Hey it's me, Tom Critchlow - an increasingly amorphous identity drowning in my own domain names. You probably know me as a blogger and indie consultant.
I had a fever dream last night about
the flower and the chessboard - a vivid image for an essay I want to write about finite and infinite careers, about how "game playing" is frowned upon in careers, about how beautiful it is that flowers and plants grow, about how much I love studying and playing games.
Being machiavellian and playing politics at work is seen as distasteful. And yet these skills are powerful, important and worth learning. It is, after all, simply humans all the way down.
This metaphor of the flower and the chessboard speaks to the value of the flip flop - back and forth between becoming an excellent game player, and rejecting the very premise of the game. I think it might just be the next decade of my work - exploring this tension of "soft skills" and "networks" and..... "people"?
(not sure why that last one has quotes around it...)
Anyway - yes, this me emailing you about a fever dream. You're welcome. If you send me a fever dream of an essay that you've yet to write I will love you forever.
Ok, so two things from me and a few things I've enjoyed recently:
Figma Thinkers is a course designed to teach non-designers how to use Figma. More than pushing pixels around, Figma is a new kind of communication and it's totally re-wiring my professional life as an indie consultant. So I've partnered with Nate Kadlac (a real designer!) and we're launching the first cohort for the course next week.
If you're a product manager / consultant / UX researcher / founder / executive and want to learn how to communicate your ideas more effectively, work closely with designers or just create visual assets this is the course for you:
sign up for the first cohort here.
Writing, Riffs & Relationships - a blog post I wrote about using writing as a way to create connections, open doors and drive networking outcomes. It's half blogging manifesto and half practical guide for indie consultants to manage direct outreach and lead generation.
Read the riff on riffs here.
Now, some stuff I've really enjoyed recently:
From my friends:
My good friend Howard Gray runs
Wavetable - a learning studio that designs learning experiences that people give a s&*t about. Things like a kitchen arcade for DIG, or an accelerator program for NYC.gov. Whether you need to design an internal experience like an offsite or a training program, or whether you need to design a community/marketing engagements program, Howard and Wavetable are experts at designing experiences that bring people alive and make them lean in - better education, better marketing, better engagement. If real engagement isn't what every brand needs right now I don't know what is.
Anyway, that's enough for now. Hope to see some of you in the first Figma Thinkers cohort!
Much love and fever dreams,
Tom
