Forget "Overnight Success"

The Logical Path to a Creative Life

I think there’s a myth that many of us, especially creative people, secretly believe in: the myth of the overnight success. We imagine that great ideas strike like lightning and that the right piece of art at the right time can miraculously explode, launching a career into the stratosphere.

In reality, I don’t actually believe in instant success. I believe most people we think of as an overnight sensation are just people who worked really hard for many years, often on a disparate set of skills that finally came together at the right moment.

As a business strategy consultant, I’ve worked with many different businesses. And what I’ve learned is that any successful enterprise requires the presence of two powerful, and sometimes opposing forces: creativity and logic. The creative side is the idea - it’s what the business sells. The idea is often a hybrid version of a bunch of experiences, skills and interests of the business founder. The logic side is how to turn the idea into something that you can actually make a living from. This applies equally to a small solo-owned creative business and a Fortune 500 company.

Starting and running my creative business is a constant dance between creativity and logic, and the inspiration for this illustration.

As I sat down to draw I wanted to capture how I was feeling in that moment: happy to be creating, but knowing the logical side of my brain was telling me I had other work to do. I love puns, I love nerds and I love animals, especially those from my home in British Columbia. And thus a nerdy otter bemoaning the fact that he “otter” get back to work was born.

This feeling the otter represents, the tension between creative joy and professional duty, is at the heart of my entire process. To manage it, I've had to be intentional about how I structure my work.

The creative part of my business — coming up with ideas and illustrating is the part that sets my soul on fire. I like to think of this like dessert. Delicious, but not allowed until I’ve eaten my veggies.

The veggies are the business side. It’s setting goals, handling the finances, and putting together a schedule. In other words, knowing what to do with my illustrations once they are complete. I have a whole process: schedule a social post, upload the design to my website along with my Redbubble and TeePublic shops, and document everything in my master tracker—the title, the description, the color palette, where it’s been posted. This information is then logically repurposed for marketing so I never have to start from scratch.

Because I want to maximize the time I have for creating, I have well documented processes in place to streamline as much of this as possible. It also makes it easier to delegate tasks to others - something I’ve yet to do, but once this business is thriving, I will absolutely delegate as much as humanly possible. That’s CEO 101 right there.

And why shouldn’t I dream of becoming big enough that I need to hire someone? My Big Hairy Audacious Goal (my BHAG, as they say) is to be so wildly successful as a commercial artist that I can live and work from anywhere—a winter skiing, a spring by the beach, and a summer in my hometown. How wonderful would it be to create art everyday and be inspired by new places, sights & sounds all while having an assistant (or team) to keep the business running?

If I have any hope of achieving that goal, I’m going to need to set many smaller goals along the way.

And the best place to start is one small goal that is achievable but a bit of a stretch - meaning that I’m going to need to really work at it. My one achievable goal for this year is to get my art featured in a specific local store that I love—a place whose vibe perfectly matches my own. To get there, I created a work-back plan. By the end of the year, I want to have a contract with them to feature one of my designs in their store. That means two months before that, I need to be in conversation with them. And one month before that, they need to know who I am, so I’m not just a cold approach. So I’ll continue creating art that fits their brand, research their online presence, and create content designed to catch their attention. This step-by-step process blends the fun of creative work and structured planning to create a roadmap that I can really believe in.

Ultimately the work is driven by creativity, but logic builds the path to get that art out into the world. Creativity and logic need to work in harmony, because they are equally necessary for success.

In other words, if you want to turn your creative practice into a successful business: Plan the work and then work the plan. Because any goal or ambition you have that doesn't have goals with milestones and actionable tasks assigned to it is just a pipe dream.

So let's turn our wishes into plans together. I'd love to hear from you in the comments:

What's your "Big Hairy Audacious Goal?" And what's one small, logical step you could take this week to move toward it?