I was at a client's office in Milwaukee and saw their team's design system in action, and it completely changed how I work

It's like when you finally see a well-run kitchen in a restaurant. You stop thinking of cooking as just making one dish at a time and see it as a system of prepped parts. That's what a good design system does, it changes your whole view from making single things to building with ready parts. I see it everywhere now, in how people organize their tools or even plan their week. It's all about not starting from zero every single time. Once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it and you start applying it to other messy parts of your life.