Visuals increase the velocity of your message by an order of magnitude.

You can (and should) get better at writing, speaking, selling, etc. All brilliant skills with massive leverage.

But realizing that "design" isn't a skill reserved for art school or design specific careers, is a ridiculously powerful force multiplier for your ideas.

The barriers that used to exist: expensive software, tuition, certification, etc are no longer there.

Fire up YouTube, crack open Figma and experiment.

99/100 people will never do this because they aren't "creative."

But, those same people will often see the merit in laboring for a 1% improvement skills that everyone else is already practicing.

Design + anything is a massive, massive advantage.

Like anything else, there are people who have been practicing this skill for decades and it'll feel terrible comparing your work to theirs (but that's also how you know you have taste.)

I used to believe this wasn't true. It's something you have or you don't (idiotic and incorrect.)

But I've since seen (and I mean this very literally) hundreds of people go from zero to one as designers in very compressed periods of time.

Some have switched careers and now make a living with design, others have massively augmented/differentiated what they were already doing.

I'm yet to meet anyone that didn't start seeing more opportunity after spending some time learning the fundamentals of design.

In the same way expanding your vocabulary allows you to more accurately express what you want to say, design adds an entire new dimension to your ability to communicate.

A sketch on a napkin can do the same amount of communicative lifting as a page covered in wall of text.

That's the power of good design. Saying more with less.

But we discourage people from publishing the equivalent of napkin sketches because they aren't "pretty."

Pretty has something to do with it, but it's the last 10%.

The first 90% is the ability to better communicate an idea.

If you want to learn, I want to help.