Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What I look for when I’m hiring designers or what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet. I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it.

00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here today with Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined by Brian Lovin. Hello. Brian, you are a designer at GitHub, a prolific podcaster with design details, but before we talk about all that, I know you made a move recently and you’re getting to design a new home office space. What are some of your goals in building out that workspace?

00:01:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, where we’re moving from, my girlfriend and I, we both work from home and we were in separate rooms, and it always felt pretty isolating. Where, you know, you’re working for most of the day, so you’re in separate rooms most of the day, but also those rooms were the bedroom and the living room, so the office and living space and sleeping space always felt intermingled.

So, with our new home office, it’s actually a bigger room where we decided to put both of our desks, which is great cause we see each other throughout the day.

The problem is You have video calls and you’re always interrupting each other, so we’re swapping in and out.

So one of the big goals that I have for the space is there’s like this tiny little closet off the edge of the office space, and we want to convert that into like a little phone booth, you know, soundproof it, put a little monitor in there so you can just carry your laptop in, plug in and go.

So I’d say that’s the biggest goal, but honestly, we haven’t even started cause I don’t know about you both, but post move, you get unpacked and you’re motivated to fix stuff, and then as soon as you’re settled in, you’re like, yeah, it is what it is. You just got to live with it for a while, you know.

00:02:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s a dangerous valley in there where you have unpacked enough to live, but you’re not fully unpacked and settled, and sure enough people have boxes for months and years, if they’re not careful.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Which is also a useful little rule, you know, it’s like whatever is in the box for more than a month, you probably can just get rid of. So just take that box away, don’t even open it.

00:02:41 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I call this moves as copying garbage collectors, you know, and copy everything once and some stuff goes.

00:02:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, when I first started seriously doing work from home, remote work, and lots of video calls and so forth, I didn’t move, but I realized how important it was to have a separate space. I think I had a desk kind of shoved off the corner of my living room, which was fine when I had an office, but once I was working from home, there wasn’t enough separation for me between those spaces.

But actually the insight that someone gave me was I had sort of a very small room and a big beautiful one with big windows and you naturally think of the big room as well, that’s the master bedroom, but actually you don’t spend that much time in there.

And eventually I converted the biggest room in the house with the nicest windows and all that into a home office. And that was an absolute game changer.

I had a big workbench where I could do kind of stand up and do kind of more physical tasks with the hands and I had a big desk. I had a Pin board on the wall for keeping all my stuff up, could also even think about and now always in my mind is what’s going to be behind me on video calls and what lighting is going to be in there.

So for example, my current space, I kind of arranged it so that there’s some nice windows right in front of me, so I’ll get, you know, sunlight on the face and then behind me is not facing, I don’t know, out over the whole house so that when the partner walks by, she like suddenly panics because she realized she’s, you know, on camera in the background on the camera, yeah.

00:04:03 - Speaker 1: I did the exact same thing as you. So when we moved this big office space was staged as the primary bedroom cause it has the big windows, it’s the most beautifully lit.

And then there’s this other room which was intended to be the office, which isn’t well lit, it’s a lot smaller.

We’re like, you know what, we just sleep in the bedroom. 99% of the time the lights are off, so we might as well take the space where we’re gonna spend most of our time and make that the most beautiful and inviting and warm. And enjoyable, right? Like this is where we’re gonna spend all of our time. So yeah, very much with you on that idea, swap the bedroom in the office to match time spent, I suppose.

00:04:44 - Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I also take a bit of inspiration from there’s a couple of subreddits, one that I like is Battle stations, yeah, slash slash battle stations where people do these beautiful setups. It’s obviously their computing devices and desks and things, but they also get the aesthetic element and yeah, the carpet and the chair and all this sort of thing and. I don’t quite have the time or inclination to go to that level, but we do spend so much of our lives now in a home office in front of one or more computing devices, spending some time to make that aesthetic and pleasing and good vibes just seems to make sense.

00:05:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, the last thing I really want to get in here at some point is the couch. I’ve never had a couch in an office and there’s something very attractive to me about.

Going and having a sit or a lie down in the middle of the day, where you might be sketching or reading a blog post or catching up on email, but just having that short break from, you know, sitting upright in your office chair.

Sounds really attractive.

I don’t know, we’ll see. I don’t know if I’d actually end up spending time on it, but there’s an idea of kind of mixing the feeling of what kind of work can be done in there, right? It doesn’t just have to be upright desk keyboard kind of thing. It could also be a little bit more lounging, reading, that kind of stuff.

00:06:02 - Speaker 2: Relaxed posture, reading and thinking. Now you’re very on brand for me. Thank you for that.

00:06:07 - Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go.

00:06:09 - Speaker 2: Well, tell us a little bit about your background.

00:06:13 - Speaker 1: So like you mentioned, I’m a product designer. I’m currently working at GitHub. I’m working on the mobile apps there, and GitHubb is an interesting place because there’s a lot of different kinds of jobs that it solves for people in the world, you know, you have, of course, developers who come there to code and review code and merge code, and there’s the whole DevOpsy side of things. Then there’s this whole other side, which is like the social productivity side, organizing work and in my case, like taking work on the go.

And so I’m interested in that part, that’s what I’m working on and get with the mobile apps.

On the side I podcast, I host the Design Details podcast. I’ve been doing that for, I think, 7.5, almost 8 years. So that’s the thing.

00:06:58 - Speaker 2: Yeah you something 400 some odd episodes in.

00:07:02 - Speaker 1: 429.

00:07:03 - Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, and then you were nice enough to invite Mark and I on there recently. I’ll link that episode in the show notes. Very interesting to be on the other side of the conversation there, but it definitely provides me inspiration, which is, I worry sometimes that we’ll sort of run out of things to say, you know, we’re 50 some odd episodes in here, but you’ve managed to keep going this long, keep it fresh and relevant, so maybe there’s hope for us too.

00:07:26 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the nice thing about what you’re doing is if you do interviews most weeks, you’ll never run out of people to talk to. There’s just too many interesting people in the world to learn from.

00:07:37 - Speaker 2: We’re outsourcing the problem of being interesting to someone else.

00:07:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, just extract that from other people. Our problem is we stopped interviewing, you know, my co-hosts and I just chat back and forth every week and try and mix it up with things like listener questions or talk about industry news.

But there are weeks where we just look at each other like, have we talked about this? Have we answered this exact question already and you just can’t really remember, so you answer it again. So I do worry about that, like going in circles a little bit.

So that’s the podcast, I guess before that, I started a company it was called Spectrum.chat, and that was myself and two other people, Bryn Jackson and Max Stoiber.

The three of us were trying to build large public asynchronous forum software, really ended up gravitating towards like open source communities and design communities.

That company was acquired by GitHub, which is how I ended up at GitHub.

And before that, I was a product designer at Facebook, and before that at a company called Buffer. And then I guess throughout all of this, I’m a side project, tinkerer kind of person. I like writing, I like building websites, I like the podcast. I really enjoy interviewing people. I’ve launched a couple of interview projects.

And I would say my most long lasting side project besides the podcast now has just been my personal website where I have all these random subpages that tickle my brain in different ways.

So one of them is like a security checklist, how to be safe online, and the other is A better, more readable version of hacker news, and another is my personal bookmarks and an AMA and my blog and on and on and on. And so that’s really where I find a lot of joy and fun outside of my day job.

00:09:27 - Speaker 2: We’ll link that site in the show notes.

I think it is an inspiration.

We’ll talk about personal websites here a little, a little later on, but I think Mark and I, for example, both have incredibly minimalist personal websites that we update pretty infrequently.

I think you have a pretty comprehensive design.

It’s, I think it’s a full web app you wrote about the technology stack there, you use it to kind of.

Explore interesting new front end and back end technologies, yeah, tons of writing, that’s obviously the podcast, you’ve got a newsletter now, so yeah, really, I don’t know how you find the time, but I guess the answer is that these are your hobbies and as you say, they tickle your brain, so it’s less of uh finding the time and more of a following your nose to your interests.

00:10:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, hobbies and many, many years, you know, I think there is an incorrect perception that I work all the time. People like, how do you have time for all these different things like, I don’t, these have just accumulated in the dustbin over, you know, a decade. And so with a decade in hindsight, it looks like a lot and it looks like I’m busy, but really it’s quite incremental.

00:10:31 - Speaker 2: That leads nicely to our topic today, which is personal brand. So, I’ll ask first what that means for both of you. Actually, Mark, maybe you wanna start us off there.

00:10:41 - Speaker 3: So two things come to mind when I think of personal brand. The first is the brand in the more pervasive, thicker sense like Coca-Cola is a brand, and I think that some people have such a personal brand, they invest a lot in building it up, and the other more general sense is like information theoretic in the sense of people having Knowledge about other people on the internet or being able to obtain that knowledge if they if they want to, versus the base prior of you’re a random person on the internet and could be, you know, a dog or whatever. I think both of those are interesting and we can talk about them.

00:11:17 - Speaker 2: And I’ll note on the company brand side we did an episode on that some time back because some I have pretty strong feelings about about how to kind of intentionally build a company brand. We ended up describing it as the character and what you know the company for, and you know, if the company has a personality, what is that personality? And so you can imagine that mapping to a person as well, not in the real sense of a fully fledged human with many interests and many dimensions and so forth, but maybe a little bit more narrowly defined as how you’re representing yourself to a field or on the internet or to some target audience.

00:11:54 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I suppose my personal definition of personal brand maybe skews that direction.

I’m stealing this. I can’t remember who said this, but at one point I heard someone say that a personal brand was really just how someone would describe you if you weren’t in the room, which I guess could apply to a company, but for a person, I think you get to capture a little bit more of the nuance there.

Like, how would somebody describe you? And the thing is, you’ll never really know.

I think that’s kind of the ideas.

You can try and influence that, but really people will describe you however they want to describe you and when you’re not in the room, they can be a little bit more open in that description. So that’s how I’ve thought about personal brand and I don’t know, adjectives come to mind like curious, fun, kind, excited, and then maybe some negative personal brand characteristics would be like complains a lot or rants a lot, or is an asshole, right? Like those all fit under the personal brand vibe for me is those kinds of adjectives.

00:12:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess there’s also the, you know, if I think of looking at your website, for example, to get a feel, you know, let’s say I had somehow come across you and was interested in learning who is this Brian fellow, maybe in the context of I’d like to hire you, maybe in the context of like to have you on my podcast, or maybe something a little more general, which is just you said something interesting, and I’m just curious to know the person behind that.

And there’s the very practical element of, you know, you say off the bat, I’m a designer, podcaster, writer, and even the order there, I think tells me something. It’s like you may have a long running and a pretty successful podcast, but that’s not the first thing you list, you consider yourself a designer first. So, you know, there’s that sort of pragmatic aspect of just what do you want to be known for in your career, but then yeah, you’re talking about maybe the softer side of it as well.

I think aesthetic conveys a lot, maybe this is a medium is the message sort of thing, but right, you have a website that says you are a person that likes clean, modern design, whereas you can imagine there’s this, what is it called, the professor style website. Just these kind of like very bare bones, HTML, you know, not only is it not responsive design, but it’s like barely even styled at all, but you come to associate it with often busy and successful professors who are very erudite and accomplished in their field, and they do have a representation online, but it would almost be confusing or maybe feel wrong in some way. had a sleek, well designed site like a designer would that conveys maybe the wrong idea.

00:14:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it would feel like they were trying to sell you something.

00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s an aesthetic, maybe some of that is almost like tribal affiliation to some degree, you know, you go to the punk rock band’s website and there’s going to be a very different color palette, for example, then you go to the designer’s website and a lot comes across, because almost anything I think you would want to get to know someone online for, again, whether it’s Hiring them, applying for a job at their company, asking them on your podcast, meeting them in some professional context, kind of a lot of what you want to know is just like, are we in the same tribe or do we vibe together or do we have the same interests or the same values because often that’s the thing that matters a lot for those kinds of connections.

00:15:12 - Speaker 1: I think that’s amazing, especially in the designer developer space. I don’t know about you both, but when I find somebody on Twitter and they have a link in their profile that is firstname lastname.com, that’s an instant click for me, right? That already says something about this person that they’ve gone out and bought that and invested in that.

Then you click and you get the aesthetic. I like to go just a tiny bit deeper and like, did they build this or was this a template, and that distinction also tells you a lot about that person, you know, maybe it only makes sense for designers, developers, but I find that developers often don’t care as much about having built it themselves.

Like I think you encounter a lot more stock WordPress themes or something like that, but designers, I think there’s perhaps this.

Community pressure to represent yourself in a unique and special way, so there’s a lot more playfulness with color or imagery or, you know, drawing your own custom icons or things like that.

And I suppose maybe I’m like squarely in the middle, like my site is pretty boring, like you mentioned minimal, but I see it as fairly boring. There’s not actually much color or visual interest on the page.

But that can be its own tone, right, and people can read into that, how they will and maybe be surprised if they meet me and, well, maybe I am a boring person actually. I don’t know, but I guess that’s up to other people to decide.

00:16:44 - Speaker 3: I don’t know if I would call this boring. I mean, it’s minimally styled, but it’s like it’s a whole app. I mean, there’s a whole sidebar with all kinds of different categories and everything. It’s a whole thing.

00:16:52 - Speaker 2: And maybe that sort of begs the next question, which is if representing yourself online, it is to someone. And that someone is again someone that maybe you want to connect with or they want to connect with you and you’re trying to find the like-minded people to connect with, and that maybe leads into a question of what you might call your, how available you are. To outreach. So, for example, I have my email address on my home page. Some folks maybe have their Twitter handle, but they have DMs turned off. There’s many pros and cons to making yourself more or less accessible and be curious to hear how you think about that.

00:17:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question because my perspective is maybe changing a little bit over time. Which is, I’ve always just tried to be accessible because I’ve always been so thankful to other people who made themselves accessible. For example, I started the Design Details podcast because I wanted to meet other people and what we did is we created a spreadsheet of 100 people who we wanted to meet and just started going down the list and emailing them. And everyone was super kind and most people were open to being on this brand new podcast with these young 20 something designers trying to figure out what they were doing in the industry, and that approachability was magical, and it really opened a lot of doors and helped, I don’t know, get me into the room, so to speak.

And so I always wanted to have that same feeling that people could reach out to me, especially. Younger designers or people just getting into the industry who might want to learn about, I don’t know what it’s like working at GitHub, they might want to apply there or work there someday, like having that approachability has all sorts of benefits.

But when I said I think I’m starting to maybe change that over time, I’ve just noticed, I don’t know if you both have your DMs open, but like when you have your DMs open, surprising stuff comes through and a lot of it increasingly is noise. Or even if it’s not noise, I feel bad not responding to people. And so there is this trade off of like being approachable and accessible, and then all of a sudden having a 3rd or 4th to do list, you know, you have your work to do list, you have your emails to go through, and now it’s your direct messages and you want to come across as a friendly person who responds quickly and thoughtfully and carefully. But then there is a little bit of a burden there, I suppose. I mean a good burden to have. It’s awesome that people want to reach out and chat, but sometimes that’s overwhelming. I’m curious if you both have experiences cause you both are also quite public and put yourselves out there.

00:19:33 - Speaker 3: In general, I’m very bullish on this channel that is cold contact over the public internet in both directions. I think people underestimate the opportunities that you can create by sending a good cold email or cold DM as it may be. And I think there’s also a lot of value potentially in being open, and I’ve always been open for a similar reason I think to you is I was incredibly fortunate to have people help me out as I was entering Silicon Valley, basically on the basis of cold emails.

00:19:59 - Speaker 2: Mark, I feel you gotta tell your story here about how you came to San Francisco.

00:20:04 - Speaker 3: Oh, the full story will not be told, but I will give the abbreviate story.

The abbreviate story is someone posted on the internet that they were looking to help people who were we help people in San Francisco or early in their career, something to that effect, and I emailed this individual, and we ended up meeting at a bar in San Francisco, see if he can help me out, and he introduced me to someone there who worked at Hiroku and one thing led to another and I ended up working there for about 4 years, and the career went on from there. So there’s a classic example of Silicon Valley and cold emails and Just being willing to just reach out. Yeah, so I’m very bullish on the channel, and I think furthermore, there’s not too much downside to being open. I found quite a bit of value in receiving communications and my experience is that very few people actually write in. I get a few emails, mostly about go by example, and I get a few DMs, but the volume isn’t an issue for me, and if anything, I’m surprised at how little it is.

00:21:04 - Speaker 1: I wonder if email is a good filter there versus DMs, like the act of cold emailing something requires a little bit more activation, probably because there’s a subject field, right, and you’re forced to consider what do I actually want to get out of this interaction, whereas the DM it’s just a chat, right?

00:21:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and on my personal site where I have a contact page, my line is that I respond to every thoughtful note.

And that eludes this activation energy, which, by the way, is just one special case of this overall dance that we’re doing as strangers on the internet, because again, the base case is that You’re a random person on the internet, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re probably malicious, you know, whatever, but if you’re able to provide just a little bit of signal, which can be a first name last name.com website that’s well done, it can be a simple thoughtful email, either of those, and especially if you do both, it’s like, OK, you’re already in the 99th percentile of random internet people, and I’d be happy to chat with you.

00:22:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. The bar is low in that world, right?

00:22:05 - Speaker 3: You would think, but then most people fall blow it, but most people don’t, yeah, yeah.

00:22:11 - Speaker 2: And my experience is that, yeah, maybe through your podcast and Twitter and other things and all the writing you do maybe you end up being higher profile, Brian, but yeah, I would say the amount of inbound kind of both DMs and emails that I get are certainly manageable, but yes, it does create a new to do list. I do like to, even though I don’t say this explicitly, have kind of a similar policy to Mark, but I think it’s easy for me to sort out. There’s ones that sort of obvious good signal where it’s like an interesting person and they have a clear request that’s something I can fulfill in not too much time.

Or there’s the case that’s clear spam or something close to spam, let’s say, not classic spam necessarily, but something where I don’t know, you know, the recruiter, the classic recruiter thing. Oh, I see you have a Ruby on Rails project. I’m working with a company that, you know, they clearly just didn’t look at my profile for more than 5 seconds.

The middle ground, I think, is the harder thing where someone does know me personally in my work, they are writing to me saying, hey, you know, I’ve enjoyed what you’ve done at, I don’t know what I can switch, Muse, whatever, and here’s the thing I’m doing, you know, I’m a student, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m something else. But then if that doesn’t lead into like a real clear request, it’s more just a general like, I’d like to get to know you or it’s just unclear what they’re asking for, and then maybe it’s a long email, and then it’s like, It is thoughtful and it’s in this middle ground that’s tricky and it’s hard to know 100% what to do with it.

I still try to like find a good reply if I can, but it’s often ends up being more of a thanks for the nice words. I think you’re doing something interesting. You know, if there’s some specific thing you’re looking for, let me know, but this kind of comes to the rules for emailing busy people thing, right? Like make it short, have a crisp and clear request. Maybe they’ll say no, but just make it easy for them.

00:24:06 - Speaker 1: Just to add on to that, you know, speaking of what the bar is to stand out as like a non-random person on the internet, like have a domain, have a clear ask. I’ve found. If that puts you in the 1%, well then the 1% of that is people who actually follow up.

And what I’ve been really surprised by is, you know, people will email you and they’ll ask a question and it’ll be very thoughtful and you’ll maybe send a reply and say, hey, I think this, or I’m not sure, but I read an article about this, or here’s a person that might know better than I would, and you send out this information, you’re connecting people and ideas.

Nobody ever responds to those, but the 1% of people who do are really special and I feel like that’s where you build really cool relationships is, you know, somebody asks, hey, I’m weighing these two offers at a job. What do you think I should do? I’ll tell you what I think. And then they respond, and they say, hey, by the way, I ended up doing this, and even better is they say, oh, I did this, and I learned this, right? And so one thing that I’ve started doing now recently with sort of these kinds of engagements with people I don’t know, where it feels a little bit transactional is I try and explicitly request a follow up, and the way I frame it is. Hey, by the way, if you end up making a decision, I would love to hear how you made that decision if you learned anything. So a lot of times this will end up being like job hunting or negotiation. A lot of people have been asking me how much to charge for freelance service, and I love to say just let me know what you end up doing. Like, no matter how much you decide to charge as a freelancer, please just tell me because I’m trying to populate my own data library so that I can be more helpful or more fine tuned in future interactions.

And most people don’t, but the people who do, it builds a cool, cool relationship there and it feels like it keeps the door open for back and forth, right?

00:25:55 - Speaker 2: Nice. Now another topic related here maybe is what some folks call audience, and audience is pretty clear, I guess if you’re a YouTube influencer and your audiences your subscribers, people who are, you know, following your work and you want to grow that because the whole point of your business is, or I should say the business is built on attention and the more kind of attention engagement you have, then the stronger your business is, and it also reflects your impact. You’re sharing ideas, maybe you’re creating some kind of entertainment, and you want to get that out to as many people as you can. That’s kind of what you’re in the business for. Now, all of us, we’re in the business of making products. We want to get our products to a lot of people. That’s kind of our main goal, but if personal brand is sort of a helper, contributes to Your career, but also just your ability to meet interesting people, maybe your ability to hire or be hired. Uh how important or how much do you, Brian, and Mark, I’d love to hear your answer as well. Think about audience as a thing you want to grow, Twitter followers, podcast subscribers, or is that a thing you think about at all or do you think that’s not important to you?

00:27:09 - Speaker 1: I’d love to hear your answer first, Mark, I’m curious how you think about followers specifically. I think first of all, the term, but yeah, how do you think about this?

00:27:18 - Speaker 3: This goes back to the answer that I gave to Adam’s original question, which by the way, I was getting some quizzical looks from you also maybe I can elaborate a little bit.

I think there are some people who purposely build a brand as a first class goal and want to have a lot of followers, either because they just enjoy playing that. Game or because they’re in some type of role where having access to that marketing channel is valuable if they’re developer advocate or they write a newsletter, someone like that. And that again is that sort of classical brand that you would think of if you compare it to something like a Coca-Cola. I think of it more as an asset that I can draw on when needed, so I don’t particularly need any followers. I need the ability to point to something and say, hey, I’m reaching out to you. You can refer to this artifact and see that I’m a clueful person, and that’s really all that I personally, and I think that covers most people. Now there’s a bit of a spectrum there, but I think it’s important to differentiate between Having this big standing audience and that being a first class value versus having some signal that you’re able to draw upon.

00:28:22 - Speaker 1: Hm, so maybe more clearly, do you care about how many followers you have? Like if you had 10,000 or 100,000 or a million, like are these break points interesting for you at all as far as Communicating ideas, marketing for use, the product and company hiring, like, those things matter, right? But how much do you care about how much that matters?

00:28:47 - Speaker 3: Yeah, so mostly not because I don’t need to do a lot of this called outbound. Now there are a few exceptions including marketing, use the product, and recruiting, and so they’re having a little bit of a follower base helps, but there’s also liabilities that come with a larger following base, especially from a personal perspective. And there’s this joke that as you approach Infinity followers, your tweets become like fortune cookies, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And so I think there’s kind of a sweet spot in 1 to 10,000 or whatever, but people have different takes.

00:29:15 - Speaker 1: What do you think, Adam? Do you care about this stuff?

00:29:18 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it is good to look at the difference between company and personal in this case. I do care about the followers for, say, the Muse Twitter account because that reflects our ability to get our message out of the world, right, or our newsletter subscribers or whatever.

In the beginning, when you’re brand new and no one knows who you are or cares what you have to say, if you Built something good or you believe you built something good, it’s hard to get that out into the world and you compare that to working for an established company, you know, I was part of the Salesforce empire for a little while and I saw the value of this huge megaphone, these events they did, just the reach of their voice, and so you could make a product and you didn’t need to worry too much about whether people would see it. You would worry just about making the product good.

I think obviously GitHub having such a far reach and being part of Microsoft empire probably only enhances that as well. It’s not to say that you don’t need to worry about marketing, but it’s more, you don’t need to worry about crickets or people not seeing something good you’ve made. If anything, it’s almost, you tell me what you think, but it’s almost the opposite, which is when your things still early on and you need to just get a few people to test it and not get everyone piling on to it, then, you know, it’s almost you have to work hard to sort of keep it under wraps.

So I do care about kind of the followers and the audience and the kind of the reach for my companies because that’s part of their existence.

For me personally, yeah, like Mark, I would say that’s not something I care about in the sense that it is occasionally useful recruiting is one of the main ones there, or being able to support and promote things my friends and colleagues are doing. So when a friend launches a new Product or you can switch, puts out a new essay or whatever, and I can retweet that or just, you know, do a quote tweet and say this is awesome and get them a little bit more attention than they might have had otherwise, you know, help contribute to that. That feels really good. That’s a nice use of that power. But yeah, it’s not something I want to make go up.

00:31:05 - Speaker 3: I think it’s also the case that as the technology around these social networks advances, the reputational capital becomes more atomized down to the individual, say, tweet. So it used to be back in the day, if you wanted to publish something you need to go to a big newspaper or whatever, a big radio station, and then it was that you need to have a big Facebook page or maybe a big Twitter account, but now you just need the one right TikTok video or the one tweet and it can blow up by itself, and so there’s more weight placed on having something good and valuable to say versus having a stock of reputational capital in the form of a bunch of followers.

00:31:42 - Speaker 2: Hm. Although being known for saying things that people want to hear definitely is a huge amplifier on anything you might say, which is maybe to that fortune cookie point, you can say basically pretty generic platitudes, but if your audience is big enough or you have this reputation where people just care about what you have to say, then, yeah, they’re excited about what would otherwise be a pretty bland statement.

Now the other piece of this on the followers though is I would say that the quality is not the right word. It’s people who are following me for the right reason, and I especially like the mutual follows and maybe the mutual followers thing just kind of takes you back to a little more of the classic social network where you have people who sort of all know each other rather than a publishing form, but I guess I like this thing where you can start to follow someone.

Without necessarily needing that to be two way, but the really high value relationships to me are ones where we follow each other because we’re interested in each other’s work or we share work values or we’ve worked together in the past or we might want to work together in the future, and you can have those little interactions, those little conversations, etc.

But for me, a much smaller number of followers who are people that I really vibe with or have a lot in common with or we just have similar interests and passions.

And I think I saw one effect of this when I transitioned, kind of did a bit of a career pivot, still in creative tools, but you know, went from the kind of developer tools, cloud space to the research world and more of kind of like personal productivity software. And so quite a lot of people who had followed me because I don’t know, they saw me speak at a developer conference and now they’re, why is this guy tweeting about tools for thought? What the hell is that? You know, not that interested. Maybe they don’t unfollow, but they just become kind of a dark. The point of our connection is no longer there, and so maybe the newer fresher followers who are here because of things I’m doing now, and then maybe in turn I follow them because they’re doing similar things, that’s to me where the value is.

00:33:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that you both have pointed out two things that I think are interesting challenges as you like start engaging online.

The first is the cookie cutter problem, and the second is how do you actually allow yourself to evolve? Fortune cookie, not cookie cutter, maybe the same thing. I think the fortune cookie problem is a really interesting one because I think there’s a point where you have a certain amount of reach on Twitter where the algorithm becomes very apparent. You can watch it in real time take hold, and you very subtly understand or maybe subconsciously understand what is going to get likes and what will probably not get likes, and it just breaks your brain, at least I’ll say it breaks my brain because it puts you in this position where You are tempted and also rewarded for oversimplifying, polarizing. Tweeting the hot take, criticizing. Those kinds of things. I think a good example that I learned and in many ways has for me discredited the value of like having a large following in some ways is, I remember when I launched a side project last year, I think. When I tweeted about the staff design project, which was an interview series I did. Maybe 100 people liked the tweet, which is awesome. 100 people checking out my project, fantastic. And then I think the next week I tweeted a screenshot of framer.com, and I said something like, Framer clearly reveres visual design or something like that, and that tweet got 1000 likes. And so that I felt this really deep disconnect between What I thought was valuable and what people seemed to resonate with versus this throwaway screenshot of somebody else’s work that everybody sort of glommed onto and followed me for and all of a sudden I’m like, oh, people are following me because I tweeted a screenshot of somebody else’s work. That doesn’t feel super good. And then to your point, Adam, this idea of almost being locked into a thing you’re supposed to tweet about, I feel is I don’t think I’ve really encountered this yet, but you see other people encounter this where they are the design systems person, they are the accessibility person, and when they try and branch out, it feels particularly hard. Like you can watch them struggle with it. You can watch them try and find their voice because all of a sudden the thing that they’ve become well known for and recognized for and respected for. They’re trying to branch out and are met with crickets, right? Like the design systems person who becomes interested in web 3, that’s a painful transition, like that is an entirely different disconnected audience. And so I think, you know, these ideas connect because You start tweeting things that are your more current modern interests, they’re met with crickets, and you feel the algorithm pushing back against your own personal development, and you think to yourself, well, I like getting likes, I like getting followers. I like that notification dot. Maybe I’ll just keep tweeting about design systems and then you end up with people creating alts, and then you have all these multiple Twitter accounts you’re balancing, and then your life is just These different threads of interests and nothing feels authentic or complete anymore. Maybe that’s OK, maybe that’s how the internet should work. Maybe we should have different accounts for different interests, right? Like we have different networks for different types of communities. Facebook has a different type of connection than a Twitter. Maybe you should have a different Twitter for every kind of interest you have. I don’t know. But yeah, I’ve noticed those sort of tensions in my life, like figuring out what to tweet about and wanting to be real and authentic and true to yourself, while also recognizing as you’re typing, you’re like, uh, I bet if I reworded this to be slightly spicier, more people would like it, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

00:37:53 - Speaker 2: That’s incredibly interesting.

I mean, those pressures, social pressures have always existed, of course.

I think of if you want to like reinvent yourself a little bit, maybe like your personal style or something about how you present yourself to the world, the best time to do that is when you move to a new town. No one knows the old you and so you can just kind of, you know, change it overnight and not deal with the I know it’s quite pressure, but maybe even if people are not necessarily trying to push you back into what they know you for, but yeah, I think we always feel a sort of pressure to be what we’re known to be rather than what we want to evolve into, and that comes from our environment, friends and family, peer groups, and so on, and that makes personal change even harder than maybe it already is. Now obviously you digitize these natural tendencies which are maybe not great to begin with and make them maybe even more amped up, particularly when the algorithm makes it so visible to you. So that’s very interesting. Actually this is a nice connection back to a concept we talked about in the company brand episode which is there’s what’s known as brand extension. And the general thing is that brand extension is uh basically a pretty bad idea and almost never works. So, you know, for example, Kleenex is known for making facial tissue. If Kleenex makes printer paper, which perhaps is a similar product in the sense of how it’s manufactured, not only is it confusing what the hell is Kleenex printer paper, but you’ve actually destroyed the brand equity of what Kleenex is in the mind of your customer. And the recommendation there is generally make a new brand if you’re truly transitioning to a different market. So maybe that does beg the question of should I have just started a new Twitter account when I was transitioning my career. And again, to me it feels I’m the same person. It feels like a continuous journey that I went through, and I do think there’s this uniting thing that ties togetheroku I can switch and Muse, which is creative tools and helping people, you know, making things to help other people make things. So to me it’s perfectly, perfectly logical and obvious, but maybe there is places where that ends up being sort of a brand extension.

00:40:03 - Speaker 1: I feel like crypto is just the most obvious example to point to where like everybody has their separate crypto brand now, or I mean we could talk about pseudonymity, which is this interesting trend that’s taking shape right now where people want to have.

This alt profile where they can feel safe to talk about this other interest they have, but they know is incredibly polarizing and they don’t want to sort of poison the well of their existing brand by introducing these new topics, right? What do you both think of pseudonymity in this space, maybe even going back to Mark’s point about, I think he called it reputational capital, I think is a really interesting concept that gets associated with, you know, a name, a face, a person, and we’re sort of breaking that a little bit.

00:40:51 - Speaker 2: I think the ability to make multiple profiles and isolate them from each other, have some be private, some more public, maybe one that’s career oriented, one that’s personal, something like that is one of the incredible strengths of the internet, and I pretty strongly, I think Mark Zuckerberg at some point in the early Facebook days said that everyone should have just one personal account, your one person, it should have your real first and last name. And I think that really removes a lot of what makes the internet a pretty special place.

I think it’s a place, particularly, for example, teenagers or younger people who are still figuring things out, they can explore parts of their identity that they’re not sure about yet in this sort of safe but still out in the world way. I think it’s an incredible thing. Now, of course, the ability to make anonymous accounts or relatively little tie to your real world identity is also part of what creates so many problems on the internet. Spam and fraud and abuse and different things like that, but I feel that’s a price worth paying.

00:41:48 - Speaker 1: It feels like there’s this tension, you know, in the old world of forums, every forum you went to, you would sign up and have a separate account and you could kind of build your own identity there that wasn’t linked to your other forum accounts, but now we live in the world of Discord where you are.

Your account, no matter what server you’re accessing. Mark, I’m curious because I know you’re deep in Discord. I’ve always wondered why Discord doesn’t have this concept of bringing a separate identity to every server, even though it’s all wrapped under one login.

And maybe even Twitter has an opportunity to innovate here cause they’re experimenting with a feature called Communities where, you know, your design persona or your development persona or tools for thought persona is just different and as you switch contexts, it should feel very natural to do that and you shouldn’t have to log out of one persona and log back in. It should just be, oh, I’m switching into this space, this mode.

00:42:49 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, in general I’m very bullish on pseudonymity. I think it’s super important to individuals, to people, to citizens, and I think it’s honestly fairly threatening and sometimes problematic to like managers and governors, you know, that kind of group, and so that’s why there’s this constant tension of should you be able to make a synonymous account and generally individuals say yes and people running stuff say no.

Discord is interesting that you mentioned that because I think it is unfortunate that they don’t natively support multiple. Identities, for what it’s worth. I do have multiple disco identities. I think one is for like personal and gaming and one is for work. I forget how exactly it’s split, but I definitely have several. Yeah it’s too bad they don’t support natively.

00:43:31 - Speaker 2: Identity is also a huge topic of interest for me. It’s something I think that the computing slash internet world is basically serving users really, really poorly on from a security perspective, from a mental model perspective and all that sort of thing, but it is obviously a very thorny problem and here we’re talking about personal brand which is about a public identity or how you’re representing yourself to some.

Group, whereas identity could be in the kind of foundational sense, could just be an account with the system or how I represent myself to a computer somewhere that’s relatively private activity.

But I do think that, do you have one account that is in multiple things versus sort of many totally segregated accounts is an interesting one on that side because for example, one thing I think GitHub got really right from my perspective is you only have one GitHub account and you belong to different organizations.

I don’t get a new GitHub login when I join a new company. And maybe some people choose to do that separate their open source work from personal work or whatever.

But at least for me, I find that works very well, maybe because coding related things are not something I feel particularly desirous of separating, but on the other side of it, you can look at something like Google, which has increasingly just rolled up more and more and more and more services into one giant Uber identity, and I basically have tried to stop using Google services for the sole reason that I just cannot stand in their identity system.

Because it seems to get the worst of all worlds.

On one hand, I do have different accounts, you know, I have the different ventures I’m involved in, each have their own thing, and I have to switch between that. I go to a Google doc, I can’t access it. I got to switch to the right account, but on the other hand, they roll together all this stuff like my search history with other things that I just don’t want connected at all and I’m really annoyed by.

It’s sort of like the worst of all worlds. I think we’re very much still figuring this out as an industry.

00:45:30 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like the YouTube connection is particularly painful. At least for me, I’m like, the things I care about on YouTube are very different than the things I’m typically googling for. I don’t know if that’s the same for you both, but no, yeah, for sure.

00:45:42 - Speaker 3: We’ve talked a lot on this podcast about understanding and aligning with how things actually work in their underlying basis, mostly in terms of knowledge work and tools for thought and Workflows and stuff like that. We can have a whole discussion about this with respect to identity. I think a lot of the troubles that we have with identity and therefore developing personal brands comes from an impedance mismatch between how identity actually works and how it works on these platforms.

The way identity actually works, it’s a much more distributed networked mesh concept. The identity is something you Have with respect to another individual or with respect to another group, and it’s the sum or the intersection of all the interactions and labels and information that that subset of the universe has about you and it can vary depending on which subset you’re talking about.

So my identity with respect to this group is different than my identity with respect to my family. You know, those two groups are different things there’s some overlap but they’re not the same. Whereas identity in the technical sense tends to be modeled as a single row in a database that again, they tend to want to match 1 to 1 with like a human body, and I think basically that’s wrong and that’s why you get all this impedance mismatch, something that the in which the lab has done a little bit of work on. I’m curious to see them do more on that too.

00:46:58 - Speaker 1: Have either of you encountered a tension between the fact that you Follow people you work with and people you work with follow you, and then this interest graph, right, like you behave differently around your close friends and you behave differently around your family, and then you behave differently when you’re in a work meeting, but all of that stuff gets scrambled up on Twitter and I found this very odd sensation of, I don’t know, like personal brand conflicting with, oh, these are also people that I have professional relationships with day to day and I’m in meetings with them. And my shit post on Twitter kind of shows up alongside, hey, we gotta hop on a Zoom call to make a decision about Q3 strategy. It’s a very odd sort of sensation to bounce between those kinds of things. Have you experienced that or do you feel that in any way?

00:47:50 - Speaker 2: I do think it’s a good thing that they talk about the like concept of bringing your whole self to work, which I’m not sure I quite fully agree with. When I got started in the business world, and there was a sense of professionalism which to me felt really inauthentic, things like you’re expected to dress in a certain way that was just not the way I wanted to dress and That was quote unquote professional and there’s many ways in which I felt it was very sterile and very just kind of restricting of, you know, we’re people here and I think it doesn’t hurt to get to know each other as people a little bit.

And the flip side of that, I do believe in professionalism as a kind of siloing of we’re all here to serve a particular mission, the mission of the company that we’re involved in, and we should mostly build our interactions about that sort of thing.

So I think there’s a balance to be struck there, and I think it’s maybe not bad that people see your tweet and, you know, thought it was funny and they can reference it and you can make a connection on that level.

I don’t know if you feel like it undercuts your serious tone and authority because you like to be a little goofy on Twitter, but I don’t know. I feel like, you know, people just have a little more fun in the workplace than they used to and being taken seriously as an authority or as a boss or as a designer delivering a piece of work that folks are going to needed to sort of take as the golden path for what they’re working on, shouldn’t be undercut by that you like to have fun sometimes.

00:49:11 - Speaker 1: Well, here, maybe this gets back into like personal brand building, like there is this strategy or way to go about building an audience or increasing your online cloud, which is, you just learn things and talk about it, like you build something, you learn something, and then you share that with the world.

And the thing is you learn, at least in my case, I learned the most about designing and building products through my engagements at work at GitHub at Spectrum and Facebook. And it does feel like there’s some tension between, oh, I learned this thing from this interaction at work, but now I don’t want to tweet it because it feels like I’m subtweeting a co-worker. And so then I end up only really tweeting about side project stuff.

So while it’s great that I work at GitHub and I can like Tweet big product announcements. The things that I am actually learning day to day, I feel very self-conscious posting about that online. It feels almost like betraying the bubble of the workspace where like we’re learning internally at work together, yet there’s still, I believe, something valuable about people sharing that stuff externally.

Hey, I learned this thing, I overcame this hard problem. So I don’t know, this might just be like a classic case of overthinking and being too self-conscious about what other people think of me, but that feels like the more gray area boundary of, I don’t want it to feel like I’m ever subtweeting someone at work where we had a particular interaction that I learned from and it was good, but now it’s going public, right?

00:50:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I can see why that would be especially tough for you because you do have a pretty big audience, you do have a lot of Twitter followers, quite a few more than.

Mark and I and through your other means as well. And so yeah, maybe if you had 50 followers, then it would be OK to share that, but you know, you have to be conscious of you do have a pretty big megaphone and if you get up there and say, you know, I really realized that a meeting without an agenda is always a waste of time, and you tweeted that right. After meeting without an agenda, and so whoever like organized that meeting, and maybe it’s a good learning and so on, and maybe you even had that conversation with them, but it feels a little bit airing dirty laundry or you know, it’s the way you trust your colleagues as you’re able to be a little vulnerable around each other and going blasting through your megaphone about it is maybe not that nice.

00:51:35 - Speaker 3: I think this is a great point and a very real dynamic, and I think it’s appropriate and reasonable to be mindful of this when you’re tweeting or not tweeting about stuff at your work, but I think there’s a big macro implication of this, which is that there’s a lot of professional dark matter in social media, you know, in astronomy there’s this idea of dark matter, which is All the mass or whatever out in the universe that for some reason we can’t directly observe, but we know indirectly that it’s there.

And if you only look at stuff that you can easily and obviously see you’re sort of missing a lot of the universe, I think the same thing happens with professional experiences or takes on social media where there’s actually a pretty narrow subset of stuff that tends to get out of the filter and on the social media, and especially the social media that you look at. So if you turn that around and say, The stuff that I’m seeing on Twitter is representative of what happens in my industry. That’s a very serious mistake, especially in terms of best practices, or what should I do, or how should I approach this problem, because a lot of the, the most effective and experienced people, they just like go and tight for 10 hours and they go back home to their families or whatever, and that’s that. They never post anything on Twitter in their entire life. So I think you got to be really aware of this dynamic.

00:52:45 - Speaker 1: I’m so glad you brought that up, cause this is another topic that I’m really interested in, because I feel like I wish the world worked a different way, that it just doesn’t work, which is that, how do I tee this up? Maybe you’ve seen people say something like, The talkers are on Twitter and the builders are off doing the real work, or people will frequently say the best designers or developers I know don’t have a presence on Twitter, and these things are quite often true. I mean, I have these people in my life, you do too, I’m sure of you just know a fantastic person who is good at their craft, and they don’t care at all about Twitter.

And I think that’s great. I think that it’s amazing that there are people out there doing great work and Unfortunately, we never hear from them. We never get to learn from them.

So as a result, the stuff that does get posted to social media ends up skewing like not as good or maybe lowest common denominator kind of content, and I understand why this happens, you know, if you imagine even someone inclined to share the things that they’re learning and the skills that they’ve developed, they buy a house. They have kids, they get married. They don’t care about impressing people on the internet. They just don’t care anymore, and those are the people that I want to learn from the most.

So yeah, when I said I wish the world worked a different way. I wish the world worked where people who are really good at their craft and felt like they didn’t have to be on Twitter, would still go on Twitter and share what they know with the world. I wish those would be the people whose blog. we read whose Twitter accounts get the most likes, not this other hot take spicy repost screenshot of framer.com stuff that isn’t substantive and quite shallow, but people seem to like, you know, there’s just I don’t know, I complaining about reality, but How do we get more people who are really good at their craft, the person who we say, yeah, you know, the best people are off building, they’re not tweeting. How do we get them to tweet and actually feel comfortable and safe and rewarded for sharing what they know?

00:55:03 - Speaker 3: I have a couple thoughts here. One is, I do think it helps if you take a broader and more networked approach.

So my experience with infrastructure engineering, for example, which is the space that I used to work in, uh, and really focus in, my experience was that very few of those people were like online, but they were quite accessible if you just knew who to ask. So you just ask for an introduction and then you tell me your war stories about my sequel or whatever, and you can get access to a lot of information that way.

So it might not be online and public social media, but You can access them directly.

The other thought I have here is that I think that the edited interview is a great way to surface this information, and I wish people did more of it.

That it is you identify someone who might have a lot of insight and experience, but for whatever reason, they just don’t have time or they don’t want to do it, and they haven’t got. The activation energy to go post about it.

You just go interview them because people love to talk about themselves, right? And you can usually get people to talk for an hour about their work or what they learned. And if you do all the hard work of editing it and writing it up and publishing it, and so forth, you can get a lot of stuff out that way.

And I’ve seen a few people attempt this. Like I think Will Larson, for example, has done the staff engineering series, you know, the podcasts end up being something like that sometimes. But I think that’s a really valuable and underutilized form.

00:56:18 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, and that’s why I actually think the Meta Muse podcast is so special in the space of whatever we call this design engineering technology podcast, which is that the two of you have experience, you’ve walked the walk and you also know how to talk the talk, and you have the ability to ask questions that go beyond the surface level.

I remember when I started the Design Details podcast, when we would interview people. We were brand new to design and it’s like we could ask them questions, but we didn’t know the best questions to ask or even if they gave us a response, we wouldn’t have a nuanced follow up of, oh, I’ve also experienced that, like, how did you solve it and we can compare paths, right? It was very much newbie interviewing expert.

So how do we get, I guess, to that point, Mark, like, what does it take to get more experts interviewing experts and it comes back to the same problem of they just don’t have time, they don’t care enough.

00:57:16 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think we need more information entrepreneurs, and by the way, it’s a great opportunity to build a little bit of a personal brand.

00:57:22 - Speaker 1: Oh, interesting phrase, information entrepreneur. Hmm.

Do you ever think about how there’s this path, it seems like where people get traction for doing something, and so they talk about it.

I think this is quite common in the building and public movement which you all talked about on last week’s episode, which was You know, you build something you share it out with the world, you talk about what you learned, and quite often that gets engagement, but then it quickly becomes like a meta-analysis of, here’s what I learned about tweeting about what I learned.

And then you get to the next level, which is, I made money tweeting about what I learned about what I learned, and then you inevitably have somebody selling a course about how to tweet about making money from learning about things that you learned about. And you just get stuck.

I feel like that’s, I don’t know, the logical conclusion for all of this is you just release a course, have a newsletter, and talk about how to make money from tweeting about stuff. Yeah. Do you have the same perception that this problem exists and how do we avoid it? How do we help people not get stuck in that trap of doing the meta creation?

00:58:35 - Speaker 3: I think it’s a very powerful and unfortunate attractor. I definitely see that a lot. I think a lot of this comes back to the individual participant in the information landscape and the social capital landscape. You gotta be aware that there’s a huge attractor there, so you got to heavily discount people who are selling courses about stuff, honestly. It’s not to say there aren’t any good ones, but you need to be aware that there’s much more incentive for someone to post about it if they’re doing that versus if they’re a very experienced practitioner who’s just scraping some time together outside their family to write one blog post.

00:59:04 - Speaker 1: I agree with that. I would be curious to hear if you’ve experienced this, which is The people who are the best at that, who are very productive and good at their craft, they’re unwilling to take the reputational risk to talk about that publicly.

One thing that I encountered when I did a series of interviews about staff design, which is really about the IC career ladder for product designers, and some people that I asked to interview didn’t have an incentive to be interviewed about that.

They had made it at their company, they had the job where they were doing the best work of their life. There’s no reason to rock the boat. They’re making as much money as they want to make. They don’t care about being famous, they just want to do good work, and there’s no reason to be interviewed for that.

Like, the downside of a misspoken phrase in today’s environment is pretty consequential from a reputation point of view to the point of, you know, you could actually get fired for saying something wrong or I don’t know, counter to the flow of online discourse.

So I had people reject participating in that, who sadly are the people who I most wanted to learn from and have the most to share with the world. So, I guess selfishly, you could have that conversation one on one, unrecorded. But then we lose this opportunity for everyone else in the world to understand how the actually great people think and get work done and stay productive or whatever it might be.

01:00:33 - Speaker 2: Well, before we go, Brian, one of the questions that I think your listeners sent in to ask Mark and I kind of a bonus question was basically advice to young designers getting started. So maybe I’ll repurpose that a little bit, turn it back around to you, which is if there’s someone early in their career that thinks, all right, this personal brand thing seems useful, will get me in touch with people I want to meet or maybe help me get a job or something, what would you advise for sort of how to get started and then Not only in terms of where to start, but even channels, right? We’ve talked a lot about Twitter, but like newsletters are really interesting one as well, building a personal website. There’s obviously lots of other ways to kind of speak to the world. What would you advise is the right place to start and are there even pros and cons, right? Like just coming in and thinking, oh, it would be cool to be like mildly internet famous, it’s probably the wrong motivation. There’s probably you even talked about some of the downsides. How does a young person know? If or how much to invest in a personal brand, and then how would you suggest they go about doing that?

01:01:36 - Speaker 1: This is a really interesting question cause as you’re asking it, I’m like, damn, I wish I’d written about this to think more clearly about it before answering it live here with my voice captured for all of eternity on the internet, but let me try my best.

I think maybe there’s 3 points I’d want to make. The first is what I look for when I’m hiring designers or even going back to original points like, what’s the experience of encountering a stranger on the internet? I like this phrase proof of curiosity. Is this person curious about the world, but curious in a way where they actually take action on that curiosity, and that can manifest itself in lots of ways. One way is, you tweet about it, right? Like you learn something, you tweet about it, you read a book, here’s my review. Other ways are you went ahead and bought a domain of your personal first name last name.com, then you built your own website. And in building your website, you got stuck on this gnarly JavaScript problem. So then you went in this way, right? So that’s one thing. Others are people who get frustrated with the way FIMA works, so they build the FigMA plugin, or it can be even just you take photos of the world and publish them. There’s just something about being curious about the way the world works, or more specifically about the way software works, and following some thread of that and sharing that online. I find that to be the number one signal I look for, like, a lot of people can design apps, a lot of people can design websites, and I’m sure are great at it, but it’s more enjoyable and interesting to work with people who are curious about how it all works, how it all fits together, and they have some activation to pursue that. So that’s the first thing is maybe it’s less about building a personal brand or building an audience and rather just like, how do I actually make sure that I’m still curious about the world after many years and don’t get jaded about everything and cynical and pessimistic about the future of software.

01:03:42 - Speaker 2: I wonder if one piece of that, you know, curiosity is something I personally value and is one of our company values at Muse. So it’s interesting to hear you say you look for that in hires, but it’s also notable, I think that there is a connection really to creative and knowledge work, which is you are doing something well creation oriented and it has to be inspired somehow. It has to have a unique angle, you’re doing something and so curiosity is the start of that pipeline of making something interesting, making something unique, having a voice, doing some interesting work that isn’t just kind of Put something in the start of the pipeline and something obvious pops out at the back end.

01:04:23 - Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. And of course, you know, exceptions abound. I think a common push back against this idea is like people have families and work a second job or they might just be trying to break into the industry and they don’t have time to go make their personal website. I think that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be some big thing. I think it can be small proof of curiosity that grows over time. I think it’s OK, don’t need to overthink the size of that artifact, which maybe leads into my second point, which is I think it’s so easy to overthink. It’s gotta be perfect. If I’m gonna write a blog post, it’s gotta be a world shaking essay. If I could make a YouTube video, it’s gotta have, you know, 4K perfect sound quality, perfectly color graded. And I think this over optimization or this pursuit of perfection causes a lot of people to get stuck one step short of shipping, where they are way too invested in the polish of the thing they’re building and not concerned enough about just actually making sure the world sees it and can enjoy it. And I don’t know exactly how to battle that except What I’ve been doing a lot more lately is trying to publish right at the moment where I’m a little bit scared that it’s not quite ready. And there are definitely downsides to doing that cause you end up making many mistakes. A good recent example is I tweeted this idea that, hey, I will critique the visuals of your website or app. Would anyone pay for that? And I just tweeted this out into the world, and it’s taken me down this really random side project rabbit hole. Where now I’m doing these like product design critique breakdowns for people. But that initial tweet, I tweeted it when I was maybe a little bit scared to tweet that, like, is this too shallow? Does anybody care? Is this useful? I don’t know. Maybe I should just delete this draft. But I hit publish and there were mistakes in doing that. Like, the framing of it was incorrect. I put a price on it that was incorrect. I gated it like, oh, I’ll do this for 2 hours. That was a mistake. It ended up taking way longer. So I mean there’s this tension of being thoughtful about what you put into the world, but also not overthinking it. And so I’m trying to actually push back to not being unthoughtful, but being a little bit more daring, I suppose, and like, let’s just get it out there and it can develop over time. And then perhaps that leads into this third point, which is maybe even echoing what you said earlier, Mark, about. For younger designers, I look back at the stuff that I published and wrote when I was getting started, and it is just eye rolly cringy, embarrassing stuff, and that is on the internet. And I think that’s OK. I think it’s good to have some of those artifacts that you can look back on and laugh at yourself for. But if you’re particularly nervous about that, about being wrong, about having your early ideas published for the world and archived, I think a useful workaround for that is to ask the experts, you know, this was the way I started with design details, is we just interviewed better designers than us. In fact, even the precursor to design details was a series of blog posts that I wrote. They’re now called app dissections, where what I would do is I would screen record really interesting software on my phone. Oh, that interaction was cool. I would take a screen recording and annotate it. There’s no stakes in that. I’m commenting on other people’s work, but in doing so, I felt like I was You know, preserving some artifact of design in time, adding a little bit of commentary, forcing myself into a mode where I was thinking about design, trying to reverse engineer a decision. But I didn’t actually have to put my work out there, right? So it’s a little bit more of a safe way to wade into those waters. So I think podcasting is great, interviewing people is great. Use existing resources and extract information and knowledge from those before you necessarily feel like you have to publish your own groundbreaking essay. There’s an on-ramp here. So maybe those three ideas in combination, the proof of curiosity, don’t overthink and don’t put this pressure on yourself of having to have some magnificent idea when you’re early in your career. Maybe that all comes together into some concoction or soup of ways to feel comfortable talking about the stuff you’re interested in on the internet.

01:09:00 - Speaker 2: I think that’s a great point to wrap on. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at MAHQ or on email, hello@msApp.com, and you can help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Brian, thank you for inspiring us all with your decades-long accumulation of side projects that you’re willing to put on the internet for everyone to see and for educating us about maybe some of the pros and cons of having a lot of followers and how that might lock you in, but I look forward to continuing to follow all of your writing and podcasting and thanks so much for being on.

01:09:36 - Speaker 1: Thank you for inviting me. I guess I have to be candid. It was a little self-conscious about being interviewed for this subject. There is this, I guess, chip on my shoulder of being known for being known, and that doesn’t feel super great. It’s like.

01:09:52 - Speaker 2: Watch out, pretty soon you’re going to be selling a course.

01:09:55 - Speaker 1: How about this? I’ll look forward to take to where we get to talk about design or product building. But this was really fun in the meantime and thanks for having me.