Category / work

by Nathan Coumbe

It may not feel like much

It may not feel like much when it’s all you can physically do.

I’m speaking, of course, on producing, practicing, or creating when there just isn’t enough time in the day to get much of anything done. On those days, all you can do is all you can do.

And all you can do is good enough.

Write a few sentences instead of fretting over not writing a chapter.

Practice your instrument for 15 or 20 minutes instead of saying, “screw it” because you didn’t master an entire piece today.

Draw a doodle comic, not some magnificent portrait.

Go for a 10 minute walk rather than beating yourself up over the fact that you didn’t spend an hour at the gym.

Incremental improvement. Streaks. Baby steps. 5 minutes here; another 8 minutes there. This is how progress is made.

Change your mindset; realize that you are building mental fortitude and creating habits when you do just a little something each day rather than adopting an all-or-nothing mindset.

You might feel like you suck. You don’t. You’re doing a heck of a lot better than the person that decided not to show up today.

And if you can’t do anything at all, wipe the slate clean and show up again tomorrow.

by Nathan Coumbe

Stop telling people to avoid the arts

How many of us have told someone that she should choose a real major, one that is applicable in today’s job market, rather than pursue something creative like art, music, or literature?

(RAISES HAND)

Why do we do this? It is well-meaning enough, I suppose: we don’t want them to struggle financially, we don’t want them to fail, we don’t want them to get hurt because it is so hard to live as an artist…

Let’s just stop, shall we?

What if the person to whom you gave this advice is actually quite talented as a writer? What if she has spent so much of her free time drawing, painting, and sculpting that she has become a fantastic artist? Do you really feel comfortable telling her that she should go get her MBA, work in middle management, collect her benefits, get the 401(k) match, and just worry about “all that artsy stuff” in her off hours, because she can’t make real money in the arts? Why is that good advice (especially when that last claim is bogus)?

Handle Money. Fail often.

Why don’t we teach her instead? Let’s make sure that we are teaching our children how to handle their finances, how to live on a budget, spend less than they make, save money, make money, and how to avoid debt at all cost (this is the real reason so many of us starve these days). We should most definitely teach her not to go $100,000 in student loan debt for her MFA in painting, but that does not mean we should tell her not to pursue her passion – those are not the same thing.

At the same time, we should also be teaching her to fail and fail often. Have her start trying to sell her art online. That doesn’t work? Should we tell her that she should quit and go get a real job? No! You don’t tell a child to stop trying to ride a bike because she fell off and scraped her knee; you tell her to get up and encourage her to try again.

Do the same thing with your creative child or friend. Encourage her start teaching other people what it is that she knows. She can make online videos of her work so that others can see it and her ideas will spread. Find whatever avenue works for her.

Encourage

There has never been a better time to be an artist than today – the market is wide open, the possibilities are limitless. You can be an artist in anything at which you are talented; it does not have to be a traditional “art”. Let’s focus on teaching our family and friends the right skills they need to survive and thrive – let’s teach creativity, leadership, personal finance, marketing and storytelling. Then let’s send them forth to pursue that which they most truly enjoy.

If we can teach them to handle money well, and to learn and grow from failure, they will all be fine.

We will all be just fine.

by Nathan Coumbe

Why did they not follow a passion?

One of the most common subjects we talk about these days is following our passions. Some of us are passionate about music, art, or writing, while others enjoy business, finance, and marketing. Regardless of the specifics, many of the conversations among our peer groups revolve around ways in which we can pursue careers and success in these areas. It has gotten me thinking about our parents’ generation and those that came before.

Most of the media on television or the internet today lampoons the adults of the mid-20th century, who went to a white-collar office job or a blue-collar factory job every day, did the same boring thing day after day, left at 5pm, came home, and spent the rest of the evening watching television before falling asleep and doing it all over again the next day. It is obviously satirical in many cases, but it also doesn’t seem far from the truth.

Why did our parents and grandparents do that? Was that all that was available to them? Did they not have specific passions they wanted to pursue? Were they actually content with working simply to earn an income to buy a house with a two-car garage for their 2.5 children to live happily ever after in the suburbs? Did they not also spend time with their friends and family discussing art, music, or writing and how they might pursue these areas? Does that explain why so many of them are portrayed today as drinkers and layabouts at home?

I don’t have an answer to this question; it just seems to me that the idea of pursuing passion areas as a career is a relatively modern one. Perhaps it is born from the end of the industrial age where factory work (and yes, office work counts) has been replaced by information work. We are now required to be creative and unique in order to stand out and survive in a globalized economy.

I just want to know if the passion was there and got stamped out, or if passion just never entered their minds.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your time or your money?

40 hours is a lot of time, and this doesn’t even include the time spent getting to and from work; on a good day, it takes me 30 minutes one way to get there – on a bad day, more than an hour.

How much of that 40-hour block is spent actually producing work or making a profit for your company? How much of it is spent staring at a clock?

At what point does making more money become less valuable than having more time?

Can you be satisfied, temporarily, by only making enough to get by while you create and ship something that truly matters to the world?

by Nathan Coumbe

Leave a legacy

What calls you? What pull do you feel in the pit of your stomach when you think about it? What is that something that fires you up, fills you with passion, excites you at the thought of contributing?

“You vocation will leave a legacy.”

– Dan Miller, 48 Days to the Work You Love

Vocation, career, and job are three different things, and vocation is the one on which you must focus first. Your vocation, your calling – that is what will leave its impact on the world.

I have been gifted with an insatiable curiosity all my life which has made me the consummate student, and the best teachers are always lifelong students. My calling, the pull I feel in my stomach, is to leave the world a better, more informed, more educated, and more beautiful place because of the knowledge and wisdom I hope to impart to others. Whenever someone talks about educational reform, or better ways of learning and teaching, or how to truly prepare others for the real world outside of an outdated, industrialized classroom, I feel called to contribute.

You see now that this calling can cover a variety of different careers: teacher, coach, politician, entrepreneur, musician, artist, writer. So many different titles could fulfill this calling as long as I use that career to leave the legacy for which I am striving.

So today, sit for a few minutes and listen to what your life has to say to you and about you. Recognize those moments when you feel truly inspired and truly tuned in to something going on around you or something to which you are listening. Ask yourself what you want to be remembered for when you are gone from the world.

What legacy do you wish to leave?

by Nathan Coumbe

Take the pressure off

Seth Godin said something in his podcast “Pizza & Sushi, Joy and Mediocrity” that really resonated with me today. One of the listeners asked him a question about whether he should find a job while he pursues his art or just dive straight into creating. I’m paraphrasing his answer here, but in essence his response was that sometimes less-than-ideal work allows you to create your art unhindered.

Let’s think about this for a moment: what if the only source of income, of survival that you had was your reliance on producing your art, of developing your craft? How much pressure would that put on your shoulders? How stressful would your art, that thing you love to do so much, become if it was the only difference between feeding your family and going to bed hungry? How generous and authentic would your art be if it was the only thing keeping you from losing your home?

There are plenty of creatives that I know who would be just fine eating beans and rice and living in a van. For some of them, that is the life. But for me, with debt to pay off, a roof to keep overhead, and a wife who leans on me (and I on her) for financial support, it is too much stress.

So get a job.

Do something, anything, to keep the wolf away from the door. Drive for Uber or Lyft; deliver pizzas; wait tables; work in retail. It will not be glamorous, and it might be boring and tedious to the creative mind. But it isn’t forever, especially if you start down a path to your dream job.

If you can take the financial burden off of your art, whether it is visual art, speaking, music, theater, or writing, it will be that much easier for you to produce meaningful work. You’ll also learn a lot of useful skills you might not otherwise gain working on your art, such as leadership, communication, planning, business skills, and countless others. You also will make a lot of contacts with other people who might someday benefit from your art.

More than anything else, you’ll worry less about survival and focus more on creating and making the world a better place for us all to live.

Again, I am not advocating working in something you don’t want to do forever; I certainly don’t plan on doing that. So get to work, make some money, and make your art without worrying about where your next meal will come from.

If you would like to start down the path to your dream job or start your own business, I recommend going through the 48 Days to the Work You Love Seminar and joining the 48 Days Eagles group, a community of creative, like-minded individuals supporting each other in finding and creating work that is meaningful, purposeful, and profitable.