The Most Professional Day of My Career

It was February. That greyest month. It was also kind of my start as the new lead designer at one of the best-known design studios in Hungary, which turned out to be... Smaller than it looked. You know the type: impressive website, a couple of gorgeous case studies, the aura of prestige you can smell from two tabs over. I arrived there just fresh enough not to know the social minefield I’d just been airlifted into. The studio owner was something of a local celebrity in the design scene, part genius, part provocateur, lots of books published. The team? Five of us in total. Plus two dogs I really liked from day one.

It was a Tuesday. One of the black ones, as I learned the team had come to call them. Black Tuesdays. Like a tiny goth holiday nobody wanted to celebrate. Because every Tuesday, we had our client check-in with a particularly demoralizing partner: a small family business specializing in bathtub door installations. I want to pause here and say I have nothing against bathtubs or doors. In fact, I'm quite pro both. But this particular client had the ability to cause 100% dread with 0% communication. They were like if feedback wore a face mask and snuck up behind you at the nespresso machine.

This Tuesday was no different, except that it was. The meeting didn’t just go badly. It combusted. Quietly, awkwardly, like someone sitting on a party balloon filled with mayonnaise. There were passive-aggressive sighs. There were polite threats. There was the sentence “I just don’t see the value in any of this,” which landed like a steel chair across the collective face of our design sensibilities. At the end of it, we were no longer their agency. Poof. They were gone. Into the great slippery beyond, to install bathtub doors with someone else. Maybe someone with more "value."

Now, here’s where the story usually pivots into a lesson or a best practice or something involving a downloadable checklist. But that’s not what happened. What happened is we threw a party.

By the time the call ended, you could feel it in the room: the crackling energy of relief mixed with unprocessed failure and that strange euphoria that comes right after narrowly avoiding a car crash you caused. No one really knew what to do. Mr. Studio Owner, in his enigmatic way, vanished into his own schedule like a magician who didn't want to answer follow-up questions. So we booked a table at a little pub in Budapest that served craft beer, had pop quiz nights and more empathy than most agencies.

It wasn't a team-building event. It wasn’t even work. It was five people and two dogs and about a dozen drinks celebrating the end of something awful, together. We told stories. We laughed a little too hard. Someone ordered a weird drink and we all regretted it together, which I believe is the true essence of bonding. One of the dogs fell asleep under some coat. The other one went for a hunt in the pub. We talked about the future and the kind of people we wanted to be. How it might feel to build something that doesn’t just look good in a portfolio but also makes us feel better.

It was one of those moments that doesn’t feel big while it’s happening, but in hindsight it glows. No slides were presented. No performance reviews were conducted. But it might have been the most professional day of my entire career. Because what is professionalism if not knowing when to let go, how to hold space for failure, and when to buy the second round?

There was a kind of crazy potential lingering that night. Like we were on the edge of something we couldn’t yet name. Like one of those nights that doesn’t need a moral. Just people, figuring it out. Quietly starting to believe that maybe the best work doesn’t always come from the biggest wins. Sometimes it comes from knowing which clients not to keep.

I ended up staying there as lead designer for a year and a half. Not because the company was any good. Not because the clients magically improved. They didn't. But because of that night. Because of that feeling. Because something in me said this is what it looks like when a team decides not to fall apart.

I just love them so much.