Define Your Own Success As a Freelance Graphic Designer and Creative Entrepreneur
Vol. 037
Define Your Own Success As a Freelance Graphic Designer and Creative Entrepreneur.
Don’t allow hustle culture or society define success for you. You don’t always have to work from sunup to sun down, make a lot of money, or even work with big clients. Set your own goals, define success for yourself, and work towards your version of success.
A quick bite:
Success comes in many forms. Sometimes success means making a lot of money. Sometimes success means working with high profile clients. And other times success simply means having an open schedule...There are many different versions of success, and ultimately it’s up to YOU to decide what it is that you’re working towards. If you allow yourself to embrace different versions of success that come in different seasons of life, you might find yourself far happier with your career journey.
Continue reading below…
Time and time again, I have the “why the hell do I work so much” epiphany.
Taking some time for self reflection always reminds me that “hustle culture” has forced me to think that if I wasn’t working, I wasn’t succeeding.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Today I wanted to offer a bit of perspective from my experience of running a creative studio for ~7years (at this point, at least).
It’s been a wild journey, and more than anything, I want to highlight that “success” is relative. Success is subjective.
Success is based on achieving YOUR own goals.
Success is relative to what YOU are working towards—don’t let society dictate your perception of what success is. To help explain what I mean, below I have highlighted 4 different “periods of success” that I’ve experienced in my career. Note: three of these are not financially focused.
Success #1
For the first few years freelancing I made just enough money to live paycheck to paycheck. I was spending essentially every dollar I made, and I made just enough to go play in the mountains whenever I wanted to and travel on and off to various locations around the world for a few years. I snowboarded a lot, I met a ton of amazing people, I experimented, and partied — I did everything I wanted to do, and I had just enough money to do so. This was when I was about 23-25, and I felt massively successful.
Takeaway: Success at this time meant making enough money through graphic design to simply survive, so long as I had some time to do some fun shit along the way. In this time, I felt very successful.
Success #2
Over the following couple years in my career I found myself able to charge more money for my work, I was starting to land higher profile clients, and I was slowly starting to make a bit of name for myself in the creative industry.
In hindsight, I owe a lot of this to simply marketing myself and putting my work out into the world. I began speaking at events and conferences, teaching workshops, and I started to position myself as “an expert” (relative term) in the industry.
At that time, establishing myself in this industry and receiving recognition for my hard work felt like a huge success.
Success #3
Continuing forward, projects and clients continued to grow, and Vicarel Studios continued to generate more revenue. This ultimately enabled me to purchase a house in 2019. That was, and still is, an absolutely insane accomplishment that I never thought would really happen. Truly surreal to me.
Being able to commit to such a large financial decision through the growth of my creative business was a huge success to me.
Success #4
For the first time since it all started, I’m actually able to take a step back: my business is no longer all-consuming of my life as it has been for the past many years. There are a lot of reasons this is possible, but one of the main reasons is because of delegating, and hiring contractors and employees. Letting go of the unattainable (perfectionism), and trusting others and delegating has completely changed my business.
Currently I’m working essentially ~9–5, M–F. Rarely any weekends. Rarely late nights. Maybe this is just a phase. Or, maybe this is how I will continue to operate moving forward. Regardless of the answer there, I have acknowledged that the ability to continue to hit revenue numbers that I’m happy with, create work that I love and to work “normal” office hours is a new success that I never realized I desperately wanted.
Allowing my creative business to bolster a life outside of design is currently the ultimate success to me.
Yes, I could push more. I could work more; I could make more; and I could grow more. But I don’t want any of that right now. I don’t want to hustle. I want to live my life, I want to spend time with friends and family, and I want my business to fund that living.
I currently feel a new type of success. The ability to truly construct my life as I want it feels like an ultimate win.
Lifestyle design is something that many people work towards; however, because of standard corporate structure, the ability to do so is oftentimes hindered. I feel very fortunate to have achieved (at least, currently) this 4th success.
I hope this reminds you that “success” is relative. Success is what you want it to be.
Define your own success. Accept that your career and life will come in seasons and it won’t always look like what you want it to. However, if you set some goals, define your success, and trust the process, you might find yourself feeling quite successful quite often.
Keep on keepin’ on my friends!