Book Review: Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie

A corporate fool's guide to surviving with grace.

What you don’t see is what you get.

Does this sound familiar? Can you have it ready today? As a designer, you hear this and kick into high gear. Speeding through your process to get to the final results. You meet the unrealistic deadline but there is another request the very next day.

This is usually the request from the business and tech teams.

Ideas need to incubate and percolate in the gray matter for a period of time before being expressed externally.

In his book Orbiting the Giant Hairball, Gordon MacKenzie provides a simple analogy that every designer needs to keep in their back pocket for why they need enough time to bring forth creative ideas.

The analogy Gordon MacKenzie used was of the miracle of cows producing milk. The cows

The only visible outcome of the process is at the end when the cow is milked.

“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:
Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past...
Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions...
Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood...
Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.”
― Gordon MacKenzie

I picked up Orbiting the Giant Hairball because of a post by John Maeda. He shared the page in which the author Gordon McKenzie explains how people don't understand the creative process. They only see the outputs of it but not the work that goes into creating the output. He gives a clear example which is good for all creatives to use when asked to do a "Quick and easy request".

I love the illustrations and the unique page layouts used in the book.

Definitely, a must-read if you want to break out of the corporate hairball.

Have you read it? Share your thoughts in the comments.