#76: How I work, early musings
Think of this as a personal wiki — for the people I’ll build things with.
Inspired by Dustin Moskovitz and Claire Hughes Johnson, both courtesy of Tim Ferris Podcast. Most recently, fellow product designer and substack writer, @chaavi, wrote something similar.
It is increasingly harder and harder for me to describe what I do, even to myself sometimes. I write, I build things (with a team), I think of ideas—lots and lots of ideas. I also package those ideas, and sell them. A few years ago, I dabbled in teaching people how to do all of that, in both a classroom setting as well as in a 1-1. I do a lot and I cover a large area in terms of overlapping disciplines.
From an identity standpoint, it becomes a challenge to make sense of it all. This a critical piece to capitalizing it.
Capitalizing is essential in this case, not just because of the bills it allows me to pay. It’s also a means to expand and open more doors for myself. It’s a way to help others in the best way I know how—by deploying my skills and my talents where they can be most useful. What good is a ‘good thing’ if it is hidden and sheltered from a world filled with problems waiting to be solved? We all have something to give, something to contribute, no matter the size of the impact. Finding those areas, developing them and putting it to work has been one of the core guiding principles of my career.
The current live version of this document is here, on my site. I wrote this a few years ago right before the pandemic. It’s a good start, and I’ve always felt like an update was way overdue.
Consider this as an early draft to that update.
Early musings on how I work
When it comes to selling & presenting anything—ideas, services, my resume, I prefer to: Show, and not just tell.
I’m a visual person, and so are a lot of people. We, humans, tend to respond well with effective storytelling, but that is not an easy feat. It takes years, or even decades to really hone it, even then there is no guarantee you’d be great at it. I do believe if you want to succeed in most worthwhile pursuits, it is worth doing for a few reasons:
Talk is cheap. Having something to show for is better, much better. Whether that’s a thoughtful deck, or a prototype, or even a messy whiteboard, I am biased for visuals. When done right, it’s engaging, and fun, and most importantly, it builds credibility. The internet makes it possible for everyone to have a microphone, especially when you are opinionated. When you can match what you say with what you do and have evidence to the work you’ve done—that’s the extra step not everyone is willing to take.
Data can only take you so far. If you can’t present it in a way that makes sense to the audience who matters, it’s less valuable. This is especially true in UX.
Content creation is a vehicle, a currency, and a fuel for today’s economy and in economies of the future. Even if you don’t have an online presence, or aren’t planning on becoming the next Casey Neistat, there’s a lot of upsides to cultivating the skills required for content creation e.g persuasive writing, mobile video editing, graphic design, lean media production etc. In the corporate or startup world, it gives you an edge over coworkers who don’t. You’re able to flex your creativity in meaningful ways. You’re able to tell a story far, far more effectively. You’re able to empathize and learn, and perhaps, never really get bored no matter how tedious the task is. There’s a certain type of energy that happens when people exercise a tiny bit of agency in what they do. Creating things out of nothing is an immediate source of that.
Writing is my main way of thinking.
It is the baseline for my work, as shown here on this newsletter, and elsewhere. Most of my design work starts with writing. It makes sense to do so. A clear brain is a fertile ground for fresh ideas, and writing makes that possible. For additional context to this, please read my previous essays on this subject:
Shane Parrish of Farnam Street wrote an excellent essay on this as well:
‘…Writing doesn’t just convey your ideas, it conveys a part of you. Your personality and worldview become part of the work itself. While the reader remembers the story, the writer is forever changed.
Many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to think, understand deeper, or solve hard problems.’ from Writing to think
In work and in one’s personal life, almost everything is negotiable.
Becoming a good negotiator is a life skill that pays dividends, literally and figuratively. It’s funny how my learnings on this subject is shared and agnostic, in a lot of ways: negotiations in business influences its counterparts on my personal life. Where they can be applicable, obviously. Negotiation is also an essential step to closing things, to selling things. ‘
‘The success and influence of your work will be relative to how well you showcase it.’ from:
Speaking of learning… one of the best types of reward for me, aside from financial, is learning.
I love learning, especially from the most unexpected of places in a myriad of ways. There’s a lot of business benefits to chasing lessons, whenever possible, wherever possible. In my post #67: The work behind the work of chasing career-defining projects, I wrote:
‘But the hallmark of a great project is even in the act of letting go, it gives you back something that is extremely priceless: lifelong lessons through war stories, anecdotes and shared memories with people you’ve put out fires with. They’re not all happy stories, for sure. That is not the point of a great project.
The point of a great project is to learn how to fight the worthy battles, choose the people to fight those battles with and try your hardest to win them. Winning, in this case, could mean a variety of things:
Designing a really spectacular experience for the right type of users
Solving a critical problem using creativity
Being innovative in your company / industry
Pursuing worthwhile causes that brings in a lot of impact to society
Etc
There’s probably no shortage of lessons that come from great projects. If you are already learning loads from a current project, there’s a chance that you are in the middle of a great one.’
Unpopular in the age of Slack/Discord, but I have a stronger preference for emails as a form of communication.
Emails can be synonymous to ‘stress’, or ‘boring’, or ‘stiff’, or even ‘old-fashioned’ for a lot of people, especially the younger generation. I feel the exact opposite. Over the years, I’ve grown even more fonder with emails as a means to a richer, deeper communication. Emails, unlike dm’s, or channels, or even SMS, don’t promote instant gratification nor senseless urgencies. It’s perfect for long-format writing, threads, knowledge management and organization but most of all, it’s less popular nowadays. This is great for filtering out who you’d want access to you and for how long.
Nowadays, I mute most of my instant messaging apps. If people want real, possibly undistracted access to me, email is their best bet.
My influences are vast— from films to music to literature. I am not afraid to think in abstract nor to look for inspiration in different places.
For a company welcome email, I once wrote on my profile: 'I consider myself an industry-agnostic designer with a strong generalist background. I enjoy being in the intersection of commerce, and art, professionally as well as collaborating with talented people of diverse skill set.’. The point of which is to say that I value range. It is instinctive to me to connect patterns, deal with abstraction and work at a high-level in pursuit of connections. Lots, and lots of connections. Ideas are born at those intersections, and they thrive in environments that foster serendipities, randomness and luck. If I want longevity in my work as a creative, my brain would need to mimic that environment. That is why I read a lot, and that is why I watch a lot of films. There’s a caveat: I try and keep a relatively healthy consumption diet, with usefulness and curiosity at the top priority.
This is the end of the list, for now. I’ll expand this further into something more tactical, as I always do with themes like this. (See: #62: Building & growing a (digital) reputation, #63: Digital reputations, part 2: credibilities and how to establish them and How to build a bio, part 1 & 2)
Guiding questions that helped me think through this
As I was going through this thought exercise, I started my reflection on the assets I have: my work, my work & personal notes. I was looking for evidence to support my insights from above & it did worked. It also led me to also ponder on these questions:
What is my competitive edge?
What does my reputation look like to myself, to my loved ones and to others?
What am I great at and how can I do more of that?
What do I really want to do—if time, money and other resources were not a barrier?
What are the blockers that I have in making that happen, currently?
How can I get to a place where I can reasonably compromise and still be happy and fully satisfied?
What are the biggest lessons of my career so far?
How can I expand that and make use of that in ways that would continuously reward me?
What do I do on a daily basis that sets me apart from my past self and from others?
With all that I have, how can I give back tenfold to a world that has been generous to me?
The last question is extremely important to pursue. One that gives me a lot of energy, every time I think about the future.
I think a lot about how I work—beyond where I’m failing and where I’m succeeding so writing about it is easy for me. I live it. This is not about doing methodical things just for the sake of. It’s really more about energy and time management. It’s about finding areas where I can make smart bets about my future. It’s about the long-term pursuit of modeling and designing my life, and how I live it. It’s about seeking control, which is a real scarcity for most of us.
There’s a worry, as mentioned by Claire on the podcast, about sounding and being perceived as a narcissists when writing a document like this. I’m less concerned about that, just as I am way less concerned with how people (who don’t do this) can have the spare time to even make that criticism.
We all have choices to make and paths to pursue. Mine just happens to be one where I really don’t have the headspace to deal with judgement and unearned access to me. If I take every single comment as seriously as I do with my own, I would not have written nor have published anything. I would’ve still been on a blank google doc, stuck and anxious thinking more about why I’m not good enough to call myself a writer as opposed to just doing what a writer does: write.
As far as criticism goes, I’d take that over not doing nor shipping work, anytime. Always.
Thank you for reading working title,
Nikki
✨
If you have a spare moment, I’d love to hear your opinion on my newsletter. This will help me understand what to write about and curate better. I am also on Notes, where I post previews and premature ideas that fuel my writing streaks.
Worth your time:
Proof you can do hard things by
- GREAT essayNo, you don’t owe me a favor by
How to start, grow and monetize your engineering newsletter by
- - easily one of my favorite writers on substack
If you find working title useful in some way for you, the best type of support is sharing this to others who are like you. Thanks a lot again for your time.
Thank you for your kind shoutout here!! 🤍