Since plastic is pretty much an inescapable part of our diets now, and since we humans are inclined to prefer selling/buying a solution rather than inconveniencing ourselves with rollbacks or preventive efforts, my prediction for big pharma is that their next big offering will be pills (or some other form) of supplements to help digest that plastic.
A humorous take on the paradox that exists between the views or tendencies of us common humans, versus that of therapists, who seem to take the more empathetic approach, versus some behavioural science practitioners who try to leverage behavioural knowledge to grow business without it necessarily being beneficial to customers themselves.
I had shared this forward on social media a few years ago, and it popped back up today.
Apart from the innocence, simplicity and being purely hilarious, it is a nice example of the recognition stage of ’empathy’, a term we behaviour and design thinking folk throw around a lot.
Situations we accept in a particular context without a thought, look so different from a child’s perspective.
It helps serve as a reminder that our worldview is not everyone’s worldview.
Enjoy this one:
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What, you ask, is ‘Butt dust’? Read on and you’ll discover the joy in it! These have to be original and genuine. No adult is, this creative!
JACK (age 3)
was watching his Mom breast-feeding his new baby sister… After a while he asked: ‘Mom why have you got two? Is one for hot and one for cold milk? ‘
MELANIE (age 5)
asked her Granny how old she was… Granny replied she was so old she didn’t remember any more. Melanie said, ‘If you don’t remember you must look in the back of your panties. Mine say five to six.’
STEVEN (age 3)
hugged and kissed his Mom good night. ‘I love you so much that when you die I’m going to bury you outside my bedroom window.’
BRITTANY (age 4)
had an ear ache and wanted a pain killer. She tried in vain to take the lid off the bottle. Seeing her frustration, her Mom explained it was a child-proof cap and she’d have to open it for her. Eyes wide with wonder, the little girl asked: ‘How does it know it’s me?’
SUSAN (age 4)
was drinking juice when she got the hiccups. ‘Please don’t give me this juice again,’ she said, ‘It makes my teeth cough..’
DJ (age 4)
stepped onto the bathroom scale and asked: ‘How much do I cost?’
CLINTON (age 5) was in his bedroom looking worried.
When his Mom asked what was troubling him, he replied, ‘I don’t know what’ll happen with this bed when I get married. How will my wife fit in it?’
MARC (age 4)
was engrossed in a young couple that were hugging and kissing in a restaurant. Without taking his eyes off them, he asked his dad: ‘Why is he whispering in her mouth?’
TAMMY(age 4) was with her mother when they met an elderly, rather wrinkled woman her Mom knew. Tammy looked at her for a while and then asked, ‘Why doesn’t your skin fit your face?’
JAMES (age 4) was listening to a Bible story.
His dad read: ‘The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city but his wife looked back and was turned to salt.’ Concerned, James asked: ‘What happened to the flea?’
The Sunday Sermon this Mom will never forget:
‘Dear Lord,’ the minister began, with arms extended toward heaven and a rapturous look on his upturned face. ‘Without you, we are but dust…’ He would have continued but at that moment my very obedient daughter who was listening, leaned over to me and asked quite audibly in her shrill little four year old girl voice,
‘Mom, what is butt dust?’
Do you use hyperboles often?
I do. Mostly with close friends and family, but when necessary, with clients or my students. Helps convey the meaning or gravity of an idea or situation.
Like when Gordon Murray says something like,
“Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because you didn’t fucking cook it!”
However, when you’re in a responsible position and you’re talking statistics about an important matter, hyperboles (obviously!) do more damage than good.
What’s your favourite or funniest hyperbole you’ve used?
Mine are usually said in the moment, so I don’t really remember them later.
But one I’ve used a few times with clients who create assumptions on a business model and then go on to create multiple layers of assumptions atop those assumptions, I’ve said something like, ‘now, it’s like you’re trying to pick curtains for the windows of your castle in the sky.’
A lot of good non-fiction books usually mention a few more good books that the authors found relevant. However, even if you highlight them as you read, it is tough to find the names later on. Especially if you didn’t make a note of them. You’d have to go through the book or highlights to find those names again. Before you forget.
What if authors did one of the following:
Used a common phrase each time they referred to or recommended a book in their book. Something like ‘XYZ, a book written by ABC’
Or separately list out the books at the end of the book
The latter would help both physical books and ebooks. The first would help search for the specific phrase (“a book written by”) in the ebook, thus turning up results of all the books mentioned in it
Now all that needs to be done is suggest this to authors, and to remember it myself if I ever get to writing another book.
Every once in a while, mom would pester me to explore opportunities abroad. Canada in particular for some reason.
And between my love for an imaginary idea called ‘India’, familiarity and wanting to do something in the country I was born in, among reasons not to look for opportunities especially in Canada or the US, was the weather. The American summer holidays, working out for the summer body, etc., etc., gave me the impression that people there merely just exist and go about 9-10 months in anticipation of the 2 months of life and warm weather.
And we have that here, at least in Bombay all year round. Apart from the monsoons that is. And the few days or weeks of light chill that is our equivalent of hell freezing over. 🤣
If you were to randomly consider invasions in the past few hundred years, I wonder if crappy weather might have been a big reason for people to invade other countries in the hope of better weather.
The Brits, the Mongols, the Chinese, the Japs, the Russians.
Those invaded or attacked: South America, India, Australia, Africa.
And why didn’t the other countries in the north invade others, you might ask? Maybe because they didn’t have the means or the inclination? So they more likely found simpler ways to co-exist…for 9-10 months in anticipation of the 2 months of life and warm weather? 😉
Don’t worry, this is not a lock-down, culinary achievement post!
I recently had these bitter melon/gourd (karela in Hindi) chips. An interesting paradox – using an ingredient that’s great for health and known for reducing cholesterol, and then deep frying it is fascinating. But the result, are chips that are far better than potato wafers or banana chips. And you might even get this subtle sub-conscious reassurance that you’re eating something healthy.
Vulnerability of Tech Processes and Human Decisions
Here are two interesting incidents I came across online in the last week. One, about a seemingly harmless vulnerability in an online service’s process. The other, a possible vulnerability in human decisions in a human-dependent, traditional business.
First of, a French literary buff, conducted an interesting experiment. It was to check his hypothesis, that the standards of publishing have fallen significantly. Writer Serge Volle, took 50 pages of one of the novels of a Nobel laureate Claude Simon, and sent it to 19 French publishers as his original work. Interestingly, 12 of the publishers flatly rejected it. The others never replied.
While one could argue that publishers might have felt the content or style of this 1962 works, was not relevant for modern readers. However, one could also say that if these people can’t identify quality, how right are we to trust them with deciding if your works are good enough for readers or not.
The other incident is even more amusing. An industry colleague of mine in the Design Thinking space shared this one on a group. A writer with an unusual name, Oobah (Butler), once upon a time, used to take small fees from local restaurants to write fake, glorifying reviews about them on TripAdvisor, even if he had never eaten at those restaurants.
And this seemingly huge chink in the TripAdvisor process, got him thinking if he could better himself. And he did. He decided to list his messy shed as a restaurant on TripAdvisor, and then made it London’s top-rated restaurant, without having served a single dish. How bloody cool is that?!
TripAdvisor folks later justified, saying their effort is largely channeled around eliminating fake reviews. Nobody in their right sense would create, or benefit from creating a restaurant that doesn’t exist. But it still is a gaping hole in the process.
Point being, as we continue to be wowed by the latest of apps that simplify our lives dramatically, teams at those companies need to be constantly aware of how their simple-to-use service can be abused.
You can read about the hilarious ‘Taking TripAdvisor on a Trip’ article here: link
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