We ought to find the courage to stop running away from our problems and start embracing them; the good news is that we’ve never been better prepared to do it.
Run, fight, or hide away from what frightens us is an innate reaction. For a biologist, the capability to react to the environment is considered one of the main characteristics of Life; if an organism reacts to an external stimulus, an ability called irritability, then it is a living being.
But when it comes to humans, and if we understand how human impact is such a transformative force shaping the world. Then as humans, er, we kind of need to go beyond running, fighting, or hiding. We need perspective, intention, and strategy.
A little bit of Martial Arts
In martial arts, it can take up to 10 years for someone to educate their reactive instinct and start experiencing, for very brief periods, the notion of centeredness, which translates into “owning any situation”, a sort of “mastery of all”.
The development of this mastery is quite counterintuitive. It takes being in the middle of turbulence, a threat, a stimulus, and instead of reacting to it, you let go of the illusion of external control. You “go within the center”, the spirit, the Mind, to get acquainted with more intelligent innate reflects that allow you to move with purpose and intention.
Today, there is an acceleration of the process of centeredness in all of us, it comes with the moment in time we are living. No one can control the abundance of information we are floating on; this information has become our new environment, and like an ocean, it is abundant.
Thus, we are all forced to let go, to adapt, and EVERYONE is trying to figure our way out.
Creativity, designer skill, human skill
Expertise is over, creativity is the new human core skill. And that is great! Because that is exactly what we need, to try to solve the challenges we are facing. Globally, but also at the scale of our communities and as individuals.
Like never before, the challenges we are now facing are global scaled, and we are only growing the awareness of our interconnection. Connectivity surpasses geopolitics, where individuals from more and more diverse backgrounds, look past their insecurities to lead and make an impact.
Designers love problems because designers create solutions. So in order to navigate our world with purpose, let’s all adopt the designer’s posture. Let’s approach the problems of our world proactively, let’s get designing solutions that are centered on our true needs, the needs of our communities, our planet, …our future.
Design Age series
We are in a design age, we are all to become designers, artists as Seth Godin would say. This means we ought to fall in love with problems, learn more about how to work collectively, conquer resistance and perfectionism, make prototyping our new currency and show up to make our work valuable.
I’ll be writing a series of articles under the name of Design Age, I hope you enjoy it.
