Hey Pat, thank you for sharing. There are some really great insights here and I thought I'd share a couple that may have been overlooked. "This is who I am" is a lie we often include with "I'm a designer". But being a designer is not who you are. Being a designer is what you do. Being a human is what you are. That comes with things that compound every aspect of our life and often gets left out of columns such as this one. We need to reframe being a designer by assessing what it is we most want as humans. We must balance the important silos in our lives - work, relationships, health etc.. Only then can we ensure that the lies we're telling ourselves are more easily reframed.
Sadly, we also get caught up in comparison syndrome and the lie "they just got lucky" is again compounded occasionally by things left out of the story. It is not just the "greatest hits" imagery we encounter on socials. Chris Do likes to tell the story of landing his first job. With only 4 pieces in his portfolio he accepted a great, high-paying creative job right out of college. But he frequently fails to include that his college was Art Center (one of the top design schools in the world) and the employer offering him the job, already employed someone who knew Chris very well - a built-in reference. Sometimes in order to reframe the luck we see in others, we simply have to dismantle the fantasies we tend to build up in our own minds. After all, that's a key ingredient in being "creative", no?
Hey Pat, thank you for sharing. There are some really great insights here and I thought I'd share a couple that may have been overlooked. "This is who I am" is a lie we often include with "I'm a designer". But being a designer is not who you are. Being a designer is what you do. Being a human is what you are. That comes with things that compound every aspect of our life and often gets left out of columns such as this one. We need to reframe being a designer by assessing what it is we most want as humans. We must balance the important silos in our lives - work, relationships, health etc.. Only then can we ensure that the lies we're telling ourselves are more easily reframed.
Sadly, we also get caught up in comparison syndrome and the lie "they just got lucky" is again compounded occasionally by things left out of the story. It is not just the "greatest hits" imagery we encounter on socials. Chris Do likes to tell the story of landing his first job. With only 4 pieces in his portfolio he accepted a great, high-paying creative job right out of college. But he frequently fails to include that his college was Art Center (one of the top design schools in the world) and the employer offering him the job, already employed someone who knew Chris very well - a built-in reference. Sometimes in order to reframe the luck we see in others, we simply have to dismantle the fantasies we tend to build up in our own minds. After all, that's a key ingredient in being "creative", no?