Playtime 101

Sometimes adults need help with this:

> This week thirty of us have promised to keep a daily crayon journal, build a fort or play with bubbles, and go out of our way to notice and welcome any children we see.

I love ReIMAGINE.

Work/life “balance” seems less like an arrangement of two objects than an understanding of how to prioritize all the parts of life when they conflict. Less a schedule, more a decision-making tool.

YouTube time machine

Pick a year and see what was recorded then. Here are videos from the year I was born.. Looks like I just missed out on the last solar eclipse to hit North America for 38 years.

For people to listen to you, they have to trust you, and that requires you spend a lot of time listening to them first.

The way you handle the small things in life seems to determine how the big things end up.

It’s July already!

Jeff Buckley

[Jeff Buckley](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Buckley?wasRedirected=true) died accidentally at exactly the age I am today (via [Dead At Your Age](http://dead.atyourage.com/grave/person/24497), which sounds morbid but is mostly motivating).

Before that, he performed this:

Great David Eagleman interview

[This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/04/david-eagleman-40-afterlives) contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of [Sum](http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2009/03/alternative-afterlives.html), which I greatly enjoyed.

> I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.

> Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.

> I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.

I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.

Ambition and naivete

Ambition and naivete always seem to go together; it seems like a good idea to always be a novice at something, but to be aware of it.

Don’t have ambition–but act like you do

“Every day, I struggle with ambition. Every day, I try to understand the meaning of this line: ‘Live your life without ambition. But live as those who are ambitious.'” – Larry Brilliant. I’ve been sending the entire (10-year-old) article to everyone I know lately.