Getting to the Core of UVP
You know what makes Levain Bakery so special? Its cookies. There are only four kinds. And each is six magical ounces of goodness. Levain’s unique value proposition, for me anyway, is an obscenely large indulgence of chocolate chips and walnuts. […]
SWOT Analysis – What It Is & Why It Works
Sometimes knowing what you don’t do is even more important than knowing what you do. Articulating what we don’t do can save endless hours of metaphorical torture. Engaging in a bit of reflective SWOT analysis can help a creative individual […]
The Lazy Way of Setting Goals
Goal Setting is always one of the first activities I introduce, whether I’m working with undergraduate students or seasoned creative professionals. Rarely do those I work with think about goals for the first time with me. We’re taught to think […]
Portfolio Careers in Action
In honor of Labor Day, we wanted to spend some time thinking about all the work creative individuals do to make a creative career successful. This is not the glamorous stuff. This is everything else. And of course, all month […]
The Cash Connection
Quick: What’s the last purchase you made? Odds are, it was today. And odds are it wasn’t with cash. (My last purchase was with a credit card; I bought lunch for my team at a café. Before that, […]
Financial Freedom
Imagine this: You never have to say yes to something you’d rather say no to. We all have those sorts of projects, no matter our creative medium. Perhaps it is a commercially viable print (when you’d rather be doing one-of-a-kind […]
Straddling Duality
Huge thanks to the Clark Hulings fund for adding this piece to their site! I had the pleasure of chairing a panel discussion in May that featured a variety of artists from across the artistic spectrum. And they all […]
Curiosity versus Fear
My daughter came home from school a few months ago and reported that a classmate’s mother “didn’t like her.” “[Classmate] said his mom doesn’t like me,” she said. I remember he words exactly, along with the puzzling expression she […]
Beautiful Distractions
Small confession: I was interrupted three times during the first paragraphs of Verena von Pfetten’s piece in the Times last month about—you guessed it—being distracted. Twice my daughter asked me to refill her water gun for an ongoing arms […]
It’s Not That Bad
You know those weeks when things get away from you? When you start out with, maybe, eighteen things to do and by the end of the week, you’ve finished two of those things and forty-seven other things? Last week […]
