About a year ago, I had an experience that taught me one of my life’s biggest lessons. I learned it the hard way. Probably the most painful way.
A couple of friends and myself got together in Borders and sat down to chat about some ideas we had, and pick one to start working on. We had big ideas. Ones that can potentially change the world. Surprisingly, one small and simple idea kept presenting itself in many of the things we’ve discussed. One that’s so trivial that anyone can sit down in a couple of weeks to design it, code it, and publish it. We decided to give it a shot anyway, and to see how our collaboration will turn out. We all had our own thriving consulting/freelancing business, and we agreed to to this work on the side, in Google’s 80/20 manner. With my move to San Francisco, and the endless client demands, I let the idea gather some dust on my desk. We actually had a working prototype, and were finalizing some technical detail to apply some designs and finalize the product. But somehow, I didn’t give this idea the respect it deserved. After all, ANYONE can do it. It must be too trivial to become anything of value. Few weeks later, my perspective turned upside down. I was reading a technology blog one morning and saw an anouncement. Our idea was out there, gaining best of the show award, and getting investment and acquisition offers from several companies. Except that we weren’t the ones who shipped it. Someone else did. That day, I felt that someone has ripped a piece of me. Someone has kidnapped my child. Later, I realized that I didn’t even have the right to think this way. I didn’t really care for that idea enough to call it mine.
That incident made me reflect a lot on the nature and life of ideas. An idea is just a seed. As dead and as dry as a seed can be. A lot of people see it. And many even stop to look at it, hold it in their hands, and think about its potential. But few take the time to care for it and grow it. And fewer hold on to it when the plant, after years of care and attention, seems to bear no fruit. And somehow, those who are patient and persistent enough wake up one day to see a small blooming flower at the end of one branch, and know that they were given a nod of approval for their tenacity.
And there is time at which an idea feels like a drag. As it grows, it asks for more. And at times, it asks for far more than one can provide it. Even worse, it doesn’t show any signs of growth. It looks hopeless. And one stares at the soil where the seed is burried, and wonders if that seed will ever ‘break through’ and show a hint. And it’s during that time that one’s faith is tested. And once again, those who believed enough in their idea to realize it’s already pushing its roots deep through the soil are the ones who allow it to survive and see daylight.
I’ve been always waiting for “the right idea” to strike me, in order to move forward. I gave up on so many small ideas waiting for the big one, and I realized that every big idea starts small, and that I may never get to the right idea unless I try the wrong ones. Over the past couple of years, I have seen many companies that changed their direction, and vision, to adapt to changing market conditions. But if they weren’t moving forward in the first place, they can never change direction. As Einstein eloquently put it: “Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
Now that I learned my lessons, I am realizing that it’s one of the hardest thing I’ve got to do. I am currently working on a product so dear to me that it’s refusing to let go of me. When I almost gave up on it halfway through, I remembered my earlier lesson and came back to it. The fascinating thing is that the more I work on it, the more I am having silent conversations with it. It knows what it wants to become. It knows who it needs to help. And it knows how to control me to grow despite of my doubts and setbacks. And I am enjoying these conversations as ever. I have no idea whether this product can be useful to anyone, but I know it needs to exist strong enough that I have no other option other than to believe in it, and watch it through its secret life.
Two young MBA couple graduated and landed great jobs in California. They realized that they had some time before their job starting date, so they flew to California a couple of weeks earlier and enjoyed spending their days on the beach.
One day, the Devil walked by and saw them, so he approached them and said: "Hey. I see that you are enjoying your time here. I have a proposal for you:
I will offer you everything you ever dreamt about: fame, success, money and prosperity for as long as you and everyone of your descendant shall live. In return, I need you to offer me one thing: your soul."
The couple looked at each in bewilderment, then looked back to the Devil and asked: "What’s the catch?"
There are times where one realizes that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to face it. Despite one’s weaknesses, lack, and inabilities, there is a power that lies in everyone of us. And there are moments in our lives where our courage defies all our weaknesses. Moments where we are forced to do something that we never imagined possible. And we look back at these moments and realize that we are much better than we thought we were.
This video clip showed me one of these moments. Enjoy it…
If you’ve been following my old blog, you’ll notice that I started migrating some of the content to the new one. In the next couple of days, I will be adding older posts from that blog that was burried in cyberspace.
When I was a kid, my school used to host a circus every summer. In the morning, I would sneak behind the circus tent and watch the animals being fed and trained. That was one of my greatest joys.
I remember looking at the elephants, and noticing something that fascinated me and kept me wondering for a while: knowing how powerful an elephant is, I was surprised to see a thin rope tying the elephant’s leg to a pole, and that the elephant never tried to escape even though it wouldn’t take any effort for it to cut the rope and walk away.
After a while, I gave up guessing and went to ask one of the trainers. He smiled and said:”It wasn’t always a rope, you know. When the elephant is young, we put a hard chain around its leg so that whenever the elephant pulls, it would feel the resistance of the strong chain and know that how far it can go.”.
“When the elephant grows up”, he continued, “there is no need for the chain anymore. We just put a thin rope around its leg and the elephant stops pulling whenever it feels that rope. The elephant doesn’t know anymore that the chain is gone, and that the rope tying it to the pole can be easily broken as soon as it decides to walk away. The only limitation that elephant has, is in its own mind.”
“For the elephant,” the trainer said, “all that it knows is the memory of the old chain, and the slight feeling of resistance from the thin rope… The elephant doesn’t know the difference. “
An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work, as the ground was hard.His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:
Dear Vincent,
I am feeling pretty sad, because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.
Love, Papa
A few days later he received a letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where the bodies are buried.
Love,
Vinnie
At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left.
That same day the old man received another letter from his son.
Dear Pop,
Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
There isn’t much for me to say on this one (or may be there is too much for me to say here ). My favorite segment is about the guy who changed his car’s tire for $22,000.
This past Saturday, I had three different discussions with three different groups of friends about purpose. I almost believed there is a self actualization bug going around town. But I’d feel selfish if I didn’t share the main highlights of these conversations, hoping to hear more about what others think about this topic.
The conversations revolved around the same questions: Does life have meaning? Do we have a purpose in life? if so, what is it?
Let’s start with a simple assumption: that God really doesn’t play dice, and that everyone is here for a reason.
If this is true, then there is no insignificant event in our lives. Let me highlight this with a fictitious example:
You’re standing in a bookstore checking out a book that looks interesting. You take it off the shelf, flip through it, and return it to the shelf. Only this time, you didn’t put it in its original location.
Someone comes few hours later looking for another book, and stumbles accidentally on the book you put back in the location where this other person was supposed to find her book.
She picks up the book, flips through it and is immediately captured by the information inside it. She buys it, goes home and spends the following days devouring the material inside it.
She’s finally found something she’s passionate about, and for the following years, she studies everything she could find about that topic.
A couple of decades later, she wins the Nobel prize in medicine for discovering how to reconnect damaged spines, ending the pain for thousands of paralyzed patients who could finally walk again.
And this could not have happened if you didn’t pick up that book, and put it back in the wrong place.
This is the butterfly effect that’s going around us in every single moment in our lives, and we’re not aware of it.
I remember reading in Paul Madonna’s book how his grandfather, during a walk in San Francisco, while they were both ready to cross the street asked him to wait for the next crossing light, saying: “Let’s change the fate of the universe”.
And we all do, on a daily basis. Everything we do alters the fate of the whole universe, whether we are aware of it or not.
This leads to a simple conclusion: everyone has a purpose. Whether we are aware of it or not, that’s a different story.
There are those who live their lives completely oblivious to its purpose, those who don’t care about what their purpose is, and those who think they have one purpose and discover later, or never, that their life had a completely different purpose.
My point here is best illustrated through a fable that I read a long time ago:
Once lived a good man that God was so happy with, so he sent him an angel to grant him a wish for his virtuous life. The angel showed up for that guy and told him that he’ll grant him any wish he wants.
“Do you want money?”, the angel asked. “No. I have enough money to live gratefully day by day”, the man replied.
“Do you want long life?”.
“No, I want to live my days on Earth, and leave when my time is due”.
“Well, I have to grant you a wish, so please ask for anything you want.”, the angel said.
“I want to live the best life God wishes a human being to live”, the man replied.
God granted the man his wish, and made his shadow heal everyone it falls over, whenever the sun is shining on the man’s face. The man lived the rest of his life, going around the world, doing his day to day business, performing miracles he was never aware of.
When I was at Microsoft, I attended a presentation where Dean Kamen talked about his inventions: an iBot, a power generator, a water purifier, etc…I was really moved and inspired by one man’s ability to change the world by creating many artifacts that benefit humanity in this magnitude.
A friend of mine who was sitting next to me during the talk whispered in my ear:
- “This guy reminds me of Howard Roark”.
- “Howard who?”, I asked.
- “Howard Roark. You know? The Fountainhead!”, he answered.
Apparently this is a book that has been taught in high schools in the U.S., while I was studying Camus’ L’etranger and Hugo’s Les Miserables in Egypt.
Since I am a big believer in the third omen (things that appear in my life three times must be telling me something), and that it was the third time someone mentions this book to me, I bought it on my way back home and started reading it that evening. The book was over 700 pages, and I couldn’t put it down. I took the following two days off, and did nothing but read the Fountainhead cover to cover. And when I was done, I was transformed. Transformed by a fictitious character that represents a human ideal to strive for in many aspects. One who’s immune to people’s expectations and judgments. One who holds his beliefs and values above his desire to please others and the urge follow the status quo.
Long story short, two years later I was reading a memoir by James Dyson where he mentioned Buckminster Fuller as an inspiration. I researched Fuller and realized quickly that he was a manifestation of the values that Ayn Rand portrayed for Howard Roark in the Fountainhead: selfless, confident, different, and in some way, scary. (I should mention that selfless in this context does not refer to the act of self sacrifice for the pleasure of others, but to put oneself out for the good of humanity and for the sole goal of doing what’s right with no regard to others’ judgments, or to one’s personal desires).
At 32, Fuller was already penniless, jobless, and his second child was just born shortly after his first one died of meningitis few years earlier before her fifth birthday. Since the age expectancy for males back then was 45 years, he realized that he had two choices to live the remaining ten years of his life: To join the game of money making that’s been played all over the world, or to start thinking on his own. He vowed himself to silence for two years to get over his reflexive talking habits. Once Fuller stopped communicating with the outer world, he started tapping into a different world: his inner world. He started listening to his intuition and learn about what needs to be done.
And in doing his own thinking, he gave up what he’s been taught, and stopped accepting taking for granted what others told him.
His silence and thinking led him to a simple theory: If one attends to the problems of humanity and commits oneself to solving them, the universe will care for that person the same way it cares for a flower or a bird. So he committed himself to working on the bigger tasks of the world on the absolute faith that the universe’s integrity will pay him back. His philosophy was that changing the world does not occur through preaching or social reforms, but through artifacts that solve the existing challenges of humanity.
In the following fifty years of his life (he lived well beyond the statistical age expectancy), Fuller wrote more than thirty books, created numerous design and architectural inventions, was awarded more than twenty five patents, held over forty eight honorary doctorates, and traveled the world lecturing and teaching.
Throughout his life, he always focused on what he can do in a given situation instead of dwelling on the negative aspects that presented themselves to him. He did what nature, and the universe, wanted him to do, and not what the system expected from him.
And in achieving all that, Fuller never gave up his humility. He always referred to himself as a “throwaway guinea pig” who is in constant experimentation with his own life for service of humanity, and who dares to be naive to learn what he needs to know.
Below is one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve ever watched. I strongly recommend it!
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from that interview:
- Can you trust yourself that once you get the knowledge necessary & apply it to solve the problems of the universe that you won’t mistake yourself for being big? that you are still the small you? the “throw away ” you?
- Dare to be naive. That’s the only way you’ll ever learn.
- Become a comprehensive student of the world’s repository. Learn to see the invisible world. Do much more with much less.
- Great religious and political institutions rely on man’s belief of being a total failure.
- Our challenge is not lack of knowledge, it’s lack of faith.
- Find out the truth and commit yourself to the truth of your finding.The truth is out there. You only need to tune “in”.
- You need to realize that you’ve got some of the mystery of the universe inside you, and you need to make it available for others.
- Humans have the unique ability to access the secrets of the universe. Hence, they should be here for a great purpose.
- Every human being is born genius. But we degenerate from that state very rapidly because of fear.
I also loved what the interviewer said at the end of the show: “May the force be with you, and the force will be with you when you realize you are the force”.
I’ve recently finished reading “Ouliers” by Malcolm Gladwell (or rather, finished reading the first half, and skimmed through the second one). At the end of the book, I was both inspired and frustrated. I was inspired by the author’s demystification of success as a singular hero’s effort, and frustrated because there was a missing chapter that I wanted to read at the end of that book.
Gladwell used his clever storytelling techniques to cite examples of “lucky” hardworking geniuses who were at the right place at the right time. From Bill Joy, to Bill Gates, to Steve Jobs, he makes the argument that these names would not have been known today if they were not presented with an opportunity that took them from being no ones to being someones.
Gladwell also provides the recipe for becoming a genius: 10,000 hours of work. It’s the magic number that separates the amateur from the professional, the no one from the someone.
I found myself nodding in agreement with many points that the author made, only to realize after turning over the last page that the proposed theory is incomplete. What Gladwell proposed is that there are some lucky ones among us who were able to break through by unique opportunities that was presented to them: A super computer at college or high school, being born in a specific month, or living in the heart of Silicon Valley. He also proposes that these opportunities are presented to selected fews, and not to everyone. Here is where I started shaking my head in disagreement. But what happens to others? Do they not get their own opportunities? Is life unfair? Does God play dice?
I’ve long believed in unfair opportunities that favor some over others. It was easy for me to assume this, than to put in 10,000+ hours of work and be aware of the opportunities that are constantly presented to me. Call it laziness. Call it fear. Or even call it denial. It’s one of the things that makes us favor our comfort zone over our true potential, and choose luxury over self realization.
In my opinion, these outliers are unique, not for the opportunities that were presented to them, but in their recognition of, and ability to act on, these opportunities. Every day, every one of us is presented with unlimited possibilities and unique opportunities. But many of us walk past them, looking at what we want (or what we think we want), unable to hear the secret calling in every omen that speaks to us. Among the noise that surrounds us, it’s becoming harder and harder to hear that faint genuine voice inside us that somehow knows the answer to all our questions.
There is a mysterious force that starts acting with us once we recognize an opportunity, and without having any fear or desire, start acting upon it. Once we start something that we cannot finish alone, somehow we are no longer alone. People and circumstances start appearing out of nowhere to help us. What Paulo Coelho called our personal legend is no more than this faint voice calling us to action, when we see an opportunity that feels right for us to take.
Of course, there is the antagonist that always acts against our call to action. That stronger voice that was bred by our parents, teachers, friends who inherited it over millions of years. The one that tells us that we are not good enough, that we may make fools of ourselves, and that we would crash and burn while attempting to fly. This demon that knows us far better than we know ourselves, is often successful fighting that faint light that’s starting to grow inside us. And that demon is always clever in finding the right excuses for us not to act, pushing our idea for another day, and living a life of postponed dreams. For each one of us, this demon has a different name. And for every one, it has a million names. Sometimes it’s easier to fight that demon when we can find a name for it, and other times we can just fight it by moving forward with what our gut feeling is trying to push us towards.
There are few myths/realities that I realized lately, that are changing the way I think about these so called “outliers”:
Myth: Successful people know what they are doing: What’s probably separating them from the crowd is not knowledge about their path, but their ability to move forward with a good deal of uncertainty. They move forward out of their confidence in taking a step towards an initial direction and adjusting their path as they move. As Einstein puts it: “Life is like a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep on moving.”
Myth: Successful people don’t have fear: Only amateurs don’t have fear. Having fear is probably the best indicator that you should take that specific direction. What separates these “outliers” from others is their ability to act despite their fear, not their ability to overcome it. If fear is gone, that’s a bad sign.
Myth: The path to success is a straight line from “here” to “goal”: Since I came to the US about 7 years ago, I’ve been dumbfounded by the goal-oriented mindset that people live by, and that thousands of self-help authors keep feeding people’s minds with. Goals are great if I know exactly what I want to accomplish. But having that 5 year outlook or that new year’s resolution has rarely worked for me, or for many people and companies I’ve heard of. The challenge is that these targets are always moving. Once we get to the next milestone, life has completely shifted. As one of my mentor put it once: “Change is the only constant in life”. And so I learned that the path to the future is a winding, zigzagging road full of turns and obstacles. We can only see the next step in the path once we move along the current path and take the turn. As Steve Jobs put it in his Stanford Speech, you can only connect the dots looking backward.
Myth: One must wait for inspiration to act: Inspiration comes from acting. Our actions, our creations and products, will pay us back the love we invested in them with more inspiration. It’s another mysterious fact that these creations start to take a life of their own, and if we already wait until we know exactly how that book we wanted to start writing will end, our story will be probably mediocre: we didn’t leave enough freedom and uncertainty to the characters to act and create their own story; the story they wanted us to write when they called upon us with this small voice called intuition.
Myth: One might get very lonely working alone: There is a great difference between being alone and being lonely. When we are alone, without our TV, our iPhone or our internet browser, we are faced with the person we’ve been out of touch with for most of our lives: ourselves. Trust me, this person has A LOT to say, and if we miss what it’s saying, we would have lived a second hand life. As one of my dear friends puts it: “I am not bored being alone. I think I am a very interesting person to be with”.
I’ve learned these lessons the hard way, and I wish I had someone telling me these facts twenty years ago. However, as the saying goes, if the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, the second best time is right now.
In Non-Designer Design Handbook, Robin Williams gives a very valuable advice on design (and life). I quote:
Don’t be a wimp
Don’t be afraid to create your Design (or your Life) with plenty of blank space-it’s rest for the eyes (and the Soul),
Don’t be afraid to be asymmetrical, to uncenter your format - it often makes the effect stronger.
It’s okay to do the unexpected.
Don’t be afraid to make words very large or very small; don’t be afraid to speak loudly or to speak in a whisper. Both can be effective in the right situation.
Don’t be afraid to make your graphics very bold or very minimal, as long
as the result complements or reinforces your design or your attitude.
Back when I was a research assistant at the Human Computer Interaction Lab in Maryland, a very interesting study was carried by Kent Norman on the acts of rage against computers. Kent surveyed people and asked them to “vent” their feelings and frustrations with their computers and software. The results showed that people screamed, swore, hit, and even killed their machines out of frustration and anger. For a full flavor of the acts of violence, follow the link to the full study below.
What was particularly interesting to me was the difference in opinions between Mac users and Windows users: Windows users blamed Microsoft for anything that goes wrong with their PC, even when it’s not Microsoft’s fault. On the other hand, Mac users forgave Apple even when it’s Apple’s fault. Back then, I wasn’t a Mac user (I’ve been a faithful PC user until Vista came out), so I grabbed a friend of mine who owned a Mac and asked him: “What’s so special about the Mac that makes you more forgiving?”.
“You know when you are driving back home through the rush hour traffic, after a long day at work, and your car suddenly gets rear ended by another driver. You stop your car, you go down and you’re ready to yell and fight with the other driver. And the other person gets off the car, and it’s this really hot chick, beautiful, well dressed, smiling at you with innocence and kindly apologizing. You can’t help but to smile back, tell her that it’s no big deal, get back in your car and drive back home. It may actually put you in a good mood that such a beautiful person has been nice to you today. That’s how I feel about my Mac!”
This person’s answer revealed to me the importance of a product’s look and behavior to users. It may even eclipse in importance its ability to function properly, or give users all what they need. We are mostly emotional creatures, and we like those who treat us well. Next time your product displays an error message, make sure it smiles, it apologizes, and qualifies as a hot chick
A year ago, I walked into my manager’s office and told him that I was quitting. I was probably more surprised at my decision than he was. I just changed teams, and I couldn’t have been happier with the new team: every person was cooperative, positive, and respectful. My decision wasn’t based on any rationalization, but on a gut feeling and some strange bio-feedback: The minute I was stepping into the office, my heart would start pounding hard, and I would start gasping for air. I went to see my doctor, did all the tests that he recommended, and found nothing wrong with my heart or my health. Yet I kept getting these symptoms over and over.
I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me: I had a very comfortable job, working in a great company, getting paid a six figure salary and offered tons of benefits. There was no reason for me to be dissatisfied with my life, and yet I was. In fact, for someone who moved from a country where I was getting paid annually less than I was getting paid here monthly, it would be insane to give up such opportunity.
One morning, I looked myself in the mirror, and asked myself if I were to do what I was about to do that day if it were the last day of my life. I didn’t just say it, I felt it. During the following hours, I started seeing many messages, what one might call omens, that left no doubt in my heart that I am about to make the right decision.
When I walked out of the company that day, I felt light. I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and I didn’t care. I drove home with Castaneda’s sentence resonating in my mind: "I have told you that to choose a path you must be free from fear and ambition."
The following week, my dear friend Aaron Jasinski emailed me and told me that he knows someone who’s looking for a good UX designer to help with a new startup idea. A week later, I was sitting in a coffee shop with Aaron and Kevin Merritt who pitched me a vision for an application that lets people create databases with the same ease and freedom that they fill out a spreadsheet in Excel. Since I don’t believe in coincidences, I told Kevin that I would help him with the product. During the following nine months, I had the most fun in my entire life, designing the user interface and interaction for blist, working with one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in Seattle. blist went out of stealth mode with a bang, and everyone praised its slickness and ease of use. It wasn’t a surprise to me because it was a pure labor of love! In products, as much as in food, you can taste love from the first "byte". What was a surprise to me was how my design work on blist was more effective than any PR or marketing work I would have done. Founders and CEOs started calling me, and I had hard time picking the next project to work on: every one had an interesting challenge, and I wanted to help every single company and make more users happy. And in making them happy, I am having the most fulfilling time of my life: When I go to bed at night, I can’t wait to wake up and do what I do one more day: Whether it’s designing a new user experience, or improving an existing one.
What brought these memories back was not just that it’s been a year since I quit Microsoft. A week ago, precisely a year from the day I walked into my manager’s office and told him I am leaving, the product I was working on was shut down.
The reason I am sharing this story is that every day, I meet entrepreneurs whom I admire for their determination and commitment to solve hard problems and make a big difference by doing things differently. I also meet people who are worried about what they would face "out there" if they leave their comfort zone and do something different. People who are longing for change, and yet are afraid of the slightest change. But at some point, we need to take that leap of faith, answering that voice deep inside, knowing that it doesn’t matter what we’ll face on that journey, and it doesn’t matter so much what we’ll accomplish. What really matters is who we’ll meet on the road, and who we’ll become at the end of it.
About
Amir is a user experience guru, and founder of Fictiv: an interactive design agency that helps organizations innovate through design.[more...]
). My favorite segment is about the guy who changed his car’s tire for $22,000.
