The Journey of Being Self-taught - Part 3
Do you ever start a journey without knowing where you’re going? without knowing the real cost and when it’ll end? I certainly don’t, and if someone ever told me that my career would feel like this, I would have laughed. Everyone that knows me understands that I’m a planner because I go on a vacation trip with a year ahead of plans, reservations to attend and carefully chosen flights.
It turns out that my professional career was nothing like that, especially the part where I assumed that my learnings from the university would be the main tools for my future job, whatever it was going to be. Looking back where I started and where I am right now, it can’t be farther from the truth.
This article is part of a series where I explore my journey of learning Product Design on my own, you can check chapters one and two to read the full story.
Transformation and Return
I’m now back to working remotely, and not only due to the pandemic, but rather because the team I’m part of is distributed in three different countries. It came full circle for me, but now I’m on a team instead of working independently.
Some things haven’t changed, like the fact that I enjoy having a quiet space to work, or the mid-afternoon snack that recharges my energy for the last few hours of work. But if I have to be honest, most things have changed drastically compared to the initial phase when I was flying solo. My work is data-driven, collaboration is now essential in my tool belt, and being a leader to my team has taught me that the sum is greater than the parts.
Now that I’ve gone through this drastic change, I realize that what got me here won’t exactly take me to the next level. Sure, I still read articles, listen to podcasts and take courses every now and then, but the way I approach learning is way different than it originally was, so here’s my current recipe for growing.
1. Being intentional
At the very beginning, any article or resource that crossed my path seemed useful, and it totally was, at least for a while. As the years passed by it became increasingly difficult trying to keep up the pace and now I’m left with a couple hundred articles — literally — on my list, waiting for me to set time aside and read them one by one.
The FOMO was strong at first, I felt that if I didn’t read the latest article that I found I wouldn’t unlock the next level of my growth until I realized that I’ve done enough study on certain topics to be confident enough when talking about them, and with some others, I really didn’t need to become an expert to advance in my career.
I didn’t want to become a jack of all trades but master of none, and what helped me to get out of it was totally unintentional: I started developing an interest in specific topics.
Before I realized it, I had to create separate bookmark folders with multiple levels of hierarchy for increasingly specific topics, like Design Systems from end-to-end, Business Design, and my favorite one in over a year: Design Leadership.
The words from Steve Jobs resonated in my head: Focusing is about saying no. As much as I wanted to learn everything that crossed my path, I had to become intentional in my learning to reach my goals sooner.
These are some practical tips that keep me focused every day:
- I stopped following large publications in general and instead started following specific hashtags from them and industry leaders sharing content related to the topics I’m currently interested in.
- After reading Measure What Matters by John Doerr, I started developing personal OKRs around focused learning, to search for and prioritize content based on what I’m currently studying.
- Saying no to distractions was a tough but necessary skill to learn, but useful to prevent me from going on a tangent. It’s easier said than done, but it boils down to being conscious of your time and prioritizing activities based on your goals.
2. Books
Through my entire career, I’ve been hearing about how industry leaders are big book worms and can easily pinpoint quotes or learnings from the hundreds of books they have read in their life, but for some reason, I wasn’t convinced that it was a good idea to spend hours and hours reading books, not when the internet had already so much information at my disposal.
Few of the books that I read caught my attention, mostly detective and dystopian fiction, but they were hardly useful in a professional context. That was until I got the first recommendation of a non-fiction book: How to Make Friends and Influence People.
Truth be told, the title was deceptive. I, for one, wasn’t truly interested in going around making friendships because it usually requires a lot of time investment and high levels of trust. But the influence part of the title was enough to pique my curiosity and give it a try.
The old saying of “Don’t judge a book by its cover” fits perfectly with Carnegies’ writing because it was much better than I ever expected. Have you ever wanted a manual on how to deal with human relationships? Look no further, this book is exactly what you need.
It opened my mind just a few pages in, with an incredible amount of practical advice packed in just one book, teaching me a good lesson: books are more than just entertainment and I can learn from them just like I did with articles or podcasts, if not more.
I took the matter seriously and made a reading list on my own based on recommendations coming from everything else that I was consuming. It started with about 20 at the top of my head that I could remember, and every time I’ve come across another one I simply add it to the list. There are currently 72 and I’ve only read 15% of it. It will take a while, but it’ll be totally worth it.
From the 15% that I have read so far, these are my top recommendations:
- The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo
- Measure What Matters by John Doerr
- Business Thinking for Designers by Ryan Rumsey
- Radical Candor by Kim Scott
- How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
3. Community
When you come from Latin America, some aspects of your tech-related career will be innately different than other parts of the world, and the one that stood out to me early on was the size of the community or lack thereof. Nowadays things are changing, but it’s still relatively small and there’s a lot of work to be done if we want to bring everyone together.
As my career progressed, I started noticing how on social media and particularly on Twitter, designers interacted with each other around the world, but I hadn’t found a way to be part of the ongoing conversations for more than just a couple of tweets. That is until On Deck came around.
A colleague of mine had been talking for months about a community he was part of as a company founder, and I wasn’t paying that much attention until he heard that a new program tailored for design leaders was going to start and he thought it would be perfect for me. After applying and being accepted, I had a gut feeling that this was going to be something great, I just didn’t know it would become a pivotal point of my career.
Week after week, I wasn’t only learning from industry leaders and getting practical advice on how to become a better leader, but the connections I did and continue to make even these days after the core 8 weeks have passed are invaluable. Even this blog article that you’re reading is an outcome of it, thanks to a weekly session we can attend to write together each Friday.
I could list all the reasons why joining a community can push you forward in your career, but the single main difference it did for me was teaching me how everyone has something to offer and areas where you can help just as well.
A few years ago I was purely self-taught, working with others but focusing on myself. Now I have colleagues, friends, and even my own team that I can trust to share, collaborate and learn with them.
What initially made me anxious about not knowing how my journey would end, turned into a career that has been anything but ordinary, and going through all these challenges made me stop thinking about the end and actually enjoy the road every step of the way. After all, life is a journey and not a destination.
“As long as you’re learning, you’re not failing.”
— Bob Ross
