Let’s Talk About the sequence of your Goals
Coffee Sunday
☕️ Coffee Sunday, is a discussion about creative careers. I’ll share my firm stance, but just as an opinion and I invite everyone to share their own, ask questions of each other, and my goal is really to get us talking and learning from one another. Today we’re talking about the sequence of your goals.
Don’t be a Donkey
Derek Sivers has a wonderful blog post titled Don’t be a Donkey, it’s an illustration about doing one thing at a time by having foresight and patience.
Derek Says;
“If you’re thirty now and have six different directions you want to pursue, then you can do each one for ten years and have done all of them by the time you’re ninety. It seems ridiculous to plan to age ninety when you’re thirty, right? But it’s probably coming, so you might as well take advantage of it.”
He illustrates this with this story:
“Buridan’s donkey is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. It keeps looking left and right, trying to decide between hay and water. Unable to decide, it eventually dies of hunger and thirst.”
It’s hard to choose I get it.
There are so many interesting passions we can pursue.
But by trying to tackle too many we actually handicap ourselves.
Imagine, your website focuses on selling art prints, but your X/Twitter says you’re an aspiring writer. And when I click on your Instagram I see pictures of your daily relationship comics.
And on LinkedIn, you’re in charge of the finance of a tech startup.
You’re sending potential clients away confused.
Instead…
Imagine every link on your Link-tree clearly said; What you do.
“I make Children’s Book illustrations”
And it was consistent everywhere the client looked. You’ve passed the first hurdle, you’ll be put into a bucket of, when I need this, this person seems reliable. The only way you can do this is if you make a choice.
When I made the choice to be a Children’s Book Illustrator, the hardest part was updating my LinkedIn, signaling to a network that I spend a decade building that I was no longer available in my former capacity, but was embarking on a new adventure.
I was offered my first Children’s Book the same week.
”There are some games that only allow you to play if you decide to go all in”
- Jordan Peterson
“A single trade can feed a family, 6 trades can’t even support one’s self”
- Og Mandino
Discussion
I’m saying let’s do it all one thing at a time, perhaps one decade at a time.
Okay, so this is the discussion… does this ring true to you? Do you have contrary examples or stories? How do you see it?
PS: In my extra newsletter/section for paid subscribers, I write briefly about how I sequence, days, weeks, years, and decades.
Hmm.... I get this in terms of wanting to go off on ALL the possible illustration (and pattern design!) tangents. I got into a zone and was making money from pattern design (not a living, mind you) and, instead of digging deeper into that and pushing and promoting, I veered off toward illustration because it looked fun and because I thought I could do it, whereas before I couldn't have. And then I got book deals and, while I did keep pushing and promoting there, I also started veering back toward pattern design, at the same time as digging into other areas of illustration (because I didn't want to miss out on those opportunities either).
BUT... First of all, I can't switch off my educational publishing stream of income and work that I have built up for decades UNTIL I can consistently make enough money from illustration. In the same way as I didn't go freelance until I had enough freelance clients/jobs to know I could make a consistent living from it. In 8 years I probably could, because the kids will have left home and the mortgage will be paid off and we can concentrate only on what we need to survive. I can't and won't risk losing our house (etc.)
AND... Second of all, I built a successful (in my terms - i.e. gives us a comfortable standard if living) business by providing a variety of different services (within a specific industry niche). I didn't just concentrate on editing and proofreading, but branched out to indexing and typesetting, and then to design, and then to digital development, and then to typesetting PowerPoints and Word files, and then to creating 'typesetter illustrations', and then to editorial management, and then to project management etc. etc. My multi-faceted experience and expertise within the particular industry make me a go to supplier for multiple educational publishers and for multiple different types of projects, meaning downtime is less frequent than it was at first.
SO... I think it is possible do all of the things, as long as you niche down in ONE way (i.e. for me in my initial career, this was UK educational publishing). For you, it might be children's illustration (allowing the expansion into illustrating for products and home décor etc. and possibly also educational books, rather than JUST children's books) or it might be book illustration (allowing the expansion into adult, for example). For me, in my illustration career ... Yeah, I really really do need to settle on some kind of direction and focus! But what if it's the wrong one????