Resources for product teams from industry experts
Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy — when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.
— Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
‘Story’ is defined as ‘a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader’. This limiting definition sells ‘story’ short.
Traditionally, in business and career development, we’ve primarily used our stories as communication tactics — ways to get people to see us — while overlooking the opportunity to leverage them to help us see ourselves more clearly.
Far from just being a way to differentiate us, our stories can help us to decide, plan, lead, sell, inspire, influence, persuade, rally, create value, build trust, foster connection and succeed by building better, more purposeful organisations and lives. Our stories can shape who we are.
— Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa
A person’s identity is formed by integrating life experiences into an internalised, evolving story that provides him or her with a sense of purpose. We make sense of who we are by piecing together stories from our reconstructed past, perceived present and imagined future.
‘In personality psychology, what mainly counts when it comes to the idea of a life story is the narrator’s subjective understanding of how he or she came to be the person he or she is becoming — that is, the person’s narrative identity.’
— Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa
To transcend means “to go beyond,” but this need not compel us to adopt an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (such as the spiritual level) to be not of this world.
We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Although I have been called a materialist, I regard myself as a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend.
Since the material stuff of which we are made turns over quickly, it is the transcendent power of our patterns that persists. The power of patterns to endure goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems, such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that support life and intelligence.
— The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
Researchers classified the three types of behavior. The first group, termed gamblers, took high risks but exerted no influence on the outcome of events. The second group, termed conservatives, were people who took very little risk. The third group, termed achievers, had to test the limits of what they could do, and with no prompting demonstrated the point of the experiment: namely, that some people simply must test themselves.
By challenging themselves, these people were likely to miss a peg several times, but when they began to ring the peg consistently, they gained satisfaction and a sense of achievement. The point is that both competence and achievement-oriented people spontaneously try to test the outer limits of their abilities.
— High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
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No more stories or excerpts.