One of the biggest frustrations many creatives have is not the creating but getting the work out there. Vincent had his brother Theo. Matisse had the Cone sisters. Michaelangelo had Pope Julius or so Wiki tells me. For the rest of us, there are things we do great and greatly –– paint, write, sculpt, sing. And there are other things –– networking, devising expert social media campaigns, promoting one’s self and one’s work without feeling like a complete officious braggart –– that totally overwhelm us.
When I told Ginger, my business coach and all around this-is-how-life-works-explainer, how much of a failure I’d always felt like when it came to the promotion side of things she looked at me and said simply, Debra, do you think the Chairman of Learjet knows how to tighten a rivet on an airplane wing? I don’t know if he does or not, and Ginger probably doesn’t either. But what she was getting at is that we all have a distinct skill set. There are things we do well and things that we don’t. For the latter, we need a team. Advisors. Friends willing to share their marketing prowess and others who can lay out what needs to be done so that the thicket becomes less thicket-y and more maneuverable.
Case in point. I know a teeny bit about HTML coding. Enough so that I figured out how to insert the “TM” symbol in Picture a ConversationTM. Couldn’t figure it out in the headline of this post but definitely in the body. But try as I might, there was no way in God’s green earth that I could conquer website design. Every time I tried, I ended up in a puddle of tears and frustration. Time to haul out Ginger’s words about the Chairman of LearJet and rivets. She referred me to someone who has taken my ideas, made them better, and has built our wonderful site — pictureaconversation.com. People hire me to write for them because they know I can do in a few hours, and so much better, what would take them days or weeks.
Some tasks are surmountable and some we will never conquer. There’s no shame in recognizing this nor defeat in calling in an expert.