Let’s give it all away!

A few days ago, I attended a very cool digital conference called “24 Hours of UX” which is a conference literally runs 24 hours for the day. Different speakers all around the world speak at their timezone to cover the enter 24-hour block. Without picking specific content to attend, I joined a few based on my availabilities of the day and stumbled upon a wonderful talk by Jeff Gothelf on the topic of Forever Employable! As literal as it sounds, the talk was about how to ensure you have sustainable competitive advantage so that you won’t be out of job. While I already knew many things he touched on, something he said deeply resonated with me … which is You Have to Give It All Away in order to get it all back! What does that mean? It essentially means that the more you share aloud your work/learning, the more people will hear about them, subsequently the more people will reach out and work with you. When you give it all away, you’re not just helping others, you’re helping yourself as well. You will attract the people who share the same experience or want to learn about the experience, then you will get a chance to learn from each other. What Jeff said is exactly why I started the Service Design Collective in NYC. I want people to share and learn from each other. And that’s why I started XProject52. I want to share what I’ve learned, observed, and reflected, so that people can learn from these experiences. Similarly, I never hesitate to share with my peers what I know at work. I want them to know what I know, so they can do what I do, so that I can eventually move onto the next role. I don’t want to forever be in the same place with the same people, I want to keep moving further along in my career. So here’s the tip, make sure you hire the people who want to be you, so that you can pass on your work to them and move onto the next challenge 🙂