Design Your Career with a Whiteboard

DISCLAIMER: While this course was filmed in 2014 with minimal editing and has low production quality, the core concepts and knowledge shared are timeless. The insights you'll gain from this course are just as relevant and applicable today as when I first recorded it.

Art students get degrees. A year later, they can’t get work as artists. They call me for help.

I’m never surprised. Getting work is difficult. It often takes more energy to get clients, or a job, or a supportive fan-base, than it takes to get through school.

My response to these students is “First, get a Whiteboard…”

A dry-erase board in your studio is one of the most valuable tools for designing your career. You fill it with a chaotic mix of your skills and interests, your contacts and options, your dream job and your current responsibilities, then you seek connections and consolidations, gradually evolving the chaos into hopeful order. A whiteboard is a map of the uncharted territory of your career as you explore it, and maps help you get where you want to go.

In August 2014, I presented a seminar at Fullerton College showing how this approach has helped me and how it could help anyone seeking a career in the arts. We recorded the lecture and refined this video into a boiled-down-to-the-best-of-it presentation.