What Creators and Innovators Can Learn from What Color Is Your Parachute
You may not send resumes, but you almost certainly send work into the world hoping the right person notices — a portfolio site, a pitch to a gallery, a submission to a publisher, a demo to anyone who'll watch. This is the same trap as blind job applications: putting a generic version of yourself out to strangers, instead of getting clear on what you're actually best at making, and reaching out directly to the specific people who'd care about exactly that.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Get honest about what you're actually best at, not just what you can produce on demand
It's easy to keep making whatever pays or whatever's asked for, without stepping back to ask which of your skills are genuinely distinctive versus merely available.
A designer takes every logo job that comes in because saying no feels risky, and two years later realizes the work that actually got her noticed — a specific illustration style she rarely uses anymore — has quietly disappeared from her portfolio.
Look back at the three pieces of work you're proudest of, and name specifically what made them different from your average output — that's closer to your real strength than your full body of work.
Reach out directly to the specific people whose work or platform you admire
Submitting to open calls and cold-pitching editors or curators works occasionally; a genuine conversation with someone already working in the space you want to enter tends to open doors that a submission portal never will.
A writer submits the same manuscript to forty agents found through a directory, hears back from almost none, while never once reaching out to a writer she admires whose agent might have taken a look on a personal recommendation.
Pick one person doing work you admire in your field, and reach out with a specific, genuine question about their process — not a pitch, just curiosity.
Pitch the specific problem your work solves for this client or audience
"Here's my portfolio" asks someone else to do the work of figuring out why they need you; naming the specific problem your skills solve for their specific project does that work for them.
A photographer sends the same generic portfolio link to every potential client, while a competitor who took ten minutes to name exactly how her lighting style would solve that brand's specific problem gets the booking.
Before your next pitch, write one sentence naming the specific creative problem this particular client or platform has, and how your specific approach solves it.
Keep re-checking what kind of work you actually want to be making
The work that excited you a few years ago may not be the work you want now — revisiting what you actually want to create, and for whom, is an ongoing practice, not a question you answer once when you first call yourself a creator.
Reaching out and pitching takes time away from the work itself, and can feel like a betrayal of the craft; treat a small, regular amount of outreach as part of the creative practice, not a distraction from it — the work still has to be made, but it also has to be seen.
Name one thing, honestly
If you only had time to make the work that used your rarest strength, what would you stop doing, and what would you finally start?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before your next pitch, write one sentence naming the specific creative problem this particular client or platform has, and how your specific approach solves it.