This year I decided to prioritize my reading habits. I read a lot every year, but most of it ends up being kind of directionless or happenstance consumption (“Oh, here’s an article I should be reading.”)
In 2024, I’m trying to be more deliberate about the books I’m consuming so that I’m following a more structured path of learning, and enjoying it while I’m taking it in.
I just finished Do/ Purpose/ Why brands with a purpose do better and matter more by David Hieatt. The Do series of books is pretty robust, but they’re all quick reads that get your mind moving about design, creativity, entrepreneurship, etc. If you haven’t read them, then I suggest you do when you have a few minutes. There is a lot of actionable information in each of them.
One quote I snatched from Hieatt’s book that feels close to my mindset this week was:
“Patience is required in a world that doesn’t always understand the value of it.”
Life moves so fast now, or at least it seems to. I’ve been reading a bit lately on the effect that our perception of time — more specifically, the feeling that there is an increase in the speed of time passing has on our mind and body. It’s scary. While technology (most specifically social media) has been an incredibly powerful tool, these advances have brought an “always on” lifestyle to our doorsteps. The result is the loss of slowness and patience in many ways.
We consume content all day, every day. We don’t have to wait more than a day or two to get anything we order by mail. Our emails are read in record time, our responses are expected post haste. We read by scanning rather than absorbing. Clients want everything “yesterday”. We yell at each other from our cars. We scream at each other at gas stations. Our patience has been obliterated.
When we become acclimated to the immediate pacification of our wants and needs, we can’t understand why anything would take any time at all. My great fear with AI, while a powerful and much-needed tool, is that this will be a compounding agent, making everything worse. Yet, patience is a tool.
Slowing things down and taking the time to read, think, and process before we react helps us begin to regain our clarity. When we are clear, we become more competent, more compassionate, and more considerate.
As creative professionals, patience is essential. Creativity needs to be a rational application. You cannot write a prompt on a piece of paper, shove it in our mouths, and expect us to spit out results. That is for the machines. We need the ability to think, and the resulting benefit of reflection. That is how we work best. That is how we deliver results.
Yet, in our personal lives, we also need the benefit of patience. It’s what allows us to work our way through stressful situations. Slow living is a whole movement, but there is some sensibility in what that represents to us mentally and emotionally. Slowing down has become an art.
Professionally, by slowing our collective “roll” and embracing patience, we can apply our creativity as a craft. We can build better solutions to problems, and we can make better decisions about our jobs, studios, careers, and our lives.
Despite what you might think, you are not better when you move and produce faster. There is real value in patience. It’s just that we’ve forgotten how to take things slow. We’ve assumed the role of the machine to keep up with the world around us. Yet the idea of keeping up is a fallacy. It’s better to slow things down, take time for the human in the equation, and let the world go its own way. You can turn on the fire hose when you need it, but let it be on your terms.