Growing up, it was instilled in me by my parents to have a financially stable job with benefits and retirement. With that mindset in mind, I found myself with a design career in corporate restaurant hospitality for 3-4 years. While this was super awesome for my portfolio (as you can see on my website, more than half of my work has been for restaurant branding), it was also the unhappiest I’ve ever been, to the point where I would often get “call of the void” moments when driving over a bridge during my daily commute. I also started developing stressed-caused dermatographism. The stress from work definitely took a toll on both my mental and physical health.
The importance of good leadership.
Why was I so unhappy? To put it bluntly, it was bad leadership. I’ve experienced micro-managing and being overworked while being underpaid. I’ve had managers who didn’t know how to be managers and were also bad communicators. I also acknowledge that it’s not entirely their fault—they also had pressures from their managers to generate leads and profit. In the end, I felt that I was on the bottom of the corporate pyramid and felt the weight of the pressure that got sent from the top level down. I left one company due to bad management for another company whose CEO ended up getting caught in a $400 million fraud scheme. I thought I could escape and now I can only laugh.
The importance of good company core values.
As a creative, it’s important to love my work. When workloads increase, becomes more rushed, less creative, and all about numbers, stats, and leads, leads, LEADS!!! then, of course, morale goes down. Working in marketing is also eye opening, especially when my job was to sell products that I myself would not have bought as a consumer. I would have to go through every work day living with that constant disconnect. I developed a “just do it for the money” attitude where I became increasingly pessimistic and just felt like an empty vessel/tool where I helped churn out ideas and designs that weren’t mine. I no longer had any heart in the work that I created, which made me incredibly unsatisfied and unhappy. My motivation was simply to get paid in the end.
Getting laid off in the summer of 2019 was the best thing to ever happen to me.
It was a perfect excuse for me to leave the corporate world without the guilt and shame for choosing to willingly leave a source of financial stability. I now had all this free time to do the things I’ve always wanted to do. I took on more freelance design projects, explored new hobbies that I never would have done before but always wanted to, opened an online shop, and finally had the time to help my senior dogs live their best life. I was also able to relax and focus on my health. The stress rashes went away and I like to joke that I was previously allergic to my old work. Additionally, I was able to enjoy some time without the pressures of deadlines. I learned how to take my time and time is exactly what I needed.
After 8 months of unemployment, I was able to find my place in Passion Planner’s product development team. To be honest, I was hesitant in applying because I thought I was a too much of a pessimistic and negative person to be a good enough fit. That’s how damaged I felt from my experience at my previous workplaces. I’m happy that I gave it a shot because working here has made me a more positive person. Here I can truly feel the difference of what good leadership, good company core values, and a positive work environment makes. I feel seen, I feel valued, I feel authentic. I help design products that help people achieve their goals. My salary is less than what I was making at my previous jobs. This would have bothered my old self but right now that doesn’t matter to me anymore. What matters is that I’m rested, happy, and creating things that I can be proud of. The tradeoff is worth it, especially when it comes to my well being. Money isn’t everything!
