2 Core Questions to Level Up Your Creative Career
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Here are two questions you need to answer if you’re hoping for any success with your creative career.
1. What problem are you trying to solve?
People pay for solutions to their problems.
Your clients don’t pay you out of the kindness of their hearts just because you’re a nice person. So if you’re looking to make a career out of your creative skills, make sure those skills solve a problem for other people.
One of the reasons I don’t teach people how to sell their music or their “art” is because it’s hard to position that as “solving a problem.” People don’t buy music anymore (or not at the level at which independent artists can make a living), but fans may still support you because they like you.
However, building a creative career has nothing to do with patronage and “fan sponsorship” and everything to do with using your skills to solve problems other people will pay you to solve.
If you’re not getting the clients or customers you want to work with, it might be because you’re not focusing enough on the problems they have.
For instance, many of the people on my email list are hobby musicians with no ambition to make their music-making and audio engineering skills into a career. That’s fine, but this post is not for them. Instead, this post is for committed creatives who want to grow their careers and earn money with their skills.
The biggest problem those creatives have is finding clients and building their marketing systems to grow their careers. Making ordinary creatives into ambitious entrepreneurs is what I’m focused on right now because it’s a helluva problem and an enjoyable one to help people overcome.
2. What is the specific result you’ll achieve for your client?
I wanted to go on a bike ride one day, but it turned out my tire was flat. So I did a quick search for bike shops around me and found one that could repair my bike for me quickly so I could go on my ride.
I had a problem, and I needed a specific result to solve that problem. I didn’t go to the bike shop to wax poetic about the health benefits of bike…
