As long as we “will be”, we are free to ignore all of that work, effort and opportunity. As long as we “want to be”, we can go about our lives and dream. Once “we are”, however, we MUST take action in harmony with that declaration or we are lying to ourselves, and this is something we can’t mentally take for long, so we switch back into “we want to be.”

Scary? Sure. But its easy to get started. Try something small. Try putting whatever it is you want to be in your email signature and design a business card. Put it in your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles. That’s it. See how it feels. I’ll bet you like it. :)

A rant about a road block, from personal experience – listening to or reading the words of established creative talent, while helpful AND necessary to anyone serious about it, can be very intimidating. I mean, have your heard how experienced some of these ladies and gentlemen are? How precious they are about the details, and how thorough their though processes are? From the standpoint of someone who thinks they’ve got the drawing chops to do something for money, listening to a podcast (and I’m not naming one in particular, because most of the best ones get this way) where the hosts talk about why they chose one serif font over the other, or what emotion their color pallette conveys, or (my personal favorite) what 80 year old artistic movement inspired their magazine cover… WOW. I’m nowhere near that level of expertise!

Well, time to demystify the great, unreachable power of the professionals a bit, because if someone is too busy looking up in wonder, they’re not looking down at the art table. And that’s not a knock at you freelancers living the dream – I’m certain many of you can remember having this perception of the industry at one point, and overcoming that perception was a large part of getting to where you are now. I am only encouraging that others do the same, and wording it dramatically.

To those starry-eyed wannabes and newbies reading this. Listen to the escapee. Don’t worry about the fact that you’re not as clever or as your future peers. Don’t worry that what they say about their line weight decisions and studio feng shui makes you realize you’ve only ever considered a fraction of what goes into this whole thing. Just. Get. To. Work. Keep listening and reading, but do your own thing. I promise you – promise, that eventually, at whatever speed you work at, you will catch yourself thinking or saying “Well, I chose that shade of grey because it compliments the blue-tones, which I chose because it is a standard blue tone that the printer won’t charge me extra for and… oh, holy #$%@, I’m one of them! I’m a high falootin’ illustrator! Yipeee!”

To whittle all that down to one sentence: The experts became experts by doing things, and that’s the only way you’ll become oine too. Jeez, I should have just said that in the first place.