Guillebeau says: “My mission is to help people live unconventional lives, make their own choices, and change the world.” He has never had a “real” job, having been self-employed his entire adult life. Guillebeau sells advice but he also gives away a lot of very interesting and inspiring content, like his “A Brief Guide To World Domination”, available in PDF format. Here are a few interesting tidbits:

“You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.” Now that’s music to an artist’s ears, right?

“You can focus the majority of your time on the things you enjoy, and you can also make an incredible difference in the lives of other people while you are at it.”

“…you need to devote as much time as it takes to find out what you can offer the world that no one else can.”

“When you finally come out with something truly worth caring about, people will notice.”

I just signed up for Guillebeau’s email updates, so I’m looking forward to reading more of his stuff. He also recently published a for-pay report called “Art and Money: How to Thrive as an Artist Without Selling Out”. I’m thinking of purchasing that, and if I do I’ll write a review of it here. In the meantime, here’s a preview video:

I’ve been wearing mine since yesterday, and even though my breastfeeding days are long gone, I love this ring! The tiny letters are subtly small, so this is not like trying to wear your nursing bracelet out in public. No one would know what it is unless you showed them. This attractive ring goes everywhere – to the store, out to eat, or anywhere your day takes you. You can even sleep with it on, which helps for that groggy first feeding of the day (or middle of the night).

Sterling breastfeeding reminder ring $60

It’s that desire to make something “completely new” and different that can lead to forced, stiff, and even sometimes dead, artistic output. It is forced because I wasn’t led by the creative spirit inside me, but instead by an outside drive, namely, to please the imaginary “other”. It’s not the creation of something new that leads to stiffness, but the fact that the push came from the outside instead of growing naturally from the inside. That’s not good because invariably, whatever I produce when I am being moved by outside forces doesn’t please me and doesn’t have that quality of artistic vitality.

Sometimes when this overwhelming (or underwhelming, or as a friend used to say, whelming) boredom starts, I go back and look at some of my old abandoned projects. I am usually amazed at how much I like them now! I don’t always use them for anything – just simply looking at them tends to inspire me toward other things. Other times, I just put the tools down and walk away for the day, or even a couple of days. I give myself permission to back up from the “trees” or the details of the creative process, so that I can change my perspective and see the forest. Usually just a little while of gazing at the beautiful green forest is enough to convince me that the trees are pretty darn good the way they are.

Sterling wrapped carnelian earrings $35

For me, designs come in a much more haphazard way. Sometimes I don’t even really feel qualified to call myself a jewelry “designer” for just such a reason. I do design all my pieces, but to call myself a designer sort of makes it sound like I’ve been at this for professionally trained decades – and that’s just not the case. Anyway, my designs sort of just float through my head and I try to grab them and hold them. They’re never completely “unfuzzy” in this infant state – my main task is to tie an anchor to them to let them float but keep them from floating away. I miss a good percentage of them, and they go off into my brain sky, getting smaller and smaller until I can’t see them anymore, so high that they must eventually pop and fall back down to the soil of creativity in my head, to sprout again as something quite different on another day.

I never sketch my designs. I think that must be an awesome way to capture ideas, but it just doesn’t work for me. I think it’s because my designs remain fuzzy throughout the process, until they are finally brought into focus by the medium and by my hands. To draw the design is to commit it to something before it is ready to be committed, and that act consigns it to death.

The way my weird brain works is that I have a kind of shape-shifting idea, not really totally sure where I’m going with it, and I sit down and start working with the metal or the gemstones or whatever it is. And the idea responds to the movement and activity in my hands and begins to flow, almost as if it were electricity that was powering my body, and the idea comes to life. Sometimes it is quite different from what I thought I saw in my mind – but it is always either recognizable to me, or a logical progression from the fuzzy picture in my brain. Sometimes I might even think that my final design was the result of a “mistake” – but I have begun to learn that there are very few actual mistakes when it comes to designing this way. What I think is a mistake is just an unexpected direction. When I set the “mistake” down and come back to it another day, I can many times see the original intent and not just an error.

One of my most popular designs is my Bud and Leaf ring. This ring is the result of one of those “mistakes”. Originally it was supposed to be a simple ring with a little concave domed disc soldered on. But the disc got too hot and it crumpled a little and got crooked. I grabbed the pliers and pinched one side of it – I honestly can’t remember why now – and it looked just like a little leaf. So I melted a bit of silver into a ball and soldered that right next to the leaf. “No one will ever take a ring like this seriously,” I thought, “after all, it’s a mistake.” I set the ring aside for three months, never really intending to do anything with it except maybe melt it down for scrap.

But I found the ring again one day while rummaging around on my (rather cluttered) bench, and it was at this time that I could see the intent of the design and I knew that was what the ring was meant to be all along. It just took some time for me to realize it. Such is life – not just in designing jewelry, but in every area.

Bud and Leaf Ring, from Sterling $27