 So last June, I get a phone call and the first thing Chris Lemme says to me is whatever you do don't hang up on me until I'm done talking. And that's you know that's an interesting conversation you want to listen to it. And he said I would like you to be a project manager at Crowdfavorite. And if you know me you know that that's like a totally crazy pants idea. I graduated from design school in 1996 when there was no internet. It came out the year I graduated. For the past 20 years I've worked at agencies. For the last 13 years I ran my own freelance design business. So the idea of me going from this awesome freelance lifestyle to an 8 to 5 working for the man, even if that man is Chris Lemme, it sounded crazy pants. And if you know Chris, Chris is a persuasive guy and he kind of kept convincing me and giving me the hard sell and I said let me get back to you. This is something I need to give some serious consideration. Thing is I've been thinking about making a change for maybe a year. And I saw this quote that really resonated with me from Barbara Bradley Hagerty from NPR. And it's most of us become competent in our work by our 40s and then we have a chance, a choice. We can play it safe or we can take a risk. I had been feeling really not happy. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Corey Miller's iceberg talk. And the top of my iceberg looked really successful and I was doing okay and I was supporting my wife and I on one salary and and it looked really cool from the outside. But I am a naturally lazy person and so I would do just enough to get by. You know what I mean? Like I get just enough clients and and I do just enough work. And it started getting boring. I found myself feeling like there has to be more than this. And then at Ward Camp Los Angeles I curated a designer track and Natalie McLeese had invited James Archer from 40 to come and speak. And I hadn't heard of James and so I went and I googled him and I saw that every single video he had was everything I had been saying about design for 20 years. And so I started like getting a design crush. Are there any designers in the room? Do you get design crushes where like their work is so awesome you just want to be their friend? So I got this massive design crush on James Archer which only got bigger when I went to see him talk. And he told this story about how design isn't making something pretty it's solving a problem. And he said you know you don't always get time to go in and do the research and follow the process. And he told us this story about how 40 had gone in and there was a piece of software at like a FedEx type company or an Amazon type company where there was a guy whose job it was was to take a box off of the conveyor belt scan it with a gun look at the number on the gun walk over to one of those little like green screens from 1982 make sure this number matched that number and then walk back and click okay and push the package along. And he said that after five minutes watching that he did some math and he found out that this guy walked like eight or nine or ten ridiculous miles every day walking back and forth to this stupid thing every single day. So their design solution was make the font bigger. It wasn't used you know this font versus that font it wasn't the color it was this simple make the font bigger. And we can save this poor guy making minimum wage in a hot-ass warehouse from eight miles of walking a day. And I thought to myself I want to work for that guy and I want to know everything he knows. So at the after party I went up to Rebecca Cordray and I said I want to work for crowd favorite because at the time 40 had just been acquired by crowd favorite. I want to submit a design resume and work at crowd favorite because I want what that guy has. Chris actually sent James over to talk to me and I had such a design crush on him that I saw him coming and I freaked out and ran to the bathroom so I didn't have to talk to him. And eventually like Chris was like come on man this is go talk to the guy it's not you know. And so I went and I talked to him and then nothing happened. Like nothing happened at all for a while. But I just kept thinking there has to be more. And so I went and I interviewed at a startup in San Francisco and that didn't pan out because I thought why would I ever leave San Diego to go pay even more rent someplace else where it's never sunny. And even though nothing was really happening I just kind of kept getting in touch and kept doing that. And then Chris came to me and said come be a project manager. And like I said crazy pants. But then I started thinking about my career and originally Chris had asked me to talk about what it takes to change careers. And I don't feel like I've made some big change like I'm still who I am. I I still think the same way. I've had more of a career evolution over the last 20 years where every path along my career has been a different step to get where I want to be. So what I'm going to talk to you about today is some of the lessons I've learned to maybe save you some of the headaches that I encountered along the way. The first thing you need to know is if you don't like change go be a cheese monger now. Like go be an accountant go do something completely different because in this industry my skill set has become obsolete at least five times. Probably more than that because Chris are you in here now. I was a flash girl like I coded the heck out of flash. Like I said I started in 1996. My first job was at a skateboard company and I got hired to make t-shirt separations and make catalogs and zines and two days after I got hired their web guy quit and they looked at me and they're like guess who the new web guy is. So I went from being a print designer to being a web designer. Fortunately it was at the time when there were like five tags and there weren't even background images yet so it was pretty easy to pick up. And then eventually I kind of got tired of 16 year old smelly dudes giving me art direction and having to say hey you can't smoke weed in here while I'm working. So I decided it was time to move to a more grown-up job and I worked at San Diego's first digital agency and it was there that I learned how to like nest tables 15 deep which was actually an item on my resume. I coded stuff like crazy but still a designer. Like at the time I just had to learn if you wanted to be a web designer you had to be the designer and the developer. And from there I went to one of San Diego's biggest agencies. We worked for people like Wynn Hotel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was where I learned that if you mess with people's forms they will burn you at the stake. Like in effigy we spent a week doing damage control on messing with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans. And then I showed up one day and the dot-com bubble had burst. And that's how I became a freelancer. And over my 13 year career as a freelancer I did regular websites. I did a lot of flash. Then I became a professional scrap booker which is actually a job. Like people paid me to make scrapbook pages and send them to magazines so people could copy them. I art directed a magazine. I took a break from web for a while and did print. So you can see that through all of this like that's not the steady career. It was an evolution. Like to my mom especially it looked like I was bouncing all over the place and she wondered when the hell I was going to grow up and figure out what I was going to do with my life. But every one of the changes was really intentional. Another lesson that I've learned is if you don't ask you don't get. For the women in here I want you to hear that especially because it's something we have a really hard time with. And every amazing opportunity I've ever gotten is because I've asked for it. I was at a trade show. I met a guy we started talking about the difference between Charles S. Anderson who did the archive versus Charles Anderson also known as Chank who did fonts. I liked his company and I said you should hire me. I would like to design your books for you. A week later he said okay. So I went and I it was one of the most awesome jobs I ever had because they paid me to like paint and craft and do crazy stuff all day long. And I wouldn't have gotten the opportunity if I hadn't asked for it. When I was done doing that some people I knew were starting a digital scrapbooking magazine and they needed someone to do the branding and art director magazine and come up with the entire publication design. And I said well we know each other. You should hire me to do that. And they did. And so for six months before the scrapbooking industry tanked which seems to be a theme. I got to play with paper and art direct a remote team. It was really the first remote job I'd ever had because we had designers everywhere. And a print magazine in a remote environment like ten years ago. That was a challenge. Like that was a definite career evolution. Same thing with crowd favorite. I went to Rebecca and I said I want to work with you guys. Even though I didn't hear back and didn't hear back I kept checking in and maybe Chris called me because he was just tired of debugging him and he was like fine come work for us if you promise to stop emailing me. But the big lesson is ask for what you want. No one is going to come to you coding in your basement designing in your living room and say I have an amazing opportunity for you. You have to go out and even when you don't have the confidence to ask fake that you have the confidence to ask because the worst thing anyone is ever going to tell you is no. For every yes I got I probably got 15 no's which is discouraging but if you keep asking eventually someone's going to say yes. Another big lesson I've learned is if you don't know what you want you end up with a whole lot of what you don't. Over the last 20 years this time around when I was getting ready to do my resume I figured out what I wanted and I didn't want out of life. I didn't want to code anymore because I'm not very good at it and it takes me forever. I knew that I wanted to use my skill set as a designer and so when I was putting my resume together I did a lot of branding when I was a designer and I thought I'm going to treat myself like a client like a business and come up with a brand document and use that as my resume. So the first thing I had to do was come up with my mission statement and my mission statement was I want to do work that matters with people I like where design is valued and knowing before I went in what I wanted let me say no to a lot of places that weren't the right fit for me because at this point in my life I'm 45 I don't have time to waste time anymore I don't want to go to a job and work there for a year and finally figure out how things work and then go to another place and keep doing that you know I have a five-year plan I have a ten-year plan I know where I want to go and I know what I need to do to get there and so keeping in mind you know the career evolution is less about each individual job and more about how each individual job can take you where you eventually want to be and knowing what you want not necessarily today because some days it's like dude I want to paycheck and dental insurance and as a freelancer those were too big like if I have dental insurance that would be awesome and even that was knowing what I wanted it's like a lot of people talked about the freedom of freelance and sometimes I think it might have been a little too much freedom for me because I would be like well you know works mostly done and it's nice out today so you want to go take a kayak ride around the bay and and so knowing what I wanted some of those things were structure a team that I was answerable to so that my natural lazy tendencies were not there I was like a precocious like teachers pet kid and so when I have other people relying on me I put in a lot more effort when it's just me I'm like super easy on myself and so that and the knowing that I needed to work someplace where design mattered because I'm tired of trying to sell bacon to vegetarians at this point I don't want to have to fight someone about whether or not design is important if you don't believe it is before I get there I don't want to change your mind anymore and so again just think about what you want and keep that in mind as your career progresses this was a big one for me you have got to know when to walk away I have kind of a sixth sense for when things are about to go sideways so I could tell when the dot-com boom was coming and so I quit my job about three weeks before everyone showed up at the office and there was just a sign at the door that said out of money no paychecks good luck when flash was dying I was like my skill sets getting ready to come obsolete again this might be a good time to transition into something else one way to keep that in mind is to kind of keep looking ahead at what's coming next no one to get out another reason you know another thing about getting out is life is too short to do things that don't make you happy if you are miserable someplace leave you will find a way to get through it you you know can deal with the the financial insecurity for a little bit unless you have kids I'm lucky like I have a dog I don't have to worry about kids so I have a little more freedom with that but when I have stayed at jobs where I was miserable it affected my mental health to the point that it wasn't worth the paycheck like my health was far more important to me than that and so knowing when to walk away when you've had enough that's another kind of evolution it's like you know you shed your tail because it's getting in your way this is one of my favorite sayings does anyone recognize this quote is anyone in here as old as me there was a movie in the 80s called nine to five and it stuck with me I saw it when I was a kid and Lily Tomlin says I'm a tree I can bend and I say that to myself sometimes five six seven eight nine times a day one of the things that I learned early on in my career here's a story I was at a job that I hated I was miserable there because all of the other designers decided they were too good to code and me and one other girl were like well we know how to code and so we got stuck with all the crappy work everyone else got to design because they were unwilling to learn new things and we got stuck doing the grunt work and the production work because we knew how to do it and it was miserable man like when I talk about my three worst jobs ever that one I think is number two and so we're at lunch one day and my boss was into wine tasting so we'd all like drink a little bit during the day and we were at Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego and we're walking down some stairs and we see these garage doors open and I look in it looks like an awesome place and I'm a little lit so I'm like hey what do you guys do here and they said well we're a web development agency it looks really cool you hiring which goes back to ask for what you want that was actually the first time I ever asked for something I wanted so maybe the message there is have a couple drinks before you ask for the first time it makes it a lot easier and they offered to hire me but they offered to hire me as a site builder which was someone who coded HTML and Sandra calls these cockroach cracks and that was like the cockroach crack that I wiggled in to get to the company that I wanted to get to I had never worked on a PC before I was like I had that you can have my Mac when you pry it from my cold dead fingers poster I walk in on the first day and there's a PC sitting on my desk and I think oh crap and they take me over and they set me up in whatever version control system they have and and I sit down and the first thing I think is I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this directory before I do anything because boy it would be embarrassing to screw stuff up on my first day Apple key and D on a Mac is duplicate the control key and D on a PC is delete but again they they were flexible they knew that I had no experience working in that environment and thank God someone knew how to fix it because I sat there frozen for about 10 minutes and I'm like great I'm getting fired my first day this is awesome same thing with crowd favorite I applied as a designer I applied as a user experience designer and when Chris said come be a project manager I was willing to do whatever it took to get in and learn from the people that I admired I wanted to work with Kareem I wanted to work with Chris I wanted to work with James I wanted to learn what they knew and so I was willing to be flexible I was willing to bend and I looked at it as an opportunity to fill in the skills that I don't already have because let's face it after 13 years of working from home I didn't know if I could work for a team I didn't know if I could sit in a chair for eight hours a day like consecutively and not go stir crazy and so when you're looking at the evolution of your career be flexible like think about it in different ways are there ways that I can get skills here that will help me you know five years down the road here use what you know like I said earlier I don't feel like this was a huge career change because every single day at crowd favorite I use my design skills I approach everything with design thinking when I write an email its user experience design and user interface because I am just prioritizing information it slows me down sometimes because my spreadsheets have to be really pretty and like the colors and the fonts and but I apply those lessons I think about everything as a problem I think about how to solve it from a design perspective and everything has kind of been that way throughout my career I learned HTML and then I learned JavaScript and the object-oriented part of JavaScript prepared me for learning how to do action scripting which prepared me for PHP which prepared me for CSS and so every one of those skills that you've gained even if it seems completely unrelated is something you can build on I was talking to Rebecca Cordray at breakfast today and we were both waitresses and probably one of the most valuable skill sets in being a project manager comes from waiting tables and being in a service industry learning how to multitask learning how to juggle learning how not to spit in people's coffee and so the lesson there is use what you know if you know you're a designer and you're transitioning into something else think about how those skills transfer change is good it's all so hard and I'm not gonna lie to you guys this has not been an easy transition for me when I started my job I felt like I sucked about 95% of the time and it had been maybe 10 years since I felt anything less than awesome at my job like Chris said and I am not shy to say it I am an awesome designer it was second nature I didn't have to think about it I it was part of who I was I have a saying that design isn't what I do it's who I am and so it was really hard to to not be that person anymore Ego has been my biggest challenge in transitioning roles and evolving into this role I went to an AIGA event in Arizona when I went out to meet the 40 team and I'm walking around and James Archer is very well known in the Phoenix AIGA design community and he'd introduce me to people and he'd say this is Chris Ford she's a project manager at crowd favorite with me and you could see just like that and that was really hard you know because usually when I go to AIG events in San Diego they're like oh my god you're Chris Ford it's so great to meet you and it was a really difficult to be in that position of you're just a project manager and so it was that killing that ego and accepting the fact that the design stuff is no longer my job but I can take everything I know from there and apply it to this situation and realize that I've never really cared much what people think about me and what matters is how I see myself not how these random designers at some conference that that I was attending that I'd never see again think about me but again now that was one of the biggest challenges and I'm not gonna lie there were days when I cried under my desk and got up and wiped the snot off my face and got on a client call you know change is not easy but it's worth it when I would call James and be like I'm losing it man he told me you have to be bad at something before you can be good at something and again because I hadn't been bad at design and in like 10 15 years it was hard to be bad at something I've definitely improved I feel like I only suck at my job about 90% of the time now instead of 95 but I'm learning and that's the important part the last thing I want to talk to you about is anything that you love and you're passionate about I look at as a long game it is chess and not checkers I look ahead because God willing if I make it to 80 I still want to be doing whatever iteration of this there is in 40 more years and I had a couple of things happen to me this last year that have really driven this point home last October I had a cancer scare and for a couple of months they kept telling me oh you know you'll go and you'll get this test and it'll rule it out and that test didn't rule it out and then I went back to the next test and they're like oh this will totally rule it out and that didn't rule it out so I was freaking out man I was like I'm a little anxious Chris can attest to that little high strung and I mean in my head I was like oh my god at my funeral and I like had the I need to make my slideshow because no one else can make my memorial slideshow but me it won't be good enough and then two months ago my cousin's husband passed away unexpectedly and you just start thinking like if I don't make it until 80 how do I want to spend that time and so you know my wife and I have had some really serious conversations about you know where do you want to go what do you want to do what's our five-year plan what's our 10-year plan like like let's make the most of the time we have because you just never know and it's definitely you know got me thinking about what's my long game and I'm hoping that at the end of today you guys start asking yourself what's your long game where do you want to be what's going to make you happy what is going to bring you joy and how do you get there and how do you evolve your skill set to be the person you want to be and have the career that you want to have I am in no means an expert at career change someone yesterday like a 20-year-old kid told me I can't wait to figure it out I I haven't figured it out I haven't even come close to figuring it out this is just my experience it's how I've approached my career evolution and I hope that you guys can leave today thinking about that and figuring out how you can have the best career for you personally and that's it does anyone have any questions no no questions alright I'm getting booted I got the gong show gong so Chris is kicking me off