Badges

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We all like to get badges, goes back to our childhood, badges on birthday cards, badges for doing well at school, badges for learning a new skill, badges for belonging to something.

I use a daily journal writing site called 750words.com and they give out badges for various achievements, and like being a kid again, I want the next badge. I have accumulated a fair few over the last 2 years, but there is always the next one and I want it.

If you want something done by others or if you want to get something achieved, then start handing out badges. We like physical recognition, something tangible that we can show others.

Simple rewards always outperform complex strategies.

It’s all about the badges.

Reimagining

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The human race has got stuck.

We spent 70,000 or so years from the plains of Africa to traverse and settle pretty much the entire planet and create the world we live in now.

Along the way we imagined, we were curious, we invented, we did different, we created amazing new things. We strived for better and better. Until industrialism came.

Now we are knowledge workers, mainly engaged in shallow repetitive tasks, entertaining ourselves with addictive click porn on the internet. Engaged in a never ending sorting of email and consumption of social media to convince ourselves of worthiness. We have become human routers of data.

We take existing ideas and we reimagine them, believing we are being disruptive. Yet most of it is putting a slightly different label or coat of paint on the same tin.

The human race is stuck in a complaint ditch of mass, average, bland, homogenised slop. Churned out by the ‘industrialised’ machine by knowledge workers for mass consumption. The only winners are the owners of the machine, that 1%.

There is a paint by numbers money making formula that is so fine tuned now. But it lacks any real imagination, now matter how often you reimagine it.

We need to start imagining things and doing new not reimagining old.

The current human race would have never escaped the plains of Africa, they would be too busy try to reimagine a stick into a better stick instead of making a fire by rubbing two of them together.