No one is coming to your rescue, and nothing will change until you do.

–Dave Navarro (rockyourday.com)

If you keep shouting, you are not making communication any better. You only remove talking and whispering from the system. I find our society a bit noisy. I just would like to contribute a little silence.

– Bruno Monguzzi

Although fantasy and make-believe flourish in childhood, they rapidly atrophy as one is moulded to fit the adult’s grey consensus of reality.

A child, out on a walk with its mother, suddenly points and cries out, ‘Look, a purple cow.’

The mother, perhaps rather tired and domestically harassed, snaps, ‘Don’t be silly.’

And then delivers the crunch line:

‘There’s no such thing as purple cows.’

So the child, a vagabond in the backwoods of rationality, is brought up to see the world in the prosaic terms of grown-ups and eventually forgets it ever saw a purple cow.

Now purple cows walk around unseen by anyone.

– Alan Fletcher

It has long been an axiom of mine that the Little Things are infinitely the most important

– Sherlock Holmes

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution, it is that they can’t see the problem

– G.K Chesterton

A problem well stated is a problem half solved

– Charles Kettering

Beware of the man

Who says he has

Twenty years’ experience

When what he should

Be saying is he has

One year’s experience

Repeated twenty times

– Alan Fletcher

Fabio Sasso of Abduzeedo says;

As you can see a lot happens when you make a decision. Of course there’s always a downside. Nothing after-all is perfect. Life would be boring otherwise. Also, everything takes time. It’s sort of like planting…you’ll never get results right away, because you need to get experience, learn and be prepared. We have to persist if we believe in what we’re doing. At least it was like that with Abduzeedo. It took over one year for the results to start appearing.

I believe the most important thing in life is to do what you like and make decisions based on your own opinion and not based on what other people think. I know that’s pretty much what Steve Jobs said in his commencement speech at Stanford and it makes so much sense. Or perhaps it makes more sense now after these almost 4 years of blogging, because that is the most important thing I have learned. In other words, put yourself out there, have passion, confidence, and persistence.

These inspiring words could not have come at a better time for me. I am currently doing some freelancing, but mostly I am looking for full-time employment as part of a User Experience team in the right kind of company. Working within the UX field is something that I feel very strongly about and is a real aspiration of mine. However, over the past few weeks, when I have been searching for work, I have been told on numerous occasions to give up and go for a job that is ‘easier to get’. By that, these people often mean doing something administrative in an office, or apply for a grad scheme in a corporate sweatbox doing something like management consultancy. This, to me, is unacceptable. I am incredibly passionate and focused on the job sector that I want to get into, and for me, anything else would be a letdown. But there are only so many times that I can tell people politely that this is not what I want to accomplish right now, and I’m not going to give up till I get what I want. And only so many times before that little seed of doubt starts creeping inside of me telling me how easier it would all be if I just gave up.

When I made that decision – not to give up until I get a job that I really want – it came at a price. As Fabio says, a lot happens when you make a decision. For me, this means that I have to live at home. And I have to pick up freelancing gigs that I would not really want to do otherwise. And this can get frustrating. Especially when those around you have a difficult time understanding your motivations.

Reading Fabio’s article though, really has given me a new sense of purpose and direction, and has re-cemented my decision to stick to my guns and not to bow down to these outside pressures and negative thoughts. Fabio says two important things:

- Everything Takes Time

I have to be patient. I have to use this time wisely to build up my knowledge and my skills in order to really be prepared for my call-up. As Linford Christie once said, “Listen, when the gun goes, I run like hell”

- I believe the most important thing in life is to do what you like and make decisions based on your own opinion and not based on what other people think

I have to remember that I have a goal, a vision, even a dream about how I want my life to go. I must not settle for what may be easier short-term. Long-term is the rest of my life, and I want to be doing what I love.

I think that Abduzeedo is an awesome example of what can be accomplished through sheer hard work, passion and perseverance, and his blog post really highlights this. Fabio Sasso is incredibly inspirational and I thank him for writing such an honest, motivating post.

Another speaker worth watching from the same event is Jonathan Fields;

“I try one way of doing something, and then I try another, to see if that works. But even when I’ve done that I try its opposite, to see if that works.”

— Vivienne Westwood

- A quote from the Twitter CEO about the importance of the User Experience

- An interesting article from Jared Spool entitled ‘The Essence of a Successful Persona Project‘

- An article looking at ways in which we may be failing our clients – found here

- A great TED talk – Why Are We Happy

- Finally, in commemoration of the demise of one of the greatest shows Ever, 101 Lost T-Shirts

Have a great weekend everyone!