Forget About Finding “Your Thing.” Go Taste The Ice Cream.
Picture this…
A new ice cream shop has opened in your town. Tonight, you go out with your friends and decide to check it out. Your friend opens the door for you and the smell of baking ice cream cones fills your nostrils. You survey the shop: three teenagers take orders and scoop ice cream for customers, a fourth teenager stands ready at the cash register, and a handwritten menu with what feels like 100 options takes up an entire wall.
“What can I getcha?” one of the ice cream scoopers asks.
What do you do?
Try the various flavors, of course!
Well, not if you’re me.
For as long as I can remember, I have had the same ice cream order: mint chip or vanilla. When I enter a new ice cream shop, I always pick one of the two without ever trying them. I swear I could be handed a scoop of ice cream that looks like mint chip or vanilla yet tastes entirely different, and I would probably still eat it.
“Doesn’t seem like a big problem,” you may be thinking to yourself. “Sure, it’s a bit weird, but it’s not a catastrophic decision. It’s just ice cream.”
You’re certainly right, but I have come to realize that my attitude toward ice cream is the same way I approach novelty, regardless of type. In relationships, both platonic and romantic, I search for my “one person.” When I find him or her, I am content yet hesitant to actively pursue anyone else. I don’t fear that my new relationship will end out of perceived disloyalty; I just become too comfortable, too fast.
Similarly, I latch on to my interests and refuse to sway from them, even when they aren’t the best fit. One example in particular perfectly represents this dilemma: my unwavering determination as a Lincoln Douglas debater in high school. I have written about my past troubles in this activity, as well as the effects of my blinding commitment previously (which you can find here). Originally, I joined the club as a proxy to get into a good college. I had heard that Lincoln Douglas debaters (those who do a single person style of debate about philosophy and policy) did the best in terms of admissions. The longer I spent in the activity, though, the more entrenched I became. Other activities were subpar, even childish to me at the time. Yet, when I finally ventured into a different style of debate called Public Forum (a two person debate instead of solo style) with my brother during my final competition, I excelled and enjoyed my experience far more.
The problem doesn’t stop with overcommitment, though. To return to my ice cream analogy for a moment, I denigrated alternative ice cream choices for years. Chocolate, my brother’s favorite flavor, was my lifelong target. “It’s nasty. Tastes like dirt.” I’d say. There was only one problem: I had never even tried chocolate ice cream, and yet I convinced myself that I didn’t like it.
Unfortunately, I have historically approached creativity in the same way. Painting? I’m not creative. Drawing? As if. Acting? You’re joking right. I’ve never truly put any effort behind these pursuits, and yet I find myself shutting down any thoughts related to them!
Why have I become so close-minded?
When I was younger, I was deathly afraid of decision making. It got so bad, in fact, that, once when my parents asked what I wanted for dinner, I got so frustrated that I cried and screamed at them to let me out of the car immediately. When we finally arrived back home (without any food in hand thanks to my tantrum), I stormed out of the car and ran into the woods behind my house, staying there for upward of an hour. My parents got so worried that they almost called the police for a missing child!
I’m not quite sure where this fear comes from. Maybe I had a traumatic event when I was little or maybe I have a genetic predisposition to it. All I know is that it has been with me for all of my life. Upon reflection, I have realized that I am not afraid of the decision making process; I am merely afraid of making a bad decision. I think my close-mindedness comes down to an internalized death grip to my comfort zone. You can’t make a bad decision if you already know what the outcome will be, right?
Thankfully, my what-do-you-want-for-dinner skills have improved since my outburst, but the stakes of my decisions only seem to escalate with age. I’m turning twenty in two months and the ever-present question of “What do you want to do with your life?” looms overhead. I have a rough idea of my answer to this question, but I find it weird that there is so much societal pressure to specialize around this age. Practically speaking, it makes some sense: the earlier you focus on “your thing,” the more likely you are to make a decent income. But, as I have heard all too often, many people switch careers, find new interests, or just flat out hate what they do but stick to it because it “pays well.”
What if we’ve got this all wrong?
In January 2020, I noticed my death grip loosen slightly after a workshop I participated in for an entrepreneurship course I was taking. The mission of the workshop was for us to design a wallet for a partner in our class. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have never designed a product in my life, let alone a wallet from paper, pipe cleaners, and glue. Nevertheless, over the course of ninety minutes, I got to know my partner’s interests and style and designed her a prototype of her ideal wallet. Sadly, I don’t have a picture of it to share with you, but I can assure you that it was simple and incomplete. But, it got the ball rolling.
As you can imagine, the workshop was about more than a wallet. The real aim was to encourage us to empathize with potential customers and specifically address their needs, an integral skill for product and service design. I learned that this exercise has been quite popular in business school for years. Its genesis can be traced to the d.school at Stanford University. The Stanford Design School is famous for a concept known as design thinking, defined by The Interaction Design Foundation as “a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test — it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.”
Following the workshop, I approached my professor, a man I respected deeply for his teaching style and passion for entrepreneurship, and said, “All my life I have had a ton of ideas running a muck in my mind. What should I do with them?”
“Write them down,” he responded.
“Great. I already do that,” I thought to myself.
“Okay, and what do I do when I write them down?” I asked my professor.
“Hold on to them.”
“And, what do I do when I hold on to them?”
“Well, if I knew that, I don’t know if I would be here right now,” he said.
“Fair enough,” I settled.
Hours later, I was still left with one lingering question:
How do I even know when I have a good idea?
In the time since the wallet workshop, I have fallen into a design thinking rabbit whole of sorts and realized that it has been the answer to my questions, as well as my ice cream problem, all along. Design thinking is a methodology for approaching novelty and yet it’s deeply familiar; it is practically the same as the scientific method:
- do your background research // conduct customer interviews to understand your users and their problems
- generate a hypothesis // create a prototype
- test your hypothesis via an experiment // conduct customer interviews with your prototype present
- generate conclusions // analyze your customer interviews
- repeat // iterate on your prototype
Here’s what that process looks like in an infographic…
Design thinking is a never-ending, yet liberating circle of creativity.
So what if your ideas are garbage or your choices are terrible? You’ll tweak everything throughout the process anyway. Returning to my earlier example about making decisions about what to eat for dinner, I unlearned this behavior thanks to a piece of advice from my mom:
“Just make a decision. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good choice or a bad choice. In fact, deliberately pick the bad choice just to see what happens. I promise you it isn’t that bad.”
In that same vein of thought, design thinking is teaching me to loosen my grip on my initial intuition and play more with alternatives.
Moving forward, I’m eager to incorporate design thinking into my daily life. Painting? I’ll give it a try. Drawing? Sure thing. Acting? Anything is possible. I’ve never truly put any effort behind these pursuits, and that’s precisely why I’m going to try them!
In 2021, I have set a goal for myself to try twelve new activities over the course of the year. And, in the spirit of design thinking, I will only move forward with the activities I enjoy upon trying them.
To me, design thinking is much more than an entrepreneurial theory. It’s precisely the thing I need to address my rigidity. Core to the theory is the concept that no one has some God-bestowed, a priori knowledge of what differentiates a truly good idea from a bad idea (or a good ice cream flavor from a bad ice cream flavor for that matter). Instead, design thinking pushes me to consider life from an empirical lens, tasting all the options before finding “my thing.”
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this piece (especially constructive criticism) and whether you think design thinking is a useful methodology. I am relatively accessible on direct message via Instagram or you can feel free to drop me a comment here on Medium.
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Learn more about design thinking and the Stanford Design School.
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