If there is one thing that will remind me of this past year forever, it will be the smell of Subway. Every Friday, after the Creative Economy lectures, we gathered in Hannafords, the student union bar on Kingston Hill campus, and shared drinks and laughter. Thanks to a Subway right next to the bar, the distinct smell pervaded the air and, as much as it annoyed me, it will probably make me nostalgic from now on.

Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans – if those plans had worked out, I would never have sat in Hannafords or moved to London. The plan was to move to Oxford with a friend, and we had made it all the way back in early 2009, sitting in The Red Lion in Oxford. He moved to South Korea a few months later, I stayed in Cardiff another year and after I realized that the MA in Translation Studies at Cardiff University was not going anywhere and thus getting me nowhere, I considered my options. The journey to figure out what I wanted out of life eventually led me to book a single train ticket to Manchester and travel around the UK from there (eventually arriving in the Scottish seaside town Montrose), because I have always been learning most about myself when somewhere new on my own. (I highly recommend reading Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel” on that subject.) I didn’t have a plan when I returned from my travels but I had dots that I could start connecting: lines that eventually pointed towards London.

 
I could pretend to remember what the USER model is, which we discussed and re-visited a few times over the first weeks of the Design Thinking & Entrepreneurship in Practice module. The truth is that I don’t, just like I don’t remember some things from other modules — and that’s not only okay, it’s a good thing, because it leaves more brain capacity to consider all the things I do remember.

Something I do remember is having to go to the toilet as a mentally impaired person and the constraints this placed on how I could act, constraints I had never truly been aware of. It’s different imagining what it would be like, and actually acting it out — a lesson I learned over and over during this past year, not only in the Design Thinking module, but also in Leadership in the Creative Economy. When Professor Richard Cohen asked us to roleplay a publishing deal discussion, it was perhaps the deepest I was thrown into cold water, but ultimately it was also the one where I learned the most useful things for my future: how publishers think and act when they want to sign an author.

“While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him” wrote Dostoevski as quoted in Sam Richards‘s powerful talk on empathy. His speech is a formidable exercise in empathy, wherein the American audience is asked to put themselves in the shoes of the Iraqi people. Empathy is perhaps the most important lesson that we were taught in the Design Thinking module: there was the time when we had to go out and ask people about why they were wearing that particular pair of shoes, then we had to design a new elevator button, and finally there was my endevaour to understand the children at Kingston Market.

Another empathy-related exercise which went a step further was the storytelling and creation of a persona. Slightly different from empathy, it required an outside analysis of a system first and then the invention of a third person who might be interacting with that system. While fellow Publishing & MACE coursemate Sarah identified train ticket machines as a particularly daunting task for a first-time user (truth be told, thanks to the user-unfriendly interface the machines sometimes still confuse me after five years of living in Britain), I struggled with an ATM that decided I needed to use it in French. This is a problem I have since become aware of with many ATM machines, while some do ask what language I prefer, others simply assume it is French. Oddly enough, when I use my British card, which is registered at a Welsh branch, I never get the option of choosing Welsh (unless I am indeed in Wales) — not that I would need that option, but I do wonder what the rationale is behind building multiple language support into the interface and leaving out non-English British options.
The interface design is perhaps the most intriguing lesson I have been learning – and struggling with – this year, and it will also be an important part of my dissertation. I have long been fascinated by the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and often wondered why the same concepts are not applied throughout all interactive systems, and above all the concept of staying out of the way which Sollenberger argues for.

 

The start-up business was undoubtedly an uphill struggle. As Paul Graham argues, “you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.” The issue of course was that there were no colleagues to start the business with, most of us hadn’t met before the course started and thus only had a few weeks to find people we could join forces with and build a company. Eventually, Janja Song, Edward Keeble, Harry Logan-Jones and I decided on working together, and launched Cloudbow, for which we came up with more ideas than we could ever have possibly managed to squeeze into the few months that we had.

There have been severable valuable lessons I have learned from running a company:

1) Early failure is not an option, it is a necessity.
This has already been argued by other entrepreneurs: fail early, fail often, writes Mitchell Ashley. The amount of work that went into concepts and ideas that were never made reality is a significant percentage of the overall work that went into the company. I designed a website which never went online, and we created a completely different one in January. I also designed several flyers which were never printed, because the events they were for were never organised.

2) Organising an event is not easy.
This is perhaps where we had the biggest illusions. As can be seen in the video above, we were initially running with a one-month preparation phase for an event, when we did not even have a venue yet. We invested a lot of time into discussing terms and conditions with the Student Union to try and get one of their venues for free, but more and more constraints were placed on us than we were willing to accept. Organising an event takes a lot of time, a lot of negotiating and also a lot of marketing and advertising, the latter of which we fell short of because we didn’t have any more time left.

3) Communication breakdowns need to be handled well.
This was, by far, the biggest issue we ran into, and because initially we were hoping that help from outside would save us, that help never came. Things fell apart dramatically, and time pressure only added to the communication breakdown. I am aware that I didn’t handle the issue well (two of us wrote an ultimatum to the other two, and had it signed by the course leader), but ultimately I am glad that it happened. Because it allowed me to understand how communication breakdowns occur in the first place, and how I may address this better in the future. As some teams last year also encountered communication issues, I can only hope that future students will be warned about that possible stage in the process and perhaps given an adequate skillset to respond to the situation better than we did.

I still strongly believe in the business idea that we had. We identified a market demand and, with more time, we could have turned it into a profitable company. But I am also happy that the company will be shut down soon, and take all those lessons away with me.

 

Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans — after two primary schools, three high schools and four universities I am more than aware of the truth this saying holds. In a way I am reluctant to make any plans for the future, but on the other hand I also can’t prevent myself from considering what will happen from here on out.

There are not many people who I truly admire. Some fascinate me, some I have a lot of respect for, but admiration is reserved for a very select few. One of these is Merlin Mann, who, if you know me in real life, I’ve probably mentioned a few times to you already. When I went to Brighton last September, it was to hear talks by John Gruber who spoke about his auteur theory of design and to see Merlin Mann give his first talk outside the US, ever. Some days it still hits me and I realize anew that I have actually seen one of my heroes. I wonder how many people can say that.

Mann’s latest project, in a very long line of projects, is my favourite one yet: Back to Work, a podcast on the 5by5 network where he talks for about an hour (almost) every week about how to make your dreams come true. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I have been struggling to come up with a plan for after I finish this MA. I am 25, and I’d like to start paying off that huge debt I’ve acquired at some point soon, and actually get a regular paycheck. It’s been an adventurous journey through education and I’ve made mistakes along the way (Cardiff University being by far the biggest one), but I’m mostly happy about how it all turned out. One of the things that Mann is very adamant about is that you need to find out what makes you happy. Stefan Sagmeister once gave a talk about how good design makes him happy.

What really makes me happy is getting into the flow. I learned this year that, while entrepreneurship is fun and while I enjoy learning about managing creativity and the publishing industry, it’s not at all what I want to do. I want to write. This year has been a big success in that regard: together with fellow young writers I have written and recorded an audiobook at the Luxembourgish publisher Op der Lay, the first edition of which is almost sold out and about which the national press has been writing great reviews. The dream, ultimately, is to write radio plays for BBC Radio 4, and, yes, maybe even my very own drama.

The lessons in entrepreneurship I have learned this year may be able to help me with the pursuing of this dream. I have been considering to become a freelance writer, a tough gig as writing initially has no tangible value, and hone my writing skills until I have something good enough to submit to the BBC.

 
What are the steps towards that stage? What I know is that I need to get out of London and that August cannot come soon enough in that regard. While it is often listed as one of the world’s creative hubs (even though there is an argument that it is jeopardising that position), London has killed my creativity, and I long for the days when I could look out of my window and see mountains instead of an ugly tower. I miss the Welsh people that are so different from Londoners who I will never identify with, and I miss sitting by the sea and scribbling more ideas down than I will ever be able to expand on. Cardiff is also where my network is — and I’ve learned this year how important a network is. Nobody at networking events cares whether you’re a student who wants to get an insight into the industry, and it is only through my personal network that I managed to find people who were willing to offer some of their time to me and share some of their experiences and knowledge. Sometimes directly, such as Daniel Grosvenor, sub-editor of theSprout, sometimes indirectly, such as Mark Chatterley, whose company I found out about thanks to a friend, author Jaque Thay, who is writing for the show Supermarket Matters.

So the first step will be moving back to Cardiff this summer, and start writing as much as I can. I need to show more initiative and entrepreneurship, send articles around and turn this blog into a place where I can advertise my writing. I need to use my network as a starting point to make lasting connections with people, and I need to apply for an internship at the BBC to get a foot in the door. I need to observe and emphathise with everyone I meet. And I need to make as many mistakes as I can as early on in the process as possible.

I am already making some money from the audiobook (a tiny, almost insignificant amount, but it’s a start) and I have been paid to read at literary festivals back in Luxembourg that I got to participate at thanks to the young writers platform I launched in 2007 (I engaged in entrepreneurship and didn’t even realise it at the time!). I’ve done radio and newspaper interviews. I know I can get there. And now that I have a thorough understanding of the publishing indstry and learned all these invaluable lessons about how to communicate effectively, how to market something and how important time is in evolving an idea, I feel that I am well equipped to reach my goal.

I may be leaving London and the Creative Economy course behind soon, but I’ll carry the countless great memories and the invaluable lessons with me wherever I’ll go. So listen out for an Afternoon Play by yours truly, sometime in the next few years. Determination and boldness are everything.