In my twitter-life I often seek out advice for my real, independent-professional-designer life in the form of articles and lists linked and retweeted up the mountain that must surely contain the sweet nectar of the divine -- new business. Often I am shocked at how valueless these lists are. Not that they all suffer from some massive dearth of actual content, but that the content they share usually has little to do with how to find new clients, or establishing new connections, and falls more along the lines of: 1. You should get some new clients, and 2. You need to establish new connections. As helpful as a 12-year-old may find that advice, to struggling indies it hold little value. But the Twitterverse loves its lists, and so my search goes on.
Then there are advice columns from the über-stars, or mega-designers, or, I don't know, graphic design world-devourers where the advice seems to be like that of a parent admonishing their child for doing the exact same thing they themselves once did all the time. Like they've forgotten what it means to be starting out. It's easy, they say, just invite the VPs of Marketing from the top four employers in your city to golf at your private country club. Oh yes, I forgot, it is that easy. How silly of us all.
Almost forgot -- big thanks to superstar designer Drew Davies for essentially writing this strip in an iChat last Friday and Prescott Perez-Fox for our design megastar's nom de guerre.
I have observed a very similar phenomenon. In blog posts, and in real-life lectures, there is a lot of jabber, with few actionable tips. And the word "just" pops up more frequently than I would like. You used it right there in the example.
I'm also puzzled by the war stories of designers who have magically switched focuses within the design industry. For example, you'll often hear in lectures a speaker say "For ten years I did nothing but book covers, so then I switched to doing motion graphics at the top motion graphics firm in NY." And I'm thinking to myself, "how the Hell did you pull that off?!" A similar path of how this is done is severely lacking.
By the way, did you read the BusinessWeek article about "Horatio Moriarti?" It was pretty severe, and made me nauseated about his highfalutin lifestyle. I'm sitting here thinking "I can haz paycheck?" and he's talking about being Martha Stewart's neighbor.
*sigh*