EmpathyWe’ve been talking about how mindfulness and meditation affects the physical makeup of your brain’s gray matter and how ability to empathize is affected.

Poets may not consciously realize how empathy is working or not working when they write poems but even a decision to be emphatic or the ability to do it will affect the content and the tone of the poems you write and how you critique every other poem you encounter, the content of that poem and your attitude toward the poet who wrote it.

So at a foundational level, empathy will affect what you write and how you read because it fundamentally affects how you conceptualize the world.

From a brazenly marketability viewpoint, empathy is one of the big buzzwords these days. Similar to writing a poem, your ability to empathize affects the very foundation of any product you design. Without customer empathy, you can’t understand customer needs. Marketing guru Seth Godin defines what empathy is in this blog post:

Empathy doesn't involve feeling sorry for someone. It is our honest answer to the question, "why did they do what they did?"

The useful answer is rarely, "because they're stupid." Or even, "because they're evil." In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from.

Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

He also talks about flipping the rules here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/08/the-permanent-rules.html

In this PDF on Design Thinking:

Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process.  The Empathize mode is  the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge.  It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them….WHY empathize? As a design thinker, the problems you are trying to solve are rarely your own—they are those of  a particular group of people; in order to design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.

Honestly, most of us have fallen somewhat short of empathy as critics. We’re too self-focused. But as a customer we usually get it immediately. We think, “You better understand me or I won’t buy your device, soap or service.”

But what about books and poems? Why is it taboo to have empathy for a customer as a reader? This is not to say you should write poems like a marketer would, although you’re free to try that. (Big secret: marketers have yet to understand how to do this themselves.) But it's the practice of human empathy that is the issue here.

Because marketers are under such pressure to sell, (and because they can be psychologically ruthless about it), marketers and product designers are usually ahead of the rest of us on understanding human experience. It behooves us all to listen to what they are saying. Don’t be that guy who misses the message for the messenger.

The PDF above also shows how workshopping is similar to product testing:

How to test: show don’t tell.  Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or your user within an experience.  And don’t explain everything (yet).  Let your tester interpret the prototype.  Watch how they  use (and misuse!) what you have given them, and how they handle and interact with it; then listen to what they say about it, and the questions they have.

I also follow Marketoonist. He has a good toon from 2013 on idea generation and submission issues for cartoonists. His commentary works as tips for writers as well: https://marketoonist.com/2013/01/brainstorming-ideas.html