Think differently, follow your passion (5/23/11)

Yesterday’s class was interesting and entertaining. We started class by sitting in a circle and played a listening game, “This is a What.” We had an object that we had to pass around.  The leader, Person A, starts off by passing the object to Person B saying, “This is a What.” Then Person B says in a form of a question, “a What?” to Person A. And then Person A responds with a matter of fact tone, “a What.” Then Person B gets it and says, “Oh, a What.” Then person B goes to Person C and the statements are repeated. But when Person C says, “a What?” Person B goes back to Person A and asks, “a What?” and Person A is always matter of fact and says, “a What.” Sound confusing? Getting the concept was confusing at first for me. But the point of the game was to be consistent and not mess up the translation of the meaning. In the design field, if you don’t work directly with the person who makes the decisions on the project and have to go through middle people, the translation is bound to get lost somewhere in between and misinterpreted. It is best to work with directly with the person who makes all the decisions so that there is good communication and nothing gets lost in translation for the project. This is a good rule to follow so that your project can be completed successfully. We played “This is a What” and it took us about 4 tries before we made it all the way around the circle without fumbling it. Then Jimmy added a second object He passed around one to his right side, and one to his left side. But this time the objects were “a What” and “a Who”. For this task, we could not make it around full circle. We tried about 4 or 5 times but still failed. The trickiest part was when both objects reached a single person. The message then got lost somehow in translation.

After we played our game, we watched a video of Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken Robinson is a creativity expert. He is a great speaker and a comedian as well. There were a lot of funny moments in his talk. Most of his talk focuses on how people should think differently. He believes that people do not work to their full capacity, but only to neutral capacity. He believes that people mainly pursue a career of what they are good at, but they don’t enjoy what they do. Just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. An example he brings up is that there was a woman who was a musician and was great at it. But when someone observed her work, he noticed that she didn’t enjoy it at all. So it made her think. She realized that she loved to read and write so she ended up changing her career path and chose to pursue writing. She never went back to being a musician. Sir Ken Robinson then goes to say that she doesn’t make as much as she used to but she is now happy and that “wealth has no guarantee of fulfillment”. He also mentions how teachers love their jobs but again that career doesn’t pay well either. It made me think of Professor Jimmy Moss. He is constantly mentioning how he loves being a teacher, that it gives him a sense of fulfillment but it doesn’t pay well. He used to make a lot more only being a designer. Jimmy still loves to design, it is his passion, but being a teacher brings a lot more to it. At the end of Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, he said, “Finding your passion changes everything.” That message really resonated with me. There are a lot of things I wanted to be when I was younger, but I think that graphic design is where I really want to be. I love being creative and I feel that I can really succeed and be happy in the design field. Hearing Robinson’s talk also made me consider buying his book, The Element, which goes into more detail on how finding your passion does change everything.