Esplanade, orig­i­nally uploaded by Thorsten Becker.

Over the years I learned an impor­tant les­son when it comes to busi­ness that I’d like to share, espe­cially with cre­atives: If any­body can do it every­body will do it, even­tu­ally. That means if some­thing is easy to do and doesn’t require much effort it can and will quickly be repli­cated by some­one else. This is cer­tainly not a rev­o­lu­tion­ary insight. There is plenty of advice out there urg­ing artists to be unique and authen­tic. But how to accom­plish that? By being you. Any­thing you do must relate back to who you are. Do not try to arti­fi­cially invent your­self or spend a tremen­dous amount of time com­ing up with a really clever idea. Chances are that by the time you’re ready some­one else has already done it, and done it bet­ter, because it was in their blood.

On the other hand there is a con­stant lure of quick fame and money (though it’s dimin­ished a bit in this econ­omy). It may be tempt­ing to exe­cute on an idea with­out fur­ther refine­ment hop­ing­toin­stantly turn it into a rev­enue cre­at­ing busi­ness. The prob­lem is that the result­ing product(s), at that point, often lack char­ac­ter or per­sonal trade­mark, some­thing that con­nects them in a per­sonal man­ner with their cre­ator. The result is often a con­stant fear that some­one will “steal” the idea or copy the prod­uct. Again, if it is easy to do then oth­ers will do it even­tu­ally, it’s com­mon human behav­ior. We imi­tate the moment we are born. This is how we learn, this is how we acquire skills. But here is the impor­tant part: while we learn and grow we have to come into our own. We have to expand on the knowl­edge we’ve acquired by inject­ing our unique per­sonal traits, any­thing that makes us ‘us’ — the way we hold the brush, the way we see and pho­to­graph our envi­ron­ment, the way we hear sounds and melodies, the way we talk, walk, feel, per­ceive and judge.

We could dis­till the pre­ced­ing para­graphs into “be your per­sonal best at what you do”. And while doing so do not com­pare your­self to oth­ers unnec­es­sar­ily (it’sf