> As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.
– [Natalia Ginzburg](https://smile.amazon.com/Little-Virtues-Natalia-Ginzburg-ebook/dp/B01LY5HBCQ)
It’s not often one of [my design heroes](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4150) comments on something I worked on, so [Jonathon Keats’ comments on how to redesign Google Glass](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2015/08/14/this-insider-look-at-google-glass-shows-how-google-should-and-should-not-design-glass-2-0/#316843461386) were interesting to read.
> To navigate this uncanny valley in time, the designer must either create something so futuristic in appearance that it arrives from beyond our collective vision of the future, or something that looks and feels like a natural extension of the present.
It mirrors one of my own new product design lessons learned from Glass (which admittedly [wasn’t meant to be a huge consumer product](https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/17/8235277/sxsw-astro-teller-google-x))–either create something completely new to the world, or replace something that people already use. Simply being faster or better isn’t enough if people still need their existing solution.
What’s behind the increased rate of deaths from suicide, drug abuse, and heart disease for middle-aged white Americans? According to Nobel Prize winning economists Case and Deaton, it might be that [they’re just not able to fulfill their own expectations](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/24/the-disease-killing-white-americans-goes-way-deeper-than-opioids/):
> Most of the increase in white deaths is concentrated among those who never finished college. These are the same people who have been pummeled by the economy in recent decades…
> White American men without a college degree still earn 36 percent more than their black counterparts. But the death rate among less-educated black Americans has actually been decreasing…
> Case and Deaton believe that white Americans may be suffering from a lack of hope. The pain in their bodies might reflect a “spiritual” pain caused by “cumulative distress, and the failure of life to turn out as expected.”
Maybe Calvin had it right after all:
Contradicting [Jane McGonigal](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=5585), Martin Seligman says that [we already spend plenty of time thinking about the future](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/opinion/sunday/why-the-future-is-always-on-your-mind.html?_r=0):
> We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected…
> Even when you’re relaxing, your brain is continually recombining information to imagine the future, a process that researchers were surprised to discover when they scanned the brains of people doing specific tasks like mental arithmetic. Whenever there was a break in the task, there were sudden shifts to activity in the brain’s “default” circuit, which is used to imagine the future or retouch the past.
Though there are limits:
> Less than 1 percent of their thoughts involved death, and even those were typically about other people’s deaths.
I’m surprised this was found to be mostly a positive phenomenon given the stress it causes, but the absence of prospection would cause much bigger problems. Makes sense that this is baked into our natures.
> “What is it now what you’ve got to give? What is it
that you’ve learned, what you’re able to do?”
> “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”
> “That’s everything?”
> “I believe, that’s everything!” – Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Ahmet Ertegun – arguably for a long time the greatest record executive of them all – told me that unless you’re 100% sure the artist is wrong, go with their vision. – Jason Flom
True for designers as well, in my experience.
[Some fascinating techniques](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/may/06/eliud-kipchoge-misses-out-on-sub-two-hour-marathon-by-2-seconds):
> At the start the three athletes were immediately joined by six pacers, who adopted an arrowhead formation behind a Tesla electric car with a giant clock timer on it. Wind tunnel studies show that this formation would help them as it saves energy…
> Kipchoge was also using a new carbohydrate-rich sports drink, delivered by helpers on mopeds so he did not have to slow down…
> Then there was the use of Nike’s Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes, which some have suggested should be illegal because they contain a special curved plate that allows runners to roll through instead of bending toes and losing energy.
Because any other way of evolving humans isn’t fast enough:
> Genetics is just too slow, that’s the problem. For a human to become an adult takes twenty years. We just don’t have that amount of time. –
[Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future – Wait But Why](http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)
Great set of resources for running a sprint: Design Sprint Kit.
This is the highly, highly distilled and refined version of what designers at Google (especially [Knapp, Kowitz, and Zeratsky](http://www.thesprintbook.com)) have been developing for years.
By thinking differently than humans do:
> Our machines now are letting us see that even if the rules the universe plays by are not all that much more complicated than Go’s, the interplay of everything all at once makes the place more contingent than Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, or even some Chaos theorists thought. It only looked orderly because our instruments were gross, because our conception of knowledge imposes order by simplifying matters until we find it, and because our needs were satisfied with approximations…
> The nature of the world is closer to the way our network of computers and sensors represent it than how the human mind perceives it. Now that machines are acting independently, we are losing the illusion that the world just happens to be simple enough for us wee creatures to comprehend.