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I grew up around money without having it.
I learned early what looking like you belong does to how people treat you.
I drew paintings in every class I ever sat in instead of listening, a face is a few marks that settle what people believe about a person. I was drawing the problem I work on now.
I got fired more than once, I was a bad employee and a good builder.
I left the one job I liked because I wanted my own thing and the studio came out of that. A founder who has built something real and is still treated as small is standing in the room I grew up in.
So I read a company the way that room read me, at least from what it can see.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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Over the past few weeks, I have shared a lot of what I have been working towards for years with Halate. It’s the part of my life I share most often, and something that genuinely makes me proud. But there are also other sides of me that I like to share every once in a while.
Building a personal brand and starting a new company are deeply personal. It can feel like you are creating something for yourself, but in ways it can also feel like you are simply trying to make enough money to pay the rent and cover your basic needs. Sometimes I feel like just another cog in the machine we call capitalism.
Over the last few years I have been working a lot on myself and trying to see who I really am and what I really want. But because of internal and external struggles I also feel like a ghost in a shell that is just here to fulfill the social standards that we have build. I struggle with depression, loneliness and a general feeling of uselessness. I question life often and a lot of times it feels meaningless.
Besides those internal struggles, I am constantly confronted by everything happening around us… trying to find a home, searching for more work, struggling to form meaningful connections, the state of the world, people blaming minorities for society’s problems, the rise of AI and whatever else comes next…
These thoughts occupy my mind almost every day. Even though I have managed to turn my passion into my work, I still struggle to tell my own stories and express my own creativity.
So from today, I want to do something with these thoughts and struggles. I want to make space for my own stories, not to chase likes or views and not because I expect to change anyone’s mind.
Simply to express myself, for myself.
Beautiful!
My career as a designer has never been a consistent one.
No straight line. No winning year on year. Honestly, the bumpiest journey imaginable to get where I am.
I started in this industry with a cracked version of Photoshop, running on a PC that would crash with anything I designed.
I once worked for a company on 12k a year and could barely make rent. But I did what I could, because I love what I do.
To anyone expecting perfection in your first year, think twice. Technology lets us get better faster, sure, but you still need the fundamentals of design and business. Without them you're just guessing at what's good, and your clients pay the price.
Take your time. The reality of success is still damn hard work. A social following doesn't pay the way you think it does not unless you know how to sell or create.
If I could give someone a piece of advice, it'd be this: Be patient, Be willing to give more than you take and don't rely on AI to do all the thinking for you.
How long have you been in this industry? Since I started this career, I have been a huge fan of your work. From which design period did you start to show the desired outcome after you joined?
There's a moment in a lot of expert-led businesses where growth quietly stops feeling like the goal.
More clients means more billing questions only the founder can answer. More leads means more follow-ups only the founder remembers to send. More revenue means more of the founder's own attention gets absorbed just keeping the machine from jamming.
I call this the Expert's Trap. Not because the expert did anything wrong. Because nobody ever assigned ownership of the system itself. The founder became the connective tissue by default, one urgent fix at a time, until the whole business runs through them personally.
At that point, growth stops being something to pursue. It becomes something to manage carefully, because more of it means more weight on the one person already holding everything up.
The fix isn't more hours or a better calendar. It's separating "the expert who does the work" from "the operator who runs the system," even inside a business of one. Someone has to own the system, the automations, the follow-ups, the dashboard, on an ongoing basis, so growth adds capacity instead of just adding pressure.
That's a different kind of help than most experts think to ask for. It's not another project. It's someone accountable for keeping the system running after the project is done.
