Redefining what I want

Whew! It’s been over a year since my last blog post and that’s because well… life has been life. To be honest, I was forced to focus on living it than documenting it. From company layoffs causing me to lose the team I built, broken hiring processes, bad hires, getting my first house, slowly re-building a new team, health issues, and the world being literally on fire. Even as I’m typing this, I’m currently recovering from surgery and researching investment funds (I’ll get to why). It has been a doozy.

For the past year or so, I’ve been asking myself “What do you want? You don’t need any more things. What are you doing this for? Do you even want to keep climbing the design career ladder? What are you working towards?” It’s interesting how having a near death health emergency has helped me finally have an answer. It used be that I just wanted stability and to build cool and interesting sites for the past few years. Now, I want to continue growing as a design leader but to build a stronger, diverse, and multi-skilled product design team, to contribute or even help create a healthy design culture within any company I work at, to scale products strategically and ethically, and I want to invest in companies that are dedicated to improving the world we live in. Most importantly, on the personal side of my life, I want to be better to myself.

I’ve been in this industry for a decade. Getting into it and what I used to put myself through in order to build my career was not healthy for me in the long run. I didn’t prioritize resting and creating great life experiences for myself. As a manager, I emphasize for others to do so but I need to take my own advice. So I’ve decided from here on out I will be doing so and Marie Kondo my life. I will be traveling more, I will enforce healthy work boundaries for myself ( I will not push myself if I’m not feeling well), creating more, doing more of the things that make me fulfilled, and also working on my side project of becoming an angel investor too.

That’s what I want this next decade to look like for me: healthier, traveling, investing, and being the best design leader I can be.