I’m a late 30 something designer, sadly a failed or a best mediocre student, they do say education is wasted on the young! Once working though I went from someone who can ‘do computers’ to senior designer, with a few stops inbetween and eventually realising the dream I had as a 13yr old of owning my own design business. It is only with the confidence of age that I dare call myself a ‘creative’ as it carries a self-congratulatory stigma that the British just don’t like, much like calling yourself an entreprenuer in Britain (yet the US and Europe have no problems with it). Just like most ‘artists’, I do not take creative critisim very well, so I chose to sell my artistic abilities to the one client I could rely upon to ‘go easy’ on me, that customer was… me! And for the most part I have been happy as client and happy as the designer.

However, the designer part of me cannot stop the one thing that comes naturally, which is to create things, but the client part of me is strugglying to keep up with all this new stuff, stuff that the client part of me has to see through to the end. My inner designer does not care what the projections are, or if a courier is better than the post, because the designer is only involved in the jump-start, the big bang, the adventure of the fresh and new. No, the designer doesnt even understand that he has left the ‘client’ running a business which has become a process of ‘management’: production management, staff management, file management and project management. So the client take 90% job share of the business, but the problem is this client is a creative (me) and we hate management!

To solve this problem, unbeknown to myself until recently, I have created more and more sidelines projects to take away the boredom of running the non-creative elements within the business. This has led to several websites, two additional brands and dozens of social media profiles. All of which get started with such vigor that they can be up in a weekend and tweeted and pushed into the digital world, until the designer says to the client (in me) right over to you, you carry on tweeting, facebook-ing, youtube-ing, developing new products, costings, projects managing etc etc, to which the client gets more bored with managing more managment and creates more new projects… I sound schizophrenic to illustrate the point, but it is not terribly far from the truth as most creatives are ‘double minded’ we often pose and answer our own questions, think with our mouths, write posts that we read to ourselves, and turn to drink to silence the voices, well maybe I’m not that bad.

The curse is that I cannot stop thinking of new ideas, ideas that seem so much more interesting than the day to day of this businesses I’ve created.

As I see it, I’m the creative guy, I was meant to be the creative guy, I’m not the manager guy, some other people are good at that and enjoy it, but I don’t.

So I have set myself a little challenge and already mothballed some of the side projects, even before I finished this post. Lets see if I can remain true to the goal and stay focused on the main tasks at hand, which also involves delegation…because there we have another creative trait, ‘control freak’! ☺