I never used to like interview articles — I felt they lacked substance. Too much backstory, not enough useful information to help me do my job better. But over the past few years I’ve realised the error of my ways. It became clear that by getting to know the people who make the things we use every day, we keep being reminded that we’re defined by more than the jobs we do. And we find that we have more in common with people than we might think.

This week I read two great interviews with designers I’ve admired for a long time. The Great Discontent interviewed Trent Walton, and Industry Web Conference interviewed Josh Brewer. Both interviews are worth reading all the way through, but I want to mention something specific that stood out for me.

Once you become a parent you start looking at everything through that lens — from grocery shopping to restaurant menus to the work you decide to devote your life to. There’s no getting around it. Non-parents usually find it annoying, while fellow parents are drawn to each other and can’t help but discuss how the parenting lens affects every single decision they make every day.

So, my favourite parts of these two interviews were their reflections on parenting. Here’s Trent:

It’s insanity [at work] until 5pm and then I go back inside and it’s all hands on deck. I’m feeding the kids, changing diapers, reading books, and bathing them—I love it because there’s no time to answer email or think about anything work related. It’s a really great transition for me. What I would have thought I would see as a pain in the ass is the best part of my day and it helps me to shift gears.

And here’s Josh, saying something similar:

Keeping things in balance was (and is) a constant challenge and something that my wife and I work hard at. I tried to be home in time for dinner and reading to my daughter and tucking her into bed. Weekends were definitely reserved for family time. I was lucky enough to walk to and from work which gave me a little time to decompress.

It’s hard to explain how comforting it is to read those paragraphs. To realise that these extremely successful designers — people I look up to and learn from every day — generally don’t work 12 hours a day. They work hard, of course, but as any parent knows, 5:30pm - 7:30pm is chaos. And the people we look up to aren’t immune to that. They don’t have superpowers that allow them to fly through that time, and the ones I really admire don’t push those responsibilities to their partners or someone else. They show up, every day, and they pursue the challenges of being a parent with every bit of passion that they throw into their design work.

This is really obvious stuff, I know, but I also think (hope?) I’m not alone in the struggle to find a balance between pursuing my career goals and learning to become a good parent. So reading Trent and Josh’s stories gave me comfort that it is possible to excel at what you do without losing your soul to your work.

And that’s why I like interview articles.

Jeff J. Lin looked at the life of director Ang Lee and pulled out some insights on what it takes to be successful. This part from Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success talks about the long periods of non-success that often occur:

If you’re an aspiring author, director, musician, startup founder, these long stretches of nothing are a huge reason why it’s important to pick something personally meaningful, something that you actually love to do. When external rewards and validation are nonexistent; when you suffer through bouts of jealousy, wondering “How come so-and-so got signed/is successful/got a deal/etc?”; when every new development seems like a kick in the stomach, the love of what you are doing gives you something to hang onto.

Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times — whether through sheer determination, a strong support network, or simply a lack of options.

Related, Paul Tough’s thesis on how children succeed:

Noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

— Lou Holtz (retired American football coach, author, and motivational speaker)

I can’t stop thinking about this quote ever since I saw it on Quote Vadis. At some point over the last three or four years, life became pretty heavy. The pressures of two kids, a career, and a life that’s just public enough to invite some nastiness every once in a while can really wear you down.

So it’s easy to fix your eyes on the load. The weight, the texture, the uncomfortableness of it all.

And then I read Austin Kleon’s words of encouragement in his post On writing post-fatherhood.

You owe your kid food, safety, and love, but you also owe him your example. You give up on The Thing, and then when the kid grows up, he might give up on His Thing, too.

So don’t give up on The Thing.

The Thing in this context is writing, but it applies to so much more. It’s the dream you can’t let go of — the products you want to build, the lives you want to affect positively, the tiny dent you want to make in the universe. If we let the load break us, The Thing will never happen, and worse — our kids will watch us give up on what’s important, and maybe do the same.

I can’t let that happen.

Here’s to carrying the load better.

Jason Cavnar wrote a great piece for VentureBeat called Why developers should start choosing conscience over profit. He urges us to be Makers, not Takers:

Makers choose their work based on impact and happiness. They recognize the truths in the work of people like Daniel Pink and Simon Sinek — that income does not generate happiness or enjoyment, nor alleviate sadness or stress. They concern themselves with doing work that is important. With thinking about what moves society forward. With jobs and startups and weekend hacking and open-source contributions to things that have a real-world impact. They introduce and push fundamentally new technologies.

It reminds me of Matt Gemmell’s Makers and Takers:

People who make things, or Makers, contribute something to the universe. Makers are people like writers, musicians, artists, architects, software engineers, carpenters, and the chap at the coffee shop who makes your morning latte. He has a skill, and he applies it to create something that makes your day a little bit better. […]

When I’m choosing who to spend time with, or seek inspiration from, or learn from, or adopt as a role model, I’m exclusively looking at Makers. The fire and water, rather than the mere pipework. The lightning, not the rod. Surround yourself with Makers.

And one more, just for good measure. Here’s Mike Monteiro in Design Is a Job:

I urge each and every one of you to seek out projects that leave the world a better place than you found it. We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

So there you go — some nice midweek inspiration.

Every time I start a new job I take my dad to see my office. He loves seeing where I work, and I love showing him. It’s a thing. As much as I enjoy this unspoken ritual of ours, there’s always a predictable response from my dad that serves as a clear indicator of our large generation gap. At some point he’ll ask a question along the lines of, “So… no one has an office? You just sit out here in the open?” I’ve tried many times to explain the idea of co-location and collaborative work, but I don’t think it’s something that will ever compute for him.

This isn’t a criticism on how he’s used to doing things (especially if he’s reading this… Hi Dad!). But it shows how our generation’s career goals have changed from “I want the corner office!” to “I just want a space where I’m able to do good work.” We’ve mostly gotten over our obsession with the size and location of our physical workspaces. But we haven’t completely managed to let go of that corner office in our minds: the job title.

Even that’s starting to change, though. This tweet from Jack Dorsey has received over 1,700 retweets so far:

Titles, like “CEO”, get in the way of doing the right thing. Respect to the people who ignore titles, and fight like hell for what is right.

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) September 29, 2012

In episode 60 of Back to Work, Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin discuss what they call “work as platform”. The basic idea is that we need to stop looking at work as a thing you do for a company. If you view your career like that, your success will always be linked to the success of the company, as well as your ability to survive within that particular culture. You will be at the mercy of people who are concerned about their own careers, not yours.

Instead, if you think about your work as platform, your attention starts to shift to using whatever job you are doing to develop your skills further, so that you’re never at the mercy of one company. Here’s Merlin, from about 31 minutes into that episode of Back to Work (edited down slightly):

If you think just in terms of jobs, you become a little bit short-sighted, because you tend to think in terms of, “What’s my next job?”, or “If I want good jobs in my career, what do I put on my resume?” So in terms of what you can do to make the kinds of things you want, and have the kind of career you like, I think it’s very interesting to think about what you do in terms of having a platform for what you do.

There’s always this thing about “doing what you love.” Well, doing what you love might not ever make you a nickel. And if doing what you love sucks, no one is ever going to see it, like it, and buy it, which is problematic. That’s not a branding problem, that’s a “you suck” problem. So the platform part is thinking about what you do not simply in terms of what your next job is — it’s a way of thinking about how all of the things that you do can and should and do feed into each other.

I think it’s worth giving yourself permission to take a dip into the douche-pool, and think a little bit about what platform thinking might mean to you. Because if you are just thinking about how unhappy you are with your job your horizons are going to become pretty short, and your options are going to be very limited.

So here’s how I want to pull this all together. Just like we’ve moved on from the idea that the big office is a big deal, we have to let go of the idea that a big enough title is equal to a successful career. Much more important is that we figure out what it is that we want to spend our time and attention on — and then working at our craft to make that our platform.

I was really inspired by Jason Santa Maria’s interview in The Great Discontent, in which he said the following:

One of my greatest fears is being at a big company and rising through the ranks to become a manager of people. That’s an art and there are people who are really good at energizing others and getting the best work out of them, but the thing I most enjoy is being hands-on and seeing something through to the end. I want to keep making things and not just talk about making them.

That resonates with me. It doesn’t have to resonate with you, and that’s the point. We don’t all have to follow the same path. You don’t have to run out and learn how to code. But be curious enough to find out if coding is your platform. Build your own platform, and make your own work. That’s what it means to “do what you love.”

The Great Discontent just published another great interview, this time with Cameron Moll. The final two paragraphs, where he speaks about the kind of legacy he’d like to leave, really spoke to me. First, on a personal level:

I think the legacy I hope to leave for my family is that they, of all people, knew me in the most intimate way and regardless of how the public saw me, I hope they will be appreciative and thankful for who I was in their presence.

Or to quote CJ Chilvers:

As noble as you may believe your pursuit of excellence is, it means nothing if you go home at night to people who do not recognize you or want you around.

I’ve been thinking about family a lot lately, since the birth of our 2nd daughter 6 weeks ago. The first child is mostly a physical adjustment — the long, hard process of getting used to very little sleep, very little time, and no room for selfishness. The second child is more of an emotional adjustment. Suddenly you’re a family of four. Suddenly you’ve become your parents. Suddenly the people close to you can be scattered in many different places, and your heart somehow needs to stay in your body and not freak out because of all the evils in the world that can possibly hurt them. From physical exhaustion to emotional exhaustion — that’s the move from one to two kids.

But for me it is also a move to a better understanding of what it means to be a family, to be bound together through thick and thin, to care more for these people than I ever thought would be possible. And with that comes the realisation that I don’t want to be that guy. That Dad at the park who’s always on his iPhone. The one who’s never home in time for bath time. So I obsess over these things — it pretty much takes an act of God for me not to be home to give my 3-year old a bath. And when I fail, I fall hard, and sometimes stumble rather slowly back on my feet.

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about family a lot lately. And as much as I love my work and my side projects, I cannot allow that to become more important than my family is. So I identify with Cameron and CJ’s words. I feel like I often fail at building towards that legacy, but I’m going to steal a buzz phrase from startup parlance and say that I think I at least “fail forward”. I hope.

And then, on a professional level, Cameron says this:

I don’t have it all figured out; I’ve made so many mistakes, but I hope that through some of the work I’ve produced or the efforts I’ve championed, people feel inspired to try harder and be better.

These things seem like pretty good legacy goals to strive for. Sign me up.

Chris Bowler took the wind out of my sails with Overcoming Project Guilt. It’s as if he’s been living in my head the past couple of weeks. With a newborn and a 3-year old, I’ve become increasingly nervous that I’m not doing enough to “contribute to society” by working on my side projects. Chris says that’s just crazy talk:

Please do not spend your time endlessly comparing your accomplishments or progress with those who have no family. You’re setting yourself up for guilt at best, and resenting your family at worst. […]

In all of this, you will have to decide where your priorities lie. Is launching a new application, store, blog more important than building up your children? Do you find yourself watching the clock between 5 and 8 PM, waiting for the kids to go to bed so you can get in a few more hours of sketching, coding or PhotoShop?

I know things will normalize eventually, and I’ll have time for all of that stuff again. But for now, I have to be ok with putting some things on the back burner.

I love the conclusion of Leah Hager Cohen’s The Courage To Say ‘I Don’t Know’:

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile: Or, Treatise on Education,” the philosopher writes, “I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.” Too often we fear uttering these words, convinced that doing so will diminish us, will undermine our status and block our advancement.

In fact these words liberate and empower. So much of the condition of being human involves not knowing. The more comfortable we become with this truth, the more fully and unabashedly we may inhabit our skins, our souls, and – speaking of learning – the more able we become to grow.

I’ve been saying “I don’t know” a lot recently. It’s uncomfortable, but I think it forces me to dig deeper for the right answers.

I really like Mike Monteiro’s “Dear Design Student” series on the Mule Design blog. The latest entry gives advice on how to deal with clients who say things like “I hate green!”:

When a client says, “I don’t like green”, most designers translate the sentence into “You must change the green.” But no one asked you to, did they? They merely made a statement about their subjective dislike of a particular color. Your job, as a designer, is first and foremost to listen. And then to gather data. Don’t jump the gun. How, if at all, does the client’s subjective taste enter into the success of the project?

He proceeds to give some good advice about how to figure out what the real problem is that the client is commenting on (if there is one).

(My other favorite post in the series is I want to start a company right out of school!)

If you’re at a company where the next step up the ladder means managing people more than managing the quality of the design the company is producing, get the hell out of there. There’s way too much design to be done to be losing good people to idiotic corporate structures that take our best designers out of commission.

– Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

Those are some harsh words from Mike. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I’ve now spent about an equal number of years at small companies as I have at big companies. And I’ve come up with a theory that I probably shouldn’t even write about yet, because I might be wrong. But in the spirit of thinking out loud, here goes — as long as you know I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

My theory is that as soon as a company grows to a size where the people who make the strategic decisions aren’t the same people who actively work on making the product, it becomes very hard for that company to continue to serve the needs of its customers. Not impossible, just much harder. We recently did some work with a startup where the founders are also the people who write all the code for their product. They were passionate, engaged, ego-less, and interested in only one thing: how to make their product better for customers.

But in bigger companies, what often happens is that once you enter the management career path, priorities start to change. You need to learn how to play the game so that you don’t become irrelevant. You need to watch your back. You need to figure out how HR works so that you can get to the next step on the ladder. Directors need to know how to become VPs. VPs need to know how to becomes Senior VPs. Senior VPs need to know if there is any growth left for them. And sooner or later, you spend so much time caught up in the politics of the organization that there is simply no room left to worry about customers.

I am not saying that all managers are like this — I have been in these situations myself, and I know how difficult it can be to stay sane, and I know many people who are managing the pressures extremely well. But it doesn’t help that we tend to measure business success by the size of a company, and personal success by the seniority of people’s roles within that company. In his much-praised post Startup = Growth, Paul Graham said the following:

Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company.

Mark Suster responds to this particular idea in a very interesting post called Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?:

Some entrepreneurs can make a dent in a smaller world. […] It’s ok to build a company that stays small, has a few million dollars in revenue and builds careers, bank accounts and enriches client experiences.

A poster child for this kind of startup is 37signals, whose CEO Jason Fried has repeatedly stated that they deliberately stay small. From an interview with Fast Company:

I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. […] There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to — our revenues and profits support that — but I think we’d be worse off.

My point is that each of us needs to think carefully about the kind of career we want to have. If the title at a big company is what you’re after, that’s great, but make sure it’s because that’s what you want, not what the system makes you think you want.

But if you find that a company focus on growth is making it harder to make customers happy, or that you’re no longer able to do the things that you love so much that you decided to make a career out of it, it might be time to consider working at a company where the decision-makers and the doers are the same people. You might make less money, but you’ll also be happier.