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Unlearning Is an Underrated Skill
When you let go of the wrong lessons you’ve picked up throughout your life, you’ll find new possibilities
Six years ago, product designer Andrei Herasimchuk wrote of an earlier time when he learned the wrong lesson during his career at Adobe. Early into his career as a designer, he had built a prototype over the weekend and a few days into his workweek. One of the product managers, who had worked at Adobe for a while and was well-liked by the team, stopped by Harsimchuk’s cubicle. The following conversation would change his life:
“Well,” they continued, “while I certainly applaud your effort, I must say that you really don’t need to go to this length. You’ll have to do this all the time for all the products going forward. These screenshots you have here are plenty. It’s all we’ve ever done before, so there’s really no need to spend this kind of time on a prototype.”
Next came the mistake. Like I said, one of the biggest ones I’ve made in my career. It’s burned into my brain as if it happened five minutes ago.
I simply said, “Um… Ok. I guess. If you think so.”
I never built another prototype while working at Adobe again.
Herasimchuk takes responsibility for learning this wrong lesson, writing, “I could have easily ignored the product manager’s advice and stayed the course with my trained design process and built out my prototype. No one at Adobe ever forced me to work in one particular way, and no one would have stopped me.”
Still, the damage was done — that conversation set him back five years of making prototypes and programming as part of his job, and also the culture change he could have made as an early member of what would become a very large team.
Similarly, author Mark Manson writes of a similar lesson Will Smith would need to unlearn in their collaborative project, Will. Will was working with his son Jaden on After Earth, a project intended to nurture their relationship. While it worked as intended, bringing father and son closer together in the…
