You can never be a good designer.

I design because I love my job.

I design because I have an appreciation for the craft.

I design because it’s the intersection of art, purpose, and business excites me.

I design because I enjoy the puzzle-solving curiosity it invites, and the wonderful and beautiful things that can spring from it. The meaningful design solution that someone would look at and think, “wow that’s actually really clever.”

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I design because I need the validation.

I design because if I’m not perceived as successful, I feel like a failure.

I design because my upbringing installed a sense of anxiety deep within me which fuels my desire for success.

I design because I hate how my work looks right now.

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Expectations and passions can be conflated.

You can never be a good designer. People can only say that in passing when they offer their opinion of your work.

What you can do though, is make a design, if only just for today. When you put it out into the world, it will be judged by others, and no matter if it’s positive or negative, letting that judgment guide your work will always make you create worse work.

It sounds really backwards, no?

I think of creativity like I’m in a room with two doors.

One door has a sign on it that says “Great,” and the other door says “Shit.” Now, knowing you, you’ve probably done your hours of research on Pinterest, Dribbble, and Behance and followed the greatest design accounts out there. You think to yourself, “Well I have to pick the Great door, right? Why make something and post it if it’s not gonna blow everyone’s mind?”

The Great door is sneaky, because once you open it, the room gets smaller. You’ll find yourself in another room with the same two doors, and as long as you keep opening the Great one, the rooms will get smaller and smaller until you can’t even fit into the next room. You expect yourself to be great by following the leaders, but you stifle your progress and exploration by narrowing your choices according to what you think Great means.

“Well, what’s behind the Shit door then, and why would I even want to create shit work anyway?” — You, probably

The Shit door represents everything that’s terrifying to us. If we create shitty work, it means we’re letting down our audience. It means we’re not trying to be Great™ anymore, and god forbid anyone sees our half-baked ideas and designs that we hide away in our sketch books. The Shit door also represents experimentation. It means we’re so bold in our self-expression that we try something different every time we post because we don’t care, that it may be hot garbage and we do it anyway, and that the word Shit no longer exists in our vocabulary as an excuse.

Growth stops exactly where we draw the line of our expectations.

Maybe you think “I should design more like this person,” or “my work isn’t good unless I use this font,” or “my work isn’t worth showing unless I spend hours on it.” The funny thing is, opening that Shit door opens up to rooms that get larger and larger. The rooms get so large that one day that you won’t be able to see the ceiling.

Letting yourself do shitty work is part of the answer. The other part of the answer is what’s behind that door.