Five years ago, back when we were still in the throes of the pandemic, I was having conversations with MIT Press about writing a book about Revision Path.
Someone from there had reached out to me about doing a blurb for Kevin Bethune's book Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation, and I slid in this request:
"Also, and this is unrelated, but I'm interested in writing a book based off my podcast, Revision Path. It's a design podcast where I interview Black designers, developers, artists and digital creatives, we've been around since 2013 with over 400 episodes, and it's the first podcast in the Smithsonian's NMAAHC. What's the best way to pitch this to MIT Press as a potential book project?"
Bold, but closed mouths don’t get fed.
They liked the idea and sent me some proposal guidelines — I could not tell you WHERE those guidelines are now — and eventually I had a meeting with their executive editor, Bob Prior. The big questions he asked me were pretty straightforward: Who is your reader? Who is this book for? What is the through-line? You know. Easy questions. 😅
At the time, I thought the answer was a book about Revision Path itself. I imagined a series of essays about building and scaling the podcast: stories from the early days, interviewing, fundraising, behind-the-scenes stuff, and everything I'd learned from producing a weekly show for nearly a decade.
Basically, I thought the interesting story was how I made Revision Path. Bob thought that was too narrow.
He suggested I think about a book that wasn't exclusively about Revision Path or podcasting, but something broader about "communicating the work and contributions of Black designers and creatives," using my experiences with the show as examples and "distilling the lessons you have learned from your guests."
I remember reading that and thinking: ahh, okay. I need to broaden the scope.
And then I did what any budding author does after receiving helpful advice from an executive editor at a major academic publisher: I gave myself a deadline to work on the proposal and then apparently never finished it.
Look, life happens! I had just started a new job at Orbit. They wanted me to create a print and online magazine from scratch. We were still in the pandemic. Revision Path was still coming out every Monday, and the book wasn't exactly going anywhere. (Eventually, neither did the proposal.)
But now that the show’s ended and I've got some much-needed distance from it, I've been thinking about that exchange again and I realized something.
Bob was right.
Well...mostly. Walk with me here.
I don't think I needed to broaden the scope of the book. The distance I have now is what I needed to understand what I already had.
I went back recently and looked at who I was interviewing during the months when these conversations with MIT Press were happening. Between August 2021 and February 2022, I interviewed 29 people: designers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, researchers, game developers, illustrators, creative directors, technologists, and people whose work crossed enough disciplines that trying to give them a single title would be kind of ridiculous. When I looked at those conversations together, I noticed something.
I kept asking them the same questions. Not literally the exact same questions, but variations on a theme.
Where do you see yourself in the next five years?
What do you want your legacy to be?
Do you feel creatively satisfied?
Do you feel like you're living your life's purpose?
Are you where you thought you'd be at this stage in your life?
How do you define success now?
What haven't you done yet that you still want to do?
Those aren't really questions about design. They're questions about making a life. Once I saw that, I started looking at Revision Path differently.
For 11 years, I interviewed hundreds of Black creative people and asked them, in one form or another about their origin stories. How did you get here? How did you discover this was something you could do? Who helped you? What did you have to teach yourself? What happened when you got into the room? What happened when you realized the room wasn't built for you? How has being Black shaped the way you move through this industry? What does success mean to you? Are you happy? What do you want next? What do you want to leave behind? And maybe most importantly: What do you know now that the next person should know?
That's the book.
I think a Revision Path book would be about how Black creative people make a life for themselves. (Not just a career, because careers are only part of what people talked about on the show.)
Guests on the show talked about anything and everything. Family. Money. Education. Geography. Racism. Mentorship. Failure. Ambition. Burnout. Community. Entrepreneurship. Identity. Joy. Purpose. Reinvention.
They talked about getting the dream job and discovering it wasn't the dream anymore.
They talked about being the only Black person in the classroom, and then graduating and becoming the only Black person in the office.
They talked about starting businesses because nobody would hire them (same), leaving businesses because they were exhausted (also…same), becoming teachers, becoming mentors, moving across the country, moving across the world, starting over, changing disciplines, and making entirely new lanes because the existing ones weren't built for them.
Something else also kept showing up in those conversations: reaching forward and reaching back. I got that phrase from my interview with Alanna Flowers, and it perfectly describes something Revision Path was doing that I don't think I fully appreciated at the time: I was asking people to make their knowledge public. And because I did it every week for well over a decade, Revision Path became an archive of that knowledge.
Which brings me back to Bob's email.
He told me to think about "distilling the lessons you have learned from your guests." The funny thing is, when he wrote that in February 2022, I was still learning them! I was standing inside the thing trying to explain what the thing was.
Revision Path was still happening. I was booking guests, researching them, interviewing them, editing episodes with RJ, publishing them, promoting them, fundraising, running the business, working a full-time job, and trying to have something resembling a life.
And now somebody was basically asking me, So Maurice, what does all of this mean?
Hell if I know! I've got an episode to publish on Monday! 😂
But now I have something I didn't have then…time.
Think about how many things have changed from 2013 to 2024. The design industry. Technology. The language we use to talk about design. The way companies talk about diversity. Then there was the Obama administration. Then Trump. Then Biden. COVID. Remote work. The racial reckoning during the summer of 2020. Corporate America's sudden enthusiasm for DEI. Corporate America's considerably less enthusiastic feelings about DEI. Trump AGAIN. Layoffs after layoffs after layoffs…for years. That damn AI. Entire categories of design work appearing, disappearing, and transforming.
And through all of that, Black people kept making things. That's what I think interests me most now.
A creative career isn't a straight line from "aspiring designer" to "successful designer." You find something. You become something. You work. You survive. You decide what success means. You give something back. Eventually, you become something else.
Finding. Becoming. Working. Surviving. Defining. Giving Back. Becoming Again.
Maybe those are the titles for Michelle Obama’s future books. I don't know. But there's something there.
Because if Revision Path proved anything to me, it's that nobody's path stays fixed. People change careers. They change industries. They change cities. They change their minds. Sometimes you reach your goal and discover you want different goals. You walk away. Maybe you come back. You make room for other people. You become the mentor you wish you'd had.
In other words, the path keeps changing. Revising, if you will. (Okay. I swear I did not set all of this up just to land on the name of the podcast, but come on. 😂)
Revision Path.
The title has apparently been telling me what the book is about this whole time.
It just took some distance to really see that.