The Digital Learning Journey: My Journey

To me, learning is common sense. It is a routine that I perform every day. Learning helps us adapt and cope with the changing world around us—and can be a lot of fun. If you are reading this (thank you for that by the way) you might not think about learning the same way I do. For a lot of people, learning is elusive—something that needs to be measured and provide immediate benefit.

That’s not quite how it works.

In my experience instead, it comes from the small learning opportunities we experience everyday—even if we don’t see them. So learning isn’t that hard. We just need to work together to change the voice in your head from saying “I need to learn more” to “I’m learning all the time”. Because you are learning all the time, whether you know it or not.

Learning is something that has been a part of me for almost my entire life. Coming from two parents that were educators, it seemed predestined in a way. The approach I took was pretty untraditional. I entered my career through a degree in communications, and a side hustle of coding and information technology. I started my career as a web designer at the University of Delaware, complete with Lynda Weinman’s bible on creating web graphics at my side. Little did I know how that book, and the person behind that book would impact me.

Over the course of several years, I found myself at an educational startup in San Francisco, then after navigating through the dot-com bust, worked on projects with a number of Bay Area companies, eventually finding myself as a production group manager at a digital agency in San Francisco. What got me through all these opportunities was the ability to balance creativity, coding, understanding people, seeing workflows people use, and not try to overcomplicate a problem. Appreciating and embracing that simplicity earned me two Webby Aware nominations, and led me to Adobe as a product manager.

But I had a problem.

I was scared out of my fucking mind.

I had never been a product manager before, and as a fanboy of the company, I was finding myself in meetings with people that I idolized and helped me establish my own career. I felt I owed my success to them and the products they created. Being at Adobe (re)introduced me to members of the community that I always felt were out of reach but were now a phone call or email away.

The truth that I learned though, is that these people were always reachable.

The belief that they weren’t was only in my mind. Instead, they embodied “generosity of spirit” with their lives, talents, and support. This was something I was recognizing but didn’t have a phrase to describe it until I left Adobe—more on that in a bit.

At Adobe, prior to the release of our desktop software products (this was back in the days of Creative Suite), we held a regular event called “Demo Days”. It was our chance to meet with training partners and publishers to share with them the new features and capabilities of the Adobe products to help them plan out their content and publishing calendar. The event was held in San Jose, in one of the giant conference rooms in one of the Adobe towers (the West one I believe). It was here were I met Lynda for the first time. Now, I had seen her before—speaking at her conference Flash Forward or other creative events in the industry, but this time—I was speaking with her and answering her questions. While that interaction was brief, it was the start of something that would change my career forever.

After a layoff at Adobe, I found myself out of work. But through cultivating friendships and relationships with people that had left Adobe before, and with the partners I worked with as a product manager, I found myself walking into the doors of Lynda.com at a critical moment for the company. The history of Lynda was vast before I walked through those doors, but when I joined they had recently expanded into more “human skills” like leadership and management and were trying to find the path forward with technology and developer content in a growing industry of competitors. Working together, we built something amazing and was able to start and support careers, passions, and opportunities for millions of people across the globe.

When I became an on-screen instructor myself at Lynda.com, I understood. All those individuals I idolized in the past, and then discovered how approachable they really were—I was now one of those people helping people learn new skills and create new paths for them. All from demonstrating, what Lynda called, “generosity of spirit”. Ever since then, and even through today after leaving the company, I have taken that and developed my own philosophy to “give more than I expect in return”.

Those early days at Adobe, where I thought I owed something to my new coworkers, I actually didn’t owe them a thing. I was doing what they expected of me:

Learn.

That is the intent behind this newsletter. The path that I took was unique, and I can’t expect others to follow in my footsteps because that isn’t fair. There are parts of my life that can’t be replicated or duplicated, because it is uniquely mine. Just like your life is uniquely yours. But there are things that I have learned along the way that can give you a framework for how you approach your learning and the learning of others.

While there are no acronyms at the end of my name—My hope is that my lifelong experience working with individuals, students, peers, communities, educators, and professionals can be valuable to you. Everything in this newsletter is based on things I have learned from thousands of people I have met in my life.

And I am excited to share them.