an engineer's journey to learning design (and art)

an engineer's journey to learning design (and art)

Limiting beliefs are ideas in your head that you take for granted that hold you back in some way.


Now, I'm not going to get all woo-woo self-improvement grindset lecture on you. But I will say that limiting beliefs are real, and you should combat them wherever you see them, in yourself and in others you care about. They genuinely can hold you back from achieving things that you absolutely have the ability to achieve.


One of my lifelong limiting beliefs, and a very common one from what I've seen, is that I'm simply not artistic. That being creative or artistic is a thing you're born with or not. I never played an instrument, aside from very briefly and badly playing trombone, until I was in my late 20's. I didn't draw or paint much, aside from doodling occasionally.


Art and creative work was just... not something I did. Because I wasn't artistic, that's not how I was born.


Entering the tech and software development field was, at first, very bad for that limiting belief. My brain decided "you're not creative/artistic because you were born to be an engineer, and they're not creative/artistic." I fell into the "front-end engineers are just artists who learn how to code badly" mindset, and fashioned myself as a backend engineer.


I realized four things:

  1. 1. I am not even that good at backend engineering
  2. 2. Creativity is learned, not something you're born with
  3. 3. There are tons of people who are both more creative and better engineers than I am
  4. 4. Everything is going full-stack now, so being a good designer and front-end engineer is kind of important, especially if I want to build my own successful web apps.

Now, you're probably looking at this site and saying "yeah well you clearly decided against getting better at design" and my response to you is, first, "fuck off" and, second, "fair point, I'm working on it."


Creativity is learned


I'm 30 and I just started piano lessons.


I also just started learning to draw, and I'm learning 3D modeling, guitar, and art. Yeah, it's a lot at once, but I'm letting myself explore and learn new things. There's something very weird about using a part of your brain that you have very rarely used before.

/*TODO*/