Junior - Celebrating Life at the Bottom

This week we welcome Ed Howley from JUNIOR to the Guest Blog! Ed, along with Monica Clapcott and regular Stan Johnson are the folks behind JUNIOR, an outstanding Melbourne website that aims to demystify creative 'success' and inspire young creatives to make great work and get noticed!  JUNIOR features regular interviews and priceless words of wisdom with inspiring creative professionals. This week Ed and team will be sharing some of their top tips gleaned from 3 years of writing JUNIOR.  It's going to be a brilliant week,  thanks Ed! - Jenny x

We’re chuffed to be writing the Guest Blog this week. And very excited. Because for the first time we’re going to be sharing all the things we personally have learnt along the way in our time running JUNIOR.

We started JUNIOR to help demystify success and find out how we could get our dream jobs. So we set about interviewing the most successful creative people we could lay our hands on.

So if you’re a wannabe creative – be it a designer, illustrator, advertising creative etc. you’re in for a treat, as we’ll be delving back into three years of interviews and guest speakers to find the nuggets of gold that will hopefully help when it comes to the job hunt.

Without a doubt there has been a constant theme in the advice we’ve been given. And that is if you really want to succeed you have to make it happen yourself. This goes for anything - getting a job, getting work made, winning awards - everything.

What most people have told us is that it’s all about making your own opportunities rather than waiting for something to land in your lap. And to be honest, it’s NOT all about talent. It’s about passion and persistence and being in the right place at the right time.

So what does this mean? We reckon the key is “doing”. It’s easy to have an idea – doing something with that idea is something else. Someone told us recently: “ideas are like assholes, everyone’s got one – it’s what happens with the idea and how it comes to life that really counts”. So our advice would be to do things – go above and beyond uni coursework or your workload – because this is how you will get noticed or get your foot in the door somewhere.

There’s a great quote from Paul Arden that sums up this post nicely.