How to Fake It ’til You’ve Kind Of Made It
In March I started an internship at a Startup to redesign and develop the frontend of their online platform. I’m neither a designer nor am I any good at programming. Here’s how I manage.
Interns — the epitome of “Nobodies” in the workplace. At least that’s what the movies tell us.
In my current position, I am definitely not one of them.
But I like to work (which is really important in a Startup), so I did.
When I started out I didn’t realize how much responsibilities were actually awaiting me. Doing a lot of research in the beginning of my internship, the list of todos, sub-todos and subsub-todos began to grow to a large extent, that I wasn’t able to oversee.
As I started to try working on the UX, I was thinking of a 1000 things at once and wasn’t able to concentrate on one, because I simply did not know how to organize myself (a thought, that came creeping in, every time I as much as touched my laptop).
Having a lot of people from different work fields around me, their advice only spoke to me to a minimal extent and left me with an enormous amount of different possibilities to handle my workflow.
And speaking of workflows, mine must have changed at least 30 times in the last two months alone.
But my obsession with planning turned out to be one of the biggest problems I had.
Having to reflect on the way I wanted to work and especially what I wanted to achieve in the few months remaining, made me realize a lot of things.
And finally, articles like F your planning from Kris Gage definitely put me in my place.
Lessons learned
1. You will not be able to do everything you planned to
Especially if you’re not fully trained in the field you’re currently working in and have to self-teach to be able to reach a certain goal you’ll have to cut some corners.
My reality is: I won’t be able to do everything I wanted to do, perfectly, for my current set deadline. But I am able to create a solid basis to build on later on.
2. You need to find your own ideal sources of creativity
Especially in jobs where you need to be creative at the touch of a button, not knowing how to do that, can stress you out even more.
Take your time and get to know your sources of creativity.
If you’re usually a “free” creative who’s just active, upon being really inspired, this may be a tough task, but it helps you not only to grow as a creative but also in your job.
3. When you need help, you need to f*ing ask for it
This might be an obvious one, but man, did I need time to find the guts to do it. Every. Single. Time.
People can’t read your mind. Especially if you have a deadline it’s so important for your superiors to know if you’re having any problems or can’t seem to be able to fix something by yourself.
4. Sometimes you are right too (but not very often)
If you can, speak out! Even if it has nothing to do with the field you’re working in, your opinion means something.
Even if you end up saying something really stupid. At least you’ve learned something.
