Light can help you live a better life…if you can afford it.
Someday my personal journey with light may come to an end, marked by the moment I arrive at the ocean after a transcontinental voyage, dip my toes in the water, and finally relax a bit. Today, it seems like I made it to the mountains, the last big obstacle between me and the goal, and have been climbing upwards for several years. It is tiring, even exhausting at times, yet each peak crested affords me beautiful views and the exhilaration that comes from a hard climb.
It is also easier to see the way forward from up in the mountains, and the way forward is just as exciting as the path behind me. All this time, I have also been growing older. Sometimes that makes me a bit wiser; other times only more acutely aware of what I do not know. Age and experience, perhaps the stuff that makes up the figurative mountains, have provided me with a new set of life goals.
My goal is to become irrelevant, unnecessary, a relic.
I have long struggled with the fear that I am an imposter, never good enough. I compensate for my lack of self-confidence with dangerous perfectionism, an ill-fated quest for excellence in which I seldom allow myself to accept “enough”. This can manifest itself in ugly, narcissistic ways, strong desires to prove my worth by achieving fame or fortune. It has taken me years (and lots of therapy) to arrive at a place where, instead of wanting to be the best in the world at my job, I want to become irrelevant.
Why do I want to become irrelevant? Because I – and most lighting designers – are both the ideal candidates for sharing the gift of light with others and the most likely to do the opposite.
Light is amazing. I could write an entire blog about how light works, how it helps us live…ah, yes, doing that now. Our business (lightcanhelpyou.com) is built on the idea that light is a gift to be shared with everyone possible, and we help hundreds of homeowners every year plan better lighting for their projects. Hundreds of custom homes is a pretty big number for a single lighting design firm; we are likely among the most prolific firms in the world.
Yet hundreds of homes each year is statistically irrelevant against the millions (billions?) of homes that could use better light and cannot afford our services. Why is good lighting- and good lighting design- so expensive, so out-of-reach?
I once saw a postcard advertising lighting design services as a way of reducing costs. In my experience, lighting designers can help clients spend their money smarter, but rarely, if ever, reduce the spend. The budget for lighting is usually so drastically low that any improvement, no matter how slight, will cause the budget to rise. And rising budgets means it can be hard to get into better lighting.
Designers- those who do not sell product for their income- must sell their expertise, their collected experiences and knowledge. This takes money and time to acquire, through schooling, mistakes, and years of experience, and that means we must recoup that investment by charging for our services. And, of course, those of us who are not independently wealthy must also charge for our services to cover our living expenses including housing, food, and flashlights. Well, maybe I’m the only one who wants to have lots of flashlights.
Our expertise is sold in increments of time, our services billed hourly or billed against a fixed fee that we hope we estimated correctly. The average new home built in the United States likely has a $1,000 budget for architectural lighting fixtures and none for lighting design assistance, so every hour we bill is an increased expense. If we put in eight hours of work per month over five months of construction, we’re at 40 hours of time on the project, billed at rates over $100/hour to cover the costs of operating a business. Our fees regularly top $10,000 and can reach far higher for larger and more complex projects.
If the budget is $1,000 for fixtures and we are charging $10,000 for basic lighting design services, the math will not work out right. We will never be able to help thousands or millions of people get better lighting with the traditional business model. We – the lighting designers that charge for our time – then become gatekeepers, ticket-takers that only allow those with substantial financial means to visit the promised land of better light.
Sure, we can do the occasional pro-bono project. Maybe we can charge our clients even more, so we can do more pro-bono work…but that just makes our services even further out of reach. And good light should not be available only to the few.
A few years ago I decided to start giving away my knowledge and experience, despite fears that I would be teaching my competitors, lessening our value, or putting us out of of work. In the magical way of life, the opposite has been true. The more I volunteer my time to write blog posts, pen articles, speak at conferences, deliver live webinars, and get the word out in a myriad of ways, the more work we have that pays our bills.
Light has become a message, something I want to share as widely as possible. Sure, I am tempted by fame and fortune as next as the next person, prone to greedily soak up the attention and accolades from writing and speaking and teaching. Those always end up feeling hollow after a brief flash of enjoyment, however, and I find myself returning to the simpler, clearer ideas.
Light is the first gift of the universe, a fundamental element of human experience, and a treasure to be shared with everyone. Light can help you live your best life, and I want to provide the resources to help you with light.
And so this blog continues to exist, despite me having plenty of paying work to occupy my days. I write articles and make guest appearances on podcasts, give presentations at conferences and events, lead webinars and training sessions, and get the word out as often as I can. It is a mission, sharing the gift of light, and I simply want to share the message.
I am grateful for the support of many others that enable me to share the message without restrictive cost, like the publishers and editors who feature my work in their magazines, the conference organizers who invite me to speak, the podcasters and YouTubers who feature our work. I am grateful for the support of my team that continues to allow me to spend time doing these things, especially my business partner Mark for his hard work keeping the day-to-day operations flowing. I am grateful for our dealer partners who introduce us to clients, so we can continue to gain experience that we can then share with others. I am grateful for our manufacturer partners, for their invitations to contribute to their efforts. And I am grateful for those that read my blog, attend my events, and listen to the podcasts. So many people support this endeavor; sharing the message is only possible with a platform, and that platform is provided by others.
What is next for me, in sharing the message? Will I get around to launching a YouTube channel? Will the television show move from concept to reality? Will I write and publish books? The road ahead is thrilling, a new adventure, and also scary. Will my ego grow too large for my head? Will I think that I am more than a messenger, and forget that I am just one of many lighting professionals trying to make the world a better place?
As I near the end of this series, the future is uncertain. But whatever happens, you can bet that I will be sharing the message every way I can.
Read more of my auto-biographical “finding the gift of light” series HERE.
the language of light 
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