Kids these days.

Freelancing: The importance of walking the walk

_{By Tom Lane
Via Computer Arts}

There’s nothing stopping you from doing a particular project – just get on with it, says Tom Lane

Don’t rely on other people to make things happen for you, or for the work to land on your plate. Make it happen: walk the walk, don’t talk the talk. If you like magazines, create a magazine with a friend. If you want to land an advertising campaign for a major client, do one yourself and show it to other people. Tell stories, let people into what you’re doing, what you’re about and what it is that you want to be. Potential clients will come to you because they understand where you’re coming from and what you’re capable of.

If you want to get into an area of business or do a particular project, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from doing it. Don’t rely on someone else handing it to you – just do it. That way, you give art directors the easiest opportunity possible to say: “Oh, I can hire them to do that. Look, they’ve already done a successful job of it.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s ‘real’ or not. There’s no such thing as a make-believe project. It all comes down to the results you get and the story behind it. I’ve never witnessed anyone saying: “Well, that isn’t a real project,” or: “That’s not a valid thing”. People see something awesome and they want to hire you to do it.

After six months of thinking I was going to get a design job, I went out and knocked on the doors of design studios instead of waiting for them to put up an advert. I introduced myself and said: “I can help you in the future if you want.” I wanted to do an advertising campaign around cars, so I just did one – and three weeks later, I had a commission from Mercedes to do a mail-out. A project you can put a bit of yourself into and use to show people what you’re about is the best piece of promotion you can use.

_{Illustration by Cachetejack}

The Gap

For months, I have been paralyzed.

When I sit down to write, nothing comes out. When I start to design, I stare at a blank canvas. My ability to create things does not meet my own ridiculously high standards of quality, so I get stuck in an endless loop of making decent things, throwing them away, and then starting over from scratch. I’ve been floating around in despair, a creativity limbo, which has nearly destroyed me. I stopped working. I became depressed.

That was three months ago, and while I now feel more inspired and energized than ever, the paralytic gap between my actual ability to create and my sense of what is “good enough” remains. I cannot make things good enough for myself. The problem is festering in my thoughts, and I doubt myself at every turn.

The truth is that perfection is impossible and “Good enough” is good enough. To move forward, I need to lower the insanely high standards I have for my own work. But as a designer, this task is insurmountably difficult. It feels like defeat becuase it’s a tacit admission that I am not good enough to create things that meet the same level of quality that I demand from others when I evaluate creative work. My “taste” exceeds my own ability.

It’s interesting that the source of my internal battle lies buried in something as innocuous as “taste”. For most people, taste is just the basis of opinion. It describes the point at which something flips from being “not good enough” to “ok, decent”. But for creative people, it’s something different. Taste is everything. It is what drives us. It is the definition of success, the ceiling of what is possible, and the source of everlasting internal frustration. Being creative is a battle fought over the slow conversion of a mere idea into something tangible that you think is great. The question is: When do you stop the conversion process?

I don’t know. •

These words were not written by me but if you are convinced that they were, then I’m not the only one stunned by that realization.

Dustin Curtis, insanely understands what I’m going through or it could be the other way around. Either way, he has given me the words to finally express what I’ve always been afraid to say, especially with that first paragraph.