Twenty years. I have tried to count the pages I have touched and I can't, honestly, but it is somewhere in the tens of thousands, and I want to set down what is left when you take all of it away.
Here is what I am proud of, and it is not what I expected at twenty-two. It is not any single piece of work. It is that a nurse at the Grey Nuns found her way down a corridor. That a citizen got a permit from the City of Edmonton without standing in a queue. That a welder's reputation finally matched his website. Almost none of it is in a portfolio, and all of it is the point.
Here is what I got wrong, and I will be specific, because vague regret is useless. I said yes too often, for too little, for too long. I explained my work when I should have just made it better. I reached for cleverness in rooms that only needed clarity. I lost a client once because I was too pleased with myself.
And here is the smallest lesson, the one that took two decades and tens of thousands of pages to arrive at, which is a little embarrassing given how simple it is.
Find out what the person actually needs. Give them that. Take everything else away.
That is the whole of it. It was true of a sign at a racetrack and it is true of an AI system, and I expect it to be true of whatever comes next, because it was never really about the medium. The good decisions all turned out to be the same decision: to remove something so a person could get where they were going.
Twenty years to learn one sentence. I would do it again, and I'd like to spend the next twenty getting better at saying it.