It’s Called a “Body” of Work
Not “7 identical heads” of work
In theory, the idea of a “body of work” is simple.
Your body of work is everything you do while alive. Or, if you want the boring version, a body of work is an “entirety of the creative or academic output produced by a particular individual or unit.”
Easy to understand, right?
Notice there are no references in either definition to the type of work you do. Your body of work is not condensed to one medium, genre, or form. In other words, you don’t have to do the same thing over and over to create a body of work.
Fresh creatives can get confused about this.
You write a viral post and say “how can I do that again?”
You take put on your Pointless Detective Hat and dissect what you just made. You read every comment. You ask friends why it’s doing well. You read books on mass market appeal.
Then, you try to put lighting in a bottle again. And again. And again.
That is not how you create a body of work.
Yancy Strickler was a music critic. Then he was the co-founder of Kickstarter. Later, he wrote a wonderful book called This Could Be Our Future.
