Growth mindset for designers

Your thinking behind your work is more important than your current skills today

This is the fourth and last part of the assessing your product design skills article. Previously we talked about a framework for evaluating yourself and evaluating your craft and collaboration skills. Now we’ll dive a little into an important trait for designers—mindset.

How you think about your work >>> work itself. Photo by Stanislav

Mindset is at the core of who you are as a professional and as a person. It is made up of deeper values that you deeply hold about yourself, your work, and others. This doesn’t mean they’re unchangeable. Mindset is something that permeates your acquisition of skills and how you work.

Why mindset?

When I started my career in design I set a high bar for myself to do great work. While I made progress and created good work, the process was anything but great. Often times I would look at the work of other designers and their amazing execution filled me with anxiety. How can I be so bad?

Wise words from Adventure Time

While it’s expected that as a new designer you won’t know all the things—it’s how you handle your lack of knowledge that makes a difference. I didn’t handle it well. Instead of practicing to get better and renewing my skills, I escaped the work, I procrastinated.

Reading Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck changed my attitude. It made me realize that it’s not about having an innate talent—which we so associate with creative fields of any kind (arts, theater, design…) but rather it’s about practice. Believing that your intelligence is malleable and that you can learn many new skills well past your 30s (outdated studies use to say that your brain development stops in your late 20s).

Day to day I changed my approach from relying on last minute miracles at midnight to push me through a creative problem to showing output every day. Shitty first drafts made for better communication, eased tensions and ultimately helped drive the quality of the work further due to different perspectives that I alone wouldn’t have.

Key traits

Overall a star designer has a mindset that helps them grow individually. Their attitude and thinking empowers, motivates, and elevates the people around them. They’re seen as a leader, someone to follow and emulate because of the way they get work done.

Growth oriented — do you see mistakes as a natural part of learning? Do you attribute your design skills to innate talent or hard work? How do you view others, do you see their behavior set in stone or malleable? Comfort with ambiguity — how do you tackle nebulous problems or business goals? Are you comfortable with assignments that are less defined? What is the most ambiguous assignment you’ve faced? Bravery in uncertainty — How comfortable are you ok with speaking up? Occasionally looking “stupid” or being wrong? Are you comfortable in voicing an unpopular opinion? Are you ok with being vulnerable at times and not having an answer? Transparency and ownership — do you own up to your mistakes, ask for help when you’re stuck, identify action plans on how to improve your performance? Do you show your work early and often and admit to being stuck instead of covering up?

Unlike craft and collaboration skills, we usually think of mindset as an either or. While people do have certain preferences or attitudes and a certain inclination, a helpful mindset can be developed and cultivated.

You CAN practice bravery. You CAN look at your work objectively, be vulnerable, and continue practicing every day, getting slightly better. These gains are like compound interest, incremental day to day but exponential over the long term.

Imposter syndrome and the growth mindset

If you’ve ever struggled with the imposter syndrome (and if you haven’t — let’s talk!) then I recommend you check out Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck, see her amazing talk too.