WHY NINJAS?
If you've been following me for a while, you probably know what I'm talking about... "What's good ninjas🥷?" "ninja this, ninja that.." 🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷🥷
well let me clue you in my G.
Since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with Japanese culture, particularly samurais. The idea of total devotion to a practice and a way of life that places perfection as the only way to transcend—they are specialists of the purest breed.
As I grew older, I began to reject this idea because of the effect I could see it was having on how I viewed my life. Over-fixation on results and destinations put a lot of pressure on my expectations for the future. It made me question whether my identity was determined by achievements rather than actions. Are you an artist because you made some posters, or are you an artist because you engage in the process? Are you a designer because you made a logo, or because you live like a designer? You see things and sometimes try to understand them to make them purposeful. The process gives us identity, not the final result.
OK, but what does any of this have to do with ninjas?
I'll get there. What am I other than a designer? I'm a partner, a son, a brother, an athlete, a dog trainer, a chef, a gamer, a fashionista, a reader, a photographer, and other things I can't remember.
Like I said before, credentials don't make these things part of my identity; the fact that I go through these processes does. In some, more gracefully than in others, but they all nurture my perspective on everything. They cross-reference each other. All we are in one practice informs and influences the way we are in others, creating the fractal web of ideas that constitutes us… making us.
AND THE NINJAS?
By switching from a specialist mindset, which offers a narrow but very specific view and provides only one tool to gauge the world, to a broader generalist perspective, we allow ourselves to explore multiple directions of ourselves.
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Through this awareness, we can design a vision for our lives based on the activities and processes we want to engage in, rather than a checklist of accomplishments.
One simple example I always use to illustrate this is straightforward: You can dream of achieving a muscle-up (an achievement). Maybe you'll achieve it, maybe not. You can also dream of living a healthy life and training hard every day (a process). This way of life will most likely lead to being able to do a muscle-up at some point. The key difference is that with the first view, happiness and success come and go in the moment of achieving, and then you need to look for another goal. In the second view, the process itself is the dream, and you can start that right now. The first view puts stress on things in the future outside of your control, while the other makes you pay attention to what's in front of you right now.
SO, BRO, WHAT ABOUT THE NINJAS?
Every day at my desk, working and then gaming, I guess I'll need a strong, supple back to enjoy it. Why train like a bodybuilder then? We need to change our training to something that provides mobility. Oh, and it would also be nice to enjoy the body without feeling off all the time. Hmm, I guess we also need to be aware of what we eat. And it turns out that if you feel better, you can work out more consistently, which provides more stable energy and mood. Now we can sit down to work with less fog and more clarity, faster and more supple. You get more done, not to outwork anyone, but to have the time and energy to do the other stuff that fulfills you, like spending quality time with a partner or friends. This time with loved ones, in turn, nurtures and influences you to expand into even more ideas. For me, for example, it's also time to train my dog because we want to travel with her in the future, and she needs to be well-trained. That process will continue to expand and influence other processes, and the cycle starts again.
Everything influences everything, and this unique combination of factors determines who you are, whether you are aware of it or not.
I don't think we can be whatever we want, but I do believe that with what we've got, we can do something great, or greater than we are now. But to figure it out, we need to play around with it.
The goal is to be able to reach out for multiple tools to help us move towards this vision with a heftier toolkit. A generalist mindset, means being adaptable and supple... like a ninja.
Never held down by dogma or a rigid code, reaching for the right tool at the right time.
A mindset to accommodate all of our facets and nurture the ones we want.
What I can do here is help you with some ideas and design resources to encourage exploration and play, to help you save time from browsing subpar stuff, and to skip right to the working part, the process part. Everything else you need to go find yourself, Ninja...
