At some point in our childhood, we made something. It was good and therefore it made us feel good. This created a lovely feedback loop that probably took us all the way to design school. Overall, it’s a positive thing. It’s what drives us to create.

The problem however, as John Kolko talks about, is what happens when we create something that’s bad. We then think to ourselves “I am bad” and question our entire being.

We need to remember an important rule: You are not your work.

By detaching our own self-confidence from what we create, it gives us the emotional strength to continue to push onwards, even when what we’re doing isn’t great at that moment.

4. The creative process is a roller-coaster

On many projects, we go through a similar series of emotions.

1. “This is great!”

2. “This is tricky.”

3. “This is shit.”

4. “This might be ok.”

5. “This is great … What was I ever even worried about?”

I go through this. Every. Single. Project!

My tip: Look for the do-ers.

Find the person in your team who is good at pushing forward and just keep going, regardless of whether they are a creative director or just an intern. That person is your greatest asset: look at them, watch them, follow them.

They will guide you in your darkest hours.

5. Your talent cannot exceed your taste

What gets most designers started is our taste. We see great products out there, and we think “Hey, I could do that!” Unfortunately, this is usually followed immediately by sharp disappointment once we realise the first thing we created wasn’t very good at all.

Our taste, our understanding of what is good or bad, is our key asset as designers. The gap between our taste and our own ability is what drives us to improve.

However, as you progress and improve, there is a risk. Barry T. Smith warns us, if your taste stays at the same level, there’s no way for your quality to improve, because you don’t know what better is. You need to always continue to improve your taste. How do you improve your taste? Seek out mentors, ask for honest feedback and participate in usability tests.

A few months ago, I participated in a usability test of a product I’d designed. Afterwards, myself and my team mate gave the test a rating of 3/10, one of the worst results I’ve ever had.

It was not a happy day.

Looking back on it however, while the result may have been poor, in that moment, our taste had just improved, we now knew things that we didn’t know before, so rather than being worse designers than we thought, our taste had just improved, and that could drive us to do even better work. After a redesign, a test a few months later passed with flying colours.

6. Don’t overestimate your ability

Our self-evaluation of our skills, is often wildly inaccurate.

There is a documented cognitive bias in psychology called the Dunning–Kruger effect. Essentially it means that often the skill needed to assess your ability, is the same skill needed to be good at something. It’s why bad singers (like me) don’t truly realise the pain they cause at the office karaoke event.

How does that affect us? Well, at the start of our careers, we are all terrible at self-evaluating. As we grow in our abilities, we tend to vastly overestimate our progress.

At some point, we hit a peak, and we start to realise we’re not nearly as good as we thought we were. I recommend hitting that peak as soon as possible, because the higher up you go, the harder you fall.

How can you manage this?

One of the best ways I've found to minimise this, is to surround yourself with the best people you can find. For me, when I attended Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and then joined frog design both were very humbling experiences that helped me radically re-evaluate my skill.

“Try to never to be the smartest person in the room.”

— Michael Dell

If you think you’re hot shit, find people better than you and work with them. It will make you better and it will also soften the harder edges of your ego.

7. Junior vs Senior Designer