The making of a maker

The delusion of thinking that I must be in a leadership position to be able to make a difference in my career as a product designer was holding me back from my own success.

In times where many of us are obsessed with self promotion, desperately searching for opportunities to prove the meaning of our lives by the glory of leadership, it was not easy for me to let go and admit that I am moving in the wrong direction.

I don’t think that I am alone in that. Which is why I want to share in this post how moving away from questioning what I should do with my life, to what I actually want to do with my life helped me realize that I was aiming at the wrong target.

But before jumping into that, let me give you some background about myself.

In the beginning, there was passion

I’ve started my career in graphic design more than 10 years ago. I didn’t even think about it as a career back then. I just really liked creating things in photoshop and to my surprise, people actually paid me to do that.

With no formal degree or even a clear direction, I’ve slowly transitioned into the world of web and mobile design, and eventually ux and product.

I was driven by a passion that I could not really explain or articulate to myself or others.

Somewhere in the beginning of this professional life as a graphic designer, I had the opportunity to manage a small mixed team of graphic and jewelry designers for about two years.

My experience in design was little, and my experience in managing others was zero. Those were the most challenging and difficult two years in my all professional life.

Making every possible mistake you can think of a manger could do, it made me so depressed until I couldn’t take it anymore and just resigned off my job.

I’ve left with the thought that I have failed but I was still thinking to myself that what I really needed to do next is to take a step back and gain more experience in this profession before moving again into becoming a manager.

Continuing as an individual contributor and developing my seniority, I kept having this voice in the back of my head telling me that at some point I should, and must move into a leadership position the sooner or later.

Time passed and I felt more and more as a failure for not making any progress into that direction. My enjoyment of making stuff, the thing that I was always passionate about, was fading away.

Its place took the feelings of guilt and shame for not being successful.

Fast forward into early this year, I was really excited when the book “The Making of a Manager” came out. Like many other fans of Julie Zhou’s writing, I expected to find all the good stuff that will help me with my struggle of progressing towards management.

And indeed the book is packed with practical and applicable no bullshit advices and tips on how to successfully lead and scale design teams for new, and even more experienced design leads.

What I didn’t expect however, was that it will change the course of my life and help me rethink if I was at all even moving in the right direction.

One of the triggers was a question at the beginning of the book: “How do you know if that’s the right path for you?” Julie asks, and later continued with the suggestion that “You have to enjoy the day to day of management, and want to do it”.

I am making the assumption that most of those who read the book have probably ignored that question and continued in their pursue of becoming successful leaders.

Many of those readers, are probably already in a leadership position and purchased the book in the hope of finding comfort words that will help them with their day to day struggle.

Someone to whisper in their ear that it is fine, that they are moving in the right direction. It just that they needed to try harder to overcome the struggle and build their competency for leadership.

And this is probably true and helpful for many great leaders out there.

But I was more concern about how could I know if I was moving in the right direction from the first place?

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” ― Stephen R. Covey.

You see up until that moment, it occurred to me that I never stopped to ask that question. I was instead focusing on what I should do, not on what I sincerely wanted to do.

The difference in between these two words, should and want, may sound too subtle as you read this and perhaps won’t come out as significant. But in my case it made a huge deal.

Asking which direction should I choose created a very different picture in my mind in comparison to the question what I actually wanted to do with my life.

Should, elicited follow up questions such as what is expected from me? How do I become successful by the measures of others? And how do I prove my success?

Mistakenly, I have attributed the definition of success to a leadership role, while in reality I should have thought about my own measurements of success.

A leader or a manger, so I thought, was the natural next step for me to demonstrate success in my career. Why? Well it’s obvious, “leaders gets all the good stuff. They have power and fame, they are up there in the front line getting all the prestige of being shown on the headlines, and on top of all that, they make a shit load of money.”

Then what about makers? Well, “makers are just a bunch of losers. They are failures of society that are not willing to work hard to become truly successful. Stuck there in their comfort zone, immature and not seeking real challenges neither responsibilities in their life.”

I have a feeling that I am not alone with having these very wrong misconceptions of the two different paths which are both very important and successful in their own way.

In this culture where makers don’t often get into the front page of the news while managers, leaders, CEOs and entrepreneurs do, what we tend to believe (or at least I did) is that the only way to really be successful in your career and life is to be in one of those positions.

We all strive for a meaningful life. We all as humans want to be remembered greatly; it is one of our ways to cope with our mortality, to defeat death –which is driven by our fear of dying.

Becoming a manager, so I have thought, was about to gain me this power. It was about to give a meaning to my life.

Top down vs bottom up perspective

I’m a problem solver. I enjoy that part of my work. In my day to day job as a product designer I am always looking for ways to find creative solutions that could enhance our product.

However sometime I realize that the issues is not with the solution, rather with how I look at the problem.

Somehow with my personal life I have failed to see that I was looking at the problem from the wrong perspective.

Looking at it from a top down perspective, I’ve picked leadership as something to aim for, breaking it down into a list of traits, qualities and competences that I should acquire in order to become successful in my career.

And overall, this make a lot of good sense and sound quite reasonable when you think about it. You have a goal and you try to achieve that goal by defining your own strategy to get it.

The main issue going that way was that I took a chance here believing that at some point I will learn to like this position and everything that comes with it along the way.

I didn’t really know what I wanted. I’ve stopped listening to my true self, trying instead to be someone that I may or may not like to be.

I was still making stuff, but I was not happy because I had that fear that I am not doing the things that I am supposed to do to pave my way into management. My focus was not on my work, but on how to become successful enough to transition into that next level of design leadership.

Realizing that, I began to think about what would happen if I looked at the problem from the other side, meaning bottom up. What if instead of thinking about the title I wanted to attache to my name on LinkedIn, I would focus on the things I really care about, like my passion for making stuff.

Finding my inclinations and core values

In his fantastic book Mastery, the brilliant author Robert Greene uses the phrase “inclinations” to describe those unique tasks we are all naturally inclined to engage with and enjoy doing since we are young.

Figuring out those and using them as a lighthouse to direct our way to our true purpose is how each and everyone of us can find a meaning in our life, as Greene was discovering by tracking and researching the paths of masters from the past.

“In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society.” — Robert Greene

When I was a teenager I was a very shy boy who was curious about almost everything and anything in life and nature. One day my oldest brother gave me a special gift. It was an old drum machine, Roland TR505.

I was fascinated by this mysterious device and started exploring the thing, experimenting with all the weird and funny sounds that came out of it. I would spend hours trying to figure out how I can make simple drum loops of electronic music. It was a great way for a shy and introverted kid like me to express himself.

Time and space disappeared when I played that drum machine. Psychologist have a name for being in that state where you are fully immersed, focused and energized about what you are doing. it’s called flow.

To better understand my drive in life, I had to dig deeper and investigate all those similar moments in which I had experienced true flow, discovering my inclinations and distill them all into a roadmap that could cast a light on the direction to my own unique and meaningful purpose.

The more details I added, the more I’ve began to see some patterns and themes starting to emerge.

When I was in flow, I realized, I was curious. I was learning. And I was making stuff. And most importantly, I was truly happy.

Discovering my core values and reminding myself what I am really passionate about felt like a big relief. It helped me gain back my focus and enjoy the process of my work.

I once again gave myself the permission to make and do stuff, to be curious and to continue to learn and discover new knowledges without the guilt and fear of missing out the management path.

It also helped me gain back my confidence in myself.

I’ve figured out that all those things I like doing such as strategy and visioning are not reserved to the “gods of management”. As a maker, I still get to do all these stuff and even demonstrating leadership in my own areas and responsibilities as an individual contributor.

I’ve let go of the FOMO (Fear of missing out).

I don’t need to (or want to) build teams or grow individual designers and keep supporting their career with one on one conversations and feedbacks.

However I do want to inspire, help and influence others, and I can still do all that by mentoring, which I am much more comfortable doing than leading full time.

Choosing a direction is not permanent and no matter where you are in your career you still have the chance of making corrections that will steer you in the direction that is right for you.

The main point is to get your focus on the tasks that you do in your day to day work and reflect on how you feel about them. It is about being mindful and being in the moment to realize your own unique and sincere true inclinations and most importantly — the direction they are taking you.

It is a bout realizing what you want to do, not about what you should or are expected to do because of other people definition of success

When you learn to define your own success with your own measurements, you find purpose and meaning in your life.

From my personal experience it is not something to be forced, rather discovered. So try not to feel bad if you are still not there yet.

For some lucky people it may come easier so they can actually learn that in the beginning of their career.

For others, like me, it took almost a decade.

I appreciate your time reading so far and hope that you found it valuable or helpful. I would love to know if you share similar feelings, or if you feel lost by moving in the wrong direction in your own career as a designer like I did.

Please share your thoughts and experiences and any other comments below 🙏🏻