Making money with your work: The Picasso Vs the Van Gogh method

It is the law of the market, if people are interested in your work, no matter the reason, you can make a lot of money. If people are not interested in what you do, no matter how well you do it.

Designers, software developers and other people who can do valuable work quickly and enjoying it seem to face a moral problem with charging good money for it, and when they not, they have a bad time explaining the price to clients that ask why would you charge so much for something that you will do in little time and enjoying it.

Why is the client wrong on these assumptions?

It takes your whole life to do the job
Two days for you are the same time that two days for him. The reason why he wouldn’t be able to complete the task in that time is because, actually, it doesn’t take 2 days, it takes a whole lifetime. As a client, he is “lucky” to catch you in the last two days of the several years it took you to create the mind set necessary to complete hist task.

He is not supposed to pay for all your education, of course, but he is supposed to pay for a part of it in a way that on the end of your life, your clients and employers had paid for every course you took, every book you bought, every second of your time invested.

The client have to pay for the potential your work has to make him make good business.
You are not being paid for your trouble, you are being paid for the potential your work could represent to his business. If he is going or not make enough profit with your work to worth the price is something he should consider on his business plan, but his is not doing you any favor in letting you have some fun with his company.

He might as well have fun with his work, but if he doesn’t is not of your business as much as is not his whether you like yours.

It might be a game for you, but is not a game for him
Yes, it might be a game for you. Yet, famous football players are among the richest people in the world and what they do as a profession is described as “play”. It might be a game for them, but if the sponsors want them to win the matches they had to pay them, and nobody seems to find that wrong.

Of course is a terrible strategy to throw the list above on your client’s face. That would not only make you lose the client, but will make of you a bad professional, because respect is fundamental on any professional relationship (or even any relationship at all, for that matter), but sometimes you have to keep your standards and say no!.

Promote yourself!

How to make people interested in your work? Promote yourself!

Today, the owner of a Van Gogh can live well just by auctioning its original, but Van Gogh himself wasn’t able to sell a single picture in his lifetime, unless you consider a sell the picture his doctor accepted as payment on Van Gogh’s death bed because he had no other currency to pay him.

Van Gogh wasn’t really promoting himself at any moment of his life. His relationship with his art was an inner struggle and he didn’t envisioned his importance to other people.

Picasso, on the other hand is doubtlessly gifted, but he was very concerned in showing his importance. The very name he is know for, Picasso, is his mother’s surname. He chose not to be know as Pablo Ruiz — his father’s surname — because he though Ruiz was a name too common to describe him, this is raw promotion, and in his case, seemed to pay off.

I am not an Art Historian and I’m not able to debate many details on the life of these two painters but, as far as I can understand it, despite his enormous talent, is actually promotion that actually took Picasso to a life of wealth and recognition, as opposed to Van Gogh, who died in misery and as opposed to many people today that might be even more talented than Van Gogh, but are making much less that any owner of one of his original pictures.