Performance Optimization as a Designer
As a performer of creative art, it is of vital importance to develop your own craft of design - a visual aesthetic that defines what you create and your creative abilities. Whether you call them your skills, talent, or style - develop it and own it. The inner monologue that you use to evaluate how good, beautiful, or logical an idea is - becomes the mysterious thing that makes what you create truly yours. It is a personal battle to create something better than your previous creative effort created. Those kinds of acts always possess a degree of unknown magic, that magical thinking.
Regardless of your education, experience, how hard you plan or strategize - anything seen as a perfect creative product requires a messy and imperfect path of multiple concepts, iterations, and trial & error to come and life. That process and those series of steps you take are the processes of developing something out of nothing. By embracing our abilities, while giving ourselves over to where the idea is taking us, accepting the fact that things won't turn out how we originally envisioned them - we bear the fruit of creativity which takes us where we need to go.
We're supposed to make a plan and work the plan. If the plan does not work, it is completely okay to change it - but always have a plan to start from. By sticking with the process and understanding the output, giving the things we did not expect the room to breathe, we end up with final products which more often than not tend to exceed our initial visions and expectations.
Ultimately, optimizing your performance as a designer is about choosing what and how to think and then acting upon it with passion and commitment. The more productive and optimistic your mindset is, the more your creative health and stamina will be. When it comes to design, you must be a long-distance runner. As a creator, you have to strengthen your creative muscles and this will require exercise, pain, and repetition. This is an unavoidable part of growth and becoming better.