Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Today I like to remember one movie that I saw that explained a lot what I want to talk today. It's the Social Network movie. And I always remember when I saw the young Mark Zuckerberg thinking about a network where they can engage with, uh, women, find their interests, and decide, okay, how they want to approach them. And this was the seed that created Facebook. And of course, here, I don't want to say, uh, my thoughts on if Facebook is good or bad, but. Why didn't you create that? Why? Why is it so easy when I see a wonderful painting on the wall and I say, why didn't I create that? Many times, you think, oh, this painting is so easy to paint, and all the time, it's because I love art. My answer is it's very easy to copy. It's not very easy to create it, to have the initial idea and the seed. And this is the topic of this podcast. And when everyone thinks alike, there is a high probability that no one is thinking a lot.
And why this? Because most of the time, we are all driven by conformity. We want to comply with the norms, cultural values, and societal values. Most of the time, these put us as project managers inside a box, and it's very hard for us to think outside that box because, you know, it's just crazy. We feel locked in that box, and we only think that the possible solution is that one. And this is where we fail. When we try to create innovative products. Most of the time, we try to follow the same path. For example, you're building a house. You always try to follow the same path of construction. You are building a car. You always think of the car with the same shape when someone thinks differently. This person of course, puts him or herself in a more risky situation, but if they succeed, they just change the game. And this is so important for us. So what is my advice for us to I would say stop this mindset of doing things repetitively and in the same way.
It's first. How much time do you spend? Do you spend time in your daily routine thinking about different things, comparing things, or repeating things? For example, today, you were listening to this podcast. So try to reframe your day and try to take okay out of the eight hours, the ten hours I'm working.
How many hours am I truly spending doing new things, thinking differently, and trying to find an innovative way of solving a problem, creating a risk matrix, or budgeting?
Or am I following the same path as yesterday, last week, last month, or last year? Because we tend always to follow the path of something, and this is very good if you want to do repetitive work, but it's terrible if you want to innovate; if you want to think differently, it's just impossible. To do this way. So, you need to break this pattern. So if you are spending most of your time doing just a repetition of previous week or previous project, you need to challenge yourself and see what I can do differently. And you can also do this in your own life. Are you going to the same restaurant, eating the same food, watching the same TV channel, wearing the same clothes? These are perfect examples of how our mind tries to trap us in this square. For example, social media helps this in a dramatic way, and they do a very bad service for us because, for example, if you go on social media and you, for example, click like on a cat photo or on a panda photo, what happens the following days? Your feed will receive an avalanche of cats and pandas and pandas because social media wants to create conformity to make you comfortable, and then you stay there forever. But if you are a project manager, you are trying to create something new. And if you are trying to create something new, it's impossible to do things the same way. And it's nonsense. So this is why when everybody on the table thinks alike, you know people do not think too much.
You need to challenge that. And this is my second tip for you. It's to explore and improve your creativity. Try to dress a little bit differently. I'm not saying every day, but try to take a different route to work. Try to use different software or tools, visit a different website, go to a new restaurant, visit different places, and meet people you don't meet every day. Try to meet people that think very differently from you. These will be a massive benefit to you as they will help you analyze and structure problems in different ways. When I spent my time at the UN, it was like a dream come true for me because I had the opportunity to meet so many different people. That helped me to see reality through different lenses so I can understand the problem much better and try to find a better solution instead of just having a myopia of, you know, looking through only one lens. Another example I want to give, probably many of you saw my newsletter, my Beyond Hype newsletter, where I share my experience at Burning Man. So why someone like me, you know, an engineer? I'm very much a person on track, you know, on track. You know, my whole life was trying to follow a path that was acceptable for society and everything. And suddenly my wife and I spent ten days in the desert at a music or concert. I don't know if we can call that concert three days. You know, under a rain in the desert. Isolated.
You know, with a very different group of people. Why did I do that? I did that for me, and I did that to allow me to explore and see things in a different way. So when you are shaping a project, when you are identifying risks, you are trying to identify the best approach for your stakeholders. You are trying to make the change.
It. It's just impossible for you if you have this fixed firm mindset. So it's time for you to just practice that because these will improve your awareness, and you will make yourself able to see reality through different lenses. This is what created generative AI, for example. Well, a group of researchers thought. We can think differently; we can create a mechanism that is different. For example, nobody in the traditional way thought that computers would be able to be creative. And now everybody is really I don't know if it's scared or happy with what is going on. But, you know, it's it's surprisingly good and disruptive. So, for you to be an agent of that, you need to be mindful that you cannot do it by just repeating the same things. This is the message I want to convey to you this week. I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
