The year is off to a good start and ideas are flowing. Growing a consulting service from a part time side-hustle into a full time enterprise is top of mind. Next thing you know, we are midway in March and the effort can get overwhelming.
And March could be your metaphor for any point in time where you need to implement some order and simplicity to make things work.
Muscling through can be a good short term solution but not a very sustainable one. So narrowing things down into buckets can give you some perspective on where to spend your time and why.
Your First Bucket Is The Work
This is the bucket where your vision influences your projects, processes and skill sets.
What vision?
A vision is your desired future.
Your why.
Your why is the soul of your work that gives it meaning. It is personal. It matters most to you. First. Then trickles out and affects what you touch.
Not all work aligns to a great cause that is important to you. But you can influence it towards that direction.
By adding your voice, ideas and style you can let it seep into the things that you do and make it yours.
Eventually, a collection of your work serves as a portfolio that can build up the body of your floating boat.
Your Second Bucket Is Getting It Out
Sometimes just doing the work is a form of getting it out. If it is useful or any good, one’s hope is to have it find its audience.
To connect to a welcoming tribe all on its own.
This can work very well if your timing is right. But this method also leaves it largely to chance.
Actively and deliberately putting it out where your ideal tribe sees it needs to be part of your process. And serves as a rudder that actively steers your vessel towards your goal.
Your best start is one-on-one.
One project at a time.
One audience at a time.
Start with your first collaborator. Your first prospect. Your first pitch.
Use your work as material to help get you to the next collaboration effort.
And then the next.
Your Third Bucket Is Your Work’s Connection With Others
This is where you see the effects of your efforts.
What happens when your work makes contact with others?
What effect does your work have?
In our idealized vision, we hope that it does good things. But when it doesn’t, reality, timing or circumstance may require several iterations to get to it’s intended effect.
Sometimes the integrity of your work is so important to you that you don’t care if it reaches as many people or anyone at all.
Other times the idea is more important that you would do anything to have it in people’s hands. Give it away, iterate and compromise its form just so you can have it reach as far and as wide as it possibly can.
For some creatives, form can be the end all be all. It is sacred. –Take it or leave it, world!
For others, it is the idea, the message behind the art that is more important. The medium is just one vessel of many.
I don’t think there is a right or wrong here. Sometimes it’s your personal connection to the work that matters more and other times it’s more about how it affects your audience.
And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it can be both.
Per our analogy, the positive effect your work has on others is akin to the sails of a boat.
It blows your vessel forward as success generates more passion to do better.
