What does it mean to be complex without being complicated?

How I overcame one of my biggest fears on Valentine’s Day

There are two kinds of people who aren’t creative.

Every morning, after I wake up, put on my clothes, and stumble downstairs, I go into the kitchen and I take a cereal bowl down from the cupboard. It is always the same bowl; it’s my bowl.

It’s about more than what’s in the bottle.

Let me tell you about the year I decided to stop shaving—my legs, my armpits, you name it. I was a budding feminist and had heard the talk about how shaving legs was just a cultural construct created by the patriarchy to sell razors, and after seeing my brother-in-law’s girlfriend sporting armpit curls and shaggy legs at a family wedding, the idea wouldn’t leave my mind.

I don't just want to make boxes that hold things, quietly. I want to make boxes that sing while they do it, that cascade you with vibrancy and that have a presence of their own.

There are thousands (millions!) of things that you can visualize clearly because you know what they look like. But what problems could you solve, what things could you make, if you knew exactly what 1/16” feels like, or what a double convex curve of a certain radius feels like, or what a low-relief acanthus feels like?

“I’m going to drop out of BYU.”

As the words came out of my mouth, I could hardly believe them. I had recently been accepted into BYU’s very competitive Industrial Design program and had all the hopes and expectations of parents, grandparents, friends and teachers riding on me… and I was going to drop out?