What Can You Control?
You can’t control your customer’s budgets. But you can control how they perceive your value.
You can’t control your clients’ lack of boundaries when they spend all weekend emailing you. But you can control who you work with.
You can’t control people’s existing worldviews. But you can find an audience that matches yours and tell them a (true) story about how your work can make their lives better.
Every day, as we aim to create work that changes the people who engage with it, we’re faced with dozens of situations, circumstances, beliefs and plain old laws of nature that are completely beyond our control.
We can spend our time dwelling on these, saying “If only…”, and making excuses, or we can accept the situation for what it is and focus on all the things we can control.
By focusing on what we have power over, we can build our work around the problem or circumstance rather than waiting for it to disappear so we can take the most direct path forward.
This is where the creativity in our work comes through, and the way in which we navigate the things beyond our control is what makes our work truly ours.
No one who’s ever created anything has done so under perfectly ideal circumstances, with no obstacles or roadblocks in their way. The stars didn’t align for…
