Found this article through my friend/mentor, Chase Jarvis. It's written by Court Crandall, a founder of the agency Ground Zero down here in LA. What caught my eye, was the article was written about my friend Noah Clark and his resilient character and motivation. So, if you're reading this Noah, Kudos!
I believe a lot of what it takes to be come a pro photographer, and also as Chase says is hard work, and motivation. That is the core character of a job like this because it can be tough. You need to be very self motivated to excel in this world, especially with all the competition that is arising. That even extends into assisting and learning. Be willing to get your hands dirty for a while to learn. Attitude is everything.
Here's a bit of the article:
"Last week was about as bad a week as I can remember at Ground Zero. We lost two employees. The first was art director Noah Clark, who announced he's leaving to join Crispin, Porter + Bogusky in Boulder, Colo. The second was a woman who made breakfast for the staff and cleaned the office, and who died of lung cancer despite having never smoked a cigarette in her life. (Having worked on the California Department of Public Health account for eight years, I'd be remiss not to mention that her father was a heavy smoker and she believes the second-hand smoke she inhaled as a child ultimately led to her demise.)
Clark interviewed to be my assistant a couple weeks before he was scheduled to graduate from the University of Southern California. Unlike the other finalist for the job, an attractive woman the rest of the creative department was imploring me to hire, Noah was more "boy band": spiked hair, fresh face, jeans that were more fancy than a guy needs to own. But there was something about him that reminded me of myself. And it wasn't the hair. He was just so damn eager to be in the business. There was no pretense, no attitude or entitlement. All he wanted to do was work hard, learn and help.
So I hired him, spelling out very clearly that the chances of his growing into an art director position with us were similar to the word at the end of our agency name: "Zero." He nodded along and said he understood. Then he set about completing every task asked of him to the highest standard possible. Between doing all the so-called "grunt" work, Noah grabbed every creative brief he found lying around the office and looked for ways to help out with layouts, taglines, new business presentations, etcetera. He never asked to be promoted. He never bitched about his day-to-day responsibilities or acted like anything was beneath him. Which is why when a junior art director position opened, I decided it was time to do what a guy named Peter Seronick did for me years before: Give him a chance. So I gave the kid who was Ground Zero the opportunity to join our creative department over all the guys and girls who simply wanted to work for Ground Zero.
In the four years that followed, Noah turned into an award-winning art director who did the kind of work students at VCU and Art Center now point to and say, "Someday." But that wasn't what made him special. The longer you do this job, the more you find that doing good work is the price of entry and it's all the other stuff that separates the folks you really like from the ones you can't live without.
In 15 years of owning Ground Zero, there haven't been many folks who regularly beat me to the office in the morning. Noah was one of them. It should also be noted that he was often the last to leave at night, if he left. I don't say this to glamorize long hours or a sweatshop mentality, but to point out that he typically wasn't burning the midnight oil or the pre-dawn oil to better his portfolio, but to make a presentation look a little better, work on the agency new business materials or polish an ad that was still a little too rough around the edges for his liking. This kind of dedication earned him the moniker "The Cleaner" from Laura Eastman, our head of account services. Like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, Noah was the guy who fixed things, no matter how screwed up they might have been when someone dumped them in his lap. When another art director left on vacation, Noah picked up the slack. When another team dropped the meat in the dirt, he picked up the pieces."
Read the rest here:
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