When you’re a little kid, you have everything to look forward to. You’re optimistic and excited. Bad things haven’t happened yet. You’re not judged. You’re just surrounded by people who love you.

Then you go to school.

And it goes downhill from there.

Or at least it did for me.

When I was young, I loved engaging in the arts, whether it was singing or dancing or drawing or acting or playing music or dressing up. I did it all. And it was fun. But when I entered school, it was made very clear to me by every other child that I was different. And, as such, I became a subject of ridicule. I was terribly confused. I thought my sensitivity, care and attention to detail would make me naturally accepted by my peers, but instead I seemed very out of place.

They wanted to rough-house. I wanted to draw.

They wanted to kill insects. I wanted to save them.

They wanted to make fun of the girls. I wanted to kiss them.

It was lonely, and I didn’t want to be lonely. Having had such a strong passion for all things and a desire to connect with other people, being lonely is probably the worst thing I could have had growing up. Quite a dilemma… you want to be true to the values that make you who you are, but you also want to be accepted and liked.

People suggested that I stop caring what other kids thought and just be myself. But they weren’t there with me in school when I had to constantly sit alone, when I was ridiculed to tears or when my entire fifth grade class sang the lyrics to “We are the Champions” and replaced the phrase, “No time for losers,” with, “No time for Eric.” Be myself? I think not.

It became apparent to me pretty early on that I had to choose between being me and being accepted. I chose the latter and tried every which way I could to fit in: changing how I thought, what I cared about, how I dressed, how I acted. To me, there seemed to be no other option. Lucky for me, I guess, I was able to translate my inner voice to other mediums, such as art and doing well at school. Granted, it still set me apart from other people, but there was no way I was going to purposely do poorly in school just to fit in … it was the only part of me I retained. Kids were drawn to characteristics I just didn’t have, so I was left to change everything else about me.

I begged my parents for a new box of crayons to bring to class so kids would want to draw with me, even though I always preferred colored pencils. It backfired; suddenly kids were interested in aromatic markers instead.

I needed my dad to come in and give a talk about taking care of your teeth so I could help out with the demonstration and feel special. It backfired; he didn’t let me help out.

I got myself a laptop in eighth grade to take notes in science class so that kids would think I was cool for having it. It backfired; I became too much of a nerd.

I had to get a pretend earring so I could seem as cool as my friend who had a real one and never seemed to get teased. It backfired; the kids said it made me look gay.

I had to buy the popular clothes from Abercrombie so I could at least start looking like everyone else. It backfired; none of the clothes fit me.

I had to force myself to climb the unknotted rope in gym class like everyone else. It backfired; I tired quickly and then couldn’t even climb the easier, knotted rope.

I had to make fun of other kids to avoid getting ridiculed myself. It backfired; I got detention and ridicule anyway.

I had to cheat on test so I could ensure I’d still get good grades. It backfired; somebody told the teacher.

I tried to make fun of myself and beat the other kids to it. It backfired;  I just gave them better material.

I tried helping my classmates out during our fourth grade group Scrabble sessions by scoring big words, but that backfired because I was taking the game too seriously.

I tried getting involved in intramural basketball. But that backfired too; I wasn’t very good and thus, I was teased.

The only thing I really had going for me – in my mind – was that I was doing well in school and was able to make things that people liked. So I clung to that as my identity and safe haven. When I felt bad about myself for anything, I told myself I didn’t have to care about what people said because, for example, I did better on a math test or I was friends with the teacher or my class project got the highest grade. It gave me a sense of self worth which I was severely lacking. To add to my frustration, I often felt unable to express myself honestly and kids often misinterpreted what I meant and twisted it so I still looked like a bad guy.

I feel like I’ve been so concerned with how other people see me for so long that I’ve blurred the lines between what I do for me and what I do for other people. And this, of course, is bad practice in design.  A lot of designers, including myself, have advocated the sentiment that you shouldn’t let your users define your brand or your product. That’s not to say, of course, that you shouldn’t consider their opinions and feedback and weigh it into your decision-making. But at the end of the day, you really have to create your own vision and be confident in it. This is a value I know is central to companies like Apple and Facebook.

You can’t design for everyone. I should know – there’s just no way to make everyone happy. If you’re not confident in yourself and you try diluting your identity to incorporate everyone else’s feedback, you end up with something where no one’s happy – and, in the design world, products which are overly complicated, lack focus and ease of use, and are just unpopular. This is something I’ve found from my experience at Microsoft. Despite incredible talent and success, they seem to have lost their way. When you try to satisfy every constraint and spend so much time appeasing other people, you become something you’re not and it’s a terribly sad situation when you realize it (and even more sad if you don’t).

Sometimes I don’t even know if what I feel or think is actually me or if it’s just the result of years of adapting. I like to think I’ve tried hard to be true to my values and beliefs, but there’s always some doubt in my mind about my motivations and reasoning. Even now that I’m a lot older and have had a lot of experience at a lot of places, I’m still not entirely confident. And it’s hard being yourself when you don’t even know who you are yet.

Design, for me, is a personal affair. That’s not at all to say, however, that the design decisions I make are based on subjective opinion. Rather, my thoughts and personal experience have naturally lead me to the design mindset and it’s pretty much everything I am today.

As a child, I took great interest in putting things together, building structures and figuring out how things worked. I was very akin to seeing shapes in everything and describing complex objects as made up of smaller, more recognizable components. But more importantly, I also tended to see or be sensitive to faces in objects and would instantly feel connections that made me very sympathetic and concerned for their well-being. As a result, I often saw plush toys or porcelain figures I had to have and ended up collecting hundreds of them over the years. I grew really attached to characters in stories and movies. I cried when I met Cinderella at Disney World because, I said, “they ruined your dress!” I saved flies and ants that I found in our house. I held little funerals for mice that my cats brought in. I couldn’t throw away so much as a piece of paper with a drawing of an animal on it without feeling guilty. I wouldn’t eat chocolate animals because I saw them as real animals and felt bad. I would even hold onto little pink erasers if they resembled an animal. The only way my parents ever got me to finish items of food was by telling me that if I didn’t eat the last bit, it would be lonely.

Aside from my mathematical, spatially-oriented mind which I’m sure most designers had as kids, my dedication was really more to relationships, feelings and personification. I built up a miniature town of my little animal figurines, complete with houses, trees, cars, handwritten menus at restaurants and little pieces of food I made out of clay. And with the setup continually growing from just a shelf in my room at age six to an entire room in our house by the end of middle school, I developed deep and complex stories between all the animals and would write at length and in detail about them. It was common knowledge across my family that someone could so much as rotate one of the pieces and I would be able to figure out which one it was.

I couldn’t explain it at the time, but everything had to be “a certain way.” It wasn’t until I started school, however, that this mindset really became so important to me on a personal level.

Kids have an amazing ability to make fun of anything they can. For me, it was my short height, thin build, weird clothes, bushy hair, artistic flair, lack of physical strength, inability to play sports, sensitivity, being jewish and having good grades. To add to my lament, I also loved girls way earlier than most kids and was continually frustrated that none of them liked me back. The kids made fun of that too, of course. To this day, the years of ridicule and need for acceptance have instilled so much neuroticism in me that I’m affected in some way in everything I think and do.

Unable to feel comfortable showing people “the real me,” I found more superficial ways to get people to like me: I told jokes, I performed magic tricks, I played piano, I drew pictures – anything I could do that would get people to like me without forming a “real” connection. Granted, this did instill a somewhat natural inclination to be a performer, but it masked what otherwise would have been an ability to connect with people on a more genuine level all those years.

Additionally, my parents – who finally got divorced when I was nine – were not your typical parents. My mom never made friends with “soccer moms” because she was probably too liberal-minded and she was starting a company in our basement. My dad never bonded with any other parents because he’s sensitive, hates sports and has an idealistic image of how the world should work. Both were overprotective and instilled their values – and fears – in me from a young age. As such, I grew up rather sheltered, socially shy and sensitive yet ambitious, creative and an independent-thinker.

Between the social scene at school and the odd dynamic at home, the only place I really felt safe and at peace was among my stuffed animals and miniature town, with my stories and relationships and characters. I often begged my mom not to make me go to school so that I didn’t have to interact with any of the kids. But then something happened in preschool that struck a major chord in me. I liked to draw and I found that the other kids were drawn to my ability. They’d ask me to draw them pictures and I, so eager for acceptance, would of course consent. Soon I realized that despite whatever mean comments the kids could think up to say to me, they couldn’t touch my art. And that gave me something that I desperately needed – an identity.

As the school years progressed, the teasing got worse, but I got more involved in my artwork. Kids might have said things about my physique, but no one could really penetrate my made-up world in my drawings. If anything, they tried to copy them. By the end of elementary school, I had started drawing comic strips with a variety of animal characters and relationships. I considered these cartoons my real friends and would draw them constantly throughout the school day, especially when I felt alone. A project about careers I found from seventh grade reads, “I want to be a cartoonist so people will like me for my drawings.”

In addition to the social benefit, I added artistic flair to my homework assignments and it made them stand out from the rest. Without many friends, I had time to do every project when it was assigned and spent most of my time perfecting visual elements, picking out certain fonts, colors, lines, images, etc. Even little things such as math problem sets from sixth grade would be carefully written out (or rewritten, if my first version wasn’t pretty enough) and notated. By high school, I became known as the kid who always excelled at his work and went that extra mile with assignments to make them extra polished and [perhaps unnecessarily] detailed. It wasn’t because I really wanted to – rather, I was just using it as a medium to express the self I otherwise wasn’t able to. As designing became more important to my personal success, I also got involved in extracurriculars that extended my reach, allowing me to redesign and edit our school’s newspaper and literary magazine and create flyers and print material for other clubs and events.

And so, this personal obsession of mine to create, to make things a certain way, to put things in order, became almost paradoxically also a way for me to define myself and connect with people I seemed otherwise unable to. Praise for my work was taken personally as praise for me. In my mind, people may not have liked me for whatever reason, but they could connect with me through what I made, and that was just as good. It gave me extreme comfort to feel as though I did have some value to society and that following my own set of rules made everything more bearable.

This makes sense, of course. Feeling rather helpless and confused in the real relationships in my life, the only thing I really could control was my work. And, with so many different people seemingly telling me who I was and how I was supposed to act, it was imperative for my own sanity that I maintained some semblance of having an identity and I obsessed over developing one and promoting it. Fortunately, the importance of identity – of brand – is at the root of design. I had a concept and feeling that drove my actions and every decision I made in how I presented myself. For me, it was making order out of chaos. I created rules and frameworks that made sense of things, since so much in my life didn’t. I spent copious amounts of time analyzing people’s behavior and thoughts with strict objectivity, trying to figure out almost mathematical reasons why they did the things they did, so I could then change my actions and expectations to fit the paradigm. It was all I had to make myself feel comfortable with things. Otherwise, it would all be too chaotic.

As I’ve formalized my design expertise, learned techniques and about guiding principles and worked on all sorts of projects big and small – print layouts, architecture, graphic design, 3D models, animation, video production, web development, iPhone apps and much more – one thing has remained the same: an attention and true dedication to a story and a core value and vision for a design. I’ve found through my experience that most companies and projects often lack this central, most important component and without a driving force, a framework or a concept, it’s all too easy to end up with something sub-par. Design requires discipline and dedication.

As technology has grown more ubiquitous, we’ve had the ability to affect people’s daily lives and their relationships and I’ve found these challenges to be especially close to my heart. Although my specific skill-set, however diverse, may not be as perfected as others, I see the big picture and understand the need for a vision and the steps to create one and follow it. My passion is who I am, and this mindset has been so crucial to my own personal happiness that it’s become essential in my day-to-day job. Without it, everything easily feels chaotic again and I am deeply unsettled in my own well-being. What can I say – loving design is one thing, but another thing entirely is living it.