Site Visit: Grit
screenshot of Grit’s landing page.
Getting to visit Grit was one of my favorite site visits so far. I found Sean’s journey to be particularly inspiring. Sean got his degree in fine arts and then moved into agency life where he self-taught himself design and advertising. He found himself quickly bored with the limited scope of his role – he wanted to do everything. Fast forward a few years, he started Grit where he and all of his employees could do everything. Sean described Grit as an environment where everybody does everything – design, copyrighting, art direction, animating.
Sean’s trajectory was not at all linear – at fact I find reassuring. At each decision point, he took the information he knew about what he loved and how he wanted to work to figure out what was next. As someone whose path has also been very circuitous, it is inspiring to see someone else take a round about path to doing something they love. It is clear that Sean is incredibly passionate about what he does. When talking about the characteristics most important for success, Sean emphasized the importance of loving what you do and being willing to learn. It’s not just about having the right technical skills but about being driven by an intrinsic love for the work. While I agree that this is the ideal, it sometimes feels beyond reach to me. In my own journey, I want to do something I love but also feel bound by the very practical concerns of income and the need to support my family. I sometimes feel like I have too many responsibilities to be driven purely by passion. In conjunction with this, I also really love and value my time outside of work. I don’t want passion for my job to take over my whole life.
On of the things that resonated the most with my was Sean’s take on the importance of interaction and relationship. I appreciated that Sean had developed a process beyond “present 3 options and do 3 rounds of edits.” His process of present everything and make as many changes as needed allows for designers and clients to really be partners in the development of a concept and deliverable. Those kinds of relationships are the foundation to why I entered the design world to begin with. For my own sanity however I think I would work best with slightly more parameters than Sean does at Grit.
