Whenever I hear the phrase “Be patient!” I think of The Empire Strikes Back when Yoda and Obi Wan are talking about Luke’s training:
Luke: We’re wasting our time!
Yoda: [looking away] I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience
Obi-Wan’s Voice: He will learn patience.
It’s crazy to think that these lines were written over forty years ago, when my parents’ generation was young, before the internet, Twitter, streaming television, or Amazon two-day delivery. Instant gratification, it seems, has been a staple of youth for a long time—even in a galaxy far, far away.
What Does Being Patient Have to Do With Creative Work?
I think a lot about consistency in creative work: the idea that the more other people see your work, the more they learn what you’re capable of. After seeing more of what you’re capable of, people start to associate you with a certain quality of writing, drawing, music, acting, or whatever it is you do. Sure, there’s always going to be creative people who hit the jackpot with their first project and go on to long-term success, but Laurence Olivier got to be Laurence Olivier because he acted in a jillion Shakespeare plays and movies, Stephen King got to be Stephen King because he wrote a jillion bestselling horror novels, and The Rolling Stones got to be The Rolling Stones by being at the forefront of rock and roll for decades.
In each of these cases, audiences knew what to expect of the artist, and when they came out with a new project, people knew it was going to be good—or at least cared enough to check it out.
Audiences learn to associate artists with this kind of quality through repetition: they have to see the artist’s work multiple times to get a feel for it and develop that pattern. That’s why it’s so important for artists to keep creating, and to keep sharing their work with audiences, who can then get a better feel for it.
This repetition—this continuous state of creating—is how artists and creative people build up their reputations. One piece of work is never enough—you have to do the work multiple times so that people know what you’re capable of.
And working to develop that reputation over the long term takes patience.
Platforms, 5-Year Plans, and Long-Term Goals
This is idea of creating multiple pieces of work over the long-term to build your reputation is also building what people in marketing call a platform: or, a network of supporters who know your work and will buy it, watch it, Like it on social media, share it, and spread it by word of mouth. Platforms are incredibly important and I hear a lot of talk about them, but I think the most powerful and organic platforms are built based on the quality and level of work the artist is creating: that is, artists who do great work will build great platforms.
And having a great platform opens all kinds of doors: word about new projects can spread exponentially online through sharing and word of mouth, and industry gatekeepers will take creative people more seriously if they have bigger platforms. This can help you out, like, a LOT.
But again, building up these platforms takes a record of producing consistently good work, which takes time, and as I said before, patience.
I recommend that any creative person looking to take their career to the next level make this patience and platform-building part of a long-term plan. Figure out a way that you can consistently get your work out to people, then do it—even if it’s on a small scale to start. Find ways to build it, and to help it grow, then seek out new venues where you might get noticed. Make a 5-year plan about where you want your work to go—not in terms of success or recognition (since those aren’t things you can control!) but in terms of what you want to be doing and how you want to be getting it out there.
Here’s the really important thing about this: If you acknowledge that platform-building and success comes more easily over the long-term, you’ll be in a better position to make a long-term plan for building your platform, rather than focusing on short-term goals and getting discouraged when they don’t pan out right away.
I talk to a lot of people who experience this when they focus all of their energy on one project, then lose steam when it doesn’t yield incredible results or make them super-famous. The person might not have had a plan for a second project, or maybe they got discouraged and couldn’t finish their second project because they felt like the first one didn’t pan out. The person didn’t have a long-term plan, and was too focused on their one project.
Here’s the thing, though: no project is a failure if it builds your credibility and platform, even in a very small way, or a way that’s not immediately measurable. Sure, the result may be small, but it still got you something—and you can carry that extra bit of momentum into future projects to make them even better.
Think of every project you do as less important on its own, and more important for what it can do for your overall career and credibility.
Final Thoughts
I wrote this post (or, rather, stream-of-conscious-ly spilled this post on to the page) at a time when I’m refocusing my energy away from short-term goals and more towards long-term ones like finishing my second novel and growing my author platform. This long-term process is really important to me, and not just about the success of any one novel or creative project, because in the long run, everything’s connected—and everything you do can potentially lead to bigger things.