Working professionally in any creative capacity, especially working alone or with a remote team, can give you a beautifully gross list of hang-ups that at one point you’ll have to come to terms with and hopefully get over.
Got Issues?
Some examples, in no particular order:
- My work isn’t “good” enough.
- I’m not making a difference.
- I’m bored & complacent.
- There’s something bigger and better every day, all the time.
- Look what he’s doing. It rules more than what I’m doing.
Without acting on them and just leaving well enough alone, they don’t go away or stay stagnant. They get bigger, fatter, and profoundly more annoying. For me, it’s always like a monkey sitting on my open skull smacking my frontal lobe around. It sucks a whole bunch.
Photo by Jason Scragz - Click Image for Original
The Intern
I had an intern that worked for me last year, from about May through August of 2010. She was a marketing & communications major about to begin her senior year at university.
At that point I was slammed with work and welcomed an open-minded intern but my past experiences with interns for the most part left me a bit sour about the whole ordeal. To my delight, it turns out she had an eye for design so I started pushing some promotional design work for events her way. And she embraced it.
She worked super hard, always on time and getting to the office early (even before me occasionallly), and for being a college student was extremely open minded about design criticism and working for a great end product.
I had no clue the impression the whole process was having on her, again being wrapped up in my own head doing my thing and probably not paying attention to my surroundings like I should be.
So as her internship came to an end, she announced to me that she wanted to continue her education after her senior year, move south to attend the university I graduated from, and get a design education.
This totally blew my mind.
She went on to fly down to Orlando, tour the campus, and got herself set up to start a month after she finishes her marketing degree. She polished up her internship, I wrote her performance synopsis for her professor, and that was that.
Conclusion
My point in telling this little tale is that it made me feel more proud than ever about what I do and how I do it, and when self-doubt creeps in I think back to it and the impression the experience left on a person that was already at the end of one milestone and willing to take it a bit further.
That monkey lays off the frontal lobes a bit more these days. He’s still there, but he’s just not as much of a jerk.