I am currently taking an improv class and here are a few of the things I have learned from it:

• Don’t try to be anything; good, funny, or energetic. Just be.
  The harder you try to be any one thing, the more you miss the opportunity that presents itself at the time. In design, react to your client’s needs, your team’s capabilities, and your user’s goals. Preconceived ideas can limit your possibilities.
• Make your partner look good
  Set the people up around you to make awesome. Whether you are in a scene or on a design team every role is equally important and the better everyone else is doing, the higher they can elevate you to succeed.
• Say “Yes, and…”
  The word “no” can ruin project and scene mojo pretty fast. In both design and improv the sky is the limit, you can keep things positive while still setting realistic expectations. With the ever-changing nature of the industry, flexibility is invaluable.
• Know everyone’s name
  I am horrible with names. The. Worst. (Though I am pretty good at remembering Twitter handles. ) Learning everyone’s names in my improv class has been a serious challenge for me, but the benefits have been off the chart. No matter who the next person I get thrown into a scene with is, I know their name. Knowing your team will help create a bond and respect for working quickly under pressure.

Taking an improv class has had an impact on my perspective as a designer and my role in the teams that I work with. If you have the chance to take a class I highly recommend it.

We’re coming up on our fifth time running the Front-End Design Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. A question that I get asked often is “how did you start your first conference?”.

The most important things to know are “why” and “how”, which are both intermingled from life experiences that my (now) wife Cherrie and I had in the year before the event. We were engaged and wanted a destination wedding: Turks and Caicos and Jamaica lost out to Key West in order to keep it more accessible for friends and family. It was going to be expensive and we didn’t want to go into debt, so Cherrie lived and worked in NYC for about 6 months. (Partly just to see if she could do it, but also to earn more money. As the great philosopher Jay-Z once said “And since I made it here, I can make it anywhere”.) I worked 2 full-time jobs, one of which was my first job as a web designer for a small shop in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida.

There were two significant things that happened that led to why we wanted to run a conference: I attended the 2008 Future of Web Design Conference (which was in NYC in November) and Cherrie and I sadly had to fire our wedding planners about 2 months before our wedding, which was to be in February 2009.

FOWD was amazing. Being in a place with so many like-minded people and hearing stories from people that I had been learning from the past year blew my mind. It was my first conference and I came back completely inspired. I started looking for events like that a little closer to home but I didn’t find much besides a BarCamp.

Meanwhile, we were having a really hard time maintaining communication with our planners in Key West and getting anything booked. We made the decision to lose the planners and have Cherrie take over. I really didn’t do much except for agree to most of her awesome ideas. She put together a fantastic four days in Key West to celebrate with our friends and family.

All of a sudden it was all over and we had nothing to do except to live happily ever after.

Around that same time, Chris Coyier tweeted that he had just spoken to a high school class about web design. So, I pitched Cherrie on an idea. I still wanted a day in Florida to celebrate the web industry and the people who share their knowledge. Cherrie wanted to plan another event, even if it was for a bunch of my fellow web geeks. So, we agreed to give it a shot.

Here’s how it went down.

I sent out a couple of awkward “if you’re not doing anything on this day in July, would you kind of maybe want to come to Florida and talk to people on stage” DMs. Chris was the first to reply and the first to say yes. At that point, it was officially “on”. I asked a few others that I had been learning from and also asked what they would want in order to be able to break away from work and travel here to do it. It was pretty consistent amongst everyone so we started planning and promoting.

Twitter was still relatively focused at the time and I had gotten in early with the completely appropriate handle of “webdesignfanboy”. Since I was early enough and it was clear what I was about, I gained some traction in the follower realm. We relied on Twitter and the blog posts that the speakers wrote for about 97.5% of the promotion. (We whipped up 100 promo post cards and sent them to Florida web design shops as well.) One of my favorite things is that I had recently discovered Ricardo Gimenes and I hired him to do characters for the speakers. He rocks and they were so much fun.

Cherrie said yes to running the conf in March and we ran it on July 31st. We had 7 speakers: Fabio Sasso, Grant Friedman, Jonathan Longnecker, Chris Coyier, John Ashenden, Andrew Maier and Kevin Hale. We were fortunate to have some helpful sponsors and 92 people got to see me nearly pass out from stage fright as I stumbled through welcoming everyone and introducing Fabio.

It was stressful, but totally exhilarating. The speakers absolutely rocked and I was awestruck the whole day. When the presentations were over, Eric Azares sealed the deal on us running another one by walking up and asking if he could buy a ticket for the next one.

Running an event for the first time and putting it together in a few months meant that it wasn’t very efficient, so it cost us a good chunk of cash. It was totally worth it, though, as it started me down a path of front-end development and Cherrie as an event planner. I have personally had so many wonderful opportunities come from it and I now work with the rad folks at Envy Labs. I try to pay back the time Cherrie spends on it by helping with her other events throughout the year, but I’m still in debt in that category.

It’s a lot of work each year, but the benefits outweigh the work so much that it’s not even a factor. We have met so many wonderful people and formed awesome friendships. It’s almost starting to feel like a reunion with friends that we may have not gotten to see much throughout the year. We are sharing knowledge and celebrating community and it is absolutely fantastic. My absolute favorite part has been seeing people progress in skill and in their career path.

Running a conference isn’t for everyone, but there is definitely something that you want to do that feels intimidating. Dive in after it. Good things will come. In the meantime, we’ll be celebrating you and our community in a couple of days. Cheers!

This is especially clear in the first season, when they’re setting up the wiretap that gives the show its name. Throughout the drawn-out process of getting the administrative and legal clearance to set up the wire and actually monitor the calls, Freamon is the one advocating for doing things by the book.

One of the rules is that they can’t legally monitor the calls unless they know one of their targets is using the phone. So in order to listen to the calls, they need somebody on the roof nearby to confirm who is talking. When Herc, one of the younger cops starts complaining about spending hours on the roof of a building waiting for drug dealers to make phone calls, Freamon cuts him off:

“Detective, this right here, this is the job. Now, when you came downtown, what kind of work were you expecting?”

I love that line. I think about it every time I’m sitting around with a bunch of designers and we end up complaining about everything we have to put up with to do our jobs. Whether it’s implementation issues, software annoyances, client headaches, or just putting in long hours, we all sound like Herc sometimes. “More bullshit,” we complain.

That’s when I hear Lester Freamon’s voice in my head. “This right here, this is the job. What kind of work were you expecting?”

In my recent article on The Pastry Box I specifically chose to use the term ‘impostor phenomenon’ instead of ‘impostor syndrome’ throughout the entire article. In most of the peer-reviewed research I read I saw this reflected as ‘impostor phenomenon’, but it has been pointed out to me that ‘imposter syndrome’ is used fairly often to describe the same thing.

In fact, the latter is used colloquially far more often than ‘impostor phenomenon’.

I made the choice to use ‘phenomenon’ because the word ‘syndrome’ carries with it a host of negative stigma that is wholly unproductive. The term ‘phenomenon’ in this case is at worst a fairly neutral term. Whether or not we recognize that ‘syndrome’ is, in fact, a clinical term that could apply here is orthogonal to the impact that using the term has on those experiencing these feelings, emotions, and experiences.

It has negative stigma. Negative stigma is not helpful to anyone.

Whether we like it or not, words take on cultural additives as we use them. A word may begin it’s career as an idea meaning one thing, but eventually evolve to mean multiple things or something else entirely.

We are all very impressionable. Unconsciously so, even those of us who like to think that we have a thick skin. You cannot escape the unconscious processing of subtle meaning, if you think you can you are a fool. If anyone is interested in talking about this particular point — there is a host of cognitive science research waiting for you.

That being said, the words we use are immensely important, and so I implore you to use the term ‘impostor phenomenon’ when describing these experiences. It makes a difference.

Whenever I hear someone complain that advocates of careful language are trying to be ‘too politically correct’, ‘sugar coated’, or ‘too nice’ I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for them because they don’t understand the difference these things make, and worse they don’t understand how vulnerable they are. They lack the self-awareness that will set them free if they’re ever upset about something someone has said about them.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never —”

Wait, wait. I know this one. Sticks and stones will break my bones. Those will heal up, because biology can do wonderful things like that. But words? “Names will never hurt me” is usually how the rest goes. Those words can still be with you months, years, decades later. They can torment you when you’re trying to fall asleep, apply for a job, or make a new friend.

Words have power because they have meaning: treat them with respect, and treat others with respect accordingly.

I am not alone. It was recently reported that “one in four people suffer a mental health problem”. I’ll say that again. One in four people. One quarter. 25%.

Depression means many things to many people. It can have a variety of symptoms and a variety of causes. But for all sufferers of depression the same thing is true — the part of your brain controlling perception is broken. Sufferers receive the same information others receive but cannot process that information in the same way; your perception of the world is fundamentally distorted.

Depression is an incredibly hard thing to talk about because talking openly about our frailties can be regarded as a weakness — or worse, a failure (most crucially by ourselves). But the first step in managing depression is knowing it and to do this we must open up to somebody: whether that is a loved one, a medical professional or a complete stranger. So I’m opening up to you.

I want to take this opportunity — this privileged platform — to share with you that depression is not a weakness; we need to be able to talk openly about mental illness and accept that it is a condition which can affect anybody. Mental health problems affect one in four people. One quarter. 25%. You are not alone.

“Outside” can mean a lot of things, and many, many of us who work on the web grew up poor or very far away or without a formal design education or one of a million different outsides. The early web attracted weirdos and misfits like you wouldn’t believe, and many now run successful companies. This is a malleable field, and if you’re interested enough, there’s probably a place for you—but it won’t necessarily be easy to find it. But you don’t have to do it alone.

Culture barriers

If you are coming from outside the usual pool of people who work in Field X, you’re going to hit culture barriers. Some of those barriers need to be rattled and eventually demolished, but some are just about a lack of shared context. Open secrets are the hardest ones to crack when you’re coming in from outside, because no one will take you aside and whisper them in your ear. They’re the air everyone else is breathing. If you’re feeling out of place or you don’t know where to begin, don’t freak out. There are ways to pick up the context you need to thrive.

For starters, figure out who your role models are, even if they’re not doing exactly what you want to be doing. Use your role models’ processes and tools in your own experiments, and credit them when you do. Find out what work-related blogs and books they read, what conferences they go to, and how they talk about their work. Read all the things. Watch all the videos. Develop opinions about what you’re reading and hearing—and try to balance negative criticism with generosity, because there are always complexities that are easy to miss. If the stuff you find this way makes you excited to wake up in the morning, you’re heading in the right direction. If it makes you want to barf on your shoes, maybe try a different part of the industry.

You don’t have to try to sound sophisticated or jaded to fit in. People who are paying attention can tell, and it’s better to just be honest and work at gaining the knowledge you need. When stuff comes up that you don’t know, cop to it and then go look it up or ask questions about it during downtime.

And while you’re at it? Build hard skills other people don’t have. There’s a difference between being literate and having a decent editorial eye and knowing how to professionally copyedit and offer kind, helpful, effective editorial feedback to writers. There’s a difference between knowing the basics of a lot of web stuff and being really really good at writing fast, stable applications. Being a generalist is awesome, but you need to work toward clear specializations as well. It’s not either/or.

Do what you say you’ll do. Make yourself as indispensable as possible by actively tying up loose ends and helping with others’ work. Help the people you work with be awesome. Don’t wait for things to come to you—but you probably already know that, or you wouldn’t be here to begin with.

When good jobs go bad

Some companies are amazing places to work. Some are soul-destroying hellmouths. Most are in the middle, but it’s the second I want you to watch out for. At these companies, you will hear that it’s important to be “a team player without an ego,” which is often code for “you will work late nights, weekends, and holidays because that’s how we do it.” You will find that project and product managers don’t have the power to negotiate reasonable deadlines, that contracts go unsigned, and that executive whims regularly derail projects. And sometimes a company is reasonably healthy, but you’ll wind up working with—or for—someone whose workplace behavior would make perfect sense if he or she were five years old.

The hard reality is that you will probably have at least one terrible job, if you haven’t already. And you probably won’t be able to quit immediately, especially if you don’t have financial support from your family, or if you’re reliant on a sponsored visa, or you have kids of your own, or a dozen other things. This is hugely stressful even for people who aren’t particularly vulnerable, and no easy advice helps.

But you won’t be stuck forever. Our industry includes boatloads of kind, generous human beings and plenty of organizations that will support you in having a healthy life. You just have to make a path to get to them. How? Learn all you can where you are. Be good to people. And above all, get outside your company (or regional) bubble, talk to people who are doing amazing things, and ask how you can help. Sometimes you can do it all at the same time. Sometimes you’ll have to take a deep breath and leave a bad situation to get to a better one.

The fact that you’re reading this website suggests that you’re working in one of the few professional sectors that’s actually booming right now, which makes you luckier than most people in the world. You don’t have to settle for misery. Which brings me to your secret advantage.

The dangers of being valuable

There are a lot of open jobs in tech right now that pay a lot of money and offer a lot of perks for people with the right skills. If your background hasn’t prepared you to assume that you’re destined for a high salary job with a prestigious company, this may feel especially surreal. This is good! One of the hidden strengths of being from not-around-here is that some things that seem normal to most people in the field may seem weird to you. And sometimes, sensitivity to weirdness can save you.

You may, for instance, already realize that if you’ve been hired into a prestigious, high-paying job as a junior designer/programmer/whatever, this probably has as much to do with a fluctuating market as with your own skills. If the people you grew up around don’t have access to that kind of job, you probably already know that you can be extremely skilled and work very hard and still barely make a living.

So why is that awareness useful? Leaving aside minor things like empathy and wariness toward entitlement, you’ll be better prepared for inevitable changes in the market value of your own skills. More importantly, you’ll be significantly less vulnerable to one particular flavor of manipulation: When you internalize the idea that you’re precious and irreplaceable in a company or an industry, it’s easy to be wooed into life-altering decisions like handing over years of 80-hour weeks to companies whose work you don’t actually care about. The more you accept this flattery as your due, the easier it is to be hypnotized by interests that conflict with your own.

Keeping the rest of the world—including the part you came from—in your peripheral vision can keep you from getting bewitched.

If you write code, if you participate in the act of programming, then you are a programmer. We can add a clause to this that suggests regularity — someone who programs often is a programmer. That’s all it takes to be a programmer. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started and worked your way through the fundamentals like control structures and taming functions. It doesn’t matter if for some reason you don’t feel like a programmer. It doesn’t matter if someone pays you or not, unless you really find it important to be a professional programmer. If you program and you do it over and over, you become a programmer.

Last week I had the privilege of being amongst the speakers at JSConf 2013. The best part about this particular speaking opportunity was that I was able to give a non-technical talk about programming that I’d wanted to give for a long time. It was a culmination of all the things regarding learning to program that I’ve talked about here on The Pastry Box stitched together with further anecdotes and advice. It talked about cognitive biases and tried to convince people to get their biases out of the way so they could realize their potential. One of the slides in my presentation addressed impostor syndrome (known as impostor phenomenon in peer-reviewed, formal research) as it relates to the craft of programming, but really the point I was trying to make could be applied to anybody in any field.

Impostor phenomenon, explained simply, is the experience of feeling like a fraud (or impostor) while participating in communities of highly skilled participants even when you are of a level of competence to match those around you. Impostor phenomenon is highly correlated with individuals who are successful; arguably success here means success as perceived by others. The important thing to note is that this experience isn’t isolated to people we perceive as experts, only that it is a counterintuitive notion: one might assume that as they develop their skills in a craft further that their confidence should increase and their insecurity about whether they are good and whether they belong would fade away. It turns out that this is not the case for a lot of people.

I found myself wondering if my talk was going to be all that useful to the people I perceived as experts; I questioned whether or not the smart people I admired that I knew would see it were going to find value in this thing that I had made to share with everyone.

I gave the talk, and afterwards several of them thanked me for that slide. Some of them my heroes, they took me aside and confided their thanks. They confided their relief.

In the end I wasn’t shocked that the successful people I admired had experienced impostor phenomenon and talked to me about it — I was shocked that I somehow thought the people I see as heroes were somehow exempt from having it. I did the one thing I didn’t want to do: make that assumption about anyone.

We’re all just doing the best we know how to when it comes to programming, it’s just that some people have more practice coming across as confident than others do. Never mistake confidence for competence, though.

I’m just going to put this out there: to anyone of any skill level who reads this, if you’re ever feeling like you’re a fraud in your field; if you ever feel alone or if you worry that you’re not smart enough or good enough as the next programmer, just come talk to me. I’m a busy person by design because I can’t stand to be idle, but I’ll make time for you because feeling this way is isolating, lonely, and not constructive. I think of all the missed opportunities I let pass by all because I was worried about making mistakes, not being perceived as an equal by my peers, and all the code I never wrote just because I was intimidated by all the great code and smart programmers out there.

I want to listen to what you have to say, to tell you that you’re not alone, and that your heroes are human too just like you.

But mostly, I talked to 11-year-olds.

Armed with laminated poster boards and nametags, a colleague and I would walk into a new sixth-grade classroom each week. For an hour at a time, three days in a row, we’d talk about staying safe, about saying no, and about being assertive. About the way boys and girls are often expected to be, and how that sometimes sets everyone up for trouble. About how abusers will sometimes tell you it’s your fault, but it’s not, no matter what.

At the end of each day, we’d collect “anonymous questions”: little paper scraps on which students could write down anything they were afraid to ask out loud. If they wanted, we always said, they could also ask for help and include their names.

In nearly every class in nearly every school, someone would write about abuse he’d experienced, or that of a friend who’d confided in him. They were often aching to tell someone.

We were just the first ones to ask.

Sometimes it took two hours in a cramped back room behind the principal’s office, sometimes ten rushed minutes in a quiet hallway. But each abuse disclosure unfolded in largely the same way: slowly at first, and then all at once. Stories and feelings and sometimes tears gushing forth, engulfing them. Engulfing me.

And then that was it. We’d pack up our role-playing props and poster boards, never to see those kids again. We couldn’t return to their classrooms or contact them at home, much less find out whether they had gotten help or their abusers had been stopped. We simply filled out the requisite forms and handed them off to the school’s administrators, hopeful—yet far from certain—that things would work out.

But I didn’t want a form. I wanted to make things right for those kids. I wanted to take them in my arms and tell them, unequivocally, that they were safe now, and that it would never happen again.

Instead, I left those sessions angry, sad, and drained. I was angry because they deserved better, and even angrier because I knew how hard it would be for them to escape not just the abuse, but feeling that they’d done something wrong, that it was their own damn fault, that they should be ashamed.

I wanted to wash the guilt away for them.

But life doesn’t work that way. Whether you’re a crisis worker or a web worker, it’s all the same. You can’t fix things for the people you’re there to help. You can only get them started.

In hallways and counselors’ offices, I may have loosened the seal of fear and shame that was bottling up a child’s voice. Yet she was the one who had to speak, and keep speaking, until her life changed. She had to regain her own sense of power, not be saved by mine.

My head knew this, but my heart wasn’t convinced. I’d still spend every drive back to the office the same way: shaking with frustration and wishing I could swoop in to make it all OK.

It wasn’t until much later, years into a consulting career, that I understood how foolish this longing really was. Promising solutions to people in need, even people in crisis, may be immediately comforting, but it’s ultimately dishonest.

At my best, I can ask the questions they’ve been aching to answer. I can light a path between the experience they know and the experience that could be. I can give them the space to find their way, and the confidence that their way is worth finding. But their problems will never be mine to fix.

Soothing CEOs with bon mots and buzzwords or tossing technology around like confetti won’t help. Real change comes from within. There’s no outsourcing it, no papering it over, no substituting someone else’s efforts for internal ones.

The world doesn’t need more solutioneers. It needs more advocates.

Empty. Finished. I drag the pen point over the paper, and it tugs the surface with it. The pen, formerly of no particular importance or consequence, is out of ink. Spent, it no longer translates gesture to paper.

This, an ordinary event, doesn’t ordinarily turn heads. Yet this everyday ballpoint and I have made it, together, for months. Through airport security and droning meetings, through bags and pockets. It’s persisted. And, ultimately, triumphed as it has shown up here today, doing the last bit of what it was intended to do. What it intended to do.

How often do we see empty? Threadbare? Erosion? Patina? We subvert it — when we’re not intentionally designing it — aiming to finish our products’ sentences and anticipate objects’ needs, replacing them before they’re obsolete or worn.

There’s something to be said for showing up to finish what you started. Perhaps it’s a communication of commitment, of consistency, of gratitude. But when two parties show up to start a job and finish, still together, it’s rare. And beautiful. A perfectly dotted i.

Full of empty.