Supritha S

Take the burgeoning field of biomimicry, for example. Biomimicry looks to nature for solutions to modern problems — after all, Mother Earth has had 3.8 billion years to work out all the design kinks. Biomimetics requires practitioners to be more than engineers, more than biologists, more than ecologists, more than designers, and more than... See more

The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.). The time has come for... See more

But it would help us to remember that what we really want isn’t the thing itself. What we want is the experience of ease and unfettered enjoyment that is promised, falsely, by the thought of acquiring the thing—the restaurant meal, the cruise, the raise, the loving relationship—even though everything comes with its own pains and complications and... See more

Presumably, most human challenges and triumphs are of just that sort: unseen, unsexy, and unrelatable to almost everyone else, which is why they don’t really come up when we talk about achievement. But it’s all real work, and it must be done. No extra time is given to accomplish it. There’s no instruction or training, and often no support. It’s... See more

One thing I had to get used to was not going all-out in my training. On most days, I was clearly doing less than I could have. I would do my scheduled sets or miles and call it a day, even though I could have done more. I wasn’t “leaving it all out there” or “giving every ounce” very often.

How to Optimize Your Default DecisionsHere are a few strategies I have found useful when trying to design for default in my life:

Feedback is a gift. It lets you know precisely what the other person wants or needs. After you receive the gift, it’s up to you to accept it or not. But shutting down feedback with an argument or by appearing ungrateful makes it less likely you’ll be offered it again. And if you’re getting feedback from a customer or a prospect, shutting it down... See more