I lost a dear friend two years ago. His name was Kenny Lee.
He was also my business lead at IDEO, and we would end every check-in by gifting each other the mantra: “Don’t you dare be boring.”
Today is my birthday, so therefore I get to make a demand of you. And my demand is don’t you dare be boring.
I think we are all carrying around this belief that everyone else wants, and needs, things to be boring.
I hear some version of this all the time: well I would love to shake it up, but [legal, marketing, the CEO, general other people] won’t be down. Ambiguous other theys will certainly prefer it to be more serious, and less out there.
My friends, NO ONE WANTS THINGS TO BE BORING. I haven’t met a human in the world who is like “Wow, I wish this was more vanilla. How rude of them to make it interesting and unexpected!”
Irrelevant of what team we are on, what role or amount of power we have, we are all still humans. Who crave emotion and delight and surprise and novelty and texture.
We only make memories of things that give us feelings. And you know what doesn’t give you memorable feelings? Boredom. Your brain literally checks out and does not code said experience into memory.
So now your experience is both not interesting during, and will cease to exist POOF after it is done. Bye bye. Why did you even do it? What a waste of time!
But decades later I still remember when our business analyst made a game show out of helping us understand the end-of-year data, and the intricacies of the “Rubric Olympics” we held to strategize how we wanted to approach evaluation in our online courses.
So friends, as a birthday present to me, be brave. Make things weird. Go all in. Choose different.
Don’t you dare be boring.
What are you currently building? What story might you be telling yourself about other people needing it to be more boring?
How can you say OH HELL NO to that narrative, and bring more of the verve, the spice, the rule breaking, and the unexpected?
In honor of Kenny, Olivia
At the heart of every experience sits a shift in feelings. And as such designing for emotion is the most foundational skill you need for designing any type of experience — from corporate work meeting to witchy coven gathering
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