I've been with my girlfriend for three years now. The nervous excitement of early love is gone, of course, but we've settled into something more mature: a relationship where we lean on each other and root for each other, almost like close friends. Every once in a while she'll ask, "You don't really like me that much, do you?" and it stings a bit, because I feel like I'm doing my best and it's just not landing. But when I sit with it, I usually notice the places where I really haven't expressed myself well, and I end up feeling sorry.

Expressing your heart matters. If the heart is an invisible realm of possibility, expression is the visible realm of motion. The thought "A doesn't seem to love me" is a negative reaction that arises when A's motion (that is, expression) has been insufficient or inadequate. Conversely, if A takes the right kind of action, it produces the positive reaction of possibility: "this person must love me." Keep that up, repeat it, and eventually you arrive at a state of certainty.

In this sense, possibility doesn't exist as some static state; it reveals itself, or comes into view, only as the result of motion. A ship that never leaves the harbor will never find traces of a new continent. This is also close to the advice so many founders hear: "just start, fail early, and learn as much as you can from it." It's another way of saying that constant motion is what uncovers new possibilities and breakthroughs.

I Am 3D, a book by Bae Sang-min, a KAIST professor well known for his work in donation design, lays out clearly how he kept generating new possibilities throughout his life through constant motion. He's a passionate doer who steps out into the world instead of sitting around agonizing over things, yet he also thinks things through more fiercely than almost anyone. Reading his story feels like it would be a great source of inspiration not only for designers and design students, but for anyone chasing a dream.

He was a kid who loved dancing and had never set foot in an art academy, and yet he got into the famous Parsons School of Design, and later became a designer who swept the world's design awards through donation design. He credits this to what he calls his 3D: Dream, Design, and Donate. Some readers might think, "Discovering a dream in design, pursuing it with passion, and eventually using it to contribute to the world? Sounds great. But most of us struggle right from the first step, just finding a dream in the first place!"

That's true, honestly. Finding a dream is the most important thing you can do, and it's exactly as hard as it sounds. Even after you find one, real-world problems often get in the way, and a lot of people end up giving up or never reaching it. But that's exactly where the value of I Am 3D lies. The process of a young Bae Sang-min searching for and running into his dream contains hints about what the rest of us, still wandering in search of our own, need to do.

It's simply this: become truly yourself, become the one and only version of you that exists in the world. The fact that Bae Sang-min got accepted, all at once, to top American design schools like Parsons, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SVA (School of Visual Arts), and Pratt Institute; the fact that a student who had been practically invisible in class heard the word "excellent" from a professor for the first time; and the fact that he became a KAIST professor spreading donation design instead of a glamorous New York designer (and went on to win more than forty design awards as a result), all of it was the result of living as his own, distinct self.

Image source | http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/

"Chasing your own star means discovering who you are and what you're capable of; it means learning how to become yourself. That takes courage, because you have to be ready to risk being different from everyone else."

• From Matthew Kelly, The Great Me -

Image source | http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/

"The goal shouldn't be to become a completely different person. The ultimate goal is to draw out your full potential. Be a unique version of yourself."

• From Karim Rashid, Design Your Self -

Image source | http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/

"Even if you love the 'design' itself and throw yourself into it completely, none of it means anything without an overall worldview behind it."

• From Kenmei Nagaoka, The Designer Who Doesn't Design -

Image source | http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

• Steve Jobs -

Image source | http://idim.kaist.ac.kr/

"Find your own answer. Every assignment at Parsons carried this enormous mission inside it. To find your own answer, your own perspective, your own individuality, you first had to know who you were."

• Bae Sang-min, I Am 3D, p. 54 -

Regardless of field, becoming yourself is an essential rite of passage on the way to realizing your dreams and your identity. In his younger years, Bae Sang-min also spent a lot of time thinking and experimenting with who he was and how he could become a one-of-a-kind version of himself. The proof is in the fact that he came to know the streets of New York better than native New Yorkers, and that he made, by hand, the hanbok pants he wore nearly every day.

Bae Sang-min may look like someone whose career has been one dazzling win after another, but even he went through bitter stretches. There was a time he went completely broke, down to just thirty-five cents in his pocket, and he got through it by holding onto the belief that he was "New York's best designer." At the same time, working in an industry that demanded he wrap the same products in different "shells" to sell them, rather than create lasting masterpieces, he found himself longing and wrestling with what truly valuable work would look like. That's how donation design was born.

Bae Sang-min once appeared on the Korean talk show Baek Ji-yeon's People Inside, where he introduced a small notebook he calls his "journal." It looked something like a diary, but he used it as a space to record and revisit his own observations. The book also talks about note-taking as a way of finding the source of creativity, and it comes across less as simple record-keeping than as an effective method for building a perspective and a style of your own by accumulating "your own thoughts" over time.

According to Bae Sang-min, I Am 3D is itself a "journal." It's a journal of dreams and passion recording his years of youth, and it reads less like a success story than like a coming-of-age memoir. As you read through it, you run into dramatic episodes that make you think "is this even possible?" or "that's incredible," and yet you still find yourself on his side, able to relate. That's probably because he, too, spent his youth full of doubt and wandering, and that struggle comes through clearly in the book.

There's no fixed answer that can define our one and only life. If you trust yourself, become yourself, and move forward one step at a time, you'll eventually find yourself standing at the edge of your dream without even realizing it. Failing at something you attempted isn't really failure; it's a valuable experience that confirms new possibilities. What's certain is that if all we do is think, we'll never uncover whatever potential is hiding inside us. Now is the time to go out and find your own answer, and run straight at it. I Am 3D will be a steady, reassuring cheer along the way.

I Am 3D