Do what you do best. Do it now.
Some months ago a good friend of mine convinced me to have a long Q&A session with a group of 30 students she’s teaching at a Design course.
In between the more practical and curious information exchanged with the bright students, at one point I think I gave them a really valuable advice, at least for those that consider themselves to be creative.
It’s nothing new, and tons of people said it before - but so many still seem to be miles away from it. If it would be an exercise, It would go something like this:
- For a moment, ignore your context - academic, social, familiar, etc. It shouldn’t keep you from following your true passion.
- Look at what you really love doing. Writing, painting, designing, programming, talking, collecting, travelling… what-ev-er, as long as it’s something that creates value.
- Do it more often. Even more often. In your free time. With nobody paying for it. Just do it. Get better and better and do it even more. It shouldn’t bother you, because after all you love doing it!
- Thanks to an ever more transparent and global society, somebody will find your work and love it because it’s more genuine and mature than most of your counterparts.
- Voilá, you have the chance to get paid what you do best and love to do the most.
It’s only a hypothetical scenario, and the path is never this smooth, and it requires tons of trial and error. But be sure of this: if (for example) you’re a graphic designer, and write an application to a webdesign company saying
“I’m really eager to start doing webdesign, I love it, I’m ready to learn from you”,
what I read is
“I’m surely not in love with webdesign, because if I would be, I’d have tons of stuff done on my free time already, and wouldn’t be waiting for someone to pay me and teach me this, and this is NOT my future passion”.
Do, do, do what you love. If not at your dayjob, then on your freetime. You won’t get good at anything - much more at something you really love - unless you do it for yourself. Only then you might get a dayjob where you get paid to do what you do best and what you love doing the most.
