Better ways to be better

Originally written back in Oct 2025. I left it unfinished and forgot about it, but six months later, I'd unknowingly lived by the things I wrote here and owe a few parts of my life to it.

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It's been a year. I looked at my portfolio again and the work I’ve done and thought, hey, I hate them less now. One day into the far, far future I’ll finally love it. I’m getting there.

How do you get better in a creative field?

In many of them, like music, it’s mostly rudimentary. You practice until the notes mean nothing. At least that’s how it was to a younger me when I told my parents in the car I wanted to quit my lessons.

There’s no concept of a “design critic” the way there’s one for films or food. That’s just the job. You do it to everybody’s work and you do it to your work. If you’re a creative you’re probably familiar to the discrepancy between what you think is good design—your taste, your sense—and what you actually put out.

There’s a gap between who you want to be and where you’re at. Unfortunately for me, and I’m sure a lot of people doing this for a living, my critic-self is as insufferable as she gets. So it’s a very, frustrating, very big discrepancy. And I imagine this is where most people stop being creatives to pay the bills. Good for you guys.

Personally, it’s always gone a little like this. I know I’m looking at something very different, very good, when it makes me smile. I’ll think, I love designers. I love creativity. I love what I do and that I get to be in this field. I’ve never thought about using type that way. I’ve never thought about folding paper that way, or that the handle of a boring paper bag looks like a mouth, or that marqueed, disembodied text on top of the least accessible screen colors you’ve ever seen would scratch my brain so right. I’ve never thought about it that way before.

That spark will, as we all know, wear off. Once it did, I realize that I hate that same fact, that I've never thought of it that way before. I hate that I wasn’t the one to come up with that. Why? What makes them different from me? How do I go from here to there? Do they hate themselves more? I hate when I’m not the best in the room. I also hate it when I’m the best in the room. I should be in a room where I can hate myself in the former way.

As you can tell already it’s not a good way live. For a long time it was the best way to be a better designer. But I was missing something.

**

Australia has a weird academic calendar. This year I started with the foundational courses I was supposed to do had I started a semester earlier like everybody else. I spent the past year letting myself slow down. I gave myself a year to decide if I want to continue doing what I do or cut my losses while I’m still in school. In the mean time, I was picking up screenwriting.

[TODO]

So I was asking. How do these designers come up with the things they do and get so good? And I realized something so corny, so obvious but also so hard to agree with: it's not hatred. It's love.

I'm not talking about it in the the safe and grounding sense, but the kind closer to hunger, the insatiable kind. The one where you want to learn all and everything about this object of love, where you obsess and overthink, and you think about it at night and it becomes the last face you see before you sleep. And the reason you sleep is to wake up again as somebody who's in love with something.

I don’t know. When I look through the Babel tower of the Pinterest account I’ve built up over several years now, it’s harder to imagine they all came from a place of “I want to be the best” than, “Let’s create something stupid today.”

**

You need self-hatred. You need a degree of self-hatred to realize there's a gap and make it hurt enough to do something about it. It’s what will make you think, “This can be better, I can do better”, even if you don’t know how yet and that’s such an icky feeling to deal with. It makes you look up at a place really far away and go, "I want to get there", and then that's how you get there.

Which brings me to what I've been doing wrong: once you're done with the realizing, you also need the ability to switch it off and put on a different hat. If you give yourself permission to love---it's not easy, by the way---you'll just find that love is always the better place to create from. You have the 'what'---this is the 'how', the thing that's going to get you there. You need two hats.