The question

...the question we are called on to answer is no longer primarily, “can it be built?”, but rather, “should it be built?”

Ash Maurya, Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, O'Reilly Media, 2012.

gain this confidence

Bandura calls this process "guided mastery." I love that term: guided mastery. And something else happened, these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. They just gained a new confidence. And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy -- the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do.

....

I really believe that when people gain this confidence -- and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO -- they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas so they can choose from better ideas. And they just make better decisions.

David Kelley, "How to build your creative confidence," TED 2012,
www.ted.com/talks/david_kelley_how_to_build_your_creative_confidence.html.

the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers

The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system -- all the species, all the links -- and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with.

Eric Berlow, "Simplifying complexity," TEDGlobal 2010, Jul 2010,
www.ted.com/talks/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html.

We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

With the rise of the product designer, there’s a simultaneous progression and regression in digital experiences. Using Jesse’s 12-year-old diagram (!) as a framework, we’re seeing the top two planes getting tastier and more interesting — look at Path, Square, AirBNB. Luscious full-bleed high-design screens where it’s clear that designers obsessed over every pixel and element of movement. But in that middle plane, digital experiences suffer from a lack of attention to flows, taxonomies, relationships between content areas, etc. (Any attempt to navigate Path turns into a trip down the rabbit hole.)  We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.

Peter Merholz, “'Product designers' and design team evolution," peterme.com, 31 Oct 2012, www.peterme.com/2012/10/31/product-designers-and-design-team-evolution/.