Working with creators made me better at my day job
You’ve probably been there: you ambitiously set your alarm for work the night before, convinced that you’ll feel excited and refreshed the next morning with only six hours of sleep. But morning sets in and you somehow feel even more tired than the night before.
No matter how much you try to convince yourself that you can’t wait for the day to start, you can only build so many affirmations around your happiness before you need to have something to be happy about.
After spending countless hours working low-paying jobs for money-hungry companies, I’ve realized one thing: working for the man doesn’t get you very far. There will always come a time when you will crave the feeling of doing work that you love with people you enjoy working with.
When I was invited to join Patreon’s Community Happiness Team in June of 2015, I felt like it was my first day of high school. I was familiar with the structure of the job, but the giddiness I had around all the possibilities and uncertainties that awaited me was new. I was finally about to work towards a mission I passionately believed in; one rooted in doing good for the world by empowering those at the core of generating positive change: creators.
One thing I learned pretty quickly is that creators think and act differently than the average person. This has completely improved the way we build and interact with the community at Patreon.
Here are three ways working with artists has made me better at my day job:
I think about the big picture more often
To create art, we have to envision an overall objective while simultaneously focusing on the fine details. This is not unlike building a quarterly roadmap at a company.
“Creativity is like a game of chess, the best players think strategically several moves ahead without losing sight of the immediate situation.” — Will Gompertz, art critic
We see this thinking play out every day on Patreon. Creators take large bodies of work and thoughtfully plan them out into smaller pieces that they publish to their Patreon pages and social media channels. Not only does this allow creators to have a constant stream of work to share, but it increases the opportunities that their fans can interact with their work, thus increasing engagement.
Having a clear window into micro/macro thinking at Patreon has helped us tremendously with recognizing big picture goals and laying out the framework to achieve them.
At the beginning of each quarter at Patreon, we go over our company mission and strategy, before laying out our team-wide and personal objectives for the next three months. In this way, we tie all of our work back to our overall vision and the reason we exist.
I’ve become more curious
Creators have a natural curiosity about their surroundings. They are constantly observing the world around them and asking themselves questions about how to make it better.
Too often, companies lose sight of “the why” when building products for their users. This is an issue. If what you’re working on doesn’t solve a problem, then it could be creating one.
Before joining Patreon, I found myself making generalizations and assumptions about the world around me. I blocked out most opportunities to question how things worked and instead trudged through life with the belief that I knew everything there was for me to know at any given time.
Creators don’t do this. They tend to ask more questions than the average person and when they are faced with beliefs and ideas unlike their own, they embrace the idea of conflicting viewpoints rather than dismissing them.
Picture yourself at five years old. Did you ask your parents why the sky was blue? Or lick every bus window you came in contact with to see if it tasted different than the last one? Why is it that we are so naturally curious as kids and then lose most of that curiosity as we get older?
We don’t have to lose that curiosity. Spend some time with creators and you will begin to realize a much bigger and brighter world out there, filled with complexities and uncharted territory waiting to be explored.
I’ve learned that there is no such thing as an “end goal”
Life seems pretty dull when we imagine it as a treacherous road that ultimately leads to the end of something; but this is the mentality that so many of have when we start new projects or relationships. We are so hyper-focused on getting to the finish line that we take short cuts and hurry through the work that really matters.
Creators understand that there is no end goal because if there was, they would need to stop creating at some point. This is not an option for so many artists who rely on creation to survive.
Since Patreon is a platform for creators to get paid for their work on an ongoing basis, the creators we work with know that there is no finish line for creation — it is simply an ongoing outpouring of ideas that we package up and send out into the world in bursts of artistic expression.
“Your whole mentality shifts when you’re working to publish. You focus on the stuff that matters and you ignore the stuff that doesn’t.” — Jack Conte
Our CEO, Jack Conte, recently gave a talk at a small conference we held for creators that drives the idea of working to “publish” rather than working to “finish.” This is such a simple mind shift that actually makes a huge difference in how we create and share our work.
Only when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and publish things that we don’t necessarily consider “finished,” are we able to fight off the perfectionist in us that keeps us from sharing ourselves with the world.
