How the way I was raised atrophied my ability to solve problems
Life always finds a way to level our skills at the right time.
Nearly 5 months as Product Designer at Seedrs, I come to some very interesting conclusions about myself and life itself. More than a very good job, this opportunity has been an incredible moment of self-knowledge. In the midst of my philosophical moments, I realized some things:
At the moment, I am a very weak Product Designer
How absurd to admit it in public like that, right? But I think it’s important to point that it’s a temporary state. It’s the recognition of my incompetence and the first step to becoming competent.
The fact that I admit that I’m weak in my problem-solving process has made me wonder: Wait… why do I have this? I thought I was a little bit creative, since I’ve been working as a Graphic Designer for years, being praised for my projects, getting customers, gaining positions in the market… there’s something wrong here, right? Shouldn’t the problem solving skills be associated with creativity?
Along with millions of questions, coaching sessions with my Jedi master, crisis in the shower, and desperation to study as many things as possible to overcome this weakness, I came into two important questions: “Why did not I develop this and how did I still developed my imagination?”
2. Mom, I love you, but part of this situation is your fault.
Children are naturally curious. They like to understand why the sky is blue, why the water is wet, or why they can’t eat a whole bag of cookies before dinner.
I don’t know about you, but I was a child like this. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t have that much patience with me and started to answer “yes”, “boy, stop asking so much”, “you’d better not eat all that cookies or the flip flops will fly.” There’s a time when we get tired of continue like this and understand that make too many questions is not something good.
Of course, school also helps a lot with that. Give correct answers, don’t ask questions. People who asks too much are stupid. Everyone else gets easily irritated by the amount of questions … and so… life goes on in a natural way to find the answers that pleases and not the right questions to expand.
This behaviour happens even after the famous Einstein’s quote:
“If I only had an hour to save the world, it would take 55 minutes to define the problem and 5 minutes to solve it.”
Then I became a Graphic Designer and, you see, when the work appeared to me, a lot of decisions had already been made, and then it was “just” solution time. Some questions were asked (which meant that I did not feel like a lost cause in my current career), but in general, my fuses did not burn with this, but with the imagination to develop a good solution, with all the answers available there. Find references, experiment, combine, steal as an artist, study theory to understand how to apply, trial, error, attempt, error, approval.
You see, in Graphic Design, we usually solve problems on a daily basis, but when we move on to a more detailed analysis of Product Design, we must start the process WAY before the solution, where the right questions are made! Living this situation, I realized how weak I was with that skill. And then we got the last question.
3. What about imagination? How did I not feel this big barrier when I started making Design?
That was an interesting questioning… and I remembered that, as a child, I had this habit of creating stories alone in my bed before sleep. Epic stories with heroes, magic and everything else. That habit nobody could kill and, at that point, my mother helped me a lot (I love you mom, don’t get mad at me) encouraging my reading, writing, letting me watch a lot of television (I’m not sure if that was an advantage, but many of my visual references came from it), putting me in music classes and other cultural activities that I was interested.
Hence came the interest in drawing, design, hard work, reading a thousand books, four years of design school, which continued developing my imagination. This reflection led me to remember that any skill can be developed with due time and effort.
Right now, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to become a great Product Designer… I just need the patience to train that atrophied muscle that has always brought me troubles in life, though I’d never given it enough attention. And with that, there will come other perceptions, other developmental needs and other phases of this cool game, which is life.
And you, do you realize some weak point that you will have to develop to pass in the next phase of the game of life?
