1. Go outside

Design remixes and samples from the human experience. From metaphors. If you're going to be a good designer, you have to learn what these metaphors are. That means cultural immersion in the world. That can be on the internet, too; I mean "outside" in a more metaphorical way, meaning outside your typical experience. Design is a remix—you have to know the music.

2. Get opinionated

Develop preferences. Most jobs have a way of teaching people to stay in line, to respect authority, and to do as they're told. But designers are hired for their judgement, so if you don't have opinions, what are you here for?

Don't forget that design is fundamentally disruptive, revolutionary, counter-cultural. Paul Rand famously said (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "the public prefers bad design for that is what it lives with." Really groundbreaking design always faces some kind of resistance in some way. The only way to function in that landscape is to have an internal compass.

3. Get confident

You can learn to be great at public speaking. Not only is that important for your professional success (self-advocacy is a skill that will return dividends your whole life) but it's critically important to be able to do creative work well.

4. Fall in love

All good design starts with curiosity. You have to fall in love with the work, with the world it exists in, and the people who experience it, to really love what you do. If you're not excited about the work, nobody else will be either.

I mean this literally, too—for many people, their personal relationships are the source of some of their biggest inspiration and the support of friends and significant others can make you that much more self-actualized and confident in articulating your vision for the world.

5. Learn hospitality

Designers are ultimately in the hospitality business. If you want to get good at design, there are few things you can do to help yourself more than to work a hospitality job, even for a short time period.

Hospitality is like the swan: graceful on the surface but frantically paddling underneath. We abstract away complexity and difficulty to present a theatrical illusion of effortless, invisible, user-centered service. Good design is invisible. It's as little design as possible. Hospitality, as an industry, teaches this again and again.

6. Get some experience

I think experience is overrated but there's one thing that I've found it really teaches: perspective.

When you're starting out, everything can seem like a big deal: inspiration feels like the greatest idea you've ever had—so great that you need to go take action on it right away before someone else steals your genius—, problems seem insurmountable, and contextual judgement about some things can feel out of immediate reach.

Getting some experience can often be the only way to develop good intuition around what to do next, when you can skip steps and when you can't, etc. Get some perspective.

7. Join a sports team

Design is a collaborative, team activity. One of the best ways to be a great designer is to be a great collaborator. Sports teams are a fun, healthy way to learn what it means to rely on others and work collaboratively toward a common goal. I personally find I can always tell when someone has never done this.

8. Volunteer for a political campaign (especially in a diverse city)

This is great for a few reasons: you get exposed to random, normal people, often in places you wouldn't otherwise go. Knocking doors, you get invited in to the living rooms of strangers and you see how others live. You get practice with clear, confident communication. It's a crash course in sales and user research.

And perhaps most of all, it shows how hard some problems are to fix and how there's rarely an obvious or uncontroversial answer. People disagree; design involves inherent tradeoffs. Don't forget that government is a design decision.

Also, government is sometimes the right way to solve things. Because designers work for companies, they start to believe that companies are how things get solved. There are a lot of other ways to "make the world a better place".

9. Find a creative outlet that's not design

Paint, cook, dance, you name it, but do it from a place of love and a real effort to continually improve. Learn what it means to pursue creative practice outside of work with nobody but yourself as the judge.

10. Listen to jazz

Trust me. This is the way. Jazz is improvisational, Modernist, countercultural, cultural, intensely teamwork-based, a symphony amidst technical limitation, you name it.

People sometimes ask me what design is, and I think of Louis Armstrong's famous quote: "If you have to ask, you'll never know." Design, like jazz, is remixed joy. You don't just know it—you fall in love with it—when you see it.