VictorE

 When we look into people’s eyes, focus and think about it, we often times see projections of ourselves within them. We paint their manifestations with our own perceptions of them, both negative and positive. And it’s interesting that we view people in such a way, because each person is a reflection of ourselves, not our bodies but our thoughts and insecurities. When Sartre mentioned  that in the character that “Hell is other people”, he is not saying that as truth. We create our own hells and use other people around us as agents. It is our own selves to create the hell and it is our own selves to take it apart. It is us and us alone. No one else.

Something that pisses me off about has been my desire to seek out things that are comfortable, riskless, and prestigious. Has it ever occurred to you that it’s the people before you that contributed to that? And has it ever occurred to you that you have as much stake and even more responsibility now to perpetuate that lasting tradition instead of just riding on it?

We value things based on such criteria instead of seeing how much we can learn and help transform it ourselves. Maybe I’m just irrational, but I enjoy things that are broken, imperfect, and unworthy. I enjoy solving it, patching it, and resuscitating it. In a sense, I want to save it. I won’t let it die. I won’t let the others prove me wrong. I want to prove myself right.

youmightfindyourself:

You would like to figure out the approximate probability that there are no jackpot winners for the Mega Millions. On March 27, 2012 4,715,569 tickets from the total pool of tickets were winners. Approximately 1 out of 40 randomly chosen tickets are winners. Therefore we can approximate that 40 *…

youmightfindyourself:

By: Keenan Cummings
Beaker Magazine, March 19, 2012

I was an agency-trained, senior-level, print/branding designer and left to work at a startup. Here’s why:

-1- I want my work to feel valuable.

It seems the higher up the institutional chain you climb, the more abstract the value you generate, and the more you are worth. The roles become so far removed from the end goals they are managing, and you have to wonder how long you can stay focused on what matters — making peoples lives better.

“The vast majority of the wealthiest people I’ve met are far more about building value for themselves than they are about creating value for anyone or anything beyond themselves.” (Are You a Role Model, HBR)

But this doesn’t add up in the startup world, mostly because there is not time nor room in the equation for anyone that doesn’t directly affect the outcomes of pursuing whatever the goals may be.

In a startup, value is a concrete measure of your contribution. I enjoy the clarity and trepidation that brings to the work. Things can fail, and the onus is on the person or team that failed to solve the problem correctly. (No blaming ‘bad’ clients!) Likewise, the triumphs are deeply felt because of the intimate relationship you have with the possibility of failure.

-2- I want to stop talking about good work and start making good work.

Startups are notoriously biased toward action — it’s a survival tactic in a competitive field.

I’ve spent a lot of time on research and development, writing pages of airy ‘positioning statements’ and the like. It often felt like intellectual glut that gummed up the process. “Research & Development” feels valuable, but I’ve found that it rarely delivers.

Startups trade R&D for insight and iteration: talk to users, find a solution, something elegant and surprising and useful, and try it out, not as a print out on the wall to be discussed and over-thought (and yes, over-thinking is symptomatic of many if not most stalled innovation processes), but something out in the real world with other people using it.

-3- I want other people to find value in my work.

That value is directly tied to making people’s experiences — and *hopefully lives — better. You have to deliver on that if you expect any kind of real impact.

Client work can often be far removed from any real world positive affect. When your goals happen to align with a client’s, then sure, it’s great to help them achieve that. You’re lucky if you can build a roster of clients you deeply believe in.

More often you are operating under one major but overlooked assumption — that lending clarity and delight to any message makes the world a better place, regardless of the real value of the message you are helping to sell.

Working as part of the team that is defining not just how a product gets communicated and used, but what that product is and what it does for people — that’s an opportunity you rarely get with client work.

*Part of the reason I have a very specific idea of the type of startup I want to work for. There are plenty of problems I don’t care to solve, and more power to the people out there tackling those.

-4- I want my mom to understand what I spend my time doing.

You ever meet someone very successful and say to yourself “what the hell do they do?” You ever meet someone that can hardly answer that question themselves?

I’ve come to believe that “coordinating teams of interdisciplinary, strategic partnerships for generating long term sustainable growth” is code for makin’ spreadsheets and delegating real work (the spreadsheet has even become the symbol of faux productivity). 

-5- I want to design with empathy, and that means being close to the ground.

I want to get as close as possible to the people that will love, hate, use, abuse, praise and sh*t on my work.

There is power in making something for someone you know well, someone that you’ve taken the time to listen to.When you are designing for a real person with a real problem you exercise that designer’s empathy that you’ve been trying to squeeze out of yourself when you read vague marketing reports about a ‘target’ consumer or an archetypal customer.

You sit down for a casual cup of tea and a chat and they blow your mind with insights into what the problem is and how to make something that really works. You take that with you, synthesize and sift through it, and cone up with something that you are uniquely qualified to come up with. It is grueling, sweat-dripping-from-the-brow work — empathy exercise. Getting it right is intense and rewarding.

-6- I want my stamp on the things I make.

I don’t want to contractually hand over credit for my work to any institution. Too many designers do great work that is absorbed by client’s contracts or even by the agency they work for.

The industry is changing. Designers are getting involved long before the brief is created. They are helping identify opportunities and build platforms and even products and in turn, generating an immense amount of value. The industry is demanding much more out of agencies but the rates aren’t changing. And we aren’t just talking learning new tools or building a web team or hiring film producers. Clients are demanding deeper domain knowledge, broader expertise, and bigger ROI.

I can go create this value somewhere else, for something I really believe in, and for a company that is moving quickly and iterating responsively. 

I realize why I work. I choose to overcommit myself to tasks, classes, and jobs because it distracts me. I don’t know what the hell what I want from my life and productivity provides me something to do while I wait and push my desires aside. It’s my form of procrastination.

fuckyeahillustrativeart:

Stephen McCranie

For quite a while, I truly wonder how I’m impacting others. Am I just some schiesty person? Then I remember that other people’s reactions matter very little to me. In fact, my circumstances only contribute to 10% of my happiness. 40% is my attitude about it. I’m forfeiting too much control if I decide to give people’s reactions any more than 10%.  

Too “Idealistic”?

It took me a while to understand why I’ve had trouble communicating my thoughts or why I’ve had problems with motivating people to take on something. Others saw my goals as too far-reaching. They saw my goals/initiatives as improbable and too much effort.

I’ve thought about this long and hard, and I realized where they’re coming from and what they were trying to communicate to me.

I began to uncover this truth last week. As an assignment from my ME 104B class, I had to take this StrengthsQuest by the Gallup Organization to examine my top 5 strengths. They were listed as:

1. Input (Learning/Collecting Knowledge)
2. Restorative (Problem Solving)
3. Achiever (Idealist)
4. Adaptability (Spontaneity and Evolution)
5. Developer (Maximizing Opportunities)

Analyzing these strengths had me to focus on “Achiever”.  Whenever I get stuff done, there is always a part of me that pursued perfection. No matter how much I felt after accomplishing so much yesterday, I would feel dissatisfied  when I don’t get something perfect. It’s that internal fire: it pushes me to do more, to achieve more. 

The problem before was not that others were lazy.  It’s that I always breathed those winds of discontent. While that force may bring me energy, it demotivates everyone else around me. It also allows others to believe that this need for achievement might not be logical. Most of the time, it’s not focused, which explains why I fail to communicate my desires properly. My resolution to this problem is to simply keep these concerns to myself and work on solving them instead of sharing them sporadically.

Another contribution to my idealistic thinking is that I have the ability to think short-term as well as long-term. Whenever I pursue an event or initiative, I think of the possibilities in both frames of time.  Therefore, things that others feel that are hard to achieve such as ending world hunger, curing cancer, and other megalithic goals like that are possible. 

The reason why I wrote this post was because of a quote that inspired me. One of the professors for MS&E 193W (Technology and National Security), Secretary of Defense Perry shared a video on expert views regarding the importance of the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons:

Shultz: A man named Max Kampfelman, who had been my counselor when I was secretary of state, made an eloquent statement emphasizing the importance of talking about what ought to be. If you are constantly mired in what is, and you never look at what ought to be, you’re never really going to get anywhere. And he used the Declaration of Independence as an example: all men are created equal - in 1776, are you kidding me? We had slaves. Women couldn’t vote. You had to have property to vote. We had ‘ought’ up there. And gradually over time, with a lot of pain, the ‘is’ has come closer to the ‘ought’. And we ought to have a world free of nuclear weapons.

That quote assured me that I didn’t have to change my thinking or curb my idealism around others. What I was doing was necessary and proper if I wanted to transform what “ought” to be to what “is”. It’s important to have these idealistic thoughts because these are goals that are reachable if we examine them generationally.  It’s never wasted to have  and chase these dreams. Even though the road to this is painful, it’s definitely worth it. I am going to continue to pursue my goals and never stop.

cbenjamin:

I love that I have a diverse following, but this note is especially for my non-white peoples (though you can donate as well). Aziz is totally right about the need for people of color to register to donate bone marrow. While working admissions, I had the blessing of interview a young woman that had been battling leukemia most of her life. She had had a bone marrow donation once and the chance of remission was less than 25% or so. Because she is white, it was comparatively easier for her to find a matching donor. Needless to say at the end of her junior year she slipped into remission and needed another bone marrow donation. She told me about her roommate in the children’s hospital that was from Central America and died waiting for a donor match and how common it was for people of color with diseases like leukemia to die waiting for matches. This happens for 2 main reasons. The first is that it’s REALLY hard for people to match. The second is so few people of color register to donate, thereby lowering the chances of another person of color to find a matching donor (ethnicity does matter when it comes to bone marrow donations). It’s really fast and TOTALLY painless to register: you just swab your cheek and send back the kit. 

azizisbored:

BECOME A BONE MARROW DONOR PEOPLE. 

I posted about this a few weeks ago and just wanted to update.  

Amit Gupta has acute leukemia. He needs a bone marrow donor to survive. Unfortunately, South Asians are really unrepresented and his chance of finding a match are low. So I’m encouraging all of you (in particular brown folks) to join the registry. All you do is swab your cheek with the q-tip looking things (as seen above) and send it in. It takes 3 minutes and it can save someone’s life.

Click here to get a kit and swab your cheek. 

Amit needs your kit BEFORE November 30th. Seriously, just click and do this. You get a kit in the mail, swab your cheek with some q-tips, and put it in the mail. Done. Couldn’t be easier. If you know any brown people, harass them to do this. Be racist if you need to. (Ok don’t be racist, but encourage them to do it.)

For more info go to: www.amitguptaneedsyou.com.

My Worldview

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two Impostors just the same; Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”  - If by Rudyard Kipling

I was just speaking to a friend about my worldview. Recently, I have undergone a huge, traumatic experience that devastated me financially, mentally, and physically. I still have the same feelings of anhedonia now, but I have been working and striving to truly improve my view.

What actually destroyed me was holding onto the faith that the world was a better place, that there was more good than there was bad. The result of my worldview is what brought me so much internal suffering: was I wrong about everything?

I wasn’t so sure then, and I am less than certain now. While the tangible situation was able to fix itself,  I was still in the process of repairing  my identity. 

My worldview will not let others or my circumstances define my identity or what I can do to make my situation better.

I am able to commit full passion to what I do because I care and I deeply want to give as much as I can to others. It’s also to realize that I can’t assume everything I assume as true. I don’t know all the answers, and it’s that search to understand myself and be sensitive to my environment that will allow me to have a fuller life. If I can recognize what’s inside me and what’s alien and treat it as one, that’s when I know I have performed well.  I’d like to continue that for the rest of my life:  form relationships, live, and love.