The Bittersweet Journey of Growth

Navigating the Grief and Excitement of Personal Evolution

May 13, 2024

Hello! I'm Patrick, your guide to well-crafted tech and a rich creative life. New here? Join our supportive community to fuel your creative journey!

As I embark on a new phase of my career, I find myself grappling with a familiar feeling. Despite having shifted roles three times in the last decade, I still feel a sense of being adrift during these transitions. Excitement for what's to come intertwines with a wistfulness for what I must let go of to achieve my vision.

Transitional moments are uncomfortable, and the discomfort of being a beginner again is humbling. It's like reliving the awkwardness of adolescence after knowing what it’s like to be an adult.

All the hours I've poured into crafting great software designs will of course be helpful on my new path, but those skills aren’t sufficient for creating the business my co-founder and I envision. Most of my time going forward will be spent outside the blissful cocoon of a design file.

Many people experience this sense of leaving things behind through moments like school graduations – high school to college, college to the working world. For me, these were bittersweet – I was ready for the next chapter while savoring the last bites of the delicious experience that was ending.

Fewer people undergo as many strong identity shifts during their professional career, but the life of a creative entrepreneur doesn't resemble the linear paths of the stable professions that comfort parents. Instead of a gradual progression, it's more cyclical. Moments of growth mix with moments of pause and painful regression. You get seasons that feel like a blissful summer, ones where growth begins to fade and fall, and dark winters of stagnancy where throwing in the towel seems tempting. But ultimately, always, another spring comes around, sprouting into new life that's both familiar and wholly new.

Each era of my career shaped foundational parts of my professional identity. I learned to identify cultural trends and the underlying human needs that powered them during my time at Leo Burnett as a brand strategist. Then I learned to build solutions that could address those needs during my years as a software engineer. But it wasn't until I shifted into design that I felt like I had discovered a role that might suit me for the long haul. It took longer than with the other disciplines, but after several years I heard another calling reaching out to me yet again.

After rising through the ranks as a product designer, I'm shifting to a new identity as a co-founder. While I've always felt like a misfit within the design community, my love for good design runs deep. The satisfaction of entering a flow state to solve the puzzles of a well-crafted design is undeniable. But I know my aspirations require a new path. To get where I want to go, I have to let go of the day-to-day of simply being a designer.

Creating a business from scratch is messy. Much of the work bears little resemblance to the fun parts of being a craftsperson (whether design, engineering, etc.). It takes a lot of grunt work and force of will to bring an idea to market and make it stick. It's like the world is gravity, and you're fueling the rocket ship to break its pull. So many forces weigh you down, and it's your sole responsibility to propel the ship with sufficient force to reach orbit. It takes massive, focused energy and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get yourself off the ground.

My co-founder and I believe this company can make a generational impact – like Airbnb, Etsy, Stripe, and more before us. The scope of the possibility is hard for me to even fathom. It feels uncomfortable to dream so big but it’s critical fuel for the hard journey.

While I grieve right now for letting go of the comfort of my design success for something promising yet uncertain, I do it with the knowledge that a bigger realized dream awaits me past the horizon. Although I may not be the one pushing the pixels for much longer, that dream is big enough for me to accept the trade-off.

Today I'll grieve that my era as a designer is ending, so that one day I can celebrate opening the door to an era where I’m responsible for designs greater than anything I could have achieved on my own.

Until next time,

Patrick