Arrive with Less
At the end of my senior year, I got to go to Greece for six weeks. I was so pumped. It was my first trip abroad, and I daydreamed about all the aesthetic photos I could get for my IG.
To know what to pack, I did what I’m sure most of us do: I built Pinterest boards, scoured travel blogs, and Googled “What to wear in Greece in summer.” I packed my suitcase to the brim with floaty linen shirts, cotton shorts, and sandals. I was ready to have my European summer.
Then I landed. Everyone wore jeans...even in the height of summer. They sported crisp white Reeboks or Nikes, with not a single open-toe shoe in sight. The outfits I’d been re-pinning didn’t match how people actually lived there.
Three weeks in, I went shopping, tired of sticking out, embarrassed by how confidently off-base I’d been.
I packed wrong because I “researched”.
Bought a denim skirt to fit in
Did a better job when I went to Lisbon…still not 100% right, though
So, when I moved to Portugal a few years later, I’d learned from Greece: don’t show up with answers.
I packed basics on purpose. Partly, I wanted an excuse to shop. Mostly, I knew the only way to understand what actually worked was to be there first and decide second. The cobblestones, the shifting weather, the way Lisbon asks you to move—these details shape what works.
That trip changed how I think about getting dressed. I stopped trying to solve for style in the abstract or chasing “it-girl” trends. I started paying attention to what was in front of me: my body, my life, and the context I moved through. I stopped chasing the idea of a wardrobe and started building one that worked.
Okay, okay, don’t worry. This lesson isn’t just about clothes.
In client work, many designers (myself sometimes included) show up as I did in Greece: we do the research, review the industry, and form ideas before the first call ends.
And sometimes we’re right. But a lot of the time, we’re wearing linen in a city full of denim.
Research gives you exposure, and exposure teaches you what things look like, but not what they are. And that difference matters a lot to the brands you’re creating for.
Exposure is the mood board. Experience is the project that didn’t go the way the mood board suggested.
Exposure is the study of how other studios price their work. Experience is the client who pushed back on your rate, and the moment you decided whether to hold it or fold.
Exposure is reading about brand strategy. Experience is sitting across from a business owner who can’t articulate what makes them different, and having to help them find it anyway, in real time, with no script.
You can learn a lot from exposure. I’m not dismissing it. Please do the research (see my most recent article on Strategy). But there is a ceiling on what it can give you. Most of us hit that ceiling when we face a real client and realize that nothing we prepared quite covers this situation.
That gap, my friends, is where experience lives. The only way to close it is to be wrong enough times that you stop being surprised by the complexity.
The style guides that changed how I dress didn’t tell me what to wear. They taught the underlying logic behind getting dressed: proportion, repetition, and what “enough” looks like. Now I can decide for myself in any context with whatever is in front of me. (Leandra Medine Cohen and Amy Smilovic of Tibi are my guiding lights in the math of fashion).
The best design education works the same way. Design has rules, but they are frameworks, not hard-and-fast rules. Often, they don’t tell you the answer and instead tell you how to find it.
That’s why I get suspicious of anyone who learned design only from the outside. Canva templates, Instagram, and repinning admired work—all of this is only part of the process, sure. But it’s incomplete. You only see that once you’re in something messy and real, solving it yourself.
The practical version of all of this is simple, even if it’s hard.
The main takeaway: arrive prepared, but leave room for experience. The most valuable thing you can bring to a new client, project, or environment is enough openness to learn from what’s actually there.
Ask more questions before you offer more answers. Sit with ambiguity a beat longer than is comfortable. Let the context tell you something before you tell it something back.
The designers I respect most aren’t the ones with the biggest reference libraries; they’re the ones who know how to read a room, a real one, with real stakes, where the answer wasn’t given in advance.
That only comes from showing up. Over and over. In the wrong shoes if you have to.
Class Dismissed.
What’s your version of the Greece trip? What was the moment you realized your research hadn’t actually prepared you? Tell us in The Collective chat.
