A year ago was the beginning of when I started to thoroughly think a lot of things through to be able to define my outlook on life properly. Due to a project idea someone had wanted my collaboration with which
had a load of exciting potential to be artistically and culturally
provocative, my head was full of alternative thoughts, The exciting, crazier ideas were meant to develop a film project to appeal to a more edgy community. I was getting further from conventional with a kind of permanent over excited hyperactive state of mind and frustration with ordinary living, aware I was being too surreal in my creativity and wanted
to suppress that too irreverent thinking to be less out
there but I was relishing it at the time, it was putting lots of new information and ideas into my head.. As it happened, the person who came up with the idea had no motivation for this so it came to nothing: great pity as I thought it was a marvellous idea but it's maybe best left alone. As I said in a previous post I was quite demoralised with other things so this was a great focus for my attention and distracted me from any lethargy I felt, though when you're needing inspired it's hard to put what there is of your energy towards getting someone else directed to something that's stirred your own imagination.
Last year there was someone who instigated me to realign my focus - I was concerned he'd think of me as a dilettante with crazy ideas, which I can be but it's predominantly not me, I'm too focused - or so I'd like to think :) He showed me there were still motivated people like I was used to
growing up and not just feckers - most people are content plodding on
and don't have a structure or direction. So I started working on my business brain to develop a route to get where I wanted to be instead of making and taking opportunities as they arose or I had time and imagination to develop them. I've achieved focus on styling and have theories about the psychology of fashion which make sense to me.
I've looked back and realised the effect situations have had on life. Through these situations changing my perspective I've experienced confusion and seen how making the best of bad circumstances changes your focus: you go with new ideas and plans because they have potential at the time. But I didn't want to be too surreal and lose any ability to relate to people on a normal level, which can be easy to do if you open your mind up and get frustrated by closed minds. I wanted to be predominantly business like rather than arty farty dilletante.
As I had a very professional class background, my parents living a non arty consumer lifestyle and living in middle class Bearsden where the expectation was after school you'd go to uni to study English, medicine, psychology or something similar. My upbringing alongside my imagination made it quite
difficult to resolve conflict between the two states if mind, and
without courses or structure to develop a career plan I had to make it
up as I went along, which has been great fun but the lack of trajectory has been frustrating, but in hindsight I wouldn't change it given the experiences I've had and the people I've met. I've had to rely on my creative talents because I missed so much school - when you're channeled one way but you instinctively want to go another and you're not in the optimum environment to make it successful it's frustrating.
Now my business brain has centred it all and brought focus to the sometimes frenetic creativity. Too much mental stimulation can sometimes cause confusion, not knowing where to start or
what to do with the ideas. I've made sense of it now . I can take my
creativity seriously and now want to be professional and in some ways a
conventional professional. I thrive on productive stress and hate stress I get with unproductive frustration.
Combining my desire for cultural and societal development I'm thinking how to conceive a progressive independent business, by taking our current conventional structure and figure out how to work independently beyond and around it to succeed independently. That's where I'm at now and finding out there are a lot more like minded people than I'd previously thought, and that there are larger support networks for these micro businesses. I reckon this whole process has been about trying to put ideas into a workable framework, having to figure it out as you go along because the concept of microbusinesses in this currently scale is fairly new after so many people deciding to do their own thing after the economic crash. I think a lot of us are having to find our feet and our direction. I feel much more confident about my capabilities and my clear route forward which is fantastic :)
No comments:
Post a Comment