Design Observer: Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

I'm particularly fond of number two:

95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.

Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

I'm really coming to terms with this lately. The amount of non-technical, non-critical path, stroking, politics, deception, and shit work I have to do is astounding. But this has to happen in order to get things done.