I’m often criticised for making things overly complicated, and that’s because I default to thinking big. It’s actually one of my more optimistic traits: that anything you can think of must somehow be possible if you fit it into the right context with the right resources. Having said that, many of my ideas are easily entire businesses in themselves. When they need to be shrunk down to fit a website or marketing campaign, and then there’s still oceans of work and resources needed and it has to be scaled back again, there’s often an ‘oops’ moment where I feel a bit sheepish.

The plus side is that once that stage is reached (often with some help!), is that I get to do stuff that no one in the industry has ever done before. And that’s pretty exciting. One of my favourite feelings in the world is when something that only I could see in my head suddenly appears in real life, brought together by designers and/or developers, when just a few minutes or hours or days or weeks ago, it didn’t exist. And I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that.

Not everything ends up exactly how I’d like, but that’s okay. Other companies and professionals and plenty of others copy my work (with varying success), but that’s okay too. It means more to me, because I’ve spent hours thinking over every angle and every reason to determine whether to make this decision or that decision, and why. They don’t have that insight. They see what they think is a good piece of content, or useful tool, or successful strategy. But they don’t have the insider information that makes it all work. The secret sauce and hidden extras that are all internal, and very often stop something from being simply mediocre, and turn it into something genuinely successful. It also encourages me to think differently: how can I do something that’s harder to copy? How can I do something that has secret aspects to it that aren’t visible to the naked eye?

I like things to be perfect. I like things to be interesting. I hate – and resent – doing anything I don’t enjoy. And that might be very Generation Y of me, but I’m lucky in that I enjoy 99.9% of what I do. And the 0.1% of the time I don’t, it’s more likely to be a frustration I have…that I need a colour that doesn’t exist, or there literally isn’t code that exists that will let me do what I want.

Yeah…that sounds pretty crazy. Welcome to my world, please mind the bunnies.

The problem is that I can’t turn my brain off. And when you start thinking about everything in the world from every single angle, and there’s always a nagging voice in your head competing with a doubtful one and dozens of others, it gets very overwhelming very quickly. I would love to be able to switch my brain off naturally, rather than having to recognise what’s happening through all the noise and then end up having to think more about a healthy way to calm down and relax according to the given situation and the tools available to me.

The question is, would I change it permanently? Probably not.