Staying A Student

Nitesh Kumar
Dots & Dashes
Published in
3 min readMar 17, 2016

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I’m a designer and the design landscape changes everyday. Every other day, they launch a new tool that is supposed to help you design faster. Or, there is a new skill that is mandatory for a designer to know or you’ll be left behind. It’s like a zombie apocalypse. If you don’t adapt, you die. Well, you don’t die but you become outdated. I’m talking about design because that’s what I know but this is true no matter what you do. There is so much to learn out there, all you have to do is become a student again.

Do you love it enough?

A few days back, I was feeling directionless and wasn’t sure about what I was doing. I needed to talk to someone and luckily enough, I had a friend to talk to. I told him that I know I can do so much better and I’m not using my full potential. He asked me a simple question, “Do you love it (design) enough?” Of course, I said yes. He told me a small story about two musicians. So, there were two musicians. One was so good at it that music flew from his fingers. The other one was kind of average but he loved music more than the first one. Both played all their lives but somewhere in their careers, the second musician was better than the first one. All because he loved music more than the first one. All the answers you are looking for are inside you. You have to really love it.

Accept the fact that you don’t know everything

This is hard. Accepting that fact that you don’t know everything about your field can be hard and it can almost feel like you’re beating yourself up but that’s the truth. Self awareness is the first step towards becoming better at anything. You cannot hope to fix a problem if you don’t acknowledge the problem. Assess yourself, know where you lack and you’ll be able to see a clearer, a bit weaker but true self.

Make Peace With it

So, now you know that you’re not as cool as you thought and that’s okay. It’s okay to not know everything. It’s a problem only when you refuse to learn any further.

Do something about it

Do some actual work in this direction. This actually requires you to sit, put your head down and work. And don’t just put a body of work out there. Talk about your work, the behind the scenes stuff, the wrong decisions you took, how you took the right ones, what inspires you, the books you read, everything.

Keep doing it

This is the part where you acknowledge that the problem you had is not really a problem that can be fixed in some days, weeks or months. If you stop after sometime, it will resurface. Make the “Do something about it” part a habit. Do it everyday. It’s just a way of becoming better everyday.

Keep learning.

Thank you for reading. I’m Nitesh Kumar. Have a great day!

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Nitesh Kumar
Dots & Dashes

Product Designer @Helpshift . Always learning . lover of food, dogs and people.