Video: Forget the Career Ladder – Start Creating Assets

I hope this finds you as well as can be.

Here in the UK we’re bracing for what we are assured will be a large wave of Omicron.

I know things may be very different for you, depending on where you are in the world. But whatever the circumstances, I hope you are finding your creative work a source of energy and inspiration in the midst of it all.

And to help you focus on the things that will make the biggest difference to your career, here’s a video of a live talk I gave in October about a strategy for long-term success as a creator.

In case the video doesn’t appear for you at the top of this post, here’s a link to the video on YouTube.

The talk was hosted by Robert Vlach and his team at Freelancing.eu. (You may remember Robert’s interview in Season 4 of The 21st Century Creative.)

And Robert and the team have done an excellent job of editing the talk into a video. They’ve kept the whole of my presentation, but instead of just using a Zoom screen capture, they have edited in my original slides and blended these with the video of me talking.

Because of the original Zoom source, some of the footage of me is a bit blurry, but the slide resolution and audio quality are excellent, so it’s easy to follow the talk.

So what’s the talk about?

It’s based on one of the most important strategies I use in my own career, and which I teach to my coaching clients:

Forget the Career Ladder – Start Creating Assets

Because there is no conventional career ladder for creative professionals like you and me, we need to create our own path and our own opportunities.

And creating assets – such as world-class skills, a catalogue of great work, a communication channel with your audience, a product range and/or a reputation for excellence – is a way to find creative fulfilment and attract more income and opportunities as time goes by.

In this talk I explain that this strategy has always been used by the big stars, but these days it’s available to all of us.

I talk you through the different types of creative asset and how they add value to your career or business.

I also give you an exercise that will help you take stock of your current creative assets (you may already have more than you realise!) and start to think about what kind of assets you can create to achieve your long-term ambitions.

We’re coming to the end of another challenging year, and who knows what 2022 has in store for us.

But my approach has always been to focus on the things I can influence, and to end every year with more creative assets than I began with. So around the end of each year, I take time out to review my progress and think about my long term goals – and what new assets I want to create in the next 12 months.

I invite you to watch this video with a pen and paper handy, and to use the exercise as a way to review your current situation and to think strategically as well as creatively about what you want to create in 2022.

OK here’s the video, I’d love to hear what you make of it.

Stay safe, and creative,

Mark