“People Buy Your Joy”
I just finished reading a wonderful little book of career advice for illustrators called “I Just Like to Make Things: Learn the Secrets to Making Money While Staying Passionate About Your Art or Craft” by the agent Lilla Rogers (who is herself an exceptionally successful artist).
The title of Chapter One stopped me in my tracks: “People Buy Your Joy.”
Amen to that.
Have you ever been around someone who is unabashedly in touch with their joy? Someone who lights up with delight when they talk about their work, who seems fully grounded in themselves and their direction, who never worries about “helping the competition” because sharing their knowledge and inspiration brings them such obvious pleasure?
People like that are rare — and magnetic.
What is even more rare, though, is people who got that way without going through struggle and rejection. There is a very, very high likelihood that at a certain point, you’re going to offer your heart to the world and it’ll respond (at first) by saying, “No, thanks.”
J.K. Rowling once tweeted about the painful period when she was submitting the first Harry Potter manuscript to publishers: “I wasn’t going to give up until every single publisher had turned me down, but I often feared that that would happen.”
Moments like these can be a critical turning point.
Do you redouble your commitment to your work?
Or do you start trying to figure out “what the market wants” and rejigger yourself into something “more commercial”? (Or, worse, give up on yourself?)
If rejection is more likely to make you question yourself than become even more determined, you’ve got to employ every tool in the arsenal to keep in touch with your joy.
- Meditate.
- Exercise.
- Practice your craft religiously.
- Take breaks.
- Be in nature.
- Spend time with your favorite people.
- Laugh.
- Find mentors.
- Do things you love, every single day.
As David Lynch says in his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, “Experience the joy of doing…. Your friends will be very, very happy with you. Everyone will want to sit next to you. And people will give you money!”
One of my most important insights has been that persistence and self-confidence are “the killer combination,” when it comes to building a successful creative career.
Persistence is hard. But if you consciously seek out the supports that enable you to persist, your self-confidence grows.
As your self-confidence grows, it becomes easier to persist.
Both self-confidence and trust in yourself that you will persist bring you joy.
