#degrate

The Design Strategies & Motivation course is put into place in order for Masters of Media Design to reevaluate past projects, and elevate them to new, professional levels.

The first part of my project is to revise the charitable sea turtle event. During this course, I’ve started the process by changing the event name, and recreating the logo. The process included multiple revisions and peer/instructor feedback.

Connecting/Synthesizing/Transforming - The research that I utilized was peer and instructor feedback, Lynda and Youtube tutorials, feedback from friends, and incorporating a second round of research when it came to navigating across Adobe Illustrator, and creating a strong logo. I used all of these tools to create various revisions. The feedback received helped push each solution forward.

Problem Solving - For the logo of my charitable sea turtle event, I was solving the problem of inexperience. For example, I felt as if my logo was not an accurate representation of my skill and creativity. I felt as if my logo represented that I did not have much knowledge or experience with creating logo and using Adobe programs. For this reason, the logo that I had initially created did not accurately represent the brand, nor was it the most legible and effective solution. Therefore, I wanted to create a stronger design solution that was more professional and worthy of client presentation.

Innovative Thinking - I feel as if my work does not really compare to others in the industry. This is because I am growing to be unafraid of challenging boundaries. For example, this revision phase included a ton of feedback on the placement and legible ability of my typography choices. However, I used the characteristic of “unity” in order to defend those choices. My work is innovative because I think outside of the box, and use elements that are questionable, which leaves room for more interpretation. My work is innovative because it doesn’t include the basic characteristics that many designers often live by and operate within.

Acquiring Competencies - Throughout this process, I learned more about Adobe Illustrator. I learned how to better place typography elements, and how to create more effective solutions that are accurately cohesive, and representative of why brand.

I also learned the ability to accept constant critiques and continuously work towards new solutions.

Below, you will find various images from this process. 

see my logo in action below. 

just a basic logo for the purposes of this week’s assignment.

[references located below as well]

LinkIn with me, yo.

or, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn. 

Whichever you prefer.

www.linkedin.com/in/tiarydegrate

This is cool. I have truly enjoyed this Mastery Course. I feel fancy.

*sips tea with pinky out*

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ooooo pretty!

Feedly seems quite similar to Papaly. 

However, here on Feedly, I can read journal articles and blog posts on specific topics that may pertain to my Mastery Journey. I can also share them with my current (and imaginary) team of creatives.

As explained in this week’s Go To Training video, Feedly allows me to follow the feeds of blogs that I love-without necessarily having to visit these blogs everyday.

You mean to tell me that I can get Rawvana feeds with great ease? 

*Lightbulb*

I must explore Feedly a lot more.

It seems as if you have to upgrade your account in order to get the most of Feedly. Perhaps they should take suggestions from Papaly...

The excitement is real, however.

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I love multiple things, but the two things that I love the most are writing and designing. I truly believe that my life’s task is to inspire others, specifically through my writing and design endeavors. Although I have a strong inclination (and underlying wish) that my endeavors will eventually lead me on the path to writing books, I need to focus on the truth. I am a phenomenal writer, but I do not enjoy writing like I enjoy designing. I am passionate about communicating across various media platforms. I love designing different campaigns and providing for a broad audience. I hope to bridge the gap between social, cultural, and racial barriers in art.

As a freshman in college, I started an inspirational blog that received great praise. My current desire is to start a new lifestyle blog that will allow me to incorporate all of the things that I love doing. Although I had been coding since I was a teenager, my first blog was the first endeavor that I had truly realized the depths of my life’s task. I believe that this was the first personal step on my Mastery Journey that I took towards pursuing my life’s task. One positive thing that I gained from that experience was the understanding that I had a powerful voice that inspired thousands around the world. With all great success, comes struggles, however. This leads me to my negative experience, and what I learned from it. As my blog grew, I began to feel more and more pressure to perform and constantly outdo myself with my content. While I had a ton of positive people in my corner, I started to see a trickle of negative people who either did not agree with me and my viewpoints or did not like my persona entirely. This negativity started to consume me, made me feel insecure, and made me question my life’s task. Because of my newly discovered low confidence, I stopped blogging altogether.

This brings me to Robert Greene’s “Strategies for Acquiring Social Intelligence.” In it, I found a sort of stressful, yet comforting concept. A negative thing about being a Master (or a human being in general), is that there will always be some sort of parasitic counterforce that attempts to pollute your mind. This very thought invokes a sense of fear, reminding me of the challenges that I have had to overcome in order to have even earned my seat in life present-day. However, I believe that for every negative thing, there’s also something positive. The positive here is that the negative can be combatted. Sometimes, standing up for what you believe in can result in your demise. In Greene’s section “Speak Through Your Work,” he tells the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, who, through his insistence of improper protocols enforced his beliefs upon many in the medical field with great frustration. Although his frustration was cultivated through the amount of people who constantly shunned his theories when he thought the evidence was blatantly apparent, Semmelweis carried his negative resentments throughout the rest of his career. This reminded me of many martyrs who have changed the scope of mankind. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was one such martyr. While his beliefs, sentiments, and speeches gave way to the more inclusive society that we live in today, they led to his own assassination. Speaking through his work brought him great recognition. Even in death, his voice still resonates.

To stand far more “socially intelligent,” as Greene calls it, can often pose a threat to those within our society. People are so used to either doing things by the book or giving away what power they hold themselves, that they are often uninviting to new innovations. One powerful take-all that I have gained from this week’s reading is the understanding and courage to stand firm in what I believe. As Greene points out, we will always encounter fools along our journey. However, we can “Suffer Fools Gladly,” and truly prevail.

Another negative thing that I discovered is that our personality and our actions will reflect on the world, and if we are not careful, our persona can come in between our Mastery Journey and our success. This concept tugs on the strings of my heart. We have all heard that you should “never judge a book by its cover.” I try to practice this principle in all of my affairs, and I truly despise people judging in this manner. I truly believe that it is important to consider the content of someone’s character. A person’s outer appearance is hardly ever an accurate depiction of who they truly are. It also isn’t fair to judge someone for these reasons. I will choose to introduce Donald Trump for explaining purposes here. A close friend of mine and I have been debating on politics for some time. While neither of us support Donald Trump as a president, I am not afraid to express my sentiments on the fella. She, however, hates hearing of my sentiments in the way that I so deeply present them. I do not know Donald Trump personally, so the way I speak about him is unfair to her. While many American citizens may understand and value his points as a valid businessman, others refute him as the president of our country because they despise his persona. It is the characteristics that he portrays, his actions, and his words that inevitably led people to deem him untrustworthy and unfit to run or represent our country as a whole. My fear of a brewing war-zone is her fuel to turn the other cheek. Through my debates with her, I have realized that I am a fool myself! In many ways, I have had a double-standard. Greene insists that if we are able to see the fool in ourselves, we will be better able to handle others and overcome difficult situations.  

Again, as I mentioned earlier, for every negative, there is a positive. Just as people judging one on their physical characteristics or persona overall is negative, I find positivity in Greene’s dissection of Temple Grandin’s experiences. In the “See Yourself as Others See You” section, Greene argues that it is important to be able to recognize the positive and negative attributes that your audience experiences in relation to you. Because Temple Grandin wanted to perfect her craft and her persona, she truly absorbed the feedback from others. Rather than taking things personally and quitting or putting others down, Temple Grandin would take her shortcomings and use them in order to further advance herself towards being the ideal individual that she wanted to be. In doing so, she learned exactly how to have a more positive impact on others. I aspire to be more like Temple Grandin in my Mastery Journey. I want to utilize my negative and positive attributes in order to become a better Master. Even with the negative situations and difficult fools that are still waiting to pursue me, I will prevail.

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I’m Tiary DeGrate.

What an impeccable course to start my Mastery Journey! 

I am excited to embark on this journey, in awe of the concepts and suggestions that have already been introduced to me, and extremely confident about my decision to obtain my Master’s Degree in Media Design from Full Sail University.

Although I am only approaching my third week, my expectations have already been exceeded. When I enrolled in the Media Design program, I was under the impression that I would only be enhancing my design skills. My Mastery Journey is multi-faceted, however; I am not only expounding upon prior skills, but I am also being encouraged to strengthen my character.

I am receiving priceless life-lessons, and for that, I am forever grateful.

Over the next 12 months, I hope to strengthen my understanding of myself and my Life’s Task. After being introduced to Robert Greene’s Mastery, I am inspired to revisit my childhood experiences, absorb the lessons from other Masters, and possess and utilize Master’s characteristics on my own.

I came into this program thinking that I wanted to know all of the answers. It is crazy to believe that less than a month ago, I had believed that mere intelligence was the key to success. I thought that in order to be the best in my field, I had to know everything and surpass the skill level of others. Today, however, I have a deep desire to increase my curiosity. Even beyond my 12 months in the Media Design program, I will strive to never stop asking questions. I hope to accept things without judgement while also challenging what I know as truth. I also hope to have the courage to challenge other concepts, push boundaries, and rewrite various ideologies.

While on my Mastery Journey, I am eager to unlock my Dimensional Mindset. I would like to have a full understanding of my Life’s Task, the skills that allow me to pursue it, and the knowledge that allows me to challenge and rewrite it. After my Mastery Journey, I will continue to utilize everything that was freely given to me. I look forward to further absorbing the concepts, applying them to my life, and contributing to the world with my own Mastery.

Robert Greene’s Mastery has truly given me a deeper understanding of life. The readings alone have instilled me with clarity. For this reason, I am positive that I can achieve what once seemed unobtainable.

Prior to this course, I only looked forward to rediscovering my voice and learning more about designing. I will leave this course with so much more. In mastering the Media Design industry, I must possess characteristics that transcend design skills. In order to make the most of this opportunity, and truly reach my full potential, I intend to constantly push myself to exceed my own expectations.

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Bonjour!

My name is Tiary Degrate, and I am originally from Texas. As a military brat, my family was always on the move. It was this nomadic lifestyle that has contributed greatly to deciding to get my Master’s in Media Design. My love of design and my obsession with learning new languages and cultures, have both stemmed from the experiences that I have had growing up. The two have synonymously cultivated my ultimate desire to have my own unique lifestyle magazine.

As I began reading “Mastery” by Robert Greene, I knew that I was exactly where I needed to be. I immediately began to make connections to my own life, and understood concepts that I had been pondering for decades. It felt great to have my feelings validated, and my curiosity and excitement grew with each page. My Grit Scale and Ambition Scale Self-Assessment results came as no surprise to me. Both tests yielded results that were extremely close to the maximum score that I could receive. My three strongest areas are overcoming setbacks in order to conquer important challenges, achieving goals that take years of work, and aiming to be the best in the world at what I do. My weakest areas are being obsessed with certain ideas for short periods of time, but later losing interest, being distracted by new ideas and projects, and finishing whatever I begin. Because of the reading, I now have a clearer understanding of my results.

Robert Greene provides a revolutionary introduction for his findings in “Mastery.” In it, he illuminates the importance of Mastery by presenting it in the context of our evolution (p. 5). In doing so, I believe that he successfully conveys how vital it is to realize the origin of the concept, and that we all possess these characteristics naturally. Just as Greene outlines how our earliest ancestors evolved in order to survive, I too did the same thing.

Because my family constantly relocated, I had to learn to adjust to change at a relatively young age.  Neither time, nor stability were ever on my side. For this reason, possessing the ability to quickly overcome setbacks came as no surprise to me. The same applies to my ability to achieve long-term goals. At an early age, I learned that our constant moving was not changing anytime soon. Therefore, if I wanted to try something or complete a goal, I had to rise above my circumstances, and do so. Often times, moving a lot meant starting over, readjusting, and having to have extreme patience.

I believe that aiming to be the best in the world also stems from the lifestyle I lived. My parents were very young when they had me. My dad was always fulfilling his military duties, and my mom was finishing school and working two jobs. This left little time for me. Not receiving the love, affection, or time that I would have liked to receive contributed to me reaching outwardly to fulfill these voids. The recognition that I received from my design endeavors would supply me with the love that I did not receive at home.

My areas of weakness are what I used to heavily correlate the reading and my self-assessment results. This is because I had begun to literally lose my mind trying to discover what path I was supposed to be on. Within the past few years, I had started to believe that I was approaching the invisible time limit that I had set for myself. I clung to Greene’s concepts to supply me with answers. The first weakness that I want to address is my tendency to be obsessed with certain ideas and projects for only a short period of time. For me, this weakness is multifaceted. On the one hand, I placed a great deal of blame on my inconsistent environmental factors. Moving often meant constantly meeting new people and learning new things. Because I struggled with identifying with my own sense of self, I would see someone else doing something they loved, or hear someone else’s aspirations, and attempt to forcefully apply them to my own life. This supports my other two weaknesses as well. After diving deeper into “Mastery,” I began to realize that I jumped into new projects, often got distracted by new ideas, and quit a lot of my endeavors because I was not truly following my own intuition (p. 25). This lack of intuition not only kept me from completing projects, but it also contributed to me succumbing to the rules of society, and suppressing my own voice. I was constantly striving to fulfill someone else’s dreams instead of my own.

In further explaining the concept of Mastery, Greene states that those who reach the Mastery level eventually “learn the rules so well that [they] can now be the ones to break or rewrite them” (Greene, 2012, p. 3). This touched my heart deeply because I truly understood a significant factor in my own lack of Mastery. Somewhere along my path, I lost confidence in my own intuition. I struggled with presenting my truth as fact. I could relate to the feelings of a euphoric, child-like sense of clarity, and even pinpoint instances in which this concept was within my grasp. Somehow, I still allowed myself to become one of the statistics that Greene explains as having given in to some other life-force (p. 26). In turn, my ability to identify with my own Life’s Task has been weakened (p. 26).

All in all, I am ecstatic to begin this journey. I have written down the strategies for finding my Life’s Task, and plan to be mindful of them with each day. Following the strategies is the key to improving my weaknesses. Sure, I am on a journey towards Mastery in a career sense, but I am also on a journey towards mastering myself.

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