Maintaining a growth mindset

How the challenges of the design industry can fuel our passion for learning new skills

After all the tech industry has gone through, today, more than ever, it’s important to maintain a growth mindset.

“If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work” — Maria Popova in Tools of Titans, Tim Ferris (2016)

Designers have been through a lot recently

• Mass layoffs that increase competition for jobs and lower salaries
• The design bootcamps churning out junior designers like it’s a production line, reducing the perceived value of the profession
• The standardization of design systems, reducing the dependance of developers on designers to make things look decent
• The normalization of remote work, that makes it easier to hire designers in lower cost areas
• And of course, the omnipresent threat of AI taking over your job

It’s a grim outlook to say the least. So how do you stay motivated in this thankless industry that doesn’t give you a seat at the table and wants you to work for less?

How do you stay motivated to carry on?

“All of this stuff feels like play to me, but looks like work to others” — The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (2020)

It feels like it was only yesterday that I was teaching myself how to use Sketch.

In 2014 I was working a soul-crushing job doing lead generation for 10 hours a day. I’ve always been the “creative type” — the kid that spent math class drawing— so staring at a spreadsheet wasn’t my idea of a meaningful job.

I was fascinated by how smartphones shaped how we experienced the internet. I wanted to be part of that.

I wanted to be a designer but no one would hire me

Juniors have always had a rough time getting hired. But that didn’t stop me. I would wake up every day at 4:30 AM to read design articles and practice Sketch until it was time to leave for work. I also used that time to apply for design jobs.

After about a year or so, a startup finally hired me as their “UX” designer. I was over the moon.

Challenges can fuel your motivation

When facing challenges, you always have two options: You either complain that the world isn’t fair, or you can use it as firewood for your motivation.

Back when no one was hiring me due to my lack of experience, I could have given up and settled for my miserable spreadsheet job. But I’m grateful that —either through passion or stubbornness— I pushed myself to become a better designer.

Every obstacle is a learning opportunity

“We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.” — Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way

A few years after, I was working at an agency where we realized that the factor limiting our growth was not that we couldn’t hire good designers, but rather that we couldn’t close enough deals.

I loved our agency and I was willing to do what it took to help it succeed. So I started doing less design and more sales and marketing, of which I knew next to nothing.

That passion for making the agency succeed, coupled with the fact that I didn’t know how to sell (i.e. a challenge), motivated me to learn everything I could about selling creative services.

I read, watched and listened pretty much everything I could find on the topic from Chris Do, Dan Mall, Blair Enns, David C. Baker, Douglas Davis and many more. I joined one of the first cohorts of The Futur’s Business Bootcamp. And, of course, I took many, many sales calls.

Through a combination of hard work and blind luck, we began closing big deals and all the hard work paid off.

I thought to myself that if I can do this for an agency, I can definitely do it for my own business. So after 4 years, I quit the agency and began selling consulting services.

Going solo

As a solopreneur I had to deal with accounting, marketing, sales, and production. It was overwhelming but also inspiring. I picked up lots of skills as I produced my video-podcast, launched a blog, wrote an ebook and created some free resources.

While I learned tons of valuable skills, my consulting practice didn’t take off. I was trying to help other agency owners grow their businesses but no one was buying. Instead, I kept getting contacted to do design work. So I decided to close shop and get a full-time job.

Humbled and inspired

When I went back in-house, I learned two hard lessons: One, there where much better individual contributors than me out there (shocker, I know) and two, playing the stakeholder game in product companies is very different than in agencies.

Realizing that there was so much room for improvement, reignited that obsessive learning spark of mine. Once again I felt excited to hone my skills.

This period happened right around when the massive layoffs began. Luckily I wasn’t laid off, but it was obvious things were changing. Picking up new skills and quickly getting good at them is not a nice thing to do anymore, it’s a requirement.

How are you going to face these new challenges?

We have two options, we can sit back and complain that companies don’t pay us tons of money for drawing rectangles, or we can use these challenges to fuel our growth and our passion for learning.

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” — Nelson Mandela

While it is true that the traditional UX role is all but dead, new roles are becoming very sought after, with lucrative compensation to boot. Here’s what I’ve seen and my take on each.

The legendary design engineer

https://medium.com/media/9b0c8b073d92baa68ff48b2207f72f19/href

AI is making it easier than ever for anyone to pick up coding. Tools like Copilot, Cursor AI and v0 by Vercel take the edge off starting your own little UI projects. This has led many designers to venture into the realm of front-end coding, giving them an unprecedented control over the final experience.

Will you be able to make a career out of design engineering? Who knows, but being able to code your own design components will give you a tremendous edge and companies are interested. For a glimpse into what the role entails, check out designengineer.io

Creative design engineers to follow:

• Mariana Castilho @mrncst
• Dan Hollick @DanHollick
• Julius Tarn @tarngerine

The visual mastermind

https://medium.com/media/5cbb6d93b1a9139eb797239eed92675b/href

In a world of sameness and low-risk branding, exceptional visual designers stand out. Truly tasteful visual design can be applied to UI, branding, marketing and sales. While AI floods our feeds with mediocre visuals, and all apps now look kind of meh, some designers are raising the bar in terms of what remarkable visual work can look like.

For a visual feast, check out these tasteful visual designers:

• Oğuz @oguzyagizkara
• Fons Mans @FonsMans
• James Laurent @jameslaurents
• Benjamin den Boer @benjaminnathan
• Brett from DesignJoy @BrettFromDJ

The designer PM

“PMs are now doing code demos — using chat GPT — and they’re even handling user research. What’s most concerning is that they’ve essentially overpowered the SVP of design and are now dictating UI decisions” — superhiperwalrus in Reddit

Product management is such a weird role. PMs usually don’t design, or code, or do user research. Yet they call the shots on what a product should or shouldn’t do. And they get paid ridiculous amounts. Do you know why? Because they take on responsibility. PMs are held accountable for the success or failure of a product.

But here’s the kicker though, designers (and engineers) are the OG PMs. If you’re a designer who can lead projects, you’re worth your weight in gold.

You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors […] they decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them. — Steve Jobs

https://medium.com/media/2814184eb119609bbd95e4f075ecf3aa/href

From what I’ve seen in my career, the most senior designers are essentially product managers who can actually design. And the best product managers started out as researchers, designers or engineers.

Transitioning into PMing is for those of you who enjoy the product and business side of things. You can play the PM card in two ways. Either you stay a designer and prove that you can lead successful projects, or you change you title and get a job as a PM. And of course, nothing stops you from doing both.

To learn from the best PMs, look no further than Lenny’s Podcast.

Parting thoughts

You’ll notice one commonality among the 3 roles I cited above. They all start with a solid foundation in design, and expand their stills into front-end, visuals or product territory. No one can predict the future, but one thing is certain, if you keep taking on exciting challenges that help you grow, you’ll always find opportunities to do well for yourself.

So find that little obsession of yours, and go after it. Worst case, you’ll have some fun learning something new.

https://medium.com/media/c861c4e1ec3d4573a2b68f217849e9db/href

One more thing:

How to persevere through periods of learning

Being a beginner at anything sucks. To stay on track:

1. Collect inspiration voraciously. Develop a taste for good stuff. Stalk your heroes. Hang out where they hang out.
2. Ignore age and stereotype. If you like something. Go for it. Obviously you won’t get world-class but you don’t have to as long as you enjoy improving day by day.
3. Keep it fun. You don’t have to monetize everything you do. Do things for the love of art. Explore ideas.
4. Listen to Rick Rubin.

Further reading

• Dunning-Kruger effect and journey of a Software engineer — Addy Bhardwaj
• Four stages of competence — Wikipedia
• Dunning-Kruger effect — Wikipedia
• Tools of Titans — Tim Ferris
• My view on the designers most in-demand for 2024 — Tom Scott on LinkedIn
• The Business Bootcamp — The Futur
• Pricing Design — Dan Mall (Sadly out of print)
• Creative Strategy and the Business of Design — Douglas Davis
• The Win Without Pitching Manifesto — Blair Enns
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson
• The Obstacle is the Way — Ryan Holiday
• Designengineer.io
• Changing the Conversation about Product Management vs UX — Melissa Perri

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Maintaining a growth mindset was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.