How to be truly original (and get paid for it)
I watched the documentary Martha last night, chronicling Martha Stewart’s life and career. I was born in the early 1990s, so Martha Stewart’s brand was as ubiquitous as Sports Illustrated or any other major publication by the time I started understanding what those were. Martha Stewart existed as a global force before I existed, so I never considered how her brand came to be.
What stuck out to me as I watched Martha was the specific combination of interests, skills, and life experiences that mixed together to form her empire. She grew up in a large, but poor family. Her father was a gardener, and her mother cooked three meals each day for their family of eight with the food they grew. To make extra money, Martha modeled during school. When she was 19, she got married, had a child, found herself unsatisfied with mere motherhood, and went to work on Wall Street. After a few years, she left Wall Street and started a catering company.
By this time, Martha’s husband was the president of a publishing company. She catered their parties, then pitched the publishing company on her first book, called Entertaining. The dominoes kept falling after that, leading to more books, a magazine, a product line, a TV show, and eventually, enough capital for her to buy back the rights to all of it, and take her company public.
You can see how seemingly every aspect of Martha Stewart’s life came together to make her empire possible: gardening, hosting, modeling, Wall Street, publishing. I got a similar impression when I watched Free Solo, the documentary about the Alex Honnold summiting El Capitan (a 3000-foot rock face) with no ropes. Honnold’s body type, disposition, view on relationships, and life experiences all came together to make that climb possible for him.
Business writers have a bad habit of extrapolating core principles and life lessons from successful people, without considering the negative aspects of their lives. That’s not what I’m doing here. Martha Stewart’s father was physically and emotionally abusive. Her husband had multiple affairs, and her marriage was loveless. By her own admission, she was not a good mother, and was uninterested in the emotions of others. Most famously, she was convicted of lying to the FBI, and spent months in prison. These things are wholly unenviable.
However, there is one lesson I want to pull from this: we should all be leveraging our own combination of life experiences. We all have an upbringing, a disposition, a set of hobbies and interests and professional skills that can come together in a unique way.
In fact, to be artists and creatives who do something truly original, and command a high rate for it, this may be the only path.
