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Notes, Quotes, Songs, Writing – November 2025
November 23, 2025 @ 3:52pm – Camberwell, Victoria, Australia Here are some notes, quotes, songs and writing from last month. This is probably my last post before the end of the year. At some point in January I’ll compile all my notes for the entire year.
Thoughts
- Motivation is important, but it’s difficult to drive forward if there’s a part of us that has their foot stamped on the brake. We tend to set a louder alarm clock when there’s a part of us that is tired and wants to rest.
- It usually comes as a shock when we recognize how similar someone else is to us.
- If technology had a slogan, it would be something like “there’s still a few bugs to work out”. It’s never finished.
- I think there’s a real cost to watching hours of television every night, especially for younger people. Streaming makes the problem both worse and cheaper. It’s like subsidized rubbish. At least a Blue-Ray is unsubsidized.
- If you can, acknowledge your tiredness. It’s not even unpleasant. What’s unpleasant is ignoring your tiredness or not even knowing that you’re ignoring it. Say to yourself, “Yep, I know, we’ll go to sleep soon.”
- There’s spontaneous conversation and then there’s the pain of wanting and wishing the next conversation to be the same.
- Hell is not giving yourself space between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’.
- There should be a decent reason you are only giving 40% effort.
- Any time I’m doing something that requires me to wait a few minutes, like boiling a kettle, my hands leap at the opportunity to fidget and scratch.
- A sleep cycle is about 1.5 hours. If you wake at some ‘odd’ hour in the night, translate it to cycles instead: Oh, I’ve just woken up after sleeping for a few cycles. It makes more sense.
- I’m automatically assigned ‘team leader’ for a day. It’s hardly got any power or real responsibility. It’s more a contact person if anything. But almost immediately people emerge from the group who want this job and don’t want me to have it.
- There’s been a stain on my bathroom door for months. I finally look at it closely. It’s mould. I clean it, sand it, wipe it, paint it.
- I swim crawl much better when I breathe despite the water, meaning I don’t adjust my position so much. Usually I’m breathing around the water, gasping to fit a breath in without swallowing water.
- I remember a bumper sticker I saw when backpacking years ago. It said something like “Life: This isn’t practice.” I think you can read this and feel worried, or just read it as an important fact to remember.
- A lot of modern weight loss techniques are about going fast. Whizzing smoothies, interval sprints, flapjack burpees. But you can lose weight doing everything slowly.
- This year I opted to not be part of my apartment buildings’ committee. Most issues have quietly resolved themselves without any intervention from me. I wonder if wars are what happen when groups of people can’t help but intervene.
- Kids use great language. A kid playing soccer with his brother exclaims “if you kick it with force it goes like a slingshot!”
- If someone wants to lose weight ask them what will happen once they have lost the weight. Most of the time we don’t actually think about what will happen once we get the thing we want. We are too busy wanting the thing.
- A basic experience of freedom: stop a habit
Quotes
- If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live. – Einstein
- Even these nihilist guys, they’re trying to provide meaning even if it’s an anti-meaning…they’re enchanting the world with nihilism. – Grant Morrison
- True creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies. – Alain de Botton
- We’re all put to the test. But it never comes in the form, or at the point we’d prefer, does it? – The Edge (1997)
- One of the best ways to discover what you really believe in… is to watch your own behavior. – Robert A. Johnson
- The moment a friendship feels like it’s a sort of tit for tat, it’s no longer a friendship – My mother
- Jet lag is your soul being dragged around by your body. – William Gibson
- When I am having difficulty getting into a task, when I am writing, repairing something around the house, frustrated by difficulties, or literally breathless from jogging. The phrase will come into my head—“I am just warming up now.” I usually find more energy available after this. – The Teaching Tales Of Milton H Erickson
- True science results when (with common sense)… people know what kinds of experiments to conduct. – Rudolph Steiner
- They were sending me kids who couldn’t sit still. Well, they could sit still when they were listening to me, because they realized I was giving them something valuable. – John Stokes
Songs
- You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’ – Judas Priest
- Regiment – Brian Eno & David Byrne
- The Coffee Cola Song – Francis Bebey
- I Want More, Vitamin C – Can
- Going Down Slow – Eric Clapton
- I Want It All – Queen
- The Swag – Link Wray
- Can’t lose what you never had – Allman Brothers Band
- County Fair -Joe Walsh
- Amoreena – Elton John
- The Ghetto – George Benson
- The Main Thing – Roxy Music
Writing
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Your services are no longer required
December 2, 2025 @ 12:03pm – Burnley, Victoria, Australia Will AI take my job?
This is a question that has been hanging over many of us this year.
Will AI replace me? Will I no longer be needed? What will I do?Many of us have been thinking about these questions. They make us anxious about the future because now the future looks different.
For some of us, it’s easier not to think about it. We quickly change the topic or fill our heads with distractions. Others might shout and complain and point fingers, hoping that it helps.
Crying, screaming, hiding, shrieking, and cursing are all options available to us. But they don’t really change anything about the situation. In fact, they usually make it worse.
AI, like any other technology like concrete or wireless networks, exists.
Popular self-help authors encourage us to do what’s in our control to make the situation better. “If you’re scared about it, lean into it.”1 Use your agency and “slurp up all those problems and knowledge, and leave nothing for anyone else to do”2 and “push through (your) own excuses… even when (you) didn’t feel like it.”3 Even if there are layoffs or other acts of fate, you will be in a better position.
This is a helpful way to look at problems, but the reality is, of course our jobs could no longer exist.
Here are some more hard “could be truths”:
- You didn’t do a good enough job (for this company at this time). True.
- What you were getting paid for can now be done by someone with less training, or for less money.
- Someone can do what you do but better, faster. TRUE.
It’s hard to look at these directly.
But of course it could be true.
I think it’s hard to look because there is such a slippery slope from “I’m not actually needed” to “I’m not good.” It’s scattered with guilt and shame and beliefs and all sorts of things. They feel connected.
But I didn’t say, “You are a loser,” “You are a failure,” “You should have done something,” “You won’t be happy again” or “It’s all downhill from here.” No judgements.
If you look closely, you’ll see that there is space between. Of course there’s space. It’s possible to separate these things.
Admitting that ‘I’m no longer needed here’ doesn’t take away your agency or say anything “bad” about you.
It’s difficult and painful but we must be able to recognize that it could be, and might be, one day, true.
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Drawer shoving
August 22, 2019 @ 5:32pm – Scottsdale, Arizona “The one thing that our unconscious will not tolerate is evasion of responsibility.” – Robert A. Johnson
To-do lists are a simple tool, invented to get stuff done. You write down the item that needs to be completed and then you tick it off when it’s done.
You can do all sorts of things with your list. You can order the items in priority. You can create sub-tasks. You can set due-dates. But all these things and features are working toward the same goal, getting stuff done. I believe there’s been some books written about this.
Some of us rely on to-do lists because they hold us accountable. Without them, a task might land on someone else’s plate, or somewhere in our own nagging conscience before we realize we’re late or forgotten something.
But like any tool, they can be misused. Just like we can buy excellent, well-constructed gym equipment and leave it to collect dust in the garage. We can misuse a to-do list too.
Misusing a to-do list is when we write down something but we don’t do it. It’s good that you’ve written it down, but then the due-date slips by and it’s still sitting there. You’ll get to it later right? Maybe it got less important or something. That’s fine.
You could also remove it, delete it. This is a bit more subtle. Maybe it’s not important anymore. And now, with a bit of helpful forgetting, or reasoning, your list is looking pretty good. You’ve cherry picked items that are pleasing, easy to complete and there’s only a handful of those left to do.
I call this particular move drawer shoving.
What I’m talking about has nothing to do with a to-do list, or some specific app or workflow. I’m talking about this process of acknowledging something and then hiding it or destroying it. Avoidance. Shoving it away into some drawer.
And what makes this tricky to get a handle on is that so much of it happens outside our awareness. The hypnotist Milton Erickson once pointed out that if someone has been skipping check-ups, they’ll actually speed up when walking past a dental clinic. Or if you’re hungry you’ll automatically slow down when passing a restaurant. You can see a similar phenomenon in body language. Some people will instinctively cover or rub their eyes when they don’t want to look at someone or something.
But we shouldn’t look away.
It’s one thing to be caught off guard by something you couldn’t have known about. You did the regular services on your car, but something weird still happened and now it’s busted. That sucks. It happens to all of us.
But it’s another thing entirely to know about a problem and shove it into a drawer. You see that the edge needs taping before you paint, you skip it, and a few days later you’re standing there thinking: Why did I do that?Excuses don’t help either. I’ve used them all before. I can’t be bothered. No one will notice. It’s good enough. I don’t have time. I talk myself out of it. I’m scared. It’s not my job. Surely it’s unimportant.
No matter what, these shortcuts, hacks, and avoided stuff all tends to come back. Chekhov’s gun is real. Not immediately, not all at once and not always in the ways I expect.
When my junk drawer was getting emptied out on me at work, I’d blame co-workers as overly detail oriented. Or I’d think certain people were out to get me, to specifically point out my flaws and make me look bad. But if I was honest with myself, I already knew what they were going to point out, because I was the one who had consciously avoided it first!
It comes back. It catches my attention somehow and reminds me for the millionth time, that I might be able to wiggle, obfuscate or lie my way out of some things, but it’s never possible to lie to myself.
And even if it doesn’t come back. Even if you get away with it. Why not just assume that it will. Live like it will. Assume that it will bite you. Not in a paranoid, ‘prepper’ frame of mind, just in the spirit of intellectual honesty and the fact that you are always stuck with you.
Assume anything that you know about, has at least the chance to be known by others. And when that inevitably happens, what’s going to be your excuse then?
I first wrote something about to-do lists in March 2014
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Yes? What else?
January 11, 2025 @ 11:08am – Bolinda, Macedon, Australia It’s a shame we take our thoughts so seriously.
They distract and pull us away from what’s actually going on. They sneakily absorb our attention without us noticing. Spiritual teacher Osho goes further, calling them “parasites”.
If we could just take a step back and find a little distance, our thoughts might have less influence over us. We might be able to live without instantly reacting or getting caught up in their stories.
This is possible with a little mindfulness, and shows us there’s nothing there to worry about.
With “humility and the patience”, Richard Rohr says, “you will say 98% of your thought patterns are repetitive and useless.”
So what do we do with them?
Even if they are mostly negative or trivial, it’s not possible to stop the tap of thoughts. Instead, the usual advice is that we should treat them kindly.
It’s good advice. Letting your thoughts float by without clutching onto them or harsh judgement helps to de-potentiate their energy and prevents one from acting them out. Altering your nervous system with a long walk or a cold plunge can also help.
But it’s not easy to be kind and understanding, especially when we are dealing with persistent, ‘sticky’ or uncomfortable thoughts.
So here’s another approach.
Your thoughts are racing, they’re really distracting you, and pretty soon you’ll be completely carried off by them. When that happens, try saying this:
“Yes? What else.”
Let’s say you’re upset about the dinner you’ve cooked for yourself. Thoughts might show up like:
- “I should have planned this better.”
- “I should have eaten that yesterday, now it’s going to go bad.”
- “I wish this looked more appetising.”
Step 1: Say “Yes?”
Firstly, affirm the thought by saying, internally or out loud, “Yes?”
When you say this, try to take on the attitude of someone who is patient, a little bemused, and on the verge of exasperation, like someone dealing with a person who doesn’t quite know what they’re doing.
“Yes?” is a statement of recognition. You’ve grabbed hold of something that usually lives in the dark and you’ve brought it out into the light. And you want to do so without being judgmental. We’re not wishing it away or demanding it be different.
The thought may not feel very nice to touch. The thought might have a feeling tone of desperation, or sadness or some other emotion. If it’s something annoying, problematic or scary, you’ll probably want to drop it and do something else. Eat some food, watch YouTube, whatever. Or you might fall back into the old pattern and get carried away thinking about it.
Step 2: Say “What else?”
If you can stomach one thought without distraction, see if you can handle a second.
After you say “Yes?” then say, “What else?”
Another thought might arrive.
The attitude should be the same. Slightly impatient, but non-judgmental.
When you do this, you’ve made the choice to grab some more stuff from down in the drain.
“What else?”
“What else?”
(“Is that all ya got?”)We keep that attitude going. We’re rolling our eyes at ourselves. We’re nodding. It’s not scary. It’s maybe even a bit boring. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just more thoughts.
When big, heavy thoughts appear
Sometimes really “big” thoughts will come up.
- “I’m never going to be able to cook something nice.”
- “I’m a loser.”
- “It’s never going to change.”
- “I’m going to be broke forever.”
- “I don’t know what to do.”
They might feel scarily true, like facts rather than opinions. We might call these beliefs. A belief quietly trains you to expect certain things from life. Like a child might expect to see Santa on the roof on Christmas Eve. But they’re just thoughts too, just ones you’ve probably thought a lot of times in your life.
And what do we say to beliefs? Same as we do to any other thought.
Yes? What else.
When we say “What else?” we don’t treat one thought as more special than another. And why should we? I didn’t choose any of the thoughts that arrived in my head, so why should I honour some over others?
By doing this over and over, we’re teaching ourselves that we can handle any thought.
Tips and caveats
This is a slow process, and we shouldn’t need to rush into it.
Start small
It will feel stupid at first. You are talking to yourself. Start with small, everyday thoughts, before trying this with bigger beliefs. Practice while washing up.Don’t go deep
There’s no need to spend any time trying to understand or intellectualise the thoughts. This isn’t depth-psychology. All I’m suggesting is three words, plus a basic, non-judgmental attitude.Watch out for moods
If you’re in a really good mood, you probably won’t want to do this at all.
If you’re in a really bad mood or feeling very reactive, I wouldn’t recommend it either. We’re adding attention to our thoughts, which might fuel some flames unnecessarily.Why this works
One big reason this sort of practice is helpful is because it’s the exact opposite of what we usually do. Most of the time we do one of the following with our thoughts:
- Buy it totally and get completely identified with it
- Resist and rage against it
- Run from it, numbing out with food, tv or other distractions.
But to simply look at a thought, raise our eyebrows, keep looking, and calmly ask for more, is a complete 180. And we could all do more 180s.
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Designing like a spreadsheet
November 1, 2025 @ 5:56pm – Porepunkah, Australia Nudge. Change position. Change label. Undo. Redo. You hit a wall. You think about deleting everything and starting from scratch.
Then, an idea hits!
You race after it, leaving a stream of frames and layers behind you. Looking over your canvas filled with colourful shapes, you feel like you’ve really diverged in a creative way.
But have you actually made progress? What decisions did you make exactly? And are you any closer to a solution? Often, it’s not clear. And sometimes there’s a sinking feeling that you’ve actually gone backwards.
This random, slightly automatic way of designing can make it difficult to feel confident about what you’ve made, and can be painful for your collaborators. Engineers can’t find the ‘latest’ design and design crits and reviews can suffer from murky rationale. Not great.
A method to the madness
Inspired by another designer, who was much more methodical and measured than me, I started to experiment with a different way of working.
It looked something like this:
Each new approach is labelled (eg. “Full width panel). Variations or iterations related to it are also labelled and grouped together.
Then, when you’re ready, you create another direction and branch into related solutions from there.
Why this worked for me
At the time, I had started to work on product experiments, usually described as “growth design”. This meant I was thinking about smaller changes to workflows that could be built and tested rapidly.
Every solution also required a strong prediction or bet about how it would move a metric, expressed as something like “If we do X, then Y will happen, because X”.
Using this structure, I could organise my design file like a spreadsheet, with each hypothesis followed by a series of ideas. Once I felt I had exhausted that line of thinking, I moved onto a different hypothesis and another “row” of executions.
I remember reading about how designers at Spotify worked in a similar way. They called it “thoughtful execution”. Spotify designer Annina Koskinen explains why it’s important to explore multiple hypotheses (rows) and multiple executions (cells).
“Any problem or opportunity can be addressed in multiple different ways with varying results. That’s why it’s important to create multiple hypotheses per opportunity to see which one leads to the most desirable results. Each of the hypotheses can have several solution executions, so you can’t prove or disprove a hypothesis by just trying out one design solution.”
Aside from being a helpful way to organise and keep track of experiment solutions, I noticed a few other benefits:
1. More creativity
We have funny rules in our heads about what counts as creativity. For me, I thought I had to be kind of messy and impulsive to find these lightbulb moments. I don’t think that’s true. Sometimes a little more constraint can force us to think out of the box (like the repetition of crazy 8’s).
2. More buy-in
Working from goal to hypothesis to solution gave me a chain of reasoning that helped a lot when I was presenting work to stakeholders. It’s easier to gain consensus progressively, at each of these stages (a bit like going from lo-fi to hi-fi). It can be much harder to find agreement when we present a piece of work that has a lot of different ideas and assumptions baked into it.
3. More intentionality
By labelling screens with a “why” (hypothesis) or a “how” (execution), I’m forcing myself to ask:
- What’s actually different here?
- What problem am I trying to solve that the last one didn’t?
- What am I actually exploring here? What do I want to see?
That little pause and questioning can help prevent you from doing and re-doing the same thing over and over.
With a bit of structure in place, it makes it easier to work effectively with tools like Gemini. Gemini can help suggest new solutions for existing hypotheses or generate altogether new hypotheses you may not have thought of.
Putting it to work
In general, I’ve enjoyed less chaos in my Figma files while keeping (I think) my creativity intact. So if you’ve ever felt yourself spinning wheels, re-doing stuff, losing track of decisions, try out this method.
Most of us where I work at Xero are designing complex tools and workflows with lots of moving parts, and we don’t have the need to test different dimensions in this way. But if you’re designing more specific changes or in a high-traffic space like a check-out flow, designing a bit more like spreadsheet might work for you.
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Is this co-design?
December 29, 2023 @ 7:01pm – Jiaoxi, Taiwan When we set out to co-design, we’re usually intending to get clear on a strategy or approach, find alignment across different groups and discover some new ideas together. If we’re putting together a formal workshop, we might plan, re-plan, create activities and facilitate the best we can.
And often these types of things work well. But the expectations don’t always match reality. Ideas can get a bit lost in translation. Some participants invariably feel left out, or misunderstood. And worse, the designer might end up creating something altogether different. It’s like the workshop never happened.
For some of those reasons, it’s natural for a designer to want to work in smaller groups, or by themselves, avoiding this way of working entirely. There’s less overhead and you can move faster if it’s just you and some focus time right? But less collaboration doesn’t work great either. Whenever I’m designing alone for too long or with limited input from other collaborators, I hit a dead end pretty quickly.
No one should design like this, even if it feels easier or more comfortable in the short term. I often think of this quote (now five years old) from Bob Baxley, reflecting on Apple’s review-heavy design culture: “If you ever found yourself sitting at your desk by yourself with your headphones on, stressing ’cause you felt like you had to figure it out on your own, something was really broken.”
Meet me halfway?
To make co-design more palatable, effective and integrated into our ways of working, we need something to fill that middle ground, somewhere between intensive multi-day workshops and flying solo.
Recently, I found myself in a cross-functional group that had formed to help with product growth. We wanted to test out a lot of little experiments and see if any helped customers to get onboarded and set-up faster. This shared goal had given us valuable alignment to begin with, but we still needed to decide what experiments to run and how they should work. We had limited time and a big backlog of experiments to flesh out. How were we going to work together?
Once or twice a week, we’d come together to ‘frame’ or ‘shape’ an experiment. We’d discuss the problem it would solve, risks and a few possible approaches. It was never longer than an hour, and it was purposefully unstructured. There might be some ideation or diagraming or maybe we’d spend most the session on the right problem to solve.
Initially, I found this working session really frustrating. I’d think, shouldn’t the designer be doing this? How can we start to design without exactly understanding the problem? There wasn’t any time to optimise or improve the activities. I had the typical fear (of designers) that we were rushing into solutions, and we were! But we also needed to agree (or disagree) and commit, so we could move onto the next experiment and keep moving.
But slowly, I started to see some benefits. When it came time for me to actually design something, I was no longer starting with a blank slate. Many of the edge cases that would have me spinning wheels had already been resolved. And design reviews were more effective, since everyone had shared context and had already contributed significantly to the concept. I didn’t feel like I was shouting down a one-way telephone line.
Why did it work?
I think this sort of framing activity worked well for us because:
- Everyone involved was responsible for driving the same goal
- We’d already prioritized the rough idea, so we could focus purely on the how rather than the why
- Each experiment was scoped to no more than two weeks to build, so there was a natural expectation for designing to be similarly fast
But most importantly, it succeeded because we allowed it to, without forcing it. If this was ‘co-design’, we never labelled it such. We need to allow co-designing to express in ways that are appropriate to your particular team or project. If you’re designing a new product from scratch, co-design will likely look very different. And that’s ok! It’s easy to get attached to how you think alignment and agreement should look. But if we’re too rigid in how we expect collaboration to happen, it probably won’t.
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Swimming under pressure
October 29, 2020 @ 6:24am – Canberra, Australia I’m lap swimming, like I usually do on a Monday evening. It’s a coached squad and there are six or seven others in my lane. We’re meant to swim about five seconds apart, but we tend to bunch closer, so the person in front is almost kicking in your face. Swimming that close gives you a bit of a ‘draft’ and uses less energy.
We order ourselves fastest to slowest, which generally works well. I’m usually the second slowest. If I miss a few weeks or have an off-day, I’m dead last. When we’re asked to swim “fast,” I only need to keep in touch with the person just ahead of me, someone slightly quicker. If I were near the front, I simply couldn’t keep up.
And that’s exactly what I found myself struggling with. We were meant to be swimming at a moderate pace, but I noticed a gap opening between me and the swimmer ahead. “What’s going on?” I wondered, kicking harder and pulling faster. “Am I slow? Or are they extra fast tonight?”
Over the next few laps, I worked to close the gap, eventually bringing it down to a body length. I felt satisfied, but I was gassed. In trying to keep up, I’d been swimming much harder than the coach had asked. It wasn’t sustainable. Luckily, the set ended, and I could rest for a few minutes before we started again.
I think one of the main reasons I strain to keep up is because I hate the feeling of being passed, or of slowing someone down behind me. It’s the same pressured tension you might have felt when rushing to an appointment, gripping the steering wheel as traffic refuses to move
Before that moment, I’d never really admitted that to myself. I’m far more likely to get irritated, blame others, vow to get fitter, or just swim harder. Anything rather than really acknowledge that bad feeling.
Sometimes I’ll move to the very back, so there’s no one behind me. Back there, there’s no pressure, no fear of blocking anyone. But usually someone’s already claimed that spot. There’s usually a swimmer nursing some kind of sore shoulder or something who insists, “No, you’re faster than me, stay where you are” or “where do you think you’re going?” And so I’m back where I started. Burning with indignation, trying to keep up with the person in front while the swimmer behind is on my heels (literally). So much for that shoulder.
Another way to avoid being passed is to just give up and get out. This isn’t usually my style, but I do see this in my lane all the time. A swimmer is up near the front, swimming strongly for three-quarters of the set, then suddenly veers off to the side, clutching a calf or hamstring in mock agony. A cramp, exhaustion, hunger or a multitude of other excuses can become a get-out-of-the-pool-free card. With a laugh or a shrug, they no longer have to worry about keeping up.
Luckily, there’s a simple antidote. Just let yourself get passed! Relax. But you’ve really got to let it happen. No excuses. Swim the best you can, and if someone passes you, you got passed, simple as that. Remind yourself that no one has asked you to not get passed, except yourself. Obviously, it’s not going to feel good, but that’s sort of the point.
Exposure always helps, but there’s deeper assumptions to fight if we want to avoid this reaction for good.
Falling behind and keeping up both assume there’s a race, a specific result that’s expected.
But that goal line doesn’t exist. The pressure is entirely self-created.
When we see that clearly, the straining and the avoiding are no longer needed.
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Totally and seriously
October 1, 2008 @ 6:58am – Central Bulgaria Imagine you have to get on stage dressed as a giant carrot and get chased around by a guy dressed as a rabbit.
You’ve got a job. You pay the bills. You just don’t do stuff like this. It’s ridiculous. It feels silly and wrong.
But, not only do you need to run around with this rabbit, you’ve got to do it as seriously as possible.
Usually to be serious at something, we try and be good at it, or at least try hard to get it right. We roll up our sleeves, ‘focus’ or might screw up our face in concentration. We take things seriously if they are important to us, or when we care about the result.
It may be easy to think you’re being serious, but being serious is more serious than you think.
Let’s go back to the carrot suit. Have you put it on yet? Great.
It’s going to be difficult to take something this silly and make it serious.
But. What if:
You’ve been doing this carrot – rabbit thing for 50 years. It’s not just a one off stunt. It’s been the career of your lifetime.
It’s been your livelihood too. It’s got your kids through college and made a nest egg for retirement.
It’s also been passed down your family line. Your father did it before you, and his father, and so on, further back than anyone knows.
Over the years it’s helped you through your own struggles. Addictions. Mistakes. It’s taught you things. You might not even be standing here if it wasn’t for this Carrot suit.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, you enjoy it. You see the benefit not only for yourself, but you want to share it with others who might benefit too.
Now, when you think of all those things at once, as you’re dressed as a carrot, I think you’re getting a bit closer to what serious looks and feels like.
And I think we’d all be better off if we did things more seriously.
Like singing, for example.
I’ve always disliked karaoke, because I’m not very good at singing and I feel uncomfortable looking and sounding bad in front of other people.
But I’ve found the more seriously I sing, the better I sound and the less uncomfortable I feel.
To do something seriously, means to do it totally. You can’t have one foot in and one foot out. That carrot guy isn’t hesitating or doing it half-heartedly is he? Why would he?
It’s a bit like a dog chasing a ball. There’s not much inner conflict, umming and erring or hesitation when a dog chases a ball. The dog is not divided. It just does.
Totally, and seriously.
Also published on Substack
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The Slow and Painful way to Effective Speaking
October 4, 2025 @ 10:55am – Boronia, Victoria I’ve tried lots of things to make my presentations better. I’ve read countless books and articles about narrative, storytelling and communication. I’ve learned about frameworks like The Pyramid Principle and I’ve attended Dale Carnegie courses to improve my public speaking. I’ve even spent hours poring over famous keynote speeches frame by frame, trying to figure out what made them great.
But nothing really helped. Even when I thought I got things right, my presentations still weren’t explaining, informing or persuading anyone.
More recently I’ve come to realize the problem wasn’t the advice, feedback, frameworks or PowerPoint templates. It was how I was using them.
For example, I’ve often received feedback that I speak too fast. I need to speak slowly. Good advice. But I’d misunderstand it. I’d speak slowly because I thought that’s what would sound good, or would make me look good or simply because that’s what other good speakers did.
I’d also try out things that I saw in other presentations that looked good. I’d create a slide with only one sentence on it. It looked bold and dramatic. But there was no thinking or intent. I did it because I’d seen others do it. With every decision I made like this, I’d wind up with a series of slides that didn’t really make sense together.
I was putting together presentations like cooking without ever stopping to taste or question a particular method or ingredient. I’d remind myself to add salt without learning or understanding that one adds it to food to balance and bring out the flavor.
Rather than figuring out the perfect font size, I’d have been better off asking myself what my audience were actually interested in, or why my slide-deck was even needed in the first place. Even though just thinking about your audience can increase anxiety, they are the reason for your presentation and it helps to bring them into sharper focus.
This focus helps you when you are deciding on both the content and style. It’s not to say that craft and polish don’t matter. They do. But before I start nudging around rectangles, I have to keep reminding myself to ask ‘why?’. Am I making myself more clear? Does this benefit my audience? And 99% of the time it doesn’t.
When we edit, we consciously shape what others will hear, see and hopefully understand. Here’s actor/director Jesse Eisenberg answering a question about how he edited his film A Real Pain.
I feel the tone is created by the characters, and Kieran’s character is this relentless character. He’s driving the whole movie, and he’s a guy who doesn’t give you a break. I just wanted that feeling to be part of the movie. So when we were cutting the movie, it felt like: What are the characters doing in this scene? How are they driving the movie? It was 99% driven by Kieran, except one scene where Kieran’s not in — at the dinner table in the restaurant — where the camera suddenly slows down, and now the scene’s about David. But for the most part, it’s just: how are the characters driving this?
I recognize the irony in me sharing advice about presentations. I’m living proof that reading stuff like this won’t help. More information won’t make you question, reflect and recognize what’s getting in the way of clear communication.
For me, my concern over looking good excluded more important inputs like how the audience was feeling and what they were interested in. I’d forgotten the reason why I was presenting what I was presenting.
Until we can answer those sorts of questions, or admit that we aren’t asking them and just trying to look good, we will struggle to bridge the gap between what we say and what people actually hear.
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Working well with others
September 4, 2025 @ 11:47am – Melbourne, Australia “A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”
— David Foster WallaceWhether you are making shoes, advertisements about shoes or shoe-making software, it’s likely the work is getting done in a group or a team.
Since 2020, this way of working has become especially important. Engineers and designers can no longer reliably chat at a desk or gather around a whiteboard. Those conversations have migrated online to collaborative software, like Miro and Figma.
If you’re used to working alone, it can be overwhelming to see all this work in progress. Miro boards filled with sticky notes, spaghetti diagrams, screenshots and other design detritus. What used to be private thinking is now facilitated in real-time workshops, with dozens of stakeholders calling in, watching, listening and co-designing together.
I resisted this type of collaboration for a long time.
I was critical of workshops and dismissed them as “UX theatre”. I thought they were inefficient and believed there was better ways to use my time. I didn’t think stakeholder management was my job. I was wary of politics, group think and other barriers to creativity. And when I had no other choice, I turned my criticism inward, lamenting my own facilitation skills or introversion. I thought, maybe I’d like collaboration if I was actually good at it.
There might have been some truth to these concerns. But what if it was less about collaboration being a mess, and more about my own need to be perfect?
Anti-teamwork
A perfectionist is usually defined as someone who has set high standards for themselves or others. At their core, they need to look good and be right. And at first glance, a perfectionist in the team will look like and sound like a normal person. They’ll bring their skills, help out and try to work together. But because of this strong, often unconscious need, they tend to prevent, rather than encourage healthy collaboration.
Firstly, a perfectionist cares more about how they look, rather than the shared goal of the team. They’ll often lose sight of the overall goal, and instead tend to focus on little things that don’t really make much difference.
The perfectionist is usually driven by a harsh ‘inner critic’ that nags and nitpicks them hundreds of times before they critique or blame another person. But when they do, harsh criticism will make their team feel judged, shamed and less likely to share ideas. Hypocritically, a perfectionist can’t bear to be criticized.
A perfectionist thinks they are right. This rigid conviction comes at the cost of creativity, listening and general respect for others. If you believe you are right about something, why listen to someone else? Conviction taken to extremes is behind every totalitarian regime and fundamentalist religion. Due to their predictable righteousness, a perfectionist will struggle to sit with uncertainty, ambiguity without an “irritable reaching for facts and reason.”1
A perfectionist can’t handle being ordinary. They think in black and white terms; their output is trash that needs to be exceptional. They live in a fantasy world and need to return to reality, where the rest of their team is waiting. Marie-Louise Von Franz connects this attitude with a “sudden-fall” dream, which she says “generally coincide with outer, deep disappointment when one is suddenly faced with naked reality as it is.”2
Lastly, a perfectionist doesn’t know how to fail. If something doesn’t turn out how they planned, they blame or find ways to avoid responsibility. Without owning (and learning) from these mistakes, they have failed to fail, or what I’m coining inauthentic failing. They’d be better off to “get back up… to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.”3
It’s easy to wave off perfectionist tendencies if you’ve got them. I’d filed most of mine under positive sounding interview answers like attention to detail, working too hard or caring a bit too much.
Collaboration can be chaotic. For a perfectionist, this collaborative world can feel like hell and they naturally want to defend against it viciously. That’s where all the ranting, blaming and burning the midnight oil comes from.
But rather than blame brainstorming or lame ice-breakers, I would have been better off noticing my own perfectionism – and how it makes collaboration nearly impossible.
To truly collaborate, and to actually get things done, one must accept the messy Miro board, the antithesis of perfection, the ordinary, imperfect nature of life itself.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability ↩︎
- Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream: Conversations on Jungian Dream Interpretation ↩︎
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations ↩︎
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