Astronaut Chris Hatfield’s autobiography, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, begins with him floating in the airlock, preparing to take his first spacewalk. “Poised on the edge of the sublime, I faced a somewhat ridiculous dilemma: How best to get out there?”, he writes. “The hatch was small and circular, but with all my tools strapped to my chest and a huge pack of oxygen tanks and electronics strapped on to my back, I was square. Square astronaut, round hole.”
This is how life challenges us. It saddles you with all sorts of cumbersome things: experiences, knowledge, fears, anxiety, goals and needs. How can you fit though that round door? Some people will maneuver slowly and methodically; others will focus on the door’s boundaries using their available tools to square them off. Still others will re-arrange their burdens so they can easily fit through the round hatch. You’ll never know which is the best strategy and solution for you until you’re actually facing your own personal doorway.
I recently found a vulture.com article called “The Secret History of Ultimate Marvel, the Experiment That Changed Superheroes Forever.” The article was long, very, very long! Since my internet attention span is about 32 seconds, I was concerned that the nearly 6000-word article would stretch its limits. A few days later, I summoned the courage to read the article. It discussed how the Marvel Comics Ultimate Universe reboot experiment changed the direction of Marvel Comics as well as the successful Marvel superhero movies. The last paragraph sums it up nicely. “There’s one final lesson. According to (Brian Michael) Bendis—the alpha and omega of Ultimate Marvel storytelling—the key to the reboot was understanding what made the old Marvel archetypes worth rebooting in the first place. ‘The transition that we made was based on the fact that the concept of Spider-Man wasn’t broken,’ he told me. ‘The Spider-Man origin and its themes are pretty much perfect. So adaptations are much like a Shakespeare play: The trick isn’t to fix it and say you know better than Shakespeare. It’s to find the truth of it and keep the truth going for a new audience.’”
Marvel’s reboot evolved the characters and the storylines. This in turn changed the way the storylines and characters were portrayed in the movies and created new opportunity. The success of this change was reflected in the Avengers’ Age of Ultron $191.3 million first weekend gross. The weekend total was the second highest opening weekend gross in history. The Age of Ultron’s opening weekend gross was second to the $207 million that the first Avengers movie made in it’s opening weekend.
While my own Design Thinking career reboot has not earned me $191.3 million, it has pushed me into a new direction. Fundamentally, I still think like a designer. The problem solving, research and creative process are still the same and I still think in systems, but the medium and tools have changed. It’s a new creative direction and a new audience, but it’s still a round door. Focusing on developing your own tools to create a new personal ecosystem can help open up new opportunities. A quote in an article in the June 2015 Harvard Business Review, by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter hits this idea home.
“Some people think of opportunity the way it’s defined in the dictionary—as a set of circumstances that make something possible—and they talk about it as if it just arrives organically. You ‘spot opportunity’ or wait around for ‘opportunity to knock.’ I look at it differently. I believe that you have to be the architect of the circumstances—that opportunity is something you manufacture, not something you wait for.”
There’s another lesson that was learned. No matter how long or difficult an article is, always read to the end. You never know what you will find there.
– Stay true to yourself
– Be introspective and aware of yourself
– Learn and develop new tools
– Keep an open mind
– Follow through to the end