Author: phonghtran

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Fashion used work in seasons. The avant garde fashion designers create their fantastical pieces for fall and spring. Those pieces trickle down to other designer en-masse, and those pick and extend new ideas, shapes, and colors. Eventually, mass production slims and trims the excess, and presents the next progression of those ideas. By that time, the next season had arrived, and the cycle begins anew.

However with the internet, the avant garde started introducing more ideas. The trickling started falling a bit quicker. And mass production started looking at wider and wider sources. 

Nowadays, a Japanese designer can check a New York blog, and instantly grasp what’s happening in Brooklyn. At the same token, that New York blog can check that Japanese designer’s website, and see what’s Japan is doing. 

Which introduces a beautiful new phenomenon: instantaneous feedback and synthesis. Within your brain, when your eyes sees a red rose — that rose explodes within the millions of your neurons. Each with its own concerns and filters, and each in-turn fires its own impulse; generating a burst snapshot completely unique to any moment before it.

If there’s a contentious debate over a policy, and public opinion is split 50-50: often today’s politicians will do nothing. They will hope to slide under the radar, and then pivot after a decision is made. It’s a rational safe move to avoid looking like they made a mistake. Avoiding mistakes is a very innate and fundamental behavior.

However, in the position of the politician, or any decision-maker, when faced with such an issue — the realization is that any decision would have been considered a mistake by the half of the public that doesn’t agree. 

But because that’s an unassailable truth, it should be that those decisions should be okay to make. And that the only mistakes to truly avoid are the ones that 100% of the people consider a mistake. Like avoiding making a decision for fear of losing face.