Cluttercore, No More Resolutions and Talking Books

Down With New Year’s Resolutions

Its a new year, 2023. Something that I’ve always disliked is New Year’s resolutions. I’m hyper-pro-commitment for those that know me, I’m also anti-procrastination.

Start of year commitments for personal growth don’t mean anything, if they really mattered you would have started as soon as you thought of how you could improve.

I’ve been building up this publication for just 6 weeks, and working hard at building wider and deeper connections with more people for 10 weeks.

If I had waited until Jan 1st for either of those, I’d just be getting started. I know its too late for me to convince you not to make a start of year resolution, but maybe you can add one

“When I want something, I commit and I accomplish.”

Everything Is Conversational

ChatGPT continues to be THE thing in my world, and now Bing is getting in on it as well hoping it will make them relevant to search. What I missed entirely though was Google’s Talk To Books. And I missed it by 5 years.

Five years ago Google came out with an experimental service called Talk To Books that lets you ask queries as a human would, but instead of answering conversationally it finds conversational answers within books in its database.

To my question: “How do I more deeply connect with the earth?”I got the following answers:

and

Google positions the experiment as a way to discover books and play around, but to me its an inspiration we need to look to as conversational AI evolves. When and how are sources cited, artists credited, and content pointed to.

I love “Talk to Books” because I can get answers that spark learning journeys and lead me to discover authors and voices I would otherwise miss.

Cluttercore is The Future of Design

Cluttercore is a revolt against minimalism and its gaining traction. I remember going through my closet Marie Condo style and tossing half my clothes, and stripping my desk down to a white mousepad and natural wood monitor stand.

My closet is still clean but my desk is covered in pink and green stickers, posters, broken tamagotchi and a few dozen toy stegosaurs. The feeling of having things around me is GOOD. Cluttercore is hardly new as it started during pandemic times. My guess is it appeals to the nesting instinct we still have somewhere deep in our animal brains.

While the changes I’ve made to my desk are fascinating, I think the broader implication is how cluttercore and individuality will affect design trends. We went through a phase of audio software looking like radios, but are now on the flip side of it being an emotionless interface hyper-optimized for open space.

How does software evolve so that the tools we use day to day are just as reflective of us as my desk is of me? Where are the Google Doc themes in pastel pink and green with sparkling unicorn stickers? Or will physical identity, tied to objects, remain divorced from the world of software interfaces?

What Im Reading

This week I was in the mind of Gary V. And I have a silly story to tell.

Crush It is a book often recommended to me, so I grabbed the audio version and gave it a listen. Every chapter was anecdote after anecdote of how the book changed people lives and businesses. It was thinking

“This is the most meta reading experience I have ever had.”

Well, it turns out I was reading Crushing It which is a collection of outcomes and casestudies from people who read Crush It. Anecdotes in books tend to be the toughest part for me to get through unless they have the core content folded in. I want either a bullet list of what I need to know or a story that teaches me along the way, not a story to reinforce what I was just told.

So I went ahead and read Crush It after I realized my mistake. It was fine and had some great but outdated tips. The TLDR of them both? Build a personal brand strategy for social and really keep to it for years. Legit.