Bridge the gap between making art and making a living,

… one tip at a time

Your smARTip for the week:

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Are You Sabotaging Your Success?
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For years I thought my to-do list was the measure of success in any one day, or at any one point in time. (I confess, I had a very limited idea of what success was!)

Check off something on the list, and I was positively giddy.

Like any “fix,” it lasted a millisecond and then I was looking for the next item on the list, getting geared up for the next check mark.

My to-do list was losing its effectiveness as a simple tool and becoming

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This week’s smARTip:
Your Originals Carry One Heavy Load
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I don’t know if you’ve ever performed on stage, in a play, a leading role where you were in every scene and interacted with almost every player.

If you’ve never been there, done that, it might seem romantic or thrilling – all that attention focused on you.

That was never the case for me, even though I loved the entire process of acting in a theater. I loved finding a voice, character, body language that wasn’t “me.” It was a toot!

If only I didn’t have to do it center stage, it would have been perfect.

The load of all that

I don’t know why this idea persists that competition and the arts are odd bed sisters. But it does.

I know that for years, competition had so much sport’s testosterone slathered over it that I cringed just to hear the word.

Then one time, when I made sure I got to a local potter’s studio right when she opened (I had a hankering for this lovely, tiny bowl that was actually a small nesting bird), my friends who were meeting me there “accused” me of being highly competitive because I got the bowl and about 3 other items that simply called to me.

Well, blown me down! If you never!

If I’d been asked to list ten-thousand adjectives about myself,  competitive would have never showed up.

I didn’t play sports. Didn’t enter contests. Never felt elated when I got a better test score than someone else, or a better grade in school.

And yet, there I was clearly getting a head start so I’d have first dibs at the potter’s studio.

Of course, that time the competitive label came with a derogatory implication that somehow what I’d done was unfriendly. I remember the sting of feeling emotionally ostracized the rest of the day – but not to the point of giving up my bird bowl!

In re-imagining this distant past, I realize I also had another emotion that…

For a lot of you, Geoffrey Gorman needs no introduction. Besides co-hosting the Art Career Mentor Program with me, Geoffrey has a long history of coaching other artists (but, alas, no more as he’s now devoted to full time art making!)

Over the years, Geoffrey has learned a thing or two about art consultants and agreed to share his latest outreach here on the smARTist Career Blog.

Without further ado, hereeeeeeeeeee’s Geoffrey!