Morning Reader,

Welcome to this weekly newsletter on creative entrepreneurship I have yet to name! Let's jump right in.

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A fantastic question

This week, I had my friend Lucas on a practice edition of the podcast I am soon to launch and an interesting question came up:

Who would be more successful as an online creator?

- The “pure” creative person

- The business person who wants to be an online creator

The two worlds

Let’s say you started a love for photography at a young age and it completely consumed you. You now spend most of your time practicing and thinking about photography. After a decade or so, you find yourself very good at your craft and very creatively fulfilled.

The only problem is have to bounce around menial part-time jobs to supplement the inconsistent photoshoots that come your way.

On the other hand, let’s now imagine the person who loved photography at a young age but decided to let it go in order to pursue a career in business. They immersed themselves in the world of making money and got pretty good at generating money for themselves and for their clients.

Their struggle is the feeling of creative emptiness inside, bored with life attitude and so have decided to reconnect with their once passion of photography.

Who will be more successful as an online creative entrepreneur?

• The “pure” creative who much learn business and money-making skills?
• Or the business-person reconnecting with an atrophied photography skill?

The answer is of course: it depends.

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What does success even mean?

Let’s look at the “pure” creative first.

Immersed in a world of creation, production and art, their mindset will be focused completely on channeling their creative direction. Anything outside of these tenets of creativity may just seem pointless.

With such a deep love for the art, they may simply have a defined boundary between their art (which doesn’t make money) and a “normal” job (which does make money).

They may even feel disgusted at the thought of bastardising their creations for profit.

Nonetheless, they hate the part-time gigs they must take and wish they could make a full-time income from their passion.

Now the business person will understand markets, marketing and reasons that people buy things. They know how to craft an offer and how to position online products and services that sell.

The challenge of course is that their product (their photography) isn’t good enough… and they know it.

They know their photography skills are mediocre and can’t compete against the top photographers in the market. Selling their photography will be difficult.

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How to overcome

In each case, the challenges are unique. They differ greatly but can be boiled down to these two obstacles: - Mindset challenge - Skill challenge

If the “pure” creative can’t overcome the ickiness feeling they have towards money, they will never grow their creative business. Creating a border between the world of art and money might have made a false dichotomy between the two worlds. A common problem we see in creatives.

This is a mindset challenge. The creative will need to reflect on their values and begin to build healthy relationship with money.

The business person on other hand doesn’t have this problem. They understand that buying and selling is an exchange of value that has nothing bad about it at all.

They just have poor photographic skills that they need to grow.

The challenges they face are not having a good enough product to sell. They need to start putting in the years of work to get better.

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I think it’s clear who will win

What makes perfect? Practice.

In this case, the business person will find more success being online creator.

All they really need to do in order to get better is take a lot of photographs.

Repetition of the craft will make you better at the craft. And the quicker you pump up those numbers, the quicker you get better.

With an already existing money-mindset in place and a knowledge of how businesses operate, all they need to do is increase their knowledge of the craft.

The same of course can be said with mindset growth.

Having a daily practice of reprogramming your mind can absolutely work - but you can’t brute force this like you can with taking more pictures.

The success of reprogramming mental habits and self-talk has way more variables from person-to-person. A persons mental flexibility is can vary greatly and so this makes it difficult to predict success.

The pure creative may never bridge the gap between the worlds of art and money. They may never overcome the their icky feelings towards money or what it takes to grow online.

And that’s why I’d place my bets on the business person.

Ludo- ✌️🖤

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But what do you think? Tweet me with your answer.

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