Why I love MakeoverMonday

I wrote this on my phone one night after my 4th makeover. I didn’t work up the courage to publish it at the time, but I am going to do it now (~9 months later).

For those who don’t know me, my name is Dorian, and I discovered MakeoverMonday about 10 months ago.

I got heads over heels about it, and I started participating almost every week since then. Below is a list of my “why”‘s I wrote back then.

My thoughts from June 28th 2018 at 00:26:

For me, the key word is progress. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.

• Negative feedback – it doesn’t mean you’re bad, it just means you have to keep working
• You can literally see how your skills are improving every week
• Not a week goes by without learning something new
• Showcasing your work in front of top-class professionals
• You can ask them questions and they will help
• A sense of belonging
• Accountability: the others expect you to create
• Workout
• It’s always there – it creates a routine
• Excitement for the next challenge
• Cool data
• Cool tools Tableau, Tableau Prep, Exasol, Data Studio, Yellowfin, Power BI
• Learning interesting tricks
• Reducing the learning curve
• Producing eye candy for social media
• Starting a portfolio with your work
• Ideas for your actual work
• Watching others showcasing new ways to look at the same data
• Improving your creativity; inspired by this Ted Talk: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
• If these Andy and Eva take the time every week, how can we not?
• There is no prize! Someone asked me if I won. It’s not about winning a race, it’s about finishing the marathon
• People are doing it purely out of love of work
• It’s a new theme every week – a sense of novelty
• It has a lot of history – I can smell it
• It starts on Sunday afternoon – nice to fill this time with something else instead of re-watching the Sopranos for the 30th time. It’s also good if you don’t want it to eat out of your working week.
• You can do it in an hour, but you won’t (I usually spend more than that)
• Anyone can participate, from every part of the world
• We benefit not only from feedback to our work but from what that of others
• The people are not overly excited
• Inspiring people around you when they see what you’re actually about
• Opens up your mind/broadens your horizon
• It strengthens your focus muscle
• The new logo looks very cool
• The recaps are useful – you can go back to the favorites and lessons when you need it
• Becoming fluent in data – something we all need now and will definitely need in the future
• It’s live video
• A great sense of satisfaction when the reviewers are actively using your viz to draw conclusions
• It’s a group of people that love what they do
• There’s a competitive spirit that pushes you forward
• Getting to know popular datasets – presented at meetups/conferences (like the London Cycle Hire one)
• Andy and Eva do the makeovers themselves – learning from their perspective
• You might be doing things the wrong way for some time and you might not even realize it – learn to do things the right way
• Developing both EQ and IQ at the same time – not only learning how to do cool stuff with Tableau but gaining insight from how people react to your work
• Finding a sweet spot between design and storytelling
• Grow into a mindset of iteration
• Failure is part of the process
• If you don’t give 100% it will reflect on the viz
• You have the opportunity to mess up, badly
• It’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get

This here represents a part of the world I always dreamed of finding. Pure altruism and selflessness! I guess the cynical part of me never thought this could exist.

Positivity might have a chance at winning this thing after all.

I did just 4, but I have such a good feeling about this! I felt the need to write this down and share it with the world.