I've always been a hard worker. From the time I was a little kid, I was totally okay with buckling down on something and seeing it to completion through pure grit. This is a handy trait when you grow up on a small farm. A reformed former straight-A student in high school, I've never had a problem with putting in the hours or sweating through the manual labor required to finish my business. I can't really take credit for this however, it has always been a part of me like my blue eyes or my weird concentration face, passed down through DNA or environment. Or maybe the iffy well water we drank as kids. It just is. And was. And probably will always be. 

My willingness to lean into hard work got me through some tough times, too. It helped me work three jobs at once to pay for college and grad school. It convinced me to tackle two different tracks at VCU's Adcenter and it helped me score and keep my first freelance jobs in New York primarily working on projects nobody wanted, during hours nobody wanted, on days nobody wanted. It afforded me the courage to open up a small studio in Pittsburgh before I knew better. It gave me the courage to try leading a creative department that was majority Arabic in Dubai. My work ethic (and I prefer to think of it as an ethic) helped me stand out as a junior creative who was willing to literally fill the walls with ideas, and it helped me progress in my career as I took new roles earning my keep at agencies far and wide. And it most certainly plays a large part in running Magnetry, where I wear a lot of different hats. (Some of these hats don't fit perfectly, but they still need wearin'.) 

Despite what some might call career success, I've seldom felt like the most talented person in the room; and I've relied on my work - the unglamorous toiling behind the scenes - to make up the difference. It was my way of surviving in a competitive, show me what you've got business. Even now, I feel like I have to struggle to keep pushing my own creativity as I'm often disgruntled and wanting more. The voice inside my head says, "You haven't done anything yet." And I believe it. Maybe the more talented don't have this nagging voice, but I suspect they do. 

In the past, I thought of work as the means to get through something, as the method for a greater end; but I have recently started valuing work as something much more significant than that. Now, It's less of a process and more of the point. The real power in work, especially in a creative field, is the meditative transformation that happens when you toil through a problem. If you train your mind to work divergently often enough, long enough, and on enough problems - you literally alter who you are and how you think. And I believe it makes me more sensitive to the type of ideas and solutions that I enjoy making real. While I'll stop short of calling my work and process, enlightenment—it sure feels as close to that as I've found anywhere else. Wisdom is work and work is wisdom.