That’s all okay.

There are many reasons to leave a job. They’re all valid except for one. Fear.

Fear leads you to leave a job out of concern for a future that may never occur, which leads you to leave early. Leaving early means you haven’t achieved what you came to do. You haven’t leveled up enough to move up in the next place. A lateral move is rarely the right one.

So when you decide to leave, maximise the value you gain, especially in experience. And maximise the value you give the company, so you leave the best image of you behind. The future is always uncertain. Burning bridges is subtractive, so inherently it adds no value.

So the work itself is no longer the proof. Having a solid portfolio is no longer enough to distinguish you from the herd.

A portfolio shows what you created. Your personal brand shows how you think.

This is where most designers get it wrong. They think personal branding means posting more designs, adding their face to the feed, or making a logo for themselves.

It’s not about looking like a brand. It’s about being understood as a creative mind.

Why this direction?
Why this color?
Why did you reject the obvious choice?

Answers like these are what the tools can’t give you.

Clients don’t hire designers because they can design. They hire them because they trust the way they see. And trust is built when people understand your thinking before they need your service.

So don’t just show the final result.
Show the creative mind behind it.

With time you learn their interests and aspirations, their habits and flaws. Slowly you form a more detailed portrait. As they become your friend, your lover, your enemy, you step closer to their soul, and the amalgamation of everything they are starts to feel less common. Rare, even.

That amalgamation is what we actually mean by personal brand. So developing one means being vulnerable, doing the work to understand yourself, and building the confidence to communicate it.

It’s something only you can tap into. Anyone offering to build it for you is really offering tools to help you find your own voice. There’s no way around doing the introspective work yourself.

But in some divine joke, art is where it started. Suddenly everybody and their pet dog could generate in a minute what would take a professional weeks to paint. Ghibli-style portraits. Everyone holding a baby version of themselves. AI wasn’t knocking, it had its boots off and its feet on your couch.

Artists were right to feel under attack. Instead of curing cancer, it looked like these corporations were spending their billions taking away jobs that people had spent years honing their craft to get. What made it worse was the gloating: the claim that artists had already been replaced, the endless side-by-sides announcing the machine had won. My least favourite was training a model on a living artist’s work and reproducing it, sometimes for money. It felt like the apocalypse of art, and I wasn’t happy about it.

So I put down the pitchfork and forced myself to look properly. Ethically and emotionally I still couldn’t embrace generative imagery, but that wasn’t the whole picture. There were tools like Claude that couldn’t generate an image at all. To my LLM-virgin brain it seemed genuinely intelligent. Instead of digging through webpages and PDFs, you ask and you get an answer. Your own pocket Gandalf.

The last piece was capitalism. While all this was happening I moved to Dubai, into a work culture that rewards production speed and long hours. It was a struggle at first. AI was the remedy. Building small tools with Claude, setting up systems to generate and iterate, I saved more and more time. I worked at an easier pace. I started leaving the office earlier.

I still don’t have the philosophical answer. But AI is here to stay. If you can use it in a way that doesn’t affect the livelihood of others, and it gives you and the people you love a better life, is it right to ignore it?