What are some of the mistakes you did in your early design career? And how did you overcome it?

Early Career Mistake: Spend too much time building the product instead of validating the idea first. Solution: Focusing on validating the concept before investing too much time and resources.

Lead designer @ Series B co here. I'd add that I put too much weight into what people said, and less into what they did. Actions speak louder than words. Watching someone use your software (or using it yourself) is way more informative than asking someone what they want to improve about it! I came up with my latest startup idea this way - I was doing a ton of screen recordings and kept having to restart. I looked at the behavior - I kept clicking this stupid button again and again, how could I reduce that repetitive action? Now my rewinding screen recorder reached #3 on HN and got 4k upvotes on reddit! (Shameless plug :) https://vento.so/

Building a team is important, but even more important is listening to the voice of the user, who can bring unlimited motivation to the team.

Spending too much time for learning the design skill, but not focusing on applying it. I think that happened to a lot of student.

Some of the mistakes I made in the beginning of my design career were not communicating well with clients, not putting user experience first, and not being open to feedback. To fix these problems, I worked on my communication skills, learned about user experience design principles, and asked my colleagues and clients for feedback on how I could improve and grow as a designer.

Spending too much time looking at a white canvas. Don't remember how i overcame it but I've trained every other designer afterwards never to do this mistake again. Whether you have an idea or not, just start designing stuff even when you know it's not right. Then after you design 5 bad designs you can start combining it into something that actually makes sense. Then ask others what they think, how they feel etc. 😄

Many early designers tend to focus too much on the visual aspect of their designs and neglect the functionality and usability. To overcome this, it is important to understand the user's needs and create designs that are user-friendly and intuitive. Regards : chairarea