It's not building your creative entrepreneurship muscles and honing the skills. I know too many creatives who either tried a few times and it didn’t work, or they’re too afraid to try at all before everything is perfect. The truth is that creative entrepreneurship is a skill just like anything else. You have to be bad at it before you can be good. The Aesthetic Way will help you not feel so lost, and it will also save you a lot of struggle, but you’re still going to fail sometimes. And that’s okay. It’s part of the gig.
If there's something you don't need to spend thousands of hours trying to figure out yourself, it's how to bridge business with the creative. You deserve to spend the majority of your time creating what you feel called to create and working out the mysteries that come with that. That is, unless, like me, figuring out how business and creativity come together is part of your life's work.
With so many unknowns in our world, becoming a creative entrepreneur is less about making a fat stack, and more about honing a set of skills. A set of skills where you learn how to make something from nothing, and then that something is able to take care of your livelihood. And then because your livelihood is taken care of you get to zhoosh up your creativity. I call this creative sovereignty.
Without learning both the deep alignment and practical skills of creative entrepreneurship over these 90 days, you could be missing out on putting your life’s work out there with no tradeoffs, missing out on opportunities to get paid to do the work you’re meant to do, and changing your own life.
You see, when you learn how to take something that you made with your own hands (literally or metaphorically), package it up to share with people, get paid, and see your work make the positive impact you know you’re meant to make, it’s like alchemy. It’s like gold flowing out of your heart, your fingertips, your lips. It's where you don't just get to create your work, you get to share it. It’s thrilling.
I've sold well over half a million dollars in physical products, digital products, services, and programs that feel like what I was meant to put into the world. But I couldn’t always make something from nothing and sell it. It took years of work, multiple mentors, my life falling apart, and discovering my Heart Story before any of it ever even started to work. And then it finally clicked and I was obsessed. I immediately started to work on The Aesthetic Way.
Maybe you feel really unsure about your idea. Or worse, maybe you have so many ideas you have no idea where to start, especially when everyone says you’ve got to “pick one thing and stick to it!”
As you can probably tell, everything in The Aesthetic Way is brewed from my own frustrations with getting my business off the ground to having an $83k year once I went full-time, as well as working with hundreds of creative entrepreneurs over the years to help them get their creative business off the ground.
If you’re new to being a creative entrepreneur, it can feel really overwhelming to realize that it is literally your job to do everything (at least at first)... especially making the things to sell, figuring out how to market them, marketing them, and closing the sales. And especially when it comes to running your business, these are necessary skills to keep things moving forward. The bad news is that because your business is so unique, no one will have the exact answer for what you need to say and how you need to say it. The good news is that after going through this course, you will realize that the doors are open for you to create whatever you desire. And that your creative entrepreneurship skills will be your greatest tool for making it all happen.
Between making what you feel called to make, figuring out all of the minutia of marketing your business online, you have enough to do. Don’t let the confusion of how to approach business as a creative get in the way of putting your creative calling into the world.
A Creative Entrepreneur is someone who feels called to put something into the world. At EN|SCE, we have a focus on helping small businesses, because that is an epicenter of the power of creative entrepreneurship, but we truly believe every person is a creative entrepreneur, whether you're a full-time unpaid caretaker, an employee, a rockstar, the CEO of a business that's been around for a century, or a solopreneur with a calligraphy business. A Creative Entrepreneur is dedicated to the creative process, their creative sovereignty, offering their gifts to the world, and believes that "all flourishing is mutual" (Robin Wall Kimmerer).