4. You need to be going wider than deep right now.

The only problem you will learn to solve at a startup is that startup’s problem. And it may well indeed be a worthy problem to solve. But right now you need to be learning how to solve a wide variety of problems for a wide variety of people. You need to be trying different things. Dealing with different types of clients.

And that mentor we talked about? They’ll be an invaluable resource in teaching you how to deal with all of those different people. And reminding you that lessons you learned on a project a year ago are applicable to the current project in a way you hadn’t thought of.

I run a design studio, and on any typical day we have about a half dozen different projects running through the job. It’s never boring. We learn a little bit about this and a little bit about that. We get to find out about industries we knew nothing about. And we get to design a variety of things. Every once in a while one of our designers enjoys a project so much that she decides she wants to go focus in that area. Which is great. She’s put in her time and made her choice. And she can go off and focus in that area knowing that she has a strong general foundation.