20 Epiphanies I’ve Learned During My Career (albeit my young age of only 27 years old)

During my sick-leave for four-days, I jotted down a list of epiphany in Evernote that came up on my mind— in which some may not be popular opinions, if most of all. Being sick may had incapacitated me from doing tasks that required larger energy expenditure, but it sure did not deter my mind from pondering around, along with a menial addition of efforts to jot them down on my smartphone.

After consideration to consideration, I thought I’d share these bits of ideas from the top of my head by enlisting them through this platform. I welcome all scrutiny to the points I’ve made— I suppose there’s nothing to lose upon sharing my personal epiphany, and further scrutinization could do good in order to gain broader spectrum of perspective.

So here goes nothing:

1. Your current knowledge is in jeopardy to expire soon, and your university degree can easily amount to nothing without any effort to expand, level-up, and diversify your existing knowledge. Assume that you know nothing, and never stop your learning curve to keep up with our everchanging world. Be critical and stay hungry.

2. Adopt the concept of ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5) in your daily communications with your coworkers, especially amongst your colleagues in cross-divisions who may not speak your technical lingos.

(Would your colleague in the Procurement department understand what you mean by ‘Single-minded Proposition’, ‘Above The Line’, or ‘SES’? Would your peers in the Sales team know what you’re talking about when you speak about ‘Histogram’ and ‘Kerning’? Would your audience in other departments understand you when you use terms such as ‘Iterations’, ‘Agile Method’, or ‘Sprint’ in regards to IT? Do they even know what GitHub or Dribbble is? Don’t let your way of communicating get lost in translation–– make an effort to speak in a language they can comprehend.

And to my fellow designers–– try not to lose your sh*t when someone from the Product department tries to hurry you into creating a logo for their new product, educate them instead on how the protocol actually works–– in terms they could understand, of course.)

3. Fully integrate the method of backwards thinking in addition to forward thinking–– make a projection of an ambitious goal within a timeframe, and take it from there in backwards manner and start strategizing steps of development to reach that goal. Looking at a problem from the end back to the start allows us to foresee the issues that may arise on our journey before it happens, allowing us to plan better such as coming up with Plan B, or even Plan C.

4. Strategize upon releasing a product in a holistic manner by considering all aspects. Make use of momentum while simultaneously considering your brand’s ecosystem, as well as adapting to the current social climate. If it’s a sub-product, consider how it affects your brand integrity as a whole— how it integrates into your existing brand ecosystem, how it affects the principle of your core brand, and most importantly, be patient with waiting for the right momentum all in all while you’re still building trust between your brand and your audience.

5. Diminish all personal ego and subjective idealism, and engage with your audience in a compelling way while still maintaining an ethical manner upon marketing your product (i.e. avoid over-promising). Take a bird’s eye view, be open to inputs, and put things in perspective by putting yourself in various different shoes. You don’t want to be out of touch with your target audience, do you?

6. Abolish personal KPI and adopt shared goals within your team. Take one for the team, and assume responsibility— not merely to get the assignment done— but to keep in mind that by taking a part of a growing ecosystem would automatically contribute to your personal growth.

7. Improve your communication skill by raising your awareness of the importance of intrapersonal approach: understanding the concept of ‘Equity’ instead of ‘Equality’, making sure the message you mean to convey would be received as effective, i.e. precise, as possible.

8. Raising self-awareness and recognizing personal bias makes a tremendous change in forming decisions that would be made well-informed and formed more consciously. Trust me, we all have our own biases. By recognizing such bias, we have more chance to override that bias itself, thus enabling us to open up for better chance that yields the best outcome possible.

10. Minimize black-or-white thinking: by learning different ideologies that oppose your preference, you broaden your perspective by taking into accounts as much different aspects and possibility. Moreover, it may work in your favor when you use it to your own advantage by utilizing opposing ideology to complement your side of perspective.

11. When presenting an idea, encourage your team-mates to scrutinize, find faults, and flaws within your idea to reach a more wholesome, well-rounded conclusion.

12. Adopt an unassuming stance upon discussion for the aim of creating a conducive and constructive forum of discussion. Listen to ideas to really absorb them— keep in mind that there’s a high chance that better ideas exist out there that you haven’t even thought of. Listen to reflect instead of listening for the intention of forming an immediate response— or worse— only to find faults, refute, and negate differing ideas.

13. Divert shame and guilt attached to failures and archive them instead to form a case study for the sake of future reference. Turn past failures to your own advantage (and possibly others) to form better decisions in the future by taking past failures into account.

14. Never fear of sharing a success stories on you and/oryour team’s professional achievements to the outside world–– moreover, it’s an ironclad move to market yourself and your company by sharing brilliant ideas. Never fear an idea to be stolen by competitors–– the very same idea would manifest differently depending on the execution and the executors. Generating ideas is easier than keeping secrets— if it’s a uniquely brilliant idea, chances are, replicating it would be near impossible as it likely requires such intricacy upon its execution.

16. Stay grounded, everything is fleeting— preparation combined with opportunity breeds luck (taken from the wisdom of Seneca). Everything can be taken away in unforeseeable events. Learn to never put your eggs in one basket, and there’s no loss in investing yourself in different skill and trades in order to stay relevant— only gain. As long as we’re still a human-being, nobody is guaranteed an immunity from having everything taken away from them— however, you can control your stance upon maneuvering yourself in difficult situations in case it must happen to you.

17. Don’t waste the cost of having to endure unfortunate event: be savvy and frugal with your time, energy, and emotional toll by reaping every benefit you possibly can upon facing setbacks, even if it requires you have to scrape the bottom of the pan.

18. Redefining success: it’s not how much money you have, but what impact could you make (if you want to raise capital for your nett-worth, you might as well rob a bank).

19. Restrain yourself from being lured into a job only based on monetary gain: money can be obtained elsewhere, but passion can’t be bought with money. Choose a profession that aligns with your values along with the cause you support. 

20. Forbes’ 30 below 30 is a toxic culture of superficial concept that rely heavily on ageism and materialism.

Bonus: Don’t let a boisterous, seemingly charismatic person intimidate you against speaking up your idea. The volume of one’s voice does not guarantee the quality of the idea itself; the framework of a good idea is more important than the magnitude of the volume it is spoken in. Just because someone speaks louder, doesn’t mean your idea is less valid than theirs.

While I’m just a young lady who only has only dipped my toes within the professional world for a mere short time of less than a decade, I’m not expecting much impact from this plebeian piece of writing based off a narrow sample during the span of my career. I’m grateful enough to live in the advent of technology, lucky enough to have a platform to voice my thoughts, not so much expecting a whole lot of reactions coming out of this.

If this piece is any useful for you, even if this only reaches one single person, I’m at my utmost gratitude that such a green, newcomer like me could make an impact, no matter how big or how little.

And I certainly hope that we all continue on speaking our minds; to raise any issue to your heart’s desire. You may find someone who happen to resonate with your thoughts and ideas. Maybe there’s someone out there would resonate with my thoughts ideas. Perhaps. Just perhaps.