Being creative is hard. Really hard. Actually, let me rephrase that. Being creative isn’t so bad. In fact, if I’m honest about it, the being comes pretty easily for me. As my wife and most of my friends will attest, I have ideas all the time, sometimes great ideas. The ideas themselves aren’t the problem. It’s what to do with them that’s the problem. The doing is where I get stuck, specifically on the business side of the doing. When I get an idea that I really like, I’m all in on it. My friend Sean teases me about designing the merch before I’ve ever figured out how to actually make the thing, regardless of what the thing is. And he’s totally right. The potential of an idea is where I tend to live—that’s what excites me—and I will spend hours, days, weeks, exploring what a thing could be. But, as great as I am at coming up with ideas, I’m just as great at talking myself out of them. I convince myself that they won’t land with an audience—sometimes even within minutes of first getting an idea. It doesn’t help that I tend to believe that if an audience doesn’t like the thing I made, which I put so much of myself into, they don’t like me. And the cycle repeats.
The most consistent challenge in my creative life is untethering the worth or value of a particular project or idea from my own sense of self-worth and to keep my focus on putting out work that I am proud of and want to see in the world, regardless of whether or not it finds a large audience. Unfortunately, that’s often at odds with trying to monetize what I do. And while intellectually I know that those things aren’t linked, existentially it’s often very hard to get out from under. For example, when I released my book Photography by the Letter in 2018 after more than three years of research, writing and rewriting, designing and redesigning, and multiple printings, I was convinced it was going to be a big hit. But it wasn’t. And despite the fact that it was exactly the book I wanted—and was able—to make at the time, I saw it as a failure and, because I had put so much time and energy (read:myself) into it, that I took the loss very personally. I still do. I spent a great deal of time wondering what I did wrong, what I didn’t include, or how I could have made it better so that more people would have wanted it. The answer to each of those questions is the same: nothing. The excitement that I had (and, frankly, still have) about how valuable it could be to an audience simply didn’t match the reality that regardless of how “good” something is, quality is only one factor as to whether an idea made real will translate into an audience’s willingness to pay for it. The irony is that for many creatives, myself included, that’s the metric that we chase the most and have the least amount of control over.
This can be a difficult lesson to learn, and even harder to put into practice—I know that it is for me—but I think that only in continuing to identify what happens and why it happens can we provide ourselves the opportunity to break those cycles. The hurdle of a monetary return on my creative work is something that I seem to put in my path in nearly every project I undertake and I think it’s the biggest reason that I end up feeling so disappointed. How and to what degree a project lands with an audience is an unknown variable and simply cannot be the prime mover. If it is, we set ourselves up for failure from the jump because we can’t strike gold every time—and the reality is that few things that we produce ever will. As my mom used to say, ‘It’s a numbers game.” There’s just too much content competing for a finite number of eyeballs, clicks, likes, and dollars. I think the return on our creativity has to start with the joy of seeing what we make in the world.
For me, it always starts with a good idea, because I know I have at least some control over what that looks like. I trust what that means for me and it’s a high bar. From there, it’s about asking questions, and maybe being more honest about the questions I’m asking. Is the goal only about connecting with people or do I also want it to make money? If so, how much? What resources will it take to realize a particular idea and what won’t I be able to complete and put out into the world in the meantime because the why and the opportunity costs are inexorably linked.
Monetizing my creative work is still a struggle because I know that there isn’t just one answer that fits everything I do. But asking better questions early on in the process and being honest with the answers can hopefully allow me to become more aware of the cycles that I tend to get stuck in around all of this and maybe even create the space to disrupt them.
Questions:
What cycles do you get stuck in and how do you disrupt them?
This morning, I watched a terrific short documentary film by Ben Proudfoot, called The Best Chef in the World. In the film, Ben shares the story of Sally Schmitt, who was the creator of the French Laundry, the restaurant that Chef Thomas Keller made world-famous. It’s a beautifully touching film that I can’t recommend highly enough.
Ooof... this one hit close. I'm gonna be thinking about this for the rest of the week.
Wow I feel attacked by that graph you've drawn... It's like looking in a mirror 😅