Some Thoughts From the Trenches

You may know I've been focusing on my art for the past several years. Here's how that relates back to all the business and economics shit I talk about.

Most of you are here because last month I said some shit about Walmart. A couple weeks ago I said some stuff about economics and poverty. And if you happened to go look me up on BlueSky or Tumblr (lol, nobody here uses Tumblr) you may have been fairly confused to find me posting two art videos from my YouTube channel every week. Why is this shitty artist talking about business and economics?

Well, it really goes the opposite direction.

Several years ago, I was a small business performance and success coach, which is a fancy bullshit way of saying I am kinda smart and give fairly good advice. If you had a problem in your business, and it was costing you many thousands of dollars, and you needed someone to look at your problem and tell you what to do… I was a pretty cost-effective way to do that. I have about thirty years of business experience across multiple industries, and I’m especially attuned to the problems of a small business feeling the growing pains of becoming a medium business.

But I really, really don’t like having clients. So what I wanted to do was migrate my practice from having a schedule where people paid me hundreds of dollars an hour to talk to them on the phone, to having a website where people just went and took a course on how not to be a stupid fucking idiot when you are running a business.

I would, of course, have to put it slightly more diplomatically.

Like Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” When you really look at it, this entire book - classic that it is - boils down to an experienced warrior trying to explain, for thoroughly unqualified military leaders, how not to fuck up a war too badly. Because China had a bad habit of appointing socially important people to logistically important positions, with absolutely zero regard to their qualifications.

You, you’re the nephew of that guy who helped me gain power, you’re a general now. You lead this part of our army. By the way, that army is marching on that territory next week and I expect a glorious victory.

Business ownership is much the same. You do not own a business because you are especially qualified to own a business. You own a business because you could afford it, and you felt like it. I started my business at 16 with $20, and the first thing I did was have a conversation with the county clerk about whether I had to be 18 to get a business licence. It took them a few hours to figure that out, but the answer was “evidently not” and I walked out of that office the proud owner of a business.

Today you don’t even need to leave the house. You can do it online. I mean, I had to take a bus, at least. I had to know where to get the business licence. Today you type “HOW START BUSINESS” in your browser’s address bar - you don’t even need to go to a search engine first - and click links until you find something for your state. You can literally do it with one hand.

There are still comparatively few people starting businesses, but there are several times as many people doing it, and they are even less qualified than they used to be. So I figured it shouldn’t be all that hard to write a blog and a book and make some videos and tell people “how not to be a complete dumbass running your business” - again, in a somewhat more diplomatic fashion - and charge them something like $100 a month for membership.

The way you build something like this is through iteration. You start by making a basic core product, and you put it out there, and you refine it. You fine-tune it. You go back and do a new version, making it better. And I went through this about three or four times, enhancing and extending the curriculum that was going to turn into the final product. But I got one criticism that needled me.

The entire system presumed you knew what you were doing.

Obviously not in the “running a business” sense. That would be pretty stupid. Clearly, you are taking a course like this because you do not know what you are doing in that sense. But your business has a thing that it does - a product or service it provides - that the business is working around. And I had absolutely no advice or assistance for anyone who didn’t know how to provide the product or service their business was meant to provide.

Well, I’ve never done that. I’ve never started a business doing something I don’t know how to do. I’ve never thrown everything out and started from scratch. I’ve always started a business operation from an existing strength. But… what if you don’t have one?

I had no damn clue what that was like.

So in 2016, I shut it all down and took a big step back. I started to fire things back up again in 2018, but I still didn’t feel I’d addressed the issue - I had, instead, tried to make an acceptable excuse for not addressing the issue. This excuse was not convincing because I was, myself, not convinced. And I concluded that I would need to start over in some area that I knew absolutely jack fucking shit.

While I was trying to figure that out, I thought I may as well do something to keep myself busy, so I was going to make some cheap shitty video games. But I needed an artist to do the graphics, so I was lurking around a Discord server full of artists watching for someone I could partner with on the venture.

After a while, they started to complain that if I was going to hang out in the art channel, I needed to post some art. I cautioned them that I was not a good artist, then posted some art they said was actually pretty good.

They made some criticisms, but also had a bit of praise, and suggested that maybe instead of looking for an artist I should just become an artist.

And I had nothing better to do.

It was, in fact, exactly what I had been looking for - something where I was really starting from nothing. I had, in fact, quit art around the same time I started my business; I’d entertained some notion of learning art, but when I went to my first real art class I discovered that most people in the class had like… talent, and shit, so I felt really inadequate and I didn’t much care for that.

Almost six years later, I feel like I’ve made some progress. I’m still not where I want to be. But I’ve gotten closer.

Over the course of this journey, I’ve learned a lot of things I never needed to learn before. I always played to my strengths. Never in my life had I deliberately leaned into a weakness. But it was a valid question: what if you don’t… have any strengths? What if you’re a loser? Is there just no hope for you? Surely there is something you’re stronger in than anything else, but what if you are still not very good at that something?

I’d already done something like this before. I was a software developer for a long time. When I migrated into small business coaching, I found that my instinct was always to address problems by writing software. That was my hammer, and every problem was a nail. So in 2008, I said “I am not going to write any code for five years.” And that forced me to see the world in a whole new way.

It’s kind of crazy. But I think being crazy is the only way to learn certain things, and most people don’t learn them because they typically avoid being crazy.

The difference is that writing code wasn’t my only skill. I had over twenty years of experience in business, and I’ve always been a fairly good writer, so I still had a lot of ability to fall back on. “I will write no code” didn’t even slow me down as a coach.

The art thing is different. I don’t know what the fuck I am doing. And it doesn’t help that I am in my fifties; I think it just gets progressively more and more frustrating to learn new things as you age, not because it is harder, but because you’re just not used to it. I am accustomed to being fairly good at whatever I am doing, even if it isn’t the main thing I do. And when I’m not good at it, I get very annoyed because it seems like I should be good at it, I am too old not to be good at things.

Motivation is a massive issue. It’s not hard to be motivated when you are fairly good at something - I have finally reached a point where I am, generally speaking, motivated to keep going because I am good enough to have skills that are worth developing further. But that took almost five years.

So I understand, a lot better than I used to, where people are coming from when they are working their shitty little dead-end wage slave job and complaining that they can’t afford to live. Which is bullshit, of course they can afford to live, you can tell because they’re not dead.

But it seems unfair. Most of these people complaining have university degrees; some of them have a master’s. Almost all of them have some college education. And that means virtually all of them have student loans, which are fundamentally based on the assumption that you are not going to have a shitty little dead-end wage slave job.

They made this assumption, too. After all, they were promised that if they just go to university, their life will be a lot better and they will make an average of over a million dollars more over the course of their career. And they nodded their head and said “that’s rather a lot, that is” because they didn’t do the maths to recognise that a million dollars spread across forty years is $25,000 annually.

Now, that is in fact very nice. But you’re talking about the difference between $35,000 and $60,000. Not to mention salaries are back-weighted; you’re not going to make the extra $25k in your first few years. You’re going to make an extra $50k in your last few years, and in your first few you will make absolutely jack shit extra.

Just like the art thing. When your art is good and you have a reputation, you can literally print money: you stick a bunch of art you already did in a book, and a bunch of people buy it. You make posters. You make t-shirts. You make little enamel pins.

But for several years before that, you make your art and nobody gives a single shit. You advertise $20 commissions - which is about $5 an hour - and get nothing. Literally nobody gives enough of a damn to pay you $5 an hour part time.

And when you’re used to making fat stacks for your work, that seems unfair. You’ve done your time. You’ve paid your dues. You spent those years getting paid dick fifty for your work already, and you earned those fat stacks. Why are you back in the dick fifty trenches?

Different trenches. Different work. Different time to do, different dues to pay.

You walk out of university. You went to class, you did the work, you got the grades, you have the sheepskin. You go out into the job market and the only place you can get hired is at Scarbutt’s where you get to make the same dick fifty as Becky from high school who got Ds in study hall and pregnant at junior prom.

How the fuck is that fair, right?

The core issue is that Becky’s mediocre high school education and your top-tier university education have precisely the same value to Scarbutt’s: absolutely jack shit. Both of you may as well have nothing at all. Scarbutt’s values your ability to show up on time and do your damn job without upsetting the customers. Neither one of you has any demonstrated competence in that.

Exactly like my decades of coding and project management and business coaching mean absolutely jack shit when it comes to art. It feels even more unfair because there is so much of it, and it has historically been so highly valued. But I don’t get bonus points for it. The only points that matter are the points I score in art. I may as well be complaining that I lost a basketball game because they didn’t count the touchdown I scored last month. That was in a different game and a different sport. Those points don’t carry over.

So we have to look at our hypothetical university grad’s prospects from a realistic point of view, and understand what we are telling them.

First, those years you spent in university counted for something, but once you get into the job market you typically find they don’t count for this. Which means you really have two jobs, here. First, you have to do something that does count for this, if you ever want to advance and improve in it. And second, you have to find a job your years in university do count for.

This presumes there even is such a job; if you have a degree in some arbitrary horseshit like Occult Science (it’s me, I got the degree in that arbitrary horseshit), that sort of degree is meant for the independently wealthy to write weird esoteric books that don’t need to support them or anything. A lot of degree programs are just for the idle rich, and the rest of us are better off ignoring them.

If you have one of those - and, again, I myself do - your university education is worthless and you got those student loans for nothing. I went in the ‘80s when you could still pay tuition with a part time job, so I got to skip that second part. If you didn’t, I’m really sorry you got fucked like that, and I am 100% in favour of any effort to forgive those bullshit loans. Just because I didn’t get fucked doesn’t mean you deserved to. These loans are predatory and abusive and nobody deserves that.

But the fact is, if you got a degree that doesn’t matter... and there’s a fairly high likelihood that you did… you are in the same boat as Becky. You may have spent years working hard on something, but it wasn’t anything that mattered. No matter how well you did, it doesn’t count.

And even if your degree matters, it only matters if you get a job in your field, which most people don’t. Even if they don’t go work at Scarbutt’s, they have to go work somewhere that their degree counts toward advancement, and the odds of that are pretty low for most fields. Unless you deliberately selected an underserved field, chances are very good that more people get a degree in it than there are jobs for those people. The rest of them are probably going to end up in one of those underserved fields, unless of course they drop through the cracks and go work at Scarbutt’s or the like.

The only difference between these people and me is that I have deliberately chosen the thing I am doing. I did not get shoved into it and have smoke blown up my arse about the long-term career potential. Additionally, I am aware that other things are available; that if I wanted to pack in the art and go write code, or manage programmers, or reopen my coaching practice, I could do that. I recognise that I am where I am because of my choices, and that if I don’t want to be here anymore all I have to do is make different choices.

This does not, however, alter what choices are available. And when I think about people who don’t have better choices available, the outlook is rather bleak. Because if working at Scarbutt’s for dick fifty really is the highest and best use of your talents, the only way you are getting a better life is to become a better person.

And I get it. I do. This is hard. It’s probably easier in your twenties or thirties, but it still isn’t easy. You have to pick something to be better at, and motivate yourself to be better at it, and keep showing up and getting better over and over again until you are actually good at it. And it’s only after you are good at it that you are going to see any meaningful results. Education is only valuable in retrospect.

You know how everyone wants you to have three to five years experience for a job? My first three years of art were a shitshow. It took me that long to learn how to learn. I didn’t realise this was something I didn’t already know. I made little to no progress, all that time, because I didn’t know how to get any better. And then it took another two years to get sufficiently better that I was comfortable suggesting I knew what I was doing.

I’m not good. I have another few years yet, before that. I still paint things I see every day and realise that… I don’t know what those things look like. I have a grape arbor in my front yard, growing an heirloom vine from northern Italy. I’ve seen it every day for more than fifteen years. Why don’t I know what grapes and grape vines look like?

There’s a reason for that. The things you see every day stop being important, and it’s not important what they look like. Your brain replaces them with an iconic representation that may or may not have anything to do with how it really looks. Chances are good it shares this representation with several other similar things in your head.

This goes along with something I talk about fairly frequently, ecological rationality. The things you do every day, you get good at, even when you don’t entirely understand how or why they work. Make coffee at Scarbutt’s long enough, you will be able to make one hell of a fantastic cup of coffee.

But you won’t be able to explain how you do it, even if you try with both hands. And on top of that, you won’t know what the machine you do it in looks like.

It was a valid and meaningful criticism to say I had never started a business doing anything I didn’t already know how to do, but that was exactly what I advised others to do - without the front-line experience to know what I was telling them, or what that experience would be.

That website about how not to be a fucking idiot running your business will probably materialise someday. I will have a different name for it, probably using the word “badass,” and a less inflammatory slogan. Maybe “stop being weak and stupid.” I do want to be a little inflammatory, I mean Goddamn, some of these people are morons.

But it’s on hold right now. I’m digging into the mud and figuring out how to tell people this is worth it. Part of that process is going to be showing them it’s worth it. I’ve always done that; every product I’ve ever released has had a proof-of-concept phase before I wrote it. A vertical slice, at minimum.

So it may be a little weird, seeing ivory tower subjects discussed from the mud of the trenches. But this is where the real work gets done. And if you don’t know how the work gets done, you can’t help anyone do it.