Pete Sena
Designing a Career in the Green Zone
In this episode of Brave UX, Pete Sena shares his story of building a design agency from scratch 🏗️, how he’s become a better person and leader along the way 💪, and why each of us need to know our unique value 💡.
Highlights include:
- How did you feel when you first stepped into a martial arts gym?
- What question does every designer need a compelling answer to?
- How has your self-image and what you value changed over-time?
- Do design leaders need to sacrifice personal time to stay relevant?
- How can something that we’re great at be not great for us?
Who is Pete Sena?
Pete is a serial entrepreneur and design executive who advises founders and CEOs on how to create design-driven cultures; the kind that help them to discover and explore new growth opportunities for their businesses 🌱.
In 2004, when he was still in college, Pete founded Digital Surgeons 👩⚕️- an independent demand design consultancy, based in Connecticut, USA.
Digital Surgeons now employs over 50 people, has a fully-integrated and self-sufficient leadership team, and has created award-winning work for brands such as Google, United Technologies, Epic Games, the US Open and Lady Gaga ✨.
Pete is also the Co-Founder of ThinkFWD ⏩, a community of innovative business owners who are invited to lean into their curiosity and become true catalysts for positive change within their teams, social circles and society at large.
As someone who leads by example, Pete is also a Venture Mentor at Yale University and an entrepreneur-in-residence at his alma mater, the University of Connecticut, in the Technology Incubation Programme 👨🎓.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist UX research practice and world class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Pete Sena. Pete is a serial entrepreneur and creative executive who advises founders and CEOs on how to create design-driven cultures, the kind that can help them to discover and explore new growth opportunities for their businesses.
- In 2004, when he was still in college, Pete founded Digital Surgeons an independent demand design consultancy based in Connecticut, USA, and it was there until December, 2021 where he was the CEO and Chief Creative Officer. That was until he worked himself out of a job. Digital Surgeons now employs over 50 people, has a fully integrated and self-sufficient leadership team, and has created award-winning work for brands such as Google, United Technologies, epic Games, the US Open and Lady Gaga.
- While at Digital Surgeons, Pete also co-founded district, a comprehensive co-working and innovation campus located in New Haven. District is home to Digital Surgeons, Connecticut Innovations (the largest venture capital firm in the state) as well as many other creative entrepreneurial businesses.
- Pete is also the co-founder of ThinkFWD, a community of innovative business owners who are invited to lean into their curiosity and become true catalysts for positive change within their teams social circles and society at large.
- As someone who leads by example, Pete is also a venture mentor at Yale University and an entrepreneur in residence at his alma mater, the University of Connecticut in the technology incubation program.
- And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Pete. Hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Pete Sena:
- Great to be here. Great to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's great to have you here. Pete and I did just yesterday actually watch something that was quite it's quite strikingly similar to something else that I'd recently recorded, which was your interview with Mauro Porcini, who is PepsiCo's chief design Officer, and that was on your podcast called Forward Obsessed. And Mauro got into this idea of his, that he's written about in his book called The Human Side of Innovation, which is about unicorn designers, these people that exhibit some of the 20 or so traits that he writes about in that book that represent the best of the designers that he has seen in his career. And you told him when you were talking about this, that mythical creatures were near and dear to your heart, but you didn't actually go on to elaborate. So I wondered, was there a bit of DND perhaps in your childhood?
- Pete Sena:
- I was a huge sci-fi nerd. DND was actually not something that I played, but I was a big Diablo fan and oh yes sci-fi has definitely been everything. I feel like sci-fi fantasy, so much of what I do now I think was because I was just a huge nerd growing up.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of that, being a huge nerd growing up, I watched your talk, the UX of you and you in that talk, put up a photo of yourself in middle school, and it was during a trip to Washington DC and you were alone at the back of this bus by the toilet with your headphones on in your own world. And you described yourself in that talk, and I'll quote you now as a scrawny, introverted, nerdy kid, yet you went on at some point to get really big into martial arts, and I was curious about that. What was it that led you to step outside your comfort zone as that scrawny, introverted, nerdy kid and do something that's quite confrontational, something like martial arts?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I love that question and your research is uncanny, so thank you for that, Brendan. So many things that I've gone into, it's either been pushed into them by somebody else or pulled into them with just this energy about things that happens. In the case of martial arts growing up, I didn't know it because it was not as popular to be neurodivergent or have ADHD and these types of things back then. Back then we just said, I've got a lot of energy, pretty skinny kid. I was always really, really tall, but I, as a skinny kid, didn't have a lot of confidence, had a skin issues when I was younger, acne and whatnot. And that sort of back then, it wasn't cool to be a geek. Nowadays, geek is the new chic and the smart kids are the ones that I guess, ruler roost as opposed to the chads as I guess the Gen Z calls it, which is the jock type of folks.
- So to answer your question, really, it was a combination of getting some more self-discipline, but also some self-confidence by being able to learn how to protect myself. And I didn't grow up in a particularly rough and tough area, but there was definitely some kids that were a bit of a bully. So I think my dad pushed me into martial arts early, and it definitely changed the way I think about things. It changed the way I think about discipline, changed the way I think about breath now I have a daily meditation practice, which I discovered in my adult years. And then I went on to really, really embraced martial arts as both a confidence builder and a strength builder, but not just physical strength, but really mental strength. Funny that you call that out because I think that a lot of the premises and the design principles that I think about now in terms of how I build businesses, very design driven, big surprise here being on Brave UX.
- But I think a lot of that really comes down to some of that early stage confidence building in learning martial arts. And the beautiful thing about martial arts is it's one of the few activities in my mind that is as much about the mental acumen as it is about the body in so many cases and being able to build that brain body connection as someone who wasn't into sports growing up and was very much into computers and coding and video games, martial arts was an opportunity to really learn about my body and how it can do incredible things, incredible things like break boards and break blocks and those types of things. Things that I would never think were possible. So I think early on, it's funny that you mentioned it because now looking back 20, 30, even over 30 years later, many of the things I learned and practiced in many years of martial arts I still apply today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I remember reading something else that you'd written about, which was this realization at some point in your life that you could take advantage of the power and totally, to me, the nerdy scrawny kid, adding martial arts into their life was a very good example of just how you can be actually more than you think you are in the moment, in the present moment. And I was wondering that move that you are your dad encouraged you to, to add to who you were, the martial arts, the strength, the discipline, the ability to see yourself in the world as something other than that kid that was getting beaten up by those other nasty kids. What was that like for you in those first few weeks when you turn up to the martial arts gym? Do you recall at all just how you felt when you stepped through that door that first time?
- Pete Sena:
- Well, the first time I stepped through the door, like anything that whenever we experience it, I'm sure the folks that are listening to this are watching this in the future. The first time we do everything is scary and overwhelming because true growth happens at the edge of our comfort zones, and I'm certainly not the first person to say that. So really, except that door the first time I feel like I'm going to throw up, there's that sort of feeling of anxiety in the body and overwhelm. And it's interesting because a lot of times when you have these moments, these first moments feel that way. When I found out I was going to be on this podcast following Don Norman, who though I've never met him, he's a legend in UX and design and research, I've read everything the man has written that I can get my hands on. We've got books over there. I felt that similar feeling of anxiety. But I think what was interesting is going back then, having that feeling of like, oh man, what did I just, I just sign up for or get myself into? That's what it felt like.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked about being pushed or pulled toward things or pushed towards them. At what point, if at all, in your martial arts journey, did it turn from being something that your dad was pushing you into to something that you were pulled towards and that you wanted to be there, you know, didn't have those feelings of anxiety, of feeling like he wanted to be sick. Do you recall when that sort of light switch went on for you and you started to actually enjoy what it was that martial arts presented as a challenge to you?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, for sure. I sort of think of this idea of before design and after design or sort of BD and ad in my life was a really critical moment. And I would say probably right around the age of 19 years old. So up until 19 years old, I was a quiet, introverted follower that wanted to do that, wanted to listen to status quo and follow other people and do what society at that time said I should do. I didn't grow up with a cell phone in my hand at 14 years old with social media. These are things that came later. I just turned 40 recently to give the audience a sense of my age and whatnot. And so growing up, child of the eighties, video games, that sort of thing, that inflection point moment happened. And I say before design and after design, when I realized that I was going to design my life a little bit differently, and it was when I started what then became Digital Surgeons in my dorm room in college where I realized that it was time to lead and it was time to make my own decisions.
- And nowadays it's much more popular to design a non-linear career, whether it's not doing school or delaying school or having a side hustle. These things weren't nearly as possible possible or probable back then. Back then it was you go to school, you go to college, you get a job, you know, get an internship, then you get a job and you sort of follow the path and you work your way up the proverbial corporate ladder or you go out west and do the startup thing and you know, either succeed or get eaten live. And growing up on the east coast it was different for me in terms of what that moment meant when I decided to start my own thing. And it was at that moment where that fear and that scary moment of walking through that doorway of the martial arts studio, I wouldn't say it went away, it was amplified.
- But at that point I really embraced that change and that ambiguity and that chaos. And now I'd say to a certain degree, chaos is such a big part of my design synthesis process and just how I go about learning and absorbing new things. I go 120% into any new thing that I'm doing, whether that new thing is art and design in 3D or becoming a father or whatever those things are now I just throw myself into it. And I would say that that inflection point happened where I went from being a follower to do things, what other people said and did, to really leading and taking some ownership and some agency to what I was going to do with myself and my future. And it's funny that you ask that question because I never really thought of my life like that, but it's really interesting thinking about who and how I was before that moment and how I was after that moment. Reflecting on that now, just on this very conversation,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was wondering about whether or not you could attribute that shift that you were just describing there from taking charge and not conforming to what the world expects of you, and instead trying to wrestle with that chaos and make sense of the world yourself. Can you attribute that to any particular event, a book you read, maybe a conversation, something that you watched? Was there a pivotal moment there in there for you? Or was it a bit more complex and murky than that?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, it was this, I would say the pivotal moment was when I was standing in line at the bank opening my bank account for my business that I had just created an L l C for. And there was this moment where it was like, oh crap this is on me and I'm either going to make this happen or I'm going to mess this up. And failure is something that I really embrace failure in the innovation process. But me, myself, I hate to fail. It's not that I don't like to lose, but it's that when I put my mind to something, there's just a gear inside me that just doesn't want fail, it doesn't want to quit. So I would say it was at that moment when I started my business and at the time it was like my name was on the business that I had a sense of pride in ownership that I don't think I'd ever felt.
- And before that I had had other jobs or that sort of thing, but it didn't feel nearly as weighted as doing my own thing. Because I remember in my first year, I had hired a childhood friend to be on my team. He was a developer, he was my first employee. And I remember just even though at the time we were both still living home with our parents and whatnot, I felt a sense of responsibility to make sure that this, at the time this young man was getting his paycheck every week and making sure that that happened. So I would say one of the, in my experience, the two most sobering ways to grow up that I found is join the military or start a business. I'm obviously having a child is probably top of the list now, but I didn't think of it back then. So starting the business was definitely my sobering wake up moment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And personally speaking here, it would be my preference over joining the military. Although I'm not actually sure if New Zealand has a military at all. Occasionally I see some ships in the harbor, but I'm not sure. I'm sure we've got some somewhere. Coming back to your upbringing though, you mentioned living under your parents' roof and starting the business, Digital Surgeons. I understand that you've described your upbringing in the past as being blue collar, that your dad was an Italian-American union guy and that your mom was a secretary. So how does a blue collar kid then go on to be the first person in his family to start a successful business, to be the first person in his family to go to college and do many other things that were a first for your family? How does that happen?
- Pete Sena:
- So that's a great question. I never really thought of that. So h let's unpack that together right now. I think that modeling's a very interesting thing and we as humans model our behavior based on the things that we experience. And sometimes people will. That's why I believe that representation is so in important today. And for if people can see someone that looks like them in a movie or on a television show or in a game, then they can sort of model that in their own mind. And I think we model the things we want to be and we model the things we don't want to be. And early on in my life I was very into video games and I was very into film and special effects for film and I was constantly, I always had an innate sense of curiosity for me. My mother tells me a story when I was five years old where I took a glass clock.
- It was the tube over the top. It was at my Italian grandmother's house. I took it off the television, took the glass tube up, I took the entire clock apart before anyone had noticed I had done it, everyone was panicking. And then I put the entire thing back together and it worked. And my mom tells me this story, I don't remember it obviously cause I was too young. But I've always been really, really curious. And to answer your question of how I went on to do these things, I think it came down to a couple things. The first thing is I idolized the Bill Gates's, the Steve Jobs of the world, these prolific entrepreneurs that were on the covers of computer magazines and these types of things. So for me, every chance I got, I was watching a documentary or a show or something I can get on the TV or in a book because there wasn't YouTube back then.
- You couldn't just pop on YouTube and study things or TikTok or IG or whatever. So I would say one, seeing these prolific characters, these Steven Spielbergs to George Lucas's and the game designers of the time, they really inspired me to have that sense of entrepreneurship. I would say the benefit of being blue collar and growing up that way is I valued everything we had grew up middle class and objects and things meant a lot. So when we would get something nice, whether it was a video game or something like that, we would treat it with a lot of respect as opposed to some folks I've seen grew up that had money or the silver spoon comment that people talk about, which I'm not saying negatively, but when you have everything, it's easy to just discard things like they don't mean anything. So I would say work ethic and a value and appreciation for nice things was something that definitely was bestowed to me in a very, very early time through modeling.
- And then me sort of looking up to these giant that'd never met Bill Gates, never met Steve Jobs would've loved to before he passed, but that I'd say created this spark in my mind where it's like, okay, I want to be this storyteller. And it's funny actually, I never thought of it like this until you asked this question, and I'm really grateful for this conversation with you. When I was like nine, 10 years old, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and I was a very decent, mediocre, fine artist, and I was such a decent fine artist. And that's why I got into digital and got my hands on my first copy of Photoshop, sorry, Adobe we spent lots of money with you now. But it was back then where I was always creating these characters and these worlds and these superheroes and these different things, and I didn't realize it, but my career today is really building worlds.
- It's just that instead of them being video games or movies or superhero characters, it's businesses and teams and those types of things. So I would say modeling was the thing that really did it. Seeing hard work, having an appreciation for a hard-earned dollar really was something that I valued. And then just having one thing I got from my mother was just a tremendous respect for other people. My mother would always put others before herself and would always care really greatly about other people. So I'd say that that was something that was really a big part of me too. So when you care about people and you care about hard work and you appreciate things going into business, I'd say it's definitely a pretty helpful bootcamp to do that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So thinking about modeling then and the impact that modeling of one's parents can have on our lives, and in particularly your life here, how did growing up with a dad being a union guy, how has that shaped the way or influenced how you've thought about the relationship between yourself as being on the capital side of the ledger and your employees as labor?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, it's a fantastic question. One thing that I always appreciated is that my father didn't go to college. He wasn't super book smart, educated, he was very street smart, and my dad was the man of the people. So I would watch how he would go with his bosses or the sort of suits and the executives and I would watch how they would speak clearly. Many of them were college educated MBAs, whatnot. I'd watch how my dad would speak and then I'd watch how the crowd would gather towards my father and not towards those executives. And I think what I realized and early on was my dad could talk to anybody because he treated everybody with the same level of respect. It didn't matter what color your skin was, it didn't matter what your upbringing was, didn't matter how much money you had or what kind of a job you had, he treated all people the same.
- And I think that for me, made me realize early on, people are the greatest asset that any organization has. No matter if you are in the waste removal business or the food business or the software as a service, business people are your greatest asset. AI needs people to get better. So there's not a world I think we're going to know in our lifetimes where they're not entirely people intensive. So I would say early on, that definitely helped out coming up. But for me as a maker myself, part of the reason that I went on to start a professional services company, an agency consultancy, whatever label you want to give, it was because I wanted to make really cool shit for the internet. And I would love to tell you that early on I wanted to be this big entrepreneur. And the truth matter is that that's not true.
- What was true is I wanted to make really cool shit for the internet at the time. People were pulling me in the direction of tech or pulling me in of coding, excuse me, tech and then pulling me in the direction of creative or design. And I didn't want to just do one thing. Nowadays it's really common to do this thing. So that's where I had this mindset of and over or early on. And what I'm a firm believer in is if the thing that you really want and you have a vision for in your head and your heart, if it doesn't exist, go out and create it. And there's a million ways to do that. You don't have to necessarily start a company to do that or leave your job to do that. It could be a hobby that you have or something else. But yeah, what I would say is what helped me understand how to treat people is I was hiring people that were doing the things that I did. So I wasn't some industrious entrepreneur that had a great sales or business background and was hiring a bunch of designers and engineers. I was a designer engineer that needed to hire other designer engineers and other types of folks to be able to go on and build a company.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You know, mentioned you've been an operator in your business for 17 years, and now you're really stepping into this role of helping founders, people that are trying to do really creative and exciting and entrepreneurial things to make better sense of what it is that they're doing through design. And you recently said, and I'll quote you now, the one biggest mistake that I made in my life and career is that I was always behind the scenes helping other leaders build their brands, both their personal brands and their business brands. So what makes you feel that playing a supporting role has been a mistake, you know, seem to have been pretty successful at what you've been doing?
- Pete Sena:
- Well, I appreciate you saying that. I wouldn't say it's a regret or mistake, but I think the thing is that if you have a set of beliefs, if you have a set of core values, sharing them with the world, even if it's quietly, whether it's in words or in videos or whatever your comfort comfortable medium is, that's going to attract people who see you for what you're about. And I think that if there's one thing that I've learned over the past 17, 18 years of building businesses, mostly service-based businesses, it's that the power of brand is everlasting. And it's really, really important to be able to put yourself out there because some of the best friends that I've met, or the best clients that I've had the pleasure of working with have come because of being in the right place at the right time. And now in this post covid world where everything happens here first on these cell phones, that I think is just a really interesting thing for us to think about. So that's what I meant by that Brendan
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Peter, get the sense that you feel like you're a little late to the party.
- Pete Sena:
- Well, I'm an overachiever. So being when I step foot in the martial arts studio, taking me back to that moment, I looked at the person who was the most experienced, which was the sensei, and I said, what are all the ways and things that I have to do to get to his level? How do I get, in the case of martial arts, it's getting the black belt, or in the case of business, it's oftentimes getting to a founder or c e o status or being able to exit the company for a successful acquisition or liquidity of that. So for me, I'm an overachiever. I wouldn't say that I'm behind because this conversation alone has had me looking in the rear view mirror a lot and feeling grateful, feeling grateful for all those stories and journeys that quite frankly, I never even thought about or seldom thought about until this conversation today.
- But I'm also firm believer, Brenda, that the rear view mirror in the car is much smaller than the windshield. And that's for a reason because we should be looking forward and we should be forward obsessed with what's next. That's my philosophy. But that being said, I do, I see colleagues of mine. I was working with a colleague the other day, he's like 23 years old, and he's got a half a million followers on TikTok and Instagram and whatnot. And I see some of the brand deals that this guy's getting, and it's super impressive what he's built. And it's not that I want to be a TikTok influencer, it's seeing wow, when he's 30, if he keeps on this trajectory, he'll be a person of influence where whether he wants to open a not-for-profit or he wants to do something, getting people to know about it, it's much, right?
- It's like we think about as UXers, right? We're trying to create the best experience for people, the CX, the UX, the DX. Well, one of the first things we all have to do in marketing is acquire customers. If you already have a baked in audience, acquiring customers is faster, cheaper, easier. So that's one of the reasons that I sort of belabor on that point. It's also probably top of mind for me right now. It's made a lot of mistakes that I want to share with the world so others don't make those mistakes. And like I said, early on, I was modeling myself after in some cases what some people might call asshole leaders in some cases, as much as people love Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, they also have lots of negative things to say as well. It's a bit polarizing, and I think the things I want to share with the world now, I think can inspire myself when I was 19 years old where I could maybe have said, Hey, you don't have to be loud and braggadocious to be popular on social media. I wish I knew that at 19, Hey, you can be an introvert but still do public speaking. Hey, you can be this or not this. But also a lot of those things were not out there for me to plug into early on. So that's why I'm a little bit hung up on that at the moment. But your intuition is spot on y. You're definitely picking me up for sure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's see if we can continue on that role then. You spoke about looking in the rear view mirror, and we have done a bunch of that in this conversation and we'll start to look forward shortly. But thinking about the time that it's taken for you to reach this point in your career where now we think forward and becoming forward obsessed and putting yourself more in the public eye, that time it took you to do that. How much of that, if any, do you attribute to occasionally looking in that rear view mirror and still seeing that scrawny, introverted, nerdy kid, peak the geek? How much of that still stays with you from your time as a child?
- Pete Sena:
- Ooh, that's a great question. So look, I'll be blunt, I've had a chip on my shoulder since I was a kid because of those things. The difference now in my adult years after being much more mature, becoming a father, being a husband to someone, being someone that people look up to as a leader, I've been ama amazed and been receiving some pretty good feedback. I have this thing I do called feed Forward where anytime I have a meeting with somebody, I have an automation that kicks out a survey. It's a very quick survey, and I do a wish wonder post-meeting with everyone. I'm going to do it with you as well. And it's, it's been the ultimate level up tool for just collecting feedback and iterating on that feedback. Kind of updating my UX, if you will, and I wish I started that much sooner.
- But to answer your question early on, it created a fear of failure where I was running full speed from failure where I didn't want to be this middle class scrawny kid for the rest of my life. I didn't want to be all the things that I was, I was running away from that full steam. And in pursuit of grandeur and different things nowadays through meditation, through just some of the many gifts that I've been blessed to have accumulated or have in my life now, it's got me coming from a place of gratitude. So not coming from a place of what I would say most of my life was a, I would say scarcity mindset. You're going to lose this thing, this one thing is yours, you got to hold onto it with for dear life. Now I've got an abundance mindset, which is the more that I put this energy into the world or these core values into the world, the more that I take a stance on this topic because I believe in it and I take action on it, the more that the universe sort of kicks in and creates a multiplier effect.
- So I would say that the stark contrast how it feels right, which is something that a therapist might ask, is how it feels is a lot more happiness and joy, a lot less anger and frustration. In my twenties, I was very angry. I was jealous of the person who had more than I had. I was going to do whatever I could to beat them and to win and to one up to one up to one up, oh, you can do it this way. Let me code this thing and show you that I can do this and do this. And a lot of people that worked for me at that time were with me or people that were my clients. I'm so grateful for the ones that stuck around because in my early twenties, I was probably an asshole. You know what? I was definitely an asshole because I was on a mission to get to the top of a mountain and I didn't even know what the top of the mountain was.
- And that's where I think now the importance of setting intention, which is something I do every single morning and evening when I close the evening out with a meditation practice, it's really shifted the way that I think about things. But it's funny because I don't know if I could have endured some of the earlier challenges in business. You remember I started Digital Surgeons in the middle of the first economic recession. And granted now today, some might say, well, you think that was a recession? You just wait. [laugh] heard that before from some smart people recently. But I think back then it's like I'm graduating college, all my friends are going off and getting great jobs at corporations, and I start a company, I walk away from a giant global corporation and start a company and I look back then and go like, holy shit, I would never do that now with a wife, with a kid, with a mortgage, with the bills I have and whatnot.
- But it was that fear of failure. It was running away from that failure that created the drive on those moments where there was $75 left in the payroll account. And I'm throwing up in the bathroom because, and my co-founder's like, it's going to be okay, chill. We're going to figure this out. And we did together as a team. So that's a real story. It's talked about that story before. It's a dark moment, but that drive, that fear of failure, that fear of screwing it up is often what gave me that drive to kick it into high gear and keep it flowing. So I appreciate you mentioning it. It's so interesting to look back because nowadays I find it easy to look back and hard to look forward. But back then I found it really, really easy to, really easy to look forward and really hard to look back, which is so funny. It's in some cases the 180 has happened. Mm-hmm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A bit of water under that bridge, a few hard lessons learned and some sleepless nights and some sessions in the bathroom wondering about payroll, will definitely do that to you,
- Pete Sena:
- Blood 'em to the bridge, right? Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, for sure. You spoke about recession and dark moments, and there are definitely some dark storm clouds gathering at the moment globally with what's been going on and Ukraine, what's happened post covid heating up in Asia-Pacific currently between the states and China, there is a lot of uncertainty out there. And we're actually seeing tech companies in particular in the United States make changes to how they staff their organizations. And that has led to a lot of people in these fields finding themselves unfortunately without employment. Now, understand that you recently had contact from a friend of yours who's an enterprise design leader who was recently laid off and one of those right-sizing, and I'm using coms here move that tech companies have been making, what was it that you quickly realized about your friend's situation?
- Pete Sena:
- You really do do your research. It's an absolute pleasure to be here with you, and I'm grateful that you checked that out. Yeah, so talking with my friend who I will not name or out, he came to me looking for some perspective. I wouldn't say help, but he looking for some perspective, he knew that I had a pretty diverse Rolodex and a good network, and he was looking for his next thing. And I had watched him rise. We were coming up of a similar age and similar ilk, if you will. And I started asking him some questions. And what I very quickly realized is that he fell into a trap that a lot of middle managers and design leaders or any leader for that of any industry for that matter, fall into which is they let the saw get a little rusty. And what I mean by that specifically is he had a person on his team that would do everything.
- He had a person that would handle research, a person that would handle copy, a person that would handle visual design and interaction design, a person that would handle vendor management and two, project management and tools and all this. So he had a person for everything. And I think what he started to reveal to me and in a very vulnerable conversation was what his current skillset really, really was. And this is something someone that came up that I really looked up to, their UX chops, their design chops, their leadership chops, definitely the kind of person you'd want in a brainstorm, in a facilitation in a sprint or whatever it is. And I had been asking him some various questions, well, what is something in the past six months you've learned or you've taught yourself or whatever? And really, again, because I'm not outing him, I can be very, very vulnerable with you in the audience.
- It was clear to me that he just spent the past two years just going from meeting to meeting to meeting and really just acting as a layer between the executive team and between the execution teams. And it was to the point where I was like, oh, well, I actually know of a gig right now that needs a FinTech UX leader for two weeks to sort of run a quick team. Everything's basically interactive Figma prototypes, they just need reviewing and it pays pretty well. I know you're out of work right now. Do you want to lock in for a two to four week engagement? And he's like, Figma? I was like, yeah. He's like, oh yeah, no, I'm not hands on. I'm like, no, no, I don't mean designing. I mean the UX reviews are happening in Figma and you're doing other commenting, you're user feedback, reconciliation, et cetera. And he's like, yeah, I don't really know how to use Figma. And I'm like, so, oh, did you guys use Adobe xd?
- They're pretty similar. And he is like, oh, no, no, we used Figma. That was what my design manager used and what my product manager. And I'm like, that was a sobering moment. And the sober, it was a sober moment for me because I was like, wow, in the back of my mind, I'm saying to myself, so what skills did he actually have and what skills did he let go by? And this isn't sort of a fable here where I'm saying that executives should be and being the best user of one particular tool, but it is a cautionary tale to say that we should not design ourselves into obsolescence. We should design ourself out of obsolescence. And I think that the way we do that is by empowering the experts, but by still being that Swiss army knife creative generalist that has a strong set of skills to bring to the table.
- And it's not a rally cry for people to be hands on the tools. I would argue that design executives probably shouldn't be hands on the tools because there's more capable people who love doing that, and that's sort of their zone of genius, which we'll talk about, I'm sure. But that was a sobering moment for me, Brendan, because it made me realize how did this person a get to this point? And also by no means do I want to throw any shade at the tech companies or right now because a lot of people have done that. But I want to actually take a contrarian perspective for a moment, which is a lot of companies, especially the FANG companies, so Facebook, apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google Cetera, meta, they grow fast. And once you get into the Fang company circle, and a lot of my friends work with these companies, I've worked with these companies before, they've been cli, some of 'em have been, some of them have been clients before.
- Once you get that name on your roster, it's easy to bounce from Fang Company to Fang company because you sort of like in the club at that point, you check the box. And I think a lot of these companies, they think they're too big to fail at some point and they think it takes a thousand people to do the job of a hundred. And what I want to caution us on is as the world gets more advanced with the technological perspective as people are trying to do more with less, whether it be because of global economic challenges, sociopolitical challenges, whatever those challenges are, what I would really argue is if you're a leader or if you're an employee, whether it's your company or working for someone else's, asking yourself, what value do I provide? Asking your customers what value you provide, really, really important. Because if you can't answer that question and you're still not pursuing new skills, I think you're going to find yourself in a situation where you might get knocked on your ass.
- And I have tremendous empathy for people because I do everything I can to try to help people. Luckily I was able to help. That friend of mine turned into a really great story. He actually went into a design leadership bootcamp or something like that, and then he ended up linking up with somebody and now he's got a great design leader role at another company. It's not a fan company, but it's company he's really passionate about. And he's really going to be providing a lot of value as a facilitator and a product leader where he doesn't have to sort of be in the tools, but he's picking back up some skills that had gotten a bit rusty. So yeah, I dunno if that's a bit of a ramble, but it's something I'm pretty passionate about because I see this conversation a lot with people and I think that we're going to see a lot more layoffs.
- I think we're going to see a lot more consolidation that's happening. And I think some of it is because the era of companies printing money and being able to spend an unlimited supply of resources and dollars, I think is behind us. And we can see that now apparent with Meta's layoffs, unprecedented level of layoffs as they miss their numbers. We can see that in a lot of companies. And it's scary. And I also think that Silicon Valley, specifically here in the United States, created a really bad model. You could make a half a million dollars a year and have dry cleaning and free food and free things in the office and all these different things and be in this little bubble that is San Francisco, and now people are fleeing offices. As we move to more remote and hybrid environments, people are realizing that consumers don't want to give up their data for free and give up their privacy for free anymore.
- And what people see as value is changing. And I think as a result of it, these companies can't afford to have 10,000 people that they pay half a million dollars a year when the median salary for that and 10 miles down the road is a hundred thousand dollars. I think it's a lot of right sizing is going to have to occur. So I hope I said that from a place of empathy, which is where I meant it from. And really the moral of the story that I get at is never stop learning and never stop questioning yourself and the value you provide.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I think that's a key question that you've raised there is what is the value that I provide? And being able to clearly answer that and also to sense check that against what it is that marketplace as it currently stands. Values, I think is a really key part of that as well. And we've talked about the right sizing that's going on with people losing their jobs with these tech companies, missing their numbers with investor confidence being down. And a lot of these companies, their executives are remunerated on the back of the performance of the company on the stock exchange. So a lot of their calculus as to how they resource their organizations based on what their current and projected performance is doing. And that's clearly why they're making the decisions that they're making are respective of the impact that they're having on the individuals that were previously employed.
- And something that we hear often during times like this, I mean, you mentioned that you started Digital Surgeons in the middle of the great recession the global financial crisis. Clearly now we've had covid and now we're rolling into what looks like it's going to be shaping up to be a pretty big recession during these times. Companies talk about doing more with less, that people need to do more with less. And you, well, don't run directly now at Digital Surgeons, but you've run a company, you, you've talked about how you have great respect for everyone, not just whether they're the person that's cleaning district or whether the person that's the CEO that you see everyone has value and you respect them. So if we take this idea of people having to continually do more with less, and this is something that I've heard multiple times in my short 20 year career, where does this eventually leave people, people that don't have the supposed security of being at the top of the pile, these people that are in the middle management that may be just starting their careers coming out of college. Where does this leave them? What kind of world does it leave them to walk into or to try and operate with them?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, it's a fantastic question. The way it occurs to me is to get a little bit philosophical in terms of how I unpack it, if that's okay. Let's start with the word currency for a moment. So if we think of the word currency, you can attach that to a number of things. Cryptocurrency, financial currency, energetic currency, whatever the root word for currency is current. And the etymology or the root word for is to flow. So what makes a currency valuable is its ability to flow and to change hands, the principles of supply and demand, that sort of thing. And what's interesting, and also not ironic, but most people think it might be ironic, is take cryptocurrency as an example. You have these crypto bros that were fast millionaires off of these meme coins or shitcoin or whatever you want to call them. And then you see the market by just a few people.
- In the case of what happened with ftx with St. Beckman Fried, and we see these few people are able to create massive butterfly effects and ripple effects. By what I mean by that, just sort of a classic butterfly effect term. But so I think to answer to your question, we have to understand what currency is important to us. We have to understand the currency that we operate on. We have to understand the decisions we're making in life. I think I read somewhere that in some places, like a pack of Oreos is $17. I think I read somewhere, and this is a very unhealthy consumer package. Good. That is one of the many types of foods that we eat here, definitely in the states, but certainly globally. That leads to things like diabetes and obesity and all kinds of other things. And this is not a knock on CPG companies or Oreos or any of those brands for that matter.
- But what this is to say is understand currency, understand the exchange of value, and understand those value storages and those value exchanges. Whether those value exchanges are fiat, [laugh], US dollars or the Euro or Solana or Ethereum or whatever those stores of value are, pig bellies, whatever the currency is, understanding how that works I think is really, really important. So where I think it leaves people is we have to constantly be creating value and the exchange of value. And let's just be clear, when I say value, I don't just mean financial value. The exchange of value has a currency attached to it. And you know, mentioned a person that's cleaning at an organization, well, that's really a huge exchange of value because if the person that is cleaning, which might be considered a low skilled job, if the person's cleaning creates a clean environment and someone has a great experience in that clean environment and then they have a high net promoter score in that business, that business is going to do much more successful.
- So if you're the CEO of that business or the founder of that business, you damn sure better make sure that you're treating the people who are cleaning the place or you're treating the server at the restaurant that you own very, very well, whatever that might mean to them or to you, because that exchange of value has a ripple effect. And everything's connected. We're all connected. I'm a huge, huge believer in that. And really I think what that means to people watching this or listening to this is what value do you provide? I have a friend mine, she was making high six figures a couple years ago, had a very stressful job. It was leading to some health issues to her. She quit her job and she lives basically at a cabin in the woods in the west coast and in the middle of nowhere. And she's super happy.
- I think now her total annual combined income is I think $40,000 or something like that. And that would be considered the poverty level in places where I live or in other places. But for her, she's living, she has all the things that she wants and needs. The first question, she has answers when she meets somebody is the thing she loves to do. She never talks about work when people say, Hey, what do you do? We answer or I answer, I do this and I do that. I leave with my hobbies last, right? But she leaves with her hobbies first. She has almost four days a week where she's hiking and she's gotten into much better shape. She was not feeling so good and gaining weight and those types of things and not feeling so good. Now she's waking up every day with energy and she's got her meditation and that sort of thing.
- So it's to say that what is valuable to her and what is valuable to others. She's still doing a lot of things that she does. She does innovation, she does facilitation, she does remote work, she's paying her bills, but she's happy. And by her definition of happiness and success, she's much happier than when she had the corporate job that she could put up on her LinkedIn and making the nice six figure salary. And she didn't have a single moment to herself where she was going from thing to thing, commute to work, to meeting, to meeting, to meeting. And we waste our lives away. I think in some cases, and that's another reason why I'm thinking about life and work differently now, where I'm trying to empower other people to run things and to take the fruits of that labor. I'm trying to have, my philosophy is I want a much smaller slice of a lot of pieces of a pie.
- And why I like to do that is by having a loosely coupled wealth strategy, it allows me to not be as affected emotionally when a few of these things don't work out. And during Covid, I had half of the things that I was in that I was involved in really got took a kick in the pants and then the other half thrived. If I didn't have that balanced portfolio, if I had all my eggs in one basket, I think ultimately it would have resulted in a pretty poor outcome. So that's just my philosophy. I mean, again, I hope it's helpful. I encourage everybody, do your own research. This is not financial advice by any means, but got to do what's right for you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So bringing this back to design leaders that are working in tech or in enterprise, in an enterprise setting, you've said the dedication and effort that it takes to stay relevant, fresh and wildly inventive, while managing people hitting numbers and maximizing efficiencies can feel nearly impossible, but it is doable. And you were just talking about there the sort of extremity of giving everything to your job, ending up with negative health consequences and then having to make drastic changes of lifestyle. Thankfully, your friend there in that situation, I'm assuming, had been wise with their finances and had the capital behind them to enable that transition. But not everybody, just like your friend who came to you when they were laid off, will be in that same situation and have those same options available to them. So I was curious about your outside in perspective on these design leaders that are in jeopardy of losing their jobs, worried about the prospect of that or have done so, is this ability to stay fresh and relevant and wildly inventive, to stay connected to the tool so you stay relevant. Is this doable within the time that design leaders are currently investing in their work? Or do you see this now as possibly unfortunately a period of time in our economy where people are going to have to put in more time over and above what they're doing to see less of their friends and family to do less of the things that they like to do outside of work in order to get through this time? Is this a trade off they're going to have to make?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, I mean, people love to count the hours. Not a lot of people love to make the hours count. And if there's one thing that I've learned over the years, I've always been a big proponent of finding shortcuts. I've always been a big proponent of investing in yourself. Something that I have walked that walk since I was a little kid. Now that I'm a parent, and I realize that the extra many hours that I had every week where I could tinker or screw off or mess around with different things personally, professionally, whatever, are not there because I have a human being that needs my attention physically, it's got me thinking about time a lot differently. I'm a big believer in, I dunno if you're familiar with Cal Newport and some of the work with deep work that he talks about. He's a big proponent of things like time chunking and being able to chunk your time.
- These are really, really important things. If you look at the C H R O or some of the human resource leaders at companies, the two things that they're really, really focused on a lot, besides employee happiness and retention, which is of course paramount to any organization, is learning and development. People want to feel like they're growing in any situation because stagnation leads to look at nature. I'm a huge biomimicry fan. We study nature and nature is the most intelligent design around us. What happens with stagnation in nature, it leads to stagnation, leads to bacteria and death and viruses. Look at a pond that's stagnating in some cases don't drink that water. But I think that we have to break down our time differently. And what I mean by that is people waste so much time. I dunno if you saw recently that Shopify kind of band meetings for a couple weeks as an experiment, there's a lot of time that gets wasted.
- What I think is funny about companies, and again, I consult with companies from all over the world, so I see a lot of different office cultures, remote cultures, in-person cultures. And what I think is funny is people want the best of both worlds. They want the cake and they eat it too. And what I mean by that is they want to be able to have interpersonal relationships with their coworkers and be able to be off task and just having fun and being playful, but then they want to clock out at that that end clock moment and then go hang out with their families. So I think in some cases, as an entrepreneur, I say this because I find it to be pretty frustrating when people want everything, but then they're not willing to make any sacrifice for the company that they work for. It's like you can't have the half a million dollar salary and the laundry and all the perks and those things and not have the other things that come with it too.
- Right? It's a tradeoff in a balance. So I think that we don't have an unlimited supply of time. So what we have to do is we have to be really mindful of how we spend our time. So what I mean by that is scheduling time for learning and development. There's lots of things out there where you can do five minute, 10 minute, 15 minute tutorials to teach yourself things. There's micro courses, courses, maybe while you're eating your lunch, you might have to take a class instead of just eating your lunch and being away from your desk. So I think it's all about a balance. You can't have everything and do everything. So what I often suggest to folks is they identify what's important to them, they identify what the outcome is that they're trying to get to, and then they reverse engineer from there. And I think what people will find is if they do a time audit, which is something I I'm a huge fan of, and it's how I got to that zone of genius concept, or I call it the green zone, which is sort of my own flavor of a zone of genius, which is well written about by, I think it's gay Hendrix was the gentleman who wrote the book all around this topic.
- But how we spent our time is really, really up to us in a lot of cases, even in companies, if we understand, we ask our manager or we ask our leader, what if in the case, if we're an employee, what are my goals? How am I measured? What are the things that you expect of me? And then understand how to plan the schedule or experimenting with things. So I did this recently with a founder that I'm coaching. I had him do an experiment where he felt like he was going to a lot of meetings with his teams that were not a good use of his time. And I asked why did he feel like it wasn't a good use of his time? Then I asked him to sort of investigate where he felt he was adding most value, write it down. Then I asked, then I went to all of his employees that he was in those meetings and I asked them where did they feel like he was adding value?
- And they said, oh, I feel like when let's, let's call him Jason. His name's not Jason. So when Jason would go to these meetings, he would just love to talk to a bunch of people and he would talk for almost an hour. And then the meetings were go over schedule because they never got done on time. So I went to the employees and I said, well, hey, it sounds like this person wants to be heard. Why might he feel like that? They went on to some different things and they said, all these meetings are annoying. He's kind of a blowhard, blah, blah, blah, all safe space. I said, well, have you ever said to him, Hey, what are you looking to get out of these meetings instead of them just complaining about it? And it turned out that he was looking for sort of 15 minutes of connection with these people because he didn't get to see them a lot.
- And then once he knew that everyone was doing okay emotionally, he was able to then move on and they were able to have the staff meetings without him and just send him a recap. So now this guy got back three and a half hours a week [laugh] in his schedule, and now the thing that most people do is then they go, they fill that time with other stuff. So what I do with this particular person I was coaching is I said, okay, great. What are some of the things that you really wanted to work on that you didn't get a chance to work on? And one of the things that he was looking to work on was his sales team and his sales proposition. So I said, okay, great. Let's schedule two hours a week where you can go get sales training that you can then spend one hour a week applying that sales training to.
- So that's how we're going to spend the three hours and we're going to block out the calendar. We're going to say, this is not blockable, not bookable time. We're going to do that. So now this really busy like c e O type figure, he's actually a cmo, but just to be specific, but now he had all this extra time, which three hours a week times how many weeks he was working in a year added up to a lot of time. So I think we feel like we don't have time. We feel like we're so busy because we're distracted, we're multitasking, we're doing all these different things instead of asking ourselves like, all right, how do I make the hours count?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We're not going to have time to get into great depth on the green zone today, but I will link to your medium post on that in the show notes. And I just want to contextualize this for people that are listening as well. Sure. In case people think that Pete some sort of flawless individual and you've never had any struggles with time and how you spend it yourself. You've previously written, and I'll quote you now, for years I was a workaholic whose identity was so deeply blended with being an entrepreneur. I could barely separate Pete, the human from Pete, the founder. And something that you went on to describe in that article as I mentioned that I'll link to that I thought was quite an interesting insight into how we spend our time as you actually created a quadrant to enable people to break down what activities fit in different dimensions of their ability and their ability to do the task, but also their passion for the task that they're doing. And again, this won't be doing it just as describing it audibly, so just do check out the medium article. But you said in there that or you suggested that excellence, the things that we are excellent at can be a trap. We can be spending time and investing time and things that we are really great at that are not necessarily a net net benefit or a net positive to us overall. So how can something that we are great at also be something that's not that great for us?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, that's a great question. What I realized, so the one thing I want the audience to know, really passionate about the stuff, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out to me, hit me up on Twitter, whatever. I've struggled with so many of these things I've needed to create systems for my systems because as someone with a D H D, as someone who is constantly forward, obsessed with the next shiny object or the next new thing that's coming out, it's really hard for me to stick with things and get things done. And I've had to design a lot of systems. At some point, you take all the shortcuts, you learn all the shortcuts on the keyboard, you find ways to shave seconds and minutes and hours, but then you're still out of minutes and hours. So at some point, there's always the one currency that we all share is time, right?
- It's 24 hours a day. I don't recommend that people sacrifice sleep or sacrifice time with their family. I'm not advocating for hustle culture, so I just want to make sure that people understand the place I'm coming from, which is a place of passion and empathy and compassion, not from a place of preaching, which sometimes I might feel like I sound that way and I don't want to. The answer to your question, how we all fall into is what I'll call the trap of competence. The trap of competence is the things that we're really good at often get us promoted. I'm a really good designer, I'm a really good researcher. Then I get promoted to research director, design director, and I work my way up to this executive thing. But what ends up happening is the things that we're good at get us to excel, and those are the areas of competence.
- But what we realize is the things that we really love to do sometimes in that we are also really good at, we're not doing. So what the zone of competence is, again, I took this from a concept called the Zon of Genius, which a great book by Gae Hendrix was the gentleman's name. The name of the book has escaped me. I'm sure you'll add it in your show notes, but that book got me thinking about, wow, I'm spending so much of my time in my zone of competence. I'll give you an example. I used to be a very, very, very fast concept designer. So one of the things that I could do faster than anybody else was come up with a rock solid pitch deck and a rock solid UX concept for someone. I was very fast. I apologize for anyone that ever had to edit my files because they were a yes.
- But jokes aside, I was very competent at that. But my job as a founder and at the time c e o, was not to be the person designing the awesome pitch deck. I needed to empower the teams to go through and make those mistakes. I needed to assign that to people and let them fail because that was their job, was to solve that problem. So what I love to do, what I realize my sort of zone of genius is, what are the things that you're really competent at that you also love that give you energy where you could do them just for 12 hours a day because you love them so much versus what are the things that you are really good at but you don't love doing? Because if you're really good at something you don't love doing it. It takes your energy and then your battery on a cell phone gets drained really, really, really fast.
- So I think what happens is we fall into the trap, the zone of competence, not our zone of genius, which is the areas that light us up, give us energy, but then also that we're really good at, or in some cases the worst zone to fall into is what I would call the zone of incompetent, which is where it doesn't make you happy and you're incompetent at it. And in some cases that that'd be like, because it's mostly a design audience, I would say finance is an area that a lot of senior UX leaders sometimes are not great in. So getting a finance leader to take on some of those duties of spreadsheet, spreadsheet calculus, if you will.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Even managing people, some people you mentioned, some people get promoted into director roles because of their competence doing the craft, only to find that what they love doing and that they were great at is the craft and that they actually loathe managing people, but then they feel conflicted as if demoting themself to a principal role, which shouldn't be, that should be a peer role. But going back to craft seems like it's a bridge that they have burned. So you're right, a hundred percent. There are these kind of situations.
- Pete Sena:
- It happens a lot. And I want to just actually touch on that for one quick moment if it's okay, which is there's this inflection point in most people's careers that happen. And if you're listening to this, you've probably have already reached this point, or you might reach it soon, which is are you going to stay on an individual contributor or an IC track or are you going to go into a group management track or a leadership track? The problem I think, is that people, in most organizations, the way to make the most money would typically be to go on a management track. And there's a lot of, if go to Taylorism and do maybe on another podcast, there's a lot of reasons for that. One of the things that we've done early on in a lot of the companies that I've been a part of is we've always created an opportunity for excellence in both tracks where we have some people who are individual contributors that are earning some of those highest pay grant pay bands, and they're able to keep practicing the craft.
- Because just because you're really good doesn't mean that you should have to go into a management le level because I would say being an indiv individual contributor, especially a principal design lead or a principal engineer, very important roles. And we don't want to penalize people for that. So I think that's an important thing early on. The other thing I want to say to people is I think some people I had a brilliant designer on my team, Matt, I'm talking to you I'm going to call him out. And now he's turned into a great manager. He's turned into a great manager and a great leader, and he loves mentoring other people. But for years, he just didn't want to be a manager, didn't want to fall into that thing. He just didn't want to because his mental model of managers was all managers and design companies can't design anymore.
- They lost their chops and he just didn't want to be that person. And now he loves mentoring other people, and he loves a mix of the craft as an ic, but also leading others. So what I would say to you, if you're listening to this and you're thinking that you only want to be an ic, challenge yourself as to why is it that you don't like to teach and mentor and inspire is that you don't like doing performance reviews or whatever. What's the main reason you don't like managing people? Because everyone can be a leader. You don't have to manage people to be a leader. You can be an IC and still be a leader in many ways. So that's a whole separate conversation that I'm passionate about because I've just seen some incredible people that should be people leaders because they just deeply care about others, and they're great at holding space and teaching, and then they don't go into it because of their bad mental model for it. And then other, I see situations where people want to go to the top of the ladder and be the manager, and it's like, wow, they should never be managing people. So yeah, that's an interesting segue to another time,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Pete. Well, speaking of time, our time has come to an end, and you've shared a lot with me today. So I really want to say thank you for that. And I have one final question for you before we bring the show down to a close. Sure. And it's when I was preparing for this talk, it was another talk of yours that I watched and you said something in there that really struck home for me. You said, as you can see from the background here, which is where you were physically sitting, which I believe is where you're sitting now, meditation literally saved my life, but that's a story for another day, is today that day is my question. Sure.
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah. Happy to share it. So I was at a, I'll sort of take the audience back and okay, on time, if you are by the way, sure, I'll take you back to a time because the audience, you yourself, I'll talk to you, the audience you might have experiences yourself. Have you ever felt extremely burnt out, extremely tired, almost to the point of tears, or you wanted to just quit your life? Just literally you're like, I want to just quit life. Whatever that means to you. I'm not going to get too dark because it, it's a very serious topic and one that I don't want to make light of for myself or for others. But I was at a point where I wasn't happy. I was so burnt out. I was working 13, 14 hour days. Not proud of that, by the way. And I was doing way too much.
- And I was saying yes to way too many things. I didn't know how to say no. I started having a lot of health issues. I started getting these crippling anxiety attacks to the fact where one time I almost drove off the road because I was having this tunnel vision, crippling anxiety attack. And I remember my brother who at the time was working with me, brilliant, brilliant guy now runs a really awesome design shop called Ever Wonder and Great name. And he said to me, Pete, you're super unhappy. You're not like my brother. You're a different person. And he wrote this really endearing post-it note, and he stuck it to a book called 10% Happier and 10% Happier, if you're Not Familiar, is a book by Dan Harris. He was a national newscaster here in the States. And he had this breakdown on a live interview where almost like in the show with Jim Carey, where he is just like, blah, blah.
- He just start, the people thought he might be having a stroke or dying or something. And he goes on, he was the biggest skeptic of meditation. And he writes this book called 10% Happier. He's actually got an app and that sort of thing, which I haven't done the app, but the book was great because I was very anti woo woo and all that stuff. I used to think people were hippies that were into that. I had a lot of friends that were into it and transcendental meditation and blah, blah, blah. And I laughed at it and my brother gave me the book. I read the book, and I tried this meditation thing, and I'm like, I can't stop my mind. This is just a waste of time. It's not for me. And I was a doctor, and the doctor was like, all right, here, I'm going to give you all these medications for this and for that and for this.
- And then he was like, Hey, but just, you might experience the following side effects. And we've all watched a health commercial where it's like you might experience the following side effects, and it's like bleeding from your eyes and your anus and you might die and DA and erectile dysfunction, all these things that we hear on these commercials, they speed it up so much that just so they can pass the law, but it's really small. And you're like, wait a minute, do I really have to take that? So I looked at the doctor, I'm like, these side effects sounded a little bit scary. He is. He's like, well, isn't it scary? Da da da. He's like, well, I guess you could try this meditation thing. And he kind of shrugged it off. And I'm a big pattern guy. One thing we didn't talk about today, which I wish we did, was just how I dig into patterns and how I believe that pattern recognition is something that'll make anybody better at their job, whether they're a janitor, a UX lead, or a C E O, right? It's something I'm really into, and I dunno if you've ever talked to John Coco.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- He's coming up. He's going to be on the show in the future.
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, yeah. Tell John I said hi, because I've emailed him a bunch of times based on an article that he wrote that changed my life on abducted synthesis, but not getting off topic. So that was my dark story of basically needing to discover meditation. I'm not insulting or discounting medication or Western medicine, but I, for me, wanted to seek Eastern medicine. And for me, one of those things was getting a daily meditation practice. So I started out using an app called Headspace and then I found myself listening to the Great accent more than the actual app. Then I discovered guided apps like Sattva or Calm, where I would just do a guided meditation to start. And then over time, I managed to be able to do unguided. And then over time I would start to do mantra based stuff. And now meditation is my drug of choice.
- I meditate every single day. I've meditated on planes, on trains in hospital, bathrooms in restaurant. I've meditated the day that my wife went into labor with our son, and I think now, we'll, actually we can put it to the test now. It's funny, it's four forty four exactly on my phone, which is kind of irony. But I want to show the audience in you this because I'm proud of it, which is that I have meditated for over 2300 days consecutively. This is the Calm app. I don't actually use the guided meditations anymore. I just use it to track the meditation. But this is my accountability tracker right here. And meditation changed my life. And I want to be clear. If you think you can't meditate, you just haven't found the right meditation for you. Meditation could be being on a Peloton, it could be exercising, could be doodling, it could be talking to your loved one or talking to a therapist.
- There are lots of forms of self-care and meditation. So definitely find one that's worked for you, because when I tell you I probably wouldn't be here, I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for meditation. So I appreciate you asking that question. It's a deeply personal one, but one that really changed my life for the better. And now it's like one of those things where now I'm the hippie. Now I'm the one that's constantly preaching it. I've got the dial over there, which is a nice carve thing that my buddy Mark gave to me, Kozo art behind me, which is using sacred geometry to build this, these kind of interesting art things. And I'm all in on the stuff now. I mean, it's made such a positive impact in my life. It's made me a better leader. It's made me a better father, husband, friend, son, and it's made me a lot more creative. It's helped me see patterns that I never thought were possible by realizing that it's better to walk away from the problem than to work 15 hours through sometimes. So I hope that that's what you were looking for in that one.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's a bit of enlightenment right there, Pete, thank you for going there. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for this conversation today. It's been certainly wide ranging, and I had a lot of fun prepping for it. And across all of the topics that we've covered and some of the ones that we didn't, I actually spent far too much time with chat, G P T three and Mid Journey, which we didn't get to, but maybe we'll get to do another episode at some time in the future. So I just want to say thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me and everyone else today.
- Pete Sena:
- My pleasure. I know this is great, and I love what you're doing with this podcast. I know you were reflecting on if you're going to take a break or if you're going to keep going, I think that you would let a lot of people down if you didn't keep going. So I hope that you still feel the same energy for it. It's a huge accomplishment for you to get to over a hundred episodes. I've been tuned in since you first kind of connected with me. I'm subscribed to all the channels and will continue to be tuning in as long as you want to keep putting it out there. But I think that I hope this episode was beneficial for some people. It's funny, I thought we'd be talking about UX and business, and really it felt like a interesting journey inside my own crazy head. So thank you for that. You've definitely gotten me thinking about some things I haven't thought about in a long time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Oh, you're welcome, Pete. It's been my pleasure. And if people want to keep up to date with what you are doing, because you're doing a lot of good work out there for people in the community, people in the business community, people in design, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Pete Sena:
- Yeah, for sure. So I'm Pete Sena on just about every channel. So LinkedIn, I'm Pete Sena on Twitter my website's petesena.com. My consultancy is DigitalSurgeons.com, where I'm still the chief creative officer, but we've got an incredible team running it. And yeah, I would love to be a resource for anybody. If you guys have questions, if you're thinking about making changes in your life or work, I respond to just about every message, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter. So hopefully this is helpful for some people. And thank you again for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thanks, Pete. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes. As you can expect from us, every time we release an episode, everything's in there, including where you can find Pete and all of the great things that we've spoken about.
- If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders and UX, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Can you believe it? This podcast has over a hundred episodes and only five reviews on iTunes. So if you want to be someone that's creating a positive difference for the podcast and for me, please go and leave a review on the podcast. That would be much appreciated. Subscribe so it turns up weekly and also pass it along to someone that you feel would get value from these kinds of conversations like Pete and I have just had, where we get into issues at real depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile on LinkedIn at the bottom of the show notes on both the audio versions of the podcast and also on the video version on YouTube. Or you can head over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.