There is a wonderful new e-magazine out called Fear.less. Started by Clay Hebert and Ishita Gupta (both really incredible in their own right), it explores, through a series of interviews (it is how I found uber-awesome Danielle Laporte), how we are to identify, confront and ultimately overcome that which we are most afraid of. It is amazing stuff and the blog, written by Matt Atkinson, is also very well done.
I cannot do justice to the insights Fear.less provides and leave it to you to discover them for yourself. However, my biggest take away, at least for creative businesses, is that fear drives conformity. You become desperate to find the box you can put yourself in so that you can be easily understood (designer, planner, photographer, stationer, florist, etc.). You use buzzwords that really mean nothing: “quality customer service”, “attention to detail”, “creative”. You offer the same “packages” as everyone else and your contracts make Ulysses look like People Magazine. It is all fear of having your creative business be iconic, to stand for something, to stand apart not just for the sake of being different, but because it is different. The irony is never lost on me that you get paid to create for a living. You do not make widgets. I am sure you would all shudder if someone told you that your art is such a good knock-off of so and so (read: copy, not reminiscent of). Yet, so many times I see that that is exactly what you are doing with your creative businesses and are not horrified at the thought that you are.
It reminds me of a time during my days as a lawyer (yes, back in the stone ages) when some overworked associate put “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” (G rated version) into the boilerplate of some dense agreement. This was when word processing was just getting started and all documents worked from a previously created one. The line found its way into multiple places in 235 documents at 5 different firms before it was discovered. No one read the boilerplate, but it was there in every document because it had to be. Really? Or was it easier to just cut and paste? There is safety in the idea that there is A way it has to be done. Except it is not safe at all. Imagine the senior lawyer that had to explain why it was there to her client — a client who was paying hundreds of dollars an hour for the very same lawyer to actually read the documents she was going to sign.
If your art demands that you talk to your clients (as opposed to their planner, manager, agent, lawyer, etc.), then not making that a prerequisite regardless of who you might offend (clients included) is a sure way to jeapordize your art. If you present only one opinion while your competition shows many possibilities, what will it do to you to conform? We all have to make compromises, but never at the price of integrity.
What fear of authenticity does most of all though, is stop your evolution. What might have worked when you got started may not now. Your contracts, process, pricing structure, even the name of your business need to be relevant to who you are today and where you are headed. A clever name works for a start-up, almost never for an established creative business. If you fear the ramifications of having your creative business be truly authentic, all that should be open to question will not be. Conformity (even to a version of your former self) will make you stuck. And broke.
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hey man, thanks for the shoutout to fear.less. made my day. great post, too. authenticity is always a challenge. all this meta-analysis and questions of relevance and how much conformity is okay, bouncing off each other. way to hit on the problems so many of us face daily.
Your clients can determine how forward thinking you can be. It seems that most clients want a copy of some item or some other design and when you try to deliver originality, it is deemed “too edgy” (that’s not to say there are clients on ocassion who want you to push the envelope). So you fall back into being safe to please them and I don’t necessarily blame them. It seems this is the way society is going. “Creativity” isn’t relying on originality anymore. It’s relying on how you can turn plagiarism into flattery. It’s up to us to find a way to sell clients on originality and not conservative work or ones that copy cat.
Love this post, especially the anecdote about the law firm associate! As a former lawyer myself, I know all too well how that one phrase could have made its way all over without anyone noticing. Though I left the practice because I felt it was oh so stifling, I often find myself looking for examples, someone to tell me THE way something should be done. Thank you for reminding me that this “openness” is in itself one of the true joys of owning a creative business, that creativity is important not just to WHAT you do, but HOW you do it, too.
Thank you for the article. Fear.Less. will be the topic in my office this morning. This article reminds me that being creative in my business is my business! I’m going to have a great Fear.Less day thanks!