Seven years in, and the honest report is that everything worth learning this year was something I had to unlearn.
The first was a thick skin, which is not the same as not caring. It is caring, and then not bleeding on the client.
The second one cost me. I had to unlearn over-investing in the version of a project I like best. There is a version of every job that is really for me, the one that scratches my own particular itch, and I used to fight hard for it. It is a slow, expensive way to lose.
The third is the one I still turn over at night. The client is often right, and sometimes the work asks you to bring them along, and that is the hardest part of any project. Because here is what I have come to believe: if I have to explain my design, why the flow works, what a person is meant to feel, then I have probably already let the design down.
I don't think good work needs a lecture. When it needs one, the lecture is the design admitting it fell short. So I have been trying to unlearn explaining. I used to walk clients through my reasoning point by point, making the case. Now I try to make the thing plainly right, so there is little left to walk through.
That is a harder standard, and I think a fairer one. Seven years, to learn that the work should do the talking, and that when I am the one talking, the work has usually gone quiet.