For a while now, I’ve been writing a book. It’s called Do The Thing: Stop Postponing Yourself. A Modern Maker Manifesto.
It follows five stages: Find, Start, Focus, Cultivate, Ship. Each chapter opens with a place and a year, a moment from my own life when that stage became real for me. Then come the Present Principles: short, practical, meant to be used rather than just read.
Today I’m sharing another piece of it, from the beginning: Chapter 1, Find The Thing. The story that opens it, and one of the exercises that grew out of it. It’s still a manuscript, so expect a little scruff.
Cologne, 2004
My childhood room smells of shisha. Double-Apple, our favorite. I’m still playing football three times a week and I’m deep into my Aikido practice, but for a while now, Counter-Strike and Warcraft have my attention.
“Let’s meet on the server!” I hang up the landline phone and boot up my tuned PC.
We organize LAN parties. We play online for hours. We start our own clans (shout-outs to Vatos Cologne and team.Marzo). Inside Counter-Strike, you can upload your own designs and spray them onto the walls of the map. Every player wants their own logo to spread. And every clan comes with a visual identity, website, and merch. Someone has to make it.
That someone is me.
So after a few games with my buddies, I turn to my newest hobby, the fast-growing passion that is even more fun than jumping around de_aztec: I open my cracked versions of Photoshop and Illustrator and completely dive in. Hours pass. I build dozens of logos for my friends and family. Then full identities, stationery, posters, websites. The click comes when my designs leave Photoshop and enter the real world. It starts inside a game, and suddenly it’s everywhere.
Graphic design feels liberating. For the first time I feel I can really express myself, and help others at the same time. I have found a tool that lets me create something useful, and beautiful, for the people around me.
And graphic design is the perfect playground. I can move fast. Experiment fast. Learn fast. If it’s bad, I press Ctrl+Alt+Z until it’s gone and start over. Nothing really breaks, so the growth curve is steep. Everyone needs graphics, everyone needs identity, and design connects me to all kinds of people and professions. Every request pulls me into somebody else’s world.
The more I try, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I want to build. I say yes to everything.
I consider myself lucky that I had supportive parents who paved the way for me to find what I love. They supported weird hobbies and real passions the same way. They listened. Both of them were self-employed, riding that rollercoaster, also financially. And still they found ways to get us the tools we needed, even when it meant borrowing money. This is not normal. I’m forever grateful.
At night, alone in my room, I listen to music and dream about my future. House music. Bossa nova. When I ride my bike through the city after dark, it’s the St. Germain album. It helps me dream. I see myself as an international designer, working for brands I love, in slick agencies, in the greatest cities of the world. Traveling. And building my own brands that can inspire people. I start to write it all down. I start to collect visuals.
Little do I know that this dreaming, writing, collecting will still be part of my life twenty years later. Or that most of those dreams will actually come true. (The rest? I’m working on it!)
That’s how I fell in love with graphic design, at fourteen. I feel immensely grateful for having found my Thing that early. And I promised myself back then to devote a big part of my Thing to helping others find theirs.
This chapter is me keeping that promise.
Follow The Pull: Your Childhood Obsession Knows Something You Don’t
Three steps and one sheet of paper. Don’t interpret anything until step three:
Step 1: What did you love at fourteen? Before anyone told you what to be. Write down three childhood obsessions. Don’t judge them. Just get them on paper.
Step 2: What makes you feel alive today? Write down everything you enjoy or find fulfilling. Include things you rarely do. Include things you’d be embarrassed to put on a CV. Include things you’ve been doing since you were a kid without anyone telling you to. Reading, coding, drawing, fixing things, talking to strangers, organizing chaos, making people laugh. All of it counts. Don’t filter, don’t ask if it’s practical yet. Then read the list back. Some items will feel flat. Others will have a kind of pull to them. Mark the three with the strongest pull.
Step 3: Connect the dots. Lay the two lists side by side. Are your interests creative, analytical, physical, social, solitary? More importantly: look for surprising combinations. Steve Jobs once said that creativity is “just connecting things.” The secret about uniqueness is that it rarely lives in a single skill. It lives in the combination of your…
Want to keep reading? The rest of this chapter is already waiting inside presentOS. Become Present Pro to unlock full chapters in early preview, updates from behind the scenes, and the printed book when it’s out later this year.
What were you obsessed with at fourteen? Hit reply. I’d love to hear from you.
Talk to you soon,
Hugo
💚
…fühlt sich an wie Leidenschaft 😉