Category: Blog

Being able to distill information should be our first and most important goal.
Not because we want only to be understood but mostly because being able to spread information is vital to any success.
How can you communicate what’s your plan, your goal, your ideas if you are not aligned with the people around you?
How can you ask for feedback and purposely follow the advice if you can’t further investigate their objections?

In these troubled time information can be spread everywhere and we’re the first line of defense in a world that presumably needs our ability to communicate correctly.

So, arm your pen or your keyboard with patience, take your time refining the message and send it over.

When life puts you into big transformative moments it’s quite easy (and the void of writing in the last two months is proof) to loose the way.

To forget all the foundations you’ve built over time and move onto the next big thing.

Yet, we should try and ask: should I keep it or throw it away?
Taking that moment is extremely important to allow understanding if this is the correct path.

No one else beside you can answer that question, and that’s perfectly fine.

If your job is not going well, if there are problems you can’t stand the default answer from many people will go towards courage.

Courage is the word we link to the spartans, to the great epic conquerors of the past, to the people with enormous success.

We expect courage to fix all the problems, because in the mindset of “fake it till you make it” (which isn’t wrong per se), we think that courage will trump any other thing.

Until it doesn’t.

Courage, much like willpower, is finite.
We need to recharge, to instill courage and willpower into ourselves.
Therefore courage can’t be the solution to all the problems.

Often we need empathy from the world and an introspection into what we truly value.
Making a point of what we believe in and trust that value.

The outside world might guide us towards other goals, but what’s truly important is what our values are. In that we should put our faith.

The title was an intriguing phrase I got to read (in italian, so pardon my translation).

There is something about it, something very powerful. It lies into the idea that when we face crisis we don’t really get a chance to form our character, but instead to choose a path.

They call for us, for our choice, for our path. To stand up fiercely and do what we are called for.

We’ve all had that moment: “Oh, this is so simple, why don’t you do it right away?”
It could’ve been a product, it could’ve been an action and so on.
We got that impression that something is easy to do.

Working lately on products I can’t stop thinking at how magical complexity really is.
Let’s move away from products for a second to make a point: Think about the act of drinking a glass of water.

For many of us it doesn’t require much thinking. If we have the glass ready in front of us it’s a matter of taking it and drinking.
Easy.

My soon-to-be 2 years old instead watches the glass as a skill to master. She uses two hands to grab the glass and slowly moves it toward the mouth. Then she tries to drink but managing the flow of the water, the drops that fall, etc, results -often- in a mess.

Which, btw, is amazing and beautiful.

You might say “yeah, but this is an action. When we’re talking about products and so on some things are simply easy”.
Which can be obviously true, but we take for granted so many things we see.

Like a door.
If you played videogames you surely encountered a door in the game which is… a door. Like the real doors.
A door is something simple. It can either be open or closed and can be opened/closed.
That’s it right? So simple.

Which leads me to this video about doors in videogame that I recently saw. It sparked some fresh thinking into what complexity is.

Because a door has an enormous amount of details to get right into a videogame and the result is the mix of many small choices and decisions.
It is the result of many questions to get into the details of how things works, how it should open, at what speed, where the camera should be and behave, how the player would move while opening and passing to the door, if the door can be opened partly and so on. (which, btw are somewhat linked to my “making good questions” article because that’s how you get deeper into a topic.)

As you see even a door can be complex yet simple in plain sight. It’s a door afterall.
In any product (good or bad) there’s so much complexity hidden that we don’t see, so many outcomes from each decisions that have been taken into consideration before releasing.

Which is these days I rarely have a definite answer for some questions.
Because I know that whenever I get a question like “It should be easy, you simply need to do it like that”, I know I might discover some hidden complexity.

That’s why it’s magical, because it’s hidden and we often forget about it, yet it’s something we should be constantly aware of.
We rarely get something “easy without tradeoffs”.