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Desire, Determination and Faith

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If the opposite of what you tell me about you, your art and your creative business cannot be true, you have just told me nothing and wasted my time.  My design business prides itself on incredible creativity, service and attention to detail.  Seriously?  What design business does not pride itself on creativity, service and attention to detail?  So telling your clients that you do what every other design business has to do tells me exactly zero about what your design business does that is iconic to it and it alone.

Just like I noted in my last post, you have to stake your claim, tell your story that matters and then live to its truth.  Sounds simple enough.  As if.

Water goes wherever it is able to go.  Ask anyone with a leak.  So too your clients, employees, colleagues, even peers.  Your job is to make sure there are no leaks.  Why?  Because the journey is yours to share, not the other way around.  Yes, you can learn from anyone and everything along the way.  However, the path is yours and yours alone.

The real challenge here is when you move towards the very essence of what you do.  What happens when you own your process as yours and yours alone?  You will meet resistance.  Fact.  It will come from within – your employees, partners and, most importantly, your own head.  Your clients will think you unreasonable and inflexible.  Everyone will ask you why it has to be this way.  The only answer that matters is because this is the best way you know how to do your best.  It will not satisfy those that want more behind the answer (proof that it will work, reference to others that work this way).  Who cares?  It is your journey to share, not the other way around.

Your desire to create, your determination to create on your terms and your faith that your desire and determination will manifest in incredible work is the essence of your creative business.  When you remove all of your excuses, trap doors and potential fall guys, you are left naked with nothing but desire, determination and faith.  There is no more terrifying and necessary place to be.

Confront the fear you must though.  Eventually, you will come to learn that beautiful work without a better process is uniquely debilitating and ultimately soul sucking.  Place an image of your work in front of a potential client done for a disaster of a client next to work done for a dream client.  My guess: the potential client cannot tell the difference.  Maybe you can convince yourself that you can absorb the pain in the name of the work.  I pray not.

We all need to be seen for who we actually are.  As artists and creative business owners, you have to be seen as the guides you are, not merely the help.  For this to happen, you must be responsible for the power of the journey, your journey.  Water going where we tell it to go is among the most powerful forces humanity has been able to harness.  Your creative business is no different if only you have the desire, determination and faith to make it so.

What Is Your Word?

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I am perpetually fascinated by a creative business owner’s elevator pitch.  Most start with the obvious – I am a [you fill in the blank – designer, photographer, architect], then move on to a specialty – high-end residential, luxury destination weddings, commercial work, then, maybe, comes the style statement – my focus is modern, or lush or posed.

For meetings with strangers, I suppose the strategy is ok, while still being wholly lacking in the spirit of creation.  However, for potential clients, it is just plain silly.  These are the things that put you in a box that almost never helps you.  It is like saying you are a restaurateur.  What does that actually mean?  Do you run a McDonald’s or are you fine dining or somewhere in between?

If you believe your work is about process as much as it is about the end product (which I wholeheartedly hope you do), then you have a word or two that encapsulates you, your art and your creative business.  The question is, are you willing to dig for it and, more importantly, when you have found it, own it?

Here is an example, if you are an interior designer that enjoys a one-on-one relationship with clients, working from idea to plan to production with a very specific attention to detail, you might call your process intimate.  So why wouldn’t your elevator pitch be – my work is all about intimacy.  When asked to define what that means you can then move on to discuss how your process is like peeling an onion to reveal what is meant to be in the space.  How you move from idea to plan to production to reveal.  In the end, all creative businesses are about The Four Transitions and how you discuss them with your clients, employees, colleagues and the press is almost always based on one or two words.

Please do not cop out though.  You cannot use words like high-end, luxury, professional, detail oriented, service oriented, anything that makes it easy for the listener to categorize you and understand, through their eyes, what you are.  That is not their job, it is yours and the word has to have meaning to you and you alone.  If intimate is not your game, then how about nuanced, explosive, layered, awe-inspiring, subtle, high-impact, storytelling?

How would you build your creative business if only the word mattered?  Surprisingly, it would be a lot easier than what you are probably trying to do now.  Being a chameleon sucks because you never really know who is in front of you and what you have to be in that moment.  If instead it were you who were doing the work of defining the space you occupy, refusing to let your clients do the work for you, then you would own what you are without ever having to compromise.  Then you would set out to operate in the way that works best for you, your art and your creative business.  Own your world.

Or you can live in the box you allow others to put you and your creative business in.  Your choice.

Atonement and Intention

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking to many wedding professionals in Los Angeles as part of Honeybook’s Hive Educational Series.  Really a wonderful event and an awesome experience.

Originally, the talk was supposed to be about how to get your groove back for your creative (and, in this case, wedding) business.  However, by happenstance it was September 23rd, Yom Kippur, Judaism’s Day of Atonement, and also Greater Eid for Muslims, celebrating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to Allah and the end of the Hajj.  The two events almost never coincide, making it extra powerful for me.  So I decided to focus not on reinvigoration but instead on atonement for past sins and intention to start anew.  I offer five thoughts on the subject:

1.            Honor Your Creativity – You get paid for what is between your ears.  You earn a living with what is between your hands.  If you do not have a business that honors this axiom, you will suffer.  Why?  Because you are telling your clients to believe in the opposite of what you do — creativity trumps craft every time.  I will forever be a broken record when I say that process is everything, the end inevitable, and, therefore, irrelevant.  You will all come through in the end AND your clients are predisposed to want you to succeed.  Failing a client takes a lot of work, much more than amazing them.  What if your mission was simply to listen, relate and elevate?  And what if that is ALL you got paid for?  Would you still be arguing about why the couch is $20,000?  Or would you be able to explain how it fits as part of design and overall budget?  If you honor your creativity – what it means to listen, relate and elevate, surely you would.

2.            Be The Sherpa You Are – All creative business is a process.  Your client comes to you with a need for creation and your work is to manifest the need far beyond the imagination of your client.  In every instance, your work is to guide your clients up the mountain as only you can.  You know the way, the best way for them and, as much as they might be brilliant at what they do, climbing Mt. Everest is not their daily existence.  It is yours though.  Respect your experience, your expertise and your knowledge of what both you and your client know and do not know.  Translation: your client does not get to decide how your business and/or their project runs.  Only you do.  Whether you guide people with a gentle nudge or a strong grip is completely up to you, so long as you are forever the guide.  Truly, nothing else matters.

3.            Stop Getting Paid What You Can And Get What You Need – If you fully grasp the depth of number one and two above, you understand creative businesses have no competition.  Only you take your clients on your journey.  There might be other ways to get to the same place, but none as satisfying to your clients as the way you do it.  If you are getting paid relative to what others are getting paid, you exist in reflection.  Maybe it will be enough, maybe not. The only way to stand in the Sun is to honor what you need to create what you do, how many times you want to create it each year.  Any other method of value is a pointless exercise in mental masturbation.  Your value is what you say it is.  Full stop.

4.            Own Your Niche – One Size Does Not Fit All – Only those who care about why you do what you do and how you will do it for them matter.  If you believe in the first three thoughts, you know that finding those who drink your Kool-Aid is key to your ability to create your very best work.  Here is a shocker: having the opportunity to create your very best work on your terms is the very thing that will get you MORE opportunities to do the same.  You are not a deli or a diner.  Speak to those who matter in a language that they and they alone will understand.  Ignore the rest.

5.            Get Real With Yourself – Do What It Takes Or Move On —  This is the hardest truth of all.  If you are unable or unwilling to go through the excruciating work that one through four above demand of you, your art and your creative business, you need to gracefully exit the stage.  I am of the belief that the power of art, of creative business, is to transform.  Whether that is through an amazing event, interior design, photograph; for a minute or eons, makes no difference.  The point of it all is to inspire, exalt and, yes, elevate.  The responsibility is yours to own.  Your conviction in your talent is not enough.  You must also be convicted in the way your creative business expresses that talent.  Neither will enduringly exist without the other.  There is no shame in admitting that you simply cannot rise to the responsibility, only your refusal to see it as yours.

The World In Pain

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Everywhere I look these days, there is profound human suffering.  Sometimes it is at the hands of Mother Nature — earthquakes, wildfires, Ebola, etc.  And while completely tragic and horrific, these natural disasters/outbreaks pale in comparison to what mans’ inhumanity to man has been in recent times.

Without judgment on relative import or which side might be right, civil war in Syria and the Middle East and Europe’s growing refusal to accept those that have been forced to flee, Donald Trump’s desire to rid America of its “immigrant” problem, race relations in the U.S. – the Charleston killings, Baltimore riots, unbelievable police brutality largely based on race in the U.S. and abroad, even a Kentucky marriage clerk refusing gay couples the right to marry and being lauded for doing so. I have no answer other than to acknowledge that hate is alive and well, thriving even. Us vs. them, have vs. have-nots, all of it pervading our sense of community and justifying abject indignance to another’s worldview.

I know I cannot be alone in feeling that we can and should do better.  The role of creative business is, at heart, to shine a light on those we so readily seek to dismiss.  Go read Vicente Wolf’s description of his travels to Syria in his book, Crossing Boundaries and its influences on his interior design projects; discover Eduardo Kohlmann and the brilliant event/catering work he does in Mexico; have a look at Tara Guerard’s first book, Southern Weddings: New Looks From The Old South, and you will see the best part of the South.

You may dismiss Vicente, Eduardo and Tara’s work as only for wealthy people to the exclusion of other.  Sure, but then you deny that there are those that want to see the beautiful parts of their world, to celebrate what is possible or even what is impossible for them, but alive nonetheless.  The sheer existence of beauty, of art, matters when all that surrounds someone is the exact opposite.

To that end, I would like to think that EVERY creative business can own the responsibility to create beauty, to celebrate the best of human creativity and community.  Dismissing your role as a mere product or service provider is a cop out.  Go further because you can.  If you are willing to see your art and creative business as one of purpose and meaning, so too will your clients.

Here is a part of a note my client, Erick Weiss of Honeysweet Productions, wrote to his team (and shared with me) on the eve of the opening of the World Lacrosse Championship in Syracuse, New York this Friday:

“The next 5 days are going to be difficult.  All I want to say to you all is that we are making history.  We are making a difference.  We are going to produce a sporting event that has a real story to tell.  Not a story about a wife batterer.  Not a story about a drug addiction.  Not a story about a broken family. We are telling a story about a proud nation.  We are peeling back the layers of a story that has not been told.  We are telling the story of a people mightily abused by American history.  And we are telling the story of a Nation that is proud to adhere to its higher calling.  The calling of healing, friendship and world peace.  Thank you all for everything you are doing to make these world games the best they can be.”

If you believe you, your art and your creative business matters, that it can move people no matter the forum, then it does and it will.  For that responsibility, you will be paid and we will all be so much richer.

The World Continues To Shift

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In 2004, I binge watched The West Wing to catch up to the current episodes (it ran for two more seasons).  I used my Netflix account to get the DVDs.  Super cool for me since I grew up in a generation where if you did not watch a particular show it was gone unless you maybe caught some reruns in the summer or on syndicated TV.

Today, of course, binge watching and the ability to catch up to current episodes are what we all do or can do.  Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and now Apple are banking on our insatiable desire for immediate content.  You might think that all it means is we are able to consume more of what we want when we want it.  And the Grand Canyon is a little hole in the desert.

Because our consumption for media, for story has changed, so too has the way stories are told.  Here is an interview with the makers of Bloodline, another Netflix series, talking about how they changed the pacing of the story to capture the audiences that they knew were watching the series in huge chunks.  They understood that engaging this audience, who controls consumption, is fundamentally different from engaging an audience where the storyteller controls consumption.  Reveals are slower, character development much more nuanced, the climb to the final act multi-layered.

Oh if this were only a millennial story.  Except 64% of Netflix’s audience is either Generation X or Baby Boomer.  Our culture has shifted.  About a billion people use Facebook every day, most for more than 20 minutes.  And on and on I can go.

What does it mean for your creative business? Using my dear friend, Rebecca Grinnals, favorite quote from Will Rogers,  “Even if you are on the right track, if you stand still, you are going to get run over.”

You have to believe that, if the way we all consume media has shifted, so too does the way we expect you, your art and your creative business to move us.  Pretty is irrelevant if there is no meaning behind it.  Why? Pretty is everywhere and it is getting cheaper every day.  Whether you are a baker, a designer (graphic, event, interior, fashion, etc.), photographer (especially photographers) or architect, demonstrating the story you intend to tell, how you are going to tell it and why, is every bit as important as actually telling the story.

The tools you need to convey what your story will be are growing ever more powerful and accessible – 3D Printing, Digital Rendering, etc.  The tools themselves will NEVER be the story.  But do not kid yourself into thinking your story will remain relevant without them.

Ever wonder why Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. are in the business of creating original content?  Because they spend an enormous amount of time figuring out who will watch what they create BEFORE they create it.  The Long Tail is firmly here and here to stay.

The lesson:  spend as much time as you can focusing on the clients that want to hear and be part of the story you want to tell for them, then do all that you can to show them what that story will be and how you will tell it.  Actually telling the story is and will continue to be the foregone conclusion.  More importantly, the actual story will not be enough to earn you the right to tell another story.  Live on your portfolio at your own risk.

The world shifts under our feet whether we like it or not.  It is a brave new world if you choose it to be.  I pray that you do.

Gay Marriage

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In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage legal throughout the United States, I wanted to take a moment to revisit the issue.  Marriage equality has been near and dear to me ever since my time in law school (1992).  I never understood the right to discriminate and all things that claimed to be equal but were not (domestic partnerships, etc.).  Needless to say, the Supreme Court’s decision is a most welcome one to me.

So what now?  This I have written about a lot over the years: Dare To Be First (March 2009), Gay Marriage in New York (a personal fave) (July 2011),  A Changing World (incredibly relevant for today: “When the fight is over, the real work of creative business begins), and Gay Marriage and The Supreme Court (June 2013).  All I wrote in these posts is as powerfully true today as was when I first wrote the words.  I do hope you might take a few minutes to reread them and see if they might not be useful to you as you decide how your creative business might proceed in the wake of the decision.

No doubt creative business now has a massive burden.  Opportunists will be opportunists.  Many will be invested in commoditizing the opportunity as they have if they happened to be in a State that made gay marriage legal prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling.  So be it.  My prayer – be the change agent instead.  We do not call inter-racial, inter-faith, inter anything marriage any more, we just call it marriage.  This is the work for gay marriage.  A moment to define our culture – a step towards inclusion and tolerance on what remains our long journey towards true acceptance of other.

We Did The Best We Could

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What does it mean to say we did the best we could?  For the most part, those who are saying it are saying it in the context of failure, personal or professional.  Those in the midst of success rarely say we just did the best we could and look what happened.  No, they are basking in the spoils of victory and the best they could is implied, circumstance notwithstanding.  In sports, there is a clear delineation between winner and loser.  No matter how valiant, losers do not get parades.  They just get to say they did the best they could and it was not enough.

The issue I have with the dialogue is lack of humility.  Almost never in business, especially creative business, is the “best we could” statement followed with the idea that there is more to learn, experience to be gleaned, improvement to be made, acceptance of the past as it is, yes, but determination to be better.  This comes later – maybe.  The moment asks us to understand we need never apologize for our limitations, but must always accept and be responsible for them.  And yet, all too often, we do not.

So we did the best we could is the very justification of failure, the refusal to say, truly, no we did not do the best we could.  We could have and should have done better.  We will learn.

For creative business, the best we could is an illusion.  The beauty of creation is that nobody knows what will happen in the end.  Yes, incredible focus on the process of getting there is the best way to ensure a wonderful result.  However, the result is always in question.

If the result falls flat for whatever reason, telling a client you did the best you could means nothing.  You and your creative business are your client’s New Coke, their Edsel, their DeLorean.

What would the world be like if you decided to immediately own your flaws.  Start with an authentic apology.  Know that your process failed you.  Your ability to fully understand your mission, your client’s vision, perhaps even the power of your own art, was amiss.  For so many creative businesses, once the moment is past, it is over.  If you missed the moment, you missed it.  The only thing you can do is to try to make the moment next time.

It sucks to be the client who suffers a missed moment.  Do not compound the injury with we did the best we could.  You cannot fix it.  Your only recourse is to offer empathy and the desire to improve.  Let the rest lie.  No refunds, future promises for discounted services if they come back.  Leave the platitudes where they belong, shot dead in an alley.  We tried, we could have done better, we will do better, we are sorry we could not have done better for you.  Let it be enough.

Authentic humility, like authentic shame, is endearing.  It is what all of us crave, your clients very much included.  Failure is information as much as it is circumstance.  The ability to know that you can and will get back up is the very definition of confidence, desire and determination to go forward when the power of inertia overwhelms.

Having confidence that your way and that of your creative business is the best way for your client should never presuppose that there is another, better way.  If you are shown that you must find a new way, you will never get there if you start with we did the best we could.  Of course, you thought you did, but you did not and, even if you did, it was not good enough.  Who cares? The real question, the only one that matters, is how are you going to get better?

Back To Basics

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With creative business in full swing – tis the season after all — it is easy to get lost in the doing and ignore what lies underneath.  Yes, at a point, it is all about chop wood, carry water.  You can just never forget you are not farmers, you are artists.  There always, always has to be a purpose to the work.  Your “Why” has to be front and center not just because it is how you maintain perspective, but because you never know who is looking.  Make no mistake — pretty puts a smile on people’s faces.  Why is what gets you hired.

So I thought what would be really effective is to revisit the foundation for every creative business: the 4 P’s – passion, philosophy, platform and process, with process itself supported by the 4 transitions – potential to actual client, idea to design, design to production, production to reveal.  Here is the link to my original post on the 4P’s and to the one on the 4T’s.

Passion is what gets you out of bed in the morning.  If you are not dying to create for your clients, if you are not truly in love with the work you are doing, you need to stop.  Today.  Two reasons: first, you will get run over by those artists that do have the passion.  Your clients have to believe.  If you do not believe in your purpose, the gift you are meant to share through your creative business, why should your clients?  Second, sometimes passion gets annihilated by circumstance.  If you get so busy that you cannot value what is in front of you other than to get to the other side, you have just turned a project into a job.  Hard to be grateful if you are overwhelmed.  On the other side, if you are slow you might get lost in the hunger for money and work to see the value of creation for its own sake.  Circumstance cannot drive passion.  Love, desire, thirst to create and share your gift has to be its own definition.  Stand in the Sun for sure.

Philosophy is what you stand for.  You might like to do pretty, but we are bored by it.  We have to know why you are doing it.  How will you make your clients’ lives better?  What part of you, your art and your creative business will we know from miles away?  Philosophy is the comfort of knowing what matters to you.  Finding those that appreciate and seek that comfort is your platform.

Platform means you only care to share your gift with those that appreciate it.  These are the fans who adore what you do and how you do it. Why only these clients?  Because these are the clients that will actually pay you for your art – for what is between your ears far more than what is between your hands.  Do you think the person who bought Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)”for $179.4 Million considered what the canvas cost Picasso or how long it took him to paint it?  If you do not seek out those that value you, your art and your creative business far beyond the sum of their parts, you are delusional.  Talk to everyone and you talk to no one.  Talk only to those that love you and your art.  Ignore the rest.

The only way to serve the first three P’s is to have an awesome process.  An awesome process highlights the first three P’s by giving clients confidence that you only do your best and you actually have thought about how to do just that.  If you build your process around the four transitions, you cannot help but to create the virtuous circle to build your upward spiral.

If you are deeply invested in your platform, you will seek out potential clients that will be blown away by the actual you.  These clients will want to participate in brainstorming their vision, but ultimately will look to you, the expert, the guide, the artist, to blow their vision away with your design.  Creative business is not a smorgasbord or a deli.  You are guides and your opinion is what you are paid for.  Once “IT” has been imagined and approved, then you can set out to actual turn “IT” into reality.  Reality is a “TA DA” moment since the “TA DA” moment is what you want people to talk about.  Process is not going from point A to point B just to get there.  Process is about storytelling, a purifying narrative that sets the stage for the next (and hopefully bigger) story.  This is what the 4T’s are all about and why building your process around them is its own reward.

Of course, the biggest reward is seeing your first three P’s validated by your clients – again and again and again.  The very definition of foundation.

Humility vs. Humiliation

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Nobody is perfect.  Not everything you do as an artist and creative business owner works.  You will be wrong.  More to the point, you will be wrong more often then you are right. The goal is not to be wrong less, it is to be really really right when you are right and slightly wrong when you are wrong.

With the idea of being really right and slightly wrong in mind, nothing can be more important than understanding the difference between humility and humiliation for creative business.  If humility and humiliation were crimes, humility would be a misdemeanor where you pay a fine and move on, humiliation a felony where jail time, possibly execution are in the offing for your creative business and maybe your art.

There is no such thing as right and wrong when it comes to guessing at the future, just timing.  We love all things Apple today, but in 1986, in the age of the K Car and PC Clones, you could not give Apple away.  Every dog does indeed have its day, even the mullet.  So when you try to predict the future of your creative business, have a sense of humility when you get it wrong, just do not be humiliated.  “I thought I would have x projects by now” or “I was just featured in a shelter magazine, just finished my book and my new website, how come the phone is not ringing” or “this project is taking sooo much longer than I thought.”  It sucks to be wrong but it is not an indictment of you, your art or your creative business.  You are just wrong.  Today.  Not necessarily tomorrow.

I have seen too many creative business owners go down the rabbit hole of doom when they are wrong.  They call into question everything that they are doing, their marketing, process, structure, even the kind of art they create just because they were wrong.  Trying to kill a fly with a bazooka, blowing up everything, except the fly.  Can you redouble your efforts to continue to get the right business?  Sure, there is always, always room for hustle and hunger.  But change everything, live in despair, convince yourself that you belong in jail because of your failure? Seriously, no.  Circumstances will change and you will find what you seek provided you just keep swimming.  Do the work, act as if and stay true to what you know you are tasked to do: improve the lives of your clients as only you and your creative business can.  You have to be flexible and have humility that you were wrong about the future.  Learn from it, pay the misdemeanor fine and move on.

Juxtapose being wrong and the need for simple humility with places where you should be authentically humiliated. These situations have nothing to do with the future, they have to do with character and integrity.

A restaurant that prides itself on beautiful, pristine food based on the highest quality ingredients runs into a hard time.  The chef decides to cut corners.  More money flows when the cost of food goes down until customers start to catch on.  Then the restaurant dies because its customers do not trust the promise of only the highest quality anymore.

A designer tells a client that the work will be $x and then shows $2x.  Bait and switch.  Maybe the designer gets $1.5x and calls it a win, until he is spending all of his time negotiating each item on the budget ad nauseum.  The business might go on, but each client interaction is torturous. There is, and can be, no trust.

When you lose your way and compromise your integrity for the sake of whatever – money, fame, ego, etc., there may be no way back.  You can kid yourself to believe it is in isolation and will not affect your overall business.  Not a chance.  Trust is as precious a commodity as there is.  When you blow it, regaining it is almost herculean.  And even if you do regain trust from your clients, employees and colleagues, there will always be the lingering notion that you might be willing to blow it again.  Compromising your integrity, your purpose, the truth of what you do and why you do it, is a reason for humiliation and indictment.  You will suffer and you may never come back.  So here is a thought: do not do it.  Ever.

Go ahead and be wrong – a lot.  Eating crow never killed anyone.  You and your creative business will be stronger for it.  Humility is our guide and she is awesome.  Humiliation on the other hand – suffering for your willingness to compromise all that you are – is a fate I do not wish for any of you.  Keep perspective always, humility never justifies humiliation, no matter the circumstance.

A Pig In A Snake

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If you are a regular reader of the blog or talk to me for ten minutes, you know I love my analogies.  The Apple Tree, Rowboats and Motor Yachts come to mind.  The one I have been having the most fun with of late is the idea of a pig in a snake.

There are pythons that can literally eat a 120 lb. pig (yeah, no link here, just trust me that it is true – they can also eat people and alligators, but let’s stay with pigs – visceral enough).  Incredibly thought provoking when it comes to creative businesses.  Yep, this is how my mind works.  By the way, sorry to all the snake lovers out there, but I hate snakes – they freak me out.  Why when I see the analogy in my head, it never leaves me mostly because it is so terrifying.  Hope it does the same for you — albeit for a whole other reason after reading this post.

If you can decide whether you are, or want to be, a 15 foot python or not, you can set the foundation for just about every decision you will need to make for your creative business.

First, a 5 foot python cannot eat a 120 lb. pig.  A guinea pig maybe, but not an actual pig.  To eat a pig, you have to have the size, strength and experience to catch and kill the pig.  It is not like the snake can lie in the Sun and say here piggy piggy.  Strategy, timing and ability all matter if you actually want to eat something of that size.  While a 15 foot python does not necessarily have a choice whether to become a 15 foot python, it certainly does not have the choice to go back to being a 5 foot python.   It is what it is and has to commit to it. 5 foot pythons will always be better at catching smaller prey – they are faster and more agile.  Then again, the 15 foot python only needs to eat every 90 days give or take.  Not to say that a 15 foot python will not eat smaller prey, but imagine how much the 15 foot python would have to eat if it focused only on smaller prey.  It would probably starve in the effort.  In a very real sense, once capable of killing pigs, a python has to focus on killing ever bigger pigs much more than on killing more pigs.

The lesson: if you want to get to the next level, it will take time and you have to commit to what it means to be there.  You do not get to eat a bunch of guinea pigs and then say to the world, “see, now I am ready to eat a pig”.  You have to demonstrate that you are capable of understanding all that goes into capturing and eating an actual pig.  Then and only then will you get the opportunity to exercise that skill.  This is rarified air and you have to appreciate the sacrifice necessary to live there.  Your goal will be bigger clients on an ever grander stage far more than more of the same.  While volume is important, quality of opportunity is what really matters.

Second, pythons are most vulnerable when they are digesting such a huge meal – quite literally you can see the animal moving through the snake, getting smaller as it is digested.  If you cannot appreciate what it takes to digest a pig, you might put yourself in the position of being eaten by a 5 foot snake or similar predators.  There has to be a sense of propriety and scale to your work.  We all want to be busy.  However, taking the next job just because it is there or is ever alluring in its size and scale (and entirely wrong either in timing or type of business) belies the fact that you are still digesting.  Taking on what you cannot is as dangerous as starvation.  Truly.  Great work begets great work and each deserves a proper moment.  How long that moment is is up to you, but please give it the major consideration it deserves.  Following your biggest project to date with a tiny or ill-fitting piece of business just creates confusion and comes with a price.  Translation:  Do not drive the pigs away while you are eating smaller prey.  There is a price for eating for eating’s sake.

Last, appreciate that circumstances change and pigs may not come around enough to sustain your current strategy.  You have to be willing to adapt to go look for where the pigs are and potentially change your strategy as to how to capture them (or similar prey).  What you cannot do, however, is to pretend you do not need to eat pigs (or the like) to really live.  Be flexible with your process, but do not break it.  Ever.

Yes, a crazy and not fun visual, but such is the nature of life.  Your creative business is no different.  To live well, we have to eat as nature intended, no more, no less.  Circumstances may change and you will, by definition, evolve.  The point is that the evolution will be driven by the opportunity and determination to stay or become a 15 foot python.  Or not.  There really is no in between.

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