When I sat down for the tenth time to begin working on this website, I asked myself a number of questions: What work should I show? What fonts should I use? Why does my head look so big in that picture? Does that shade of green really represent who I am as a person?
When I got all of the “designer” questions out of the way, I was left with this: Why Me? It’s a question that came up all the time at my last job. Why do people engage you to buy stuff? What is it about you that’s special, that no one else has? It’s a great question to ask, and SUPER HARD to answer, as it turns out. But it has to be answered.
I eventually settled on the idea that I’m a “multi-disciplinary designer with a broad range of experience” (jack-of-all-trades has sat on my LinkedIn profile for forever, but it didn’t feel right anymore). I’ve always thought titles were borderline pointless because they mean different things at different companies, especially when you try to take into account “Junior” “Intermediate” and/or “Senior” in a title. What’s intermediate at one place might be VERY senior elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it’s only taken a pretty cursory search through LinkedIn over the past week to discover that a lot of people have branded themselves as “Multi-disciplinary designers.” It hasn’t caused an existential crisis or anything, but it’s made me start thinking about what else makes me “special.”
I sat down for coffee with a friend of mine, noted Wolf Kicker and recent Governor General’s Medal of Bravery recipient Russ Fee. We had a VERY interesting discussion about a lot of these things. Russ is in the same boat as I am career-wise. After listening to me complain that my broad range of interests and curiosities was causing a lot of personal frustration (because not every thing you needs to be monetized), Russ asked a really poignant question: Do you think that’s your superpower, having this broad range of interests? And I was kind of struck silent.
And looking back on the last 25 years of my life, I realized that it might be. Near the top of my personal philosophies is the pursuit of Life Long Learning. I’ve cultivated what I think is a really broad range of interests: the art and craft of filmmaking, fiction writing, history, military & political science, geopolitics, design, photography, music making, songwriting, front end coding, city building and urban planning, the legal system, healthcare, climate and climate change, hiking, camping, backpacking, baking, beer brewing, cooking, gardening, architecture, astronomy, and on and on and on.
Some of these areas go a little deeper, some are pretty surface. Part of it feels like a survival mechanism, trying to understand the way the world works in all of its forms. It usually involves a lot of reading. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to shut up more and listen. Process. Ask questions. Synthesize new information and how it fits. THAT part has been an interesting personal observation.
That curiosity—and the desire to pursue that curiosity—has led to a number of changes. On a couple occasions, I’ve quit a job I was REALLY good at to go back to school, once to finish a degree, the other to become a designer. I’m constantly on the lookout for courses and workshops. Staying curious and open to new information has found me in conferences about how healthcare is delivered and how cities are designed. It’s opened my eyes to injustices that are systemic in our society and how those things can be overcome. I’ve started to learn about how I can contribute my knowledge and experience to maybe making a very small part of the world a little bit better.
Sometimes that curiosity leads to terrifying realizations: potential collapse of our climate and our civilization; circular patterns in history that indicate dark periods on the horizon; technology moving faster than our systems are able to keep up, opening the door for a lot of people to get left behind, or worse. But those things that are terrifying spark the desire to do more to prevent them.
Working in design has been an incredible conduit to feed it. Every day you’re learning something: a client’s business and products/services; new tools and skills; new ways of thinking about a problem; new challenges to solve. I love it.
So yeah. Maybe that broad interest base, that curiosity is my superpower. Now it’s time to go out there and keep using it. (Thanks Russ!)
Photo by Eli Allan on Unsplash
