“I flew the Atlantic because I wanted to … Whether you are flying the Atlantic or selling sausages or building a skyscraper or driving a truck, your greatest power comes from the fact that you want tremendously to do that very thing, and do it well.”
Amelia Earhart1
Follow Your Passion, Fall Off a Cliff
In May of 2014, actor Jim Carrey gave the commencement address at a small University in Fairfield, Iowa. The speech went viral thanks to Carrey’s remarks about following your dreams, taking risks, and doing what you love. Social feeds were full of people waxing poetic about “following their passion.” The world was one big poster with eagles and mountains underscored by the word “DREAMS.” I wanted to join in and sprinkle pixie dust on the conversation, but it honestly made me want to punch a kitten.
People readily latch on to the idea of finding one’s calling in life and pursuing it to the ends of the earth. While the earth isn’t flat, there are cliffs, and blindly pursuing a passion is bound to take you over more than one. In an age where overnight celebrity and wealth are becoming increasingly common, the adage “follow your passion” is a message of hope that everyone loves to embrace. But it’s a terrible business strategy. Not every passion can earn you a paycheck.
When we’re in the thick of it, and doing the work, that fire isn’t burning as bright. We’re tired of doing yet another repetitive task for a client that asks for ridiculous revisions. We have half the budget we need to do a quality job, so we cut corners and turn in another final product that isn’t worthy of our portfolio. A few months or years go by, and you haven’t done anything “meaningful.” What happened to that passion? What happened to that fire? Now, it just feels like a job.
I love it when someone brings a deep and personal passion together with good business sense. People like Sara Blakely, Richard Branson, Tori Burch, Walt Disney, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Tony Hsieh come to mind. They did the work as business people first in order to sell creative and innovative ideas. They all had talent, but their focus was always on getting the solution into people’s hands. They knew that no matter how fun or enjoyable the work, if no one used it, it wouldn’t be around for long. We expect others to be infected by our passion. Typically, that isn’t the case. You have to sell your ideas, your solutions, and yourself. It’s no surprise that it requires a lot of hard work and energy to do so. It’s laborious.
“Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus—these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors. Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.”
Lewis Hyde2
The Pursuit of Happiness
We’re raised to believe that tasks producing income are work, and anything else is playing. So when we spend our time doing something we don’t enjoy, like waiting tables or selling insurance, we’re unfulfilled. We feel that our work is distracting us from our true calling. Throughout our monotonous workday, we long to rush home and labor at our side projects and creative pursuits: our passions. We hear speeches and read articles that fuel the fire to quit our jobs and pursue our passion. We search desperately for ways to do what we love and have it be our primary source of income. So we tear off that apron, slam it on the table, yell “I quit” and go home to open a graphic design business.
And then six months later we’re on food stamps.
Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but it happens. The reason for failure probably wasn’t a lack of passion or even a lack of talent. Most likely, it was a lack of income. Reconciling something we’ve always done for fun to our financial livelihood isn’t easy. The truth is that most people who set out to make money pursuing their passion end up disillusioned, disappointed, and underemployed.
But why?
Get Your Mind Right
In the words of Young Jeezy, “you gotta get ya mind right.” A creative job will follow you everywhere you go. Being a garbage man or customer service rep isn’t likely to do so. You finish your work and you go home, there is no “labor.” We need garbage men, but “if we believe that personal fulfillment is really the ultimate purpose of labor, then who do we expect to do all the other jobs that are not so existentially fulfilling?”3
Garbage men and customer service reps aren’t defined by their jobs. The garbage man may be an incredible woodworker on the weekends and the customer service rep a great jazz singer at local clubs. Neither of them may harbor a desire to make a living at their creative pursuit. For them, a job is a job, and love is love. “It makes it seem like work is a very important if not primary source of love, and if you aren’t deriving pleasure from your work that there’s something wrong with you or something wrong with the choices you’ve made in your life—I absolutely reject that.”4
You don’t have to turn your passion into your career, but if you’re going to do so, know that there are challenges along the way. Turning your passion for creative into a bad business will suck out every ounce of joy. But that’s what we’re here to fix, so don’t be sad! I promise, I’ll put you on the back of a magical unicorn that’s riding through candy mountain—you just have to climb on.
If you get into this line of work because you believe it’s going to fulfill you or give your life meaning, prepare for war.
The pursuit of passion and great work is part of finding happiness in a creative business. The key is to change your approach and let the passion come from the work. “Don’t follow your passion, follow your effort.”5 If you get into this line of work because you believe it’s going to fulfill you or give your life meaning, prepare for war. It’s hard to be financially stable and find meaning from a creative business unless you learn to treat the work as a deliverable. You’re only a few pages in, so there’s still time to run away. If, however, you’re still with me, I want to help you do what you feel you must do and make a decent living along the way.
You, Defined
In “When You’re At the Crossroads of Should and Must,” artist Elle Luna asks a profound question, “what if who we are and what we do become one and the same? What if our work is so thoroughly autobiographical that we can’t parse the product from the person? What if our jobs are our careers and our callings?”6 Your life as “you,” the person and your creative life are then one and the same. The work is the outcome of your efforts, so it is your energy and your time being traded for an end product. You are the equipment, the tool, and the machine. Just like a factory, if a piece of equipment is used at full speed without rest, maintenance, and care, it will break. Getting to a place where we can relax and enjoy the fruit of our labor means being smart about how we work.
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
L. P. Jacks7
Business in the Front, Creative in the Back
What stands out among my successful creative colleagues is a dedication to the creative work and business operations that run in parallel. They are intentional about their day, week, month, and year as a business owner first, then a creative. They’re focused and tactical. When things go wrong, they aren’t lost without a map. They’ve developed systems and methods for working through the inevitable creative and business challenges. Those systems, as boring as they may sound, won’t stifle the creative fire. In fact, they make it possible to keep it burning for years to come.
In a creative business, misguided passion can be poison. Holding too tightly to your vision, your design, and your opinion can cost you clients, money, and personal peace. In the past, if your creative pursuits were just for play, the pressure was off. Now, it’s what keeps the lights on. Your attitude regarding your creative work changes when it becomes your job; it’s unavoidable. You have to become pragmatic, which doesn’t come easy for many creatives. Pragmatism means using success and experience to determine what works. It means being practical, which at times is the opposite of passionate.
It’s Just Business, Baby
Business, business, business. There, you said it. Your creative endeavor is a business, through and through, whether you’re working on the side for a few hours a week or full-time.
No matter how and when you start, having the business mindset from day one is critical for longevity.
But what is a business mindset?
- • Strategic thinking. It’s knowing what you want, what you need, and how you’re going to get it. It’s being intentional with your time, energy, and resources to move your business forward rather than reacting to whatever comes your way.
- • Making money. You have to earn money to keep a business open. There are a lot of ways to make money in your business, but the most common is to exchange your time and effort for client revenue. So you have to be strategic about where money is going to come from. It also means you intend to be profitable.
- • Having a vision. You’re getting away from mundane tasks and finally doing something you enjoy, so don’t muck it up by doing a bunch of mundane tasks! Dedicate time on a regular basis to think about where your business is going long-term and how your daily decisions affect that vision.
- • Marketing. You have to talk about what you do to people who may hire you to do that thing. That may be in person, online, or through other media channels.
- • Being uncomfortable. You will have to make sacrifices to keep your business growing. Being willing to make business decisions, fueled by pragmatic thinking, can be the difference between success and failure.
So, here’s your first hard truth: this shit is hard. It never gets easy. There may be times when things are going well, and all seems right. Enjoy it, because darkness can and will come. You can’t avoid every single pitfall that comes from owning a small business; it’s impossible. Success and sustainability come from mitigating risk and lessening the impact. Think of it as wearing a bulletproof vest but still getting shot. Above all, you have to create the maximum opportunity for optimism. The more control you have over the business side of things, the less panic you’ll feel when things go wrong.
Sold Out, Not Selling Out
How do you find the balance between doing great work and making money? And not just some money, not just enough money, but the money you need to find your level of happiness and fulfillment? Money doesn’t equal happiness, I believe that. But I can tell you that barely making it from month to month doesn’t equal happiness either.
Holding yourselves up by the bootstraps for years on end will result in your feet falling off.
Some artists wear perpetual financial struggles on their sleeve like a badge of honor. Small design shops shake their heads at the big conglomerate agencies. No self-respecting web designer or developer would work with Microsoft products! There is a beauty in the bootstrap culture that prevails in our industry today, but holding yourselves up by the bootstraps for years on end will result in your feet falling off. At some point, you have to let go and start walking the walk.
How would it feel to be as passionate about business growth as you are about the creative work?
You should never start a business by purely thinking about the financials. Most of us started this because we had kick-ass band posters on our wall, we got our hands on a copy of Made You Look, or we finally realized that Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser may not have been from this planet. That passion for creating something amazing is innate in the creative soul; the passion for making money doing it is, if anything, the antithesis of creative passion.
Those who focus on the fundamentals are the most likely to get noticed and get to keep creating good work indefinitely. The hardest thing I had to realize is that I am not, and never will be, the best designer in the world; I’m not even the best designer in my zip code! There are some people who are so talented that work will find them. For the rest of us, we’re not going very far if no one knows who we are. Getting that recognition, and the clients and cash that come with it, starts with focusing on the business first.
It’s No Longer a Hobby
Once you get started, it’s important to be clear with everyone whom you interact with, that this is your job. As you transition into working full-time in your creative business, “the work” and “your work” collide. In the past, there’s most likely been a difference. For some, there are personal projects that you do on the side—maybe for a freelance client—and then the work you do at your day job. Your creative work that is now your business felt like an escape from your day-to-day when it was “personal work.” Now that work is your day-to-day grind.
It’s critical that you establish escapes from what was, in the past, your hobby. It sounds insane, I know, but you can’t sustain a lasting love with creative client work without an external outlet. That may mean something that is different from your creative roles such as music or writing. Your family and relationships are not those outlets. For the creative mind to thrive, you need constant growth and that only comes from external pressure.
Some of my most successful creative friends’ hobbies include surfing, gardening, triathlons, go-kart racing, teaching yoga, and interior decorating. Regardless, it’s important to make the time for hobbies early on, even when you’re in those sleepless start-up days. The quality of your work will suffer if the type of creative work you perform in your daily business is all that you do, all the time. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s exponentially harder to wedge in a hobby once you’ve gotten used to giving your business every waking hour.
Every Project is a Transaction
It’s also important to treat every project as a business deliverable. Even the simplest things, such as a quick polish on a past project or throwing together a one-page flier for a friend’s small business, should be treated as a business transaction. It goes without saying that you should bill for all of your work, but even more importantly you have to treat every client, regardless of size, as a business customer. When you’re freelancing on the side, you throw together things for friends. I often did mini sites for friend’s tiny business ideas or whipped up small flyers for local non-profits free of charge—it’s a good way to get practice and to establish yourself in the community. When you decide to turn this into your real, income-generating business, there are no more hobby projects. We’ll cover pro bono work later; there is a time and place for it, but it can’t be all the time.
To this day, when working for a close friend or family member (which I don’t recommend), I do provide discounts and have even bartered for work a couple of times. It should be rare because it’s rarely fun or successful. Just as you wouldn’t walk into your friend’s business and ask them to give you their time or product for free, neither should they ask that of you. There are always exceptions, but, above all, make it clear to those around you that this business is how you make a living, and you charge for it; it’s no longer your hobby.
Another Creative Business? Really?
So you may be asking yourself if you should be adding yet another web design firm or blog to the world at large. My answer will always be “yes, you should.” Most people who are starting a new business are doing so because they believe they can do something unique. The problem is that the word “unique” has been hijacked. The better word is “distinctive,” which means “characteristic of one person or thing, and so serving to distinguish it from others.” The difference is that it revolves around the characteristics rather than the action. You don’t have to have an original idea, but you have to be an original person. There is no other “you” in this world; you’re the only one. So “you” are what’s unique. You, the unique individual, can be found at the center of a business much like thousands of others and create something truly special.
“Nobody gets to be you, except you. Nobody has your point of view, except you. Nobody gets to bring to the world the things that you get to bring to the world—uniquely get to bring to the world—except you. So saying there are enough writers out there, enough directors out there, enough people with a point of view—well, yeah, there are—but none of them are you, none of this them is going to make the art that you’re going to make, none of them will change people and change the world in the way that you could change it. So if you believe somebody who says, ‘No, no, we’ve got enough of those,’ then all it means is you’re giving up your chance to change the world the way only you can change it.”
Neil Gaiman8
Don’t worry about whether you’ll be able to compete in your market and if there are too many businesses doing the same thing in your zip code. If your desire is to move to an underserved area and open a web design shop in a small community in Montana, then please do so. Everyone deserves good design. But don’t let the fact that you live in Austin or San Francisco, where you’ll find a creative business on every corner, keep you from bringing your distinctive offering to the world.
There’s Plenty of Room, So Jump In
Stephen Covey coined the phrase “abundance mentality”9 to contrast the “scarcity mindset,” which is the prevalent school of thought when it comes to founding a business. The idea of scarcity means that if someone else wins, you lose. So if they’re getting clients, you’re losing those same clients. The abundance mindset, in which there are plenty of resources and successes to share with others, is alive and well in the creative industry. There simply aren’t enough good creatives out there to take on the millions of projects that need help. Everything needs good content, design, coaching, and marketing. There’s quite possibly no end to the amount of work awaiting us!
So, if you predicate your business strategy on being exclusive, you’ve already lost. Services are almost impossible to protect from competition and copying. No matter your idea’s originality or difficulty in execution, if it’s good, someone else will find a way to duplicate it. You may be the first to market, but that won’t protect you from being surpassed by the competition. No one can duplicate your individual personality. The more of “you” found in your business, the more distinctive it will be. The bonus is that you’ll love it so much more when it feels like a part of who you are.
Recalibration Isn’t Forever
As I shared in my story, I had to strip my business down to the foundation to find the cracks. What I found was a business started out of passion, but running with a complete lack of direction. The change in mindset to business first, creative second was hard to swallow. It felt wrong for quite some time, but it saved my life. My work is better than before because I have so much more freedom to work on meaningful pursuits. I can spend more time getting projects right because I’m charging clients more. Most importantly, I enjoy what I do because I’m not always struggling to find out from where my next project is coming. I feel the freedom to make mistakes, say no to work that isn’t interesting, and to pursue work about which I feel passionate.
I know what it’s like to take this approach, to strip away the love and the passion. You don’t have to do that forever, just long enough to recalibrate your approach to your creative business. Sometimes the truth hurts, but in the end it’s worth it.
Notes
1. http://explore.brainpickings.org/post/37916180672/i-flew-the-atlantic-because-i-wanted-to-if-that.
2. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.
3. Miya Tokumitsu, http://jamesshelley.net/2014/03/do-what-you-love/.
4. Miya Tokumitsu, http://jamesshelley.net/2014/03/do-what-you-love/.
5. Mark Cuban, http://blogmaverick.com/2012/03/18/dont-follow-your-passion-follow-your-effort/.
6. Elle Luna, https://medium.com/@elleluna/the-crossroads-of-should-and-must-90c75eb7c5b0.
7. Education through Recreation.
8. http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/37350257826/advice-to-aspiring-artists-this-is-very-short.
9. Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit number 4.