The Unexplainable

The other day my six year old son said, “Since God is everything, he is as much death as life, happy as sad.  It is all one to him.”  A) We are not religious in any traditional sense; B) this is not the first time he has blown me away– an earlier fave of mine: “You don’t have to really worry about the love, it’s forever.  Time you do though, so don’t waste it..“; C) even at six, he already knows he is part of something bigger than himself; and D) I hope he never loses C.

C cannot be explained.  C truly makes no sense, it just is.  The spirit of creative business is C – the very notion that you are here to share what the collective gives you.  If you ever had the feeling that you just knew, that the words just came out of you and was almost as if you were watching someone else speak them, then you can go with the idea that the world, your world, is bigger than you.  Your gift as a creative business owner is to be able to share your world with others that want to taste it, see it, touch it.

In the classic sense, I am a terrible businessman.  Buy low, sell high, focus on efficiency, control everything, not my natural strength.  I can do it and have learned to do it very well.  My inclination though is to pay what I need to get what I want when I want it and trust if I make every step count (i.e., ensure that everything I do is profitable – financially or otherwise), the long-term will take care of itself.  I am so not the guy you want to hire if you want to save your way to success.

I have been graced though to really come of age in a time when classic business skills in business generally, creative business specifically, while still valuable, are certainly getting more and more marginal every day.  You see, my strength lies in putting a value on the unexplainable.  Better said, my strength is in uncapping the value of the unexplainable, putting structure around it and process underneath it.  Celebrating the crazy.  Yes, brilliance is just crazy in hindsight.  Classic business skills can never justify a million dollar design fee where the cost to produce the design is negligible.  Because there is no tangible thing to validate the cost of design — not time or materials, etc., those who live and breathe in classic business skills are lost.  I love being in that place.  So should every creative business owner.

The outrageousness that exists in your art, especially the unexplainable part, the part that comes from a place beyond you is what your creative business is all about.  Most of you can easily go with respect to your art.  The whole point though is that you have to go there with your creative business or else you will never get the chance to go there with your art.  You belong on the stage you wish to play on, no matter what anyone says.  You just have to do the work to put yourself there.

The work is not about digging a ditch.  I wish it was.  Then you would be hot and sweaty and see the big hole in the ground as the fruits of your labor.  No, the work is about being willing to risk being judged for the totality of you art, the feeling you were paid to create, the relationship you were meant to honor.  If you make it about the couch, the flower, the invitation, the website, any one thing, you have hidden, run away from the essence of your art and yourself most of all.  The work is to remove the training wheels, take away the moments that let you say, well I do not really care about so and so anyway.  Acknowledge when you say you don’t care about the little thing that you set yourself up to be judged ONLY on the little thing to avoid being judged on the big thing.  Did your client really get it?  Do they know how deeply you see them?  What would it mean if you bet your whole business on that idea and not whether they liked the couch?

Getting to a million dollar design fee is not the goal, knowing that it is cheap for the price is.  You need what you need to share what you are meant to.  You must embody the knowledge that those who receive your art will be far better off for having gotten it.  The irony is is that if you make it about ego, you have lost no matter what comes your way.  Giving the gift you were meant to share is its own reward.  This much I have learned from my son this week.  I cannot even imagine what next week will bring.