“Ego is the number one attribute that hinders brilliant work”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“I’m a graphic designer from Brazil. I’ve been working in the field since 2018 and I’m currently an art director at an agency. I’m surrounded by incredibly talented designers, and even after all these years, I still feel like a little fish swimming with big sharks. Am I a good designer? Will I ever be able to consider myself one?

Will I ever feel like a good designer?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

It’s brilliant that you know exactly what you want (and don’t want). There has to be space in this industry for people who’d rather stay on the tools. Firstly, because there aren’t enough managerial roles for everyone. And secondly, because we don’t want to lose all that wisdom and insight from our creative teams. We need it on the studio floor, not sitting around the boardroom table.

This means you haven’t succumb to the thing that gets lots of great creatives. Ego. For me, ego is the number one attribute that hinders brilliant work. It stops people from learning, discovering, and listening to others. Humility is a great trait to have as a creative person and it sounds like you have it in spades.

There’s nothing wrong with respecting your peers or looking up to them. There’s nothing wrong with people being ‘better’ than you (though I bet they feel the same way about you). We should strive to surround ourselves with people more talented than us. That age old quote comes to mind: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It sounds to me as if you’re swimming in exactly the right ocean. Being in an agency environment where you’re the best would mean you quickly begin to stagnate.

And stagnating as a creative is the worst thing that can happen. Don’t forget this is a career – you want it to last another 30 years.

I recently attended a session with Amanda Graham and she said something that I haven’t heard before. “If you look at work from 2 years ago, you should want to dive behind a sofa in shame.” Good creatives always believe their best project is the next one. It’s the difficult part of this job. There’s no final exam, no finish line, no project that we think is the best thing ever. We just keep moving forwards, driven by this desire to be better. Looking back at your work from 2018, I bet it’s easy to see the progress you’ve made.

All that being said, a prolonged period of time feeling this way is bound to wear you down. So here are a couple of practical tips to help boost your confidence day-to-day.

• You will not wake up one day and think “I’ve done it, I’m brilliant”. The moments where you feel that sense of accomplishment will be much smaller. A nice piece of client feedback, seeing some work in the world when out with friends, a message from a co-worker saying thanks. Collect all these moments, write them down, screenshot them onto your desktop. Create somewhere for your small wins and open them up when you’re feeling that self-doubt creep in.
• Check your language. It’s easy to say things like “It was all thanks to the team” or “That was a lucky call” etc. Try to take credit where it’s due. Your brain needs to hear you taking ownership of those wins.

I wish I could say you’ll get there, and feel like a shark, but you probably won’t. You’ll just get more comfortable with this feeling – and that’s going to make you a brilliant creative for a very long time.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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