I should have done this long time ago
In High school, I used to spent hours and hours designing websites. It was pure joy. There were no “SMART” goals or deadlines. Nor did I have to deal with hard discussions with stakeholders. It was just me, Photoshop, and my idea of a website I wanted to build. When I look at some of my work today, I feel a bit embarrassed. The designs weren’t anything impressive. Some of them I’ve never finished. But none of that mattered. What I remember to this day is the joy of coming home after school and designing something for so many hours, and only taking a break to eat.
Then, I landed my first job as a User Experience designer and things changed. It was still fun to design websites but from that time I had to achieve specific goals with my team. We had to measure how websites perform. How our job improved key metrics. And it wasn’t about us or users anymore. There was always pressure for the job to be done sooner, cheaper, and better. Everything was new and exciting, and I learned a lot. But designing wasn’t as joyful as before. The joy of coming home to design something just for fun vanished.
For a few years, I wanted to start writing about my experiences working at an agency and share what I’ve learned about topics like business, strategy, marketing, research, and design. However, this rigid thinking made me over analyze and second guess myself. That formal approach (as I call it) made me wonder:
Why do I want to write about these topics?
What do I expect to achieve?
What experience or mandate to write about them I have?
Who’s my target audience?
Why should they care?
How will they benefit from my writings?
And you know what? Fuck it.
I tried to answer these questions so many times, and plan the whole activity of writing many times. And I always ended up feeling only doubts. That I am not good enough, that I don’t understand it enough, that I am not experienced enough.
But then something changed. I discussed this intention of mine with a few friends and they encouraged me to do it, even though they might not know they did. And I decided that I am not starting a new business here. I am not doing this for money. I want to do this because I feel excited about it. I am starting a new habit, here and now, wherever it leads.
This is something I should have done a long time ago.