Outcomes
You’ve reached the next subsection of the book! Glad to see you here, and excited to walk you through this next bit, as I can attribute so much of my success to shifting this mindset around outcomes.
The name for my business “Craftsman Creative” came from the book So Good They Can’t Ignore you by Cal Newport. I read it initially in 2014, and again in 2017 when I left my production company to pursue a career as an independent film producer.
Cal compares the typical approach driven by a person’s passion to what he named “the craftsman mindset”, an outcome-focused approach to creative work. In short, rather than figuring out what you love and then trying to find a way to become successful at it, you think about the outcome you want and then reverse engineer a direct path to it and start walking.
To compare the difference between the passion approach and the outcome-focused, craftsman approach, you don’t need to look any further than my own career in film.
I started producing by trying to raise money on the first script I co-wrote in 2008-9. I failed miserably, so instead of figuring out a new approach, I assumed it was the product we’d made, so we just wrote another script. Then another, and another, and another. Over the nine years my business partner and I wrote five screenplays and two TV pilots. We never got any of them produced.
Compare that to the craftsman approach I was reminded of in 2017. I had just left the production company and set out on my own, and So Good They Can’t Ignore You was part of my nightly diet of books that were going to help me chart a new path.
Two months later I was hired as a senior producer on the #1 rated show on BYUTV, Relative Race. During the four seasons I produced for them between 2018 and 2020, I was hired to produce a TV pilot, a documentary series, and finally my first feature film. It took 12 years, from 2009 to 2021 to produce a movie, but only 3 years since changing my approach, with a number of other successes along the path.
The Craftsman Mindset not only helps you achieve the things you want in your life and business, it helps you achieve them faster.
In this sub-section of the book, we’ll outline a step-by-step process for you to become outcome focused as a leader and creator. You’ll define the outcomes you want in your life and your business, so that you can create a plan to achieve them, as well as understand how to create a promise of helping your customers and clients get outcomes through your offer.
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