Nobody tells you this early enough. The title won't feel how you thought it would. The pay rise lands and within a week it's the new normal. The status you spent years positioning yourself toward turns out to be surprisingly quiet once you're actually standing in it.
I've watched it happen to people I respect. Brilliant creatives who optimised their careers for the markers that looked good from the outside and arrived at a point where the work itself had stopped meaning anything to them. Not because they weren't talented but because somewhere along the way the brief stopped mattering.
That's the trap the creative industry sets and almost never talks about.
My career has been built on a different logic. Not a plan, not a strategy and most certainly not a five year framework. A simple filter. Does this project, brand, brief and or person, align closely enough with what I actually believe in to be worth my time and energy?
If yes, pursue it completely. If not, no title or number on the end of a contract changes that.
The projects that have stayed with me over my career and the ones I still lean into for references aren't the ones with the most impressive names attached. They're the ones where I cared about the outcome before I knew what the outcome would be.
That feeling isn’t accidental. It's the result of being honest enough with yourself about what actually excites you and disciplined enough to use that as your primary filter when opportunities arrive. That instinctive feeling you get when a brief lands or you meet the right person for the first time. That's real. Follow it.
The creative industry is full of people who took the safe road. The bigger agency, the more recognisable client, the role that looked better on paper.
And plenty of them have built perfectly respectable careers. But respectable and fulfilling are two very different things. The ones who hit you with conviction when they talk about their work, the ones who still light up describing a project from fifteen years ago, are almost always the ones who chased alignment over affirmation.
There will be moments where the money matters. Where the practical reality of a decision overrides everything else. That's not a failure of principle. That's life. But those moments are fewer than the industry would have you believe and the cost of making them the default is higher than most people account for until it's too late to course correct easily.
The brands, sectors, people, and briefs that align with your belief system aren't always the most obvious ones. Trust me. And they're not always the biggest or the most prestigious. But they're the ones that compound. Every piece of work done with care and alignment builds something.
A body of work, a reputation, a set of relationships and a way of thinking that becomes distinctly yours over time. That's what a creative career actually is when it's working.
Chase the work that excites you. The rest has a way of following.
Shot of the good stuff.
