We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clinton Norris. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clinton below.
Clinton, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?
Sooner. The earlier you start the more time you have to hone in on your craft and it gives you room to pivot.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Clinton Norris! And I’ve been a hairdresser for 16 years now! Before I joined the hair industry, I traveled the world playing music for a living! In that time, I did a bunch of exciting things! Lots of fun tours, and I got to meet a lot of the people I looked up to! At some point, I wanted to venture on my own and create something for myself! Loads of people told me that I should be a hairdresser! So I took a chance and enrolled in hair school and I haven’t looked back since! Since then I have traveled the country teaching hairdressers how to own the craft of haircutting better as well as owning my own salon and education company. Along the way, I have picked up the passion for creating videos for the fitness world, the hair industry, and for small businesses!
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
What I think non-creatives don’t understand about a creatives work is that it takes longer than you think. There is so much that goes into an hour haircut. Years and years of practice. Hours and hours of doubt. Years and years of watching, and learning from other professionals.
This even happens when I’m creating social media assets for brands. they think you just point a camera and click around on your computer. But there are hours that are taken up by organization, picking a song for the video, dialing in assets that you can download for your creative work. And this is the one thing that will sell your brand, better than others! Yet it’s the last thing that comes to a business owners mind.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Before I was a hairdresser, I played music. And after I decided to leave that industry, I was lost on a career path. So pivoting to me means that you turned 180° and go a different direction. But instead of taking that mindset, I decided to transfer the skills I learned from playing music into haircutting and videography. We don’t necessarily have to jump out of our lives and start a brand new one when we switch careers.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: clintoncutshair