“All happiness depends on courage and work.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.”
― Balzac

It is time to move on, move up and move out with a new mission. This guide is about taking charge of your destiny. Be the author of your life story. Its hero.

This guide will show you how to find, create and tell you unique story, and then how to earn a living doing what your love.  You will learn how to overcome the challenges the hero faces, and how to make your nature and your creativity work for you.  You’ll learn how to market yourself and your art even in a crowded marketplace, survive and thrive in the battlefield that is the creative business, be your own boss and work for others, take the ‘free’ out of ‘freelance’, rise to the top without stepping on too many toes, and use your natural abilities to find a perfect pitch and harmony in your story about work.

Your story is your life

There is a direct, undeniable correlation between the story you tell yourself about you and your career and your life story. It is less about what you do for a living than what you can live with doing. Finding fun and fulfillment at work spills over into the rest of your life. Without it, your health will suffer, your creativity will suffer, your work will suffer – and so will everybody around you. You don’t need to live that way.

“I’m a great poet. I don’t put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

If you are thinking of giving up on a creative career and getting a ‘real’ job, stop right there. When you settle for less than wat is best for you, you instantly get less than you settled for. Don’t sell yourself short. The regret will eat you up inside. Don’t miss your chance; it may be right around the corner. Instead, get going and go for it  – be bold.

“An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.”
― Honore de Balzac

Don’t let others push boulders in your path and fill your head with factoids like ‘most businesses fail in the first year’, ‘it is too competitive out there’, ‘there are NO jobs’, ‘you don’t have enough experience or talent’, ‘only the top can make a living’. It is bad enough that these insecure and misinformed people are telling you why you cannot succeed. It is worse if you believe them. Don’t let anyone talk your dreams down.

This guide is for creative heroes in all walks of life – composers, brand gurus, painters, poets, musicians, magicians, designers or dj’s, writers or actrices. It is not meant to apply to just the glamour jobs; whatever form your creativity takes, you can apply this story.

“However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot’s voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?”
― Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot

For everyone who tells you ‘you can’t make a living doing that’ there are hundreds of stories of creative people who found a way to turn something they thought was fun and would even do for free into a fulfilling career.  I will help you take your powerful creative energy and harness it, and you will beat the odds, making a living doing what you love to do. Your life will become a legend. A work of art.

About Peter de Kuster

Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Hero’s Journey & Heroine’s Journey project,  a storyteller who helps creative professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.

Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing,  MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.