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Episode 6: Making Mistakes
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A great episode to end the year! Spend some time with Sam and Steve as they look at their own mistakes and consider how they came to be. Reflect on your own mistakes and how they can be moments to savour and even love. Happy New Year to everyone!
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Transcript
Introduction to Off the Path
00:00:14
Speaker
Welcome to Off the Path, a show where we talk about research careers, especially our own. I'm Sam Ladner. And I'm Steve Portigal. Sam and I have been having a bunch of conversations about research careers. And with Off the Path, we're going to share those conversations with you.
Career Path Realizations
00:00:30
Speaker
There have been many times in my career where I have felt completely wrong, like I was going in the completely, absolutely wrong direction. And I was never sure until it was over that it turned out to be actually pretty good.
00:00:45
Speaker
I am sure that if I were starting my career today, I think this would happen to me on a regular basis. Like I was feeling like I'm going the wrong direction. i've made a bad decision, cetera.
00:00:55
Speaker
Maybe we all feel like we have lost our way from
Hypothetical Career Mistakes
00:00:59
Speaker
time to time. So my question to you is, let's imagine you were starting your career today and you were probably going to make some mistakes. What do you think those mistakes would be?
00:01:09
Speaker
Your question is a creative, facilitative one because you're talking, i think, about what happens if we already know what we know and also what happens if it's 2025 versus some other period of time. Exactly. Exactly.
00:01:22
Speaker
So there are different things to be wrong about or there are different pitfalls on the path now than there were. Exactly. X years ago. Exactly. Maybe that's the key thing that questions asking us is what's different?
00:01:36
Speaker
I'm going to start in the other direction to maybe take away some pieces and let's tell us focus in because you acknowledge right up front of the question, you make mistakes and maybe that is inevitable. Maybe making mistakes is part of the process.
Learning from Mistakes
00:01:48
Speaker
And certainly for me, thinking about making mistakes, there's so many things that you learn by making a choice, seeing negative consequences and in the best of all possible situations saying, okay, I'm not going to do that again. Here's like a literal change I'm going to make. At a metal level, there is acknowledging that this is just how things go. You you are going to make mistakes and that's how you learn.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yep. And I think that's the thing that you learn with experience is just accepting that you're going to be responsible for your own failures. we can kind of take that off the table, right? and Right. One thing that we might know in this, I don't know if we're in magical realism or science fiction or what we're in sort of scenario.
00:02:25
Speaker
Sure. Magical realism. is that whatever mistakes we make now won't hurt quite as much because we know that mistake making is part of being on the journey.
00:02:36
Speaker
Mm. you now are a little inoculated against making mistakes because you know that that's just normal. I'm not inoculated against making them. i can reduce the suffering from making them. OK. Oh, yeah. Here we are.
00:02:51
Speaker
You know what this is like. You did this. You're going to not do it again next time. Or maybe you are going to do it again next time. This is my self-talk. Right. As opposed to like, oh, my God, what am I even doing in this career or or in this project? So the mistakes may suck less. You're better prepared now because, you know, mistakes are part of the process. But the second part of the question still stands. Yeah. It's
Tool Mastery in the Workplace
00:03:15
Speaker
2025 now. The mistakes are going to be different. What is the nature of the kinds of pitfalls that you would fall into today that you may not have been falling into in years past?
00:03:26
Speaker
The industry is more mature. For me, that shows up in a couple of ways where, boy, I still feel out of step. This is stuff that came on the scene after I grew up.
00:03:37
Speaker
And so I didn't get brought into some of those things. So one is about, I want to say tools, but I want to sound smart, I would say tooling. Tooling. That's how people talk now, right? That's that's the tooling.
00:03:50
Speaker
That graphic that user interviews produces that shows, it used to be a subway map for many years. Now it's a D&D map. As any industry matures, right, the amount of things that can get done has grown.
00:04:02
Speaker
And I have managed to avoid familiarity with most of it. But I think if I was starting out now, I would try to ignore it because it's a lot of noise. It's a lot of feature comparisons, a lot of pricing complexity and whether you're in-house or a consultant, there's still a lot of stuff to be worked through.
00:04:23
Speaker
i think I would make the mistake of thinking I could keep ignoring it. You would tune out. You would tune out to the tools. Yeah, if I'm the Steve Portigal of 2025 that exists in the real world, that's an m MO of mine is to ignore stuff that seems too much and too distracting from what I want to be focusing on.
00:04:42
Speaker
And why is that a mistake? Like, so if you think that that's a natural tendency that you would do, and there's a this huge number of tools you can choose from and compare and endlessly get lost in. And so your natural reaction is to tune
Industry Shaped by Tools
00:04:54
Speaker
them out. Why would that be a mistake?
00:04:56
Speaker
Because I think that the way a lot of work is done now requires, if not mastery, certainly like efficient utilization of some of those things. And, you know, it's not like, hey, when I was starting out, we used QuarkXPress.
00:05:12
Speaker
And then it's something, you know I use Macromedia Director before became Macromind Director or whatever the direction of those brandings were. Like there was always tools put in front of you that you would figure out how to use to do something. Yeah. Think about how many video editing things you did before iMovie came around. like we're Right. We're always learning stuff.
00:05:31
Speaker
And this could be completely wrong. I don't know. Those tools, they seem more tightly tied to the way that a researcher, if not interviews, then analyzes, synthesizes documents, reports.
00:05:44
Speaker
When we shape our tools and our tools shape us, it feels like that those tools are shaping the way research is done and setting us setting expectations for just how you sort of go through your work day or your work life. And so you need to pay attention more than you would naturally want to pay attention. Is that what you're saying?
00:06:03
Speaker
Yes. Thank you for good clarification. I actually think that's an related to the way that I might first answer this question, because I was thinking about it and I was thinking, OK, knowing my orientation now in a way that I didn't when I was younger and then transporting myself just like that little Google Street View dude gets thrown into the new location. If I were to do that, I think I would be paying more attention to the tooling because that's my natural tendency is to dive into a new tool. Like I love trying out new things and I get really lost in it. And I always think to myself, there's got to be a better way. I've got that orientation, those stupid commercials like there's got to be a better way. This is inefficient. I'm always thinking that. So I'm like, OK, maybe i should not dive into the tools. And today I would be like, I don't think I even have a choice. You have to use the tools. But I would be overwhelmed like immediately because there's like 8000 of them. Like, how would I choose? Because there wasn't as much choice back then.
00:07:06
Speaker
I chose to engage with tooling and technology, but there were only so many choices. I admire you for being someone who is curious and wants to try out the new things and play with them. There's lots of people that have that tendency and there's, for some of us that don't, I'm just going to own not being that person, not being curious about the tools. I'm i'm too curious about the tools. It's two sides of the same coin.
00:07:32
Speaker
You're like, okay, this is overwhelming. I'm going to tune it out. And I'm like, okay, this is overwhelming. So I'm going to falsely, egofully believe that I can solve the problem. by just engaging so deeply with the tools. And I don't think you're actually going to get an appreciably different outcome if you carefully compare and contrast all the tools and try them all. You know, you should just get to the 80% rule and move on.
00:07:57
Speaker
Is it the perfect tool? Maybe not. Does it matter? No. And I don't know if I would have known that. I think I would have just like, oh my God, look at all these things I can start trying. I wonder in this scenario how much agency ah for exploring tools we would see ourselves as having.
00:08:13
Speaker
Because we wouldn't be allowed to try them? Or why would we not have agency? I guess the agency is how much are we choosing how to go about the work that we're doing? Are we in an environment where, like you said, are we allowed? Right, I've definitely talked about teams that struggle. One aspect of maturity they struggle with is allowing for sort of individuality and creating some consistency. And so one of those that's sort of obvious is, well, we only want to pay software licenses for one recruiting tool, one transcription tool, one whatever.
Tool Constraints in Organizations
00:08:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I wouldn't say that's new, you know.
00:08:45
Speaker
I mean, i I had that problem very early in my career where nobody wanted to buy anything. Nobody wanted to buy software. Oh, that's not proven. We don't know if that's going to work, which is not the same thing as we only buy one recruitment tool or whatever. but I was constantly like downloading the free version and like trying it out and installing things on the slide that I wasn't supposed to be installing. And I was doing it all the time.
00:09:10
Speaker
I mean, it would be different now because it's cloud-based mostly, but i I think I'd still be doing it, except for I'd be doing it constantly because there's so many new tools. I think the problem with it for me, though, like if I'm thinking, OK, so this is my natural tendency. You're going to get overwhelmed with all the number of tools. You're going to think that you can solve the problem by trying them all and maybe even systematically testing them all. I could totally see me making that mistake, building a huge spreadsheet and, you know, comparing and contrasting and spending months on things like that.
00:09:38
Speaker
But the bigger issue with that choice architecture that I just described is that I wouldn't have spent enough time thinking about When I first started doing, you know, web producing back in the day, which is what it was called, I was a web producer. I wasn't as effective as I could be because I didn't have enough ideas, right? Like I didn't have enough reading. I didn't have enough thinking. I didn't know enough about how technology works and how people work. And so I went to grad school to fill that gap. And when I was in grad school, There weren't that many choices in terms of speeding up your work, like reference managers, citation managers. Sure, I tried those. OK, but there were only so many of them and they weren't that impressive and they really didn't change much about how you did things. So I did very old school kind of deep reading.
00:10:22
Speaker
And I'm so grateful I did that because that has helped me more than knowing anything about writing. SPSS or Atlas TI or Dovetail or any of these things. Like, I'm so glad that I didn't have the option to make a huge spreadsheet comparing all the tooling because I never would have done the reading.
00:10:41
Speaker
I would have gotten lost in all of that stuff. And then I would have had no intellectual horsepower. It's possible that that experimentation, though, is a way to think about thinking. I'm thinking about the amazing J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who does these great experiments, you know, how to make the ideal hard-boiled egg. He'll do 30 seconds, 45 seconds, all the way up to like two and a half minutes, with or without baking soda in the water. i am I may be making up that particular thing, but He'll produce this amazing infographic of the egg that results from this kind of sliced in half and beautifully photographed in this eight by eight matrix. And you can kind of see time and additives in the water that are acidic in nature. And so he does this kind of analysis, but he's still talking about how things taste and sort of what's desirable and what are the qualities in, you know, not only taste, but texture and moisture and color and appearance and and and sort of cookability and and all that.
00:11:39
Speaker
It's not like he's just making a chart. He has to reflect on something deeper. But like how did he get that vocabulary about like taste and texture and cookability? How did he get that vocabulary?
00:11:51
Speaker
Doing those experiments when you're entering a field versus doing those experiments when you already have some some professional sophistication. I can tell you, I think the reason that I suggested this question today is because I was having a conversation just this morning. As a matter of fact, I've been thinking about this for a while, but I had this conversation just this morning with somebody who wanted to improve their research ability. They had taken a class with me. This was the extra session that they get as part of the class. And they wanted to talk about career choices. And they were saying how they needed to know a more stuff.
00:12:25
Speaker
I was like, OK, fair enough. Let's have a conversation. And this person had tried a bunch of things, but didn't have the vocabulary to make sense of all the things that they had tried and didn't know, oh, I can try this tool and that tool, but it didn't seem to really make a difference. Like this tool seems like the same as the other tool. And they didn't have a sense of taste for good research to evaluate the tools that they had. And I don't think I would have that taste necessarily. Because I'd just be completely, oh, look at all the tools. It must have solved everything. In reality, what I needed to do was develop a sense of like, what is it? Acid, fat, salt or whatever. Like those components in cooking.
00:13:04
Speaker
I need those components in research. Yeah, this is scratching a lot of itches of mine in an encouraging andnna and irritating way. If I go way, way, way back, one of the things that used to irk me about just very early online discussions about user research was that it was hard to actually talk about anything because every third question was, what kind of video camera should I buy? And and what kind of handheld recorder should I buy? And boy, that lit up any message board or any email. Really? It's like, oh, get this one. You know, you'd see people with pretty hefty credentials and experience, you know, rattling off features and benefits.
00:13:42
Speaker
Of any particular camera, a recorder, yeah or whatever. Yeah. And, you know, oh, you want to talk me about how we mic it up to actually do this? I mean, we all did this with, you and I are looking at each other with sort of fancy mics and our headphones and our remote recording setup. And the beginning of the pandemic was a lot of, how do you do remote research? Was our communities freak out?
00:14:02
Speaker
And specifications of tools was immediate answer. And there was a lot of, look at me, I know everything posts that came out that were tool-based. And There's just a lot of complicated operations things that need to get done. And people that can figure that stuff out are great, especially when they document it. But you're really reminding me about that beginning the pandemic era was very tool-based and not addressing the crisis in front of us, which was Besides the actual crisis, just the professional crisis. Like, oh, i' yeah i'm I'm trying to use tool A, video, to get result B, in-home immersive empathy. How? How do I do that? how are you going to do that? Which is yeah why I think we got a lot of discussions about what tools to use and how to do it. And... I mean, just like with the video camera stuff, it always makes me sad that um this is how we think about our profession and this is how we find common ground to talk about doing better, which I think is why I run from the discussion of tools to my own detriment.
00:14:59
Speaker
I'm not saying this is a healthy thing, but it's it's the overwhelm. It's also just the chattering monkeys around me of people wanting to specify things that and there are more elusive and things that are harder to thought leader about around this stuff.
00:15:15
Speaker
There are things that are harder to do than choose a mic or a video camera or a repository tool or whatever. Way harder, for sure. So do you think that that is what you're running away from? You're realizing that that is not the real problem and you don't want to be focused on the wrong problem. You want to be focused on the meat of the problem, which is how to do great research.
00:15:39
Speaker
I'm on so many high horses, it's hard to tell what all of their names are. And I think why I would, in your fantastical scenario, why I would think to revisit that and take a different approach.
00:15:50
Speaker
You make a great point without the experience of doing something and reflecting on it. You don't have the taste. That's a great lens to look at You don't have the taste. But if I know everything that I know now and I can sort of start again and make mistakes, I guess I would try to balance that out instead of from it.
00:16:07
Speaker
ah You know, maybe I could do what you were trying to do and in at different points in your career is try these tools and reflect on the meatier questions about how to do great research.
00:16:18
Speaker
Even if that's not what everyone around us is talking about. Well, that actually leads me to my second belief about what other mistakes I might make. And I think my social comparison would be out of control if I were to start in 2025.
Social Comparison and Self-Perception
00:16:36
Speaker
And the reason i mean, social comparison is the theft of joy, as we all know.
00:16:40
Speaker
And I had social comparison problems as a young researcher, absolutely, all the time. Constantly looking at other people's stuff like, oh, it's so much better than mine. And, oh, they have this big title now. And, like, oh, they they got so much applause for such and such. And, oh, look at this paper that person wrote. Oh, they released a book. Oh, look at all this stuff. Social comparison was definitely something that affected me as a young researcher. But today, i think social comparison is so much harder to avoid, so much more difficult.
00:17:16
Speaker
We have completely overrun ourselves with not just like Instagram, like, oh, look how beautiful their life is or whatever. But also like LinkedIn and Twitter or, well, what used to be Twitter, Blue Sky, you name it, right? People are everywhere posting all about their professional successes. And it's almost impossible to avoid. And I think it would really be a huge mistake that I would fall into. I would have to like create this kind of force field, like this architecture of habits that would like stop it from coming into me every morning. I don't know if I would do that because I don't think I would have been aware how easy and frictionless it is to start comparing yourself to other people. So glad you brought this up. And for me, this still, I struggle with this constantly. So we're talking about previous time and previous points in our career where this comparison was difficult. And yes, oh my goodness, I just think about all the angst that I suffered through, but I so i still have that.
00:18:16
Speaker
I'm always working at how to not have that, whether that's don't look at LinkedIn or some different self-talk or something. You know, and you and I have achieved a level of whatever fame is in professional world. I call it dork fame.
00:18:31
Speaker
Dork fame. Dork fame. Yes, you're a famous dork. There are dorks. Among dorks. Famous among dorks. Famous among dorks.
00:18:42
Speaker
So the social comparison is still there. People have narratives about me that are very laudatory and then presumably about you. I have many narratives about you, given sort of my respect for how you conduct yourself and how, you know, what you've accomplished. But let's just acknowledge that that social comparison stuff is is throughout. And I'm sure it's different than it was when we were younger and we didn't have as much as much confidence or as much positive signal.
00:19:09
Speaker
And I think you're making an excellent point. It would be even harder now because there is so much of that. i wonder, and this is just a speculation, for thinking about different paths we might choose.
00:19:21
Speaker
So I'm saying, oh, I might choose to engage with tools because I've avoided them. I wonder if you or i chose not to like post and give talks and do things that are meant to drive the discourse forward, but also meant to give us credibility and give us access to opportunities and all that.
00:19:38
Speaker
I have this sort of mythical person who has basically opted out of that because what what's the participation, right what's Any forum right, is' like posters lurkers, like the path they not taken.
00:19:51
Speaker
you know what if in the scenario you're talking about, you or i decided just to have a simpler, less public facing kind of life? Does that reduce the exposure to social comparison?
00:20:06
Speaker
Well, I think you'd have to kind of choose it on purpose, this simpler life that you're talking about today. Like, I think you might have been able to happen into it when I started my career. You could have happened into being less exposed.
00:20:22
Speaker
Today, i think you have to actively choose it and like make strategic decisions about when and how you engage in a way that I don't think was expected before. I don't think it was necessary before. I think it now it's just... You've got so many normalized ways of publishing or publications or being public that are just considered this public sphere, as you put it, right? Like the public sphere is qualitatively different now. And it is something that you're constantly, even if you're not posting, you're
00:20:54
Speaker
You are consuming, you're lurking, and you're seeing all the stuff. So in order to fight that social comparison, which I think all of us, all of us have that problem and have always had that problem. And it does get better as you get older and you get more experience and you get more accomplishments of your own. But you still notice everything that everybody else does. You still notice it. But today it's like frictionless to see it. Like it just arrives every day like an onslaught. Here, look at all these amazing things that people have been doing.
00:21:26
Speaker
Look at all these new jobs that they have gotten. Look at all these new books they've published and these new conference presentations they've given and these webinars and whatever. I mean, you don't have to do anything and it just arrives at your doorstep every morning.
00:21:41
Speaker
It's really rough. Can you imagine advising a person earlier in their career, stay off LinkedIn?
LinkedIn Engagement
00:21:48
Speaker
It's essential, isn't it? i Yeah, I actually noticed that conversation on, I think on a listserv I was on, which is like an academic kind of listserv.
00:21:57
Speaker
And people were talking about like whether or not they should have a LinkedIn profile and how they should, you shouldn't have one. And I tell my students not to have one. And I was like, what? Yeah.
00:22:07
Speaker
No, no, that's crazy. No, it's not an option. It's not an option. I did like a Q&A with a graduate program a few weeks ago, and I really pressed them on networking. And I tried to distinguish networking from asking for stuff. And I said to them, you should be on LinkedIn. You should connect with everyone.
00:22:27
Speaker
said, you should all connect with me. My point was not, I'm inviting you to connect with me, but that you should be operating in a mode where, oh, we've got the Steve Portigal guy coming in and talking to our class. I'm going to send him a LinkedIn invite. Let's look him up and like, you know, and connect with him. You know, there was maybe 15 people. I think I got two connections that were directly from that class. That was interesting. I don't know why or why not.
00:22:52
Speaker
It seemed like I got sort of low uptake from that, even though I was giving it as practical advice. What do you make of that? Let's assume that you weren't connected to any of them and you had two out of 15 who literally followed your advice.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah. What do you of mean, it wonder about the value of that advice or the resonance of that advice. Like, what is it like to be early 20s and kids these days? Like, there's so much more grown up than I thought we were just conducting themselves. And any time I go and meet students,
00:23:25
Speaker
They just act like professionals. They know how to talk to me, even if they're young and goofy and uncomfortable. i've I've been really impressed with people and wishing that I had just, you know, a small percentage of that kind of confidence and charm and just friendliness and seeing these as opportunities. I mean, I was exposed to people when I was younger and I, Dater didn't say hi to them and Dater didn't form relationships with them.
00:23:51
Speaker
That's a funny way of looking at it, you know, because, you know, when you say like kids these days, they're so professional and they're so polished. I would think that maybe we're more professional and more polished than we thought.
00:24:03
Speaker
I think the internal reality of being young and inexperienced and on the precipice of starting your career, you become consumed with insecurity and anxiety. And you may come off as professional, but, you know, all you remember is being lost.
00:24:25
Speaker
Right. Well, there's how you feel and how you express that. Right. Right. So I guess I was surprised that given what feels like a professional mindset, did they not feel like LinkedIn is useful to
Nuances of Networking
00:24:41
Speaker
them? Did they not feel like networking is useful to them?
00:24:43
Speaker
Did they not feel like networking with me is useful to them? Which that's one reading of the situation. Like, yeah, maybe not. I don't know. Right. Connecting with someone on LinkedIn, there's not an outcome to doing that. Right. You are sort of, now you know, accreting relationships and tuning your feed and whatever. and and Tuning your feed. Yeah, that's right. I met yesterday with a former coworker and I just moved. And so we reconnected and it was in person and You know, it was nice. It was really nice. And it was a purely, quote unquote, networking moment. They weren't asking me for anything. I wasn't asking them for anything. it was just, how are you doing? What's new in your life?
00:25:26
Speaker
And we did talk about work. Sure, we did. But we mostly talked about, like, personal stuff. How's your family? You know, what's going on at home? You know, what's good in your life these days, that kind of thing. And there was no goal to the whole conversation. I think if I were starting my career in 2025, I would be completely blown away by the idea that you could just talk to somebody for no good reason. Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
like That somebody would talk to me for no good reason? What? Who? You know, and so I never asked for like, quote unquote, networking meetings when I was young because I thought they just think I'm going to take something from them. And I don't I don't want to ask them for anything. I'm not here to like take from them. I'd like to get to know them and maybe they have advice for me and I'll take it. But I'm not like looking for something in particular. And I would have made that mistake. I would not have connected with you and on LinkedIn. Let me put it that way.
00:26:23
Speaker
If I was one of these graduate students that you just met with and you had said literally, you know, you should send me an invite, I'd be like, oh, I don't know. i don't think I can do that. Your example of meeting up with your former coworker, the way you characterize it, there's a big social element of it.
00:26:39
Speaker
How are you? What's going on outside of work? But you're not characterizing this person as a friend. Right. you know Yeah. It's like there's some people you call to like help you move a body. Isn't that the old line?
00:26:52
Speaker
um but what the What old line? what What old circles do you run in Stand-up comedy circles. But you can have these interactions that feel friendly-esque. You smile and tell jokes and send book recommendations and eat a meal together and talk about how good it is and enjoy each other's company. And it still can be networking.
00:27:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm. I find that that there's so many gray areas. I find that sort of sometimes hard to navigate. Like, who am I close to? Who do I care about? Who cares about me? Should I get together with that person again?
00:27:28
Speaker
There's no sort of binary thing. Oh, when you tell them X, now your friend's not networking contacts. Or, you know, or when you stop seeing it as transactional. And like, it's good to put energy into these relationships, which have elements of friendship and elements of colleagueship and elements of transactional. Yes.
00:27:46
Speaker
And that's people that would give you advice and people that you would give advice to and people that you would refer. There can be this whole mix of it. You know, and when there's a big age difference or role in society difference, like me and a bunch of grad students, like, yeah, we're probably not going to hang out.
00:28:03
Speaker
I was at a conference a little little while ago, and i mean, here's my privilege. People recognize me and introduce themselves to me, so I don't have to make that first step. Do I have permission to talk to you? Are you interested in me coming up and sort of breaking that wall?
00:28:18
Speaker
And sometimes when people approach me, they start off with a presumed power differential. Right. It doesn't seem very nice for them at all because they're embarrassed or apologetic or worried that they're overstepping. And the really nice thing about this event over like a couple of days is that each one of these people and I, like we together quickly broke that down and found common ground on other things. And I told one person about being involved in creative writing And they got super enthusiastic and like, that was their degree. And they're involved in this group.
00:28:53
Speaker
And something I was trying to write made them think of this article. And someone else is like, oh, it made me think of this book. And then they all linked in with me because that's what you do when you meet people at a conference. And then they sent me links to the things that they had recommended to me. i mean, it was great. I was just sort of reaping the benefit of these friendly, helpful people. But if you think about, you know, this sort of binary power thing, like, oh, there's Sam. Like, why would I ask her for anything? Like, she's dork famous. And, you know, yeah I'm just this.
00:29:28
Speaker
And then to have an interaction with them and then have them feel like, oh, I'm going to, like, tell Sam about... this book or this tool or this article or this restaurant, you know. she may want to know about it, right? Yeah. Yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
Well, you can only get to that genuine exchange that you're talking about, like, hey, I'm interested in creative writing. Well, so am I. Let's talk about creative writing. You can only get to that level of, you know, here's a link or here's an article or here's a book I read or whatever when you have a genuine conversation. Yeah. And it is, i think, difficult, you know, for most people ah to have that, to to break the ice, as you say, to get to the point where you're like, this is the common stuff that we have. And you and I are just two people who are happen to be interested in the same thing. And you can exchange with me and I can exchange with you. I think a lot of people today believe that they have to have a polished, polished,
00:30:23
Speaker
pitch, like elevator pitch to talk to you. And I don't think you need an elevator pitch. I think you just need to say, hey, I'm interested in you as a human. And this is me as a human. And here's the things that we might have in common. For example, you had the creative writing question. For me, if somebody started talking about photography, I'd be like, cool, what do you shoot with? And we would have the conversation and then we'd I'd say, hey, what do you think about the new Fuji? It's only got an F4, but it's a prime lens. And they'd be like, yeah, i know. It's crazy, right? Who would buy that? And I'd be like, I don't know. I kind of was tempted.
00:30:58
Speaker
We could have that conversation, but you only get there if you pass through the moment of like fearful social comparison and say we're two humans and we're interested in the same thing. So back to your prompt, would I make that mistake again? and yeah it's Yeah. This is an example of what I mean by professional is like I can approach somebody with more status points and have a genuine conversation with them.
00:31:24
Speaker
Assuming they're not like a big jerk, which well ok people up and down the status hierarchy are. Sure. Seems like there's more of them near the top. Sure. um We've all gone up to people thinking we would have some conversation like that and just had them blow us off. And in fact, at the same event, I had that happen to me where like I tried to talk to people. It just failed. But people tried to talk to me and it worked out very well. And there's a bias in all of that. But would I, you know, what mistakes would I make?
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, what mistakes? I guess I would be afraid that I would make the mistake of not networking in kind of a open-handed, open-faced, I don't know what what sort of the characteristic is, just stuff yeah a friendly, like the way you talked about meeting with that person where networking included all those things, including social and friendly and common ground and work.
00:32:12
Speaker
That's such a just a nice way to be in the world. And I think people in research are smart and pretty nice. And I always enjoy that. And I would hope, but I fear that I would make the mistake of sort of not leveraging that and not networking and kind of a. Yeah, I think I'd make the same mistake, to be perfectly honest. Even with the the adult brain that I have now, I think I might make the same mistake because it's just so obvious how accomplished people are or how accomplished they seem to be yeah and how constant social comparison would just be eating away at me. And I wouldn't know how to approach people. You know, I would be all worried. Yeah. I just want to be like, I want to be noticed, but I don't want to be like put on the spot.
00:32:59
Speaker
ah Genuinely speaking, I find it when somebody asked me like, well, what do you know about such and such? I am like horrified when they ask me things like that. And I'm constantly like worried they're going to ask me things like that. Nowadays, that would be so overwhelming. That fear would be so overwhelming that I just wouldn't bother.
00:33:16
Speaker
I wouldn't do the networking thing. I would not take your LinkedIn advice. I would not send you a LinkedIn invite if you came talk to my class. looping back to could we go back in time or restart and choose a path where we don't put ourselves out there we don't become dork famous becoming dork famous relieves a lot of the pressure like i said when people approach me it means that they air have already expressed an interest so that rejection from the doorstep is gone they've already come up and and said hi to me
00:33:47
Speaker
So it reduces a lot of that fear in sort of
Impact of Being 'Dork Famous'
00:33:51
Speaker
networking. To your point about worried that people are going to ask you what you think, right? You get asked more now than if you were back the beginning of your career.
00:33:59
Speaker
No one cared what you thought. And if they asked you, they might shoot it down because you didn't have sort of brand credibility that yes that you have now. You know, if I were to give myself advice, like let's imagine that there's a little mini me that is about to start their career in 2025 and it's still me, but it's, you know, at and a new version of me in this time and this space, I would say you're a sensitive person.
00:34:25
Speaker
So you got to build an architecture that supports your gifts, whatever that is. Right. And so my gifts, I know that I like to dive deep. I love to do deep research. I do that comparison of the tools. I try all the technologies. I get on all the platforms. I try the social media. I do all the stuff. And I would say to that person, I'd be like, you know, you are going to be constantly bombarded with information and social comparison, and you will lose your way if you don't go inward and spend time thinking, spend time learning, and spend time just like joyfully exploring instead of sadly comparing yourself. Those are the mistakes that I would make and I would try to get myself to not make if I could. And you're applying that to yourself. You're not saying that's everybody.
00:35:15
Speaker
That's me. That's me. But I mean, I think the standard principle is you have to make an architecture that supports your strengths. I think that goes still. what do you mean by an architecture? Like you're going to be thrust into this world that you did not design, that gave you these structures, these institutions, these practices, all of these things that you didn't get to choose. And some of those things are going to work for you. And some of these things are not.
00:35:41
Speaker
So the things that are not going to work for you, you need to create a force field around those. You need to like seal them off. You need to create a space that allows you to prosper. And it may feel like you're completely going in the wrong direction. It may feel like you're going off the path as it were.
00:35:58
Speaker
But that's the right thing to do. You have to know yourself and you have to give yourself space. And everything changes. So we change. We need different things at different times. As an avid explorer and experimenter, I bet you also have times where you want to retrench and just ah hundred percent build muscles. and not It's not a constant steady stream of what's new, let me try this, let me try that.
00:36:19
Speaker
So you can change from decade to decade. We also have different tendencies or different things that we hunger for. And the path itself changes. So if you're off the path, you could be really far off or you could find yourself back on it because the context around us changes. So if you need to work in a way or set up your life so you have an architecture that lets you prosper and you're the only researcher in a company doesn't get research versus you're working with 17 other researchers and you have academics around you and you have people that are older and former product managers and your company embraces research and you have a head of research who's been doing this for 20 years, that context around you is going to create different pressures around you and different expectations. And you may want to say, oh, I'm in a really different situation. I am going to explore more, explore less, or take time to network or use the network that I have around me every day and not link in with
00:37:14
Speaker
the Steve Portugals who are giving talks and just have lunches with the people that I see every day and talk about their families. and Yeah. there Yeah. Your strategy is going to change because the context changes. And so your tactics can can continue continue to evolve. And so that's the key there is choice, though, right? Like, I think you just said something really important is that, you know, the context may be different. You may be a solo researcher or you may be surrounded by other people or whatever it is, but you need to like critically assess where you are.
00:37:41
Speaker
What is available to you? Are those the things that you should like go to purposefully with an intention instead of just letting it happen? Whatever it is, like you just let your social comparison suffering happen. Well, maybe you should make some choices about what you're going to do.
00:37:59
Speaker
Do we have some for instances of choices? Yeah. Yeah. we can't possibly enumerate every choice for both of us, let alone for the hypothetical person work of imagining. Well, that's a good question. I think in the junior researcher who is working by themselves, right, it's a really common issue. And that person may happen into focusing solely on their organization.
00:38:21
Speaker
and the people in the organization telling them what is important and telling them what skills they should develop and telling them what they need to do. I mean, it's good to be responsive to your stakeholders, but you also need to like critically assess what is this organization able to give me? Are they going to get me to that next level as a researcher? Probably not, to be honest, probably not. You need to surround yourself with purpose and intention with people who have been doing the role you're doing more frequently. more regularly. You need to make space for that. You either join a book club or you go to a regular meetup or you go to a conference or you join a Google group or something. You do all of those things on purpose because you know that the things just that arrive to you in your context are not going to give you what you need. I have a less reflective example of specifics. We're talking about networking, you talk about Google groups. There are things that you can do, like if you're on a Google group, you can reply privately to a post and you can say something in that. You can say, thanks, this was a good idea or thanks for posting this. I'm going to go try it. The amount of depth or richness to your response isn't as important, I think, as responding.
00:39:35
Speaker
So thanks or, and you know, we live in a world of sort of thumbs up reaction. Like that is a thing that you can do. So if you you know are on LinkedIn, you don't have to post the hot take or the provocative question. And in fact, I've seen people kind of schedule some of this. I'm going to spend this many hours on LinkedIn. I'm going to post these things. Really? People do that? This And then I'm going to do these many replies.
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, I think people programatize it so that maybe it's less overwhelming. i don't know if they set themselves a goal of like 30 minutes or 12 responses, but I don't know. I sort of see like who's out there commenting. Mm-hmm.
00:40:12
Speaker
And, you know, when you receive a comment, it's like very validating. So to be that person that says, great point, Sam, or ha ha, I fell off my seat laughing, or this reminds me of Goffman. Somebody quoted Goffman in a response to something I wrote today. Like they, somebody quoted Pulp Fiction in a response to something. This was yesterday.
00:40:33
Speaker
That's just a way of connecting. LinkedIn doesn't encourage private replies the way a Google group does. Google group is great. You don't want to post for everyone in that group to see your Pulp Fiction reference. Fine. Reply privately. It's like built into the interface.
00:40:47
Speaker
But those are options that are available to people that are sort of low effort, low low risk, but that engage you in connection with somebody. Mm hmm. You know, it's not like somebody posts something and then you write with a scene from Pulp Fiction and then the person writes you back and says, oh, I have a job for you or let me bestow something. Nothing happens except that you're doing this sort of small moments of community building.
00:41:13
Speaker
You know, networking is not just the connection on LinkedIn. It's sort of all the stuff that you do that might years later, maybe your example, your lunch is like it's like gold standard. Get together in person You didn't say if you were eating, but I think you were eating or having a coffee. We had a drink.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah. Go for a walk. I go on like walking meetings nowadays. And you don't have to get to that. That's for somebody that you know more. But you can have these very small interactions with people that still are significant.
00:41:43
Speaker
Yes, getting yourself able to do that may be harder for certain personalities than others. But I think it it it pays you back. Critically, choose something, make an architecture of connection that makes sense for you and gives you your strengths.
00:42:00
Speaker
It's very hard, I think. You know, you have to willingly decide to do something that might be considered weird or different. I would love to go and interview those grad students and just find out what choices are they making. We had a story about the thing they didn't do, but it doesn't mean that they aren't doing things that fit within their their architecture and that are comfortable that are helping them thrive.
Student Networking and Career Choices
00:42:23
Speaker
i just don't know what that is, but we have sort of two examples of what that looks like, but I would be super curious to learn from people like how do you do that and why and what what role does it fill in what what context is so different to how a 20 year old uses the internet and has relationships than yeah someone my age does i don't know i would love to that's that's the researcher brain like i want to ask these questions Well, maybe we'll find that out at some point.
00:42:49
Speaker
Maybe we'll find that out. So today, i think what we really tried to, i think you were right when I brought the prompt forward, what I was trying to do was to subtly force us to critically assess the social context of today. Like, you're still your same person. You have all your personality traits, but there are things outside of you that shape your experience.
00:43:11
Speaker
And you need to see them and you need to see what they are and being You know, instead of just kind of bumbling into a world, you want to put some shape around how you move in that world. And you need to know, like, what is the nature of this world in order to make that call, in order to be able to do that.
00:43:28
Speaker
And it may feel weird and it may feel off the path, as it were. may feel strange. And we'll continue to feel strange. We're talking about these sort of mini-me versions of ourselves, but everything that we're talking about is, these are all stuff that I spend too many brain cycles being worried about or being insecure or uncertain about. It's a normal thing.
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah. That's really encouraging advice. Work on this. It's hard. And by the way, it never goes away. Thank you. This has been Sam and Steve. Stay off the path, everybody. It's never going to get better.
00:44:00
Speaker
It does get better. Just I think it it gets better. It just doesn't go away. It doesn't go away. If you're someone that pays attention to this and that cares about these things, you're going to care about them. But yes, you have wisdom from trying things. You build that architecture. You can improve that architecture. But it it doesn't go away. Nor should it, right? This is what we care about. Our relationships and our connections and our, you know, being part of what we do and our growth.
00:44:24
Speaker
yeah Of course, it's not going to go away. Thanks for listening to the Off the Path with Sam and Steve, the show that takes you off the beaten path of research careers and onto your own chosen path.
00:44:35
Speaker
Hire Steve Portigal to lead a research study with your team or to help build user research skills in your organization. or to deliver a talk or workshop for your event. Learn more portugal.com slash services.
00:44:48
Speaker
Steve's classic book, Interviewing Users, is in its second edition with an audiobook. Check out portugal.com slash books for more. And Steve has his own podcast, Dollars to Donuts, where he talks with people who lead user research.
00:45:01
Speaker
That's at portugal.com slash podcast. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn. Hire Sam for research projects or research coaching. Take one of her classes or sign up for exclusive video content at samladner.com.
00:45:16
Speaker
Sam's books, Practical Ethnography and Mixed Methods are both available on Amazon and her new book on strategic foresight is coming out in 2026. Sign up for her newsletter to find out more at samladner.com slash newsletter.