The party pooper
May 21st, 2026
Learning when to pursue, when to let it go. And knowing that sometimes it is better to go the painful, costly, unnecessary way to get to the best result.
Probably the toughest part of my job is to manage frustration — mine and my team's. I don't think I'm very good at it yet, and this is a painful process. I look back and remember situations where I clearly didn't manage it properly, with clients or colleagues, and I think — I hope — I'm better at it now. But I also see myself fifteen years back in the expectations of my younger colleagues today.
This helps. Writing forces me to dissect and structure my thoughts — an out-of-body experience that lets me observe myself from a distance.
The struggle is when you know you are right. You have all the facts and figures, you can see the consequences of pursuing the wrong path, but you will lose the battle. You just will. And that's demoralising. I'm back in my poster-filled teenage bedroom having a discussion with my dad that I'll never win and that will end with a door slam. Which is something I can't do these days. But feeling this, acknowledging it, putting it on paper — that helps. It's my adult version of door-slamming.
Design is very much a negotiation business. You negotiate experience with capability or technology, appropriateness with personal taste or pre-conceived bias, potential with budget, ambition with reality. The toughest spot is when you're voicing reality, budget, constraints. When you have to be the party pooper. Because you were hired to materialise ambition — and that's the expectation. The challenge is when it's expected that the materialisation will sort out the flaws of the ambition itself. But sometimes, as painful as it is, the only solution is to materialise it to the point where it's inevitable that it will break — and then fix it.