YakShaving

As most of my friends and some of my readers may know, design school [graduate school in general] is an incubated environment for me to test out new ideas with great people, every day. To find people that I would love working with on a regular basis on interesting projects that are meaningful and, dare I say, fun.

In an independent study class, I’m working with a partner to commercialize a product from concept/inception to production. Thus far, it’s been a blast. And I can say it’s this continuously thinking-doing process that has been the most engaging and representative of what I’d like to do after graduating from the ID. As a personal learning experience, this is unparalleled and I am assured it will only get better.

It’s come to my attention that my use of language, perhaps body language and unspoken signals that I may send to others do not demonstrate my confidence in a particular endeavor. Which amuses me, because I always think of myself as an overly optimistic person– If there’s anything you need when starting something up, like, say, a company, its staunch belief in your team and mission and the strongest conviction that you are incapable of failure. Which I have. I really do (c’mon guys, remember squidbag and dollars&sensei?) . But sometimes I feel like I have to balance that with my sense of design “evaluation”– Ultimately we both want the best product out there in the market. We’re both spending lots of time on it, and we both are passionate and excited about the journey. But as soon as I start “evaluating” in my head and thinking about costs or engineering considerations, my language actually signals that I am doubtful.

I’ve noticed that changing my language from “I’m concerned about the implication of abc“, to framing as “I’m thinking about the introduction of abc… AND I think …xyz” is so utterly powerful. It’s not even so much about me– It’s about not turning off someone else’s spigot.

So, as lame and cheesy as this sounds, I wrote something down in my Moleskine to refer back to when I get stuck communicating in this “engineering” mode. I’m going to ask Sri to remind me when I forget— I’ll call it the “actDO” model: Always Communicate Thoughtfully Dogged Optimism.

The cheesy slogan will fade once I’ve completely internalized it’s ethos. And it will.