As children, our heroes were the dream of a future that had no boundaries outside of our imagination. As adults, our heroes are rooted in reality, giving us an ideal to strive for, setting goals against the highest benchmark, creating ideals so great they blind us to our actual potential so we can…wait…what?

This article is referring to for-profit educational institutions and “non-profit” institutions that charge a premium based on brand recognition or reputation and not the multitude of educators and department chairs who struggle as underpaid employees of a system that forces them to risk their jobs and sacrifice their personal time to work around the institutional mandates that sabotage their goals as educators and the integrity of their relationships with their students.

When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be a member of the X-Men – fighting against the evils of the world with my laser eyes next to the coolest group of misunderstood misfits that ever existed (Storm, Wolverine, and Gambit specifically). My imagination used this idolization to open my world up to a sea of adventure and pretend that I look back on fondly to this day. As a young adult, my idols became rooted in real world figures – creative minds that have lent a hand in shaping our visual culture and are hailed for their prowess; the Carsons, Sagmeisters, and Schers of the world. My imagination had survived the years and I imagined myself next to these real-life creative heroes, fighting against bad ideas, and saving the day with my obviously complimentary creative genius.
You can see by the parallels here that nothing really changed. I mean, the sentence structure is even the same between the two thoughts; what a coincidence! The imagination we fed as children morphed over time into the motivation we all use to always successfully meet our wildest dreams, and we all lived happily ever after. The End.

Except that isn’t true for most.

Adult Preston has the rational mind to know that the X-Men are not real. While shooting lasers out of my face is super cool in theory; I understand that I am not the kind of mutant who was given cool super powers, just this amazing sense of humor and devastatingly good looks…and you can’t fight Magneto with those. This hasn’t ruined the fantasy of my childhood and spoiled all my fond memories. So why do adults, with our rational minds, deal with the pressure and expectations of emulating our heroes?

Simple, because your force fed a fantasy before you ever knew how to do your job by the institution that was supposed to be mentoring you; your college.

“That was a longer intro than normal, can you hurry up. Some of us have things to do and don’t wanna hear about th…”

Where did you get the idea that greatness awaits us all right after our education? Could it be? No? Wasn’t it your recruiter that told you their job placement rating at your school was amazing? Didn’t your career advisor show you all the famous designers and how they started just like you did? Didn’t your academic advisor tell you that the biology class you were taking was totally worth the exorbitant amount of money you paid because you needed that for Graphic Design.*

These trusted advisors are building a dream for you, one filled with fame, fortune, dental plans, paid vacations, and fields of jobs ripe for the harvest. All it takes to be the next big success is to graduate, and then you too shall be immortalized in one of the design books rotting at the local thrift store. So how is it possible that you, with all your promise, ended up “only a lowly” junior designer?

Simple, you did not attend Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters where you are uniquely gifted and individually mentored to bring out your unique powers. That school is fiction, while the institution you attended in the real world has to compete with other schools to milk you for all your worth while they have you. So they lie to you from the start;

Some schools’ job placement marketing reports use statistics like 80-90% of graduates are placed in jobs. But they fail to break that down by further extrapolating that the percentage includes “related” and “somewhat related” jobs as defined by their own standards. Not to mention some schools have been accused of making up these numbers all-together.

Many of these “schools” you are putting your trust in are actually businesses that are marketing to you to get you in the door. $730 million on advertising in 2017 alone (the most recent year for which data are available as of the posting of this article) to sell you on your dreams without ever meeting you.

From the beginning of your career, before you worked a single hour, this “safe” space for learning was already infusing you with marketing that keeps you paying while creating a fantasy from within of what it means to be successful. Your own personal comic book being written for you without your knowledge, where you are the hero of your own story, but that story hasn’t happened yet, so how can it be guaranteed?

So, now you are fresh out of school and ready to take the world on with your well-muscled genius. Your education has prepared you for everything you will ever need to be the next Saul Bass, and those student loan payments you took on for the next 15 years will disappear instantly in the face of your 6-figure salary! Except without experience, many jobs are out of reach for you due to the competitive market. We also can not forget about those willing to do the same jobs for less than you need to pay off your education because not everyone cares about the same standard of quality. Suddenly that 90% placement rate begins to reveal itself to be less than promised.

Then life hands you a miracle…a job as a junior designer, making a little less than your job as a server if you include your tips, and you are mostly clipping our photos all day for the other non-junior designers.

Did all of your college “inspiration” and “foundation” prepare you to deal with the financial repercussions of your education to do a job you needed no training to do and didn’t really enjoy? It is bad enough you have to look past the damn director calling you “Justin” even though she damn well knows your name is Preston*, now you have to contend with the destruction of a dream built from ideas implanted into your head at a time where you were most professionally impressionable? Well, those “Dreams” be damned, murder them with fire.

“So you are saying to kill my dreams? Great advice there, are you going to kill a puppy next?”

The point is that these are not your dreams. They are the equivalent of thinking you should look like an Instagram filter or thinking that models in magazines actually look like that. These are fictional things that are said to help “inspire” but actually make most people feel terrible about themselves. It is not about killing your drive; it’s about striving for what you want to be and not striving to be what someone else already is. Good intentions or not, these invasive idolizations and promises are smothering the chance for your dreams to fully form as you learn.

Is the fact that you did not meet your goals straight out the gate a bad thing? Some of your friends have found better jobs. Does this entrance into a highly competitive field mean you are worth less for working your way up the ladder to something more?

So you didn’t become a creative director 6 minutes after looking for a job. You are the best photo cropper in the building damnit, and you are gonna take that and turn it into the hypothetical face laser that is going to blow the roof off this building as you ascend to your next job.

The well-known creators and quick scam promises are nothing more than the perversion of a reality of where hard work and time can take you. Their paths have already been taken and are not available for you to copy while truly shining for what you bring to the table. Focusing on these things as a measurement of your own success is blinding you to your unique situation and how being in the moment can help you maximize every small step you take in your career.

“Fine, the puppy gets to live, but how the hell am I supposed to do that in this purgatory I work at?”

Many people who see success in their careers often claim to have the habit of learning to make the best of any situation. Is there an individual in the organization who exhibits skills or professional ethics that you want to learn from? Does the job offer you experience and time in the field to boost your resume for your next job? It is all about finding the benefits of each step of your career to help forge your own path.

Find the person in the organization who exudes or exhibits qualities that you could incorporate into your professional repertoire. Be a participant in your “purgatory” and mine those around you for the best pieces of their experience to grow your own. At that point, you can decide whether that “bad job” was a judgment that has changed, or if there are places that are better suited to continue your ascension into the creative you want to be. Just remember, no job is perfect, but it may be perfect for you and no person is more valuable than you; they may just have knowledge you can add to what you uniquely bring to the table.

Decided to stay long term? Take a hard look at those running and managing the organization and remember not to work for people you do not want to become. Within an organization, the “pinnacle” of your hard work might be one of those positions. Do your goals align with the company culture that created those people? Your boss and your boss’ boss are indicators of the type of personality and work ethic needed to see success within the org. Is that work working towards becoming? Is that helping shape you into the professional you want to become? Has the idea of that changed your perspective of what it means to be successful? If not, move on when the time is right.

“So all this to basically say everyone’s experience is different and we each have our own peak achievement that is only impressive because it’s unique? See how I did that in one sentence.”

Becoming comfortable with committing to a path to success of your own making can feel unnatural. As a society, we are taught to identify and follow the norms of what it means to be human and everything that goes along with that. The confidence and self-awareness that you need to step away from the prime examples of “success” and follow your own is a step most do not take.

Don’t get me wrong, it is better to have any drive than none at all, but to truly reach a pinnacle that feels satisfying, it does have to be tailored to each of our unique experiences. Respect and reverence are two very different things; respect is earned through direct experience, while reverence is often given based on an impression we have been given. You can revere something you know nothing about, but to truly respect something you have to have some basic understanding of why.

Celebrity creatives can be revered for their contributions to the collective creative community, but just like the rest of us, they did not wake up one morning and copy what someone else did to make their mark right then and there. They also had their path to excellence, their own respect and reverence for other renowned professionals, and they made the decision at that time to do something different. Although we are familiar with their work now, at the moment of conception, famous designs are celebrated for their out-of-the-box thinking and are emulated to death because truly unique ideas are so rare in that space.

I do not work with Carson, Sagmeister, or Scher. I work with people whose last names you probably have never heard of and spoiler alert…I look up to them, I respect them, and I learn from them. The most unbelievable part is I actually know them. They are better than what I had hoped for and much of my professional growth is directly attributed to their presence in my life. Even though none of them have been impressive enough to get me those face lasers I deserve. So whether you are thinking about school or have attended and feel lost, just remember; a dream is a goal that is not meant to be easy, otherwise it would already be your reality.