Go Deep

Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might take quite a while to get to know the music that well, but even when you seem to know every line and every note, you are still surprised and delighted by new facets every time you listen to it. What a joy!

Real satisfaction comes from going deep into something. From listening to music over and over again. From being deeply immersed in reading. From exploring a topic that interests us not only on the surface by reading a summary, but digging deep into the rabbit hole until we unearth the truly fascinating details. From understanding how something works at its core.

That’s also when we create our best work: When we know something so well that we are able to not only apply our knowledge and use our skills intuitively without much thinking, but also know when to playfully and consciously improvise or vary to create something new. Mastery comes from going deep into something.

Far too often, we only scratch the surface. We try to take shortcuts to understanding and mastery. Take any topic you like: Writing, playing an instrument, drawing, learning a language, astrophysics, medicine, cooking, interaction design, typography, and, of course, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Try to master it by only scratching the surface, and you will utterly fail. It’s easy to dismiss it as being overly complicated or “broken” then. Yet, in the end, you just didn’t go deep enough. There are no shortcuts. There is no silver bullet. Go deep.

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This is the 26th post of my 100 days of writing series. You can find a list of all posts here.

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10 Webmentions

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Matthias Ott
Hey Florian! 🤗; Thanks a lot! Hope you and your loved ones in Berlin are well? If you pay close attention to the date at the top at the article, you’ll see that I’m actually a bit behind schedule. (But don’t tell anyone!) 😉;
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Florian Weil
Hey Matthias, I like very much your #100Days writing challenge and that your still on track amazes me! Huge respect! Since you are prototyping expert, I really would like to know what you think about Serious Play and Playful Prototyping.
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Matthias Ott
Play is a super interesting topic! I actually have very rough draft about that lying around. 😄; Will think about it a bit and write one of the next posts about it. 👍;
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Florian Weil
Lego seems to be active in that field Lego is active in that field helloagile.de/lsp-facilitator and the Maker Scene are very good in implementing prototypes with lego, e.g. that project raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry… What do you think`? does it provide some value for the prototype process?
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Florian Weil
ANother great example of Playful Prototyping is the @makeymakey universe. That tool might be even more interesting from an ideation point of view...
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Florian Weil
Hehe, I didn't notice any delay ;-) I moved last year to my home village close to Frankfurt am Main. Currently, I haven't visited Berlin for several months due COVID.. Hopefully, next year I can visit Berlin again. By the way,a few times I have been in Stuttgart since my movement
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Rahul
Go Deep, by @m_ott matthiasott.com/notes/go-deep . Because - Real satisfaction comes from going deep into something.

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