Recap: overcome burnout, how to start a business, and why consulting sucks
This week's office hours covered a wide range of topics
Hey folks. We are T-11 days until the launch of Why Design is Hard. This week’s office hours were a lot of fun. I had a special guest, Amber Case, the author of the excellent book Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for non-intrusive design.
I’ve written about burnout many times, most clearly here, but I’ve come to think it’s a sloppy term for several different unhealthy patterns. In the recap I talk about what some of them are and how to get out of them.
Questions this week:
Is it better to start a new venture if I’m frustrated working at a faceless boring company? What are the real tradeoffs?
(5:00) What are your revenue streams as a writer?
(7:30) How do you adapt to a new culture and country?
(10:00) Why is the ego trap (from the book excerpt) a self reinforcing loop?
(13:20) How do I go about creating a good portfolio despite most of my work being for clients?
16:30) How to understand and overcome burnout
On consulting; I forgot to cover this in the video answer to question #2 , but the short version is there are four patterns in consulting I was never fond of:
People hire you for X, but really need Y. This means the job is often trying to teach clients about Y, but there are reasons they can’t see or are avoiding Y. So you end up taking pay for X, which never really solves Y. It’s less satisfying to me than writing, speaking or building things directly.
There is financial incentive to never solve anything. The best clients are the ones who always need more help, right? I mean, if you quickly solve their problem, they don’t need you anymore! Consultants quickly figure this out and it often shows in the way they sell their services. Of course this isn’t always true, some organizations need lots of help so there is always genuine work to do.
You often don’t see the results. Much of consulting advice is just flat out ignored. A classic situation, especially in design, is a company hires an outside agency to “completely redesign” the product. They come in, do some work, and then leave. But their ideas never get used. This still has value, the team may have learned from that project, but if you like to actually ship your ideas, consulting often doesn’t provide that kind of satisfaction.
Relationships > Expertise. I’m convinced most workplace problems are inherently about relationships and the client knows more about the players than I can as a consultant. I might know more about project management or leading innovation, but the solution to whatever the problem is likely revolves around who doesn’t trust who and there are only limited ways to consult through that.
Reading this list makes me sound like a consulting cynic. I’m not! I’ve definitely had some experiences where the situation and my expertise were a great match and it felt good. But finding clients and doing matchmaking takes time. The whole enterprise was more stressful for me than speaking, teaching and writing, which is why that’s most of the way I’ve made a living for decades.
Whew. That was long. Without further ado, here’s the video recap:
Thank you for answering my question. I told myself the same thing 😂 and I said it in a very harsh way quite a few times but your answer was just the blunt truth and you have no idea how much I appreciate that. Thank you so much... See you next Thursday