This may sound really simple, but it is so important to understand how useful outside advice can be.

When you start out in your creative career everybody will be throwing advise at you left-right-and-centre so it will be hard to know who to listen to, and who to take with a pinch of salt.

However, once you have established yourself, and you need to grow, that’s when advice really comes in to play.

You may not know it yet, but you are probably already an expert in a very niche field. You may have one tiny idea, or one tiny way of doing things, that is so different to everybody else, and you are so passionate about carrying it through, then it is pretty straight forward to achieve your early ambitions.

It gets trickier when you have run to the end of your knowledge and understanding, and you need to branch out in new directions to pursue new opportunities. That’s when you need to seek out the best advise you can.

One of the things that I noticed when I was about 25 years old, was that people younger than me, perhaps my students, would ask for advise on all sorts of things, and I really tried to give them the best, most realistic feedback I could. When they followed my advice, they really succeeded. It made me realise just how much I could benefit from meeting other experts and getting them to help me.

I really love the idea that you don’t need a certain education, you don’t need a certain qualification and you don’t need years and years of experience. You just need to find someone who has!

I was reminded of this fact just a few days ago, when I got a call from an old friend from back home. He had started a fantastic theatre company with a group of talented friends, but their areas of expertise were in drama and performance, not technology. 5 years ago he asked for my advice on a website project, and I explained to him all the details, and explained that his team would be well served by a professional expert, but they didn’t come cheap!

He called me up, and he remembered all the advice I had given him, word for word, from 5 years ago. He and his theatre company had taken 5 years to come to the conclusion that what they really wanted to do was to do exactly what I said in the first place.

Although that might be a slow realisation process, I think its really great, as I know that his company will do really well in the future, and I am confident of their success.

Some people spend their entire lives trying to figure out every little detail along the way, but you have to be smart enough to ask for help, even if you don’t act on it right away.

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