I have been creating user experiences in both the digital and in the physical world for over a decade-and-a-half.
User experience design has been a field that is constantly evolving, but it is a multi-disciplinary field that I have been working in from the web, creative, to the marketing field. involving aspects of industrial design, graphic design, to marketing.
It is too easy to shoot down an idea, and it takes a lot more to come up with a solution which is where I would rather focus my energy on doing.
Contracting for a variety of companies early in my career gave me a big picture view of how businesses operate, but the one thing I appreciated from that experience was the number of skills I learned from my co-workers.
I have always pursued everything that I was passionate about, but what I did not know, I went out and learned (which is a lot of things). Having that approach was critical when contracting for various businesses in all sorts of industries.
A giant whiteboard, sketching out ideas, and getting everybody involved and collaborating early on in the process is something I learned early on as an industrial design student and while working with a co-worker who was Cal Berkeley graduate in architecture.
I believe that in order to be effective, you have to be a team player who knows how to collaborate, and you have to know how to pull things out of people. If you can, your results will show, and I can even point to areas of anything I have done where it was somebody elses contribution.