Author: Andrea Grassi

Few days ago in Italy, a terrible car accident happened between a group of people doing a challenge (50hrs on a car), and a car with a family inside.

It’s heartbreaking, in many ways, and only the police will shed some light on what happened.
But why do we care for such video? Why staying for 50hrs is so much  compelling to watch?

To me, this boils down to one word: clickbait.
Yes, when video was not a thing, clickbaiting was common. It’s that practice that creates that void in your stomach, that hunger to want more.
And I think we are seeing something similar with video. Videos created to spark that interest, to make you wonder how it all went, etc.

And this is also only a result of how humans work, and how companies work. If the easiest way to trigger attention (which is what 100% works for humans), is to have this kind of clickbait/attention magnet headlines and contents, companies will spend their time at work to push these results, because they earn more money.
Why wouldn’t they, after all?

Now, I’m not implying that all the people and the companies are bad, but it’s clear that incentivizing some views will often lead to have people using tricks to gain attention. It was clickbait then, it’s still clickbait now, just a different medium. 
I’m not even sure if companies can actually fix this. They can probably improve how it’s handled, but I guess it’s up to us (the consumers) to shift the mindset.

There’s a subtle power to not giving up an healthy habit. Whenever you do it, you get a small reinforcement, and you become a little more robust in keeping your habits.

That is not all, though. 
Because there’s the opposite side: giving up.
To me when you give up, you’re not only skipping a habit, but you’re also allowing noise to enter your life. It’s easy to start slowly forgetting a habit, thanks to a single day when you said: “Today I’ll skip this”. 
It’s a slippery slope. Every day you become less interested, your will is less powerful, and your consistency slowly starts to fade. 

That’s why not giving up is always a good answer. Even if it rains, even if you’re sleepy, even if you’re out of ideas: don’t give up.

We live in a world full of noises. From videos, smartphones, advertising.

All these noises are something out of our control, as we can’t shut them all down. We’ll still have helicopters running, people listening to loud music, etc.

Yet we seek silence, calm, relax. We search for ways to escape the world while we continue adding new noises to it.

Yesterday, Apple presented the Vision Pro, and it’s clear this was a target for them since the early introductions of AR Kit.

Now, let’s look at this from a product perspective and imagine how much time, effort, and work it took to get to this point. We’re probably talking about a multi-year product development with many iterations.
Not only that, we’re talking about a product that currently has no direct competitor. 

Some of the features you see there could be easily dismissed by saying “there’s no way we can do that”.
Is that unique? Just like the iPhone, no. We did have smartphones at that time, but we didn’t have that kind of smartphone.

The same goes for the new Vision Pro, but here what I want to emphasize is: when do you stop? Because I can see many products stopping too early or not stopping at all, whereas, here, you can see the results of a multi-year (surely difficult) product development that goes beyond many expectations.

We might not like the output, but we cannot ignore the amount of effort and imagination that made this possible. 
Many of us would have probably stopped along the way, so the question I ask myself is: when do you choose to stop? When is your dream big enough to fail or big enough to succeed? When, along the journey, you decide to keep ideas that feel crazy but in fact are not?

Every product needs these questions, as well as their answers.

If I look back at myself, twenty years ago, I see how much importance I gave to appear serious while working.

It was always part of what I considered normal. Work was serious stuff afterall.

Over time, though, I learned the value of play, thanks to a dear friend, and started enjoying the play at work, the laugh, the joy that comes from small jokes or not taking things too seriously.

What’s even more beautiful, to my eyes, is finding people who enjoy this same thing, discovering how much they enjoy the joyful part of work and make every ride something to look out for.

Because it’s great if you enjoy work by yourself, but it’s even better if you enjoy it together.