Where these came from.

These lessons started as a lecture I gave at the end of every semester while teaching UX and Design Thinking at the University of Houston. The things I wished someone had told me when I was navigating the same transition my students were about to face.

They aren’t rules. They aren’t a career plan. They’re field notes from someone who’s been building products and leading teams for 25 years, and who keeps seeing the same patterns show up in different people at the same life stage.

The challenges are universal. Everyone faces the same fundamental questions about work, meaning, and direction — they just show up wearing different clothes. The uncertainty and confusion aren’t defects. They’re how the system works.

These lessons help you navigate more effectively by naming the patterns you’re already living inside. Each one comes with a single question designed to cut through the story you’re telling yourself and get to what’s actually going on.

The philosophy underneath all of it: your world is an organism, not a machine. You can’t force growth. But you can create the conditions for it. These 32 lessons are the conditions — applied to the earliest stage of a career.