Episode Details

Ship Happens

Today it is all about shipping something and getting it out into the world.

Often we talk about what the difference is between a professional and an amateur, the art is one difference, but another difference is professionals "ship."

Link: Merlin Man Podcast

When people are successful, one big hallmark of that success is that they actually ship things, which means that they finish things. They don't just finish things and keep it in their house but they share it with others, they ship it.

Also, Seth Goddin, Linchpin

Make sure you don’t just start a project and let it fizzle, don’t start one after another and let them fizzle. 

Look at all of your artistic heroes under the lens of finishing things and shipping things, what you find is a constant project based mentality. Where their projects go further than they do, they have to figure out how to publish it, and look at who it is going to go to.

Lee’s Story:

After school, Lee needed to try and get work, so he did the postcard thing. His idea was to create and send out 6 postcards a year, to 600 clients. He sent the first card out, and nothing happened, then he sent the second, and the third... and he was getting no responses.

However, his goal was just to get those cards sent out, they had to get out into the world. He decided that he was going to go on a trip to New York and he felt that he needed to have have something more substantial than a postcard to give to publishers so he made these really nice custom build books and custom mailers and sent them to 21 dream clients. 13 of them had him in for an interview.

Earlier he felt like he was just sending his postcards out into the void and was seeing no results, however, as he went around to meet with different publishers he noticed that a lot of the publishers had his postcard on their wall.  Some of those publishers, he is just now starting to work with. There was lots of stuff happening behind the scenes that he didn't know about. All of it came from him shipping things out..

Lee finished college where I was drawing and painting all the time. Then felt that after he was now just creating stuff to ship out. The shipping paid off.

The Power of a physical object

Jake been to every publisher and to Chronicle, he's been to all their meetings, and he can attest that their walls are full of postcards.

One of the art directors told him, speaking of the postcards on the walls, “I don’t know if I’ll work with them, but I want to remember them, and I hope that our paths will cross.”

Sometimes we think we need a broad audience and that we need to get our work out there onto the inter web, but sometimes something tangible for a small audience can be just as powerful as something digital to a huge audience.

This was evidence to him of the power of physical objects.

There is no guarantee of anything. It almost always costs more than what you might have anticipated. It’s terrifying putting yourself out there, you might be scared of failure.

You might have thoughts or hear people say, “who do you think you are?”

Will's Story: after finishing school he was planning on doing the postcard thing. His dad was doubtful and said “What are you gonna do? Send postcards to people? Without a cover letter? How will they know what it is for?" Despite his Dad's skepticism, he sent out postcards. It worked! He came home one day and his Dad was excited because there was a fax from Psychology Today wanting him to do work for him.

It's very powerful when you ship something out into the world. If you haven't sent anything out, you might be wondering if it will pay off, and you don't know. But once it is out there it is moving and there is this serendipity that Lee has faith i