 In this video, I'm going to talk about that one thing that's going to make you hate your UX job. But more importantly, I'm going to tell you how to avoid that one thing, how to avoid hating your UX job. OK, so I'm going to jump straight into the one thing and not leave it till the end of the video like some YouTubers do. The one thing you're going to hate as a UX designer and it's unavoidable is working with other people. Let that sink in. So let me know in the comments if you're already a UX designer and if one of the things you hate the most about your job is actually always think about just think for a second. What do you hate about your job? What are the things that irritate you? Isn't it always related to having to collaborate with other people, meaning clients, meaning colleagues, your boss, whoever it is, it can even be other UX designers. The answer is yes, right? Like I have friends working at some of the coolest companies in the world at Google, at Facebook, at Apple. And when they complain and when we sit around and have a few drinks and start complaining about our jobs, the number one thing they're complaining about is just the other people that they're working with. And for me, back in my, you know, the beginning of my career, I've been a UX designer now for almost 12 years, but in the beginning of my career and in the first few years, this is also the thing that I just couldn't believe how much I hated. I loved UX design. I love nerding out and making the wireframes and coming up at the just like doing the user test, all of this kind of stuff and actually doing the design work. I loved doing the design work, love sitting down in front of Figma and actually making the stuff. But what I hated was having to pitch this to other people, was having to show these screens to other people like, you know, managers or people who didn't really necessarily understand UX and just having to have arguments with people about why we should do this and why we shouldn't do that. And when I was freelancing, that same thing would happen with clients, you know, you would, you would work on something for a week after getting a, doing a kickoff workshop with the client and then they give you some feedback and you're like, they, that's not what they said they wanted in the beginning. And this feeling of misalignment and this feeling of frustration starts to build and it's crazy to think when I think back, if I think about like the amount of stress, the amount of conflict, the amount of just hatred I had for the work I was doing after a while because of the, you know, collaborating with other people and just how easy it would have been to solve that if I had known what I know now. So I want to help you, if you're new to UX and haven't worked with other people yet, I want to help you avoid these challenges because they can really hurt your career. You can also burn out because of these issues. And if you're already in UX, if you're already a senior UX designer, you might have already tried some of these things, but maybe you haven't. Okay. So the first thing, and I think the baseline of a lot of the problems that happen when you're collaborating with other people is that you probably have an ego problem. And why I can guess you probably have an ego problem is because pretty much everyone does. And actually, I think the younger you are, that is often the bigger you have issues with your ego. You might be thinking, oh, ego is all about arrogance or being cocky or being like kind of an asshole or whatever, but ego is not just that. Ego is the thing that makes you feel hurt when you have an argument with somebody or when someone gives you tough feedback. Basically, it's the part of your mind, it's the part of you that will cause you to get into conflict with other people. And even though you try to be open to people's feedback and you try to be open to, you know, working with other people and having people with different opinions, often your ego gets in the way of really learning. One of the best books I've read on this topic is called Ego is the Enemy, The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent by Ryan Holiday. If you read this book when you're young, first of all, I am so happy for you. I read this way too late in my life. I probably read this when I was 30. And looking back on my early career, I realized that my ego not only hurt my career, but also made my life just way more stressful. So this is number one. It's almost like the baseline operating system. You need to not have an ego problem because there's nothing worse for me as somebody who's been hiring designers for the last six, seven years. There's nothing worse than working with someone who has their ego not in check. You can't give these people feedback. You can't work with people who have an ego problem because they're always pushing back and they're always, they always have self-esteem issues. You can tell they're hurt by feedback and you can tell that they're not learning because they're protecting their ego. And by the way, for me, books are the key to everything. For me, reading a book, it's like, you know, before I read this book, I didn't even know what the ego really meant. I didn't, obviously because of that, I didn't think I had an ego problem. And then you're reading this book and it's like a magic spell happens, right? It's like, it changes something in your brain. You're like, oh my God, I didn't realize this was a problem I was having. So please, please read Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. This will help you understand other people and their motivations better and help you become a better designer just by being a better person. I just want to let you know it really helps us if you subscribe and like this channel. It helps the algorithm, it helps the YouTube algorithm. If you've been watching this channel a lot, you'll know we put up a lot of valuable videos, free videos. The other thing is we have a really amazing newsletter that goes out every week down below in the description. You can find out about it. We send you a couple of links every week to cool things, cool articles, cool videos that are going to help you in your product design or UX design career. It's a really killer, spam-free email that you get every week. You can unsubscribe anytime, but check it out. Book number two, and this is related to the problem of, especially if you're working with non-designers, you can't explain why something needs to happen. You can't explain why the home screen needs to look like this to people who maybe don't understand design, and they'll push back and say, yeah, well, this is the business reason. And then you retreat into getting angry or irritated or frustrated because you don't really know how to pitch your ideas to people. If you get better at pitching your ideas to people and making those ideas really stick for people, then you're just going to have a better career and you're going to be more successful. And the book I would recommend for that is called Made to Stick, which we featured on this channel multiple times. Before I read Made to Stick, I didn't realize that I was not good at explaining ideas to people. I did not realize that I was actually bad at pitching things to people because I am someone who I can talk, I'm confident. I can get on this YouTube channel and blah, blah, blah, blah, all day. It doesn't really matter to me. But what I was not good at was being able to really concisely pitch something to people so that it sticks and it convinces them that this is the right choice and this is the right direction to go in. Of course, obviously, I only try to do that if I believe it's the right direction to go in. If you have read this and someone in the same level as a career as you has not read this, you're going to be able to pitch ideas to people at a crazy high level and they won't. This will help you if you're ever feeling frustrated about not being able to explain why something should be this way, why should the interface look like this. This book is going to help you do that. It's a killer book. These two books together, if you read these early in your career, you're going to get paid more than people who don't read them. It's ridiculous to me how much of an unfair advantage reading has been for me as a UX designer. It's crazy how few UX designers also read. By the way, here's the thing, this is a bit controversial to say, but I know that only about 5% of you will actually get off your ass and read these books and maybe another 5% will go ahead and try to find book summaries of these books. By the way, book summaries don't work the same way as reading a real book, but if you get these books, and I do recommend getting the physical copies so you can do what I do and actually highlight everything and then come back to it as a reference guide, if you actually read these books, you will get ahead of other people in your career. But the good news is most people will not do that because most people have an ego problem and think they already know everything and think they can get this information from a video. This video that you're watching right now is crap compared to reading these books. Okay, now finally, one of the biggest problems when it comes to working with other people is actually the act of getting together in a room and making decisions. Have you ever been in a kickoff meeting for a new app and it's just a nightmare? Nobody can get on the same page. If you can be the person who can help a team come together and make decisions and then you can go away and actually do the design work, you're going to get paid more, you're going to enjoy your job more. And now I'm going to pitch a book which I actually wrote. This is called a workshop or playbook. This is a super short one and a half hour read. If you can't get through this book, then I have nothing more to say. This is the workshop or playbook. This basically teaches you how to run strategy sessions, how to run kickoff sessions, how to run meetings as a designer. So if you're a designer and you want to lead meetings so that you can actually help to bring people together, come up with concepts, and actually then get everyone on the same page and put yourself in the position of a leader so that you don't have all of this frustration building up. You can get the ideas out of people's heads. You can work with executives who maybe don't know about UX Design. This book is a secret killer piece of your arsenal that will help you figure out how to work with other people. It tells the story of my early UX career and how I went from being a UX designer who is super frustrated to actually enjoying what I do. If you want this book down below, there'll be a link in the description if you haven't already gotten it. And I'll just tell you straight out. So when you click this link, you have two options. One, you can get the physical copy of the book for free, except you have to pay for shipping. So the shipping is always less than $10. If you don't want to pay the $10 for shipping, there's also an ebook version for $1. Why do we even charge $1? Well, the reason we charge $1 is to at least put some skin in the game for you to actually read it. I don't care about the $1. The $1 isn't even enough to cover the cost of the processing of the Stripe account. But if you go below, there's a link. You can get this book. You can get the physical version and the ebook together for less than $9. By the way, I will also say that on this page, there's loads of upsells. There's, we'll try to sell you other stuff. You can ignore all of that if you want to, obviously you can buy the stuff too. But don't get overwhelmed by how salesy the page is. I just like making salesy pages. This book will change your career and help you make more money and enjoy your career more if you learn how to actually design these sessions. Because these are the things you're going to have to run with your clients or with your team anyway. And this will just make you the person who can actually do it. And obviously like, yes, I'm recommending my own book, but I have wrote this book because I was having these troubles as a designer. So in this order, you go as the enemy, made to stick the workshopper playbook. This is probably $30 worth of books here. And this $30 is worth more than any course, any college education. These three things will make you help you get more money in your job and enjoy your job more than almost anything else I can recommend. The only thing you have to do is not be too lazy to read them. If you don't read and if you're too lazy to read, you will not get ahead of the people who are doing that. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget if you want weekly doses of this kind of information, cool links, cool resources, join our newsletter that's also in the description below. Like I said, it does help us. If you hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, it really does help my company. If more people watch these videos, get the workshopper playbook, you know, for as little as one dollar, you really have nothing to lose. Even if you think it's this book of all time, we have a really good one-star review on Goodreads. This person said it's the worst nonfiction book they've ever read. I don't think it's the worst nonfiction book of all time. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it and have a great day. And I hope your UX career is amazing. Bye-bye.