May 8, 2023

Dear Journal,

I recently discovered what has been eating away at me to the core – I feel like I am rusting away in my career. I’d climbed so fast and did so many things, I forgot to keep on learning.

I work in oil and gas. While I do enjoy many things about my job, my current job doesn’t allow me much creative freedom or freedom of expression.

A publicly traded company can be much different for someone who is so used to being creative, expressing themselves through art, and having the liberty to explore different types of messaging. There are a lot of corporate processes that can get in the way so it becomes necessary to find other ways to reach individual goals and grow. If a path isn’t there, sometimes you make one.

Realizing I really desired to learn and to grow and knowing I only learn through application of principles and doing the work in the real world, I decided to enroll in some courses on Coursera.

The first course? I am going to study to become Google certified in user experience.

I am excited. It has been so many years since my first design course. I am sure things are a lot different than when I graduated in 2008. One thing I have learned this past year is that the tools and strategies that worked for me for so long, work less and less with each passing year.

Although I have a degree, how relevant is it? I need to learn and grow and sometimes that means to reach your destination you have to go back to the beginning.

I started my career as a designer. I had such a love and passion for design and creating multimedia experiences that I turned this into a successful career in digital marketing. But as time goes on and as I get further in my career, I feel less in touch with why I began so long ago.

As I get more into strategy, more into corporate processes, more into segmented weeks and endless amounts of “collaboration meetings”, I feel more and more pulled away from my passions.

I hope this course puts passion back into my career and gets me back on a path to being more creative and more engaged with the creation of beautiful experiences.

That is, in fact, why I began this kind of work in the first place – the ability to guide a person through a series of intended experiences, using marketing to inform the design and ultimately capitalize on the art form in some way or another.

I imagine I will need more than a simple course on Coursera taught by Google instructors to light my flame again, but it’s a damn good place to begin; right at the beginning.

I look forward to getting through the course, designing some neat experiences, and sharing the work here on my website. I used to have such an incredible portfolio. I want that again.

I am most happy when I am being creative. It’s time to find that again, even if I have to pay for my own courses and carve out the time in my already busy schedule.

It must be done. It will be done.

Until tomorrow.