Being Bilingual in Business and Art

It’s often a misconception that one is either an entrepreneur or an artist.

Why not be both?

From a young age many of us are encouraged to chose between doing something “productive” or making something beautiful.

Some of us work hard and excel at math and chemistry while others succeed at playing guitar and creative writing.

Some of us go on to be doctors, software engineers, or start businesses while others find fulfillment through block printing, hand illustrating, or touring in a band.

All too often we are assigned — or assign ourselves — to one of these neat little boxes.

I’ll never be able to paint, I’m a lawyer.

I’m a master woodworker, but I’ll never be good at bookkeeping or accounting.

I can write catchy songs but monetizing my passion would be selling out.

We choose to develop one skillset because our identity revolves around “being this and not that”.

We resign to speaking one language - business or art.

But what if we consciously choose to be bilingual in our endeavors?

What if we decided to learn to take our hand drawn illustrations, make prints and then sell them online or at a local boutique?

Could we teach ourselves how to write a business plan, put together a financial model and expand our pop-up food business?

Conversely, could we take our very successful, yet stale construction business and start to publish 60 second lighthearted or funny videos on social media?

How do we put aside our mission statement and current culture and focus on ways to continually inject more creativity into our standard processes?

Business and art have never been mutually exclusive.

Quite the contrary, some of the greatest businesses of our time are equally creative powerhouses.

Similarly, some of our most praised artists, musicians and creatives have well oiled businesses running under the hood.

We need to challenge ourselves to break out of our comfort zone and embrace all that “we are not”.

When we do, we’ll often find ourselves able to tap into something greater than the sum of their parts.