Rethinking Big Ideas: On Finding Joy in Simple Pleasures

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Education, Social Sciences, Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last season, author/designer Ingrid Fetell Lee taught us about joy spotting. It’s the practice of going out into the world and finding ordinary objects that make you feel extraordinarily happy. But what about when you can’t leave the house? Well, it turns out joy lurks in all sorts of unexpected places — you just have to know where to look.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From Wundry, I'm Rufus Griskum, and this is a special episode of the next few weeks. All of a sudden
0:30.7	our houses and apartments feel like the worlds in which we travel.
0:34.4	A living room that was so recently just a place to watch TV is now our habitat.
0:40.1	So I've been looking at the confines of my environment in a new way with greater
0:44.4	appreciation for all the objects I used to ignore. Here's an example. In our living
0:49.2	room we have a frame poster that my wife and I bought 15 years ago. It's of a nun holding a lamp. a
0:55.0	frame poster that my wife and I bought 15 years ago.
0:56.0	It was actually an ad for booths produced by a French convent in the 1890s.
1:00.0	The nun backlit in orange and yellow is curvacious and beautiful, apparently in a state of radiant joy, simply from the pleasure of holding the bottle.
1:09.5	Why do I love this poster so? Is it the humor of sultry booze peddling nuns or is it the vibrant
1:15.5	colors?
1:17.7	This seems to be like a great moment to ask, what are the things around us to trigger joy?
1:23.0	A comfortable chair, an old photo, a brightly colored bowl,
1:26.0	or maybe a view of the backyard?
1:28.3	It turns out these things can have a far greater impact
1:30.8	on our state of mind than we realize.
1:33.6	So I thought it would be a great time to get Ingrid Fatell Lee on the phone.
1:37.3	Ingrid was featured on the first season of the next big idea.
1:40.0	You may remember her.
1:41.3	She was a design director at IDEO, the legendary design firm,
1:45.0	before writing her brilliant 2018 book Joyful,
1:49.0	The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things
	...

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