Ep 8: Design Studio Co-Founder Rob Hubbert on Leaving Corporate Life
Wisdom on how to navigate the increasingly common transition of leaving corporate life to do your own thing.
Meet Rob Hubbert
In episode 8 we meet Rob Hubbert, a founding partner at the Brooklyn-based creative design studio Super Okay, where we recorded our interview.
Rob grew up in Kent in the south of England, and spent the first decade of his career in advertising running partnerships for the Cannes Festival of Creativity before eventually charting his own path as an entrepreneur.
Outside of work, Rob is a devoted record collector and occasional DJ with a deep love of music, he’s also a talented photographer. You can see some of his work on his Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/rhbbrt/
Rob’s story reminded me of the VIII of Cups. Sometimes you have to leave something that is working, a job or career path that has all the markers of traditional ‘success’, to find the thing that really lights up your soul.
I invited Rob on to talk about his transition from corporate life to becoming a business owner, because to navigate that successfully, Rob did a lot of work on himself. He knows who he is, can laugh about himself, and is open about the challenges he’s worked through - both personal and professional - so that he could create an energizing career and uniquely fulfilling life.
I’m pleased to bring you this conversation about transition, personal growth, and entrepreneurship.
”I told myself a bunch of things about who I was and how I needed to show up in the world and what success looked like. And I probably spent the best part of, I don't know, six months, nine months, just breaking down each of those different things and talking it through and figuring out what mattered and what didn't and rebuilding from a place that was a bit more neutral.”
”It’s about acceptance. And what you learn to do is to stop trying to change things about who you are. And learn to accept all the different parts of who you are for what they are. And I think what’s interesting is that you can, or what was interesting for me was that I started to see things that I previously had thought were bad as being positive things.”
”There’s a degree of running a business, particularly when you’ve got partners, where I think you’ve got to treat it like it’s a relationship and you’ve got to ultimately show up in the way that you would show up to any other relationship that’s good and healthy. You’ve got to be willing to be vulnerable, you’ve got to be willing to be honest, you’ve got to be willing to figure stuff out and have moments where you’re selfish and have moments where you’re selfless and own all of that stuff and just kind of keep moving forwards with it and hope that the people around you are trying to do the same thing.”
I hope you enjoy this conversation about navigating a very common challenge with grace and intentionality.
Inspired and want this for yourself?
I help people connect to their internal compass so they can create energizing careers they love and carve their own path through life. This is the stuff of a life with Character.
I also have a lot of free resources on career fulfillment.