 Thank you all for coming out to this talk. The name of it, as you can see, is Indefense of Fear, the musings of a serial overthinker. I am the serial overthinker in question of, I guess you could say. And my name is Joseph Carter Brown. I call myself a dev designer because the world of web and design or web development and design don't really encompass me fully on either side to just straddle the line. So I call myself a dev designer for that reason. And by day I am a front-end designer at Unleashed Technologies. You can find this right over at booth 110 and by night. And actually, by the way, Unleashed is right up the road in Columbia for anybody local here. By night I am the incoming president for AIGA Baltimore. AIGA is the largest professional association for designers. And our Baltimore chapter has a number of members. We actually have a little party going on at Brewer's Tap, starting at 5.30 if anybody wants to join us. As far as where you can find me, you can find me on a blank screen apparently because that's what we do here. Let's see why that's happening. I'm not sure why this is happening. I just got a blank screen for some reason. And by the way, this doesn't do anything for the fear quotient when you're talking about a fear talk. It does not help. All right. So you can find me on social media, on Twitter and Instagram at abrowncreates. You can find me on Behance or Facebook at slashabcreates. And you can find me on LinkedIn at Joseph Carter. Whoops. Sorry. I'm having a little bit of a technical difficulty here. All right. Let's get back. So all that stuff, you heard all of these things. LinkedIn at Joseph Carter Brown. Okay. So a few fun facts about me. Again, my full name is Joseph Anthony Carter Brown. There's actually a junior that shows up in there as well. So since I have so many names that are incorporated, I like to add as many as I can to those. So my favorite is Sir Joseph Anthony Carter Brown Junior, the third Esquire. So if you are addressing me in any formal situation, please use the proper designations. As far as hobbies, I like sports, bad jokes, obviously, animals cooking, and animals cooking. Like that guy there making waffles. I told you I like bad jokes, right? I also love design, and you can't talk about love without talking about your family. They're going to watch this recording later, and I don't want them to yell at me. Another thing you should know about me, though, that is I don't belong here. At least that's something I tend to tell myself. In a lot of places, I don't belong there. And a few places I want to talk about are three in particular. I didn't belong at Apple. This was my first job. I was a fresh-faced 18-year-old working at the company I love. You can actually see how much joy is radiating off of my face right now. But I didn't belong here. It was my first job. I wasn't a salesperson. I was working with a lot of sales and techie people. I was a techie guy, but that was about it. I didn't belong in one of my biggest business ventures, which was Rogue Squirrel. Me and my three partners in the background there. I didn't belong there. I didn't have a business degree. I had some cursory knowledge of how to run a business just from doing freelance and little projects, but never really run a big company. I was in the middle of an economic downturn. So how was I, this guy who had not really a lot of knowledge in this area able to survive, especially when me and my partners all got laid off from our ad design job at the newspaper, because it's a newspaper. So I didn't belong there. And I didn't belong when I had a very unorthodox history as a designer. I started out, taught myself, and I went to school later. And when I went to school to finish my degree, I didn't belong there. I knew that I was going to get run out of the place by all of these vastly more talented people, and I would be figured out pretty quickly as a fraud who really didn't know what he was doing. So there have been other times in which I felt the same way, but these are the three most prescient to me. And when I reflect on them, something has become apparent about all of these things and that I've learned over the years is that we treat fear all wrong. If you think about how we associate with fear as a society, we sort of treat fear like the guy at the party that nobody wants to hang out with. It's like, get him a beer, and then we're going to go to the other side and hopefully he'll just roll out a little later. And that's sort of how we always discuss it. Even if we think about the language we use when we talk about fear, we use words like shed our fears or overcoming fear, defeating fear, removing it, confronting it. We even consider it weakness in a lot of cases. When you're a fear, you're weak, and that's how we associate with it. Even everybody's favorite muppet, Yoda, has some pretty strong words about fear, which I actually don't think is fair because only the Sith deal in absolutes, so that's sort of an absolute statement. I think he's got some explaining to do. But you know, all of this is just how we associate the language as it pertains to fear. And when I reflect on, again, those experiences that I'm talking about, I think we should change our language, adjust the language that we use when we talk about fear. So instead of things like shedding our fears, we should start understanding it. Instead of confronting it or treating it as an adversarial emotion, we should respect it. We should make it a source of strength. Use it as a source of strength and start to embrace it and even nurture and maintain it. And the reason I say that because if you think about it, fear makes us better. Biologically speaking, fear heightens our senses. It elevates brain function. It prepares us to act in many ways. And it's helped us really survive as a species much more than a lot of things we probably give credit to. If we go way, way back, and we talk about early man, if you just think about all of the struggles and all of the environmental concerns that you had to deal with back then, I'm pretty sure fear was one of the reasons we were able to survive. Pretty sure they figured out how to harness fire, not because they were just like, hey, this looks cool and fun. It was like, hey, if we're not warm, we might not be here tomorrow. So I'm pretty sure there was a lot of fear that had to be used to get from there to here, right? So fear played a role there. But let's make it a little more modern. I'm sure everybody's familiar with the comedy duo of Key and Peel. There's a great story that I heard of Key, the one in the blonde hair. I heard him give on NPR. And he's talking about how he and Jordan Peel, the one on your left, how they met. And they met early in their comedic careers. They became friends very quickly because they were similar people. They were both biracial. They're comedians. They were in a new place. They were learning all these new things. And so they hit it off really quickly. Fast forward a few years later, they cross paths again professionally. This time they both had joined the cast of Mad TV. And that's got to be pretty cool when you think about it, right? They're comedians. They want to play on the same team as their best friend. And everything is going to be great. So they're living the dream. But one day, they're hanging out and Jordan Peel, again on the left, says to Key, says, you know what's going on here, right? And Key goes, well, you know, we're enjoying ourselves. We're doing it. We're doing what we always wanted to. He goes, well, yeah. He's like, but we're also competing against each other. We're two similar people for them to keep us here. There's no reason for them to keep two people who have such similar background, similar comedic styles. There's no incentive there. So they're going to see who performs the best. And then one of us will be out based on that. So their response to this was to write and do all of their comedy together. This way, the studio couldn't separate them. They couldn't pit them against each other. Anytime you saw Key, you saw Peel. Any sketch you saw Key, you saw Peel. Anything they did as a written asset was done together. So they couldn't separate each other. It was a response that was driven not by their confidence in their abilities, but by a healthy understanding of a legitimate fear that they needed to survive. The result, though, is one of the most popular, if not the most popular sketch comedy show to ever show on Comedy Central. So now bringing this a little more locally, I'm going to talk a little bit about myself. So this doesn't look anywhere nearly as impressive, or my story isn't anywhere as impressive as any of the other ones. But for me, this is an important story. When I went back to school, actually, part of my goal was I wanted to build my own confidence as a designer. There's always that question, and I'm sure we all have that question of how good am I in comparison to my counterparts? How much validity do I have in what I do? One of the areas that I had always struggled with and always shied away from as a designer was sketching. It's an extremely important part of what I do, but I always ran away from it. I said, I'm not a good sketcher. That's not what I do. I jump on the computer. I mask my deficiencies there by doing other things, maybe getting somebody to do something for me. And there was one point in my tenure at Full Sail in which we had a project that you couldn't get any asset from anywhere else. No one could create something for you. You couldn't find an image from online. You had to make it all yourself. So I went to my teacher and I said, hey, I'm not that good of a drawer and I have an idea, but I'm not good at it, so can I have someone else do it? Can I find the images? And she said, no, just go ahead and do it. You try it. I'm like, yeah, I know, but I'm not very good at this. I'm out of that. And she kept pushing me. She wouldn't let me back down from that. So ultimately, I sucked it up and I said, all right, Joe, here it is. Here's the moment that you said that you knew you didn't belong here. Here's that moment. Everybody's going to laugh at you. They're going to say you're terrible. Get these fourth grade drawings out of here and go for it. But the results it was, I set and I did some sketches of this design I was really happy with, really proud of, and even the drawings that I did were much better than what I expected they would be. So that really started to drive me to, and that's really where a lot of this talk comes from too, it started to drive me to go after the things that I was uncomfortable with. If the more uncomfortable it made me, the more I wanted to do it and the more I wanted to try it just because it made me uncomfortable at the time. And I started drawing little silly things like the hiccup, the sound you make when you hiccup and burp at the same time. Or this guy up at the top, which is my inner voice. This is always a voice I hear like. This talk in my head was that guy going, this is so unoriginal, Joe. So that's my inner voice. And these are just little rudimentary, silly drawings, nothing too special to write on them about. But the more I did these things, the more I felt comfortable with what I was doing. And the better, the better, the better my work started getting. Someone in my sketching started to become, I started seeing a little more character in my designs even. I started seeing a little more personality in what I was doing. It wasn't so dry. And I started building that out more and I started taking it into different directions and learning more about what my style was and again embracing my fears and those things that made me who I am and bringing them into my work. And what I realized in this whole process is that people like humans, right? Fear is a human emotion. It's not just a human emotion, but it is a very human thing to have this fear and to then feel sometimes ashamed about it or to feel certain ways about it. People don't like perfection, right? We always try and strive for perfection, but the imperfections are the things that make us unique. And those fears may not be my own fears. They may be someone else's fear. Someone else has their own set of fear. So that's one of the things that I started to realize was the human aspect of it and the humanization of our fears can ultimately be a good thing. Now, don't get me wrong. Before any of you, you know, if you were thinking about committing some terrible act, I don't want to be the reason you're like, hey, I was able to get over that fear and do this terrible thing. Don't do terrible things on the response to this. Because fear obviously isn't always good. I know what you're all thinking right now, so I'm not going to say it, but I know what you're thinking when I say that. But I want to talk about some of the ways fear causes us to react in certain situations. So in a lot of cases, we've all probably been in these situations where fear causes you to do things like procrastinating, you know, waiting on something, waiting until the last minute, trying to find reasons to not do something, finding reasons why you don't need to do it, which can lead to you self-destructing. That can happen in a number of ways. I actually think about, again, going back to my time at Apple, you know, being so young in that environment, not really understanding how to work with my fears. There were times where I did things, whether it was self-destructing or hurting others, hurting myself, because of those fears that I didn't want to deal with. I wanted to shed as opposed to embrace. And one of the big things that I see that happens as a result of fear is that we want to turn into perfectionists, right? And it's because it's a great excuse, right? Fears or perfection is a great excuse to use. I'm just such a perfectionist, that's why I never finish it, right? I'm never going to take that next step, because I'm a perfectionist. I want it to be right. But we already, as I mentioned earlier, perfection isn't really human, right? And people like humans. So this led me to make friends with my fear. So a couple of ways that I did that was I took the project management approach to it in some ways. So like when you have a big project, they say break it down into smaller chunks. I do the same thing with fears, whether it's being up here, whether it's doing things in my work or in AIGA or with my family. I try and break it down and say, well, what are the main elements? What are the smaller elements that maybe I can approach without as much fear or be comfortable with that fear? So I also try to understand it. I understand where that fear comes from, because sometimes there are realities that lie underneath that fear. If you're like, hey, I'm afraid to ride a motorcycle. Well, what's the reason for that fear? I've never been on a motorcycle. That's pretty legitimate, right? So you have to look into these things. You need to consider what the realities are, but also have a plan of action and set goals. To me, when it comes to why that's so important is because you start to understand where your priorities are and how you need to move with those fears. Again, coming back to even this talk where there were times when I was asked to submit a talk track, I tried not to. But when I will look at, because of fear, right? But I will look at my action plan and I will look at my goals. And one of my goals was to start doing speaking and finish this particular talk. And I said, okay, well, that's one of my goals. Even though there's fear behind it, that's one of my goals. I'm going to keep pursuing that. I understand it makes me uncomfortable. I understand I'm scared. That's good for me. And then another part of this is, and this is extremely important for me, and that is reflecting constantly, especially when those fears are strongest. The stronger a fear is, the stronger those doubts are. That's when I reflect. And even going to those first three images I showed, those are areas I tend to reflect on. Because when I started the Apple, like I said, I was the youngest guy in the store, had not much experience doing anything more than tinkering with computers and being a nerd about it. But nothing more than that. But I came out of it being one of the top sales guys, being one of the lead trainers. And that was in the midst of all this fear that I had that I didn't belong. Whether it was Rogue Squirrel, my clothing company. We went seven years and when we closed our doors, we ended on our terms and we had some amazing success. And that was all in the midst of me going, I don't belong here. I'm not a business guy. I'm just a graphic designer. There's no way I can make it. The economy is terrible. Why would I have any type of company and be trying to take care of a family and be trying to do all these other things in the midst of this? But I look at it now and I say, in the midst of all that fear, I still did some amazing things. Whether it was full sale. I got the awards for the best work in valedictorian in my class. And I told myself for sure that I didn't belong in that setting. So when I start getting into these situations where I'm nervous about something, I have that fear and it starts to get, maybe somewhat debilitating, I reflect and I say, well, what situations was I in before in which I felt debilitating? And I felt this debilitating fear that I still made it through and somehow I'm still here. Maybe my story doesn't relate for everybody, but I'm sure we all have. I mean, we're here, right? We're all sort of privileged and I'm sure grateful to be here. So there's some success or there's some reason that you can find to work with your fear and become friends with it. And then ultimately, something that many people don't like doing is getting uncomfortable and being okay with it. Being okay with the ambiguity of what these situations are. Because it's always going to be there and it's really part of the package. And then the other thing is, I always try to remind myself and I would say remind yourself that it's okay to be in fear, right? When I'm talking, again, talking about the talk, it was really funny because I came up with every excuse, right? I'm still working on the talk. I don't have it fully developed. The idea could be better. All these reasons that it wasn't the right thing. Even, in fact, the funniest thing to me was the submission was due to February 1st, 1159, February 1st. I submitted my talk probably around 1045 p.m. on February 1st. I tried to come up with every reason I had to do it. Well, maybe my internet will go out and then I just won't be able to. It won't be my fault. It'll be everything else's. But I had to still do it. And that's because, honestly, this shit is scary, right? Like, we put a lot of hard work into this. We put a lot into what we do. We care. I care about everything I do. So, of course, I'm going to be a bit scared of how you all are going to react to it. How much you're going to accept it. How much my clients are going to accept it. Whatever. How much me getting my daughter's case about her karate is going to either ruin her life or make her life so much better. I don't know. So it's scary. And to me, that's not a reason we should stop. It's one of the reasons you should try harder. You should keep pushing harder and you should try and make it even scarier if you can. Make it scary. Get them more uncomfortable because that's really where your growth is coming in. That's where you start to stretch yourself and find efficacy in things that maybe you didn't know was there. And even when you start to find that efficacy, you're still going to be scared. But the question that I always ask myself, how many opportunities do I let slip by simply because it's scary? And how many opportunities do we continue to tell ourselves we're not ready for, no matter how much work you put into it, simply because you feel, oh, I'm not ready. It's not there yet. I need more time. Because really, the fact is, most of the time, we're not ready. I'm pretty sure all of us in our first job, nobody can say definitively that you were 100% ready for your first job. You might not have been ready for the job you have now, but you get there. You figure it out. And all the practice in the world really doesn't prepare you for the real thing. So if you're going to fail, you might as well fail early. You might as well fail spectacularly because that's what it's supposed to be. It's part of the process. And if you're not scared, I can almost guarantee you that you're not doing the right thing because it takes a lot of courage to make friends with your fear. It takes a lot of courage to do a lot of the things that you want to do, but there's a lot of success that comes out of that fear. And I want to sort of wrap this up and talk about the word courage because while we have usually an adverse reaction to the concept of fear, I'm pretty sure no one thinks negatively about courage. We all look at courage as one of those great qualities that everybody wants to have. Everybody wants to say they have. But if we consider what the meaning of courage is, one of the things we'll realize is the ability to do something that frightens us. So to frighten you, right? That means fear is part of courage. That means if you spend all your time trying to shed your fears, trying to discourage your fears, dismantling them, then what are you doing to your courage too? What happens? Where do you find your courage? So that's pretty much my talk. I thank you all for sitting and listening to me. Thank you for dealing with some of the technical issues. I'd like to open it up for any questions if there are any. And otherwise, I do thank you guys for being here. Are there any questions? Yes or no? Yes. Yeah, the most successful people are the people that are willing to fail most often. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely true. I think one of the quotes that I came across that really helped me was, if you're not failing, you're not trying. And I actually, again, going back to the full sale, I actually made a statement where I said, my goal, I was talking to one of my advisors, I said, my goal this semester is to fail. Not in a bad way, not like I'm not going to do the work and I'm just going to sleep through everything. It was more like I'm going to do everything that made me uncomfortable and the things that I thought I was bad at in an attempt to fail at it so that I get better at it. And ultimately, again, it led me to a lot of success in school and has continued to help me. So, no, I definitely think that's a great quote. Cool, well, if there are no other questions, just want to give a quick reminder, Friday, April 28th, there are going to be a couple of sprint sessions going on for you all to check out. So please do take a look at all of those. Also, I will be sharing these slides via my Twitter account at A-Brown Creates. I'll just tweet out a link to it with the survey link. But if you have the quickness to type that in or want to take a picture of that to find the slides on the website or the survey, feel free to do that. Besides that, once again, thank you all for your time and have a enjoyable rest of the conference.