Becoming a Priority

What determines whether something becomes a priority or just an option?

People are faced with a lot of choices in life and a lot of things competing for their attention. So how do you become a priority? What guides that decision for people?

It doesn't matter whether it's a product, a service, or our selves. We're always competing for the limited attention people are willing and able to give to the world. With the newest, tech-obsessed generation, attention spans are shorter than ever. But it's by necessity: in order to filter out all of the noise of social media and constant information, attention spans have been reduced to an astonishingly short 7 seconds. So how do you distinguish yourself and rise above the noise?

This is a question I tackle in nearly everything I do: Design for America is about getting design its due consideration at a tech-focused school, FingerReader was about making accessible technology that blind people would actually want to use, getting someone's time of day is about competing for the few hours they have remaining between work and sleep. And at the core of all of these challenges is understanding people. It's about finding what makes people excited and what makes them tick. However, there's a few things that more universally encompass what motivates people. This falls into the realm of psychology, but I'll see what my non-expert perspective can offer:

1) Humans are social creatures, and that means we're driven by communities. A group becomes a community when you start feeling comfortable around them. There's no emotional fatigue of putting up facades and no struggle to understand group norms. Once we're part of an in crowd, we become devoted to our new second family. We attend all our sport practices because we don't want to disappoint the teammates we care deeply about; we stay up until 4AM to comfort our best friends because we know they would do the same. We're motivated by our bonds with others, and that's an idea we can use in becoming a priority. Build communities of supporters and users around your products so they feel connected; be genuine in forming relationships so people know you care. But most importantly, prioritize people above all else. This is something I still struggle with, but it's a time-worn truth that will continue to ring true, even if I need reminders.

2) People dig challenges, and that's not just my inner nerd speaking. Goal-setting theory states that one of the most compelling human motivators is having challenging, specific goals to pursue. There's a beautiful truth to that: humans are innately curious, growth-minded beings, and that's super cool. Offer people a chance to grow and they'll come flocking.

3) Give people a good reason to expect high return on their investment of their most valuable resource: time. Despite being social beings, humans are also selfish. They want to maximize benefit: an urge rooted in survival of the fittest. So make yourself a pleasure to be around, make the interactions of your app delightful for the user, and help them feel valued for being the special butterflies they are.

But what other rules can we apply to becoming a priority? It's hard to say when people are all influenced by their unique perceptual worlds, which changes exactly how they're motivated and what they're motivated by. And depending on ever-changing environmental factors - rain, stress, sleepiness - even those supposedly stable motivators can change. 

So it's something of an art. Deciphering each person's unique set of quirks is comparable to deciphering the meaning of art or literature. Design is considered a art for good reason...but not necessarily for the right reasons. Design is usually thought of in the context of aesthetic design: what something looks like, how something fits into your hand, what color something is. These factors were all determined by the careful eye of a designer. But on a broader level, design is about finding patterns among people and their motivations to make some product or service a priority. And of course that would involve the seemingly trivial details typically thought of as design, such as color, font, or form. Humans are nuanced so we need to pay attention to nuances. Sure we have our base set of human motivators, but after that, it's all a finely tuned dance of navigating human complexity one small insight at a time. Guess it's time to learn to dance.

Optimistically Jaded

In freshman year, I was named the forever freshman.

People attributed it to my optimism and my happy-go-lucky demeanor towards any and everything. I remember writing a speech for the CPW TimTalks that year and it was full of absolutes: "MIT is #1 for so many reasons" and "MIT is undoubtedly the best place for students to pursue their dreams."

I reread this love letter to MIT with a raised eyebrow but a warm heart, amused yet nostalgic of my idealistic freshman world. I remember a conversation I had then in which I vehemently defended that MIT is objectively the best school out there. Not surprisingly, my friend and I both came out of that conversation with unchanged opinions.

Since then, I have learned to look at things more critically. Call it realistic or call it jaded, but I've learned how valuable it is to have a critical perspective on things. I remember when jadedness took its roots in me sophomore year. I was confused why every situation didn't have the same glow of perfection, the same aura of amazing. But then again, there were people facing real problems, so my late blooming reality check seemed trivial.

And it didn't turn out to be such a bad thing: sure I don't see everything as rainbows and unicorns anymore, but that's just a side effect of growing up, and one that I am grateful for. Looking back, I realize my jadedness was a result of my intense desire to make an impact. In order to continue growing and improving, I needed to look at everything with a critical eye. Only by looking at things critically can we improve, because being aware of flaws is the first step to fixing them. Thus, my negativity is a result of my productivity. The problem is, now I have trouble turning off my critical lens to see the unfiltered optimistic side of things with the same ease I once had. As a product of constantly looking for ways to improve, I now risk thinking myself into a frenzy of negativity.

However, I now strive for a better blend of innocent optimism and experienced guardedness. I still look for ways to improve, but I also push myself to consider the promising positives of every situation.

Admittedly, I've been a little harsh on my Cambridge experience, which is what triggered this post in the first place. It wasn't what I expected, but there's a lot to be grateful for. Nevertheless, whenever I spoke about my experiences, I noticed myself bringing up the negatives more than the positives. Conversations about my time at Cambridge always started with "It's great but..." and then spun off into what could be improved. However, the way I frame my experiences affects how other people view them as well. Taking a polarized stance can close off new ideas and turn off people from thinking in a different way. My tendency towards extreme opinions is why I'm sometimes shiet at giving advice or have trouble getting people to see things the way I do. Extreme positions seem personal and emotionally driven, and that's not convincing anyone.

So now I'm working to both internalize and externalize a more balanced perspective of the world. And I'm still working on this balance. I take criticism a bit too far at times, while giving too much benefit of the doubt at others. My perceptions influence the lens through which I view the world, tuning the jadedness dial up and down based on my preconceptions. But its important to practice objectivity in every situation. We have control over how we view the world around us, and that means we should responsibly tune our own perspectives to be a little more understanding. By being aware of our biases, we're able to give everything and everyone their due consideration.

It's kind of ironic then that my jadedness was a result of one of the most positive experiences of my life. My time in Singapore the summer after freshman year was the catalyst to my passion for impact, but was also what started me on the relentless path of making impact happen as fast and as often as possible. But rather than approaching improvement in the blindly critical way that I used to use, I'm trying to tune my mindset to one of optimistic jadedness. I still want to see problems as improvements to be made, but I also want to see them as a projection of a better world in the near future. It'll be a process, and I'm still working towards this happy medium. 

Or maybe I'm just working towards happy :)