creative maverick

I meet people at careers workshops who want to do something creative like writing but they’re not doing it. It’s like they’re waiting for some kind of permission to start.

They say “I don’t know if I’m good enough” like there’s an Independent Talent Auditing Board who issues licenses. Guess what, no one can stop you! The talent police will not swoop in through the windows if you put pen to paper. Besides, the best way to become a better writer is to write. This applies to pretty much everything else in life too.

“But what if I’m not very talented?” So what? As David Bayles and Ted Borland write in the superb book “Art & Fear“;

“Q: If people differ [in their level of talent], and each of them were to make their best work, would not the more gifted make better work and the less gifted, less?

A: Yes. And wouldn’t that be a nice planet to live on?”

If you feel drawn to write, write. Maybe you won’t ever make a living out of it but if you don’t start, you are stunting the growth of a part of your personality. And who knows where developing this creative part of you might lead?

You don’t need to pack your job in to become a full-time writer (please don’t!)
Just take out your pen and write for 5 mins.

Congratulations, you’re a writer!

Here’s my conclusion about work as play:

When you are truly in play, when you are following the unfolding path of what provides you engagement, expression, excitement, and curiosity in the world, then your work is simply a natural expression of who you are and who you are becoming.

Work becomes a way of achieving the fullest expression of yourself. It’s a channel, as David Deida says, for giving your love to the world.

So when people ask “Can I really have what I want in my work?” the answer is of course you can, because everyone can move towards their fullest expression of themselves, everyone can decide to give their love to the world in their work.

The only person blocking you from doing that is you.

I was asked for input into an article for Look magazine this week, apparently the UK’s best selling women’s magazine. It’s to go with an article about recession-proofing your career and my bit is a beginner’s guide to starting a business as an alternative to staying in a dicey job market.

Here’s what I wrote:

• Self-employment can be safer than a job because you can have multiple clients rather than one employer but you must choose the right line of work to start
• Make sure your business solves genuine problems experienced by a large number of people at a price they’re willing to pay
• Don’t look for a business with no competition - there’s probably no market. Do something people need and do it well.
• Choose a business that’s growing in demand, not one in decline. This is not the time to open a record shop!
• Build your business around work that you will enjoy doing - it’ll make the hard work more fun and your passion for the work will attract clients
• Creating multiple income streams means you won’t be dependent on one line of work that might disappear but you’ll need to be very organised to manage it all.
• Launch one income stream at a time. Once one is running, you can start another. Be clear which line of work is your cash cow and prioritise it.
• Aim for passive income when you can - create the business so that once it’s running it requires little or no input from you.
• Look for people to collaborate with on each part of your business who have different skills to offer and then only do the part you are best at on every project.

• If you are providing services on your own, you can register as self-employed. You will need to submit a self assessment tax return every year.
• Limited companies provide more protection if your business gets into trouble but come with more paperwork and accounting. Speak to an accountant to help make the decision.
• An accountant or company formation agent can register your company. They will typically charge a fee between £25 and £150.
• Unless you are fearless about paperwork use an accountant to do your limited company’s accounts. They will charge from £100 a month upwards.
• Related income streams can run through one business.
• You can register multiple businesses with yourself as Director of each one.

• Get clients quickly - be clear who your target customer is. Work out where they hang out and offer to give a free talk there.
• Set up a free website for your business at weebly.com
• Choose a good domain name that is easy to remember and spell
• Save money on advertising: write an information-packed article on your area of expertise and submit it for publication on related websites. Include a link to your business’ website and you’ll get a better response than an ad - all for free!
• Google adwords provides a useful way to bring visitors to your website within minutes and you can limit how much you spend per day
• Business Link provides lots of free business advice and training

Over at Creative Entrepreneurs Club, we are kicking off a series of monthly 30 day challenges to help Creative Entrepreneurs further their business.

Every month we pick a hot topic to get into action on - automating and outsourcing your least favourite tasks, making dreaded sales calls, writing compelling copy for your website, decluttering and streamlining your office and more.

June is blogging month

The very first 30 day challenge starts 1st June and is “Blogging for your business”. And it’s FREE to take part!

We think blogging is a fantastic thing for your business. Are you sceptical? Have you considered it but not taken the plunge? Or perhaps like many others you started one and abandoned it to stagnate on the ‘net?

Well join us in the challenge and we’ll get you going again.

Listen to our radio show on the blogging challenge

Listen to our radio show with Judith Morgan, Mike Yates and I explaining why we think you should blog, what it can do for your business and how to get started (again).

Join the challenge (it’s free!)

To take part, register at CreativeEntrepreneursClub.com.

Commit to a weekly blogging schedule. I will be blogging twice a week but even once a week will have benefits for you. If you want to get hard-core about it, blog daily as Judith will be doing. Listen to our expert interviews on how to blog and what system to use and let us know how you get on in the Creative Entrepreneurs forum.

Register for FREE as a guest member at CreativeEntrepreneursClub.com.

(You’ll also get a profile to promote yourself to 1000 other members, and access to an entire archive of expert interviews for your business. All for nowt!)

Would you like to play all day and get paid - to do the creative, fun stuff you love doing, to have oodles of variety and freedom… and to make good money doing it?

If so, have a listen to my free audio class below.

I’ll explain why I think you need to switch from a worker mindset to a “player” mindset (now more than ever), why “players” are ultimately more successful, and how you can start playing right now.

I’ve found that the more I play (ie do what I love and dare to experiment and explore), the more successful I am. I’ve written for the Guardian and the Reader’s Digest, I’ve had my “sound art” played on BBC Radio 3, I’ve created a popular monthly London event for creative people, and I’ve been a successful technical consultant only needing to work 3 months of the year.

Now I’m writing a book for a major publisher about all this called “Screw Work, Let’s Play”.

Listen to the free audio

Just click the play button below.

Or… Right-click this link to download the MP3 to your computer
(It’s 25MB so it’ll take a while. Once you’ve got it you can put it on your MP3 player just like any other MP3.)

“I dare you to listen to John’s teleclass and not get passionate.”  Suzy Greaves

Join the “Screw Work, Let’s Play” Summer School

ONLY 3 PLACES LEFT!

Join my Summer School to learn how to play and get paid.

You’ll get clearer what playing all day means to you then help you launch a project to get you closer. I’ll share the best ideas from the book as I write it and you’ll have the creativity, contacts and encouragement of a small group of other motivated people.

What’s holding you back?

• If you have a good idea for a business or a creative project, we’ll get you actually doing it at last!
• If you’d like to turn a hobby into a business, you’ll work on winning your first “playcheque” – getting paid for something you really enjoy
• If you’ve found yourself running a business you’re not passionate about, you’ll set off on a new income stream that really excites you

We start Thursday 4 June and run until Thursday 13 August.

By the end of the Summer School, you will have launched your project onto the world and be ready to build on it further.

Read all the details in this brochure

Life is supposed to slow down when your life is in threat. And yet it didn’t when I found myself on a motorbike in a Tennessee forest, pulling a wheelie, heading for a tree. One moment I was riding along a forest path, the next I was on the floor with a bike by my side.

I blame Chris, my friend who had suggested we go on a motorcycling holiday despite the fact that I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life. His email had sold it to me; “We will travel to the unspoilt natural beauty of the Tennessee mountains and spend a week tearing through it on high powered off-road motorbikes.”

This seemed a daring holiday choice given that my only previous experience on two wheels was riding a bicycle. But Chris assured me we would get two full days of training before going truly off-road.

It was our first day at the Motorcycle Vacation Resort. The training had started well. We spent the morning learning the most important skill of off-road motorcycling: looking ahead.

What I didn’t realise is that a motorbike is not steered by turning the handlebars but by shifting your weight. It’s a lot subtler than you would imagine. If you turn your head to look to the side, the bike will follow where you are looking. Our trainer Laura told us something that was to become our mantra for the week; “Where you look is where you go”.

We spent a lot of time on the first day establishing the deceptively challenging habit of “looking ahead”. The toughest test of this was to ride in a tight circle. In order to turn in a clockwise circle, we had to ride while looking ninety degrees to the right. The moment we forgot and looked straight ahead, the bike straightened up and we rode out of the circle.

Once we got the hang of this in an open field, Laura told us how to ride off-road where we might encounter rocks, logs, and holes in the path. The key, she told us, was quickly to pick a line of travel through the obstacles, then look ahead to where we were going. The most important thing was not to look at whatever obstacle was right in front of us. Since ‘where you look is where you go’, if you look at a big rock in front of you, you’ll hit it.

After some fun practising riding over small logs, we set off to go back to the house. We took the scenic route through the woods and this is where I momentarily forgot all my training.

As we entered the woods, I saw two large rocks in front of me blocking the path. I couldn’t see how I could negotiate around them. My cyclist brain told me that if I hit anything higher than a few inches, I would be thrown off. I panicked and my cyclist brain then did something even worse. In an emergency on a bicycle, you yank the brakes against the handlebars with both hands and pull to a stop.

On a motorbike this tends to result in pulling the throttle as hard as possible.

And the result of doing that on a 350CC motorbike is to pull the front wheel off the ground and launch you at great speed in a random direction.

Here’s the first of my very important learnings that I think will be helpful to share:

Learning #1: Sometimes hitting the first tree you come to is the very best thing that can happen to you – because you don’t want to gather any more speed before impact. (This is what entrepreneurs refer to as “Failing faster”)

A split second later I hit the tree in the chest and there was a loud crack from my back.

Finding myself on the floor I feared my worst nightmare – a broken back. “I can’t move, oh my god I’m paralysed” I shouted until I got up and realised I wasn’t. There was however a large gash across my chest where I had made contact with the tree. I turned to my friend Chris for support as his job is to rehabilitate people with severe injuries. But it was all he could do to choke back his laughter and say “that was a very impressive wheelie you just pulled”.

With no apparent structural damage I went on to complete the training course and was riding up and down mountain dirt tracks by the last day.

By that point, I had come to realise that off-road motorbikes are built with over 12 inches of shock absorber so you can hit a log or rock and ride right over it.

Learning #2: If you find yourself in a new environment, applying the principles of your old, different, environment can have very grave consequences. Update yourself. You might be amazed what’s possible - but only if you believe it’s possible.

And, most important of all:

Learning #3: The only reason I crashed was fear of crashing itself. I guess you could say this is “the law of attraction” in action.

Here’s a good question to remind ourselves of often:
If “where you look is where you go” (not just on a motorbike), where am I looking?

…or what Columbo can teach you about discovering what you really want from life

I love the detective show Columbo. It’s the ultimate wind-down TV; while modern cop shows are neurologically over-stimulating with handheld cameras and 3 cuts a second, Columbo is slow-paced and charming.

The series has been running for over 30 years but my favourites are from the 70s featuring mutton chop sideburns and plots that revolve around “cutting edge technology” like a tape recorder.

Lieutenant Columbo, played of course by Peter Falk, is a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. Every feature length episode starts with showing the actual murder scene. There is therefore no mystery, no whodunit.

The pleasure is in watching Columbo, the disheveled, apologetic cop shambling his way towards snaring his prey and proving them guilty.

Columbo knows in the first scene who the murderer is but doesn’t let on to his subject. His talent is in appearing to be harmless, enabling him to bypass the murderer’s defences, while he gathers fragments of evidence that point to what really happened. Nothing goes unmissed no matter how small; a single word, a sound on a recording, a piece of lint.

Columbo is troubled by details he can’t resolve and he drives his suspect to distraction with his famous line “Just one more thing…”.

When you are on a search to discover what you’d like to do with your life, you can learn a lot from Columbo. It’s time to play detective in “The case of the missing passion”. Your adversary is your inner critic or Top Dog.

Put yourself under surveillance. No clue should go unnoticed. What part of the newspaper do you turn to first? What part of bookshop draws you? What are your favourite TV programmes?

The evidence is there. Follow every lead, act on your hunches. Carry a notebook everywhere and record every piece of evidence about what work you do like and what work you don’t. Look for where the excitement is in you. If you hit a dead-end, call for backup – get help from friends or have a session with a coach.

What clues have you discovered that might point to something important? Leave a comment.

PS. I think this finally shows that it’s possible to turn anything that you enjoy, including lying on the sofa watching TV, into something useful for your business!

Would you like to be recognised as a pioneer, a thought leader, a true original? Want to write a life-changing book? Want to do something more than just rehash other people’s ideas? Then it’s time to make your life a laboratory.

The people who create remarkable content - Barbara Sher, Steve Pavlina, Martha Beck, Seth Godin, Mark Forster - have something in common. They experiment and they observe. They try things and notice the results - not just externally but internally. How did it feel? If every guru says you should set goals but when you do you just end up feeling crappy, that’s part of the feedback. So you experiment to find a better way, checking all the time that it feels right to you. If it works for you it will work for others like you even if it does not work for everyone. That’s fine because in reality no strategy works for everyone.

What do you know is true for you? What received wisdom is a load of hokum for you? Record it all in your lab notes.

One of the world’s most successful and respected bloggers, Steve Pavlina, conducts frequent “experiments” on his life - changing his diet, his habits, his thoughts, and as a result writes the most engaging and effective content I’ve read anywhere on the web.

Mark Forster, time management guru, experiments with radical ways of managing his time and creates completely new techniques to write about in his books. Barbara Sher, author of several books and expert on “Scanners”, finds techniques for having a great life while doing many projects at the same time.

You can do this too. What is it you’ve already learned and know works? What existing challenge in your life can you start to experiment with to find a solution?

See you in the lab.

Not only will you have a hell of a lot more fun but you’re likely to make more money than you ever did before.

A player is someone who puts creativity, fun and fulfillment first. We go where we feel drawn rather than purely pursuing money. We are engaged in a lifelong process of learning and follow an organic process of growth without knowing where it may lead us.

Playing isn’t about sitting in a corner all day daydreaming, not is it sitting on a beach drinking cocktails forever. Look at what children do when they play - they are interacting with the physical world around them, testing it and experimenting with it and they are also interacting with others and learning about relationships. It is exploratory and responsive.

A player therefore is not ignoring the real world, far from it. We are being more responsive than the worker who simply does what they’re told or the business owner who follows the latest strategy that experts recommend to make money.

A player responds to their inner world. We recognise what is happening inside of us, accept it, acknowledge it and use it - long before others are even aware of it. The musician, music producer and artist Brian Eno said recently that the question that has occupied much of his life is “What is it I really like?”. By accepting what he discovers years before it is fashionable to do so, he has become a thought leader who created an entire genre of music (ambient) and worked with some of the biggest bands in the world such as U2 and Coldplay.

Players indulge all their interests no matter how whimsical or disparate they may seem - sometimes resulting in misunderstanding and ridicule. And later we emerge with genre-smashing creative works and rule-breaking businesses. Players change the game for everyone else.

Players are not new-age dreamers. The player plays with capitalism, notices what their market wants and sees providing value and making money as part of the game. Players make more money than workers because we love what we do and passion is attractive, we are thought leaders and create original solutions, we focus on creating genuine value (not just making money) and we respond to what the market needs.

We need to be responsive, flexible and playful right now because we are on the cusp of massive change. The recession looks likely to get significantly deeper before it gets better. At the same time, there is a tidal wave coming from the East as countries like China and India explode in growth. We may very well be seeing the end of the era of economic dominance by North America and Western Europe. As the next wave of outsourcing sweeps away any work that is easily defined and repeated, creativity will be the safest pursuit at is it specific to the local culture and environment.

Players surf the big waves that others are drowned by.
When everything changes and all is in play, only the playful will survive.

(This post is a development of an earlier post)

It might seem strange to bring death into a blog about doing what you love but in fact it is at the very heart of the topic.

When I was a 5 month old baby, my parents took my brother and I out in the family car to visit some relatives. Just a few minutes from our home, we were hit head-on by a young drunk driver who had lost control and was on the wrong side of the road.

Both my parents were injured. My father died in hospital 10 days later from complications with his injuries. It was 43 years ago today. He had just turned 34.

Losing my father before I was even old enough to know him has coloured my whole life. It made it abundantly and painfully clear that life can end at any moment.

With this stark reality in mind, now answer this question: Do you really want to spend another few years doing some crappy work in the hope that you can do what you really like later?

Here’s the real message of this blog and my work in general (and it’s as much a reminder to me as to you):

STOP PISSING YOUR LIFE AWAY

What do you really want your life to be about? Start it right now in some small way. If you don’t know what you want, your mission is to find out. It’s less important that you complete your work mission than that you’re engaged in it. It’s in the being in play that you will find salvation.

When you are fully engaged in the right project, you will easily attract others around you who are inspired by the same aims. And if the worst happens and you don’t get to complete your work yourself, others will pick up the reigns.

Do what really matters. Start small. Start right now.