This started as a guest lecture at Vega School in Umhlanga: a room of first-year students getting their first look at the inner workings of Studio JDB, alongside an intermediate-to-expert run-through of SketchUp.
Do you know the famous university, MIT? Now take those three letters, M, I, T, and scramble them.
That's the most useful piece of career advice I know how to give, and it fits on the back of a napkin.
The I is the straight line. One passion, and you hunt it down. You want to be an interior designer, or an architect, or a multimedia artist, and you point your whole life at that single thing. Nothing wrong with it. Some of the best people, in our eyes, are deep, narrow, and unmatched at the one thing they do.
The T. You start as an I, and then somewhere along the line you branch: left, right. The deep specialism is still there; that's the stem of the T. But you grow sideways into the things next to it. Most working designers I know are somewhere on this path, whether they'd describe it that way or not.
The M is the one the billionaires talk about. Develop three or four passions across your life, and trust that at some point they'll converge, and if that convergence happens to make you a living, all the better. Several deep legs holding up one thing.
I'm becoming an M. I just didn't know it while it was happening.
I grew up in the Netherlands. I spent a year in Lesotho working in an orphanage in the middle of nowhere: no wifi, no running water, about as far from a design studio as a person can get. Then somehow I found my way to South Africa, to sunshine, koeksisters, and biltong, and started building a career that has called me, at various points, an interior designer, a retail specialist, an office-installation guy, a SketchUp educator, a consultant, a founder. The title kept changing. For a while, that mostly felt like drifting.
It wasn't drifting. It was converging.
Reality capture, retail, architecture, teaching, the software obsession with SketchUp: every one of those turned out to be a leg of the same table. They didn't compete for my attention in the end. They fused into what the studio actually does now. But I couldn't have planned that at twenty. Nobody can. You only see the shape looking backwards.
So if you're studying something now and you already feel the pull towards something slightly different, don't panic, and don't feel you've betrayed your own plan, your own narrative, your own journey. What you're learning now is a foundation. And foundations are meant to be built on, not lived in.
A small piece of advice on how you actually get good at any of it, whichever letter you turn out to be.
There's this idea that 10,000 hours of deliberate work makes you a master of something. Put simply: eight hours a day, five days a week, forty-odd weeks a year, and you're looking at about five years to get there. You won't hit that on any single tool, any single workflow, or any single skill while you're studying. But an hour or two a day, over three or four years, and you're a genuine quarter of the way to mastery before you've even graduated.
Which brings me to the one rule that sits underneath everything I've said: measure what you value. If it's the balance of your bank account that matters to you, you check it. If it's your phone notifications that matter, you make sure you check those. And if it's the hours you lose to your phone that bother you, measure those too. Decide what you actually want to become good at, then measure your honest hours against it. It works for anything you care about.
You're not the title on your LinkedIn profile today.
You're the sum of everything that's quietly about to converge on it.
#DesignCareers #Architecture #Mentorship #SketchUp #CreativeCareer
