Craft of Storytelling, Design Taste, Inner World
Rumination #14: Craft of Storytelling, Design Taste, Inner World, Outer World, Meta-knowledge
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Hi friends,
I’ve found a lot of value in regularly revisiting past learnings , reflecting on them, and connecting them back to existing knowledge.
Here’s another Rumination to catch up on, revisiting Weekly I/O #106 to #110 and connecting them with related inputs from the Weekly I/O learning archive.
This might be one of my favorite revisits recently because it feels especially useful in everyday life. Hope you find it helpful too.
Craft of Storytelling
Bomb Under the Table Theory: If you want the audience to care deeply and stay hooked, create 15 minutes of suspense instead of 15 seconds of surprise. Build tensions through dramatic irony and leverage the gap in knowledge between the audience and the character. [Bomb Under the Table Theory] | Related: [Four Elements of Storytelling] [Three Rules for Great Copywriting]
“There’s nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept” — Ansel Adams [Perfect Image with Fuzzy Concept] | Related: [Get Closer When in Doubt]
No one wants to hear anything you ever have to say unless you give them a reason to listen. It’s your responsibility to entertain them and give them a reason. [Give Reason to Listen]
The four essential elements for sustaining interest in storytelling: stakes, suspense, surprise, and humor. [Four Elements of Storytelling] | Related: [SUCCESs Framework for Ideas]
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." — Antoine de Saint-Exupery [Teach Yearning before Skill] | Related: [Meaning not Money] [Artful Leadership]
Design Taste
If your taste is so good, why aren’t you deploying it anywhere? We don’t need more cultural critics. We need people who can deploy their taste and shape the world around them. [Deploy Taste] | Related: [Jim Simons on Taste] [Beyond Smart]
Bartle’s taxonomy breaks down game players’ motivations by how they engage with game elements (Act/Interact) and where they focus on (World/Players). Game designers should create goals for Achievers, secrets for Explorers, chat tools for Socializers, and competitive arenas for Killers. [Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types] | Related: [Six Components of Game]
Age plus adaptability is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and the occupants learn from it too. [Age and Adaptivity for Building] | Related: [All buildings are Predictions] [Inner Contradiction in Design]
Product and game designers often neglect the physical spaces where users interact with their products. The same app feels different in a living room, at a desk, and on the subway. The venue dramatically shapes the user experience, dictating whether it should be intense, social, relaxing, or brief. [Venue in Product Design] | Related: [Six Psychological Concepts in Design]
Three factors that make an entertainment experience interesting: Inherent Interest (natural appeal), Poetry of Presentation (aesthetic quality), and Projection (audience immersion through empathy and imagination). [Three Factors in Entertainment Experience]
A startup creates sustainable growth by focusing on the five growth factors in the correct order: Activation > Engagement > Referral > Revenue > Acquisition. Don’t increase spending on ads before solving your onboarding flow. [Startup Growth Priorities]
Inner World
How well we remember things is based on the brain’s prediction of its usefulness in a given situation. Predicted utility influences fidelity of memory representations in the brain. [Predicted Utility and Memory Fidelity] | Related: [Context of Memory Recall and Formation] [Environmental Context and Memory] [Memory Distorted by Words]
Avoid making any important decision when you are either hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (HALT). Just halt when you are HALT. [HALT When Making Decisions] | Related: [Cognitive Tunneling]
Human emotions and behavior can be understood by examining three processing levels: visceral (instinctive reaction), behavioral (learned responses), and reflective (conscious thinking and memory). [Three Processing Levels of Emotion and Behavior]
Real confidence is status fluidity. Truly confident people have internal comfort to be unapologetically themselves. They are at ease with both praise and critique without deflection and navigate status without chasing or avoiding it. [Confidence is Status Fluidity] | Related: [Status and Idea Seekers]
Tacit knowledge is acquired through a process of moving from conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. [Unconscious Competence] | Related: [Bloom’s Taxonomy] [Cultivate Deep Understanding]
The goal of life is to be excited to go to work and excited to go home. [Excited about Work and Home] | Related: [Love and Work]
“Intensity is the price of excellence.” — Warren Buffett [Intensity is Price of Excellence] | Related: [Working Hard is Skill]
Outer World
Art is like the hair of society. Although art and literature may seem optional in daily life, they are what endure when people and societies do not. [Art is like Hair]
“Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.” — Maxwell H. Brock [Omnibus of Art] | Related: [Art is like Hair] [Only Imperfect Produces Art]
“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” — Marcel Proust [New Eyes not Lands]
The advancement in AI narrows the gap between ideas and reality, but widens the gap between creation and meaning. [Gap between Creation and Meaning] | Related: [Gen AI and Photography to Art]
Meta-knowledge
Historical periods have unique and often hidden assumptions that shape the structure of knowledge, making past ways of thinking fundamentally distinct from our own today. [Foucault and Hidden Rules of Knowledge]
Books quietly offer friendship when you feel lonely, clarity when confused, and peace when troubled. Each book holds someone’s living thoughts, preserved across time, and opening its pages is like entering a private conversation, just you and the author. [Books are Friendship] | Related: [Antilibrary] [Read Fewer but Better Books] [No Knowledge in Book]
“In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” — John von Neumann [Get Used to Don’t Understand] | Related: [The Will to Think]
Recap
Try recalling 1 learning you found most interesting from each category and reinforce what you’ve learned:
If you enjoy reading this, I’d appreciate it if you could share it with anyone you think might find it interesting.
And as always, feel free to send me any interesting ideas you came across recently!
Looking forward to learning from you.
Cheers,
Cheng-Wei
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