Daily Prompt: Comfort Zone

What are you more comfortable with — routine and planning, or laissez-faire spontaneity?

I don’t always adhere to the “letter of the law” when it comes to these daily prompt posts….and today is no different. 😉

As architects and design professionals it is easy to get comfortable, to stick with what you know, to take the road often traveled. By this I mean it’s easy to stick ourselves in a category and never venture beyond our self-imposed bounds. And in years past, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you got a few similar projects, you quickly became very good at a select market sector. And if you did good work for those clients, word spread and suddenly you’re the “strip mall guy” or the “urgent care guy” or the “hospital guy” or the “residential addition guy”, so on and so forth ad nauseum. But if history teaches us anything it is that a good thing can not last forever.

Businesses, any business, that do not position themselves to adapt and grow or change with the times will fail. It is no longer a matter of “if” but rather “when”. Architects, design professionals and architecture in general are no different. I even venture to state that Architects are not meant to be pigeon-holed into any specialty. We are Master Builders, and this is our calling. It is not our calling to be hospital designers, or home designers, or mini-mart designers. An Architect can do all of these things once the right team has been assembled. And that is the way it should be.

So, I challenge all my fellow architects and designers out there, stop pigeon-holing yourself. Get out of whatever comfort zone you’ve put yourself in, or been put in by others, and get out there. Design something different, design it well and more clients will come. Our specialty should be architecture. Period.

Daily Prompt: Erasure

You have the choice to erase one incident from your past, as though it never happened. What would you erase and why?

The answer for this is easy:

NOT. ONE. SINGLE. THING.

My life is a cumulative achievement made up of all the choices that I have made throughout my life. The good, the bad and the ugly. If I was able to change an incident or a choice that I made I would fundamentally be a different person today. Perhaps I would be a person who wouldn’t care about the Daily Prompt, in which case you wouldn’t be reading this right now. Perhaps if I could change my life I would make the wrong choice and I would be worse off for it.

The bottom line is you can not change the past. Nor should you want to. Do we all do things that are unfortunate, mean, illegal or just wrong? Sure. The point of life is to move beyond those mistakes and missteps, learn the lessons that are offered in those moments and make better choices down the road.

You are who you are for a reason. Rather than focusing on what you could change, accept who are you, love who you are and make choices that will hopefully make your life and the lives around you better.