110 - Patience

What this episode covers

How do you get what you want in life? Hard work, and lots of patience. Music and links from this episode Golem by Pas Dans Le Cul Aujourd'Hui Dub Steps by Dub Terminator Octopussy by Juanitos Line-by-line notes INTRO When Stephen HawkingStephen h began studying physics, he was rubbish at it When Louis Hamilton first started driving, he couldn’t even start the car When Robert De Niro started acting, he couldn’t even land a job in a commercial By default, when you start something, you’re rubbish at it Now, collectively, they’re world renowned physicists, multi million pound racing drivers and some of the best actors of all time You want to know why? Because they had patience This is AADA, and I’m Craig Burgess PLAY MID SONG I still vividly remember the first ever piece of design work I made It was in the first few weeks of official design education And I designed a website for William Wallace It was terrible I mean, absolutely terrible It’d offend you if you saw it, seriously In week 1 of a 2 year course, I was a terrible designer But I had the passion and the willingness to become better at being a designer So I put in the work And started designing everything and anything I made up projects I designed fake logos for fake companies I started projects where I designed stuff for fun All of this on top of the work I had to do for my design course It meant I rapidly became a better designer I still wasn’t an amazing one, by any means I was still a design student after all But I knew that if I followed the process And continued to make new design work And continued to keep putting in the work I’d automatically become better I knew this because I had patience Gary Vaynerchuk says lots of good things about patience too I’ll let him tell it for you PLAY GARY VEE CLIP Because of the internet, we expect results fast Because everything can be downloaded, purchased instantly or delivered the next day We expect everything to be so easy to acquire But a craft like design doesn’t work like that It’ll never work like that, because design is a craft A craft takes time to learn  It takes patience to learn You have to learn the ins and outs of it And be able to do things backwards and forwards The epiphany I had about this whole patience thing came a few years ago When somebody said to me Even Jimi Hendrix had to learn guitar once Even he used to be rubbish at playing guitar Everybody, no matter how talented they are Has been where you are right now, no matter what level of your craft you’re at If you’re just starting out, everybody has taken that first step at least once in their career Once somebody told me that, I became enlightened It’s something so obvious, but something you just don’t think about We put talented people on pedestals And attribute everything they do to natural talent Or luck Or something else that makes that talented person seem like they haven’t worked for it When in truth Any talented person has just worked hard And they’ve worked endlessly at their craft Of course luck comes into it And being in the right place at the right time But if you’re working hard at your craft non stop The law of averages says you’re going to get a hit eventually Unfortunately people usually stop before they get that hit Because that one thing more people need Is patienc OUTRO  This was AADA. I’m Craig Burgess. Music featured in this episode was  Golem by Pas Dans Le Cul Aujourd'Hui Dub Steps by Dub Terminator Octopussy by Juanitos  For a line-by-line run down of this episode, go to askadesignernaything.com/ep110 I’m back tomorrow for another episode of AADA Support Ask a Designer Anything Ask a Designer Anything Website Twitter (@craigburgess) Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook Leave me a review on iTunes