Time waits for no-one: stay curious, be intrepid and make your own luck
- TIME’s Design/UX Director Adam Perlis: rewards come when you’re pro-active, inquisitive, and keen to learn.
- Success arrives with a step into the unknown: “Don’t be afraid to pivot. When you move, providence moves with you.”
- If life is all about making bold decisions, how do you know when you are about to make the right one — or the wrong one?
Designing the user experience for a platform with millions of daily visitors is a big enough task, but in doing this job for TIME, Adam Perlis experiences the extra pressure which accompanies a world-famous media imprint. Nevertheless, he takes it in his stride, and his resilience was shaped through hard work, an open mind and an eagerness to try new things.
At TOA, we love to hear the life stories of key decision-makers as much as discovering the inside track on their work. And while it’s great to learn what innovators do when they reach a position of authority — it doesn’t answer the tastiest question of all: “Yes, but how did you get there?”
In the week that TIME announced Donald Trump as its Person of the Year, we asked Adam to re-tread his path — so, thanks to some gentle probing and a few of Proust’s simplest (and trickiest) questions — he described his route to TIME…
TOA.life: What has been your biggest life-pivot, and how did it help you get to where you are now?
Adam Perlis: One of things I really pride myself on is that my life is full of pivots, and my career has largely been focused on learning new things. A few pivotal moments came at unexpected times, but they came because of some hard work I was doing at different stages in my life.
A false start: When I graduated from college with a Business and Marketing degree, I got my first big job at a big ad agency, Digitas — and after six months of learning the ropes I realised I hated being an account manager and that what I really wanted was to be a creative.
And that’s when I got a phone call from my old boss at NBC Sports, where I interned a year earlier.
I’d worked hard as an intern, and had passionately pursued learning Final Cut, so he trusted me, and we had a good relationship. I quit my advertising job and became a Production Assistant. After a few years producing and editing I realised I needed to learn more to do all the cool stuff I saw on TV, so started learning from online tutorials. It lead to a few freelance jobs, but I still wasn’t using it in my day-to-day.
A blast from the past: I volunteered to create some marketing videos for my new employer AT&T AdWorks — it wasn’t part of my job, but I was itching to be more creative, so I took on the extra work. That lead to my promotion to Creative Director, and during that time I learned to code and do more web design projects, along with an intern called Will.
A couple of years later, I decided that if I really wanted to work in the product design world I needed a better website that showed off all my skills. I spent two weeks on it, posted it to LinkedIn and got a message from my old intern at AT&T.
Turns out Will had been quite successful for his young age, and had become the Director of Innovation at TIME Magazine. We met for coffee, and he asked, “How can I get you to TIME?”
I asked him, “When do I start?”
I guess my best advice is don’t be afraid to pivot in your life, and don’t be afraid to learn new things. A friend paraphrased William Hutchison Murray and said, “When you move, providence moves with you,” — in other words, you make your own luck.
TOA.life: When making decisions — in work or life — what “acid test” helps you understand that it’s the correct choice?
AP: It’s hard to ever truly know if something is the right decision. What I can say is that I have always followed the things I am passionate about — so my gut has told me that it’s the right move.
Your training, your preparation and your thinking present opportunities to you when you least expect them: so in those moments you will know the right thing to do.
Happiness to me is being happy with yourself. Ultimately, you are in control of your own happiness.
TOA.life: A question from Proust — what do you appreciate the most in your friends?
AP: I appreciate their loyalty, honesty and support. I have been so fortunate to be surrounded with such unbelievably successful people, but when we met, we were all “nobodies”.
However, I think we all recognised some amazing qualities in each other which is why we are still friends today — and why each of us has been able to reach the heights we have. I still go to them for advice about life and business; and I still go to them to have a laugh.
TOA.life: And one more — what is your idea of happiness?
AP: Happiness to me is being happy with yourself. Ultimately, you are in control of your own happiness. You have the power to choose, and make decisions in your life to institute change that will make you happier.
I feel empowered when I make choices to help me cope with life’s stresses, I feel happiest when I know that the choices I have made have been truest to myself and my well-being.
Listen to Adam’s fascinating talk at TOA Berlin 2016 where he describes using Design Sprints to rapidly evolve ideas and solve problems:
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