This one is for the other designers out there, and really, anyone who has a client-based business. It’s the end of the year, and you know I like a good post-mortem and re-tool.

I listen to a Jungian podcast sometimes—life isn’t just about outer beauty, y’all—and Jungian analysts love talking about myths. Karl Jung believed that mythos and midrash make up our inner dialogue and create the zeitgeist—a term he coined. That is, story-telling helps us make sense of the world. It can get us into trouble, too, when we believe the stories we make up over reality.

The podcast’s hosts mentioned the Hephaestus myth the other day, and it caught my fancy. The short version is this: Hephaestus was the Greeks’ blacksmith god. He made the weapons and tools they depended on: Zeus’s sceptre, Apollo’s chariot, Athena’s spear, Artemis’s bow and arrows, Achilles’ shield, etc. He was very talented, but still, the other gods mocked him because he was lame. Zeus even threw him off of Olympus and he had to live among the mortals for a while.

Early on, he made some mistakes due to the crack in his vanity from all of this god-tier rejection and as a result, received a little more. He had a thing for Athena, and she rebuffed him, violently. Then he married Aphrodite against her will as a “sorry, my bad” present from Zeus when he returned to Olympus, soon after which she rather spectacularly left him for Ares—that’s Venus and Mars for you Romans and 80s self-help afficionados. Finally, he married one of the Three Graces, Aglaia, and, upon achieving satisfaction and support, he settled down and became the go-to problem solver of Olympus.

Once Hephaestus had his own act together, everyone came to him with their problems, and he made them solutions. He wasn’t just a weapon maker anymore; he was famous for his automatons, for example. The original Rube Goldberg!

Once Hephaestus had his own act together, everyone came to him with their problems, and he made them solutions. He wasn’t just a weapon maker anymore; he was famous for his automatons, for example. The original Rube Goldberg!

The upshot is this: when he was happy, and stable, he could turn from his own selfish worries and had more than enough to give to others. He was focusing on the wrong things. He was comparing himself to the other gods. All the other gods had two functional feet! Not fair! But when you are looking at other people, you can’t see the road ahead or yourself, your own greatness. So here is lesson number one from Hephaestus: You are the expert. Believe it. Believe in yourself and your clients will believe in you.

You know what you are doing. The client came to you for help. Your job is to make them proud and joyful in their home. They hired you because they like the way your previous work looks. Let them trust you. Show them how to trust you by trusting yourself.

Worse, indecision is a communicable disease! Do not allow yourself to be a carrier, or to be infected. If you second-guess yourself, especially out loud in front of the client, you’ll create all kinds of problems for yourself. It’s like they say in dog training: a dog doesn’t want to be in charge. They want you to tell them what to do. If they get the sense that you don’t know what you are doing, they will try to be in charge and it won’t work out very well. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.

The client chose you for what you can do, not so you could get them wallpaper they picked out at a discount. This doesn’t mean you have to be inflexible, or not take requests, goodness no. I’m just saying you should make sure you don’t start doubting yourself or make too many compromises or the design will look weak and muddy. Design by committee is never good.

But let’s get back to Hephaestus. As it turns out, his problem-solving abilities were not just in the physical realm. The other gods and demigods and mortals came to him for life advice. He had been through it, and he had to have been a treat to listen to while he hammered out this or that metal bit. I think the unspoken subtext is that these conversations helped him tweak the product to be the best it could be for that person. He got better and better at his job as he spent more time with his clients, and they kept coming back because they felt that rapport.

So lesson number two from Hephaestus: listen to what the client is saying, AND what they aren’t saying, directly, or to you. Write down your conversations. Little nuggets later might stick out and be the real meat in there. Their stories hold the gold of what they want, and don’t want, and where the landmines might lie.

For example, I have joked upon occasion that being a designer is a little like being a marriage counselor. There can be some real aggression behind disagreements over small things like wall colors and carpet loops—not usually, but it happens. But I’m not a god, and I’d rather focus on wall colors and carpet loops than end up as a pawn in someone’s marriage disputes. Spoiler alert: it’s never actually about the floor or the walls.

The questions I ask new clients are pretty neutral and basic but yield information about what we are really solving for. Where do you eat dinner? Do you need a guest room or a home office more if space is scarce? Do you read more at night or in the day? These kinds of questions reveal what their priorities are. The way they answer will help you with the design, but also in discerning what to expect over the life of the entire project.

It is perfectly natural for a couple to disagree about sofa arm heights or tile color, but it is important that you all be on the same page about the big stuff. Why should that matter to you? Why not just take the job and let them worry about their personal problems?

It matters to you because the big stuff is where the rubber meets the road for all of you: budgets, chain of command, priorities, communication, decision-making. All of those things can land you in trouble. Hammer it out, Hephaestus. Hammer it out before it becomes a problem.

So what’s the fix? Prevention. Everyone signs the contract. Everyone comes to meetings. Everyone sees the purchase agreements and everyone signs off on them. Everyone is on emails. Nothing is clear unless it’s clear to all of you.

It’s a better way to work even when the sailing is smooth. Everyone is happier when they know what to expect. Listening and elucidating will make everything easier, on every project.

Ok, so with that unpleasant bit taken care of, let’s take it back to the positive and embrace lesson three from Hephaestus: the pivot, the growth, the evolution, the hustle. You can be a designer until you die; it’s not one of those businesses where you retire at 65 and collect your pension. What will keep it fresh for you? What’s a new direction for you? Do you want to be making swords 20 years from now, or do you want to be making fabulous clockwork machines? Or both?

As a creative, you are likely multi-talented. Your life evolves and you will wander on and off the path periodically. You’ll go in new directions, you might even have a midlife crisis and start painting grumpy shrimp (ahem, cough cough) or making dollhouse furniture (ask me about my new miter saw!).

But here is where you are ahead of everyone else having a midlife crisis: you are halfway there, especially if you own your business. You know how to hustle. You are just retooling and expanding.

Hephaestus didn’t say, “Oh, well, all people want is shields and spears, I’ll keep doing that.” No. Sometimes people didn’t know what they wanted until he showed them what was possible. He used his existing skills to expand his repertoire.

It can feel sometimes that the prevailing wisdom is that you need to focus, that you need to specialize, and that it is somehow undisciplined and disorganized to do more than one thing. It is natural to be curious, though, and following our curiosity is how we develop new talents.

Take your twists and turns, follow your ideas, flesh them out, try something new. Focus on different aspects of your business as they come to you, add services, take services away. If there is something you’ve always hated doing, don’t offer it anymore! It’s a waste of your energy to do something you detest just because you think you should.

Your business will grow where the electricity is, because that will be where you focus your best attention. It’s not about being self-indulgent, or eccentric. It is a good business decision to pay attention to these ideas tugging at the corner of your consciousness and take them for a spin. What if you strike gold? Where do things overlap? What does the Venn diagram of your talents look like?

You know better than anyone else what your talents are, what your interests are, and the problems you encounter in business. Solve them. If you have that problem, someone else does too. Then figure out a way to sell the solution. Pivot, pivot, pivot. The arc of a creative life is long, and you will be happier, more productive in the community, and more helpful to your clients if you feed your creativity with new challenges.

You are a problem-solver. Act like it.

In the end, that is the entire upshot of the Hephaestus myth. All three lessons I’ve extracted from it and elaborated on here come down to that truth. Designers (and architects and general contractors and blacksmiths to the gods and basically, really, any client-based service provider) are finely calibrated and destined—destined!—to solve the problems we are presented with, and best at solving problems we find interesting.

Don’t buck your destiny. Just do it. There is no try. Be all that you can be. Just don’t sit there and scold me for mixing my zeitgeists.