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When information enters the mind, it self-organizes into patterns and ruts much like the hot water on butter. New information automatically flows into the preformed grooves. After a while, the channels become so deep it takes only a bit of information to activate an entire channel. This is the pattern recognition and pattern completion process of the brain. Even if much of the information is out of the channel, the pattern will be activated. The mind automatically corrects and completes the information to select and activate a pattern.
This is also why when we sit down and try to will new ideas or solutions; we tend to keep coming up with the same-old, same-old ideas. Information is flowing down the same ruts and grooves making the same-old connections producing the same old ideas over and over again. Even tiny bits of information are enough to activate the same patterns over and over again.
These patterns enable us to simplify and cope with a complex world. These thinking patterns give us precision as we perform repetitive tasks, such as driving an automobile, writing a book, teaching a class or making a sales presentation. Patterns enable us to perform routine tasks rapidly and accurately. When we see something that we have seen before, we understand what it means immediately. We don’t have to spend time studying and analyzing it.
Habits, thinking patterns and routines with which we approach life gradually accumulate until they significantly reduce our awareness of other possibilities. It’s as if a cataract builds over our imagination over time and its effects slowly become obvious, because the accumulation goes almost unnoticed until the cataract reduces our awareness significantly.
How then can we change our thinking patterns?
Think again about the dish of butter with all the preformed channels. Creativity occurs when we tilt the dish in a different direction and force the water (information) to create new channels and make new connections with other channels. These new connections give you different ways to focus your attention and different ways to interpret whatever you are focusing on.
Nature gets variation with genetic mutations. Creative thinkers get variation by conceptually combining dissimilar subjects which changes our thinking patterns and provides us with a variety of alternatives and conjectures.
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“The fact of the matter is, for me, most good music comes from suffering or from feeling some sort of extreme emotion,” Englehardt says.
“I was talking to somebody [recently], and he was talking about how right now, this is, like, the ‘zero generation’: it’s about kids getting enough medication to numb themselves so they don’t have to feel anything, and the music is a direct result of that—especially electronic music. There is no funk in it, there is no emotion, there is no jerk. It’s fucking flatlined.”
After talking about some current artists who haven’t—Theo Parrish, Jeff Mills, Legowelt, even Jack White—I think I’ve got a handle on this “dope jam” thing and point to a copy of Floating Points’ Shadows EP perched prominently on one of the walls. “Not for me, no,” he answers, which leads into a takedown of James Blake and some hand-wringing about the direction Burial is headed in.
“The quality of dance music is so bad right now,” Englehardt laments. “It’s so bad right now, I don’t even know what to do. It’s so hard for me to find records that I really like.”
”—“Dope Jams” – On Myrtle Avenue at the northeast tip of Clinton Hill, a historic handful of blocks sandwiched between Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy that Walt Whitman and Biggie Smalls have called home over the years, sits a storefront that at first glance might pass as one of these little churches.
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“You can change up, right? You can say you’re somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story, but what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don’t matter if some fool say different because the only thing that makes you different is what you really do or what you really go through.”
A great clip from The Wire where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is broken down.
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This, now, is my answer too.
… As I emptied my desk ready for my new venture down under, a colleague asked, “How do all these interesting opportunities come your way? What do you do?”
I didn’t know what to answer then, but I do now. Not only have I always had an eye open to adventure and opportunity, but I have always had a tendency to seize them the moment they occur. Herein lies the problem for many. Too few of us see the opportunities that are presented to us. Even fewer of us dare to meet them head on and run with them.
The interesting thing that I’ve learned over the years is, true to that old Chinese proverb, the more opportunities we act on, the more we get.
—
As we get older, we become more fearful of change. We are anxious about losing everything we’ve worked for. And yet the paradox of this is that we often lose it all when we do nothing. However, if we grab those (sometimes madcap) opportunities that come our way, the rewards are immense.
—
-Martin Lindstrom
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The reasons to adopt a mobile first strategy go well beyond the exploding mobile usage numbers:
Drive focus and excellence. Successful mobile-optimised services must be focused and elegant.
Prioritization and strategic choices have to be made. This will help you clarify your offering, focus and strategy.
Find new customers. A large proportion of your future customers are mainly mobile.
Learn new tricks. There’s a significant difference between yesterday’s “software” experiences that target PCs, and tomorrow’s post-PC experiences designed to fluidly scale across platforms. Focusing on the latter will help you master modern service design.
Disrupt yourself before others do. The innovation you do on mobile platforms can directly influence and benefit your other target platforms too – digital and non-digital. If you don’t find ways to disrupt your business using mobile, it’s likely that other mobile-focused companies will.
Be relevant at all times. Mobile will make you atomize your service to fit into the daily life and tasks of users.
Get closer to your customers. In mobile you can create a stronger emotional bond, and a mobile focus will help you organise and design around users rather than around software platforms or “channels.”
Become better at design. The personal and lush mobile medium demands first-class design, and if you aspire to have a leadership position in mobile you will have to focus on design.
”—@olof_s
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What makes the irrationality of Silicon Valley so powerful is that people in the thick of it have no concept that they’re being irrational. Every entrepreneur thinks his startup will make it. The biggest risk takers actually don’t see themselves as risk takers. They just clearly see an opening in the market and know they can fill it — whether time proves them right or not. Over and over again you hear this from entrepreneurs: If we’d had any idea what we were taking on, we never would have started this company.
Sarah Lacy on David Sacks
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When you’re thinking about reinventing user experience:
1. Start with the core problem, the one that everyone else is failing to solve, and throw out whatever everyone is doing.
2. Ask yourself the fundamental question: “What problem am I trying to solve?” If it’s making file sharing easy, start there. And if it’s finding the best, least agonizing flight, start there.
3. Build a user experience that solves the simplest problem you can and you’ll probably be onto something.
4. After you’ve mocked up a bunch of different approaches, try to find the simplest one that that still solves the problem, but doesn’t include anything that gets in the way.
5. Talk to your market! Build a consumer app prototype. Then take this down to your local independent coffee seller and offer people a free cup of coffee to get their opinion on what you’ve built.
via @alexisohanian reddit/Breadpig/hipmunk
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This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient.
Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone.
You have to figure it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.
Haruki Murakami – “Norwegian Wood”
Wandering Wandering Star 