You don’t have 99 problems, you have 5 or 6 at most

#IDisagree:?You don’t have 99 problems, you have 5 or 6 at most

Us humans live in a never-ending tension between wanting to belong and wanting to stand out. The latter leads to often believing one’s problems are unique, original and unprecedented. This is, of course, false.

There are more like 5 or 6 problems, and we are all living a cover version of one of them. These are the ones on my list:

• You lost/are losing something/someone (revenue, clients, employees, etc.)
• You’re not making as much money/clients/impact as you’d like
• You’re doing OK, but you’re not happy doing it
• You’re no longer doing as well as you did, but you don’t know what went wrong, and you never knew what worked in the first place
• Everyone else is doing a thing, and you’re wondering if you should jump the bandwagon or not

So, does this mean you’re boring and unoriginal? Not at all. In fact, many covers are better than the original song and your version of a problem just may be the one that leads to an original solution.

In celebration of that, here’s a list of covers that (I personally believe) are way better than the original song.

There are only 3 reasons why people do things #ChangeMyMind

Lots has been written about change, and even an entire industry has risen from the human need for change and the correspondent resistance to it. In any case, before even thinking about how we can change something, we must first understand why the thing exists in the first place.

If you ask me, there are only 3 reasons why people do things:

1. They need it
2. They want it
3. They don't know they're doing it

For example, you need food, you want to eat a burger and most times you don’t even realize you’re getting the fries, you just order the combo.

So, next time you’re designing an offering, ask yourself: are we the food, the burger or the fries?

A t-shirt that says: Agile is about making decisions

Whatever argument you can come up with that is against agile, is an argument against decision making. Whenever these arguments arise, we should be aware that it's coming from a place of fear, uncertainty and a longing for a status quo: sure, it’s safer to have everything pre-decided by someone else, so you can say you were just following orders.

But agile is, fundamentally, the capacity to adapt to change, not some whim or the newest trend of the week. If you go against agile, you are refusing to adapt to something that is inevitable, you are relinquishing the ability to survive things that will, unequivocally, come about.

This newsletter was put together with love, dedication, (a bit of) sarcasm and not enough time by the minds behind?Sunstone. Do feel invited to share your comments, ideas, suggestions and/or insults with us at?[email protected]