Twenty years does something interesting to your relationship with confidence.
When I started out, I was confident in the wrong things. My craft opinions. My aesthetic judgements. My belief that if the design was good enough, it would speak for itself. I had strong views and a relatively thin basis for them. The confidence felt earned because I’d worked hard to develop my skills. It wasn’t. It was the confidence of someone who hadn’t yet encountered enough failure to understand what they didn’t know.
The first decade knocked a lot of that loose. Not cruelly, mostly. Just progressively. Projects I thought were well-designed that landed badly. Research that contradicted my assumptions. Clients who made decisions that seemed wrong and turned out to be right. The gradual accumulation of evidence that the practice was more complex than my early mental model of it.
What replaced the certainty wasn’t doubt. It was nuance. The ability to hold a strong point of view while staying genuinely open to the thing that would change it. That transition is the core education of a long career, and I don’t think you can shortcut it.
The second decade felt different in ways I didn’t expect. The technical questions got easier. Not trivial, but easier. I had enough pattern recognition that I could read a brief, a team, a set of constraints, and make a reasonable assessment of where the hard problems were going to be. I’d seen enough versions of similar challenges that I wasn’t starting from scratch every time.
What got harder were the human questions. How to tell a client something they needed to hear and didn’t want to. How to know when a project was beyond saving and say so clearly. How to build a team culture that survived difficult delivery rather than fracturing under it. How to know when my seniority was an asset to a client and when it was making me less useful than a younger designer who didn’t have twenty years of institutional assumptions baked in.
Consulting sharpens these questions in particular. You’re working across organisations, cultures, leadership styles, different ways of thinking about design. You can’t default to familiarity. Every engagement requires you to read the specific situation quickly and accurately, to understand what kind of help is actually wanted versus what kind of help is actually needed, and to navigate the gap between those things with enough care that you’re still trusted when you’re done.
The most common mistake I’ve made as a consultant is solving the problem I was hired to solve rather than the problem the client had. Those sound like the same thing. They’re not. The brief is usually a symptom. The actual issue is often structural, organisational, political. You can deliver exactly what was asked and leave the client no better positioned to do good design work six months later. That’s technically successful and practically useless.
Getting to the underlying problem requires a level of trust that doesn’t come automatically and isn’t always welcomed. Some clients want the work done and don’t want the broader conversation. Learning to read which is which, and to respect it when the client genuinely just needs the deliverable, took me longer than it should have.
There’s also the loneliness question, which nobody talks about enough in consulting. When you’re embedded in a client organisation, you’re not quite part of it. You’re useful, sometimes essential, but you don’t have the relationships that come from years of shared history. You arrive, you contribute, you leave. The work moves on. The team moves on. You move to the next thing.
That suits some people perfectly. It has suited me, mostly. But I’ve had to learn to find continuity somewhere. In the development of a practice, a point of view, a body of work that compounds over time even when individual engagements don’t. In the relationships with clients that persist beyond a single project. In the mentoring work, which has been unexpectedly important to me as a source of meaning.
The thing about twenty years is that it gives you something you can’t buy or borrow. The ability to say clearly what you think, based on having been wrong in instructive ways many times before. That specificity of experience is the most valuable thing you can offer a client, a team, or a more junior designer trying to figure out what the work actually is.
Not certainty. Certainty is cheap and usually wrong. Grounded perspective. The ability to look at a situation and say: I’ve seen this before. Here’s what usually matters. Here’s what usually doesn’t. Here’s what I’d pay attention to.
That’s worth something. More than I understood when I was starting out and trying to demonstrate value through the quality of my Figma files.
The education is ongoing. Every project teaches something, even the ones that go badly. Especially the ones that go badly. The appetite for that kind of learning is, I think, what separates the people who stay genuinely curious at twenty years from the ones who’ve calcified around their existing frameworks and stopped growing.
I’m still learning. The confidence is better calibrated now. The craft is stronger. The judgment is sharper.
But the practice, honestly, is still humbling. That’s not a complaint.
That might be the point.
