It’s almost April. My classmates and I will be graduating in a month’s time. Unsurprisingly, stress levels are sky high. Between school work, thesis, and part-time jobs, we’re at our wits end. But alas. In a month’s time, we should be flying off into our sparkly new jobs.
Which brings me back to the present. We’re soon-to-be new grad designers. We’re eager to please, even more eager to pull ourselves out of student debt, to prove to ourselves and our families that a design degree is valuable, that WE are valuable. This desire for validation of one’s abilities and worth should be familiar to everyone.
If you can’t get a job in your profession, you must not be very good at what you do. If recruiters reach out to you, surely that means your work is superb. If companies offer you gobs of money, you must be hot shit.
It’s easy to get lost in all the fanfare.
Wanting Validation is a Good Thing
Let’s talk about this desire for validation. Despite what it may seem, it is a good thing. Validation is feedback. Feedback helps you understand what you’re doing right or wrong. It helps you improve.
The thing with validation is that it’s tied to ego and self-worth. When you have a healthy level of ego and self-worth, you seek validation with an open mind. If you don’t get that job you want, you try to understand where your shortcomings are and improve. It doesn’t devastate you.
The problem arises when you don’t have a healthy level of ego and self-worth. Too much or too little ego comes from a place of fear. Fear clouds people’s abilities to think clearly. When you seek validation from a place of fear, you place all your self-worth on external factors. You believe that getting the that prestigious job or hundred thousand dollar salary will fill the gaping hole that is your self worth. When you don’t get the job…
It destroys you.
The Origins of Self-Worth and Validation
Self-worth is your confidence. It needs to come from within. Betting your self-worth on external factors is detrimental to your well-being.
Validation can only come from external sources. That’s because validation is asking for feedback. You can’t make up your own feedback,
It’s easy to confuse the two but it’s important to differentiate them. Knowing that validation can only come from external sources means that you have a choice.
Sources of External Validation
- High salary
- Offers from prestigious companies
- Offers from large companies (my mother loves this one)
- Offers from “stable” companies
- Acceptance from people you admire
- Awards and recognition
- Hackathon wins
- High number of Twitter followers, Dribbble likes
I’ve been there. I’ve coveted all these sources of validation before. Some I’ve obtained, some I haven’t (one day I’ll win a hackathon Q_Q). Of those I had, what surprised me was how fleeting the feeling of accomplishment was.
Why is that? Probably because they were the wrong indicators to prioritize.
I am designer. I wish to know where I fall on the spectrum of goodness as a designer. What are the best indicators of whether I’m a good designer? The answer seems so clear in retrospect.
External Indicators of a Good Designer
- Their work accomplishes business goals.
- Their work is actually built by engineers.
- Target users find their design easy, even delightful, to achieve their goals.
It’s not about you or your ego. It’s about your work. You are merely the conduit through which it flows.
There are so many forces that stand in the way of ideas becoming reality such as business needs, development constraints, and always, the complexity of real life. A designer’s purpose is to bring these forces together to improve the lives of specific groups of people. If you’ve done a good job, other people will benefit.
Your greatest source of validation should come from the people you help. If your designs are making a positive impact on someone’s life, you’re doing a good job. I’m not saying salary, prestige, and recognition aren’t important factors to consider. They just shouldn’t be the MOST important.
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