Katherine Pettitt

I believe it's a two-part thing. First, you've got to do the work - there's no cutting corners unless you're doing it strategically. You have to put in the effort. But second, you're forever being either elevated or lowered based on an invisible network around you, and everything you do touches that network for good or bad. Those good interactions you have with people, those moments of integrity, that's all building your network, and all of that energy bolsters you up over time. I think there's a bit of manifesting in that - the goodness you pour in does go somewhere and lifts you up. But at the end of the day, luck is real. I believe very much that luck favors the prepared. Success is based on doing the right work visible to the right people at the right time. There is baseline talent that exists, but what attributing things to talent fails to capture is how much you put into it - that's really what determines how far it goes. You are statistically much more likely to get lucky if you are doing a whole bunch of other things.

The best advice I've received is to build around yourself a board of directors. The same way a company would have a board of directors with trusted people who have unique insight to drive them in a good direction, you want to do the same with yourself. It's really important to make sure you've got the right people on that board, because a person that doesn't know you or see you could really detract from you. This ties into the idea that all information is information, and you're the one that gets to decide if it's useful and applicable, or if it's discardable. As you move through your career, you're going to have lots of people giving you advice and insight on who you are and the work you do. You need to be able to filter through all that noise and find what's good and valuable and what's going to keep you moving in a good direction - a direction you want to go in. There's an overlap between what you're good at and what you actually like to do, and they don't always seem to do the same thing, but in design you want to try and thread that needle. Make a conscious effort to identify these are my five people that I go to when I need advice, when I'm at some sort of crossroads. These are the people I need to bounce ideas off of and to keep me grounded.

This is tricky advice because AI is eating up a lot of the entry-level space right now. Typically, people enter the design field learning tools - how to use InDesign, how to use Photoshop. But AI is eating that, so you have less learning ground to rely on. What I would tell someone entering the field is that there are career opportunities here, and they're good, but the most important thing you're cultivating, the thing that's not replaceable by AI, is your eye and your judgment. As you go through creating everything you create, that's the true thing you're training, and that's what's not replaceable. You need to find a way to be a little bit tool agnostic, because the tools are changing. That's part of the AI challenge - you've got to be careful that you're not structuring around a tool that might not exist in a year. If you're someone that thinks going into design means you just make whatever and you're not interested in working at that higher level, you're going to struggle. If you want to do work where you're just mindlessly executing, this probably isn't the field for you, because it's going to evolve to where there's less space for that kind of work. You need to be honing that eye, honing that judgment, and you also need to be interested in directing that kind of work.

The biggest challenge right now is AI disruption. It's not the first time design has been disrupted - I had professors who were around when the digital age hit and they had to face the reality of do we learn computers or do we retire. That's kind of what's going on with AI as people try to figure out how to adapt and whether their job market will exist in five years. That's all really scary. But it forces you to focus on what you're good at and what you bring to the table. If AI is capable of replacing your job, then you need to pivot and be real about that. AI is not a magic wand - it's capable of amazing things and drastically accelerating things, but it needs that human element, that human intervention. One thing we're already seeing that will only be magnified is that AI is an aggregator. It wants to pull things towards the middle. As people start investing in these tools and de-investing in people, you're going to start having brands that look more and more the same. AI literally wants to give you the most recognizable version of something. That's good for familiarity, but for brands and design you need interest. There has to be a balance - you need something to be recognizable but not boring. AI is not built to push away from that middle ground on its own. When you start losing that human direction around it, in a year you'll look around and wonder why all these things look the same. That's AI without human creative direction.

It's got to start with integrity. I know it's a big word that people throw around, but Steve Kemps, the Chief Legal Officer over at S&P Global, once said that you're always interviewing for your next job. He didn't mean that in a bumping way - he meant that kind of like how brands are built over all these small moments that aggregate over time, the same thing happens with integrity. Your integrity is not what you do in crunch time. It's all those small moments that build up, all the times that you were transparent with someone when you needed to be, all the times that you did the work even if the work wasn't visible. All of those moments add up and create that bigger sense of self. That's got to be an anchoring value. I also value curiosity, but if these values don't anchor back to that underlying integrity, they don't have any basis. If you're not curious in a way that's conducting yourself in a good way, it's bad. You can take any good attribute, and if you don't tie it back to integrity, it's going to go sideways on you.