The Big Money — and the Big Work — Is in the Waiting

Wait, what?! I want it now. I have bills to pay.

Charlie Munger's line — "the big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting" — was written about stocks, but I don't know a truer sentence about building a creative art career. Sort of.

Almost every young artist I've watched come through my studio space wants the transaction: finish the piece, get it seen, sell it, move to the next one. And you have to do that — commerce keeps the lights on. But the actual value in an artistic life isn't built in any single transaction. It's built in the years between transactions, when nobody's watching, when you're developing a voice that doesn't yet have a market and might not for a while.

And here's the part most people miss: your art can be generating income for you even before you've sold the piece.

The Bread and Butter Nobody Talks About

This is uncomfortable advice in a culture obsessed with speed. Everyone wants the viral piece, the overnight gallery pickup, the single painting that changes everything. Those stories get told because they're rare, not because they're representative. The representative story is much less cinematic: an artist works in relative obscurity for years, refining a sensibility, absorbing rejection, building a small and then a slightly larger audience of people who actually understand what they're doing — and then one day the "overnight success" arrives, built entirely on the compounding of all that unglamorous waiting.

In the meantime, there's other work to do. Get your work licensed — there are reputable companies that will represent your work and handle all the grit: reproduction, mailing, and fulfillment. You can also sell reproductions of your own work. Years ago, before I opened my studio and gallery to the public, I went around and interviewed galleries about the business. What did I learn? Reproductions were the bread and butter of every gallery I visited. Original sales were just an added bonus, a surprise on top.

With today's technology, you don't need overhead. You can print one at a time, as orders come in — on your own printer or through a qualified local print company.

I know, I know — you don't want to do it. You're special. That's fine. Keep doing what you're doing and you'll keep getting what you're getting.

The Emotional Curriculum

Munger also talked about needing patience, discipline, and agility to take losses without going crazy. Substitute "rejections" for "losses" and you have the entire emotional curriculum of a creative career.

A show that doesn't sell — I've had those. Yes, it sucks. Then six months later, everything that came back to you from that show, you end up selling yourself. Has that happened to you? It's happened to me. More than once. It's hard to figure out why. Maybe the gallery's clientele was the wrong crowd? I doubt it. Maybe the venue had lousy sales staff. Does it really matter? You wound up with the work back in your hands — and this time, when you sold it yourself, you kept the whole price instead of splitting it with the gallery. Effectively doubling your income on that same piece.

Now, if you'd had the chance to pre-sell prints of it too, along the way, you'd have made even more. Here's another thing. I've had shows sell out at galleries. We had great rapport. And then, never invited back. Who knows what happened? Don't fuss over such things. They have their own issues. Moving right along! You've got the originals. Now what? How can you get your art that is sitting around working for you? Like I said earlier: make prints. That's how. Or get someone else to do it. Or both!

Let's say you made prints. You signed and numbered them. Selling them for one hundred dollars each, you sold one and made a hundred bucks. (Heck, for all I know you made ten or twenty of them and sold all of them. Congratulations! You superstar!) Split up the earnings: put thirty percent away for taxes, twenty percent into an investment account — that's the long-haul stuff, the part that makes Charlie smile. The rest goes into your business account, for when you pay yourself at the end of the month. Because you're going to sell more than one or all the prints. Right? Get an accountant or bookkeeper for money advice — not me.

And if you've got a day job, don't quit it until you have enough saved to survive for a year. You'll need that cushion to surf what I call the rhythm.

Artists, like writers, know this rhythm: a manuscript that gets fifty passes before one yes. A body of work the market ignores for a decade before it clicks. None of that is evidence you're on the wrong path. It's the ordinary texture of the waiting period, and the artists who survive it are the ones who've made peace with the fact that it's supposed to feel like this.

I used to keep my stack of gallery rejection letters so I could look at them and laugh. Hundreds of them. Persistent — I'll give myself that much. Be persistent. It was disappointing at first.

But persistence doesn't have to feel like defeat. Deep down, I knew my art was good. And I started noticing something: everywhere there was an empty wall, there was an opportunity for me to have my own gallery.

Don't Trust the Noise

There's a related idea I find myself repeating to artists frustrated with slow growth: don't let short-term thinking cloud your judgment. A single bad sales quarter, a cold reception to a new direction, or a rejection letter — none of it is data about your life's work. It's noise inside a much longer signal. Artists who make decisions based on this month's numbers end up chasing trends instead of developing a voice — and a chased trend is worn out by the time you catch it. Remember the gray trend? Now thrift stores are full of bland gray sofas.

The natural rhythm of the universe is highs and lows. That's just its frequency. Ride the waves. Not every day can be a banner sales day, but you can control your thoughts about the lows. You might not control your first disappointing thought — that's natural — but you can control the second one. Don't keep going down the negative whirlpool.

Here's a big one. Remember playing Show and Tell in grade school? Well, that's your life now. You're going to play Show and Tell with everyone. It's called sales and marketing. It goes something like this:

"Hi, I'm RD, and I made this — wrote this — on my summer vacation…"

What Waiting Actually Looks Like, Day to Day

• Showing up to the studio or the page on days when nothing is selling and nobody is watching. Learning how to make prints in Photoshop or other apps.
• Resisting the urge to abandon a developing body of work the first time it underperforms. Researching and finding three or more art companies where your work fits and where you can license it.
• Treating a quiet period as accumulated vacation time, not failure — this is when the real work of finding your voice happens. Just chill the F out today and appreciate your talent. Appreciation and gratitude lead to greatness.
• Taking those signed prints you made and donating one or three, not your originals, to your favorite charity for an auction. This is also marketing. Be sure to include your contact information on everything that leaves your studio, kitchen table, desk, or wherever your creative genius happens.
• Separating your sense of worth from this week's sales, because if you don't, the waiting will break you before it pays off.
• Playing Show and Tell. To everyone. Put your art on a two-sided business card.

Remember: the frequency waves we're all surfing change.

The reward for this kind of patience isn't guaranteed — especially if you aren't putting yourself out there, sharing your gifts, and talking about your work. But the absence of patience guarantees you'll never find out. Every mature artistic voice I've ever seen up close was built the same way capital compounds — slowly, invisibly, and then all at once.

On a side note, I'm writing this on a quiet day in my studio. I thought it would be one of those "where is everybody?" days. I'm grateful to say I've had five sales by the time I've written this last word.