Learning to love this dented trash compactor universe

My friend Scott Berkun and I are writing a book on "Why Design is Hard". To keep up with our progress, sign-up here.

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I have a hunch about this existence of ours that I call the Star Wars Dented Universe Theory. It's the idea that perfect things do not resonate deeply with most folks because they don't reflect the rusty, dented, trash compactor filled universe of our experience.

Imaged ethically generated from Adobe’s Firefly 2 engine - which is trained on fully licensed images.

This, I believe, is born of things not going as planned throughout our lives, so much so, that it begets a kind of natural law.

The world we inhabit is weary in a way that, when we encounter shiny happy perfect situations, many of us respond with a healthy nervousness about other shoes that are about to drop.

This is a rusty, dented, trash compactor filled universe story.

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I was a few months into my stint at Amazon when my friend Luz Bratcher pinged me on Chime, the internal chat system.

She was helping organize Conflux – the internal UX conference for Amazon's research, design, and content folks around the world. It was a few weeks before the conference, a speaker had dropped out, and they needed to fill a 20 minute slot on opening morning.

Luz wanted to know if I'd be up for speaking.

I immediately guffawed at the idea – telling her that, having only been at the company for 3 months, I had no insights on "How to optimize your Amazon X for Y".

I had been reading (and fanboi-ing) a lot of Brené Brown since 2014 and told Luz that the only topic I was interested in exploring was how to develop teams that were not driven by fear – and that I seriously doubted anyone at Amazon would be interested in that topic from a newbie like me.

Me fanboi-ing Brené Brown at Chase Jarvis Live in 2014.

I'll never forget Luz's chuckled response:

"I already told the organizers you'd say something like that and they definitely want you to speak."

How could I say no to that?

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Fear and anxiety played deeply into the rusty dented universe I inhabited from 2016-2017.

I got laid off from Startup Weekend after an acquisition and lost one of the most interesting and mission-filled positions I'd ever had.

Then I joined one of the most promising start-ups I'd ever come across, only to have it implode via cashflow mismanagement and co-founder differences.

Then, when I decided to get back into enterprise tech, I got ghosted during my first Amazon loop and rejected when I looped for a second position, this time as a manager.

I finally landed a position through Amazon's recycle program where I was approved for hire to a non-management position if one opened up - which happened a month or two later.

Nine months of being out of work was a seriously weary season for the family and me.

It was so weird to now find myself invited to share, in a very public way, my explorations of fear and shame as significant roadblocks to innovation and generative thinking.

I called the talk "Sometimes Superpowers Come from Unexpected Places" and was blown away by the positive response it got.

I confessed to struggling with fear and anxiety all my life and how I was starting to realize that those things were the root of the superpowers I bring to my work in enterprise systems.

It was mind-blowing to meet so many people who shared the same struggles with personal and systemic entropies - from executives to folks from every user experience discipline.

We were all flawed people navigating flawed systems while struggling with fear and shame as an innovation killer – and in this shared moment, we were talking about this stuff out loud in ways that helped us see more meaningful ways through our various quagmires.

The whole experience reinforced this nagging hunch that the rusty, dented, trash-compactor universe of ours had a much deeper upside than I ever imagined.

Sometimes the bugs become the feature.