch-skipper please stand up?

Ok, I admit I’m one of those who doesn’t take lunch. I work from home and can’t even remember when the last time I took an hour lunch. Usually I’m eating smaller snacks during the day so I take a quick meal around 12. From the surveys mentioned in this article, it looks like I’m in good company.

Remote work allows us to complete various at-home tasks in our life with greater ease and flexibility (laundry, quick appointments, caring for pets), but it has damaged the dignity of the lunch hour.

This is a good reminder to take the break we need during the day instead of plowing through and not taking care of ourselves first.

57 percent of participants also said they focus better on complex tasks after even a 30-minute lunch break.

Our minds need the break from the screen and the desk to get up, move around, and enjoy a precious moment we have every right to enjoy.

That does it! My goal for today is to take a 30 minute lunch break and not feel guilty about it. ✊🏽

If you work from home, do you take a break for lunch or has it disappeared for you as well? Let me know in the comments!

Source: Eater

The Mindful Designer

The AI Vampire

With a 10x boost, if you give an engineer Claude Code, then once they’re fluent, their work stream will produce nine additional engineers’ worth of value.

In the Eater story above, the author mentioned the “curse of competence”, which is when even more work is piled onto those who demonstrate efficiency. That sums up the challenge with the efficiency gains form AI.

AI may make us efficient but at what cost? Burnout, confusion, stress, not to mention being out of a job because who actually gets to keep our efficiency gains?

Hint: It’s not you or me.

Companies are capitalistic extraction machines and literally don’t know how to ease up.

The AI train is barreling through our workday, steamrolling over anything and everything in its way but we are not helpless.

We can control how we act and react.

We can step back to take care of ourselves first and foremost.

Do something without AI. Close the computer. Go be a human.

Source: Medium

Mindfulness

38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume

the average person processes around 74GB of information a day; that’s comparable to watching 16 movies daily.

That is a lot of information that we are exposed to. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed it is estimated that we spend almost 7 hours of our day consuming. But how much of it do we actually retain?

I love this post by artist, , in her newsletter , where she provides a practical guide to slowing down our media consumption. To become more intentional with what we let in to our minds, to notice more, to think more, to consider more.

The mantra Tuğba shares is:

Create more than you consume while you consume.

While all of the ideas Tuğba shares are great, I want to focus on a single action I can start with and this is the one that I will work on next:

Active album listening. I will not feel guilty of breaking out of a playlist to learn about an artist and listen to their whole album, so I can remember what I consume and appreciate the creative acts.

Source: As Slow As Possible

Drunken noodles are so-called not because the recipe has alcohol, but because they’re so hot you’ll get drunk chugging beer trying to soothe the burn!

From the recipe comments for Drunken Noodles 🍜

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

I recently looked back at the art I have created (I highly recommend you do it too) and I noticed a pattern. I’ve been drawing a shape that is amorphous, flexible, ever changing, and adapting to its environment. As I recently shared one of the illustrations on Substack I wanted to do more than just post it and walk away, I wanted to use the artwork as a way to develop my writing and storytelling skills.

I have talked about how what we do one thing can be applied across other parts of our lives. So improving my storytelling skills through this series will help me present designs to stakeholders and even in conversations at home with my family.

How we do one thing is how we do everything.

👋🏽 Introducing Morf

Today I present to you Morf, a character I created that embodies everything Low Fidelity is about.

Morf is what a curious, growing, adapting mind looks like if you gave it a body.

Morf is an amorphous, shapeshifting otherworldly being drawn here by our little blue planet’s impermanence, color, chaos, and beauty.

Morf explores the places, people, objects, and moments in this world and communicates through shape, color, and transparency.

I invite you to follow Morf’s sightings on Substack and in this newsletter. Better yet, have a favorite place you want Morf to visit, suggest it in the comments!

Let’s go on a journey together with Morf and see where our curiosity leads!

On to the this week’s gems!

Today's Gems

1. Visual Thinking: A Better Way To Learn In Organizations: Visual Thinking Strategies

2. The Mindful Designer: How to operate as a Staff Product Designer

3. Clown Show: Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz

Visual Thinking

A Better Way To Learn In Organizations: Visual Thinking Strategies

Our minds don’t seem very willing to digest regurgitated expertise no matter how profound, wise or clever it is.

How can we make information we are given or consume really stick? Think back to a presentation or a handout you were given.

How much of the information shared do you remember versus a moment when you were in a conversation with others about a topic?

Chances are the times you engaged in a discussion and actively sought answers to what you saw visually, you remembered more and it made a bigger impact on your thinking.

This is where the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) approach helps us get off the sidelines and into the conversation so we can be intentional with the information we come across and take more of it in. VTS provides us with tools for shared inquiry and to spark our curiosity for deeper thinking and engaging with others to build our perspective-taking skills.

The approach is simple. Look at an image, a piece of art, a design, anything presented to you visually together with a group of peers.

In VTS, teachers ask three consecutive questions:

1. What is going on here (in this picture)?

2. What do you see that makes you say that?

3. What more can we find?

The teacher/facilitator then does prompts the conversation:

• They repeat what participants answer in response to the questions, but using their own words. This allows teachers to acknowledge what was said and to anchor responses into whatever model is important (e.g. art history, natural sciences, etc);

• They create a space where everyone has the opportunity and safety to respond

• They use open-ended questions to encourage deep thinking

While this approach uses art as the medium for the explorations the principles learned can be applied across all parts of life to engage with what we see at a deeper level, which helps us retain more information and is a more rewarding experience because we are changed as a result instead of passively consuming information.

🔗 Medium

The Mindful Designer

How to operate as a Staff Product Designer

Becoming a staff designer isn’t a switch that gets turned on after a certain amount of years as a senior designer, the title is earned by the intentional actions you take. If we move past the title we can see how we need to be thinking not just within our small area, we need to zoom out to see the product as a whole to help with the overall direction.

In practice, it’s about thinking in systems and bringing clarity to the future of your product area.

You don’t need permission to operate at the next level. You own your career trajectory and the confidence that comes from taking action and doing what you think is right is priceless.

Focus on your craft, your curiosity, your collaboration, your listening skills, and your visual thinking to elevate yourself to where you want to go next.

🔗 Verified Designer

Also…

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? A Quiz

Does it feel like every single news story, every article, every think piece, every bit of media content revolves around your leader, almost as if, no matter how hard the country tries to talk about literally anything else, he seems to keep finding ways to pop back into the spotlight and suck all of the oxygen out of the room, to the point where it feels like you’ve spent every waking moment of every day for the past ten years hearing about every single stupid and/or evil thing this guy’s done, and you’re just so fucking exhausted?

Each day there is some news about how the current US regime is chipping away at our democratic foundations. Some days it’s not even hiding about its agenda by taking a sledgehammer to the institutions that have been built for safety, support, freedom, and our basic human rights.

This fascist regime likes to point the finger at other nations to distract from the chaos they are inflicting.

If the answer to most or all of these questions is yes, it may be time for a massive nonviolent resistance movement.

Does Your Country Need Regime Change? My answer is a HELL YES! ✊🏽

🔗 McSweeney’s

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

We are complex beings living in a complex world with other complex beings and within complex systems. So imagine how much more complexity arises because of our interconnectedness, our constant evolution, and our emergence as we interact with each other and the beings all around us. This complexity brings challenges, volatility, uncertainty, but it also brings amazing opportunities for us to connect with each other and the world in new and creative ways that unlock infinite potentials.

Together we can navigate uncertainty, find meaning, and flourish not in spite but exactly because of the complexity that defines us.

Today's Gems

1. Systems Thinking: Complexity Blindness

2. The Mindful Designer: The Aura of Care

3. The Mindful Designer: Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

4. Spotify Playlist: Tom Morello’s Fuck Ice playlist

Systems Thinking

Complexity Blindness

Why do we remain stuck, unable to effectively address the world’s most challenging problems? Why do capitalist and conservative paradigms persist despite intensifying threats like climate change, systemic inequality and other deeply rooted issues? Why do so many people turn to conspiracy-driven ideas to make sense of the world, and why is there such widespread faith in technology’s power to solve our most pressing challenges? While these questions seem disconnected, they are actually deeply interwoven, revealing a fundamental shortfall in our conventional ways of understanding and responding to the world.

The world we live in is complex. The people we interact with are complex. We ourselves are complex. When we put all of this together we end up dealing with a lot of complex issues yet we approach issues we think in simplistic terms,

A leads to B.

This is causing that.

We think we are dealing with isolated individual parts that can be controlled and we can predict interactions.

But we don’t live in a simple world.

We live in a complex, deeply interwoven, interconnected, dependent, and emergent world.

Our education and socialization have primed us to break down problems into isolated parts, relying on simple cause-and-effect relations and assuming control and predictability—qualities often absent in complex systems. Yet we live in a world of deep interconnections, feedback loops, nonlinear dynamics, emergent phenomena and nested systems working at multiple scales.

How can designers overcome complexity blindness?

Seven helpful practices are recommended:

1. Create networks of collaboration

2. Refine their work through real-world feedback

3. Draw ideas from different contexts to spark innovation

4. Work to balance various impacts on stakeholders to prevent favoring one group excessively

5. Create mutually supportive connections between system elements

6. Guide stakeholders through complexity by illuminating intricate connections

7. Foster gradual change, recognizing meaningful transformation often requires patience.

We are deeply woven into the fabric of life, inseparable from the flow of complex planetary ecosystems. Embracing our own complexity and interconnectedness, we can engage in a deeper, more genuine relationship with the intricate world we inhabit.

As designers we need to be comfortable with complexity and harness tools and techniques that enable us to work and lead through uncertainty and the complex nature of the systems we are a part of.

🔗 Whispers & Giants / Complexity Blindness

The Mindful Designer

The Aura of Care

If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimised to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.

Each day there is news about a company finally owning up and doing things right for its customers. However they conveniently overlooked any dark patterns and shady practices on their way from 0 to 1. This article highlights this pattern that is all too familiar with tech companies.

UX ignores questionable usefulness and the bright aura of care distracts from real questions of ethics and harm.

The “Aura of Care” is the idea of companies gaining false legitimacy through UX. It’s about absolving a company of practicing dark patterns and ignoring the voices that called for better experiences to help it’s customers instead of misleading them for corporate profits only after they are caught and have bad publicity.

Basically, seeking forgiveness from the public after the fact, after the damage has been done and after being caught red handed. Renewing focus on a better UX helps legitimise products that are intrinsically bad for people who use them.

UX needs to make clear distinctions between commercial design work and design as a social good so the aura of care is not just an aura. Until that happens we’ll continue to see the worst companies hire the best people to help them make the worst things.

🔗 THE AURA OF CARE

The Mindful Designer

Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

As the speed of work gets faster each day and we deal with more complexity there is a tool that can help us make better decisions and solve problems more efficiently, that is taking the perspective of others. This stance helps us get out of our own heads, assumptions, and biases to see how others view the same situation or problem, which I learned from this article is also supported by neuroscience.

Importantly, perspective taking may improve business outcomes not only by giving us access to more information than we would have without it, but also by ramping up activity in core brain regions involved in creative problem-solving and innovation.

Turns out that perspective taking activates the same core parts of the brain that are used for creative problem solving. So taking other people’s perspective helps us open up to new possibilities and ignite our own creativity.

As designers it is important for us to be comfortable with understanding other points of views so we can collaborate across teams to solve the complex challenges we face.

Want to strengthen your perspective taking muscles? Try the exercises listed in this Wharton @ Work Nano Tools For Leaders: REAL BRAIN TRAINING: FIVE MINUTES TO BETTER DECISIONS

🔗 Knowledge at Wharton

Also…

Here’s a playlist by Tom Morello, from Rage Against the Machine. “A rocking little soundtrack to enjoy while you drive those bastards out of your neighborhood!”

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽