Inspired by the iPhone Duo, I reimagined expand/collapse for the web.
A glass cover folds open while the content stays flat beneath it. Blur, light, and shadow make a familiar interaction feel a little more physical.
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Inspired by a conversation with a friend considering leaving:
There are either three paths:
1. You’re on the right path.
2. You’re exploring something that *could* be the right path.
3. You’re on the wrong path.
The best way to get on the right path is to leave the wrong path.
Which looks to other people like not being on a path.
It invites a lot of judgment, questioning — why haven’t you found your path yet?
Whereas being on any path feels safer to others. No one questions it, not to your face anyway.
Even though you know it’s not the right path. And thus, even though it looks like you’re on the right path, you’re the furthest thing from it, and you’d be closer to the path if you were on no path, even if that feels like a setback because it’s going from certainty to uncertainty. It’s actually a step forward because you’re creating space to find the right path.
A lot of people try to turn the wrong path into the right path. But It’s so much easier to find something great then turn something from bad to great, or even OK to great.
For those uncertain about whether a path that feels mixed can turn into the right path. Ian Rogers has a good line in the Dialectic podcast: “if the cat is bigger than the shit, keep the cat. If the shit is bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat”.
If you need someone to change behavior — in jobs and in relationships — it’s likely a recipe for unhappiness, since it’s out of your control. Especially if they don’t want to change the way you want them to.
(Of course, if you’re a reoccurring reason why your paths continuously feel wrong, you’ll need to work on those because you’ll carry your patterns on your next path.)
When I asked you if you would still be on this path in a few years, you definitively said no. OK, so now you’re definitely leaving, it’s now just a matter of when. Why not leave sooner? What’s keeping you? Often the fear of judgment, fear of change, fear of not the unknown, fear of letting someone down (which is inevitable either way), fear of picking something or someone and it not being the thing,
Well, yes, you might pick the wrong path again, but you’re also on the wrong path now, so what do you have to lose? It might take picking the wrong path a few times before finding the right one.
People rarely regret leaving the wrong path too early, just like people rarely regret firing someone too early. If you have a long string of very short paths, that’s one thing, but usually people feel when they leave something that they could have left it a while ago.
If anything, more people regret not trying more paths, taking the time to explore and learn more about themselves in the process. People spend way more time in the wrong path (which invites learning of its own kind, to be sure) than they do in the wilderness, exploring things and people that could be the right path.
There are all kinds of illusions and delusions that trick us into seeing the wrong path as the right path — our comfort with any path vs no path, other people’s comfort with us on any path vs no path, the “what if x y z can change”, the “what if no other path is better than this path,” the “what if it’s actually me that’s allergic to paths and therefore I’m the problem and I’ll always be the problem so I might as well just stay here…”
Being in truth with yourself about what you feel and what you want is the only practice that can help you and navigate and discern what path you’re on, and then summon the courage to leave it in order to find the right path for you.
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