Four Lessons from Turning Pro

Are you a professional or an amateur?

Or if you consider yourself a professional, are you still treating some parts of your business like you did when you were an amateur?

The classic thing is ‘we didn’t get taught that in design school’ - the things we didn’t get taught (and I’m self taught so I’m only speaking from what I know from the people I spend time with) are often the things we are still being lazy with.

Sales, marketing, client management, terms and conditions, the business side is often the side we know we should spend more time on but don’t.

And that’s natural because we went into a creative field because we loved creating, not because we wanted to learn business.

I went through the same journey, but in a different way, I learned my design process first and was clear about that, but learned business simultaneously working with my dad as a coach and trainer.

But for most of us, like Steven Pressfield says, we need to make that leap from amateur to professional if we want to make a real impact in our own lives, the lives of our clients and in our business.

In Turning Pro, some key points that stood out to me were -

The amateur waits until the time is right until they act (you might have heard this recycled as ‘take imperfect action’ or something from an influencer or two).

But he’s right, we have to ‘build the plane as its flying’ we have to act when we feel the compulsion to, and learn as we go, only then can we learn what works and what needs work.

The idea that the best creatives are addicts, we are addicted to something, creating the next award winning logo, the next beautiful oil painting that we sell for a thousands or whatever it is for you.

We get stuck though because of this in the mode of ‘thinking’ about doing the thing, we get consumed by thinking about the thing we want to do instead of actually doing it.

We get distracted by endless courses, youtubes, by drink and drugs becasue we’re putting off doing that hard thing we know could be the thing that changes our lives.

Books like this are important because they are manifestos, they get you to act, to decide, where do I sit?

And what do I need to do to change?