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

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