5 Wishes for You & Your Creative Biz

As this year winds down, here are my 5 wishes for you and your creative biz in the New Year:

1. I wish you’d stop doing the stuff you’re only doing to make other people happy. I’m not talking about stopping washing your dishes or picking up your dog’s droppings from the neighborhood green space. I’m talking about the goods, services, and features you offer in your biz that don’t thrill you, show you off in your best light, and make you feel like a smart, together, freakishly cool creative pro.

2. I wish you’d let your mind go way back as far as you can remember being alive and look for clues about your natural, inborn passions. What did you love doing as a child? What were your dreams and your fantasies? How can you take the oeuvre — the essence — of those and work them into your business concept or model? There’s a lot of entrepreneurial richness there in your past just waiting to be recognized.

3. I wish you’d hone in. I almost said ‘I wish you’d simplify,’ but that’s not necessarily the answer for every business concept or every creative solopreneur. {Maximalism, anyone?} But I do wish you’d hone in. Don’t think about the whole rainbow of things you could do, say, write about, teach, create for, etc. Focus on the one stripe of the rainbow that makes you mad with passion and purpose.

4. I wish you’d get giddy about what’s working well for you a little more often. And when you see something working — a blog post getting tons of comments, a Facebook update with many likes, a product flying off the shelves — examine it, ask yourself why, and think of five ways to replicate the idea behind it without copying yourself. Or go ahead and copy yourself. Why not. It worked once! Let your successes teach you and change you.

5. I wish you’d stop looking at anyone but yourself, except as a mentor or a peer. In other words, get out of the competition paradigm. Just pretend like the idea of ‘competition’ doesn’t exist. {It won’t once you start doing this.} It doesn’t even matter how fiercely your peers regard you as competition. If you let go of that idea for yourself, it’s gone. Learn from others. Befriend others. Soak in others’ good stuff. But don’t threaten your own creativity by comparing it with someone else’s success.

It’s been a really good year. A bumpy ride of a year, but a good year in ways that matter. If you’re reading this post right now, you’re a part of that goodness for me and I want to say thanks for that. Thanks for supporting me and what I’m building at Abby Kerr Ink.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and I hope our paths will cross even more often in 2011!

P.S. Have you signed up for my free 10-part e-course in Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche? It’s a deep course — no surface-y stuff. Might be a great time of year to start propelling yourself further into your entrepreneurial dream. :)