The Right Way or Your Way?
Been thinking recently, there’s a huge imbalance in articles intended to guide people into the art world.
There’s way too much emphasis on getting it right (and by definition, letting everyone know they've been doing it wrong).
Yes, you read that right.
All that information available on every subject you can think of: marketing, pricing, selling, the whole shebang. Brilliant…right?
Mm, maybe not. If you read stuff like that, is it empowering to have all this information…or are you completely overwhelmed, wondering how in god’s name anyone EVAH gets started? So much you don’t know. What if you get it wrong; maybe you’d never sell ANYTHING if you don’t rock up with all your ducks in a row right from the get go (sorry, cliché alley there). Will anyone take you seriously?
It’s possible all this how-to malarkey actually inhibits people from making a leap into new things. Yes, there are basics to be taken care of, but the rest? It’s a blank page and you’re a creative person, aren’t you? (Yes, we all are, in myriad ways).
The web is full of experts; we love thinking there's a right way to do things but the more we believe there's a right way, the less creative space is available to come up with other, new ways, completely personal to us, to do things.
Listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech (ha! Got the spelling right first time!), he says it's OK to fail, and he still achieved everything he planned regardless of being told it was impossible. Elon Musk cheerfully admits the Tesla team was ‘clueless’ about making cars when they started out, made many mistakes and were ‘delusional’ in what they believed they could do. Now everyone else is trying to catch up with them.
I’ve read artists’ saying things like:
They photocopied their work at a local copy shop, put it in cheap clip frames, took it to a local fair…and sold stuff.
Had no clue how to price – just picked numbers. Sold stuff.
Had no idea how to display or sell; just turned up at local events, laid their canvases out flat on a table. Sold stuff.
Were total rubbish at updating their blogs or didn’t know what to write and still ended up with loads of readers.
Ignored the advice that you should only write in a ‘professional way’ and only show you’re brilliant. Instead they admitted mistakes, used sweary words and bared all. People came back for more.
Put stuff out in public, got asked to do a huge commission which they said ‘yes’ to, knowing they had NO CLUE how they were going to do it. But managed it anyway.
What held me back for years was that I didn’t know enough, if I got it ‘wrong’ no one would take me seriously, I'd fail and I’d look like a total idiot. And the more I read, the more I found I ‘had’ to know or ‘had’ to do.
And yet, there were people who didn’t know what they were ‘supposed’ to do but just dived right in and built successful art careers anyway.
There are plenty of artists who will happily tell you that you’re lucky if you manage to scrape a meagre living.
Well, thanks and all but I don’t want to hear about others’ struggling reality. I want to make my own thriving reality. The world is changing and it’s up to each of us to decide how we’re going to navigate it. By all means gather data, but looking to others to tell us how to move forward could mean going places we don’t want to be or not moving at all.
Waiting to be ready? You’ll never make a move. No one is ‘ready’. Just be willing to try then do what you can and you will always become more than what you were.
Waiting until you feel confident enough? You never will be. Be OK with having wibbles – they’ll pass, and with experience, they’ll subside.
Figure out what you want your business/life to look like – it should match who you are not follow a prescribed path. Why would you want it to look like someone else’s anyway?
You can follow all the ‘rules’ and get nowhere. I have a wise old friend who says ‘there are no rules’. He’s right. People just make 'em up and we think we have to follow them! Those successful people, the ones living a life they love - laid their own path. They weren’t following rules. They were following their vision of what they wanted life/their career to be.
It’s taken me years to really ‘get’ this. It’s a work in progress and in some weird way, I'm being forced to work out my own strategy anyhow. It’s a meandering trail with detours and there will be dead ends but I'm finally OK with all that. I don’t have to get it right every time.
