We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Thomas Taylor a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Thomas, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?

For readers to understand the point I’m ultimately going to impart, I will need to talk a little about my job history.

When I was young, I had lawn jobs, assembled trophies in a trophy shop, worked for a watch company filing invoices and distributing sales fliers on cars, as well as a few other jobs here and there.

At university, I went through teacher training, and taught students in rural, urban, and suburban settings on the elementary, junior high, and high school levels. I taught students who were in special education and remedial classes, I taught slow-learners, mainstream students, accelerated students, gifted students, advanced placement students, and honors levels students. This while working as a janitor to make my way through school.

As an adult I worked as a courier, a bookkeeper, supervised a bookkeeping department that balanced the books for 150 community banks, and worked for a consulting firm that served non-profits.

Perhaps the best things about those jobs in my opinion, was getting to see things other people seldom got to see, and learning about aspects of people’s lives that they kept mostly private and quiet.

Cutting lawns meant I mowed the grass in people’s backyards, and it’s in backyards that some people tend to have their personal sanctuaries. I saw patios, barbecues, statuary, birdhouses, putting greens, shuttlecock and volleyball nets, butterfly gardens, garden vignettes, and herb and vegetable gardens.

At the trophy shop, I made so many awards that I came to see them as a combination of marble, sheet metal, bushings, core rods, and metallic figurines, But the people who received these awards prized them, and loved them. Their self-esteem was inflated by them. That was my first real job, and I and the other kids seemed to feel that this was the first step to bigger and better things. Minimum wage was only $3.35 an hour, and we were only allowed to work a few hours a day during the school year, but when we got our paychecks, we felt rich. Summers we worked more hours, and really raked in the dough. Someday, we would put this job on our resumes and get better jobs and become even more rich.

While I was a boy putting invoices in numerical order and filing them in an office, I watched the men and women around me as they struggled to meet deadlines, and overheard them as they bantered and gossiped in the lunchroom. I saw flirtation going on between a man and a woman, and once I saw an instance of passive aggressiveness between workers. Most of the chatter and antics went undetected by their bosses, who were hyper-focused on keeping the workers working and the deadlines met.

Distributing sales fliers afforded me the experience of seeing how other people lived. As I put slips of paper under windshield wipers, I recorded the sights and sounds and smells of the neighborhoods I walked through. Rich and poor. Residential and industrial. I absently noted makes and models of cars, the condition they were in, what kind of trinkets were tied to the rear view mirrors, what kind of things were sitting on the dashboard. I was never interested in stealing anything, you should understand. Nor was I being nosy. I was just making mental notes.

When I did my clinical experiences and observations and teaching in schools, I saw every emotion you might expect a student to have. Boredom, interest, excitement, distraction, apathy. You could see their minds working as they ingested and digested what I was teaching them. As a student, I had been told that my education was what I made of it, but as a teacher, I felt my students’ educations were in my hands.

When I worked as a janitor, I discovered you could learn a lot about a person by what they threw away. Someone had a chocolate addiction. There was a fellow who came in on Sundays and drank twelve cans of beer while he watched TV on a portable TV set. One of the women was having an affair. Another woman kept her desk and her garbage as neat as a pin. There was a man who injected himself with insulin at his desk when he thought his coworkers weren’t looking. Two co-workers were passing love notes to each other just about every day.

I took a courier job at one of the places I cleaned for, and then I found myself having a slightly different view of that particular business. Now I was going in and out of the mail room with bins full of letters, driving proof work from bank branches to bank bookkeeping operations, leaving empty mail bins on the loading docks at the post office, etc. As a janitor, I hardly ever saw anyone around. Now I was seeing people, but the ones I was seeing were working in coveralls, or business casual attire. These were the people most likely to smoke in the alley among the dumpsters during breaks, or hang out on the roof at lunchtime.

When I took a job as bookkeeper at that same office – a bank – I felt like I was a part of a machine. Now, I was able to associate faces with nameplates, empty desks, and trash cans. It was hard for me to earn their trust at first, when they knew I knew their secrets. But I wore formal business attire as they did, and after I learned to be like them, and carry myself the way they outwardly carried themselves, they grew to accept me.

After I became a supervisor for a bookkeeping department that balanced the books for 150 community banks, I no longer felt like a cog in a machine. I now ran the machine. It was then that I saw yet another aspect of people. I checked their reconcilements and spreadsheets, and so I knew where their bookkeeping deficiencies lay, One of my workers could only work part time for health reasons, Another kept having to leave early and make up time because his son was causing problems at school, and the principal kept calling to have his son picked up. I suspected, but was not sure, that one of the women I was in charge with might have an abusive husband,

But there is was: I had gone from blue collar to white collar. No one could say to me “You don’t know what it’s like to _______ ” when I had done so many jobs at so many different levels at so many different times of day, in so many different communities.

And new experiences continued to happen as I got another job. When I worked for a consulting firm for non-profits, I met celebrities, politicians, business executives, and all manner of movers and shakers who were major donors or board members of charities and non-profits. I also met average, everyday working men and women who wanted to make a difference in the world. When you really get to know all these people you discover that at their core, people are people, and money is an abstract divider between them that ought not to be there. Most people are fundamentally good, earnest, altruistic, and philanthropic in their own way.

But here is the point I am trying to make: I don’t believe a writer, or an artist, or a poet, or a photographer can capture the essence of a person, or how they work, play, live, and behave, without an in-depth study of humanity. My jobs gave me the opportunity to step into other people’s shoes and walk around in them sometimes, and to observe them from different viewpoints also. I try to reflect what I have seen, heard, smelled, felt, in every creative thing I do. For me, that is the value of  so-called “real jobs”. The lesson I have learned is that coming to any creative endeavor with preconceived notions about who a person is, or how a person behaves, or how they work or play or where they live will not serve you. You must strive to get past your own personal experiences and see people the way they are, if you can.

All the time that I was working -from boyhood to adulthood- I was also writing and painting and taking pictures, and I do truly believe that my work improves as time goes on. I attribute this forward progress to the life-experiences I’ve gotten from working, and what I’ve learned from the jobs I’ve held.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers?

I am an author, an artist, a poet, and photographer.

My stories, novels, poetry, and non-fiction are written under my name and many pseudonyms. I have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and I have self-published.

I’ve sold artwork (acrylic on canvas) that now hangs in the US, Canada, and Hungary, and for a period of four years, I co-painted commercial art with my wife (Elyse Bruce) that was used nationwide to advertise a literary festival in the area where we live.

Other paintings I have done can be found on record albums and book covers, and photos I have taken have been used as book covers.

My intent from the earliest years of my childhood was to try to publish stories and sell artwork, so I was always creating no matter what life’s responsibilities entailed. While I was in school, I wrote and did artwork in my free time. If I had jobs, I wrote and did artwork in my free time. If I had romantic relationships, I wrote and did artwork in my free time.

Initially, the generation and submission of my work was a mechanical process. I kept a ledger of which publications I submitted literature and poetry and artwork to, and whether or not there was a response to those submissions, and what the response was if I got one. This allowed me to keep all my stories and poems and artwork in circulation for perusal by editors, and to have an idea of what their publication status was at any given time.

The first time I got an acceptance letter -TWO stories were to be published in ONE magazine- I was of course pleased, but I hardly allowed myself to enjoy the occasion because even as I was reading the acceptance letter, I was stuffing envelopes with submissions of other stories.

I have now reached a point where I submit less but get published more, and I make sure to allow myself the pleasure that occurs when something I submit has been accepted. Still, I “push the envelope” in other ways. A few years ago I submitted two stories to an anthology. One of those stories was submitted under my name, and another I submitted under a pen name. Both were accepted by the editor of the book before he knew the pseudonym was me. He published both of them in the book.

My works are unique in the sense that I do not write or paint or photograph to please an audience. I do what I want for myself, and people can take it or leave it. I do not adhere to any formulas with regard to story writing, and though my paintings can be distinguished from others by my own style, I gravitate to no established styles, and have little formal training.

For me, all creative works are a form of expression. If you want to know what I think, then read what I’ve written. If you want to know how I see things, then look at my paintings, or try to see my photographs through the lens of my camera.

At the same time, if you hire me to do a painting (as was the case with a Chamber of Commerce that wanted to promote the literary festival I mentioned earlier) I will give you a painting of the subject matter you asked for, and I will strive to give you what you want, but in my signature painting style. If you don’t like what I’ve done, we can part company amicably.

To be succinct: I try hard to please my clients, but my belief is that I must be true to myself in order to provide the best product I can. If I am copying others’ styles, then I am not an artist, but a copy machine.

These viewpoints about writing and poetry, and artwork, and photography must be working for me, because the literature, artwork and photography continue to go out, and the royalties continue to come in.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Given that I’m in the creative industry, I think people would be surprised to learn that the inspiration for my creative entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy comes from reading the perspectives, biographies, and autobiographies of businessmen and businesswomen.

I’ve read, for example, the books written by John C. Bogle, founder and chief executive of The Vanguard Group. While I had read his books with the intent of learning how to successfully invest in mutual funds, what the books taught me is that unseasoned investors make emotional decisions that, in the end, don’t serve them well, whereas informed investors can step around the pitfalls others often get lured into. Specifically, invest in funds that are based in your own country. Invest in funds that invest in companies that are in your own country. Invest in companies that provide needs, and not wants. We NEED energy, healthcare, utilities and certain precious metals. With regard to household items, we may WANT fancy cars and clothes, but when push comes to shove, if we are financially strapped we buy what we can afford, so invest in companies which provide needs to the majority of the populace. Speculation is wishful thinking. Do not speculate, unless the industry you are speculating in has identified a new need and is providing for it. (Examples: Apple and Microsoft before they became what they are now.)Invest for the long haul. If the funds provide a good return, people will flock to them. But at the same time, don’t follow the herd, because people can be like lemmings running into the sea.

How does all of that relate to creative endeavors?

Write what you know. Stick with what is familiar. If you write in a particular genre, fill in the gaps where existing literature is lacking. (Satisfy the need, in other words.) If you are the first to write something that people have never seen before, be the best at what you do, so that followers can only succeed you instead of overtake you. Stay the course if at first things seem rocky.

If you paint subjects outside of your skill set, either learn about how to paint subjects that are outside of your purview, or don’t make the attempt. Buyers buy what they like and buyers buy depictions of things they know about. You’re not going to sell a painting of a train engine if you put the wheels in the wrong place. If you put the wheels in the right place, they’re not going to like the painting if you paint the painting poorly.

As with artwork, admit to yourself that with photography, despite the fact that you might be trying to say something you think the world needs to know, sometimes people buy a picture because it’s pretty. At the same time, remember that, yes, you can get rich running pretty pictures out of your studio like lumber out of a mill, but the value in good furniture is ascribed more to the craftsmanship than the wood the piece is made of. A photograph is an image produced by film and chemicals. But nearly anyone can distinguish an Ansel Adams from a tourist snapshot. Aspire to be an Adams if you want to succeed and to be known. Anyone can be a tourist, and luck on to taking a good picture.

To restate everything: Find a niche. If you cannot find one that suits you, make one. Strive to be the first and the best. That way, everyone who wants to be like you has to catch up to you, even as people who like what you do invest in you by buying your product. Never give up. Once you start on your endeavor, stay with it for the long haul.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

If you find yourself listening to music and thinking to yourself that it all sounds the same…

If you find yourself watching TV and thinking that most shows look the same…

If you find yourself thinking that the books selling at your favorite bookstore are written by the same best-selling authors every time you go in…

If you find that most paintings look alike at every craft show or art gallery you go to….

It’s not some strange coincidence. The arts and entertainment industry has become homogenized. You can read opinions espousing this view in trade publications. The big conglomerates which hold the most market share know what sells and try to keep the virtual and real store shelves stocked with what they believe the public wants. This is how they remain profitable. Why take a risk on something unproven when the proven is already paying their salaries?

There is some value in the idea that creative works should be produced for the masses. Bread, milk and eggs are something nearly every one of us has bought at the grocery store. But there are other things to buy too. Special treats that are just as healthy, if not more so, but which don’t have such a wide swatch of the aisle.

If you as a consumer want to support those of us who are creative, then buy our works and tell others about them. If you’ve had enough of the same songs, same books, same artwork, or whatever, stop buying those. Spend your money on us. Because at our core, we’re like you. The reason we got into the field in the first place was to share how WE see things and share how WE feel things so that YOU could look at things and feel things in a new way.. We didn’t put all of our efforts into our creative works in order to be seen as a grain of sand on a beach. Which is more appealing to you to look at and hold? A grain of sand, or a shell, or a piece of coral? Which causes a more emotive response?

When you invest in us, we try our best to give you the highest return on your investment.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thomasdtaylor.wordpress.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Author-Thomas-D-Taylor-Fan-Page-Official-271277696233883
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttaylor_author/
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Taylor/e/B005LLGQU6

Image Credits
Author Photos: Elyse Bruce Artwork and Book Photos: Thomas D. Taylor