[This is the story of the start-up and app Purposely™. Each week I’ll chat about its purpose, progress, and possibilities. Let’s consider this the memoir of an app <smile>. If you’d like to be in touch, please drop me a line to [email protected]. And please take a peek at my latest book, Choose Your Life Purposes, which spells out the principles upon which Purposely is built.]
Of course, my host could not believe his ears. This so startled, rattled, intrigued, or maybe annoyed him that our on-air interview became about that. It was as if he wanted to say, “You don’t own a phone? How dare you! All we sheep are obliged to follow our phones around by the nose. You think you’re better than us? How dare you!”
And it may indeed seem perplexing and implausible to you. How can a contemporary person who writes books, gives interviews, provides coaching, delivers worldwide trainings, and so forth not have a phone? On the face of it, it makes no sense. What if … and then you can dream up a hundred scenarios where it would be something like madness not to have a phone instantly available.
Well, as I tried to explain to him, it’s actually easy. If you have something to say to me, you can drop me an email. It can be a line, a paragraph, or a page. It can be anything it needs to be. I can look at it at my leisure, think about it, and craft a wise reply. Why do I also need a phone? I can have every manner of conversation via email, even chatty ones (and I am not chatty by nature). Hence, no phone needed.
Did that interviewer grudgingly get it? I don’t think so.
Fast forward to building an app. Now, it would seem, someone building an app should not only have a phone but have a phone with apps on it, so that he had some sense of what apps do. That seems like a minimum, doesn’t it? Certainly, I should come into this century now, while building an app? Really, how could I not?
The other day, Bharath was showing me something on his phone. To get there, to the app he wanted to open, he had to scroll past what seemed like two hundred apps, page after page of those pretty, pesky things. As he scrolled, I could hear myself say, “Ah, rabbit holes.” It was so very clear to me why I didn’t want a device brimming over with rabbit holes. It put me in mind of a New York street with open manhole covers. You’d break a leg falling into one of those!
I am careful about rabbit holes and to me a phone = rabbit holes times a million. But that isn’t to say that as an “app developer” I may not be obliged to acquire that infernal device, learn it, use it, and, one would hope to be able to say, tame it. We shall see. I can see that day looming on the horizon and, while I’m not dreading it, I am not looking forward to it in the slightest.
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[Purposely is slated to appear November, 2024.]
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
