Into The Sun

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, Google Glass anyone?  Do it anyway.

Into the Sun 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.

Is your goal to increase by a percentage every year – 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?

Incremental change is an oxymoron and you will never walk into the Sun 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.  If you are fortunate enough to be doing well at the game you currently play – 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.  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, 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.

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 into the Sun 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.  I could imagine a day when 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 can 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.

When you walk into the Sun you might find the other building was there all along.