You see, during the initial pandemic lockdowns of 2020, which here in Melbourne, Australia, were very long indeed, I finally turned my attention to something I had long ignored: learning to cook, and to find pleasure in cooking. And boy, did I take to it like a fish to water! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am definitely a massive noob in the kitchen still, but I have had the time and the headspace, plus the coaching of my beautiful wife and and her father, a retired French chef, to show me the way. Plus of course, an entire Internet’s worth of champions to show me the way.

So I started cooking, and being a massive show pony, my next thought after that was “I should make a youtube channel about this!” to which my wife wisely shook her head, but hey, when I get an in idea, there is no stopping me and this was an idea that once it took hold, just wouldn’t let go.

Well, 2020 turned into 2021 and here in Melbourne we are STILL enduring lockdowns (don’t get me started on THAT) and consequently, I have moved ahead with my plans to create a YouTube channel and am now deep into the world of video creation and YouTube channel growth. Oh boy, and I thought I was just learning to cook! Anyway, I am having a ball doing this and I just thought I would pop up a quick post to let you know what I am doing, and so please! Go and check out the videos. You can learn how to cook sea perch, or how to cook a steak with a chimichurri sauce or even how to make a chicken curry like a boss.

Life is good. Enjoy.

However, if you look closely at the arts, you will see that this is not the whole case, in fact many creatives benefit from what business-heads call “leverage”. This does not, in this context, mean debt. It means getting more output out of less input. For example, you can “chip away at it”, like an old fashioned craftsman, or you can shove entire tree branches into a wood chipper to get a result, at scale, fast. When it comes to creativity, the go-slow method is romantic and thus generally admired, and yet the real money has always been in creating a factory to pump out the art at scale.

The question here is: which way of working is right for you? And are the two mutually exclusive? Let’s have a closer look at mechanisation (wood chippers) vs. artisans (charcuterie).

The Charcuterie Approach

Firstly, in case you aren’t up on it, charcuterie is the art of making traditional French cured meat products. Examples of the Charcuterie Approach are everywhere. Musicians, at least those who don’t have a big enough following to sell recordings at scale, use the artisanal approach to earn money by doing one-off shows. These need rehearsing for and require the personal attendance and performance of the musicians involved. There is nothing factory-like about this approach, at least not as it applies to most bands; it is pure manual labour, if indeed, that of love.

Painters are another example of the ‘chip away at it’ approach, painting one piece at a time and hoping to sell the actual painting that they have manually laboured away at. If they are successful, they get more cash per piece, but they can still only sell the original once. After that they have to make another one.

The Wood Chipper Technique

For an example of the Wood Chipper Technique, let’s look at Andy Warhol: he set up his “Factory” studios wherein he made plenty of bespoke pieces to be sure, but he also had low-skilled workers creating pieces “by” Andy Warhol with little or no involvement from himself. This was more of a statement on modern society than a truly mass production environment, however it is certainly true that he made some pretty good coin without actually needing to much manual work himself to create the products that he sold. (What he DID do was labour to create the BRAND that he then leveraged.)

The best example of this approach is the creation of packaged media for limitless reproduction and sale. Movies, records and reproductions of artwork in many situations are the perfect example of this. The reason such endeavours make me think of mulchers is because at one end you do have a lot of “manual labour” but the product of this effort can be resold over and over again more or less infinitely. For example, it takes a big team and a lot of hard work to make a movie, but they can then sell screenings of this movie, in the various modes, forever. The makers of Seinfeld famously cashed in big time on the syndication rights to endlessly repeat the episodes, paying the creators a fee each time.

And as I say, this applies to other mediums also. A popular band labours once to create a song, which then earns them money every time it is purchased by a fan, included in a movie soundtrack, played on the radio or used in advertising. An illustrator labours once to create a quirky drawing of a super cute bunny, which can then be resold on birthday cards, wall prints, toys, stickers, clothing, stationery, advertisements … the list goes on.

Have Your Creative Cake And Eat It Too

While a “factory” mentality is not very romantic nor popular as an idea, compared to the much vaunted and valued concept of being “bespoke”, in the end I think getting leverage makes more sense for an artist or creative of any type. By looking at it as a woodchipper rather than a widget factory, you get a better sense of how you still get to do what you love, but once it’s made, you pop your creation into a whizz bang machine that then sprays reproductions of your art everywhere, building your brand and hopefully, your bank balance in the process.

Let’s face it, even a traditional French master of Charcuterie probably uses a sausage machine to speed up production once he has perfected the ultimate saucisson recipe!

It’s quite the labour of love, quite weird, quite profound and not quite this shade of blue (there’s more green in it than this shows but taking accurate photos of real paintings is, apparently, kind of hard. Might have to get a pro in to sort that).

Here’s the story behind the painting, and the deeper meaning behind the story.

Detail of artwork “Aloysius Sees The Light”, by me, Seamus Anthony, acrylic on canvas, 2018 – click the image to see the whole thing

Aloysius Luck is a character in an album, “Escape from Section C”, that I made some years back with three of my best friends in a band we call Zuiiza. He is the central character in that psychedelic, fever-dream arthouse, space-rock-opera of an album. In the story, which is jumbled and out of order to represent Aloysius’ mental state, Aloysius is a public servant, stressed from working in politics, who has a nervous breakdown when the woman he loves rejects him. He goes temporarily insane and winds up in mental health care.

To start with, Aloysius thinks he is a robot on an alien planet dealing with all manner of dramatic situations involving an evil mastermind, Professor Von Wiggett and his army of mindless zombie style characters, The Hungry.

Eventually we realise that Von Wiggett is actually his therapist and, slowly, slowly, Aloysius comes to understand this too. At the “end” of the story, Aloysius comes good, first in the song “Indivisible”, where he regains a sense of self and of self-empowerment, and then in the song “Aloysius Luck”. In that tune, he leaves it all behind him, driving off into the sunset to start anew.

The scene describes the moment where Aloysius, formerly head-down, obsessing about his internal world, which as you can see on the desk in front of him, is dark and complicated, suddenly looks up and is surprised to “see the light”. The light takes his breath away (represented by the butterfly) and his mind finally cracks open as the light (represented by the little yellow rectangles in his head) merge with the serious scenarios he was previously obsessing about.

The painting means a lot to me as I personally live with and through a repeating cycle of becoming drawn into a dark internal world, full of (needless) worry, stress and anxiety, only to emerge from these dark times full again with the wonder and joy of life. When the light comes calling on me, often in meditation, but sometimes just when I am looking into my children’s faces or simply walking the dog, the hours, days, weeks and months that I sometimes spend drawn into my own darkness seem incomprehensible to me, as I return to the childlike and happy-go-lucky state that I am blessed to sometimes bounce about our planet in.

A wiser man than me once told me that this is a pretty normal state of being for creative people, so as much as I would be happily never venture into the darkness again — and believe me I do try to stay up and out of it – when it does consume me, I console myself with the thought that perhaps this is the price I must pay for the fact that I can compose multi-instrument pieces if music in my mind when I am stuck in traffic, and that I get to enjoy watching inspiring words flow through my fingers seemingly of their own accord, and that now, once again, I get to play with colours and patterns and shapes to make meaning out of this odd thing we call Life.

I hope that this painting of Aloysius ends up in someone’s world. Maybe someone I don’t know, maybe my children’s. Maybe yours? Perhaps hanging on the wall in an office or bedroom, to be seen regularly and to serve as a reminder that – if we only make the effort to look up – there truly is ‘a Light and it never goes out’. It is always waiting for us to seek it out again, to be inspired and consoled and just plain cheered up.

If you didn’t already, you can go see it at the shop, where I have some other artworks for sale also.

“Data Flowers”, digital artwork, Feb 2018 by Seamus Anthony

1 – Remember Your Why

OK … yuck… but if you can forgive the tired n’ tacky cliche, then honestly, one of the best ways to remain motivated to create is to remember who you are and why you need to express yourself creatively.

Here’s my why: I make art because I know it makes me feel better about life and I hope that my art will make someone else feel better too. I know I feel better when I witness other people’s artistic expression. When I see/hear/read something that resonates with me, it just makes me feel better. Like a headache tablet for the soul, it soothes the existential pain. It re-connects me to my higher power, to the energy that connects us all.

It’s kind of like taking a drink.

Some of us like to drink because it moves us away from feeling like we live in separate plastic bubbles, able to talk to and see each other, but never able to truly connect. One drink (maybe two!) and we’re there: we’re connected.

We drink to re-establish the connection that we crave … but it is a false sort of connection, and it has a terrible trade off. Not just the hangovers, which do suck, but also the slow, dismal slide into increased separation. (That’s what booze does to us, if left unchecked, it actually makes the sense of separation get worse over time. Same for our other addictions: sugar, social media, cigarettes, sex, whatever – all feeding back into themselves, fueling the need for more drinks, more sugar, more “Likes”).

Creativity, however, connects us together in a healthy way, a real way, a genuine, healing way. It is not a band-aid; it is the actual skin cells regrowing and reconnecting and unifying the planet. If we could only get everyone, every single living person, all making art and/or witnessing other people’s art, then we would collectively heal and change the world.

I am an artist and an artist is a doctor for the soul.

That is my purpose.

My aim is that someone hears my song and is, even if only for a few minutes, healed.

My aim is that someone buys my art, hangs it on the wall and just before speaking to their children for the first time that day, they see it, and they feel more connected to the Great Thing That Prefers To Remain Mysterious, and because they use my art as a conduit for connection, for soul-healing, they feel better and in turn, treat their kids better and the world is a nicer place for those little ones that day.

Perhaps someone reads my words and they take a hit of Love and are encouraged to know that even if they do feel like a big old weirdo, they are not alone. Just the opposite: they are connected, loved and respected, and so they step into the world happier in themselves and able to help others to feel better too. And the world is nicer place that day. A happier, kinder, healthier place.

That is why I create. This is what the Muse is trying to do through me. This is why I must insist on making my art.

Creative inspiration: detail of artwork “Aloysius Sees The Light”, by me, Seamus Anthony, acrylic on canvas, 2018 – click the image to see more and, if you want, follow me on Instagram

2- Screw Self-Imposed Constraints, Allow Your Pure Expression To Flow Unhindered

There is a saying: “creativity needs constraints”. Maybe this philosophy is useful for creative professionals who need to address certain business realities, but for the rest of us mere mortals who just want to get a creative flow happening, I think it is unhelpful.

If you’re feeling creatively stuck, then better to give yourself permission to tap into your pure creative expression and just let your Muse take you wherever it wants to go.

For example, I have wanted to make visual art for many years. As I explained in a recent post, I used to draw but when I was rejected from the only two art schools in town, I gave up on visual art altogether … for 25 years!

However, the itch to make visual art returned and grew stronger and stronger every year. But I did not allow myself to act on it. Why? I believed that this was “not my thing” so I just didn’t give myself permission to do it…

Until, about two and a half years ago, I had a particularly amazing bath…

I had the house to myself, was in an introspective mood and had just read a quote that day by Rumi, (whom I know little to nothing about):

“When I run after what I think I want,
My days are a furnace of distress and anxiety;
If I sit in my own place of patience,
What I need flows to me,
And without any pain.
From this I understand that
What I want also wants me,

There is a great secret
In this for anyone
Who can grasp it.”

For some reason this moved me a lot, so I ran a bath and sat with it and asked myself:

So … if what I ACTUALLY want also wants me, the only question is what do I REALLY want?

I wasn’t sure about this, so being in a meditative space, I asked my Higher Self and the answer came in a flash:

“My Pure Expression”

And in this moment – I just knew.

I just knew that what I have wanted, truly, all along: simply to authentically express myself through my art – be it music, visual art, writing.

“That’s it,” I thought as I sat there soaking, “My pure expression. It’s about the art, the self expression, the soul expression of my life!”

But … but …

It still took me a long time to tap into what that actually meant…

I got there eventually. That’s a story for another day perhaps but the short version is this:

Just allow yourself to be a conduit, to just create whatever the hell comes through you without self-censorship, without judgement.

For ages I would not make the music I wanted to make nor indeed any visual art at all because I was not allowing myself to be free. I was self-imposing restraints (“I make music in style X”, “I can’t really draw properly”).

It’s all bullshit. When I realised this and let it go, the music and the visual art just started to flow and doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

3 – Just Start: Inspiration Comes To Those Who Rock Up

This is something I bang on about a bit:

If you’re feeling frustrated about your lack creative productivity, you can’t sit around waiting for conditions to be perfect and for inspiration to strike. You just have to scratch-out some time and start…

No matter how busy you are,
No matter how tired you are,
No matter how less than perfect your working space,
No matter how noisy/hot/cold/damp/whatever,
No matter that you have a sniffle,
No matter that you can’t afford the perfect art supplies,
No matter that you don’t feel like leaving the house tonight,
No matter that you have to get up early tomorrow,
No matter that you haven’t got any creative ideas,
No matter if you feel that everything you make is shit,
No matter if you feel like it’s self-indulgent,
No matter what other people want you to do,
No matter if other people are discouraging,
No matter if you feel lazy and unmotivated,
No matter what.

Just. start.

And if you do, eventually…

…your Muse will show up.

It may take days, weeks, even months, but if you grind it out, eventually…

…inspiration will arrive.

You have two choices:

1. Get off your arse and start making something
2. Ignore the creative itch and fester and be miserable, resentful and depressed

Here’s the thing: whatever your chosen medium, you are a creative type, an artiste.

It’s somewhat like being an alcoholic: you can’t just stop being an alcoholic because it’s inconvenient. You can only do what needs to be done to treat the condition. Except unlike an addict, you need to KEEP doing stuff, not stop!

You NEED to create, and if you don’t … if you let the Monkey Mind talk out of it, day in day out, with the myriad excuses that pop into your head, you will only get more miserable, resentful and depressed.

So stop making excuses (and they ARE just excuses) and start making your art.

Now.

Today.

Thanks for reading: keep up with my zany creative adventures daily by following me on Instagram

Unlike my friend Paul, I would be a terrible person to phone up should you be in need of some kind of fridge repair service. You can see from his business page that he specialises in making your old Samsung fridge do what it is supposed to do. On the other hand, I look at fridges and what I see is a canvas going to waste. And then I start thinking about paint which, while colourful, isn’t very good at chilling that Pinot Gris you’re looking forward to imbibing.

And therein lies the artist’s dilemma: your utility is very often non-obvious.

Whether you’re a writer, a painter, a musician or something less obvious, like a post-it note artist, (which is actually a thing, I just discovered), you’re in a way lucky, because you naturally observe the phenomena of life, the stuff that exists all around us, and you think about how you can bend and shape it into something interesting. It’s a state of mind that some people pay good money for. Everything seems trippy; like “what’s the deal with all this stuff?” trippy.

So the good news: being an artist by nature makes boring things fun. Standing at a bus stop isn’t nearly as dull when you have the capacity to begin orchestrating an avant-garde musical piece in your mind using the rhythm of passing cars on the wet road as inspiration.

The bad news: it is, to quote Oscar Wilde, in some ways, “quite useless”.

The arty brain isn’t very good at fixing fridges. It doesn’t code apps. It doesn’t formulate public policy and it sure as hell wouldn’t know how a TV works.

So are all artists useless to society then?

Of course not. If they were, my friend Jimmi wouldn’t be able to work full time painting commissioned dog portraits. And Damien Hirst (the formaldehyde shark guy from the ’90s, remember him?) would not be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.

What I Think About When I Think About Value

People don’t give you money unless you provide some kind of value. The thing about artists as opposed to traffic management companies or your local plumber, is that the value that artists provide is not as obvious and certainly not felt as keenly as a backed-up toilet. Nobody wakes up of a morning with a burning desire to go out and buy a contemporary art installation. They do however, wake up with a burning rash and immediately hot-foot it to the local pharmacy to purchase some ointment.

I am not writing this essay to tell you how to make money making art or music or whatever. I have and do sell some creative works sometimes, but I can’t hold myself up as some Internet Art Commerce Guru (nor do I want to). But the thing that interests me is value and how it pertains to creative works. What is the value to the artist of making art? What is the value to the “consumer” of the creative works?

Here and there I witness moaning that “people don’t value art” or “nobody wants to pay for music”. However, what’s forgotten is that actually, people DO pay for art. They DO happily enrich many musicians and painters and other types of artists. But they do it when they perceive that they are receiving value in exchange. And it is not a very conscious process.

People don’t think “Wow, I get SO MUCH VALUE out of Nick Cave, his music and what he represents to me in terms of culture, life and my self-identity within those eco-systems, that I think I will exchange money for concert tickets and tell everyone in my Facebook feed about it in order to explore and promote these self-affirming concepts!” … and yet this is exactly what is happening.

On a simpler level, people don’t consciously think “If I buy a framed print of this hipster illustrator’s work that I found at a maker’s market and hang on it on my wall, my friends will witness how truly cool I am,” … but they unconsciously think that. This is where the value inherent in the creative work exists for them.

Subtly communicating non-obvious value

So, the creatives that win, on purpose or by accident, facilitate a story that person (the customer) is telling themselves about themselves that they want to tell the world.

Meanwhile, a lot creative people simply view making art in the same way a surfer might view surfing: they do it because it feels good. And that is fine … but it is does not necessarily have any value to other people. And if it doesn’t, they will see it is as “quite useless”, and thus not line your pockets with silver.

So in a way, as an artist of various flavours, I kind of feel jealous of my friend the fridge mechanic. He no doubt has many business challenges, but subtly communicating the non-obvious value of what he does to the lady whose freezer is on the blink ain’t one of them.

On the other hand, how many people can compose multi-layered, prog-rock symphonies in their minds, complete with imaginary video special effects? When it comes to the bus stops of life, I’ll take that over tapping away playing “Kwazy Cupcakes” on my phone any day.

image credit: Lost At E Minor

First, I wiped down the kitchen table. Then I made a cup of tea. Then I got out my shiny new Christmas presents from my wonderful little family; some drawing pencils in various shades, an eraser, a sharpener, some pens for inking and a sweet drawing pad. Then I asked myself the Ultimate Question … 2B or not 2B?

Ha ha sorry … it’s ok I have a Dad Joke licence… fully paid up!

In truth it was scary, the clean blank pages. Imposing. But I have an idea for an art piece I want to make and the first stop was to draw a vintage suitcase, which will be part of it. I googled the topic and found one that was at the angle and of the type that I wanted, a stock image with watermarks all over it, and I propped up the ancient ipad on a book stand thing that my daughter uses to read giant fantasy tomes while eating breakfast.

I began drawing, very conscious of the tension I feel about it. That my wife, a skilled illustrator with not one but two art degrees under her belt, was hovering about pretending not to be sticky beaking over my shoulder actually made it worse, not that my hang ups are her fault. The things is, and I think I’ve written about this before, I had my confidence shattered somewhat in my own art abilities as a young man. Well actually, I allowed my confidence to be shattered. I see now that this was nobody’s doing but my own. Nobody can stop you but you and you have to take responsibility for that and stop making excuses.

But that doesn’t mean it is always easy. Here’s what happened:

As a kid I was full of confidence that I was ‘good at art’. Always one of the best in the year group. But then in Year 12, the final year of high school, the art teacher I was lumped with didn’t help much. “All men are pigs,” she once said to my face, and proceeded to sniff at and criticize my work for the course of the year while fawning over my (admittedly highly talented) then-girlfriend.

Said girlfriend and I then applied to both the art schools in Adelaide, our hometown, and she got in to both while I got into neither. I did get into acting school, which was a big deal due to the competition levels and the tiny intake, but actually, I had little interest in acting and soon left to pursue my rock star dreams.

Meanwhile, as of the day the universities rejected my art, I stopped drawing.

I was being a precious little snowflake, but I did stop and then, somehow, a quarter of a century (!!!) went by and during that time I have almost always been surrounded by visual artists, while myself desperately wanting to create art, but suffering from a massive inferiority complex about it and not making any.

But this changed recently. Something just came unblocked and I started again. A couple of weeks ago, I drew a giraffe … from a cutesy little drawing lesson video online … and then I photographed it and imported it into photoshop and started jamming with it, bending it, adding to it, filtering it. Then I drew a weird little cow character from an odd little soft toy that my daughter made me. And I added multiples of them to the giraffe image and then I emailed it to myself and then I put them through various apps on my iphone until I liked what I saw.

Then I built an instagram account, and a Redbubble store, and a website, and then I made a soundtrack to go with the image and then I animated the image in photoshop so that it made a weird little video….

…and my kids watched the whole thing unfold and I hope I taught them that nobody can stop you making art, because making art is expressing yourself, it is unfolding in the sun like a flower does, like nature intended. It is revealing your pure expression to the world and nobody has the right to muffle that noise. And they actually can’t muffle it, somehow, no matter what, it can come out.

I hope that I teach them that the only one who can stop you is you.

So last night, ignoring the Monkey Mind, I drew a suitcase. It’s not a finished piece, just a study for something I have in my mind that I want to make. Looking at the drawing, I know I am not as good as I am going to get, but I also know I can make art as worthy as anybody else. So I threw it online and went to bed.

‘Nuff said.

Privately, I sporadically write journal-style ramblings to help me work things out. I’ve always considered (accurately) these to be unpublishable; too scrappy and irregular, not unlike their author.

Meanwhile, I have long written things – more polished and ‘value’ orientated – for public consumption, most of which I am utterly embarrassed about now. (Hey, I needed the money.)

Lately I’ve been doing neither … but over Christmas this last couple of weeks, at the various parties and gatherings, a part of me has been sitting back witnessing my mildly-to-fully-inebriated self rolling out my favourite stories about my life, in all their well-practised and undoubtedly inaccurate glory and thinking “you know, maybe you should write this stuff down”.

And, you know, maybe I should.

As well as that, I have been thinking and thinking and totally over-thinking about how to go about marketing my music and my nascent visual art and the idea of writing about it seems to make sense. (It also possibly makes no sense, but it’s ok, I am comfortable with that kind of cognitive dissonance. It potentially defines me actually: I’m nothing if not a wooly ball of contradictions getting batted around by a playfully giant kitten who clearly doesn’t realise how damn sharp its claws are.)

Further to this, much to my better half’s chagrin (however you say that), I remain resolutely, if somewhat ineffectively, ambitious, and I’d like to go forth and make something happen yet in this life and you know, ‘win’ at some stuff. Basically, I find it irritating to make music (and now, perhaps inadvisably, art) and to write words only to have a tiny, miniscule fraction of the population of the planet give a shit. Especially when I know that this is purely my failing, not as an artist but in terms of the effort I put into it. We listen to a lot of radio in our house (Triple R mainly, which is an excellent Melbourne-based public radio station) and my kids, who are still young enough to assume (mistakenly, of course) that I am a God Who Walks Amongst Men, have both independently paused thoughtfully while munching toast only to ask through a mouthful of jammy goodness: “Dad, why don’t they play your music on the radio?”

I wish I could have honestly said to them “Because they’re all jerks, my love,” or “Because I don’t care for the attention, sweetie,” but the truth was not this and so I had no option to say to them “Because I don’t try hard enough to make that happen, actually”. And given the rhetoric I spout at them along the lines of “talent and brains not being enough, nope, no sirree Bob, you have to work hard, harder than everyone else” kind of makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite.

Which of course, is on the agenda to be fully and consciously realised by them in due course. But I would dearly love to provide them with a different failing to rub my face in, one that I am more comfortable owning. Like loving Neil Young’s Crazy Horse guitar solos way more than is probably healthy, par example. Or my absolute comfort at telling them in no uncertain terms to tidy up all of the things while resolutely making no such effort myself.

So that’s what I am doing this year (technically next year; thought I’d get a head start).

What the “that” is that I am doing is probably not very clear to you, which is because it is not very clear to me. However, writing tends to help me clear up the old noggin somewhat, so with any luck typing away will make things clearer … ok… what I think I mean is, I am going to write about the process of making things (music, art, coffee, mistakes) and the process of trying to promote the things (the music and art, not the coffee and mistakes) and hopefully it will be interesting to someone, even if that’s only me.

I suppose I will publish it to this blog, seeing as it used to be a thing. Actually, it’s “been” and “not been” a thing a few times over almost ten years. Long enough that I kind of despair of many of the old blog posts, to say the least.

But what the heck.
I yam what I yam,
I was what I was,
And like I said: I needed the money.

Business is Creative

OK so … late last year I was having a lot of fun: I was fresh back from China, making music and pumping out blog posts here about how to unleash the creative beast within like there was no tomorrow – but there was an elephant in the room: I was going backwards financially. This would be bad enough if I was a single man but being the father of two awesome school-aged kids, it just wasn’t ok.

I mean, I wasn’t broke – yet – but I had been neglecting my bread and butter gig (digital marketing) chasing good times and the trajectory was clear: I was headed for Brokesville unless something happened quick!

Thankfully it did – and for the better. It started when I read a quote by Joanna Penn (from The Creative Penn podcast) that “business is creative”. This just resonated with me for some reason, I guess because I have long had a duel interest in these two subjects (creativity and business) but have often found myself believing that unfortunately, business is more about grinding it out like a robot to get that sweet cash than about being creative. I no longer think this is correct.

It got me thinking and I remembered a conversation I had been having with a colleague in the digital marketing space. You see, for a long time, I had found it very difficult to make good money being a digital marketing freelancer, but a very amiable fellow called David was explaining to me mid-late 2016 his business model for making better money out of ‘the game’. And it had really interested me at the time, but then I got distracted going to China and everything and it fell by the wayside.

So I gave David a call and he very generously explained his model to me and it was a revelation that really got my creative juices firing – AND promised to rectify the less-than-desirable trajectory I was on.

Long story short I got busy reimagining my own business, riffing and jamming off of the ideas David had presented me with. I rebranded the business and went out there and started hustling. And it worked! OK I am not a millionaire yet but it has been a good year and things are on the up and I have found the business very creative and rewarding to run – even if I have had to spend a lot of time thinking about things that I would not normally give a stuff about, like “motorbike repairs Melbourne” and other random topics like that (in order to help my digital marketing clients).

Meantime, have I been making music? Yes. Yes I have.

Execution is everything

OK the music … the music … you see, the OTHER reason I flipped from last year’s focus on talking “about” creativity was because the more I looked at it the more I realised that the most important thing is the execution of creative work. Execution is everything. Actually doing the work is more powerful (and sometimes a lot less pleasant) than talking and writing and thinking about doing the work. So I decided I would not do any more blog posts until I had something to show, that I would stop waffling and execute.

And execute I did – I got the songs done for the chinese TV show (still waiting to see that come out of production yet, time will tell what the result is) and I have a new song which I’m stoked to present today.

Now, I say “got the songs done” like this was nothing but the truth is it was a big deal. It took a lot of time, frustration, hustle and a steep learning curve because I did not know how to record music myself nor did I have anything resembling a home studio.

My old laptop was not up to the task and I needed simple software to help me to the music rolling without having to spend massive amounts of time learning the hardest, most complicated software skills going.

So I hustled the money to buy a relatively inexpensive mac laptop (not a new one) and I set about learning the very basic (but surprisingly excellent Garageband application). Now the problem was still that I did not have the studio engineering know-how nor the production (mixdown) skills. So I had to badger my friends into helping me, while not really having much to offer them for their trouble other than production credits and a few beers.

Great Artists Ship

But … we got the songs done – and dealt with the sometimes challenging aspect of doing creative music work and sending it off to the animation company only to have them come back with a bunch of reasonable (yet sometimes hard to comprehend) requests. In the end it took months – MONTHS – to get those two songs finished. But finished they eventually were. I personally was not 100% happy with them, but the client was and eventually you have to draw a line under your work once you reach the point of diminishing returns and ship the damn thing.

The cool thing was that along the way I started to get ideas for new songs (in fact I wrote many on my guitar as release from the frustration of tweaking the same two songs endlessly) and of course I learned some production skills and so, Chinese songs in the can, I began a new recording. This time I was able to complete the recording much more quickly. I still strong-armed a mate (thanks Tony) into helping me with the mixdown because I’m not really an audiophile as such. For me it is more about the song structure – the melody, the lyrics, the dynamic of the song journey, the mood and aesthetic – than about whether the mids are too muddy or the lows to brown or whatever. However, I do know that these skills are important to the end result, so I did get some help and then get the song mastered.

I am very happy with the result and now am happy to release it to you to listen to (see above).

THAT is why no blog posting for so long – because I did not want to come back to this blog about creative output without any new creative output to show. And it took WAY longer and was WAY harder than I anticipated. I am pretty sure that with the responsibilities of my adult life as a father with all that entails, I would not have finished any actual art if I had been using up what creative time I had available writing more guff about “how to be a more productive creative”. So maybe the lesson is – stop thinking, talking and writing so much about being creative and JUST DO IT.

Anyway … enjoy the song. I hope it helps you in some way somehow…

Face up to the depression and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the substance abuse and take steps to deal with it

Face up to your procrastination. Face up to what you are avoiding and take the steps you need to take.

Face up to the work that needs doing to pay the bills and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the money that is getting wasted and take steps to curb spending where you can.

Face up to the poor business model and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the frustration, dissatisfaction and boredom you feel with your work and/or life and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the health issue and take steps to eliminate the cause and/or symptoms.

Face up to the sub-par physical health and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the challenges of relationships and take steps to deal with it.

Face up to the fact that you’re not coping and ASK FOR HELP.

Face up to whatever isn’t working, or could be working better, and take steps to deal with it all.

…And Feel The Weight Lift Off Your Shoulders.

Facing up to ALL of your reality will help you to stop carrying around a great shoulder load of unresolved bullshit that is weighing you down. It’s often the unresolved weight on our shoulders that makes life hard, more so than our issues themselves.

Actions have consequences – deal with that.
Inaction has consequences – deal with that too.

Meet the world – your life – as it is. Be compassionate with yourself, but also be real with yourself. If you don’t take steps to deal with problems they only get worse.

• If you don’t eat healthy, you won’t get healthier.
• If you don’t exercise, your body will deteriorate faster and feel worse.
• If you don’t talk to your wife, you don’t sort shit out and enjoy a better life with her.
• If you don’t do the work your clients have hired you to do, you soon won’t have any clients.
• If you don’t focus on building a satisfying career, and put in the hours towards building it, you won’t get a satisfying career.

Taking Steps Does Not Mean Knowing All The Answers

Sometimes we do know the answers and just don’t want to do what needs doing, but sometimes we genuinely don’t know the answers. The solution there is to take steps to discover the answers.

Seek professional help. Talk to your family and friends. Try 999 things until the 1000th thing that works. Take a guess and go for it, but don’t just sit there! Don’t avoid taking action because nothing happens until something moves.

Don’t Second Guess: Progress

Once you come up with a plan – keep at it until you KNOW it won’t work.

• Not just until you have second thoughts.
• Not just until you tell someone who screws their nose up at your plan.
• Not just until your first attempt doesn’t come up to scratch.
• Not just until your 100th attempt doesn’t come up to scratch.
• Not just until it gets too hard.
• Not just until you don’t feel like it.
• Not just until you get a door slammed in your face.

No. Keep at it until you KNOW it won’t work this way.

Here’s a clue about how you know when it is time to change the plan: it is almost always when you realise you need to throw out some bathwater but not the baby. It’s when you realise you need to make a course adjustment, but not quit the race entirely.

I am not saying there is never a time to quit. But I am saying that a lot of us self-sabotage by quitting too soon and too often. If you’ve been working at something for 5 years and it’s just made you horribly miserable the entire time, then sure, come up with a different plan. But if you’ve started a new project (business, relationship, geographic location, diet, band, whatever) every six months for the last ten years – then the problem was never the plan! It was your lack of persistence. Which always comes back to avoidance. Not facing reality and dealing with it.

Ask for help.

Reach out.

Rest.

Try things.

Do the work.

Face and deal with what needs facing up to and feel the weight lift off your shoulders. Do this and you will progress, and the sun will shine again.

Special thanks to Simon for introducing me to the 4 powers of the Sphinx, which this process is based on