How To Gain +999 Resilience As a Designer
When you think about it, sharing design work is a pretty intimate experience. All of the creative processes going on in your brain are manifested as sketches, prototypes, mockups, or a host of other mediums that are a direct reflection of your thinking. And when someone comes along and critiques that work, it can get personal pretty quick.
This is especially true for young designers since it’s natural to invest a lot of emotional value towards the things you create. Unfortunately this results in some unnecessary frustration under the critical eye of a good teacher. Far too many design students aren’t resilient enough, and left unchecked, it can be detrimental towards their career as a whole.
Why does resilience matter?
It matters because it sets you up for quicker and more frequent success in any project you decide to take, especially if you have a desire to create a startup. That’s because the most resilient designers are the ones who aren’t afraid to take the risks of disapproval that innovation invites. If you’re lacking in this area, you’re going to corner yourself into building “safe” designs which, although they might look good, never have the potential to be groundbreaking (ehem… Dribbble)
And at an even more basic level, people respect someone who has enough confidence to lay down their thoughts on the line in an unapologetic manner. It hard to take someone seriously when they don’t take their own designs seriously.
How do I quickly grow resilience as a designer?
1. Always generate new solutions to problems
Design is all about problem solving. If you have a backlog of problems with potential solutions, you don’t have to hold so tightly to any one idea. Let them get trampled on during critique. So what if the idea crashes and burns? You’ve got 20 more where that came from.
2. Share your ideas everywhere
It doesn’t matter if the people you’re sharing it are part of the expected customer base. It could be your roommate, family, classmates, or some random people on a subreddit. Imagine they’re all stakeholders and you’re pitching them your new product.
Your family might not tear the idea apart, but you can be assured that people online will. Exposing yourself to that is among the most effective way to build resilience.
3. Preform enough user research in the beginning
All of your design solutions are built off of this foundation. The sooner you can truthfully answer these questions below, the quicker you can start sharing your designs.
- How will you add/grow customers?
- Please describe your domain expertise in this market. What do you know that others don’t?
- How do you know people need your product?
- Who are your direct and indirect competitors? Who do you most fear? How are you competing?
- Why would customers choose your product? What do you offer that others don’t?
- How will you make money?
- What is the estimated size of your total addressable market? How much can you capture?
- What are the primary factors that will lead to your company’s failure?
Answering these questions forces you to think critically about the viability of your solution, making you more confident in sharing your designs. And that’s the most important part. You need to be healthily connected to your solutions so that critique will actually carry weight, but sufficiently detached because you've collected a backlog of ideas that you can comfortably move to when this idea (probably) crashes and burns.
Simply stated, you’re able to build resilience in proportion to the degree of confidence you have in your solution.
Summary
Becoming a designer with +999 resilience manifests itself in three ways:
- Constantly designing new solutions to problems. Innovation is always better than iterating on something current.
- Sharing your ideas with as many people as possible.
- Conducting solid user research to make sure you have a viable solution you’re proud of.
The return on investment for a skill like this is really high. A few months of consciously increasing your resilience can very seriously yield hundreds of thousands of dollars in added revenue in the long run of your design career. But that’s assuming you’re trying to build your own company, and not become a cog in the corporate design world.
Next, we’ll be talking about why designers are the most prepared of all to build and launch successful businesses.
For another perspective, this book by Mark McGuinness gives a good take on why resilience is necessary for anyone wanting to create original and meaningful content.
