The most difficult thing about carving out a living for yourself in any creative field is figuring out the value of your work. Artists never know how to price their paintings, DJs don’t know what to charge for their services, and graphic designers in the beginning have no idea how much a logo should cost. I think there are two big reasons that figuring out value for your work is really hard, today I’m going to cover one of them, we’ll leave the second for another time.
Okay, lets start. It sucks to suck. One of the dirty little secrets of being a successful person in any creative field, is if you have good enough taste to actually make it, you know in the beginning that you suck. Nobody starts out amazing at anything. I know this because I’ve gone through this process at least 3 times, but also, I was lucky enough to have a teacher in my first semester of design school play a short video from Ira Glass. That video was very inspiring for me when I saw it. Linked in this article you will find that video, WATCH IT, it’s only 2 minutes long and he is going to make this point better than I will.
Okay, back to my experience with sucking. The first creative endeavor that I embarked on to “make a living” was body piercing. Back in 2006 I had been working as the front guy at Bonehead Tattoos in Sacramento CA and we had just found out that one of our piercers was moving out of state in 2 months. This started my crash course in learning how to be a piercer. Typically an apprenticeship would take at least a year, but we didn’t have a year. For 2 months I learned as much as possible, then for another two months 1 piercer worked 7 days a week while I kept learning and then 4 months in I started working on my own for 1 day a week and it grew from there.
In the end I spent 6 years of my life as a body piercer, I’d say I was a good piercer for about 3 of them. However, it took those 3 years of experience to realize how much better I could be. I probably thought I was a good piercer for about 5 of those 6 years. I sort of backed door’d my way in to piercer by “right place, right time”. Piercing wasn’t something I was passionate about, it was something that I thought was “cool”. I didn’t have the taste in the beginning to realize how bad at it I was. Over time as I developed that taste, I saw how much there was to learn and I grew to become somewhat respected piercer.
Graphic design was a different experience. When I was 27 I started going to school for graphic design. This was my second journey with college. I had gone when I was 18 but all I did was flunk out of a bunch of philosophy classes I never did the homework in. I went in to Graphic Design interested in it. I had never touched an Adobe program in my life, but I went straight in to 4 classes my first semester.
I had a natural good sense of design, it has served me well over these last 10 years, but it was rough in the beginning. I was painfully aware what I was doing wasn’t good in the beginning. I knew something was off with every design that I did, but I just didn’t know what it was. It was a lot harder for me to learn how to apply value to my design work, than it was to ask for money for piercing. Piercing the prices were set, and I wasn’t aware that I sucked at it. Graphic design I set all my own prices, and I was struggling daily that I wasn’t good at it. I powered through, because I was stubborn mostly, and I honestly believe that Ira Glass video helped. There was a tipping point though. It was about 3 years in. Most of my work that I look at from my first 3 years is hard for me to look at. My design brain is tearing it apart inside. Most of my work after 3 years I’ll at least accept as passable.
The only thing that got me through this wasn’t the time, but it was the amount of work I was doing. My first three years of design school I took 24 design classes and helped teach in the design lab at Sacramento City College. I was also working as a freelance designer. 3 years in to my design “career” I had done at least 500 different projects. Just as 3 years in to my piercing career I had done well over 500 piercings.
The third creative undertaking I’ve made a career out of in my life is DJing. DJing is something that I have thought about doing for a very long time, but as I moved further along in life 2 thoughts were holding me back. 1, I’m getting older, DJ seemed from the outside looking in as something that you had to start young. That was just an excuse. 2, I was already on creative career attempt 2, and was struggling to make a consistent living with it, while also being painfully aware of how long I was going to suck at DJing.
Somewhere along the way in design school I learned a valuable lesson personally. When you start down any creative path, if you have good taste for it, you will see how bad you are at it. However, other people, that don’t have your taste, and don’t work in that field themselves, don’t have the taste to see how bad you are at it, often times they even think you are good!
With DJing, as long as you have good taste in music, the only people that are going to know you suck at everything else is other DJs. After I was a part of doing ArtStreet, a month long temporary art exhibition in an abandoned warehouse, I was inspired to start DJing. The parties that we had at ArtStreet that received the most positive reception and people asked me constantly when the “next one was” were the silent discos. Every silent disco we had 12+ DJs. I also managed to book the Invisibl Skratch Piklz for ArtStreet, their first show in sac. Between both of those things it inspired me to finally start DJing.
Being that I knew the only way to stop sucking was to get through a large body of work I started DJing as much as I possibly could. I was DJing at art galleries, and renegade silent discos. Eventually I started weekly gigs for myself and La Cosecha, Flamingo House, Lowbrau, Dive Bar, Burgers and Brews, Red Rabbit, the Park, everywhere that I possibly could. Last year during the summer I was doing as many gigs as there were days in the week, sometimes more.
I think I was just starting to become a good DJ before the world came to a screeching halt. I LOVE DJing, I’ve yet to find anything I have more fun doing. It is definitely something that I will be happily doing again whenever the world allows it, but that isn’t going to be for at least a year.
Where does that leave me now? Well, I’m finally starting to write, something I’ve wanted to do longer than DJing, but I’m struggling with something. It sucks to suck. I know I’m not good at writing. I know this because I read excellent writing almost every day, this ain’t it. I also know that if I’m ever going to be good at this, then I need to do the work. I need to power through, and somewhere, probably about three years from now, I will write something that I think is good, and it will all be worth it. So bare with me, and eventually you will be rewarded. Maybe you think this was great, and we learned something today, you shouldn’t be a writer. I do encourage you to start doing something you want to do, even if you suck at it, because if you have good enough taste to actually do it, you will suck. It gets better though, I promise.