Creative Careers 101: Learn to Collaborate on a Creative Team

1. Introduction: Let's be sofa real for a second. So repreneurship and creative freelancing is fantastic for some, but it isn't for everyone. Welcome to this class, where we are going to be exploring specifically what it's like to apply for and work on creative teams. My name is Bernadette Banner. I am a costume designer, turned dress historian, turned content creator. So while I currently head a creative team now, I started off as an employee working on costume teams for Broadway. I've learned a lot about what it's like working from both the team member perspective, as well as from the employer perspective. So today, I'm going to sit down and talk you through some of the tips and strategies I've learned what things I've found successful and so as an employee, as well as what I look for when I'm hiring team members as a creative employer. With the rise of creative freelancers and online content production, there are so many fantastic opportunities to work with other creatives in the fields that inspire you, without, of course, the stress of having to start a whole business by yourself. In this class, we'll break down the soft skills and traits that will set you apart and help you excel in your career. The more practical elements of getting the job like CVs, interviews, and networking. We'll also talk about pay and asking for what you're worth. And, of course, what to do with the job once you've got it. Hopefully, this will give you some insight and advice if you are looking to break into a creative industry in a team oriented environment. If that all sounds interesting to you, I cannot wait to have you join me in this class. Thank you. 2. Soft Skills: Analytical Thinking: Welcome to the first official lesson on your journey towards working on creative teams. Before we can talk about the cold hard resumes and cache, we first need to start with the most important and frustratingly intangible aspect of getting the job. While, of course, it's all well and good to have the hard skills that directly relate to your fields, For example, an eye for composition, if you want to go into cinematography or carpentry for building sets, it's what we call the soft skills, like curiosity, perseverance, and communication that make you a specifically unique asset to any team. Different fields see different advantages for different soft skills, but there are a handful of skills that I find to be pretty universally useful. The first is analytical thinking. I personally am a firm believer that developing your ability to look at a situation analytically, to break it down into components and to learn why it is the way it is can help you succeed at literally almost anything in life. Having the ability to identify a goal and to break down the steps needed to achieve that goal is a skill that benefits so many areas beyond just the creative team. For example, when I was moving into the online creator space, I learned pretty quickly that I needed to know how content distribution worked. So I started asking questions. First of all, what is the goal? The goal I pinpointed was for a video to do well. What does it mean for a video to do well? That I defined as for the video to be widely seen and enjoyed by the right audience. Who is the right audience? The right audience? I think is someone who enjoys calming, inspirational, educational content in my particular case. When I as a viewer, want to enjoy some calm inspirational content. What makes me click on a particular video over every other video on the home page? The answer to that I found was a certain style of thumbnail and title wording. Here is where I got a pen and notebook and watched a bunch of videos and really examined my own personal behavior. Good audio kept me listening to videos even when I was less interested in the subject. Too many ads made me click off and detach from the creator. Lack of personality or individual insight on a topic made me not return to a creator's work. Editing effort kept me engaged, but notably, this effort didn't have to be good. It just had to be effort. I could implement all these new tips I'd learned by placing myself at the foot of my goal and working backwards in order to achieve that. 3. Soft Skills: Excitement: Creative industries are highly competitive, as I'm sure you may already know. And if you can't demonstrate that you want to be here and will make an effort to learn about the work, then I can almost guarantee you that you will be passed over for another applicant. Passion, excitement about the work. This minimizes resistance, and it makes your work more fun, and in many cases, for you, a lot easier. When you get enjoyment from your field, you are far less resistant to trying new things and taking on more difficult tasks. You're less likely to procrastinate or to do things halfheartedly if you really care about the work and you want to do it well. Before entering a creative field, it can help to really, truly ask yourself where your passions lie. As a side note, there's nothing wrong with exploring your passions, and just because you find you feel strongly about getting into a specific field right now, does not mean that you're committing yourself to this profession for all of eternity. There is nothing wrong with allowing yourself the freedom to explore your passions with as little pressure as possible. I have personally worked for people fabulously accomplished people in their creative fields who were on their second or third career and had completely different careers before this. It was that realization that, Oh, wait, you actually don't have to pick one career and do the same thing for your entire life that freed me up a lot creatively. Passion is also contagious. Your passion will help to boost the team morale. It is so much more fun to work on something that everyone on the team is really excited about. And of course, if we're looking for people to hire, we're of course going to hire the people who are all super hype about this one specific project. 4. Soft Skills: Curiosity: The next trait, of course, leads straight into curiosity and willingness to learn. This again, becomes your biggest asset, especially if you're relatively new to your field and you don't yet have the highest skill sets necessary for the job. If you demonstrate that you have a willingness to learn and to do what it takes to improve your skills, you are going to be just as hirable in my own opinion as someone who's highly skilled, but perhaps not as nice to work with. This involves asking questions, attending workshops and learning events when available, doing a ton of reading and engaging with your field intellectually, and taking constructive criticism well. This is big. I have personally, sadly had employees who I've had to give some uncomfortable feedback to. Some of course, take it really professionally and we work together to improve their skills and our working relationship. Some unfortunately take it really poorly. They react emotionally and they take it as a personal offense. And this, of course, goes back to the danger of becoming so passionate that a lot of your self worth gets tied up into your work, and that a potential criticism of your work or a little suggestion that you do something a little bit differently for efficiency or a different result will inevitably be taken as a personal insult or a criticism against your character. Having the ability to separate your work and your creativity from your value as a person is hugely important. I have to deal with employees who inevitably don't take criticism well. Inevitably, we reach a salemate, and they become more of a hindrance than a help to the team, and of course, the job doesn't work out and they don't get rehired. And unfortunately, if that's the impression that I have of their work, I then can't recommend them to go further and work in other teams to colleagues of mine. Having a healthy passion for your work, and again, that curiosity and that willingness to learn, we'll have you looking at your work and taking that criticism and in a way, being excited about it because it gives you the opportunity to improve and to build your skills. I know personally, I've worked on teams and I've worked for people who are incredibly knowledgeable and they've had me go back and redo and redo and erase this and try it this way, and it's taken so long and at some points, I've got frustrated and does it really have to be done this way? Why wasn't it better the other way. But ultimately, those are the projects that I've come out of looking back and thinking, this is the best work that I've ever done. My skills as a result that I can then apply to other projects and that I can take forward in my life and my career have been so vastly improved. Your skills do not define your worth as a person, but they do have the potential to improve your creative abilities, and improving those skills and seeking to improve those skills and learn from others, is going to be so valuable to you on your current team and in your current line of work, as well as we'll come back to serve you again and again in future. A handy little tip for that. 5. Soft Skills: Initiative: The next trait that I would say is pretty important to have on a team is initiative, which is the ability to identify problems and find weak points in a system and to work to fix them. For example, I used to do a lot of work with an organization that at times involved selling merchandise and very busy venues. The ability to recognize when a crowd was getting overwhelming and to take up another line of customers instead of continuing on a less pressing task while my supervisor was very understandably overwhelmed, showed an initiative that I was always profusely thanked for after the fact. Notice where the bottlenecks or pain points are in your team structure and see if there's anything that you can do to ease that tension on your teammates while they're overwhelmed. I know this point can be a little bit tricky, especially for those of us who are a little bit more reserved and don't necessarily want to put ourselves out in a way that could potentially not have the greatest result. And I know I was definitely like this as an employee. My level of initiative. In many cases, there were situations where if I had the choice between perhaps going out on a limb and showing some initiative or not, I would very often choose not to do that just for safety purposes. But now as an employer, I realize if an employee of mine is going out on a limb and trying to solve a problem, noticing something that maybe isn't the most efficient thing to do, and while I'm extremely busy and distractive with something else, you, does their best try and fix a problem on their own. Even if the task isn't necessarily successful in one particular instance, the ability to show initiative to demonstrate that you can go there if needed, I think is a huge win. I would still be grateful for them showing that initiative and knowing that if something were to happen while something was crazy busy, and I was distracted by something, I could potentially rely on them to take that on. 6. Soft Skills: Communication: Which, of course, brings us to the next point, and that is communication. This is huge. Of course, you know, if you're showing initiative and you know, something doesn't necessarily go right and you don't communicate that, then we have a lot of problems, especially in a team environments where potentially there are really only a handful of people doing highly specialized jobs. Your job affects everyone else's job. Be open about problems and timelines. Letting everyone else know how you're running and how your tasks might affect their tasks and their ability to work is going to be massively beneficial. I know we may not feel like we want to be the bearer of bad news or to admit that we're having problems or difficulties or mistakes, but it is going to be so much worse for you if you leave it to the last minute and you don't tell people and problems start to arise and no one's prepared to fix them. At least if you know ahead of time that you're not going to make your deadline or that you need help with something, you and your teammates can work together with plenty of time in order to meet those deadlines. You have time to ask questions, you have time to do some research. You have time to disseminate other tasks to other people, if necessary, and we're not stuck at the end of the process, absolutely scrambling to get things done. There is also absolutely no benefit in keeping secrets and hoarding information. I have worked with people like this, especially in the more high profile industries, like on Broadway, where there can be a more competitive attitude. Those were the people who ended up causing massive breakdowns in systems and caused major problems purely because they withheld information in favor of being the one in the no. Those people were generally not re hired. This goes for those of us who have disabilities or any personal limitations, be very clear and very upfront with your employers and your teammates, what you are capable of doing, what you may need help with, if there's anything that you need in order to do your job most efficiently. It is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of as long as you're not putting yourself in a position to perform jobs that you really shouldn't be doing. I have some musculoskeletal mobility limitations. And when I was an employee, there was one particular job that I got hired for that involved a lot of physical lifting and, you know, was very physically strenuous. I ended up injuring myself on that job and didn't tell anyone. So I was in physical therapy every morning for an hour or two sometimes being late to work, sometimes not being able to run as efficiently as everyone else on the team. I didn't tell anyone about this because, you know, I was afraid I'd be fired or that I wouldn't get rehired, that I would be viewed as less valuable the team. The reality was I was not able to perform efficiently because of those limitations and because I never told anyone. And so I was never able to be repositioned on say more administrative work. Instead, it was just kind of a disaster, and, you know, I was not hired on that particular team again, and I wonder why. People are a lot more accommodating than you think they are. People generally very happy to help and very happy to make you as comfortable as you can be. So I will say for people with disabilities, it is so important for you to communicate to your team what the issues are and what your limitations are, but also to have a plan in place for you to be able to take care of your issues and to solve them as much as you possibly can individually and on your own in a way that doesn't add more work to their plates. 7. Soft Skills: Recap: The final thing is, of course, you know, just be a decent person. That's very nebulous and very undefined, but, just general human decency is going to take you very far. Many creative fields require working long hours. It's for this reason that almost every creative I know and almost every hire I have personally made has been heavily weighted in preference of personality over skill. Obviously, this doesn't work in medicine where you have to know how the human brain works if you're going to be doing neurosurgery. Skills can be taught and learned, especially if the applicant is hardworking and passionate about the subject and willing to learn. But your employer and absolutely everyone on the team are going to have a brutal experience if you are working with someone who you don't vibe with or who isn't pulling their weight. That means that as an applicant, your ability to demonstrate your personality and your ability to work with others, potentially in high pressure environments, if necessary, is going to be arguably more important than the hard skills that you can demonstrate. So a recap of the skills that are very helpful for you to know if you are applying to work on creative teams, number one is analytical thinking, passion or excitement about the work, curiosity or willingness to learn initiative and communication. So the activity for this section, I would like you to define which of these core skills you feel you already excel in. Is there more than one? And which do you feel like you could work on? Here's a hint. You can put your analytical thinking skills to the test by identifying your goal, which is potentially obtaining the skill of your choice, and break that down into the steps you need to do to improve. 8. Getting the Job: If you're lucky enough to work in a field where job postings and applications are the norm, this is excellent news because this just means there's one less step in having to source the job for yourself. So let's start with the practical tools that you'll need to pitch yourself. First, you will need a CV or a resume. Depending on where you live, the definition or the interchangeability of these terms depends. A resume is a one to two page compilation of jobs and skills that's been specifically tailored for the job that you're applying for, whereas a CV is a compilation of all past jobs and schooling and education and achievements throughout your career. And it tends to be less often requested. More and more so these days, globally, we're tending to gravitate towards using both terms interchangeably with resume being more common in the US and CV being more common elsewhere in the world. But generally, this term refers to, again, the one to two page tailored report of the past jobs, achievements, education, and skills that are most pertinent to the job that you're applying for. Because as someone who reviews resumes and CVs, I can tell you that, sometimes you get a whole stack of things and you have to pick an applicant from a pile of people, and you want to be able to look at specifically what is the most relevant and your time is valuable. Number two is a cover letter, which is a round one to two page, again, personally written letter, elaborating on your resume, on your achievements, on whatever you really want to write about. It can sometimes be in the body of an e mail, it can be attached as a document. This should be personally addressed to the company or recipient and should explain why you want to work with them, what you can offer and exhibit a bit of your personality. It can also, if you need offer any explanations for gaps in your resume or anything else that you think might raise questions. The more successful cover letters I've received have been personally addressed to me. I have seen letters addressed to hiring manager or to whom this may concern. This might be different for big companies where you really don't know who will be reading this. But if you're applying for a person, a specific person, or very small company, you really should demonstrate that you know who you're addressing your letter to, and you specifically want to talk to them. These letters demonstrate an understanding of the work that I do. They communicate their own interests, goals, skills, and work so that I can see how well that they'll match with my team and the vibe of the work. One of the more successful cover letters I read was from a young woman who had an extremely impressive resume, like absolutely top tier accomplishments. But her cover letter opened with strong familiarity with my work, with her own goals and passions and curiosities, and finally, it finished with a mention of the really impressive stuff. Her resume caught my attention, but then her cover letter promptly demonstrated how down to earth and easy going and curious she was on top of being knowledgeable and accomplished. The point of a resume is to sell yourself, and you do need to sell yourself, but also to demonstrate again, who you are as the person is something that is so worth pursuing if you have the opportunity to. Personally, I prefer to read letters that are fun and feel like they come from a real person, not so professional as to be stuffy and bland. This is where I can really gauge whether someone's going to be easyg and confident in their skills and team oriented, or whether they're going to be apprehensive about their skills, which is unconvincing, overconfident in their abilities, which is concerning or too bland to tell, which is uninteresting. That's just me. The key to applying with creative people is that we're all so unique. Different creatives will have different opinions about this. Be sure you've done enough research to vaguely understand the vibe and personality of the people you're applying with. I do think cover letters are important. It's very hard to get to know someone from a CV alone, and a CV can often be misleading. Hearing in someone's words about why they want to work with you and what they do in their own work can really make or break a decision for me. If I have a pile of applicants and a few of them don't have cover letters, I'm pretty much dismissing those people immediately because who are they? Next, you might possibly need a portfolio. This is a collection of all your creative work that can be put down in words or on paper, and it depends on your artistic field. Again, you may not need all of these items, but you may need some of them, and it helps to know what they are and what's potentially best to sell yourself and your work. Artists might have prints of sketches or paintings. Designers might have fabric samples or photos of past design work. If you're applying to work on a team, this may not always seem strictly necessary, if for example, you won't be the lead designer on a project, but personally, as an employer, I really do like to have the chance to get an idea of what someone's work looks like and what someone's artistic style is. They are more so necessary if you're applying to offer your artistic services to someone like, say, a director who needs a stage designer or a gallery looking for an artist to exhibit. If this is the case, quality is going to be your best ally. Good quality paper that feels nice to hold. Feeling can be such a huge cell subconsciously. Make sure everything is presented neatly. Portfolios are all so unique. There isn't really a standard portfolio layout that I found, and that's really good. This can be such an opportunity to showcase your creative thinking beyond just the realm of your craft. It really helps to make things as interactive as you possibly can. If you're a fashion or costume designer accompanying sketches with fabrics watches or samples to get people to feel and to interact with the materials can really boost engagement. Making things fun and interactive will really make you more memorable. The next potential showcase you may need to represent to yourself in is an audition. This is a performance based review of your skills, particularly relevant if you are going into performing arts, like theater, film, music, or vocal work. It can be essential to joining a theater troupe or an improv team. Here is where your analysis skills will come in useful, since you'll need to work out what the creative team is looking for and how you can do your best to represent that. The performance showcasing your craft will obviously be important, but it can also really help to employ some of the essential skills from the previous lesson in non performance aspects of auditioning, like introducing yourself and answering any questions. Do your best to demonstrate that you'd be a great, enthusiastic, passionate asset to a cast, and that might just be the tipping point into getting the job over someone else who has an equal skill set as you. These assets are all fundamentally really the same. They are an excruciatingly concentrated package of who you are and what you do. First and foremost, all application materials should be clean and readable. I cannot tell you how many resumes I've received on editable Microsoft Word documents where decorative graphics overlap necessary text that then becomes unreadable. I've had video submissions where the sound is completely inaudible, and I have to press my ear against the speaker and thus not look at the screen and see what you're actually trying to show me. Make sure all the essential information is as easy to receive as possible and in a finalized format, like a PDF, not an editable document. This way, you will know specifically how it will be formatted when someone opens it on whatever software they are opening it on. I know it can feel a bit uncomfortable to sell yourself, but I can tell you as an employer, I want you to sell yourself to me. I want to feel confident and excited about my hiring decision, which I will do if I'm excited to work with you. Tell me what makes you the shiniest, coolest option and why I should be excited to work with you. The more personalized you can make your application the better, both in terms of differentiating yourself and communicating your personality and also demonstrating your understanding of the company or artist you're applying to. I'll also give a little shout out to cold e mailing, which is basically finding someone's e mail address and contacting them out of the blue to introduce yourself and potentially inquire after a job. These don't always work, but in my opinion, there's generally no harm in it. In many of my own cases, it's actually worked. I've ended up working for some of my absolute inspirations just from finding an e mail address and leaving the rest up to fate. And every out of network hire I have made has come from a cold e mailer. I will preface this by saying that if someone's contact isn't immediately available and provided on a site affiliated with that person, you will need to justify your obtaining that e mail address. For example, so and so passed along your contact, Because personally, I have had people contact a personal or institutional e mail about YouTube employment, which I know they must have found through extremely sketchy methods. And those I automatically delete just on principle. So make sure your methods of contact sourcing are professional because that can be an immediate red flag against you, if not. Unless maybe you're applying to be a hacker or something, in which case, I guess that demonstrates a skill. In every case of my own inquiring, the process has taken months. And as an employer, I now understand why. Projects get busy. I'm often away from my inbox for days at a time, and my inbox piles up disastrously. But I and many creatives I know keep a folder of applicants for those last minute emergency projects when you really need help now, everyone you know is busy, and nobody got time for job posting. This was the case with me twice. An e mail I had sent months previously suddenly returned a reply saying, Hey, are you available? I have a project coming up. I've actually done this myself as an employer, replying to people over a year later when specific work comes up. Cold e mailing is really great, but treat them like seeds. Don't expect an immediate reply. A reply may never come. But you may also just supplanted something that will come back to benefit you at some near or distant time in the future, and you will thank your past self. If you want to take this a step further, getting into networks can really speed along the process significantly. Since oftentimes people will exhaust their immediate and then periphery network before resorting to new unknown applicants. I'll tell you a secret. Many creatives don't even use CVs or portfolios to begin with, because while they're very useful and concisely introducing yourself to a new person, they are useless when it comes to people who already know you and your work. So here's an activity for this lesson. Take a look at your resume and or your portfolio. Spruce them up a bit, if necessary, identify one or two companies or creative teams who would be your absolute dream job and tailor your materials specifically to sell yourself to these people. You may have to do a little bit of research to get the best result. Finally, write up a cover letter to fully sell yourself. Don't put too much pressure on yourself for this. Remember, it is only an exercise. It is not a real application, but allow yourself to have fun with it. See what interesting things come out. In the next lesson, we will go through some tips on building up a strong network, which could let you cheat code your way out of all this resume and cover litter business. From the start. 9. Networking: The old saying it's not what you know, it's who you know, is annoyingly, entirely true, especially when it comes to creative industries. Creatives are very busy people generally, especially if you're applying to work for a particular person, designer, artist, et cetera. Oftentimes they're independent and they don't have administrators or HR departments specifically to handle hiring decisions, and their time is far better spent on their craft than in posting job notices or interviewing applicants. These sorts of people rely almost solely on word of mouth recommendations or their own professional network for hiring needs. So if you're not in either of these and you're in a field where applications aren't standard, you will have to start networking. The Internet is the best resource for sourcing events, but the in person events are where the real magic happens. Find the stuff online, but then wherever possible, show up. Dave Wiskus, who is the CEO of Creator Streaming Service Nebula, says that everyone he's seen find success in the creator industry is the type of person to show up to events. Because this is where you get to meet people, exchange information, get inspiration from what others are doing and make genuine friends with people who you might otherwise be in danger of viewing as competition. That is dangerous. Competition is a distraction and often a detriment. Find online communities on edit, Facebook, Instagram, on Forums, and be useful. Engage, be supportive, and friendly. Give as much as you asked to receive, and people will like you for that. Sign up to as many newsletters as possible. These often advertise gatherings, events, and classes. I cannot tell you how many fascinating workshops and classes I found through just yoloing, and signing up to something through a newsletter. I still do it today. I'm still going at least once a week. I'm going to some event that I found through a newsletter. I'm not kidding. Just start going. This is arguably the real benefit of going to university for a creative industry. The networking opportunities with your peers and instructors is extraordinary. It's honestly not about the hard skills that you learn most of the time. So many of my previous professors and mentors have since become friends and colleagues who I get to work with now. So I will never say that university is a waste of time for creative. It just requires a bit more work to get the benefit out of it, because you have to be proactive in making those connections in meeting people and forging good relationships with the people who teach you. You sadly can't just do your homework and expect to succeed in the real world. But this is also, unfortunately the exorbitantly expensive option, especially if you live somewhere like the US. This networking can be recreated for much cheaper or free. With the help of the Internet. If there are no events near you, don't be afraid to start some. I'm sure there are other people who are just waiting for someone to start something. And don't worry if you can't find anyone in your area with your exact creative interests. You actually don't exclusively want to find communities of people who do exactly what you do. You want also to hang out in spaces of people who do things adjacent to what you do. For example, if you want to work as an editor, look for content creator or filmmaker events or meetups. In my theater days, I spent a lot of evenings volunteering at industry fundraisers, getting up at Dawn for cheap tickets to preview performances of shows, which is when production members can still be found in the audiences. I would go to any lecture and event where I could potentially meet people, especially the free ones at my local library and free performances and parks. You will definitely need to read the room for sure. In certain circumstances like volunteering at a gala, for instance, it might be inappropriate to go up to an attendee and ask for a job. It can help to make sure that you know who any people of interest are, I don't mean successful people in general, but the people who are specifically relevant to your career and goals. I have certainly found myself in a room with lots of fabulously successful movie stars, and the only person I wanted to talk to was the costume designer. Because she was my important person. It can help to know what they look like and to potentially prepare some interesting stories or questions to engage a conversation if you are given the chance. Without fail, though, all of my design work ended up coming through directors, actors, and producers. All of the assistant design and wardrobe work ended up coming from other designers. So vary your pool of contacts and make sure you're chatting and connecting with the people who might potentially need your skills one day. You do also need connection with peers, though, I think, and I should make this abundantly clear that a competitive mindset, in my experience will very often set you back. Being friends with other content creators, now, other costume designers and other address historians in the past, has allowed me a safe place to go invent about problems with people who truly understand and to ask for very specific advice and to learn from what other people are doing. Creative industries are inherently non standard, and there are so many ways of doing things. You can learn so much more efficiently and progress so much more quickly when you have access to more knowledge and resources. It really helps to build as diverse a network as possible, full of peers you can learn from as well as people who might potentially employ you. I do also want to give a little shout out to the role of luck. It is important to acknowledge that a huge part of success in any field involves some degree of luck, primarily in being in the right place at the right time. While this isn't something that we can necessarily control, we can, at the very least give ourselves as many roles as possible by placing ourselves in positions to be the potential recipient of a lucky break as much as we possibly can. This means, once again, attending those events, meeting people, saying yes to things just to see where they go. Being curious, trying things. The more places you put yourself, the more opportunity you have to potentially be in that right place at the right time. The activity for this lesson is to do a search for events or meetups in your area. These can be directly related to your field, where you will find like minded people, or they can be tangentially related to your field, where you may meet people who find your work unique and interesting and potentially employable. Step two, go. 10. Pay: This topic is so important, and it's honestly criminal that the subject has become taboo for some reason. But for creatives, especially, it is absolutely vital to talk about pay. Just a disclaimer. This is not legal, financial or accounting advice. I don't live in your country probably, and so you do need to do your own research regarding your own governing bodies and translate accordingly. The amount of times I have had to teach my own employees how to budget and calculate their freelance rates. It should not be like this. There are so many people taking advantage of others in creative industries which are often very non standardized. So it's really important to have a strong understanding of how to respond when someone asks you the dreaded question. What are your rates? Here's how to calculate that. You want to start by adding up all of your recurring expenses. All of them. Yes, all of them. It really helps to track your expenses for a few months. You can't always do this if your boss needs an answer this week. But in general, it is always an exercise worth doing. Start with recurring expenses like rent, utilities, loan repayments, insurance, subscriptions, any predictable bills that need to be paid on a monthly basis. Here's where tracking expenses comes in handy. You can get a sense of what you spend on average on, say, food, transportation, entertainment, pet, or childcare, healthcare, if you're in one of those countries, et cetera. Then you could work that average into your budget. By the end, you should come out with a rough total of exactly how much money you need to live month to month. Can be as aggressive or lenient as you want. Make an ideal budget and an apocalypse budget, perhaps. When I first started freelancing, it really helped to know the absolute baseline of what I needed to survive at an absolute minimum. My basic survival, food, rent, utilities, et cetera, just so that I had a hard figure for making ends meet and I knew if I was going to be in the red. Eventually, I could branch out to include budget for things that actually make life nice. Only do this if your job prospect has growth built into it or if you're going into freelancing. Do not pitch an employer your absolute base survival rate because you deserve to be paid a living happy wage. Then add in a percentage for savings, which should be ideally at least 20% of your income, but you can adjust this accordingly to suit your savings goals. This is the amount of money you will need to earn from however many hours you work. F here, you can break down the math as necessary to find your weekly, bi weekly, daily or annual rates. So Say, your portion of the rent is $800. Utilities is $100. Food is 300. Subscriptions are 50. Transportation is 100. Personal care is 100. Your gym membership is 75, and insurance is 200, pets 50, shopping 300. That is $2,075 in total, plus, we're going to be very conservative and say 10% for savings, which comes out to $207 round up to 210 or even to 250, however much you want to be saving per month. Let's say the total is $2,300 per month in order to survive. Let's divide this by four to find out how much we need to make per week. That comes to 575. If you're working a 40 hour week, that means your take home hourly rate should be at minimum $14.38 an hour. You can also use this exercise to help you achieve your lifestyle goals. So if you dream of getting rid of the roomies, driving a nice car, going on nice vacations, or moving to a city with a higher cost of living, add those expenses in to make a pie in the sky budget. Figure out what hourly or monthly rate you would need to be paid in order to achieve that and see if you can build your skill level or professional reputation up enough to get there. This is all with the massive caveat that the numbers that you come up with are net. That means after tax. If you're working a job that does not set aside taxes for you, you will need to calculate the taxes and add that on top of your rates so that you can get this set aside and not be surprised by a huge tax bill at the end of the year. Again, I don't know the rules where you live, and so I cannot provide tax advice, but this is absolutely something you need to keep in mind from the start if you are responsible for paying your own taxes. This goes, especially for my fellows in creative fields where things can often get very complicated with self employment taxes and deductions and all this messy stuff. Never be afraid to hire an accountant if you need. Creative taxes can be an absolute nightmare and it honestly might be worth saving the stress, and honestly the money, they might save you money too, because they can often find you some really nice tax deductions that you don't necessarily have the time or knowledge to look for yourself. So, here's your activity for this lesson. You guessed it. For this activity, I'm going to make you find your rate. Turn on your favorite jams, break out the bank statements, total up all your monthly expenses, and divide them down to find your hourly, weekly, monthly, and perhaps yearly salaries. You can split this exercise to find your absolute base survival rates and your ideal goal salary. Pro chip, please don't publish this in the project gallery down below for privacy reasons. But do please do this for your own benefit. 11. Sustaining the Job: This is the part that no one talks about. You've got the job. You're building a successful career. You can finally stop worrying about, if you have a chance in this field, now you need to maintain your position in the field. Some creative fields involve a lot of public exposure, which can come with a whole host of unique psychological struggles that let's face it, your everyday community may not understand or care about. Some problems you may encounter. Number one, of course, the most obvious is burnout. Creative fields can be extremely demanding. They can require extremely long hours, a lot of emotional input. So let me be not even the first person to tell you because I know you've heard this absolutely everywhere from everyone in your life at this point by now, but it is so important to take regular breaks. Even before you think you need them, schedule regular time off because I promise you consistency in the long term is a lot more sustainable than spectacular performance for only a short period of time. Know a lot of people, especially in creative industries, take a lot of pride in their long hours in the hustle. But the hustle and this need to prove to ourselves and to other people around us that we are capable of extreme working conditions and extreme schedules. If we're only capable of doing it for a year or two or a few years, that is ultimately in the long run going to be far less impressive than your ability to regulate your energy, regulate your efficiency, and to keep doing this for a lot longer and a lot more reliably. It's also especially in creative fields, super important to allow yourself time to be bored. I know it sounds agonizing, but so often I'll find that I get stressed, I get so wrapped up in the details of what I'm doing. But the minute I give myself a week holiday. After the first three days of laying in bed and just absolutely recovering, then I start to feel the boredom. My brain starts to wander and I start to think of new projects, and I start to want to go places and explore, and I start to get curious about things again. I find that giving myself time No obligations and no responsibilities is the best refueling for my creativity and thus makes my performance better. It gives me more energy. It makes me so much more excited to return to work and to start exploring new things, gives me new passion. Time off to rest, to restore your creative juices, to explore some curiosity, to gain new inspiration. That is essential. It's essential to preserving your energy as a worker, but it's also as a creative person, essential to your ability to continue innovating, because if you just keep doing the same thing for years and years on end, I mean, ultimately, the world moves on. You do have to keep innovating and iterating and exploring new realms and new topics, and you can only do that if you allow yourself the time to do that. Ultimately, if you do find some area of success, you will run into people trying to use you for leverage, for clout, for money, for resources. Yeah, it'll happen. Learn to recognize it and learn to listen to yourself when you do recognize it. It can be very easy to deny, especially for serial offenders and for people who are close to you. I will say helping people is a good thing, but some people will use you to your detriment. Here's a really unfortunate reality that other people around you will notice your success before you notice it yourself. And so it's important to stay humble definitely. But to be aware and to acknowledge and accept and own your success, because then it's a lot less hard than when you continuously deny your success and say, Oh, I'm not quite as big yet, I'm not, but you still have something of value that other people want. Other people can see that and can then take advantage of what you don't think you have. Don't be afraid to let go of connections that are purely drains. Because ultimately, if you are not maintaining your creative energy, your ability to work, your resources, your time, and you're allowing people to drain that from you. You're not only not helping yourself, you're not helping all the people who benefit from your work. You're not helping your team. You're not helping your projects. So do, of course, be sure to preserve your own mental health, to preserve your ability to keep your passion and your energy and your ability to work and your ability to keep on succeeding. Again, I should reiterate that helping people is a good thing, especially when you've reached a level of success, and you look back at people who might be in your position that you were in once upon a time. Personally, I love taking on work study students and young people who are hoping to get into dress history and costume because the people who did that to me when I was coming up absolutely changed my life, and I love to pass that on to other people. Even if it does cost me a little bit of my time and having to stop what I'm doing and instruct someone, and you know it's ultimately really fulfilling because I know that they're then going to go and pass on their skills and help the world. There is then, of course, the psychological effects, especially if you're in a high profile field. So dealing with mass expectation with a whole crowd of people placing expectations on you, mass scrutiny, the potential to have to be threat modeling of everything that you put out in the world of how everyone's going to receive things and what the potential outcomes of things being taken the wrong way. If you have to deal with all this sort of additional psychological baggage on top of the creative work that you're passionate about doing, that can be extremely exhausting and extremely impactful on your creative work if you let it get to your head. Some advice that I would give here is to engage in grounding activities, so have a solid core community of family or friends. I personally find it very helpful to maintain connections and activities that I did before success, especially activities that place me as a professionally, now relatively successful person within a team environment, and within a non hierarchical, or if there is a hierarchy that I'm not at the top, it helps very much to keep myself grounded and that, you know, it's very easy to get caught up in perceiving that you have more worth than you actually do. Never be afraid to get a therapist. They can be very helpful, and they're literally paid not to roll their eyes whenever you have to vent about, successful people problems that, absolutely nobody wants to hear in real life. Even if you aren't working in the online sphere, if you do have a high profile, public job, as well, limit contact with online strangers. Sometimes you can go to places like comment sections of your Instagram page if that's where you get a lot of positive feedback. It can be really nice to read positive feedback, but mass positive or mass negative feedback will not do you any good after a point. We as humans, are not built to receive the amount of social feedback that we are often given when we're put in high profile positions, I believe that it just doesn't do you any good to have a crowd in your head whenever you're trying to do your creative work and to have those voices telling you to be predicting the comments or the encounters on the street that might result from the work that you do. It really does impact the creative work that you put out, and if you gained your success from Not having those voices in your head, it could ultimately become detrimental to the future of your work. Success is such a dangerously undefined concept. We can be so easily led by the people around us by their skyrocketing growth, by unprecedented popularity, fancy houses and cars. Before we even set out, before you even become successful, I would highly recommend defining what to you the meaning of success is. When I was starting out on YouTube, I decided early on that as long as I could pay my bills through doing projects that brought me joy, I would consider myself a success. It really kept me very peaceful throughout my career, as I watched other creators take off overnight, come out with a really spectacular projects that could perhaps leave me asking myself, why didn't I think of that? People get offered really incredible opportunities that you may not. This will always be a reality. It is really great to have a grounding reminder that despite all the potential frills that could come along with a job, you yourself are still doing great. 12. Conclusion: Thank you very much for joining this class. I really hope you learned, and I hope this benefited you, and it will continue to benefit you in the future of your creative career. I would love to know if anything really stood out to you, if there were any points or tips that you will be taking away from this class. Just as a little recap, when you are applying for creative positions, remember to really foster your soft skills, the more personality based skills that will really help to set you apart from other people who might be equally, if not more skilled in your field. Really nail down your application materials, your resume, your CV, your cover letter, your portfolio, and or your audition, make sure that you are strengthening your network. This is never something that you stop doing, either. I am constantly networking. I'm constantly going to events and meeting new people and exploring what other people are doing and talking with peers. And it's something that will just continue to bring you benefits throughout your life and throughout your career. Remember to really get a sense on your finances, to develop a budget to really understand the wages and the salary that you need to survive and even to thrive and don't be afraid to ask for it. I think it's also really important to remember that a career doesn't have to be forever. We can be so prone to getting bored and uninspired, especially as creative people. We need that constant new creative stimulation in our lives. That's okay. While it may be standard in other careers to work in, say, accounting or medicine as your dedicated lifelong career, You can, in reality, do whatever makes you happy. It is not too late. It's never too late to learn some new skills and to do something different. And you can always switch if you decide a few years down the line that you want to do something else. Don't let the What if I Don't like this hold you back. I hope you love working in the creative industry of your choosing as much as I have loved working in mine, and I wish you all the best of luck in your upcoming creative career journey.