Becoming the god of war

“ To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here is where things grow” - Robert M Pirsig

I have always enjoyed playing video games and one video game series I have played over the years is called “God of War.” It tells the story of a Spartan warrior who in his hour of need calls on the Greek god Ares to help him win a battle. For once, the god aids the hero of the story Kratos and grants him the power to defeat his enemies. But—it’s a Faustian pact because now Kratos is Ares’ war machine; he must do the war god’s bidding. At one point on a murderous rampage at the request of Ares, Kratos destroys a village and accidentally kills his wife and child.

This is a turning point, Kratos now vows revenge. Eventually, across many games, Kratos does indeed get revenge and himself becomes the god of war by killing Ares.

In the latest installment of the game series, we find a new type of Kratos. He has escaped the Mediterranean and has made a new life for himself in the north, in Scandinavia, where he is trying to escape his god status. He starts a family and is laying low.

Unfortunately, his wife dies (not entirely clear how that happened). She was from the Norse race of giants and her last wish was that her ashes should be scattered on top of a high mountain in Asgard. The game is the usual action-adventure but also requires Kratos to manage his anger and be a father to his 11-year-old son Loki.

So far, so good. The game is enjoyable and as you progress you gain new abilities and become more and more powerful. Near the end of the game, I was feeling pretty good about my skills. At this point, the game takes a hard left turn.

Your final challenge is to defeat a series of characters called the Valkyrie.

At this point in the game, I was feeling pretty confident having defeated multiple other gods and so I stepped into the arena with the first of 8 Valkyrie opponents. About 3 seconds later, my character Kratos had been killed.

All the skills that I had learned so far in the game were of no use to me now. The game designers had stepped up the level of skill required by about one hundredfold. This seemed impossible. How could I defeat this enemy? It was all too fast and too brutal for me to manage. But sure enough on the tenth try, I started to get the hang of it; after the 50th I was almost winning. I lost track of the number of attempts I made at this, but eventually, I won and the satisfaction was immense. I could have given up at any time as I had finished the main part of the game, but I was compelled to continue to see if I was able to complete this challenge.

Great, that was done; only 7 more Valkyries to go! And then something remarkable happened. The game requires you to travel around the Norse mythical world and find the other valkyrie, and as you travel you encounter all kinds of nasty enemies hell-bent on stopping you.

That was when I realized that I was the god of war.

When I had been attacked by these enemies earlier in the game, I had had to concentrate to win. Now, after defeating the Valkyrie, these enemies seemed easy to defeat. I was almost playing with how I would do it; the upgrade in my skills and confidence by defeating an almost-impossible was profound. It also made the game far more enjoyable. It allowed me to feel like a god, and wield the power in a way that was not forced but almost balletic.

I became the god of war by focusing on a growth mindset and taking on difficult challenges not for the results but for the overall improvement. The game had shown me the value of a challenge system that could enhance my growth.

You can look at challenges in two ways: the closed mindset will tell you to ignore them or to call them impossible, but the growth mindset will see them as a necessary part of growth. When you go to the gym and lift a heavyweight to increase your strength you can see that lifting the weight is a challenge but you also know that if you do it enough you will be stronger and fitter.

For most challenges in life, it is not entirely clear what the end benefit may be to you if you try a challenge and then fail and try again. Some things are impossible but quite a few things, especially the things you can practice, are not impossible and are just like that weight in the gym. You're not going to enjoy doing it the first few times, but after a while, you start to see that what was hard before is now easier. You start to feel all the other benefits that doing this challenge can give you.

Write 400 words a day and you will have your book within a year and be a better email writer to boot. Draw every day and you will have your exhibition. Knit every day and you will have your hat for winter and know how to make other clothes. Read every day and you will have interesting things to think about and talk with friends about for the rest of your life.

Outcomes can be obscured by the mountain that is the challenge, but as you climb you start to feel the benefits of the effort; it sustains you, and after a while, it's the climb that matters and not the goal.

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Average cover band

If you have never heard of Robert Elms I would recommend you check out his radio show on BBC Radio London. He’s a music journalist and his show is all about the city of London and his love of music. For years it has been a favorite of mine.

Robert does a segment on the show called “cover to cover,” where he finds a song that has been covered by two different bands and then plays them back to back on the radio and then asks his audience to write and call in and tell him which one they think is best, and why.

The other week we were doing our own cover to cover at home and I was listening to a song that seemed really familiar but was somehow lacking soul. I asked my son Luca, resident music expert, “who’s this band doing Chuck Berry’s "Roll Over Beethoven"?” turns out, that pretty average band was The Beatles!

Very early Beatles. I could not believe it. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, bands in the world, and here they were doing a pretty average cover song. Between 1963 and 1965 the Beatles recorded over 20 covers. Some better than others but to my ear, most were all just okay, mainly because it was clear these were stories about other people’s lives.

Wikipedia entry

But, I started thinking about it, and I realized that perhaps--like in last week’s post--their goal was not to make a perfect version of another person's song but to focus on what they could learn by playing those songs, how could they develop their own style, figuring out what could they borrow and how could they make it their own. Beyond 1965 they recorded over 30 more covers.

The Beatles seem to have had a continual growth mindset, learning techniques and styles from the best music they could find. They learned by covering almost impossibly good musicians--mostly Black blues and rock n’ roll artists--and molded what they learned into their own unmistakable sound and stories.

Next week find out how I played a video game and felt like I had become the god of war!

Listen to Robert Elms on the BBC

See challenges, not goals in action: Watch Luca hit top bins!

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Set challenges, not goals

Summer 2018. The football World Cup has kicked off in Russia and this is the starting point for my son Luca’s football obsession. Up until now, he has shown no interest in the sport but for some reason, my enthusiasm and the nature of the international tournament catches his imagination.

Luca is 6 years old, and many of his friends have been playing for a while, so he wants to practice. I enjoy playing football so we start to practice together at the local park… Everyday!

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months. Months into years. There is a pandemic. Playing football together becomes one of the major ways we have fun. The practice becomes more serious. We try different skills and techniques. Learning to pass, to strike the ball, to volley the ball. One day, after Luca has mastered some of these skills, I decide to make things more challenging.

I find some painter's blue tape and we go to our local soccer pitch. I subdivide the goal in sections with the tape (picture below), the top left and right corners (top bins in the football world) being the most prized, and hardest to hit, targets.

Hitting such a small target from 20 or 30 feet away is much harder than it looks. It requires the player to focus, gauge the speed and power they apply to the ball, apply spin, and most of all improve their accuracy.

I wondered if this would just be too hard a target to hit for Luca.

Then something interesting happened. I noticed that even if Luca was not hitting this very specific space in the top corners of the goal, he was consistently hitting the goal with power and accuracy.

By making a target that was challenging, all his other skills were improving. He was improving overall even if he was only hitting the “top bins” targets once in every 10 attempts. On the other attempts, he was still almost always finding the rest of the goal. Creating this artificial constraint allowed a range of other skills to improve. The actual goal now of the exercise became almost irrelevant--Luca would shoot 100, 120, 150 shots every session. He could sense the improvement so not hitting our artificially created targets was not a disappointment but a challenge.

Carol S. Dweck's great book Mindset sums up this phenomenon well:

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people's minds within fearing thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What's more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we're talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that's why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.”

While a fixed mindset would think it was a failure unless you hit the top corner target every-time, Luca’s growth mindset was able to see improvement in all areas. This mindset also leads to an ability to not give up when things get hard. Beyond any specific skills you might gain, this sticktoitiveness may be the most important area to practice.

This post is the first of three about the growth mindset. Next week I will be writing about how this kind of mindset led an average cover band to become one of the world’s most famous rock bands.

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Thrive in your virtual workplace

I’ve always been a big advocate and early adopter of online collaborative tools such as google docs, Figma, and Mural. Yet, I have often found that co-workers are less excited about them. I wondered if perhaps it was hard for them to learn a new app or adapt to a new way of working.

After all these months of COVID lockdown, in which these tools are now mandatory, I have realized that the reluctance to use a new tool was not caused by the effort of learning something new, but was actually caused by the structural issue of not understanding the rules of a new system.

Perhaps I can use school as a metaphor to explain this problem. A school has a building and rooms within that building. But, it also has other, less visible, systems that make that structure work for educating kids. A school has teachers to guide learning. It has a curriculum to plan out learning for all kids. It has a gym for kids to exercise. It has a playground for kids to play in and it has a canteen for kids to eat. It also has a set of rules which both adults and children understand and therefore (ideally) makes the school a place for learning.

I realized that online collaborative tools like Figma, Slack and google docs are like a school building with only the barest suggestion of rooms, and a complete lack of the other elements that structure and connect people to an institution.

Before COVID people were reluctant to embrace new online collaborative tools because they did not know how the system worked because many parts of it were missing. Now that there is no choice, everyone needs to create those missing parts for themselves.

While there are many tools to provide the basics for online work, the true ecosystem of work is often invisible—we only notice it when it is taken away. While virtual work seems like something close to work, something is missing. That missing something, that vital ecosystem, is made of two parts: structure and connection.

Structure
Online collaborative services are often blank canvases by design. People will use them in so many ways that it is left to the end-user to organize their new virtual space. Think about the first time you used google drive or dropbox or any note-taking application; they were empty or had not-quite-right templates. The problem is that there are no rules for how to structure new virtual spaces for your needs, unlike real-world spaces which come with the desks, rooms, doors, corridors, and elevators in which work is done and conversations are had.

At a high level it is important to structure virtual spaces in three ways:
1. Sandbox: This is a space where people can experience and try out new ideas, e.g. a slack channel just for talking about new ideas, or a google doc to try out a new piece of writing a safe space. In the real world, these are often the water-cooler spaces where people can talk informally.

2. Workspaces: These are spaces where people do more formal work and put ideas that are more fully formed. In the virtual world, this may mean a google slide deck or a figma design file that is the core working document for your project. In the real world, the equivalent is your desk at work, where you have all the information at your fingertips and where you can gather and develop work and make progress.

3. Sharing: The final space is the presentation space, the place to put updated or final work files. This makes it clear where the latest official place is to get a project update or make a presentation. The real-world equivalent is a conference room or shared workspace where presentations are made and critiqued.

It’s important to have all three of these spaces to allow collaboration to happen in a virtual space. Most often overlooked are the sandbox spaces, because in the real world people do not think of these as official spaces. Yet these are the spaces that serve as the vital glue to connect informal ideas and information.


Connection
While we now have multiple synchronous and asynchronous ways to communicate with people, much of human interaction and communication is nonverbal and based on contextual cues. Hence, video calls and text-based messages fall short when it comes to conveying the range of genuine human interactions. Three ideas to improve this situation are:

1. Virtual coffee breaks Schedule times in the day with an open zoom room where people can pop in and see who’s around and talk about work or not. Just knowing that there is an informal place to meet online at a set time and place can help reduce the feeling of loneliness that can ensue from hours in front of a screen.

2. One-on-one: These kinds of conversations are more important than ever, and need to be scheduled, rather than relying on the serendipity that might happen when people are in an office together. Both managers and employees need to come to those conversations with an agenda in mind and to allow time to work on issues or skills.

3. Group space: Offsites in the real world were often used to help teams get away from every day and talk about work from a different perspective of a new space or location. The virtual world also offers such possibilities but they require more planning coordination. The Democratic National Convention’s roll-call this year was a great example of how a group space can show the diversity and space that people inhabit (link). Far from being sterile, it allowed people to show their personality and unique abilities and while that required more planning (or more technical coordination) than a group conversation, it showed a way of making the virtual more human for groups of people.

Working remotely through a global pandemic could never be easy, and people have shown amazing flexibility and resilience in adapting to this new virtual-only world. Yet there is a difference between surviving the situation and thriving in a situation. Structuring virtual spaces from the void and building in habits and routines of connection can make these spaces feel real and authentic.

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2020 Books adaptation

It’s been quite a year. The unthinkable has become everyday life, and yet life goes on. With all this alone time an important theme for me has been the idea that your mindset needs to be more adaptable than ever before.

There are five books that I read this year that took me on a journey of understanding how to become more adaptable. The first two books, The Tyranny of Metrics and The Mismeasure of Man, question the basis for much of what modern life is based on—the numbers that run the world and how often those numbers don’t really represent people but rather the system that is trying to control them. If you think you can measure the economy then think again. Think you can quantify people by something as simple as an IQ score? Once again, history and science do not bear this out. After being told for so long that these measures are accurate and important, it is time to adjust to a new (or newly clear) reality.

“But what is most easily measured is rarely what is most important, indeed sometimes not important at all. That is the first source of metric dysfunction.” - The Tyranny of Metrics

“The spreadsheet is a tool, but it is also a worldview... those who use them tend to lose sight of the crucial fact that the imaginary businesses that they can create on their computers are just that—imaginary. You can’t really duplicate a business inside a computer, just aspects of a business. And since numbers are the strength of spreadsheets, the aspects that get emphasized are the ones easily embodied in numbers. Intangible factors aren’t so easily quantified.” - The Tyranny of Metrics

“Not only did Binet decline to label IQ as inborn intelligence; he also refused to regard it as a general device for ranking all pupils according to mental worth. He devised his scale only for the limited purpose of his commission by the ministry of education: as a practical guide for identifying children whose poor performance indicated a need for special education...” — The Mismeasure of Man

The third book, The War of Art, is a short but powerful reminder that oftentimes resistance to change does not come from the external world but from your internal world. Self-criticism and regret stop you from adapting to new ideas and it is this resistance that needs to be overcome every day by showing up, sitting down, and doing the work.

“There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.” - The War of Art

My fourth book, Doughnut Economics, starts to move past numbers and self critique and does something new, it presents a new system for the world based on a simple diagram of, well, a donut to explain how to adapt to this new world view.

“We have economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive; what we need are economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow…” - Doughnut Economics

Finally, Mindset is one of the most useful books I have read in a long time. It has been out for more than 20 years and shows that beyond statistics and effort and ideas the real change starts with your mindset. If you can be open to adapting to new ways of learning almost anything is possible if you put in the practice. Practice does not make perfect but it does make progress.

“In short, people who believe in fixed traits feel an urgency to succeed, and when they do, they may feel more than pride. They may feel a sense of superiority, since success means that their fixed traits are better than other people's… However, lurking behind that self-esteem of the fixed mindset is simple question: If you're somebody when you're successful, what are you when you're unsuccessful?”It’s been quite a year. The unthinkable has become everyday life, and yet life goes on. With all this alone time an important theme for me has been the idea that your mindset needs to be more adaptable than ever before." - Mindset


The Books
The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Goul

The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Z. Muller

The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Mindset, by Carol S. Dweck

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Being Lucky

You make your own luck. Have you ever been given that advice—while in the same breath it’s applied to some titan of industry who came from nothing to rule the business world?

Let’s take a look at that idea.

“If Bezos and his team had waited a few weeks longer to raise those extra funds, people today would lump Amazon in with other dot-com-era failures like Webvan, Kozmo, and Pets.com — big-spending companies with unworkable business models that collapsed under their own weight.”
(Vox: The little-known deal that saved Amazon from the dot-com crash)

Amazon raised a large amount of money a few weeks before the 2000 meltdown. Just through blind luck. If they had tried that just a couple of weeks later, there’d be no Amazon. No prime, no two-day delivery, can you imagine?

In the provocatively named article “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” it turns out that luck rather than talent and design play a much larger role in people's fortune than anyone would like to believe.

“That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. ‘The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,’ say the researchers… So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? ‘Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,’ say Pluchino and co.”

Luck plays a clear role in my own life. My parents decided to leave Kenya when I was a kid because the health system was terrible. An incident where my brother almost lost his life in a botched hospital treatment was the last straw. It was luck that they happened to have British passports (as citizens of Kenya, a former British colony).
Without that piece of luck, I would not be where I am today. I have worked hard, no doubt, but without that lucky break, my life would be very different.

It seems to me that lucky people should be a little more humble about their privilege. While you may have taken advantage of your luck, the seed of your success was often pure chance according to researcher Alessandro Pluchino.

In the current climate of racial injustice and COVID, this may be the first time that many people are thinking about this issue and realizing that instead of their talent being the reason why they are where they are, it is in fact their luck. Being born in the right country, at the right time, to the right parents.

Maybe lucky people like me should think about giving back more than money. How about giving away some of your luck as well?

If you think you are lucky enough to be in this position, how about:
Connect with 10 people you know and share your connections to give them some luck.
Write some testimonials on LinkedIn or reference letters for people who are looking for work right now.
Give a talk (on zoom) at a college about your experience and the things you did that helped you succeed.

Luck is being in the right place at the right time. Being lucky you gain experience that is impossible to gain in any other way. Hard work is valuable and having a growth mindset is a huge asset, but even with that, there are certain things out of your control that you can not change and that only luck can account for. So share that experience and let people who have not had that luck benefit from your good fortune.



Article Links
MIT Technology Review
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it's just chance.

Vox
The little-known deal that saved Amazon from the dot-com crash

Practice Creativity

Watch the practice creativity video
I know many people who read this newsletter are engaged in work that involves being creative. It is an integral part of my work and life--coming up with new ideas and ways of solving all sorts of problems and creating new opportunities.

Think about your life and education. Were you ever taught how to be creative? Did you attend a workshop, take a course, formally learn how to practice this skill? Or did you just pick it up yourself?

For something so important to many, this central skill is often left to each of us to figure out how to develop on our own.

Making things has been central to my practice of creativity-- sketching out a new idea in a notebook, making a schedule for a new project, taking a picture while out on a family walk, each of these creative activities helps provide continuous inertia to stay in a creative mindset. I realized early on that even if my job title was "designer", which you would assume was an inherently creative job, the everyday practice of creativity was often missing in the process of making new products inside the structure of an organization.

Writing, drawing, filming, photography. It does not matter what it is, the simple act of making something helps fuel my creativity. Every time I make something, it feels like I am filling up my creativity tank, practicing the skill of thinking independently from the world and imagining something new.

Recently, I took this practice and turned it into a project over a month. Every day I took 5 seconds of video of something that struck me as unique on that day. At the end of the month, I edited all the clips together and added a soundtrack (supplied by my budding 8-year-old guitar player Luca).

The simple act of making each day was a reminder that creativity is a practice and a focus on moving your awareness to a different place for a period of time, a place you want to be.

Check out the video and think about your own creative practice. What projects can you do each day to help you find your voice and shift your focus on the things that matter most to you?

Sustainable creativity

Sustainable creativity is a workshop I have given several times over the last three months to a wide range of groups and organizations. The idea is to show people a system to generate ideas and in doing so allow them to sustain their creativity for the rest of their lives. Well, that’s part of the workshop. The other part happens after I stop talking, when the participants use the space that has been created to share the inventive ways they sustain their creativity. People have shared everything from setting up a standing monthly meeting with a group of like-minded people to writing jokes for a stand-up comedy class. The workshop enables people to get into the right mindset to talk about their ideas. 

It sounds simple—talking about ideas—but let me illustrate the issue with a metaphor. 

Let’s say that instead of talking about ideas, you like playing tennis. 

You ask your neighbor who also likes playing tennis to a game. You both like the idea of a game but realize you don’t live near a tennis court, so you both decide to just start playing tennis in the street, with all the cars and pedestrians and with no court makings.How do you think that game is going to turn out? 

Distracted, chaotic, not fun at all. 

This is frequently what it’s like when you try to talk about ideas with someone without making space for it. You can have the conversation, but too often everyday life gets in the way. And, with no guidelines and constraints (like a tennis court) to guide the conversation, you get distracted, neither of you is clear on where the conversation is going, and no one knows when it might end. 

With this workshop I am making a space for ideas, a metaphorical tennis court to be used to discuss ideas and creativity onto which I can invite people to play. 

I made this video version of a portion of this workshop to share one part of the tennis court. Perhaps if you watch it with a friend or colleague it can give you a productive space to play, think, and talk about the ideas which you find fascinating. Without ideas it is hard to change culture and if culture does not change we only repeat our mistakes. Please take a moment to watch the video and step onto the court of ideas. 

If your organization—or one you know of—could use some help creating a new space for talking about ideas, let me know, and we’ll find a time to book a workshop and set up the court.  

Design Proofreading

In books, proofreading for grammar and punctuation is a tool for creating clarity and simplicity in a text, so that big ideas are not clouded by small confusion. In the past 15-20 years we have begun to publish many more things: websites, apps, videos and even print 3D objects. What creates clarity in these?

While the possibility for error is as common as ever, in networked media a tool to help you improve the clarity and simplicity of a design does not really exist. The need for a proofreading tool for designing these new forms of media and objects seems necessary. 

With this in mind I have created a framework I call “design proofreading,” to allow people to navigate this new world of mass media and object production.

There are four core elements to the design proofreading framework: Assumptions, Simplification, Scaling, and Consistency.

Each core element gets you to ask key questions about the product or service you are designing and helps unlock potential ways to improve it. This framework is for use at critical junctures when you have made a major step forward with a design: developed a new concept, changed out the content, added a new piece of functionality.

Design proofreading framework:

Assumptions
Assumptions can be deadly. It’s important to understand the assumptions you are making and see if they are realistic or not.

How to proofread for assumptions:
List out the major assumptions you are making about the project.
1. Who is the project for?
2. What information are you basing your assumptions?
3. Are those assumptions still valid today ?
4. How many assumptions are based on known facts compared to untested facts?

Do you your assumptions still ring true? Is there new information that requires you to update or refine your initial assumptions?


Simplification
Less is more. By simplifying (but not making simple) a design you can  make the product more refined and improve the user experience with fewer elements. 

How to proofread for simplification:
1. What is absolutely essential for the project to work properly?
2. Can the same results be achieved with less?
3. Is there redundancy in the design?
4. Is the language used age-appropriate? Does is use the right vernacular?

Simplifying the design this way does not mean dumbing it down, but doing more with less.


Scaling
How can you make things work for one person and 10,000,000 people? This is important in all forms of design, from the web to manufacturing. How will a product / service respond over time with an increased number of people using it?

How to proofread for scaling:
1. What are the variable elements of the design?
2. If any part of the design is variable, what happens to this part of the design at the lowest and highest ends of the variance? Does the design adapt, or break down and stop functioning? (e.g. if your design is created for multiple languages what happens when everything is translated from english to a more verbose language like german)
3. What must be variable and what can be fixed in the design solution?

You cannot know all of the answers when you start designing something. This exercise lets you consider what might happen and plan for some of the bigger changes.


Consistency
Consistency in how something looks and works is an important part of  building a relationship with the person/ people using the design. While there always needs to be variability to allow for more intuitive ideas, the majority of the design should be consistent to create trust between the design and the user.

How to proofread for consistency:
1.How many variables do you have within a design?
2.What are the main activities that someone will use your design for? When you use the components that make up those important parts of the experience do they behave and look consistent?
3.Placement, size, behavior, typography, color, interaction, and meaning. Look at each element of the object, book, poster or website’s design: does it behave consistently when you apply the above parameters?

Do the basics, headers, calls to action add up? If not, go back and look at the system to see how to adjust or, better, simplify to create a more consistent set of rules for the people using your design. The simpler the rules, the quicker the adoption of a product.

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By asking some relatively simple questions this process allows you to make rational choices about a project.The entire design process is about providing a vision for a project, understanding the content or functionality intimately, and delivering a solution. All of these things necessitate being close to the project, making it hard to take a step back and see an obvious flaw which could stop an otherwise great idea from taking off. Design proofreading is a way to take that step back while in the flow of making an idea real.