There's a mid-career Experience Designer who described his situation to me recently like this: "I feel like I'm perched on a rock in the middle of a river, unable to move in any direction. I know I need to jump. But I'm not entirely sure whether I can swim anymore."

He's not alone. Over the last six months I've spoken to designers, writers, strategists, engineers, product people. All experienced. All talented. And all quietly stuck.

What's struck me most isn't the frustration; it's how intelligent their frustrations are. These aren't people who've missed something obvious. They know the job market is brutal. They know most postings lead nowhere, that AI is writing and reading cover letters with equal indifference, and that the full, cross-domain, hard-to-categorise thing they actually bring doesn't fit neatly into the boxes on offer.

They know all of this. And still they're stuck.

Moreover, whenever someone puts real effort into an application and gets ghosted, something deadens inside them. Slightly less energy next time. A little more self-protection built in. This is rational adaptation to an irrational system. But over enough rounds, it starts to feel like evidence (about your value, your relevance, whether the market has simply moved on without you).

It hasn't. But it does feel increasingly hard to argue with.

I've been thinking about how I've landed the work that mattered most to me. I didn't apply for any of it.

For Write of Passage, I built a small tool with another student and got twenty minutes on Zoom to show it to someone senior. Nothing came of the tool. But I'd made myself visible in a way that wasn't desperate. Eventually, I was invited in.

For Act Two, I interviewed ten students from the first cohort, turned it into a research report, and gave it to the founders. They gave me a job.

The common thread here is: don't ask for permission to be useful. Just be useful, and find a way to let the right people know.

One person I spoke to named the risk of this precisely: "In a regular application, there's still some mystery. With YOUR approach, they can see everything! If they say no, there's nowhere to hide." She's right. That exposure is exactly what makes it frightening. But it's also exactly what makes it work.

[mini drum-roll] So, I'm building something around this idea. A small group programme, running April through July 2026, for experienced creative professionals ready to design their own way into the work they actually want. The first cohort will have 8 people.

It is not a networking offer. Not a LinkedIn optimisation service. It's not for people whose primary measure of success is salary or status.

It’s for people who want a better relationship with their own professional identity, and who are ready to do something that feels more exposed, and more alive, than anything they've tried before.

If that's you, DM me, I’d like to talk to you.

You can learn more about the programme here: