So I saw a fascinating thread where someone posted, “Doing work you hate will not lead to work you love.” The responses ranged from YES! to but you have to pay your dues to get your shot. My response, all of the responses are right and all are wrong.
First, no one is going to flip you the keys to their Ferrari without some kind of knowledge that you actually know how to drive it. For consumers of creative business, I am always blown away by the very lack of understanding they have before they do in fact flip the keys. I have known many, many creative businesses that were on the brink of financial ruin but received a seven figure project nonetheless. A project, by the way, that was going to take the better part of a year to complete. A second’s worth of due diligence would have revealed the financial situation. And yet. So, please, do not tell me that you have to pay your dues to get on the stage when those that are on the stage are teetering on the edge of falling off. Yeah, this is pre-COVID. I can only imagine what it is now.
Then there are those that say that they have to do what they have to do to pay the bills by way of a day job. That is not the same conversation. If you are data processor by day, wedding planner by night, had the good fortune to become a full-time wedding planner but now, with COVID, have to go back to some data processing, that is fundamentally different from doing work for the exact wrong client.
This is the truth of the statement doing work you hate will not lead to work you love — only people who care about what you do will pay you and people who care the most pay the most. If you kid yourself (and the wrong client) that you are able to do great work for them, you are completely lost. No matter where you are in your career or the arc of your creative business, you have to have a soul. Period. If you love the beauty of color, living in monochrome serves no one. While you may not yet be able to paint the whole rainbow, you can require that you have your moment of color, however small. If it means that you will have to keep your day job for a little longer, so be it. Otherwise, you are building your business on a lie.
What it all requires though is a look in the mirror. How much do you really care about what it is that you want to share? What is driving you? Why? You need talent and skill and experience, sure, but you absolutely need conviction. Conviction is your DNA and it is beyond the medium, it is why you are compelled to create. Conviction to your perspective is not enough though. What underlies it all is your conviction to the practice of your craft; quite literally how you are to get from here to there. It matters since it is your journey that we are all sharing.
Your idiosyncrasy is not that you love to do purple weddings, it how you go about creating purple weddings for those that care deeply about not just purple weddings but about how you would create their purple wedding for them. The how you do things is lost on those who would erase themselves in the hope of a better future. You marginalize yourself to the myopia of the hopeful fear of the unknown. We all default to our understanding and try to live in our own comfort. The essence of what you do as an artist and creative business is to take us outside of that comfort zone so that our hopes can be realized in transformation. There is simply no way to do that if you are trying to keep everyone comfortable. There is just no such thing as easy and stress-free when it comes to creative business. There is only resolution to necessary stress — this might not work but let us try the best we can for what it might become.
Which then gets to the last point. Integrity. If you are doing the work you hate, it might not be the work that you hate as much as that you have no voice in doing the work. You feel like you have to be in service instead of of service to keep the work. So you wait and wait until you get the chance to have a voice. Maybe that is your reasoning. Then again, a closed mouth never gets fed. What I know to be true is that the frustration of being voiceless builds until you choose to risk opening your mouth and then opportunity comes.
We all get there when we get there but do not let hindsight change the memory. If you are looking back on the top of the mountain saying that you got here because you were willing to eat dirt for as long as it took, you do you. I choose not to believe your narrative.
You started your climb the second you decided that your voice mattered and lived there no matter what, not a moment earlier. Before that time you were just building to whatever it took for you to have your voice in the first place. Some people are born with the compulsion to have their voice heard, others take a little longer to get there. And no, it has nothing to do with confidence, it has everything to do with integrity and the desire to share. Confidence is personal, the desire to share is universal. There is a huge difference.
Does it mean you do not have to do the work every day to be better as an artist, a business, a human? Of course not, that is the price of admission. Talent, wisdom and experience are verbs not nouns. The DNA though, that lives within every artist, every creative business — you cannot hide from it and if you do work that rejects your very DNA, what is the point? What you stand for matters and the roots have to grow ever deeper to continually discover purpose. It is why seeds grow roots first, otherwise they are just weeds.
