First, I am a creative as most of you know. Deciding to start a business makes me a creative entrepreneur.
Not a small club. There are many of you out there. Creatives are not just artist or “visual people”, the word creative describes a lot of people.
If you look at the definition of Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. It parallels the definition of Entrepreneurship “which is is the practice of starting new organizations..” The word “new” is the key. It is not uncommon for us “creatives” to have many, many “new” ideas. It is also not uncommon for us to get excited about the “new“. The “next” thing that attracts us. Some people call it the “shiny object syndrome”. Of all of the fellow entrepreneurs that I know practically all of them (us) suffer from this. Some of us can control the urge to go toward the “new shiny” idea and some of us can’t. There is inherently nothing wrong with “shiny new ideas”, the challenge comes when you can’t focus on completing one idea before you are on to the next. This can have two results: 1. Success 2. Death (of the a business).
How can a creative entrepreneur avoid death by shiny idea and accomplish success? There is no right answer to this question. I can only share my experience, what I know. Though I too suffer from “SOS – Shiny Object Syndrome” I have learned that in order to keep focused I need to have a mission that is greater than me, a reason for doing everything that I am doing that cannot falter when I see a shiny object. This destination is very clear to me, I know what it looks like because I have visualized it, I know what it feels like because I have thought of what i will feel like when I get there, I know who I am during the journey because I have defined it. Without a greater sense of why we are traveling to get to our destination you risk doing what you do for the wrong reasons. Be that money, fame or both. The saying “Do what you love and the money will follow” is not far from the truth. At the center of who you are and what you do is this truth about what it is you do. This truth or essence could be called “Your Brand”. Everything you do should be an expression of this truth, of your brand.
Let me illustrate it using myself as an example. Follow me:
I am a graphic designer, I do interactive design, I am very entrepreneurial, I started and own an interactive design firm, I build web based businesses and online marketing campaigns for clients. I like to teach, I have taught for 10 years, I started an education business to teach creatives and others what I have learned about starting businesses, that business will include online software, etc. Everything in that progression is in a sequence. A sequence that builds upon itself, one thing after the other. Like a layer cake. Each new step depends on the last step.
Building my brand has taken time, consistency and hard work. And it is still at it’s infancy. It could have been VERY easy for me to loose sight of the end-game and switched to another “Shiny Object” that came by, but the design firm depends of my design skills my education company depends on the success of the design firm and the software it is building etc. They each buttress each other.
In my next post I am going to talk about creating that mission, that destination, that “brand” that will allow you to take the journey without getting distracted and suffering Death by Shiny Object.
