Related posts:

How to prototype iPad apps in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote

You might also like reading...

• What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 4 Years Ago
• If you love something, give it away
• Delve Networks ranked among the top 50 Most Usable RIAs

I hung up the phone and sat shaking on the floor. What have I just done? Blood rushed to my head, and I realized that I’d been holding my breath probably since the phone rang. A let a long exhale out, and glanced once more at the contract in my hand…

Everything I wanted was there: the salary I’d asked for, the relocation benefits and the starting date. And the company logo was also there. It reminded me how it had been my childhood and teenage dream to just visit that company. The same company that I’d just turned down a dream offer to work at.

The phone rang again. It was my best friend, probably calling to ask about when I am starting with the new job. I didn’t answer; I wouldn’t be able to tell him why I just said “thanks, but no” to the biggest special effects studio in the world. I didn’t know if he’d understand that, after more than two weeks of negotiation with them, I had a “gut feeling” that I shouldn’t do it.

This morning, I drove by the studio on my way to get a cup of team and it made me wonder whether I made the right decision three years ago. I remembered reading that successful people don’t always make the right decisions. Instead, they make decisions, then make them right. I realized that there is probably no way for me to know if I made the right decision, because that path no longer exists. But I am grateful for one thing: that I made a decision, and I moved forward to make it the right one for me. I went on to work with over a dozen startups, two of whom already got acquired, launched a successful product, and getting ready to launch a second one.

I strongly believe that there are very few “bad decisions” we make in life, and whatever they are, we can make them right by learning from the results and moving forward. I also believe that if we take the path of heart, the one that’s free from desire and fears, we’ll seldom make bad decisions. We might stumble into failures from time to time, but those wrong turns are probably there to teach us things we needed to learn, meet people who will help us in the next turn, and grow into the person we need to be for the next challenge.

So instead of standing by the start line trying to figure out the race, take time to get in touch with your inner compass and take a leap forward. Chances are you’ll never end up where you’ve originally planned to be, but most probably you’ll end up in a much better place if you keep making decisions and making them right.

Finally, to quote the bhagavad gita, “It is better to strive in one’s own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another. Nothing is ever lost in following one’s own dharma. But competition in another’s dharma breeds fear and insecurity.”

If you agree, disagree, or have a similar story to share with the blog readers, leave a comment below.

You might also like reading...

• Customer Development Hacked: How to find and interview 10,000 customers in one day
• Having The Best Tools Doesn’t Really Matter
• Listening

Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post last June became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:

• Total time spent creating the minimally viable product: less than 3 hours
• Total startup cost: $47.50 ($5 hosting, $7.50 domain, and $35 wordpress theme)
• First paying customer within 10 minutes of launch
• Copies downloaded in the first 60 days: 1,491
• Page views on the original blog post: 40,894
• Unique visitors to Keynotopia: 19,235
• Link backs/mentions: 769
• Total product returns: 2
• Total variations/tests on the landing page: 29
• Made it to Google’s first results page in less than 2 weeks for the following search terms: iPad prototyping, iPhone prototyping, Android prototyping, Keynote prototyping, Keynote wireframes, …
• I’ve never sold any products in my life (except my old laptops on eBay and CraigsList).

The story:

I pressed the update button and took a deep breath. The website was finally online, and a surge of questions rushed to my head: What if it’s not good enough? What if people call me an opportunist for redirecting the blog post to a product page? What if no one wants to buy it?

I reminded myself that it took me less than 3 hours to put that website together, and it wouldn’t be so bad if no one buys the product. I glanced at the time on my laptop: it was 1:38 am, and my stomach was growling loudly. I put the laptop on the couch and went to prepare my favorite late-night-raisin-oatmeal.

Few minutes later, I was staring at the boiling water  on the stove, entertaining the thought of taking down the website to do some more work on it, and re-launch it few days later when it’s more ready for the public. I wasn’t used to putting half-baked products out in the wild, and it made me feel uncomfortable. Then I remembered a quote from Reid Hoffman: "if you shipped your product and you’re not ashamed of it, you’ve probably shipped too late". Pouring the oatmeal into the pot, I started thinking how this all started…

It had been less than a month since I wrote about how I’ve been using Apple Keynote to prototype iPad applications. I debated whether or not I should publish the post, thinking there was nothing new or useful about it. Yet, I decided to do it for the fun of it. What I didn’t expect, though, was for the post to be picked up by some of the most respected bloggers, becoming popular among the design and iPhone communities. In less than three weeks, the post generated more than 10,000 visits and 500 downloads of the iPad keynote templates I posted along.

I became curious to find out whether people were reading the post and downloading the templates because it was a useful idea or just a cool one. I wondered if they would pay for these templates, and how much they would be willing to pay. Since I asked people to subscribe to the blog before downloading the templates, I could just email everyone and ask. I could create a survey and ask them to fill it out, promising some freebies in return. But people are generally too busy to fill out surveys.

Then I thought about building a minimally viable product that would help me answer that question, and concluded that I could put something together quickly using WordPress. Three hours later, I had a WordPress website with an e-Junkie shopping cart and few screenshots of the templates.

DING!

My thoughts were suddenly interrupted. It was the Mac Mail client, which I’d set up few minutes earlier with my Paypal email. I walked back to the couch and stared at the laptop screen. I had an unread email. The subject: "Notification of Payment received".

Keynotopia was in business!

Lessons learned:

Sell your byproducts

Become aware of the value of internal tools, processes, or even hacks that you developed while working on your main product. In my case, I’ve been using many of these templates for my client work, and hadn’t thought about selling them until recently.

(The guys at 37Signals have a great post about this)

Kill the "Coming Soon" page

Many startups are technology focused, believing that a blog is a way to tell customers about their product once it’s launched. Before launch, they put out a "coming soon"page with an email sign up box. But that page has no value for potential customers, and little incentive for them to give out their email address.

Instead of a coming soon page, start a conversation: talk about your story, share your process and findings, and provide value even before the product is ready. There is no reason to wait for a product to be ready in order to have customers.

And if you write a blog post that becomes popular, use it as a conversion funnel for your product.

Focus on benefits instead of features

I tested over 10 variations of the tagline on Keynotopia’s landing page. The ones that performed best stated some tangible measurable benefits for the user (interactive prototypes in 30 minutes or less). The ones that had the worst performance stated what the product was (a collection of interface templates for Apple Keynote).

Give away a valuable freebie

I gave away the original toolkit I’ve been using for my work. In return, I asked for people to subscribe to the blog. The perceived value was worth giving out an email address for.

Later on, I created another wireframing set and released it for Free on SmashingMagazine. This helped tremendously with traffic and branding, and many people who downloaded the free templates come back to buy the full bundle.

Create a list, and start talking with customers

Many companies use lists to inform people about new features. I end up unsubscribing from most newsletters because they feel like ads: they feel like they are sent from a business to a business, not from a human to a human. In their attempt to sound professional, companies ignore the human side of business.

In my case, I wanted to have a conversation with everyone who’d signed up. I wrote a simple, personal text-only newsletter, I told them what I’ve been up to and asked them for feedback and ideas. I wrote it the same way I write an email to a friend, and many subscribers replied back thinking I sent them a personal email.

Create embeddable media

Almost every blogger who mentioned my original blog post embedded the youtube video I posted along. Having a YouTube video or a Slideshare document in a blog post helps spread the word: In addition to being good for SEO, it provides a good snapshot of your post to be embedded by anyone who wants to link back to it.

Never stop testing

For the blog post, I tested about 5 variations for the sign up form. Changing the title from "Enter your email to download the files" to "Subscribe to this blog to access all downloads" increased sign ups more than 500%

For Keynotopia’s landing page, I had over 29 iterations for the language and arrangements, reducing the bounce rate from 59% to 12% in less than 30 days

Don’t be afraid to charge for your product

Having a product is a good excuse to talk to your customers. Charging for your product is a good excuse for customers to talk to you. When people pay for a product, they become invested in it. In my case, many people who bought the templates email me frequently to share requests for missing UI components, or ideas for new templates that I wasn’t even considering.

Additionally, charging your customers helps you find out if there is a real pain point that your product is addressing, and if people are willing to pay to solve that pain point.

Keynotopia may not be a "startup" in the typical sense of the word. To me, it was an experimental project to teach myself many things I’ve always wanted to learn. It shifted my perspective from a service-oriented mindset (getting paid for my time) to a value-oriented mindset (getting paid over and over for a value that I used my time to create). My true epiphany happened when I woke up one morning to find few hundred dollars deposited in my bank account: while I was asleep, the value I’d created was hard at work

If you have a similar experience, leave me a comment below; I’d love to hear about it.

Related Posts:

        How  I launched a profitable product in 3 hours – part 2: The nuts and bolts

You might also like reading...

• How to spot a good designer in an interview
• Is My Business Idea Good Enough?
• The eagle who lived as a chicken

What if you can prototype your next idea quickly and cheaply without learning any new tools or programming languages?

What if you can send your prototype to friends to play with and give you feedback, without having to install anything on their mobile device?

What if you can integrate your prototype into your presentation, and click through it to show your audience how it works, rather than boring them with bullet points?

And what if you can do all this without touching a design tool or writing a single line of code?

The following video shows a sample prototype created using nothing but Apple Keynote and Keynotopia‘s iPad prototyping templates. You can also see how I am testing the prototype on an iPad, tapping my way through different screens and dialogs.

Here are the UI elements I use in that presentation, which were all vector shapes created from scratch in Apple Keynote.

 

Why use Keynote?

The challenge with existing wireframing and prototyping tools is that you need to be a designer to create a good looking app prototypes. Additionally, most of them will help you create static screens, but not something that you can click through and test out.

Keynote includes powerful drawing tools, smart guides, styles, locking, and grouping. Master slides make it possible to reuse interface components across multiple screens, hyperlinks add “clickability” to the prototype, and slide transitions create cool interface animations with a single click. Finally, it works seamlessly with Adobe CS apps, so copying and pasting graphics works seamlessly across.

With the iPad prototyping templates for Keynote and PowerPoint, you can create a prototype simply by copying and pasting interface components on a slide, then creating hyperlinks to transition between slides, hence giving a prototype the needed interactivity and responsiveness to users’ actions.

How do you create a similar prototype in 30 minutes or less?

Download the iPad Prototyping template from Keynotopia , and install the file “iPad Prototype.kth” into <UserName> -> Library -> Application Support -> iWork -> Keynote -> Themes. Alternatively, you can double click the file to open it in Keynote, and choose file -> Save Theme. This will create a theme in Keynote that you can reuse to create new presentations, as shown below.

 

When you create a new presentation based on the iPad Prototype theme, you will see a single black slide. To access the assets, you need to go to the toolbar and click View -> Show master slides.

This will reveal the master slides panel above the slides panel, allowing you to click on a specific master slide and copy/paste assets into your slides.

Step 1: Sketching the user flow

To create your prototype, start by defining the different app screens that you will need and how the user will transition between them. I typically do this as a state diagram as shown below (Created on the iPad using Adobe Ideas).

 

It’s important that you get this diagram right because it will save you time doing modifications to your prototype later on.

Step 2: Putting together application screens

Next, you create a new slide for each screen, and copy/past components from the masters into each slide (Select a master slide > Select an object > Select target slide > paste object). Since all objects were created in Apple Keynote, they are fully editable (resize, change labels, change colors, add/remote elements, etc…). Each object is a group of building blocks that are grouped together. You can either double click on an object to select each sub-object, or ungroup using the Ungroup button on the toolbar, edit sub-objects, then group again. Grouping makes it easier to select and move objects.

 

Hint: After you’ve created each screen, you may find it at times easier to move the static components of that screen into its own master slide. That will save you time in making modifications in each slide if you decide to change something later.

After creating each screen, you duplicate (CMD+D) slides and add additional elements to them (pop-ups, fill text, …).

Step 3: Adding interactivity

Finally, it’s time to create transitions between screens. You do this by going through your state diagram, and for each slide, select the element that would transition it to another slide. For instance, clicking a picture shows the profile pop-up, so you’d select the profile picture (you can select all pictures in the slide), and in the Inspector -> Hyperlink select the target slide. Do this for every transition that you have in your state diagram. Keynote will add a blue indicator on each hyperlinked element in your slides.

 

Hint: Keynote is smart enough to know when you rearrange your slide, and will keep track of the right slide you link to even if you change its sequence order. Test your presentation frequently to double check that you’re hyperlinking the correct slides.

That’s it! You now have an interactive prorotype within your presentation.

Test it on an iPad !

If you’d like to test this prototype with users and see how they’d use it, you need to export it as QuickTime as shown below (This will prevent screens from automatically advancing if the user clicks a spot that’s not hyperlinked. You then open the prototype in QuickTime Player 7, and interact with it.

 

If you’d like to test the prototype on the iPad, you need to export the prototype as PDF, email it to yourself or put it in DropBox, then open it on the iPad. In the video above, I use GoodReader to show the PDF file.

Hint: Unfortunately, the Keynote iPad app does not support hyperlinked navigation, so if you open this keynote file on the iPad it will only advance sequentially. Bonus Hint: Keynote has an automatic tweening/animation feature called Magic Move. If you want to have fun by adding animated transitions, fading pop-ups in and out, you can do so by copying and pasting the shape across two slides, select both slides then selecting the effect as shown below. I found this feature to be unpredictable at times.

Final Words

Remember that a prototype doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to convey your idea better than your words do. Don’t over-engineer it, and don’t prematurely optimize it. Just put together something that users can see and play with. You will get many more insights than spending hours in focus groups, market research and surveys.

 

Next time you’re giving a pitch, remember to show more and talk less. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.

Creating prototypes is like doing magic: once you understand that all magic happens in the spectator’s mind, you can focus on bringing what matters to the audience. Everything else is a distraction.

If you think this tutorial is useful, or if you have any feedback or questions, leave me a comment below. I will do my best to reply to every single one of them.

Get The Templates Now

You might also like reading...

• Purpose
• Malcolm Gladwell outliers – A very personal review
• What We’re Really Afraid Of

What’s unique about Docverse’s user experience is that it never tried to change the way people did something. Instead, it tapped into people’s existing habits and workflows to provide them with easier, faster, and more secure way to share and collaborate on their documents. We carefully observed how people already used email attachments, how they changed and saved documents, and how they previewed and merged each other’s changes. Andwe brainstormed for days at a time about how to make every part of that workflow better, without forcing users to do anything different, and sometimes without asking them to do anything at all. The best user experience was to have no user experience: the more transparent the product became, the more users were focused on the main task: editing a document together. It was the document, not the product, that’s always been the center of the universe.

Docverse just works.

I am grateful for having the opportunity to work with this amazing team, and being part of that great journey that started less than 18 months ago with a spreadsheet of ideas, to sketches and designs hanging all over the green walls of their Howard street office, to a functional product, and finally, to a successful acquisition. It’s been a true rollercoaster ride through a unique and inspiring Silicon Valley success story.

I blame Docverse for raising the standards of what I will be expecting from technology teams to make a user experience, no matter how challenging, come to life.

You might also like reading...

• Don’t be a wimp
• The secret life of ideas
• 2008 – A year in review

Here is one of the traditional methods for conducting customer interviews:

1. Make an educated guess about your target audience’s demographics

2. Look in your contact list and social network for people who might match your criteria

3. Create an online survey and send them to these people. (better, ask them for a phone interview)

4. Ask for more recommendations and introductions.

The biggest flaw with this method is the assumption that your contacts provide a valid sample of your target audience; At best, you might get few answers that help you refine your questions, and your criteria for interviewing future, and at worst, you might end up believing the wrong answers because they happen to support your idea.

So what’s a better strategy?

Start with the tribe leader, because his voice is worth 10,000 voices. This person might be a bestselling author, a blogger, or one of the top consultant in the field. What’s important is that this person is seen as a leader and expert by your target audience; they listen to him, they trust his opinion, and they share their thoughts and feedback with him.

For instance, if you’re working on a new presentation tool, Garr Reynolds would be a great example. If you’re creating the next agile project management tool, Mike Cohn might be your guy.

Keep in mind that this expert is not just a tool expert, but a community expert as well. He uses best practices, works with the tools, and knows other people who use them.

Why is his voice worth 10,000 voices?

• He reads dozens of books on the topic, so he might save you the time to read them by sharing his insights and conclusions, or by recommending the most useful ones to read.
• He interacts with your potential audience on a daily basis; he writes for them, he reads their comments, and he speaks to them in conferences and seminars.
• His blog analytics provides him with great insights about the audience’s demographics, which he might be willing to share if you ask nicely
• He knows other experts in the field that he can introduce you to
• He knows his active readers, and can suggest some people for you to interview
• He is a power user of other products in your market, and already knows what people like and dislike about them
• He probably knows your potential competitors, and some of their current and previous employees

Once you’ve identified the tribe leader, get in touch with him and ask for an interview. Keep in mind that his time is valuable, so you will need to find a good incentive to get his attention: If the person is offering consulting services, hire him. If he’s a second degree connection on LinkedIn, ask for an introduction from a common connection. If you’ve already started a blog on the topic – which is a great way to find early customers – then ask the expert if he’d like to be featured in an interview on your blog.

When you interview the customer expert, make sure you ask him questions about him and his audience. Keep your interview questions open-ended to give him a chance to share wisdom and insights that you didn’t ask about. Find out what his readers like and dislike, what they read, where they hang out, and what they buy. Ask him for introductions to other experts and active community members that you can interview later.

By working earlier with this community expert, you will find that he may be able to provide you with insights that would otherwise take you a long time ,and a large number of users, to get on your own.

And if you continue to work closely with the community expert, and you’re creating something that he (and his followers) care about, it’s likely that he’ll give you a good mention on his blog once you’re product is out. That’s probably worth 10,000 more voices.

Interviewing the leader is not a substitute for interviewing other tribe members, but it’s probably one of the best ways to get started.

This blog post was partly inspired by an insight from Tyler Perry’s biography (recommended), where he talks about the turning point in his career. After he’d exhausted all his financial resources seven years in a row, and couldn’t find audience for his plays, he finally went about it a bit differently: he visited the city’s churches and persuaded their most powerful musicians and choir members to take roles in the production of his plays. The opening night was one of the coldest nights in Atlanta, yet there was a line around the corner trying to get in the theater. His show sold out that night, and almost every night since then. Perry hired community leaders, and made them into cast members. That made all the difference.

You might also like reading...

• Escape Velocity
• Cheap and fast interactive web prototypes with Apple Keynote
• If you love something, give it away

“… I want to own that moment.”

I started thinking about which successful products own which moments in my daily life. Here are some examples:

• ” I want to share some files with my team”. DropBox owns that moment
• “I’d like to show you how I am imagining this interface”. Balsamiq owns that moment
• “I want to embed a form in my blog”. Wufoo owns that moment
• “I want to create a cool slideshow for my website”. Animoto owns that moment
• “I am starting a new client project”. BaseCamp owns that moment
• “I’d like to know what my friends have been up to lately”. Facebook owns that moment
• “I’d like capture some thoughts.”, Evernote owns that moment.

You get the point.

Unfortunately, many products come out so bloated with features that it’s hard for them to own any specific moment. They are trying to offer too many features and several benefits that users are left wondering “When will I need this?”.

I believe that products should focus as much on WHEN as they focus on what and how. If your product is the first name that comes to mind at a specific moment, then you’ve owned that moment. And when you own a moment, you don’t just have a user; you have everyone involved in that moment.

So how do you identify that moment?

You can guess it, of course. But that’s not the best way to go about it.

One of my favorite activities is to ask users to think aloud while they are trying to accomplish certain task. I constantly encourage them to tell me what’s going on in their mind while they are looking at an interface or clicking through dialogs. After the task is done, I ask them more questions about that moment. Why were they struggling with that screen? What were they looking for? Why didn’t they try to accomplish it another way? What would have been the best way to accomplish that?

When I identify a recurrence of that moment, I make sure it goes into the user stories and is highlighted as a potential moment that the product can own. When marketing and sales are consistent with these stories, they can provide a clear message that will trigger the product’s name when someone finds themselves in that moment.

You might also like reading...

• Hackers vs. Coders
• How to spot a good designer in an interview
• Escape Velocity

One day he was with his fellow chicken picking seeds off the ground when a shadow covered the sky above him. He lifted his gaze and was mesmerized by the sight of a beautiful eagle cruising the sky. Unlike other chicken that he saw trying to fly, this eagle didn’t seem to be making much effort. With his wings spread wide, he was flying smoothly and changing his direction with the slightest gesture. “Wow. Look at that!”, yelled the young eagle to his friends. “Who is that?”, he asked. “That’s an eagle”, replied a chicken. “He’s the king of the sky. But we belong here on earth. We are chicken.”, she continued. And the eagle staring at the bird disappearing in the horizon as if it was gliding on an invisible path that only he could see.

Days later, the old eagle was flying again over the barnyard and was stunned by the sight of an eagle running around with the chicken. He surged down to the ground. As the other birds saw him they ran back to hide in the house. He descended in front of the other eagle before he reached the door.

“What are you doing?”, asked the old eagle.

“What do you mean?”, answered the young one.

“What are you doing running around with chicken?”.

“I am a chicken. These are my brothers and sisters. I grew up with them.”

“No you’re not. You’re an eagle. You belong in the sky, not on the ground.”

“No I am not. I am one of them. All I know is to do as they do, and to eat what they eat. I can’t even fly.”

“You can’t because you never tried. But you’re an eagle, just like me”.

“Even if what you say is true, I’ve lived all my life as a chicken. I am not an eagle anymore”.”

“It’s the heart of an eagle that matters, not the way he lived or ate… Come with me”

The eagle took another look at his friends hiding in the comfort of home. “Don’t listen to him!”, yelled one of the chicken. “He is tricking you”,” said another. “ If you go with him, you will die!”. “ Come back and be with us”…

But deep inside the eagle’s heart, a faint voice told him what he needed to do. He took one more gaze at the barnyard where he spend all his life playing with his friends, then turned around and followed the older eagle.

A moment later, the arrived at the cliff he used to visit sometimes with his friends. They stood next to each other on the edge looking at the mountains in the distance. Without a second of hesitation, the old eagle jumped off the edge, spread his wings and soared upward.

The young eagle looked down the cliff and trembled. He’d never flown before. May be he would die. May be he should go back.

“Don’t look down.”, the old eagle said “Look up at the sky. Aim toward the sun. Give it a bit of faith.”

The young eagle lifted his sight up, spread his wings and leaped…

Back at the barnyard, the chicken heard a triumphant cry that ascended to heaven. Their feather trembled and they looked at each other without exchanging a word. They know they will miss their brother a lot. They know he might visit some day and tell them how it felt to fly. And they will gather around to hear his stories about the lands he visited. But for the time being, they would keep doing what they did best: living as chicken.

You might also like reading...

• The monkey trap
• Purpose
• The secret life of ideas

You might also like reading...

• So You Wanna Be an Entrepreneur?
• The human side of business
• How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours

Traffic on the freeway slowed down to a halt that Friday evening. Everyone was coming from the same direction and going to the same destination. After a long sunny week, clouds were starting to gather, looking down at the streets in sarcasm, and preparing the town for another rainy weekend.

He stops his car few inches away from the one ahead of him. He glances at the infinite line of cars that disappears in the horizon and realizes that the week won’t let go that easily. He turns on the radio in search for some distraction from this moment. The same songs that were playing last week are playing again. He turns it off and glances up at the sky.

“Are you kidding me?”, he groaned. He’s been waiting for this weekend, like every other weekend, with great anticipation. It’s been a long week. Long days with endless meetings where no decisions were made, frequent visits from his manager to inform him about what the next hours of his life should be spent on, and long emails written mostly to people who were sitting at the end of the same hallway.

But today is different. He feels burnt out. He remembers the feeling when he stepped out of that building letting go a long exhale, as if he’s been holding his breath for the past 5 days. He felt like doing what he did back in school when the bell rang after a period of several boring classes in a row. He ran out of the classroom with everyone else and screamed their lungs out. He didn’t know back then why they were all doing this. But it felt good. Now he knows the nature of  what he was releasing with those screams. He knows that it was the only way of expressing how they all felt. But he cannot do it anymore. He’s a grown up now. And unlike children, grown ups know how to deal with reality.

A series of honks brings him back to the scene he’s playing a role in. He notices that the car ahead of him moved forward few meters and the ones behind him were urging him to follow. It was as if everyone was trying to get as far as possible from where they are coming from. “Follow the follower”, he thought. He puts his car in gear and starts moving, but a glance at the fast moving exit lane on his right makes him realize that it’s best to take the inroads. He sneaks into the faster moving traffic, takes the exit, misses the yellow light flipping red and stops by the white line. He is often amazed at the amount of lines on the road. Lines separating one direction from another. Lines separating cars going the same direction. And lines dictating when he can turn and when he should just keep going. He;s always felt that as long as he followed the lines, he will reach his destination safely. And he rarely wondered who drew these lines in the first place. Someone who knows what they’re doing, probably… Hopefully.

Light is still red, and the ticking sound of his left turn blinker relaxes him a bit. It reminds him of the sound of that old clock hung on the wall in his grandfather’s house. As a kid, he used to spend long moments mesmerized by the fast moving needle. He once asked his grandfather “why is that red needle moving much faster than the other ones?”. His grandfather chuckled and replied: “because it’s got much more important things to do!”. And he replied back: “I can’t wait till I grow up! I have very important things to do”. The ticking sound of the blinker is different than that of the clock. It ticks twice, instead of once. Two quick ticks, a second of silence, and then two more quick ticks, and so on. One tick in farewell of the second that passed, and another welcoming the one to come. And before one knows it, the next click signals the end of that last second, followed by another for the future one. And between one tick and the other, now happens. His attention shifts from the ticks to the silence between the ticks. And the more he becomes aware of that silence, the longer that silence feels. It was the same silence between the ticks of his old grandfather’s clock. The same silence that mesmerized him as a kid. That eternal moment between the past and the future.

He’s brought back to reality with another series of honks. He sees that his light is now green and he’s holding back a line of cars behind him. He puts his car in gear, presses the gas pedal, and the car starts moving forward. Then the car suddenly stops, urging his body to jolt forward and stop under the pressure of his seatbelt. “What the…?”. The car is still on, no gas or battery lights, it’s in the right gear, and his foot is on…. His foot is now on the brake! He stares for a second at his foot that just made its own mind to release the gas pedal and hit the one next to it. Then with the corner of his eye he feels a slight motion to his left. He lifts his head and sees it coming. The old rugged Honda was cruising at 40 mph, crossing the red light, and approaching in a straight line that ends on his side of the car. He sees the car crossing the white intersection line without slowing down. The license plates reads H7A30.

He read  before that during moments of danger, time stretches almost indefinitely. He also read that when one is coming to his final moment, he will see all his life playing back in front of his own eyes.Like a movie. And now, he is experiencing both. The volume of everything around him decreased to a mute. The speed of all things slowed down to a pause. Even his blinkers gasped one more tick and stopped. There were no two ticks this time around. Just one last tick. The past. Then he saw it all. He saw every moment in his life flashing. Everything he said. Everyone he met. Every place he’s been to. They weren’t flashing quickly. Feeling that something was quick requires time. At that moment, there was no time. These moments were just there. He saw his childhood moments. His first day at school. His first kiss. His graduation. His first day on a plane. His new job. He saw how some small things he did made big impact on others, and some big things he did made no impact whatsoever. He saw how simple moments stretched to fill more of his life, and how years of doing the same things he despised were not even there, as if they didn’t count. And he sees a man in the middle of all these moments. He was standing in front of a closed door with his back toward him. As the man slowly turned around to face him, he was still staring at his back. In that place where time didn’t exist, his fear had no face. He’s been the one placing masks on that face all his life. He’s been giving him his voice. The voices of many others. And when he didn’t find a voice to cast, he created new voices for him. This time, he didn’t have a voice at all. He was just standing there. And he knew the things that were behind that closed door. All the things he’s dreamt about doing. All the things he’s always enjoyed doing and ended up gathering dust in his life basement. All the things that he thought he would have time to do later, when he gets more time. Everything he’s imagined himself to be and do when he was a kid. And all the things he’s been always itching to do and has been rationalizing why he should be doing other things instead. He always thought he’d have more time…

He moves forward to open the door. His fear doesn’t stop him this time around. He passes through his fear as if it were a ghost, and as he does, he merges with him. In this moment, as he became fear, he sees it all. He feels how weak and powerful he is, how small and huge he became, and how hated and loved he felt. He grabs the door knob and turns it around. The door is suddenly sucked into the void behind it, and a flood of light came through it.

Light. Lots of light…  He closes his eyes to shield them from the bright scene in front of him. And as he does, his ears are suddenly deafened by the sounds around him. It was as if he was coming out of the womb, and everything around him was so bright and loud. Loud screams. Not human screams. They sounded like alien screams. more like loud squeaking. And the feeling of a cold breeze touching his ear.

All at once his senses come back to him. He is sitting in his car looking at the tires of the red Honda as they just crossed the white line and started screeching over the dry asphalt. He glances up at the driver and their eyes met for a second. Then the Honda driver tries to steer his car away from the collision course. The red car is now gliding over the road, still approaching at a deadly speed, but slowly curving away from its previous destination. All this is happening in slow motion, and he is watching it the same way he watches a movie: he is a detached observer. With his hands still on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake, he watches the other car drifting past his front bumper and missing it by an inch. His car shakes for an instant when the air between both cars is strongly disturbed, then the other car spins and stops in the middle of the road.

The next moment feels as if someone just hit the pause button on the playing scene: total stillness and complete silence. None of the cars stopped at the intersection is honking. Everyone seems to be here now. No one is thinking about what happened at work, or what will happen at home. They are all experiencing a moment out of time. And everyone is waiting for someone else to move. As his foot decided to hit the brake few seconds earlier, it now leaves it to gently press the gas pedal. The car starts moving, and he finally takes that left turn and hears the blinker latching off. He glances in his rear view mirror at the scene behind him: no one is moving yet. The red Honda was now stopped in the middle of the intersection, facing the opposite direction it came from after spinning 180 degrees. He glances at the licenses plates in his rear view mirror and smiles. Few drops of rain show up on his windshield. He looks up at the clouds and smiles even wider. Rain never felt so good.

You might also like reading...

• How I had one hour wiped out from my memory forever
• Malcolm Gladwell outliers – A very personal review
• Don’t violate fundamental design laws – even when you are Apple