Feeling Stuck in Your Career?

How Design Thinking Can Help You Approach Life Differently

I decided at 16 that I wanted to be a graphic designer. I feel really blessed that since graduating college, I haven’t taken a single job unrelated to design. I realize how rare that is, and it’s been very rewarding and educational. But now that I have a few years experience under my belt, and have slowed down enough to think about what I want the entirety of my career to look like — I suddenly felt stuck. The challenges that used to motivate me feel less and less meaningful as the years go on. Deciding to enroll in graduate school for user experience design was a reaction to that feeling, and even now, a semester (almost) down, I can’t 100% say I am sure of what I’m doing.

In this Hidden Brain episode, Vedantam speaks about finding the solution to this feeling of being ‘stuck’ in Silicon Valley. He spoke with Dave Evans, who used to work at Apple, designing the iconic one button mouse with Steve Jobs. What they realized was they couldn’t begin working on the mouse without knowing what they should be building — a one or two button mouse. Evans and his team at Apple used design thinking to solve this problem, and found in prototyping that users preferred one button.

This is Evans’ explanation for how design thinking can help solve the ‘wicked’ or difficult to solve problems in life, where one solution doesn’t fit all — like raising kids or choosing a career. It is through this process of iteration and prototyping that we can approach our lives and learn as we go.

Evans says we are asking the wrong question — we shouldn’t be looking for the one best solution to our lives, that we are just waiting until we become that one ideal version of ourselves. There isn’t one career or life plan for any of us. So how do we approach this in a healthier way? One exercise Evans does with his students is to have them come up 3 completely different versions of themselves and try prototypes in each of them. This helps you recognize there are many lives you can have, and now you are going to choose the one you’re going to have. This life will be good and maybe even great, but it’s not exclusively good — it’s just a good life you’re living now.

This exercise helps you articulate to yourself what your alternatives are, and make you feel more confident in choosing a path. Searching for the ‘perfect’ path sets you up for high pressure to hit a very high bar.

The fact is, nobody knows what they’re doing and we’re all making it up as we go. According to Evans, the answer is to get really good at making it up as we go along.

Sometimes this involves difficult realizations. Many people are unaware that they have circumstances, not problems. If you can’t doing anything about it, it’s not a problem, it’s a circumstance. If you cannot support your family as musician, it is an unfortunate circumstance, but it is not an actionable problem. Evans calls these ‘gravity problems,’ and accepting them as facts, you free yourself to do something you can do.

So now what? This is where those alternative life paths you create for yourself can come into play and help you pivot and iterate your life path. Ask yourself how you can create a path that keeps your lifestyle going but that can also make what you do for love not money (music) as satisfying as possible? That becomes the life you can design.

The takeaway from Silicon Valley: try a series of quick experiments (practical and doable) in your life, learn from them, come back and iterate and move forward. Let’s stop sitting around waiting for things to be ideal, and start moving forward with this mentality of living a life in constant beta.

Here’s a question Evans poses to take away with you and help you get started on the design thinking path:

What can I do in the next two weeks that can give me some new information?

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