Everyone's Career Looks Faster From the Outside

Hi everyone,

Today I wanted to share a bit of a motivational post that I felt inspired to write after reading the book ‘the Magic of Thinking Big’ by David Schwartz. I definitely recommend this book for anyone who is looking to expand their mind; it’s one of the best books I’ve read. What I found particularly interesting was the idea of comparison, in the book David compares the succesful people at the top with, but not in their successes but what have they got that I don’t? If you look at it realistically, the top creatives operating in the industry today are likely not more intelligent than you are, neither are they more creative. Yes, there’s ofcourse nepotism and privelege like in every industry but generally speaking most people climb to the top themselves. I often felt like comparing my work to others and feel this sadness over me, because I feel like I am never ever statisfied with what I created and sometimes even feel embarrassed about my work. Which is funny, because if I would’ve looked at it 3 years ago I wouldn’t believe I worked on these projects.

But what if you compare yourself to others on a deeper level than the work? I think there isn’t much of a difference other than the creatives operating at the top of the industry likely studied the best creatives closely to truly understand what steps to make, but they mostly think big AND take action to bring their ideas to life. And what we often compare ourselves with are our ideas that we never brought to life or don’t dare to. What they have is something you can easily have too.

Comparison is the tax on a creative life, it stops us from taking action because it takes away our confidence to put ourselves out there. You see someone announce an editorial, a campaign, a residency, and the speed of it lands before the work does. Why didn’t I get that opportunity? (Well, maybe because you didn’t even try.) How did they get there so fast? The question feels like analysis, but it is envy wearing a coat, and it is built on a false premise. Which I feel like is another part we often don’t talk about in the industry: because what you are looking at is the highlight, and the highlight is the most heavily edited part of anyone’s career.

Before we really dive in. Back to school season felt like the right moment to reopen the doors to Strategic Art Direction for a short window. If you have been thinking about joining, there are a limited number of spots available now through August 25th. The next round after this will not open until the end of November. Limited spots only!

CLAIM YOUR SPOT

Also a very exciting announcement! A brand new programme is launching in September and I can’t wait to share more about it. It’s called ‘The Recognisable Brand Method’. You can read more about the preview here, but once the doors open I will share the exact lessons with you.

THE RECOGNISABLE BRAND METHOD

In 1954 the psychologist Leon Festinger described what he called ‘the social comparison theory’, which is the idea that we work out our own worth by measuring ourselves against others, especially when there is no objective ruler to use. The funny thing is that in the creative (fashion) industry most people work for themselves and most creative careers have almost no objective ruler. There is no salary scale, no clear ladder, no annual review. So we reach for the only measure available, which is everyone else’s visible output, and we compare our full unedited reality to their published reel. It’s an unfair fight by design, and one you will lose every time, because you know your own dead months and you see only their highlights.

There is a second distortion as well. It’s more like a metaphor: during the Second World War, the statistician Abraham Wald was asked where to add armour to aircraft. The most obvious answer was to reinforce the areas most riddled with bullet holes on the planes that returned. Abraham Wald saw the flaw immediately. The planes that returned were the survivors and actually the areas to reinforce were the ones with no holes at all, because the planes hit there never came back to be counted. We do exactly this with careers, because we study the visible winners and try to copy their moves, and we never see the identical moves that failed, because failures never get posted or in the case of this industry, the countless of rejections.

This goes much deeper than social media, and image history that we know and refer of is a proof of this. The history of fashion photography that we inherit is itself a heavily edited record of what this looked like. We always remember the images that survived, the ones that got reprinted, exhibited, anthologised, and we actually don’t know that we forgot the thousands of competent editorials that ran the same month in the same magazines and vanished, especially from sites like Pinterest and such. The photographers who became canonical didn’t necessarily make the absolute best work every time. They made work that, at some point, aligned with a moment that carried it forward. That some people thought were worth more preserving and we then read their careers backwards as inevitable, as if each step led cleanly to the next, when in reality they were stumbling through the same fog as everyone else, with no idea which image would be the one that lasted.

I wrote a post last year on the hidden bias of visual archives that might be worth the read:

The Hidden Bias of Visual Archives

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September 8, 2025

Today I want to talk about an important topic: Archives are never neutral. Even though I encourage people to look outside of Pinterest, go to museum websites, find offline inspiration from magazines and more… Every collection, from a museum database to a Pinterest board, reflects choices about what was worth keeping and what was allowed …

This is why I have stopped counting rejections and started counting only alignments. You can send the same concept to a hundred magazines and hear nothing, and a year later send a barely changed version and land it, and the difference is almost never the concept. It is alignment, the right person at the right time. Imagine pitching an idea built entirely around movement to a magazine closing an issue about stillness. They decline, and you read it as a verdict on the work and your creatively, eventuelly have it hurt your self-confidence. It was simply a verdict on the timing. Send the same idea months later to someone on the team with an open slot for a story about the body in motion, and suddenly you have the editorial. Nothing about you changed, but the timing did. Sometimes it’s about finding someone you want to collaborate with who has a warm contact and you find yourself getting feedback that the editor or brand manager absolutely loves the concept, when your email went unanswered.

Please do remember: You need one yes to unlock the next level, and you have no way of knowing which attempt carries it, which means the rejections are never failures. When you post your newest brand campaign or editorial with pride, everyone who sees it doesn’t know you send out a 100 emails, they also don’t know that you doubted yourself or felt like giving up many times. Think about that when you see someone else’s amazing work being posted. These things are the cost of staying in the game long enough for the alignment to arrive. I would never post the pitch that got a polite no, so you would never see it. You would only ever see the editorial that actually happened and I loved the end result of, and you would wonder how it happened so easily, when the truth is it might have taken months or years of quiet, unposted attempts. I started only sharing work that I loved, removed dozens of campaigns I worked on and felt like were boring.

To be a succesful art director there are many times you simply have to pitch, have many decks end up in the concept graveyard, more unaswered emails than succesful ones and even a rejection reply feels like an accomplishment because it is a reply. Yet, I get daily direct messages on Instagram from people who are close to giving up or asking me how I did it.

There is an older version of this method that I also want to mention, because we also simply live in different times. Careers used to move through introductions, being in the right room, the right person vouching for you. That had its own brutality ofcourse, but it was at least legible. And honestly I miss the pre-phone times that I never experienced in my life where people would just speak to each other and introduce each other simply because you were in the room. You knew the game was access! Now I have forced myself to multiple networking events because I thought it would be the answer to my problems, and I’m likely the most shy person to exist I feel like and went home without having said a single word. Luckily, but also unluckily: the game now looks like visibility, which feels more democratic and is somehow more disorienting, because everyone is broadcasting and almost nobody is sharing the part that took the time. So a lot of succesful careers feel like a mystery. The future probably belongs to the people who can hold their own pace inside all that noise, and who treat the feed as a highlight reel instead of a leaderboard and will constantly keep pushing themselves out of their comfort zone trying to make shit happen.

There is a practical psychology to surviving this, and it comes down to what you choose to measure. You don’t ever get to control outcomes. Neither can you make for example make a magazine have an open slot, or make an editor read your pitch on a good day, or make the alignment arrive on schedule. The only thing fully within your control is the input, the number of genuine, well-made attempts you put into the world. The people who last in creative careers tend to be the ones who simply shift their attention from the outcome they can’t control to the input they can, and who treat each rejection as a data point in a long game instead of a verdict on their worth.

This is why I keep a record of what I send and pay almost no attention to the strike rate, I stopped caring. A pitch that gets a polite no is not evidence that the work is weak at all, I also know because I myself get many emails on a daily and simply can only respond to them when I have a moment and only then I prioritise the ones that I can mean something for in that exact moment. So, it is evidence that this particular door, on this particular day, was closed, and the only honest response is to make another good attempt somewhere else because I know what it’s like to be on the other side both from an individual artist’s perspective, from being someone working at an agency or client side. When you separate the quality of the work from the result of any single pitch, the rejections don’t feel as much as personal failure and start to feel like it just being the cost of staying in the game, which is exactly what they are. One yes resets the whole board again, and you have no way of predicting which attempt makes that happen, so the rational move is to keep making attempts and to stop grading yourself on the replies.

The phrase overnight success is just something we need to stop saying ever agin, because almost every one of them took ten years that nobody shared. The breakout editorial that seems to have come from nowhere usually sits on top of a decade of unpaid tests, ignored emails and a refinement that never made it online. When you remember the work that has been done is always there, hidden under every result, the comparison loses its sting, because you understand that you are looking at the visible tip of an enormous, invisible amount of work. Yours is invisible too. It is simply invisible to you in a different way, because you are living inside it. So please stop feeling bad or like things aren’t landing. It can also simply not be landing because you are lacking audacity and your fear or rejection is stopping you.

So when a career looks fast, assume it was edited, because it was. Celebrate your wins, however small, because the small ones are the only honest record you have of the distance you are actually covering. And stop measuring your draft against everyone else’s final cut. You are not behind and you never will be behind. You are simply seeing your own footage uncut, which is a privilege nobody else’s timeline will ever give you.

Love,

Zoë