2015 Life Lessons from UX

“I guess I just put too much pressure on myself, but I don’t know how to stop. I keep wanting to do something powerful with my life, something important. It’s what everyone expects of me.” A friend recently told me.

She was describing a feedback loop that had developed in her life, where she felt more pressure than ever to succeed, and couldn’t find any ways to do that. I asked her what she meant , and she described a constant pressure to follow all the things that she’s good at.

I recently heard a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on a podcast, where she describes the “conjoined twins” of Fear and Creativity. In that talk, she goes on to describe how her creative process works, and how we can contribute more meaningfully to people who are in a creative rut. After all, any problem that needs to be solved is a creative problem, finances, employment, careers, goals, art, love, meaning, these are all challenges that require our creativity to solve.

What I learned from UX in 2015, perhaps most importantly, is to fail. I have a history of rampant and unyielding perfectionism when it comes to myself. I used to approach problems with the desire to be Dr. Who, a sweeping flare of dramatic brilliance, an inspired clever quip, an unforeseen insight that saves the day.

When I started working in a new job, with people who are smarter than I am, those insights seemed less dramatic, and their lack of lustre made me question whether I’d become stupid. In fact, the opposite had happened, I was simply learning to tone down my own need for external acceptance, and learning to build my own internal acceptance structure.

In 2015, I learned to adjust my expectations to match the quality of life I’m after. I haven’t lowered my standards, I’ve just learned to see my quests with new eyes. I think 2016 will be a great year. I accomplished a lot last year, but I don’t see it as a sweeping quest to become the next Steve Jobs, I see it as a quest to continually improve myself, and forgive myself into a place of feeling empowered. I’ve been able to start supplementing my unforgiving drills for perfection with rest, leisure, and fun.

Among the most important lessons of the last year, I learned to give myself away. To be informed by the world around me in new ways. To cultivate curiosity as a virtue. I learned to give myself the room I need to adapt and grow in a broader space, and I did it with help from my friends, coworkers and leaders in my life.

What I told my friend was to pick one thing, a thing that made her curious, because curiosity isn’t so foreign to passion. When the world overwhelms us, sometimes the only thing we can do is focus, like a prism. Instead of holding onto things, or letting them go, letting them pass through us.

We talked at length about it, and I don’t want to share every detail, but if you’ve faced hard times, or are unsure about what’s next, just pick one thing and let it guide you. Even if it’s not forever, it’s ok to engage something right now, and let that lead you to the next step. In design, this is what we call iteration. In daily life, it’s more like being ok with not having all the answers, and both are important.

I want to finish this post with the Gilbert quote in full:

Everybody’s invited. When you say creative people, it’s redundant. We are creativity. And we’ve done a great disservice to bifurcate it. And one of the things I’ve been saying a lot to people is that we keep telling people to follow their passion. And I feel like that can be an intimidating and almost cruel thing to say to people at times because first of all, if somebody has one central, powerful, burning passion, they’re probably already following it because that’s sort of the definition of passion — is that you don’t have a choice. If you don’t — which is a lot of people, have one central, burning, passion and somebody tells you to follow your passion, I think you have the right to give them the finger (laughter) because it just makes you feel worse.

And so I always say to people, forget it. Like, if you don’t have an obvious passion, forget about it. Follow your curiosity because passion is sort of a tower of flame that is not always accessible. And curiosity is something that anybody can access any day. Your curiosity may lead you to your passion or may it not. It may have been for, air quotes, nothing, in which case all you’ve done your entire life is spend your existence in pursuit of the things that made you feel curious and inspired and that should be good enough. Like, if you get to do that, that’s a wonderful way to spend your time here.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Author of Eat, Pray, Love