Feedback from Rob on running the First process on Mon

Robert Poynton | rob@oyf.com | oyf.com | IP: 196.14.132.5 Hola. This is Rob. He of the loud T shirt. Monday night may well not have been what you were expecting from a business course. Which is perhaps a learning in itself. Personally, as someone that straddles business and creative worlds I think Fletcher was right - its not ‘us’ and ‘them’, which I think implies not so much learning a new language, but learning to find a way to use what you already have in a new context. If you feel like an imposter when you step into the business world you should remember that so do most business people, most of the time. The other thing I think is huge, is to disconnect price and worth, in your own mind (or heart). Price is what someone will pay for something, worth is a completely different question. So what you charge is not what you are worth. If you don’t make this distinction it can be hard to charge proper money, because you are always putting your personal worth in play. By the same token, even if you can charge a lot, that doesn’t make what you do necessarily good. For me it was a revelation when I realised that most stuff gets sold because of how much energy and work people put into selling it, not because of how good it is. When some other improv group got hired for a big job I used to think they must be better than us. They might be, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. Realising this helped me a lot. I am talking about my stuff, business stuff, here, though Max’s story, which I thought was very helpful, made the same point about art (when she dressed up to deliver her work to a gallery). Being business-like isn’t alien. It just requires common sense and clarity and energy and discipline just like anything else. Hopefully, by the end of the course, you will end up wondering why any of this ever seemed strange at all…..