To monetize or not to monetize? In part one of this two-part discussion, Rachael and Lauren unpack turning their passions into profit, the potential impacts of monetization on the creative process, and how curiosity (and flexibility) is essential for building a fulfilling and sustainable creative business. They also share ways they've harnessed the creative chaos and channeled it toward focused projects or ventures.
To monetize or not to monetize? In part one of this two-part discussion, Rachael and Lauren unpack turning their passions into profit, the potential impacts of monetization on the creative process, and how curiosity (and flexibility) is essential for building a fulfilling and sustainable creative business. They also share ways they've harnessed the creative chaos and channeled it toward focused projects or ventures.
Episode Link Mentions:
The transcript for this episode can be found here!
Rachael: Hi. Welcome to Chaotic Creatives, a show about embracing the chaos that comes from living a creative life.
Lauren: Yeah. We are your hosts, two self-proclaimed chaotic creative gals. I am Lauren Hom, better known as Hom Sweet Hom. I am a designer, letterer muralist, and all-around crafty gal, and I also just graduated from culinary school.
Rachael: I am Rachael, also known as Rachael Renae on the internet. I am your internet hype gal. I encourage you to use color and play to tap into your creativity and your confidence.
Lauren: Hell yeah.
Rachael: What are we talking about today?
Lauren: Today we are just going to chat about monetizing your creative passion.
Rachael: Or not.
Lauren: Or not. The good, the bad. Just a conversation around what happens when you decide to maybe make a little money from the thing that you love to do. And I think we are two good people to talk about it because we have plenty of creative pursuits that we have decided to monetize and some that we haven't. More that we haven't. I think it's an interesting conversation to talk about how you discern between those things at different times in your life and why you might've made that decision. Because it can get really reductive, I think, online, the discourse. The way we're incentivized to speak on social media of, "Always do this, never do this," when it's really much more nuanced and dependent on your situation.
Rachael: Just like everything, right? Yeah. So, where do you stand on the monetizing as someone who has a creative career and has monetized your passion?
Lauren: Passions.
Rachael: Passions.
Lauren: I am pretty staunchly in the camp of, I enjoy monetizing my creative pursuits. It adds an extra layer of challenge, I would say, that I personally find exciting. It's a challenge I want to figure out, and I think in the first episode, we talked about creativity and for me, it's about asking questions and then getting curious about the answers. But the important part is finding the answers you're interested in finding out. If you don't care about something, don't do it.
But for me, my personality type and my work style, I am a fast worker, I have a lot of interests, and so I'm doing a lot of things, and monetizing something just adds that extra layer of like, "Oh, let's see if I can do this." It's like a new little challenge. But, of course, not everything I monetize. For example, ceramics I'm too slow at and it's too hard to ship, so I don't know if I'm ever going to monetize that. But the things I've decided to monetize like lettering, design, murals; that's been a slow process of doing something that I liked to do, and then getting some positive feedback from other people.
People are always going to tell you if you've been sharing your work and you're getting good feedback from it, like, "Oh, you should sell this," or, "Have you thought about making prints?" or, "Have you thought about offering services?" It's such a alluring carrot on a stick. It doesn't mean you have to go that way. I posted that ceramic baguette video a year and a half ago maybe, and it went a little bit viral on Instagram and people were like, "Where can I buy one?" And I'm like, "You can't."
Rachael: Yeah. You put the offer out of someone being able to license it, right?
Lauren: I basically said, "I do not want to produce this myself. Does anybody out there have any connections to anyone who could mass produce this and sell and fulfill this for me?" Nothing really came of it, but I think I've always gone the route of monetizing the most easily monetizable things, so that is I can do lettering or design from my iPad or computer anywhere in the world. I can work remotely, I can work at midnight if I'm awake.
Rachael: She used to be a digital nomad.
Lauren: It affords me a certain flexibility that I like.
Rachael: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you said about being a fast worker and understanding kind of what your limitations are with that particular creative practice is important. Because for me and for many other chaotic creatives, I'm sure, the thing that we're interested is making the thing. The process is what we're interested in. I want to figure out how to make this quilt. I want to figure out how to make this mug.
And yes, so many people, often if you are a creative person and you're making things, people are like, "Oh my gosh, you could make this. You should sell this. When can you do this? Can you do it in this color? Can I order one of these?" And it is so enticing to be like, "Oh, yeah, I think I maybe will sell this." But I think it's so easily can shift your perspective on that creative passion. And a lot of times for me, I don't like to think about the overhead or the-
Lauren: Profit margins.
Rachael: Yeah. The timing myself and figuring out how long did it actually take me to make this one mug from creating it, letting it dry, going back, trimming it, carving it, glazing it, all of those things. Plus, then, of course, the shipping costs and the inventory storage, all of that comes into play when you're thinking about potentially monetizing something.
I don't like to think about that stuff. I have sold things absolutely, but I think that I am learning now at this point in my life where I would prefer not to monetize things because I don't want it to change my relationship with the craft.
Lauren: Which it inevitably will. Once you put a little pressure on the art or the craft to provide you with income, then you set some expectations, and then you're also opening up a relationship with customers to have expectations. So, now, you have this weight that's been added to what's riding on this piece of work or this skill that you have, and it can be exhilarating, but it can also be super defeating too. The first time you ever get any negative customer feedback or you don't sell as much as you thought you were going to sell, it is just a different experience.
Rachael: Totally. Yeah, and I think thinking about not selling as much as you thought you were going to sell... I feel like in every creative outlet that I've ever done, someone has said, "Can I buy that?" And sometimes it's like, oh, I'll make another one, and then I'm changing my creative practice to make something that isn't inspiring me in that moment. It inspired me previously. Or, yes, I already make it.
A few weeks ago someone asked about a print that I have hanging on my wall that I make, and I made as part of my stationary company. I still have some. They're still on my website. And they were like, "Oh my gosh, is there a place I can buy this?" And I was like, "Yep, here's the link." Sure enough, didn't buy it. And that's okay. I have come to get used to that process, but people express interest when their excited, but that doesn't always mean that they will spend their money on that. And that's okay. They don't have to. But just understand that the words don't always necessarily mean that the profit is there to take, I guess.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. For me, it's always been... Because I started with my background in design where I was creating lettering. I was doing it by hand at first and scanning it in, but then I got an iPad. Wacom tablet was the in-between. And there was something about it that excited me. I was so young. I think I was 19 when it first started happening, of people being like, "Can I hire you to do some lettering?" And I'd be like, "Yeah, absolutely." Because it allowed me to spend more of my time practicing the skill that I was so jazzed about.
And I think that because 99.9% of us have to work in order to sustain our lives, because I know I'm going to have to work eight-ish hours a day, I'd rather spend the time doing something that I like to do. But on the flip side, as someone who relies on her creative things for 100% of her income, there's a pressure there. It changes where you can start to beat yourself up for not meeting certain goals. It is disappointing when you have, it's not creative things, but business things kind of get stuck in places or client's late with a payment. Balancing out, now, what do people want with what do I want to make? Those are all considerations that you take on when you start to monetize your thing.
And I think a lot of us, too, dabble with the like, "Oh my gosh, where can I buy? You should make this a print." We will dabble, and your experience with that specific interaction is so common. People are excited about the work, but until they make the purchase, that is not... Just feedback is not a sign that this could be a viable business thing. Because some things like prints are easier to store than physical 3D objects. I think really taking into consideration how fast are you at making this thing, how easy is it for you to monetize this thing.
There are plenty of things that I like to do. I don't sell physical products even with my designs on them. I have the print-on-demand stuff. I have a defunct Society6 store from residual from college, but I don't have the capability to print and fulfill these myself. I'm not a passionate screen printer. I took a screen printing class in college. It was so fun, but I wasn't in love with the process enough to really get good enough to crank them out efficiently to make money from them.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: I'd rather give them away.
Rachael: Totally. I went through that exact thing with letterpress printing. Letterpress printing, like screen printing, you do each color individually. On the press that I had, I was doing each greeting card individually. So, it's not like I was printing even six at a time, but I liked it. I liked the very tactile process. But that's so much of my time then that was spent. I remember I got this huge - huge for me - wholesale order from this bookstore in Brooklyn and I was jazzed, but to print a thousand cards took me so long. And then, what I thought was acceptable in terms of quality, I had to waste so many because they didn't quite print perfectly. I just remember thinking, this is hours and hours and hours of my time when I could just outsource this to a printer. And then, for a while, I went back and forth about do I just want to be a production printer? Do I want to print other people's jobs? No, I don't want to do that. The part that I enjoy is designing the thing. I just didn't have that sort of art education background to understand the different avenues of creating and how that could have manifested.
Now, I realize I'm an ideas person. Very little execution happens for me, as far as big picture ideas like tiling my kitchen. I can do it. I'm not going to do a good job because I'm not a details gal. But sometimes that imperfection and that sort of just excitement about the project comes through, and it's fine if it's imperfect. That's something that I like. We talked about that last time, with my imperfect seams with my quilts. That doesn't bother me. But if I were selling something that needed to be reproduced exactly the same, I don't know. Rambling. Rachael's rambling corner.
Lauren: No, I mean, we are ramblers. But what you said is true about, I think it tied into what I was saying before. When you start to sell your work, you've invited in customer expectations and a certain quality that you need to be able to reproduce, especially if you're selling physical goods where there's a photo of it on your website. It invites in another person to the relationship. Where, if it's just you making whatever you want to make just for purely for pleasure, it keeps things simple in a way because you can, as a chaotic creative, you can jump around from one interest to the other, and there's no cost to that, other than maybe your own, "I feel all over the place." But if you're not relying on it for any income or expecting it to make any money for you, then you can really do whatever you want. But the second you start to monetize, the walls start closing in a little bit. And that can be, again, depending on where you're at, a fun challenge or adventure to go on. Maybe it stops at a certain point where you sell a little bit, you do one table at one market and you're like, "Fuck this."
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: Because you realize it's hard. Even if that happens, that's such valuable feedback for you. Maybe you hate interacting with people at markets, and then maybe you try another avenue of your craft, and you can keep tinkering until you realize it's a go or it's a no. Or, you kind of have to follow your gut on, would it be fun to maybe receive some money in exchange for this product or service? If you feel any inkling towards it, I typically tell people it's worth exploring because then you get more information for yourself. I can't remember what the craft was for you, but for me, it was embroidery that I bought all the things for, which luckily isn't a lot of stuff. The needles, the threads, the hoops, the fabric. And I tried it for a little bit, and I was like, "Absolutely not." Just as a hobby, I was like, "This is way too meticulous."
Rachael: It takes so much time. I did the exact same thing. I have all the embroidery floss, all these cool hoops. Yeah.
Lauren: But I follow so many embroidery artists and I really appreciate the craft, but I think maybe this is the ethos of this podcast, of just give it a try. If you see something on Instagram that you're like, "That is so cool. That embroidery is so cool. That chain stitching is so cool. That ceramic project is so cool." Give it a shot. It's worth exploring, and I think the same mentality goes towards monetizing it. If you feel like, "Hey, there's this person I follow online who's making money from these beaded earrings," or whatnot, and I make beaded earrings, maybe it's a sign that people are buying these things. I should give it a shot. You never know how it's going to be with your specific local market or the audience you have, but it's always worth a shot. Because nowadays, it's easy enough to throw up a landing page with your work and charge money for it in a way that it was a little bit harder, I think, 10 years ago. But if it doesn't sell, no big deal.
Rachael: There are a couple points I wanted to touch on from what you said. Number one, the markets thing. I think that, like you said, any of that is valuable feedback, even if you have a terrible time. I think as I was phasing out my stationary business, I was trying to find, is there a balance that I feel comfortable continuing this. Having existing wholesale customers that just continue to order, amazing, that is a pretty quick thing to grab the cards and fulfill the order. I don't mind the shipping process as long as it's not taking up a ton of space. Which it actually is. In my basement, my whole print shop is basically still there, and I keep thinking I should really pack this stuff up and make it into a quilting space. Because I, like you, I can't remember if you identify with this term, but a gear gal. I'm a gear gal in ways of, if it's a physical activity like sport or something, I want the gear. I got the tennis racket, I have pickleball paddles. I have basketballs, soccer balls, hockey sticks. Love to buy the gear. Same thing is true with creative practices. There's a graveyard of creative practice materials.
But I think what really pushed me over the edge, as far as I've had enough of this with the stationary business, was doing the in-person markets, which tended to make the most money in a short amount of time, but I was so exhausted and drained. I really have been trying to approach my life with, does this energize me or does this drain me? And I hate to live in black and white terms, but truly I was so drained. And as much as I love chatting with people and feeling that they're inspired by the work that I'm creating or them being really excited about it, it was so hard for me to continue to attend those events. And that was some valuable feedback, like you said.
I think in terms of the just trying it, the monetizing it, I think there's a couple ways to approach monetizing. So, maybe, yeah, people are saying, oh my gosh, you should sell this. And you think about it, you try to sell what you've created. The challenge that I have had, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, is that as soon as someone says, "Oh, I would love to buy that," or maybe you do one market and a couple of things sell really well. You get that market research. You understand, "Oh, okay, my splatter mug sold really well." So, then, my mind shifts to I have to produce a bunch of splatter mugs because I want to sell them.
I'm trying in my personal practice, I guess, to not let any sort of outside influence affect what I'm doing, and I'm trying to approach it instead of a production business, like my stationary business where I created the things, took feedback from my customers, understood what things were selling and what things were not, what types of products were popular. All things that matter if you're running a business, and that relies on selling products to people, of course.
But then there's the other side of the spectrum of creative practice that I have never been a part of, and that's the fine art studio practice type stuff. I think that's kind of where I'm starting to lean personally, is I want to create a body of work for myself with blinders on that is just me and my practice. And I say practice, but I as a chaotic creative, it's not like I go to the ceramic studio at the same time every week unless I'm in a class. Because then I will.
Lauren: Love a class.
Rachael: Sometimes we need the class to give us that routine. And it's not like I'm a super disciplined... I'm working eight hours on this particular thing. I'm all over the place, working on what's exciting me in that moment. But if I can approach it, I'm trying to think, okay, a painter goes to their studio, works on a body of work, has a show at an art show, and then maybe people buy those things. I don't know any painters personally, so I guess I don't, besides you as a muralist.
Lauren: It's a different kind of painting, though.
Rachael: Yeah. Yeah. I would assume that folks with more of a traditional fine arts studio practice make their body of work for themselves, and then show it. And if it resonates and they sell it, great. If they have a good agent, great. They can get it sold. But that feels like an approach that feels an alignment with sort of where I'm trying to go on the very home hobbyist craft level. Does that make sense?
Lauren: Yeah.
Rachael: Okay.
Lauren: Absolutely, and I also don't know any fine art painters on a deep personal level, so I don't know what the process is. My guess is that there's some kind of mix of anytime you've professionalized a creative skill, it is nearly impossible in the professional realm to ever make something just for you because there's always that little... You've now invited that little voice in the back of your head that's like, "How marketable is this, palatable is this? Who is this for? Who is going to buy it eventually?" And so, the ideal scenario is what you want to make is also what people are interested in.
Rachael: Yeah. We want that Venn diagram to overlap for sure.
Lauren: And it's never going to be a perfect mix, but I think there's a, I don't know, for lack of better term, a pragmatism that comes with when you monetize your creativity, you are keeping in mind how it's going to sell, even if you're mostly making it for you. Because I think there are different projects where sometimes, like for me, as someone who works on client work as a designer or muralist, the client is ultimately the one paying for it. And so, there is a certain point where, let's say if a client and I aren't agreeing on a direction for a piece. They choose my least favorite sketch and they want a ton of different things added to it. There's a point where I have to detach as an artiste and just go-
Rachael: With your beret.
Lauren: ... "This is work. This is a job. I am going to build this house the way that the person who's going to be living in the house wants it to be. My personal taste matters less in this interaction, and that's a way to preserve my peace and appreciation for my job. Because most people have jobs and they do the job, but it doesn't say anything about them or they don't over-personalize it. Whereas with creative work, I think it's easy to over-personalize it. It's one of those, you learn to pick your battles totally.
But there are plenty of projects where a client comes to me because they've seen personal work that I've put out there. Which, of course, there's probably some percentage of me when I made the personal work that's like, "How will this land with other people?" But it happens to be something I want to make. A client will come to me and say, "We love this piece that you did. Can you do something similar, in this similar style?" And then, it becomes more of a, people call them dream projects where the client is hiring you for the thing that you'd like to do and you're good at doing. That does happen too. So it's kind of like a-
Rachael: Yeah, I think I want to build off of that and talk about passion projects because, obviously, that is something that is foundational to your work. I think we talked about this before we started recording about - classic - about having a container to help give yourself some guidance. Because as chaos people like us, sometimes, I go in the basement and I sew for 30 minutes, and then I'm like, "Oh, it's nice out. I should go outside, and I should take photos." It's a little bit too much maybe ADD, and we need to refine it. Still working on my diagnosis, by the way, with my therapist. But, maybe.
So, I think having a container can help both from the perspective of I want to have a creative practice. I know that I'm a creative person and this is why I talk about play. If you give yourself a list to work from, that gives you a starting point. So, making a playlist. But then, also, I think things that you could put on that playlist are creative challenges, passion projects. By giving yourself some boundaries to work within, that helps you learn what you do and don't like about your practice. Maybe the boundary is I'm trying to make money, and that helps kind of reel in some of your ideas based on what is marketable. But then, I also think you just learn a lot about yourself, and if you focus on something from a passion perspective. I'm giving myself this boundary and I'm going to do this for a week or a month, that's building up a lot of skill and your body of work, whatever that is. And then, that can turn into monetization if that's what you're interested in.
I want you to talk about passionate pay in a second, but that is kind of what I did with my style Instagram. I wanted a creative outlet, and I have all my art supplies, but I was like, "What should I make? What do I do? Which one do I pick?" And I was like, "An easy one is to get dressed every day." So, I made a different prompt for each week, and I shared it on the internet. I wasn't expecting anything to happen other than me to feel excited about wearing some fun colors and refining my personal style. It helped me figure out like, "Oh, I actually feel a lot better in these color pairings, or maybe I don't feel inspired by wearing clown core every day, or maybe I really do."
And so, by giving yourself prompts or giving myself prompts, I was able to build a body of work that included an outfit every day and connect with people who were inspired by that and also wanted to do that for themselves. And then, I did monetize it. Kind of like you were saying, you're a fast worker. Monetizing maybe what comes easiest to us, it's hard to turn that down. And so, I do monetize some of my style work through Instagram, and I'm transparent about that. But if I were to try to monetize my ceramics practice, like you were saying, it's just a whole nother thing to think about. It takes me maybe a couple hours to get dressed, film it, edit, coordinate with the client.
Lauren: In total.
Rachael: Yeah.
Lauren: It's fast for you. When you told me it takes you that little amount of time to make a sponsored reel, my jaw hit the floor because I was like, "It takes me three hours to write a caption for a client sometimes because I just get all in my head about it."
But sometimes it feels too good to be true if like... Because we've been fed, "It has to be hard for it to be valuable." I think there's a lot of power in leaning into monetizing the things that come easily, quickly, naturally to you, because you're exerting less effort to do it, and that doesn't make it any less valuable to people who are paying for it because they're still getting the sponsored post or the end product, the physical product you might be making.
I have tried to remind myself... I have to remind myself once every six months, to be honest, because it's so easy for your practical brain to seep in and be like, "Well, it must be too good to be true," or, "I'm not working hard enough on this." What comes easily to you, whether it's I'm interested in this or I'm a fast worker in this, or I have a natural proclivity for this specific craft where I can produce it easily, those are good starting points of like, if you want to monetize them from a capitalist standpoint, it's easier because you're going to put less labor into it. I think all creatives should lean into that if they decide they want to monetize, because I am a big fan of reserving your creative energy for yourself. Of course, if you're monetizing, you're going to put some of it into your client work or business work, but the less you can put into that camp, the more you have for yourself in terms of energy and time.
Rachael: Totally. And I think in terms, of course, we're talking about this from a capitalist lens because we live in a capitalist society, and we have to participate in the system in order to pay our bills and get our groceries and things like that. But if we were on the other end of the spectrum and we lived in a society of small communities that cared for each other, we would still find our roles where our natural interests and talents were. I think it's just we're serving ourselves and our communities the best when we find that, and the only way to find what you're naturally good at and very quick to work on is to try a bunch of shit.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And to try a bunch of stuff, and then pay attention to what feels good and what feels exciting to work on and what you might want to dive deeper into. Because you could stay a surface level with a hundred different things, and that could be completely fine. But if you want to start a creative business or monetize what seems appealing to you, then it's good to, like you were saying, with either a passion project or some kind of focus of like, "I'm going to commit to this for this amount of time or this many pieces. I'm going to create 10 lettering pieces." Or, "I'm going to do a 12 week ceramics class." It's nice to have the repeat dedication to something in order to really get a better understanding of it, to really put some reps in to decide, do I actually like this? The first I guess metaphor or analogy that came to mind was it's like dating where you can go on a first date or two with someone and be so excited, but it really takes 10 to 12 dates to get to know somebody to figure out compatibility, and I think it's kind of similar with creative pursuits. You have to do it enough times to find out if it actually could be a long-term thing.
Rachael: Mm-hmm.
If you're doing something the first or second time, like you said, there could be a lot of enthusiasm. It doesn't necessarily feel like it's hard because you're excited. But if you're committing to that practice... And I hate to keep using the word practice because it sounds very formal and professional, and I'm really just talking about doing the thing. If you're committing to this hobby, let's say, if it starts to feel like it's sucking all of your creative energy and you're not getting to where you want to be, maybe that is a lesson to learn. So much like dating. You're filling in so many blanks when you first start, and you're like, "I can absolutely get here." The gap that we talked about last time, like, "Oh, I can for sure build my skill gap." Maybe you can, and that's valuable to learn and that's okay.
I feel like I'm saying all of this because there are so many creative projects that I think about and have that taste for and could potentially grow my skill to get there. I'm thinking of some particular painting styles that I really like. But every time I sit down to paint, I can't really focus for very long. I do a little bit, and then I wait for it to dry and then try to do another layer. I'm just not inspired when I'm doing it. I think what that means is I should support other painters and buy their paintings for my home, and that's just not something that's for me. But again, trying it, figuring out what's valuable.
Lauren: That just reminded me of, I think this is very on-brand Chaotic Creative where you and I are both DIYers. We love knowing how to make something. It feels fun, it's exciting. But if taken too far, and I'm totally in this camp, not everything needs to be homemade.
Rachael: Oh my gosh, absolutely.
Lauren: But it's fun to figure that out, and honestly, you have to DIY a handful of things that shouldn't have been DIY in order to figure that out of, where do I find my joy? What types of activities interest me? I know you mentioned tiling your kitchen. I look at that and I'm like, I've always wanted to tile a space, whether it's an entryway or a bathroom. I even thought about tiling my own bathroom, but I ended up hiring someone else to do it because I just didn't feel like I was going to be able to watch enough YouTube videos in order to do it. But I've DIYed plenty of other things that came out okay, but in my mind I was like, next time I'll just buy that. I DIYed like a sofa table for my old apartment that fit perfectly behind at the couch, and it honestly looks like crap underneath. If you looked up close, you'd be like, "Ugh."
Rachael: Ooh, I wonder what the Venn diagram of chaotic creative and hacked together DIY projects is. A circle, probably, because same. If you look at some of the things that I've made, I'm like, "Well, we're just going to make this work." And it does, but the inner workings aren't pretty.
Lauren: Oh, yeah, and so it's good to scratch those itches of, "I want to make that," or, "I want to try that," but only through trying it once or twice or however long will you know how much longevity it really has.
Similar to the dating analogy, there are plenty of people in my life that I've gone on four or five, six dates with, and you just know that this isn't going to be a lifelong match. But that's okay. Relationships and connections can be for a night, for a couple months, for a couple weeks, for a lifetime, and that doesn't invalidate them necessarily. As someone who just got out of a relationship, I think it's easy to feel like we failed because we broke up, but adult me is just like, "Oh, no, it ran its natural course and you can appreciate something for the time you spent together and what you put into it. But forever is not the only metric that we should be using to quantify success."
Rachael: Absolutely.
Lauren: But I think there are all these subconscious societal implants of this amount of time or this amount of commitment to something is the indicator of success. You think of, we like to romanticize the Japanese artisan way of doing things, where it's like, did you see Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
Rachael: Mm-mm.
Lauren: So, in Japanese culture, you pick a craft and you do it for your life. You are the sushi guy. It's your life's work, your life study. Or, you are the mochi person. And that level of focus is so beautiful, but not everyone is cut out for that level of focus. And so, I, as a chaotic creative, so much burden was lifted off my shoulders when I realized that it doesn't have to be forever when it comes to the things I'm interested in because you're evolving as a person and your interests are going to evolve. Also, from a lifestyle perspective, maybe you want to work remotely for a part of your life, and that's really important to you. And then, you have a family and put down some roots, and that's not as important to you, and you are okay being more localized or going into an office once in a while. Lifestyles change, things change. Creative interests are bound to change.
Rachael: Absolutely, and I think that that should be the goal. To be evolving, to make sure that you're continuing to fulfill yourself based on the now and not some future version or some societal expectation. I like your analogy of the forever not being the-
Lauren: Only metric of success.
Rachael: ... yes, for relationships and for creative or business ventures. How many people have started a small business and loved it, and then got burnt out and then they stopped? That should not be seen as a failure. You learn so much. And I think I want to tie this back to something that we've talked about in relationships, but also in projects and work is the sunk cost of things. Because I think about that when it comes to my stationary business. Okay, it didn't last forever. I never got to have it be my full-time income, but I don't think that any of the time that I spent learning about business operations, wholesale, learning about shipping, learning how to get something manufactured, produced by someone else, coordinating with people. I got to meet so many other creatives in the area.
Lauren: Customer service, community management.
Rachael: Absolutely. Yeah, there's just so many things that I learned, and same thing with the kitchen tiling project. I did it and because I'm a fast worker, I can now look back and say, "Okay, I absolutely didn't have the patience to perfectly level the floor, clean all of the old grout off. I just kind of went for it." And it's fine, it's functional, but there are some things that can be functional and imperfect, like a quilt or a mug, and there are some things like your kitchen floor where you want it to be a little more on the perfect professional end. And so, I spent this time learning the skill and did the installation, and now I'm going to pay someone to do it professionally.
Lauren: Amazing.
Rachael: I don't think that that's wasted. I don't think that that's money wasted. I learned a boundary for myself of what I cannot do, what is beyond my interest and capacity. And, I mean, even silly examples of this. We were talking about this an hour ago about the pineapple, about how we don't buy pineapple. You buy it already cut, and it's so much more expensive, and you're paying the convenience cost. Sometimes, I want to pay, like Crystal said, the convenience cost. I want to pay the convenience cost of having a professional install my tile and do a good job. I want to pay the convenience cost of someone installing plumbing in my house.
Lauren: Because plumbing is so important.
Rachael: Yeah, and also, just when you try things and you "fail" or you learn something about that, that you decide to move on a relationship, you learn something about yourself, and it's out of alignment. And then, you move on and you learn something about yourself and your connection with other people or your practices.
I think that if we start to think about things from that perspective, "What could I learn from this situation?" Back to the curiosity, which is the root of our creativity, what can I learn about this? What did this teach me? Okay. I don't want a tile. I'm not a perfectionist when it comes to projects, so I shouldn't be doing maybe higher importance projects like plumbing or tiling. I can hire someone else who loves that, who loves the perfection of something. Because there are people who do.
Lauren: Yeah, I imagine, and if there are any people who are professional tile layers... I don't even know what the word is. Tilers? I was going to make an assumption, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was looking at... I'll just be honest. I was sitting on the toilet the other day looking at my bathroom, my shower tile. Because they're rectangular, in a grid, and I had the thought: people who professionally do tiling work seem like the kind of people who would also order spreadsheets. There's a certain amount of finesse and precision with certain mediums and crafts that, again, what we talked about earlier, your natural strengths and things that you have a gift for or are already leaning that way, that can be a good indicator that you can play in those arenas, and it's maximizing or leaning into your natural strength. Whereas I am also not a perfectionist when it comes to the execution of things, and just in general, I've got a lot of flexibility. It's similar to how I find that, of course, there's no binaries, but there are people who are super punctual, and it means it's very important to them that 3:00pm means 3:00pm. And then, we've all got those friends, I'm in this camp of there's a 15-minute grace period. Depending on how good of friends you are, it's kind of messed up. The better of friends you are, the-
Rachael: The more you can. 100%.
Lauren: Yeah. Neither of those frameworks are inherently right or wrong, it's just we all have, from the family of origin that we adopted beliefs from and our natural personalities, we feel differently about those things.
Rachael: Yeah. Absolutely.
Lauren: Yeah. Something like embroidery that's a little bit more, I don't even know what the word is, tedious or detail-oriented. I'm not the most detail-oriented gal, and I think that's why I like ceramics and I like cooking, because it's like, this could go in any direction. I just have the raw ingredients.
And that also might be a response to me doing lettering for so long because lettering has... I actually really appreciate the tighter parameters of lettering as an art that I've chosen to monetize because there are only so many things I can do before it becomes illegible, and the highest purpose for my lettering is it needs to be legible. It's communicating a message, either my own message or a client's message. It's giving personality to words, and there's really only so much you can do before it's no longer a word.
Rachael: Yeah. I always use this example when I used to teach lettering workshops of when I first learned how to do pointed pen nib calligraphy, I remember doing this big address label, and I was so, so proud of it. I brought it to the post office, and they were like, "We can't read this. Put a label." And they made me print in all caps on a sticky label and put it over the top, and I was just devastated because I went in with this expectation like, they're going to want to know who I am, and they're going to send people... Like, USPS is sending people to calligraphers. But as you said, the point of lettering, the boundary that we have to set is that it is conveying a message and it has to be legible. So, another kind of reason to give yourself some parameters for your creative work.
Lauren: Yeah, this actually reminds me. We talk about ceramics so much, which I love. In ceramics class - I was telling Crystal this story - Ricky had us do a project where we did these really large coils, building a vessel or building out of really large coils. And he had originally suggested, he was like, "Try not to make this functional because if you make it functional..." because I asked why. Because I am like, "But I want to use it." And he said for him, if it can be whatever you want it to be, and there's no function. It's a bowl, it's a cup, it needs to hold liquid or you need to be able to stick a flower in it. If there's no function assigned to it, it can really be unbridled creativity where you can run wild. It can have all different types of shapes that don't serve a purpose other than your. Which, as a concept I find really beautiful. In the moment, when we were doing this assignment, I was like, "I hate this so much. I hate this so much." And he was like, "It can be functional if you want. I'm just suggesting that-"
Rachael: Be a little loose in your functionality.
Lauren: And so, I am someone who, in that specific instance, I was like, "I need some jumping off point, some point of reference." And so having a parameter and having some restraints were helpful for me. So, I was like, I want it to be a giant bowl. I want this to be some kind of serving bowl, but I can still have fun with the decoration. I ended up adding these other bowls to the rim. We'll have to pull an image of it up in the video if it's done by the time this comes out.
Rachael: I was going to say, is it around? Let me see.
Lauren: It is not. It's currently at the studio. But at the end of class, we had a really interesting discussion as the class because he was asking about the project and the process. There's eight of us. Half the class really liked the, do whatever you want, there's no constraints, and made these cool art pieces that are just going to be beautiful on the shelf in their home. I love that no matter what you make in ceramics, even if it doesn't work anymore, it can be like an art object. The art object is like, you can charge a lot of money for it and it has no function.
Rachael: Yep. Monetize that one.
Lauren: Yeah. But the other half of the class was like, "I needed a jumping off point. I needed some kind of... Unbridled creativity is terrifying."
Rachael: Because I think it can be so chaotic, and it's just like, I'm the same way. It's why when I was talking about the style challenges, I was like, "What should I work on?" I need something, whether it's the type of hobby that I'm doing or some kind of prompt to give me a boundary, yeah.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely, and I think this is where the staying open and curious part of the chaotic creative brain comes into play and is a strength, is you are typically... Chaotic creatives tend to be in tune with what they need. We're chaotic because we're like, shiny object syndrome. "I'm drawn to that. I'm drawn to that. I'm drawn to that. This feels good, this feels good, this feels bad." And I think that that's a strength because when you're exploring something, you are more in tune with, what do I need from this right now? And some projects and some skills. You're like, it'd be cool to sell this. And some things you're like, I need this just to be for me. And I think we're here to say that both of those are completely valid.
Rachael: Absolutely, and you can change your mind at any time. You can try to make something, and you can sell it after you make it for yourself. You can make something with the intention of selling it and only do it once. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, and it doesn't have to be, you make your decision and you have to stick with it forever.
Lauren: We obviously had so much to say about this topic that this chat went on way longer than expected, so we decided to split it into two parts. Stay tuned for part two coming next episode. Bye!