What I think I want right now and what I'll really need in the future are two very different things.

When I’m hungry and I go buy something to eat, I might end up eating some crappy food. It’s what I want at that moment. But if you ask me, belly full, to make a plan for the week of what I want to eat, it’s gonna look much more healthy.

I think that as service owners, creators and workers we often make the mistake to serve the immediate wants, and not the needs.

It’s something that I’ve been seing when I compare what I see in my RSS reader (1) versus what the Youtube algorithm recommends me. One only shows me what I made the conscious decision to learn about. Not much crap in there. But my Youtube algorithm is basically me just me in a candy store. Lots of fun stuff, but not really fullfiling.

Action question

What are parts of your service where you mostly serve to people immediate wants? How can you find out the deeper future needs that your customers have?

Footnote

(1) A tool that allows me to see content that I decided to subscribe too and nothing else.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Written with AI help This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.