🗺️ Take Ownership Of Your Life
You can choose the way you think about the past and future life paths. It's just a mental game.
Ciao ciao!
A few days ago I got reminded of an interesting topic - the destiny and what you can do with it.
Sometimes, it’s easy to get a feeling of a deadend on your “road”. A feeling that your life path is getting narrower and the number of options is reducing. On one hand, I think this is somewhat true, as the futher you go in your life or career, the more doors or alternative paths are closing. This is true. However, on the other hand, the same (or even higher) number of doors may be opening.
This idea reminds me of the “glass half-full” vs “glass half-empty” mindset of how one person can perceive the future to come. The future they think they can fully or barely influence.
As with all philosophical topics, I don’t think there is one right answer for every person out there. Different people have been influenced by diffirent circumstances and environments. This is a fact that everyone agrees on. What is less universal is how you can force train yourself to think about future to improve your life.
You can choose how you perceive your life or career or any other chain of events. It may seem like you are stuck and have only few paths to go forward, but in reality, each decision you make is another turn on your road through life. Here is a good illustration of how you should think about it.
Tim Urban is a great thinker and writer. I keep thinking about this illustration of life paths before and after when I notice my mindset starts leaning towards the “glass half-empty” framing 😊
Yes, you can’t change the past, but you can choose your future path.
🏴☠️ My content
🧠 Cognitive Biases Flashcards: Part 1
Starting a new side mini-project. Follow the progress and status updates, beginning with how I got the idea, how it is evolving, and how I approach running this experiment with the help of AI. The goal is to create a few sets and see if anyone wants to buy them. I’ll be documenting the journey with all prices, sales, etc.
🎙️ New podcast episode
Design for Automation, Ethics, and Personal Brand with Bahar Espiritu.
Bahar was a senior UX Designer @ Amazon when we were recording, but since then, went to work @ Blue Origin 👽 as a senior Creative Producer. We talked about:
Her career journey;
Learning about inclusive design at Disney;
Diversity of work cultures and communication styles;
Being yourself;
Clearly articulating your impact in interviews and portfolios;
Designing for automation;
and much more. Enjoy 👍
Listen/watch here: Youtube, Apple, Spotify.
🔗 Interesting links
Ethical design is something I care about a lot. This is one of the main reasons why I prefer to work on B2B software, most of which focuses on bringing value, increasing productivity, and helping users get the job done. While B2C software tends to prioritize value extraction by gathering too much user data, stealing attention, and often degrading psychological health. Create More Value Than You Take.
Deceptive patterns have been a bain of existence for a long time. Many companies abuse our human brains’ flaws to achieve their goals (usually, by making us buy more of their stuff). Here is a good analysis of how Domino’s pizza uses such design patterns to grow its sales. Using dark patterns to overcharge for pizza.
A good outline of simple actionable best-practice steps to increase your chances to get noticed on Linkedin and get potentially getting more interviews. Linkedin post.
Another round of layoffs, another reminder that this can happen to anyone. Your life and career is much bigger than 1 job. Of course, it is always sad news, especially when it feels you are not in control, but this is a good quote to remind yourself of the bigger picture - “This too will pass“. My first layoff was the best thing that happened to my career.
A few new examples of using AutoGPT as different assistants - see how these new tools can help you with researching a topic, building websites, sales prospecting and more. Twitter thread.
Till next time! 🤙