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I discovered something really early in life about my personality that is undeniable. I am a bit of a loner. I absolutely love people, I love my relationships. The deeper my relationships get the more my life feels full and complete and rich with wisdom and knowledge and I don’t take any one of them for granted but I can only spend a certain amount of time around people before I have to sort of retreat into my own world and process and take everything in and spend a good amount of time alone.
I, as a writer, prefer being alone when I’m working on my art. I know a lot of artists feel this way too in my community obviously, a lot of fine artists feel this way. We’ve spoken about this time and time again. I bring this up though because it causes an issue when you’re building a business with your art because even though you’re alone as a business owner. I actually thought, when I was just finishing NYU grad school and was out in the real world and I was oh so excited about my career, I was working with the best of the best performance artists, writers, actors just unbelievable reward in the work I was doing here in New York City. And I thought to myself I just hit the mother-load. I get to indulge, I get to immerse myself in this work I’m doing with these wonderful people and then I get to go away, be by myself, take it all in and write alone. Because I was writing my own shows, I was editing books, I was writing shows for other people. So this was a wonderful feeling and when I really looked at what the next step I wanted to take, which of course was to build a business with my art that was fantastically sustainable, profitable, for the long-term and then I wanted to help other artists do the same, I thought ‘you know what as soon as I figure this out it’s going to be incredible’ because running a business is pretty much a solo act especially in the beginning. So I know, myself, and other artists are going to be just in their element as we take these steps to do this. But as it is with life and as it is when you actually take action to do something rather than just think about it I discovered that I was actually wrong. Artists, if this is something that resonates with you then this episode is for you.
