Protect Your Wandering

What a career eventually teaches you — if you let it

A month ago, I wrote a piece called Where I Spend My Time.

I wasn’t entirely sure how it would land. It felt personal, maybe too personal. But the response surprised me.

Messages from colleagues. A note from someone who said they were going to have their college freshman read it. Conversations that started with I’ve been thinking about what you wrote… and went somewhere I didn’t expect.

One of those conversations happened at The Bitter End.

If you haven’t been, it’s a 24-hour coffee shop worn smooth by decades of professionals, students, late nights, and early mornings. The kind of place where the furniture has history, and the air feels like it’s still holding onto ideas from the last hundred conversations.

I like it there.

Things tend to get said more honestly than they do in conference rooms.

A young designer I know sat across from me, hands wrapped around a mug and asked the question that tends to find me now more than it used to.

What do you wish you had known sooner?

I told them I was going to resist the urge to sound wise. At least right away.

Instead, I told them a story.

The Bitter End

I was a wanderer.

Not lost. Wandering is different from lost. Wandering is intentional hunger — the childlike, slightly reckless desire to absorb everything within reach. New materials. Unfamiliar typologies. Ideas from completely outside the profession that had no business informing an architectural decision, and for that reason, often did.

I wanted to experience as much as could possibly be absorbed. I made very little apology for it.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure if that quality was an asset or a liability.

It turned out to be the foundation of everything.

Because curiosity — real curiosity, the kind that doesn’t need a destination to justify the trip, is what keeps a creative person alive over a long career. It is what stops the work from calcifying. It is what keeps you genuinely interested in the person sitting across the table from you, rather than simply managing the transaction.

So, before anything else:

Protect your wandering.

Even when the profession tries to organize it out of you.

For years, part of my responsibility was helping shape design culture within a firm.

But I increasingly believed good design culture was really a culture of curiosity.

So, we made room for experimentation. Installations. Competitions. Artistic exercises with no guarantee of outcome other than discovery.

Looking back, some of the most important ideas emerged from spaces that appeared, at first glance, unproductive.

They weren’t.

They were rehearsal for deeper thinking.

A reflection on healing, inclusion, and interdependence. Inspired by Detroit's history, the installation explored the idea that communities, like structures, are strongest when their differences are connected rather than separated

For most of my career, I operated the way most architects do.

More projects. More complexity. More recognition.

The profession rewards ambition, and ambition is not a bad thing. It sharpens you. It pushes you into territory you would never enter on your own.

But somewhere along the way, and I could not have told you exactly when, more started to feel less like a compass and more like a treadmill.

I was moving constantly. I just wasn’t sure I was arriving anywhere.

I remember sitting with a project once, important, complicated, well-budgeted, exactly the kind of work the profession tells you to want.

And I felt something unexpected.

Vaguely empty.

Not ungrateful. Not burned out.

Just quietly aware that this wasn’t the thing.

That feeling matters.

Don’t rush to explain it away when it arrives.

The first piece I wrote was about where I eventually chose to point my focus, toward the homes most people live in, the ones designed quickly and built to a budget, without a single moment of genuine architectural thought.

That gap still bothers me.

It is where I believe my time matters most.

But what I didn’t write about was the how behind that choice.

How do you learn to make a decision like that?

To trade breadth for depth. To narrow your focus not because you ran out of ambition, but because you finally had enough clarity to aim it somewhere true.

That is what we were really talking about at The Bitter End.

Early in a career, you need breadth.

You need to try things, fail at things, wander a little.

That is not wasted time.

That is the tuition.

But there comes a moment and you will feel it before you can name it, when breadth starts working against you. When saying yes to everything means you never go deep enough on anything.

That is the moment to get honest with yourself.

Not what can I do?

But what am I actually here to do?

Here is what I have learned.

And I’ll give it to you straight, the way I would have wanted someone to give it to me.

Protect the wandering.

I know I already said this. I’m saying it again because the pressure to specialize, to niche down, to become legible to the market — it comes early, and it comes hard.

Don’t let it arrive before you’ve had a chance to be genuinely surprised by something you didn’t expect to care about.

Curiosity is not inefficiency.

It is research you haven’t named yet.

Dploi began with a simple question: Why do children build forts? The installation explored our enduring desire to create places of refuge, ownership, and imagination, spaces within spaces that we can shape as our own.

Impress fewer people. Serve more of them.

The profession has a way of orienting you toward visibility. Toward recognition. Toward becoming legible to the people evaluating your career.

Some of that is healthy.

Ambition sharpens you.

But over time, I found myself caring less about being associated with the work and more about whether the work genuinely mattered to the people experiencing it.

That changes how you move through a career.

You stop chasing authorship quite so hard. You become more interested in contribution.

In collaboration. In helping younger designers find confidence and voice. In building things that quietly improve someone’s life, even if nobody publishes them.

At some point, respect inside the room started meaning more to me than recognition outside of it.

I think that was a healthy trade.

Restraint is not retreat.

This one took me the longest to learn.

Saying no to the wrong things is not failure.

It is precision.

I entered a design competition recently miniature chairs made entirely from the materials of a single champagne bottle. Cork, wire, foil, cap.

I chose to spare the cork.

That single act of restraint became the whole idea.

What remained the pieces everyone else discards turned into something I was genuinely proud of.

Your career works the same way.

What you choose not to do shapes you just as much as what you do.

UNcorked: An exercise in finding value in the overlooked

Enough is not a small word.

In a profession built on more, enough can feel like giving up.

It isn’t.

Enough is what you arrive at when ambition stops being performance and starts becoming intention.

When the work is pointed somewhere real. When you wake up knowing exactly why you are doing what you are doing.

That is not settling.

That is arrival.

We sat there a little longer than either of us planned.

The Bitter End has a way of doing that.

At some point, the young designer across from me said something I liked.

They said it felt less like advice and more like permission.

I’ll take that.