My first professional challenge, back at Netface in the pre-bubble days of 1996, was to work with designers coming out of school. I learned the hard way that they can sometimes be hard to deal with, as their artistic roots don’t always prepare them to face the need for compromises that the business world demands. Lots of fights that could have been avoided if I had the top 10 things they never taught me in design school list back then. Excerpt:

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
4. Don’t over-think a problem.
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
6. Don’t forget your goal.
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
9. It all comes down to output.
10. The rest of the world counts.

Link (via cph127 and anecdote)

Great food for thought. Point two is especially interesting:

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

This actually applies to most jobs out there. Cool stuff is always surrendered by boring and administrative tasks. Balance is the key.

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