Pandemic or not, there is a massive difference between flexibility and compromise. Flexibility is required for all businesses, creative or not. Compromise might exist in some businesses (selling that toothpaste for pennies to get rid of inventory), but has absolutely no place in creative business.
Flexibility is like a slinky. When you twist the slinky this way and that, it looks nothing like when the spring is recoiled. And yet it is the same toy with the same ribs. The only way it is not the same toy is if you permanently bend or break one of the ribs (that bend or break is compromise).
Why does this matter today in the time of Coronavirus? Because it is incredibly easy to think you are being flexible when you are, in fact, compromising. Think about it — how far have you gone to reconfigure your current work and potential new projects to accommodate the reality we are all dealing with today? Have you given over decision making to your clients, your production partners, even your employees? Given into their fear, their panic that things might not ever go back to any sense of normal?
If you have not compromised during the pandemic, awesome, you are super-human. For the rest of us, the likely answer is, of course you have. The point of today is to know that you have, forgive yourself and then move back to flexibility. There is no shame (or there should not be), guilt or even ego in saying, “You know what, I thought about what you are asking of me, my art and my creative business, and it will not allow me to do my best work, so we are going to have to go another way.”
Oh, Sean, you say, I could never do that because my client/employee/production partner will be so angry and will not let it stand. Maybe. However, how about you start with the notion that they will be angry, frustrated, critical. Nobody wants to what they once had to be gone. That said, you have to own what you know to be true today and if that realization came to you today, then it just is. Let that be enough to drive you back to conviction and integrity. Doing the best you can necessarily implies that you were wrong yesterday. If you were not wrong, then the best would be static and eternal. And you call me woo woo? Your best is relative to where you are in the moment. As the moment shifts, so too will your best. If that means you realize that what you thought was flexibility, you now know to be compromise, your obligation is to have the humility, vulnerability and, yes, courage to move away from the compromise.
Here is the thing — compromise is cancer. It will metastasize until your creative business is dead unless you cut it out and kill it to the point of your own illness. Yes, you can put off treating it, but it will keep growing while you wait and then it will be too late. Let that visual stay with you for a while so that when the nagging pit in your stomach that you went to a place of compromise, you actually do something about it. It can be something like having to have physical interactions when you are not comfortable or vice-versa, having to shop around more than you like, anything where you know you have just jeopardized your ability to do your best work.
All of which leads me to the following: you will have a pre and post-Coronavirus portfolio. Your pre-portfolio will just be nostalgia for the most part as reality does not permit most of its existence today. Post-Coronavirus, what do you intend to show? While it might seem quaint or naive to say you must do only your best work, know that you will be judged mercifully (and mercilessly) on this work. Do you really want to risk it not being your very best?
The very essence of creative business is that rationality is idiosyncratic and therefore wholly irrational. Neil deGrasse Tyson seeks truth in all things, rational truth. Posit, test, validate over and over again. Love it and we can all use a ton more of this sentiment today. However, it has no place in creative business in a global sense. Of course, one plus one equals two. That is not the point, it is that each one is not the same. Add them in the wrong order and the answer is zero for that artist, that creative business. Add them in the right order and the answer just might be three. Very simply, what is insane to one artist makes perfect sense to another. Your creative business has to be a reflection of your reality, your rationality, without any notion that that reality is anyone else’s. The very reason why the words “iconic” “outrageous” and “convicted” matter so much. If you have a half hour or so, check out Tim Corrigan and Vicente Wolf’s Zoom call about presentations. Both Tim and Vicente are wildly successful interior designers. Industry luminaries. If there is information you can find about how you want to present your work to clients (interior design or not), fantastic. However, really pay attention to how these two dear friends look at each other when the other describes their presentation process. They cringe as in neither of them could imagine doing what the other does for a nanosecond. For Tim, showing only one option of anything is a non-starter. For Vicente, showing more than one is pointless. Push them both up against the wall and they would have to admit that the way the other presents and operates is insane to them. Good. Now you get it. Remember, these are two designers at the pinnacle of their industry and they could not be more different.
Rationality is as you define it for your art and your creative business. Let that be enough, let it be transient and resilient. Compromise is cancer, flexibility the reality you choose to inhabit. Your choice.
