Non-creative Skills for Creatives - a Primer

Creative work is very often not about being creative.

Creative people, often, are not great at some of the skills needed to maintain a career, outside of the parts of the work which require creativity. Here are some tips to balance that out, some of the skills needed to dance with when you want to live with creativity.

Communicating with non-creative people (AKA, the client)

Often, as a creative, you are hired by people who are not very comfortable with creativity - that is why they need your skillset. The tricky thing about this relationship is the fact that to know what you want out of a creative job is in itself creative work. Because of this, most clients - be it corporate clients looking for a video that shows off their work, or even a producer looking to fund a movie, or series - struggle mightily to collaborate with creatives, because they have no actual way to communicate what they want. 

You will see this even more in Design circles, where “clients from hell stories” are extremely common. These are people who have no skills to communicate what they are looking for, yet they are adamant about keeping control of the collaboration and reflexively asking for changes with extremely specific requests even if they don’t have the understanding of how to find the problem in what they don’t like.

In these cases, a professional creative needs to employ many strategies to keep the client happy, and feeling in control, while making sure not to allow the client to self-sabotage the project they are paying for. Patience is absolutely mandatory; and, at times, even a certain amount of benign deception. When editing a video, clients will at times complain about it after having watched it a number of times, asking for changes in pacing and rhythm to a video that works perfectly well, but it is not meant to be watched 20 times in a row: it needs to be appreciated at first viewing, and that is it. More often than not, making a borderline imperceptible change to the video - this could be literally changing one cut by half a second, and sending back that video to the client will be enough to make them happy. They like it better because now they are watching it with “fresh eyes” again, the way it’s meant to be seen, not because of the change; but the important thing is that they find peace in their role in the collaboration, even if it requires a sort of placebo effect.

If this sounds like politics, it is because it is a form of politics. 

Negotiation and business basics

Unless you are lucky enough to explode into a successful career where big money comes immediately, together with the ability to hire financial and legal help, you will need to be your own business manager. This means understanding how much to charge for your services, the amount of time you need to work to survive, and how to pay your collaborators. You also figure out all the times where saying no to a project that seems interesting, but where the financial part is ambiguous, is a good way to waste time. 

This is an especially hard thing to do with creatives because a lot of us tend to think of commerce as something “dirty”, but this is just a pathway to being exploited. A good hack is to think of this relationship beyond money and with *value* as the core principle. After all, sometimes a job can pay relatively little money but serve your portfolio, or reel; sometimes, you can also take a job that pays a bit less than another one but allows you to work on your personal projects. Other times, you take uninspiring and hard projects if they pay enough to make you feel safe for a long time. You need to understand what you value in each job you take, and that is anything but crass, it's not selling out, it's just being in charge of your work. 

Promotion, and figuring out a persona

When you are being hired for something as abstract as creating art, your work is often not enough to convince people to work with you. As a creative, if you work with other people, the way you present yourself is very important.

It’s not an accident that a lot of creatives, even when they are not performers, dress and act like characters. It is a useful way to stand out and make others curious about what you do. Some artists have been amazing at this: Hitchcock, Andy Wharol, Ernest Hemingway - they all had a persona that became as big as their work.

Now, with the possibilities afforded by social platforms and broadcast structures like YouTube and Twitch, this can have a completely different level of significance: every one of us can create a public persona that can attract more work. 

This can become a pursuit in and out of itself: some artists are arguably more interesting as personas than they are for their art. Some of us hate this, and have no intention to focus on self-promotion (I am closer to this second aptitude). But some sort of awareness of the way we project to the world is necessary to become a working creative, if nothing else because it shows a willingness to live, work and act intentionally: around the fact that you are someone who puts serious energy into everything you do. 

Patience, and resilience in chaos

In many ways, filmmaking is a job of extremes, as it’s often the case with creative pursuits. You need to have the patience to work on projects that can take years to manifest, and the discipline to keep working at something consistently and with passion while also being open to throwing away 90% of everything you have done because that’s what it takes to create something others would want to engage with. But once it comes to shooting, performance, or any other mission-critical task, you need to be able to be completely immersed in your job, to stay in the moment with full engagement even as things around you become chaotic, messy and confusing: delivering something in a very short span of time, being very good at communicating in the midst of confusion. And, in all of that, not losing your temper. 

Sense of humor

I guess this is something that goes beyond just work, this is more of a thing that is good to have as an attitude in life. But with creative work, to be able to take things lightly is very important, for two reasons. First, because it’s hard and it’s a good way not to lose your mind. The other one is that humour is a superior framework for understanding the paradoxical reality of life; if you want to really dive deep into creativity, figuring out what is funny about each situation is a great way to discover truths. I’ll probably write a bit more about this some other time.