Nollind Whachell

One of the drawbacks I find in creating a loosely structured space for yourself online is that most web platforms have predefined expectations of what they should be and how you should use them, rather than being loosely structured so you can play around with them and create your own customized structure that works for you.

This is why I fell in love with Squarespace in 2004 but by 2014 lost faith in it, as a lot of the functional flexibility that it once had was removed when it was completely rebuilt and relaunched with Version 6.

Today, I love where WordPress is going with the flexibility of blocks, eventually going beyond posts and pages to constructing your entire site with them, but in my opinion it still hasn’t gone far enough on the post level. What I mean by this is WordPress is optimized for long form writing. If you want to do micro-posts (emulating Twitter), you really have to customize its “out of the box” experience substantially to achieve this.

And yet if we want to create a space where we can maintain our self as a “whole”, rather than being scattered across the Web on many different social network platforms, then WordPress needs to be flexible enough to allow a person to emulate the basic post functionality of these others platforms.

For example, if I have a simple one sentence thought that I want to post, I should be able to do this. Of course I can do this on WordPress but it looks awkward and out of place because the context of what your posting doesn’t change the appropriate style of it.

Personally I think this is why blogging, as a whole, lost its momentum because other newer, social network platforms like Twitter and Facebook made it easier to post shorter thoughts. Thus people didn’t feel like they had to write an essay on their blog, because it had a long form expectation to it, whereas these other platforms made short form writing acceptable and even admirable, since achieving clarity and conciseness in fewer words takes some skill.

I think part of the problem in combining these different forms of writing is how does one integrate and display them both on your site? My guess is that short form writing would become your more abundant and easier method of writing with long form posts emerging only once in a while.

When I was on Twitter, I noticed this same pattern. A lot of my posts were one to three tweets in length but then I would have a long thread of say 10 tweets to convey something deeper in meaning. I even remarked that if Twitter enabled a method to combine these tweets into a long form post as a whole, it would be pretty amazing, as you would be able to easily write short form and long form all in one place.

Anyways, in closing this off, I think to convert WordPress to a short form platform first and foremost, you’d really need to change some of its functionality. I’ll cover some of these things in a future post.

More generally, it seems that profound change needs a kind of space of “gratuité”: an “enabling space” which is in a first step – free of function, purposes, goals, etc. The approach of the U-theory provides one way that such a space could emerge.

Markus F. Peschl

While rereading once again the paper on Triple-loop learning as foundation for profound change, individual cultivation, and radical innovation by Markus F. Peschl, this quote near the end of it intuitively felt familiar and reminded me of Tiago Forte’s work on Building a Second Brain and what I’ve been struggling to accomplish with my own online journal for a couple of decades. That being creating a loosely structured online space where a person’s identity can naturally unfold and be discovered simply based upon what they focus their attention upon.

The creative process of this simply starts with “seeing the patterns”, which is easy, and then moving on to “seeing the relationships between the patterns”, which becomes monumentally more complex.

If you were doing this with a web platform, you’d be posting article links you found interesting, along with a few quotes from each that held meaning, and then creating a category for each pattern that emerges when you post another one in the future that feels like it aligns with it.

As time progresses and you’ve collected a lot of patterns, one naturally moves into seeing the relationships between the patterns whereby one realizes that a handful of these patterns actually relate to one another, clustering into a structured narrative of some kind that starts to provide some clarity of what is emerging.

Again one doesn’t try to force the patterns into a structure and order but instead just tries to let things emerge on their own, as noted in another quote from the paper on triple-loop learning.

This process of letting-come is the other side of the process of letting-go. In other words, one shifts the focus from surrendering to looking at what wants to emerge and what is new. This is an epistemologically fragile process in which new ideas and changes emerge and converge (“crystallize”) towards a specific vision, concept, idea, etc.

And if one researches the process of crystallization, one realizes that clustering is an integral step within it as well, whereby the “clusters need to reach a critical size” before they become stable. With our online journal, it works the same way. You need to have enough patterns clustered and converging into a greater hierarchical category, relating to what’s emerging, before you can clearly see with some stability what is emerging.

The further beauty of this approach is the loose structure of it, in that the categories as patterns can be fluidly renamed and regrouped hierarchically until you feel they are right. This is essential because one needs the ability to play with these structures, mixing and matching them in different ways, trying them out, until they fit naturally on their own (rather than being forced to fit).

To understand what this might feel like to experience, I think Tiago Forte’s article on What It Feels Like to Have a Second Brain comes very close, as noted below.

The experience I have as I work with my Second Brain is that we have a relationship. It is almost as complex as a person, with its own wants, needs, goals, and history. It is like a child – a being of pure potential, of endless curiosity and open-mindedness as it encounters each new morsel of insight. It communicates with me, sometimes aligning with my interests so we can run together, but also sometimes demanding maintenance, attention, or software updates. I know that every investment in this organism will return 10-fold, 100-fold, 1,000-fold. And not in some far off hypothetical future, but in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. Such a sure investment makes the superficial pleasures of social media lose all their color in comparison. I am on my devices as much as anyone, consuming as much information as anyone else. But I am not doing what everyone else is doing with it. I am preserving the very best of everything I am exposed to, like a patient gardener squirreling away seeds and cuttings from every garden in the world, to plant in his own magnificent creation. 

And furthermore he indicates how this alters his existing perceived and conventionally constructed sense of self, letting a larger, truer Self emerge on its own.

My Second Brain constantly deepens my understanding of myself. It reflects back to me my assumptions, my stories, and the evidence I use to justify my beliefs. It reflects back to me the identity I’ve constructed, which in the light of a backlit computer screen I can see is full of holes, and gaps, and makeshift patches. But I also have more evidence, more options, more borrowed beliefs from others to fill in those gaps. I evolve faster, on more levels, a flurry of swapping modules in and out in such a way that the system of my Self works better, but at the same time, I see that I am not the modules. I am something more, something greater than the sum of its parts. This gives me the courage to detach from that Self, to let go of my need for any one idea or theory to be right or true. I can try more of them on for size, see how more of them feel, decide which of them serve me best.

All said and done, we often don’t realize how so much of our identity is so predefined by what society expects us to be. Yet if we can just let go of these expectations (and accompanying judgements, if we don’t follow them), we have the opportunity to create an open space where our True Self can emerge and come into being, if we give it the space to play.

I was looking at some résumé templates on Pinterest the other day and I laughed at what I was seeing. Most templates showed 80% of the résumé as being work experience and just 20% of it being your formal education.

This perfectly shows how outdated things are today and why résumé are inadequate to show the potential of a person in the future emerging presently because your working and learning should be continually ongoing. Even what you’re playing with should be in there as well. By this I mean things you’re experimenting with to see if they are interesting paths to pursue for further learning and work.

Yet that’s not what we’re seeing today because we’re still stuck in the past. We need to move from outdated best practices to newer emergent practices, whereby playing, learning, and working are continually ongoing aspects of life, rather than just a serial one way path from childhood to adult.

Last year we purchased a Sonos Beam soundbar speaker to completely replace our previously outdated Harmon Kardon sound system and speakers within our living room. Near the end of the year, we also decided to add an IKEA Sonos-compatible SYMFONISK Bookshelf speaker to our kitchen as well. So far we’ve been loving the ease of use and sound of them overall.

Wanting to finally play around with the voice assistant capabilities of the Sono Beam, I activated Google Assistant on it recently and I’m also really enjoying the basic functionality of it for doing things like increasing or decreasing the sound volume, pausing playback, or skipping songs.

One drawback I noticed though is that the voice assistants only support a very limited range of music streaming services. One music streaming service we’ve been loving lately has been Stingray Music, primarily because of it’s human-crafted stations which go well beyond the 50 song playlist limits of other music streaming platforms (i.e. Spotify). Unfortunately Google Assistant doesn’t support Stingray Music even though Sonos does, so I couldn’t play its stations with it.

To get around this problem, I noticed that you could link your Sonos system and Google Assistant using IFTTT.com to create custom voice commands to play music stations on unsupported music platforms like Stingray Music. To do this, all you need to do first is just add the station to your Sonos Favourites and then create an IFTTT.com applet which links to that favourite similar to this one.

Needless to say, this is pretty wild because it allows someone to potentially create Google Assistant voice commands for many other things that aren’t normally supported by Google Assistant as well.

In watching a variety of people share what they love to do online over the years (like Li Ziqi above), I’ve been noticing a pattern emerging. To many of these people, they’re just simply living their life and by doing so, they are make a living out of it.

Of course for this to work, you need to create a system, a process, and an environment that seamlessly and effortlessly can capture the essence of what you’re doing, while you’re doing it. I’ve found this extremely difficult to do in even capturing the essence of my own life’s work, as probably 80% of what I’ve learnt and know I haven’t shared yet. Often times, this is because I don’t capture the essence of what I’m doing in the moment but do it later. But by doing it later, I find a lot of the essence, the feeling of what I was doing in that moment, is lost.

More than just sharing what you know, what is also important is how you share it. In Li Ziqi’s video above, I find it remarkable that she’s effectively just getting out of her own way and letting her work speak for itself. In comparison, most Western shows would have the person talking and gabbing away while they work, similar to how most cooking shows do today (to the point I have to change the channel because I find it too overwhelming and distracting).

She, in comparison, remains silent for the most part, thus creating and holding this otherworldly presence that enfolds you and invites you in, creating a relaxing sense of time and space for your own life. This is comparable to some artists I’ve seen who record their work and share the emergent creative process as it quietly unfolds.

All said and done though, I believe everyone has a hidden talent and potential that they rarely recognize because it’s second nature for them (perhaps even believing that everyone can do it, so it’s not that big of a deal). If given the chance to share this talent and presented so in the right way to compliment what they’re doing, I think most people could make a living by just living and being themselves.

I use the term “work”, because it’s more understood, but really it’s “me time” — doing what I love. Writing, learning, improving, and creating. Whether it’s creating music, websites, books, or companies, it’s all just creating.

The word “workaholic” would apply, except it’s play, not work. It’s completely intrinsic — just following my own interests. I’ve found what I love, and do it as much as possible.

Derek Sivers

I’ve said before that The Future of Work goes beyond just working and integrates both learning and playing into it as well. And furthermore, that the outcome of this integrative process, the transformative effect of it, is that we are finally able to just be ourselves (tying into my mantra of Be Real Creative).

With this in mind, it’s evident that The Future of Work as a descriptor for this change and transformation is an inadequate one. Calling it The Future of Living would probably be closer to the mark, as it incorporates playing, learning, and working as a collective, cyclic process of life.

Yet even The Future of Living seems inadequate to me, as it implies something not here yet, even though this new way of living is emerging right now and being practiced by many people on the edges of our society as we speak.

For some reason I’m reminded of my previous site subtitle of Life in Design. It was supposed to be a play on words, relating to my graphic and web design work in the past but it seems to have taken on a life of its own, representing now how I’m striving to design my own authentic life. Yet not design in the conventional sense, where you plan it all out ahead of time, but rather design in a natural sense (similar to permaculture) whereby your life’s design unfolds on its own by observing its patterns and seeing where it wants to naturally grow and go.

It’s funny when I think about this all. I’ve continually been shifting the articulation of my identity over the years (ie systems > identity > social innovation > creativity > play) to try to better encapsulate and “package” who I am. Yet I realize now I’ve done this continual shifting because I’ve been focusing on the wrong thing. I’ve been focusing on the how of my work rather than the why of it all.

In effect, the why of my life’s work is striving to help myself and others to just be themselves within a world that wants and even expects them to be someone else. Systems, identity, social innovation, creativity, and play are all just the ongoing methods and means I’m continually learning of how we can create environments that allow us to just be ourselves.

Again I laugh at the absurdity of the statement that my life’s work is just striving to be myself. And yet it seems almost poignant when one questions what “life’s work” means? I initially thought it was something that took you your entire life to achieve but perhaps it goes beyond this. What if your life’s work is the work of living an authentic life in itself?

Again to many, this might sound stupidly simple to achieve…until they realize how much of their life and identity is defined by others rather than themselves. Therefore being “nobody-but-yourself” is actually quite epically challenging, requiring a lot of courageous leadership and creative willpower to “follow yourself” and just be your authentic self.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

E.E. Cummings

And so I feel compelled to speak up because in my experience the more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am. But the more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am. 

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

And meanwhile in acting school, I was really for the first time discovering playwrights and characters and plays that had nothing to do with the military but were somehow describing my military experience in a way that before to me was indescribable.

And I felt myself becoming less aggressive, as I was able to put words to feelings for the first time and realizing what a valuable tool that was.  

Adam Driver

While reading an article on Creativity & Play: The Whole Child and another on What is Self-Expression & How to Foster It?, I realized something deeper about myself and my life’s work.

While my journey obviously started with seeing things wrong with the way that work worked and thus starting my research on The Future of Work, it’s apparent that it has moved well beyond this but I haven’t accepted this truth yet, even though I’ve been mentioning and embedding hints of it in my writing.

What I’m talking about here is how our society as a whole is effectively killing and constraining play in a larger context, beyond just the work world, and thus killing our self-expression, growth, and potential in the process. For example, society as a whole, with our families as representations of them, often try to get us to avoid playing “outside the lines” and would rather we learnt the hard way to “work within them”.

This has made me realize, after looking at my site’s subtitle of Imagining a Better World of Work Through Play, that really what I’m simply trying to do with my life’s work is Imagining a World of Play, one in which the permission to play with our lives isn’t even required but is rather our given expressed sovereign right (which ties into my mantra of Be Real Creative as an expression of How Play Leads Us to Our Authentic Selves).

In saying this out loud, it mirrors with the arc of my life’s story in that I started out “playing within imaginary worlds” but now I’m “imagining a world of play” that we can all truly express ourselves within. This also rings true with what I have learnt through play throughout my life. It is play that has continually allowed me to step outside my shell and become something much larger than my previous self with each passing year.

And finally, it mirrors with how my journey started, when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto many years ago. At the time, I thought it was all about just the work world but the final closing paragraph of the book made me realize over the years that this Big Shift we’re encountering is going beyond just work as well.

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Beau Lotto, author of the book Deviate, being interviewed and talking about how science and play are a way of being which helps us in turn understand play within a much larger context of our lives.

The way we do it is by not calling it science. Because if you ask “What is actually science?”, science is not a methodology. Science is a way of being. Right. Science actually evolved to be effectively play with intention.

That’s why we evolve play because everything you do, you do to actually decrease uncertainty, you hate it. But there is only one context where we love uncertainty and that’s play. And this is why play evolved. So play is a way of being that enables you to step into uncertainty. Science is just play with intention.

So then if you create a game, that’s play with rules, that’s an experiment. And then if you make observations of that experiment, you have data. So effectively we use science as a Trojan Horse, to enable kids to have the skills to ask questions and step into uncertainty. 

We don’t teach children how to ask questions. We teach them that the cash is in the right answer. Because it comes from Victorian times when we wanted kids to be efficient. But efficiency is only one side of innovation, the other side being creativity. 

What I find remarkable about his closing statement is that he’s effectively saying that they are trying to teaching kids how to ask questions. The irony of that statement is not lost on me, as it seems like kids would be asking questions naturally. But today it seems like they aren’t because we’ve unnaturally cultivated it out of them, so we have to reteach to them again.

Of course, for adults it’s even worse. We don’t ask questions because we don’t want to look incompetent, not understanding something. But even if we understand something too well, our questioning of the practice of it can jeopardize our sense of belonging and sense of place within society because it can seem like we’re “attacking” the status quo.