On Growing Up Around Doers
I’ve always believed I could do anything I put my mind to!
My family never seemed to be talking about what might happen or dreaming out loud about what life could be. We were often too busy doing.
In the early 2000s, my family bought a largely undeveloped piece of land in rural California. It very quickly became home. It became the trails we would forge on our horses. It became the grazing land for goats and pigs and chickens. It became the wilderness my siblings and I would explore. It became an environment where we could do whatever our minds and hands could create.
I never really heard my parents talk about developing the property at all - I just watched them do it. My grandfather tinkering on irrigation lines. My dad shifting hillsides with the big yellow John Deere tractor. My grandmother tugging me along the gravel paths freshly graded.
As I grew, I did the same. Anything I dreamt, I did. I tinkered, I excavated, I tugged my siblings along for the ride. I saw a need and I’d be finishing the solution to it the next day - learning skills that serve me well today.
That environment shaped me more than I realized at the time. It taught me that momentum matters. That trying is usually better than waiting. That you don’t need to know everything before you start, you just need to start and stay engaged long enough to learn.
Now, I know how rare that upbringing was. Not everyone grows up seeing ideas move so quickly into action. I was lucky to witness what happens when people focus less on perfect plans and more on steady doing.
That mindset still anchors me today, especially as I step into new phases of my career and life.
As I continue to learn in the field of environmental design, the more I realize that this mindset - having a plan and then creating it - is exactly what drew me to landscape architecture so early on.
My grandmother taking me around the property in the early days!
Long before deciding on Landscape Architecture as a career path, I saw firsthand how the environment around us can shape everything: mood, productivity, relationships, daily rhythms. I saw how space could either help you or work against you. I saw how you could take a place from nothing to something that impacts hundreds of people in a relatively short period of time.
That’s why landscape architecture resonates so deeply with me.
It isn’t just art for the sake of an idea - It’s art for the sake of creation, for practical impact, for real people, in real places.
Everything we draw is something we intend to do.
As I look ahead to the coming year, stepping into change, learning, and uncertainty, I keep coming back to a personal mission of mine: to create real things for real people in real places.
That said, I’m also becoming more aware that not every plan gets built and not every project makes it off the page. That, to me, can be discouraging, especially in a profession rooted in doing.
So I’m curious to hear from others in this field:
What continues to encourage you about landscape architecture and design?
How do you come to terms with plans that go unbuilt and still move forward with momentum?
How can someone early in their career stay grounded in the doing while still being successful and impactful in this profession?
I’m learning in public - and I’d genuinely value the perspective of those who’ve walked this path longer than I have.
