Win the Week: Why It's Good to be an Outlier

The best part about running a storytelling publication is that people share with us their top secrets for leading a successful creative career — and we steal them! In this newsletter, we pass on some actionable insights from our interview subjects to ramp up your productivity, make your ideas happen, and tackle the workweek with a focused mindset.?

This week, Suff Syed , head of design at Microsoft Research , shares how thinking outside the box and being different is a vulnerable yet incredibly useful practice for getting ahead — now more than ever in the world of AI. Here, he shares three big learnings that can shift the way we think about, operate in, and enjoy the creative world.?

1. Creativity is a state of mind, not a job.

Creativity is not solely a skill set. "People are not creative based on their title or role, but by their mindset. They tend to employ a whole new way of thinking about the world," says Syed. "For me, being creative is being able to uniquely observe a perspective and worldview that many people assume is the standard and then come back and say, 'No, actually here is a whole new way of thinking about it that reframes the thing in its entirety.'"

2. Embrace the new paradigms.

We can't shy away from the capabilities of AI. "If we want to evolve as designers and creatives, we have to be comfortable with the medium that we’re designing for. And it's not arranging pixels. It's not arranging flows. It's not building the user experience," says Syed. "I’d argue AI will soon be able to do all of this. It’s breaking the user experiences of today by delving deeper into the technical architectures of how these things work so that we can build entirely new paradigms."

3. It’s better not to just be one thing, especially in a world that demands multi-disciplinary skills, experiences, and mindsets.

This one goes back to number one: we must question the status quo in order to reach our creative potential. That means standing out, not fitting in. "I explicitly refuse to follow the beaten path, sometimes, even unnecessarily so. I have a great disdain for the normal," says Syed. "That seemed to have worked in the long run because I carved myself into a pretty niche area where my multi-disciplinary skills are the thing that has created a unique advantage in my career."

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Read the full interview with Syed here, where he shares how creative professionals can embrace AI technology to shift the paradigm, why creativity is defined by a mindset and not a role, and how the challenges in his childhood shaped him.