🤔 INTERESTING
Funny how the lessons you didn't sign up for teach you the most.
A mentor once told me, "your biggest breakthroughs come from your most expensive mistakes."
<gut punch>
No one wants to make mistakes. And failures get more consequential the further up you go.
And the longer you hesitate because you hope to get it perfectly right the first time, the longer it takes to make meaningful progress.
The sad truth is wisdom isn't learned. It's earned.
📐 DESIGN
A reader asked the other week, “How do you show adaptation?”
One strategy is a simple line graph called damped oscillation. After a shock, the line swings back and forth, each arc smaller than the last, until it eventually settles in the middle.
It’s a great way to show resilience in the face of adversity (and one you can whip up on a whiteboard quickly whenever you need). For example:
Example of Damped Oscillation at work
The key idea is wild swings at the beginning aren't a sign that something is wrong. It’s just part of a process.
By the way if you like stuff like this, Cohort 16 of Thinking in Visual Metaphors starts in late June. Sign up for the waitlist here.
🧠 ANALOGY
We don't "move on" from grief,
we move forward with it.
🤓 WHAT I’M READING NOW
I’ve been a fan of Jono Hey and his “sketchplanations” for quite some time so imagine my delight when I found out he created a book called “Big Ideas, Little Pictures!” If I were ever to write a book, it would probably look something like this.
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