Design on Your Own Time
You may have seen this already, so let me instead of recapping offer some original thought.
I strongly believe that any person who wants to make a living out of fine arts and design better be ready to put forth the dedication and effort required to innovate. If you have no desire to innovate, this is not the field for you. There are plenty of people out there doing the same old thing and it’s getting old.
No field works without those who treat their job as a job, and not a “full body tattoo”. (How do I know? I don’t. I just haven’t seen any real-world, or even fantasy-world examples of a field wherein everyone loves what they do.) While someone who doesn’t live and breathe the stuff they get paid to do aren’t going to be the best out there, it’s more than a little elitist to suggest that your chosen passion is somehow too noble to welcome drones. It isn’t. You should just be glad you’re not, you know, like that.
Another pertinent point is this: don’t be sad that not everyone loves what they do as much as you. There will always be those who won’t love it, no matter what it is. Chances are, they have other passions, prioritize other things, and lead happy lives. And if they don’t, then you should feel sorry for them because they are sad people who cannot find joy no matter where they look, not because they don’t view their job as a full-body tattoo.
Marco writes:
We see the same effect with programmers: the ones you want to hire are the ones who do side projects at night because they love the craft, not the ones who clock out at 6 and never care about code outside of work.
I absolutely agree. But again, I must warn: don’t be too noble. Don’t think you can run a company with, say, 1,000 employees, all happy with their fields, all lovers with their fields of expertise. It may work for Tumblr, with a few employees, but it won’t scale up. (Oh, and it would be more than a little arrogant to think that you deserved to thousands of people working on your project(s), all one hundred per cent dedicated. Chances are your projects suck too much. Not that Marco is guilty of this.)
So, yeah: it’s great to see people who love what they do. They are the ones who will be at the very top, skill-wise. They will produce the best stuff. But don’t pretend it’s plausible that any industry, any field, any art will not have its drones, its worker-ants who don’t care further than their paycheck. Fine arts, design, programming, cleaning floors literally full of shit — no field of study, no industry, no economy, nothing will work on pure enthusiasm. Ever. You can’t kick out the underperformers and idiots. Sorry.
