Chapter One

The first chapter of the book The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love by Jackie Battenfield talks about the importance of making a plan. She teaches through her own experience of being unorganized and how it jeopardized the quality of her work. Time management and tasks became easier with each check list she made. This chapter persuades the reader to make a plan of their own. The process takes steps which she listed in the book. In order, the steps are dream big, write your obituary (made to make you see what you value most in life), set your goals (both long term and short term), establish action plan, and, finally, take action. She tells the reader that the plan is made by you; therefore it should only be viewed by you. Battenfield even revealed how she was embarrassed by some of her plans, so she decided to include only a select few to know about them when she was ready. The plans were made to be adjusted according to events that show up unexpectedly.
The next sections focus mainly on how to exactly follow through with her suggested steps. For “dream big”, she inspires the reader to write down anything they want to be. She uses examples of Olympic competitors. The next one, “write your obituary”, is to show the reader what they really want to be. It helps to realize which goals are more important than others. “Set your goals” is made just to help organized and view what needs to be done. “Establish you action plan” comes with a how-to on making a timeline. These timelines will give a ballpark figure of when and how the plan will be done. She even encourages creating a yearly plan as well. Finally, “take action” is meant to motivate the reader to act upon their plans. The plan wasn’t made to look at. Overall, the chapter is very useful for artists to value and think about often.