How the worst day of my life made me a better design leader.

Hi, I’m Josh Clark — a product designer and builder. I’ve worked across mobile and web, from healthcare to small-business SaaS. Along the way I’ve worn most hats: product leadership, design direction, product and project management, user research, UX and UI, front-end development, and enough back-end to be dangerous.

That’s the résumé version. The story underneath it starts in 2017.

After a decade in the work, I needed to know why I was doing it. So I spent the better part of that year writing a vocational credo — a rule to live my professional life by:

A year later, that sentence stopped being abstract.

On September 6, 2018, I woke from a dead sleep with a pain in my lower back. Within fifty minutes I couldn’t move from the waist down. Ten days later I was diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis — my immune system had attacked my spinal cord and left me with partial paralysis below the waist.

It took two years of intense physical therapy, stubborn determination, and a lot of luck to work my way from a wheelchair back to walking on my own. For a long stretch I was sure the life I’d been building — including the path toward design leadership I was on — was over.

What I found was that the worst day of my life — or more specifically, my response to it — was a strange kind of gift to me.

It taught me how to dig deep, how to make the life I have rather than the one I’d planned, and how to keep showing up when progress is measured in millimeters. It also gave me the gift of perspective. Overnight, I went from being part of the majority to being a minority, navigating a world full of barriers I’d never had to notice. I won’t claim to understand the experience of every marginalized person — every story is different — but my own turned a long list of unknown unknowns about privilege into known unknowns. That shift turned my credo from a slogan into a practice, and made the ongoing work of learning those unknowns part of how I show up.

And it taught me something I now carry into every team I work with: we are all, at our base, a collection of our worst days and how we can choose every day to respond to them. They don’t have to ruin us — but they do define us. Mine is more dramatic than most, but it has made me a more empathetic collaborator and, I believe, a better leader. I’m slower to judge, quicker to listen, and genuinely interested in helping the people around me find work that feels meaningful — whatever hand they’ve been dealt.

The way I work and lead comes from all of it: identify the constraints, then find the simplest path to success around or through them. The same design thinking I applied to my recovery is what I also use to bring benefit to the product users, employees, and co-workers I serve.

That’s the leader I want to be, and the work I want to do next: building thoughtful products with sharp, talented people, designing environments of access, and helping a team do the best work of their careers.