I’ve always had a clear idea of the career I want to build, but I hit a significant learning curve after ten years of aggressively building. At that point, I had been saying yes to every lecture opportunity, teaching opportunity, commercial assignment and every opening. I hit a point where that was no longer sustainable, and I’d also had enough initial success to take my foot off the gas for a minute. And yet, I struggled with learning to say no. It felt so counterintuitive. I had to learn to trust my gut and overcome the fear of missing out. 

Becoming a parent also required honing my priorities because my ability to travel, my work time and my money all became more limited, and that has forced me to be really intentional about my work. This was never a limitation; it actually provides a kind of structure that’s been positive for me. 

My strategy has always been to get my work in front of as many people as possible and meet as many people as possible, knowing that any connection could take a long time to yield something. I’ve always had this blind faith that things will happen if you put yourself out there enough. When I was younger, I would also reverse engineer the CVs of artists I admired. I would look at artists five or ten years ahead of me and see where they exhibited, what grants they got, and what collections they were in. It gave me all these avenues to pursue and insight into how I could craft my career.