Collaboration is key to all success in one way or another. Nothing is ever achieved without some form of input from another participant; however you look at it. Even if you are a sole trader, selling a product, you still need your customers to buy from you. This is, whether you like it or not, a collaboration.
3 conversations I’ve had over the last couple of weeks have centred around this, albeit in very different ways with people from very different backgrounds.
I was speaking with a friend of mine who was talking about specialising. Becoming phenomenal at one thing and just doing that, whilst also recognising that other people might be stronger in certain areas. Delegating to a team that can help. Reducing stress but keeping your position as a professional.
Another had a few things they were passionate about but quite different from each other and they were struggling to focus whilst working alone without external support.
But the third was the one that struck the biggest chord.
I’m a photographer as you know and I love taking photographs, which I hope you can tell. Filming is something I’m pushing myself with and I know my way around it, I have tonnes of additional ideas in this area, and I am doing as much of it as I can since I’m always on the path of continuous development.
All that said, there are elements of it I don’t have the patience for even though I have the idea, such as the edit, which can be a long and monotonous process. With my stills, I love the edit as much as the shoot, it’s the ying to the yang, the peaceful afterburn of an exciting shoot, but I simply don’t feel that way when editing film.
Throughout this discussion where there was some incredible feedback on some work I’d done for him, I mentioned how I felt about all this and his words to me were “Brother, it’s all about finding your place in the Orchestra. If you try playing more than you’re supposed to you’ll mess it up, if you don’t play loud enough no one will hear you”
These words really struck a chord. As a highly self-critical person, I carry the weight of everything on my own shoulders, don’t practice my preach from time to time, and as a result can find myself in a spiral of self-doubt and toxic perfectionism, when actually the direction and idea is there and I just need to embrace a collaborators passion for the finished article.
The reality is I’ve already built my orchestra. I have incredible talent in the collaborators around me and the bits that stress me out can be sorted by my “team” who play their parts in the orchestra perfectly.
From now on, I will never use the word client again. My customers are my collaborators. Although I play some instruments in the orchestra, I don’t and can’t play them all of the time, but I can conduct and I can write that sweet melody of creation.
Consciously creative, collaborative and inclusive. Empowering, honest and realistic.
Shout out to all my collaborators, past, present and future. Without you, I’m just a busker on a lonely street corner.
We are the Children who survived, JAJA is our Orchestra.
