It can be so damn hard juggling any kind of pursuit or dream alongside the very real demands of our daily lives: family, work, meals, chores, child-raising, rest, and more. You’re not alone in feeling like there’s never enough time to actually focus on the work you want to experiment with or the creative business you’d like to grow. While finding the time can be next to impossible, it’s made even harder if the time you do find is spent going down rabbit holes, around in circles, deep-diving on other creatives’ Instagram profiles you wish were your own, and searching for yet another inspirational TikTok that promises to give you a $1m secret in the next 60 seconds, so make sure you don’t scroll.

That’s why you need a streamlined process, that’s as simple as possible, that could see you change your whole damn creative life in even just two hours a week. Yep. It’s possible. Six weeks, ten hours a week? Dreamy. Six weeks, two hours a week? You’ve still got what you need to define your product/service, find the human it’ll create beautiful value for, sell it, and see those cash results - but only with a system that’s designed for you, not for future MBA accountant-ers. (God bless’ em, though, we love accountants.)

Totally! So’s your favourite artist whose song you walked down the aisle to at your wedding. So’s the ceramicist who made your favourite mug that you start every day with. So’s the designer who made that pair of jeans you’ll wear to death because they fit just-so-right. So’s the writer whose book you’ve had to buy four times because you keep loaning it out, forcing everyone you love to read it. So’s the podcast host whose words you listen to every time you take your cool girl walk. So’s the barista across the road who’s trained for years to give you that necessary, smooth flat white just when you need it the most.

Some of the most beautiful parts of our lives are defined, created and offered by artists of all shapes and sizes. If every single one of them believed they were a sell-out for deserving fair and appropriate compensation for their time, skills, energy, training, experimentation, emotional labour, physical labour, mental labour, sunk costs, missed income, personal investments, risk-taking…. The list goes on, but it means that many of the experiences and things we love would just simply - poof! - no longer exist.

If you’ve been impacted by the work of someone in a creative field, if your life has been made better in tiny or momentous ways as a result of their offering, then you’ve got the mindset tool you need to implicitly understand that creative work is work. It has meaning. Value. Impact. And that’s a financial meaning, value, and impact.

Your work is financially valuable. By choosing to honour its value, you’re investing in yourself, your family, and every other maker who goes before you and comes after you, contributing to a cultural standard we should all desire to be on the right side of.

Given how uncomfortable it can be to ask people to pay us what we’re worth, as creatives, we’re quick to run to more training, more degrees, more hypotheticals, more learnings. If we can throw another course on the to-do list, we’ll become more trustworthy, right?

While some learnings are absolutely necessary to forward progression, there is no ‘arrival’ point when it comes to your creative career. In fact, some of the wisest people in the field tell us to ‘build in public’, to bias towards action, and to learn how to test, grow, and iterate, out where other people can see us.

The things you’ll learn by doing, not thinking? Priceless. By choosing to move now, with your existing skills and abilities (of which there are SO many more than you’re giving yourself credit for, guaranteed!), you’ve the ability to pull off a magic trick: to condense time, and learn in months what may otherwise take decades of slow, plodding inaction to achieve.

In short: the boat’s setting sail. Make sure you’re on it. You’ll build up the necessary callouses on the water, in motion, not watching from the shore.

It can easily feel like we’re totally alone in what it is we’re interested in, attracted to, or desiring to make - until you spend just a few minutes on the internet.

Have you ever deep-dived into Reddit? There are communities for everything. Have you seen the millions of listings on Etsy? Walked your local shopping centre and noted store after store catering to different people, different interests, different budgets, different needs?

‘There’s riches in the niches’ is a powerful way to reframe a belief that your work may be too insular to matter to someone else. And in this process, we’ll find exactly who they are and how you can thrill them with your offering together - no matter how niche!

As a creative, it’s so easy to feel like everyone else is having their moment. They’re winning the awards, receiving the grants, launching the projects, updating the portfolios.

You know those fun-house mirrors, where your appearance can suddenly be warped to be larger or smaller? That’s like what can happen in the creative industries: we see the watershed moments in others’ careers, but not the everyday grind, hustle, inaction, failure that it’s taken year-round to get to that one nice press release.

If you’re comparing your timeline to anyone else’s, it’s important to check: have you got all of the information about their journey? Even the ugly bits?

…and even if you have, why does it have any impact on your own?

It’s never too late for you to bet on yourself. You’re the best investment you could ever make, with the highest rate of compounding ROI. It’s only when you think the doors have closed that you make them so.
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Time to rattle on some of those doorknobs? Let’s get into it.

Everyone else knows something I don’t. They’re naturally more gifted at this. I’m foolish for thinking I could try. It’s embarrassing I’d consider backing myself in the first place

.… sound familiar?

That, my friend, is the twin siren call of self-doubt and imposter syndrome. A strange bedfellow to many of us creative adventurers, it’s designed to keep you small, safe, and secure - far, far away from any chance of growth, discovery, or opportunity.

You’ve figured out every impossible moment life has presented you with up until now. You’ve woken up on the other side of truly difficult, no-way-I-can-do-this things. You’ve faced immense fears and pressures, and you’ve lived to tell the tale.

You’re so much more capable than you realise. But you’re also not meant to do it alone, in an echo chamber where your scariest thoughts are bouncing back at you. When you realise other people feel exactly the same way, and they choose to do the thing anyway, it becomes a little dash of fuel you can pour into your own tank - before pouring it on into someone else’s when you do the same.

You’ve got all the resourcefulness you need to turn this dream into a reality. With a strategically simple process, you can focus less on what you don’t have, and more on exactly the right next simple, small, powerful step to take.