Psychologically Unemployable : 5 Lessons from a Self-Employed Architect.
studio Brancusi
To Preface,
I always knew I was never going to lead a normal nor have a normal job.
But I did in fact try to get a job a few times before.
My last few, and only, interviews were in the architectural design space and the end of each one of them went a little something like,
“You seem like you should be doing this on your own.”
“It sounds like this job is going to limit your ideas.”
“Are you sure you want this job?”
To be inquisitively asked by the architect if I’m sure that I want the job is the most esoterically hilarious yet emotionally confusing question.
Of course I’m not sure that I want this job.
I’m not sure what I didn’t not want because I didn’t not do it…
To say the least, I wouldn’t be writing this I took the job, or maybe I would. Who is really to say that it could not have been otherwise?
BUT I am deep believer that,
“Whatever happened, happened and it could not have happened any other way because it didn’t.”
You can thank Peter Crone for that one.
So here are 5 lessons I’ve learned from trusting my creative self to sustain my life financially, spiritually, and a whole gamut of other adverbs.
1. If you think you can or if you think can’t, you will be right every time.
I believe that is a quote by Henry Ford,
But what this illustrates is what I call Esoteric Fundamental (to life) #1.
Energy precedes matter.
Go to the most irreducible forms of matter, they are representations of electric energy.
For those whose convictions stop there,
At the very least you can understand that the fundamental composition to matter is electric energy. This energy can in fact be altered, stewarded, celebrated, and directed in many ways that will undeniably influence the matter around it.
Mind is a great place to start in stewarding this electric force into certain directions of matter.
A question for the curious,
How did the electricity manifest?
Did it ever, or was it always there?
Nonetheless,
Beyond the noise that comes from all the mindset gurus out there, there is deep truth in believing.
I like to break up believing into 2 parts.
Be + living.
How do you wish to BE_LIVING?
2. Get comfortable with what makes you very uncomfortable.
You have concerns about financially surviving from your art.
Accept deeply that any and all fears will be illuminated when you set out on the ancient journey of living your own life in your own creative act.
Your ancestors were creative entrepreneurs.
They learned,
They failed,
They laughed,
They cried,
They experienced their world,
And they took what they knew and offered it to their community.
Modern day business is the return to an ancient way of being set in the “future” with all the technology and resources available to us today.
The sooner you begin to deconstruct your anxieties and fears,
the sooner you can begin to listen to them,
to hear their wisdom,
to partake in their medicine,
and to transfigure their power from repression into expression
so that you can begin to live the life that deep down you cannot deny yourself the opportunity to live.
3. Money is Neutral
Everybody has a unique relationship to money.
The way money was talked about in your household,
The way you learned to save or to spend,
The story you held in what you believed money to be for you.
All of these are beautiful regardless of any pain within them, because they led to the now.
And NOW, its time to update your relationship to money.
Money is neither good nor bad, so it should not be the object you seek nor should it be the object you are in staunch opposition to.
For the more spiritually eastern,
Holding tension around the exchange of money for your creative services is only limiting your ability to be sustained in your creation.
This more deeply means that you are limiting the potential of how the world can be impacted.
A shitty relationship to money robs you of the life that you want to life, but more importantly robs others of the impact that you could be having on them.
A healthy relationship to money leads to less tension around money which lends itself gradually to a healthier flow of money which gives more time and space for you to devote more time and energy to doing the work that impacts others.
Do the world a favor,
And dive deep into where your relationship to money is limiting your expression.
4. If you don’t want to use social media, don’t use social media.
I’ve been a little entrepreneur since I was 13.
I sold tie-dye shirts after school to my friends. I didn’t even have phone.
Then at 15, I made my first surfboard.
Within a week , two people whom surfed the spot I surfed both wanted boards.
I didn’t even have their phone numbers. Next time I saw them they each paid me $200 for materials and two weeks later I threw the boards in my car and went surfing.
They were in my car for two days before I saw them,
We all surfed together and the next time we surfed, they paid me.
I ran that business for 5 years purely by word of mouth.
In that time I had made an Instagram, but resisted it so deeply and in fact despised it.
I had many insecurities around being seen in a way that wasn’t in the physical here and now. I never marketed there and I deleted my account when I was 18.
I went to architecture school and still made surfboards, all from just meeting people in the water.
During that time, I got into furniture design and especially welding and fabrication.
When I was 22, I went to visit my parents down the coast and saw an old buddy surfing one day.
We got to talking and he had been fabricating architectural metals and needed help with a big project.
A few months later, we spent two weeks together fabricating furniture and architectural elements for a brewery.
To celebrate, I went surfing in Malibu for a few days.
I met a guy there who designed furniture and we connected and exchanged phone numbers.
I got paid from the big project an amount that seemed like a lot to me at the time just as my last quarter of my architectural thesis started.
I was shocked that I could make money doing projects like that before I even graduated.
Days later,
Fear was illuminated within the minds of many across the world, but I got a call from Malibu.
It was a potential collaboration to design and build a backyard structure.
But It required me to move to a place I had never been, and go all in with someone I barely knew. I was living in a van so that part was easy for me.
I called my lover,
Thought about it a bit,
Then just committed.
No Instagram necessary.
So I moved, bought the best welder I could afford and the shittiest metal cutting saw I could find on craigslist.
Did the project, yada yada yada, too much to tell.
I Moved back to the promise land and needed money.
So, I made a minimalist flyer with a picture of a piece of furniture and my phone number and slapped at the very small local coffee shop.
Slowly but surely I got projects, just from one flyer in a small beach town.
I made a new Instagram, released my resistance and tried that whole thing.
It went, and it was not that it wasn’t particularly working for me, rather it was that after releasing the tension I had around using social platforms, I just realized that it didn’t matter for me.
I could have made it work that way with the right neutral relationship to it just the same as I made the way I had been doing business thus far work for me.
You have to try new things, especially the things you resist, but you don’t need create convictions that your way of business must be a certain way.
Do more of what works for you, and try more of what you haven’t tried yet.
But please,
For the love of God, do not say you need Social Media.
All you need is devotion, and to let your creative self lead the way in its most authentic flow.
Giacometti Studio
5. Relationships are the life-blood of business.
A important shift that must occur in piloting your own business is the shift from selling to serving.
If you are focused on selling, all you will see is customers, products, and numbers.
When you are focused on serving, you are allowing space for true impact and transformation to come through your work.
Serving is the seeing the other person exactly as they are.
It’s about making a relationship and being human.
It’s about shifting focus away from the transaction and placing it upon the transformation.
When you focus of creating transformation, you are creating relationships.
Relationships are what continue to provide nourishment financially, emotionally, and spiritually over and over and over again.
The paradox however is,
Relationships are mirrors.
The more confident and comfortable you become in embodying your offering, your worth, and the value of what you can create,
The more your relationship will feel exactly that and thus create the space for the deep impact that you can bring through your service
You can be of genuine service, but if you are shaky in knowing your worth and the value of what you can provide then you will be met with tension and awkwardness around the transaction.
Ultimately,
You have to put yourself in those positions.
You have to have awkward conversations that you’ve caused because of y our own insecurities.
You have to learn how to embody deeper integrity for yourself so that you can meet your client in their highest integrity whether they are standing within it or not.
You have to be willing to forget everything you know about how you think business should be done, and weave a path forward that strives to be of the highest service for all that neither fully rejects nor fully embraces tools, technologies, and ways of being that are available the modern day entrepreneur.
There are heaps more I will talk about in my Re-Design Reality Newsletter where every week in your inbox you get stories, codes, and insights on bridging the space between what is and what could be.