Is It Time to Shift Your Focus From Your Skill to Your Soil?

As artists, we tend to channel our time and energy into becoming better at our craft. We learn more complex lighting setups, take advanced classes in retouching, buy the latest “must-have” gadgets, and try to bring it all together to improve our skills. We do it all because we have a fundamental belief that, “If I am the best, I will be the most successful”. Have you ever found yourself doing that, pouring months, and sometimes years into ameliorating your craft, but you still have not seen the corresponding financial or opportunity growth you expected?

I think life has been trying to teach me this lesson in the background for the last year or two, but I didn’t learn it until a recent conversation. This conversation felt like an odd combination of a backhanded slap and a ray of hope. I was on an introductory Zoom call with the director of marketing for the department of culture in my city. She looked at my work, asked me a laundry list of questions, went over my experience, and at the end, she paused as if she was trying to compute everything in her mind. She looked at me with almost a look of confusion and finally spit out, “Don’t take this the wrong way... but I can’t believe you’ve worked here for so many years and I didn’t know about you.” A few weeks later, she invited me to an in-person lunch with a colleague of hers that she wanted me to meet. She also invited me to an event later this month, saying: “I need to introduce you to my contact for marketing at the Department of Tourism.” I plan to show up dressed to impress and make sure that anyone in that room who has money to spend on photography knows my name and face before they leave. One relationship can sometimes covert to thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars (wish me luck).

I felt excited by the comment, but almost irritated. Why didn’t I do this earlier? I know the importance of networking, but I haven’t really spent as much intentional time on it as I have on, let’s say, my Photoshop skills.

The lesson was reinforced a few days later. I was picking up the house and listening to a podcast.

“Would you plant a peach tree in a cup? Of course not. It would never bear fruit. Sometimes, the soil we are in limits our growth.”

I paused. “I hear you now!”

We all know the importance of networking, but do we invest as much time nurturing our soil, as we do our skill?

I won’t go into a long article about networking ideas, there has been a lot written on the topic. I will leave with this quote from Mark Cuban.

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You just have to try different things. Even if 99% of them fail, you only have to be right one time. You don’t have to figure it all out in advance. You can be wrong. You can pick the wrong career, you can pick the wrong job, you can pick the partner, you can pick the wrong whatever. But you get it right one time… you’re set.”

My exhortation to you is to invest as much time cultivating your soil as your skill. You never know when that “one time,” “one person,” or “one connection” is going to show up. If you show up in enough places enough times, you’ll eventually be in the right place at the right time.