There were four laws that I really identified with and those were organize, time, and failure. I thought these laws were most applicable to my life and should be taken into account for everyone. Organization is something that I personally love, but cannot do when it comes to my own personal things, but when it comes down to other people’s things or something that I am in charge of outside of my own things, it has to be organized. Organization can be hard, but it is such a part of our daily lives that we almost learn to expect it and are actually quite thrown off when it is removed or different. The best example of this was with the iPod. The first two designs of the iPod were organized, but they were organized in two very different ways, which people didn’t like. When it came to the design of the current iPod and the two previous designs were essentially fused, people tended to respond more positively because everything was simplified into one dial. Case in point, even if we don’t want to admit it, humans are drawn to organization and naturally organize even when we don’t intend to.
The next law was time. From this entire law of the book, I found one concept to be the most interesting: it’s not about making wait time shorter, it’s about making it more tolerable. I really related to this statement because I work in customer service, and I know how impatient some people can become (myself included) when they are not the center of attention. I started to think about ways that I could possibly improve my own customer service to make people feel like their wait time is a little less boring, or even just to let them know that they are important and I haven’t forgotten about them. I had never really thought about how to make waiting better before, just how to make a wait shorter, which isn’t always possible.
The reason that I chose to talk about failure is that I think it is important for people to realize that no matter what they do in life, there is always a chance that it’s not going to work out, and the laws in the book are no exception. I actually thought about this law of failure before I ever got to the section in the book, back when Maeda was using acronyms for absolutely everything at the beginning of the book (which he actually ended up addressing in the failure section). When I was reading them, the first one was fine, and then I shrugged the second one off, but by the third one all I could think to myself was, what the heck is this guy trying to do? He was essentially making things more complicated by trying to make them simpler, which I think is something that everyone should think about. For example, it would be nice if we all had cell phones and remotes and all kinds of things that only had one button, but if that one button made everything confusing, then simplifying the device actually just complicated everything a little more.