An Audience of One

Throughout my life and career, I have designed and crafted things to solve my own challenges and filled journals with artwork for my own enjoyment. For me, those challenges often revolved around my creative endeavors and interests like my journaling where I made tools to help my creative process, like this watercoloring easel with camera mount. If you have been following me, you know I love creative tools, making them, and using them.

In other instances, when I was employed by Microsoft and encouraged to build apps for Windows devices, I made a number of creative app for journaling, media transcoding, animation, and even 360 sketching. These were apps that assisted me with doing something that I needed to accomplish and in doing so, I learned new technologies, and made a useful tool for people to be creative with.

As you may also know, I created Galeryst because my artwork which is primarily in journals would never exhibit well in real galleries. There is a common theme here: I get the greatest joy from creating something for myself that others will use to help themselves be more creative. Srinivas Rao, hits on this theme in his book An Audience of One: Reclaiming Creativity for its Own Sake. Rao is also the host of the "Unmistakable Creative" podcast, which interviews creative people to help them tell recount their journeys and explain their processes.

In my career coaching, I often suggest that people find a passion project to demonstrate their expertise, learn new skills, and channel that restless creative energy. The key point in project selection is to do something in a domain that excites you, helps a group that has personal meaning to you, and/or requires a skill that you want to have but don't have yet. If you are lucky and have a good business sense, there might be a market for the project as well - but you look at that as "icing on the cake." If you complete your well-chosen passion project, you have something that you can be proud of, you can demonstrate your expertise with it, and have likely learned new skills on the way. I am doing that skill learning now with Generative AI where I am adding new functionality to Galeryst that uses it - more on that later. What I see with Generative AI today, is what it is enabling: Generative AI is enabling more people to try new side-hustles to make new businesses.

Getting Started on Your AI Side Hustle

If you are ready to get started with your own AI side-hustle, please reach out to me as a coach who is uniquely qualified to help you on your journey. Schedule now for a free 30-minute coaching call where we can get acquainted, and I can help you start your authentic creative journey.