Long Reads

I’ve started writing on Medium recently.

So far, I’ve got two posts under my belt worth checking out.

Without a practice, you’re just doing design — a short-term activity. But when you practice design, you’re focusing on long-term sustainable success.

— A Framework for Building a Design Practice

An experienced designer, on the other hand, anchors their work in strongly-held opinions and stances. They form hypotheses for themselves over the course of their careers, test them under real conditions, and continue to tweak their answers. What emerges from this activity are a series of design truths — philosophies that a designer holds so firmly and intimately that they simply believe them to be absolute.

— The Design Thesis

Hope you enjoy them. :)

Fearlessness

We shouldn’t ever wish for things to get less scary. Instead, we should simply strive to become more fearless.

Ask why

I strongly believe that, as humans, nothing we do is arbitrary. We may not be aware of the reasons why we do things, but there are reasons. They may be stupid reasons, but they’re still reasons.

By asking why more often and identifying the things that drive the things we do, we can be better armed to change, improve, accelerate, or otherwise affect what we do. This is fundamentally how we become smarter and, by extension, better at doing the things we do.

So, ask why more often. You might be surprised by what you find. At the very least, you’ll be better for it.

Related: Experience

Success

Measure success not by how many times you’re right, but by how resilient you are when you’re wrong.

Experience

The difference between a junior and an experienced designer is how good of an answer they have to the question “why?”.

Newness

There’s a reason why singing and playing the guitar are such consistent creative outlets for me. Relatively speaking, they’re still very new to me. And new things inherently require a higher degree of creativity to navigate. Whether it’s a new song I’m learning, a chord I’m perfecting, or a note I can’t hit, that discovery and learning process doubles as a therapeutic exercise of creativity. 

Following that same logic, the things you do day-in-day-out - stuff you would normally make simply synonymous with life - have a tendency to become void of creativity over time. It’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of doing what’s comfortable and losing touch with the feeling of newness all together. That’s where life gets dull. Repetitive. Creatively unchallenging. 

As such, it seems to me that the mission to constantly re-invent and bring newness to the things that matter most to you - be they relationships, work, or yourself - is probably one of life’s most important and rewarding exercises.