About Today’s Subject:
Dan Christofferson
Day Job: Marketing / Biz for Big Cartel, Artist, Illustrator, Designer
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Websites: BeeTeeth, Big Cartel
Twitter: @robotwithwings
Attracting Opportunities by Pursuing Your Passion
I met Dan at a very interesting time, soon after a pretty big change in his life. Just 9 months prior to interviewing him, he had begun working for Big Cartel doing marketing, promotion, and social media. His transition from working at design shops for 6-7 years to working for Big Cartel was a fascinating one, and we discussed it in detail. His story is a great example to me of how we attract opportunities to ourselves whenever we take a leap of faith to pursue our passions. Dan had made the decision to dive headfirst into making a living full-time as an artist, and he even took a month-long sabbatical to Europe and New York, visiting gallery after gallery meeting curators and promoting his artwork. What seems like a pretty casual conversation with a friend of his during this period grew into an opportunity to go to work for Big Cartel putting his promotional chops to work to help other artists promote themselves while allowing him the time to keep making his art. It’s a case where timing seemed to work out perfectly for both Dan and the team at Big Cartel, and he decided to take the plunge.
“I don’t need to stay in any sort of race. I don’t need to run ahead of anybody. I can let things go at my own pace and enjoy it just as much.”
-Dan Christofferson
Dan is a wildly talented painter. At the 2011 Weapons of Mass Creation Fest, he did a live art demonstration. (Be sure to take a look at his amazing painting from WMCFest.) He was one of the featured speakers there as well. Growing up in Salt Lake City, a sense of place has had a huge influence on his artistic vision, and his artwork and illustrations have been largely inspired by “stories of exile, secrets, faith, and a massive, dead, salty lake in the middle of the desert.”*
A Few Insights from My Conversation with Dan
- When you are true to your passions, you often attract opportunities to yourself. This certainly seems true in the case of Dan. By deciding to pursue art full-time, he landed a position with Big Cartel that would allow him to pursue his art while also developing his promotional skills through helping other artists.
- Let things go at your own pace. You don’t have to follow other people’s lead. You don’t have to live the way society tells you to live. The more you can quiet the other voices, the easier it is to understand who you are and live the way you want to live.
- If you have too many ideas in your head, start acting on them one-by-one. Dan and I share this in common. He has such a flood of ideas that it’s been hard to pick just one to work on. But he shares that lately he’s been working to make the ideas “stop screaming” at him by acting on them – creating a product or a piece, making a painting, etc. And now he’s trying to take that a step further by taking each project to a point to where it’s done.
Okay, how about some videos now?
You can pick from:
1. Just a little taste (3-min clip).
2. The feast (full 15-min interview)
Just a Little Taste (3-min clip)
The Feast (full 15-min interview)
A Viewer’s Guide
- Brief intro to who he is and something he’s working on that he’s excited about
- Studying fine art at Weber State
- Deciding to leave the design shop life
- Big Cartel
- Feeling too comfortable and deciding to move on
- The biggest lessons he’s learned since he’s gone out on his own
- Idea overload and how he handles it
- What’s mattered the most so far
- Slowing down to enjoy 3 meals a day
- Learning to follow his own pace
- Quieting the other voices
*About the quote above: Taken from Dan’s “About Me” page:
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