The Business of Being Creative

Here we are, called to introspection daily.  I, for one, relate to Michelle Obama’s depression and simultaneously see the work ahead.  My mother is an eternal optimist and refuses to not see a shinier side to just about anything.  As with all things there is beauty and dark in that sentiment.  I choose to see the light and stay there, again, for better or worse.  Thank you Mom.  No doubt though, it is a challenge.

I am all for doing what you need to do to find health and happiness these days. Simply to remember why you are here as being much more a notion of internal conviction rather than external manifestation.  Just faith that you are to do as you are doing because it is your best nature, hopefully.  If that is to create for a living, that is awesome.  Equally so though if it is about practicing a craft, vocation, calling that speaks to you.  The whole point is to find yourself.

The best part of any business, creative business in particular, is that it is a journey of self-discovery.  Yes, you get to have your artistry and art front and center.  You share your vision of what is beautiful in the hope (knowledge?) that your vision will resonate with your clients.  Making your art and your creative business the purest version of how you choose to share your gift is, at base, the foundation of every creative business.  Such is not the topic of today’s post though.  Today’s post is about blind spots and their consequences.

Most often, your clients have more money than you do and certainly more than your employees who are responsible for communicating with these clients.  Your clients are not worried about survival in any meaningful sense, while you and certainly your employees might very well be.  How does it color the conversation?  Intimidation?  Resentment?  A feeling of, “They have so much, why are they arguing with me over $1,000?”  I have watched, in horror, as an employee at an interior design firm told a client, who just happened to be a self-made multi-billionaire, “not to get all business” with him.  When I asked why he would ever say such a thing, his response was, “He’s rich, he should not care about what we charge, it is small potatoes to him.”  Yeah, no.

Or the idea that someone who asks a million questions is a pain in the butt client, while the one who lets you alone until they do not is a dream (and then a nightmare).  Fear is pervasive in all creative businesses.  You are tasked with (a) creating something new and (b) creating it for someone who cannot or does not want to do it themselves.  Everyone wants awesome and is terrified that it will not turn out that way.  Your role is to be the guide, focused not on success (which must be inevitable) but instead on the road there.  How you perceive a client’s fear (or lack thereof) is its own statement about you, not them.  The gravitas of all that is done by you, you art and your creative business has grown exponentially during the pandemic.  Gravitas and fear go hand in hand.  Embrace it or do not.  As with not testing for the virus, if you do not embrace the relationship between gravitas and fear, it does not mean it does not exist, it just means you are praying it will go back to the world of pretty where illusion was easier and acceptable.  It will not.

Speaking of fear, what about your own?  If you are worried about failing or competition or success, does it bring you out of yourself, your art, your artistry?  How fast do you talk about money?  How do you really talk about what you and your creative business are worth?  What you really stand for (see above, it cannot be only about creating pretty things)?  Do you want to look like a better option or be the only option?

We all stand in the way of ourselves.  We are loved in spite of ourselves as much as we are because of ourselves.  Creative business is about forgiveness, humility and desire to bring to life what has heretofore never existed.  Too often, ego prevents a fluid response.  Rather than antagonize a wealthy patron, explain why you charge what you do and why it is important to the project.  See the beauty in the client willing to ask questions and encourage those with absolute faith to not be so absolute.  Acknowledge your fear, live in it, then put it aside.  Your creative business has intrinsic value or it does not.  Harnessing and displaying the value front and center is its own reward.

The point of blind spots is to recognize that you are, in fact, blind to them.  Be grateful that the pandemic exposed and continues to expose us all to our blind spots. Give yourself the opportunity to have a different conversation, with yourself most of all.  You will shift, moving deeper into yourself, the essence of your art and your creative business.  This work, this change is the true seed of growth.  Survival is, of course, necessary but will be fleeting without growth.  Yes, the tree needs deeper roots and you need to do what it takes to make that possible.

Gotcha culture.  Being pedantic and refusing to act with any sort of context beyond your own myopia is the disease of our time that needs to end.  Being uncomfortable does not mean that you need to double down — i.e., scream louder, it just means you have to admit that you do not know the future and may not even know what you let alone what you do not.

Nobody is perfect.  Not everything you do as an artist and creative business owner works.  You will be wrong.  Especially today. More to the point, you will be wrong more often than you are right. The goal is not to be wrong less, it is to be really really right when you are right and forgive yourself for your gaffes along the way.  That is the thing about trust, it is not about being right all the time, it is about coming back to get it right the next time, or the time after that or after that.

With the idea of being really right 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.

If the pandemic and all things chaos teach us anything, it has to be that 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 (still), 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 micro-weddings would be the answer” “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 (one day the pandemic will be behind all of us) and you will find what you seek provided you just keep swimming.  Whether you can find it in time to warrant your survival, nobody knows.  Have a look at this NYT article about what caterers are doing now to survive all that is happening to them.  Luck favors the prepared mind, but it is still luck.  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 since business is off by more than half (outdoor dining and take out only).  More money flows when the cost of food goes down until customers start to catch on (or the chef says that it is what she has to do to survive (it is not)).  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, fear, justification, etc., there may be no way back.  You can kid yourself to believe it is in isolation because of our circumstances today 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.  Not even when you can be talked into being justified for doing it.  Global chaos demands purpose and conviction, not a willingness to betray yourself with the idea that if you do you can get back when it is done.  You cannot and while you might one day forgive yourself, your clients, colleagues and employees probably will not.

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.

Here is what I hope the pandemic and all things upheaval teaches us: 1) we are all delusional; 2) intelligence is about quality, not quantity; and 3) the zero sum paradigm is a zombie that needs a wooden stake through its heart.

It is an old trope that if you asked almost any entrepreneur (creative or not) that if they knew what they know now whether they would have ever started their business, most would say no.  It does not mean that they do not love what they do or would ever want to start, it is just that they did not know the depth of everything that they would experience.  That is the definition of delusional — you believe the world to be what it is not.  And, yeah, yeah I get the negative connotations to the word, put that aside and think about the conviction and purpose and faith you have to think, for a second, that you could make a business out of your art.  Delusion.  So now that we are ALL challenged to redefine the essence of our work, understand that we are all challenged to be delusional once again.  Call it beginners mind or just a deep understanding that the road forward is uncharted as it was when you first began.  Of course, your experience, wisdom and talent will carry you forward but arbiters and determinants of success? Not a chance.  To those then who seek to double down on their faith, conviction and resilience to the point of delusion, that is the stuff on integrity.  Just do not presume it comes without risk and that it will all work out.  Not a person on the planet knows what will come so live in your delusion and know that it is as it should be.

I wrote this week in my Business Of Home column about client management that Outrageous Promise(s) and Outrageous Demand(s) are everything as are the Three W’s.  The reason they are everything is because “Gotcha” culture needs to end.  Here is the link.

The entire point of creative business is the idea that what you are trying might not work no matter how many times you have done it before.  Ahem, the creative part.  If you have never done it before this way, how can you know it will work?  This possibility of failure IS the value in that it takes you to another place and the resolution becomes information and instruction on a new way to be.  If you cannot fail and must be somehow omnipotent, then how exactly will you deal with discovery and the promise to be better tomorrow than you are today?  You cannot so please stop.  Thank you Elizabeth Warren.

Which brings me to the zero sum paradigm.  If you cannot be wrong, then that means that someone else must be.  Then there are winners and losers.  Your gain is someone else’s loss.  Your “winning” presumes that an equally qualified widget “lost” it to your shinier penny.  Ironically, being more human, appreciating the purpose of relationships and why yours exists with your clients, employees and colleagues alike is the path forward.  Of course, you might not get a desired project, that does not mean you lost it.  It just means that, all things being equal, the relationship was better served by another artist.  That said, if we are only trying to game the system, no matter how many gobbled gook business books you spout, no change can happen.  Simply, there is no there there.  If the pandemic and the related cultural upheaval teaches you nothing except the need to be more connected, more human, let that be enough.  Us versus them is an ugly model, sure, but also robs you of the opportunity community brings you.  You get to hide in your tribalism without knowing what can be created if you instead focused on deep, authentic expression of what matters.  Spend some time watching this video about Harley Davidson and you will know exactly what I mean. Fleeting power of an empowered minority never goes quietly into that good night.

All creative business owners are confronted with a new world order.  To those that think The Phoenix will not die and all they need to do is hibernate to get through the chaos, good luck with that.  I believe there will be a new world order where community and collective humility will be expressed with a deep desire to create, maybe even define, meaning.  Finding connection and purpose within a culture of service (i.e., not “in” service) to the effort will be where creative business will manifest.  The rest will just be a derivative of the banal –  pretty lipstick no doubt, but on a pig nonetheless. The real question is where will you play?

You are delusional either way if you choose to stay in the game.  So how about we let that one go and get down to the business of asking ourselves ever more who matters, who you will seek to serve and what change you hope to inspire.  Self expression is a beautiful thing in these times — who you are today is not who you will be tomorrow and how you expressed yourself yesterday might not have anything to do with how you will next week.  If you cannot see the grace in that shift, that is okay, just know that those that do will and their discoveries might become yours too. Embracing the challenge of an uncertain future comes to each of us in our own time. Abject refusal to do so however will place you squarely on the scrap heap of history. Your choice.

What a moment we are living in as people, artists and creative business owners.  I, for one, am amazed at what is happening in the United States, and not in a good way.  I was a senior in high school in 1984 and did a term paper on the value of airbags and the new mandatory seatbelt law in New York.  What I learned then was that, even though most people knew that wearing a seatbelt dramatically improved automobile safety, only fifteen percent of Americans wore them.  And the reason car companies were endorsing seatbelt laws was because they did not want to have to install airbags (if two thirds of states had seatbelt laws by 1989, they would not have to).  No matter that the value of saving lives dwarfed the financial cost (and inconvenience/discomfort) of seatbelts and airbags, it took almost a decade for most Americans to accept wearing a seatbelt as part of their culture.  Many of of those protesting the limitations on freedom from wearing a mask happily get in their cars and put on a seatbelt.  Just saying.  Here is a recent article discussing the seatbelt journey in the United States.

Two points: none of what is happening now in the United States needs to be happening, but it is no surprise at all that it is.  What it means is that the impetus to change is driven ever deeper for just about every creative business I can think of.  Whether you are busy or in a self-induced coma, you are confronted with a stark reality that the other side is ever further away and what it looks like is fundamentally, permanently different than what once was.  So you are forced to change ever more profoundly and a renewed discussion about change is more than on order.

Painless change is an oxymoron.  All change, particularly in business, is painful.  You are giving up the known for the unknown.  We must acknowledge that moving to another reality is always fraught with uncertainty, yet must happen.  For creative business, the uncertainty is a double force for inertia.

Why?  Because no one needs your creative business.  Every creative business is a want.  I want fabulous flowers for my wedding.  I want my new house to be ridiculously modern.  I want my new website to be amazing.  Hopefully, pre-pandemic and world upheaval you had figured out how to have clients get what they want from you, your art and your creative business.  Now, the want is still there, it is just amplified by a hundred.  The intensity of denial has placed profound pressure on you and your creative business to resolve it with ever deeper meaning.  Compare this with businesses that sell a product, a thing.  You either sell enough of those things or you do not.

Take toilet paper.  Yes, we could live without it, but let’s go with it as a necessity relative to flowers for your wedding.  Perhaps there will be another run on it to let us know how important it is to our lives (and toilet paper manufacturers certainly would not mind it if there were).  The goal of those in the business of selling toilet paper is to sell more toilet paper.  So if you are not selling enough toilet paper, you change to see if you can sell enough.  All the unemotional business metrics apply.

Here is the radical statement for creative business – if your only reason to change is to make more money (or given our current situation, any money), you will fail.  Unemotional switches in strategy (marketing, financial, structural, etc.) are irrelevant.  The paradox of creative business is that real change, especially today, is not about telling a better story, it is about telling a deeper story.  Less shining the apple and more peeling the onion.  In peeling the onion, there will necessarily be those who do not fit — employees, clients, colleagues, even friends.  Letting go of the fiction that they do fit always sucks, especially when you are not sure those who you are reaching for are the ones who actually matter.  We call it faith – in yourself, the breadth of your art and the stage your creative business belongs on.

Of course, everyone likes a winner.  If your strategy to sell more toilet paper works, you make more money.  And maybe that is enough.  For artists though, who cares?  It is still toilet paper.

The satisfaction for all of us will come from creating; doing the work you are meant to share with us all.  Being in full bloom.  Yours is to move us, to make us feel, to inspire us.  You create joy and your creation is joy.  You might have once thought (and maybe even still think) the concept of working towards joy too woo-woo, but ask yourself what your clients will really pay for on the other side.  I can get the thing you create cheaper.  Period.  What I cannot get for any price other than the one you are willing to accept is your desire to create for me.  That is your foundation and you need to remove anything, and I do mean anything, that does not celebrate this foundation.

Enter trust.  The reason people did not wear seatbelts or put on a mask is not because they did not know the facts, they did and they do; it is because they did not trust in the community of it all.  Well, no one is going to trust you if you are selling the shiny penny when they want something so much deeper and profound.  No one really cares about selling toilet paper other than to see if they can.  So not true for art.  If you cannot show in every demonstrable way that you care more about creating your art for your clients on your terms that will be transformative, you are sunk.  No, you will not necessarily go out of business but you will be ever marginalized like a pencil being ground to its nub.  Deeper stories, not better ones.

Yes, change is painful.  However, it is a move towards joy.  Not a smiling nod, a giggle at a romantic comedy kind of thing.  Instead, a deep belly feeling that you are giving meaning to those who most want it from you.  Live happy, even in these our darkest of days of recent memory.  The money will follow your willingness to move further into your truth and that of your art and creative business.  If you knew the fulfillment would be there, enduring the pain of transition would be a breeze.  Such is not anyone’s reality today.  Then again, leaping towards yourself, having your creative business jump with you is, and will always be, its own reward.  You might just find that making awesome toilet paper covers is a whole lot better than pretending you make toilet paper.

Here we are. Broadway is cancelled until 2021, AMC theaters pushed back its opening date until the end of July; Disneyland has delayed reopening indefinitely; Texas and Arizona (and soon many other States I suspect) have closed bars, restaurants, movie theaters and gyms once again; oh, and people cannot travel from the U.S to the European Union.  Fun times.

As for business, creative business particularly, so many of us are in another layer of Dante’s Inferno.  Yes, there is movement and investment in some circles — I know many interior designers that are actually incredibly busy mostly trying to fit in work before the world closes again.  However, most creative business owners have been deeply affected by the pandemic and the economic destruction it has wrought and will continue to wreck on all of us for the rest of 2020, if not longer.

Let us not also forget (ever) about the social and political unrest we are facing.  We have to do the work of charting a better path at the moment we all are worried about making it through at all. Has to be cocktail hour somewhere I am sure.

What in the holy heck to do?  Really only one answer: design first.  Design is the process of unfolding discovery until you say to the world here is what I think “it” should be.  It can be in any sense, any medium, any bubble; it is what you hope to manifest as the expression of your discovery.  It can never be that because that already exists, it does not and cannot exist until you imagine “it”.

Pretty simple right?  Except I cannot tell you how many artists refuse, abjectly refuse, to go there and stay convicted to the notion that it is that.  These artists make it about the thing, the product, the end result more than anything.  And so we persist in this sea of confusion without acknowledging that art demands that design go first.

I have no crystal ball to say how we find ourselves on the other side of this mountain of pain, all I do know is that art will teach us, show us the essence of what it means to be human.  Imagination and vision and willingness to create in deep uncertainty shapes us.  The real question is whether you are willing to go there?  And if not now, when?

Or will fear, panic, despair, and the pain of uncertainty overwhelm you?  The choice to stay in the game cannot be without sober understanding.  You are going to need to get from here to there when there could be years away.  You, your art and your creative business will look nothing like what you do today.  Like it or not, the Phoenix needs to burn and it is still deeply aflame today.

The point: even if you decide that the chasm is too deep, the water too fast, design first.  Whatever you do, however you move forward, design first.

Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx got his start selling ties to classmates.  Ralph Lauren paint has been around for more than twenty five years and is one of the largest paint brands around.  Art transcends its medium.  Always.

Pandemic or not, creative business or not, you have to own the artist that you are.  Design first.

So tear it all down.  Please tear it all down.  It should be plainly evident to anyone remotely paying attention that the world does not need more pretty things, it needs imagination, contemplation and commitment to the very essence of creation.  You.  I deeply know that investment in community, an inclusive culture and innovation at the edge of the long tail will be our bedrocks going forward.  We need to invest in that future by demanding our artists be paid for creation first and foremost, manifestation second.  This future can only happen if artists show us the value of such an investment.  If we can create a culture of design first, just think of what that will do?  The courage to fail will be our ethos instead of how well you did on a test that measures nothing.

Dare to dream is cliche.  Dare to get paid to dream is not.

The world is a messy, ugly place.  Nature is cruel and unforgiving.  Truly, there is no escape from brutality if you look for it, especially today.  Yes, there is evil in the world and those that seek to do unspeakable harm.  Most believe in their righteousness and generosity before they speak of their inhumanity.  None of us want to believe the toll we can exact in the name of purpose.  And yet.

The world is also glorious, nature is majestic and the triumph of the human spirit is ever indelible.  More than five thousand years ago we began working with glass.  The rest is history.  Think about what we as a human collective have done with a grain of sand.  Microscopes, telescopes, computers, fiber optics, and on and on and on.

Humanity is singularly frail and immense.  Humility and hubris are both hard to come by and deeply profound if we choose to go there.  The righteous path never is until you recognize its vanity.

We are all exhausted and mobilized at once.  The real question is will we take the time to contemplate change.  There will be another side and the future will present itself to us as she does.  Now is the opportunity to shape the effort with resilience and the power of consistent effort.  It is also the time when the pain becomes exquisite.

Simultaneously, we are working towards tomorrow and find ourselves deeper in the morass.  The triumph of spirit is required and it will not be enough.  We will have to undo generations of indoctrination to rebuild something that honors the contributions we all can make.

However, nobody can really listen when the noise is deafening.  The longer the noise, the more likely we shut down and simply stop.  I believe we are getting there with so many creative endeavors.  Summer is here and people are thirsty for some sort of stability.  Do not for a second think that I want any of the momentum to stop or for any progress made to fade away.  I am only saying that there is real fatigue and that with no rest, the margins will fray.  Call it burn out, fatigue, ennui, whatever you want, just do not dismiss it.

This is where you will be tested as a creative business like no other.  Perhaps you have made headway in redefining your art in the context of coronavirus and the seismic (hopefully permanent) shifts in our culture.  But the phone has gone quiet.  Or even more, you are realizing that 2020 is mostly gone and you are yet to endure another lost season this Fall.  FYI, the New York City Marathon was just cancelled today.  It is held in November.  Sorry to say that you have inured yourself to pain only to know that there will be more to get through.  The old Churchill line, “If you are going through hell, keep going.”

You are left with a choice then, shine a brighter, more focused flashlight or go buy a spotlight.  The thing about spotlights, if everyone has one, the room becomes so bright that no-one can see anything.  And make no mistake, the inclination of all of us is to find a spotlight.  We need to change that.  Being the shiniest penny is fruitless when you need a dollar.  Meaning, deep, unabiding meaning to the very purpose of what you seek to share requires contemplation, study, practice and experience.  Even if no-one is at your door today, keep going so that when they show up (and they will), they will experience the best of you because you have kept going.

It is all about emotional resonance.  Think about it.  We all know when an artist gets lost in emotion or does not go far enough.  Too far and the singer literally cannot sing, not far enough and it will be technically fine but forgettable.  The point is that what is required of you, your art and your creative business today is a wholesale recalibration of what emotional resonance means and how to communicate your ability to understand and shift to clients, employees and colleagues alike.  It is exposing, raw and fraught with uncertainty.  Do it anyway, even if it feels like you are in a vacuum.  Just because people hit pause does not mean they do not want to listen.  Not now is not never.  Remember, your responsibility is to do the work, to start the conversation, to stand ready to be ever present to opportunity.  It is not and never will be anyone else’s.  Yes, you are going through hell, keep going.

The one thing that resonates ever more deeply every day for me is power.  Entrenched power, systemic bias designed to prevent access to authentic power.  The influence of money and status on conferred power.  The idea that misuse and abuse of power creates motivations against self-interest.  Such is the status quo, tribalism and hegemony.

The tropes are all there: Power corrupts.  It is all a power struggle.  Own your power.  Be powerful.

For most of us  though, the idea of power is sticky.  Some of us see power as an entitlement (even today), a zero-sum game with specific winners and losers.  Others believe in collaboration, communal, shared power where everyone wins and loses together.  Almost never do we think about power neutrally – as a force that just is.  Inevitably, we bring our own idiosyncrasies, biases, worldviews and connotations to the party.  Today, we need to examine those idiosyncrasies, biases, worldview and connotations more than ever and ask ourselves to what end other?  What would be the opportunity if we resolved to be appreciative of power yet removed from it.

One example, “Defund The Police” “Abolish The Police”.  Actually, really amazing ideas and a call to contemplation as to whether we can tear it down to build it far better.  Of course we can.  Yet, the words themselves are about taking, upending, forcing; about power.  So now we are in a fight where the entrenched will lose and the disenfranchised will gain.  Even if it has to be that way (and it does), does it have to perceived that way — winners and losers?  We never use the words “defund” or “abolish” when speaking about parts of our creative businesses yet that is exactly what is happening every day in search of a better tomorrow.  Words matter.

To your creative business in this backdrop: Your approach to power and all that it means to you underlies everything in your creative business.  To find success, you have to know what your relationship to power is, how you intend to wield it when you have it and what you do when you do not.

Of course, the discussion begins with your own sense of internal power, confidence and willingness to stand tall for your art and creative business.  For purposes of this post, however, I am taking this as a given.  Huge assumption, I know, but go with me.  Instead, my question is where you, your art and your creative business fall on the zero-sum to collaboration spectrum, the take it or earn it scale.

If you think power is ugly, you might find yourself running from it today while at the same time grabbing it.  This is my fifty percent deposit example.  Unless you are selling a specific product like an existing dress or a chair, the very notion of taking a fifty percent deposit for an item that will require a process to create and produce is hyper-aggressive.  You have not done a thing to earn the deposit and your reputation and/or referrals are not worth that much.  You want the power but are afraid it will disappear, so you take it.  With fifty percent of a client’s money, they are not going anywhere without a lot of pain.  No judgment here, just perspective that you will have power you have not yet earned.  Inevitably, how you then wield that power will be a response, and not in itself generative.   Whether it is a “trust me, I know what I am doing”, let me go overboard to show you how you made the right choice, or somewhere in between, you are living in the idea that you just took something.

Compare those that see power as immutable and transferable for a purpose.  They want a client to decide to give power as validation of the request.  The client likes your idea so they pay with their power (and money) for you to continue.  Then again, those on the collaboration side of the spectrum can take it too far and one pot of power becomes an unmanageable mess.  Leadership is required and if you are constitutionally against taking it if need be, you may never get done. Leadership is required, even if leadership constantly shifts.  If there is a bigger lesson as we contemplate our role as people, artists and creative business owners given the state of our world, I do not know of one.

To take it out of client relationship, think about the continuing evolution of corporate structure.  The digital age has hampered the very notion of the traditional pyramid, especially for creative businesses.  The Coronavirus has blown to shreds the industrial model of going to an office to get work done.  Just ask Twitter and Square.  Interconnectivity makes it very hard to have defined groups with power layers both within the group and the organization as a whole as the sole operating structure.  Bob reports to Sally in accounting and Sally reports to Fred, the Chief Operating Officer, who reports to Jane, the CEO is mostly a function of a time when talking to everyone at the same time was not possible.

Instead, the idea of the organization as an atom is now ever possible.  There are defined roles as neutrons and electrons, but freedom to move about the nucleus within those roles.  Today, all of us, Millenials leading the way, wriggle against the pyramid and thrive in an atom.  Everyone has a voice meant to be heard equally in its area of expertise.  Underlying the worldview is perspectives on power.

The work today has to be to identify where we all are in relation to power and most definitely change that perception so that we can undo the system of suppression we have created.  We have to simultaneously appreciate how our understanding of power shapes us, even dictates the direction and structure of our art and creative business.  From there we can all evolve our own place on the spectrum and see where that can take us.  Better tomorrow than today.  You cannot begin to clean up the mess until you appreciate its depth in your worldview and your business.  The choice to change is yours, of course, but you will only attempt the effort if you can find conviction in its benefit.

As we all set out into a new world order, to try to figure out if our creative business is relevant or not, or better, how we are going become ever more relevant in what we all hope is a new world order, we have to know that we have to take a risk.  Even if you try to stay the course, that too is a risk.  A few thoughts on moving forward then.

The time to risk it all is when you have everything to lose, not when you have nothing.  When you have nothing, only one place to go – up.  There is a safety in that.  If you are wrong, who cares, you are at rock-bottom anyway.  But if you are right, there is the way out.  If things are going well or even okay though, being wrong costs you something – money, reputation, maybe even a little of both.  Edsel, New Coke, Tropicana packaging, Google Hangouts.  Do it anyway.

To the light means fully absorbing the brightness of the day.  The fearlessness it took to start your creative business is the very fear that prevents you from risking its very existence.  We often define success through money and it is a useful metric although certainly not the only measure.  Fulfilled work, happy clients, expanding art come to mind as alternatives.  But let us go with money for a baseline, even today.

Is your goal to increase by a percentage every year or even insure that you get back to 2019 – maybe grow 20%, 30%, 50%?  To make a hundred thousand dollars?  A million?  What if you were to make your goal exquisitely unobtainable?  Not ridiculous, just exquisitely unobtainable?  If you make $250,000 in revenue now, what would $600,000 next year look like?  What would you have to do to get there?  Would there be compromises? Structural changes?  Would it be worth it?  It is too easy to raise the bar so high or so far as to make it a pipe dream and therefore forgive your unwillingness to even try.  To use a sports analogy, you can touch the rim (almost) and you want to dunk the ball.

Incremental change is an oxymoron and you will never walk to the light if that is the goal you seek.  Doing something a little better every year gets you run over by those that are out to redefine the game.  Never more true than today.  If you are fortunate enough to be doing well at the game you currently play or think that you will be the winner on the other side of upheaval – at the top of your market or even finding lots of clients coming your way, you can live there if you choose.  Incremental change means doing what you currently do better.  Nothing wrong with it at all.  Just do not say you want to get to the next level or redefine your and your art’s relevancy.  The next level is not a flight of stairs up, it is another building entirely.  Why the cliché is so silly.  You can maximize the level you are on and that is a wonderful vision with a lot to it.  Going to another level though, redefining your value, that asks you to believe in a reality you cannot yet comprehend.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I am a Seth Godin fanatic.  His mantra is that the connection economy, where making meaning, being an artist, is the new world order.  Underneath the message is that change is the new normal.  Resistance to change, the desire for predictability is its own undoing.  Mass is dead, the Long Tail firmly ensconced.  Delight your fans, forget the rest.  Seth’s basic premise is that human relationship requires evolution, so too with creative business.  Art transcends it medium precisely because trust is its economy.  The foundation of trust is what allows change.  This foundation IS the path forward through the pain and to the other side of what our world, our culture will become (hopefully).

Your fans will trust you as you risk what is next so long as you never forsake that trust.  So give yourself permission to imagine a world just this side of impossible.  Then walk to the light to consider leaping into that world.  That is what the next level looks like. Change lives there as a compulsion to discover the possibility of what could happen.  For those that want a tangible idea of what I am talking about, here goes.

To date, most design businesses other than fashion (graphic, interior, event) are buyer driven businesses.  Demand is created with previous work and maybe some marginally interesting ideas (here is how you too can spruce up your bedroom), but mostly it is a reactive business.  You wait for the phone to ring when the client has a project for you and your creative business.  Nobody is thinking about how to reach into a client’s life to generate demand — to be in the business of generating ideas that compel demand.  The future, which is now by the way, is going to demand that design businesses look like production houses for movie studios who are voraciously seeking fantastic ideas that they WILL execute on.  I am not for a second saying that designers should set out creating idea after idea for nothing.  I am saying that designers have to become so inextricably linked to how their clients live their lives that they are paid to generate ideas for how their clients can live those lives better.  Profound intimacy and trust in a designer’s vision will be paid for first by the client, then the creative business will be paid again to make it happen.  Turn a reactive industry into a proactive one.  Radical change would mean radical rewards and opportunity for you, your art and your creative business.

And there it is.  Proaction involves risk, it means choosing yourselves, reaching out for true conversation, building connection like roots of a tree instead of pretty cut flowers.  It is not sexy, it is not immediate and it might not work.  Then again, I know that your really do not have a choice.  The question is only how long you can delay the inevitable until you are waiting (and waiting and waited) to be picked by an audience otherwise meaningfully engaged.  Maybe then you will realize, if it is not too late, that the conversation is yours to start.

When you walk to the light you might find the other building was there all along.

What pass do I get for having worked for a gay black immigrant (Preston Bailey) for almost seven years? For having most of my clients be gay men and/or women for the almost ten years I have been in business?  For having written about the inequities of gay people being unable to marry for my law school thesis in 1991?  Yeah, not a thing.

I am a racist, full of biases and discriminatory thoughts.  Am I aware of them? Nope.  Do I have them every day?  No question.  I come from the pinnacle of privilege: white man given every advantage society has to offer — from higher education to access to conversations and opportunities my very privilege affords me.  And my name hides the fact that I am 100% Eastern European Jewish.  So there is that too.

How could I not be ignorant of the biases that live in our world, yesterday and today?  The only thing I can say with certainty is that I understand that I do not understand (HT to my brilliant wife, Cate).  What I can do every day is to live my own mantra: to do better when I know better.  It is a daily practice of humility, grace and humanity.  I will own the shame my own unconscious racism brings to bear and then I will let it go with the vision of being better.  As I tell my children, it is never the falling down, but the getting back up that matters.  Who cares that I do not have a hateful heart, that my intentions are not discriminatory? My actions speak otherwise.  My commitment is to listen and hear hard truths every day so that I can embody being better, with full and complete understanding that there is no there there, just movement.

Now to creative business.  Racism is ever present in all parts of creative business as it is in all parts of our culture in the United States.  We exclude others for the color of their skin, sexuality, faith, and economic status every day, all day.  We absolutely need to do the work of exposing these biases and hateful exclusions, and to do our ultimate best to eliminate them.  However, I have also seen these very same biases been used to justify equally shameful business practices.  I have watched an unscrupulous wedding planner remark after getting off the phone with a client where she discussed the budget that she was not going to let that client “Jew her down”, despite the fact that she did not have her proverbial sh-t together when it came to professionally discussing said budget — she just wanted blind trust.  This has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with respect when you are spending someone else’s money.

I love Preston forever and ever.  It is a well known fact that he was deeply in debt when I joined his business, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  The only reason he made it out was because he decided to run a better business.  That meant both of us doing the hard work of analyzing and assessing every single thing his business did, every single moment of every single day.  To the penny – truly not kidding.  He had lived under the premise that borrowing from the future would take care of the ills of yesterday and today.  By the time we came together, he already knew that carousel had ended and wanted to be sober.  Was it my whiteness, my pedigree, that lent him credibility to come out of his unfortunate financial situation?  I do not think so, even a little bit.  But maybe to some others.  And that is the thing:  It is too easy to put a label on anything as the reason.  The reason Preston recovered is because he did the incredibly challenging work of getting better.  He took risks, gave me a chance to change things (not easy at all to do) and enforced a discipline with his business that he had never done in his previous twenty years of business.  The discipline lead to better opportunities and better opportunities lead to even better opportunities.  That is how it works: being better every day to make tomorrow even better.  Nobody knows if it will work out, but that ignorance does not excuse the effort, it demands it.  Many many creative business owners just refuse to grasp that truth, even today.

It has been a long, long time since I have been involved with Preston or his business, but I know the man and his voice.  He is the very representation that hard, mindful work is its own reward.  I am equally certain that, since we have parted, he has made missteps and been the victim and perpetrator of racism, conscious or unconscious.  It is his humanity as it is all of ours.  The real question is what we do with it once we see it.  My confidence is that Preston meets it head on and his candor moves things forward.  Such is his life, his grace and his gift.

My naïveté is that we can level the playing field to give all creative businesses a chance at finding those who care most about their work and vice-versa.  If a black heterosexual female wedding planner is the best artist to handle the wedding of two white men, then my hope, my deep unbinding prayer, is that that is exactly what will happen. We have a long long way to go, no doubt.  This is the work though and how we can do better tomorrow.

Practically, though, it means that every creative business owner needs to do the deep, intrinsic work on their businesses first.  Why should I entrust the essence of my very life — my home, my wedding, my building, my image — to your business if you do not know your own narrative, how to take me on the journey that I need to go on with you for me to experience the world as you would have me?  I might be the subject of the story, but you are the story teller.  It is not hard to do good business if you have the courage to own the story of your creative business as only you would tell it.  And if you do not have that courage, please forgive yourself, ask to find it and, if not possible, just get out of the way for those that do.

The very best part of our culture is we love redemption and redemption is ours if we are willing to be humble and get down to doing the damn work.  As we tear down the biases and seek to heal the gashes at the fabric of our society, we will all want the placebo of saying look at what we are doing.  That just is not good enough.  No one needs a gift, we need authentic connection and real opportunity to express that connection across all platforms.  This will take time and conviction.

No one can cook a meal in a raging fire.  Consistent, constant heat at the right temperature is what is required to give the chef her chance to be brilliant.  But make no mistake, there is a monster difference between a chef and a great cook.  The chef is a professional and knows how to be brilliant every moment of every day.  So yes, let us light the fire, keep it burning well, but do make it impossible for anyone to ignore the question of whether the artist in front of you is singularly able to tell your story through their own as a creative business on every level — financially, physically, emotionally, even spiritually. If yes, fantastic, if not, then let us make it necessary, required even, for that person to move on until she finds the artist that can.  Faith, conviction and courage required of all involved.