Why do artists with great art and marketing aptitude still fail if expectations are set incorrectly?

Even if an artist has great art, is decent at marketing, has a serious aptitude to learn, and has good technical skills, when their expectations are set incorrectly—when they’re told it’s going to be easy, quick, or that they don’t have to do much—you can almost never rescue that person as a successful business owner. Setting incorrect expectations is incredibly powerful in a negative way. If someone believes success will happen quickly and easily, they’ll quit when reality doesn’t match those expectations. Conversely, when expectations are set correctly from the beginning—acknowledging it will take years, be difficult at first, and require consistent effort on both creating and marketing—that person has the mental framework to persist through the challenging early period when most others give up. Properly set expectations are one of the greatest assets an artist can have.

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Asked by general teaching point · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2023-07-19