Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly

by Bernadette Jiwa

Increasingly what we value are products and services that remove friction from our lives.

Subscription services shift the buyer-and-seller relationship from transactional to sustained and continuous.

When we make things people love, we don’t have to make people love our things.

Fred Dust, a partner at IDEO, said something that made my heart sing: ‘You’re a better designer if you love the people you’re designing for.’

When you genuinely care about and empathise with the people you make things for, those things can’t help but become meaningful.

Think of your product or service as the catalyst or enabler of something in the life of customers and users. Describe their lives before your product (café, software, app, yoga pants) became part of their stories and then their lives after it.

MAKE SOMETHING + MAKE PEOPLE LOVE IT OR LOVE PEOPLE + MAKE SOMETHING THEY LOVE

When everything you do is framed by the question ‘Is this product or service worthy of my customer and why?’ it changes everything.

And as Sal said in his TED Talk in 2011, ‘the very first time that you’re trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, “Do you understand this?”’

‘You only have to know one thing: You can learn anything.’

Khan Academy landing page.

Go out and find some real people. Listen to their stories. Don’t ask for the main point. Let the story run its course. Like flowing water, it will find its own way, at its own pace. And if you’ve got patience, you’ll learn more than you might imagine. —TOM KELLEY, GENERAL MANAGER, IDEO

There is no way of knowing how well an idea will resonate before launch day. You can understand the problem to solve, conduct surveys, do usability testing, hold focus groups and ask advice from those who have gone before you, but the only way to know for sure is to put the idea out there and let the people you create for decide if it’s worthy of their time, attention, money or love.

We can’t be certain what people will do until we allow them to do it.

If there were such a thing as a ‘sure thing’, a hundred and one other people would already have done what you’re planning to do—and that would make it commonplace, not meaningful, which is what you are shooting for.

On launch day and beyond, we feel like it’s time for the world to sit up and take notice. But with so many things out there to notice, why should the world pay attention to you and why will it want to?

You can download both the blueprint and a stripped-down working version at meaningfulbook.com