How to Invest in Yourself by Thinking Long Term.
Art-Thinking
The nature of an “investment” is committing your resources in the expectation of some future benefit. In order to make progress in your creative career, you need to invest time and energy in your soft skills. In this article, I’ll discuss ways to improve as a creative from the inside out.
Long vs Short-Term
As artists, we want to begin to invest in ourselves for long-term results. Instant (short-term) results can be gratifying, but can lead to unfocused and anxiety-driven “task hopping”. Although dabbling in different careers and hobbies is important for exploring what your interests are, unchecked it can be a killer for productivity and improvement. It’s just not good for building lasting success. You could read dozens of different article excerpts in many different genres for example, but even if you find bits of interesting information scattered here and there, it cannot compare to reading a book from cover to cover and taking notes on every idea, for facilitating deep, lifelong learning.
Build Long-Term Success by Creating Value
To build long-term success, you must build the skills that make you a permanent linchpin in that particular domain. If you’re a blogger of local vegan restaurants, for example, you could focus on building the social skills and the writing/SEO skills necessary to be the best blogger to the point of Mastery. Your readers will continue coming back to your blog because you have taken the time to cultivate excellent content. In other words, you have created value for others, simply by building your skills. More skill equals more leverage, which gives you the ability to offer even more value to your clientele. Your audience will end up giving you more in return, continuing the cycle. The goal here is to strive to provide more value than you are receiving at any given moment.
What Kind of Skills Should I Cultivate?
Allotting more time to improve your skills and experience in your domain makes you a better asset to others, but what sort of skills should you be really focusing on? I am talking about going beyond just technical skills (which are of course also important), and going into the more abstract skills having to do with your inner self. You need a good balance of these “inner and outer” skills in order to become a true Master of your field.
These inner skills are called “soft skills”. Soft skills are things like social and emotional skills, where technical skills are more so in things such as figure drawing, color theory, etc. To determine what skills you are missing, ask yourself “What sort of person do I have to be to get to that position that I want to be in my career?” Ask yourself what that thing is that’s holding you back. Ask where your creativity is actually coming from, and how you could heighten this creativity.
Once you get inside of yourself, you can begin to structure your life in a way that supports your potential for creating. Believe it or not, summoning your Muse is a skill. If you’ve ever seen a master artist, they seem to make art with ease, and even have a sort of nonchalance about it all. They have embodied a creative orientation.
How Can I Cultivate Soft Skills?
Once you have a solid 1) view of where you are currently in your career, a solid 2) vision of where you want to be, and have taken the time to 3) define the things hindering you from achieving that vision, you can begin 4) taking practical action steps to improve.
I have determined that my main challenge for example is starting to create something. Let’s go through how I was able to determine this obstacle in attaining my vision and the steps I derived for gaining the soft skill of focus:
1) I currently tend to take on the “always too busy to make anything” mentality, and rarely take the time needed to do my art. I distract myself with things that I deem “urgent”, rather than “important”. This is a huge challenge that keeps me stuck where I am in my creative development and far away from my artistic vision.
2) My artistic vision is to create work every day which I can use in my blog posts, LinkedIn articles, and on social media. I love producing artworks that clearly visualize and communicate a concept that I am developing.
3) The challenges that I have are poor time management, prioritization, and maximizing the periods that I am actually working. I also have difficulties focusing on one task at a time and am easily distracted by other things that pop up during my workday.
4) The practical step that I have developed is to create what I call “bite-sized” artworks. Creating small artworks to post on my blog as well as on social media has helped me to relax from feeling like I need to deliver something grand every time I sit with a pencil (see my model here). These works are also more fun to work on and do not take up too much time, solving my problem of staying focused on one task.
With these steps, I am developing the soft skills of patience and focus.
Begin to See the Long-Term Value of your Practice
It might be difficult to be patient in your venture of acquiring soft skills. Each little task can feel slow and tedious. The trick is to see each little bit of practice in relation to your long-term goals: First, break down every action you do throughout your work, and then take the time to think about the value that they will each add in the future. Here’s a great example: “If you’re a writer and you write a 150-page screenplay that sells for $300,000, each page is worth $2,000!” Tedious practice and skill-building become more inspirational when you begin to think of the return that that investment will bring to you!
Once you’ve identified the top actions you do in your job or business and identified their potential value, double down on those things and remain consistent in working on them. These tasks tend to have a snowball effect in the future; “If that screenplay gets made into a popular movie, you’ll have the name recognition that will allow you to sell your next screenplay for $800,000. This screenplay would also be 150 pages, but now you’re getting paid $5,300 per page!”
But What if I don’t “Make It”?
One common misconception is that if you do not “make it”, all of your work will have been worthless. If you have chosen a career that is your deepest passion and that you enjoy the process of, then whatever you produced never be a waste. That being said, I cannot stress enough that you take the time to determine what you truly love doing, and to choose that as your end-game. In other words, the screenwriter should enjoy writing, and the painter should enjoy painting.
Arguably, the most valuable use of your time is to invest in building skills for the future. The more you can “build your brain”, the more likely you are to become sustainably rich because your knowledge is something that no one can take away from you. Your future knowledge and skills can be used to trade with others, which is important in our increasingly service-based economy. This will only become more and more of a reality as time goes on.
If you think about it, what else is there? Why do any career if you don’t enjoy it? And if you enjoy it, why wouldn’t you want to become the best you can be at it? I encourage you to think beyond tomorrow and to begin investing in yourself.
