Find Your Voice

If it’s money you’re after, there are people more qualified to guide you than me. Yes, I’ve managed to scrape together a living while seemingly avoiding the grind of a “normal” job, but it hasn’t been a cake walk. I’d be afraid to add up the hours I’ve spent doing things I would have rather not had to do. I call it the 80/20 rule. You spend 80 percent of your time doing stuff you’d rather not do, and 20 percent doing the things you love—and I’m being generous here. If that seems like a normal job to you, you’d probably be correct. But despite all of that, let’s talk about how to get started anyway.

If you want to follow your muse and cut your own path, approach things like an artist who dropped out of business school. Be prepared to use your truncated education on 80 percent of the work, and let your freak flag fly on the 20 percent that makes you be you. Not everything you create will solve problems and answer questions for your customers and fans, but that’s not the point—at least in the creative part. Don’t worry, your rational self will be waiting down the line to reveal the cold hard truth later.

“Being a creative person is a series of trial-and-error episodes as much as any kind of formal schooling.”

In art critic Jerry Saltz’s book How to Be an Artist, he spells out how to discover your path—a sort of step-by-step guide to making the right kind of “mistakes” that bring you to the place where you know and understand how to be uniquely you. In fact, you might want to stop reading my drivel and go buy his book now. That gets us both off the hook.