How does one run an art business on the internet, or provide visual content, while keeping that content open as a source for people who just want to look or use it for personal reasons (like on their home computer as wall paper for instance) or for educational purposes? Answering that question seems to be the easy part. But how does one assure that income can be earned and that someone else does not swipe it for that purpose too or spread it around making it accessible for free? Not so easy really- especially when your content and purpose is entertainment it self.
I am an animator. I've been an animator for years. Almost 30 years to tell the truth. But the industry was killing me. Killing my desire to create. So I got out. I took a break in the non-profit sector and then I started teaching- teaching animation. Now that I've had my break, I want back in. Not into the animation industry necessarily, but in to animation. Ha! But I'm so busy teaching animation, I barely have time to do my job and do all the requisite tasks in life and draw or create.
After all the laundry, dish washing and errands- there is so little time to just sit and draw or read a book and learn. Still, some how I manage to scrape out a little time each week to do just that- because I have to or I’ll shrivel up and die. Truly I mean that. Without the chance to create and learn I’ll just wither into a soulless zombie like creature stumbling through life just to make it to the next day and then…I’ll die.
Yeah, yeah, I know; we all die someday, but you know what I mean.
That little space I manage to scrape out: it’s far too little. I need more. How can I do that? I don’t want to give up teaching either! How do I make these two things, work and life, fit together in a way that will provide me a real creative outlet while still providing the chance to teach and an income? This is my challenge! And it requires a new business model (or at least, I think it does).
So that’s where I’ve been. Studying new business ideas. Looking for solutions (maybe I should say soul-lutions?) and playing with what I find. Some of what I have been finding looks like the same old stuff in a different package- it is. And some of what I am finding does look really refreshing. It is the tried and true, good business, mixed with new ideas, or some tried-and-true-from-here mixed with a few good-old-ideas-from-there in ways that have not been done before.
I heard a talk given recently by Christopher Gergen, from Duke University at the Commonwealth Club of California. Gergen's book "Life Entrepreneurs" was recently published. He seems to be out doing the related touring that comes with a newly published book. So, "life entrepreneurship" was the subject of his talk. He presented some great ideas and provided much that was inspiring about the subject of business. He focused mainly on how we can change the model for business to better support society. In fact he argues that we must do this or our society, as we know it, will perish.
Okay, now I have some additional reading to do on top of my drawing and searching.
Spurred on by my enthusiasm for Gergen's ideas, I also recently stumbled on this video while searching for "social entrepreneurship" and "social ecosystems" that reccomended the books: "The Rise of the Creative Class" by Richard Florida and Ken Robinson's "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative".
So much to do, so little time....
No comments:
Post a Comment