How do you build a career you love?

How do you make it impactful, long-lived, and fulfilling?

How do you get paid to do what you love?

As someone who is shifting into design, I am interested in understanding what makes a person great at what they do — what strategies, paradigms, and habits have made them prolific and highly demanded. I was also curious about compounding effects, or instances when one’s investment continues to grow and stack up to produce exponential results, in effort to find ways to optimize time, energy, and effort. …

The magic comes just after we think we have nothing left to give and nothing worthy to create. That mental state is a facade. If you can see through that veil and continue on regardless of how you feel, you'll prevail.

I recommend The Practice by Seth Godin to cement this idea so you can keep creating with faith.

Dear Friend,

I hear you’re in a rut…a deep one. You feel like you were awesome last week — checking everything off your list, dishes done, room pristine, workout complete. Then all of a sudden, you aren’t. All of a sudden, you flopped into a feelsbadman mood as you missed your workout, didn’t study as long as you should have, have to work overtime, etc, etc, etc. and then morphed into a couch potato.

What now? At some point, after resurfacing from the couch where your butt scorched a hole, you have to get up and do the work.

How…

What separates good designers from great designers?

Answering this question can be complex given how unique designers are in skill set, background, and interest. One product designer’s expertise can be completely different from another with the same job title.

To answer this question, we must zoom out and ask: what do designers have in common?

• Designers design — meaning they intentionally craft products to yield a particular goal or experience.
• Designers collaborate. They must express their ideas to gain support in building their designs.

In my last article, I explored how craftsmanship builds great careers. In this article, I aim…

“Should designers learn code?”

This question is equivalent to an existential crisis and is heavily debated in the design community. There are conflicting views especially with the #NoCode or #LowCode movement backed by powerful interface tools like Webflow. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that many employers prefer designers who have knowledge of at least HTML and CSS, as they appear more often in job descriptions.

Code feels daunting and foreign to non-engineers. Coding knowledge is built in layers in which understanding the foundations is imperative to advancing to higher levels of abstraction. …

“What’s your application strategy?”, a design manager asked me during a Zoom chat. Although the phrase was new to me, the idea that job search involved strategy was familiar.

When I began my search in June, I understood the difficulty that lay ahead. Making a career change is an uphill battle, but doing this during a pandemic felt like I had fallen into a deep pit with a dusty sky fogging my vision.

I started by solely applying to all the product designer jobs I could find. I forfeited exercise, regular meals, and socializing in efforts to outcompete other candidates…

If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix, you may be feeling what I’m feeling.

Guilty, a victim, a perpetrator, or a mix of all three.

I know that social media is destructive for our ability to focus, be present, quell anxiety and navigate hardships…but to learn how it affects our society as a whole is a wake-up call.

For those who haven’t watched the doc, its thesis is, technology and social media is controlling the way we think, negatively affecting how we operate in the real world. …

If you and me were sitting across from each other, there wouldn’t be two people here.

There would be four.

Adult You, Adult Me, Kid You and Kid Me.

There is a kid inside all of us that wants to be fed, heard, and loved. This Kid is patient while the Adult You functions in the world — when you work, make money, do chores…practically all the responsible things you do.

This Kid lives below the surface of consciousness but can be felt as you go about your daily life. Those emotions that flare before your self-control recalibrates you…that’s the…