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my disruptive life

l design disrupted

You know that I’m an interior designer specializing in restaurant design. You’ve read my bio. But you read my posts daily and wonder how does all of this writing fit with your understanding of what I actually do for a living? The answer is I’m practicing my own version of disruption.

Disruptive thinking is the term of 2014. And it follows close on the heels of design thinking. According to Fast Company, design thinking is a ‘proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results’. Disruptive thinking takes this idea a step further and in a slightly different direction. To think disruptively you must look where you haven’t looked before to find first the problem that no one has yet discovered, then solve it creatively. Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business, published in 2010, was written by Luke Williams, fellow at frog design’s New York office and an Executive Director at the NYU Stern School of Business. (frog design, if you will recall, was instrumental in helping Apple Computer create its design edge.) Luke Williams contends that finding the problem, disrupting the status quo, is the first creative step in the process. Much like scrum has transformed the way problems are viewed and solved, disruptive thinking transforms the way processes are viewed then re-defined and executed. According to Williams, there are 5 steps to disruptive thinking:

  1. Craft a disruptive hypothesis: be wrong at the start to be right at the end
  2. Discover a disruptive opportunity: explore the least obvious
  3. Generate a disruptive idea: unexpected ideas have fewer competitors
  4. Shape a disruptive solution: novelty for novelty’s sake is a resource killer
  5. Make a disruptive pitch: under prepare the obvious, over prepare the unusual

In my case, I’m at number two: discovering my opportunity. I’ve designed space for over twenty years and loved it, except the part where design separated me from the research and writing that feeds me. So on weekends and during my scarce evening hours (I am raising two kids remember), I’ve taken classes and written fiction and essays. Fun, yes, and a nice distraction, but not fulfilling. So I’ve battled with how to be both a designer and a writer for years and finally had that ah ha moment a few months ago….just do both and see where it leads! That is my Disruptive Hypothesis. I’m doing this by reading and writing every day about things that are connected with design, architecture and food. The only three things that I know for sure are that I am a designer, I am a writer and one feeds the other. By researching and writing from the perspective of a designer I am finding ways to meld the two, making me better at both.

As I continue to research and write, I learn daily about all of the possibilities out there and I get closer to disrupting the current system and finding a place we haven’t been before, a place where design and writing can work together that allows me to contribute meaningfully.

That is my very long winded answer to the many who have asked me….what do you do?

Have a great week,
Leslie

 

slow the f*^# down: ten tips +1

preparing a midday meal

preparing a midday meal

The race to nowhere is not just a phenomenon applicable to high school kids pulling their hair out (or worse) trying to get into the ‘right’ college so that they can get the ‘right’ job and live the ‘right’ life. It’s a phenomenon that exists everywhere and affects everyone. And where are we all racing to? The end of the line is truly the end of the line, so what is the rush? We are already where we need to be….smack dab in the middle of our lives. And a number of people in a number of countries are beginning to notice and slow the f*^# down.

Carl Honore gave a TED talk quite a few years ago on this very topic and much of what he discussed then is still quite relevant. He highlights the connection between our need for speed (speed dating, speed walking, speed dial, speed reading, even speed yoga) and eroding health, productivity and quality of life. This focus on speed also creates stresses that limit creativity, something that I find unbearable. He posits that with the advent of the Slow Food movement we are beginning as societies to see the benefits to slowing down. Slow food has given way to slow communities, slow sex, even slow money, a topic that came up at a food conference I attended recently and was a reference to crowd funding.

Arianna Huffington suggests that this need for speed is an addiction to ‘busy-ness’ with the goal being success based on money and power. She proposes a ‘third metric’ borne of a commencement speech she gave in 2013  at Smith College. The third metric is success based on quality of life, or thriving, rather than defining success as money and power. Guy Kawasaki created a list of ten tips from Arianna Huffington’s new book Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder that can help us to create a life where we care for our health, sleep enough, and do not live to work. I paraphrase (and expand) his tips here:

  1. Redefine success: base success on the joy you’ve brought to people’s lives and whether or not you’ve made the world a better place.
  2. Avoid burnout: working longer and harder does not reap more success.
  3. Nurture your well being: exercise, meditate, do music and art, spend time with friends and family.
  4. Sleep: getting enough sleep will improve every aspect of life.
  5. Take a digital break: turn off all your devices some of the time.
  6. Keep learning: learn from your relationships, read, attend events inside and outside of your business expertise.
  7. Listen to your inner voice: pay attention to your gut reactions…your intuition is based on cues that may not be conscious or obvious.
  8. Act like a child: enjoy life, do what is fun for you, see the world from a younger, clearer perspective.
  9. Find solitude: clear your head with meditation or non-thinking time to unleash your own creativity.
  10. Give back: share your unique talents to improve your corner of the world.

I’d like to add number 11 to this list. Bring the midday meal back to your life. My husband enjoys a midday meal once a week with a friend. They take turns bringing food to the office to prepare and enjoy together, away from their desks. Peter Miller just released Lunch at the Shop: The Art and Practice of the Midday Meal. He and his staff make and share lunch each day, setting deliberate time aside from the busy-ness, the computer and the clock. Number 11 is a nice concrete start to the lesser defined 1 through 10. And it’s nearly 1 o’clock as I finish this post, so I’m off to my midday meal!

Keep in touch,
Leslie

 

8 beautiful questions…

 

passion

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.

~Warren Berger from his book A More Beautiful Question

Warren Berger also writes for Fast Company and created a list of 8 questions we can ask ourselves to help us to move our lives in the direction of our most authentic passions. Here are the questions…are you creating the life you are meant to live?

1.  What is your tennis ball? What pulls you and draws you (like a tennis ball chased by a dog)? Where do you gravitate most naturally?

2.  What are you doing when you feel most beautiful? Where and when do you feel most alive?

3.  What is something you believe that nearly everyone disagrees with? What is uniquely and originally your idea?

4.  What are your superpowers? Berger suggests determining your own unique strengths and suggests a brief film to help you figure it out. The Science of Character…8 minutes to your best future.

5.  What did you enjoy doing at age 10? Gretchen Rubin, who writes on happiness, says that the key may be in what you loved doing before people began telling you what you should do.

6.  What are you willing to try now? Get out of your head and act. Trial and error will show you your path.

7.  Looking back on your career 20 or 30 years from now, what do you want to say you’ve accomplished? Similar to a write-your-own-obit exercise, what do you want to be remembered for?

8.  What is your sentence? You should be able to synthesize yourself in one sentence….a whole paragraph represents a loss of focus. If your sentence contains a goal not yet achieved, then it’s time to figure out how to live up to your sentence.

I hope this gets your juices flowing. It does mine….this definitely gets its own notebook.

Have a great week!
Leslie

 

 

7 habits of successful people

that’s my daughter graduating high school….see her in the front left? yea….kind of hard to make out.

Before I could begin the search for a list of habits of successful people, I had to define for myself what success is.  My definition of success, at least for this purpose, is from the free online dictionary:  the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.  So here we are in this life trying to make some kind of a go of it, and whether we want money, happiness or something else, it is the achievement of that thing that defines success.

I think that Dr. Stephen Covey hits the nail on the head.  He published his remarkably popular book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ in 1989.  His habits number 1-3 allow us first to define that ‘thing’ that signifies our success. Dr. Covey breaks his habits down into 3 categories:  Independence, interdependence and continuous improvement.  The descriptions that follow are my interpretations of Dr. Covey’s explanations.

Independence

  • Habit 1: Be Proactive.  Take initiative, make choices and take responsibility for your choices and the consequences that follow.
  • Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind.  Discover and clarify your most important character values and life goals.
  • Habit 3: Put first things first.  First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth.

Interdependence

  • Habit 4: Think win-win.  No one need lose in order for another to win, there is enough to go around so genuinely strive for mutually beneficial solutions.
  • Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.  Learn to listen empathically.
  • Habit 6: Synergize.  Combine the strengths of people through positive teamwork in order to achieve solutions no one person could have found alone.

Continuous Improvement

  • Habit 7: Sharpen the saw.  Create a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life (physical, social/emotional, mental, spiritual).  For example, 
    • physical:  beneficial eating, exercising, and resting.
    • social/emotional:  making social and meaningful connections with others.
    • mental:  learning, reading, writing, and teaching.
    • spiritual:  spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service.

So habit 7 is pretty huge.  That’s why this list is so much shorter than the prior 2 lists for wealth and happiness. Next post is a comparison of the three lists.  I’ve already got a few habits that I’ll be wanting to focus on.

 

21 habits of happy people

Meet Rita....that is one happy walk!

Meet Rita….that is one happy walk!

George Carlin says that trying to be happy by accumulating things is like trying to conquer hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body.  Love that quote.  Of course it’s full of truth that I sometimes neglect when walking by the shoe department.

There is an actual psychology of happiness and doctors who have been studying it for years.  Dr. Marty Seligman is the founder of ‘positive psychology’ and the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Seligman finds that there are three types of happy lives:  the pleasant life, the life of engagement, and the meaningful life.  The pleasant life is one filled with the pursuit of pleasure and is the least fulfilling.  HuffPost put together the following list to aid us in living a life of engagement and meaning.  It’s a long list, but I figure if we take these things one at a time and see how they feel it’s doable.

  1. Surround yourself with happy people.
  2. Cultivate a happy thought and smile about it.
  3. Develop resilience.  Get up when you fall down.
  4. Try to be happy.
  5. Be mindful of the good.
  6. Appreciate simple pleasures.
  7. Devote some time to giving to others.
  8. Let yourself lose track of time.
  9. Nix the small talk in favor of deeper conversation whenever you can.
  10. Spend money on other people.
  11. Make a point to listen, really listen.
  12. Maintain in person connections.
  13. Look on the bright side.  Find the silver lining.
  14. Listen to uplifting music.
  15. Unplug.
  16. Find a spiritual connection, a place within something bigger.
  17. Make exercise a priority.
  18. Go outside.
  19. Sleep well and regularly.
  20. Laugh out loud.
  21. Walk with your head up and your arms swinging.

Tomorrow I’ll find some info on habits of smart people.  Then we can compare and contrast and see if rich, smart and happy have much in common.  Have a happy Wednesday!