Want a Promotion? Fire Yourself.
By Hopa Studio
Several years ago, my company was stagnating due to its dependence on a single team member, bottlenecking nearly every aspect of the creative process. To break the plateau, my mentor challenged me to write myself out of the job they hired me to do. In firing yourself, he reasoned, you focus your productivity on stabilizing what you used to do in order to free yourself for the better things you had always hoped to be doing.
Maybe you want to fire yourself from designing so you can work on managing a design team. Or maybe you want to fire yourself from managing to work on creative direction. This mainly means you document your processes and organizing everything that you’ve done so you can make the case that anyone can pick up where you left off (and hopefully raise the bar).
By “firing” yourself, you will not become obsolete (or get fired IRL). Instead, at worst you’ll have more cognitive resources to focus on doing something new. At best, you’ll be tackling totally new challenges.
