The three needs to succeed

I've applied for a job. Alas, I lack the key working experience required for the position, but it's one of the Catch-22 situations. Every time I see jobs like this come up, they expect applicants to have previous experience. But how do you get previous experience if you can't get the job without previous experience? If there were trainee positions, or assistant's jobs, or some sort of apprenticeship [ideally without the need to impress Sirullen on national TV], that would bridge the gap - but such opportunities are few and far between, assuming they exist at all.

But I've applied for the job anyway. The worst that can happen is I don't get shortlisted for interview and am offered no feedback on why I wasn't. Creative professionals face rejection far more than often than they bask in success. Enjoy your achievements, grin and bear your rejections, keep striving to improve. Someone somewhere wrote a wonderfully simple sentence detailing the three needs to succeed: passion, rigour, and smarts. You've got to want it, got to have that hunger, that need burning like a fire in your belly.

You've got to be ready, got to be intellectually and technically prepared. Study, hard work, sucking up every piece of knowledge and experience you can find. Find a mentor and learn from them. Pay attention, listen up and get humble. The amount you don't know will always exceed the little you do. Use your brain. Think. Analyse. Be willing to recognise your failings. Take responsibility for your actions, for the ways you sabotage yourself. You want something? Fight for it, and don't give up.

Passion. Rigour. Smarts.