I could start with the part where I was going to play for the Chicago Bulls. Let’s skip to 2005.
I started my career as a motion designer at Limerick Studio just after graduating from SCAD. Then, in 2008, my wife sent me a Craigslist post for a church looking for a motion graphics designer. I wasn’t looking for a new job, but I applied anyway, and eighteen years later I’m still there.
In that time I’ve had six different roles. Motion designer, marketing coordinator, data analyst, digital brand manager, UX researcher, project manager, and now back to data analyst. I was properly qualified for exactly one of them. Some of those moves were my idea and a couple weren’t, and there was a January where I came back from Christmas break with no job title, no manager and nothing on my calendar for a week. That one was not my idea.
Alongside all of it, Cheyenne and I ran a photography business for about a decade. It’s hers now and it runs without me. In 2017 I started a video agency with a friend, which is still going.
Somewhere in the middle of that I stopped believing the problem was that nobody was working hard enough. It almost never is. Teams work hard on whatever is in front of them, and the thing they’re giving most of their resources to usually isn’t the thing that deserves them. Nobody spots it because you can’t see what you’re standing inside.
So the question I keep coming back to is what we’re doing with what we already have. There are three moves. Take something out of the way, use what’s already there, or add something new. Most people reach for the third one first, because it’s the only one anybody notices you doing.
I see it as stewardship. You get a finite amount of all of it. Time, energy, money, attention, people, skills, everything already sitting there half used. The only real question is what you do with what you were handed.
I should say what I’m bad at. I start more than I can finish at the same time, which somebody put in a review a couple of years ago and they were right. I work substantially better with a partner than alone, which I’ve known for a long time and still design around badly. And I am genuinely terrible at remembering people’s names.
So I relaunched my personal site to share what I’ve learned, what I’m working on now, and what I’m still figuring out (the last one is bigger than the other two).
Currently based out of Charlotte, NC with Cheyenne and our four kids.