Radical Career Tip For Students Entering The Creative Industry:

Do not fear call centers. Or rather, do not look down on them.

They pay fresh grads more than any agency, production house, animation studio or design firm.

The hours are set, you time in, you time out. You get paid for over time & your weekends are assured. The creative industry does not have that. Fresh grads are of course worked the hardest & paid the least. They get called to work through the night & on weekends. It is a fair right of passage. But it is also highly abused & most young creatives do not even know they deserve better.

“But what about pursuing my dreams as an illustrator/designer/writer/filmmaker?”

With discipline & not forgetting what you really want to do, it is quite easy. You will have your weekends & spare time. Create personal projects. Write in a blog, upload your artworks, shoot your short film. What is important is your create something for yourself. Not a client.

“But am I not wasting precious creative time with the call center days? I could be at home creating!”

No (& being at home, creating will not pay you, stop asking your Mom for allowance & help out with the household expenses!). Think of it as breeding art lust. Remember how when you have so much homework & exams you keep thinking of all the cool art projects you would do during summer? Then summer comes along & you end up watching 6 seasons of Lost & you produce nothing. Loads of free time is the enemy of creative output. You have to get hungry to do art. Nothing will make you more hungrier for art than spending 5 days a week on a non art related job. When the weekend rolls in you’d be so excited to draw or write & you have to finish it before Monday rings the bell.

Someday you will be paid for the things you create. Or you could apply for a company, not as a fresh grad, but someone with a thick portfolio or reel. Remember, the creative industry is not so much about your resume, where you studied, where you worked, but what you have crated. So create!

Working in the creative industry has a way of robbing you of personal time. You will find out after years that you have not began that graphic novel that you wanted to do or written that screenplay. You are too tired from all the writing & drawing & shooting that you do for the company & it’s clients.

Chances are the creative people you admire the most are people who created things for themselves. So you should too.

Ok?

Ok : )

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I wrote this last year, I can’t seem to re blog myself, so I just posted it again : )