On Luck or Something Like it

My first steady job after art school came through cold calling. During an internship at a print design studio, I was advised to start with trend agencies, the now nearly defunct bureaux de style. They were open to freelancers, and their trend publications offered a kind of creative freedom that budget-bound client work rarely allowed. This was the time before email. Tear sheets were slipped into envelopes and mailed in the post. Agencies were found in the Yellow Pages. 

My first batch of mailings brought no work, but one creative director gave me some actionable advice. He told me to skip mailing and just call the agencies directly. “Ask what their going rate for freelancers is,” he said.

I remember this vividly because I had to force myself to do it. Pages Jaunes open on my desk. (This was Paris in the 90s.) Working my way down the list. One call led to another, and then to a moment of pure chance. I rang an agency listed under its legal name, not realising it was one of my top choices, I had already contacted. They had never seen my mailing. Like most, it had gone straight into the bin. But by luck, the owner himself picked up. He remembered someone else from my school and agreed to meet. That meeting turned into a freelance project. And that project led to ten years of work. Including moving from cut-and-paste layouts to digital workflows.

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Today the tools are different, the context is different, but the same principle still holds. 

If someone gives you a tip, act on it. My daughter does this naturally. She reaches out all the time, by message, by phone, without hesitation. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Sometimes you also need a bit of luck in reaching the right decision maker. When that happens, and this goes for any decade, things will move fast. 

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