Creative Hustle: Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters
Olatunde Sobomehin & sam seidel
144 pages, Ten Speed Press, 2022
In a world where the place you were born, the amount of money in your bank account, and the level of melanin in your skin can determine the precise path you are expected to follow, you may need inspiration and strategies to discover how you can make the most impact.
In our book Creative Hustle: Blaze Your Own Path and Make Work That Matters, we examine how to transcend the limits that hold people back in their lives, including both limits set by others and by ourselves. As a species, we have always been creative problem solvers. While it may seem counterintuitive, this proclivity can weaken as we age, because many institutions in our society discourage us from acting on the robust imaginations we had as children. Dreaming big is often belittled as “unrealistic” or “naive.” Yet if we want to break out of the status quo to build a more beautiful world, we need to hone that childlike creativity and couple it with our entrepreneurial instincts. This is not light work. It demands that we establish strong principles, collaborate with diverse networks of people, and build our own sets of creative rituals.
To help guide you through this process, we offer inspiration and lessons from notable creative problem solvers who have merged their own passions and values with their professional goals, such as Academy Award-winning writer/director (CODA, 2022), Siân Heder. These stories will help you identify your own path and hone the practices you will need to reach your goals.—Olatunde Sobomehin and sam seidel
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We see creative hustle as the engine to fulfilling and surpassing one’s goals. It’s about living a life of integrity that taps into core values, relationships, and behaviors to contribute to the world in meaningful ways. Creative hustle is about dreaming big in every direction. Let’s deconstruct the phrase to get deeper into its meaning.
Creative can be a fraught word. Perhaps you’ve sat in a room where someone has asked everyone to raise a hand if they consider themselves to be an artist. In a room full of five-year-olds, chances are almost every hand shot into the air. In a room full of adults, it’s likely only a few hands went up—at half-mast. Why? As our brains grow and develop, why do most people become less able to be creative or less able to claim it as part of our identity?
Filmmaker and futurist Erwin McManus reflected in his book The Artisan Soul that after thirty years studying creativity, he sees that “the great divide is not between those who are artists and those who are not, but between those who understand that they are creative and those who have become convinced that they are not.” Much of our society has been constructed to discourage people from acting on their imaginations. And yet, we believe the world can be a more just and more beautiful place, and that getting there will require all of us to tap back into the creative confidence we had as children.
The word hustle has a lot of different meanings and interpretations: It’s a ’70s dance step. A con. Getting something over on someone. Rushing oneself or someone else. There are some negative connotations here, but the word also represents a strong work ethic and indefatigable energy.
Over the last several decades, hip-hop culture has redefined hustle to celebrate the determined drive required to thrive in the face of interlocking systems designed to subjugate. To hustle is to refuse to accept one’s current conditions. It can refer to illegal activity, and it can just as easily be used to describe making music, selling sneakers, and starting schools. We see hustle as the positive act of taking any idea and applying tenacity to making it happen.
When we bring the words creative and hustle together their meanings are amplified. Creative hustle is the alchemy of imagination and ambition that will enable you to apply your gifts to reach your goals. As an action, creative hustle goes beyond the conventional to new ways of thinking and doing; as a person, a creative hustler is someone who seeks to live beyond the limits set around them.
Human beings have always been creative hustlers—just look to our ancient ancestors, huddled together, cold and in the dark, figuring out how to make fire for the first time. Today we see examples of creative hustle when scientists engineer new ways to harvest renewable energy, or musicians figure out how to share their art with people across the world through social media channels. To be human is to bleed an amalgam of imagination and ambition.
In the following passage, screenwriter-director Siân Heder shares specific lessons from her experience and more generally serves as a perfect example of a creative hustler at the top of her craft.
Do Your Research and Your Me-Search: Lessons from Filmmaker Siân Heder
When Siân Heder sold her first screenplay, her agent gave her a bottle of Dom Pérignon to open when they began principal photography on the film. Though selling the screenplay was important, Siân soon learned that many more steps were needed for the film to actually be produced. Those steps would happen sporadically, but year after year, the film remained unmade and the bottle collected dust.
“Every New Year’s Eve, my boyfriend would ask if we could pop it,” Siân laughs. Her boyfriend became her husband. They moved houses, and she insisted the bottle come with them. “It stared at me as a badge of failure,” she shared with us. “A symbol of something incomplete.”
Finally, six months pregnant with her second child, Siân flew to New York to begin filming that screenplay, which was now going to be her first movie, Tallulah. Her husband brought the Dom, and they popped it open and toasted each other behind a dumpster in Tribeca—nine years after her agent gave her the bottle.
In addition to learning more about the characters, places, and circumstances she was portraying, during the nine years it took to get Tallulah made, Siân developed a new empathy for the antagonist in her own story—a mother who struggled to care for her child—as she became a mother herself and learned how hard it is to parent. All of this led Siân to rewrite the screenplay sixty-five times.
Her experience developing Tallulah taught her that research is a key part of her practice. “I’m an obsessive and thorough researcher,” Siân explained to us. “I read a lot, but most of my research happens through relationships, conversations, and experiences.” Siân’s latest film, CODA, tells the story of a family with deaf parents. Siân is not deaf, so as she considered taking on the project, she set out to learn everything she could about American Sign Language (ASL), deaf culture, and the experiences of deaf people.
She did some of this by taking classes in ASL. She did much more through getting to know deaf people—not through consultants or focus groups, but through friendships.
The friendships began awkwardly. “I reached out to deaf friends-of-friends and asked if they’d have coffee with me.” Siân embraced the awkwardness: “A lot of hearing people are fearful of the communication barrier. We are so used to being comfortable all the time. We are afraid of not understanding something or making a faux pas.”
Not only did Siân learn through relationships, but she also read books by deaf authors and attended deaf theater productions. The sign language classes helped her understand ASL and prepared her to communicate with the actors in CODA. The books helped her understand deaf culture and the social justice issues related to ableism. The theater productions helped her see possibilities in collaborations between hearing and deaf artists—and the excitement of making work that could bridge the gap and speak to both communities.
In preparing to write CODA, Siân intentionally built in me-search—a critical examination of her own abilities and liabilities. “I consider writing to be an exercise in empathy for me as an artist,” Siân told us. “I learn by putting myself in shoes that are not my own.”
But as much as Siân put herself in others’ shoes, creating CODA also had her digging through her own shoe rack. The film is an American remake of a French film, and as such it provided some opportunities to riff on the original. The family members in the French version were loving, fun countryside farmers. Siân could have gone and researched a community like that one. She could have embedded herself in a playful family. But instead, she dug into her own experiences. Siân grew up in Massachusetts and spent lots of time in the fishing community of Gloucester. This became the setting for the new film. She modeled the parents in the film after her own hilarious and uninhibited parents. The same curiosity she brought to understanding others’ lives, she brought to her own: “The story got more and more personal as it got more and more specific.”
Since its release, CODA swept the major dramatic awards at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Even with all the accolades, Siân keeps asking critical questions of herself. Her self-examination does not end at mining her history for characters and stories; it extends to asking herself what her role as an artist should be and which stories are hers to write, direct, and share. “I ask myself all the time, ‘Whose story is whose to tell?” Siân reflects. “When you’re coming from a place of privilege you are much more likely to fall into perpetuating stereotypes. If you don’t know that you have a white, ableist, male gaze going into telling stories, you will end up playing out harmful tropes. It’s the reason disabled characters are almost always depicted as objects of pity or nobility in films by people who don’t have disabilities.”
Part of Siân’s artistic practice is the discipline she has built to do deeper levels of me-search. “What are my blind spots and how am I bringing in collaborators who can help me see them?” Siân asks. “More and more, I’m stepping back. Maybe I’m here to support and be the showrunner of Little America,” she says, referring to a series on immigration that she has been working on for Apple, “but maybe I’m not here to write new episodes. I would rather support new writers.”
It might be easier for Siân to write about only people and situations that are most familiar, but she is drawn to make art that helps her—and her audiences—learn. This comes from getting to know others and herself more deeply. As she says, “If it’s not adding to the human conversation—what is the point?”