3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Laws of UX by John Yablonski
Listening: New York by Junior Varsity
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
Quick Notes
Milwaukee: I’m back from Seattle! It was great seeing my family, but it’s also nice to be home (and to have some time and mental energy for something beyond pet- and toddler-maintenance)
Interview: I was interviewed by my old friend John Bardos for his Create Your Dream Work Summit, which goes live Friday (but you can sign up now to be notified when it’s available)
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Personalized CRISPR
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was about the Cliff Edge Model & the pod was about Crafting
Opportune Moments
Whatever work you do, you almost certainly rely on other entities for some aspect of the goods or services you provide.
I rely on several platforms that help me distribute my writings and podcasts, for instance, while folks who work in offices might rely on Slack, people who build houses might lean on CAD software and a tangle of supply chains to stay afloat, and folks who work for nonprofits maybe lean on a portfolio of grants to do what they do.
It’s always been true that our foundation stones can disappear at any moment, and that’s arguably more the case now than it’s ever been.
Several generations ago, though, the turnover on tools, organizations, and entire industries was relatively ponderous: you could commit to one way of doing things, one system and setup and modus operandi early in your career, and stand a pretty good chance of doing things close to the same way when you retired.
That’s no longer the case; more than half of the tools I learned to use in school were obsolete by the time I graduated, and the pace of change has only sped up since then.
As a result of this dynamic, even when I feel I have relatively firm footing, I find I’m always watching for a suitable, next-step place to jump.
This is true of the platforms I use to distribute my work, as such platforms have a tendency to degrade, get lazy, or intentionally enshittify, and it’s true of the tools I use every day: I’m always learning new software, new systems, new techniques, because I feel pretty confident most or all of these things will be different five or ten years in the future (if not sooner).
Paired with this sense of precarity, though, is an ever-present sense of opportunity.
It sucks to have to exhaust myself just to stay where I am and not fall behind, but every single change is also laden with potential.
Maybe I’m able to do better work, maybe my processes become more efficient and I’m able to do the same work with fewer headaches and tasks I don’t particularly enjoy. Maybe I’m introduced to entirely new things (new media, new communities, new information) and that influences my work (and life, and thinking) in a beneficial manner.
That lack of certainty cuts both ways, then, potentially requiring I scramble just to maintain the status quo, but also maybe offering me a new, better status quo.
I try to think of these moments as being opportune, then, in the sense of being rich with possibility and (if I choose to treat them as such) in the sense of being exactly the right moments to make productive pivots.
Most of those pivots will be small, the pros and cons relatively minor.
Others will fundamentally change my life, though, and if I can maintain a sense of possibility (rather than fixating only on the concomitant, perhaps truly unfair and undesirable downsides) I stand a much better chance of improving my overall state with each fresh evolution, rather than the opposite.
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What Else
I’m still a little winded from the Seattle trip, but I’m slowly getting back into my rhythm. It’s been fun filling all the time I was (before the trip) spending on my book, instead doing things in real-life with other humans, fiddling around with app-building, and returning to outdoor-running after several seasons of (to me, boring) treadmilling.
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Another eye-opening essay, Colin. I’ve recently stepped off the tech treadmill to get back to analog idea generation and creating with paper, pen, and paper. Only moving to digital tools if and when necessary (not nearly as much as you think). It’s been incredibly rewarding. I feel back in touch with the spirit that got me hooked and guided me through architecture and design school. I found myself in front of a screen all day, defaulting to digital resources and tools, inundated with input from 1,000 outside sources. Less has definitely led to more the past few weeks.