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.✊🏽

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.✊🏽

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.✊🏽

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.✊🏽

Hello dear readers,

I hope your week went well. This week I started a new project at work where I shifted from designOps to product design. It’s interesting to think broadly about how teams use design tools and how to improve the employee experience and how teams collaborate to then dig into the details of designing features and using Figma Make in the process.

So today, I share a few gems that touch on the topic of learning by doing and what we lose when using AI in the process, which is the tacit knowledge we gain by making things ourselves, instead of AI doing the work for us.

Peace ✌🏽

Today's Gems

1. Product Design: Designing Selection Colors

2. The Mindful Designer: Maker’s Knowledge

3. Visual Thinking: Design is political

Product Design

Designing Selection Colors

I stumbled upon this post, a collection of tweets, by Marcin Wichary, who I just learned designed the Selection Colors feature in Figma. This feature alone has saved me countless hours working with color. Reading through the tweets, it’s interesting to learn just what it takes to get a feature that on the surface seems simple, but the tweets show just how complicated the process was. Reading through the decisions that needed to be made, the feedback, the iterations, the development challenges, you realize how much effort each part of an app actually takes to bring to life.

I have a newfound respect for designers who are able to deliver experiences that help even against great odds.

🔗 Designing Selection Colors

The Mindful Designer

Maker’s Knowledge

The AI tools I use may help me get results quickly, make my work seemingly efficient, help me begrugingly skip over critical parts of the design process, what I lose in the process is the tacit knowledge that I gain from the active, hands on learning that comes from thinking, making, sketching, comminicating, iterating and going through the ups and downs of the process building my knowledge one step at a time.

In a client meeting this week I heard someone speak to this exact idea that we lose the understanding and knowledge of what we are working on because we end up with the results ready to be used.

We get to know things not by reading or hearing about them, not by observing and studying them, but by creating or recreating them with our own hands. At first, his strikingly simple claim, often also referred to as Verum Factum, sounds like nothing new. It seems common sense. And, indeed, in its most basic form, it is generally accepted: theory is nothing without practice. Experience trumps mere words.

🔗 Maker’s Knowledge

Visual Thinking

Design is political

Visual thinking is a powerful tool for conveying ideas.

The above illustration is an example from Italian Radical Design, a movement that sought to use design for social critique.

Designed by Enzo Mari, an Italian designer, who collaborated with Francesco Leonetti, a poet, to distill dense Marxist and Leninist political theory into a visual to make the idea accessible and digestible.

The red line represents the revolutionary path for the working class and how it can bypass existing structures to seize more power. The purple line shows a reformist approach to capitalist hierarchy.

Design is political.

This illustration is a good example of how we can use visual communication to share ideas and make them easy to understand.

Also…

Within the final and true world image, everything is related to everything, and nothing can be discarded a priori as being unimportant.

– Fritz Zwingy 1969

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

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Good morning dear readers,

I’m returning after a long hiatus. I hope all is well with you considering the global turmoil. Yes, America is burning, our government is a clown show, hate, bigotry, fascism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, is on the rise, wars are being forced upon us, and the only thing that seems to matter are the gas prices, not the devastation to precious human lives no matter their skin color. Despite the bleak outlook, we move forward and pick up the strength to come together and help each other through these challenging times. ✊🏽

Today's Gems

1. Visual Thinking: The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

2. The Mindful Designer: What is Systems Oriented Design: An Animation

3. Communication: Writing is Design

Visual Thinking

The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

“True human genius lies in the way we are able to take facts and concepts out of our heads, using physical space to spread out that material, to structure it, and to see it anew.” - Annie Murphy Paul

Visual thinking is about getting ideas out of your head and onto an external surface, like paper or a digital whiteboard. In this video Doug Neill from Verbal to Visual shares a simple tool to help you wrangle complexity and remember the important information.

You may have experienced this yourself when reading a book with lots of great information that you wanted to remember but there is just too much information and yes you can take notes but sometimes those get lost in the shuffle and you forget the information you wanted to remember.

The solution?

Create a visual reference of the information on a 3x5 or 4x6 card to help you remember it so you can use it in your own creative work.

I used four-by-six index cards to identify the key topics and capture some of those details with sketches and words and page references.

I think you’ll benefit both from the modularity of these tools (how you can move them around) and also the disposability of them. If you don’t like how one index card or sticky note turns out, you can recycle it and then quickly grab another one. Each of those individual chunks is a much lighter lift than trying to capture, all in one go, everything about the topic you’re working on.

This is a great way to quickly capture and remember the important pieces of information you come across in your day, whether it’s a process, a meeting, a video, a book, or any other complex topic you’re trying to make sense of.

🔗 The Building Blocks of Deep Thinking

The Mindful Designer

What is Systems Oriented Design: An Animation

Continuing the thread of visual thinking, the video above does an amazing job of helping you quickly understand what System Oriented Design is.

After watching the video, you just get it. No long explanations that dive into too much detail, that’s the power of visual thinking and visual communication.

Systems Oriented Design helps us examine complex issues through different lenses, from interconnected problems to known unknowns, to understanding which groups of people are having problems and which people can help. Mapping all this complexity helps identify the root causes so you can implement solutions that address the root problems.

🔗 Systems Oriented Design

Communication

Writing is Design

Design is writing, and writing is design. Writing is critical for conveying our ideas and designs. It helps us gather and organize our thoughts so we can communicate clearly and succinctly. The better our writing is, the more effectively we can communicate with our team members to convey the importance of what we design.

In this article PJ Onori, shares principles that illustrate how good writing and good design are the same.

Designers devote endless hours to make their solutions more elegant. They understand the importance of detail. They cherish clarity and simplicity. The same isn’t often said about their craftsmanship of words.

🔗 Writing is Design

The Homework Machine

by Shel Silverstein

The Homework Machine,
Oh, the Homework Machine,
Most perfect
contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me . . .
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.

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

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

You’re right, it has been a while since I published a Friday Gems post. I fell off the track, and I’m just now getting back to my writing, which feels really good.

Life has a way of showing us what we need to work on, and for me, it seems like beginning again is the lesson I must learn. I need to be comfortable starting again when life gets in the way.

Just because we stop doing what we love for a period of time doesn’t mean anything other than life got in the way.

We need to become great at beginning again. To get back to what we love, once we are distracted, without judgment.

Let’s become great at starting again! ✊🏽

Today's Gems

1. Personal Growth: The Scam called “You don’t have to remember anything”

2. The Mindful Designer

   1. America by Design Fail

   2. Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

3. Wisdom: Do small things with great love

Knowledge

The Scam called “You don’t have to remember anything”

That grinding, repetitive friction built something no language model can download into you: muscle memory for excellence.

This is the resistance training nobody talks about anymore. The more the world automates, the more value accrues to people who continue to condition their fundamental capabilities.

Admittedly, I have been using AI a lot more than I thought I would, both at work and in my personal life. AI is everywhere but as Paul reminds us, putting in the effort to go slow, to embrace the friction in our lives, to do the hard things that build up our muscle memory is what keeps us grounded and human.

Let’s continue to develop our fundamental capabilities to create originally, think creatively, and read deeply, so we use AI as a thought partner instead of a copy-and-paste resource to take the easy way out.

🔗 The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”

The Mindful Designer

America by Design Fail

How did you manage to fail so epically at making the most basic website?

I may be late to the game on this. I don’t follow the disastrous news coming out of the White House every day but when I found out that 18F had been disbanded and a new agency had been propped up by the current regime, I felt sadness and anger.

18F had some of the best and brightest designers on the team with an impossibly large job in guiding government agencies to build, buy, and share technology products. 18F developed the US Web Design System, which helped build accessible and mobile-friendly government websites. 18F had been doing a great job as the US government’s digital agency.

Now we have this! 🤦🏽‍♂️

As designer Christopher Butler put it, “President Trump’s appointment of AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as ‘Chief Design Officer’ of the United States is a sickening travesty. It not only proves a fundamental misunderstanding of both design and governance, but an unbound commitment to corruption.”

As with everything this President does, it will turn out a disaster and the American public will be left to pick up the pieces.

🔗 America by Design Fail

The Mindful Designer

Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

Whether you’ve been at it for 10 months or 10 years, the only certainty in life for creatives is that at some point, you’ll find yourself working on a project that disintegrates into the kind of diabolical shit-show that makes you question reality.

When I started my design career, I encountered numerous projects that went awry. At that time, I didn’t know any better and thought that’s just how things were done. Micromanagement, indecision, rudeness, spec work, and unpaid bills seemed like the price of doing business, that was, until I read Mike Monteiro’s book, Design is a job. Mike’s book helped me gain self-confidence to stand up for myself and see myself as being equal to the client and not someone who is at the mercy of a client. My relationship changed from then on out, which is why this article resonated with me.

Hearing the stories of how projects went south brought back painful memories from the past. This article is a must-read, especially for those starting, so you aren’t taken advantage of.

Here are a few of the examples shared in the post:

“For me, the projects that went sideways always had the same problem,” says brand design powerhouse James Martin, better known as Made By James, “I rushed in too fast. I jumped into design before we nailed the basics like scope, roles, and who actually makes the call.”

“It quickly became apparent that neither the client (a multi-national sports brand) nor their agency knew what they wanted. The project was re-briefed from scratch three times in as many weeks, including 48 hours before the print deadline. I was stressed out of my mind. It cost me a lot of sleepless nights and really shook my confidence for a time.”

What can you do to prevent a shit-storm from happening in the first place?

Here are a few ideas shared:

• No contract = no leverage

• Don’t rush in too fast; nail down the basics such as scope, roles, and who makes the calls

• Red flags (run the other way):

  • When you hear things like “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  • People who aren’t on time

  • People who can’t spell

The key thing to remember is:

As much as you care about what you put your name on, no job is worth damaging your mental health or losing sleep over (maybe a few hours here and there).

Of course, we also have to bring our best selves to each project to keep our cool, be professional, and most of all be a good human.

✊🏽

🔗 Disaster Artist: How To Survive When A Project Gets Ugly

Motivation

Do small things with great love.

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

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

You know those moments when you come across a concept that you don’t fully understand, and instead of taking the time to learn more about it, you move on?

Understandably, ain’t nobody got time to stop and look up a concept every time we hear the word!

But what if we stopped to understand better the concepts that elude us?

In today’s newsletter, I did just that.

One concept I’d been skipping past for years finally caught my attention this week.

This past Sunday, I came across Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and instead of moving on, I finally decided to take some time to learn about the importance of the story. I watched YouTube videos, searched online for the story so I could read it myself.

I found the allegory fascinating and on point for how people operate in this world by believing what the people tell them is real instead of seeking the truth for themselves.

I hope you take the time to start collecting concepts that you come across and need to learn more about, so just like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, you can be the prisoner who escapes the cave once and for all.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Today's Gems

1. Personal Growth: The defense against slop and brainrot

2. The Mindful Designer: Toward a mindful designer: Mindfulness as an essential skill for interaction designers

3. Philosophy: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

4. Wisdom: On Authenticity

Personal Growth

The defense against slop and brainrot

When friction disappears, so does a hidden form of conditioning. Consider what happens when you remove resistance from any training: your muscles atrophy. The same principle applies to mental capabilities. Every hard task you delegate is a rep you didn't do, a pattern your neurons didn't carve deeper.

As AI lures us into taking the easy way out.

As AI entices us to take one more hit.

As AI puts us in the back seat of our own thinking.

As AI promises to automate the hard work.

We can push back and invest the time needed to learn and develop the skills we require while intentionally using AI, so we don’t hand over what makes us human, our essence, to the AI overlords.

Let’s keep the friction in gaining knowledge and skills that set us apart.

I love the passage Paul shared from Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code, which uncovers the process of developing skills at the molecular level:

“The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here’s why. Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

Let’s aim for slow and steady knowledge acquisition.

Let’s aim to develop the fundamentals instead of opting for quick hacks.

Let’s aim for boring repetition where the true skill development happens.

Expertise takes time and we must be willing to put in the effort so we can stand out in a world of brain rot and slop.

The next time you are faced with the choice of taking the easy way out, remind yourself:

The resistance training nobody talks about isn't happening in gyms—it's happening in the space between stimulus and response, in the choice between easy and excellent, in the daily decision to build strength instead of just borrowing it.

✊🏽

🔗 in

The Mindful Designer

Toward a mindful designer: Mindfulness as an essential skill for interaction designers

As designers, what must we add to our toolkit to reimagine and design a sustainable future?

As technology takes over every aspect of our outer world, there is one place we can hope to find peace and that is our inner state. As designers, we can practice mindfulness to create the space needed to be fully present at work and in our lives so we can learn, listen, and think clearly.

As the challenges we must solve for evolve and become more complex, we must take the time to find the inner peace so we can keep our most precious resource, our attention, focused on the task at hand.

A designer who practices mindfulness understands that problem-solving is not a one-time event, but rather a continuous process of improving the current state toward a better future state. They acknowledge that change is inevitable and strive to learn and grow with their users in a constantly evolving technological environment.

As you go about your day, think about how you might bring more mindfulness into your day to help you solve the problems the best you can.

🔗 Interactions.acm.org

Philosophy

💡 Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Last weekend, I decided that I was going to learn what Plato’s Allegory of the Cave was all about. I had heard about it in passing, but never stopped to understand the lesson it conveys, and I’m so glad I did.

This video does a great job explaining the story. The people in the cave took the shadows as reality. Little did they know that other people were casting the shadows which they took to be real, so real in fact that when one of the prisoners who was able to get out of the cave and see the truth of how things were, and when he went back down to the other prisoners, they mocked him and even threatened him with violence to keep their way of living intact.

How does this story apply to our own selves?

We are the prisoners in the cave.

We are the ones believing the shadows of the shapes thrown onto the cave walls are our reality.

We are the ones believing in the ideas passed onto us by the media, corporations, politicians, religious leaders, and others with ulterior motives, as truth, so they can keep their power over us.

We are the ones who need to go outside the cave by breaking free of the ideas we are made to believe as facts and just how things have always been, even though they hurt others.

We are the ones who need to seek the truth out and experience reality for ourselves, instead of believing in old, passed-down stories.

We are the ones who cannot go back to ignorance once we understand reality and our connection with the world, the people, and all living things within it.

We must break free from ignorance!

Wisdom

On Clinging to the good and rejecting the bad

Art

Cover art for Three Stories I must tell

Just look at the deep orange color of the sun rays on the beautiful mountain. 🥰

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

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

You know those moments at work when someone says something that gets under your skin, or things just don’t go the way you hoped? The little annoyances that add up and leave you feeling worked up.

What if, instead of resisting and pushing back, we simply acknowledged them for what they are and focused on what we can control?

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Zen Master Seung Sahn:

“Make your opinion, your condition, and your situation disappear, then a difficult situation is OK; noise is OK; your mind will be unmoving.”

By accepting reality as it is, we can show up more effectively without wasting energy resisting what is beyond our control.

When we loosen our grip on fixed opinions, desires, and attachments to specific outcomes, something shifts.

The moment opens up and possibilities appear.

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Today's Gems 👀

1. Mindfulness: The Dog That Howls Inside Your Head: Learning to Tame the Inner Critic

2. Mindfulness: How to Observe Mindfully (And Not Lose Your Mind)

3. The Mindful Designer: Practicing Serendipity

4. Wisdom: On Authenticity

Mindfulness

The Dog That Howls Inside Your Head: Learning to Tame the Inner Critic

“The meanest dog you'll ever meet

He ain't the hound dog in the street

He bares some teeth and tears some skin

But, brother, that's the worst of him

The dog you really got to dread

Is the one that howls inside your head

It's him whose howling drives men mad

And a mind to its undoing.”

That dog. That howling. That’s the inner critic.

I know this inner critic all too well. He shows up at exactly the moment I need to get out of my comfort zone, whispering doubt, indecision, and fear into me. Keeping me imprisoned in a story of my own making. The more I give in to him, the stronger he gets. The more I listen to him, the louder he gets.

But there is a way out!

Mindfulness is the key!

Mindfulness is the practice of noticing what’s here with curiosity and kindness. It gives us just enough distance from our thoughts to see them for what they are. Thoughts. When we’re mindful, we begin to recognize the inner critic as thoughts that follow a pattern and represent a narrow perception. They do not reflect the truth and are not a prophecy.

When we can catch our thoughts before they snowball into stories we fall into, we can create space for our true selves. We can breathe and not fall into unwanted thoughts and behaviors.

But just for today, consider this:

What if that voice wasn’t telling the truth?

🔗 Dr. Susan Beesley in MindfulGrowthAK.com

Mindfulness

How to Observe Mindfully (And Not Lose Your Mind)

To observe mindfully you intentionally pay attention to the present moment, without trying to control, change, or judge what’s happening.

As we rush through the day from one task to the next and fall into the distraction traps along the way while our runaway thoughts throw us into stories of our own making, we can slow down and pause to bring intentional, nonjudgmental awareness to the present moment.

Observe the moment mindfully is a practice in which we can use all our senses, our breath, and our bodies to start to connect and get back to ourselves, within our bodies and with our true selves.

I love all the ways listed in this article to help us bring curiosity and wonder into the smallest and simplest things we do by:

• Observing with our eyes

• Observing with our sense of touch

• Observing with our ears

• Observing with our nose

• Observing taste

• Observing our urges

• Observing our full sensory experience

• Observing our breath

• Observing our thoughts

• and expanding our overall awareness

Every moment is another chance to notice what’s real!

🔗 Fundamentalgrowth.com

Mindset

Practicing Serendipity

Serendipity is more than a moment. It’s more than luck, and it’s more than chance.

It’s a practice of seeking, encountering, connecting, and activating—and it can unlock new ideas you wouldn’t have expected, innovations you never dreamt of, and clarity you didn’t expect.

It’s a practice.

A way of existing in the world.

And anyone can do it.

We can either go through life hoping for good luck or we can be intentional by adopting the right mindset and behaviors to enable new, favorable, and unexpected scenarios to arise, which creates serendipity.

As a mindful designer, you are also a practicing serendipitist because you approach life with an open mind. You are in the moment and open to all of life’s possibilities. You seek out your curiosities because of your innate desire to learn, grow, and share with others.

Check out and subscribe to the newsletter by to learn how others have created value by practicing serendipity.

Practicing Serendipitist

What is a Practicing Serendipitist?

The Practice of Serendipity…

Read more

a year ago · 4 likes

Inspiration

💡 On Authenticity

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

In stillness, find your next step.✊🏽

Low Fidelity explores the inner game of creativity through mindsets, mindfulness, and personal growth, drawing on honest stories and lessons from lived experience. Inspired by a Zen approach, it invites presence, patience, and simplicity into the creative process.

Founded and led by Rizwan Javaid, Low Fidelity offers reflections and insights to help readers navigate their own creative and personal journeys with clarity, intention, and a sense of calm focus.

Hey all. It’s been a while since I have posted.

No, I wasn’t travelling across the US on my bike or went to a months long silent retreat. Not that there is anything wrong with either of those and maybe one day I will take part those activities. I took a pause from the newsletter because work got busy and all my mental effort was put into doing my project right, kind of like when the one part of the body needs help all the available resources are sent to it for to ensure survival. All my mental energy was diverted to my work with not much time left for writing.

I was far away from my writing, which made me sad.

It’s been a rough few months but now I am slowly re-entering my happy place, writing this newsletter, where I can share interesting ideas that can help us think differently and grow to be more present in our everyday lives.

Although during the break, I didn’t go on some big adventure out in the world, I did go on an adventure within. I took time to do what I love to do, which is spend time with my family, draw, run, bake, cook, and read about Zen and mindfulness. I practiced mindfulness through the storms of everyday life, being in the moment through whatever learning opportunity life presented me. Sometimes I succeeded and many times I did not but that is the practice which will continue.

I truly appreciate your support through all my ups and downs. ✊🏽

On to this week’s gems…

Today's Gems

1. If You’re Not Growing as a Designer, This Might Be Why: The Self-Awareness Dilemma

2. Know Thyself: How to Write a Reflexivity Statement

3. The Essential Guide to Shadow Work: Integrate Your Wounded Parts + Live Your Authentic Self

4. The Metaskills You Need to Thrive in the 21st Century

5. The Mindful Designer: Embrace Constructive Criticism

But, first

Because our country is on fire…

How to protect and serve

There’s a common belief among the red-pilled MAGA crowd that the people causing all this disruption and mayhem in American cities are paid actors. And here I’ll throw them a bone—they are correct. They’re just looking at the wrong people. The people causing the disruption and mayhem in our streets are paid out of city budgets, with seemingly bottomless overtime allowances and billionaire gifts, and the cover of elected officials.

As ICE is kidnapping people and the raids are breaking up families and wreaking havoc in communities, people have taken to the streets to protest these inhumane acts. It takes courage, true empathy, and it’s the true meaning of “to protect and serve”.

As Mike says:

We are united in wanting to protect each other. We are united in wanting to protect and to serve our community.

The threat of violence isn’t coming from the crowds, the community members, the protesters, it’s from the violence workers, the police in military armor who are carrying military gear.

We, the people, protect and serve each other.

The people are the sanctuary.

We protect and serve each other.

✊🏽

🔗 How to protect and serve by Mike Monteiro

Self-Discovery

💜 If You’re Not Growing as a Designer, This Might Be Why: The Self-Awareness Dilemma

Self-awareness isn't just about knowing yourself—it's about how your awareness (or lack of it) affects your ability to collaborate, receive feedback, and grow. The best creatives aren't just talented; they actively work on seeing their blind spots.

Feedback can be tough so we may resist it at first, but knowing that we don’t have all the information, it can be a empowering experience. Without feedback we operate in the dark and may stumble our way forward but with feedback we light our path to put our best foot forward.

Seeking feedback within the right environment, with the right people, helps us break through our assumptions to make informed decisions about our own growth and how we show up as design leaders.

I love the idea of making self-reflection a habit after each project by asking

What went well? What could I have done better?

🚀

🔗 If You’re Not Growing as a Designer, This Might Be Why: The Self-Awareness Dilemma by Barney Abramson

Self-Awareness

💜 Embrace the Darkness (Carl Jung & The Shadow)

Self-Awareness

😅 The Metaskills You Need to Thrive in the 21st Century

Skills are temporary; meta-skills are permanent.

Self-awareness has a more positive impact on leadership than an MBA. Studies show that self-awareness encourages us to lead ourselves with authenticity and integrity — and in turn, better lead others.

Self-awareness is a meta-skill that can help us work through the uncertainty, unpredictability, and the constant change we face in our work and our lives. By knowing ourselves better and how others see us we can accept our reality and operate with more information to be able to do something about it instead of taking shots in the dark. Instead of fighting reality and denying it we can learn to let go of the tension and accept it and work through or around it.

When we resist, we get stuck. When we accept reality, we can act.

Self-awareness helps us adapt, take ownership of ourselves, and be more present in our lives so we can learn, grow, and be our best selves.

✌🏽

🔗 The Metaskills You Need to Thrive in the 21st Century by Fearless Culture

Self Awareness

🌏 Embrace Constructive Criticism

I have a very tough time being criticized, corrected, or accused – of even the smallest mistakes – and I react very angrily. I’ve wrestled this instinct under control in a professional context, more or less, but I have more trouble with it at home. All it takes is for my daughter to make a mild comment such as, “You forgot to remind me to bring my library book,” to set me off. “What do you mean… it’s not my responsibility…I didn’t know Wednesday was Library Day…” etc., etc.

Yeah, this sounds like an all too familiar reaction for me too. A slight criticism can set off a chain reaction which we end up regretting in the end.

Here are some strategies Gretchen shares to help keep us from falling into over reactions:

• Listen to what the critic is saying

• Don’t be defensive

• Don’t expose yourself to criticism from people you don’t respect

• Delay your reaction

• Admit your mistakes

• Enjoy the fun of failure

As designers, we will face situations where we are criticized and challenged but the key is to develop strategies to be open to fair critique, shield ourselves from uninformed criticism, and to use the information we gain from those situations wisely instead of reacting negatively.

💜

🔗 How To Embrace Constructive Criticism and Leave the Rest Behind by Gretchen Rubin

Wisdom

On Shadow Work

“This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant things that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment.

But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious. The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.”

- Carl Jung

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

May curiosity be your guide!

Hey all!

I’m kicking off a new issue of this week’s Friday Gems in which I share posts, videos, quotes to a single topic. This week’s issue is dedicated to the topic of creative confidence.

Why creative confidence? Because it is a critical part of our journey in life. Approaching each moment with a beginner’s mind, leaning into our fear and anxiety, seeking feedback, and using curiosity as our guide, we can show up and lean into each moment with intention and authenticity to reach our full potential.

Hit reply and let me know what you think about this new issue.

On to this week’s creative confidence gems.

Today's Gems 👀

1. 🤘🏽 Embrace feedback as a gift

2. 🌱 Embrace being a beginner

3. 🙌🏽 Embrace Failure as a form of success

4. 😅 Embrace Anxiety as a gateway to creativity

5. 💜 The Mindful Designer: How to spark your curiosity, scientifically

6. 👀 A creative confidence manifesto

Creative Confidence

💜 Embrace feedback as a gift

Feedback is not just about criticism or negative comments. It encompasses a wide range of perspectives, opinions, and observations from others about our actions, behavior, and performance.

Feedback is a gift.

Whether it is in the form of positive encouragement or constructive criticism, feedback is an invaluable gift for developing our creative confidence. The idea that criticism is helpful was a challenging idea for me to wrap my head around because in my mind all criticism was bad. Not until I separated the negative and harsh comments that are intended to hurt us from the positive and encouraging feedback did I realize the power of feedback for personal growth and self-improvement.

We can go about our days oblivious to how our actions, behaviors and performance are affecting ourselves and others but once we open up to feedback from the people we trust, it can lead to clarity and profound positive effects on our mental health and wellbeing.

By accepting feedback as a gift and leveraging it for positive change, we empower ourselves to lead more fulfilling and mentally healthy lives. So, the next time you receive feedback, embrace it with gratitude and curiosity, for it may hold the key to unlocking your full potential.

Asking for feedback may seem scary at first but using it as tool for our personal growth it becomes clear that feedback is in fact a gift.

Now the question is, who can you ask to provide you feedback?

✊🏽

🔗 The Gift of Feedback: How Embracing Constructive Criticism Enhances Mental Health by Kind Mind Psychology

Creative Confidence

💜 Embrace being a beginner

If you’ve ever learned something new, you can remember what that’s like: you’re probably confused, because you don’t know how to do whatever you’re learning, but you’re also looking at everything as if it’s brand new, perhaps with curiosity and wonder. That’s beginner’s mind.

As we gain knowledge and develop our skills we start to assume things with certainty. We hold on to stories our minds create instead of seeing things as they actually are. We overlook, assume, and carry around preconceived notions the world around us.

Developing a beginner’s mind helps us lead with curiosity and openness without the fear or judgement which helps develop our creative confidence.

You can practice developing a beginner’s mind right now by looking at an object close by and paying close attention to it. See the shape, feel the texture, examine the details, hold the object if you can or touch it and see it with all your senses.

A beginner’s mind helps us stop taking things, people, and the world around us for granted and helps us transform the ordinary into the awe inspiring wonder all around us in this very moment.

🔗 Approaching Life with Beginner's Mind by Zen Habits

Creative Confidence

💜 Embrace failure as a form of success

Whether it’s a missed opportunity, a business venture gone awry, or a personal setback, failure is a universal phenomenon. Rather than viewing it as a dead-end, we should consider failure as a feedback mechanism — an opportunity to learn, adapt, and evolve.

Failure is a key ingredient to developing our creative confidence.

This is not glamorizing failure, but seeing failure’s inherent transformative power to provide us the knowledge and insights to help guide us in the right direction.

Rather than viewing it as a dead-end, we should consider failure as a feedback mechanism — an opportunity to learn, adapt, and evolve.

Creative confidence arises in us when we stop seeing failure as a reflection on ourselves and our abilities and opening up to the valuable message it provides us to help direct us toward our goals.

As we navigate the complexities of life, let us embrace failure with open arms, recognizing its ability to shape us into more resilient, creative, and adaptable individuals.

🔗 Power of Failure by Ria Vanessa Caliste

Creative Confidence

😅 Anxiety is a gateway to creative confidence

Instead of seeing anxiety as something to run or hide from, what if we learned to trust our anxiety and gave it the role of our muse guiding us towards our unique creative expression?

Creative Confidence

📆 A Creative Confidence Manifesto

1. YOU MUST ENJOY THE PROCESS

2. SHAME IS NOT SUSTAINABLE

3. DERIVE AS MUCH PLEASURE AS POSSIBLE IN THE PROCESS

4. YOU GENERATE YOUR OWN MAGIC

5. WORK IN INTENTIONAL CONTAINERS OF TIME

6. THE ACT OF LIVING INTENTIONALLY IS A CREATIVE PROCESS IN ITSELF

7. YOUR CREATIVE PROJECT IS A FRAGILE LIVING ENTITY THAT MUST BE FED TIME, ATTENTION, SPACE, ACTIVE CARE, ENTHUSIASM, STRUCTURE, EXCITEMENT UNTIL IT IS READY TO THRIVE IN THE WORLD ON ITS OWN INDEPENDENT OF YOU

8. FOCUS ON GENERATING THE WORK AND TRUST THAT THE SOLUTIONS WILL COME

9. LOVING YOUR WORK AND BELIEVING IN YOUR WORK AND COMMITTING TO YOUR WORK IN TANGIBLE, CONCRETE WAYS ARE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY, ALWAYS

10. THE WORST CASE SCENARIO IS UNLIVED POTENTIAL, NEVER FAILURE, BECAUSE FAILURE IS STILL A SUCCESS, AN ATTEMPT AT SOMETHING THAT REVEALS MORE VALUABLE INFORMATION FOR THE NEXT TIME YOU DO IT AGAIN

Source: Unknown

Creative Confidence

🌏 Embrace curiosity

Think about how something works, take it apart to test it. Manipulate something and prove some physical principle to yourself. Put the human back in technology.

Instead of assuming things are a certain way, what if we opened ourselves up to new possibilities by leaning in to our curiosity so we can uncover new ideas and opportunities.

In this Ted talk, experimental physicist Nadya Mason emphasizes the need to experiment with the world around us instead of sitting on the sidelines and being passive consumers, especially as technology takes over our lives, I’m look at you AI.

By developing an experimentation mindset we can overcome our fear of failure while continually trying new approaches on our way to building our creative confidence.

🔗 How to spark your curiosity, scientifically by Naday Mason/Ted

Wisdom

💡 Spark your curiosity

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world…”

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity….Don’t stop to marvel.

— Albert Einstein

💡 Judge your work, not yourself!

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

May curiosity be your guide!

There is power in groups.

Currently I’m fasting during the month of Ramadan and have experienced mental and physical changes such as increased focus, mental clarity, and weight loss. I have tried intermittent fasting before but wasn’t able to continue it for longer periods of time to notice any positive effects.

One reason for this I believe is that I have group support. Since I am fasting with my family and not alone, I know the temptations to eat will be less.

I recently took a course in Systems Mapping and the coursework included group work after each section. The group work helped us learn and apply the new ideas because we discussed and interacted with each other as we were mapping a system which helped deepen our knowledge and understanding.

As the African proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I’m usually one to do things alone so I can go faster with less back and forth but there are times when we gain from the interactions, ideas, and the valuable experiences of others.

There is power in groups. ✊🏽

On to this week’s gems.

Today's Gems 👀

1. Mindfulness: 🤘🏽 Start your day with intentionality

2. Slow Movement: 🌱 Slow Your Roll!

3. The Mindful Designer: 🌏 Living In a World of Systems

4. Wisdom: 💡 Accepting all parts of ourselves

Mindfulness

🤘🏽 Start your day with intentionality

It’s easy to rush into the day and become consumed by the waves of meetings and deliverables but what if we took a moment before we start by making intention of how we would like to show up.

I have taped the work gatha up on the wall by my desk where I can see it at all times and have been reciting it before I start every morning. I appreciate the mindful reminder of bringing my whole self to each task and interaction during the day while also tampering down my ego when needed.

🔗 Work Gatha by

Slow Movement

🌱 Slow Your Roll!

The concept of Slow TV is to show something at the rate it is experienced, as opposed to the speed with which a narrative drama is told. There is no editing or script, as it’s built around transition and movement instead of tension and plot. It goes beyond definitions of “naturalism,” which still condenses human experience into bitesize pieces. It is the portrayal of often mundane experiences in real-time, like a train journey or knitting, as a human would experience it.

I love the idea of Slow TV to connect with experiences as they actually happen.

No editing.

No dialogue.

No selling.

Just a moment of calmness.

A life lived observing the principles of slow philosophy is a life spent “savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them”

Slow TV helps us be in the immediate present without all the noise and distractions of dialogue and drama so we can connect with nature and within ourselves.

🔗 Slow Down With Norway’s Slow TV by Scandinavia Standard

Systems Thinking

🌏 Living In a World of Systems

We are a collection of systems, living in a world of systems.

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts.

This video, In a world of systems, narrated and illustrated by David Macaulay, who also wrote and illustrated The Way Things Work, another great book about the systems around us, does a great job of explaining the systems we interact with and are part of in our everyday lives from the water system in our homes to the traffic system we encounter.

David Macaulay explains the systems thinking concepts such as:

• Causal loop diagrams - A visual representation of systems and how the parts interact with each other. For example, the amount of money you have in the bank and how your income and spending affect that amount.

• Stock - The quantity of the thing we are measuring at a specific point in time. For example, the amount of money in your bank account at a specific time.

• Flow - The rate of change of the stock or activity over a period of time. For example, the rate of money that goes in and out of your account.

• Delay - The amount of time it takes for the parts of a system to influence each other. For example, getting paid every two weeks vs. every month is a delay in the loop to add to the total balance in your bank account.

• Reinforcing loops - These are loops where change in one part of the loop causes a change in another part of the loop in the same direction causing growth or decay. Compound interest is a great example for this. The more money you have in your account, the more interest you earn which increases the amount of money in your account.

• Balancing loops - These are loops that bring a system back to the desired state. For example, if your bank account is below a certain level, the bank charges you a fee, so you deposit money to bring the balance up so you don’t get charged the extra fee.

Systems thinking s a fascinating topic and the first book you must read, or in my case listen to is Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows.

I consider this book the bible of Systems Thinking.

In the book, Donella Meadows explains the core concepts with real life examples to help the reader understand the terms and make the real world connections. But I warn you that you will not see your world the same, which is a good thing.

🔗 In A World of Systems narrated and illustrated by David Macaulay (of "How Things Work")

Political

✊🏽 Cyber Truck Man

Fight Nazism!

A retelling of the iconic Tiananmen Square photo for the dangerous times we live in.

Resist! ✊🏽

Credit: Zez Vaz

Wisdom

💡 Accepting all parts of ourselves

The degree to which a person can grow is in direct proportion to the amount of truth they can accept about themselves without running away

Anonymous

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

May curiosity be your guide!

Hey all!

A few weeks ago I added the new section to the newsletter and the Friday Gems issue called The Mindful Designer which was born from the need to help designers, myself included, embody mindful wisdom so we can thrive and not just survive, and bring joy and move past the struggles, continuously learn for professional growth, enhance our creativity, and most importantly lead with curiosity in our design practice.

I have been going back and forth on whether to create a separate newsletter out of it so I can expand on the topics I talk about.

Your input is important to me, so I would like to get your thoughts:

➡️ Would you find value in a separate The Mindful Designer newsletter?

Hit reply and let me know, thanks! 🙏🏽

On to this week’s gems.

Today's Gems

1. Self-Awareness: 🕳️ A deep hole

2. Self-Discovery: 🤑 Anxiety is expensive

3. The Mindful Designer: ✏️ A FREE Graphic Recording course!

4. Wisdom: 💡 Being content with who you are & Be patient, you’re growing

Self-Awareness

🕳️ A Deep Hole

Change takes time. Changing our unhelpful behaviors also takes time.

Going from being unaware of the problem to coping and eventually knowing how to not fall into the trap takes awareness, time, effort, and small steps forward, falling down and getting back up many times, and then being free from the unhelpful behavior.

Portia Nelson’s poem “Autobiography in Five Chapters” sums up the process beautifully.

Text of the poem from the image:

Autobiography in five short chapters

by Portia Nelson

Chapter One

I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in.

I am lost....I am helpless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

Chapter Two

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I pretend I don't see it

I fall in again.

I can't believe I am in this same place.

But, it wasn't my fault

It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter Three

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I see it is there

I still fall in....it's a habit...but,

my eyes are open

I know where I am

It is MY fault

I get out immediately

Chapter Four

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I walk around it

Chapter Five

I walk down another street

I dug up this gem from the Low Fidelity archives:

Self-Discovery

🤑 Anxiety is expensive

Anxiety is expensive—not just in terms of the mental toll, but in the way it costs us our lives. Every minute spent consumed by worry is a minute lost.

For the past few weeks I have been waking up around 2am and have not been able to go back to sleep. As soon as I wake up thoughts of what happened the day before and what could happen the next day keep racing through my head. This movie keeps playing over and over switching from one worry to the next. Thoughts such as, “why did I say that in the meeting?” or “what if I mess up on my project?” or “what if I miss my alarm and oversleep and end up missing my race?, the list goes on and on.

I mean really, it is quite predictable by now.

Worry leads to more worry, until the cycle becomes self-sustaining.

Each night the cycle continues.

But the problem isn’t with what is going on outside, in the world around us, it’s our reaction to the world.

Work. Your kids. Politics. Flying. These things aren’t the source of your anxiety. You are. They’re just places. Just people. Just things happening in the world. We’re the ones getting upset about them. Certainly, the airport isn’t thinking about us!

Yeah, thoughts that keep me up at night are nowhere else but in my mind.

So is there a way out? Yes!

The Stoics, a group of philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome who were focused on living a well-lived life, provided strategies to deal with this expensive habit that takes a toll on us mentally, physically, emotionally, and robs us of our precious time and attention.

The Stoics offered timeless strategies: stay in the present moment, detach from the illusion of control, and gain perspective. Epictetus reminds us, “It’s not events that upset us but our opinions about them.” Anxiety thrives on those opinions. Letting go of them can be transformative.

To sum it up, we can begin to loosen the grip anxiety has on us by:

• Staying in the present moment instead of spending time lost in worry

• Detaching from the illusion of control by realizing we don’t have complete power over situations or outcomes

• Gain perspective by realizing we can choose to look at events from a helpful and wise lens rather than a negative view lens

But most importantly we can continually remind ourselves the words of Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, “It’s not events that upset us but our opinions about them.”

Now I know how to tackle the anxious thoughts that wake me up at night. I’m looking forward to a good nights sleep. 💤

🔗 This is My Most Expensive Habit by Ryan Holiday

Visual Communication

✏️ A FREE Graphic recording quick skills course!

Get your sketching on!

You know those moments when everyone on your team seems to be on a different page and have a wildly different understanding of an idea?

In those moments, visual communication can be a savior. By quickly sketching the idea and sharing it we can help ourselves and our teams gain clarity, understanding, have better conversations, and understand complex concepts.

This is where developing your Graphic Recording skills will be useful. The more comfortable you are in communicating visually the faster you can communicate your ideas, get people on the same page, gain and retain knowledge, and cut through complexity.

I learned about Sara Firth from her visually engaging graphic article Making Sense of Complexity on Medium (Sorry, it’s Member Only Story). In her article she makes a case for embracing ambiguity and celebrating uncertainty wherever we come across it, and from my experience complexity is everywhere in our daily work and especially in how we communicate and collaborate with others.

Sharing ideas visually is a secret power that can help free us from the tyranny of endless meetings and long email chains.

Let me know if you take this course. I would love to hear your experience.

FREE Graphic recording quick skills course by Sarah Firth

Wisdom

💡 Being content with who you are

“To think that you will be happy by becoming something else is delusion. Becoming something else just exchanges one form of suffering for another form of suffering. But when you are content with who you are now, junior or senior, married or single, rich or poor, then you are free of suffering.”

― Ajahn Brahm

💡 Be patient, you’re growing

“When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as 'rootless and stemless.' We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed.

When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear.

We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development.

The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential.

It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is."

― W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

via Teresa Brazen’s newsletter Be Brazen

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems. Hit reply and share any gems you have found insightful.✌🏽

May curiosity be your guide!

Empathy is not a checkbox.

Empathy is not empty slogan.

Empathy is not optional.

As designers, when we claim to be human-centered, we need to have empathy for ALL people and not just the users of their products or services. Our empathy shouldn’t be transactional and for the benefit of a company or our team or our in-group. We must expand our empathy, our hospitality, our grace to all humans especially in these challenging times.

Let’s show empathy for all humans and not just those privileged to buy our products or use our services! ✊🏽

On to this week’s gems.

In this week’s edition: 

💎 Awareness: Thought Control

✌🏽 Self-Discovery: The 100 Things Challenge

💜 The Mindful Designer: Expedition Mindset

🧠 Wisdom: Survival

🎵 Music: "Denial is a River" / "Boiled Peanuts" - Doechii

Awareness

💎 Thought Control

Peace isn’t a place with no fear, but a place where fear can be felt.

Do you ever feel sleeplessness before a big event? It happens each and every single time for me the night before a race, a presentation, a podcast interview, basically anything that gets me out of my comfort zone. I usually fight the thoughts, tossing and turning, as they rage through my mind and body but reading Carina’s post on how she also struggled with her runaway thoughts gives us a path forward through the angst.

Fear wanted to have a seat at the banquet table and I was trying to think it into going away.

The thoughts are not the issue, the emotions we feel are not the issue, it our distaste for the feelings that cause us the distress.

But fear wasn’t the problem. My distaste for it was. My thinking was the fumes from the fire I hadn’t put out yet.

Getting to the root of issue is critical to breaking free from the grip our thoughts have on us. Accepting our emotions and working with them is the path forward to less sleepless nights and a better life.

We can’t start to feel until we stop hating our big feelings or ourselves for being “sensitive.”

P.S Thank you Carina for sharing the Doechii video, I had heard about her but never heard her music let alone watch her perform and like you I’m obsessed. 💜

🔗 Thought Control by

Self-Discovery

💎 The 100 Things Challenge

It was easy to come up with the first twenty or so wants. The middle sixty stretched my brain. And the final twenty was when the real challenge began.

The insightful part was what happened next.

If you’re like me, you spend a many hours in your head thinking about the things you desire.

These things we want bounce around in our heads, sometimes we are aware of them but other times they subconsciously direct us in directions that aren’t aligned with our values and can end up distracting us and even hurting us.

This is where the 100 Wants List challenge can be a powerful tool for self-discovery.

Kim Witten, a transformational coach, initially shared the 100 Wants List Challenge with me when she joined on the Low Fidelity podcast. Kim recently updated her challenge by sharing the insights she gained as a result.

When you embark on this challenge keep in mind that our wants change depending on our mood, so try doing this challenge when you’re not rushed or stressed out.

Think of the list you create as a living document and update it as you become aware of your wants.

As I started my own list of wants, I realized that instead of making a vague statement such as “I want a better car”, being more specific brought more meaning to my want and instead wrote, “I want a more reliable car so I don’t have to worry about it breaking down.” which I think will help sorting and prioritization of my wants.

The goal is to challenge yourself to get past the surface level wants to the interesting and perhaps the hidden wants that could be influencing your thoughts and behavior.

This is a wonderful exercise that can be done regularly to see what patterns emerge and most importantly to live a more intentional life.✊🏽

🔗 Dare to Create a List of 100 Things You Want - Then do this with it by

Personal Growth

🧠 Expedition Mindset

An expedition mindset is an approach to problem solving that can be applied to a wide range of workplace challenges. It emphasises planning, rapid prioritisation under pressure, with an emphasis on healthy team culture and wellbeing.

The Expedition Mindset was originally developed as a toolkit for research teams on expeditions in Afghanistan which required disparate team members to come together quickly to work towards a shared, high impact goal, with high pressure and severe constraints which also has many similarities with work projects.

As mindful designers, we are also working with diverse group of people who need to come together quickly, with high pressure and a high visibility goal as well as with many constraints.

Whether we are out in a hostile land or in the safety of an office, developing an expedition mindset is a empowering tool for our personal growth.

Here are a few skills needed to develop an expedition mindset:

• Awareness of team member intents - Bringing awareness to each team member’s goals can help with decision making.

• Prioritization - I would make this ruthless prioritization so that the team works on the most critical tasks without wasting time.

• Flexibility - Each moment brings new information and change. By remaining flexible we can adapt to new information without letting it derail us.

• Self-sufficiency - Feeling empowered to make decisions on our own enables us to use be creative and feel a sense of ownership of the team goals.

• Extensive Team collaboration - By removing the noise of drama, distractions, and bringing more clarity the team can feel supported to work together towards the goal.

These real skills will help you feel empowered to bring your best, lean in, and make an impact within your team and with the team’s goals.✊🏽

🔗 Developing an Expedition Mindset by Studio D

Wisdom

💎 Survival

It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Music

💎 Denial is a River by Doechii

Yes, I have been living under a rock. This is the first time I have heard the amazing and lyrical rapper, Doechii. The rhyming lyrics, the music, the storytelling, the choreography, the everything, is just perfect!!!

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems. Hit reply and share any gems you have found insightful.

May curiosity be your guide!

Hi there,

The common thread weaving through each gem this week is learning. Learning how to learn, learning how to live, learning how to understand, and learning through each moment which brings an aliveness within us. This knowledge makes each moment we have exciting because the possibilities are endless.

May each moment be full of enjoyment of learning for you! ✊🏽

On to the gems!

In this week’s edition:

• Learning: The most fundamental skill: Intentional learning and the career advantage

• Keeping It Real: A Rebel’s Manifesto

• The Mindful Designer: Systems Thinking + Zen

• Wisdom: Every moment is the guru

Learning

💎 The most fundamental skill: Intentional learning and the career advantage

Learning itself is a skill, and developing it is a critical driver of long-term career success. People who have mastered the mindsets and skills of effective learning can grow faster than their peers and gain more of the benefits from all the learning opportunities that come their way.

Being intentional is a powerful way to go through our daily lives because it can help guide our actions, emotions, and thoughts towards a desired way of being.

Since learning is a skill in itself, bringing intentionality to our learning helps us become more effective learners.

Formal learning opportunities account for only a small percentage of the learning a professional needs over the course of a career. Everyday experiences and interactions offer tremendous learning opportunities, but only if you intentionally treat every moment as a learning opportunity.

Repeat after me, “Treat every moment is a learning opportunity!”

Every day we are presented with moments where we experience challenges, delays, questions, and uncertainty. Those are perfect opportunities to examine and learn from as a result. The learning opportunities don’t have to be on the vocational side either, they can be in “real skills” such as time management, improved communication, collaboration, etc.

Every experience, conversation, meeting, and deliverable—carries with it an opportunity to develop and grow.

This article explores these core mindsets and skills needed to become a effective learner:

• Adopting a growth mindset - A growth mindset suggests you can grow, expand, evolve, and change.

• Feeding your curiosity - Curiosity is bringing inspiration, awareness, and an openness to ideas to help you make new connections between disparate concepts.

So how do you bring intentionality to your learning journey?

The article suggests five best-practices:

• Set small, clear goals

• Remove distractions

• Actively seek feedback

• Practice deliberately

• Practice regular reflection

Being an intentional learner helps us invest in ourselves, raises our skills, keeps us engaged and inspired, and aligns us to the goals we seek.

Remember, “Treat every moment is a learning opportunity!”

✊🏽

Source: McKinsey Quarterly

Keeping It Real

💎 A Rebel’s Manifesto

Which one resonates with you the most?

For me #7 is intriguing. Exploring our “dark qualities” and using them to fuel our creative work is a inner territory to explore.

1. Do the opposite of what you were taught in school.

2. Care not for the opinions of others. They are based on their own thoughts and fears.

3. Study the work of other rebels. steal things from them. Research with fury.

4. Forget about the competition. They are on a different path than you. Trends are for suckers.

5. "There's nothing we really need to do that isn't dangerous." - John Cage. Do the things that scare you on a regular basis.

6. Make a mess.

7. Embrace your darkside. Your so-called dark qualities (as labels) are a source of great power. Find a way to incorporate them into your work. feature them. pay particular attention to what makes you angry.

8. Exercise your voice. put your thoughts, ideas and opinions out into the world even if it scares the shit out of you. (see number 5).

9. Expand your horizons. leave home. visit other places /cultures. Wander aimlessly.

10. Never limit your play-time. even if your brain is telling you otherwise. All of your best stuff comes from it if you allow yourself to remain open to the unknown.

11. Question everything!

13. Follow your heart.

Source: Pinterest

Announcing a new permanent section in this newsletter called The Mindful Designer, in which I will share ideas and insights to help designers bring more awareness, curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and mindfulness into their work, their discipline, and within themselves so they can live a more fulfilling life.

💜 Systems Thinking + Zen

I am currently reading Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows and Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. Both books help to better understand the world we live in and the world within us.

Through Systems Thinking we can perceive the interconnectedness and interdependence of various components within a system.

Through Zen we learn about our interconnectedness with the universe and that nothing exists in isolation.

As I looked a bit closer I found quite a few concepts that are similar in both Systems Thinking and Zen. I could be wrong but I feel there are quite a few connections there such as:

• Interconnectedness - The idea that all things are dependent on one another.

• No boundaries/Non-duality - The idea of “not one, not two”, we are all part of a whole.

• Emergence - New patterns can arise from the interactions between parts within a system. We create our reality as we interact with the people and the world around us.

• Holistic view - Looking at the world around us while also better understanding the mind and the body together.

• Acceptance of Change - Change is a constant within a system and around it. The world, the people, and we ourselves are never the same from one moment to the next.

• Mindfulness - Paying full attention to the world we live in and in each moment, without judgement helps us live with more awareness and understanding.

By understanding these concepts and applying them in our work and life it can help us show up, lean in, and become a mindful designer.

What are your thoughts on the connection between Systems Thinking and Zen? I would love to know!

✊🏽

Wisdom

💎 Every moment is the guru

“Life always gives us
exactly the teacher we need
at every moment.
This includes every mosquito,
every misfortune,
every red light,
every traffic jam,
every obnoxious supervisor (or employee),
every illness, every loss,
every moment of joy or depression,
every addiction,
every piece of garbage,
every breath.

Every moment is the guru.”

― Charlotte Joko Beck

That’s it for this week’s Friday Gems. See you next time!

Hit reply and share any gems you have found insightful.

Till next time, curiosity will save us.

Hi there,

Saturday is the new Friday, ok, maybe not, sorry for the delay in posting this week’s Friday Gems, but here it is.

Also, I’m starting a new permanent section in this issue called “The Mindful Designer” in which I share a gem to help bring more awareness, understanding, and mindfulness into our design practice so we can make a positive impact in the world around us.

Also Also, a few prompts for you:

• What did you think of this issue?

• What do you hope to see in the next one?

Hit reply and let me know. I read every response. Thanks! 💜

On to the gems!

In this week’s edition:

• Ways of Working: Ditching the 40-Hour Trap

• Keeping It Real: Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead

• ⚡️Announcing a new section - The Mindful Designer: A Designerly Inventory

• Wisdom: How to survive being online

Ways of Working

💎 Ditching the 40-Hour Trap

If you have ever been micro-managed, you know that feeling of dread that comes over you as you arrive at work not a second later than 9am and not leaving a second earlier than 5pm or not being out of your seat for too long and making sure the boss is hearing you type away to show that you are busy working every minute of the day.

Companies often think micromanagement and overwork will get the most out of their employees.

Hopefully you haven’t experienced those types of horrible workplaces that don’t trust you to make the right choices and suck the creative soul right out of you.

There is a better approach, to treat people like adults by:

• Giving them autonomy to decide how and when they work best

• Focusing on results, not hours worked

• Respecting boundaries and recognizing that rest fuels better work

This is where the Results-Only Work Framework (ROWE), which is a management strategy where employees are measured by the results they produce instead of the hours they work shines.

At its core,ROWE is about trust, accountability, and prioritizing impact over busywork

Yes, there are drawbacks and risks if not implemented correctly. If the employees don’t have clear goals to meet or if they have an unrealistic workload which is why

a ROWE approach thrives when paired with clearly defined expectations and communication standards to avoid burnout.

It’s time to shift the focus from meaningless metrics such as hours worked to help employees deliver the best work possible, which is a more human-centered approach. ✊🏽

Source: Marissa Goldberg in Remotely Interesting

Keeping It Real

💎 Let’s stop calling them “soft skills” — and call them “real skills” instead

We give too little respect to the other skills when we call them “soft” and imply that they’re optional. What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work.

I love this idea by Seth Godin to change our approach to “soft-skills” as if they are nice to have and that vocational skills such as graphic design, marketing, and research are all that matter.

But we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision-making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things. We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught.

Instead let’s call them “real skills” because these are interpersonal skills and leadership skills, skills that we don’t get degrees in and can’t easily be measured.

Imagine welcoming a new team member who is charismatic, driven, inspiring, with deep-listening skills and with patience.

It’s time to keep it real. ✊🏽

Source: Seth Godin in Ideas.Ted.com

Announcing a new permanent section in this newsletter called The Mindful Designer, in which I will share ideas and insights to help designers bring more awareness, curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and mindfulness into their work, their discipline, and within themselves so they can live a more fulfilling life.

💜 A Designerly Inventory

Most importantly, the list is not to be seen as a definitive “how to” guide—design libraries are already filled with these. Instead, it should be read as a series of prompts to spark conversations, help designers challenge the unquestionable truths in their discipline, and to think more critically about what they do to make the world a better, and at times, a worse place.

Danah Abdulla, is a Palestinian-Canadian designer, educator and researcher who focuses on new narratives and practices in design that push the disciplinary boundaries and definitions of the design discipline.

Danah created an inventory of things designers should think about in order for them to know, to spark conversations, to help designers challenge the unquestionable truths in their disciplines, to think more critically about what they do to make the world a better or worse place, to become aware, to know themselves, and from my point of view, to become a mindful designer.

Here are a few of the points Danah makes:

• #8. Hospitality - As designers we focus on the needs of people but instead of dictating an approach from a “self-absorbed designerly way” can we approach the people we design for with understanding and a “caring ear”.

• #34. Design’s unintended consequences - As designers we need to acknowledge that the designs we create have real world social, economic, and political repercussions. We must work hard to reduce any negative effects. To help us remember this point is, as Tony Fry, a design theorist said, “that everything designed goes on designing”.

• #36. How design perpetuates bias, inequalities and racial violence - When we lack input from diverse voices in our design process, or when we design products that fit our taste because “we” want it and that “we would use”, “the burden tends to fall disproportionately on women, on children or the elderly, or on the petite or oversized, in addition to those with physical disabilities, both visible and invisible—anyone who is “not average.””

Pick up Danah’s book Designerly ways of knowing: a working inventory of things a designer should know to read all of the ways we can be more aware and mindful as designers.

Source: Danah Abdulla in Futuress.org

Wisdom

💎 How to survive being online

Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others [..] And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.

But the people spreading panic to generate attention for themselves? Be they elected idiots, or oligarchs, or regular folks like me and you—block at will.

Sometimes you gotta listen to the radio and trust the DJ.

― Mike Monteiro’s Good News

That’s it for this week’s gems! See you next time!

Curiosity will save us,

Hello,

This week I have been experimenting with taking notes through Zettelkasten, an intricate note taking system to help create new ideas and can be created through organizing physical index cards or digital tools like Obsidian.

I’m going through a lot of trial and error to see what works for me and what doesn’t, which can lead to feelings of overwhelm but then catching myself and reminding myself to keep an experimentation mindset to see what works and what doesn’t.

Having a good note-taking system to help take in new knowledge to be able to use it and share it is worth the time it takes.

Do you have a note-taking system? I would love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments!

On to the gems!

In this week’s edition:

• Creativity: February's Theme is LAYERS

• Personal Growth: Perfectionism holding you back? 3 ways to shift the habit

• Mindset: Why doing hard things matter?

• Wisdom: Give it your all!

• Manifesto: I WILL

Creativity

💎 February's Theme is LAYERS

CreativeMornings is a creative community. It hosts local chapter events in cities around the world. Each month, a Creative Mornings chapter picks a theme and this month’s theme picked by the Lausanne, Switzerland chapter is Layers. The theme resonated with me because the idea of layers shows up in many different contexts.

Simplicity provides clarity, but layers give our work a richer complexity and depth.

There are layers in our creative work.

There are layers in the art we make.

There are layers of flavor in the food we cook.

There are layers in our communication.

There are layers in the music we listen to.

And then there are the layers within us.

Because people have layers too. Just like a collage is created by overlapping layers of found materials, we pile up experiences that form our beliefs and reactions.

Each layer a remnant of a past we lived through, survived, and which we made the best of yet we still keep on. These layers are heavy yet we have a hard time shedding. These layers keep our deeper truths hidden. Peeling off these layers is not easy but we must let them go if we are to become lighter and move towards our new selves, who we were meant to be.

Sometimes we need help shedding those layers because we are so used to them and that’s ok.

Whatever it takes to connect with our deeper truths is our life’s work. ✊🏽

Source: Creative Mornings - Weekly Highlights

Personal Growth

💎 Perfectionism holding you back? 3 ways to shift the habit

“Perfectionism is a symptom of something, it’s not the disease.” - Thomas Greenspan PhD

The quote above is eye opening for me. I thought perfectionism is a trait we need to deal with but now I realize that it’s a symptom of something else that is going on within us.

Perfectionism is a subtle foe which can rob us of the joy of living the way we want to and can stunt our personal growth. As Thomas Greenspan puts it,

“Perfectionism is more than pushing yourself to do your best to achieve a goal; it’s a reflection of an inner self mired in anxiety.”

Over a time with our anxiety can become comfortable habit and we believe the inner voice that powers our perfectionism to be true.

But we are not destined to be victims of perfectionism forever.

We can fight back.

Morra Aarons-Mele shares three strategies to help drop this bad habit once and for all:

Find you motivation - Ask yourself this question, “What am I missing out on because I am scared to be less than perfect?”

For me, being worried about being rejected kept me from applying to present my talk at conferences. Once I changed my perspective from fear of failing to I am sharing helpful information with my audience, my perfectionism disappeared. I love speaking at conferences so I will use that as my motivation to overcome perfectionism.

Identify and name the experience you are missing out on and use it as your motivation.

Isolate your inner critic - What flavor is your self-talk? Is it mind-reading, labeling, avoidance, catastrophizing, our “should statements”?

Remind yourself that you don’t need to be the best at everything, all the time.

You are allowed bad days.

You are allowed to take your foot off the gas.

You are allowed to sit it out.

Learn to set enough goals - This is a big one. Instead of overworking on our goals, what if we worked just enough? Instead of pushing ourselves in every single goal or task for the day what if we dialed it back a little on just one of the tasks to make time for ourselves and to bring more calm into our daily lives.

The next time you feel our old friend perfectionism show up, we will be armed with the tools we need to stand up to it and take our peace of mind back. ✊🏽

Source: Morra Aarons-Mele on Ideas.Ted.com

Mindset

💎 Why doing hard things matter?

it's super tempting to take the path of least resistance. scrolling through insta, avoiding anything too challenging, staying in the comfort zone. but here's the thing: the more you avoid hard things, the harder life actually becomes. even the smallest challenges can feel overwhelming when you're not used to pushing yourself.

i recently decided to relearn math-linear algebra, calculus, stats-not because my day-to-day job requires it right now neither i am preparing for an interview, but because it's challenging, it's been a while since i've pushed my brain in that way. maybe you could say i have been on an autopilot mode. but the ongoing journey has been refreshing. it's like going to the gym, but for your mind. the process of working through tough problems, forcing myself to sit with discomfort, has reminded me how important it is to stay sharp and disciplined, even if i don't know exactly when i'll need it.

doing hard things trains you. it helps you to take the control of your mind. it builds this mental toughness that sticks with you, no matter what you're doing. you know how people go to the gym even when they don't feel like it? it's not easy for them either, but they still do it, for themselves, their body, their health, out of habit, out of sheer discipline. when you consistently push yourself to take on challenges, you start to see yourself differently. once you've proven to yourself that you can handle the tough stuff, everything else starts feeling a little more manageable. it's not just about being good at math or work or just navigating life-it's about building a mindset where you know you can figure things out, no matter how tough they seem.

but when you avoid hard things, you're essentially telling your mind to stay on autopilot. and the problem with autopilot is that it doesn't help you grow. when life throws something challenging your way, you're more likely to crumble because you haven't built up that mental toughness. discomfort will always feel like an intruder if you're not used to facing it.

so next time you feel like avoiding something because it seems hard, lean into it. push yourself to do the difficult thing. that's where the growth happens. discipline isn't built by staying comfy-it's built by showing up, especially when things get tough and proving to yourself that you're capable of more than you think.

I couldn’t agree more. The more we lean into the uncomfortable moments, the more we learn about ourselves and what we are capable of and challenge ourselves to get out of our comfort zone.

Whether it’s raising your hand to give a talk in front many people, going for a run in the dark, or learning math again, we are capable of so much more than we give ourselves credit for.

I’m a big believer in the idea that how we do one thing is how we do anything so if we push ourselves in one area of our lives we will reap the rewards in other parts of our lives so use that knowledge to your advantage.

Practice nudging yourself out of your comfort zone with activities outside of your job to gain the benefits in your job.

✊🏽

Source: Antaripa Saha (@doesdatmaksense) on X

Wisdom

💎 Give it your all!

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all,

shoot it,

play it,

lose it, right away, every time.

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book;

give it, give it all, give it now.

The impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now.

Something more will arise later,

something better.

These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Manifesto

💎 I WILL

Lately I have been seeing an eruption of posts around Zines on Substack. Maybe it’s because of the Frequency Illusion or maybe I’m just coming to the Zine party late, either way it has piqued my curiosity and I’m loving it. I’m diving into the world of Zines as a way to express creativity through tangible hand-made things.

This zine by designer and teacher from his newsletter caught my eye and specifically this panel about learning students names which reads:

I will learn the name of every student and pronounce it correctly

The intentionality behind this statement is something we all can strive for. It only takes a few minutes to ask a person how they pronounce their name so that they feel included and so we can open the door to build a connection with them.

Check out the full zine about teaching design.

Mitchell's Newsletter

I Will

Read more

a year ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Mitchell Volk

Source: Mitchell’s Newsletter

That’s it for this week’s gems!

If you are enjoying this newsletter, please feel free to let me know. It’s always nice to know that people are out there. 💜

Curiosity will save us,

In this week’s edition:

• Learning: Fail productively… how to turn yourself into a super-learner

• Focus: Clarity Cards - A Simple 5-step System to Make Your Writing a Priority

• Career: An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments

• Wisdom: The stories we tell ourselves

Learning

💎 Fail productively… how to turn yourself into a super-learner

Our ability to learn is a key skill to help us do well at work and life in the present and is a foundational skill to help us thrive in our future. The quicker we learn and understand ideas, the faster we can master new disciplines and grow our skills.

How can we make sure the information we learn actually sticks?

What if Unfortunately, many of our preferred learning techniques – such as reading and highlighting textbooks, or the drawing of colourful “mind maps” to summarise material – don’t offer enough mental challenge to make the information stick, leading to disappointing results.

Reading, highlighting textbooks, and rote memorization may be “easy and effortless options” and have gotten us through school but to give us the best chance of retaining information and recalling it when needed — we need a different approach.

Just like when we exercise and use weights as resistance which helps our muscles become stronger, the idea of adding “desirable resistance” in our learning helps our memory get stronger.

Strategies to help us learn better are:

• Take a Pre-Test quiz - Quiz yourself on the concepts you are about to learn even before you have started learning. This primes the brain to absorb information once you have started learning.

• Teach it to someone else - This forces you to gain a deeper understanding of a concept so you can easily explain it to others.

• Mix it up - Interleaving is a strategy to rotate or switch between different parts of a topic you are learning. This helps the brain compare, contrast, and discriminate between concepts and, enhances recall, and improves critical thinking.

• Get moving - Exercise triggers neurotransmitters which are essential to memory function so going for a run before or after a learning session will help give you a natural memory boost.

• Change your environment - Our memory is context dependent so learning in different places helps our memory and recall be more flexible in different situations.

• Do nothing - Once we have added some desirable difficulties to our learning we can practice “wakeful rest” or minimal sensory simulation, yes, that’s no Netflix, to help our brain cement the learning.

I am fascinated by the “desirable difficulties” concept which again is adding just enough friction in the learning process to give our memory the best chance to take in and retain information.

Source: David Robson in The Guardian

Focus

💎 Clarity Cards - A Simple 5-step System to Make Your Writing a Priority

Sometimes we get stuck in our day to day, responsibilities, priorities, work, that we lose touch with what is truly important for our creative growth.

I recently learned about Clarity Cards by Dan Blank.

You need to begin with Radical Clarity — to know what matters most to you so that you can double-down on it. This process is not just about achievement, but about having a sense of fulfillment.

So if you’re feeling stuck or just need a gentle nudge to refocus on your creative goals then try it out. I’m going through this exercise right now too and I’m excited to see what my pyramid of prioritized cards looks like.

Source: Dan Blank - We Grow Media

Career

💎 An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments

Here is my usual stressful approach to a job search:

1. Wait until I’m ready to find a job

2. Panic at my lack of an updated résumé and portfolio

3. Pull together a quick version of each for a job application

Maybe it sounds familiar to your approach too. Yes, this is not a great way to go about such a critical part of the job search.

Instead, what if there is a better way to go about it?

Introducing “The Career Management Document” or CMD for short.

A Career Management Document (CMD) is a comprehensive collection of your résumé and portfolio content. It’s a document you update regularly, over time, with all the work you’ve done.

As you go about your days, write down your accomplishments in the format of a resume bullet.

Jessica shares a few helpful examples on how to document your accomplishments:

• Coached a student on writing a stronger portfolio story to showcase their advanced UX skills, resulting in the student getting a job interview.

• Facilitated an end-of-study analysis in under 90 minutes to help the team synthesize user research data from 12 participants.

• Led a remote retrospective with teams in two offices, developed actionable takeaways, and ended on time despite a delayed start.

This is a great way to keep track of your major accomplishments so you can use them at any time during your job search process. Plus it feels great and is reward to see a long list of work you have achieved that would have been lost to memory otherwise.

It’s never too late to start your career management document and keep adding to it periodically.

Source: Jessica Ivins in A List Apart

Wisdom

💎 The stories we tell ourselves

"The narrative we've constructed about life-what the world is like, how we must behave, where we fit in the scheme of things-forms a bubble that cuts us off from life as it really is.”

Stephen Bodian

That’s it for this week’s gems!

If you are enjoying this newsletter, please feel free to let me know. It’s always nice to know that people are out there. 💜

Curiosity will save us,