Pivot or Die: Follow The Questions
All creative acts have the same set of rules, so sometimes my days of being in church leadership transfer over to my artistic education venture. One of the “rules” I remember talking about quite a bit while helping get a church off the ground was that the best time to do something new is before you’ve reached the peak.
The temptation is always to continue riding the wave and keep a good thing going, but if you do this, the ebb is imminent.
What goes up, must come down and all.
If you pivot as you’re on your way up, you might not reach the same kind of peak that you would have if you rode the wave, but you will keep your trajectory higher than if you followed the natural sinusoidal nature of the thing.
I remember thinking during those church leadership days “but how do you know the change you need to make? How do you know when the timing is just right?”
What I have learned since then is that the flow of creativity will tell you–if you’re willing to listen.
The other week I was meeting with a workshop student and she was talking about how she has spent years building this successful portraiture business. She built it around the questions she was trying to answer at the time, and the passions within her.
But now her passions have changed. Her questions have changed. And, more importantly, SHE has changed. She has seen things she can’t unsee, and with it has come a new prodding to tell a different story.
I could tell this was all weighing on her, because nothing is as scary as pivoting a successful business into the unknown. She’s been riding the wave and it has done her good thus far.
I reminded her that her business is successful because she built it on her passions. She followed the questions and now the questions are different, so it’s okay for her business to pivot with that.
There’s no need to start all over. You don’t pivot from square one. You pivot right where you’re at, with everything you’ve built and every lesson you have learned in tow.
(That doesn’t make it less terrifying.)
It was clear to me she has reached a “pivot or die” moment.
It often feels like “Oh, I’ll do what I’ve always done and that will keep me safe for success!”
And that’s true….in a way. But oftentimes we misunderstand what we have “always done”.
We think what we have “always done” is x, y, or z type of business.
When in reality, what we have “always done” is followed the questions.
I’ve seen it happen before. (I am giving a photography example, but this works with anything.) Someone starts a wedding photography business as they are in a season of life where their friends are falling in love and getting married.
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They are passionate about the question: what does it look like to fall in love and commit your life to someone else?
Then they, themselves get married, and have a baby. Suddenly their question changes to: how does a baby change the love dynamic? How does it enrich the bond that existed before, to love and nurture a third in this little family?
So their business pivots and starts photographing newborns.
It’s not that one is better than the other or more important, but each of us has our questions at different times and our call is to follow them.
Or it could be a family photographer who always used digital, but has a desire to switch to film. She might have looked through old family photographs of her childhood on film and fell in love with the nostalgic feel.
Her new questions might be: what are the threads that link the past, present, and future? How can I visually represent that connection through time and space?
And one of her ways might be to pivot and use the same medium as past generations.
Once again, one isn’t better than the other, but whatever is right for the artist is whatever helps her answer the questions.
Pivoting, like shedding skin, will mean that we lose some people along the way. We know from our graph that we are probably not going to reach the same peak we would have if we continued along.
But pivoting, like shedding skin, allows us to step into the next best version of ourselves. What we are doing isn’t FOR the audience or the clients. It’s for ourselves. It just so happens that people will see what we are doing for ourselves and desire to hop on board.
The magic happens when the questions you are answering intersect with the questions others are asking. Or that others didn’t even know they had until you posed them. We meet in the intersection and help one another. Our stories overlap with our clients and audience in the most beautiful way, but we have to remain true to ourselves for that to happen.
Just keep following the questions.