Your Friends Are the Reason You Are Boring

Q: I know I should be networking and finding a mentor, but what else do I need from my professional community?

You live in a bubble. It’s not your fault. Well, it might be but we’re not here to cast aspersions. However, chances are you live in one. We separate ourselves into these bubbles. It’s how things work. A lot of it is BECAUSE of work. A lot of it is the fact you are working in a highly specialized field. You go to school surrounded by your peers and then you start working and if you want to work you network and you talk to other people chasing the same dream you’re chasing. You live in a bubble. You work in a bubble. And outside of the bubble is the rest of the world.

Here’s the thing about bubbles. It makes you boring. It makes you less well-rounded. What shape are round things? And bubbles? They are circles. You need to navigate though more circles. Socially.

Why? So that you can stop being boring.

A good designer (a good anything, really — but this magazine is called Dear Design Student) knows what’s going on in design, sure, but a good designer also knows a lot of people. A good designer is taking inspiration from many circles and not just a single circle, a single lonely awful circle of think-alike robots who end up lacking in empathy for anyone not in their circle. This is tribal thinking and there is too much of it in the world. Tribal thinking leads to a worldview that is limited. It leads to feelings of superiority. To certainty. The bad kind of certainty. How bad? Think of any villain in your favorite movie. Every single villain has certainty. It was what blinded them to the world, to how they were perceived. And that is the certainty that killed them. Because in movies all villains end up either dead or worse. This certainty is what allowed them to function without a single strand of empathy. Because if everyone sees the world that way you do, you lose empathy. And when you lose that, you are of no use as a designer. A designer should be ALL empathy. You are communicating ideas that the end user needs to understand. If they don’t understand what you’re doing, you’ve failed. Simple.

Think of the tastiest thing you’ve ever put in your mouth.

A good designer (a good anything, again, let’s be clear) should know, I don’t know, an economist. Or a physicist. Or an Econo-physicist. Does that exist? (I have no idea but it should.) If it does, I should know one and I’m getting on it (for the record, I know an astro-physicist). You should know people beyond design and tech (an aside: does anyone in tech know anyone outside of tech? I’m asking for people who aren’t my friends because I’m not in tech…). You should know all sorts of people. Brown and black and yellow and white and all shades in between. It shouldn’t have to be said but diversity is a major bubble buster (unless all of your cool diverse friends are designers then we’re back to square one). If you’re a gang of straight white boys, even sensitive straight white boys (or girls), really how many people are you going to reach? Mixing it up is good business. Some smart Wall Street bankers are hiring young guns with Liberal Arts degrees. It’s true. Why? Because Liberal Arts grads are interesting people who have been through the wringer and have proven they can think. Also because they come from different tribes than your typical MBAs. And because interesting things happen when you mix tribes. New things. Revolutionary things. Yin and yang things.

Think of the tastiest thing you’ve ever put in your mouth. Think about how many ingredients are in that tasty thing, all of them working to make that food more everything. (Now don’t give me a single ingredient thing because that would make you smart ass and I would suffer bad feelings). Think of a team in any sport. Think of any collective (but not the evil ones) and the ones that work have something in common: different tribes/types working together. With an eye on an end result.

You are not doing yourself any favors by only talking to and socializing with other designers. You need more. A lot more. Get out of that bubble. Fuck your comfort zone.

If you’re not in a bubble, congratulations. You’re more interesting than most people. And you’re probably a pretty decent designer.

Arjun Basu is the Senior Vice President, Content Strategy for Spafax, a global content marketing agency and the publisher of the Sparksheet blog. He is also an author, and his latest novel, Waiting for the Man, is now available in paperback.