sionate about ideas… and that my ideas need outlets.

I went into this project feeling blue, and I was surprised at how quickly those feelings of sadness and loss disappeared once I started the 90 in 90 project. The daily ritual of allotting myself the space and time to explore my thoughts was liberating. Giving form to my ideas through writing or sketching was more than fun—it was pure joy. I realized that my head was full of ideas, and the 90 in 90 project gave those ideas a place to go. I discovered that my feelings of sadness and loss were not caused by the project’s coming to an end, but by the loss of my creative outlet.

The design profession has a built-in outlet for ideas, but projects and professional work are riddled with boundaries and constraints. So many ideas are abandoned and left on the cutting-room floor. After three years of working in the mobile industry, there were tons of ideas that I’d left behind because they didn’t fit into the project’s particular constraint.

I hadn’t lost them, though. Those ideas were trapped in my mind, left to haunt and torture me; stuck, unexplored, undocumented, with nowhere to go. I realized that ideas belong in the world. The act of writing about them—giving them form—gave my ideas somewhere to go and a sense of life and vibrancy, movement, and velocity. Ideas need a space to be explored, shared, and built on, and creative outlets provide that environment. Work had become my primary creative outlet, and I realized I simply needed more outlets… many more.

90 in 90 served as a creative escape; plus, it allowed me to rediscover other dormant creative outlets—drawing, photography, painting, and writing— and the role they play in my life. I quickly realized that I need these outlets, these places and environments to explore ideas in order to feel happy and fulfilled, for my own well-being. This project allowed me to revive these outlets and nurture them. I now realize that my daily basic necessities are sleeping, eating, exercising, and creating.

A Template for
Creative Practice

Back when I studied fine art in college, I had a painting professor who assigned the class the task of painting 30 paintings in a week. Seven days and a demoralizing critique later, she told us the point of the exercise was not to produce brilliant work, but to give us a template for a creative practice. She believed in the law of averages: The more you paint, the better the chances of creating something great. She encouraged us to be prolific, knowing that success would follow.

When I started 90 in 90, I felt stuck. I knew I had ideas that I wanted to express and share, but I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted the ideas to be good, brilliant in fact, and the pressure I put on myself to share only brilliant ideas became paralyzing. For a good long while, I had allowed my ideas to wallow in the shadows of my mind, and it became the ultimate downer. Inertia set in.

Committing to creating something everyday for 90 days was daunting, but the alternative

was to become a hostage of the ideas trapped in my head. In the end the choice was easy: Sit around and feel bad, or direct that energy into something productive. Starting 90 in 90 was like taking a deep breath and leaping forward. It created momentum.

Some of the ideas from 90 in 90 are brilliant, others are pretty good, and some of them simply stink. Instead of getting hung up on evaluating my ideas, I focused on the practice of producing an idea every day. I couldn’t predict when brilliant ideas would strike, but I realized the process and the practice of making a space for my ideas would allow something great to happen. When you’re generating lots of ideas, you increase your odds of something magical happening. I became prolific.

Moreover, by committing to this project for 90 days, I was bound to get better at it each day. Thinking about mobile user experience became habit forming, almost like an itch I had to scratch. It helped me clarify the things about mobile user experience that matter to me and also to find my point of view.

Silencing My Inner Critic and Finding My Tribe The decision to carry out this project online, in a public forum, was initially one of the most terrifying aspects. I was scared. What if my ideas were dumb? What if I wrote something stupid? What if everything I posted had been previously articulated and discussed? Did I really have anything interesting to say? These questions ate away at me until I remembered something my old figure-skating coach