Your biggest advantage as a designer? Not knowing how.

Amit Das
2 min readNov 3, 2024

In the last 14 years of my professional career, I have spent 50% of my time in taking decisions which I learned over time, and somewhat know now. These decisions help me and the team move faster. The other 50% of my time goes into learning new things. Things I don’t know or know less of. This is where personal and professional growth happens.

In the last 2 years, I learned how to draw an actual hardware. Something which we mildly did for curriculum in engineering drawing classes a decade ago. I learned a bit more on different parts of water filtration and how they all work together. Still learning.

Sometimes, not knowing how to do something can be your greatest strength. More importantly, it’ll give you the greatest satisfaction. In 2010, I didn’t know about the domain of “UX/UI/Product Design”, forget about becoming one. Until 2021, I never thought of designing hardware. Now, there’s more exciting stuff ahead!

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning is a good starting book if you want to gain some perspective around this line of thinking. Also, listen to this How to be creative podcast by Freakonomics. Highly recommend. Here’s another recommendation from Arjun on Twitter: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. I’ll read this.

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Amit Das

Written by Amit Das

SVP, Design & Native products at Urban Company. Software & hardware designer. Ex Crux Intelligence, Housing.com, FusionCharts.com, Fab.com.

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