It could always be better…

The advertising industry is an amazing environment where you can find many kinds of people, and today, I’d like to talk about two of those kinds.

Over the past 15 years working at digital production companies and agencies around the globe, I met some very talented people. The weird thing is, most of these people were suffering — and some still are — from the imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome, in a few words, is the feeling that you’re not good enough and that eventually everyone will see that you’re a fraud.

I strongly believe that these people are the best because they’re afraid of failing. They triple check their work, talk to someone, bring others into their ideas and finally, they consistently deliver a better work, in other words, a healthy lack of confidence may bring up the best in you.

On the other hand, we have those who are full of themselves. In fact, I’m sure they also are pretty insecure, but still, they are full of themselves. Usually these guys are the ones who will criticize any work published by other people.

Generally they will try to go against the approach, the idea or anything else. If they are not able to make you agree with them, they’ll try to find something — usually non-important — in it and just say “well… that could be better”. Without any interest in learning the reasons, the goals or results of the project, pretending that the project was specially made for them.

Once, I heard that digital projects are endless, but at some point we gotta give up and go to the next one.

Every time we’re on a project we suffer pressure from clients, co-workers and ourselves. The timeline is usually not as long and resources are not as abundant as we think it should be. There’s always something that won’t let us do as much as we want.

Turns out that for some reason there is a weird culture in this market; everyone feels as if they were a judge and therefore, should evaluate, test, find flaws, compare and of course, criticize the work of others.

My point here is, every time you see a project and you feel like judging it, remember that behind what you see there is a person. The project for sure had problems, limitations, changes, roadblocks — just like your projects do.

Besides that, remember that it’s pretty easy to connect the dots after seeing the problems and the results, but it’s not that easy when you’re walking the path.