Becoming, Not Arriving: A Resonant Journey

The text from my May 2025 graduation speech:

I moved to D.C. in 2017 because I wanted to pursue a career in foreign diplomacy, politics, or world affairs; basically anything that would allow me to use my international relations degree. I felt this would be a “serious profession,” one that proved I could hack it in reputable circles, one that would carry weight. I pursued work on political campaigns, in the labor movement, digital communications, and technology. All my work was geared towards making myself seem more legitimate, collecting more technical proficiencies and knowledge as I hopefully progressed up the proverbial career ladder. 

In 2023, I went back to school because I knew I wasn’t on the right path for the career I wanted. For a long time, I had been pursuing something that didn’t quite mesh with the person I was.

And then I got into Roger Manix’s class called “Managing Creative Teams,” where we took a deep dive into the meaning and importance of play. Below is my play personality: The Explorer. I’d never heard of play personalities before and to be honest, I didn’t think about play at all as someone who’s never really been into board, card, or computer games, and has never acted or done improv.

Ways my play personality connects to me

But it’s true that so much of adult life strips us of a kind of childlike wonder and fascination that comes with play. Play moves from being a critical and necessary way to experiment with, and in, the world to something superfluous. We start to see the world on someone else’s terms, which was definitely true for me.

I stopped wondering what would give me the greatest joy and stopped exploring my true center, as well as all the possibilities that could come with that center. I didn’t see possibilities at all; I mostly saw a prescribed future that would give me external validation for all my hard work and a way to eventually prove myself professionally.

As kids, the world is only possibilities and opportunities. And all those possibilities have the potential to wow us, to leave us awestruck. I realized I didn’t want to be someone who’s unwilling to see the magic all around me, and so I figured I needed to start incorporating this play stuff back into my life again.

Which brings me to my next realization: creative thinking is supported in part by our ability to imagine the future — our capacity to envision experiences that have not yet occurred. Before our futures-thinking class, named “New Design Firms,” with Lee-Sean Huang, I didn’t think of design as future-making, but that’s exactly what it is. 

What we have all been doing for the last 18 months has been future-making: making sense of our past and present signals, and learning to hone in on trends to make sense of them. A huge part of this work is backcasting and storytelling. And for a few folks in this room, you’ll know that my most recent creative endeavor, to get out of my own head and make sense of the world, has been a return to creative writing. I’ve always loved to write for myself but it’s never served a “purpose.” Until recently, that was a reason I didn’t have time for it.

Storytelling is a powerful tool in design and in your personal life. It fosters empathy, which should be a designer’s sharpest tool in their toolbox. It level sets on our current state and creates a map to get to our desired state. It allows us to engender certain feelings around a shared vision of a future; one that will percolate, motivate, and inspire.

“As creators of models, prototypes, and propositions, designers occupy a dialectical space between the world that is and the world that could be. Informed by the past and the present, their activity is oriented towards the future.”

It also allows us to think divergently, as this GEMS cohort experienced in the “Pizza World” exercise (thank you Lee-Sean). As you can see here, divergent thinking (even if it results in completely improbably solutions) is a critical part of how you arrive at innovation.

With this in mind, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I want to feel in the future I’m building, and less about what is reasonable, what is practical, what is the most measured and considered way forward. I am in my divergent stage of thinking right now about my life, where feasibility doesn’t play a role (yet) and I’m trying to stay in it as long as I can.

And finally, in the leadership course we took with Johann Verheem, the creator of the ShakeWeight (a fact I think we are all quite proud of), we were challenged to not only to think about the style of leadership we’d all want to espouse, but also to think about what was the kind of life we wanted to lead.

Below is my final project for Johann’s class. It was a recipe box that I filled with all kinds of color-coded categories about meaningful quotes I wanted to remember, exercises we did alone and in class, and definitions of important words (like leadership, which as we all found out, was somewhat mystifyingly hard to define).

“Leadership Map” recipe box

Something Johann said repeatedly throughout our time together was, “The quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself on an ongoing basis.” This struck me because it had absolutely nothing to do with outcomes. For so long, I had been concerned with the outcome, with where I was going to land and the “prize” at the end of the tunnel, ignoring, or being simply too unaware, that the prize is the journey, as cliche as that sounds.

“The quality of your life depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself on an ongoing basis.”

It’s something I should have known all along — I love a journey! And to travel, as well as novel experiences, as my play personality told you at the beginning of this. It’s why I decided to focus my independent study on luxury travel and the experience/ transformations economy.

But the questions I’m asking myself now are less about where I’ll end up and more about how I want to feel during that journey, what I want to learn, and who I want to become in the process. I never want to stop playing, imagining different futures for myself, or asking myself deeply resonant questions that invoke some kind of minor panic attack or life-altering crisis (that is destiny for most of us, at some point, no?)

Johann told us, “If leadership begins not with what you do but with who you are, then when and how do you escape the noise to find your purpose and summon the strength to pursue it?” That’s what I hope to do with the rest of my life: to pursue the person I want to be, whatever iteration or version of that comes along.

So finally, I’d like to wrap up by saying my perspective has changed so much during this transformation. And it’s given me so much as well; not only the ability to envision a different future for myself and the way I want to live, but also a way to make it a reality. To play with, and in, my environment, to build and create as a means to discover and test, and the ability to become my own resonant leader.

Thank you.

In the “messy middle,” courtesy of Jen Briselli