To effectively manage the risk of early-stage creative work, you need two tools: what I will call portfolio thinking and ownership stakes.

Art thinking is a framework and set of habits to protect space for inquiry.

Thinking about your life as a whole ecosystem

You have the exacting and constant task of protecting ideas while also being honest and sometimes challenging about their development. You are not executing on a vision but balancing how to be rigorous without being controlling, and how to be encouraging without interfering. Your work is essential and indirect.

within the frameworks of operating a business. Those mindsets and tools come together to support the process of art, and all of the vulnerability, risk of failure, actual failure, negotiation, and surprise involved in open-endedly and openheartedly creating the life—and the working life—you want.

The basis of our humanness is in our ability to create things. Our art—in the broadest sense—is whatever we make visible in the world. Each of us has to choose the scale at which we want to be artists of our own lives. It may be your family or your job or your neighborhood.

You may be able to develop a model collaboratively that far outstrips what you can build on your own.

You may be a captain of industry, or take on a great cause. You may collaborate with other people or work alone. It is true that everyone is an artist and a businessperson but it is also true that everyone is a citizen, in the broadest sense.

You need to think in terms of a portfolio of projects around your lighthouse. In the short term, income from one area can support investment in another. Over a longer period of time, the collection of projects functions like a diversified portfolio, with gains in one area balancing out losses in another.