[kradeelav]

I'm a corporate design manager (happily so), so my industry is slightly different than yours, but I see this question pop up enough in my circles it felt relevant to say the below ...

One of the greatest mistakes I see fellow designers do is try to make their 'passion' into their job - expecting their moonshot webcomic idea to be the bread+butter income, artisanal print hobby to pay the same as a corporate career without a sizeable investment or insane time sunk into marketing, you get the picture.

Early on I made a point to do short contract/internship stints to find our what I "didn't" like to do corporate-wise (packaging, digital design, print design), and narrow down to the parts that left me vaguely looking forward to the next day (experiential design, a team that's enjoyable to work with, autonomy, management). Note that the happy bits are almost as much team dynamics is it is the work itself, if not moreso.