I used to wake up each morning and think “I have to post on instagram”…
These days, I’m taking a different approach.
I’m going SLOWER.
Today, I decided to pick some flowers from my front yard before I sat down to create anything.
And being out there in the sun, amongst the bees and purples… that inspired me to create some calligraphy for Instagram.
Here’s what I wrote in the caption of the IG POST:
“Hurry”… they said, and that’s what I did.
Hurried through childhood, kept busy through my teens, flew frantically through college and law school, then worked my hours away in a small glass office…
So that I could finally stop in my sixties, exhausted. Too tired to do too much.
NO.
I’ll stop right now, pause and pick some flowers when they’re fresh and open to the world… not when they’re wilted and spent.
I will pick the flowers first, and then my creativity will flow and my work will blossom.
We’ve got it all backwards, haven’t we?
Sounds lovely, right? Slow down…. smell the flowers… feed your creativity first, and business with followwww…
Well, here’s what makes that romantic idea really COMPLICATED 👇
I ALREADY HAVE MONEY.
I honestly don’t know if I could embrace this slow, inspired way of doing things if I didn’t have a healthy financial cushion.
You see, I’m doing this weird experiment in 2023 where I run my business really DIFFERENTLY.
In short, I’m trying to do whatever the fuck I want, stay away from “SHOULDs”, and STILL make money somehow.
Recently, I put out a call on Instagram, asking people what QUESTIONS they had about this new way of doing business. And I got a really really great one:
Basically: ❓Is it even POSSIBLE to build a thriving art-based business without some hustle and unpleasantness?❓
Short answer: I don’t know for sure, because I’ve never personally done it that way.
Longer answer: I’m able to take it slow and easy right now because I have plenty of savings in the bank. Why do I have that savings? Because my business did extremely well in 2020 and 2021, largely because of my HUSTLE and ability to challenge myself and face discomfort.
>>>>So DO YOU HAVE TO HUSTLE FIRST, so that you can rest later?
I think that’s a really profound question that our whole society is struggling to answer.
Because the default for most people in the U.S. is —> Work hard all through school to get good grades, so that you can get into the best college, so you can the best job possible and work your ass off so you can climb the ladder, contribute to your 401K and retire comfortably at 65.
But usually, the stress and disconnection of all that hustle makes people so MISERABLE, that they’re spending their money on toys and vacations and alcohol and cars… all to try and make themselves FEEL BETTER as they drag themselves towards retirement.
What if we didn’t need SO MUCH, SO FAST?
Deep down, I truly BELIEVE that it’s possible to build a successful art-based business without burnout… as long as you define “success” very intentionally.
In 2019, I wanted to SCALE my business up quickly because:
I wanted to be “financially secure” so that I could do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.
I wanted my parents (and everyone who knew me, really) to be PROUD of me for being such a successful entrepreneur
It sounded fun to have money: to be able to retire my husband, buy a luxury camper van, travel first class, and stay at fancypants resorts
I thought I would be a more lovable and admirable person if I was a multi-millionaire.
What I didn’t realize was that:
“Financially secure” is a FEELING, not a circumstance. You hear about people who make millions and are still living month-to-month, and people who make $80K/yr who feel completely satisfied with their lives. I can achieve “financially secure” by spending my money very intentionally AND having full faith in my ability to always make more money, even when I’m in my seventies.
What matters most is that -I- am proud of myself. That kind of self-confidence is what people truly admire.
All those things still do sound fun and being able to spend money on whatever you want is a WONDERFUL feeling. AND, I can get equally wonderful feelings in other ways.
Nothing makes me more lovable than I already am. And knowing that about myself makes me more admirable than anything else ever could.
🔆If my definition of SUCCESS in 2019 were to:
Be happy working in my business every day.
Make enough money to live a modest and comfortable life filled with warm relationships and meaningful experiences.
Grow revenue slowly and steadily by: following my curiosity, putting value out into the world, building a community that I can help by being myself and sharing my art and my life lessons
TRUST that the growth will continue, so I will continue to be taken care of as I continue to create
… then YES, I 100% believe that I could have built a wildly SUCCESSFUL creative business without the hustle and burnout. I could have built something I truly wanted to work on each day.
But it’s really hard… because we’re trained to WANT SO MUCH.
We buy new things when we don’t really need them. We buy a third cocktail at dinner. We buy a bigger house because it’d be “nice” to have a dedicated home gym to rarely use.
Call it HEDONIC ADAPTATION or GOLDEN HANDCUFFS or THE RAT RACE… it has many names.
We just want to FEEL BETTER, and we think that new stuff and novel experiences will get us there.
What if we could go directly to the source and just feel better inside, living a really simple life?
I am a result of decades of hustle
In elementary school, I hustled to get straight As.
In middle and high school, I spent every night and weekend studying for the SATs and doing extracurricular activities.
I burned myself out in college trying to do too much and had to take a whole semester off for mental health reasons.
I stayed up late many nights in law school because your first year grades determined what “tier” of law firm you would get hired at.
I ate hundreds of dinners at my law firm desk, working for that six-figure salary.
I hustled my way to hundreds of thousands of followers and a million dollars in revenue in my creative business.
AND NOW, AT AGE 41… I’M TRYING TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY.
But any success I earn now, is earned on the back of all of that hustle, all of the skills and work ethic and smarts I cultivated through decades of hard work.
So I can’t say for certain that a successful, thriving art-based business can be built purely on joy and inspiration.
Because I have not and, never will, experience that.
🤔PHILOSPHICAL TANGENT:
And to complicate matters further, do we really DESERVE to be secure and live comfortably solely by “following our bliss”?
Or is that a FANTASY cultivated by mostly-white spiritual “influencers” who have generational wealth and a privileged sense of security, built largely on the backs of stolen indigenous lands and black/brown forced labor?
I mean, have you ever read the LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE series? People just a few generations ago had to work their ASSES off, just to survive. Our lives right now, in large part, are astonishingly cushy. Should it be that way, or have we raped the earth and screwed future generations in order to live luxuriously now?
Ok this is veering into territory WAYYY too large to tackle in this here blog post.
The point is… all of this is really COMPLICATED.
All I can do is experiment in my own life, learn as much as I can from my own specific set of circumstances, and share so maybe the learning can your life, too.
Let’s sum it all up: