“You’ve Got Till Tuesday” Small story, big lesson

I remember everything about that moment—well, ironically, everything except the actual assignment. All I know is, I had no idea how to do whatever was being asked. It was my sophomore year of design school, in a design systems class taught by two wonderful professors: Eike Wintzer and Nathan Felde.

Eike and Nathan didn’t hand out answers. They challenged us constantly—pushing ideas, suggesting re-dos, offering critiques that sometimes contradicted each other entirely. It was one of those classes where you weren’t quite sure what you were learning until the very end, when you walked out the door on the last day and finally realized: the chaos was the lesson.

One day, in the middle of all that chaos, came an assignment I… had absolutely no idea how to do. At the time, I believed that if no one had taught me how to do something, then I couldn’t possibly be expected to do it. Simple logic, right?

So, in that mindset, I walked up to Nathan and Eike and said—very eloquently—“I don’t know how to do that.” Nathan, without missing a beat, looked at me and said, “Well, you’ve got till Tuesday.” Eike didn’t say a word—but the silence agreed.

Looking back, it’s funny. What exactly was I expecting? “Oh, okay Colton. The rest of the class will do the assignment—you’re excused”? Maybe I thought I’d get a crash course. Maybe I thought Nathan and/or Eike would sit me down and walk me through it step-by-step. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, I Googled. I YouTubed. I cobbled together scraps from wherever I could find them. Tuesday came, and my work went up on the wall. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was scrappy, probably messy, but it was mine. In a week’s time, I had taken something I didn’t understand—and made something anyway.

What I took from that moment was simple but foundational: don’t recoil from uncertainty—run into it. Learn, grow. Grab what you can along the way. Build. Tear it down. Rebuild. The design process is a constant climb toward clarity—just before you plunge back into chaos again. That’s the rhythm. That’s the work. That was the lesson.