For those in design school, it's certainly important to be focused on what you're actually there for and what you plan on taking away from there upon graduation. Often, design students will redeem a few things upon graduation, and these may include a killer portfolio, some healthy student to mentor relationships, great friendships, a general methodology of what works for them during the design process, just to name a few. But one has to remember, not everyone will graduate and be a designer, successful or not.
A lot will just burn out and switch careers early in their life to something that wasn't anticipated to them, and then there are others who will be the superstars of the batch. Somewhere in between these two extremities, are the trooper designers all struggling like a starving artist, and trying to reach that well deserved pat on the back; eventually getting to where they want to be as a creative individual.
The important thing here is really to realize now (for those in school currently) to reach out of your safety zone and create something that might make you fail. Evaluate projects that may not interest you as much as you'd like and do something that is against the grain. It's a challenging exercise to fail, because we're systematically taught to not do so. Through failure lies success (as long as you learn from your failure), and without it, it's difficult to evaluate what works as a form of communication. Surely you don't just randomly create something for the sake of failure, but make it an educated failure.
The time to fail is now, more than ever actually. Once you get out there working, the opportunity to fail without any repercussion is next to nil. This obviously applies for the superstar designers and troopers alike. One important thing to remember however, is that although I am writing about failure, what I'm really talking about is 'the steps to succeed'.
On that note, Thomas Edison made 10,000 experiments to successfully create the light bulbs we use today. When he was asked how many times he had failed, his response was not that he failed 10,000 times, it was a matter of showing 10,000 different ways of how not to make a light bulb.
Design is a process, let it take its course.
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