The Oddest Little Business Book: for Creatives is the non-fiction work-in-progress that is obsessed with me getting it written ASAP. The book wants out–badly.
The Oddest Little Business Book: for Creatives is the non-fiction work-in-progress that is obsessed with me getting it written ASAP. The book wants out–badly.
It is about how to build a creative career that supports you both emotionally and financially. Because people need and want this information immediately, I have chosen to release The Oddest Little Business Book as I’m writing it behind a paywall. As a business coach, I know when you invest financially in yourself and your craft, it is the first step towards you owning your worth as a creative. When we invest money in our creative career, it gives us the confidence to ask for and receive money in exchange for our creations.
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The Oddest Little Business Book: for Creatives
This Book is for Creatives
If you have an idea that haunts you, an idea that you must put into a tangible form and share it with the world before you die or else you will feel like you have failed at being human, then this book is for you.
(If you read that opening sentence and thought, This writer is banana-pants crazy, I have no idea what they’re talking about, this book isn’t for you. It is for your friend who is a musician or artist or baker or writer or perhaps a little “quirky” in a way you’ve never understood, so next time you see them give them this book. They will be happy you gave them a present. You will be happy, because it feels good to make our friends happy, and you just saved yourself all the time of reading something that isn’t going to resonate with you.)
For those of us with a vision buried in our bones, I call us creatives. Creatives have the ability to take a completely intangible vision, that exists only in our minds, and give it form.
Creatives’ mediums are wide and ranging. I (obviously) am a writer, so I shape thoughts into words, opening doors to alternate realities via reading. You open doors to alternate realities in your own way, perhaps through songs, or drawing, or a delicious feast by star-light in an open field. You may identify as a painter, musician, actor, puppeteer, baker, architect, photographer, fashion designer, chef, computer-game coder, knitter extraordinaire, or an infinite amount of other things. What I know about you is, you possess an extraordinarily high rate of idea-phoria. (The ability to come up with new ideas quickly and frequently.) Because of your innate idea-phoria there’s a high probability you have one main area of creative expertise, but your creative work spills over into other mediums and formats. If this book fell into your hands, I know you have discovered your primary medium and have invested time into your craft and skills.
Craft refinement shows acceptance of your ability to turn ideas into reality. This acceptance is one of the things that sets you apart from the majority of the population. Everyone has this creation skill, but a large portion of the population has been conditioned to bury, or chosen to ignore, it. We creatives are unable to ignore our compulsion to create. At times it feels like our lives would be much simpler if we just acquiesced to “normal” and let go of our creative visions. A few of us have attempted to disregard our innate need to create, and if you’re like me, that resulted in mental health crisis and/or physical breakdown. Our “normal” is to move those ideas out of our bones and into the world so that our creation can impact someone else and help them do whatever that person is supposed to do with their life.
This book is here to help you get your creation in front of the person who needs it.
Yes. Someone needs your creation. Just like you needed that song when your mother died. Or that book when you couldn’t get out of bed. Or that piece of art when everything else in the world looked like straight up garbage. Your creation can inspire, motivate, and transform someone else—and that’s why you have that compulsion to bring it to reality.
Deep inside, you’ve accepted there is a person who needs your art, and you’re feeling frustrated because you aren’t sure how to get it to them. That’s why you’re reading the oddest little business book ever written.
This oddest little business book is going to help you and your creation change somebody’s life.
Stages of Creative Evolution
TOLBB is intended to be read in order, from front-to-back, regardless of how far along you are in your creative career. Through my coaching work, (Oh by the way, I’m a certified life & business coach.) I’ve found Creatives fall into three categories: Uninitiated, Initiated, & Established.
It doesn’t matter which stage you’re at, there are always learning gaps on the way to where you want to go next. This book is going to fill some of those learning gaps for you, but more importantly it’s going to teach you how to navigate unknown territory as you level up.
Building your creative business is just like refining your creative craft, and it all starts with a strong foundation. The four year old learning piano begins by playing a simple scale; the virtuoso performing at Carnegie hall warms up by playing a simple scale. The virtuoso has internalized and mastered the simple exercise, but they also understand the inherent value of their musical foundation and return to it on a regular basis.
If you’re reading as an Uninitiated Creative, let the games begin. If you identify as an Initiated or Established Creative, use the earlier chapters of this book as a way to refresh your foundation and illuminate places you can reinforce and/or strengthen it.
And yes, I know we all dream of putting our work out into the world and becoming an immediate, astronomical, critical and financial success. We want to fold space and time, letting us skip over all the Uninitiated and Initiated lessons. I too have indulged in that lovely dream.
Living a creative career and coaching other creatives has taught me: if all our dreams came true straight out of the gate, most of us would fuck it up. We’d spend the huge paychecks, fester in imposter syndrome, find ways to sabotage all the opportunities that had just landed in our lap, and (the saddest part of all) we wouldn’t enjoy ourselves or find happiness in our dreams coming true. Most of us would end up right where we are now, but we’d also have this horrible knowing that we’d had everything we wanted in front of us and wasted it.
This happens because our smart, tireless brains do their best to keep us safe. As a species we are engrained to stay within the confines of what we know, because what we know has kept us alive thus far. Being alive is very nice and good. I’m quite fond of it and intend to do it as long as I can, but surviving and living are two very different things.
Surviving is eat, sleep, reproduce. It is rote and fierce. Survival buries vulnerability and individuality because to stray from the pack you open yourself up to attack.
Living means exploring beyond what we know, growing into new places, ideas, and experiences. Living has space and time to enjoy, investigate, discover, rest, and savor. Living thrives on authenticity, individuality, and vulnerability—because it is through those traits innovation, evolution, and creation occur.
I know you can survive, and while you may not be ready to admit it to yourself yet—you know you can survive too. You have made it this far and you’re about to make it so much farther.
The space of living is where creative work gets really interesting, and it’s the space you were meant to end up.
Living through the Uninitiated and Initiated stages allows you to discover the sustainable, financially viable way for you to live off your creativity in a way completely unique to you.
TOLBB shows you how to baby-step through the next level of your creative career and see the opportunities for creativity to support you— for the rest of your life. Serious face. The beauty of what we do is creativity evolves, grows, and never runs out of surprises or playgrounds for you to explore.
Our lives were not intended to “put in sixty-years and retire” like we saw our parents and grandparents do. TOLBB is not teaching you to build a business and sell it so you can go pursue your passion later, when you “have the money” or “find the time.” You innately know that passion is where we are intended to start, that’s why you are so compelled to create.
You are also very, very lucky; because most people do not know what their passion is. They are still looking for their purpose. You are light years ahead of them, which is why you get TOLBB—because how they need to build a business is very different than how you discover your creative career. TOLBB is opening a door to show you how your creations are needed and have value; it is also going to show you how your creation can and wants to support you emotionally, financially, and energetically in the process.
This book teaches you to navigate and build creative success in a sustainable way. Most importantly it teaches you to hone your skills in finding the next right step for you specifically, in your very unique and individualized creative existence.
Core Concepts
Energy, Creative Stewardship, Unlearning, and Ownership impact your creative career at every stage. Because they play such an integral part, it’s best to become acquainted with the concepts right now.
Energy
You know the inherent energy of creativity.
It’s the spark you feel when you’re hit with the idea for a new project.
It’s that relentless obsession eating away at your brain until you take action to bring it forth.
It’s the creative work session, where time and space cease, because the project is unfolding in ways that surprise and inspire.
It’s the momentum that immediately follows a creative work session, which propels you to tackle something you’ve been putting off for an eternity.
Creative work gives us energy.
If we try to ignore that creative energy and attempt to bury it, it becomes draining. You have to use willpower and force to suppress it. Not working on a creative idea for too long is also exhausting, because humans aren’t designed to feed another entity forever. Humans were designed to incubate, grow something to a point, and then set it free.
Energy wants to move.
Creative energy wants to move through you specifically, because it knows you are the only person who can give it the proper form for it to achieve its end goal.
This book is going to teach you to harness creative energy beyond an individual project. It is going to show you how using energy as your guide you have the option to build a unique, fulfilling life. It is going to teach you to transmute energy beyond your artistic creations into money, adventure, relationships, anything else you can imagine, and more than a few things you’d never imagine.
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