The Courage to Be
Truth One: People Will Trivialize Your Work
When I hit college, a professor told me, “You’re a creative. Nothing you ever make will be yours. Everything in the world has already been created by someone else. Your ‘work’ will always be born of someone else—riddled with someone else’s ideas. You will always be fulfilling someone else’s imaginings, and never your own. So get used to always being an impersonator. Your ideas, your dreams, even your education, has failed you.” If you’re reading this, you know who you are. It hit me like a stunned bullet to the chest. I called my boyfriend, who talked me off the ledge of taking down my online portfolio and renouncing my design career. I couldn’t concentrate in any of my creative work for a good month. My work seemed elementary and useless—it would never quite reach out in the human potential and change the world, in even the mediocre of capacities. It was so wounding, so ill-informed, and so naïve. He taught me to be too humble, to be too dismissive of my work, and to think of my work as a cog in the machine and not an intrinsic, natural gift. And through my time as a designer for activism, there are three truths I’ve come across:
- People Will Trivialize Your Work
- Creative Overconfidence and Underconfidence is Dangerous
- Creatives are Overcompetitive
- Killing Your Insincerity is Good
Truth Two: Creative Overconfidence and Underconfidence is Dangerous
“I cannot recall a time… when there was so much talk about the individual’s capacities and potentialities and so little actual confidence on part of the individual about their power to make a difference psychologically or politically.”
We all know them. We all know those creatives who enjoy the idea of other people thinking that they’re a designer. And telling people about how great they are. The kind of designer who talks a lot about design, goes to all the right events and licks all the right arses in order to get accepted into the “design fraternity”, but doesn’t back it up with much work or doesn’t have much solid output when they do—it’s all very predictable, safe, and trendy. They worry about what other designers will think of their work when they’re designing something, rather than concentrating on the content and doing the job that needs doing. Or they do work that will look good on a design blog, because they feel the need to be accepted.
On the other hand, I’ve heard the common underconfidence in design students and post-graduates saying the painstakingly casual:
- “Anybody could have done it”
- “It was nothing, really”
- “This is just the first draft, so I know you’ll probably have a lot of critique…”
- “I’m so surprised that you liked my work”
Or the awkward design classroom setting of:
Student: Is it okay if I try...
Professor: Yes.
Student: But, what if it...
Professor: Yes.
Student: I'm worried that…
Professor: Just shut up and try it.
Or…
Student: I’m thinking of trying something like this. What do you think?
Professor: I think you should.
Student: Are you sure?
Professor: Yep.
Student: Could look pretty shitty though.
Professor: It could.
Student: Oh.
Professor: But you won’t know that until you try it.
So, so awkward.
Truth Three: Creatives are Overcompetitive
Whether you’re over or underconfident in your work, everyone is trying to scale to the top. It’s difficult trying to empower others, but keep your creative mysteries. The secret lies in walking the fine line between working unpretentiously and knowing your factual creative worth.
Our current work culture disproportionately rewards confidence. The Atlantic article “The Confidence Gap” argues the primary reason women aren’t reaching the top of the corporate ladder, despite now earning more college and graduate degrees than men and making up half the workforce, is lack of confidence. Women are urged to be more confident to catch up to men who naturally “tilt toward overconfidence.” But why are we holding up “natural overconfidence”—which is just a nice way of saying arrogance without self-awareness—as the standard? Especially when even the article itself acknowledges that a woman who exhibits the same behavior as a man is often perceived negatively by both men and women. Women exuding overconfidence may find themselves worse off.
Women: hear me out here. While we’ve made huge strides in the last few generations, the statistics are still staggering: only 3% of women in the creative industry are creative directors or in leadership positions. It’s the same across all industries: only 5% of CEOs are female. Too many women in the design field are competitive and unsupportive of each other unconsciously because our chances of success in the tech industry are so much slimmer than our male counterparts. But if we could channel this competitiveness inwards and challenge ourselves to progress as human beings, versus spending energy judging and diminishing the accomplishments of others, imagine how much more talent would be cultivated. Couple that with being proud of your work, and you’ve got an amazing, improved system.
“We live a world apart, yet we are a community of female entrepreneurs. We are building on our dreams of elevating women. Through fashion. Through beauty. Through empowerment and affirmation.”
Truth Four: Killing Your Insincerity is Good
So how do we move from dilemma, despair, and inertia to regain the confidence that your work can be an active part of a better world? A better human condition? A better human humanist radicalism? Our constant crisis as activists and designers is the danger of becoming burnt-out, and being too critical of our work. We lost energy and the will to act: consciousness in our intellect, so immersed in our own reality that we cannot act. We internalize the human condition rather than externalize our own vision. We see our significance not in who we are and what we do, but from what is, and what short-term or long-term effect we produce on the world. And we are burnt out. Leaving out social good to chance in our work is reckless and will lead to chaos and decay. We have no choice but to act personally on and with our societies, regardless of our underlying fears that the transformation may never be achieved. I argue that we can progress together to transform our sociocultural reality, and we can profess our vision that there are better ways to bear witness to the potential of the creative individual, not by chance, but by the active, critical choice to hold onto your confidence in your work. To help millions of individuals and their societies to ensure global independence and justice, and the free expression of human potential. There will be transformations in society. There will be new beginnings towards social justice. We will stop trivializing each other, intimidating each other, kill our overcompetitive tendencies and empower each other. And we will be alive.
You, with your perfect understanding of exactly how many hours of hustle, screen-burned eyes, sweat and honest human shit went into your work. You can tell your story. If you want to wait for others to talk about your work and congratulate what you’ve put out there into the black hole of the internet, you can do that. But you’re missing out on your chance to share your journey. Oh, and you’ll be waiting a long, long time, my friend.
It’s time we let go of both sincere and insincere modesty. I know that over the last few months I have worked harder than ever before to brand myself more, get all the quality work I can out there before I graduate, make more connections with design agencies, and research how design can help global innovation for developing nations. That hard work hasn’t always happened at my desk. It’s happened on the bus ride home. It’s happened while driving, and I have to pull over and sketch a wireframe. I write half of my posts on my phone before I hit the pillow.
If you aren’t proud of your work, you won’t be able to stand by it. And if you can’t stand by it, why should anyone else?
When the desire for certainty in your work trumps everything else, you get derivative and mediocre results. Overvaluing certainty means you end up choosing the same paths that have already been trodden, so you’ll rarely find yourself winning awards for innovation. A designer with creative confidence understands how to strike this balance. They understand and accept that uncertainty, false starts, and mistakes are part of the creative process, but they also project a sense of stability and progress to those around them.
I’m proud of my design work. I really am. And you should be proud too. Proud of your work, your company, your app, your writing, that sketchbook you’ve ruined with so many useless pages ripped out because you couldn’t get that bottom navigation bar, app menu, or stack of cards interface just right. You should be proud of the lines of code you slaved over and the UI that nobody is going to notice because it’s so insanely perfect. The power of great design lies in its ability to solve real problems and overcome challenges. The best design is generally humble or even invisible — not sexy nor particularly interesting. But you must pride up. You must grow confidence, no matter what your portfolio displays. You must be wary of success, because it will make you comfortable. Keep learning, keep growing. Work hard and be nice to people.
“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”