You know the feeling. Each project could be the one that catapults you to success or buries you in failure. One wrong move and you lose everything. One right move and you have it made. Everything is balanced on your shoulders, down to your skill, determination and luck. You’re running flat out on the razor’s edge, and you’re not wearing shoes.

I miss that feeling sometimes.

Running your own company is tremendously risky, in good and bad ways. It’s easy to get addicted to the constant rush of both success and failure. When you become a full-time employee, that rush is suddenly gone. You get a regular paycheck and steady hours, but in exchange you give up that chance that the next project could be the big one that makes you a rockstar.

Letting go of that addiction can be a real problem. As a member of a team, you can’t expect to be the star of the show. You don’t have total control over what you do, and you’re not going to get all the credit for your success. Nor should you. If you’re doing your job right, your success is everyone’s success, and wouldn’t have been possible without the people you work with. Your team mates are the ones that handle the accounting, sales, client contacts, production work, code wrangling, or whatever else it is you’re not that good at so you can focus on being an awesome designer. Is the rush really worth going back to filling out mountains of paperwork and handling all the non-design work yourself?

Whenever that old tingle crawls up the back of your neck, remember all the non-design you used to have to do. Instead of worrying that you’re giving something up by working for someone else, think about what you’re getting. You’re working on bigger and better projects than you could have ever tackled alone, and focusing on what you’re great at instead of spreading yourself thin. You may not reach the same highs, but you’re also never going to see the same lows. All that energy you used to spend on worrying about the business can be poured into your design work. As a member of a team, you should be creating work that’s much better than you ever could have alone, and a lot more of it. All you have to do is let go.

Being an employee doesn’t mean you’ll never be a rockstar. It just means you have to bring the rest of the band with you.

Until the next
Cube 2.0,
Josh

Josh Jeffryes | Graphic Designer | Technologist | Organizer, St. Louis Design Meetup
Jeffryes Design | On Design | St. Louis Design Meetup | BoDo Author | Cube 2.0