The end of the year is an opportunity to look back and be grateful. When we moved here, the local libraries of King County and Seattle welcomed us with open arms. No credit history or social security number required, not even a monthly fee. We’ve been continuously surprised by the local libraries and their commitment to excellence. Their dense network of locations for pick ups and drop offs, the amazing collection of books and their great electronic options to name a few.
They have been particularly helpful for our daughter. Not only did story times and a generous limit on book loans help us nurture her interest in books, it even helped her deal with daily life challenges. When she became a big sister picture books prepared her for what was to happen. When she was afraid of going to the doctor “Leo gets a check up” showed her that it will be OK. When she showed interest in diggers and construction vehicles, there were lots of picture books about how all that heavy machinery works together.
The adults in our household enjoy the electronic selection, in particular Kindle loans for eBooks and Libby for audio books. The latter blew me away. Searching, checking out and listening audio books all from within one app is a great user experience. The user interface is intuitive (better than Audible) making it easy to take notes and set bookmarks. I very much appreciated the option to search by “What’s available”, which helps me get through household chores. The collection of physical books is amazing as well. And if a book is not available right now, we can just place a hold and are pleasantly surprised once it turns up in the future – deferred gratification, a rare treat in today’s world.
We recently also discovered their Kanopy and Hoopla services, where we’ve now watched a couple of movies. They don’t encourage binge viewing, but limit consumption to five movies a month. That’s a good amount. We like the selection of movies, ones that we often wouldn’t find on other streaming services. And it’s all included in the membership.
And how much does all of this cost? It’s part of our tax dollars at work. Do they track my data to target advertising? Not that I know of. Libraries have been these shining oases nurturing our souls that we are very grateful for. If you are looking for a New Year’s resolution for 2020, making more use of your local library is a great one.
Let me close with quotes from two articles from last year that put it so much better than I could. Khoi Vinh on his blog:
Even more radically, your time at the library comes with absolutely no expectation that you buy anything. Or even that you transact at all. And there’s certainly no implication that your data or your rights are being surrendered in return for the services you partake in.
This rare openness and neutrality imbues libraries with a distinct sense of community, of us, of everyone having come together to fund and build and participate in this collective sharing of knowledge and space. All of that seems exceedingly rare in this increasingly commercial, exposed world of ours. In a way it’s quite amazing that the concept continues to persist at all.
Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”: the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact. Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.
When we left Australia a little over two years ago, we left behind many friends. One of them imparted a piece of wisdom I’ve come back over and over:
Don’t worry about our friendship. Friendship is not about intensity, but rather consistency.
His point was that friendships are less about the grand gestures and more about staying in touch. Even if it is just once a year for a birthday note. A quick photo to share an experience or a message to share a thought.
This turned out to be not just excellent advice on friendship, but also life in general. The more I thought about it, the more instances I found where this simple rule applies:
Brushing your teeth twice a day, every day is way more effective than being extra diligent only the week before the dentist appointment.
Spending time with your children every day will build a stronger relationship than neglecting your children throughout the week and then trying to make up for it for an afternoon of quality time over the weekend.
Exercising and eating healthy throughout the year on a regular basis will leave you healthier than looking for the fastest way to loose weight and the best program to build muscle just before your beach vacation.
The list can go on and on. James Clear and Angela Duckworth have written whole books around the concept. The general thesis is: Rather than doing something with great intensity, but inconsistently, try to form a habit and do something with great consistency. It is very simple – just not easy.
The most dazzling human achievements are the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which is in a sense ordinary.
An anecdote between Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook comes to my mind. Mark asked for some leadership advice and Steve recommended writing down "what it means to be one of us". The story goes that Mark took that advice to heart and compiled a list of ten-ish traits, which were highly opinionated. Most people who read the list would have a hard time identifying with those traits, but the few who that list spoke to were highly attracted and motivated by it.
The lesson here is that culture is not one-size-fits-all. In that it can produce work environments that look very odd and even hostile to most, but appealing and accommodating to some. In that I wouldn’t view those articles as condemning write ups, but rather an (at times sensationalist) account for a moment in time. I’d even go as far as saying that those cultures drive higher employee satisfaction and performance than most cultures that don’t take a stance.
People do need a purpose in life and they do have the need to be recognized by others. But we have to stop trying to define and find purpose in labor and instead seek it in knowledge and in our relationship to other humans and to nature.
If you haven’t spent the last 24 hours under a rock, you know by now that the UK voted to leave the European Union. Living in Australia, it was easy to follow the vote count live. At the beginning it was a nail-biter, but early in the afternoon it was clear that ‘Leave’ got the majority.
Born and raised in Germany, the European Union was always a given for me. I can barely remember ever using my passport for inner-continental travel. My first full-time pay-check was in Euros. While I’ve never been in business, directly benefiting from EU trade reliefs, I always assumed and felt that it was a good thing. Working together across countries makes everybody better off. Even celebrations like the Eurovision Song Contest were part of bringing nations closer together creating solidarity.
Beyond free travel, I tremendously benefited from the EU. I was raised by two loving parents, my father a policeman, my mother a nurse. We’ve never been wealthy, but there was always more than enough. Given free education in Germany, I was able to go to university and by means of an Erasmus grant I was able to study free of charge for a year in London. It was an amazing year that allowed me to live in the middle of London and immerse myself not only in the British culture, but even more in the mixed company of other Erasmus students from France, Denmark, Spain, Italy and many other countries.
My parents were especially very grateful for this year. They’ve told me many times that in this one year I became more open to other people’s opinions and matured into a much more positive human being, more friendly and kinder.
So, while I saw the results coming in yesterday, I became sadder and sadder. I will probably be able to let my children spend time abroad and experience foreign cultures, but I’m worried that other people might no longer be able to afford the privileges I enjoyed.
It just seems paradoxical to me. Technology makes it easier to connect with people across borders and continents. Out of Australia I can call my parents in Germany using FaceTime virtually free of charge anytime I want to. I can send them messages and pictures and let them participate in my life. Distance and borders become less and less of an issue to stay in touch. However, at the same time in many countries, both East and West of the Atlantic, voices become louder to protect borders and national interests, to no longer work together, but rather use tactics of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I still don’t understand why.
Yesterday, the world grew a little smaller and at some point I just had to stop reading Twitter and news sites. I’m sad for the European Union and hope that the UK’s example will be a wake up call for the rest of the EU to not take the EU’s privileges for granted, but rather nurture the idea of collaboration, openness and understanding.
But for now, I’m going to follow the British motto to "keep calm and carry on", still believing in the idea of the European Union that working together is better than working alone.
At work me and my team started writing a monthly newsletter. It started out as a mailing just for the broader team to help us understand what everybody else is working on. However, people enjoyed reading it and started sharing. Now we have a group of family and friends throughout the organisation that loves reading this newsletter every month. Although it might seem insignificant, it is one of the highlights of my job. It is a chance to connect with people, find out what they are working on and spread the good news. The newsletter is very different from other corporate emails, as we aim to write it in very accessible language (thank you Mailchimp and Slack for setting such good examples). We spend a good amount of time to get it right, and people appreciate it.
When I saw Anna speak earlier this year at Webstock, it clicked with me, why it was so hard and how we can make our job easier: Each month we were trying to figure out how to write a good newsletter from scratch, based on our experience. And even worse, we all did it individually. As a result, writing the newsletter took a lot of time and effort to make it sound right with good content and a consistent voice. We needed to reflect on what people love about the newsletter, why they read it despite their own email overload and write it down. This helps February-Michael be as good as January-Michael, and James write with the same passion as Elizabeth and vice versa.
Below are the guidelines we came up with. In fact, the whole thing became a manifesto that was fun and empowering to write in itself. It borrows heavily on Anna’s talk and if we’ve done a good job, hopefully somebody will borrow heavily from us. Maybe it provides inspiration for somebody to start sharing more of their own story through a blog or a newsletter. Believe me, it is fun and better things will happen the more open you are.
Newsletter Manifesto
We help our readers understand why our team is here, what we do and how we are working. We aim to fuel curiosity, build trust and increase engagement. We serve two main groups:
Members of our team: They work globally distributed on a broad range of topics. We want them to feel both informed and heard, wherever they are.
Friends of our team: They often know only specific aspects of our work, but are curious to find out more. We are excited to show them the rest of us as well and keep them informed about our progress.
We know that to make our team a success, we need to be inclusive – very inclusive. We make it easy and enticing to join our journey. This means: Our voice is human. It’s familiar, friendly, and straightforward. We explain how things work and why they are important. We don’t cut corners, we cut fluff. We translate complex subjects and rationales by translating them into practical examples. We value the time and attention that people invest in us. We get to the point. We don’t copy & paste press releases as they serve broader audiences. We know our audience. We educate people without patronizing or confusing them. Our voice is: Fun but not silly. Confident but not cocky. Smart but not stodgy. Helpful but not overbearing. Expert but not bossy. Sometimes weird but never inappropriate. Our tone is informal, but not sloppy. We are fun to read because we are easy to understand and have interesting topics. We avoid jargon, slang and abbreviations as they are likely to ostracize or confuse our audience. We emojize, but not everything needs an emoji. We are literate and use full sentences. We spell words and capitalize correctly. We read, re-read and re-re-read one final time before we hit send just to make sure that no typos have crept in. We never resort to text speak and we don’t LOL. We don’t try to be cool, but understand that being uncooly cool is so much more inclusive than being totally on fleek. We are ourselves. That is, we are human. We are a strong team full of good people who are brilliant at what they do. We put them into the center of our communication. We value our talent and what they do for our team. We show them in photos that are real and relatable. Our newsletter celebrates them every month. Our people are the secret sauce that makes our content more engaging and relatable. We have a sense of humor. We are funny when it’s appropriate and when it comes naturally. But we don’t go out of our way to make a joke – forced humor can be worse than none at all. If unsure, we keep a straight face. We are unapologetically kind and refrain from snarky comments. We apply the sunshine test to everything that we do – if the newsletter ends up in unintended hands, we are happy for the additional audience, not embarrassed. We are proud of our culture and want to share it. We communicate to amplify the good reputation that we enjoy inside and outside of our company. Every single one of us is the team.
Webstock turned ten last week. It is a conference thatcelebrates the web and its makers – the creativity, the magic, the craft and everything in between. Although Webstock is hosted in Wellington, they have an excellent reputation and attract great speakers from all over the world. It has been on my radar for a couple of years and this year I finally managed to go to Wellington. It was an amazing experience, an emotionally exhausting ride on the rollercoaster – in a good way. Hands down, the best conference I’ve ever been to.
Speakers typically have a tech background (web development, software engineering, UX design, long-time bloggers), but the presentations were mostly non-technical. While the Above All Human conference three weeks ago in Melbourne focused on startups and entrepreneurship, this conference focused on the web and its values and culture. You get a good idea of what Webstock is about from last year’s closing note by Natasha Lampard, where she talks about onsens, entrepreneurs and the long-game (also written up here).
A key asset of Webstock is the diversity of its speakers regarding gender, background, race and topics. None of the talks could or should be compared with each other. Therefore, by the end of the first day I stopped trying to figure out what my favourite talk was – they all were really good. Because of this diversity in topics, it took me some time to recognise the common thread: They all talked about a shared set of values, promoting and preserving values like openness, contributing, inclusiveness, simplicity and caring deeply about your work, not your ego. It is a conference that is undeniably, beautifully, human.
Before I go into the depths of my notes, my main takeaway of the two days was:
Care about what you create and care about it deeply. Do not care about ego. In the end you want your work to be known, not yourself.
Dare to put yourself out there and contribute to the larger community. Stand for something. That makes you vulnerable, but the benefits of connection far outweigh the downsides of discomfort. To quote the wonderful Anna Pickard: “Show the world your biscuit face, because the world probably likes your biscuit face.”
Heather B. Armstrong opened the conference with “The Fraud of Authenticity”, suggesting that we are increasingly faced with posed and polished pictures and videos. Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook celebrate the perfect, the posed and stylised life. For a lot of pictures on those platforms you can hardly tell whether it is stock photography or “real”. Kids especially will have a hard time to distinguish. At some point you are no longer an audience, but solely a consumer. She encouraged the audience not to forget “the dirty side of the room”. Let’s make sure that our children don’t grow up thinking that life needs to be perfect. Talk about imperfection, struggles, experiences that are not fabricated or engineered. If we don’t do that, at some point nobody wants to see the dirty side of the room anymore. Until the videos are ready, have a look at the XOXO videos, where Heather gave a similar talk last year.
Steve Hillenius spoke about “Designing Interfaces for Astronaut Autonomy in Space”. Design and user experience are critical to enable long distance space missions in the future. Design can bridge the gap. Right now six astronauts (generalists) on the international space station are covered by ~100 controllers in mission control (specialists). As space exploration moves further away from earth, communication and coordination becomes increasingly difficult. For example a round trip communication to Mars take between eight and 45 minutes. This creates the need to create software that helps astronauts become more autonomous to be able to make decisions with limited or no input from mission control. NASA is now designing system that hide complexity and help astronauts take over specialist roles by coding them in software. For example, for mission planning, astronauts can move time slots by getting visual indicators what is allowed and what not (go- vs. no-go-zones).
Luke Wroblewski spoke about “Screen Time”, discussing the current challenges of designing screen interfaces. How to adjust interfaces for input (keyboard, mouse, finger, stylus, …), output (TV, phone, tablet, …) and posture (screen in 1ft distance (phone) vs. 10ft distance (TV)). On input, support as many means as possible and communicate what is possible, screen resolution and size are poor proxies to determine best input methods. On output, as screens become larger, you need to support both landscape and portrait mode vs. only supporting portrait mode for a phone app; use scalable pictures and web types. On posture, a good proxy for interaction is the distance to your screen (1ft vs. 10ft). He ended with an open question, what kind of interfaces come after glass (voice, wearables, VR, AR, …)? Vimeo has an earlier version of his talk.
Ethan Marcotte spoke about “The Map and The Territory”, that we need to work on re-inventing the web in a way that will allow us to onboard the next billion users who will be a very different audience. This “new normal” will exclusively access the web via mobile devices that are less powerful. They have restricted access to electricity and bandwidth. This will be the new normal going forward. We therefore need to start a conversation about sustainable web design that is defined by reach and accessibility. Starting points include “reducing” (set weight budgets for websites, how big, how fast load times) and “revisiting” (start with a basic responsive design and expand only based on ROI). Vimeo has an earlier version of his talk and Luke Wroblewski’s notes of Ethan’s talk.
Harry Roberts was next. His specialty is CSS and was a bit surprised when he realised two weeks ago that he had to give a non-technical talk. As a result, he crowd-sourced his topics via Twitter and came up with work-life balance (it’s hard, do your best – you don’t need to separate them dogmatically, if you have fun), hobbies (super important to remove yourself from work – give a shit about something that doesn’t pay you, find something that is the opposite of your work, ideally something that you can do anywhere), openness (what sets the web industry apart, don’t take it for granted), the web (it’s more than just zeroes and ones, it’s about the people), cocktails (shake only drinks with dairy or juice, stir everything else) and advice (even the best advice goes out of date, know when to use new information – the web is too young for traditionalists). He also published his slides online.
Nick Gray declared that “Museums Are F***ing Awesome”. He discovered museums a couple of years ago and started doing tours for his friends under the title “Ten things I love in this museum and three that I want to steal for my home”. This quickly grew, up to the point where he now operates a company around this concept. It’s best to just watch him in action. Main takeaways for me were that good museum tours are all about the guides (be engaging and create a connection with their audience), the games (make it fun, do cheers, take pictures – everybody looks awesome in a museum) and gossip (don’t just deliver the facts, find the raunchy bits and tell them).
Last, but not least on day one came Debbie Millman who was a true highlight of the day. She talked about “On Rejection, or how the worst moments of your life can turn out to be the best”. She gave a very honest talk about all the rejections in her life, how painful they were, but also how helpful they became to get her where she is now. If you have these moments when it possibly couldn’t get worst, rejoice, because it probably can’t. She appealed to be wary especially of those successes that never become a purpose, i.e. where you are never fully engaged. She closed her talk with two quotes. (1) “If You Aren’t Getting Rejected On A Daily Basis, Your Goals Aren’t Ambitious Enough” – Chris Dixon and (2) “You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches.” – Dita Von Teese.
Day two started with Karen McGranetalking about “Adaptive Content, Context, and Controversy” laying out the differences between responsive design (same content, displayed differently based on device) vs. adaptive design (serving different content or design based on predefined criteria like device, context or person) vs. m-dot (separate website for mobile). The main difference between responsive and adaptive is that responsive design has the intelligence on the client side, while adaptive has it on the server side. Try to cover as much as possible through responsive design and resort to adaptive only for the cases where it makes sense. She also appealed to not use heuristics too much, when deciding what kind of content or functionality to offer to users, e.g. when you’re in the car driving you will receive a different view of maps than when you are walking. In 95% of the cases users are better served by getting shown the same information and choosing how to adapt to it themselves.
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino talked about “The End of Ignorance”, suggesting that through the ubiquity of sensors, we are in a position to make more informed decisions, such as how to adjust asthma doses based on air pollution or making smarter use of water. As a result our kids will approach life’s challenges very differently and we should encourage them to do so by. through teaching them about sensors through Arduinos or learning how to code rules. She appealed to put APIs in front of all public services so that people can connect sensors to publicly available information sources and build and share their own solutions. I especially liked her closing statement: “We already know what this change will look like. Now we should embrace it and make it happen.” Her slides are available online on slideshare.
Next was Slack’s Head of Editorial Anna Pickard, who talked about “Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements, Write Large (aka Humorous Self-Flagellation and the Multiple Benefits of Being Old On The Internet)”, or how Slack approaches writing and coincidentally established release notes in the app store as a literary genre. She talked about the value of using the written word to connect to users as humans. They aim to be understandable, friendly, empathetic, honest, with courtesy and inclusive in everything they publish – be it their Twitter feed, their blogs, the copy in their app or even release notes (a good approximation of their voice and tone is in the Mailchimp content style guide). They try to create elements of surprise and delight. An example is error messages that are understandable but also relatable, playful but not whimsy, real but not marketing real. She appealed to achieve a healthy balance with this kind of writing (“the difference between a little bit of salt and a platter of salt”; “A guitar solo is fine, but a concert shouldn’t be all guitar solos.”). To quote one of her slides: “Colour all the way to the edges. Colour the parts no one can see, too. Say nice things in places no one is expecting, and some won’t even notice. Do not be afraid of putting yourself into everything you do, but don’t make it all you do. Fill all crevices with wadded-up joy. Make people happy.” In that context, a good presentation to watch is from last year’s Webstock: Kate Kiefer Lee – Writing in the Real World.
Annie Machon followed Anna. She is a former MI5 intelligence officer who left the Service to blow the whistle about alleged criminality within the intelligence agencies in the mid 90ies. Her talk “The Panopticon: Resistance is Not Futile” was an appeal to appreciate the value of privacy as a fundamental human right that is the basis for most other human right as well as democracy. She argued that once you feel watched at all times, you start self-censoring yourself. You can no longer be a fully engaged citizen, which creates a situation where democracy starts to wither and die. It was an amazing talk, reminding me of Jason Bourne. You can find a version of the talk on YouTube.
Last in the succession of British speakers was Tom Coates with “The Shape of Things”, a talk about consumer IoT and how whilst the hardware is getting there, the software layer is still underwhelming. “The network should amplify a tool’s core purpose, not just put another web browser or Twitter client on a device.” Consumer IoT has the potential to achieve a vision, where we interact with objects directly (“enchanted objects”) instead of relying on abstractions in the form of screens and icons. The value of consumer IoT will depend on how easily users can interact with the service layer, but make no mistake: 95% of the value will be in the connected service layer, not the user interface. He promoted general-purpose user interfaces and interaction patterns that can be applied onto multiple use cases rather than having to re-learn for every new use case. A good services layer (1) gives control, (2) supports you from the initial set up to the day you recycle it, (3) understands that it will be used by multiple people, (4) is able to work easily together with other things you have, (5) does not expect you be a programmer and (6) communicates clearly and politely in ways that are timely and familiar. To make IoT work we need to find better patterns how the world works. Luke Wroblewski has again a good write-up of the talk.
The most emotional talk of the conference was Keavy McMinn’s “How to mend a broken identity”. She works as an engineer at GitHub and I was totally unprepared for this talk as I expected something about online identities. However, she started talking about how her strong sense of identity as a wife was ripped away from her. Her divorce came unexpected and she was not prepared for it. She built herself up from that loss and became involved in tri-sports, redefining herself as an athlete finishing several ironman distance races. This again came to an abrupt halt when she was hit by a car and had to undergo several surgeries and a long recovery that she’s still working on. I had two main takeaways: (1) don’t be too dogmatic about your identity, but have something what she called “an elastic identity”. As an example she said that despite her injuries, she still regards herself as an athlete, as someone who pushes her body to be the best it can be. (2) You don’t need to be tough to get through a tough situation. Instead be honest and don’t default to the “I’m fine response”, accept help when somebody offers it and proactively ask for help. In the end it takes a community to get through those tough situations. This was probably my favourite talk of the two days. There is an old version of her talk “What is your Why” on YouTube.
The last block of speakers started with Michael Lopp, Pinterest’s Head of Engineering, with “Fear is a Liar” about writing more and better, rather than just consuming and creating little moments through photos and 140 character messages. Instead engage with a topic and write about it, because (1) it teaches you how to structure your thoughts, (2) teaches you how to build an informed and defensible opinion (an opportunity to deeply care about something) and (3) calms and slows you down. The nemesis of writing is fear, which creeps in in various forms like doubt and procrastination. Accept that there is no right way to write, start writing and put yourself out there. We all have something to say, therefore explain in clear terms what you know, build an opinion and rant. This talk gave me quite a bit to think about. In the end I came to the conclusion, that fear is not a liar, but rather a sad potato that uses very unfortunate means to provide constructive criticism. I wrote it up a few days ago under On writing – Where Creativity, Fear and Action go on a road trip.
Next up was Cindy Gallop who spoke about “Why The Next Big Thing In Tech Is Disrupting Sex”. She pitched her website MakeLoveNotPorn and the idea behind it (educate the world that porn is not the norm). I saw her last year in Melbourne and she is impressive to watch. She combines the skills of a seasoned marketing executive with the passion of somebody who deeply cares about a greater cause. If you’re not afraid of strong language, go watch her TED Talk about Make Love, Not Porn. I loved two quotes from her in particular: “You will never own the future if you care what other people think” and “Women challenge the status quo because we are never it”.
The last session of the day was Casey Gerald’s “The Gospel of Doubt”, telling his story from growing up poor in Texas, getting into Yale and Harvard and founding MBA’s Across America. He encouraged the audience to not necessarily seek the shelter of certainty, but have more doubt instead, challenging common beliefs and building your own opinion. I will leave it at that and wait patiently for the Webstock video footage to re-watch his talk.
Natasha Lampard delivered the closing note. She is one of the co-founders and organisers of Webstock, and pointed out that it is never too late to start something new. She told the story of an Italian astronaut who had a late calling at the end of his twenties as well as a quote from a lady who was well into her nineties: “If I knew that I would get that old, I would have started playing the violin at the age of 60. By now I would have nearly 40 years of experience.” While we celebrate young entrepreneurs and their drive, we should not mistake that for discouraging an older generation from starting something new. If you have something to contribute, a calling or a purpose that you want to pursue, don’t let age be a factor that holds you back.
Any creative endeavour is an adventure. It takes us from here to somewhere new, hopefully somewhere exciting. That sounds simple and exciting in itself, but the devil is in the detail and once we embark on our adventure, we notice that things turn out to be trickier than previously imagined.
Let’s take writing as an example. Everyone knows the situation: we’ve got a wonderful idea, something to say and we want to share that idea. So we sit down and start with a blank sheet or screen. We write our first words, realise that they don’t really work so we start over again, start differently, it still doesn’t work. We get frustrated, doubt creeps in. Maybe we aimed too high and the idea was not as good as we thought it was. We really want to put ourselves out there, but worry that we are not good enough. We start checking our email, then Facebook, then Twitter, post the picture of our lunch on Instagram, then go back to email. At some point we declare defeat and leave the idea altogether.
That’s how many writing efforts end – the adventure stops before it even really begins. And that’s sad, because the world likes adventures and needs more of them. Let’s find out why it is so challenging by borrowing from two concepts:
Visualising our inner dialogue as different personalities that interact with each other. They all mean well, but they all value different things. They are our fellow passengers, the forces at play in our road trip. Yes, this is blatantly stolen from Inside Out, or before that Herman’s Head.
Once we understand who’s with us and why they are coming along, it is possible to appreciate them for what they are and how they want to help us succeed. There are three passengers in our car:
#1 – Inspiration
Inspiration is the star of the show, the headliner that gets a lot of glory and credit. Everybody loves her and she comes in alternative flavours like creativity and genius. Inspiration is the first spark of the process, the match that lights the fire of revelation. She suggested the road trip and called shotgun. She sits there with the map and snacks in her hand, navigating us to the best spots.
However, Inspiration is kind of a pushover. While she lights up bright for a short moment, she burns out quickly if her flame doesn’t catch on quickly. She forgets at times that she needs two important side kicks to come through and deliver on her promises. Which brings us to the second, probably most underappreciated passenger:
#2 – Fear
Fear is the grump, the cynic that shouts “that’s not a good idea”, “are you kidding me, leave that to other people” and “that’s never going to work”. Fear often disguises himself in the more approachable form of procrastination. Ironically, while writing this post, I starting browsing through the old program of Webstock, looked up how to write better, what Elizabeth Gilbert says about fear, browsed Twitter, Twitter on Webstock and the recent tech news. All very important and definitely urgent topics that need my undivided attention. At some point I finally got the joke and got back to writing.
Fear sits in the back, constantly mumbling and asking why we’re not there yet but Fear is there for a reason. Fear means well, but is horrible at articulating his constructive feedback in a way that is actually constructive. Fear wants to make sure that we have enough gas in the tank, that the tires don’t fall off in the middle of the freeway and that everybody has slept enough. While Inspiration brings snacks and a mix tape, Fear makes sure that we don’t die. He asks us to be our best and protects us from burning ourselves with Inspiration’s match. Fear is the reason why we edit our work. He tries to protect us. Sadly, he chooses very unfortunate means to communicate. As such we should meet Fear with compassion and accept him for what he is. Sometimes he goes as far as screaming at us to step on the brake and cancel the road trip altogether, especially before embarking on the first stretch. That’s why we need a third character on this journey:
#3 – Action
Action is the doer of the group. Action is the one who takes over the steering wheel in the middle of the night when everybody is tired. But she needs encouragement. She needs faith in her ability to deliver, a belief that once she comes into play, things will turn around and the fun will start. Action puts wood behind Inspiration’s flame and turns it into a fire.
Even better, she is self-perpetuating. Once she gets going, Fear pipes down, Inspiration starts firing on more cylinders and things move forward. Action cures Fear and encourages Inspiration. However, every once in a while, Action should check in with Inspiration to connect with the bigger picture of why we are on the road trip. Otherwise we might miss important sights on the way. Even Fear should feel heard to know the worst case scenarios. But don’t ever let Fear take over, don’t even let him play with the radio or adjust the air conditioning.
Make no mistakes. There will be setbacks. We will take the wrong exit, get into a traffic jam or run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. As with any road trip, those bad experiences will be great stories to tell later, they are just not very much fun in the moment. We have to push through them.
Diversity makes for a better team
If we get the sudden idea to embark on a spontaneous road trip, it is important to understand who is sitting in the car and why they came on the trip: Inspiration gets us going, Fear wants us to be the best we can be and Action moves us forward and keeps Fear in check. All three are critical for a great road trip that is exciting, safe and happening.
As in any diverse team, the relationship within the group is complicated. There are fights over who is driving. But diversity is good, because all three want us to succeed. Embrace them for what they are and appreciate what they contribute, but don’t let anyone take over fully.
This applies to blog posts as much as to that tricky email where we ask for a favour, the cover letter for the job that we really want to land, the love letter you’re sending on Valentine’s Day. We’ve all been there. The trick is to get into Action as soon as possible and connect it to Inspiration. This might be the one time, when advertising is right: just do it! Start writing and keep at it. Have a little faith in your ability to come up with something good, maybe even great. Who doesn’t like a great adventure?
