I’ve been thinking about Miya Tokumitsu’s In the Name of Love for days now. Miya argues that the mantra “Do what you love” devalues work and hurts workers:

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers. […]

“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL as career advice upon those covetous of her success.

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

It’s a tough critique, and at first I was looking for reasons to dismiss the argument. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. The “do what you love” idea is related to another theme I often see on social networks. It’s some variation of the message “If you don’t want to go back to work after vacation, you should find a job that doesn’t make you want to go on vacation all the time.” This has always felt wrong to me. I love my job — I really do. But that doesn’t mean I can’t also enjoy spending several days with my family, hiking, climbing, and hopefully with my nose buried in a zombie book.

This doesn’t mean I’m lazy, it doesn’t mean my job isn’t meaningful, it doesn’t mean I don’t like the people I work with. I will just always find a different kind of enjoyment in actively doing nothing than I do when I work. And it turns out that leisure time — and in particular, being bored — is really good for us. Nicholas Carr says this in The web expands to fill all boredom:

We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom.1

So I just think that it’s ok to split up work and leisure. If we’re lucky we get to have jobs that we love doing — and we should absolutely work hard to accomplish that goal. But spending time away from work (or working on side projects) is important and healthy, and we shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge that. It doesn’t diminish your job satisfaction or dedication if you enjoy being on vacation.

Anyway, I’ll have Miya have the last word:

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. If we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.

And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we really love.

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1. Also see Joseph Epstein’s excellent essay on boredom called Duh, Bor-ing. ↩

Craig Mod’s newsletter is one of the few emails I always look forward to reading. In the most recent one Craig gives some advice for people in their 20s:



To the younger folks reading now: If you’re willing to live in that small apartment, forgo that fancy food and expensive clothing, and uphold a semblance of disciplined and focused work ethic, you can probably hack more experience into your life than you’d imagine. […]
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The emotional textural quality of my memory of life then is so intense because it was a period of only the ephemeral. Those years can only reverberate in my gut because there is no material thing upon which to place those feelings. No physical token to help me remember. It’s a period of my life where I learned to walk a city (because it was cheaper than eating through a city, or five-star hoteling a city), learned to find great pleasure in the night-sounds of one piece of town winding down or the stirring of another the dawn following.
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His thoughts brought me back to my own story, and the similar circumstances I was in when I first moved to the US years ago. I moved into my first apartment with only a blow-up mattress I borrowed from my then-fiancé, and a coffee machine she bought me as a housewarming gift. I bought my first chair for $20 at a Salvation Army store, and since I didn’t have a car I had to leave my passport with them so I could borrow a dolly and push the chair back to my apartment (what a sight that must have been to passers-by).



But you know what? It was an amazing time. It taught me not to take anything for granted. It taught me how to really get to know a city (on foot — always on foot). And it taught me the value of working hard, and always keeping an eye out for things to make me laugh, especially when it’s not going well.



Starting from the bottom of a mountain teaches us that there’s more to life than standing at the top. What matters is the people you’re with and the conversations you have and the lessons you learn — not how far up you go. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be ambitious. I’m just saying that as long as you enjoy the views with those who give your moments meaning, who cares where you’re standing?

Tim Caynes’ on exposure is an honest and accurate depiction of what it’s like to work at a design agency:

if there’s one thing that really hits home in your first 3 months of transition, it’s the change in pace. and it’s not that the change in pace is a bad thing. it’s just that it feels like you don’t have enough time to think. which means you don’t have enough time to design. which is stressful and surprising and difficult and awkward. because you might not actually be able to do it. you might fail. and everyone will be able to say they told you so. and you’ll be exposed.

And this:

be under no illusion, when you work for an agency, your constraint is time. but your reputation is all about quality. so quality is, and should be, ruthlessly monitored, evaluated, and understood. and that’s why the integrity of design and design thinking is the first thing that you will get caught out on. well, apart from the pace thing. but it’s not personal. even though that’s what it feels like the first few times someone like me sits down with you, looks at your designs and pulls that horrible squinty patronising-but-really-caring face that tells you there’s something not quite right.

This post hit home for me in so many ways.

Today I’m going on what is sure to be one of the most interesting trips of my career. I’m going to do a week of UX and Product Management training and consulting for an e-commerce company in Tehran, Iran. It also includes a public event where I’ll be chatting with the broader Tehran UX community about responsive design and product management.

It’s going to be a busy trip with 6 days of solid work, so this is a heads-up that Elezea will probably be very quiet next week. That said, I’ll definitely do a big write-up of the experience once I’m back. I’m really interested to see what life in Tehran is like, and what challenges and opportunities the web community there are dealing with.

Since I feel bad about not writing much over the next week or so, here is a gif of a giraffe that’s not impressed:

See you on the other side!

My thanks to Booking.com for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS Feed again this week to promote their career opportunities.

Forgive the cliche, but coming to work for Booking.com has been one of the best decisions. Within a week of arriving to the Netherlands, I had already created two UI experiments and pushed code to the live site. It was intimidating and thrilling at the same time. Those feelings haven’t left. I’m constantly humbled by the more than 300 super intelligent colleagues of 51+ nationalities! I learn every day. If there’s a day I don’t? It means I wasn’t in the office.

The warmth and acceptance of new hires is brilliant. I was invited for chess, football, drinks, and even knitting, within a fortnight. Friday after work drinks can easily evolve into an adventure anytime. There’s always something to do in this city. And at Booking.com, there’s always someone who’s willing to join in. The many parties are just something that has to be experienced. Come join and I’ll show you around!

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

The front-end team at Booking.com continues to grow and we are looking for talented UX Designers, Web Designers, Product Owners, and Front End Developers to come help us create the world’s best accommodation platform.

You’ll work at our head office in central Amsterdam which is sandwiched in-between canals, museums and the occasional statue of an old Dutch master (good evening, Mr. Rembrandt). We’ll pay to move you and your family from anywhere in the world; USA, Portugal, New Zealand, Brazil, Japan, just to name a few! We’ll provide short-term accommodation and help you adjust to your new home in Amsterdam. You’ll be given the freedom to make impactful improvements to a website and collection of apps used by millions of people. We also have unique company perks like bicycle reimbursement, on site lunch, monthly parties, and our world class year end party complete with live performances!

Apply today.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Ainsley Wagoner shares a story from architecture school in How We Measure Success. She describes a lecture in which their architecture professor first painted a picture of what it’s like to chase the best internships straight out of school, and work oneself to death. And then the professor contrasted that option with this one:

Or you can stop right now and ask yourself what kind of life you want to have. Look around you and figure out where you can make a real impact as designers and architects. Become developers, change the zoning laws, get involved in your communities to affect real change, you can do so many things besides being a cog in the starchitecture mega-firm machine. But whatever you do, you need to ask yourself what your priorities are. What do you want your life to look like in ten years? And allow the answers to that question influence your picture of success.

I don’t think this is a question you ever stop asking yourself…

About a year ago Cennydd Bowles wrote a very good article called A changing tide, in which he thought out loud about the trend of high-profile agency designers joining internal product teams. One of his hypotheses was this:

A great agency is still a strong asset to the industry and its clients, just as a bad agency is still harmful – and there are undoubtedly counter-examples to my evidence. However, one thing is clear: the design industry’s focus is no longer on agencies. It is on products.

He goes further to conclude:

A lot’s been written about the alleged decline of client services, and plenty of people are now rushing to its defence. As always, “it depends” is the only reliable answer; context is the key factor in deciding whether to work for, or hire, external consultants. But I do wonder how the agency world will respond to this shifting community focus. How will they manage to stay an attractive option for designers and organisations who are increasingly internally-focused?

My reason for bringing this up is not to re-ignite the debate over the value of client services. I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. I’m currently on the agency side, but I don’t think I’ll do that for the rest of my career. I think agency-side and product-side design roles stretch one’s skills in different ways, so there’s huge value in both. There are also big downsides to each, of course (for example, product-side can become monotonous, while agency-side can become frustrating when work doesn’t go live).

What I’d like to talk about, instead, is why it suddenly feels like some product-side designers look down on agency designers, as if we’re the body boarders to their cool surfer personas. Here’s David Cole in The Rise of Product Design:

Increasingly the best designers of our time are not working for agencies, but for in-house teams at startups and tech companies. I think this is an important shift, not just for where the work is done, but how the work is done.

Looking back at the ideas espoused by the UX community, I find their relevance to my work winnowing by the year. Many of the practices seem forged in the fires of consultancy.

And here’s Tuhin Kumar in What kind of a designer are you?:

It is not the biggest surprise that some of the finest designers of products happen to work at tech companies and startups. I would argue that a startup or a larger tech company that cares deeply about design (I can definitely attest for Facebook being one) is a better place to bootstrap your career in design than any traditional design agency. There are lot of reasons for this but the biggest and most obvious ones in my head are the breadth of projects and the quick learning curve.

That last sentence is a head-scratcher. I don’t see how one can argue that a designer at an agency doesn’t get much variety. I come from an e-commerce background, but through my agency work I’ve had the privilege of gaining experience in financial services, mobile technologies, and a wide range of consumer products. Plenty of breadth there.

But again, that’s a side note. What I’m confused about is the tone. The subtext that agency designers are not the “best” or “finest” designers. I keep coming back to Cennydd’s article from a year ago, because I think he’s right: there’s been a shift from agency to products. That’s fine (I’ll say it again: I love the product-side and will probably end up there again some day). But we need to be careful about downplaying the role of agencies, and how agencies work.

The other subtext in all these recent posts is that deliverables are for amateurs — real designers create prototypes and ship products. That is absolutely true, and if you’ve found a company like that, more power to you. But it is simply not how the world works for everyone. I’ve said this before, but to make a blanket statement that deliverables are unnecessary ignores the mountain of organizational challenges that need to be overcome in some companies to build useful, usable products. And sure, I’m defending the agency side forcefully here, but I guarantee you that without real deliverables, we wouldn’t get anywhere in some organizations.

Does it make our role less desirable that we have to spend a bit of extra time on “non-design” activities? To those who have found their homes in design-centered companies, yes, definitely. But does it make us second-class citizens in the industry? Yeah, I don’t think so. I’m going to throw it out there that without agencies, we wouldn’t have been in a situation where tons of companies now get the value of design, and therefore fork out tons of cash to make sure they have kick-ass internal design teams. And it’s a pretty awesome feeling when you see that shift happening in an organization, knowing that you’ve had some small hand in it.

So all I’m saying is let’s recognize the inherent value in both sides of the industry, because we all have the same goal: to create great products that delight users and make businesses successful. We’re all in this together.

I always enjoy the interviews on The Great Discontent, and this one with designer Matthew Smith is no exception. Here he describes how he turned his hobby into a business:

At the time, my wife was pregnant, we had a one year old, and we were all living on about $26,000 a year—I knew I had to think bigger, so I went for it. I got the first $8,000 job and then another. Then people started asking me to build more things, like customer databases. I would nod in agreement as if to say, “Of course I can do that,” and then I’d get off the phone, crap my pants, and go do research on Google, ask questions on forums, and figure it out in order to deliver a product to a client and make them happy with the results. Done!

I can certainly relate to the get off the phone → crap pants → figure it out workflow. I also like Matthew’s critical take on the concept of endless feeds on the Internet:

Who came up with the idea of endless content constantly streaming toward us? There’s this unlimitedness that concerns me because it is so unlike the rest of the human experience and I think it confuses the human mind and puts us into a space where we aren’t at our best. I want to make sure that no matter the project or company I’m involved with, I’m always asking if it’s serving the human best and helping us be at our best.

That last part reminds me of something Alex Griendling said recently:

Our work does not exist in a vacuum; it is given context and meaning and power by the places it appears and the people that benefit from its usage. When clients hire us, they’re doing so because they believe it will benefit them. With this in mind, it’s important to ask yourself the question “Is this client worth helping?”. If great work is made for those that exhibit repugnant practices, how does this benefit anyone other than the individual client?

Words to live by…

Jason Kottke once said that The Onion is often the most emotionally honest media source we have, and that was proven once again with David Ferguson’s recent article there called Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life:

Because when you get right down to it, everyone has dreams, and you deserve the chance—hell, you owe it to yourself—to pursue those dreams when you only have enough energy to change out of your work clothes and make yourself a half-assed dinner before passing out.

But what I really want to talk about is Kevin Fanning’s excellent follow-up post where he tries to figure out why that Onion article struck a chord with so many people:

I think the reason this article is painful is because culturally we define success in such a weird and outdated way. There’s this idea that if you’re not doing what you’re most passionate about all the time, you’re a failure. If you aren’t making a living at it, you’re a failure. If you’re not Stephen King or Christina Aguilera, you’re a failure.

Kevin’s conclusion (among other things, that “maybe eventually we get to a place where we see that books and music and art are created by us, people who have school and day jobs and other shit we care about”) is a call to relax a bit, and be much less hard on ourselves. Read it and feel better!