Years ago, I was having coffee with a friend and he asked me if I wanted his old 3D printer. It had been awhile since I modeled anything in 3D and I couldn’t visualize the process, so I declined with a simple statement, “I need to learn to see first.” I’m shaking my head at my ignorance. Have I learned to see yet? Nope, I haven’t. I haven’t even tried. What I did was miss out on an opportunity to dive in and have fun learning something completely new. Vision doesn’t show up because we see something, it’s revealed through our experiences. It’s the combination of our senses and the understanding we earn as a result of our efforts. In today’s monologue, I’m going to dive deeper into how we can develop our creative vision by doing our work, sharing it with others, and refining it along the way.

1. Vision starts with imagination, but it’s much more than that.
2. Vision is fueled by knowledge built upon research and examination.
3. As I said in the previous monologue, “vision is the living embodiment of creative expression.”
4. Courage is essential for turning vision into reality.
5. I want to reiterate what I said in the previous monologue: “Don’t conform to someone else’s vision for your life.” I’m also going to add don’t conform to someone else’s vision for your work as well.
6. Your vision is about our future.

• MasterClass
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• Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World)
• Episode photo from Envato Elements: Abstract Digital Light Rays Shining Outward

What’s your gift to the world? What makes you uniquely different than everybody else? Why should I choose you? Three powerful questions from today’s conversation with John Ravaris, consultant, speaker, and author of Define Value, Drive Growth: Build a Business Clients Choose and Competitors Envy. In our conversation, John unpacks these questions and more, focusing on how uniqueness creates client value. He talks about his curiosity with what people and businesses are really trying to accomplish, what sales is and is not, how his 4D Roadmap—Discover, Develop, Deploy, and Delight—reveals what makes a business unique, the difference between a customer and a client, his approach to niching and standing out, and building your reputation by saying no and not chasing the shiny object. If your business is stuck positioning itself just like its competition, then it’s time to discover just how valuable uniqueness can be.

• John Ravaris | UVP Solutions
• Define Value, Drive Growth: Build a Business Clients Choose and Competitors Envy by John Ravaris
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
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• The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks
• Episode photo from Envato Elements: Colorful Rock Texture with Lichen and Vegetation

The longer your creative career lasts, the less written about your specific struggles. Writing and producing work for young professionals is enticing because there will always be an eager audience, hungry to succeed. They will 10x absolutely everything in order to keep up with the algorithm and crush the content calendar. The message never changes even though the audience does. But for the rest of us, time tempers all things. While your creativity continues to soar, your willingness to settle for long hours and low wages does not. You grow tired of playing the game. The message grows stale in your mouth. You still dream impossible dreams, but the truth is that you don’t need anything fancy, you just need to work on your craft. The patient reawakening has nothing to do with being the next hot commodity, it’s returning to you, practicing, focusing, and refining. Every single day. It’s not chasing popularity or relevance, it’s doing the work that resonates.

“We must train ourselves. Not to make spoons or jewelry or paintings or chairs but to be more competent, more forgiving, more patient. If we were simply training for production, there would be only engineering geared to cost-benefit analysis and not the value of Quality. But if you are truly interested in making changes in your work, if you are attempting to do work of Quality, then the work to be done is on you.” – Gary Rogowski, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction

• Reawakening Question: Why do I keep going on?
• Awakening Question: Why did I start?

• Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction by Gary Rogowski
• Guns N’ Roses – Patience
• Perfect Days (2023)
• Episode photo from Envato Elements: Rustic Metalworking Shop Interior with Forging Tools