More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The next step is to Small Mine—distill and analyze—the clues you’ve accumulated Illustration by Ole Kaarsberg
Generally, I mount a time line consisting of photographs and observations on a large bulletin board. It is here that your wall reflects the emotional DNA that you have found, as well as the correlations you’ve identified along the way.
An entry point, or personality shift, can be expressed via clothing, or by adopting a new set of friends, getting (or losing) a partner, sending children off to college or any other major milestone or career transition.
Ideas, remember, are less likely to germinate under pressure. They come together when we least expect them. So swim, bike, garden, walk along the sand.
Based on the findings of a recent qualitative survey carried out in Switzerland, in fact, most of us have up to ten discreet interdependent social identities—identities, the study concludes, which are often in conflict.16 Let’s imagine a middle-aged bank teller living in Pensacola, Florida. He is a father, a son and a husband. He is a Floridian. He is a bank employee. He is also a bicyclist and a recreational runner, and at night, drinking with his friends, he is “the funny one.” He is also a vegetarian, an amateur guitarist, and on weekends he helps coach soccer at his daughter’s high school.
When you buy a pair of pants, or a new brand of shoes, when you hang a set of bamboo curtains across your window or cherry-pick photographs to tack onto your refrigerator, or leave out a bottle of facial moisturizer in your bathroom, what are you communicating? In our small data, now and forever, lies the greatest evidence of who we are and what we desire, even if, as LEGO executives found out more than a decade ago, it’s a pair of old Adidas sneakers with worn-down heels.
