When You’re a Designer

Nobody ever told me, but when you're a Designer:

• You won’t be able to afford your own taste.
• You’ll notice everything that is even slightly out of alignment.
• You’ll never look at a problem without “reading” the context.
• You’ll only analyze a space, you won’t just experience it. 
• You’ll be a bystander.
• You’ll be endlessly fascinated with natural light and shadows.
• You won’t be able to let anything go, your brain will spin, you won’t sleep.
• You won’t be able to talk to anyone about what you do. No one will know what a Designer does.
• You’ll be weary and content at the same time.
• Your eyes will hurt.
• You’ll be less respected than you thought.
• Your shyness will be interpreted as arrogance.
• You’ll be working on your craft for years, you’ll never feel like you’ve mastered it, but you’ll keep at it, everyday, again, again.
• You’ll remember every single thing you did wrong on a project, and that will keep you from seeing everything you did right.
• You’ll want to put everything in order, always… But, you may choose not to do that.
• When you’re young, your heroes will be irrelevant. You’ll figure out the people who really matters when you're older.
• You’ll mark the milestones in your life by the projects you were working on at the time.
• You’ll come to know a little about everything, you’ll know a lot about just a few things.
• You’ll begin to see any built environment as a continuously evolving form, built piece by piece by generations of individual efforts - You’ll begin to see balance between individuality and community.
• You’ll often have an opportunity to be the center of attention, but, you won’t know how to take advantage of that.
• You will be interesting… eventually.