Mat Voyce makes motion work for Nike, Pepsi and Disney+. He also sat in an animation module at university, made one piece, and decided he never wanted to touch motion again.

I keep coming back to that. Not because it is a nice bit of irony, though it is. Because of what it says about how badly the systems we pass through measure the thing we are actually good at.

This is the first of a new short format I am calling Second Take. One idea, one guest, pulled out of a longer conversation. You do not need to have heard the full episode. It stands on its own.

One A out of eleven

Mat sat eleven GCSEs. He got an A in graphic design. A B in product design. Everything else came back a C.

He is direct about why. He liked the classrooms, the hands-on part, making things with his hands and seeing them exist. The subjects that rewarded a different kind of thinking did not reward him, no matter how hard he pushed.

He went on to AS levels with biology, psychology, art and graphic design in the mix. Graphic design went well. Biology and psychology came back as E’s and U’s. As he puts it, he was applying himself, the cognitive ability just was not there for that kind of work.

So he dropped them. And then the system did the thing systems do: the school would not keep a student on for only two AS levels. That is not how it worked. So he left.

Two years of only the thing he was good at

He went to an art college in his own town. Two years of pure graphic design, a different module every time. Logo design one block, photography the next.

He passed with a distinction and took student of the year.

Same person. Same brain. The only variable that changed was what he was being asked to do.

The part I did not see coming

At university, doing graphic design properly, the cognitive load came back and Mat says he dropped straight back to the bottom of the pack and scraped through.

And in one of those modules he tried animation.

He hated it. Not found it hard, not struggled with it. Hated it, absolutely, will never do this again. He still shows that animation in talks now.

Then he moved into agency work, picked up motion in the day to day, started folding it into his own workflow, and never questioned it once after that.

The subject he walked away from is now his career.

The imposter syndrome did not leave

The brand names started coming. Pepsi. Disney+. Some through agencies, but as Mat says, at the end of the day the project is for that client.

He describes sitting in his own head about it, his wife watching him do it, thinking they cannot be coming to me for this, I cannot do this.

What I appreciated is that he does not tell it as a solved problem. He still gets the email now. He still has to ground himself and remember that he is good at what he does and that he can handle the scary one.

The difference is what he does with it. He has worked out that the projects that frighten him are the ones he learns most from. He knows he will hate parts of it. He goes in anyway, because he comes out the other side feeling like a different designer.

Why this one

I picked this as the first Second Take because of how the two halves rub against each other.

A man who was average at school and hated animation now works with the brands he grew up wanting to work with, and still needs a moment to steady himself when the email lands.

Both things are true at once. That is usually where the useful stuff is.