A shepherd, a dream and a sycamore
If you haven't read it: Santiago is a shepherd boy in Spain who keeps having the same dream about treasure hidden near the Egyptian pyramids. He sleeps one night in a ruined church where a sycamore has grown up through the sacristy, and the dream comes back. So he sells his sheep and goes.
He gets robbed on his first day in Africa. He spends a year working for a crystal merchant. He crosses the Sahara with a caravan, falls in love at an oasis and learns from an alchemist. When he finally digs at the pyramids, he finds nothing, and a group of strangers beats him up. One of them laughs and says he's had a dream too, about treasure under a sycamore in a ruined church in Spain, and he'd never be fool enough to cross a desert over a dream.
Santiago goes home, digs under the tree he slept beside and finds the treasure.
It's been on my shelf for a long time. It's the book sitting out on the About page right now, the one marked as my current read.
My desert was the trend cycle
Design has a new look every year or two. Flat design, long shadows, glassmorphism, neumorphism, bento grids: each one arrives, takes over the galleries, and becomes the thing clients point at when they say "something like this."
I chased them. Flat design, then glass, and whatever came next, always pared back to the most minimal version I could make. That's part of the job, and honestly, I was good at it. I could pick up the new look fast and make it clean. Clients got modern, polished sites, and I got better at the craft every time.
But the work started to rhyme. I was recreating the same minimal look over and over: a new client, a new palette, the same page. And then I did it to my own portfolio. The one site that was supposed to say who I am looked exactly like everyone else's, including the sites I'd built for other people.
Nothing was wrong with any of it. It just didn't feel like it came from anywhere.
The crystal merchant's problem
There's a character in the book I think about a lot. The crystal merchant has dreamed his whole life of making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and he never goes. He's afraid that once he's done it, he won't have anything left to live for. So he keeps the dream safe by never chasing it.
Trend chasing works a little like that, just in reverse. There's always a next look, so you never have to ask what you would make if nobody was watching. The next trend keeps you busy, and busy is a comfortable place to hide from the harder question.
What was under the tree
My first website was an AOL Hometown page, around 2000, full of spinning GIFs and a Dragon Ball Z sprite powering up in the corner (the whole story is in Less is a bore).
A few years later it was Warcraft III, then World of Warcraft, and I played a lot. And once I got my hands on Photoshop, I started making custom forum signatures for my guildmates and my Warcraft III friends. Every one was wild: big type, glowing effects, their character front and center, everything tied back to their username or the character they'd spent months leveling. Nobody paid me. The reward was a friend showing it off in every post.
I didn't know it was design. It was just the most natural thing in the world for a big nerd who liked making things, and it's the first time I remember feeling like the thing I made was mine. That's the treasure. It was under me the whole time.
The day I got home
This site was supposed to be a portfolio. Every time I had to choose between the safe option and the thing I actually wanted, I picked the thing I wanted, and it turned into every idea I'd ever filed under "too crazy to actually build," all in one place: a black hole in the footer that goes supernova if you feed it enough planets, a wormhole that drops you on a random page, a side-quest game with 19 quests hidden across the site, and an actual boss fight.
The moment it clicked was seeing all of it work together, as one experience. It was a website I'd never had myself, as a visitor, anywhere. It felt like being a kid booting up Ocarina of Time for the first time, or landing on the first Halo ring and just standing there looking around. Something I'd been missing for years came back on.
None of it came from a trend report. All of it came from home.
The detour was the point
Here's the part of the story people skip. Santiago couldn't have found the treasure without the trip. The only reason he learned where to dig was that he went to the pyramids and got told. And on the way, he became someone who could recognize it.
Same for me. The years of trends weren't a mistake. They're where I learned typography, systems, motion, performance and how to make a client's idea real. Without them, going home would've just meant another page of spinning GIFs. With them, it means I can build the weird thing and make it load fast, work on a phone and hold up in front of a client.
The book calls the trip the path to your Personal Legend. I'd call it earning the right to be yourself.
In practice
- Look under your own tree first. What did you make before anyone paid you? That's usually the most honest place to start.
- Use trends as tools, not destinations. Learn every new look. Just don't let one decide who you are.
- Notice the choices you keep making. When you pick the fun option over the safe one, and it keeps pointing the same direction, pay attention. The book would call that an omen.
- Don't regret the desert. The skills you picked up chasing everything else are what make going home work.
- Brands have sycamores too. When a client wants to look like a competitor, the better answer is usually already in their own story. Branding work often just means helping them dig.
Santiago's treasure didn't move while he was gone. Mine didn't either. I just had to go the long way around to find it.