Seven behaviours that quietly do more for your career than your CV ever will

Today I visited a local school to do a careers talk, one of many I’ve done since we moved here. It was, as ever, a lot of fun. I love chatting to kids about the industry, and if we’re honest, me remains one of my favourite subjects.

While it’s still fresh in my head, here are a few tips I keep coming back to. None of them are revolutionary. They’re just the things I’ve seen make an outsized difference over time.

Be interested (and try to be interesting)

You should be proud of your ideas and skills. But remember that experienced people often will not be impressed straight away, and that’s not always a bad thing. There’s a lot you can learn from them if you let them talk.

Creative people, in particular, love talking about their work. So go in curious. Ask questions. Listen properly. If you do that well, you’ll often find they become interested in you without you having to perform.

Be confident

Confidence is useful. Especially when you’re young and you’re surrounded by people who seem to know what they’re doing.

Things change quickly in creative industries. Today’s experts can become tomorrow’s people who are slightly out of date. So trust that your taste and energy matter. Put your work out there. Take your shot.

Just maybe avoid telling someone you’re gunning for their job.

Be brave (but not stupid)

Take a risk now and again if it genuinely feels like the right move, particularly while you’re young and your commitments are still light.

One of the most reliable career regrets is procrastination. It’s amazing how often the consequences of not acting end up being worse than the consequences of getting it slightly wrong. You learn faster by doing. You also recover faster while the stakes are lower.

Be kind

Relationships are the lifeblood of creative work. Nurture them. Maintain them. Don’t burn them casually.

It’s fine to ask for help, everyone does. Just try to balance it over time by returning the favour where you can. Sometimes it’s as simple as a genuine message saying thank you, or an introduction to someone who might be useful to them.

Be open

Don’t approach every conversation as if you’re trying to extract something from it.

Be open to meeting people outside your lane, outside your discipline, even outside your industry. Opportunities have a habit of arriving sideways, through people you did not expect to matter.

Be lucky (on purpose)

A lot of “luck” is just volume and motion.

If you keep getting on with things, you create your own luck out of the little particles of chance that are floating around all the time. Opportunities, introductions, side projects, odd gigs, random conversations. Pick an activity and get stuck in. The odds improve quickly once you’re in the game.

Be strong

If you aim to do something meaningful, it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to knock you down a peg or two.

When that happens, a few things are usually true:

• It’s almost never personal.
• The person doing the knocking may be carrying their own stress, insecurity, or context you cannot see.
• They might still be partly right, and it’s worth checking.

If you’re aiming high, you will make mistakes. That’s the price of ambition. What matters is whether you learn quickly and keep going.

That’s it. I hope something in there is useful. And if it is, I’d genuinely love to hear what you end up making of it.