“Remember that the next time you take to the Internet to let off a little steam. You may think you’re standing outside the building, harmlessly yelling at the front door, but you’re really standing next to someone’s desk embarrassing them in front of their colleagues.”

Jay Fanelli

Learning to live a better story

In which I revisit a post I wrote 3 years ago, before we moved back to South Africa:

But I also know that there is no right answer, and that whatever story we tell with our lives has very little to do with our actual location, and everything to do with our attitude and worldview. So today we celebrate 3 years back in South Africa. And we’re thankful for the story we have here and now.

Tay-Sachs

Gut-wrenching story, good advice from a mom who lost her baby to a terminal illness:

But you don’t know what’s going to happen to your children, so you better enjoy them now. They could drown in a pool or get leukemia or shoot themselves in the head when they’re 30. People don’t want to hear that. But don’t look at me and put that sympathy on me, because you don’t know when chaos will hit you. And it will. I have a great life. It’s a sad, complicated, beautiful, strange life. It’s mine.

The irrelevance of most news

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. […]

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action ratio.”

And earlier, this:

The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.

“I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would fight fires, watch grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.”

Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984); French philosopher, social theorist, historian of ideas, and literary critic.

I came across this great quote as part of my research for the Product Management book I’m writing. It was one of those rare moments of satisfaction where I was able to drop this perfectly-worded paragraph into the right place to make the transition I was struggling so hard to make.

“Words, when considered as a design element, play a crucial role in shaping our emotional perception and they solidify the aspects a visual design vocabulary hints at. When considering the role of words as a building block of our design process, it’s evident that design is more than a purely visual pursuit.”

Highlighted by Rian van der Merwe in A Pocket Guide to The craft of words by The Standardistas