Originally published at: 10 pearls from Kevin Kelly's new book "Excellent Advice for Living" | Boing Boing
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You can reduce the annoyance of someone’s stupid belief by increasing your understanding of why they believe it."
Spoiler: it boils down to a lack of critical thinking skills, education, and/or self-esteem on the part of the individual. That cuts right through time-wasting BS explanations like “economic anxiety” and “disrespect from coastal elites” that are pushed on us by apologists for fascists and bigots.
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This was a critical factor in the best software development team I’ve ever been a part of. We’d often drop by each others office, plunk ourselves in a chair and start ranting about a problem. After calming down we’d describe in detail what the issue was and often the solution would be apparent before we were even finished.
It was great that everyone was willing to pause what they were doing to listen too.
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That’s one of the best aspects of working in a truly collaborative space. It’s telling that the executives and managers trying to get employees back into those expensive commercial offices only mention it in passing instead of making it the central (and most compelling) reason.
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It is good advice but my first thought was that, as somebody with generalized anxiety disorder, this is my default mode for every decision, not just the big junctures in life. One also needs to think about how probable that worst case scenario is. If I’m being realistic, it turns out that the true worst case scenario is pretty improbable, and the most likely negative scenario really isn’t that bad.
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This one.
I struggle with perfectionism that strangles my ability to do things, so I’ve adopted an approach that I call “do it badly.”
“Do it badly” de-risks getting started because it gives me permission to finish work that’s gone sideways or isn’t perfect. With some high stakes activities like painting, I go a step further and force myself to work with time limits or techniques that I know will yield less than optimal results. I’ve learned a ton from working this way, and I harbor a deep love for some of my flawed output.
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I actually got an appreciation for solving by explaining from a Cool Tools interview with Kelly Deconnick interview.
She calls explaining to others “Talking to the duck” and it is it’s own methodology.
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