While other people are sleeping, what are you doing to get ahead? For a little over a month, I’ve been busy putting in the work to get my portfolio to look a lot better by focusing on case studies rather than just putting things up. I’ve been learning how to fail by applying to different things and focusing on the process of trying rather than aiming for perfection. Done is better than perfect is a saying that has been coming up a lot lately.

I really hope my portfolio is up to par and that when I start looking for more opportunities, I won’t have to wait too long. However, I’ve been thinking a lot about personal branding lately. I look professional, but the issue is that I’m not sure if that’s the crowd that I’m trying to attract.

This past weekend, I went out and spent some time with some friends. It was a great time besides the fact that I got a flat tire while I was biking over to my friend’s place. While it was a bummer for a little bit, it was nice to ride the subway with friends going home. However, it took me so long to get home that the next day, I didn’t do much except design one thing, take a nap, clean the kitchen, and eat. Today is Monday and I feel a bit stressed out. However, I woke up and watched a video from The Futur and Darren Hardy again and it’s always nice to have someone be there, even if they’re not physically there, tell me good things to clean my brain so that I can restart again. It was 3 words that really got me: You’re gonna die.

To explain even further, death is the mother of invention. Stop being afraid to put something out. Learn to live with that fear because the quicker you learn to fail, the quicker you learn to succeed. There might be many losses over time, but the small wins will be big enough to compensate for those losses.

It’s hard to make things happen because there’s a lot of sacrifices that will need to be involved.

Recently, I’ve been sacrificing sleep and I’ve been getting a bit tired of having to make a design every single day. However, I need to do it. I need to keep practicing. My resolve is that I want to do this for an entire year. Maybe the short term goal should be to just do it until I get to my goal in January and February. However, I need to seriously buckle down and get my portfolio up to date. It’s taken me a month to get it to this stage, but it’s taking a bit longer just because I’m also trying to put work out everywhere.

I can only do so much and it sucks. I want to do everything here, but what’s starting to suffer is my sleep schedule. I feel like I’m in college all over again and while it’s a little fun, it’s also very stressful.

So I fell asleep last night before I posted. I missed one day of posting, but I still made something. Of course this is going to happen at some point and this happened to me once when I did this for my other blog.

However, we keep going and don’t worry too much about it.

I decided to apply for an Open Call. I’ve never done this before. Well, I’ve done it once when I applied for a fellowship in Alaska during the Summer of 2018. I didn’t get it and frankly, that’s alright because it wouldn’t have been my fit.

For this design practice, I decided to practice on my CV. I haven’t looked at my CV in the longest time and of course I had to update it. From Left to right is kind of my process. I used my resume as a template for the first one, but felt while it was clean, it didn’t exactly fit what I though a CV looked like which was just a straight up list. To be honest, I submitted for the open call expecting that I’m going to fail and not get into any of the exhibitions.

This is the point. To just try. Like speculative investing, how much are you willing to lose? $35 isn’t that much. That’s a week’s worth of groceries which isn’t bad at all.

If I never try, then I’ll never learn is what I’m saying. If I don’t fail, then I’m not going to learn how to succeed. However, I can’t fail big. Failing big is not what I’m trying to do. The compounding of small failures over time doesn’t sound the best, but it teaches me to be okay with it. To learn to be comfortable with failure is basically doing research. By failing, you’re researching what works and what doesn’t work.