Quantification

I've always defined myself with numbers.

It makes sense though. I'm an engineer by study (although I like to think that I'm designer at heart) and numbers have always come easily to me. I'm naturally predisposed for quantification. In general, our minds also wrap around numbers more easily than around descriptive statements. Quantitative is just easier to comprehend than qualitative: easier to explain to others, easier to scale, easier to prove progress.

And that's why investors and grants all want quantified evidence of progress. However, just because something is quantifiable, doesn't mean it's a valuable measure of success. Often, great opportunities and ideas are passed up because they're difficult to quantify. Take education. Out of all US Foreign Aid, only about 3% goes towards improving education (USAID 2012 Performance Report), while arguably, an educated population could be the best path towards change. Unfortunately, educational progress isn't easily quantifiable. You can't assign a number to how a teacher inspires students or how a student suddenly adopts a new interest in art. Instead, educational progress is reflected in the personal anecdotes of teachers and students seeing the transformational, unquantifiable changes happening day to day. When you start looking for numerical evidence in education, you create a dependence on test scores, standardization, and percent increases rather than what's really important.

The same goes for companies. By solely looking at the profit margins since Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo, you'd say the last two years of her leadership have been a flop. However, looking beyond shows that she has rebuilt the foundations of the company and rebranded it from a search engine to a mobile pioneer. This has been a huge time and resource investment, but an internal overhaul that will change the company's trajectory forever. Maybe these changes aren't showing results yet, but it's unfair to say the work has been useless. However, that's the conclusion a lot of people are coming to because there are not yet many outward-facing successes.

Thus, quantification deters risk-taking. When you're looking to impress with annual progress and big numbers, you're going to go for easily achievable results rather than the transformational changes that take much longer to implement. Which is why when I noticed my own dependence on numbers, it was clear that I needed to change. In high school, my number was my GPA. I became obsessed with achieving the highest score possible because that's how I measured my worth. I made short-sighted decisions in order to fulfill my quantifiable definition of success. 

Recently, my number has been my weight. Instead of asking myself if I feel like I look good, I'm reliant on a measurement to tell me how to feel. In addition, quantifiable goals often become moving targets, and setting these unreachable standards has become way too common. It's why people can't escape the hamster wheel of finance. It's difficult to reach a point of having "enough" if enough is never defined and ever-changing.

So now I'm making a conscious effort to not quantify everything, and to look through a qualitative lens instead.  Quantifying limits the ways in which we can view ourselves. It's on us to be conscious of quantification and make our own decisions for when and where it is valuable to have numbers in our lives.

(re)Defining Directions

I hoped to find direction by moving in a different one.

Cambridge was my way of literally and figuratively moving out. Moving out of MIT into somewhere new, moving out of my comfort zone into the unknown, and whether for better or for worse, moving.

Since then I've found that being out of the MIT intensity has been a double-edged sword. I needed the change of scenery to disrupt my mental bubble, but the lack of like-minded, passionate people at Cambridge quickly led me to complacency. DFA used to be my reminder of why I get up in the morning, but now I didn't have that constant tap on the shoulder.

After a lazy month of thinking about the future only in passing, the internship search catalyzed my focus. "What am I doing this summer" led to "What do I want to do for the rest of my life?" The internal conflict between d.thinking and engineering, people and product, the personal and the physical, kept recurring.

And now I'm trying to find my niche on the spectrum.  Where do I belong? What do I want to spend the rest of my life doing?

I love working with people, but don't want to waste my engineering background. I appreciate the quick iterative process of design, but want physical deliverables to show for my work. I love the buzz of gathering user insights, but am too aware that "understanding people" doesn't sound like a legitimate interest, especially in the engineering world. My background has made it so I will never be completely satisfied by the fluffiness of strategy or organizational design. On the other hand, a completely hardware approach will keep me wanting for more personal interactions.

So where's this leave me? Mike has inadvertently taught me a lot throughout this search. Seeing how passionately he pursues projects, I see my own passion for working with people. His excitement for solving difficult problems is the same as mine for advising project teams or redefining organizational structures. It's clear now that my heart is not in hardware design itself; I'm driven by the people I can affect and the minds I can change. I want to inspire, and that's easier for me to do through interacting rather than creating. For me, product design has always been a means to an end and that's no way to go about things: I know I will never be completely satisfied in hardware design when I am living from the high of one user interaction to the next.

So the struggle is now in finding the perfect balance, and many flowcharts and cafe visits later, the working idea is this: 

Start a design consultancy that has two focuses:

1. Design solutions for impact-driven clients looking to redefine how people live in a meaningful way (vague I know, but it's a start :D). Shoutout to Gravity Tank for doing some damn cool and inspiring consulting work.
2. Redefine CSR by having employees mentor students in design for social impact projects. Take an active role in the community like ideo.org or Vecna do. This will hopefully set a new precedent for corporate community engagement.

So that's where I am now, and I'd say that's a pretty reasonable start. I'm sure this idea will go through many iterations in the next few months, even weeks, but the core is there: I want to impact lives and understand people. The path to get there will likely wind through many obstacles, but I'm more confident with those uncertainties now that the goal is defined.