Each of us discovered a great mind at one point whose writing captures exactly what we think or have been trying to think but couldn't find the right words for.  Yet, the powerful influence of this great mind is so potentially overwhelming that it threatens our ability to think for ourselves. What was supposed to help expand your mind may have closed it.

Thinking for yourself

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer placed the highest value on thinking for yourself. If we lose the ability for independent thought, then we miss out on a key opportunity to become our authentic, original selves. If we don't think for ourselves, we will also not know what we should do, as opposed to what we are told to do. Schopenhauer was surprisingly critical of the value of reading. He states that reading too much will cause us to fail to think for ourselves, yet, he was exceptionally well read.

Reading and the value of thinking for yourself

Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking.'Two main problems concerned him:<ul><li>Opportunity cost. When you're reading, you could be thinking for yourself. This is only a problem if the kind of thinking you do while reading is significantly different from the kind you do when you are not reading. </li><li>Originality. Reading inserts foreign thoughts into our own, which never really belong to us.</li></ul>

Don’t use reading as a substitute for thinking

Apart from originality, authenticity and ownership are the primary intellectual virtues that come from thinking for yourself Thinking for yourself enables a special kind of spontaneity, variety and responsiveness to your surroundings.  Thinking for yourself does not force one specific thought on the mind, like reading. Reading has already been organised according to the mind of the author, whereas our own experiences demand that we impose some order on it ourselves.

Thinking for yourself will make your thoughts your own

The ultimate result of thinking for yourself is what Schopenhauer calls ‘the maturity of knowledge’, which is a state of total organic integration between thoughts and experiences. This maturity does not have to do with the power of one's intellect but the organisation of its contents.  Thinking is, at the least, looking at things for yourself. It avoids putting a foreign concept between the mind and the world, otherwise the two will not make contact. Schopenhauer ensured that anything he found in books was assimilated only if he could connect it to experience.

The maturity of knowledge

Schopenhauer was never totally against reading. Seeing the world from someone else's perspective brings our attention to things we simply wouldn't have noticed. Schopenhauer’s real point is that reading is best when it is accompanied by thinking for yourself. It's better to read a little and read it well than to read a lot but do it poorly. When you do read, you don't have to agree with the writers.

Combine your reading with thinking for yourself

Schopenhauer admits that reading is a better way of engaging with another person's mind because the writer's works may be richer in content than his company, the result and fruit of all his thinking and studying.  <ul><li>When Schopenhauer quotes from the authors he read, it is because he takes courage from them, but not content.</li><li>He stresses that this still does not mean we can import literary qualities into our own writing simply by reading them.  Reading shapes us for writing by teaching us the use we can make of our own natural gifts.</li></ul>

Read for company and encouragement in your thinking

Use the limits of reading by starting from where your writers left off.  Allow your favourite authors to inspire you to look at the world differently.

Allow beautiful writing to entice you to think for yourself

Thinking for yourself does not mean you keep it all in your head.   Your original thoughts demand to be put in an external form. It could take the form of writing, a conversation, or even in forms of expression such as visual or musical arts.

Write as a form of thinking

Schopenhauer and Proust can help you find inspiration from your favourite writers while also retaining an independent mind

Stashed ideas

How to think for yourself | Psyche Guides

By force of habit, most executives tune down their imagination when strategizing. This is counterproductive, and there is an alternative: Design fiction. A design technique that immerses executives and employees deeply in various possible futures, it uses artifacts such as short movies, fictitious newspaper articles and imaginary commercials to generate transformation roadmaps. Rooted in the future but helping to act in the present, design fiction results in concrete actions taken to adjust companies’ visions, strategies, and activities to create a better future.

No Place For Imagination

Trying to predict what the future will look like is doomed to fail. Yet this is what most executives do when they strategize. They — we — do this because we have been trained and educated to use trends and statistics to predict what is likely to happen and prepare accordingly. As a result, companies <a href="https://hbr.org/2020/06/3-things-youre-getting-wrong-about-organizational-change">struggle to react to changes</a> in their environments when they should be <a href="https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.2019.0289">shaping them proactively</a>. This is an issue for executives around the globe whose strategizing, anchored in the past, misses out on important opportunities to envision, and design, possible futures.

Visualizing The Future

Unlike many <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/07/how-to-do-strategic-planning-like-a-futurist">strategic foresight tools</a>, design fiction does not attempt to identify what is more likely to happen. Nor does it limit strategy conversations to the C-suite; in fact a core component is the participation of a wide range of stakeholders. Consequently, the teams that we’ve seen deploy design fiction are able to formulate and shape desirable futures that other tools do not enable people to see.

Design Fiction

The first step of putting design fiction into practice involves crafting scenarios of possible futures. For example, in a project with a major car insurance company, we analyzed information from urban mobility trends, autopilot flight modes, Luc Besson’s notorious movie The Fifth Element, and interviews with early electric car adopters to develop scenarios of possible futures. These atypical data sources help spotlight less obvious aspects that would otherwise remain unnoticed in the strategizing process.

Creating Scenarios From Pop Culture

Design fiction has helped dozens of multinational companies to strategize differently. And while creating fictional futures may sound a little quirky, we know that it works. For example, a recent design-fiction project conducted with a major oil and gas company helped identify how to shape a future in which people living in remote areas were less socially isolated. The company decided to repurpose gas stations into places galvanizing community through services such as car sharing hubs, medical centers, delivery platforms, and ghost kitchens.

Inventing The Future

Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy

<ol><li>Discoverability - figure out which actions are possible and where and how to perform them</li><li>Understanding - how is the product supposed to be used and what all the different controls and settings mean</li></ol>

2 Important Characteristics Of Good Design

<ul><li>Industrial design - emphasize form and material; optimize function, value, and appearance of products and systems for the benefit of both user and manufacturer.</li><li>Interaction design - emphasize understandability and usability; how people interact with technology and draws upon principles of psychology, design, art, and emotion.</li><li>Experience design - emphasize emotional impact and focused on quality and enjoyment of the total experience.</li></ul>

Areas Of Design

Good understanding of people is key. Designs should match the needs and capabilities of the people for whom they are intended. The philosophy of human-centeted design focuses on repeated approximations and avoids specifying the problem as long as possible when it comes to defining the specifications of design.

Human-centered Design 

Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious—even liberating—book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. In this entertaining and insightful analysis, cognitive scientist Don Norman hails excellence of design as the most important key to regaining the competitive edge in influencing consumer behavior. Now fully expanded and updated, with a new introduction by the author, The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how—and why—some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

Books

The Design of Everyday Things

Creativity is not luck and talent but a blend of skills and habits you must build over time. This is very relevant as we navigate the Great Resignation. Many people are quitting their jobs because creativity was hampered, leading to a boom in new-business creation.
The most innovative products often come from those who are consistently challenged to discover what others miss. By considering their habits, skills, and tools, we can be inspired by their creative process and how to copy it.

Designers and creativity

Look to the past for inspiration. Being creative means improving the old in novel and exciting ways. For example, the first camera was made in 1816 by Nicéphore Niépce. Chinese graduate student Frank Wang designed and built a flying device that carried a light camera that could take pictures from high. His company released a fully integrated camera drone in 2014.

Find the new in the old

Look for unique and hidden elements, then combine them with something else. Twitter is an example of deconstruction. Blogging started in 1994. Over time blogs contained longer posts, pictures, and videos. In 2006, Jack dorsey launched Twitter, which let people express themselves in microblogs. Today, the company is worth more than $13 billion.

Deconstruct

Aggregate is the opposite of deconstructing. It is the practice of combining different elements into a whole. For example, the smartphone is so successful because it aggregates many things. It’s a phone, camera, text messenger, email provider, internet browser, music player, video screen, and source of entertainment.

Aggregate

Combine opposites in an unlikely way. Coco Chanel was the first fashion designer to design the androgynous look in 1906. She combined straight dresses and pants previously reserved for men. In 1920, Chanel No.5, put her name everywhere. Chanel desired perfumer Ernest Beaux to make an artificial fragrance as "a woman should smell like a woman and not like a flower.” She also desired the perfume to blur the line between a respectable girl and a seductress.

Find harmony in contradictions

A cross-pollination between fields and industries leads to innovation in design. The innovative wearable-technology field is the result of cross-fertilization. Wearable tech advanced when Polar launched the first wire-free heart monitor in 1982. It combined medical equipment, science, industrial design, and technology that became the go-to brand for sports and exercise.Since then, Fitbit launched its wrist-worn tracker in 2013, and Apple released the Apple Watch in 2014.

Mix intellectual capital

In a new book, Maria Brito looks at how designers and innovators throughout history have unlocked their creativity and changed the world.


5 tricks to help you think like the world’s greatest designers

I’ve designed websites for 9 years now and made around $800,000 in my career as a website designer.In this article, I’m sharing my 5 top tips that will help you create amazing website designs.Let’s dive in!

My Top 5 Tips For Designing A Website

When picking your colour palette I recommend using just 3 colours. One colour for your background. One colour for your typography. And one colour for your accents. By accents, I mean things like buttons. A grand total of three colours!You can use variations of your 3 colours. For example, when I use black I do use some greys. But rarely do I ever introduce more than 3 completely different colours into the design.If you can’t pick your own colours, Great! Just use black, white and a single brand colour for your highlights.

1. Use just 3 colours

When choosing fonts for your website design I recommend using just one classic typeface.Your font family must include a number of different weights. For example Heavy, Bold, Medium and Light. To achieve variation and hierarchy in your designs you can change up the size and weight of your font.Super important! You must pick a high-quality font. It must read well in long copy. For example your blog posts. I recommend using classic fonts like Helvetica.If you must use a brand font. Use it just for the main headers. Then use your single chosen font for the rest of your website designs. Done!

2. Use just one font

The average website design is going to be viewed on dozens of different devices.Your design must be able to flex and stack and still look good. This means using a modular design.By modular design, I mean every element you create should be self-contained.Whenever you’re laying out your page elements, always be working with independent, separate modules. How your design is going to flex vertically and horizontally. And how it’s going to stack on top of each other...Check out my linked article to continue reading and see tips 4 and 5.

3. Make everything modular

To this day I still employ all of these frameworks when I’m designing a website.
Give them a shot. Especially if you’re just starting out.

When picking your colour palette I recommend using just 3 colours. One colour for your background. One colour for your typography. And one colour for your accents. By accents, I mean things like…

How to think for yourself | Psyche Guides

Using Fiction to Find Your Strategy

The Design of Everyday Things

5 tricks to help you think like the world’s greatest designers

My top 5 tips for designing a website

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