💎 Friday Gems (The Mindful Designer, In Praise of Inconvenience, Expanding your Creativity, and much more!)

✨ It's the sparkle you become when you conquer anxiety. - Björk

Nov 15, 2024

You know that tiny voice in the back of your mind that keeps whispering to you, reminding you of that goal you wanted to achieve and it keeps telling you to do something about it? Yeah, that voice was subtle at first but then the reminders keep coming faster and keep getting louder to get you to pay attention and take action because this is as good a time to achieve that goal and the timing is just right because you’re in a mental space to see it through?

I’m sure you know that voice too and you should definitely pay attention to it.

Well, for me, that voice has popped up once again asking me to write that book I have been wanting to write for quite some time.

This time I will listen to the voice and go all in.

The title of the book is The Way of the Mindful Designer (working title). The goal of the book is to help designers embody mindful wisdom from the philosophies and mindful practices of Zen, Buddhism, Stoicism, and mindfulness to not just survive but thrive at work and in life. This book aims to provide a transformational journey for the reader so they can let go of unhelpful mindsets and develop new healthy ways of being and working so they can bring their best to the world and live their full creative potential in each moment.

I am writing this book for those who are thinking about starting or have already begun their design journey and are looking for guidance and support along the way.

I am writing this book for those who feel stuck in their careers but know there is greatness within them and want to move past the inner and outer obstacles in their way.

I am also writing the book I needed when I started my design career and needed support, advice, and wisdom to help me develop my awareness, confidence, and resilience to become the designer I knew I could be.

I will continue with the Friday Gems and you will start to see more posts and content geared towards becoming a mindful designer.

Thanks for your support!

On to this week’s gems!

In this edition of Friday Gems:
- In Praise of Inconvenience: The Hidden Costs of a Convenient World
- How to expand your creativity by finding inspiration in the everyday
- The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn
- A prompt worth thinking about
- The Journey Within by Rumi
- Crystalline - Omar Souleyman Remix by Björk

Mindset

💎 In Praise of Inconvenience: The Hidden Costs of a Convenient World

“What am I giving up when I choose the convenient path?”

When convenience reigns supreme, the less human we become. Being human means facing challenges, making mistakes and learning as a result. The more friction we experience in our lives the more resilient we become as a result. Life is messy, imperfect, and always changing so if we try to optimize it to the degree where we remove each minute discomfort we will be left with a dull and boring life.

In this article, Kōdō Shimon provides a wake up call for us to take the road less traveled, make the “inefficient” choise, and doing something that takes a bit longer but is more memorable.

This is advice we could all use in a world that is rushing to optimize away discomfort.

That's why, in a world racing towards total automation, the most compassionate act towards yourself may occasionally be to pick the slower, harder path—blisters and all.

Source: Simone

Design

💎 How to expand your creativity by finding inspiration in the everyday

Often, you might find inspiration in discovering new art, yet find yourself not able to apply this to your work or what you do on a day-to-day basis. But it’s about discovering something that sticks with you by having an open mind, especially as a budding creative, and to be like a sponge and soak it all up.

Inspiration is all around us!

Can we be like a sponge and soak it all in?

I love this article by designer Craig Barry on the importance of being inspired by the world around us.

We don’t need to stick to the same old sources of inspiration cough…Dribbble…cough…Behance, we can expand our sources of inspiration by noticing what is around us already. The music we listen to, the architecture we appreciate, the food we enjoy, the places we visit are all rich sources of inspiration and for us to soak into our well of subconsciousness so we can dip into it when the time comes to express our creativity.

You don’t have to be a musician to be inspired by sound and lyrics.
You don’t have to be an architect to love a building and be inspired by materials and forms.
You don’t have to be a dancer to be inspired by movement and rhythm.
Taking in these small but impactful elements is key.

Let’s become collectors of sounds, sights, items, and images of things that catch our attention so we can practice leading with curiosity and enhance our creative expression.

Source: The Arena

Learning

💎 The ‘secret strategy’ that could boost your ability to learn

In How to Read a Book, Charles Van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler have a suggestion for how to make a book your own, they say:

If you have the habit of asking a book questions as you read, you are a better reader than if you do not but merely asking questions is not enough, you have to try to answer them.

The SQW3R method is a framework for better comprehension of material, which stands for Survey, Question, Read, Read + Write, Recall, and Review. Questioning the material before you read, it will make it more memorable and help keep you alert and focused while learning.

In this article, Ajdina Halilovic, a science writer, shares the idea of pretesting, which is testing yourself on the material you are about to learn.

It may sound illogical, but growing evidence shows the benefits of testing yourself before you start learning new material

Experiments suggest that pretesting helped participants outperform the control group, even wrong guesses before reading a material benefit the reader because it acts as a reality check and highlights to them what they do and don’t know about the topic.

Pretesting has quite a few benefits including:

Increased attention to the material being learned
Reduced mind-wandering
A focus on the answers to the pretest questions
Better recall of information being learned

So, which questions should you ask during the pretest?

Ajdina suggests glancing through the table of contents and the headings in the book to try to guess what information will be there and create questions from that information.

The pretesting question format also matters. Multiple-choice questions are more effective.

A 2016 study found that including incorrect but closely related answer options in a multiple-choice test format can help direct your attention more broadly – both to the information necessary to answer the specific pretest questions and to the information related to the incorrect alternatives.

Now, I’m pumped up to try out pretesting to see how it helps improve my comprehension of the material I read. If you already do this or try it out, let me know your experience with it. I would love to know.

Source: Psyche