Make Art Make Money: Lessons From Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career (9 page)

Where might your career be heading? Take some time to visualize the elements of your past and imagine how they might combine. Henson’s career flowed organically from past to future. His high school club led to auditions, which led to kids shows, which led to commercials, which led to
Sesame Street
, which led to
The Muppet Show,
which led to directing films. It started humbly, but built steadily. The key to your success may lie in something you already do, but do not yet see as your power, something you might not know yet “what it’s fer.” You may already be halfway to ten thousand hours and not realize it. Or you may already be there. You really can’t know, so you must work all the same. Find the kind of work that you feel is worth doing. Do it
more
.

For myself, I am lucky that I failed at many practical career paths—engineering, web design, and information architecture. The only thing I did well—and helped people with—was writing, and I feel certain this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Knowing this, I feel fine sacrificing hundreds of hours to write a book on spec. Even if it’s not published, it still counts toward my ten thousand hours, and if it’s not good enough, it may help me to become good enough.

There was a point in my life when I didn’t know if I
could
write because of a horrible shoulder pain that came on when I hunched over a computer screen. After reading
The Gift
, I made myself write
anyway
, and miraculously—my shoulders stopped hurting. Today when I clock five continuous hours in a chair, the feeling of accomplishment works better than an anti-inflammatory. Jim Henson’s workaholism has inspired me; when I cultivate it myself, I become
more
the artist I was meant to be.

If you look back at the successes you’ve had with your art, can you remember how much work they took? It may not be easy to count the hours, but try to estimate. Were you repaid in full for your work, or was the work itself your payment? What compelled you to work when you didn’t feel like it? Take some time to answer these questions, either in a journal or, if you like, on my website,
ElizabethHydeStevens.com
. In your own practice, what is the “work” and what is the “labor”? Which part could you do by will and which part seemed done by someone else? Really observe the way
you
work—even the parts you are ashamed to acknowledge. Validate your process by observing it.

In your own life, do you cut out the leather every night? How often do you force yourself to serve the gift, and do you think that frequency is enough? If not, why do you think you have refused the call? What didn’t you want to give up—family, leisure, sleep, health? Could you imagine forgoing these things for
one day
in order to make a brilliant work of art? One day may not seem like much, but it is the start of a habit.

Make a challenge for yourself—do
x
by a certain day, or take an
x
-a-day pledge. Make a ball and chain to force you to work. You may not ever know if the elves will come, but you can at least cut out the leather, so that
if
they come, they can work their magic. How many hours did you work on your art today? How hard do you think Jim Henson would have worked on it? Now think about how much he
enjoyed
working. In an episode of
Fraggle Rock
, Mokey learns that all it takes to be a minstrel is “hard work.” Henson’s character, Cantus, says, “Yes, wonderful, isn’t it? Being a minstrel is enough hard work to last your whole life!”
^[87]

Don’t listen to your friends who tell you they like leaving their work at work. They don’t have the same dream you do. They want the comfortable thing. You want the great thing. Take your work home. Longtime Muppet writer Jerry Juhl had a piece of paper above his desk at home that said, “Not writing is worse.” I couldn’t agree more.

There is nothing worse than
not
working on something you believe in.

Hard work is important, but even if you work every hour of
the day, you can’t create by yourself the kind of art Jim Henson made. Without
some
kind of collaboration, art just isn’t as good, and it’s definitely not as fun. A
writer for
Fraggle Rock
, Sugith Varughese, said of his scripts:

You feel like you were channeling something. It
wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from this collective funnel of creativity that
came through because of the juxtaposition of real specific people like Jerry
Juhl and Jim, and I was just lucky to be in the room. And it just passed
through me.
^[1]

There is something about collaboration that encourages more
play—the magic of the shoemaker’s elves—that feeling of “channeling” something
bigger than yourself. In collaboration between two people, credit is never
clear-cut, and it can allow more of the “gift” feeling that art requires.

When should you hire someone else to work with
you? As soon as you can. Hiring someone means you believe in your business. It
makes you accountable to someone else, and it makes you work harder than you
would if it were just your own neck on the line. There is power in numbers. Henson
had great power, but it came from generosity. If you want a job like Henson’s,
you need to give
someone else
a job.

In
Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas
, both
Emmet and Ma Otter want to win the talent contest, but performing separately,
they both lose to a group of hooligans—the Riverbottom Nightmare Band. In order
to attain success—enough money and a job they enjoy—they must realize how their
two songs fit
together
. Singing harmonies on their walk home, they are
overheard by Doc Bullfrog, who remarks, “I thought you were missing something.
Turns out, what you were missing was each other.” It is only after they
collaborate that Doc Bullfrog gives them a job performing nightly at his inn.

There is a lesson here specifically for artists.
Art is often more interesting to the audience when artists collaborate.
Collaboration makes an artist more successful, but that is not why artists
should do it. For Emmet, his friends, and Ma, the reason to sing together was
simply that they
enjoyed
it more. They were successful
because
they enjoyed it more.

The kind of art Henson wanted to make
required
collaboration. His crowd scenes celebrated this—the raucous audience of
The
Muppet Show
, the rainbow shining down on two hundred Muppets at the end of
The
Muppet Movie
, an entire species of Fraggles dancing, the whole Muppets
family singing carols in
A Muppet Family Christmas
. Fiction mirrors the
truth underneath the puppets—Henson said there were a “few hundred” puppeteers
in the
Muppets Take Manhattan
wedding scene:

It’s always fun to do those great big crowd scenes
when we try to get everybody that works puppets that we know of … to come
in for a shot or two.
^[2]

We feel the “fun” when we watch these crowd
scenes. It’s not about a certain number of puppets; it’s more than that. What
we feel as an audience is that a lot of people really enjoyed working together,
something we don’t get to experience very often in our own careers.

 In a quieter way, the duos also show the
alchemy of collaboration—Bert and Ernie singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little
Christmas,” Kermit and Piggy singing their marriage vows, Big Bird and Snuffy
saying goodbye forever. Each duo was worth more together than the two alone.
Part of the magic of the Muppets was in what happened
between
characters. Henson once said:

I like working collaboratively with people. At its
best, the film and television world functions creatively this way. I have a
terrific group of people who work with me, and I think of the work we do as
“our” work.
^[3]

This is a nice sentiment, and many companies say they
want
collaboration, but to truly co-create, to
share
your creations requires
that you no longer know what you can take credit for. It is a pretty radical
transformation of one’s ego, and most businesses run on ego, from the top down.
It is useless to ask employees to function collaboratively if that is not the
way the leadership operates. Jim Henson thought of his work as “our work.” This
“us” mentality shows up in his
Red Book
journal, as he notes each time
the company grew:

2/–/1957—Began working together. [Jane]

8/–/1961—Jerry joined us

7/9/1965—Olga Stevens comes to work for us
^[4]

The progression builds like a snowball, starting with Henson
himself and growing beyond him. Olga Stevens was a secretary at Henson
Associates, the company he ran. But when Henson hired Stevens, she does not
work for
him
, but “for us.” It is a different—a radically generous—mentality.