You're Talented, So What?

This is the written script of Halftime, episode 23 of the Makers of Sport® podcast. Halftime was a short show on the off weeks between interviews where I wrote and read on topics in professionalism, entrepreneurship and business for creatives in sport. The episode aired February 3, 2015; the audio is on SoundCloud and the show notes live at makersofsport.com. The show's opening and closing announcements are trimmed here.

For today's topic I'm discussing self-promotion and finding creative work, be it for freelance or making connections for a full-time job.

Let me preface by saying, just because you have a good portfolio, are super talented at your craft and make really good work does not mean people will know about you, or even work with you. There are two primary reason for this, 1) know one knows about you or 2) you are a jerk.

Everyone wants to be discovered and appreciated and/or paid for the work they put into the world. One can google the phrase “getting discovered” and Google will autofill popular searches such as getting discovered as a singer, an actor, a fashion designer, a model, on soundcloud, on youtube, on instagram, in NYC, LA and even getting discovered as an extra. The world is full of anonymous people.

So here you are, you’ve been doing tutorials, honing your skills and have become very good at your craft. You head over to the latest website where people share their work to fulfill their “like drug” cravings, post your project and no one says anything about it. Yet, you see Sally Famous post something that subjectively you think isn’t very well executed and she ends up with 100s or even 1000s of likes. Why is this the case? Why are people liking things that may not be that good. Well for one, Sally Famous is known and I believe that when famous people do things, we tend to get blinded by the names than by the actual execution of the work. This may be controversial, quite frankly I don’t care. I try to look at all things design through an objective lens and I constantly see “famous” creators posting work that is executed sub-par but yet the “rad” and “super cool” comments are flowing on that particular project.

Now I’m not saying that I’m holding everyone at the Internet famous level to a standard where they need to produce excellence every time they put something out. They are human, they make mistakes. What I’m saying is we need to be able to recognize that somewhere along the line this particular person did something that many talented people aren’t doing in order to get the number of followers or likes they have.

I can’t tell you how many design, photography or motion portfolios I stumble across, click their Dribbble/Behance, or other link and see they have virtually no followers. Now, some of these people could be wrapped up in work at a full-time job and keeping their work up-to-date or self-promoting isn’t a priority for them yet. But if you are in the market for finding a full-time job, or especially finding business contacts, then you need to be telling people about yourselves.

And when I mention telling people about yourselves, I don’t mean bragging, retweeting every complement about you or your work, or telling the world how great you are and now many awards that you have. I mean simply giving people an opportunity to know your personality and that you exist in this creative world and most of all are available for work.

So how can a person do this without being a self-righteous, braggadocio person I referred to. One way to this is to share things you have learned. Share how do your work, what worked for you, what hasn’t. Take for example this podcast. I am putting content out into the world alongside my guests, sharing my connections, my private conversations with you, the listeners. This is valuable and through that, you have gotten to know me and my personality and in some cases we have become friends or close colleagues and in other cases I have gotten work inquires directly from this show simply by sharing my knowledge.

Another example is our last guest Fraser Davidson, people follow Fraser because he is extremely talented yes, but before he got the large following he has now, he was sharing YouTube videos of how he creates his style of work. He even continues to teach as he has a few classes on Skillshare. Is he worried about people taking over any of his work or the industry becoming saturated with his style? Absolutely not, you heard me ask him. He is confident in his abilities and the relationships he has formed over time.

The old school mentality of business is that it is a zero-sum game. Meaning that for you to win something, someone else has to lose something. Talk to most business people in the boomer generation (and I’m not meaning this to be insulting any way because that is simply the way of business in the past) and what you will see is an unwillingness to share specifics of their processes, behind-the-scenes and more.

People that see the world as zero-sum, tend to live in worlds that ARE zero-sum. it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. They end up living in a world where everywhere is skeptical of sharing information with them because they are takers.

I do not believe the zero-sum mentality to be true in the Internet age. There is a plethora of work available for us out there in the world and much, much more to come. Only a small percentage of the world’s population is connected to the Internet. And not only that, from a device perspective and how big the Internet is going to become, we are only work and consume information digitally through lens of tablets, phones, computers and occasionally TVs. Eventually most devices in our home will be connected to the digital world. Imagine getting the scores of last nights games on your coffee maker.

An additional way to get discovers is to seek out speaking engagements, even small ones. You don’t have to speak at something like SXSW, you can speak at high schools or local business development luncheons such as the Chamber of Commerce. Tomorrow I’m actually speaking to classes at my high school alma mater. Sharing what you know positions you as an expert in your industry and you can bet that people will follow you and share your name if you are producing valuable content for them. Not everyone will share it, there are a lot of takers in the world. I’m going to call some listeners out, if you listen to this show consistently and haven’t shared it or written a review, you are a taker. But the ones who appreciate the content feel somewhat obligated to share it because it is good and it helps others. People will do this for you as well.

Speaking of this podcast as an example of sharing, it is also side project. A passion project. Side projects are a great way to get discovered.

I started this for fun to fill my own need for engaging, high-level conversations in this niche. I didn’t do it for money.

Now think about other creative people you know who are well-known? Chances are they did not get discovered by some particular craft, but by a similar side project that took off. We have had a few of these folks on these how. Episode 8: Darrin Crescenzi made a Game of Thrones poster and it blew up. Made it to all of the top design blogs and even non-design blogs. He did this for fun for himself as a big Game of Thrones fan. Episode 15, Matt Stevens got discovered by major brands from his Nike Airmax 100 project. Tyson Beck started creating NBA art at posterizes because he loves it. Todd Radom continuously writes about sports design history, Kris Bazen has Sports Font Foundry, Matt Hernandez has photo compositing tutorials. 8by8 Magazine is a side project for design firm, Priest+Grace. As I sit here and look at all of the past guests at makersofsport.com/episodes, the majority of these people either have side projects or share some of what they have learned in their careers.

In another area of design, Tobias van Schneider, an art director at Spotify got discovered because he redesigned the email interface. Now is he is arguably one of those “famous” designers.

Jim Bankoff, the CEO of Vox Media, the company episode of 20 guest, Ted Irvine, recently stated on a podcast I was listening to that the way that designers, developers and those people that work in the web get discovered is that they just build something and someone finds it and they like and they are invited to come work on a bigger project whether at a company or freelance. We don’t need anyone’s permission to put stuff out into the world. If you give, it will come back to you in some way eventually.

I also want to touch Networking. Networking tends to be a dirty word a lot of times. We can easily tend to loop it in with the guy that machine gun style hands out business cards at some chamber of business luncheon. Networking can be invaluable for one’s career if done the right way. For one, I have found that being genuinely interested in people’s stories and hearing them out is very valuable at networking events. Don’t keep thinking about the next person you want to go talk to or waiting for your time to speak. You don’t need to work the room. There will be other events. Invest time in the connections you are making. They will become big advocates of you and your brand and if you never happen to work together, they would have no problem introducing you to someone else or sharing your content.

Follow up with the connections you make that you really want to get to know on a deeper level. They may not always have time but reaching out never hurts. Give them something valuable, a link, an article, a book you think you will benefit them. If they are popular, extremely busy and highly requested, they will appreciate that and most likely feel the urge to reciprocate in one way, which may be that $30 dollar lunch in which they drop thousands of dollars of worth of knowledge on you.

Now this stuff may be tough if you are introvert. I used to be quite introverted myself and as an ENFP on the Meyers Briggs test, we can sort of be summed as extroverted introverts, meaning I can function fine in social situations but I need a lot of time afterwards to process what I have learned and experienced before my next social situation. A way around this is to find niche communities online where you can establish relationships and break the ice digitally before having to meet and talk to someone in person. There are plenty of these and in fact I am even building one here for Makers of Sport. Ultimately however, you are going to have to battle to get over the fear of public situations. It will be like forcing your left hand to write when you are right handed, it’s not impossible but it will be very hard. I believe you can do it. Communicating with other people is a vital part of business and especially the creative business as what we are ultimately doing is producing work that communicates ideas clearly and effectively.

The second reason I discussed earlier about why know one is hiring you is you might very well be a jerk. People hire other people. Business is built off of relationships. If put off any kind of vibe that you will be tough to work with, people will not hire you for internal or freelance gigs.

To be completely transparent here, I have experienced this first hand. I once interviewed when I was younger for a design position at the University of Kentucky athletic department. Actually, our first guest, Matt Hernandez and myself were both interviewing for the position along with a third person whom I am unaware of. Matt edged me out on the job and we had the exact same amount of experience coming from the same place in IMG College. Now in no way am I belittling Matt’s talent because he is super skilled and did a great job for UK. But when I asked the interviewer at alter time what I could have done better or needed to work on, he mentioned it wasn’t my work but my attitude. I was apparently trashing my old employer in the interview. Not necessarily the people but the company. In other words, I came off as a negative jerk.

Does this mean I would have beaten my pal Matt at the job? Certainly not. But it would given me a better shot. I have learned from this experience.

So right now, go check and see if your online presence presents you as a cynical or passive aggressive person. Do you tweet about how bad other creative work is or offer negative unsolicited and completely subjective feedback about the latest team branding without knowing the strategy or having in-depth knowledge about the job? Do you troll sports branding or uniform forums?

Silicon Valley tends to glorify the jerk personalities such as Steve Jobs, who undoubtedly was a genius, but according to his own biography and accounts of the many people that worked with him was notorious for being hard to work with, a my way or the highway kind of person. This kind of story I can assure you is an anomaly and jerks or manipulative people always get found out.

I’m not saying don’t be opinionated or you can’t post the occasional snarky or sarcastic tweet. Or even retweet a proud moment or talk about a great achievement. But if you social streams consist of cynicism, super fanboy BS, or constant humble brags, I can assure you, know one will want to work with you.

So be mindful of what you say and put into the world if you want people to hire you.