I was sitting shoeless at my desk today listening to Edge of Glory and creating images for a blog post on typography, and it occurred to me how genuinely lucky I am to be able to do what I love for a living. Not only do I spend at least 90% of my day doing things I really enjoy, but I get to do it surrounded by free food and drink and some of the most entertaining and intelligent people in the industry.

Today’s post is brought to you by sprinkles, cats, and my Nikon.

Then I realised that, actually, a lot of it isn’t to do with luck at all. It’s to do with perserverance, and not settling for a job that simply pays the bills just because that’s the easiest or safest or least stressful thing to do. I have various friends who are either job hunting or not happy with the job they’ve got. Plenty of people go down the ‘I’m working for [big name] in [important place]‘ route, but telling people that is the main perk of their job. After talking to them for five minutes the negatives inevitably start to creep in: ‘It’s an hour’s commute for me every day’, ‘I live in a box because the cost of living is so high’. I’m not saying that there are no negatives about my job, because obviously it’s not perfect….but every time I think of a negative, three positives come into my head automatically. Work-wise, I would say that my time is about 95% good days and 5% bad days.

As I’ve kind of hinted at before, it’s been a long road to get to where I am now. The most important thing I’ve learned is: never settle for ‘ok’ or ‘it pays the bills’. So many people put up with jobs they don’t particularly like because it’s easier, they’re too burned out to job hunt, or they think that all situations will be fundamentally the same. I used to be one of those people. I assumed that every company was similar, I began to feel that no one would ever listen to my opinion, and I was frustrated and bored. I figured that it was called ‘work’ because it was impossible to enjoy. I was easily replaceable. I was mostly ignored. The idea of enjoying what I did for eight hours every week day was a crazy concept typical of my entitlement generation who want everything on a plate, don’t stick at jobs for very long, and should learn to happily accept what they’re given. Obviously.

Despite that, I was always chasing the idea of the dream job. I was interested in SEO, writing etc., and I had an ok amount of experience – I just wasn’t doing what I actually wanted to do. I worked with a guy several years ago whose attitude was, ‘As long as I have enough money to do what I want at weekends, I don’t really care.’ I always found this attitude impossible to comprehend. In his field, he could have easily ended up working part time for the same money and have a lot more time to devote to his hobbies and friends. Instead, he spent upwards of six hours a day disliking most of the people he worked with, resenting his salary, and avoiding work wherever possible. Even today I have no idea whether he did basically no work because he thought he should get paid more, or whether he didn’t get paid more because he did basically no work. Either way, it was fairly clear he wasn’t a valued employee. But then only a chosen one or two were, and the only reason they were is because they deliberately created walls and bottlenecks, and no director ever heard anything that wasn’t funnelled via them and their opinion first. It showed me a lot about running a business, and it just confirmed my (then) belief that you don’t get anywhere without screwing people over.

Even now, I’m still a bit scared that all this could disappear at any moment. I am conscious that the place I work and the job I do is the exception rather than the rule. I’m fully aware that it’s not normal to spend your days in a salaried job posting cartoons on Facebook and Pinterest, searching the web for good design articles, writing blog entries and guest posts, attending web conferences for free, coming up with ideas for fun projects (zombie contest anyone?) and drinking your entire body weight in Diet Pepsi. At previous companies, I’d get irritated because I had to do pointless tasks like print out thousands of pages of a website or listen to one of my colleagues rant about how he got told off for turning up for a meeting on time. Here, I get very mildly irritated because there’s no particular cereal I want to eat that morning or we’ve temporarily run out of my favourite flavour of crisps. I am spoilt rotten, and I love it. Almost three years on I still feel like an adopted animal that’s finally found a loving home.

I read a great quote a long time ago: ‘The funny thing about people who expect the best is that they very often get it.’ Obviously, part of this is knowing what you want in the first place, and that can be one of the hardest things to figure out. But a huge part of it is also having a base level for how you expect people to treat you. If you aren’t getting the appreciation and opportunities you deserve, you owe it to yourself to make those things happen whatever it takes – whether that’s looking at how you need to change where you are at the moment, or moving somewhere else altogether. Being in a ‘bad’ job, or a job that’s wrong for you, is not a good way to spend the majority of your most productive time. I’m a firm believer that there’s no point in carrying on if you’re not getting what you need. Stop whining, and either come up with practical steps to change it, or move on. It’s advice I should have given myself more in the past.

Last week I came across an interesting article which, three years ago, I would generally have agreed with. Reading it now though, it smacks of someone who’s never had a satisfying job with a good company and who is too jaded to try and find one. I am a firm believer that there is something out there for everyone – it’s just whether you keep trying or whether you settle for ‘ok’ that makes the difference. I’m not saying I disagree with every point made in the article, because I do see a lot of people with obvious entitlement issues wandering around (usually university graduates who are involved in an intense self-fullfilling prophecy scenario with the media which tells them there are no jobs which makes it more acceptable to not have a job and so on. I kind of hinted at that a bit in my post Sometimes, I just want to yell…. Nothing against graduates, because I am one, but at that age I remember feeling like I knew everything. I didn’t. I still don’t.).

To sum it up briefly, my advice is:

• Figure out what you want first – if it’s a work in progress, that’s fine. It might not happen overnight, and every step you take is one step closer to achieving what you want, even if it feels like a step back or down at times.
• Never give up – don’t settle for second best or ‘ok’. If the answer to ‘Is this exactly what you want to be doing?’ causes you to hesitate for even a second or answer with anything other than a firm, confident ‘Yes’, then you’re still not there yet.
• Expect the best to achieve the best – if you start out expecting less, that’s the maximum you’ll ever achieve. If you can’t get the best at least some of the time, figure out how you can or move on.
• Rely on yourself – don’t expect anyone else to be responsible for your career or your happiness, but if they want to take that role in a constructive way then allow them to help you – just don’t put yourself in a position where you’re trapped or dependent. Don’t feel like you’re entitled to other people’s help, respect and so on – it needs to be earned, and there will be plenty of people and environments where it will never be possible. The key is recognising that and being in the place you need to be.

And because I almost went a whole post without cats, today’s photoshoot assistants were Fuzz and Halo: