Screw that, the best people you can FATHOM. Therefore, make effort to know, connect, collaborate with, mentor under, the best people you can find. Making your work, your career, your life, will involve others taking to you and what you do. Think you’re on a solo journey? On the contrary.

If you don’t take delight, your career will be short, either by choice or by fate. Enjoy the process, because from moment to moment, the process is reason for the season – it’s all you’ve got. Stay up all night when the ideas are flowing, because you can. Celebrate successes, pop champagne or Diet Coke when you break through tough challenges. Take delight in what you do, and for that matter, what others do too. Not always fun like a birthday party fun, but fun like you’re doing the right thing sort of fun. So when shit is getting hairy, take a breath. Anxiety – not to be confused with the positive stress of deadlines and forced production schedules – is counter productive. You’ve got know the nuts and bolts of what your doing. Vision and big-picture-thinking are important, but not at the expense of the fundamentals. The answers are in here, not out there.Ĩ. Understand that the best way to make something new and fresh is to look inside you. The summary of those iterations will aggregate into something special. Be ready to catch each one of the iterations and push it out of you. Genius, clarity, vision–whatever you want to call it–will come in fragments at inopportune moments over days, weeks, months, years. Nothing–and I’ll say it again, but louder–NOTHING will spring from your creative self fully formed. But be prepared to chop your own path through the weeds and fend off the naysayers, because if you’re doing something worthwhile there will likely be resistance to your way.ĥ. Be respectful as you make your own rules, don’t be rude. And while it helps to know the rules that others have played by in the past–those you admire who have come there before you–don’t let those rules alone define your rules or your actions. There are a million paths to get to any single destination. Education is incredibly active and it should be self directed in some capacity. And don’t fool yourself that being in school, in class, or in the seminar actually equals education. Think someone else is responsible for your education? Think again. Pros do, make, ship, send, publish, post and deliver amateurs sit around and wonder, or worse, scratch their arse. That requires actually making stuff happen. They care about what is, and what will be. People don’t care what almost happened, or what your problems are or why something wasn’t. Over-thinking, pontificating, and wondering are tools for the slacker. So here’s a list of thirteen such things that you should be doing right now – let’s call it your hit list: There are commonalities that are undeniable. Success is each to his or her own, but let’s call it like we see it: when you survey the landscape of your creative world, your industry, your career or hobby–whatever field you’re in– there are several fundamentals to achieving success, regardless of the measure.

The hit list