Experience and comfort

When I first started out as a designer I was terrified at interviews for jobs, or sales calls to bring on clients to my agency. I studied the company I was going to meet, spent time looking up the person that would be on the other side of the table (now Zoom), and practiced my lines.

For one of my first clients I drove close to 10 hours one way to meet with the client in a coffee shop (I was sort of headed that way anyway, but the interview was a big part of the trip), pitched them on the work, sold the work, got the down payment, and began. It was incredibly rewarding, but also 10x more effort than realistically needed. That was fine though, since I was just starting out.

It was stressful, but also necessary.

I didn’t yet have the comfort and experience to draw on in the moment, the ability to rely on the past to lead into the present and help support the future idea of working with this new person.

That’s ok, it’s also something we need to move past.

In recent years I’ve developed much more of a comfort with such calls, and 95% of the time they’re video calls now.

If I’m meeting with someone to talk about working together it’s usually because I’ve done some variation of the same type of work in the past. In a way this is easy. It’s so much harder to convince someone you can do the thing, then to simply share how you already did the thing in the past.

This also leads into ways we need to make it feasible for juniors to enter the workforce, but that’s a whole other topic I’ve been thinking on.

If I’m at the point where I need to talk to someone about a new opportunity, I generally spend 5-10 minutes ahead of time looking into it, then jump on the call. That’s it.

The reason? I’m confident enough in what I’ve done as a designer, know my areas of weakness and strengths, and generally would only talk to a company if I think we have a chance at being a match for each other.

If the call goes south it’s sometimes because of me, but usually because me and the other person aren’t a great match for each other. That’s it. I haven’t failed, they haven’t failed, we just didn’t build a connection.

That’s not to say I’ve only been interested in working at places that are repeats of what I’ve done in the past. On the contrary. In the last four years I’ve worked at a number of amazing startups, learning something new virtually every day.

When I’ve been on calls during these years I’ve leaned on the past while embracing the uncertain future. If a interviewer asks if I’ve done a thing I’m candid. If I haven’t I say so. But then I’ll followup with a project that may have been partially related, and share whether this new topic is an interest or not.

For each stage of our careers we have the opportunity to embrace exactly who we are. Being candid (it’s also ok not to share everything) works when you’re in front of someone who admires openness, and those are the people I like to work with.