"Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds." - Marcus Aurelius If stoicism is a practice of embracing what is in your control and reminding yourself what's not, then what odd advice. What, after all, is more outside of your control than what's going on in my head? Empathy is a tool for correcting for your own biases. When your boss is short with you, it's natural for anxiety about your job to bubble-up and just ruin your day. That anxiety is soothed, though, when you know your boss is having a really hard time at home. You may, as a practiced st ..read more

I am resting at the country-house which once belonged to Scipio Africanus himself; and I write to you after doing reverence to his spirit and to an altar which I am inclined to think is the tomb of that great warrior. — Seneca, “On Scipio’s Villa” Scipio Africanus was a consul and general of ancient Rome — a famous one. He defeated Hannibal, an enemy of Rome widely considered one of the greatest military commanders in history. Some 200 years after his death, our boy Seneca vacationed in one of Scipio’s homes. There, he wrote a lot about Scipio’s bath. Bear with the excerpts: I have ins ..read more

We idolize a project that is complete in design work. We don’t organize portfolios around failed experiments, incomplete products, the good ol’ college try. Instead, our bragging rights are constrained to a spectrum of doneness, notches in a belt, that — like a belt — represent arbitrary milestones on a line that loops back on itself. Saying this stuff out loud is a little woo, but I’m trying to temper our endemic reverence for getting things done. A complete collaborative project represents, if anything, compromise. It is the way in which a team worked together to weigh user needs against o ..read more

When I meet with teams I’m sometimes asked to catch folks up on the progress of various feature requests in the system. I work pretty hard to make sure these statuses are transparent, so more often than not I’m confirming what they know: I haven’t made and probably won’t address these in the near future. That sucks to hear. Often many of these requests are small design tweaks that take no time at all, but stay in the backlog by principle. Here’s a real conversation between me (MS) and a stakeholder (SH): SH: We know some of the customers complain [about this design] and [want it changed in ..read more

Design is a performance of smart people among smart people where it’s easy to conflate merit with your in/ability to solve the kind of algorithm you’ll probably never actually encounter in your day-to-day. While reminding yourself you’re not the smartest person in the room is probably key to doing quality work, it’s easy to start believing you’re the dumbest. This sense of being head and shoulders below a colleague fuels this survival impulse to try to further clamber-up the tree because not only do we convince ourselves we’re deservedly lower in status, we assume that because they know React ..read more

One of the first a-ha moments many of us have who are interested in user experience design is that whole maxim that “you are not your user.” At the time it’s a profound wagging of the finger that after years rings a tad cliche if only because it’s on the tip of every UX designer’s tongue. It’s not wrong, though. In fact, we reinforce this truth adopting principles like being data driven, internalizing infinity-loop design models with quadrants dedicated to testing. Good design, we learn, is about accepting that you’re wrong, your stakeholders are wrong, your product manager is wrong, and ..read more

By recommendation on twitter I’m reading But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About The Present As If It Were The Past by Chuck Klosterman who talks about our inability to predict. I think he meant it as a joke but early in the book he describes how Occam’s Razor — the principle that the simplest solution is probably the right one — doesn’t work with predicting the future, and instead suggests Klosterman’s Razor: The best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with. Stoic design teaches us to allow for this. When we are motivated by an insight from use ..read more

We might instead call a “design virtue” a design principle, the difference being that what we’re calling virtuous are principles that we have so much faith in we treat them with more reverence than rationality. Personally, or organizationally, we have them. Lately a principle like “design accessibly” — which describes the requirement that the service or product we put out into the world ought to be usable through any medium — has sort of ascended to community reverence, so that when you and I talk it up we’re not just using the language of good strategy (think mobile-first design) but the la ..read more

Real talk, “practicing Stoicism” involves a lot of reading of the same core concepts boiled down to “get good at prioritizing what really matters” and “don’t lose your s**t.” Tim Ferris calls Stoicism his operating system; I think of it - because I’m a dork - like an honor code. What’s appealing about Stoicism, I think, is its practical application devoid of woo. It’s less common to run across letters about interconnectedness, but that’s precisely what I did this morning. Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another a ..read more