I might never reach my next big career goal and thats ok

When I was about 6 years old, having discovered I could draw, I remember drawing a picture of what I thought I'd be when I grew up. A designer. Back then it was a graphic designer, i'd just thought how can you make money by drawing. I knew I had to have a big desk at a 45 degree angle like you saw at the time for people now termed "Drafts people" and my house was a mansion with a sports car outside. I wasn't to know at that point that perhaps you weren't instantly rich as a designer. I was 6. The car was a Porsche.

I mostly forgot about this dream as I grew up suggesting to parents I wanted to work in a bank to make money then coming to my senses and pursuing a degree in music technology and working in sound recording. On that course two modules, one on multimedia using director, flash and photoshop and another module hand coding HTML unleashed my inner creative kitten. I made websites for anything and anyone I could. As someone who could draw but had never learnt to do it on a computer Photoshop was a new exploration of creating imagery and designs. Then I discovered macromedia fireworks and I was in heaven.

Post university, while slinging modestly powered computers at PC world, I would spend my nights making websites freelance dreaming of making it my full time job. 18 months into a post university life working in my hometown PC world wondering if the mountain of debt was worth it, I landed my first web designer role for a small SEO company and my dream was on it's way.

First big goal

It wasn't for another 4 years when I joined magneticNorth as a senior experience designer do I remember setting my first really big career goal. I told myself at 26 I would aim to be a creative director by the time I was 35. This was a massive leap at that time. Firstly while I had been designing and building websites for years at that point I had just joined my first agency that did things for the kinds of brands that everyone saw on TV. Not only that I had joined as a front end developer as I was so intimidated by the high level of graphic and digital design there that I felt any in was worth it and I backed my self-taught coding skills over my self-taught digital design skills. Really if that was my goal I hadn't set myself up for success.

I spent around 6 years there and learnt an incredible amount from so many incredibly talented people. Creatively it's still the biggest impactful moment of my career. By the time I left I had manoeuvred myself more into a UX role, directing other folks on ideas and regularly pitching big thoughts to people with money and power at various impressive sounding companies. Without being super conscious of the goal I'd set at 26, at 33 I found myself weirdly on the right path to make it. I joined another agency, Retrofuzz, with a slight step up in a role named creative lead. I took my early forays into leadership and coaching to help direct designers and developers on new projects while not strictly line managing them. It was a whirlwind time and I loved working with the directors there who helped me develop a real eye for detail and having really strong relationships with clients and stakeholders.

Two years later I had the opportunity to take a role at the BBC and it was at this point, after years of working in a dev and design hybrid career and never fully being a graphic designer that I dreamed of as a child, that I landed a role with the title Creative Director. The most remarkable thing about that as it turned out is that I accepted the role at the end of november 2015, about 14 days before my 35th birthday. Unconsciously I'd done it.

I've made it, what now?

Once in the role I'd set as my target so many years before I was only focused on short term progress. Can I be great in this job? Can I direct work well? Do people like working for me? Can I manage poor performance well? Can I mentor and coach people to develop? What happens when people find out I am not as good as a designer as them?

I attended leadership courses, tried my best to hide my own feelings that I might not do a great job and observed the talented group of other creative directors around me. It was my first client side role not working in an agency too so getting used to a long term outlook and more product focused mindset over projects meant this first year flew by with my development in parabolic turbo mode.

It didn't take long to feel aimless though. Thats the thing for me, and I am sure most people need something, a dream, goal or north star was now missing. I'd achieved what my later time in AND digital taught me was my "big hairy audacious goal" and now I had no lighthouse to steer me in the storms.

It came to a head when I got given coaching sessions by the incredible Emma Collins . Pretty early on we tackled where was I trying to go now. I probably wasted 3 sessions saying I really didn't know anymore. Having coaching sessions helped focus the mind, when was I happiest? what did I feel I was good at when in a role? where as a dream could I see myself going?

And so at 36 I set a new goal. I think I wrote it as "over the next ten years I'll be a Chief Design Officer". Now breaking that down that was only a title and I now realise its more important to focus on what that meant. Really what I wanted and still aim to achieve is the ability to run a large org level group of talent and help them achieve great things. I gravitated towards design because it's the bit I spent my whole life up to now dreaming about but in truth over the last 8 years I have dabbled a good portion of my time in product management roles. I realise now the design bit might be negotiable, what I really wanted is to run something the way I see things being run and test that we could achieve great things doing it that way. I wanted to be set targets not tasks and given a budget by which to achieve it or get sacked. I wanted to help create incredible cultures and see what amazing things we could do that the world might notice in some way.

So how is progress?

I've never told people my big goals. I never told people at 26 I wanted to be a creative director by 35, I felt people would laugh at me. In truth being a chief design officer might not happen, and I'm at peace with that fact. Firstly the role is disappearing or morphing into something new. Secondly I am hitting 44 this year and now have a young son and that changes you to think about how you might set up opportunity for them and not you anymore. Thirdly I've started to see peers and people who worked in roles junior to me five years ago leapfrog above me. It's become less important to me to feel like achieving that means a career well done.

It's still there, lurking in the back of the subconscious and steering me every so often though. Over the last few years I have started to understand stock market traders and crypto trading. There are periods where the stocks go up and periods where it goes down. In between those there is a time where it stays roughly in the same range of prices and people can often call them a "continuation" pattern. Just a levelling off before following the previous trend or reversing. I don't feel I am ready to reverse yet but the last 8 years since I set that goal have had their fair share of ups and downs and it's definitely been a continuation or sideways pattern.

That period of becoming a creative director, finding out that leading others was probably the thing that felt most natural, but getting a bit too sure of myself and too focused on ambition led me to want to fix every deviation from the upward trajectory. You learn leadership roles on the job, no matter the training. Most don't get the luxury of having serious training in it and I count myself as lucky to have managed to get that. Still I made a lot of mistakes in that first real owning a staff budget leadership role. I wouldn't always explain my thinking or context, I'd demand a lot of folks and sometimes not let the foot off the gas or I'd just clumsily find my through new situations trying to portray a hollywood version of the actual leadership style thats natural to me.

I went through things I might one day talk more about that led me to change into product management and then into consulting, leaving the pressures of managing others behind for a while so that I could recalibrate.

Right now I am doing a job I have done before, managing a small single group of design talent, but probably given all the experience over the years this is the best stab I've ever had at it. I've learnt loads from consulting and seeing inside massive companies about the politics, positioning and how to run large groups of folks. I've experienced selling services and propositions at the most senior board levels since that age of 35. It took me 9-10 years to achieve my last big goal then 8 years in this next one feels at least another 5 years off. What I know is, I'd love to run a large design org. I feel comfortable running a team or multiple teams of designers. I hold the job title that back in 2018 felt like the next goal, it took me to 2023 to achieve it. But the job isn't different to the role I held in 2016 it's not the head of role I had above me back then and while the job hasn't changed I certainly have in the way I do the job.

I'm very lucky to have the role I have now. I am working with probably the best group of design talent I've been lucky to surround myself with. Maybe my change in style, being more open about collaborating on plans, that helps a touch but honestly while I have this group of people I feel we can really fly and I'd love to keep that going for a bit until they need to stretch their wings further.

This could be peak career. Peak earnings and peak level I manage to achieve. That is ok with older me in a way it wasn't with younger me. There are times I feel like I am just starting out but in all honesty if I was pure ambition I would have probably pursued the biggest role I could and I would likely have had to leave the UK and my home. While I have the big goal in the background, one day run a design or product org as where the buck stops, it might be a loose steer that my subconscious takes. Ultimately I have started to think about what the end of my career looks like however long away that might be and how to live a happy life. Middle age will do that to you. It's less about titles now and more about how to do great things with great people and set myself up to enjoy time with my family.

I've shown you mine, what's yours?

If setting a big dream goal isn't something you've done I highly recommend it. You don't have to head for it straight A to B. You might go through to Z before you end up at B but having it there, maybe just out of reach, it's often the pursuit of happiness that makes everything zing. I remember two things about this which makes it something I believe in.

Years ago I used to watch a fair bit of Gary Vee, he would always talk about his goal of owning the New York Jets and how wild that was and he might never achieve it. But having it there gave himself something to stay motivated as he achieved other things. Secondly as a united fan I followed the Class of 92 story taking over Salford. In one episode in the early days when debating a big decision Gary Neville simply said "Does doing this help us get to the premier league in ten years? If not maybe we don't do it".

I love a good north star or dream. I don't focus on it for all decisions but sometimes, every so often, the clouds part and I find myself much closer to it than last time I looked.

Have you got one? Have you told anyone or is it just your little secret?

Referenced a few moments in lovely career to date, biggest props to the big inspirations, if I get no further they helped me get here and I love them for it no matter if I acted a prat at times. Just appreciation and acknowledgement for all the nuggets they shared along the way to Ian Davies Matt Kendall Jonathan McNamara Lou Cordwell OBE Brendan Dawes Colin Burns Adam Todd Paul Sissons Emma Collins Sanjeev Shewhorak Sharon Fuller