The Creative Business Series · Post 3
I want to say something that might sound like ego and isn’t.
Over the years I’ve tiled bathrooms, built workshop spaces, developed bespoke software, designed websites, painted in oils, watercolour and acrylics, taught hundreds of students, run a holiday let, and now I’m building an AI co-pilot system from near scratch. And I’ve done most of it at a level that would embarrass a lot of people who specialised.
I’m not saying this to impress anyone. I’m saying it because for most of my adult life I’ve treated this breadth as a problem.
Too scattered. Can’t focus. Moves on when things get competent and the rote sets in. Half da Vinci, half cat that got distracted by something shiny.
I’m not sure I believe that any more.
🦅 What the 80/20 Brain Actually Does
There’s a pattern I’ve only recently named properly.
I reach about 70-80% competence in something (the point where I understand it well, can do it properly, and have extracted the main value from the learning), and then the pull to go somewhere else becomes very strong. Not weakness of character. More like a kind of internal signal: this is absorbed, what’s next?
The rote doesn’t interest me. The mastery phase does. I want to know how something works, develop enough genuine skill to use it properly, and then move.
This means I have broad, working knowledge across a lot of domains. That sounds like a liability in a world that rewards deep specialists.
But there’s a kind of work where it’s actually the thing.
🔗 Where Breadth Becomes the Advantage
Teaching creative people is one of them.
The artist who only paints can teach painting. But the artist who paints, understands digital workflow, knows how to document and sell their work, has built a workshop space with their own hands, understands the marketing of creative education, and has made the career transition themselves: that person can teach the whole thing. Not just the skill, but the life around the skill.
That’s what Creative Path 52 is. It’s not a painting course. It’s a system for building a creative practice and a sustainable income around it. To teach that system, you need to have lived most of it. Breadth isn’t decorative; it’s the substance.
The AI work is the same. I’m not a software engineer. I don’t write production-grade code. But I understand systems, I know how to brief a build, I recognise when an AI model has gone off track, and I’ve built something — iteratively, imperfectly, over hundreds of hours — that actually works. That combination of generalist intelligence and hands-on experience produces a different kind of knowledge than specialisation does.
🧩 The Juxtaposition That’s Actually the Point
There’s a post I want to write — maybe a series — that uses photos of me on tools. Tiling. Building. Drilling. Alongside photos of studio work, paintings, tech builds.
Not to show off. To make a point about the person you’re buying from.
Creative entrepreneurs are often told to niche down. One thing. One audience. One message. And there’s wisdom in that for marketing. But it can produce a version of yourself that’s smaller than you actually are. A curated slice that’s easier to explain but less interesting to know.
I’d rather the full picture be visible. Because the full picture is the argument for what I’m building.
The person who laid his own floors built the discipline that kept him painting during a difficult year. The person who built software systems has a different relationship with AI tools than someone encountering them for the first time. The DIY and the art and the tech aren’t separate stories. They’re the same one.
💡 The Question Worth Asking
If you’ve moved through multiple careers or skills and always felt slightly guilty about it (as if the movement was evidence of some flaw), it might be worth asking a different question.
Not: why can’t I stay in one lane?
But: what am I actually building across all of them?
The answer, for a lot of people, is a compound skill set that doesn’t have a name yet, but does have an audience. Specifically: people who are in an earlier version of the same place you’ve been.
That’s not a niche. That’s a calling.
The Creative Business series at damiansemonin.art and creativepath52.com explores what building a creative practice and business at mid-life actually involves.
