You DO have insurance, DON’T YOU?

The county music duo Sugarland has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from the collapse of the stage at the Indiana State Fair three months earlier.  The accident, which killed seven and injured another 44, occurred just minutes before the group was set to perform.  Yes, having probably narrowly escaped death, the group finds itself at risk again.

It’s a tragic situation and I’ll leave a discussion of the finer points of negligence theory to the legal scholars.  But I want to highlight the importance of taking steps to adequately protect your business.  This includes liability insurance.

I have run shows both ways: fully insured and sans insurance.  The “commando style” show even featured an aerialist suspended breathtakingly close to the heads of the front row audience.  Everything turned out okay, but promoting a show without the financial safety net of insurance was an unnecessary risk that I’m not exactly proud of… or willing to take again.  Several organizations offer group liability insurance coverage for clowns and other performers at incredibly reasonable rates.  I could not have put on a show at a Six Flags theme park–featuring a half-dozen fire performers, no less–without such insurance.

Yes, I’ve gotten away with it, and maybe you have, too.  But for many professional venues, the lack of insurance is a show stopper.  For that matter, so is a lawsuit.  Insurance won’t ward off lawsuits, but policies can be a talisman against the financial devastation that can follow an unfortunate accident.

photo credit: variationblogr

We fear a lot of things.

From an evolutionary perspective, fear keeps us alive. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself. As cave dwellers, we were right to fear the sabre-toothed tigers who would eat us without a moment’s hesitation. The fight-or-flight response has, so far, saved our species from extinction from a variety of threats.

As modern humans, we have the same physical reactions to fear–fight or flight–as our ancestors did. But having addressed the menace of the sabre-tooth tiger and with most of us adequately fed, watered, and sheltered, our fear-based self-preservation system has tuned its emotional radar screen to a more insidious source of danger: threats to our ego.

“The defense of ego is a driving force behind achievement in many fields,” according to Michael Clarkson writing in Intelligent Fear. Worrying about what others think is epidemic.

Yes, we fear failing. We fear embarassing ourselves. We fear becoming the guy who lives in his van down by the river.

But most of all, and most interestingly, we fear being successful.

We crave the fame and fortune, but we (secretly) worry about the changes that success will bring to the way our life is currently constructed.

All this fear leads, inevitably, to irrational choices and bad behavior. The biggest, meanest, baddest-mutha consequence, especially for creatives, goes by many names much like The Devil Himself.

Steve Pressfield calls it The Resistance.

Seth Godin sometimes calls it The Lizard Brain.

Eric Maisel calls it Anxiety.

By whatever name, “It” is the part of our psyche that sabotages our own success out of a fear for what failure and success will do to the present condition of our ego.

photo credit: Joaquin Villaverde Photography

I had to share this.  Inspiring.

Fresh off Seth Godin’s blog:

Art is what we call…

the thing an artist does.

It’s not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It’s in the soul of the artist.

Now get out there and be an artist!

Photo by bidrohi

I don’t normally make light of the IRS.  That’s an avoidable controversy in my line of work.  But one of the agency’s latest educational outreach efforts has got me snickering.

“Your Guide to an IRS Audit” takes the viewer through the steps of an audit from notification to closing. The video series is composed of scenarios that demonstrate the stages of each type of audit: correspondence, office and field.  The scenarios address issues that are common to audits of small businesses.

No doubt about it, audits can be scary.  And surely, being walked through the process helps lower anxiety.  But I can’t help comparing this with some of the classics of ephemeral films like Duck and Cover, Signal 30, and VD is for Everybody.

Image courtesy of The Internet Archive

I believe that creativity can peacefully and profitably co-exist with business.

But that’s not going to happen until we own up to the notion that the core skills we need to be an artist–even a genius artists–are not sufficient to be a successful artist.  Gifts and talents in the artistic realm don’t guaranty success in the commercial realm.

Seth Godin, an extraordinary marketer who isn’t known for pulling his punches, said it best: “Those struggling artists at the local craft faire are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level.”

While Seth might be right about what’s holding us back, I believe that if you’re willing to learn about yourself, focus on your strengths, delegate your weaknesses to pros & monitor their work, and remember to ship, you just might be able to enjoy your success.

Heck, even art schools are finally getting into the act.  CCA in San Francisco, Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Parsons New School and Pratt in New York City, and Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia now offer programs designed to teach not just how to think visually, but how to communicate in the language of business.

If art schools are doing it, don’t you think “all this talk of commerce” merits looking into?

An artist who understands both the creative and the business worlds, and who can clearly articulate their value to others, is much more likely to bridge the gap between creativity and business success.

You might call this person an artrepreneur.  Or an entreprenartist.  I prefer the infinitely more pronounceable profitably creative. What you choose to call this type of well-rounded person matters less than choosing to be this person.

Photo by Evan Long

Surfing the interwebs recently, I came across this little gem:

Back of every “Success Story” you will almost invariably find a story of hard work.  There is nothing startingly new about this observation, but it is one which can never be overlooked when you are interested in achieving recognition—and remuneration—beyond the average.  I am not denying that some people seem to get “the breaks” which push them ahead faster than others who might be just as capable and deserving, but this is the exception rather than the rule. And a lucky break never helped anyone who wasn’t prepared to make the most of it when it came. In other words, there is no such thing as overnight success.

Those words are as true for artists and performers today as they were when they first appeared in the February 1938 issue of Accordion World.

Scott Harrison built Charity: Water into a $5 million organization in less than three years.  But to do so, he relied on an e-mail list of 12,000 names he’d developed over years of working as a nightclub promoter, as noted by Chris Guillebeau in The Art of Non-Conformity.

It took Gary Vaynerchuk a mere 18 months from the launch of his site, winelibrarytv.com, to get a guest appearance as a wine expert on the Conan O’Brien show.  As Vaynerchuck explains in Crush It!, he’d been working in his family’s liquor store since age 16–selling the stuff before he could even drink it himself–and spent hours training his palate to discern exotic tastes ranging from mango and papaya to sweaty socks.

Look past the public hype, and you’ll see someone who’s been at it for years.  Even the youngsters.

Tiger woods might have been, at 21, the youngest player to ever win the Masters Tournament, but by that time he’d been playing golf for 19 years.

So the next time you hear some story about the latest phenom who seems to come out of nowhere, don’t get jealous.  Okay, maybe a little jealousy can be a motivator.  But don’t fall into the trap of thinking they got there–and “if only” you could get there–without hard work.

Photo by ACME-Nollmeyer

A lot of arteestic types say they’re too busy or they can’t be bothered to learn about commerce.  Some go so far as to say they’re not interested in material things.  They act as though they enjoy starving.

I call bullshit.

Arteests don’t try to learn about these unfamiliar, uncomfortable topics because it’s scares them.  Don’t underestimate how powerful The Resistance can be, and how easily our fragile egos will trick us into rationalizing away our fears as something–anything–other than what they really are.

Money, in and of itself, is merely a tool that simplifies the exchange of value between people.

For instance: You’re a goat farmer with a broken truck and I’m a truck mechanic.  You might offer me one of your goats as payment for my repairs to your truck.  If I like goat meat, we’ve got a deal.  Now if I’m a vegetarian who hates goat cheese, the goat’s value to me is questionable and the deal is off.  But what if I love goats so much I set the price for the repairs at one-and-a-half goats?

Money is society’s workaround for the one-and-a-half goat problem.  Or, as one of the central characters in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged explains it:

Money is the material shape of the principle that [people] who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.  Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force.  Money is made possible only by the [people] who produce.  Is that what you consider evil?

Where people and by extension, money, get a bad rap is when they want money without having to provide value for it–Rand’s moochers and looters–or they just accumulate money for the sake of having more without making or doing something meaningful with it.  Like animal hoarders or junk hoarders, money hoarders aren’t much fun to be around.  If all you’re focused on is counting ducats while you ignore your audience and your craft, then you deserve every bit of nothing that heads your way.

If you want to create art for art’s sake, then do that.  Have a blast and don’t worry about the money.  Your art is your gift to society.

But if you’re trying to earn money from your creative efforts, then you need the marketplace–the intersection of art and commerce–because that’s where value is exchanged and, as British writer and metaphysicist Stuart Wilde reminds us, “the Universe cannot mail you a check from the clouds.”  And the better you understand the marketplace and commerce, the better you can “find other humans, satisfy their needs in some way, and have them transfer a little symbology into your bank account.”

It’s an unfortunate fact that most ideas just never happen.

After some extensive research with creatives, Scott Belsky writing in Making Ideas Happen, said that creativity itself is, “the greatest obstacle to seeing our ideas through to the finish.”

Whoa.  A bunch of real, working artists said the thing that goofed up their work the most was their own creativity?

Yep, and it gets worse.  Belsky goes on to identify the series of negative tendencies and challenges that accompany the creative psyche:

• self-doubts
• distaste for negative feedback
• tendency to use idea-generation as a way to escape the pain of self-discipline and execution
• rampant disorganization that (supposedly) fosters creative thinking

In my humble opinion, this is the real root of all evil… or at least the evil that stands in the way of our success.

Photo by sean94112

Two observations:

If you consider yourself a working artist, you’re likely a starving artist.

If you’re starving, it’s very likely your own damn fault.

Now I’m really going to piss you off.

Starving artists are much like the hordes of zombies that frequent our popular culture today. Think about it: they spend all day milling about with other zombies, mindlessly looking for morsels of food. If a fresh brain (or, potential audience) happens to inadvertently cross their field of view, they pounce (or, slowly coagulate en masse as zombies do) and a few of the zombies get some scraps or the brain is scared away, unscathed. Either way, the still-hungry zombie hordes shuffle off and resume milling about.

Why does this image endure in our society?

Because it’s largely true!

Does that piss you off? Good! It should.

Does that make it fair? No! It doesn’t.

Do you want to do something about it? Maybe even to prove me wrong?

Excellent! Read on.

Jumping off the cliff.
Pulling the trigger.
Taking the plunge.

Whatever you want to call it, I’ve just done it.

As of July 1, I’ve left the comfortable confines of corporate life to make my own mark on the world. I’ve joined the ranks of the willingly self-employed in order to realize my vision of …

Crap. What’s my vision again? If I can’t remember it, it must not have been that important. And if it’s not that important, how can I make any money at it? Oh no. Maybe it’s not too late to ask for my old job back…

And so it goes. From the soaring heights of self-empowerment to the depths of despair and debt in five seconds flat. An emotional roller coaster.

But also necessary. Alan Moore, who wrote V for Vendetta and Watchmen among other popular comics and graphic novels, described his own transition experience:

Quitting my day job and starting my life as a writer was a tremendous risk. It was a fool’s leap, a shot in the dark. But anything of any value in our lives whether that be a career, a work of art, a relationship, will always start with such a leap.

But now that I’ve leapt, how can I be sure to land on my feet rather than my face?  It’s inevitable that from time to time I’ll feel like a fool and regret my decision. That’s fear talking. What Seth Godin calls the “Lizard Brain.”

Consistent action and focused intent are the only ways I’ve been able to overcome it and get things done.  I’ve picked up a little trick that seems to help. I even use it at the gym. Once I’ve picked my goal—let’s say, to run two miles—I ignore it. Instead of focusing on the Big Goal, which inevitably makes me anxious and want to quit before I embarrass myself by failing to achieve it, I focus on the little milestones.

When I’m running, I don’t count how many laps I have to go, I count how many laps I’ve made and only think about making two quick turns on the track to get me to my next half-lap goal. The chatter in my brain sounds something like this:

5… 5… just have to get to 5½.
5½… 5½… two quick turns and I’ll be at 6.
6… 6… just have to get to 6½.

Before long, I’ve tricked myself into running 18 laps and I’ve accomplished by two mile goal.

E. L. Doctorow said that “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Leaping, running, driving.  The metaphors may be a bit mixed, but the advice is still solid: Take a chance and keep at it, and you’ll get there.

I’m feeling energetically giddy again.  I feel a great sense that anything is possible, good, and has promise.  And I want to do everything at once.  It’s energy overload.

This can be tremendously helpful in my creativity, but if I don’t learn to harness it better, I’ll get sidetracked by everything rather than making a quantum leap in impact for one thing.

I’ve been reading Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen.  I get so excited when an idea resonates.  The excitement starts with the thought, “I want to do that.”  And, because I’m fearful I’ll either forget the idea or lose the excitement driving it, I’m compelled to do that right now.  And I’ve stopped reading and started on that.  Then, I’m so excited about that, I want to do this.  And before I know it I’m simultaneously working on this.  Or this.  Or this.

Raw creative energy at its finest, manifesting itself as a thousand-ideas-at-once.  When it hits, it feels like being sidechecked and dragged around the ice by a sweaty, growling hockey player with no front teeth.  When the ride’s over, I’m breathless.  What a rush!  But am I any closer to the goal box?

Figuring out how to deal with this is a lot like asking how to wrangle a lightning bolt.  Here’s a trick that works for me:

Whenever I’m trying to focus on one task that’s generating a lot of other ideas I want to remember but don’t want to process in the moment, I take out a 3×5 index card, or if I’m feeling particularly frisky, a letter-sized page folded in half lengthwise.  Having a narrow width to write on (3″-4″)  seems key, so that I can keep it just to the right (or left, for you southpaws) of what I’m working on.

When I get an idea tangential to my chosen focus, I force myself to simply write it down without acting on it, and immediately return to what I was doing.

Simple, no?  Yeah, try it sometime, bub.

The real magic behind the trick is the immediate return to my chosen task.  By capturing the idea nugget, I mitigate the urge to deal with it for fear of losing it in the deluge of the idea storm.  I can have my daydream moment (or half-hour, as just happened while writing this–I never claimed to be perfect) and get right back (more or less) to the task at hand.

Photo by maggieandcharles.