This is a story all about how...

My first LinkedIn post... Please excuse the Will Smith reference I know since the Oscars debacle he's a bit of a sore subject. But I was a 90's kid. Sorry, not sorry!

I'm going to touch on a bit of that well-trodden imposter syndrome stuff that is all the rage, but super pertinent, in the design field.

Even as I write this post at 1:45 am (I had a nap which screwed up my sleeping pattern) I can feel it lightly swirling away in that space between my gut and my chest. But here goes nothing.

I've been afforded an awesome opportunity at work, to spend a small amount of time with the brand studio team... For the uninitiated, they essentially work on CGI/VFX work for Sky and its partners, so branding and promo toolkits, 3D assets for product campaigns, title sequences, etc. In fairness, none of this work is new to me, and in my time working as a motion designer for approx a decade I've worked on each of these such projects numerous times myself. But as they say "real recognise real" and the project breakdowns I saw of their work years ago are a big part of my reason for even applying to work at Sky Creative. So to be in this position stirs up the memory of those hopeful times of years gone past.

Some background on me as well which will help explain why being given the opportunity also seems a bit surreal. Historically in my career, every opportunity and milestone passed has been or felt hard-won. Even my first job in this industry. I worked for ￡10 a day (lunch and travel expenses) for 3 months to pursue this dream. After the 3 months, I had to trap the CD in a lift and ask if I'd be kept on, which as a pretty non-confrontational person was way outside my comfort zone, desperately agreeing to ￡55 a day. Over 3 years increasing this to a freelance rate of ￡130 p/d (still below market value). Parlaying that job into another with better pay and benefits but being a solo designer in a start-up that could have benefitted from more design resource and more financing full stop. I've since learned that companies having money doesn't guarantee they will spend it in the areas you think they should anyway...but that's wisdom since gained.

A stop at a foreign language news channel where a slight culture clash and the fact journos can sometimes be aggy by nature due to their high-pressure work and all that guff, and a quick ride on the redundancy rollercoaster, and here I am.

It's been a journey and that's the incredibly condensed version. But I lay that all out to help illustrate that things have felt hard-won and embattled. Maybe they have been, maybe not so much, maybe I'm a snowflake millennial remonstrating over the natural order of things. Maybe even this latest opportunity, in fact, has been hard-fought, well-deserved, and overdue. Everything is subjective and my perspective with the benefit of hindsight may be different.

Also to be clear, the earlier stops in my career all have wonderful memories, experiences, and people attached to them, some of whom I hope are reading this post. Life is a tapestry of experiences and I treasure those times. But I can also be honest about how they felt in relation to my career hopes, and trajectory.

But having written this all out I think the funny conclusion I have on imposter syndrome is probably that we feel it when we are in situations that we most deserve to be in. And those things coming to fruition are far more terrifying than anything we had to do to get there.

As a black man living in a racialised world, I could layer a whole bunch of stuff relating to that experience on top, but I think this acknowledgment that we live in an endlessly complex world will suffice (for today).

Anyways, to my earlier point about the latest opportunity: it's a small one, with no pressure, and absolutely nothing may come from it. But it came at what felt like no cost. There was no desperate Putin-esque land grab required. No hostage-taking in a lift with my financial future in the balance. I was simply encouraged to have a conversation, and upon having that conversation the format for my weekly "mini-secondment" was agreed. And that was it.

Both this opportunity and the one that got the ball rolling on my career were born from a simple conversation, while one certainly felt much more high stakes than the other, they are in essence the same. And they have shown me the value of a well-placed if super awkward conversation.

For anyone starting out in their career, enjoy the crap stuff, have fun with it, make mistakes, and learn from them. You'll be glad you did it where you are and not where you're going!

Finally, my degree is in "colouring in" so forgive any poor grammar and the fact I probably went off on a tangent to what I set out to write.

I hope you come away from this having learned a bit about me, and having gained some small degree of insight into your own career journey.

Hopefully, I do this again ??

Daniel