RESOURCE OF THE WEEK
Non-Designer’s Book of Design

I’m currently on a spring break, and I decide to dedicate the following 10 days to a skill I wanted to look into for a long time:

Graphic design.

The Non-Designer’s Book of Design is the first resource I picked up (s/o to Andrew Gould for the recommendation).

If you’re a creator or entrepreneur, there are going to be times when you’ll need to design something - and you necessarily won’t be interested in hiring a designer.

The book is perfect for that purposes, as it teaches you the meat and the potatoes of a good design.

The 4 core principles I learned about I’m trying to engrave into my brain (and you should to):

1. Contrast - Contrast is what helps you make the design seems more ’alive’. It also adds emphasis on the elements that are important.

2. Repetition - The best designs are full of patterns. Whether it’s font type, thickness, or the width of the white space, you’ll never regret going over board with repeating elements.

3. Alignment - No element should be placed on the page arbitrarily. It should always have a visual connection to other elements.

4. Proximity - To improve organization of the design, group similar visual elements together.

When you put these into practice, you can turn a dull design like this…

To something like this:

Subtle - yet powerful.

3 HIGH-IMPACT IDEAS
1) The Creativity Fortune Wheel

One of the greatest life hacks I’ve found up to date:

Download any fortune wheel app in your App Store, and put there bunch of journaling prompts & questions for self-reflections.

Then, each morning (or night), spin the wheel, and use the prompt to guide you.

(h/t: George Mack).

I always do this practice at night, so when I write things out, I stumble upon meaty ideas I can turn into a long-form post, a tweet or an essay.

Then when I wake up in the morning, I have the clarity on what I want to write about, because I’ve let the idea ’marinate’ in my subconscious.

Here’s how does my wheel look like:

Sources of great questions:

1. My friend Jay’s archive of questions

2. Danny Miranda’s favorite questions

2) On Empathy

Empathy is one of the skills with the potential to make your life a lot easier.

Rather than wasting your precious time & energy on thinking why has someone done abc to me, or complaining about how xyz person is terrible, I always remind myself this:

People operate on different levels on awareness, that are determined by everything what has this person experienced up until this point.

It’s easy to think that you are right and they are wrong - but in reality, people are never wrong. At least in their own minds.

Rather than keeping your minds close, approach other people’s behavior with a bit more curiosity.

Whenever anyone does or says to you something that harms you, ask yourself:

1. What have they experienced that makes me believe what they do?

2. Would I think about the world the same if I’ve experienced what they did?

(h/t: Matt Ross).

3) On Seeking Power Over Happiness

Lately, I’ve been obsessing over Fridrich Nietzsche’s philosophy on why power should become the most important value to center your life around.

By power, he doesn’t mean power over others. Rather, he means gaining higher power over yourself:

The more you’ll focus on attaining happiness, the more you’ll crumble when things won’t go your way.

But when you focus on power, you’re not only becoming best version of yourself…but you’re also building the ’inner cithadel’ that’ll help you navigate through all the peeks & valleys.

A life spent in the pursuit of power over yourself is life well lived.

FAVORITE QUOTE