SCABs

Make your own luck – By @CocoShellim

By Coco Shellim

 

Make your own luck

One theme that seems to keep popping up at SCA, either from the mentors, Marc or past students is all about making your own luck. Nobody is going to come to your door and offer you help, so you have to really fight to be seen and heard. We’ve heard some inspiring examples of how mentors have managed to get their work noticed when they were starting out in the industry. Strapping a bomb to their books, stealing the entries for D&AD and holding them ransom, renting big billboards and asking for a job on them. We have the freedom to pull a really fucking risky stunt and if you get it right, you’ll get noticed and given a chance. You wouldn’t be able to get away with this shit if you were training to be a lawyer, you definitely wouldn’t be rewarded with a pat on the back and a placement.

Marc mentioned a Derren Brown show which was about luck. It talks about two people, one guy who claimed to always be unlucky in life and another who claimed to be lucky. Derren staged identical situations for both of them. They were walking down the street and there was some money placed on the pavement in their path and unknown to them it was deliberately planted there. The guy who was said to be lucky found the money because he was looking around, meanwhile the man who claimed to be unlucky was not looking around and walked right past the money. It was a powerful analogy about life. You have to make your own luck. In other words, there is no such thing as luck. So make sure you’re not the guy who walks around with his head down missing out on life’s opportunities and dropped fivers in the street.

Make the effort to speak to everyone because you never know who will lead to your lucky break, who will teach you something interesting and take the time to help people out because you never know when  they could return the favour. You have to keep pushing, I think this applies to breaking into any industry but more so in the creative industries. It’s difficult to stand out in an industry where everyone is told they need to stand out, to think different, or think outside the box. When you end up with everyone outside the box, it can become noisy.  And if you try too hard to think different without actually having anything different or interesting to say – for the sake of it. 

I’m learning that to get what I wan’t I’m going to have to stand up and make my own luck.

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