We caught up with the brilliant and insightful David Olano a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Everyone has crazy stuff happen to them, but often small business owners and creatives, artists and others who are doing something off the beaten path are often hit with things (positive or negative) that are so out there, so unpredictable and unexpected. Can you share a crazy story from your journey?
The biggest change in my career, and the start of a new stage of my life, occurred with the outbreak of the pandemic. Yet, this change took place immediately before March 2020, and independently of the pandemic. It also proved more fortuitous than I could have imagined.
My job as a language teacher, a profession that I held for almost 10 years, gave me great flexibility in schedules and free time to dedicate myself to everything that I could be passionate about. Plus, it kept me out and about most of the time, which was one of the aspects I enjoyed the most. Office life was not for me and I had given up on it very early in my life. But at the beginning of 2020, I decided to leave my job as a teacher and give my first vocation—graphic design—a new opportunity. This was the new twist in my work life that would fall hand in hand with a virus that was about to paralyze the world.
This was not a resignation to the office life I’d left, though. Returning to design was not returning to the lifestyle I’d renounced. This time, I would set the rules myself. I would not return to work without seeing sunlight; I would not return to a tiny office; and, most importantly, I wouldn’t work for anyone. I would be my own boss. The final shift took place in the first weeks of 2020, and thanks to a solid client base that I already had, I was ready to start working independently from home. I was prepared with my home office, however I was not prepared for my apartment—home, office, and all—to become a prison during 108 days of strict quarantine observed in Lima, Peru, where I was living.
When the world around me stopped in March 2020, I had already assumed work commitments that I could not put on pause and with defined delivery times. While friends, family and former colleagues went home and honestly confessed that they didn’t miss the office, I, who had been living the freedom of not having an office, unexpectedly became a prisoner within four walls, with no time to share doomsday theories with my friends and little time to be distracted or watch the news. In fact, because of the demand for digital marketing and graphic design, my business doubled in the first three weeks of the pandemic.
The world was in crisis and the labor system was on pause while it contorted to adaptation to virtual work while I became a prisoner in my own apartment. I soon got used to confinement and the intense pace of working at home. The street became a utopian concept that I only had the right to when it was time to walk my dog, or rather, when my dog took me out for a walk.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a graphic designer by profession. I started working when I was 24 years old and my specialty was web pages. It was a time when web 2.0 did not yet exist and if people wanted to give their businesses online exposure, they had to hire a professional. This was even before social media. But after a few years, I entered a state of exhaustion that turned into gnawing dissatisfaction. Design stopped compensating for the time I put into it, and the pressure and demands from both employers and clients was an ongoing frustration. I decided to leave the profession altogether.
While I decided to study a second profession, Communications, I realized that without a job I would not be able to pay for my new studies. This is where my career as a language teacher began. An Australian friend who was in Lima teaching English put me in contact with a British institute that was looking for teachers. Thanks to my bilingual skills, I was selected, but the path would not be easy; it takes a lot of preparation and training to teach a second language. Despite what many believe, knowing how to speak a language does not automatically make you someone suitable to teach it.
As it turned out, language teaching suited me very well, and I came to feel that I had found my true calling. Five years later I had already finished my second degree, Communications, and I did not feel the need to stop teaching languages (I taught English and Spanish) until four years later, when the second big change in my work life came: the return to graphic design and working as a freelancer from home.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
One of my biggest disappointments regarding my first professional chapter as a graphic designer was the competitive environment at both companies where I worked. That, plus the pressure from employers and the demands of undecided or dissatisfied clients combined toxically. That is why, after a decade-long break as a language teacher, when I returned to graphic design I did so with many lessons learned that allowed me to set my own rules. And this is something crucial in the world of design: you have to define the working conditions in advance.
In my first stage as a designer, I found myself repeatedly in unpleasant situations that could have been avoided. It was common for a client to “confuse” the agreed pay for a project based on the final delivery and not the number of hours worked, or the rounds of edits requested. Another common problem was the lack of decision-making: some clients want to consult the final approval of a design project with a group of stakeholders, a committee of people with different points of view (and perhaps no expert in design among themselves), and others feel the need to consult the final decision with their spouses, parents, and friends. No matter the audience, it’s too much feedback too late in the game. Feedback is needed in early drafts, because a near-finished design will otherwise be turned on its head with so many chefs in the kitchen. Inevitably, near-finished designs were often trashed.
The rules are different today. I have learned my lesson and being clear about the process is something I do from the beginning so that projects are carried out efficiently and the result is superior instead of concocted. This benefits not only me as a designer, but also clients, since the greater the agility in the creative process, the faster the delivery and the fewer hours billed. We all win.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
A crucial factor for me is to avoid the traps that social pressures put in your path. It might sound cliché, but one should listen to their heart. Our visceral responses often reveal things about our values, needs, and boundaries.
In my case, I never wanted to compete academically with my friends, much less professionally. I never cared about material things, either, so I didn’t stress that it could take me twice as long to obtain certain material “checkboxes” that my friends were excited about at the start of their careers. The important thing for me was to have quality free time. Professional success was never synonymous with success in life. Freedom and mental health were always ahead. For many years, though (which correlated with my first few years as a designer), I did not understand this yet. That’s why I gave in to work under pressure that ended up overwhelming me.
The advantages that technology gives us today allow me to have the best of both worlds. My priority remains my health and the happiness that autonomy brings, and working from home allows me to live in the way that best fits my lifestyle. Living attached to a company limited me in all these aspects.
It is thanks to this lifestyle that I ventured to leave my country and live on the continent where I always wanted to live, traveling to neighboring countries with my laptop under my arm. I still work, and I work perhaps even more than before! Remote work allows me to do so, however, and this was one of the great pushes that the pandemic brought us—perhaps the only good thing it brought with it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.coinmo.co
Image Credits
Images by the author