Here’s a time management training video I recorded at the Royal College of Art, just before I gave a talk on ‘Time Management for Creative People’.

Topics I cover include:

• Why time management matters to creative people (even if they don’t like to admit it!)
• How to manage a portfolio creative career, juggling multiple creative projects at at time
• Why I use a post-it note for my daily to-do list
• How to avoid constantly checking email on your phone (without relying on willpower)
• How to prioritize between creative ideas, deadlines and things that pay the bills
• Where time management shades into big picture career decisions

The lighting wasn’t ideal, so I’m looking a little more sepulchral than usual, but I hope you find the ideas useful.

Free Time Management Training Ebook

If you haven’t see my ebook Time Management for Creative People you can download it for free here. It’s been downloaded over 100,000 times with no advertising, just digital word-of-mouth, so I’m confident you will find the ideas of value.

And if you’d like me to run a workshop on the subject for your organisation, here are the details.

Thanks to the team at FuelRCA for inviting me to speak – they are doing a great job of providing CPD tailored to the needs of the arts and design students at the college. And they have a cool blog, click here for their notes on my talk.

Photo by AAB Engage

How do you write a successful blog?

Can blogging really bring in business, and if so, how?

What should you write about to attract potential customers?

These are some of the questions I addressed earlier this week when I spoke about business blogging at Fresh Business Thinking LIVE! (as you can see from this rare aerial photo of me presenting).

As usual when I speak to an audience, I created a written version of the presentation for the audience – and you can download it here.

Read it to learn:

• Why nobody reads most blogs
• How a blog can bring you new business – even if your customers don’t read blogs
• The critical element most business blogs are missing
• How a blog can establish you as an authority in your industry
• How to attract new readers – and keep them coming back
• Deepening the relationship with your audience – from readers to customers
• Using blogging to complement other forms of social media

Feel free to share the document with anyone who could do with a little help creating a popular and effective business blog.

Creative blocks are among the most frustrating obstacles encountered by creative people.

Our creativity is so tied up with our sense of fulfilment and identity that we are just not ourselves when we are unable to create.

And if we rely on our creative work to pay the bills, this only adds to the frustration – and the pressure to find a solution.

This is why, over on my Lateral Action blog, I invited my readers to tell me about their creative blocks – and I wrote a series of articles offering solutions to help them. Marelisa Fábrega helped me out by writing an article which is included in the ebook.

I’ve now collected the entire series into an ebook: 20 Creative Blocks (and How to Break Through Them) which you can download for free here.

Creative blocks covered in the ebook include:

• procrastination
• creativity v cash
• lack of time
• fear of getting it wrong
• disorganisation
• kids
• information overload
• taboo
• sex, drugs and rock’n'roll

The ebook is published under a Creative Commons licence, which means you are welcome to copy and share it as long as you keep it intact in its original form, credit me as author and don’t exploit it commercially.

I hope you find it useful in tackling your own creative challenges – get your copy here and please pass it on to anyone who you think may find it helpful.

Enjoy!

I’m starting to think the word ‘workplace’ is a contradiction in terms.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have told me they do their best work in the early mornings and evenings, “because it’s impossible to get any real work done during working hours”.

This is particularly common among creative employees, many of whom bitterly lament being charged with delivering outstanding creative work – and then expected to work in conditions that crush their creativity.

In other words, these are people who really want to work hard and deliver amazing results for their employer. But they are being prevented from doing so by the very people whose business depends on their creativity.

Of course,you only need to worry about this if your business depends on creating innovative products, services or business models to stay ahead of the competition – and if you’re relying on your employees to dream up great ideas and put them into action.

If your competitive advantage comes from being more organised, efficient and/or cost-effective than the next company, and you don’t need or want your employees to be creative, then feel free to ignore this article, and thank your lucky stars you don’t have to get involved in anything so messy and unpredictable as creativity.

But if you are serious about making your company a powerhouse of creativity and innovation, here are 10 big creativity crushers to avoid – and what to do instead.

1. Trying to Buy Creativity

It might seem perfectly reasonable that if you are paying people a good salary, with lots of perks and bonuses, then they should deliver outstanding creative work in return. But this flies in the face of reality.

There is a large body of research evidence demonstrating that extrinsic motivations (money, promotions and other rewards) not only fail to enhance creativity but actively inhibit it.

The trouble with dangling a nice fat carrot in front of someone as a reward is that they tend to focus on the carrot at the expense of the task in hand. And to do an amazing job, they need to be 100% focused on the work itself.

The same research shows a robust link between intrinsic motivation and creativity. Intrinsic motivations are inherent in the task itself – things like pleasure, learning, meaning, purpose, autonomy and creative flow. In other words, creative people love to work – so if you make the work interesting and challenging enough, they will respond by giving you their best.

You can’t buy creativity – you have to inspire it.

Solution:

Set people inspiring, difficult, meaningful problems. Creative people love being stretched, and get fired up when the work has a purpose beyond just making money – so it’s essential that you really believe in what you are doing (they’ll sniff it out if you don’t).

And of course, you still have to pay them properly. The critical balance to strike is to reward them well enough that it’s not a bone of contention (and therefore a distraction), without making rewards the main focus of your efforts to motivate them.

For advice on using intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to raise performance, see chapters 5 and 6 of my free e-book How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself).

2. Punishing Failure

I once taught a workshop in a large organisation and included an activity where I asked the delegates to think of the ‘second right answer’ to a problem, based on Roger von Oech’s book A Whack on the Side of the Head.

Everyone froze. They looked like rabbits caught in the headlights. When I asked them what was wrong, they told me they were always expected to come up with the right answer, and were severely punished for making mistakes.

No prizes for guessing how creative they were. And yet – when they relaxed a little – they showed me they were perfectly capable of thinking creatively. It was the fear of punishment that stopped them from using this ability at work.

People and companies that succeed through innovation take a very different approach to failure. They accept it, or even encourage it, because they know that failure holds the key to success.

You fail if you don’t try. If you try and you fail, yes, you’ll have a few articles saying you’ve failed at something. But if you look at the history of American entrepreneurs, one thing I do know about them: an awful lot of them have tried and failed in the past and gone on to great things.

Richard Branson

The London branch of the famous ad agency Wieden + Kennedy encourages risk and experiment with its company tagline ‘embrace failure’, which has appeared on its blog, on an office sign and even a range of t-shirts.

Thomas Edison famously took hundreds of attempts to perfect the light bulb filament, allegedly saying:

I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.

But he got there in the end – and not through hard work alone. Apparently he was relaxing on the shore of Battle Lake, Wyoming, when he looked at some stray threads on his bamboo fishing pole and thought of making the filament out of carbonized bamboo. The light bulb is now a universal symbol for creative thinking.

Solution:

Encourage people to try new things and learn from their inevitable mistakes. Reward them for being open and honest about mistakes and failures – so that these are not swept under the carpet, causing even more problems.

Get your managers to issue two kinds of insurance policy when they delegate tasks:

1. Act, then advise – for tasks where failure won’t have major consequences.
2. Advise, then act – for tasks where failure could be catastrophic.

If you’re going to punish anything, punish failure to learn. If you don’t, the market will.

3. Micro-Managing

When the buck stops with you, it’s only natural to want to maintain control of the work, and seek ongoing reassurance that people are doing it properly – and give them plenty of advice on how to do so.

But creative people hate being micro-managed. It sets their teeth on edge. And it prevents them from doing their best work.

By definition, creativity is about coming up with a new solution – or a range of different solutions – not the one right answer (see No.2). If you entrust a task to a creative worker, you are not getting full value from them unless you allow them some freedom to execute it in their own way.

And it’s not just the ‘suits’ who use this creativity crusher – very often, it’s a senior creative who can’t resist telling people to execute tasks and solve problems the same way they are used to doing it. Which is fine if you just want ‘Mac monkeys’ – people to implement your ideas and flesh out designs to your specification. But not so good if you genuinely want to grow a creative team.

Solution:

Stop micromanaging people and start coaching them:

• Define the goal as clearly and specifically as you can, and then allow people as much freedom as possible in finding their own solutions to the challenges you set them.
• Ask focused-but-open questions, to direct their attention and draw out their ideas.
• Give accurate, non-judgmental feedback to help them learn and improve continuously.
• Hold them accountable for delivering to a high standard.

For advice on using the coaching style of management to foster creativity, read my free e-book Creative Management for Creative Teams.

4. Efficiency Drives

3M is a poster child for corporate innovation, and rightly famous for producing a string of successful inventions including masking tape, Thinsulate and the Post-It note. Yet a few years ago, this wasn’t enough for senior management, who resolved to build on their success by introducing the Six Sigma methodology for quality control and efficiency.

The Six Sigma ‘black belts’ discovered plenty of areas of waste and inefficiency within the organisation, and worked tirelessly to eliminate these. The result was a leaner, more efficient and cost-effective organisation – but according to a BusinessWeek article, a less creative one:

Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are designed to identify problems in work processes—and then use rigorous measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of initiatives become ingrained in a company’s culture, as they did at 3M, creativity can easily get squelched.

(At 3M, a Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity by Brian Hindo)

The black belts had overlooked the fact that creativity requires downtime, experiment and freedom to make ‘errors’. Cut that out and you cut out the opportunity to make new discoveries.

No, not every experiment will succeed, but that’s the nature of experiments. Every successful creative industry finds a way to manage risk. None thrives by trying to eliminate it. The movie industry, for example, spreads its risk by funding several films, knowing that one hit will cover the losses of several flops.

Remember Google’s famous rule of allowing its engineers to spend 20% of their time on personal projects? They wouldn’t be one of the most innovative companies in the world if they had lost their nerve and decided to eliminate this ‘inefficiency’.

Solution:

Accept that you can have either 100% efficiency or outstanding creativity – not both.

If you choose creativity, find ways to set limits on downtime and playtime. Google sets the limit at 20%, not 50%, and with good reason.

Make sure everyone in the company understands your strategic goals, and give them regular updates on your progress. Not only will this instil a sense of urgency and responsibility, it will also help them keep your target in mind even as they are playing around and experimenting with new ideas.

5. Banning Social Networks

You are paying people to work, not waste time chatting to their friends, so it makes sense to ban social networks during working hours, right?

It’s true that allowing people to spend time on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks means they will not spend all day every day ‘cranking widgets’, in productivity guru David Allen’s famous phrase.

But you don’t hire creative people to crank widgets. You hire them to be creative – and as we’ve seen, creativity is not 100% efficient. It requires idle conversation, new connections and sources of information – all of which can be found in abundance on social networks.

No company has a monopoly on innovation. Connecting to larger networks of bright, inspiring, creative people should be not only tolerated but actively encouraged, if your company is to remain relevant and competitive.

Social networks are a double-edged sword – they can enhance productivity as well as kill it. If you want a creative organisation, a blanket ban isn’t the answer.

Solution:

Make sure everyone understands the importance of getting the job done, and provide clear guidelines on what you consider reasonable vs excessive personal use of social networks and the internet in general.

Help them avoid avoid the social media time-sink by developing a social media strategy (and policy) that is aligned with your business strategy.

Encourage them to build their professional network by connecting with their peers on relevant networks, in order to learn, share ideas and best practices, and look for opportunities to collaborate to advance your business goals.

Teach them about time management for creative people (yes, that’s another free e-book for you) and encourage them to restrict their use of social media to times that have not been ring-fenced for focused work.

Give them tools such as Freedom or Concentrate to help them regulate their own use of the internet, and trust them to do this responsibly.

Make people accountable for achieving goals (see No.3) and challenge them if they are failing. If you have evidence that social networking is part of the problem, give them some robust feedback. Otherwise, assume networks are part of the solution.

Too Much Control or Not Enough?

The creativity crushers I’ve covered so far are all born of the same mindset – trying to control people by using the carrot and stick, micro-management, peer pressure, efficiency directives and restricting their internet use.

This mindset is typical of the Theory X approach to management, where people are assumed to be lazy, irresponsible, incapable and in need of constant supervision, bribes and punishments, if they are to achieve anything productive.

Basically, Theory X means you don’t trust them. This may not be a problem if they are doing repetitive or mundane tasks, but you need to know it is guaranteed to destroy their creativity.

The alternative is Theory Y, which assumes people are fundamentally honest, trustworthy, responsible and keen to do the best job they can. Even if you don’t believe this is universally true, it makes sense to hire people with these qualities. Because you won’t get much creativity out of people who don’t take initiative and responsibility for making things happen.

The funny thing is, some of the most controlling organisations compound their control-freakery by being incredibly lax in areas where they should exert much more control – if they really want their people to be creative. Here are five cases in point.

6. Amateurish Feedback on Creative Work

Feedback is a notoriously sensitive subject, and giving feedback on creative work is even more difficult than giving feedback on behaviour, for two reasons:

1. There is always an element of subjectivity in assessing the value of a creative artefact.
2. Creative people identify very strongly with their work – so when you criticise the work, they are liable to take it personally.

Get this wrong, and you can crush their motivation. And because motivation and creativity are inextricably linked (No.1) when you crush one, you crush both.

Get it right, and you not only make the work better, you retain the motivation and enthusiasm of your people over the long term.

Given all of this, you might expect companies to take the art of giving feedback on creative work very seriously. But to judge from the number of complaints I hear from creatives, this isn’t happening in many organisations.

They tell me about having their work dismissed with vague and inconsistent criticism, by managers and colleagues who clearly don’t understand what they are looking at. Not all of them are as bad as the Emperor from Amadeus, but some are even worse.

It’s fun to make sweeping judgments on movies and rock bands over dinner with friends – but not so funny when a few tactless words from a manager can seriously damage your business.

Solution:

Teach people to give – and receive – feedback on creative work in a genuinely constructive way.

• Managers, account managers and others giving feedback – follow my 5 Tips for Giving Feedback on Creative Work.
• Creatives – start growing a thicker skin and having more productive conversations with the above people, using my 6 Tips for Receiving Feedback on Your Creative Work.

7. Meetings

If you put six people in a meeting for one hour, you’ve used up six hours of productivity. So you might expect meetings would be rare occurrences, and when they did happen, to be high-octane sessions where people used a lot of energy to attack important challenges and achieve meaningful breakthroughs.

How many meetings like that have you attended recently?

Now think of a number of meetings you’ve been in where you have found your presence redundant for long stretches – and to judge by some of the sighs, blank stares and fiddling with gadgets around the table, you’re not the only one wishing you could be somewhere else, doing something more productive.

No wonder the most creative people can’t stand meetings

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals call meetings “toxic” and “the worst interruptions of all”.

Seth Godin says he doesn’t mind attending a meeting as long as there are no chairs in the room, which stops people lingering longer than they have to.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’

Dave Barry

Solution:

Ask yourself whether you really need to have so many meetings, or whether some of them are scheduled out of habit. Get your people to ask the same questions. Make it acceptable for people to ask whether they need to attend, or whether they can leave early.

When you have to have a meeting, ask how much of the agenda needs to be discussed in person, versus information transfer that could take place via email, written report, intranet post or wiki entry. Have a clear goal for the meeting, and for each item on the agenda, with clear next action steps agreed and recorded for each person. Then let everyone get back to work.

If part of the purpose of your meeting is to give people a chance to connect with each other, maybe you could do that in a more pleasant setting? A team breakfast, lunch or after work drinks will probably do more for morale, and stimulate more creative conversations than sitting in the board room.

8. Interruptions

When I trained as a hypnotist, I was taught that one of the easiest ways to induce amnesia is to keep interrupting someone. You’ve probably experienced this yourself – when the waiter has just taken your order, and neither you nor your companion can remember what you were talking about a few moments ago.

In his book Your Brain at Work, David Rock points out that interruptions and distractions have a devastating effect on our mental abilities:

One study found that office distractions eat an average 2.1 hours a day. Another study, published in October 2005, found that employees spent an average of 11 minutes on a project before being distracted. After an interruption it takes them 25 minutes to return to the original task, if they do at all. People switch activities every three minutes, either making a call, speaking with someone in their cubicle, or working on a document.

Distractions are not just frustrating; they can be exhausting. By the time you get back to where you were, your ability to stay focused goes down even further as you have even less glucose available now. Change focus ten times an hour (one study showed people in offices did so as much as 20 times an hour), and your productive thinking time is only a fraction of what’s possible.

Amnesia and exhaustion – not exactly a recipe for creativity.

It’s no surprise that creatives complain interruptions are one of the biggest obstacles to producing high-quality work. They aren’t being prima donnas, any more than the baker when he says he needs a hot oven for baking, or the accountant when she says she needs all the figures to prepare your accounts.

Solution:

One person’s interruption is another’s urgent request. So to keep everyone happy, creative and productive, you need to come at this problem from two sides:

• Interrupters – ask yourself whether it’s essential to interrupt someone now, in person or on the phone – or whether you could talk to them later, send an email or text, or put a note in their in tray.
• Interruptees – let people know when is a good time/bad time to interrupt, and the best ways they can get your attention. If you’re terrible at email, ask them to leave a note on your desk or a message on your phone. And when you agree to do something, give a timescale, check that it’s okay with the other person, and keep your promise! The more times you get back to them on time, the fewer nagging interruptions you will get.

9. Death by PowerPoint

When was the last time you actively looked forward to seeing a presentation at work?

What percentage of the PowerPoint slides you see on an average week are covered in bullet points, text in tiny fonts, and charts that are impossible to read from where you sit?

How much time do presenters spend looking you in the eye, telling you something that matters and inspiring you with their message – as opposed to looking down at their notes or back over their shoulder, as they read the text off the slides?

Death by PowerPoint has been around so long the phrase is now a cliche, but that doesn’t stop people perpetrating it on a daily basis. Which is a crime, considering the power of public speakers to inspire and communicate.

You don’t have to be Barack Obama or Winston Churchill to give an engaging and stimulating presentation. And believe it or not, PowerPoint can actually be a very creative medium, as long as you disregard most of Microsoft’s hints about how to use it.

Solution:

You wouldn’t tolerate illiteracy in your copywriters, or innumeracy in your accountants, so don’t tolerate poor communication in your presenters.

Make it a rule that no one in your company is allowed to use PowerPoint until they have read and started to apply the lessons from Garr Reynolds’ book Presentation Zen. Or better yet, give a dynamic presentation yourself that explains and exemplifies the following guidelines for presenting:

• One big idea
• Three key points
• One compelling story
• One idea per slide (and no more than six words)
• One clear call to action

For more advice on taking a creative approach to presentations, read my article How to Create a Captivating Presentation.

10. Email Run Amok

It’s amazing to me that some of the companies that have the strictest policies on social networks are the most lax when it comes to email.

I’m not talking about sending personal emails in work time – some of them are only too happy to monitor employees’ email. I’m talking about allowing people to send work emails in ways that produce inefficiency, unnecessary interruptions (No.8) and apathy.

Some of the biggest creativity crushers include:

• CCing everyone on just about every message
• using emails instead of the phone for urgent requests
• expecting a near-instant response
• not signalling whether an email is FYI or contains an important request
• burying requests in long rambling messages
• sending an email to avoid having an emotionally charged conversation (pretty well guaranteed to start an argument)

Left unchecked, these habits produce overflowing inboxes and a sense of overload. It feels impossible ever to clear the inbox, so many people give up trying to keep up with email. Others spend all day on hyperactive alert for email, inducing amnesia and mental stress (see No. 8). Meanwhile, important requests and information are slipping through the cracks in your business…

Solution:

Get everyone in the office to read Seth Godin’s email checklist – not to follow his prescriptions slavishly, but to start a conversation about what kind of email habits are the most effective for everyone’s needs.

Ask for people’s biggest gripes about email – and consider whether you could introduce a new email rule to eliminate these. For example, some companies report boosts in productivity and morale after instituting ‘email free Fridays’. Another made it imperative for someone to pick up the phone if an email conversation generated more than five replies.

Here are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling:

• If you need a response today, don’t rely on email. Pick up the phone or go and see them. This means no one is under pressure to check internal email more than once a day (client-facing employees are an obvious exception) and can devote their time to more productive activities.
• Batch process emails. It’s far quicker to answer 30 emails at one sitting than it is to keep stopping and answering them one at a time throughout the day.
• Use email for correspondence, not conversation. Correspondents don’t send letters every five minutes. Correspondents take care over what they write, and keep their reader in mind. Correspondents don’t expect an instant response.
• Take the conversation elsewhere, such as a conference call, Instant Messenger or intranet forum. Or better still, sit down in a room together. You’ll have a more productive conversation, you won’t be clogging up your inboxes, and you’ll all feel better.

How Much Creativity Do You Need?

Remember, you only need to worry about these things if you’re depending on the creativity of your people to help your business succeed. You’re running a company, not a creativity workshop.

If your business model depends on creativity, then watch out for these creativity crushers and use the solutions I’ve provided. And if you know someone else who is running a creative business, please forward them to link to this article.

But if you can afford to manage without your employees’ creativity, carry on crushing it.

Would you like your team to be more creative and productive?

If your team could do with some help getting creative work done in the midst of the demands and distractions of the 21st-century workplace, ask me about running my popular time management training workshop Time Management for Creative People for your organisation.

Over to You

Which of these creativity crushers have you seen in action?

What would you add to the list?

Any tips for improving workplace creativity?

If you’d like to inject some inspiration and momentum into your creative career, feel free to enrol on my new course: The Creative Pathfinder.

It’s a 25-week programme designed to equip you with the creative and professional skills you need to succeed in your chosen career path – whether you’re an employee, freelancer or creative entrepreneur.

Things you’ll learn include:

• why following your heart makes sound business sense
• the four most powerful types of creative thinking
• how to handle a creative block – when you’re supposed to be the creative pro
• why opportunities just land in some people’s lap (and how you can be one of them)
• the most effective ways to make a living from your creativity
• why having a resume could handicap your career
• how to turn your website into a magnet for new business and career opportunities
• the weird and profitable properties of intellectual property
• how to sell without selling out
• what to do with all the money you earn
• why other people seem so weird – and what to do about it
• how to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds

Every week, you’ll receive a new lesson via e-mail, containing:

• An article explaining the what, why and how of the topic
• A practical worksheet for you to download and complete
• Links to additional resources (articles, books, e-books etc — most of which are free)

And it won’t cost you a penny. Sign-up on the enrolment page and you will receive the entire course of 25 lessons for free.

Since I launched The Creative Pathfinder on Lateral Action last week, over 1,200 students have signed up. It would be great if you could join us on the journey…

Photo by PhillipC

If you’ve seen the latest news from Lateral Action, then you’ll know I’ve just taken over the running of that site from my partners Brian Clark, Tony D. Clark and Sonia Simone. It’s been great working with them over the last two years, and I’m now excited at the prospect of running Lateral Action as a one-man show.

It does however leave me with a very nice problem. I now have two popular websites for creative people, so I’ve been thinking about how to make the best use of both of them, so that they don’t overlap too much and get in each other’s way.

So here’s what I’ve decided. Both sites will continue to focus on creativity and creative business, but with a slightly different emphasis.

Wishful Thinking

This site has a predominantly UK audience, so anything to do with the UK creative industries will appear over here. This will also be the place I write about issues relevant to medium- to large-sized creative businesses. And this will be my ‘home base’ for my consulting services for agencies and larger businesses, and my public seminars in the UK.

So here’s the topic menu for the Wishful Thinking blog going forward:

• Creativity
• Collaboration and teamwork
• Managing creativity
• Coaching
• Internet marketing and social media for agencies and larger businesses
• The UK creative industries

Lateral Action

Here I’ll be more focused on individuals and very small businesses: artists and creative practitioners, freelancers, micro-businesses and creative entrepreneurs. Lateral Action will also be my ‘home base’ for work with private coaching clients and my e-learning courses.

Here’s the topic menu for the Lateral Action blog:

• Creativity
• Productivity
• Creative entrepreneurship
• Internet marketing for artists and creatives
• Personal development for creative people
• The creative economy

I know many of you subscribe to both blogs, so this ‘division of labour’ should maintain their individual character, and make sure you get a different kind of value from each of them. Obviously there will be some overlap, particularly in the area of creativity, which is central to all my work.

If you’re not already subscribed to Lateral Action, then you can sign up here for free articles about the topics above.

(If you recently subscribed to Wishful Thinking after reading my piece on Why Artists and Creatives Have an Unfair Advantage at Internet Marketing, then I should point out I’ll have plenty to say on that topic over at Lateral Action — so if that’s your interest, you may well want to subscribe to Lateral Action.)

Finally, I’d like to thank all of you for reading Wishful Thinking and encouraging me with your comments, e-mails and face-to-face feedback. I’ve been on an amazing journey since I started this blog four a half years ago, and the site has transformed, Tardis-like, several times. I hope you enjoy the next incarnation!

Drawing by Hugh MacLeod

If you’re an artist or creative person of any kind then ‘creating’ is a lot higher on your list of priorities than ‘selling’.

One of the great joys of pursuing your creative passion is the sheer pleasure of writing, painting, making music, acting, taking pictures or whatever you do — without any ulterior motive, and without needing to show any kind of ‘return on investment’. You do it because you love to do it. Amen to that.

On the other hand, even if you don’t want to be a millionaire, I bet you wouldn’t mind a little fame. Not vulgar Hello! Magazine celebrity, but maybe the respect of your fellow artists, and some critical recognition. A few adoring fans probably wouldn’t hurt either.

You don’t have to be rich as well as famous, but all of us have bills to pay, so I’m guessing you wouldn’t mind earning a decent living from your creative work. Getting paid to do what you love has to be one of the greatest gigs on earth.

We are now living at a time of unprecedented opportunity for artists and creative professionals. Once upon a time, if you wanted to get your work in front of an audience, you had to submit it to an editor, agent, manager, curator, talent scout, whoever. A gatekeeper who had the power to open the gate and usher you through, or slam it in your face.

They called the shots, so when they said “Jump!” we jumped — and when they said “10%” we agreed to 10%. What else were we going to do?

Now, the Internet gives you the chance to gatejump, to build your own platform, find your own fans and sell your work directly to them. And it won’t cost you a fortune. Most of the software and tools you’ll need are either free or very low cost.

And that’s not even the really good news — it gets even better …

Your Creativity Gives You an Unfair Advantage

One of the biggest trends in internet marketing at the moment is something called content marketing. In a nutshell, it means creating and giving a way original media content that doesn’t look like marketing — but functions like marketing.

For example, Matthew Inman creates hysterically funny cartoons and gives them away for free on his website The Oatmeal. And because they are so cool and funny, lots of people send their friends to look at them, via Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. When you visit his site, he offers to send you more cool cartoons for free. What’s not to like? I’m just one of thousands of people who have signed up for his free cartoons.

As a result, Matthew has a mailing list of people who want to hear from him. He also has a shop on his website, where you can buy posters and mugs of his cartoons. And he has a book coming out soon. Not everyone who visits his site or signs up for his mailing list will become a customer — but enough of them do to create a nice income stream for Matthew. So Matthew gets to be a professional cartoonist, his website visitors get a good laugh for free, and his loyal customers are even more thrilled with their purchases. Win-win-win.

Not only that, but people like me, with audiences of our own, start doing his marketing for him, by writing about his website and recommending his stuff.

Is Matthew highly creative? Yes. Is he generous? Yes. Does he have a smart business strategy? You bet.

Matthew understands the fact that what people are looking for online is original and remarkable media content. In his case, he’s producing entertainment. But others have succeeded with art, news and particularly education. He is a visual artist, so obviously he uses images. But others are using text, audio and video just as successfully.

You see, even when Matthew gives away his cartoons for free, he’s not really giving them away for free. He’s giving them in return for visitors to his website and subscribers to his mailing lists. In a nutshell, he’s giving his work away in return for attention. Now that he has an audience paying attention, he’s in a very strong position to sell products, services, advertising or whatever else he wants.

Matthew’s success (ahem) illustrates one of the central paradoxes of Internet marketing: the less your media content looks like advertising, the more effective it will be as advertising.

If he had started a website that was nothing more than an advert for his books and posters, how much traffic do you think he would get? Not much. But because he is giving away something genuinely valuable and making it easy for others to copy and share it, he’s created a business that virtually markets itself. Welcome to the future.

In my own case, my business was transformed the day I added a blog to the Wishful Thinking website. Before that, I had a nice-looking brochure website that told people what a good coach and trainer I was — and which hardly sold a thing. When I started the blog, my website traffic took off — and so did the new business enquiries. My version of content marketing is to write educational articles with practical tips for creative people. Over the last four years, this has become my main source of new business, and has led to some amazing business opportunities I’d never have dreamt of when I started out.

Internet marketers have known about content marketing for years, and some of them really do earn millions of dollars a year with little more than a laptop, a network of trusted associates, and some very large mailing lists.

Nowadays, companies in all kinds of industries are starting to cotton on to the fact that they need to start thinking like media companies, and producing original articles, videos, podcasts, educational resources and news updates, if they want to command attention and generate online buzz and business.

And you know what? Lots of them are tearing their hair out. You don’t go into the frozen food business because you want to work in media. But now they are faced with having to create entertaining and engaging media content, or be left behind.

Even their marketing departments are confused. Remember the paradox: the more your media content looks like advertising the less effective it will be as advertising. If you’ve been working in a traditional marketing department — categorising and ‘targeting’ people and treating them like ‘consumers’, bombarding them with advertising and marketing-speak — this is a hard lesson to learn.

You of course, don’t have that problem. Creating original, engaging, remarkable images, sounds, text, music or video is what you do best. You’re already a one-person media company. Even if you hate the very idea of marketing, you should know that when it comes to Internet marketing, your creativity gives you an unfair advantage.

If you’d like to know what you can do with that advantage, read on.

Option 1: Build Your Own Audience

The first and sexiest option is to do what Matthew did and build your own audience online, creating a remarkable website that you love to work on and people love to visit and tell their friends about.

If you do this smartly, it means other people will send you potential customers, you’ll be found easily on the search engines and you will gradually build up mailing lists of fans who are prepared to pay good money for your work. Kevin Kelly famously estimated that a creator needs only 1,000 true fans to make a living via the Internet. The number obviously varies depending on what you are saying and how much you can charge for it, but the basic principle still holds.

This is the route chosen by artists Natasha Wescoat Hazel Dooney, Hugh MacLeod and John T Unger, graphic designer David Airey, musicians Steve Lawson and Tobias Tinker, craft artist Emily Martin and writer Justine Musk.

If you’re reading this thinking “That’s all very well for those people, but I work in such a non-commercial medium that I can’t imagine earning enough money from it”, then hold that thought for a moment. For one thing, who would have thought that solo bass playing could be the foundation of a viable career?

And for another, even if you would struggle to earn a living from your primary creative passion, maybe there’s something related to it that could provide you with a viable and fulfilling business.

For example, I write poetry, and not even the trendy hip kind of poetry at that. Old-fashioned stuff like sonnets, blank verse and sestinas. I’m not banking on it making me a millionaire any time soon. But I’ve discovered that people are willing to pay me to teach them about creativity, productivity and other professional skills for creative people. The result is that I love my work so much that it doesn’t really feel like work. And thanks to the wonders of content marketing and the Internet, I even love the marketing side of things.

What could be more fun than writing about your favourite artists, writers, films and rock stars? Nice work if you can create it — and I’m glad I did.

Option 2: Partner with Others

Remember those company owners tearing their hair out at the prospect of having to start producing media content? To them, it’s a nightmare — but for you, it’s an opportunity.

You have the ability to write the articles, draw the images, record the music and produce the videos they need. What’s to stop you teaming up with them – to help them create the online presence they need, and to allow you to learn a decent living doing something you enjoy?

I’m not suggesting you go out and start composing odes to frozen peas. (Not unless it really blows your hair back.) Pick a company you really admire, whose products or services you use and recommend. Have a look at their website — how does it compare with Matthew’s? Could you help them do better? Can you see yourself writing about them, or building them a website, or helping them make educational videos that genuinely help their customers? If so, what’s to stop you getting in touch with them?

I’m not talking about freelance gigs either. You have an unfair advantage, remember? That’s worth more than an hourly rate. Look for companies who are willing to partner with you, for a share of the profits or even a stake in the business. That way you reap the true rewards of your efforts, and both of you have a real investment in making the venture a success.

Have a look at the English Cut blog. It’s written by Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon. When he started it, he was in need of new clients. Now he has a long waiting list of people who want to spend thousands of pounds on one of his suits — which he attributes directly to the success of his blog.

Now have a look at the Stormhoek wine blog. Stormhoek is a small South African winery, which was in need of new customers before it started the blog. And thanks to the blog and various other initiatives, its sales have skyrocketed in the last few years. And for some reason they’re doing very well in places like Silicon Valley and Texas.

In both cases, that “some reason” is cartoonist Hugh MacLeod. Not only does he run his own successful business by his Gapingvoid website, he’s the mastermind behind English Cut and Stormhoek’s online marketing. He showed them how to use blogging to command attention and attract new customers, and it worked out very well for all concerned.

I also use partnering in my business. As well as running Wishful Thinking, I’m a partner in Lateral Action with Brian Clark, one of the most successful Internet marketers on the planet, and Tony Clark, who is also Brian’s partner on hugely successful ventures such as Teaching Sells and Third Tribe.

Now why would a couple of ‘big shot’ American entrepreneurs want to partner with an introverted poet from England? One reason is that I love writing about creativity, and I’m prepared to write and edit the Lateral Action blog which powers our content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, they get to work on the bits of the business they love doing. Win-win-win again.

Here’s the Bad News

You knew there was some bad news, right? Whenever I run my workshop on Web Marketing for Creative People, I can sense people getting excited when I tell them about the opportunities of the online world. But it’s not long before someone raises their hand and asked the following question:

But doesn’t this take an awful lot of time?

And the answer, of course, is “Yes”. If you really want to succeed online, it will take a lot of time. Let’s face it, if you want to succeed at anything worthwhile, it’s going to take a lot of time.

If you feel discouraged by that, think about how you feel when somebody admires your skill at writing, drawing, playing music or whatever. “I’d love to be able to do that,” they tell you, “but I bet it takes a lot of time to learn, right?”. And what can you say?

Of course it takes a lot of time — but you do it anyway, because you love doing it, and because you want the results it gives you. You know there are no shortcuts, but you’re happy to accept the challenge.

Finding and nurturing your thousand true fans is hard work, make no mistake. It takes a lot of time, not to mention creativity and sheer persistence. Only you can decide whether the potential rewards are worth investing your time and effort. Or whether it would be easier to go the traditional route, and catch the eye and win the favour of the gatekeepers in your industry.

Technically, it’s not rocket science but there is a bit of a learning curve involved. You can get help with that, but unless you already an active internet user, you’ll need to be prepared to learn a little about the technical side of things. I should point out that I’m not a programmer or web designer. I am a wordsmith and a ‘people person’ with a background in psychotherapy, coaching and training. If I can do it, so can you.

Probably the biggest hurdle for many creative people is the very idea of putting yourself out there and selling things. You might worry that it feels like ‘selling out’. Or that it’s just plain scary. I’m afraid I can’t sugarcoat this bit: if you want to earn a living from your creative work, you need to learn how to sell.

Even if you opt for employment, you’ll still need to ‘sell’ yourself to an employer, and ‘sell’ your work to your manager, your teammates and your clients. If you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur, you’ll have to takeaway those inverted commas and learn how to sell full stop.

On the plus side, if you adopt the content marketing approach, you get to produce fabulous work that functions as advertising because it doesn’t look like advertising. Which makes it a hell of a lot more fun to create.

“OK, Where Do I Start?”

“Build it and they will come” is a nice idea, but even in the brave new world of the internet, I’m afraid it’s a myth. There’s more to content marketing than simply posting your pictures or writings on a blog and waiting for the world to beat a path to your door.

You need to combine your natural creativity with knowledge of what really works in online marketing, so that the time you spend creating and publishing content online becomes a worthwhile investment.

If you want an in-depth guide to using the internet to build a business around your creative talent, I’ve created an e-learning program in Creative Entrepreneurship, in collaboration with Brian Clark, Tony Clark and Sonia Simone. Sign up here if you’d like to be first to know next time the course is open to the public.

What Do You Think?

Do you agree that artists and creatives have an unfair advantage at internet marketing?

Have you successfully used creative content to promote your business?

If you haven’t started internet marketing yet – what’s holding you back?

If you only read one book about creativity, I tell my clients, make it The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

It contains the distilled wisdom of a bestselling novelist and Hollywood screenwriter, who has both the scars and trophies of a life spent wrestling with creative challenges.

This book has been an inspiration to me for years, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Steven and record an interview with him for Lateral Action. In the course of an hour, we covered a range of topics relating to creativity, work, entrepreneurship and life in general, including:

• Why is it so hard to pursue our dreams, and get started on the creative challenges that mean so much to us?
• How can we overcome our inner Resistance to doing the things that matter?
• What rewards can we expect from persevering in the face of difficulties?
• What are the creative opportunities — and pitfalls — of social media and digital publishing?

As you’d expect from an accomplished novelist, Steve is a great raconteur; I was spellbound in his company and I think you will be too.

You can listen to the interview with Steven Pressfield over at Lateral Action.

Make sure you check out Steve’s website, StevenPressfield.com, which should be very appealing to Wishful Thinking readers.

Finally, ‘conversations’ plural wasn’t a typo in the title — Steve has very graciously returned the favour by interviewing me about creativity, productivity and entrepreneurship. It’s a slightly surreal experience being interviewed by one of your heroes, but Steve asked me some very stimulating questions that made me think about things from a fresh angle, and I hope you’ll find the interview of interest.

Many thanks to Steve for his generosity and inspiration.

I’ve just added a Guest Articles page to Wishful Thinking, where you can find all the guest articles I write on other blogs and websites. I’ll keep updating it as I publish new articles.

One piece I’d particularly encourage you to read if you are a freelancer is Build a Business, Not Just a Client List, published at The 99 Percent, where I’m a regular(ish) columnist. It sums up my current thinking about the business of being a self-employed creator.

Another piece I like for completely different reasons is Remember Yourself, commissioned by one of my all-time favourite bloggers, Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid.

My most recent guest piece is How to Stop E-mail Killing Your Creativity, for the Cockpit Arts blog ahead of my upcoming workshops for creative people.

And if you still want more, remember that I write every week on my other creativity blog, Lateral Action.

Following the success of my Creative Momentum workshops last summer, I’m pleased to announce two more public workshops in central London this July:

Time Management for Creative People — 7 July

Manage the mundane – create the extraordinary. Essential skills to maximise your creativity and minimise your stress levels at work!

From people who attended last year:

“Clear, intelligent and genuinely useful material.”
Thomas Heath, thomasheath.tv

“I liked the way the ideas for managing time were uncomplicated and realistic enough to start fitting them into your everyday life.”
Candida Bradley, candipops.com

“The content was clear and can be easily applied.”
Jacob Sam-La Rose, jacobsamlarose.com

Full details + booking here: Time Management Training

How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) — 14 July

Motivate yourself to overcome obstacles and create amazing work – and a sustainable career.

From people who came last year:

“This was nothing like I expected and much better than I expected. Made me look at how I work and why I work, in a completely different way. Mark has a very laid back style which is great.”
Sarah Turner, turnerink.co.uk

“The group size was just right. The distinctions worked well, and gave me a different way of thinking about motivation. The material is interesting and well presented. An enjoyable and worth-while workshop!”
David Stevens, musicforspecialneeds.com

“I really liked the way you related the issues of the talk with stories which you almost acted out! It was interesting relating problems which you experience yourself to other people who have succeeded – it made it seem more achievable! I really enjoyed it, a really comfortable atmosphere was created and the group seemed to get on well. Thank you!”
Candida Bradley, candipops.com

“I liked your presentation style. I think it was the first time in a long while when I actually was captured by a presentation and the content and listened to what you had to say.”
Kim Robertson

Details and booking here: Motivation Training

The workshops are designed for creative people of all descriptions — artists, creatives, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who takes their creativity seriously.

As before, I’ll be tailoring the workshops to the specific needs of each group – when you book your place, I’ll send you some questions about what you want to get out of it, which will help me target the issues that are most important to you.

The workshops are designed to work equally well as standalone sessions, or to complement each other if you take both. There’s also a special offer if you book both workshops together.

Places will be strictly limited to 25 per workshop and allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Last year they sold out well in advance, so early booking is a good idea if you want to be sure of your place.

Here’s the booking page (with secure payment via credit card or Paypal):

We had a lot of fun last year and I’m looking forward to more of the same this time round. I hope you can join us!

PS — I may be running some more workshops later in the summer — you can join my mailing list if you want to be first to know when they are announced.