Creative entrepreneur part 1 May 20, 2009

I have started working through some of the exercises from the book by Lisa Sonora Beam, The Creative Entrepreneur.

The exercises focus on 4 pathways to help design a viable creative business.

Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning looks at how to follow your heart’s desire and creative dreams, while lessening the potential for heartbreak.

Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow reveals how uncovering and using your unique gifts contributes to flow, or less-effortful accomplishment.

Pathway 3: Value and Profitability is about creating a customer-centric business, and how to create and deliver value that people will pay for.

Pathway 4: Tools and Skills presents the vital necessity of developing your business skills and leadership capacities to achieve the results you want in the first 3 areas.

I’ve done the collages and journalling that go with the first two pathways below:

 

Pathway 1: Heart and Meaning

I’ve always wanted to make a difference, do what I love on my own time table, not have to live according to the demands and expectations of others, explore what moves me and interests me as I am internally led, be noticed for my creativity, have a sense of accomplishment in my work.

My creative dream is to produce visually appealing and conceptually exciting work that communicates to others in an inspirational and thought provoking way, create several bodies of work that explore interesting themes, exhibit work in galleries, collaborate with other artists.

I would continue to learn, sharpen my artistic skills, paint, even if it didn’t pay.

What matters most to me is seeking to reach my potential, growing my latent talents and gifts, helping others explore their creative dreams, continuing my journey in reaching my creative goals.

I value financial security, recognition, helping others, autonomy.

I am most passionate about self-expression, self-realization, meaning, harmony, unification.

I have a burning desire to feel rooted, find my place, live joyfully, feel integrated in body, mind, and spirit. I want to be recognized and financially viable as an artist and mentor/creative coach.

If I was to answer my creative calling and knew I couldn’t fail, I would own a studio, produce work, invite people in, receive recognition and admiration as an artist and creative spirit, help others identify and reach their own creative goals, participate in a creative community that is altruistic and wholistic in nature.

My deepest creative longing is for creativity and leisure to take place at home, unharried; to make art and live a life of richness and meaning.

More than anything else I want to be part of a creative community where I am accepted, participating, producing, contributing.

 

Pathway 2: Gifts and Flow

What do you do so well you barely exert effort to do it? Spending time alone. Self Inquiry. Self awareness. Writing and journalling. Tying ideas and images together in symbolic, metaphorical ways. Abstract connections. Playful discovery.

What comes naturally or easily to you? Flexibility. Adaptibility. Creative problem solving. Although I love my artwork (drawing/painting) it is really hard work! I do not find that it comes naturally.

What do you get absorbed in for hours? Thinking. Daydreaming. I can get absorbed in a drawing or painting once I get started for 3 and 4 hour blocks of time. (But I need to have structure to get started. Being in school at this moment helps.)

What do you do that feels like rowing against the current? Being organized. Knowing where to start. Getting started. Making money and having financial savvy. Networking.

When are you most in flow? When I enter a project excited. When the project is new or when I return to an older project having taken a break. I have to have rested physically or mentally, need to feel energized instead of exhausted. I am most in flow when I have filled the creative well, when the idea for a piece has perculated for a while and I’m anxious to birth it, cross it off my to do list, when I have a build up of emotional energy. I am in flow sometimes unpredictably, as long as I am working, and work through the times I feel stuck.

What are your unique gifts? I like my sense of color and the ideas I want to express. I see the big picture. I  am a unifier and harmonizer of divergent things. I am persevering in pursuing the goals I have identified for myself.

What are the things you are better at than anyone else? Knowing what I want. Making decisions for my own life.

What would I like to stop doing even if I’m good at it? Stop procrastinating. Stop telling yourself you’ll do that later. Stop whittling time away in areas that are not priorities. Take those chunks of time to fill the creative well, take care of my body, reflect/journal, play outdoors, sketch, observe and take note of the things that inspire me. Stop deferring to others by allowing myself to be limited by what I perceive others expect or want from me. 

If you were using your creative capacities to the fullest, what would you be doing? I would be financially viable as an artist. I would be recognized, productive, showing and selling work. I would be satisfied with my work; it would remain authentic to my own creative vision.

How are you being underutilized? I am not investing enough time in my work.

Mastery November 19, 2008

Our level 1 class is reading the book Mastery by George Leonard. Many of us are hitting plateaus, feeling the frustration of trying to master our level of the craft, realizing that the breakthroughs are few and far between. Much of the time is spent just plodding along, doing the work, training but seeing little external leaps. However, in the steady work of the plateaus, something is happening. This book is a good reminder. Below are some excerpts I especially liked.

“To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone you skills, to attain new levels of competence. But while doing so – and this is the inexorable fact of the journey – you also have to be willing to spend most of your time on a plateau, to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.”

“The real juice of life, whether it be sweet or bitter, is to be found not nearly so much in the products of our efforts as in the process of living itself, in how it feels to be alive. Goals and contingencies are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.”

“Love of your work, willingness to stay with it even in the absence of extrinsic reward, is good food and good drink.”

“What is mastery? At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.”

“The essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.”

The dilemma February 16, 2008

On the one hand

• I’ve been dreaming about and planning to attend an art atelier for over 2 years now.
• I will scream if I have to continue my day job in which I do not feel that I am satisfying a needed sense of purpose.
• This is an important step in my long term dream of working and teaching out of my own private studio. 
• I want to follow my heart. 

On the other hand

• I may not be accepted into an art atelier this fall.
• I worry about financial security and don’t think the numbers are going to work out very well if I stop working.
• I don’t want to be in debt. 
• I want to continue to be able to live life with the extras (gym, organic farm share, concerts, trips…).
• I am afraid that even if I invest in becoming a better artist/teacher, I will still not be good enough to have a financially viable career.
• If I leave IBM now I am missing out on a well-paying career path with an established company.
• If I leave IBM now I am shutting the door to a secure job in an uncertain future.
• I am good at my day job (and have been getting positive feedback from important people). 
• I am used to sacrificing my dreams for practical and material reasons.

For now: I will apply to the art atelier. At least I will have a decision to make later if I am accepted. If I am not accepted, the decision is made for me.

Avian meditation December 2, 2007

My blue budgie obi is just learning to warble fragments of song - a tune that I sing faithfully to him everyday. Obi looks at me intently when he’s in a chattering mood, and I hear echos of my own vocal inflections and rare, but occasionally clear “hi, obi.”

Obi was acting lonely a month after we brought him home, talking to his mirrored self; so I picked up a green friend for him. Mango is much more shy than obi ever was and hides in the corner when I approach. They seem to like each other,  like siblings. They preen each other and share food, but also squabble in a raucous of feathers and squacks. I tell them not to use their ugly voices… but to tell the truth, they probably hear ugly voices from Chris and I.  The parental addage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

I never thought I’d be a doting pet parent… I was wrong. These little creatures brighten the day with their very aliveness and unpredictability. They are an avian meditation. I watch them, look at the clock, and realize that an hour or more has flown by. I watch them, and feel a sense of joy return.

Of lulls and glowering September 4, 2007

I haven’t been painting…and I don’t have any good excuses. I have been procrastinating. I know the reason is somewhere in my realm of knowledge and I’m blocking/denying it. Fear? Insecurity? I had a perfectly long labor day weekend in which I had the time, but I hemmed and hawed and decided my house needed to be clean and the laundry needed to be done (but those don’t require 72 hours – maybe just three). I did do some reading, but even that was avoidance! I know it! I willfully side-stepped valuable creative time opportunity after opportunity. I know I’ve had other longer hiatuses from my artwork, but none that I was so painfully aware I was taking because I was sulking. Insert image of me at seven scribble-scrabbling angrily over a perfectly decent seven year old self’s drawing, pressing so hard the paper rips. One of the shadows of my idealistic nature is the inward turned eye coping with the discrepancy of things as they are in my life and things as I wish them to be. Yes, fear and insecurity spring somewhere from that place, when I feel I won’t ever be who or what I imagine. Dreaming is necessary. Believing I am entitled to achieving my dreams without the pain of labor and failures (that’s where the sulkiness comes from, really) is vain. Yes, so I’ve hit a rough patch where I am hating my work and hitting walls. So there you have it. The dark side of the creative process.

A little gem February 13, 2007

I just started reading a little gem of a book, The Time Traveler’s Wife. It relates to my very first post “Seeing, and being seen.” I love how Audrey Niffeneger, the author, explores a relationship disjointed by time. The chronological and achronological experience of the lovers augments their love and knowledge of each other despite the inherent difficulties of the time displacements. The narrative reveals “multifacets” of personhood superimposed upon the beloved as the characters interact at different ages and years. That concept of knowing someone outside the boundaries of time, which fascinated me in my first posting, continues to intrigue in this satisfying, lovely, and well-construed tale.  

Seeing, and being seen September 18, 2006

I once read someone’s thoughts on seeing someone whole, outside the limits of linear time. The author proposed the idea of seeing a person’s entire personality over his/her lifetime multidimensionally in the context of eternity (i.e. Alice simultaneously at ages 5, 43, 80…). Metaphorically, instead of seeing just one face of a cut diamond, we see the diamond whole, all the facets at one time which give the diamond its sparkle and lustre. To truly behold someone and to be truly known in this way — what would that be like? It’s intriguing to think about.

I think I might be embarrassed if someone who knows me now, knew me as one of my past selves. I consider myself such a late bloomer and I’ve always been somewhat of a geek — even more of a work in progress (piece of work?) than I am now. On the other hand, friends who knew me in the past might expect me to always be who I was, limiting in expectation Adele at 15 in becoming who she needs and wants to be at 35.

To believe in Someone who knows me outside of time, in this multidimensional personality with all the flaws and imperfections in each face, and still values the diamond as a jewel and not a rock to be tossed, is enticing indeed. 

Though we do not see others in this multidimensional way, we sometimes get glimpses. People we know and love, over time become more precious as we recognize their value.

As an aside, I was recently reconnected with a friend from college who I painted for my senior art exhibition. I decided that I would paint her again. Perhaps changes that have taken place, both in her and in me, will be revealed in this endeavor, as I record two distinct glimpses separated by the span of eight years.

Here’s a photo of us eight years ago as well as a sneak peak of this work in progress: