Loving your designer ego

ego

I’ve experienced this in myself more times than I care to admit. A voice in my head saying, “damn I’m good…. I must be the best designer ever…” and so on and so forth. I remember this feeling of joy and a burst of energy around the feeling. It must be the same feeling women feel after giving birth, although I most definitely can’t relate to that 🙂

Have you experienced this? After a spurt of creativity, “you” come up with something great or you’ve been struggling with a design for a while and then suddenly it just clicks? I love it when that happens. But I also think it’s funny that my ego comes in and claims property to what just happened. And saying what just happened put’s it into perspective, these things just happen sometimes, claiming property to it is very selfish it might seem.

But the reason I wanted to write something on this subject is that when I feel the ego creep in and “claim” a design it is always the exact oposite of creativity. To me creativity, true creativity comes from everything, absolutely everything. Everything that ever has happened caused this moment to be like it is. Everything that ever happened helped with the design for what ever is being designed. Kind of like a website really wants to be designed, we are just helping with it’s “birth” So isn’t it silly to claim property to it?

All of our experience as designers comes from others, so saying our experience is in a sense nonsense. But it’s also real easy getting stuck in an endless loop this way. Some of the things we say and write are just like they are because language is like it is, the structure of language.

Hearing this voice in my head or being aware of it is actually quite great. Getting stuck in that and actually believing that voice will not help with becoming a better designer, like I said, I believe it to be counter creative. But like most stuff in this vein, I have no proof 🙂 And the oposite view might be that designers need ego, and I can’t argue with that.

We definitely need our ego to function, for if there is no ego there is no action. But there is a difference between an immature ego and a mature ego. Have a look at the video at the bottom and listen to what Genpo Roshi has to say on this.

What do you think?