The world belongs to the energetic.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Freelancing is only suited to seasoned professionals. Pursuing a freelance career as your first step in the profession is almost always a foolish move. Professionalism is maintained by habit. If your first step is a misstep, you’ve set a poor tone for the work ahead. Unless you immediately correct your mistakes, the habits you’ll develop will be clumsy and unprofessional.

…The design professional’s job is to show confidence when dealing with clients. No one else can communicate your value or win trust for you. The reason clients distrust those who do not communicate with confidence is because this trait signals other incompetencies.
—Andy Rutledge, Common Questions About Design Professionalism

Rutledge is all up in my business, tapping me on the shoulder and reading my mail. This is an excellent article, full of advice I wish someone would have told me when I was 3 years into being a designer and I thought I knew everything. I’m going on 7 years now, and I realize how little I know. Go get some wisdom.

Fame is the thirst of youth.
—George Gordon Byron

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence & having it last in your absence.
—Frances Frei

I’ve been (back) in my role as Design Director at NewSpring Church for 2 years now. From a purely practial standpoint, the team I serve with has produced some great work in that span—a revitalized brand identity, a new website (a newer one is on deck), and better overall visuals, public spaces, interiors, processes and systems. I think it’s the best job ever.

What we haven’t done well is replicate ourselves and train up people within our community to be better than we are at what we do. We run a lean team; everyone on board is extremely high-capacity and more than capable at doing their jobs. But when it comes to specialized roles, work, and projects, we suck at raising up people. None of us would argue that.

In the marketplace, there’s no competitive advantage for me (individually) to mentor others. Mentorship and investing in the next generation can help the bottomline for the company or organization, but unless I’m a partner or shareholder (or just a wildly generous nice guy) there’s no reason for me to take away from my work to help others become better at theirs. In fact, there’s the possibility that by doing so I’ll mentor myself out the door by giving my coworkers the tools they need to take my job. This is scarcity mentality at the core. Survival mode.

But I don’t work in the marketplace. I love working in the church, and we play by different rules. If I “aspire to oversee” an area of our church, I’m supposed to be able to teach. And if I’m a teacher, I have a very specific task:

And [Jesus] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…
—Ephesians 4:11–12

Equip. Work. Build. Equip to act, not to sit and watch. Equip the saints, not fill the seats. Help others grow in their gifting, not hoard my own. If leadership is about making others better, permanently, then I have some work to do. And it has absolutely nothing to do with design.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.
—David Starr

You should probably listen to Esperanza Spalding more than you do.

The motto for every missionary, whether preacher, printer, or schoolmaster, ought to be ‘Devoted for Life.’
—Adoniram Judson

It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.
—Jean-Luc Godard

But we don’t stop [at simply being disappointed]…we need to express it. Vent it. Hiss it and spit it and hurl it like fistfuls of mental manure at the great wall of hey, screw you.

You have but to take a peek in the comments section below…any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama’s speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother’s cookies. [It] will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can’t help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.
—Mark Morford, Why are you so terribly disappointing?

Morford doesn’t come to any grand conclusions or offer any fixes here, but that’s one heck of a apt, well-written critique of the general state of additional commentary online. The internet has at once connected much of the world, and unearthed our latent desire to vomit all our personal opinions and loathing at anyone, or at no one.

I hate the internet. I love the internet. My name is Joshua, and I’ve just started to ignore 95% of comments on 95% of websites.