Make Your Creativity Pay. Pete Mosley

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СКАЧАТЬ up the shortfall. I’ve met many that have learned trades or taken up new skills like website design as a second string to the bow.

      But when you come to weigh up the need for income versus job satisfaction, where does it leave you?

      The inbuilt problem for creative people is that they are motivated more by intrinsic factors - the love of what they do, the creative muse, the magic of it all coming together - and less by extrinsic factors like money and material rewards. In fact, scientific surveys of creative activity show that whilst quality remains high when working on projects that have been commissioned by others, levels of creativity drop. The focus on monetary reward coupled with the external influence of the commissioner on the idea itself can suppress the magic.

      There are also other issues in play – creative people choose the self-employed lifestyle because it also gives them autonomy – freedom to live as they wish, and the time to master, by constantly practising and improving, the craft of their choice. It’s a brave decision, often challenged at various points by parents, family or friends. These challenges alone often make the difference between sticking with it, or not.

      So how do you reconcile freedom of expression with the need to put food on the table? A large number of successful creative people get a large proportion of their income from secondary sources - which all sounds a bit bleak. But let’s think about the science again. If the creative edge is indeed dulled by monetary rewards, what’s so wrong with earning at least some of your income in other ways?

      The clincher for me is this - the people who consistently do the work they love in an uncompromised way, and as a result create works of quality that are imbued with authenticity and passion, usually end up harvesting richer rewards than those who doggedly try to link the monetary reward directly to the creativity.

      Clearly, one shouldn’t bankrupt oneself and one’s family creating and trying to sell work that doesn’t cut the mustard, and I acknowledge that it’s sometimes hard to see whether your work is or isn’t of sufficient quality to make the grade. However, I do regularly see great people with considerable potential giving up because of the money vs. creativity struggle – and that’s a shame.

      So what am I really getting at?

      The first thing, I think, is not to beat yourself up if your creative output doesn’t immediately create 100% of your desired income stream.

      Second, in terms of personal satisfaction, having a clear purpose within your work is probably more important than the financial reward. People who choose to work towards those intrinsic, value laden goals are less stressed out and more satisfied than people who chase money all the time.

      Third, having an occupation where, at least part of the time, you are master of your own destiny and where you get to work with and learn about what you truly love – and where you are in a state of flow more often than not - beats the hell out of working full time for someone else.

      Fourth, the trickiest bit is finding and balancing the things that will earn you the money with the things that you really love to do but which may never earn you a fortune.

      Fifth, if you are already able to combine all of these things and have the lifestyle you always dreamed of, you are lucky or gifted or have worked extremely hard – probably a bit of all three.

      The truth is, most of the truly successful people I know have worked extremely hard. I knew someone who had worked for the Moscow State Circus who said this, ‘If you want to excel (in your chosen craft) you must work 25 hours a day - you must steal an hour each day from your death’. The subtlety of this, I’m sure, is lost in translation - but it didn’t stop the message hitting home.

      I’m not going to try and provide an answer here - every single person I work with resolves this in different ways. But the realisation that the work that you do for money and the work that you do for love can be separate things is healthy and can actually free you up in a quite significant way.

      If you find yourself spending more time pondering on all this stuff than you feel is healthy, it pays to take some time out to compare notes. Find someone who is achieving the things you want to achieve and go and ask them how they have done it. It’s very rare that someone will refuse to share a bit of wisdom. I explore ways of doing this in more detail later in the book.

      The Stuff of Survival

      The ideas I introduce in this chapter are things that I wish someone had taken me aside and thrashed into me when I first started out. Life would have been a hell of a lot easier. In a sense, they are the immutable truths, basic rules that really should be followed. The paragraphs that follow summarise the main themes that will be explored in detail as we move through the book.

      I’ve worked with lots of creative businesses, and have evaluated and assessed many more. For all of that, I reckon success in most areas of business boils down to a small number of really simple factors. Get these right and most other things fall into place. What I say here applies equally to painters and mosaic artists, musicians and cake makers. The same rules apply right across the spectrum of micro-enterprise.

       Do your research

      Whatever you do, don’t go into this venture blind. Scour the web to see what your fellow entrepreneurs are doing. Go to popular shopping areas – especially the ones that have clusters of the specialist shops or outlets you’d like to sell to. They’ve not appeared there by accident. Read, talk to people, attend events. Look at other people’s marketing materials. Get to know the marketplace inside out before you begin. If you don’t do this, how can you expect to be a skilled player within it?

       Quality - of your ideas and products

      In the end, success boils down to having a product or service that people want to buy. That people will buy in sufficient quantity to sustain you. So it’s got to be good.

      Please don’t commit to starting up until you are convinced that this is the case. Be objective, check it out with people who can give neutral feedback. Pay attention to the feedback, and refine your ideas as necessary. Skip this step at your peril.

       Supply and demand

      I often visit colleges and talk to arts and humanities students. When the subject of self-employment comes up the most common fear that comes into people’s minds is the spectre of having to deal with record keeping, the taxman, banking and accountants.

      I always feel that this is approaching the problem from the wrong end. The real issue when starting a small business is to do with supply and demand – you need to know for sure that there’s a big enough demand for your product in order for you to cover all your costs and for you to make a decent living out of it. Finding out about the other stuff is relatively easy in comparison to figuring this out.

       Know your market

      Study your niche. Can you identify and list all the different types of people who will buy your product? Do you understand their wants and needs? Have you asked them? Will what you make and do fulfil their dreams and desires?

      Will people be eager to buy what you make or do? How will you know? How can you find out?

      Quality – in your dealings with others

      People pay more for quality. This is true. But it will really help you along if you infuse quality through everything you do – СКАЧАТЬ