creative maverick

I was interviewed by Dave Monk on BBC Radio Essex on Tuesday about how to find work you love, even in a recession. Dave challenged me with some tough questions - have a listen to see how I answered questions like:

• Should you just fire off your CV to all the jobs you can find?
• Isn’t it just living in a dreamland to think you can get paid for doing what you love in the current economy?
• Why does someone who is very well qualified and very creative about finding work still find themselves unable to get a job?
• Aren’t some things you would love to do simply impossible - like wanting to become a rock star when you’re in your fifties?
• Surely if you have a mortgage and a family to feed, you might just have to take anything?
• What’s the alternative to job ads and recruitment consultants who don’t seem to be very helpful if you want to find a new line of work?
• Isn’t it a fact of life that some jobs are boring but pay well?

Dave makes it a very lively interview. Have a listen now - just click the play button below

Let me know what you think.

Derek Sivers is a remarkable guy. He’s best known as the founder of CD Baby which he sold for $22 million last year but he’s also been a professional musician and at one point a circus clown.

He is very much a Scanner who has found a way to manage his addiction to learning, creativity and variety to launch multiple businesses and have fun doing it. When I read that he treats his work as play, I knew I had to interview for him for my book “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Derek is a real joy to listen to. You can listen to our entire interview right now and hear how he answers the dreaded question “What do you do”, what beliefs and habits have contributed to his success, and what was the most important haircut of his life…

Just click the play button below

Got some good ideas of your own?

If listening to Derek has inspired you to go further with your own ideas,
join us in The Ideas Lab on 12th August.

Derek Sivers has been a circus clown, professional musician and a very successful entrepreneur. Last year, he sold his company CD Baby for $22 million, the majority of which will go to The Independent Musician’s Charitable Trust, an organization that he created to fund and support music education for future generations.

Derek is a fascinating guy as I found out yesterday when I interviewed him for my book - we’ll be releasing the recording here soon. He’s a Scanner and a very successful one at that. I discovered in speaking to him just how similar musicianship is to entrepreneurship.

Derek has created a rather wonderful 71 page guide for musicians called “How to call attention to your music”. You can download it for free at his site here. If you’re a musician I suggest you download it now. (There are no affiliate links or up-sells involved)

Here is some of his excellent advice:

Be an extreme version of yourself

Define yourself.
Show your weirdness.
Bring out all your quirks.

Your public persona, the image you show to the world, should be an extreme version of yourself.

and

Proudly exclude some people

Proudly say what you’re NOT:  “If you like Celine Dion, you’ll hate us.” …and people who hate Celine Dion will love you, or at least give you a chance.

You can’t please everyone in this world.  Recklessly exclude people.

How could you apply this advice to your music or your art project or your business?

Download the free guide here.

Our greatest fear in creativity is not that we are crap but that we are mediocre - of moderate to low abilities. Crap is easier; you know you missed and should look elsewhere. Mediocre is far more challenging.

Yet mediocrity is something you need to come to terms with because much of your work will fall into this band. You need to dare to try something, and risk landing in the mediocre zone. Mediocrity is your basecamp on the way to a peak of excellence. It’s the mulch from which your best work grows.

If you’re blocked, you probably have a fear of creating mediocre work. Embrace the possibility. Dare to be mediocre.

“What’s your favourite animal?” people would ask me when I was a child. It’s one of those questions you get asked a lot as a child (and never again as an adult). I would say “Penguin”.

Not dog, cat, lion, tiger, horse. I picked the animal that seemed furthest from my suburban home in the Midlands. My pet was also not a dog or a cat but a tortoise. Several tortoises in fact.

Looking back in my self-critical moments, I thought that I must have been trying to be “different for the sake of it” (and that apparently this is a bad thing). But in fact creative mavericks and Scanners thrive on innovation; our minds rush to the edges - the edges of what’s considered normal, what’s socially acceptable, what is established thinking and technique. Because it’s at the edges that the new things are happening, things are changing, new discoveries are being made.

As the set representing established thinking and accepted practices slowly expands, we rush to the edges where something is just being uncovered, created or included so that we can see it, enjoy it, add to it.

Standing at the edges, everything on the inside looks old, dull, done.

We’re looking outwards to see what’s coming next, where the sun is just coming up for the first time. For me it’s in psychotherapy, coaching, writing, humour, business, marketing, working styles, web 2.0, technology, user interface, pituitary treatment, healthcare, happiness.

Which edge do you rush to?

It’s funny that my first reaction this morning after last night’s talk by San Sharma at Scanners Night on Social Media is to quit 2 social networking sites.

What I’ve realised is that if I want to play all day and get paid, it’s essential I surround myself with people of similar values - people who are creative, playful, entrepreneurial and are forging their own maverick lifestyle.

San last night said in his quick review of social networking sites, “LinkedIn is like facebook for er…” and I chipped in “boring people”.

LinkedIn is a very standard business networking site. It’s full of straight up business people, consultants and so on. Nothing wrong with that (I was one until a few years ago), it’s just not the people I really enjoy hanging out with.

Ecademy is similar but more annoying. I’ve had enough of pointless connection requests from random people around the world I have no interest in talking to. So I’ve quit my membership of that too.

You might think it harmless to just remain a member in case something useful might come your way but even this very light commitment still uses some attention at the back of my mind - and attention is the most precious resource I have. Now, I no longer need to pretend to myself that one day I’m going to go to another of ecademy’s networking events.

My profiles are still up on both sites but I’ve cancelled paid membership and switched off all pointless notifications. Maybe one day I’ll delete my profile but for now it increases the chance of people finding me when I have such a common name. (Actually I’ve just discovered my name has made it onto the front page of google so maybe I don’t need the profiles!)

Success is as much about what you quit as what you commit to. The brave decisions in life are not between the bad and the good but between the good enough and the excellent. So I’m focussing on the networks and events that are an excellent fit for me and put me in closer contact with the people I love to hang out with - places like Scanners Night and Twitter.

What will you quit?

Yesterday as I was walking back to the officespace I sometimes work at, I saw a young woman collapse just ahead of me. Some people nearby rushed to help her into the building to sit down.

She said that she suddenly felt numb down one side of her body. It sounded like she was having a stroke and I urged one of the staff to call an ambulance immediately. The ambulance came within minutes and by that point the woman was feeling faint and completely numb on her left side.

I was shocked to witness someone falling so ill so quickly and was worried what would happen for her.

Today I discovered that it was not in fact a stroke or heart attack. She had suffered a panic attack; a sudden overwhelming bout of anxiety. Panic attacks happen when negative thoughts feed back on themselves and escalate to the point where some very startling physical symptoms occur - which in turn generate more negative thoughts.

A thought is a very powerful thing. If negative thoughts can produce paralysis, what can positive thoughts produce?

Choose yours wisely.

My pituitary gland doesn’t work. When I say that and people ask “What’s a pituitary gland?”, I feel a tinge of sadness because this pea-sized gland has coloured my whole life. The pituitary is a gland at the base of the brain that controls many functions of the body including growth, blood pressure, thyroid gland function, the conversion of food into energy, fluid balance and temperature. So kind of a big deal.

As a result I have to take several tablets throughout the day and inject every evening in order to stay alive and healthy. And actually, that’s not that bad. Plenty of diabetics manage a much more delicate balance.

What had a much larger impact on my life was the journey to get here - the decades lived in a sub-optimal state due to incorrect replacement of my endocrine hormones; years of unhappiness and fatigue, some extreme illnesses due to low cortisol levels, gaining three stone in weight on an excessive cortisol dose. On top of this, my treatment in the hands of doctors from the age of 4 was traumatising. As I entered my teens and beyond, treatment was often invasive, grossly insensitive and on one occasion clearly abusive.

Aside from this, one result of the condition was that I was much shorter and looked younger than others my age which meant that I stood out when what I really wanted to do was blend in. All this led to a kind of learned helplessness and a fair bit of unhappiness.

In my thirties I invested a lot of time, energy and money in my recovery. I now consider myself above average in mental health and enjoy the continuing journey towards unusual levels of happiness and success.

My condition is such a large part of me that I came to use the phrase “I am my disease”. Not because I want to carry my story around with me everywhere but because my unusual life experience is important. My experiences have made me unusually open minded having faced illness, death and disease that many others have not yet had to. It’s made me more able to listen to others. It’s contributed to my dark sense of humour. And feeling like an outsider looking in on “normality”, I developed a unique perspective on life and how people live it.

So why tell you all this on my blog? Because it’s the great losses, traumas and challenges in our lives that drive us. I get the biggest thrill from helping people who feel powerless, stuck or unhappy find the quickest route to happiness, creativity and success.

The real tragedy is when we lock away the traumatic events of our lives and the things that make us different, because then we don’t get to integrate the incredible riches we gain from our deepest personal challenges.

Use your experience, use what makes you different, use your disease.

Yesterday I found myself sitting outside in the London sunshine at a Thai restaurant with a friend. As we sipped Lemongrass tea and discussed her imminent move to America to further her acting, the conversation turned to money and doing what you love.

I said that I was feeling rich right now - because if I had a million pounds in the bank, I wouldn’t choose to be doing anything different. I’d still be sitting outside a restaurant in the sunshine, eating tasty Thai food with someone interesting. So I am already rich.

(And it only cost £15 a head.)

Notice those moments when there is nothing else you need, nowhere else you should be, and no one else you would rather be with because in that moment, you too are already rich.

If you can’t appreciate the rich moments you are having right now, you might discover you won’t be able to appreciate it if and when you really do achieve your financial dreams. We’ve all seen the millionaires who just can’t stop; however much money they get, whatever they buy, they’re never satisfied. That’s not happiness.

And of course the other reason to appreciate how rich you already are is because it tends to attract more of the same which means you’ll realise those financial dreams all the sooner.

I’m currently writing a book called “Screw Work, Let’s Play” for Pearson in the UK. It’s due for publication in March 2010. It’s based on my experience as a careers and business consultant helping creative people to find work that they love and make it pay (see my other site freestylesuccess.com).

What’s the book about?

The book is about how to play and get paid for it. That means to do whatever creative, fun stuff you love doing, to have oodles of variety and freedom, and to make good money doing it. I’ve found myself that the more I play the more successful I am.

I’ve noticed that the most creative people in the world today have a playful attitude to their work - they experiment and explore, they bring humour and irreverence to their work, they follow their instincts on which project to take on next, they do the work that they love and that comes naturally to them, and they focus on creating a life they enjoy in the present rather than hoping some future goal will bring them happiness.

You can read more in this post on what I call the player mindset.

Who am I interviewing?

I’m interested in interviewing a wide range of people from comedians and artists to employees and entrepreneurs. I’m talking to the very successful and also those just starting out.

I’ve already interviewed Tim Smit, Creator of the Eden Project, Leslie Scott, creator of the game Jenga, Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, Mike Southon, serial entrepreneur and author of the Beermat Entrepreneur series of books, and Nic Roope, founder of Poke, one of the most respected digital agencies in the UK and creator of the Holger brand.

How do the interviews work?

We meet in London or over the phone at the interviewee’s convenience. I will ask them questions about their work and their attitude to it. If they have an hour free, that’s great. If not, I’ll fit whatever time they do have - even 10 minutes.

I’ll record the interview and may get it in transcribed. If it’s easier for the interviewee I can conduct the interview by email, instant messenger, or twitter.

What happens to the interview?

I will take inspiration from the interviews in writing the book and may quote from them directly. I will also make the recordings and possibly the transcripts available as a bonus to people who pre-order the book.

Interviewees will feature in the credits of the book and I will also link to their website from the website for the book.

Can you help?

Do you know someone who you think would a great interview subject? Please leave a comment and let me know. If you know how to get in touch with them or have a connection with them, please email me.

And if you think you are a “player” yourself, let me know!

If you’re reading this because I’ve approached you about an interview, thanks for giving me some of your time. Do let me know if you have any questions, concerns or reservations so I can address them.

My email address is john [[at]] creativemaverick [[dot]] com and I am on twitter as johnsw.