10 Steps on Making Your Creative Ideas a Reality
As a continuing of the guest post written by Annching Wang last week: A Guide on How to Make the Transition from Fashion Creator to Fashion Entrepreneur, I invite you now to read some tips she give to any fashion entrepreneur, on how to make his ideas real and how to succeed to achieve their goals.
So, enjoy and do your best to achieve your goals!!
1. Get over it.
You’ll find excuses everywhere. Not enough time, not enough money, someone’s already done it, nobody’s done it. My biggest foreseeable hurdle was money, so I decided to get creative on how I was going to fund my fashion line by starting a crowd funding campaign. I turned an excuse into motivation to do something about it.
2. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time
In the beginning, I hesitated in taking the entrepreneurial path because I thought I wanted the conventional life - graduate, get a good job, get married, buy a house. My definition of success followed that path strictly. But I knew that the further I stayed on this path, the further away I strayed from what I was really yearning to do. So I got a little impractical, and I ditched that roadmap for another one.
And I think the younger you are, the more forgivable your mistakes - not just to others, but to yourself. At any point in time, whether you are 20 or 40 or 60, you are younger than you will be tomorrow. The longer you wait on your dreams, the more excuses you’ll conjure up not to pursue your art.
3. The worst that can happen might happen. It probably will happen
I know that my business could fail, and I could lose all my money and have to start over from scratch. And I could look like a big loser. But, then I can think - what went wrong? There’s something to be learned and you get closer to yourself when you pursue a passion and it doesn’t work out. But if you stay where you are and don’t go for it, and you succeed - you’ll come out probably learning a lot less, and perhaps further away from your best self, which isn’t really success, is it?
4. No matter what they tell you, doing it yourself is the best experience.
People want to get jobs in creative fields because they’ll gain valuable work experience. And while I did learn a lot working in the photography industry, I could feel that the more I learned, the further away I strayed from my goals. It is rare that you will find a match in a company that is congruent to yourself, and what often happens is our creative spirit gets stifled. It’s important to learn and absorb, but it is important to recognize when “experience” takes precedence over growth, and that can sometimes only come from taking risks to stretch your boundaries as an entrepreneur.
5. Get super practical
You have to learn business. You have to learn how to market your idea. If you don’t, you need to partner up with someone who does. The more creative the idea, the more practical you need to get with execution.
6. Know your bigger picture
Perhaps you know what you want to create, but why do you want to create it? I asked this question to my clients while working as a fashion copywriter, and most of them could not come up with anything other than “I just love it.” Love is grand and mighty, and that may very well be your core message, but it might not. Know the bigger picture, and the details look less overwhelming. This applies to both your idea itself and your life - do you want to build a larger than life empire, or are you happy keeping it small and intimate?
7. Become a part of the community
There’s power in numbers. Things are happening on the internet now through the power of community that could not have been possible five years ago, and many of these things are designed to help people like me and you with creative ideas succeed. Source4Style is a community and sourcing platform for independent designers to get sustainable fabrics. And Fashionarium itself is launching a platform to help fashion designers connect with the larger retail community. You don’t have to do it all yourself.
8. Get resourceful
If I had to point out one quality that has made the process of turning my idea into a business that much easier, it would have to be resourcefulness. Part of that resourcefulness comes from lifelong curiosity, and the other part from a drive to make things work. I have business resources that I’ve been collecting since high school. I share them whenever someone asks. But resourcefulness is such an important quality to cultivate. Always be looking, always be learning. And keep track of these things (I use Evernote.)
9. Build the momentum
If you do at least one thing a day to get closer to turning your dream into a reality, in one year, that’s 365 little actions more than doing nothing. Along the way, you’ll want to stop. You’ll want to take breaks. Try to keep the momentum going. Get into a habitual mindset of entrepreneurship, and it will become ingrained in you. It takes time though, but the more you take little steps, the easier it will get to take bigger ones. I sometimes started building momentum before I even had a concrete idea, and even more valuable than the steps themselves was the consistency of mindset I was able to build.
10. Never lose the creative spark.
I recently signed up for a painting class, because I was starting to feel the lull that comes when focusing so much on building a business. So I decided to explore my creativity in a new way. I’ve always been designing clothes, writing and taking photos, but I’ve never really painted. Turns out, I’m learning a lot, exploring my creativity, and it’s a lot of fun. The worst thing to happen is to become an entrepreneur only to shift completely away from creativity. Yes, running a business is a whole game in itself, but it is just important to remember the game you’re playing in the first place. Whatever was your foundation should remain so, so whether you are a designer, illustrator, crafter or artist, you should always make sure to have fun and play with your art.
“A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.” -Unknown
An unfulfilled dream, a hidden vision, a gift that hasn’t been shared is like that piece of charcoal, and while it may be a long, hard journey to get to the diamond, you can’t argue that it won’t be worth it. They’re diamonds, after all. And you have yours to share.
Photos source: vi.sualize.us
Guest Post by Annching Wang
