Sajid Ismail

With 2017 around the corner, I’ve decided to jump on the ‘minimalism’ bandwagon and get rid of excess. Here’s what I’m following to separate the wheat from the chaff. 

Do I love it?

Do I use it? 

Does it work?

If I were to buy them right now, how much would I pay for it? 

If I sold it, how much would I get it? 

If my house burned down, how upset would I be about its destruction? 

Next, do the same with people. (:

Imagine getting people to build a VR experience of war - putting on your Oculus Rift, you’re instantly transported to the middle of combat. Will what you see change your perception on war, will make you feel for those who are living it?  

Take the Battle of Normandy as an example. You’re at the beach on what is essentially a suicide mission. You’re behind the doors of boats whose steel doors are raining with bullets 3 inches away from your face. Experience the chaos around you as those very doors come down. Be in the thick of it.

Will that help sympathise with the soldiers who only think of one thing since the moment they’re drafted - the date they’ll return home.

What about being in the middle of a street in Afghanistan or Palestine when intensive aerial assaults commence?

What if every time you ‘died’ in this experience, it restarts from the point of view of another individual who was caught in this mayhem. The teacher on her way to school. The child studying for her exams in the incandescence of a candle. The mother kissing her children goodnight. The businessman negotiating with a buyer. The bride looking forward to her big day. The pregnant woman at the hospital. The artist in the street. Experience their story. Feel their emotion.

In May, Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, published a paper debunking the notion that “soccer” is a semantically bizarre American invention. In fact, it’s a British import. And the Brits used it often—until, that is, it became too much of an Americanism for British English to bear.

We can finally stop blaming the Americans for the invention of this word and focus our annoyance on their role in spreading its adoption. 

I love reading. I’d say at least 50% of my leisure time is spent with the written word (on paper or digital format). But since there are always more books and articles than time to read them, and in order to avoid the stress of knowing we’re always going to miss something, recently I started guiding my reading habits according to three (yep) simple rules:

30 pages is enough. Not enough to grasp the key message, but enough to understand if it’s worth grasping. If by page 30 of a book I’m not hooked, I stop reading. A writer has to hook our imaginations, and 30 pages should be enough to do just that. Need more pages? I say need more editing.

Love or leave. This one is semi-corollary of the first rule, but powerful enough to stand on its own. Basically, if I don’t instantly fall in love with an article/book/blog, I stop reading and move on. In a time of infinite resources but finite attention, first impressions matter more than ever.

Respect the attic. What helps my system complete full circle. Sherlock Holmes famously considered our brains to be like a little empty attic, which we stock with objects of our choosing. Since attention is finite, I don’t want to decorate my attic with stuff that doesn’t make me dream. This isn’t the same as only reading about stuff directly related to work; it’s about transversely choosing which different types of information will make my attic sustainable and unique.

A short bonus regarding long reads: in case of doubt, skip to the conclusion. If it’s worthy of understanding how the author got there, read it all. If not, congratulations. You just avoided wasting time. (I owe this one to Jason Fried)

I have found this system to be incredibly relaxing, because I spend less time reading things which I don’t really enjoy, and therefore have more time to read what matters to me (and also more time to go outside, take photos and play my guitar). Cutting down on RSS feeds and creating lists for people you want to truly follow on Twitter greatly helps.

All the information we have available only increases our stress levels and diminishes available time. We consume much more than we create, we read much more than we think, and it should be the other way around. We have to make sure we consume the things that truly matter to us, but only so that we have time to create something that matters to someone else.

Marko Dugonjić's experiment is a proof of concept about how capturing the user with a web camera can be used to adjust the font size for any given reading distance. A very interesting implementation that will contribute towards shaping the future of the web.

However, I don't see it working in it's current form as a result of the facial-recognition technology that is at the root of this concept and because said facial tracking data is under the control of the site that you visit. Scary to have every website you visit owning information on your great looks.