"Get into this space where money isn't everything". My guest today is Ryan Rumsey, CEO, and founder of Second Wave Dive. In this episode, we discuss how Ryan left the corporate world to start Second Wave Dive, how Ryan measures himself in personal and professional aspects of life, and why everyone needs to have a career manifesto. For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show Level Up Your Design Career (Free Email Course): https://levelup.designmba.show/
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Ryan Rumsey is the CEO and founder of Second Wave Dive, where he develops boutique leadership programs for professionals in the digital product and services industries. Second Wave Dive has worked with product, design, and executive leaders from companies like Google, IBM, Lyft, Workday, ConsenSys, Autodesk, and ANZ. Ryan has a hybrid background in interaction design, front-end development, and product management. Previously he led digital product innovation and transformation at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, and Nestlé. His life experiences include working on a farm and acting in a Staind music video. Ryan is a dad, partner, and massive fan of the Liverpool Football Club.
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Jayneil Dalal: Today's guest is Ryan Rumsey who is actually a Ryan gosling look like, I kid you not. Ryan is a CEO and Founder of Second Wave Dive where he develops boutique leadership programs for professionals in the digital product and services industries. Second Wave Dive has worked with product design and executive leaders from companies like Google, IBM, Lyft, Autodesk and many more. Ryan has a hybrid background in interaction design, front end development, and product management. Previously, he led digital product innovation and transformation at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, and Nestle. His life experiences include working on a farm and acting in a music video. Ryan is a dad, partner and a massive fan of the Liverpool Football Club. In this episode, we discuss how Ryan overcame the lure of titles to leave his associate vice president job and start Second Wave Dive. How does Ryan measure himself in personal and professional aspects of life and why everyone needs to have a career manifesto? Ryan just published his latest book called Business Thinking for Designers in partnership with InVision. The book is free. Head on over to DesignBetter.com and download the book to up your business acumen as a designer.
Ryan, super excited to have you on the show. Thank you so much.
Ryan Rumsey: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the invitation.
Jayneil: So, you're working out of a co-working space and one of the things I always wondered is, let's say you have an interview lined up or you're trying to talk with someone or you're trying to get on a podcast, is it always easy to get a hold of a conference room or a quiet space?
Ryan: No. Sometimes it is but the benefits of my co-working space are we have bookable rooms. And so, there's a mobile app that we can use to kind of book rooms ahead of time. We also have quite a few phone booth style rooms but if I’m not able to grab a room, my wife fortunately has a private practice and I’ve used her office as well on occasion. There's even been this spot here and there where I’ve had to sit in the closet at home to try to get that quiet space.
Jayneil: Wow! When I first saw your photos on your website, because I was watching this movie Crazy Stupid Love a few weeks back and you just reminded me of Ryan Gosling.
Ryan: Well, thank you, I guess. There was a time a long time ago where I was a professional actor. So, 20 years ago I probably got Edward Norton a lot but I’ve gotten Ryan Gosling before. And he's a fine actor. I appreciate what he does. And thanks. I’ll take it as a compliment.
Jayneil: And since you spent some time in Hollywood, you probably did a lot of improv. So, I want to kind of dig into how did improv have an impact in the way you teach design and especially I believe it's called a yes-and method.
Ryan: Yeah, I did do a bit of improv. So, I was a student at a school called The Groundlings. The Groundlings is a well-known improv not only school but they do performances as well. A lot of people that show up on say Saturday Night Live or in the movies have come from The Groundlings. And so, in their instructional methodology, what you're really doing is improv is all about the team. There's no improv performance that is great when one individual is just trying to take the stage. Often, it's a team approach where the benefits to the comedy, to the actors, and to the audience is to ensure that everybody is kind of bought into the same storyline, even no matter how ridiculous it gets. So, yes-and is a particular instruction method but then it's utilized all the time in improv comedy where kind of whatever your partner or fellow actor on stage says, you buy in and agree wholeheartedly that it is like straight-up truth. And then by doing so, what you can do is kind of take that story in a direction that most people don't expect. Oftentimes those are very humorous directions. And so, yes-and is all about supporting the narrative rather than saying no-but, right? And it's not really funny when you sort of discredit or say that somebody your partner on the stage is wrong. A lot of audiences don't find that particularly funny. They might see it as “Huh, something's going on there.” So, yes-and is this great technique that comes from improv.
Jayneil: So, if I were to say “I’m sitting on a chicken,” how would you use that with yes-and?
Ryan: I’d say “Interesting. Did you know chickens also are wonderful hang gliders?” You don't sort of neglect that one, there's a chicken there; two, that it's possible to sit on the chicken and then just kind of add to it. So, it's this sort of addition approach to comedy.
Jayneil: Wow! So, you're pretty much taking all the learnings, it's kind of like you're bringing all these learnings outside of design into the world of design. And I think what I’m trying to figure out is like you've had a lot of executive positions at different, different companies starting from Apple to Comcast to USAA. How on earth did you overcome the lure of titles like “Oh my God, I’m going to leave this executive title or SVP, senior vice president to go and do my own thing.”
Ryan: I suppose the titles have not been that much of a driver for me. I tend to enjoy more the process of mentorship and problem solving and working with others. that I’ve been able to get some of these titles has been a fortunate circumstance but if your question is how do I overcome sort of the lure of getting more of those titles to go do my own thing is those titles never really translated to bringing me more joy. I think there were some benefits and compensation packages that were certainly more beneficial than other titles but I wasn't going home necessarily with a bigger smile on my face. Nor did I see myself, I guess, Joy is the word that I can use. I think also the bigger the title at certain organizations, the bigger the pressure to kind of associate with the organizational values. And I think sometimes I would feel like there was some pressure to lose my own personal identity, my personal values. These kinds of forces I’ve been referring to them as gravitational forces is something that I’ve thought about for a while and just kind of writing about these days but for me, I found myself wanting to move more towards my identity and sort of recapturing that and identifying more with what I stood for and what I aligned with and how those might fit with an organization rather than vice versa. I’m fortunate that I was able to go out and do this on my own. And look, if we want to talk about the lure of titles, I’m CEO now. It's my own little company but the titles don't really mean anything.
Jayneil: So, when you went out on your own, I’m trying to figure out in my head, how does a designer go about doing that? Is it like “Oh, I’m going to save up this much amount of money first, have a safety net before I start my own company?” What was that process like for you?
Ryan: I think it depends from people to people. For me, certainly, the safety net was involved. I’ve got three kids. And so, my wife and I had discussed it over the years of probably coming to a point where perhaps I would go out and do this but safety nets certainly came into consideration but also when I went out and did it, it was more, I think, around my emotional health, right? What was going to sort of keep me on the side of being emotionally healthy and allow myself to sort of set conditions to maintain that. So, one of the first things when I was just jotting the idea of forming the company is, I set 10 business conditions for myself. And those conditions included things like some big hairy audacious goals but then they also include things like “be home for dinner” and “be my authentic self.” And so, when going out and doing this, the safety net was a big thing but it was also could I go out and sort of live by these conditions of me of what I stand for. And then it was kind of a no-brainer.
Jayneil: So, did you have clients lined up before you ventured down the journey or was it like “Let me do this part time and figure it out” or was it just like “Okay, let's just go all in and figure this out?”
Ryan: I’m not sure my approach is something that I would advise or that business books particularly teach but I went all in. I did not have any clients because I was not looking to become an agency or provide sort of consulting services. In fact, I’ve sort of said my model is an unconsulting model. That comes through a lot of experience of working for 20 something years in corporate America but I went all out and what I did was essentially announced to the small universe of my peers and colleagues in the design community and said “In eight weeks, I’m going to be offering a course in this weird space of business acumen. Who wants to sign up? It's a discounted rate because I’m just creating a prototype course.” And incredibly, I got 18 people to sign up for that first course. I had not even written the course yet. And so, I tend to do really well when I put myself under pressure. And so, suddenly having 18 people that have paid me money to deliver a great course in sort of instructional six weeks put the pressure on to have me develop the curriculum, to identify how I would deliver that curriculum, identify how I might continue sort of the mentorship model and what aspects I wanted to include or not include but essentially had eight weeks to do all that. And so, that first course I was literally writing or developing and writing and recording the next week's curriculum the week before. So, it was a very intense and pressure packed time but also pretty exciting because I could kind of just adjust on the fly based on how the previous week went for the participants.
Jayneil: What did you call the course when you first launched it, the first prototype version?
Ryan: So, the first naming is so hard. So, rather than getting hung up, I was having a conversation, I was just like, if you know those weird Venn diagrams or they're not weird, they're pretty well known of like business engineering and design, I was like “My course is where they meet.” And so, the initial name was just Design Meets Business. I went with it and through the conversations that I had like the course title was weird but after talking to somebody for five minutes, they kind of got it and trusted in me to deliver it. The next iteration was a little more direct and I started calling it Designers Meet Your Business because the sort of instructional materials and the assignments was really kind of getting to know and understand your business models and your business colleagues in new ways. So, it was a little more direct. And I’ve now landed on a different title and that really goes along to some writing that I’ve done and we'll be sharing out to the world pretty soon. We're recording this mid-march and it's now going to be called the Business Thinking Intensive. And so, through that iteration, it has allowed me to kind of write a bunch, kind of iterate my writing a bunch and getting a lot of feedback from peers and trusted colleagues and sort of defining business thinking as a dedicated process. So, that's where it is now, the Business Thinking Intensive.
Jayneil: And if you were to do like a one or two-minute elevator pitch to designers about this course, how would you describe that in your own words?
Ryan: So, I think there's a lot of desire for designers to have more strategic influence and impact at their organizations. And I think there are a lot of organizations who are hiring designers and looking to design to do that but perhaps a lot of designers are still not quite there and a lot of organizations are still struggling with understanding how design will get that to them. So, the course is really about increasing business acumen. We hear this phrase that “designers should learn business” time and time again, which I think is correct, but over the years, I’ve noticed the term ‘business’ being used as a synonym for ‘business acumen’ and that's categorically wrong. While business has a lot of meanings, acumen is really the ability to understand and respond to different situations well. So, what the Business Thinking Intensive is, is it's six dedicated weeks spending about six to eight hours a week of learning, of reviewing and completing some assignments to increase your business acumen so that you have a better ability to understand and respond to the different situations you're in day to day at your company.
Jayneil: And you pretty much flipped the classroom model, the traditional classroom model how people learn whether it's online or in in classrooms. So, how are you bringing that into these six weeks? How are you flipping that paradigm?
Ryan: Right. So, the flipped model of classrooms is actually a known paradigm. What you typically get in traditional in-person instruction is synchronous conversation. You have a teacher or a proctor there walking you through, available for feedback in real time. When it comes to asynchronous where a lot of our digital worlds are, you think of something like Slack where you can post a message but you're not necessarily going to get a response right away, somebody can go back and read that later kind of reflect and then post a message back at a different time. And I think what we have with a lot of our online learning these days is mostly that asynchronous where students will pay to watch a course and it's really on them as an individual to sort of have that personal accountability to watch all the videos and spend the time to really learn. And that works for some people but not necessarily everybody. And so, what the flipped model or really blended model is, is during the six weeks, you'll get a combination of synchronous and asynchronous instruction. So, I provide videos that are really meant to help people kind of ingest information at the beginning of the week but then we use things like Slack to provide that sort of running commentary in that continual sort of mentorship apprentice style feedback. I then do things like weekly office hours and host an Ask Me Anything session with an industry peer so that people, while ingesting and learning this information and trying to practice a new skill, have those all-important synchronous conversations to kind of help them develop more rapidly than they would if they were just watching a video by themselves.
Jayneil: I love that. I’ve personally taken an amount of online classes and one of them being on Coursera and that was the problem that you just mentioned. It was all upon me, the onus was on me to self-motivate myself to learn. And sometimes, when you don't have the community, it can get a little bit lonely, I feel.
Ryan: Yeah, I absolutely agree and that's where always my frustrations were in my career too. We have an amazing design community and I think what we have is a very generous design community. And so, through different Slack groups or through in-person meetups or tools like Twitter, our community shares a lot with each other but then when it comes to kind of our instructional learning, our traditional conferences and workshops, we can kind of ingest information but we don't really get that dedicated time to practice something and get that all-important feedback. So, that's one of the things that we do in my courses is it's required that peers have to both give and receive feedback in a structured way every week to at least three of their peers. And by doing so, it helps them with their own reflection, it helps the others see that there are alternative ways to solving a problem but then the great thing is everybody is kind of exposed to everybody else's assignment and feedback. And when you talk about sort of giving you a fast pass to learning, imagine if you taking your Coursera class could also see the 30 other people taking that class and what were the materials they produced. And imagine if you could just see that really kind of in real time in a week's time. And it's a model that's been used by a few other groups but it's a model that's been really successful with my programs thus far, particularly when you're talking about strangers learning with others. It's a way to kind of break down, I think, a lot of the vulnerabilities that we have in sharing or especially when we don't necessarily know or believe we have a great answer yet.
Jayneil: So, are you just doing all this single-handedly or do you have a backroom office with dedicated staff that's helping you with all the other functions or you're doing everything, you're doing invoicing, billing?
Ryan: I’m doing it all. It's a lot. I am doing it all, I’m exhausted but it's also to ensure that I can see there's some type of business model to this structure, to this format and particularly to my content before I go about and ask others to join me. There's a lot of responsibility, I think, in leading others and I want to do the best I can that I have enough indicators in place that it's going in the right direction before others kind of place their trust in me and want to join the team. The most difficult part is sort of changing mindsets. I have to be really dedicated to time blocks in a sense to kind of move from business mindset to marketing to design to instructor to a mentor, all these types of things. That's really difficult. And if I don't block that time out, it has really affected me not in a great way.
Jayneil: Can you give an example of how, let's say, you switch between those mindsets or how you use a time block?
Ryan: Sure. So, typically the mornings I dedicate to kind of running the business. So, as you might imagine, there's a lot of operational things but there's a lot of inquiries. So, while yes, I offer these courses sort of wide open to the public to who might take them, I also run these courses sort of internally. So, say a company wants to have kind of a private six-week cohort. I do that as well. So, all the kind of invoicing, replying to emails, I do that usually in the first 90 minutes of the day. I mean, there are some days where I don't have to do that. My work involves a lot of writing whether it's for marketing purposes or for the actual course materials itself. That's typically when I spend the mid-morning to mid-afternoon doing that. And then when it comes to like meeting with people, so initially during my courses, I had an application process to really kind of ensure that I’m going to have folks who could provide me great feedback with the course but also folks who are kind of at the same place in their career, that they are ready for some of the materials like this. So, that's typically how I block the day out is kind of into three blocks – early morning for the operation stuff, mid-morning to mid-afternoon for any type of writing whether it's instructional related, design related, marketing related, and then the afternoons are meetings, so that's meeting with mentees, meeting with companies or just meeting with some of my own mentors.
Jayneil: Now, what happens if you're going through this whole jam-packed week and life comes up and you got kids and you got to take care of them or you just get exhausted and you're like “Oh my God!” and you fall behind a couple of days. How do you manage to catch up with that or workload?
Ryan: The honest truth is I can't. I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to be better than where I am that day but those things happen. And one of the things that by setting up those sorts of conditions for my own business to be home by dinner and be my authentic self was to essentially give myself permission for missing a day or being at home with my kids because in the end, those are the more important things, the things that are going to be really the backbone of me being my authentic self, keeping my sanity.
Jayneil: This is just amazing. I’m reading this phenomenal book by DHH and Jason Fried called It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work and they're echoing the same thing that if you go home at 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. and your kids are waiting for you at the dinner table, then you are going to reply to that email for a potential company next day. You're not going to stay up and sacrifice that moment. Wow!
Ryan: Yeah. I mean, there's other things, just practical things of like putting my phone in a drawer or trying to when I get home. It's always a process but trying to be more and more present every day when I’m at home with my family. And then if I really need to respond to that email, I can after they go to bed but, in the end, I think, if I’m working with people and they see me responding it at midnight or at 6:00 p.m., they might have the expectation that I’m always going to be available at those times and that's not the point of me doing any of this, right? This is one of the more big hairy audacious goal conditions that I set for myself but I would love a life where I’m only working 40 weeks a year. And so, I put that down on paper. And so, what might that look like if I’m able to pull that off. I’m nowhere near that now but what might that look like?
Jayneil: So, what do you call this in your own words? Do you call it career manifesto like all this business goal that you're putting on a paper like how you want it to be?
Ryan: I think I refer to most of it is like designing myself. So, I’ve written about a manifesto that I wrote quite a long time ago and I’ve done some speaking about that too but for me, it's can I kind of leverage what I know and understand and can I sort of apply that to my own life. Does that work? There's actually a great book and they actually have a course at Stanford as well called Designing Your Life by Dave Evans and, I’m forgetting the other author's name right now at the moment, but it's kind of just applying these same techniques and processes and structures that we might do in our professional life to solve problems. Can we do the same things for ourselves? A lot of self-assessment, a lot of reflection, all those types of things.
Jayneil: So, what does self-assessment look like for you or how often do you do it?
Ryan: In my professional life, I get fairly nerdy with it. I actually wrote about this and I designed myself a personal opportunity workshop where I use Post-Its and affinity diagramming and developed my own rating scale and rubric to sort of take on what I perceive as being important versus whether I’m actually using any of my energy to take on those priorities but in my personal life, it's therapy. My wife is a behavioral therapist. And so, mental health and treating mental health and sort of confronting mental health very intentionally is important. And so, the great way for me to kind of get that self-assessment time in is to be with my therapist who's going to be very objective and provide some tools to kind of help me do that.
Jayneil: Well, that's amazing. I was just thinking about it like your wife is a behavioral therapist. So, you might also get a lot of questions “Why did you say it or why do you think about it that way?”
Ryan: I mean, we do have some interesting conversations. I have a former colleague Meriah Garrett who's the Chief Design Officer at USAA. During one of our chats, she's like “Gosh, your conversations at home must be pretty intense.” No, I think, even though we are kind of rooted in a lot of these skills, certainly my wife is more rooted in them than I and applies them every day, I think we do pretty good at seeing ourselves as individuals and humans and all that and it's not always about using some particular technique to analyze but we might have some conversations that are a little more elevated than perhaps the normal couple.
Jayneil: So, do you write down because you're single-handedly running the entire business at a Second Wave Dive and do you set like “Okay, this year I have to have this much revenue” or “this many students” or what metrics you set for yourself or there are no metrics?
Ryan: I set some of those goals early on. I’m not defined by those goals. I think there's more an 18-month goal. I’m now about halfway through or a little more than halfway through, I guess. I’m about 9, 10 months in. I don't know, I started in July. I’m not really tracking my metrics that intensely right now but it's going to be interesting few weeks to sort of see if this sort of scales in the way that I hope and expect it to be. I’ve written a book with InVision that's coming out at the end of this month and we'll see. That's kind of part of my plan to get some of this knowledge out there and to share it with others and we'll see if that then translates to more business. So, I have some goals out there but I’m not too focused on that. Most of my focus is getting on quality content that receives good feedback. Thus far, all that's going pretty well. There's been quite a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations and I am tracking things like my own CSAT and kind of NPS scores just for myself. So, I provide surveys to my students, if you will, and take their feedback and then check with them later on. So, I’m doing a little bit of measurement but mostly it's around the course materials itself. And then in the instructional methods and programs, are they meeting expectations? And so far, so good. And now we kind of pivot over to getting more into that growth stuff and looking at different ways to market, for lack of a better word, advertise a lot of these materials and see how that then gains traction.
Jayneil: And in your syllabus, you're definitely having the students give you feedback. Are you also actively, I’m assuming, reaching out to your industry peers to make sure that this course is up to date like having them take a view at it?
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And luckily, a lot of those peers have taken the course. I’ve been fortunate, very fortunate to kind of have a career where I haven't needed to be like a big public figure in the design world but then quite a few of those peers of mine, who are public figures, do know me and know the type of work that I do. So, that's kind of how I keep my finger on the pulse, if you will. I still participate in great events like Design Leadership Camp which was just a few weeks ago in January in Palm Springs and that's where I can connect with a lot of my peers. And these are directors and above, so folks who are leading organizations and sort of dealing with the day-to-day. I’m not that far removed from being inside a large corporation. It's only been nine months. So, the trends aren't changing so fast that a lot of this material needs to change just yet.
Jayneil: Talk about the speed at which big companies move.
Ryan: Right but also the speed of markets. You mentioned speed and I like to think, I think I mentioned this before, more like gravity. So, if we think about gravity, if you're talking about the organizational level, the gravitational pull to sort of align with the speed or velocity or cadence of that organization is strong. So, kind of that higher you go up in a hierarchical pyramid of an organization, the more adjusted you are to that slower pace of decision making, if you will, whereas conversely, say at like the individual level, the gravitational pull for individual success or individual progress or individual development is stronger than the organizational pull. And so, the speed at which we could work as an individual is very different than that as an organization but then as an individual, you could probably only reach a couple people whereas as an organization, you can reach many, many more. So, it's interesting because it's not just speed. There's sort of these other physics-based forces that come into play and pretty abstract. I like to kind of nerd out and draw things around what that might look like but when I do that, I’m trying to put down some sort of pragmatic and applicable ways that you can deal with these fuzzy things like speed or philosophy.
Jayneil: That makes sense to me, absolutely. As I think about my experience in the corporate world, I definitely see that as one goes up the ladder, things are not always as fast as me and my peers making quick decision at the bottom of the totem pole, if you may, and upgrading your skill sets. Speaking of the book with InVision, what are you calling that book? And is it free?
Ryan: Yes. So, it is free. It's part of their Design Better Series and the book is called Business Thinking for Designers and it's kind of about 90 pages of sort of a step-by-step process that I introduced of really how to develop more business acumen. And I kind of mentioned it is over my career, I grew really frustrated that me learning a skill was not necessarily impacting my ability to kind of have more influence, be part of some strategic conversations but also to show how my work was having some type of impact on competitive advantage or revenue or retention, things like that. And so, the book is an overview of some of the tools and processes and methodologies that you can learn but really to show how they fit together so that you can develop your business acumen. One of the things that I like to say is this is a book for people who find their frustrations following them from job to job or company to company. So, if you find that the same sort of frustrations follow you from one place to another, the only consistent variable is you, those companies are different but if you find that you're having the same frustrations, then it's time for you to maybe pivot and make some changes. And so, that's where this book is targeted towards. It's going to be an audio book and ePub book as well and everything will be on the Design Better website. So, it's a DesignBetter.com/BusinessThinking.
Jayneil: And how did this opportunity come about?
Ryan: Again, fortunately, I know Aaron Walter and Eli Woolery from the Design Leadership Camp events and they lead the Design Better Series and work and all those resources. So, I approached them. I said “This is something that I’ve been working on for a while and that I’m going out to start my own company and I’d be interested in writing a book. What are your thoughts?” And that's where the conversation started and it was a great experience and I really enjoyed it.
Jayneil: And then thinking of pursuing like a free book that you can offer, did you also think about maybe doing a paid version of it?
Ryan: So, that's where I considered it at the time early on when I was thinking about the book of sort of different publishing models but for me, where I wanted to spend the most of my time sort of being paid is really in that mentorship side of things. So, I hope that my instructional programs are more like mentoring on steroids. I like working with other people. I like seeing them progress. I like sort of collaborating in that way. And so, when I was considering the book and just kind of selling it on its own, I don't think there are a lot of books that make a lot of money. And so, I’d rather say “Here's a bunch of information free. If this is of interest to you and you want to dig in and dive deeper into this material, yeah, let's talk. And here are some programs or some solutions for you in that space.” Yeah, that's how I came to that decision.
Jayneil: So, now business is doing great. You're on track to achieve your goals. Was there ever a conversation with yourself where you said “I’m going to give myself a one-year or two-year period to just see how this company does and if I don't hit the scales, then it's going back to working at a company.”
Ryan: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think we're getting close to that time. I’ve taken some risks after kind of assessing the opportunity in front of me, so some calculated risks. And we'll see how those pay off in the coming weeks but regardless, it's been a fantastic opportunity to kind of take the time to educate myself in a way of going through this process and writing and all those things. As a business owner, as a parent, as a husband and as somebody who likes to live a quality of life that benefits me, yes, those decisions come up. And if this does not end up resulting in a model that allows me to be independent and continue to do this, then I might go look for other alternatives but I think this is something that even with those alternatives I’ll continue to do. And so, it would be perhaps not the same type of opportunities that I’ve had in the past but opportunities where, yes, if I had to go back and work with others, I would do so but still kind of maintain my ability to do this as well because this is a passion thing for me.
Jayneil: Yeah. And the reason I was asking you is I feel like I’m in a similar type of boat. So, I’m leaving AT&T on April 20th, that’s my last day. And on the side, I’ve been teaching students at Career Foundry, 60+ students.
Ryan: Nice.
Jayneil: It's nowhere bringing in, obviously, the amount of money that I would get at my corporate job but I definitely enjoy the flexibility of just being remote and myself. And right now, I’m just kind of in that zone where I’m like “Well, do I really want to go back and work or do I want to do this thing that I really love, the teaching and just being remote?” So, I’m at the same crossroads.
Ryan: Right. And everything is a trade-off decision. And I think we mentioned that self-assessment. One has to be really mature about where their priorities are and what drives them and sort of motivates them as well as what frustrates or annoys them to sort of get into this space where money isn't everything or benefits aren't everything. I should also acknowledge that that's a very lucky place to be in. It's very fortunate. I have a lot of privilege in my life that allows me to kind of make those decisions. And from the sound of it, it sounds like you've had that luck and fortune as well. And so, I know that not everybody has that choice. Yeah, I’d love to hear how your progress goes and what it's like to off-board from your regular full-time corporate gig into the gig of you, know what comes up. I hope you write about it. I hope you talk about it.
Jayneil: Thank you. Thanks so much for the encouragement, man. I’ll definitely keep you posted on it. What does Ryan stand for?
Ryan: That's a good question. I think we've been kind of dancing around it. It's a good question. And I think what I stand for first and foremost is my family. They are numero uno, right? They are everything but I also believe in kindness. I believe in giving back if you've been fortunate enough to learn or develop or understand to give back to those that might need it or want it. I believe in women. I believe in science. I believe that I have and will continue to make mistakes in my professional and personal lives but I also believe in getting up and doing better and getting on with it. I believe I have good ideas and good sort of approaches with those ideas but they're not all the good ideas. There are lots of other people who have amazing ideas and I love what they're doing. And lastly, yeah, getting back to that sort of fortunate place that I’m in, I believe I’m much more fortunate than others and I think it's my job to listen better every day to understand and do what I can to support others as well.
Jayneil: Love it. How do designers contact you if they want to take one of your courses or just ask you questions?
Ryan: Yeah, pretty easy. So, I’m on social media, so @RyanRumsey, but then I’m also at RyanRumsey.com or you could find out about all the courses and materials at SecondWaveDive.com. That's where you can find me.
Jayneil: Any parting words to designers who want to go out and do their own thing like you?
Ryan: I think if it's a fit for you and if it's working for you, go do it, go get it. Be the person you want; live the life you want and give back to others when you can.
Jayneil: Thank you so much, Ryan, for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom.
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