108 - Work Hard

What this episode covers

Music and links from this episode This Minus Five by Captive Portal Day Bird by Broke for Free Exotic2 by Andrew Pekler Tonight, By The Moonlight by James Pants Line-by-line notes INTRO I love shortcuts All kinds of shortcuts actually I love keyboard shortcuts, because they speed things up when I’m working I love productivity shortcuts, that make me more efficient I even love shortcuts in Mario Kart, because they make sure I don’t come last Sometimes though, shortcuts just don’t work Sometimes, you’ve just got to knuckle down And just work hard This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess PLAY MID SONG If there’s something I see more and more of as I get older And I guess you could say more experienced Is that people become more entitled Because anybody can get a YouTube channel or a blog set up in 5 minutes They expect the results to come equally as quickly Because when we forget something or don’t know something And we can just google for any answer in 5 seconds flat People expect everything else to be as easy to achieve People like to talk about overnight success As if that’s an excuse for the fact that somebody has achieved something There’s no such thing as an overnight success It’s a lie The only way an overnight success is achieved Is through hard work, and years of it No matter how old somebody might be Take a talented 17 year old footballer for example who’s just broken into the professional leagues That 17 year old kid has been playing football their life Probably not far enough since they started walking What’s overnight about that success? There’s a thing that occurs over and over when people talk about success And it doesn’t even matter what kind of definition of it you have This thing comes up over and over And it’s working hard Nothing worth achieving comes without hard work Otherwise everybody would be doing it The same couldn’t be more true of being a designer There’s so many designers out there now You just need a computer and a copy of Photoshop and you can call yourself a designer There’s no regulation Increasingly people are turning away from traditional design education too Which I don’t agree with by the way So the only differentiator In a stupidly crowded market Is your work And the only way to make your work get better And stand out from anybody else's Is to do lots of it, and work hard The design world is no different from many other industries these days And I predict with the rise of the internet, competition for any job will only get bigger And the only way to make sure you’re the best is to work harder thane everybody else Designers have to know so many things these days And have to be good at so many different crafts That the only way to get good at them all is to knuckle down And get working hard Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating working yourself to the bone In a traditional sense I don’t mean work hard and burn yourself out I mean work hard at your craft And work hard to be the very best at what you do No matter what that is Because if you’re not working hard There’s somebody else just behind you waiting to take over  OUTRO  This was AADA. I’m Craig Burgess. Music featured in this episode was  This Minus Five by Captive Portal Day Bird by Broke for Free Exotic2 by Andrew Pekler Tonight, By The Moonlight by James Pants For a line-by-line run down of this episode, go to askadesignernaything.com/ep108 I’m back tomorrow for another episode of Ask a Designer Anything Support Ask a Designer Anything Ask a Designer Anything Website Twitter (@craigburgess) Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook Leave me a review on iTunes