Author: Andrea Grassi

It’s the work that counts that matters and at the same time it’s how you approach the work.
Reading game of thrones made me realize that how you approach work is part of the work.

When Tyrion Lannister is assigned the place of the king first knight, he doesn’t blame anyone.

He know he is in a difficult position, he knows shit will be happening, but still gets the job done.

Doesn’t complain and goes forward towards the goals. 

This is such an excellent example of how the mindset make the difference.

We may not be our work, but what we are defines how we work.

There are times when I hate technology. It’s when technology becomes

1. Slow
2. Inefficient
3. Complex

When things don’t work or are too slow or complex to find/understand, those are the times I wished to be a farmer.

Nature is complex, but yet it feels ok, while the complexity of technology often leads to frustration.

Why is that? 

I guess it’s because nature is “natural”, while the complexity added from technology is something that’s an artifact. It can be understood only if you are already understand much of the tech world.

That is why usability is so difficult to create and infuse into products.

Because the goal of usability is to create that natural-like experience that allows people to “do things” without too much frustration or thinking.

Raising a kid is complex, it is frustrating sometimes, but hardly will you “feel” a barrier caused by nature. 

Maybe the barrier is your kid itself, but there is no barrier added from the system, while in tech it’s the system itself that add limits.

The more time it passes, the more I’m inclined to pay for services that just work the way I want, because the usability and efficiency of a service is part of the “natural” feeling I expect from good technology.

Technology should add more work to your life, instead it should remove it.

When you take a pause from something (in my case this blog, because I was in japan and didn’t feel like writing it for that time), the hardest part is to take the rhythm.

It’s like retuning yourself to your habits, because installing an habit is hard, losing it is easy.

So the best thing to do in these cases is start again. From zero. Like it was the first time.

Because, in some ways, it is the first time.

Looking at how ads are made and seeing how we differently react it’s hard for me to say that men and women are equals in term of perceptions. 

I’m not talking about a better or a worst, but instead I refer to different take on the same fact.

Men and women are different because they are emotionally different. They feel joy and fear in topics totally unrelated. And while we can asset that exceptions do exists we must also consider the rest of the options.

We laugh, we choose differently, and marketing knows it, while we might not even realize.

Today I was looking at some ads in Japan and here the difference is less obvious that in Italy.

It is obvious for coffe, which seems primary aimed towards men, while many tv ads seems to focus on both genders because the Japan male can have a face that’s less manly than usual. 

In other races, the male is clearly different, while in Japan the difference is more subtle (not less evident), because the you can have delicate face lineaments without being too much feminine.

It was interesting because it shows how our interpretation of human body change the way we market to it.

Here in Japan everyone follows the rules. It’s such a strange thing to see people respect each other so much, even too much sometimes.

Even then, it amaze me how much perfectly they act