#3: Delight = Experience - Expectation
What's Delight , reading out loud to kids, the serendipity mindset...
The delight formula
Delight (/dɪˈlʌɪt/): please (someone) greatly.
This is the dictionary definition of delight. But recently I discovered a formula that describes delight in another way:
Delight = Experience - Expectation
When experience is worse than the expectation, this produces negative delight which means frustration and anger.
But it’s interesting to see that, if we don’t expect too much, we can be delighted as well. Imagine going through some government paperwork that you expect to be difficult, slow, and painful and ends up being really easy. In that case, you are delighted as well, even if it wasn’t the best experience out there.
This concept came from UX designers but it’s applicable to other contexts:
Manage expectations to your boss when doing your job.
Deliver better and more thorough content than your audience expects.
Have a great experience when onboarding a new company.
However, we get used to expectations as a result of hedonic adaptation. When I first switched from Linux to Mac, I was delighted all the time. Everything just worked. I did not have to spend all day setting up the drivers for my wifi card! But you get used to it. If you expect that everything works, when something fails it will frustrate you. If you have delighted your users in the past, expect your bar to be higher.
You have the power of setting expectations for what you do. For example, did you expected to receive a package one day and received it the day before? The courier gave you a pessimistic expectation and they over-delivered, so you feel delighted.
The key is to set the expectations with enough margin that the experience is always better. After this, improve the experience bit by bit until you find the sweet spot where people get delighted all the time.
The Benefits of Reading Out Loud to Your Kids
Talking about delight, have you seen the face of a kid when you read them a story? Is one of my favorites part of the day, and I did not think about all the benefits it has until I read this article. Transmit the love of reading, extending their vocabulary and the time spent together are the best ones.
Reading to your kids from a young age and continuing through even the teenage years is the best way to help them understand the power and beauty of the written word.
Continue reading: The Benefits of Reading Out Loud to Your Kids
The Serendipity Mindset
Being aware of unexpected things and converting to positive output is not an easy task. I recently read this article and the concept interested me enough to start reading the book from the same author: The Serendipity Mindset.
The author states that serendipity – the occurrence of events by chance in a beneficial way – is an active process rather than a passive one. You need to be aware of these events when happen to take action.
Our habits of thought and preconceptions about the world can make it difficult to spot or harness serendipity. They shape our behaviour and how we interact with the world. There are three major biases that will require the most attention to overcome if we’re to effectively cultivate serendipity: underestimating the unexpected; hindsight bias; and functional fixedness.
Continue reading: How to be lucky
10 rules to help you rule typography
Correct typography, when is well done, can change how you perceive any kind of text: being a blog post, a tech document or a tweet. This video tell you 10 rules to follow if you want to have better typography in your writing:
The 40-hour work week system is broken
The first step is realizing that taking time in the middle of your day to do stuff that doesn’t look like work is the most important part of your work day.
Even if the jobs have changed from physically exhausting to mentally exhausting, the model of the 40-hour work week has prevailed. This article explains how the current work schedule is broken. Some jobs that need critical thinking or creative need some time-space:
Continue reading: The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed
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See you next week!