Surviving the Dream
Simple techniques to grow your creative business while saving your sanity
Even after fifteen years of business ownership, the day-to-day is still full of little surprises. This week a colleague of mine who is just getting her creative business off the ground called me for some honest advice. Like her, I’m a creative entrepreneur and have first-hand experience with the peculiar hurdles that come with running this kind of business. She heard that I moonlight as a design business professor and she was hoping I could provide some insight on what was already a frustrating start to her ‘dream.’
As my entrepreneurial colleague is learning, finding information that is relevant and meaningful to a solo creative business can be far more difficult than it sounds. Generic business advice and operational how-to’s are pretty easy to find. One quick google search and you’re surrounded by lists of books, articles, websites, and podcasts, each one offering brilliant business hacks and top 5 secrets to success. But, in the midst of all the noise — the data, metrics, reports, and occasional click-bait — where do you find the article that tells you how to survive in the small moments? Once the excitement from ’living the dream’ fades away, what’s next? How do we weather the under-whelming, mundane, or the times when there isn’t a client in sight? How do we stay motivated to get out of bed and do it all over again when all we have to count on is ourselves?
Regardless of whether we make a living in a commercial business, or run a more traditional art practice, we are all still hybrids — both service and product in one. Separating the creative work we do from the operational side of our business takes some acutely focused effort and adds a unique layer of difficulty to an already challenging life as an entrepreneur. We’re no strangers to discipline as artists, but when that right-brained artistic discipline is now subject to a left-brained business model, it takes a bit of fancy footwork to hit that creative vs. commercial balance. Here are a few of the suggestions I offer my students on how to survive the day-to-day small stuff:
Intention: the ‘why’
We are inundated with external tools for evaluating our business successes and failures from a hard data perspective, but our goal in surviving the small moments, not just the grand ones, starts with defining your own criteria. The ability to bounce back from our low points, or resiliency, starts with clear intentions. adrienne maree brown, a social justice advocate, writes in her beautiful book, Emergent Strategy, that a major part of resiliency lies in, “…being intentional even in a fractal sense, at the smallest level.’
Intentionality should flow into every aspect of your work: ‘what is the purpose of this, what is the goal, what is my ‘why’?’ Each choice you make for your business or project at hand, should be fully imbued with your intention, and keeping that intention front of mind will help you maintain perspective even in those tougher moments. Reflections made with intent offers us a way to evaluate a situation and craft a path forward — an adaptable and resilient one — instead of focusing on the failures, which, over time, can slowly wear us down.
Alliance: finding your SuperFriends
Borrowing from classic comic book wisdom, you need to have the ultimate team in place to protect the Universe, or just keep Gotham City safe. In other words, building your own team of ‘super heroes’ that you can rely on for all types of business-related support — anything from expert advice to someone who could freelance for you in a pinch — is one of the best ways to ensure your business will thrive. The key to building a solid alliance is recognizing where your strengths lie and finding those creative entrepreneurs who can fill in the gaps. It’s always a good idea to have creatives with a similar vision or a complimentary practice, but be open to all types. They might not have the same skill set or operate in the same industry, but there is always something you can offer to each other.
One of the toughest things to grapple with in a solo practice is the idea that you’re in this alone. Before striking out on our own, it is more than likely that we came from an office or other communal environment with ample opportunities to ask for a helping hand or even just grab a quick coffee with a co-worker — tiny moments spent in the company of others. A solid support group re-creates this sense of collective purpose — the feeling that you are not alone. That is the fundamental value of SuperFriends. In addition to practical knowledge-sharing, it strikes at the heart of our human need for belonging. Maintaining that feeling of connectedness once you are out on your own is critical to your long term success and sanity as a solo practitioner.
Self-Reflection: seeing the whole
I am an unapologetic fan of constant improvement, and along with keeping intention front and center, self-reflection is a major component of this improvement practice. When the road starts to get a little bumpy with the business, the first thing I do is turn the microscope back on myself: What did I do to contribute to this? What could I have done differently? How can I make it better next time?
Developing the habit of pausing and stepping back to look objectively at your business both at periodic intervals and at the conclusion of each project can help you recognize new opportunities and grow. It’s also an excellent tool for re-evaluating your business practices and methods, and help to maintain focus even when the path forward is unclear. These self-reflective pauses give you time to ground yourself and allow you to course-correct mid-project, if necessary, keeping business projects from spiraling out of control.
Downtime: knowing when to quit
This one piece of advice can be found from business blogs to psychology research but bears special meaning for creatives. Fueled by passion (and our favorite vehicle for caffeine) we tend to work relentlessly in pursuit of our art, sometimes to the point of burnout. We need downtime to rest and recharge. Try putting yourself on a set schedule: observe regular business hours, even set alarms to take periodic breaks. Then, stick to them! Creative burnout can put an abrupt end to our business, so put your feet up and relax. You earned it.
Apart from the absolute how-to basics, our creative business landscape changes constantly and there’s really no road-map to follow when you are the one building the road. How you ‘live the dream’ is almost entirely up to you, but crafting habits that keep you grounded and focused, will not only save your sanity, but will help you stay resilient even as the road gets rough.
