Follow your passion
Follow your dreams
Go with your gut feeling
Quit your boring job
These are some lines that we hear from every Startup Founder, read in every blog article, hear in every commencement speech and see on every Instagram image.
So obviously when your brain is constantly bombarded with the same information you are bound to feel fear and for any normal human, their fears are their reality.
So the only way out is to decide to join the league of these great players. I mean how can a Billion Dollar Founder, a Grammy winner or a trending Blogger on Medium ever go wrong when they tell you to follow your passion.
So you decide to join the bandwagon and jump into the sea of uncertainty, drowned in passion all ready to explode the minds of people with your work.
You forget you have a social life, you practise your skill for 15 hours a day, you listen to every possible motivational video on Youtube, you follow every single icon from your field on twitter, you update your work 5 times on 5 different social networking sites every day, attend every single online course and in the midst of all this forget what you look like, what you eat, who you meet and after a point even what you feel.
And you know what ……………
Even after all this, your code still breaks, you could not find a single person to invest in your business not even your dad agreed, just 10 views on your Youtube video and that also probably because it was refreshed 10 times, only 30 followers on your Instagram page and the only person who saw your painting was your maid when she came to clean you room.
So you did everything mentioned in the checklist and even then you failed. Miserably. And don’t even get started on the cliche that failure is the first step to success. So why did you really fail? Maybe you were just unlucky? Maybe.
Or Maybe not. Maybe this could be one of the reasons.
Did you realize that all your actions are always focused on yourself? Your music. Your blog. Your hard work. Your struggle. Your story. Your work. It’s always about you. It’s like you are singing “ Mirrors” all for yourself.
Maybe you are focusing so much on yourself that you have lost sight of everything else around you.
And by around you, I mean people. People who will put up your art in their house, people who will buy tickets to see you on stage, people who will wear that little black dress designed by you, people who will sign-up on your website to collaborate with other people, people who will cry after watching your movie.
These people are your audience who you need to think about. Only if you want to make money, if you want people to appreciate you, if you want to become famous, if you want to inspire other people. If your hobby does not carve these recognitions then you can go back to doing whatever you were doing within your 4 walls.
But if not, then …………
Care about your people just the way a business cares about its customers. Understand who are your audience, your users and how can you reach out to them. Understand the business of your profession.
Okay, I do not mean you have to go and get an MBA now. It is not all that hard.
Maybe it’s just talking to someone already in the business, maybe it’s talking to agents, maybe it’s about researching the best companies in your field, maybe it’s about taking a night class in marketing, or maybe it’s just spending an hour googling how to raise money for your projects online or collaborating with a friend who is interested in handling your business while you focus on work.
All you need to do is just put yourself in the place of your audience and see if they are getting what they want from your work.
I am not saying you should compromise on your craft and focus on making money. We have to keep improving and focusing on our craft because that is the reason we are here in the first place.
An article by Sania Shaikh, Co-founder @ Creatyst