On a recent anniversary trip to New York, I surrendered the itinerary to Sara, telling her we could do whatever she wanted. She chose to look at art, which, for me, is about as exciting as watching paint dry—literally, in this case.
Sara had lined up appointments at fancy galleries across the city, each one staffed by someone with an accent I'm pretty sure doesn't exist in nature. At our first stop, we were presented with picture frames spray-painted blue, mustard yellow, and red. That's it—just frames. Painted.
My first thought was, "Well, somebody's really good at spray-painting things blue."
My second thought was, "These probably cost more than my first house."
But here's what hit me later: In a world of nearly eight billion people, you don't need everyone to "get" what you're doing. You just need to find the one person who looks at a blue spray-painted frame and sees a $5 million masterpiece.
It's a powerful business lesson: There's a market for everything. Your job isn't to convince everyone to love what you do - it's to find the people who already do. So keep creating and spray-painting blue frames if that's your thing. Your audience is out there somewhere, probably speaking in an accent I've never heard of.
