If you read last week’s post or listened to my podcast this week, you know I challenged you to quit. I asked you to consider why you are persisting and if was because of shame or guilt or even blind rage masking as determination, to reconsider. This week the other side.
Even if you are working now, perhaps even swamped, the world is shifting underneath your feet. As I write this in Northern California, Cate and I joked this morning that the sky, with its smoke, fog and otherworldliness makes us feel like we are in the middle of the peach in James And The Giant Peach. So strange and discombobulating. Such is the nature of our time.
The real question in front of all of us is what tomorrow looks like. Some creative industries will be decimated — events, hospitality, specifically restaurants. Some will just raise higher like architecture and interior design. And those businesses related to all of these creative businesses like air travel, fashion, even entertainment will be redefined for a very long time to come.
So what are you going to do? Easy, choose the one thing that matters. Why do you create? What drives you to see the world differently than those you seek to serve? What you serve is always subservient to why.
Now for the expression. The only thing that COVID-19 and all of the upheaval it has wrought is to beseech you to upend crappy model. Please please please stop putting lipstick on a pig. Which would you rather focus on —patrons or testers? Spend all your marketing on getting the next client or delighting those you already have? I completely understand project specific work. But does it have to be your whole business? And, no, I am not talking about licensing or some other side-hustle that will bring in ancillary money relative to your core business. I am talking about reconstructing your model to provide for a different relationship to the art you wish to create for a living.
Meal kit delivery businesses will exceed over $19 billion this year. You subscribe so you can get food sent to your door that you then make yourself. What?? The value of not having to go to the grocery to buy the exact same products, look up the recipe and then prepare it is worth $19 billion? Why yes it is because having the professional make/show you how to make your food is worth it.
If you are a chef, and you can use your restaurant as an effective marketing tool to sell your at home preparations, why wouldn’t you? Because you are mostly trying to figure out how to serve the first time diner in largely the same way as you serve the true patron. Yes, the true patron gets the nice table, acknowledgement from the staff and a few freebies, but real tangible value beyond the infrequent diner? Not so much. Until the chef acknowledges the true value of a patron and offers ways for that patron to join a deep community designed to serve ONLY patrons like her, the chef/restauranteur has no chance to make meaningful changes to his/her model.
I am not saying that meal kit delivery is the salvation of the restaurant business by any stretch. What I am saying is that the possibility of redefining models, or better said, destroying bad models is most certainly there. We just have to be willing to go there.
Our culture has been defined in the information age and will continue to be defined by the value of idiosyncratic choice. The better our machines have gotten, the better our choice. Some do it better than others (Netflix yes, Audible not so much). The trend though is to continue to allow the machine to work diligently to know us and offer us ever better choices tailored to our own preferences. When I was a kid, Saturday nights at 9 starting in the Fall, it was time for The Love Boat. If you missed it, it was gone forever (other than in random Summer reruns). Fast forward to today, we can consume content in any quantity at any time we want and most often the content lives for a really long time for us to get to it when we can/desire.
How can the instant everything mindset NOT have an impact on your creative business? Infinite choice needs curation and yet you choose to say only when you need me, my art and my creative business? That is inverted. You provide constant curation so that those who seek to choose look to you provide curation.
Now, more than ever, is the time to question everything about why you do what you do, starting with how you get paid to create. Every single model for just about every creative business I can think of is based on a pre-digital world, where information was scarce and communication tools lacking. It took a global pandemic to finally blow these models to smithereens. For that, and that alone, I will always be grateful. Nature abhors a vacuum though and the real question is what will fill the void? Might I leave with this: the safe choice is not, so start over with the singular idea of what really matters and rebuild from there.
