Action is the antidote to anxiety.

There’s a lot for designers to be anxious about:

• Do we focus on aligning pixels or stakeholders?
• How do we connect our value to revenue?
• What about AI?

Our field is in flux. And that’s actually exciting. It means we have opportunities to try something new and stand out.

I jumped on the data visualization trend in the early 2010s, when everyone was talking about big data and trying to visualize it. That was the edge that got me into UX.

Where are the edges now? Idk. But one way to find it is to just jump in and do the work. Find the edges and solve them. That’s what designers do.

There’s no playbook for the future. But action is the antidote to anxiety.

—

P.S. Thanks to John Durkin for inspiring this post. I’ve had the phrase “Do it. Do it right. Do it better.” written on my whiteboard for about a year. It’s the one thing I haven’t erased. This was a good reminder.

P.P.S. Every time I bring up the ever-changing nature of working in tech, my wife asks why I didn’t choose the stability of medicine as a career path 😑.