🪼 Day 4: The Jellyfish and the Beginner’s Mind
In the waters of the Mediterranean and off the coast of Japan, there’s a tiny jellyfish — Turritopsis dohrnii — with a strange evolutionary advantage.
When this jellyfish is injured, starving, or under stress, it doesn’t die.
Instead, it does something no other known animal can do: it reverts.
Its adult cells transdifferentiate — that is, they transform into different cell types — and reorganise into a polyp, the earliest stage of jellyfish life. Effectively, Turritopsis dohrnii starts its life cycle again. Not metaphorically. Biologically.
Scientists call it “biological immortality.” I think of it as something more familiar: the power to reset.
And I’ve seen that power in designers, too.
Over the years, I’ve met design leaders who’ve stepped away from big roles, prestigious org charts, and six-figure salaries — not to get ahead, but to start over. To pick up new skills. To ship something small. To build something of their own.
They went back to first principles.
No more OKRs. No more aligning five departments. Just the clarity of a single user problem and the urge to solve it.
And while it’s scary — to go from Director or VP to solo builder — there’s something deeply energising about shedding the armour of seniority and returning to the beginner’s mindset.
That mindset is powerful. It says:
I’m not expected to have all the answers.
I can learn publicly and iterate fast.
I can experiment without fear of “messing up the brand.”
And it’s something designers are naturally good at. You’ve had to reinvent your practice over and over — from print to digital, mobile-first to systems thinking, UX to service design, Sketch to Figma, agile to AI.
You’re built to adapt.
But somewhere along the way, many designers get stuck. You become “too senior” to start small again. Or “too niche” to be taken seriously as a founder. Or “too late” to jump into the startup game.
Those aren’t truths. They’re stories. Old ones.
And like the jellyfish, you get to rewrite them.
You get to return to the version of yourself that shipped with curiosity. That iterated fast. That learned by building. Not because you’re regressing — but because that version of you might just be what the next version of your career needs.
Tomorrow: We wrap with one final story — about birds, navigation, and why so many brilliant designers stay stuck despite having everything they need to fly.
- Andy Budd
The Design Coach & The Design VC