Getting down to business
Ever since I began freelancing, I have dreaded the idea of running the business side of things. I’ve always wanted to place all my energy and focus into the creative, not the numbers. Turns out, if you avoid the business side, you won’t have a business to practice the creative. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how bad creatives can be at business and didn’t want to become part of that narrative so I set myself an achievable goal of reading a business book every quarter (an idea from Run Studio Run by Eli Altman) to hopefully make the business side of my freelancing much less daunting. Here are a few that I have begun to devour:
The Business of Design: Balancing Creativity and Profitability by Keith Granet
Owning it: A Creative’s Guide to Copywriting, Contracts and The Law by Sharon Givoni
Simple Tip, Smart Ideas: Build a Bigger, Better Business by Erica Wolfe-Murray
How to be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy
Run Studio Run: How to Operate and Grow a Small Creative Agency by Eli Altman
“…Memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are processing the world, the more we can remember about it.” — Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein