🏀 Play, play, play
Hey yall, it's been a fun week with the heat actually coming back to Texas. Hope everyone's getting prepped for summer. This week I'm getting into the habit of treating work as play.
✍️ Quote of the week:
"Have enough quanitity to focus on quality.
Have enough quality to never have to think about quanitity."
🎶 Song of the week:
📖 What I’m reading:
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
🧠 Top 3 learnings:
🧮 When starting out; quantity is better than quality - We’ve been led to believe that we should try and strive for greatness. This sends people down a rabbit hole that we don’t push out anything until it’s truly great. But that’s not the case.
Take YouTube for example. The average YouTuber with 1 million subscribers has around 492 videos. Picasso created over 50,000 pieces of artwork throughout his lifetime. Fighters fight more off the ring than they do in the ring.
So the next time you publish a newsletter, a video, a song, a drawing, remember that it should get you into the flow of doing it more. True greatness comes from people pushing out content like machines and then honing their craft to get better.
💪🏻 Gym equipment doesn’t matter - An old friend went to prison and spent the next 5 years behind bars. He came out absolutely shredded and bigger than ever. I told him “I would look that way too if I spent 5 years with nothing to do but lift weights and workout.” He then told me that prison has changed. There were no more weights, dumbbells, or benches. They took all those away because the inmates were becoming too big and could possibly overtake the guards. So how did he get fit with zero equipment? He said he would do basic things like pushups, sit-ups, and dips from his bed. The idea that you need fancy equipment, the perfect workout plan, or the time is just excuses you’ve made for yourself because we’ve seen other people accomplish more because of that.
🏀 Play - There’s a misconception in today’s world that athletes and professionals do big things all the time. This is untrue. One thing I’ve learned from watching people at their best is that they treat work like play. Athletes do this too. A runner doesn’t set out to break his personal best every day or every week. That just leads to injury. Instead, they focus on the run and improve the form, the shoe, the cadence, the breathing, and everything in between. They take the average of those days and just naturally progress through training every day.
🖍 Designer thoughts:
What helped me be a better design leader:
Learning to deputize, not delegate - One of the things that I’ve seen people do is become the person that delegates tasks to their team. The issue becomes that the team is so set focused on being task-oriented that when a new issue arises they turn to the delegator for the next steps. What I've done in a large team setting is to deputize people into their roles. This means that a person is in control of one specific domain and they have all decision-making power for that domain. It might seem shaky at first but it empowers people to be comfortable and confident in their own roles. They're not sitting around waiting for the next order. Instead, they are finding new ways to be more efficient and in return, letting you focus on the bigger picture.
Every company has a different customer: If you think what worked for your last project will work for your next project it just ain't so. What makes design so interesting is that every company, project, and app has a different demographic of users looking at it from a different perspective. Also if you've been at the same company you have to understand that users will change over time as new apps and products are adopted. Sure you can be experimental from time to time but at the end of the day, a horizontal carousel might not work, or a swipe left swipe right feature. Customers think differently in almost every category. While we like the idea of a "one size fits all solution" we have to be mindful as interactions, customers, and even business objectives change.
👴 Dad thoughts
I recently learned from a father of 4 kids how we raised 1 CEO, 1 business owner, 1 doctor, and 1 lawyer. He said every time his kids learned a new skill; such as a new word in a different language, won a sports tournament, wrote a short story, or read a book, he would reward them with money. He said most parents give money for chores around the house which teaches kids to be better workers. So instead he would reward his kids for new skills that would make them more valuable to the world. By the time they were in high school, they all knew at least 2 languages and were competing at the collegiate level for debate and written programs. This was an interesting take.
Have a great week!
📬 PS: Please do reply to this email if you have anything to add / any questions. I quite enjoy replying to comments/emails as a source of procrastination from revision.
📬 PPS: Please hit the <reply> button and let me know what you thought of this email if you have a spare few seconds. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what was useful about it and what could be changed. Thanks <3
