Street library “Rapana” : Unique Library from Bulgaria

A talented young team of architects and designers have come together to create ‘Rapana’, a street library in the Bulgarian city of Varna. Passing members of the public are invited to pop in and browse the library’s collection, momentarily removing the distraction of their mobile phones. “Nowadays, young people’s lives are almost entirely based around the digital era”, says Boyan Simeonov, one of the library’s creators. “This decreases the popularity of books among this generation. We decided to do what we can to partly solve this issue, by building a street library.”

The team chose Varna, a charming coastal city on the east coast, as the setting for their project. “Varna is located on the seaside, and is often called the ‘marine capital of Bulgaria’. That’s the main reason why the chosen concept shape of the library resembles the shell of a sea snail; the design was inspired by nature and its organic shapes. The installation takes into consideration the most important aspects of the city’s identity – the sea and its value to Varna’s citizens. The abstract construction unravels from a single focal point and develops into a semi-circle, while creating a public space and shelves for placing books at the same time.”

The team experimented with innovative technology when it came to building the library. “Rapana was designed using the parametric design tools Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper, which give architects the possibility of trying different shapes. Using the software, the team tested over 20 variations, changing the number of vertical and horizontal wooden pieces, as well as their width and height. We ended up with the final design, fitting the budget and the open library’s concept, providing easy access for the readers, sitting spaces, plus a tiny stage for street artists and lounge sessions. The street library was built using 240 wooden pieces and the full capacity of the library is 1500 books.”

Source : Facebook page of Rapana

Some more pics 

How to Manage Your Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can motivate you to perform at a high level and deliver top-quality work. On the other hand, it can cause you unnecessary anxiety and slow you down. How can you harness the positives of your perfectionism while mitigating the negatives? What measures or practices can you use to keep your perfectionism in check? Should you enlist the help of others?

What the Experts Say
“A lot of perfectionistic tendencies are rooted in fear and insecurity,” says Matt Plummer, founder of Zarvana, the online coaching service that helps workers become more productive. “Many perfectionists worry that if they let go of their [meticulousness and conscientiousness], it will hurt their performance and standing.” And so they cling to their perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. If this describes you, take heart. Reining in your perfectionistic propensities is not as hard as it sounds. “It’s about rechanneling a strength of yours rather than aiming for a lower goal.” Your aim is to take “some of the pressure off yourself,” says Alice Boyes, a former clinical psychologist and author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit and The Anxiety Toolkit. Of course that’s easier said than done. But the fact remains, “if you genuinely want to be a high achiever, you’re bound to do some things imperfectly.” Here are some ideas of how to let go of your penchant for perfectionism.

See the big picture
As any perfectionist will tell you, being perfect isn’t easy. Your diligence “takes a lot of effort,” and your attention to detail is “incredibly time-consuming,” says Plummer. Of course, as a perfectionist you’re never going to aim for merely adequate — nor should you. But you must also “recognize the opportunity cost and time” of your behavior. “Ask yourself: Am I using my time wisely? Am I being productive?” He recommends focusing on “maximizing the impact” of your work. “You can spend an extra three hours making a presentation perfect, but does that improve the impact for the client or your organization?” Boyes concurs. “Shift your mindset,” she says. You’re going to be “less perfect about some things, so you can concentrate on what’s important.” If you’re continuing to tinker on an assignment that most others would consider complete, try to “recognize that just getting it done” is a decent goal. “There’s a point of diminishing returns” when it comes to sweating the small stuff and nitpicking niggling details.

Adjust your standards
Managing your perfectionism also requires you to “calibrate your standards,” says Plummer. Say, for example, you’re grinding out an important memo for your organization. He suggests showing your efforts to a colleague or supervisor early in the process. You may discover it’s “already good enough” and “that task you thought could take 10 hours could really take only five.” Don’t be shy or embarrassed. “It’s your first draft,” says Boyes. And even if you need to continue to work on it, the “feedback you receive will help you improve.” Keep in mind, too, that this memo needn’t be worthy of a Pulitzer. “What you’re saying doesn’t have to be the final word, it just has to contribute something useful.”

Create a checklist
The pursuit of perfection is a bit like wandering on an aimless journey, says Plummer. “You keep walking and walking, but you’re not sure that you’re getting any closer to your destination,” he says. Similarly, “a perfectionist is always going to want to keep working [on a given assignment.] But the end result is rarely satisfying.” So, rather than toil “in search of this amorphous goal of perfection,” he recommends, “creating a checklist” for each task. Say, for instance, you’re working on an important client pitch. The perfectionist in you might fret over the font choice and sweat every semi-colon. But with a checklist that reminds you to confirm you’ve spelled things correctly and to eliminate basic editing errors, you needn’t endlessly slog. “You’re following a process with discrete and measurable goals,” he says. Once you’ve ticked off the items on your list, “you’re done.”

Break the cycle of rumination
Many perfectionists have a proclivity to ruminate — repetitively mulling over a thought or problem without ever coming to a resolution. “It’s related to anxiety,” says Boyes. People who ruminate tend to be “less forgiving of themselves.” It’s unhealthy, and it’s unproductive. “Don’t confuse ruminating with problem-solving.” Instead look for ways to disrupt the cycle.

• Identify your triggers. The first step in conquering this habit is to “learn to recognize when you’re ruminating,” says Boyes. Figure out what sets you off. Make note of the situation: where you are, the time of day, and who’s around. “Find your consistent patterns,” then think about ways you might steer clear of or control those factors.
• Don’t trust your first reaction. If you’re dwelling on a past event, such as an interaction with a colleague, be cautious. You might not have an accurate read of the situation, says Boyes. When you ruminate, “you tend to focus on all the bad things,” she says. “So you can’t trust what your ruminating mind is telling you.” Try hard to get perspective and give yourself time and distance before taking action. You might be “blowing it out of proportion.”
• Seek a diversion. “Distractions are useful,” says Boyes. “Do something that is cognitively absorbing but that’s also tedious and doesn’t induce anxiety, such as filling out an expense report.” Often spending just 10 minutes on a mundane but practical task like that “breaks the chain” and keeps you from “spinning your wheels.”
• Think positive. Ruminating often leads to “avoidance” of certain tasks, notes Boyes. “There’s a feeling of, ‘If I can’t do it perfectly I won’t bother,’” she says. To combat this idea, she recommends reflecting on times in your past when you tried something new. “Think about the successes you’ve had,” she says. By reminding yourself of the pathways that led to your accomplishments, you’ll be able to see that you achieved a meaningful outcome despite not being “100% certain of success” in advance. This helps you “learn from your experiences,” she says.

Get perspective
You may find it “helpful to talk to someone about your tendencies,” says Boyes. That person could be “a boss who’s willing to engage with you emotionally, a friend, sibling, mentor, or spouse.” Be honest and open. Tell this person that you’re working on getting better. “Say, ‘I give you permission to let me know if I’m being too fussy/high maintenance/finicky’” about a given topic. Make it clear that you want to hear how you come across. “Say, ‘I may get defensive, but I promise to think about what you say.’” And be sure to make good on that pledge.

Monitor your progress
As you’re working on moderating your perfectionist tendencies, Boyes recommends undertaking “a weekly review” in which you reflect on your progress. Try to get some  “psychological distance” and ask yourself, “Was there anything I avoided this week due to fear of making mistakes? Were there any instances where my perfectionism was not worth it? Were there any times this week when I took action, even when I felt uncertain, and ended up moving things forward?” Your objective, says Plummer, is to “learn where perfectionism has a positive impact and where it does not.” Remember, you’re not fundamentally “changing course”; rather, you’re, “redirecting your personality.”

Principles to Remember

Do

• Learn to recognize the point of diminishing returns when you’re aiming to complete a task perfectly. Sometimes just getting it done is a worthy goal.
• Reflect on your progress. Identify examples of when you successfully moderated your perfectionist tendencies.
• Calibrate your standards. Oftentimes what you’re writing or saying doesn’t have to be the final word, it just has to contribute something useful.

Don’t

• Mistake ruminating for problem solving. When your mind is twisting and turning, seek out distractions to break the cycle.
• Toil in pursuit of an amorphous goal of perfection. Create a checklist that ensures you follow a process with measurable targets.
• Go it alone. Ask others — a trusted colleague, friend, or mentor — for perspective and support.

Case Study #1: Shift your mindset and get comfortable with imperfection
In the past, Stacy Caprio’s perfectionism led her to avoid certain tasks. “I never wanted to start something unless I knew exactly how to do it,” she says. “It was a roadblock. It literally stopped me from doing new things.”

Earlier in her career, she worked for an online marketing agency. One of her tasks was to add tracking tags to client websites, which would allow her organization to gather more information about their customers’ revenue and sales.

Stacy had never added a tag before and was petrified of doing it wrong. “I wanted my work to be good, and I wanted to be seen as doing a good job,” she says. “I didn’t want to mess up.”

Instead of trying and risking imperfection, Stacy busied herself with email, building ad sets, and working on other marketing campaigns.

Her avoidance of the task didn’t keep her from ruminating on it, though. “I thought about it constantly,” she says. “Every time I have something new to do, it doesn’t go away for me. It was at the top of my to-do list.”

Still, she couldn’t force herself to try. She realized a shift in mindset was in order. “To get this in check, I needed to make it clear to myself that getting it done was more important than making it perfect.”

The turning point came when she happened upon a series of blogs by published authors. “Writers talked about that first step of getting a draft on paper,” she says. “The first draft is usually terrible. But then they go back and edit and rework it.”

Learning more about the writing process helped her gain perspective on her situation. “I had to give myself permission to know that the first one was not going to be great; it might not even work,” she says. “But I will get better.”

Eventually, she plucked up her courage and took a shot. Her first one was fine; her second one was an improvement. Her third attempt was great.

Today Stacy is her own boss. She runs a website devoted to inspiring side hustles, her.ceo. She has learned many lessons about battling her perfectionist demons. “Just because I think something is perfect doesn’t mean it is,” she says. “I likely need feedback from others, especially customers, so that I can change the product over time to keep making it better.”

Case Study #2: Seek support and perspective and focus on the big picture
Flame Schoeder, a professional certified coach based in Omaha, Nebraska, admits she is a “recovering perfectionist.” While her perfectionism has helped her excel professionally, it has also contributed to feelings of insecurity.

Earlier in her career, for instance, she noticed that she sometimes had the tendency to “freeze up” when talking to clients. “I’d get so in my head,” she says. “I’d have something to say and then I’d think, ‘That’s not a smart enough or insightful enough comment,’ and so I wouldn’t say it.”

A similar thing happened when she had a big client proposal to write. Beginning the project was hard because she “had a ton of self-doubt.”

The solution: “I realized that all I needed to do was ask for help,” she says.

Flame discovered that reaching out to a friend or colleague and “talking through ideas” helps her see that she does indeed have something to offer. Now she does this every time she’s having difficulty getting a project under way. “It needs to be someone who knows that I am a perfectionist and knows that I get stuck,” she says. “They give me the solid ground and the creative energy to start moving.”

Colleagues also give her perspective on her work. Recently, she was working with a team on a marketing pitch for a restaurant brand. The pitch was for a new client, so “there was some uncertainty” about what this client would like or dislike.

Flame and another colleague — a fellow perfectionist — hemmed and hawed over the proposal. “Perfectionists tend to focus on what needs to be fixed and we negate everything that’s good,” she says. “The two of us went over and over the details and reworked things.”

Finally, Flame asked her colleague a critical question: Is this pitch good enough for the client? “And we both had an ‘ah-ha moment’ that it was,” she says.

They submitted the pitch, and the client loved it. “The client never saw that anything was missing,” she says. “They saw the creativity, the polish, and the finesse.”

This approval was a powerful signal to Flame. “I try to remind myself that I am not dealing with life-or-death situations. It’s just marketing.”

Source: HBR April 29,2019

To Change the Way You Think, Change the Way You See

“Think Different” 

                           -- said the famous 1997 Apple advertisement.

Excellent advice, obviously, to all creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs. But, along with thinking differently in order to come up with revolutionary new ideas or products, there is also seeing differently. Great creators, innovators, and entrepreneurs look at the world in ways that are different from how many of us look at things. This is why they see opportunities that other people miss.

The story of Velcro is well known. A Swiss engineer, George de Mestral, decided to look more closely at the burrs (seeds from plants) he found clinging to his clothing after a walk in the woods. He took out his microscope and saw that nature had designed hooks on the burrs, which had then attached themselves to looped fibers in his clothing. The famous hook-and-loop alternative to the zipper, under the name Velcro, was born. (Today, there is a whole field, called biomimetics, devoted to imitating nature in order to solve human problems.)

Less well known, but equally deserving of fame, is the story of Softsoap. An American entrepreneur, Robert Taylor, decided to look more closely at how bars of soap actually appeared once unwrapped and used in bathrooms. Zooming in on the soap dish in an otherwise spotless setting, he saw an unpleasant puddle of ooze. He decided that the answer was liquid soap dispensed in a beautiful pump dispenser, and this is how Softsoap, which changed the entire soap industry, was born.

Two brilliant entrepreneurs who looked at things differently. Whether through a microscope or a zoom lens, and whether literally or metaphorically, they took the key step of looking at the familiar in an unfamiliar way. The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal said: “Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.” It seems he had in mind something similar: Look at what is right in front of us, but look in a way that escapes most people.

There is a word for this activity: de-familiarization. Working in the early twentieth century, a Russian literary theorist called Viktor Shklovsky pointed out how Tolstoy achieved heightened effect in his writing via techniques such as describing objects from a distorted perspective and refusing to use the customary names for objects, and by generally “making strange’” (de-familiarizing) the otherwise familiar. Later, the great French director Jean-Luc Godard revolutionized cinema with his use of jump cuts in Breathless. Taken for granted today, this innovation must have seemed baffling to many people at the time. Up until then, great efforts had gone into creating a smooth continuous flow (“continuity”) on the screen. After all, a continuous flow is how we experience vision, thanks to the workings of our brains. This is the familiar. But Godard decided to break up this flow to force us to step away from our usual assumptions and see his characters as, literally, jumpy and disconnected. Now, we sense the feelings of isolation experienced by his characters and also their efforts — unsuccessful and tragic, in the end — to connect with each other. Godard lifted the technique of de-familiarization from the page to the screen.

The examples of these great artists give everyone — entrepreneurs included — some tips on how to stop seeing the world in the familiar way and start seeing it in unfamiliar and generative ways. When we look at the world, we should not just examine, but examine with a deliberately different perspective. Not just name what is around us, but come up with new names. Not just consider the whole, but break things up (or down) into pieces. These techniques can help us see our way to the new and the revolutionary, whether in the arts or in business.

Sherlock Holmes famously said once to Watson: “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.” More advice on how to break through the familiar and instead observe, truly observe, comes from psychologist and writer Maria Konnikova, in her book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. She writes: “To observe, you must learn to separate situation from interpretation, yourself from what you are seeing.” As a technique to improve our ability to operate this way, Konnikova suggests describing a situation of interest out loud or in writing to a companion. As she notes, Holmes used Watson in this way to talk through his observations when investigating a case, and, often, it was through this exercise that key points in the case would become evident. This is another technique for aspiring artists and entrepreneurs — and consulting detectives — to try.

Our brains are designed to stop us paying too much attention. This is well demonstrated by the optical illusion called Troxler fading (named after the nineteenth-century Swiss physician who discovered the effect). If presented with a steady image in the area of our peripheral vision, we actually stop seeing it after a while. This phenomenon — the general neuroscientific term is habituation — probably points to an efficient way in which the brain operates. Neurons stop firing once they have sufficient information about an unchanging stimulus. But this does not mean that habituating is always our friend.

We can think of the effort not just to think differently, but also to see differently, as a way of countering our built-in tendency to habituate, to sink in to the familiar way of seeing and experiencing. One way in which great artists, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds come up with the insights that enable them to change the world is that, very literally, they do not see the way most of us do. Their methods teach us that by seeing differently, we can end up seeing what no one else has yet seen. This is how the future is built.

Source: HBR 16 Apr, 2019

Seven things to do right now to get noticed

You don’t need a complicated marketing plan, selfie strategy, or growth hack to market yourself.

If you want people to care about you and your work, double down on its quality, your commitment to those who consume it, and your willingness to share your expertise with the world.

Here are seven simple ways to do that…

1. Make things and put them into the world.

Your work is your greatest marketing tool. People may ignore what you say, but they’ll pay attention to what you do. The more you make, the higher its quality, and the more willing you are to share it with the world, the more people will discover and spread the word about you.

2. Help people.

Be known for being generous. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it will get you noticed by the people you help and the people they know. Selfish doesn’t spread.

3. Over-Deliver

An adequate job doesn’t get talked about. Nobody tells anybody else about the person who did a “good enough” job on work they hired them to do. To get noticed, you must exceed expectations — not simply live up to them.

4. Respond to everyone who reaches out

You don’t have to have an answer to every question you get asked and you don’t have to agree to every request you receive. But you do to have to respond to them.

5. Acknowledge everyone who mentions you

It’s amazing how many people and companies want to better market themselves while they simultaneously ignore their existing audience. Everyone is worth your time when trying to grow your audience. I repeat: Everyone is worth your time.

6. Share what you learn

That thing you learned today? There are millions of people who haven’t learned it yet, but would love to. When you share your journey, it makes people want to come along for the ride.

7. Teach what you know

Your knowledge is an asset that becomes infinitely more valuable when you share it. Teaching not only attracts an appreciative crowd and creates opportunities, but it also unlocks a deeper understanding of your subject matter for you in the process.

Source: CILIP: Library, Information and Knowledge Professionals