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The Basic Problem
A creative person needs three things to be happy:
1.Freedom — to do what you want, when you want and how you want it. Not just in holidays and spare time — but also doing meaningful work, in your own way.
2.Money — to maintain your independence and fund your creative projects. Of course you want a nice place to live, but you’re not so worried about a bigger car than the guy next door. You’d rather spend money on experiences than status symbols.
3.Time — to spend as you please, exploring the world and allowing your mind to wander in search of new ideas. Usually, you’re lucky if you get two out of the three. But if one of them is missing, it compromises the other two. Without money, you don’t have much freedom, because you have to spend your time chasing cash. Without time off, money doesn’t buy you a lot of freedom. And if you’re doing something you hate for a living, it doesn’t matter how big your salary is, or how much holiday you get. You still feel trapped.
What makes things harder is that most of the world seems to be trying to do things in a different order to us. Think of all the people you know who sacrifice most of their time to earning money, promising themselves freedom in the distant future. And we’re supposed to be the strange ones. In this article I’ll tell you about my own struggles to find the right combination of freedom, money and time. I’ll share some of the lessons about creativity, work and life I learned the hard way. If they are new to you, I hope my words will help you learn them more quickly than I did. But before we go any further I’d just like to clarify what I mean by a ‘creative person’. I mean someone who takes a creative approach to work and life. Someone who works hard, but because they love what they do, it doesn’t really feel like work. They may be an artist, writer, designer, musician, actor, filmmaker — or working in any of the other artistic professions. Equally, they could be a coach, scientist, cook, entrepreneur, healthcare professional — or tackling complex, meaningful, inspiring challenges in another field. If that sounds like you, and you’d like a little more freedom, money and time in your life, read on.
FREEDOM
“If you want to be a writer, you’ll need to get a proper job as well.” This was the general consensus when I first announced my creative ambitions, twenty years ago. And it didn’t help my commercial prospects that by ‘writer’, I meant ‘poet’. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But I knuckled down and got a job in publishing. Not a bad job — the people were nice, the money was OK, bits of the work were interesting. But it made me ill. Literally. I got cold after cold, bug after bug, until I realised it was the job that was bugging me. Fortunately, I had a Plan B: hypnosis. I enrolled to train as a hypnotherapist, and spent my weekends in London learning mind-boggling hypnotic inductions and techniques. In the evenings I devoured books with titles like The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing and worked on my essays. Once I gained my diploma I started seeing clients one evening a week, at the local health club. Then one day, the news we’d been expecting for months was confirmed: our department was to fold and we would all be made redundant. I walked through the office past ashen faces, locked myself in the toilet and jumped for joy.
I opted for the traditional route and went to London to seek my fortune. I set up shop in a fancy Notting Hill clinic, charging an hourly fee equal to a day’s wages at my old job. There, I worked with all kinds of people — bankers, hippies, drug addicts, estate agents, lawyers, venture capitalists, rock stars (real ones, not the social media kind). And artists. I loved working with the artists, writers, actors, film-makers. The ones working on amazing creative projects. The ones who really inspired me. The ones who told me I inspired them. The trouble was, I was getting better and better at the work, but not richer and richer. It was an odd experience. One minute, I’d be working with a client, full of enthusiasm and energy, seeing how much they valued the work, how delighted they were with the changes they were making. Then they’d leave, and I’d be left scratching my head wondering how to find another client like that. One problem with therapy? My clients weren’t in a hurry to talk about their success. Sadly, it’s hard for people to admit to having therapy, at least in the UK. Seth Godin tells us “ideas that spread, win” — and I couldn’t see the therapy idea spreading very fast. Not unless I became one of those ‘pushy’ therapists who wrote the tacky books, whose names were always in the magazines, and whose faces were always on TV. And I definitely didn’t want to be one of those therapists.
The real problem with therapy? I wasn’t in a hurry to talk about my success. Things got a little easier when I started using the word ‘coaching’ to describe my work with artists and creatives, on the basis that most of them didn’t have psychological problems, they just needed some help with their professional challenges. One thing that did work pretty well was writing magazine articles about creativity and communication skills. Editors were pleased to get the articles, and some of them paid me handsomely for the privilege of writing what was effectively an advert for my business in their magazine! Each time an article came out, it brought me new clients. But I had the same problem with editors as I did with clients: once I found one and delivered great work for them, that was it. They didn’t need another article, I needed another magazine. In an ideal world I’d have run my own magazine, but this was the 1990s, when you needed a fortune to start your own magazine. The thought never crossed my mind. So I endured the ‘feast and famine’ cycle known to freelancers the world over. Financial insecurity meant it felt hard to justify spending time on my own writing, and when I did it was hard to concentrate. I wasn’t exactly setting the literary world on fire. In theory I was my own boss, with the freedom to do as I pleased. But without the money or time to enjoy it, it didn’t feel like freedom. And the better I got at helping clients, the more the question gnawed at me: If I’m so good at what I do, how come I’m usually broke?
Learn from My Mistakes (Part 1)
It’s not enough to be really good at what you do It’s not even enough to be amazing at it.
Delighting your clients or customers is only the first step. It’s a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for success. This doesn’t feel fair. It cost me a lot to qualify as a psychotherapist — time, money, hard work and a lot of what Seth Godin calls ‘emotional labor’. I’m sure the same is true of your work — learning your craft and acquiring your skills took years of effort, trial and error. When you finally broke through and realised you could do it, it felt like you’d arrived. And now I’m telling you it’s not enough. I’m sorry if this is bad news. I didn’t make it this way. It’s just the way it is. Your market may be next door to your first love Poetry is my true love, as far as creativity is concerned. But nobody spends money — not real money — on poetry. So I’ve still not figured out a way to earn a living writing poems. And if I’d decided to coach poets exclusively, I’d never have had enough clients. I’d have stood a better chance by including all types of writer. But by including artists, creatives and entrepreneurs in my target market, I could create a sustainable business. Could your business benefit from widening your focus and looking for opportunities ‘next door’ to your core passions?
Sharing your knowledge is the best advertising No disrespect to Yellow Pages, but it never really worked for me. In my early years I would dutifully buy an ad every year, on the assumption that I needed to advertise if I wanted to bring in business. But when I looked at the psychotherapy listings, and saw all the ads just like mine, I wondered what would make clients pick my ad over the others. And to judge from the results, the clients were wondering the same thing.
But when I wrote an article where I shared what I knew, giving concrete examples and practical tips, it brought the telephone to life. And enquirers were respectful, curious, keen to talk. To them, I wasn’t some random trader hawking his wares in the classifieds — because I was a published writer, I was an authority. Someone they could trust. ‘The media’ can be useful, but don’t count on it It feels old-fashioned writing the media, but when I was younger, it felt like a monolithic entity. It meant the TV, radio, newspapers, glossy magazines and big budget movies. For those of us with artistic ambitions, the media was a magical kingdom floating in the air, where the stars looked down on the rest of us. So seeing my words in a national newspaper or magazine felt like a Very Big Deal. It was also pretty good for business. But the media has its own agenda. You may be flavour of the month this month, but next month will not be this month. Unless someone deems you worthy of a regular column or multi-album deal, they move on. So if your game plan rests on a kindly manager, agent, editor or impresario reaching down from on high and whisking you up into the heavens, you might want to have a Plan B handy, just in case.
Watch out for part 2...
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