I often wonder how much strategy people put into making career-oriented decisions. For most folks, it’s a matter of doing something that pays the rent or feeds the family. For others, it could be driven by obtaining power or the lucrative trappings of executive success. For me, I just wanted to be excited and passionate about what I do and what I can create.
When I was much younger, I’d always imagined I would be heavily involved in the creative world. Animator, graphic designer, painter, sketch artist. Hell, mime. Either way, the world of color, space, value, and form seemed to have a greater hold on me than the perceptively dull and dry world of investment banking, actuary, or (gasp!) programmer*.
Despite my initial prejudices against the world of math and science, I started on a path early in college that would eventually marry the world of the creative and the world of the rational. One world fit like my favorite pair of jeans, the other fit like the most comically oversized coat in my father’s closet. For most people, an art major enrolled in computer science classes seems most ridiculously incongruous. Even I thought so for the longest time, yet I continued to attempt a double major in Comp Sci and Commercial Art.
Perceptions have an interesting (and even a tad unexpected) way of changing. Things I have learned:
1. Creativity is not limited to just paint strokes on a canvas or the savvy use of Photoshop.
2. There can be a natural balance between the intensely imaginative and the analytical/logical lines of thought. In fact, the best problem solving I’ve ever seen involved incredible imagination.
3. I am passionate about design; but I live for the full creation and realization of a design idea — from concept to delivery. The best way I can describe it is this: My heart is in design; my head is in the code.
*To my developer/programmer friends: Don’t worry, I love you! I kiss you face!