What ever that gold may be. It can be your line of work, your schooling, beliefs, thoughts, dreams, you name it.

Okay now, here’s what I learned.

There are those people who like the spotlight that follows the hunt for the gold. They enjoy the glamor and mystery it comes with and try to follow in the footsteps of successful people from the past. They adorn themselves with the (supposedly) correct attire. They get their equipment and clothes dirty and try to break in to the proper circles, and pose for photos at famous digging sites just to be seen. Heck, they even choose to take part in classes, visit conferences, join seminars and junkets, all that for all the wrong reasons. The only thing they are doing is looking the part, without breaking out a shovel. At the end of the day they are satisfied by deceiving most of the people they meet along their way.

On the other hand , there are those who are neck deep in the trenches, getting cut and bruised deep inside the mines, or way underneath sea level tirelessly and relentlessly digging. You might even call it an obsession with their chosen path in life. They don’t care about the bright lights and/or groupies. They are in Love with the struggle. They are fully aware of the sacrifices they have to make in order to find what they are looking for. Often they come up empty and yet they dust themselves off and pull themselves up, just to fail over and over again.  Even after all that, they still keep going.

These are two people on the exact same path, but they are light years away from each other.

I know which one of the two I want to be.

There are those projects where you believe (emphasize: believe) that it’s got no potential to become a portfolio piece, all creative juice goes stale and suddenly you have a heavy feeling in your gut as you begin to work on it. Hell yeah, I’ve been down that road a gazillion times.

It’s all in the mind..

Yes. Or at least that’s what I believe. For instance, after working on a huge project, learning new ideas from the senior designers and info architects, peeking the newest CSS work-arounds from the programmers.

All our mocks got sent of for sign-off and green lights. There comes that waiting period where I get placed on a project in which I’ll have to build two dozen ads in different sizes. For you sales folk those would be big boxes, skyscrapers.

Specs I received were basically to fit in stock images with a huge body of text. A very tedious and repetitive project. My mind kept wondering off to that one cool project that’s “so awesome, and it would look sweet in your portfolio.” At the same time thinking of having to create around some 12 ad units times 2, feels like having to climbing the Himalayas.

The Difficulty / The Challenge

It was exactly that challenging feeling that got me down and bored out of my mind. “Dude, seriously? 24 ads? ” I felt myself sinking deeper into my seat.  It got me thinking… What if this was the project I will be judged by down the ages? What if this were the last ever project I’ll ever work on?

So I sat up and popped on my iPod and started looking for the cleanest way to layout the text and best place to add the graphics. After that I looked for the fastest and most efficient way to replicate the look & feel on the rest of the 22 ads, keep in mind not all ads were to have the same text and graphics being that those were ad units to be shown in different provinces of Canada… Six days later, I finished. Man, a huge rock just fell off my shoulders. Although they didn’t really turn out to be the greatest ad units on earth, I could look back and say I gave what I had to complete those.

It was exactly that feeling of difficulty that gave me the drive to see the challenge in it. The challenge being able to overcome the procrastination and follow through. Or beating a tedious job simply by seeing it as my last shot that had to count.

If I was to overcome this simple yet repetitive project, how much effort will I be able to put into a project that really catches your passion and drive?

I’ll just come right out and say it. Boring/tough projects are a good way to build creative character, as corny as it sounds… Not sure if it’s true, but I sure feel that way. It’s exactly that feeling that usually gets me through.

Quick note right here. This post has been inspired by a chapter in Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be A truly life changing book.

It’s been a year since I’ve made my first ever real ad unit (Sky Scraper) – and I never knew how much thought and work is put into an ad.

Behind the Scene

It’s quite a small space and a short period of time to work with, you’ll receive a “novel” of a copy to place (I’m just kidding my copywriting brethren, I still love you!), you have the imagery or materials to include and you basically should have only less than 2 seconds to really capture the users attention – and how many times have you been really intrigued by an ad unit…. and I mean REALLY intrigued? And I don’t mean those Apple ads with the Mac and PC guy going through their usual conversation like the ad on the tele. There’s no copy to read on it so that’s cheating, just playing, I love it.

Wax-on, Wax-off

It is a challenge working on an ad that really has to hit the mark while maintaining the target deadline. In that small confined space creativity gets stifled really quick – But I can tell you one thing, after working on an ad, working on a site layout suddenly isn’t as difficult as it seemed initially… It seemed like sort of a creative warm-up or exercise.

Ever since creating my first online advertisement, I browse yahoo!, MSN or CNN (or the other news websites for that matter) I actually enjoy watching and analyzing the art work and finesse other designers have in placing the copy that has been handed to them together with the images and graphics they are supplied with.

Having said that, ads are little inspiring creative snacks on the side, for me when they are well done!

I was actually glad to read that another designer also chose to get up early in the morning to work on personal artworks and projects. And I’m not talking about deciding to or not to get out of bed at 6 a.m. I’m talking about 04:00 hours. The time some people come home from a night out. Or the time bakers in the old world are already awake and baking the nth batch of fresh bread.

Up until this day, every time I mention that to people around me they’d think I’m a little desperate and should re-schedule my time, since “If you love something, you’ll always find time for it.” Yup it’s true, but hey sometimes your battery is just drained at the end of a long and fruitful day. And guess what, I found the time!

Going all the way back, the first time I tried hopping out of bed at four in the morning was back in my school days, just to get some homework done. And then of course I stopped after leaving school — A couple of months back though, I got up to hit the road for a couple rounds of jogging. I was standing at the front door, that’s when I noticed the world around me was just silent, streets were empty and I only could hear a bird or two twittering in the distance. You could say the atmosphere was like past midnight and your standing in the dark, in the middle of the living room.

After that I just had to try out working on a few projects, since I was desperately looking for time to work on some artworks. Getting through a long day and coming home, the only thing you sometimes want to do is just get to some video gaming or you end up watching some reality show you’d usually hate to watch.

That one morning I got down to some work on personal sites and ideas I had swimming in my head. And guess what? As if everything just happened magically, new ideas started emerging – they weren’t the greatest but I was thinking about the projects and artworks in front of me. Not that I’m saying the pieces I was working on turned out to be some kick-ass portfolio piece. But what really happened is I was actually was able to work on some personal stuff for the first time in a long while and I had the time to experiment and play. Something I haven’t done in ages.

I’m not really sure if it was a fluke, oddly enough on those days I got up early to work on my stuff, the ideas at the office came easier.

Let’s just say waking up early and being “creative” is like the warm-up before you get to the actual work-out. Instead of jumping in to warm-up-mode at 8:58a.m. when you enter the office, you’re actually already run-in and ready to tackle the problems of the day.

Yes, of course if you don’t go to bed early enough and you pull something off like that, you are bound to be really burnt out at the end of the day. Trust me I’ve been down that road once too many, but that’s not something Redbull can’t fix…