Point, Aim, Shoot: How I Make a Living as a Creative
If there’s one thing I learned from years of freelance videography work, it was the importance of focus, clarity, and awareness. Clients are picky. They have a vision, and it rarely matches my own. I always have to figure out what it is they really want to see– people aren’t always good at describing or knowing what they want, and so part of my job is to generate the widest breadth of perspectives I can, all while balancing it with a clear focus on what’s most important. Maybe they want to be the star of every frame– maybe they’re shy and the subject is their business or product. But losing touch with your creative identity– your soul– threatens to jeopardize the whole enterprise. What’s it all for if I can’t make what I want? How do we balance marketability and our creative integrity?
There is absolutely a way to combine the two. “But the world should just appreciate my ideas, regardless of their utility,” the young creative responds. Look, I agree and sympathize. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time making things– videos, photos, and music– for other people; enough to know that most people don’t have any sense of taste. That the world often rewards marketability over genius. Punk is a rotting corpse. The creative spirit is alone, misunderstood, and unappreciated. What are we to do– protest? Revolution is unlikely and possibly even unjust. The only thing you can do is to equip yourself in every possible way to survive and to try and keep your soul in the process. In a world of uncertainty, the development of the creative individual’s physical, mental, and spiritual faculties are a necessity. We can lament or we can build. But it requires a fine balance between increasing perspective-taking and focus.
As a creative, it is your responsibility to become more virtuous and to solve the problems that the vast majority of humanity is simply too unaware to even see. This requires the taking of multiple perspectives– it is not enough to consider your own. You must take the perspective of the masses if you are to reach them through your work. Throughout history, clever artists have found ways to attract the eyes of patrons and audiences, all while doing their own tinkering on the side– their real work. The greatest works of art have held simultaneously exoteric and esoteric meanings. Your unique perspective is what differentiates you from other creatives— it matters more than gear, more than skills, more than anything.
A variety of lenses used to capture the same scene can have dramatically different effects on the final image. How it looks, the emotions it inspires, what it amplifies and signifies– all of this change with the lens used to perceive. Do I want a super wide perspective, capturing as much around me as possible? Or am I trying to focus on something really small, specific, particular? The mistake is to assume that one perspective can be holistic and all purpose. Similarly, with your creative endeavor, the goal is not to set one goal and mindlessly pursue it. With time passed, what initially inspired you may be discovered to be meaningless. In a moment of crisis, your initial presuppositions might be found to be narrow-minded, misguided, or misinformed– that what you were truly seeking was something else. You can’t know until you gain the perspective afforded by experience. It is your job as a creative to subject yourself to the widest breadth of experience for the sake of the expansion of perspective and focus.
Here are your action steps for the next week:
Decide which realm you want to improve in. It can be anything, even things you think might not make money. When I started making videos as a kid with a camcorder, I had no idea I’d be asked to film corporate commercials years later.
Set a goal large enough to test your abilities. Something achievable within the next month. It can be anything; make X dollars doing Y, maybe revise that rough draft you left abandoned in some dusty drawer, network with X amount of people per day to start generating traffic toward your work. This is your personal project so let it align with your goals.
Make it just outside of your current ability, but not so complex that you can have an excuse not to complete it.
Add social pressure by betting your friends you’ll complete it on a deadline. I go into this strategy in more depth here. Make it embarrassing to cheat yourself out of completing this.
Publish on the deadline regardless of how you feel about it.
Get feedback once it’s complete, but not from friends or family. They’ll tell you it’s good even though it isn’t. You need to seek out someone in your field and ask for critical feedback.
Integrate feedback non-personally. You are not your work; your work is not you. Even if the critic misunderstood your work, through their feedback you have at least learned something valuable about them and about what the market values.
The goal of all of this isn’t to complete the most amazing piece of work ever, but to gain perspective so you have something to iterate on and to start your portfolio. Figure out what works, what you enjoy, and where the gaps in your knowledge are. In the creative world, speed beats endless planning. Work ethic has to compliment talent. Get perspective by failing as quickly as possible. Point, aim, shoot.
