Circle Three: the twenty-second

Empathy. Bitcoin. Photography. Abe.

Apr 20, 2021

The early bird gets the worm, and Circle Three will hopefully be in your inbox ready for you each Tuesday. No more waiting around!

Last week's most-clicked link was a website showing the true size of countries.

Cheers,

Dan

So what’s Circle Three? For new readers, the name comes from Seth Godin’s Linchpin, where he posits that the internet has created a circle beyond family and business: a tribe. Where knowledge is exchanged and our gifts are shared.

Thanks for being a part of this third circle. Let’s create something.

One Big Idea

“A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” — Abraham Lincoln

Read like your life depends on it, because your future does. I like having a fiction and non-fiction book when I can in order to maintain balance. That’s the goal, but not always the reality. Reading strategy is another topic of interest. Are you a margins-writer? A notebook-writer? A skimmer? If not reading, what’s your strategy for gaining new knowledge?

Circles of Thought

Bitcoin has gone up hundreds of percent in the last year, and Coinbase became a publicly-traded company last week, but crypto comes with criticisms too: nearly 25% of Bitcoin mining takes place in an area of “egregious human rights abuses,” cryptoart’s environmental issues, and the hidden tax of Bitcoin.
Frank Slootman is to IPO’s as Steve Jobs was to Apple in 1996: come in, lay a new foundation, and turn the ship around. His eyes are on the horizon as he reorganizes and refocuses. Read more from Forbes about Frank’s leadership journey. “I still don’t think I’ve ever taken anybody out of a job too soon. It’s [always] been too late.”
A popular move on social media is to bring followers to a page displaying all your content. I debate the efficacy of this solution, but there’s a growing base of users and sites. Takeme.to is a new one that takes minutes to set up and supports all sorts of platforms. Between travel account, website, and newsletter, maybe a solution for consolidating my little corner of the internet?
In my constant fascination with Spotify API (application programming interface), here’s one more: a visual that maps your favorite artists in an interconnected web.
Pelle Cass created a photography portfolio called crowded fields. “I radically reorder the sequence so that, in sporting terms, my pictures are nonsense…” See an example below, or the rest here.

Inner Circle: Learning with Empathy

Why empathy is important, and a couple questions to ask to help.

This short, beautifully animated video from Brené Brown introduces us to empathy. It's hard stuff and requires intentional listening.

Pulling from my background in human-centered design, there are three phases to the design thinking process (discover, design, and deliver) with one thing in common: they all involve empathy. Each requires the perspective-taking and communication components Brené poses.

What, in my opinion, has made “design thinking” more than just a buzzword is its focus on empathy.

Empathy in each of discover, design, and deliver helps to approach problems with the right questions in order to understand needs and make connections. We need to ask questions.

While there are no perfect questions, Guy Raz has made a living out of being relatable and asking key questions. He creates a space for both his guests and his listeners on his podcast. This Subject Matter podcast episode (10 minutes) written by a writer and friend, Jen Vermet, reveals how Guy makes relationships feel understood.

He becomes intentionally empathetic with two questions:

What's it like...?
If I were you, I imagine I might feel...

Questions that start this way help us to shift to a place of understanding and curiosity. Like the video, we meet people where they are in order to exchange vulnerability. And as the deer says, don't start with “at least.”

People make good decisions. To you it might feel like a bad decision, but empathetic questions allow you to cross over into outrospection and see for yourself just where the decision came from; I can use this cognitive empathy to understand perspectives, beliefs, and fears to create better products and understand why people want something.

Similarly to Guy’s questions, successful sales tactics are no longer about sleazy persuasiveness and abusing knowledge gaps. The days are gone where the customer is at the mercy of the salesperson for knowledge. We can find that and more online. It’s now about using empathy to create a connection with customers. I recently received a package three weeks late, but was given a 50% code and a letter of apology. I'll be shopping there again because it felt personal, the company and I are in this together. In this way, as Daniel Pink says of sales, customers “become collaborators more so than puppets.” Empathy and questions get us there.

So empathy isn't just about being a piece of the design thinking process. It serves as a lens.

Empathy can help us learn about others to strengthen our relationships, design a more unified world, and even discover ourselves.

State of the Circle

Dan is a mechanical design engineer interested in human-centered design. I love coming up with intuitive solutions. Reply to this email with what you’re working on.

🔊 Listening: Bleachers - MTV Unplugged (top-5 favorite album ever)

📖 Reading: Greenlights by Matthew McConug…..McGoughy…McConna...this guy. (Finished Think Again, highly recommend!)

➕ Win: Good training for June race.

🔑 Solitude Key: Talk to yourself to verbalize ideas. Most times, what you say and what you think turn out differently.

This week was: Intense

If you like what you’re reading and feel inspired to share it, click below!

Circle Three