The most important thing you’ll ever make
If you want to make groundbreaking products and services, start with cultivating real, healthy and resilient relationships.
You want to make the next, great product or service, living for years on the income it generates. That’s great. You totally can, but before you set off, let me ask you a few important questions:
- Are you prepared to be the most humble you have ever been in your life?
- Are you willing to place others’ needs ahead of your own?
- Let me reiterate, are you ready to set your ego aside and make other people feel like they matter more than you do?
- Can you find something fascinating and unique in everyone you meet?
- Can you put down your phone long enough to not only listen to another person but really hear what they are telling you?
- Do you know the difference between empathy and sympathy, and can you identify when you feel the former for someone rather than the latter? Have you ever felt either for another person?
If you haven’t guessed by now, your next great product or service will only be as great as your relationships. That’s because relationships are the most important thing you will ever create. Nearly everything we do depends on relationships with others and ourselves, and yet far too many of us take our relationships for granted. We assume we have a right to human connection. The fact of the matter is, we have a right to many things, but human connection is not among them. We may have the right to pursue it, but not to possess it.
That especially holds true today.
What others’ inventions are costing you
Think about how often you check your feeds to see who liked, retweeted or DM’ed you. Research indicates we check our phones, on average, 150 times a day. Worse yet, every time we check our phones we’re delivered a small hit of dopamine. That’s right, checking our phones is akin to hitting the slot machine or taking a drag on a cigarette. As Bill Davidow wrote for The Atlantic in 2012:
“Thanks to neuroscience, we’re beginning to understand that achieving a goal or anticipating the reward of new content for completing a task can excite the neurons in the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine into the brain’s pleasure centers. This in turn causes the experience to be perceived as pleasurable. As a result, some people can become obsessed with these pleasure-seeking experiences and engage in compulsive behavior such as a need to keep playing a game, constantly check email, or compulsively gamble online.”
Instead of getting a financial payout, we get a (albeit perceived) social one. We believe we’re getting an answer anew, each time we log in, to the most important question in our lives: “Am I important?” As Dale Carnegie writes in his 1936 bestseller “How to Win Friends and Influence People”:
“The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the chief distinguishing differences between mankind and the animals. … If our ancestors hadn’t had this flaming urge for a feeling of importance, civilization would have been impossible. Without it, we should have been just about like animals.”
Now, when has the momentary high you get from a social media interaction ever compared to a two-hour dinner conversation in which you were entirely and pleasantly lost? It hasn’t, and it never will. Yet, we are, far too often, considering our relationships online — short blips of pseudo connection — to be a replacement for our in-person relationships. I would argue it’s not even an adequate replacement for the in-person work we used to do to build connections.
This is beginning to take a toll on our personal health and wellbeing. It is negatively affecting our work, our romantic relationships and even our sense of self-worth. Instead of sitting across the dinner table from one another and enjoying a moment of silence, we’re checking our phones to see if someone else loves us more, needs us more, thinks we matter more or is just really keen to have us respond with the ubiquitous 😂 to their latest fart joke.
Really, the joke is hilarious. Check it out. Your boyfriend’s in the predictable middle of that story about his day at work anyway. He won’t notice. Besides you can pay attention to two things at once, except science says definitively that you can’t. Oh, look, you’re slowly killing your real relationship to feed a few fake, ones. Now, your boyfriend has stopped talking and is watching as you proceed to ignore him, making him feel like the answer to that most important question in the world —“Am I important?” — is a big, fat “nope”.
Way to go, champ. ‘Hope that Insta like was worth it.
The greatest products and services ever created, and that we will ever create, rest in the health and wellbeing of our relationships. The better and deeper the relationships we can create, the more groundbreaking the results of our creative effort and labor.
Human-centered design isn’t about product creation; it’s about relationships.
I spent the past three years learning about human-centered design. The entire process of creative problem-solving starts with building relationships, learning from others and working with them to meet their expressed need. It’s often thought that this process is solely for building great products and services. It goes well beyond that. It’s a process for building and growing great relationships.
Whether romantic or platonic, business or personal, temporary or life-long, human-centered design is a relationship-building method as much as anything else. I have found the process to work in making my everyday relationships stronger.
I no longer sit with my assumptions about what others’ intentions are; I test them. I don’t shoot down people’s ideas; I build on them. I don’t let things rest in a murky complexity; I doggedly work towards establishing clarity. I don’t say “yes” or “no”; I ask “why”.
In the coming days and weeks, I’ll have more to write about how design thinking methodology can be applied to your personal relationships. In the meantime, set down your phone, go apologize to your boyfriend and ask him how your actions made him feel. Then, actively and compassionately listen.
I run a consultancy at the crossroads of human-centered design, media, policy and professional development. I recently gave a TEDx talk on the need for a marriage of design and unconscious bias in professional development and media training.
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