Time for some live Q&A! In this episode I tackle audience questions on: time management, how to juggle multiple interests, and favorite power tools for making you much more likely to actually accomplish your goals. [Read more…]
“I was very, very scared. I just didn’t know if I could do it.”
-Ben Affleck, in an interview with Terry Gross, on directing Argo, his first feature film
More often than not, when we’re looking longingly at a big, scary goal, we’re ready much sooner than we think we are.
One of the common features of any big goal that’s very close to your heart is that it feels like you don’t yet have what you need — are not yet the person you need to be — in order to follow it.
In fact, such a feeling of “unreadiness” is one of the hallmarks of a true calling.
Here’s a secret:
It’s the very act of following the calling (or going after the big, scary goal) that will grow you into the person you need to be in order to follow it. (Click to tweet this!) [Read more…]
Yep, it happens to the best of us.
You set your goals, form your intentions, make your commitments… and – wham – life happens.
Even that little 15 Minutes a Day creative challenge can get the best of you.
Never fear, dear creative! When you don’t manage to follow through on a given day, it does NOT mean that you’re a failure!
In fact, an occasional tumble off the wagon can be a helpful tool to get you recommitted to what’s important.
Watch the video, correct forward, and let me know what you think.
(Oh, and always, if you know someone you think needs to hear this today, by all means send them a link, share on Facebook, tweet, etc. etc.)
If you haven’t guessed by now, your intrepid correspondent can be a bit… obsessive sometimes.
To wit: just as soon as I make a public announcement that I’m not yet ready to commit to making a new painting every day, I go ahead and form the private intention to do just that.
Sometimes I drive even myself crazy.
But the truth is, way back in May I had my first (and so far only) life coaching session with Susan, in exchange for designing and installing for her a new WordPress website (not yet live at the time of this writing; if you click through that link, that is not the site I designed — check back in a few weeks). In that life coaching session I got very clear that I really, really want to be making art every day.
Did you catch that? Every day.
Because the thing is, when I’m actively creating, when I actually make art, the whole rest of the day goes better. I feel like I’m living in alignment with my life’s purpose, and I’m just plain happier.
My Irresistible Yogini line of artwork sprang from that life coaching session, which was awesome. And for a number of weeks I was making art every day. It was great. I was happier, and the whole rest of my day did (for the most part) go better.
But gradually my discipline dwindled, and I stopped making art every day.
Why? What would make me stop making art, when that was the exact goal I was going for?
Honestly, I was kind of stumped, and felt pretty badly about not following through.
Recently, though, I figured something out. I realized that although I love my Irresistible Yogini and I do want to fill out the line, after the first few days, working on that line didn’t actually satisfy the need that I was hoping to fill.
I wanted to play. To experiment. To mess around with color, get my hands dirty, and not worry about rules.
Think adult finger-painting.
Making Irresistible Yogini is a lot more about designing than experimenting. It’s fun figuring out how to turn simple brush strokes into a female form in a yoga posture, but after the first few minutes it doesn’t feel like playing anymore.
Instead, it’s redoing the same brush strokes 57 times until I get a version I’m reasonably happy with.
Then it’s calligraphing the words over and over until I get a version of that that I’m reasonably happy with.
Then it’s scanning and color correcting and messing around in Photoshop, which, while it can be fun, is 180 degrees from my original goal of messing around and “finger-painting.”
Which brings me to my four tips:
My initial goal, to make art every day, was not really clear enough. I didn’t really just want to add a new line of art to my website (though of course that’s always nice). I didn’t want a new work assignment. What I really wanted was to use my hands to be in the creative zone.
As a result, my real goal would maybe have been better stated as:
To mess around with paint every day
or
To make a tiny painting every day in one hour or less, even if I don’t like it
or
To spend 20 minutes every day making marks on canvas or paper
Thankfully, I did finally get clear, and guess what — today is the third day in a row that I’ve made a painting! Knowing the real aim of my goal (to play, experiment, not feel bogged down by rules or expectations) helps keep me on track.
Getting clear on your goals is really important, but it’s just as important to do some processing to figure out why you want this particular goal, what you want to get out of it. If your goal isn’t in alignment with what you really want to get from it, you’ll run out of steam.
But if you’re clear that performing the tasks to get your goal will feed and nourish you, I’ll bet you that very little will be able to stop you.
and a related tip:
I am most definitely not making a public commitment to make a completed painting every day. I’ve already made enough big public commitments recently, thank you very much. But I did go out and buy 15 tiny canvases and 3 tiny boards, and I do have a goal of painting every one of them by the time I put up my booth at the To Life! festival in Palo Alto, California on October 10.
That is achievable. And if I do end up making art every day, fantastic! That would make me phenomenally happy. But feeling like I have to because I’ve made a public commitment, while a great idea in theory, for me right now would feel too much like yet another client deadline I have to meet.
For me, the whole purpose of this make art more often goal is to provide an antidote to all the client deadlines that fill up so much of my life. Besides, it’s always better to under-promise and over-perform than vice-versa — to yourself just as much as to other people.
Now you may decide that making a public commitment is exactly what you need to light your creative fire. Great! Fantastic! The point is to do some thinking about what is really going to work for you.
For example, if you want to make a painting every day (even if you’re not publicly committing that you’re going to [ahem]), it’s probably a lot easier to make that happen if you canvasses are, say, 4 inches square, rather than, say, 12 feet by 18 feet.
Just sayin’.
It’s also a lot easier to scan a smaller piece to reproduce it as a print and/or post it online. A few months back I bought some canvasses with the intention of playing in a new medium, and I used those for my first two paintings. They happened to be 10″ square, which is not a large canvas in the scheme of things, but it is an inch and a half too wide to scan in one pass on my desktop scanner.
Doh!
But no matter. I learned a wonderful lesson, and when I stocked up on more canvasses I kept them on the really small side. Clever monkey, aren’t I?
(It also doesn’t hurt that smaller canvasses cost a whole lot less, and use up a lot less paint, which costs money too. :))
It took me a few months, but I finally figured out what I really want from my make art every day goal. I figured out how to make my goal achievable and right for me, and I set things up so that my goal is as easy as possible to achieve.
In case you haven’t guessed, the image at the top of this post is today’s effort (see a side view below). I’ve got 17 more little canvasses and boards sitting on my drafting table. Watch for more little paintings to appear here (though not necessarily every day…)
And you? What’s one of your goals, and how can you tweak it to make it achievable, right for you, and as easy as possible to achieve?
Last week I had the pleasure of lunching with Ann Rea, successful painter, artist business coach and owner of ArtistsWhoTHRIVE.
Ann went from zero to profitable in one year of painting full time, and has been profiled by none other than Fortune Magazine. I interviewed her awhile back for my Thriving Artists Project, and I already knew she was one sharp cookie, but in person she’s even more impressive.
Ann takes no prisoners. She’s as creative about business and marketing as she is with her art. She thinks outside the box. She coaches other artists on how to make their own art careers financially successful, and of all the things we talked about over lunch, one thing really stood out:
The number one problem most artists have is not setting their goals high enough.
Think about it.
How do you achieve something remarkable? First, you pretty much have to imagine that it’s possible, and set a goal to achieve it.
If you don’t allow yourself to believe that something is even possible, how can you expect to make it happen?
Um, yeah. Confession time.
Case in point: I realized maybe a year or so ago that, without any conscious thought on my part, I had installed a glass ceiling over my earning power for my entire adult life.
In other words, I realized that somehow I was operating under the belief system that I was incapable of earning a lot of money.
I never actually articulated this thought to myself, but that didn’t make it any less powerful. The belief was still there: other people made a lot of money, not me. Making a lot of money just seemed … beyond me.
From a purely logical standpoint this belief is patently ridiculous. I’m intelligent, capable, multi-talented, good with people, driven — surely at least as much if not more than a good chunk of the global population. If other people could make a lot of money, there was no logical reason why I couldn’t, too.
But for whatever reason, the belief was there (no doubt installed very early in life [yay, something else to work on…]) As a result, I set my money-earning goals way, way too low.
How low? “All I want,” I remember thinking during my divorce, “is to make enough money to get by, and to have time to do the things I love to do.”
That’s right, just enough money to get by.
And guess what? I built a business around my art that made just enough money to get by.
In Silicon Valley, granted, which is nothing to sneeze at in the scheme of things, but just enough is not a high enough goal for me anymore — I want to pay off my debt. I want more security. I want the option of taking time off to travel more. I want to be able to buy things I want without agonizing over every purchase.
Call me un-zen, but I want more!
(As for time to do the things I love to do? Well, yes and no. It depends what day you catch me on. I’m still working on that one.)
Building a business around my art was no small accomplishment, and it’s something I’m still proud of. But now it’s time to change the picture, and allow myself to believe that I can make a lot of money. From my art, and other things I love to do.
It’s time to set my goals even higher.
Which brings me back to lunch the other day. Ann suggested that it’s always a good idea to tie a project to a concrete goal. When I mentioned that I have a big goal of paying off my enormous mountain of debt and being debt free again, Ann didn’t skip a beat.
“Then why don’t you make your Thriving Artists Project your Debt Elimination Project?”
[Shocked pause.]
But… but… but… my enormous mountain of debt is… well… enormous. Making enough money to pay off my personal debt from one project? — my first big information product? — surely that cannot be done.
My overactive brain went into overdrive, thinking of reasons why eliminating my personal debt with the Thriving Artists Project is impossible.
Now, I’m too embarrassed to state an actual number, but when I stopped panicking long enough to think about it a little, I realized that the truth is, if I were to create something really successful, if I put into practice the marketing lessons I’ve been studying hard to learn, it’s not inconceivable that I could make enough money from a single project to pay off my debt.
But my list is tiny, and the idea that my first big project could be that successful is, well, hard to imagine. So I said, sure, great idea — maybe the second or third or fourth information product could be my Debt Elimination Project…
“Hell no!” retorted Ann. “I don’t want to wait around for the next project! It’s this one, or none at all!”
Clearly I could benefit from some regular coaching, because Ann made me realize I was doing it again: not setting my goals high enough.
And so I thought, why not?
Why not make the Thriving Artists’ Project my personal Debt Elimination Project?
Why not set a really big goal, and go for it?
What’s the worst that could happen? Sure, I could fail. (Indeed, I still need to work on allowing myself to believe it’s even possible!)
But here’s the thing: if I seriously make the effort to make the Thriving Artists Project earn enough to eliminate my personal debt, I’ll sure as hell be working hard on it! A helluva lot harder than if I didn’t tie the Thriving Artists Project to the Debt Elimination Project. I’ve got a concrete goal to reach, after all, and a big one at that.
Brilliant.
So it is with a fair amount of trepidation that I unveil for you my Debt Elimination Project.
Bold indeed, especially since I’m still in the process of creating the Thriving Artists Project, and don’t even have a launch date yet.
What I do have, though, is interviews completed, scheduled with, or agreed to by a whole slew of fascinating, creative people, including:
… and the list is growing.
Not that I’m big on military metaphors, but what I also have is some excellent mentorship, inspiration and motivation along the way, including:
– The Third Tribe, an online resource (regular audio seminars and a rockin’ user forum) for internet marketing strategies that work (without being obnoxious)
– Guest Blogging, Jon Morrow’s brand new apprenticeship course in, you guessed it, guest blogging!
– Dave Navarro (The Launch Coach)’s More Buyers Every Month Group Mentorship
– The Empire Building Kit, Chris Guillebeau’s course and longest-autoresponder-in-history, which delivers an email in my box every single day with inspiration and tools to grow my business. (Plus more courses from Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides line: The Unconventional Guide to Art + Money, The Unconventional Guide to Freelancing.)
– Question the Rules, Johnny B. Truant and Lee Stranahan‘s audio course, which I return to again and again for inspiration and reminders that there are lots of ways to be a successful entrepreneur (or in my case, ARTrepreneur).
[Note: many of the links above are affiliate links, which means that if you click through and then buy something, I’ll make a commission. I’m always grateful to the anonymous purchasers who buy through my affiliate links, but if you don’t want your purchase to earn me money, just do a Google search on the thing and click through that way.]
Yup. I’m basically in self-paced grad school for using the internet to reach my Debt Elimination Project goal. Watch and learn.
So there you have it: the number one problem most artists (including me) have is not setting their goals high enough. Solution? Set higher goals, and work to achieve them.
Here we go!
And as Ann said at lunch the other day, once I’ve eliminated my debt, I can make the next goal my Mortgage Elimination Project.
Um, yeah. One thing at a time…
