I Could Relate with That

In recent times, I found myself being able to relate totally with a couple of lines I read on the Net, simply because I’d experienced the feeling just recently.

The first one was when we bought a new TV and discovered that all LCD/LED TV’s above a certain size are necessarily smart TV’s. You don’t even get the non-smart version at those sizes anymore! The guy who came to install it, right after setting it up, pulled out his smartphone and showed how to project stuff from the phone onto the TV. “Install the app and you can do the same”, he said. And so when I read this line by Ben Evans, I could fully relate to it:
“TV, once thought of as the next phase after PCs, turned to be an accessory to smartphones.”

The same week, I attended this company training on adopting a faster, nimble and less bureaucratic way of working. As you may have noticed, trainings nowadays cannot just be informative; they need to be entertaining too to keep people engaged rather than dozing off. Of course, that approach has its downside: touristification, a term Nassim Taleb coined in his book, Antifragile:
“What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flaneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors.”
That is probably why I was nodding my head when I read these lines by Seth Godin:
“Merely looking at something almost never causes change. Tourism is fun, but rarely transformative. If it was easy, you would have already achieved the change you seek. Change comes from new habits, from acting as if, from experiencing the inevitable discomfort of becoming.”
Amen to that!

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