Atlas Shifted his Shoulders Just a Little to the Right

Okay! Updates first:

1. I’m in CDMX now, after a week or so in El Salvador for a conference. I brought some of the PGS team with me: I’m thinking seeing the world as a big, big, place will be fun if not eye-opening about the impact of our work. It’s been interesting so far!

   

2. I’m releasing a new typeface, Jaro, soon on Google Fonts, and I’m so grateful to have worked with Mirko and Celine on its completion. It would have been so much less of itself without them

   

3. PGS and Unqueue, my loud cry-y babies (or, the things I am a loud cry-y baby about), are going to be okay. We’ve spent most of the year working on a set of operational and strategic changes, and it’s so good to see a business we started head toward sustainability.

So, it’s been a very hectic time.

I won’t bore you with the boring bits, but I will say: I don’t think I’ve ever had a more difficult personal period in my life than 2023. A combination of things which are certainly not your business have come together to put a lot of things in perspective for me, and I realised some things while managing it:

1. I am a really good CEO. I don’t know when it happened, but, objectively speaking, I have been performing my role as visionary, operator, and administrator pretty well. A lot of what I’ve had to do is solitary work, but would be futile without the executive team I share responsibility with.
2. I don’t enjoy being a CEO. That isn’t to say that I don’t value it. I do, sure; learning new things about myself and challenging my designer-brain to perform new tasks is enticing, but it’s not enjoyable. I like going to the gym, i do not enjoy it. I have to go to the gym, but I do not have to enjoy it.
3. I miss design, a lot. it’s been difficult to wrestle with how little design I’ve done this year, by proportion. I’ve done loads of telling designers about stuff, sure. But that’s not what I mean. I miss the work of making the problem mine, and the feeling of my hard skills improving. What this means for me, now, knowing that I am very uninterested in commercial design as a job? Who knows.

This would all be a lot more worrying if I didn’t see it coming, but maybe around February this year, I decided that I was going to work actively to modify my role at Unqueue and PGS and its responsibilities: I’m a decent enough CEO/Founder, but also spend most of my time on tasks that could be delegated. That’s going to change in 2024.

The overwhelming workload obviously because of a lack of necessary income, but it’s hard for that to be the problem now: PGS and Unqueue are more or less okay through to the end of next year, we have two (funded) projects with global impact on the way, and we’re actively working on expanding Unqueue to a few more Caribbean islands and the Pacific.

It’s been really good, and (this is hard to type but I’m owning it) it’s been partially because of a lot of hard work that I’ve put in. The rest is the amazing teams I work with, supportive relationships, and plain Catholic-style luck.

So, now what?

I’m going to move around a bit. First, metaphorically: my next big set of work at PGS will be on hiring new roles to delegate responsibilities to, and to work within the frameworks I’ve bent my back to develop. Both the PGS and Unqueue teams will be focused on growth, expansion, and new relationships. The good idea has happened, now it’s my turn to look at it. This will free up loads of time.

Next: I’m going to move around. With my feet, and maybe a passport, and mostly toward the work I’ve wanted to do most of my career: drawing type.

Somewhere along the road, the plan got interrupted. Starting a world-class, award-winning company that builds award-winning tech for both the man on the street and large government organisations (in three years) is nice and all, but I really miss drawing Os over and over and over. And then getting it kind of wrong, and drawing them again.

I don’t know what this kind of change will mean for my personal income, but I’ve built a million-dollar practice before (two, now, but who’s counting). What would have been maybe a cushy CEO compensation can be spent in ways that free up time for me to focus on design, and that’s what I want.

With what I know about business, relationships, and selling software, maybe I’ll be even better equipped than I think. the important next step is to get started. I’m going to try to re-immerse myself in type work pretty soon, looking for work that allows me to sharpen the skills I don’t have in abundance: production, tedium, writing code that other people can use. The boring stuff, I guess. Maybe to someone else.

I’m looking forward to the next steps, and am looking forward to feeling closer to my authentic self: a withdrawn problem solver with a chip on his shoulder, a vector editing program, and a text editor IDE. I’ll keep the bizdev skills on deck for when I need them, though.

Is it a career change? not really. It’s all the same road; I just want a nicer side of the bus. I’m probably never going to be the Altman-esque, Jobsian character some expect from me, but if I’m really lucky, I’ll (continue to) be happy with the body of work I’m making.