studio non troppo : mindful design : facilitation

We humans tend to use categories a lot, at least as adults. Having a category allows us to save space in our brain; it’s like a compression system. By “compression system,” I just mean that it takes less brainpower to remember “a number whose six digits are eights” than to remember “eight hundred eighty eight thousand, eight hundred eighty eight” (it’s also easier to type).

So when someone asks me, “what do you do?”, it’s easy for me to reply that I am a professor. Or that I am a conductor. Or that I am a blogger.

Of course, I’m not principally a blogger. And, frankly, I feel uncomfortable with the statements “I am a professor” and “I am a conductor,” too. They’re convenient replies; they take considerably less time and brainpower to speak than it would to figure out and communicate my existential nature.

It can be good to take the easy way out and lean on a category. After all, I don’t want to bore absolutely everyone with endless self-analysis. But categories should be tools we can use to think; we shouldn’t let ourselves be the tools of categories.

So the next time you are trying to solve a problem, consider whether the categories you’re using to describe the problem are helping you solve it…or boxing you in.