When you’re starting out in your career as a creative, there’s a little bit of a catch 22 happening: You can’t get hired because you haven’t done any work, and you can’t do any work because nobody will hire you. It seriously sucks when you’ve got the chops, you know you can kill it, but you can’t get a break. You need what you don’t have: history.

So what do you do?

You keep swinging. But don’t put good effort after bad. If you can’t immediately jump into the hottest studios in your market, lower your expectations and take whatever assignments you can get — a lowly assignment now can mean something higher profile by next year.

Getting it Rolling

In my first regular gig as a full time Flash developer, my dream job at the time, I was making learning packets for employees of a major electronics retailer to educate them on various products. A far cry from the cool points of the indie hip-hop label I’d been with a year previous, but more in line with my overall career goals — kicking ass in the web lane.

Your real goal, at this point, is building your history and your experience, so that you will be desirable to that hotshot studio that didn’t call you back after the phone interview. I found signing up with a creative management agency to be the boon my career needed, I was able to get into organizations in extreme junior positions, but those allowed me to start building my history.

In my first year as an agency contractor, I worked with four different studios on various projects. Each of those gave me better work to show for the market, which gave my agent better material for marketing me, which in turn got me better assignments, and the cycle begins again with having better work. There is a momentum to it.

When you’re starting out, be honest with the world and yourself in dealing with it. All of us have been green, we all know what it looks like, and what overcompensation looks like. If you’re in your first couple of agency assignments, be honest about it. And shut up. You want to keep mouth closed, ears+eyes open, observe the process and the machine around you. Do the work with promptness and precision. You have the opportunity because you are good at what you do, never give them any reason to question that perception. Deliver quality and let that be your boast.

1. You suck until further notice.
2. …Always put your best stuff first. Don’t save it.
from “Dear Kozik: The Rules of Graffiti”
Bomb the Suburbs by Upski

Getting Your Hooks In

Eventually, unless you are really socially non-functional (in which case I’m sorry but you need more help than my coffee can provide, please get it), you will inevitably be invited out to Cut Loose With the Team. That’s when you’re in, you can ease up, swag to your level of comfort. But that’s a point that you have to earn, and that happens through perseverance and commitment to nailing it. Not doing something, putting Kevin Costner’s arrow through an arrow and nailing that task to a tree.

Your history will need these stories, you can do a lot in a couple of years. Consider four full-time assignments in three years: A is 4 months, B and C are 6 months, and D is 8 months. This also leaves 12 months in that three years for side projects, education, travel, attaining mastery of the xylophone. Let’s say you manage four independent projects (church, band, cafe, biz consultant) that have websites in that time. That means in three years you could have the four FT sites and four side project sites. With code to show for eight sites, you can tell your story as a hell of a developer.

In that scenario, you will also most likely still be doing moonlight work for A or B while working at C or D. People have a tendency to call in resources they know can nail a task (arrow in arrow).

Don’t get discouraged if your first assignment or two isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, or is only two weeks instead of two months. Any opportunity to take a seat at the table and work the craft is a chance to show both what work you can provide as well as what kind of a person you are in providing it. Results speak for themselves, be easy to work with and talk to. If they only have you for two weeks, give them something that it will break their hearts to lose in two weeks.

“I build my name out of bricks, not hype.
Respect the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.”
Brand New Nikes, Matlock

A History of Value

Solid, dependable, reliable, straight shooter, square business, these are all terms that you want mixed in with your history. Never prompt feedback (unless it’s That Time and you’re thirsty on LinkedIn) but welcome it with humility, if you hear those sorts of things being used to describe you, things look good in the success lane.

Kinda flaky, disorganized, temperamental, sloppy, half out-of-it, these are the things you want to work against. Again, sometimes we get feedback even if we haven’t asked for it, and if you are coasting or lazing on a starter position, you will most likely hear these sorts of things instead.

In my own career, I’ve heard from both camps, and at different points. In eight years of programming, you can have a really bad year, which I did. In that bad year, my performance suffered in general, on all fronts. Did I bounce back? Absolutely. Do I think it could happen again? Absolutely. A bad note or a harsh critique is not the end of it, certainly not if a bad year can’t kill a career.

Collect stories. Know how to talk about yourself in an honest way, emphasizing what you’ve accomplished. Don’t gush about the quality, explain the process. Much like in geometry, show the proof. Build a history for yourself that you can be proud of, even if they are the dumbest projects in the world (which they usually are), make them into the strongest examples of what you can do.

That is the history you want to be known for.