Object affordance

The Health Growth Letters is a weekly publication of tips, frameworks, and lessons to help you build a more balanced life based on faith, health, and wellness. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

What’s on the agenda:

• A Verse

• A Lesson

• A Puzzle

A verse:

We hear stories about “overnight success” often.

We see this with celebrities, actors, actresses, and social media influencers who make a post that blows up, and they become huge seemingly overnight.

And in some ways, they do, but the story that rarely gets told is the faithful and dedicated work that went into building, creating, and putting in the reps for weeks, months, and years to get there.

For example, Mr. Beast posted for five years before his first viral post truly drove him into fame.

FIVE YEARS!

But this story isn’t unique.

We just went to see Nate Bargatze. He is a household name in comedy now, but he told a story about when he moved to NYC, had no money, and would do comedy anywhere they’d take him. It was years before he got a Netflix show, and his life changed.

It was nothing, nothing, and then suddenly.

Faithfully waiting for a sudden movement

It can be hard to wait. To put in the work or effort day over day, waiting and hoping for a breakthrough or a change, but God uses those periods of waiting. He’s building our faith, he's molding us, and preparing us for the season ahead.

We aren’t forgotten, we’re being prepared.

When the moment is right, God acts and moves quickly and decisively.

Now, that doesn’t mean we sit back passively and wait. It means we stay attentive, obedient, hopeful, working knowing that the story isn’t over.

I don’t know what you’re waiting on or hoping for, what dreams or goals you have, but God is good, and the wait can be just as good as the gift if you let it be.

Trust, work, and faithfully wait. God moves suddenly and great things happen “overnight”, just usually after years of work and waiting.

A lesson: object affordance

Object affordance is a concept from design and psychology that refers to the inherent qualities of an object that suggest how it can or should be used.

In product design and growth marketing, object affordance shows up in the size of fonts, buttons, and product placement. Big fonts communicate that this is what you are supposed to pay attention to. Colorful buttons afford pressing, and products at the top of a list indicate these are popular or the best options.

But object affordance shows up in real life, too.

A flat panel on a door instinctively leads you to push, whereas a handle makes you pull.

A coffee mug with a handle affords a “correct” way to hold the cup.

A lamp with a pull string affords an action that turns on and off a light.

These are purposefully designed and created features to make you engage with them.

Recognizing object affordance

Object affordance is designed and built into products and objects, but it’s also something that can be assigned to random objects.

Interestingly, research in psychology and design shows that women are often better at recognizing or assigning affordances to objects, intuitively seeing what things can be used for, or what could or needs to be done with them. Men, on the other hand, tend to see objects more statically, unless there's an obvious mechanical or goal-directed reason to engage.

For example, when guys see a piece of clothing on the floor, they typically see “a shirt on the floor”. Whereas, when a woman sees it, she sees “a shirt on the floor that needs to be in the hamper”.

This isn’t the case across the board, but the insight and takeaway here is that:

1. We don’t see object affordance in everything

2. We can create or recognize an affordance in objects that others don’t see

Creating & assigning object affordance

We all have things in our lives that are begging to be acted on—we just don’t always notice.

That is true for dirty dishes in the sink and clothes on the floor, but it’s also true with relationships, feelings, and thoughts. All around us are little, quiet invitations to take action, but most of us are so locked into what we “should” be doing that we miss new opportunities and actions.

So here is the shift I want you, and myself, to take: start noticing, and start assigning affordances in your life.

Start practicing with the little stuff.

Pick up the dirty clothes.

Put the dish away.

Clear your desk at the end of the day.

These small actions train you to recognize and respond to what your environment is offering, but I want you to do something more important. I want you to zoom out and look at the bigger things in your life and look for objects, people, or objectives that have “affordance”.

What relationship or friendship is budding up that needs attention

What problems keep popping up in your relationship that need to be addressed?

What idea or business idea does your brain keep coming back to and dwell on?

These sometimes “noisy “ things in our lives that seem to bring chaos, responsibility, and extra work are often opportunities to assign affordance and take action.

Maybe your breakthrough isn’t in more effort, but in more attention to the things that are already in your life.

A Puzzle:

A rebus is a puzzle that uses pictures, symbols, and/or letters to represent words or parts of words. The challenge of the puzzle is to decipher the hidden meaning behind the symbols and solve the puzzle.

Here’s this week’s puzzle:

The answer will be given in next week’s letter.

The answer to last week’s puzzle was “breaking the bank”.