Did I tell you about the importance of taking your mind off work to have some proper rest and get back on track being way more relaxed and motivated?
It is still true that to be the best at what you do you need to practice it every day, as is that with doing what you love it shouldn’t be too hard. However, other than amazing achievements, putting hours and hours into one field is likely to result into burning out.
Regular breaks are the thing that helps me avoid it. During these breaks I try to get away from work completely. When recently the great guys from Iconfinder have invited me to participate in their Icon Salon conference in Amsterdam, I took this opportunity as a perfect getaway from the daily routine. Who wouldn’t?
But instead of travelling straight to the conference and heading back home right after it finishes, I planned a one-week vacation in the beautiful Amsterdam. It meant no computer, no phone, and even no sketchbook! Only wandering around the city, discovering one amazing thing after another.
You won’t believe how even short vacations like this can help you restart your mind. Running away from the daily work routine and avoiding checking your feeds and email every other minute eventually put you in a completely different mindset. After just a few days you feel how you stop rushing, and everything slows down, while your mind clears up. It feels as if you simply reload your brain. You have to do this every now and then to dump all the trash out of your mind and let the creativity flow.
When I got back to work this Monday I felt reborn – that rested and ready to tackle daily tasks and craft some great icons I was!
But let me take a step back and tell you about the conference that made me take this refreshing break in the first place.
The Iconfinders conference – Icon Salon – took place on the last day of my vacations. It happened to be a great comeback to the icon world. I had to switch my creative mode on, and got to spend some amazing time with like-minded people.
Icon Salon wasn’t what you normally imagine a typical conference to be like. Instead of dozens of speakers overlapping each other and hundreds of people rushing to the different venues, it was more like an old friends’ reunion. There were a few awesome speeches and about twenty people overall in a really comfy and unofficial environment. Perfect.
The most valuable thing to me was, of course, the chance to have meaningful conversations with new amazing people. Since there were only about twenty people at the conference, proper quality conversations were possible. This was a perfect opportunity to share some insights and simply ramble about icon-related stuff with other enthusiasts like me.
Finally I got to meet the awesome guys from Iconfinder. We chatted about the future of the marketplace and all the great features that would be released in the upcoming months (keep an eye on them!).
And I will definitely remember the dinner with such icon design legends as Dutch Icon and Sodafish, where they shared their design practices, workflows, client works and talked about the golden age of selling stock icons.
Also, discussing the ways of attracting right kind of works and having the guts to follow your heart and turn the blind eye on the norms dictated by the society over a beer with the one and only Michael Flarup was priceless.
I met other great folks too! For instance, one of the Iconfinder bestsellers Laura Reen, and the creator of a huge free icon library Yannick Lung. It was truly exceptional!
I believe that connections and friendships I’ve managed to make during the conference will last, and I’ll be meeting these guys more often in the future, not just at the next year’s conference.
No one will deny the importance of connections and right contacts in our lives. And at this event I got to know a whole bunch of great people! Some of them have already been familiar to me, so I had a unique opportunity to express my appreciation of their work. But the chance to meet other professionals was of no less importance! All in all, the conference was a great source of inspiration and motivation.
To call it a day, the keynotes you should take from this article:
1) Regular breaks from the thing you’re working on is a must.
2) New connections and friendships are not only fun, but they can also be very beneficial and inspiring.
Icon Salon made both of these things possible to me. I’m already looking forward for the next year’s Icon Salon! Thanks Iconfinder!
