Say nothing to say more.
Last week we flew back to Riga for summer. I love the UK and miss it already, but excited about Riga at the same time. Feels like eating peanut butter with Nutella. You know DIY snicker cream. Experiencing two good things at the same time.
Honestly, coming back to home town is a weird experience as suddenly people give you more attention. It is as natural as it can get. People want to catch up, swap stories and generally shake hand.
However, there is this remarkable sense of value that comes from being away. Obviously this value is born from different sources, but one natural source is the fact that you can’t touch the person and be in his presence. Your physical presence is none.
I feel like this underlying process could be framed as a “white space” factor. In graphic design you would work with “white space” as an asset to focus attention or to emphasize something. Just think if this whole text would be without paragraphs you would not read it, it would feel like a huge piece of text — absolutely no desire to read that long sausage. But when there is paragraph break, it is like an inhale of fresh air. In a sense, it's white noise, white space.
It doesn’t make sense to use nothing to say something. But the nothingness packs a punch that pro’s knows how to leverage.
I love a simple real life scenario to paint points, for example, when you go to the Apple store and see that they have fewer products on huge tables it kind feels like there is a value in what they say, which is what sell. To compare that to a conventional shop their goal is to sell space, as much as they can. Apple retail creates a focus on value through the space — the white space.
It feels like people, can have much more meaningful experience by using more “white space” principle in their daily routines. As simple as saying one compliment or an encouraging word to a friend and none comments about the weather, politics and other stuff.
This reminds me of my colleague who surprised me with this line “Today is the best day”. He didn’t elaborate on that. It stayed with me and the next day I laughed about it and said to him, “Hey, this is probably an even better day than yesterday?” we laughed and he said “Yes, it is”. By the way I thought What? That was it? Yes, and it worked.
This line stayed with me, just because he framed the line with “white space” — silence of any other messages.
If you have an objective to focus attention, drop out everything that steals the white space.
It is done, blog for today.
PRIOR POSTS
“2 Simple Tactics for Focusing”
“Lose “likes” by sharing weak story. No. It’s not the story that’s weak”
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