We are all painters

The brown compromise is an analogy from the painting world. The story goes like this: if you ask a family of five folks living in the same house which colour they prefer, you may end up with a dataset like this one: green, yellow, blue, violet, and I don’t care (yes, this is not a colour!). You may also end up in a family (like mine) where one of the users (me!) is colour-blind and has a very different perception of the world than the other four family members.

Navigating the Rhythms of the Mind

Our mind operates with two main paradigms. Open or closed.

Openness is the feeling we experience when connecting directly with our experience. It can be while being in the flow state, as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where we lose our sense of time and solicit our brain effortlessly. We have multiple expressions for these states.

What better moment to reflect on life, life choices and happiness than a day after you were laid off?

Ultimately, the reasons do not matter much and will not be exposed here.

A one to zero transition:

I realized today that quitting your job (without another one planned) or being fired is a 1-to-0 transition. In physics, this is called a non-linear transition. It describes rapidly evolving phenomena like phase transitions and the exponential growth of tiny lifeforms. We don’t practice (mentally) this 0-to-1 transition! It is, in fact, the exact opposite of a prevalent mental model of the product & business world. Pether Thiel popularized the 0-to-1 mental model in a well-known book of the same name.