For example, if you’re somebody who is always out and about, maybe it does make sense for you to spend a lot of money on your phone. But if you’re mostly homebound, don’t waste your money on the phone, especially if you don’t even use your phone to make phone calls much.
Also, I thought: now that I spend so much time outdoors, walking 30,000 steps a day, to me it actually makes sense for me to optimize the design for my website to be mobile first. Why is that? Because now, I am mobile first. Nowadays, I think I spend less than 30 minutes a day in front of my laptop.
If you’re at home all day, or working from home, you probably don’t need a laptop anymore. Just get a Mac mini.
First thing about your life, and your lifestyle, and then the products after the fact.
In America, and I suppose elsewhere in the world, products are an aspirational thing. That is, we want to buy the all-wheel-drive Subaru in order to do more hiking and camping and nature stuff.
Similarly speaking, we want or we think we want to buy a certain camera in order to do more photography, which is our passion.
Similarly speaking, the Lamborghini is also an aspirational thing, as we think that by buying the Lamborghini it will make us cooler, sexier, more powerful, more confident, and more egocentric.
Same goes with Apple products: we think that by buying the newest iPhone, or the newest apple something will make us more technologically suave, more current, more modern, more productive, more efficient, and happier.
With Tesla, we think that buying the Tesla will make us more superior, more futuristic, and also make our lives more efficient, and proud.
The best advice for new parents, or parents to be
Funny enough, the best advice I got about becoming a new parent is this: choose a password for your computer that you could type with one hand. My personal takeaway is this: get a phone that you could use with one hand easily, and also with your less dominant hand. In other words, no matter how good the iPhone pro may be, only buy an iPhone mini.
What is this? In lived reality, when you have a kid, you are typically holding the kid with one arm, and doing something else with other arm. For example, holding the baby with one arm, and using your other hand to warm up the bottle, or holding the baby with one arm, and using the other arm to open and close doors. Therefore the simple take away is this: we should optimize for one handed design. That is, being able to easily use your iPhone with one hand.
The genius of Steve Jobs was that at least with the original iPhone 4s, which is probably the last iPhone that he guided, he made the point that one should be able to reach every single corner of the screen with just their thumb. Even when the original iPhone 5 came out, there was a huge hubbub, because honestly, the only reason they made the iPhone 5 a little bit taller, was to add a few inches of screen to their marketing materials, which was in order to drive more iPhone sales, rather than considering whether it was actually the right design choice.
Even nowadays, the drive for the iPhone to keep getting bigger and bigger is a bad one. It is a slavish imitation of Apple copying Samsung phones, the whole “phablet” notion, in order to get more people to upgrade and buy the newest iPhone.
Your actual lifestyle versus your aspirational lifestyle
Much things in life are aspirational. That is, we desire to become something or become someone, and we desire to purchase certain products in order to become more of that thing.
Therefore, perhaps the wisest thing we can do is this: clearly identify what we are, what our current lived reality is, and whether we actually do want to live a different style of life, or mode of living.