Welcome to Change, Logged, a bi-weekly newsletter offering 5 minutes of honest thoughts about life, design, and everything in between.
Most of our lives now are shaped around optimisation. Productivity hacks, time hacks, systems designed to help us do more with less. Over time, it becomes the default normal and there is a constant pressure to add more on top of what’s already there, as if there’s never quite an enough.
Even the old cliché of “work smarter, not harder” has slowly been absorbed into the same mindset. Smarter no longer means lighter or simpler. It usually just means finding new ways to increase output. But maybe the answer isn’t doing more at all. Maybe it’s learning how to work differently. Nintendo understood this long before most people did.
Nintendo embraces restrictions as a defined space for creative experimentation. It is not about chasing the latest cutting edge technology, or endlessly upgrading tools but rather using the same ones differently. Gunpei Yokoi called this “lateral thinking with withered technology” — finding new ways to work with what already exists, and getting the most out of affordable, familiar components.
We made Yoshi a dinosaur not because we wanted Mario to ride a dinosaur, but because the space we had, in terms of functionality, was shaped much like a dinosaur.
One of my favourite examples from Super Nintendo is Mario himself.
In the 1990s, Mario became more recognisable to many children than Mickey Mouse. His moustache and hat were intentional decisions to work around the the technical challenges of animating hair and facial expressions. The limitations shaped the character’s iconic features.
In the AI age, it’s easy to feel pulled toward the same tools, the same trends, the same race to keep up. But Nintendo’s approach feels quieter, and maybe more sustainable. Creativity isn’t always about adding something new. Sometimes it’s about bending around the edges of what already exists and stretching what’s there a little further. Focus on spending more time with what others might dismiss as insufficient.
When something doesn’t work, we often default to scrapping it entirely. But we don’t always need to start from scratch. Sometimes the better question is whether there’s still something there worth working with.
I love routine, and that’s one of the things that first attracted me to Ashtanga yoga. For the last few years, four times a week, I’ve been practising the same sequence in each class. Even though the postures themselves never change, no practice ever feels identical.
It’s been a while since I shared one of my yoga teacher’s thought-provoking observations, but she said something recently that stayed with me: if the sequence is always the same, does that mean we’re the thing that changes each time?
For the last year, I’ve been working on difficult backbends and handstands. Some days the body surprises me. Some days it resists. What I’ve slowly realised is that the work isn’t necessarily about removing the difficulty, but about approaching it through a different lens. In some ways, it reminds me of Nintendo’s approach to invention: experimenting within limitation and finding new ways to create space for the same posture.
Leading with the breath instead of force, slowing down instead of pushing through, or softening where you would normally strain the experience of the same posture.
There’s a kind of curiosity in that practice that reminds me of Nintendo games: what happens if I try this differently? What happens if I do this instead? It’s about practising patience everyday, and the ability to keep showing up without being tied to a particular outcome.
It has also made me realise something bigger in my day-to-day life: the place stays the same, but the way you meet it doesn’t have to.
Fun fact: Mario was originally called Jumpman because he designed for function first: a man who jumped. Only later did he become a fully formed character with an identity and personality we now recognise so easily.
Nintendo continues to invent, but it also stays true to the curious, adventurous spirit at the heart of its games. Delight comes first, profit second. It’s a commitment not just to making money, but to creating fun and memorable experiences.
Resist the pull toward more tools, more speed, more intensity. Instead, choose to stay, repeat, and look again. Rather than expanding outward, let something deepen. Repetition is not flat, and even within the ultra familiar, something new can still emerge.
If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: not more, just different. And sometimes, that is enough.
Books that inspired the thoughts on this page — and are worth a look:
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