UX is a video game, here's how to win

So I've been playing a lot of video games recently. I just finished The Last of Us Part 1 and 2, and it's such a great game. While I was playing, I noticed so much similarities between the video games I play and my actual job as a senior UX designer in the real world. I mean, just like in video games, in your job you have goals you want to achieve, you have objectives you need to complete to achieve those goals. Achieving those goals could get you promoted. The points you earn is your salary, and you have side quests to complete. While focusing on your objectives. While doing all of this, you also have to make sure your character doesn't die or else you lose some progress. In the real world, you want to do all of this without getting burnt out every time. I hope you can see the same patterns I'm seeing here. Your UX design career is actually a video game, and this video is going to help you get to the next level faster. Throughout the course of my career as a UX designer— I've been a UX designer for about 8 years now— there are 3 core skills that I've developed at different levels that have helped me to continue to progress in this game. I don't think I've won the game just yet. In fact, my plan is not to win, but I want to continuously make progress. I want to continuously earn points so I can keep being interested in playing the game, because if it feels like the game is too difficult and I'm not making progress, then I might start to lose interest. I think Elon describes this really well here. What do you get from video games in general? It needs to be not too easy, not too hard, um, kind of in the Goldilocks zone. Um, and I guess you generally want to feel like you're progressing. Going back to the principles I've been applying in my 8 years of being a UX designer, the first skill I developed is the skill of craft. Craft is simply your ability to do something exceptionally well, where it feels like you've put so much thought, love, care, and attention to what you produce. That is craft. Ideally, you should focus on the skill of craft in the first 1 to 2 years of your career. You should forget every other thing and just be obsessed best on the craft of creating exceptional designs. At the point when I focused on my craft, I was just getting into the UX design field, so I was constantly trying to understand what good design looks like and how I can replicate that. And like in a game, while you're building your skill of craft, you're going to complete so many side quests along the way. These side quests are going to help you pick up superpowers that you need later on in the game. So your superpowers could be visual design, prototyping, user research, motion design, coding, usability testing, copywriting, or anything related to user experience design or user interface design. The most important thing is to pick up as many superpowers as you can while focusing on building your skill of craft so you can find a combination of superpowers that can help you get to the next level. But how do you find these superpowers? The best way to do this is to make sure that you actually try to explore all the side quests to gain these superpowers so you can identify which ones you enjoy the most. Like in video games, what's stopping so many people from understanding their superpowers early is that they're stuck on tutorial mode. And tutorial mode is basically when you're trying to understand how each button works, how to attack, how to defend, and how to figure out what happens in the game. Now, if you keep playing the game in tutorial mode, you'll never get the experience to crush that level. For me, my superpower is visual design and prototyping, and this is influenced by my architecture and graphic design background. I also like the discovery stage of the design process depending on the kind of project that I'm working on. So I really enjoy trying to understand what the problem is, asking questions, trying to get into the problem and disambiguating it, and then trying to find out how to solve the problem with a well-designed prototype. But I wouldn't have understood all of this if I kept watching YouTube tutorials and never actually tried to explore. You need to be able to find your own superpowers too. And this is what you're doing in your craft era. When you're focusing on the skill of craft, you're simply trying to identify the combination of superpowers that can make you a badass generalist. Something that can make you good at a lot of things and great at a few of them. But you're not specializing in anything just yet. Now, when you've been able to master the skill of craft and you've identified the combination of superpowers, it's easier for you to get to the next level. Which is where you move from maybe a junior designer to a midweight designer or even maybe an early senior designer. And like in every video game, the same skills that you used to beat the boss in level 1 will not be sufficient in level 2 when you get to the next level. You need to add another skill to your craft skill. You have your craft skill on lock already. You've been doing this for 2 years and it has already become second nature to you. So what you need to do next is to focus on skill number 2, which is the skill of storytelling. Ideally, you should start focusing on the skill of storytelling in about your second year. Mastering the skill of storytelling is important because you can use your skill of craft to make all your designs look super nice, clean, visually aesthetic. In fact, it can be the best-looking designs in the entire world. But if you can't develop a compelling story about how that design meets your users' needs or helps your business make money, or does both, then you might be stuck at that level. What you need now is to be able to understand how to use storytelling to sell your ideas, to sell the craft skills that you developed along the way. Now, how can you tell a good story to sell your craft? One, you need to understand what your user needs are. Secondly, you need to understand what the interests of your stakeholders are. Thirdly, you need to understand what the business goals of the company that you're working for are. And then you need to use stories to connect the user needs stakeholder interests and business goals. And this might sound really simple, but it's a bit more complicated than that. At every point in time when you want to sell your ideas, you need to understand who your audience is. If you're presenting to like designers, for example, you need to put the user needs forward. If you're presenting to business team, you need to put the business forward. And again, with storytelling, like in video games, you have other side quests as well. Your side quests could then be learning how to share your work for feedback, learning how to create good presentations so you, you can understand how to present your ideas in a deck without losing the audience. Learning public speaking so you can be comfortable speaking to a large audience. Now, without mastering the skill of storytelling, it will be difficult to sell the craft skills that you've already mastered, and this will make it hard to influence your team. Now, this brings us to the 3rd skill in the game. You should be about 3 to 4 years into your career at this point. You've mastered your craft and the art of storytelling. Now, for the rest of your career, the ultimate skill you need to master in this game is influence. You need to combine your craft and storytelling skills to influence the impact of your work. This is what gets you promoted again and again and again. In fact, the reason why designers struggle with getting promoted is because they haven't mastered the skill of influence. I made this mistake early in my career as well. I spent the first 4 years of my career focusing on craft skills, but I was lucky it was at a time when craft was scarce. There were very few UX designers that had the same level of craft that I did because because UX wasn't that popular at the time, so I was able to make some progress. Now, the competition is too much, so you have to consistently use a combination of solid craft and good storytelling to show impact, and that's how you grow your sphere of influence. Again, like in a game, there are different milestones that you need to hit to grow your sphere of influence. First, you need to start influencing your immediate team. You can do this by using a combination of superpowers from your craft skills. For me, that would be running workshops with my team to uncover the problem, creating prototypes to solve the problems, and collaborating with engineers to ship the solution. When you do this repeatedly, you'll have a lot of influence as a designer in your team. Then you grow your sphere of influence beyond your team to the organization. This may take longer depending on how big your organization is. This is when the work you do has a direct impact on the goals of the company. For example, if a feature you've designed and shipped with your team helped the company reach their revenue goals, for the year, then you have been able to achieve organizational level of influence. The 3rd sphere of influence is when you've been able to grow your influence beyond your team and organization to a larger community outside your organization. It could be through mentorship in a design community, through growing your personal brand, or through the direct impact that your work is having on the lives of users or customers. Or it could even be the combination of all 3. For example, if you worked on a feature that helped people save money, and 1 million people save money using that tool, that means you've been able to help 1 million people build a money-saving habit, which if you look at it, is a net positive. So it makes sense because now you've had an influence in their lives and they don't even know it. So that means your influence has gone beyond your team, beyond your organization, and has gone to the community. And really, that is what meaning means to me personally, because when you are able to achieve these 3 spheres of influence, It's going to be easier for you to command a higher salary as a designer. It's going to be easier for you to choose the kind of job that you want to do or the kind of industry that you want to work for, or even become an entrepreneur or founder because you've gone through the different levels of this game and stacked up different skills along the way. Now, this is the most important part. If you agree with me that your career is a game, you would see that sometimes you might feel like things get difficult at each level. It's never really that easy. Easy to go through each level of a game except you play the game on easy mode. Unfortunately, a UX design career or any career at all is never on easy mode. There are going to be challenges along the way, and what you need to do is understand what level you are in the game and identify the right combination of craft, storytelling, and influence skills that you can use to crush that level. So I'd like you to take a moment to reflect right now, and based on everything I have said in this video, let me know in the comments How many years of experience do you have? And which of these skills do you need to be focusing on right now to get to the next level? Is it crafts? Is it storytelling? Or is it influence? Let's have a conversation in the comments and I'll meet you there.