Career trajectories aren’t a straight line - and that’s ok
May 4, 2021
I've been feeling tired of work lately - well, kind of. The work itself is challenging to say the least as there many problems to solve - which for any type of designer, should be absolutely thrilling. But, you see, I've been feeling uninspired. At first, I thought it was because I haven't really had any time off since August. I've been working many Saturdays and took hardly any time off during Christmas. Then I thought it could be the global pandemic and its haunting effects over all of us for the past year. Sweden is certainly looser in terms of restrictions, but it IS affecting all of us. As vaccinations are starting to roll out here and we can finally get a glimpse of hope which can also lead to weariness. But after deep self-reflection this weekend, I believe it might also just be a case of... grinding. Let's back up.
A history
Most people's career trajectories follow a path where it's gradually progressing but it's not a straight line. This line plateaus every now and then. For someone that has been consulting for as long as I have, the goal is to always be chasing that next step, that next level. Looking back, I think I've had a great career experience (and hopefully just as long to go). I've lead the design of an IKEA.com redesign. I've worked for brands like Volvo, Spotify and tens, as well as hundreds of brands that you've never heard of. (I wanted to highlight that because it's actually what most people's careers look like while looking at other designer's portfolios it's easy to think they only work for well-established brands).
When I did my first project with SuperFriendly, I was so excited to get to work with people that I looked up to. I remember boarding the plane thinking that this was me moving from a good but not as good league, say the Dutch Eredivisie to the Premier League (apologies to my American readers, there will be more football references in this post). This was the next level. And it turned out to be. It was thrilling and at a pace that was refreshing. I found that I was able to quickly to adapt to it.
Side note: The branding work that DesignStudio did for the Premier League is, in my mind, really great. Realizing this just now, but it's fitting to compare SuperFriendly to the Premier League, seeing how they both work so actively against racial injustices.
Then I started working with Ueno, an agency I've admired for so long and with people that seemed so genuine and nice. My encounters with them always lived up to it. Is this like competing in the Champions League? It sure seemed like it. Then Ueno got acquired by Twitter and at first I wasn't really sure what to do. I considered continuing with the new team - many of us were freelancers on my Ueno project, a lot of us continued to work together and, sticking to football references, I LOVE these team mates.
So work was fun and challenging, I loved the people I worked with and I felt like I was competing on a very high level. What was wrong? It wasn't until this weekend when I saw a documentary about one of my football heroes, Steven Gerrard, that I was able to put the pieces together. Playing in a top league might look glamorous and fantastic to a kid, but you know what most of their days are spent doing? Practice. Day in, day out. Practice over and over again. Grind. Until all the details/skills are there. Refine to perfection. It's not always fun. In fact, most of the time it's not fun at all. There are times when everything seems to go your way and there are times when you feel like you're playing against the odds.
Football isn't about what team I'm playing. It's about dealing with whatever that comes with it.Steven Gerrard
I think this is worth highlighting. It doesn't matter if you're at the beginning of your career, or whatever league you play in, most of your time is spent practicing for the big game. This is not the same as actually playing the big game.
I've been trying to get back into reading more (and watching less) and really enjoyed this piece from Rands on career progression.
My wife wrote a very nice birthday card where she listed things she liked about me. Item number four on that list read, “How you are always on a quest.
She’s right. At any point in my life, you could ask me, “What quest are you on?” and I’d instantly have an answer:
• Growing an American Chestnut.
• Making sure I don’t miss out on this Internet thing.
• Figuring out how humans make decisions.
• Explaining leadership to engineers in a helpful way.
• Getting the hell out of a no-win job scenario.
• Writing and publishing a book.
You are Going on a Quest
Reading this, and watching the Gerrard documentary, didn't necessarily give me an answer, but it did give me something more - relief. I know what my quests are and what I'm doing right now will ultimately help me fulfil those quests.
A title is a sign-post. It tells you where you are. A title is a comforting reminder of where you are, but what is more interesting is where you are going next and how you will get there. This will involve a quest.You are Going on a Quest
What quest are you on?
You need to confirm your email to confirm your subscription.
-
March, 2024
-
February, 2024
-
January, 2024
-
December, 2023
-
November, 2023
-
October, 2023
-
September, 2023
-
August, 2023
-
July, 2023
-
June, 2023
-
May, 2023
-
April, 2023
-
March, 2023
-
January, 2023
-
December, 2022
-
November, 2022
-
September, 2022
-
August, 2022
-
July, 2022
-
June, 2022
-
May, 2022
-
April, 2022
-
January, 2022
-
December, 2021
-
November, 2021
-
October, 2021
-
September, 2021
-
August, 2021
-
July, 2021
-
June, 2021
-
May, 2021
-
April, 2021
-
March, 2021
-
January, 2021
-
November, 2020
-
October, 2020
-
September, 2020
-
August, 2020
-
June, 2020
-
May, 2020
-
April, 2020
-
March, 2020
- Regarding Zoom
- Why wireframes are becoming obsolete
- Get static
- Emotions and work - know yourself
- All books are now free
- Wireframes are too concrete
- Stuck at home
- What Great Managers Do
- From Error to Understanding: The Importance of Brand Voice When Things Go Wrong
- Answering your question - How I design
- The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck
- Hard startups
-
February, 2020
-
January, 2020
- Debbie Millman - Time Well Spent
- The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com
- Fathom Analytics
- Redesign to learn
- How putting a price on speed helped one retailer increase mobile revenue in just 2 months
- Accessibility drives aesthetics
- Smart people use simple words to make others feel smart.
- The great paradox of our time: everything is both better and worse than ever before
-
December, 2019
-
November, 2019
-
October, 2019
-
September, 2019
-
August, 2019
- How we work with microcopy
- Measuring UX with HEART
- Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely
- Analytics are reshaping fashion’s old-school instincts
- What to Do When You Feel Uninspired at Work
- Stay in your lane and outlast your competition
- A Mindful Approach to Technology
- “I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For”
- People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work
- Fast Software, the Best Software
- Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts
- Freelance and Business And Stuff
- UX can’t be defined by one set of "rules"
-
July, 2019
- 5 Years - 300+ Posts!
- Superhuman and email privacy
- Why Consultants Quit Their Jobs to Go Independent
- Give them candy: small details make all the difference
- Your inbox is spying on you
- On Modus: It’s Time for a Code of Ethics for Designers
- Frank Chimero on causing ’good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture
- Advertising: contextual vs. behavioral and why it matters
-
June, 2019
- Citrix improves UX and cuts costs by 65%
- Delight Comes Last
- Tim Cook’s Stanford Commencement Address
- You care more about your privacy than you think
- The Cost of Lies
- Let’s assemble like the Avengers and... do work
- Big Mood Machine
- Simplicity is a war
- How Notion Is Going After Atlassian and Why It Just Might Win
- Hiring a Management Consultancy for Digital Is a Mistake
- Just write: why Product Designers should write, and how to get started
- Dos and dont’s on designing for accessibility
- I’ve redesigned my website and it looks exactly the same
-
May, 2019
-
April, 2019
- Scapegoating User Experience Design
- Clip sharing with Overcast
- Why don’t we just use Material Design?
- Accenture sued $32m+ over website redesign for Hertz
- Venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps
- Creating a UX Strategy
- The elegance of nothing
- Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
- Working as a UX-lead
- Gumroadday: Get my books at -17% discount
-
March, 2019
- Working as a UX designer
- Meet Q: The First Genderless Voice
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure
- What’s the meaning of work?
- Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing
- Neurodiversity and the Digital Divide: how our neurological differences shape the way we experience the web
- Accessibility, a powerful design tool
-
February, 2019
-
January, 2019
-
December, 2018
-
November, 2018
-
October, 2018
-
September, 2018
-
August, 2018
- Living among baby robots
- Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
- Voice Input’s Effect on Social Norms
- How I kicked my email compulsion
- Facebook's struggle to moderate itself
- The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness
- Google Employees Are Organizing To Protest the Company’s Secret Search Engine
- Why Small Teams Win
- Back to Work!
- The Bullshit Web
- Nikhil Sonnad on the banal evil of Facebook
-
July, 2018
- Five questions UX employers should be asking
- Just keep at it
- Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design
- High Fives, AI, and Connecting the Dots: MailChimp’s VP of Design on What Business can Learn from Design
- Rands Information Practises
- The Race to a Trillion
- What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue
- Cheap Shower Curtains
- Tech Sector Values are Broken?
-
June, 2018
- Confirmation Bias in Design
- Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?
- Good product writing is conversational
- Retail is Not Dying, But it Has to Evolve
- The Netflix Binge Factory
- We are all trapped in the “Feed”
- Stop “feeding” your users
- Turn off your push notifications. All of them.
- From the Drawing Board to the Board Room
- Think inclusively at every step
- No classes, no professors: the alternative to business school
- Designer Ethics & The Moral Implications of our Apps
- Conversion optimization with A/B tests
-
May, 2018
- AI Ethics - A New Skill for UX-Designers
- Netlify now shows your deploy status on its favicon
- Let them eat cake
- Netflix Culture
- Skype
- How do you learn UX?
- The New Google Assistant
- What Happened to Apple’s Whimsy?
- Who would you trust more with your data, Apple or the government?
- Unfoundered
- Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business
- Twitter logged all user’s passwords in plain text
- Requests for Personal Data From Apple, Google, and Facebook Compared
- What’s in a pattern name
- GDPR is ruining my life
-
April, 2018
- A Modest Guide to Productivity
- Google Debuts a Standalone To-Do App, Google Tasks
- Apple Should Make an Instagram Clone
- Vanity Metrics
- Tech is not Neutral
- Facebook to exclude North American users from some privacy enhancements
- Netflix has to "produce great content, market it well, serve it up beautifully."
- Sen. Blumenthal: “Your business model is to maximize profit over privacy.”
- Productivity
- My #1 Piece of Advice to Freelancers: Lean Into The Moment
- Design Systems: Better UX through Defined Standards
- Tim Cook - We care about the user experience
- Europe’s tough new data-protection law
- The Real Technology Problem
- Why Small Teams Win
- Whose risk?
- Phone Bored
- Karim Rashid
- Creative Class is open
- Dieter Rams
- Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack: Swedes turn against cashlessness
- What’s a ‘User Experience’ Anyways?
-
March, 2018
- Fake News is spam
- Bleeding Out
- How Tech Giants Design For Transgender Users–Or Don’t
- Don't use the F word (freelancer)
- Dropbox
- Conversational Design
- Everyone Is Going Through Something
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- Flight Crews Don’t Decide Where To Fly
- New Tools Don’t Always Equal Productivity
- The seat at the table
- Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But YouTube, Facebook And Google?
- Cuba
- Bye bye Facebook
- Why I hate your fake redesign
- Givenchy
- Diversity in the design industry
- Your competitors don’t matter
- Apple’s "Sound on the Go" Strategy
- The Most Important Design Skill For An AI-Dominated World
- Love letters to trees
- Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs
- You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.
- Voice Input is the Next Big Thing - Or is It?
-
February, 2018
- Specialize
- Pricing Philisophy
- AMP for email is a terrible idea
- Is this Finnish school the perfect design?
- The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change
- A Year of Learning and Leading UX at Google
- C.A.R.E - A simple framework for user onboarding
- Inside Facebook´s Hellish Two Years
- A better user experience...or?
- Personas
- Reflections on working on an iPad
- Everything Easy is Hard Again
- How to succeed at freelancing
- The iPhone X is Apple’s underrated masterpiece
- Make me think
-
January, 2018
-
December, 2017
-
November, 2017
-
October, 2017
-
September, 2017
-
August, 2017
-
July, 2017
-
June, 2017
- The Why before the Why
- No Share Buttons on Mobile Sites
- Groundwork for Creating Great User Experiences
- ARKit
- 4 Reasons Why Your Body Text Should be Bigger
- Now that Apple is talking about AR and VR, should we be too?
- Think like an artist to create better designs
- Investing in businesses and products
- 10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
- Become a better UX-designer with these three words
- Vox Media Accessibility Guidelines
- Writing for UX: some practical tips
-
May, 2017
-
April, 2017
-
March, 2017
-
February, 2017
-
January, 2017
-
December, 2016
-
November, 2016
-
October, 2016
-
September, 2016
-
August, 2016
-
July, 2016
-
June, 2016
-
May, 2016
-
April, 2016
-
March, 2016
-
February, 2016
-
January, 2016
-
December, 2015
-
November, 2015
-
October, 2015
-
September, 2015
-
August, 2015
-
July, 2015
-
June, 2015
-
May, 2015
-
April, 2015
-
November, 2014
-
April, 2013