January 18, 2024

10 brutally honest pieces of advice to my former designer self.

I was not meant to be a graphic designer, or even less a creative director for real time interactive and metaverse experiences.

I majored in 20th century history at high school and then did one year of political sciences at university, when I realised that in a country such as Argentina, political career was not something I was probably cut out for. But perhaps I was wrong.

I did have love for films, videogames and the internet, but a major sweet spot for "Behind the Scenes" featurettes on HBO where the mixture of practical and visual effects and early computer graphics were shown. That was for me real magic.

My logic eventually was clear. I love movies, I love posters, what if I learn how to design one poster, as the basic unit of visual communication, then I multiply that 24fps and I get a movie.

I was young, and stupid, and it took me a while to find my path so here is a list of ten things I would tell my younger creative self and I hope he doesn't listen to me and repeat the same things, otherwise I wouldn't be the person I am today, and I kinda like it.

  1. All those sleepless nights paid off. But prioritize health.
  2. Do an apprenticeship. All the free work you did to get experience also paid off, everything counted.
  3. Save more. Pay yourself first and build a freedom fund.
  4. Document your work better.
  5. Spend more time mastering the tools.
  6. Learn how to draw & create every day.
  7. Make more friends (build an audience).
  8. Go all in. Live in a shity place and focus everything on your craft.
  9. Have technology always up to date.
  10. Have kids earlier.

1. All those sleepless nights paid off. But prioritize health.

Our job demands that we sit in front of the computer for hours.

It was very often in my university days to pull all nighters either working on a particular project, or studying for a particular subject.

This tendency only increased when I started working at the first motion graphics studio, pitching until the very early hours because volume only seemed to come the last 2 days of the sprint. I remember taking massive amounts of coffee, sugar, cookies. And I gained a lot of weight in the meantime.

It was not until I was about 27 and after a couple of health scares, that I started to get interested in the theme of longevity, started drinking orange juice and eating blueberries in the morning, and luckily now with 40 years old Im very glad those first steps that lead me to weight training, crossfit, and running, etc.

Still lazy at heart.

2. Do an apprenticeship. All the free work you did to get experience also paid off, everything counted.

If I would have to start again everything, I would do a sort of apprenticeship of sorts.

I've had many boss-mentors over the course of my career but I have never really done apprenticeship type of work for long periods of time.

I would today, try to find someone that is doing the type of work that I would be interested in, and go all in, work for free and dedicate all my focus and energy to learn as much as possible for as long as possible.

That could have also been done at a place where I would have started from the very bottom, for example at a game studio creating assets, learning all about the tooling from the ground up.

My first job out of university was directly as an Art Director, therefore I always lacked the technical skills on a core level.

3. Save more. Pay yourself first and build a freedom fund.

Im not talking about fuck you money, but many decisions I had to make during my career were for a lack of funding to take the time, think, make my personal project and reshape the career on my interests.

Sometimes it feels that where I am right now, it's the direct result of not having the capacity to take 1 or 2 years off to reshape where I would see myself in the next couple of years.

Either bootstraping a project or learning something new.

4. Document your work better.

I've had a lot of great and cool projects during my whole life, that there is no real record of them.

Some of my most successful friends, have always spent time creating proper documentation about their work. Creating nice renders, of photography of the finished product.

I tend to look at my work as some sort of flow, and hope that the best one will definitely stand out the test of time on itself, but that is wrong thinking.

For example, last year when we launched the metaverse experience in Las Vegas, I could've travelled with my DSL camera and record and document the whole launch experience and the car much better. Luckily my colleagues at Journee created this fantastic film, which I've never would've managed to do by myself and its a whole project on its own.

BMW Vision Dee - Created for BMW's Vision Dee Launch. Role: Creative / Art Director

It is very easy for to make even not so polished work just stand out using proper mockups and templates. The same amount of effort and energy should be invested into proper documenting and presenting the work to the world.

5. Spend more time on the technical side.

I definitely wish I would know how to code.

At least to understand the basic principles of computer science to be able to solve problems from a different perspective.

I always felt that my limitations were mostly due to my lack of proper depth and understanding of the tools and therefore I had to use what little I knew, and come up with creative solutions and my superficial knowledge of them allows me to communicate with more technical artists.

But definitely bossing around about how to use Houdini, Javascript or even Blender Nodes, I think would make a massive different on my visual output.

6. Learn how to draw & create every day

Drawing is thinking and seeing.

One of my mentors once told me, "the only tool a director ever needs is pen and paper".

I always regretted not having a more formal way of expressing my thoughts on paper. Not knowing how to draw was always something that behinderd me on my creative journey.

As a director, it sometimes pays off to show someone else that idea that you have on your head to someone else with clarity and drawing is the perfect medium.

Good use of perspective, human anatomy. All things that I would love to master.

I'm addicted to purchasing notebooks but they are all empty because I don't know what to do with them.

Photo of my notebook.

Recently I stole my son's pastels, and started creating, not every day but almost, and start to discover a new form of expression.

It still feels that not knowing how to draw properly is not allowing me to express the things that are in my head. Like not knowing enough of a language to talk to people.

That creative output, then reflects on my work, I take another look at color, texture, and the tangible aspect that is so missing on the digital space.

7. Make more friends.

I'm not a friendly person, maybe not even an likeable person.

The few people in my life that I call friends, are true friends. That I know I pick up the phone and they will be there, and even if i don't see them after 10 years, they will be there for me.

Nowadays, with the internet, you can build an audience of followers, and like minded people that you can have a shared journey together.

If that is something that you are interested in then, supporters, followers, or people that follow your journey, will come back to you if you are genuinely engaged with them. You can feel part of your own little community that can help you grow, or go independent one day.

But if that is the case, I want to be lucky enough that I connect with the right people.

8. Go all in. Live in a shity place and focus everything on your craft.

I went all in on adventure, but with a bourgeois spirit and soul.

I've experienced extreme discomfort and really extreme situations, like that time I was struck by a rare vascular disease that turned my skin red for months alone, in the middle of a dark winter whilst trying to make a big job come across because I needed better health insurance. I cannot say that I left everything behind and dedicated my living self to my craft and soul. Maybe in that case I would've become an artist.

I tried to "balance" things out. Go all in on something, but making sure I got paid for it, and not reinvesting always that money on myself or my craft but to enjoy things in life, go out exploring Berlin's techno nightlife and wasting a lot of time trying to "find myself".

9. Have technology always up to date.

A bicycle for the mind.

Your tools should always be sharp, clean and up to date.

Business will run smoother if your tech stack is up to date and it allows you to create the things that you want with ease. Tech should not be an impediment for you to express yourself.

They should actually give you an edge. Allow you to work faster. Become a bicycle for your mind.

10. Have kids earlier.

Controversial, but, to be honest, when you are young, you have the energy and stamina to go through things with higher rates of recovery. Not only kids give you purpose, but they give you a sense of responsibility and real growth that nothing else delivers in this world.

Your lens and priorities will permanently change, but also, if you would have kids at you early 20s, you would have the energy to go through parenting and career, and when your kids can start taking care of themselves and become more independent you will be able to focus on the best years of your career without sacrificing their formative years.

More kids please.

November 7, 2023

The secret to infinite creative productivity.

In this post I will show you how you can increase your productivity 10x and get to better results faster in any creative discipline. We'll uncover the essence of perseverance and the iterative process in the realm of design and creative problem-solving.

We are all grownups here: We know the secret to success in the creative industry does not rely on the genius, or the talented, or even the...well genius. The secret is really that the ones that want to solve the design problem the most, and by want, I mean, REALLY want the thing, they will solve it. At any cost.

The Importance of Persistence in Design

When facing a creative problem, the designer that manages to create more value per output, is the one that will get closer to success. Design is a process of discovery, you will start doing something, and it will not match what you have in your head, so you need to iterate over and over until you start discovering that little seed, that little thread that you need to pull until you figure out what that thread is.

It is in the repetition, in the exploration and in the discovery that you will find what tool, technique or driving force actually starts to multiply the output. That is for example, the essence of style.

The Significance of Style

Style is a set of choices and decisions that are repeated over and over forming a pattern that is recognizable and over time, it starts to mature its coherence.

The Dual Approach to Problem-Solving

The formula is on one side understanding the problem and on the other side trying to brute force a solution, eventually you will manage to marry both. The more experienced a designer you are -more library, more tools, more skills- the faster you will transform overclocking your brain and trying to bash through a problem, but everything starts on those two energy demanding edges.

Application of Principles Across Creative Disciplines

Here is the thing, that principle can be applied from developing a custom set of brushes, to drawing circles in order to learn how to draw basic shapes and also if you want to learn anatomy in order to complement the foundations, and you manage to repeat this every day until it becomes second nature, then you will start finding solutions faster.

This happens also when you are trying to solve hyper complex design problems, in real time for example, working on a landscape or an environment, you need to understand your foliage brushes, distances, landscape design, scale, composition, etc. Then in order to get to a perfect frame, you need to go through hundreds of iterations.

In concept art, usually before starting drawing, people do thumbnails, and they do sheets of dozens of them until they find that seed of what they are looking for.

Same applies to character design, character designers go through many iterations until they find the right curves, the right colors, the right expressions, etc.

With photography its the same thing.

The Art of Discarding

Bear with me with this one... In philosophy, via negativa is used to explore the nature of existence and reality. It emphasizes the limitations of human language and understanding when it comes to describing complex or abstract concepts. By focusing on what something lacks or what it is not, philosophers aim to clarify the boundaries of what can be known or defined.

We judge design, by what its not, and so, we try to define what it is, since designing is bringing something useful into this world (serving a commercial purpose then digital design has intrinsic value), we poke, challenge and stress test design and see where it fails.

Some designers value their work too much. They believe that their output is something that comes from the gods, and treat their work. But its the other way around, you can create divine work only if your decisions translate to an end result that solves the design problem.

Therefore, like evolution, the strongest designs, meaning the ones that are judged by stakeholders, will eventually be challenged, morphed and adapted to fit that particular need that the design is trying to fulfill.

Therefore, you have to get used to discarding your work, to try millions of iterations until you learn something, until you find something that is useful not to satisfy your ego, but to solve the business problem and provide value.

The Path to Infinite Productivity

You cannot brute force your way without an intellectual understanding of a problem, but the secret, in the end is not too complicated. Start. That is 50% of the battle, then keep going, repeat, try something else, repeat again, gain confidence and speed, iterate as much as you can and have as many options as possible, have a backup plan and be a master of your craft. Be open to examine your work, as if you were an ice cold judge, poke holes and challenge it, be brutally honest with yourself and make sure that the only thing you are mostly aware of is your own ignorance. If you ruthlessly apply this principle to every single stage of the process, no matter how small, it will mathematically push you forward in your discipline.

November 5, 2023

Love, Death and Designing the Metaverse

Metaverse Design

A frame from Joytopia 3 created at Journee

I love the metaverse. I would read of metaverse design in those consulting forecasts, or blog articles about "10 future jobs unleashed by the web3 craze" and thought it was all BS. Sure Beeple opened a whole new market for 3D artists, but the web3 craze in the art world, meant that a lot of the creative class could now imagine completely new sources of income, new jobs being generated. I had friends working at decentraland, and there were other very promising projects out there that were trying to combine blockchain technology and NFTs to be able to create these unique metaverse experiences.

Let's also not forget that we were just fading out some heavy lockdowns and a crazy amount of these companies got a lot of traction, because a lot of the marketing or tradeshow budgets had to be allocated for something and people were craving experience on one side, but also a little window of opportunity was developing.

A lot of blogs started raving about how 3D designers, architects and coders would create a whole new market for these virtual experiences that people would use, even create their own economies. I was reading The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson at the time and everything made sense: The future of work and money, the future of creative work and the new ways of experiencing the internet.

But the crypto markets started to collapse and the intoxication of all these new ideas started to fade off. But not at Journee –where I work– they were thriving.

Think Again

Metaverse Design is a completely new discipline. The new advances with Pixel Streaming technology and web interactions make it possible to showcase triple A gaming experiences directly in the browser, with e-commerce integrations, web layers and cms backends that make it extremely easy to create custom virtual experiences with very little technological knowledge.

This took me a lot of time to understand and it is a strong shift in the way that I've approached my work. We are not building video games, we are not building full scale CG projects. We are building unique custom experiences in a video game engine, we are also trying all the latest AI tools to include in our pipeline, even if they are clumsy, we get excited because we know 6 months from now they will be doing things we cannot even believe. Midjourney a great, obvious example that has evolved exponentially during 2023, and has become the best tool to enhance the art director's role within the company.

What is this new discipline?

The process of building metaverse experiences is fairly new. We are somehow in uncharted territories.

On the first hand, you have experiences like Decentraland, or Sandbox that are open world platforms where you can customize your avatar, purchase virtual land, etc. These experiences are locked to their unique visual styles and ecosystems. There is a certain degree of flexibility but the world is essentially locked as it it.

What we create at Journee are custom virtual experiences that are enterprise ready to be deployed for brand and artists around the world. I know it sounds like a boring sales pitch, but I can't contain my excitement to the work that we are doing, it is truly groundbreaking.

This discipline is a mixture of high-end 3D design, combined with video game design, combined with strategy, e-commerce, interaction design, cinematics and storytelling.

Metaverse Design

A shot from Mstyle Lab for Macy's created at Journee.

Let's call it the discipline of Metaverse Design. As always, it all starts first with an idea, a story that we want to tell, some client's objectives that need to justify the investment. As any part of the creative process the idea is the leitmotif for what should happen through the whole experience. A bit of dramaturgy, theatrics and attraction design needs to be complemented and married with the latest and most accurate visual aesthetics that one can find around.

Being able to construct everything possible, metaverse design usually demands that our worlds are always in a sense surreal, extraordinary.

Furthermore, If your worlds are not convincing, then, the whole illusion falls apart and people very easily close the window-tab, and all those months of effort die after 30 seconds.

The biggest challenge is to get your aesthetics right. This is what the users buy in probably the first microseconds of entering the worlds. Designing real time graphics means we can move really fast, but at the same time we need to design in 360 degrees. That means that our decisions and designs need to work from all possible angles, plus adding the fact that we need to transition from area to area and that needs thought too.

As a creative director, or as a designer not only you have to consider the visual look, you need to also think what set of logics and interactions your user will face.

Usually experiences are exploratory, micro-stories that help brands promote a new product launch. Other times the experiences can be educational, or even tailored for interactive commerce.

Therefore how the user interacts with the world requires a lot of thought processings.

User Experience Design

Let's add more complexity to the whole topic. We need to craft an experience that has to work on desktop, mobile, vertical and horizontal format. We need to make sure people from different ages are able to understand to navigate this new format. It's not like web design, where most people know what a hamburger menu is and thinks are pretty much thought through.

Being able to move around and interact with things require a lot of investment from the designer towards the user. It's a little pain tradeoff, to educate the audiences how to interact with the world, and it usually involves a first onboarding session done with a landing area and a micro-onboarding tutorial.

Consider also that these experiences can be crafted not only for young, gaming savvy audiences, but also, for middle aged executives. Usually the people that sign-off are top management and we can't afford that they don't fall in love within the first seconds of running around.

To ensure a user-friendly experience, we aim to minimize any potential difficulties. This means we steer clear of overly complex tasks or challenging puzzles that might overwhelm users. Instead, we focus on straightforward and easy-to-grasp micro gamified interactions, ensuring that the main points of each section are clear and easy to understand. Simple logics that help us make sure that the user leaves the interaction with the key takeaways from each area.

We also need to recognize that users employing web 2.0 style of media interactions typically spend more than the average time, between 3 to 7 minutes, exploring these type of metaverse experiences.

If they quickly lose interest, they are likely to disengage prematurely.

What is our goal? Ensuring that the user enjoys the experience while we simplify the intellectual effort required for each of these encounters, making the process easily navigable and incorporating an element of amusement, alongside stunning designs.

Typically, we commence with ambitious ideas, often complex in nature, but ultimately distill them into the most streamlined interactions for the experience.

Avatar design

Rey Loves Life - A virtual influencer project that I started and never took off.

Online expression has long revolved around presenting an idealized self, irrespective of the circumstances and as some sort of shield against the troubles of the outside world. The internet gave its anonymous users in weird IRC chat rooms, a place to explore social interactions, find love or even become someone they would never ever dared to become with a high degree of psychological safety.

In this realm, individuals can project their idealized selves, showcasing the embodiment of their aspirations.

Consequently, when fashioning avatars for our immersive metaverse experience, we regard avatar design as a pivotal touchpoint, treating it with utmost significance, and in some cases it becomes almost a parallel project on itself. There's artists that specialize only in avatar design, and I personally believe this will become a sub-discipline of this new frontier.

We always have to consider factors such as refraining from engaging in divisive discussions pertaining to gender, ethnicity, nationality, location, and age. What we strive to offer aligns with the demand for gender-neutral, enjoyable avatars, constantly seeking to defy conventions and introduce novel forms of self-expression within the metaverse, offering an extensive degree of customization.

Each aspect of the avatar undergoes thorough scrutiny, interpretation. Given the metaverse's unique nature, we often work with unexplored materials and unconventional combinations, leading to an extensive process of trial and error in designing features, material combinations, impossible fabrics or physics.

To help us facilitate this unique design process, we utilize a service known as "Really Player Me." –or RPM if you are in with the cool kids. This platform offers a system for grading and preserving one's digital identity online. Their concerted efforts to achieve cross-platform compatibility have been instrumental in establishing an interoperable metaverse experience, representing a significant milestone in the field.

Advantages and advantages of real time design

Our real-time design methodology allows us to work swiftly and efficiently, enabling the rapid development of complex and immersive environments. We can bring to life expansive landscapes, and cityscapes, all within remarkably short timeframes, all really exciting stuff!

As our clients and partners begin to comprehend the dynamic pace at which we navigate these projects, the creative iteration process takes center stage, undergoing countless transformations and refinements. This is not always great because you can get lost always trying to improve and improve things, and there is a time to freeze, and start putting everything together. This accelerated creative cycle fuels our passion for pushing the envelope of what's conceivable but it's a double edged sword.

One of the challenges we encounter is the harmonization of various elements into a finished product. We find ourselves occasionally prioritizing the pursuit of exquisite visual aesthetics without due consideration for the intricate web of interactions that sustains a truly engaging and user-friendly experience. This often leads us to grapple with the intricacies of balancing visual excellence with practical functionality, recognizing the fine line between artistic expression and usability constraints.

Optimizing and launching the project

Once we conclude the design and logic iterations, our focus shifts to optimizing these projects for online deployment. While pixel streaming technology offers great potential, the associated server costs pose a considerable challenge, particularly given the temporal nature of many of our projects.

Ensuring that our projects remain playable at sixty frames per second becomes imperative. Regardless of the visual allure, it's essential that our creations operate seamlessly on our servers, often demanding a trade-off between visual quality and performance.

This continual push for visual innovation occasionally overshadows considerations of practical functionality, prompting us to find a delicate balance between visual splendour and interactive efficiency. Our experiences with complex natural landscapes featuring abundant foliage or expansive urban environments highlight the cost of intricate detailing, necessitating careful optimization strategies.

Fortunately, the extensive expertise of video game designers and optimization artists comes to the forefront, guiding us through the process of balancing aesthetics with performance. While adhering to established best practices in 3D design and polycount management, we often find the creative process challenging these norms, resulting in striking visuals that warrant careful consideration and compromise.

The finished product as an immersive experience

As we near the completion of our experience, the culmination of our design, implementation, logic, user experience, optimization, and web integration processes, we finally hold in our hands the definitive metaverse build. This build not only encapsulates the experience but also serves as the end product.

This is an exhilarating phase, where the crafted experiences become unique platforms for users to engage with, offering insights into user preferences and behaviors while providing a delightful, interactive, and 360-degree brand immersion. The metaverse transforms the brand narrative, evolving it beyond mere advertising to an interactive storytelling experience with an unparalleled potential for user engagement and shared human–yes human experiences.

Forging new disciplines

Skytopia a huge metaverse experience designed for Shiseido.

Our journey into uncharted territories represents a pioneering effort, redefining the landscape of virtual experiences and forging new paradigms for future exploration. With the trust of forward-thinking brands willing to navigate the uncertainties of this new internet, we are not only shaping new best practices but also paving the way for a new discipline in itself.

This process spans a wide array of sub-disciplines, encapsulating design, branding, user interface, and virtual aesthetics.

These efforts extend beyond the creation of virtual worlds, encompassing the establishment of corporate identities within the metaverse.

It reflects the growing realization among brands of the necessity to embrace virtual experiences, recognizing the potential for fostering intimate, persistent brand ecosystems that enable interactive engagement, customizations, and transactions within a singular, brand-centric environment.

Anticipating the inevitable convergence between virtual and physical realms, we find ourselves contemplating the intricate details of foliage, the nuances of architectural design, and the harmonization of diverse brand presences within the metaverse. These endeavors not only shape the metaverse's visual aesthetics but also establish a new standard for interactive experiences, transcending the realm of novelty and emerging as a fully-fledged platform for meaningful, immersive interactions.

As technology advances and computational power becomes more accessible, the convergence of the physical and virtual worlds is no longer a distant vision but an impending reality. This paradigm shift positions the roles of metaverse designers, creative directors, and architects as integral components of a booming discipline, one that is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical realms, shaping the fabric of our future interactions and defining the landscape of our digital experiences.

October 29, 2023

From Designer to Creative Director in 5 easy steps.

This is a basic how to guide to become a creative director. Besides the obvious clickbait title I will break down how you can become a creative director in no time, even starting as a dumb designer at the bottom of the food chain. This text tries to be less of a prescription and more of sharing some mental models.

  1. Develop you own ideas.
  2. Find a style that you can scale.
  3. Present, present present.
  4. Own the responsibility.
  5. Aim to be world class.

Develop you own ideas.

As the titles suggest being a director, means directing projects, people, teams. You set the vision and you bring everyone together where to go. You can't do that dry, empty, or copying everyone else. Your position only generates value if your vision is unique and clear. Solve problems, bring new ideas to the table that you can execute and always be developing and nurturing your vision and ideas. Collect them, share them, mix & match, go to the past and bring into the future.

People will take you in for your unique way of seeing the world. Do you have great taste, can communicate ideas clearly and also be business savvy enough to deliver value to your clients even from the early days? Then you are on your way.

Find a style that you can scale.

Similar as before, your style, is the personality that you bring into the table. You like clean and minimalistic things? Let that be your forte. You want to make the world a better place? Then focus on the projects that you feel are the most meaningful. Strive to be unique and find that which separates your from your peers. I remember one of my first assignments at the university, I had to design an energy drink. And everyone of a class of 300 people where coming with skinned versions of Red Bull cans. I got the highest score because I brought a bottle, at the time - a radical idea. But I wanted to differentiate myself of everything that was out there in the competition and it worked. That small lesson made me focus on always trying to be different, finding a style that I can scale.

I try to work so that my style becomes - timeless. I hate looking at Pinterest and seeing that everyone is doing the same type of work over and over. There are shape languages, color palettes, ideas that might change, but work that considers the fundamentals of design, composition, light and storytelling -and obviously- your unique (justified) spin is guaranteed to be successful in the short and long term.

I don't feel one ever masters this, but being aware is definitely a differentiating factor.

Present, present present.

For many, many years, I was always the guy making presentations at design studios. I used to design them, prepare them, and eventually go to present them. This is a very underrated task, many people fear the spotlight. Looking back some of the presentations I had in the past to clients are nothing compared to the ones I get to do on a daily basis directly to global clients, where I get to joke and convince people that the work that's been done is what was asked for and delivers value to them.

Offer always to create the presentation deck early one your career, use it to get your foot in the door the big table, be part of that meeting, see how the masters present, learn from them. And to our previous point, see what they are not doing and where there is room for improvement, but also, see how other people react to the jokes, the pacing, the editorial, the story beats. The more you present the more you will get to be yourself at the top. Obviously - try to do more public speaking and a bit of theater doesn't hurt.

Own the responsibility.

Directing projects and teams, means that you will be looked as the vision holder, and you will make decisions, and sometimes you will mess up. You will make someone on the team unhappy, you will not consider production needs, or you will make that bad joke that someone go offended. Own it. Be able and be ready to defend all your work, designs and ideas at each granular level. If you are insecure, be honest about it, maybe take more time to become more confident. If you fear things will be delayed or are heading into the wrong direction, open up, let people know. Some designers, artists, are happy just being on the other side, waiting for direction, masters of execution, the risk is easy to mitigate, but if you give bad directions, you are responsible of the output, and also for their wellbeing of your team. If you are just getting started, own each aspect of your work, and your decisions and soon you will be the one making decisions for teams and projects.

Aim to be world class.

Can't state this strong enough. Like it or not, in the era of the internet, you are competing with the whole planet, so, aim to be world class. A world class designer, with storytelling aspirations to grow, should look at whoever is on top of you that you admire and, in the beginning try to figure out what they do, that you can apply to become better. So simple. Compare your work with the whole world. Challenge yourself and be honest, own the responsibility of being self aware of your strengths and weaknesses so that you can double down on fixing both. Do you need to be more curious? Are your ideas the best in the world? Compare yourself with the best, and endure the pain of competing against the world and yourself. If you manage to tolerate that pain, understanding that it's just making you a better creative, then there is no way to fail.

You will only fail if you stop.

Photo Credit: Magda Ehlers via Pexels

© Ivan Flugelman 2022 Creative Direction, Design & Strategy in the Metaverse.

#metaverse