My biggest block is marketing. I am so creative that I can make and do almost anything. And come up with the most ingenious idea's.
I just haven't found a way to make big money out of that.

Think I am too sweet for this world. Don't have that pushy sales mentality.
Although I started a business last year and became official. That is a big step.
Started importing a 100% natural detergent from India. And felted slippers from Kyrgystan. Those are very good products that are already made. Doesn't cost me any time to make them. But fit with my lifestyle and theme.
So I have time to make my own stuff. And still have income from that.

Well here is three difficulties that often come up.

Balancing the vision to the mission:
Trying to create fresh original art that fullfills my artistic vision but still meets the needs of the client/marketplace. It’s a balancing act. Sometimes, I find myself doing art that really is in line with what I want to present to the world but not having it sell. Other times, I’m just being a hack. Creating stuff that just does the job and doesn’t say a lot about me as an artist but pays a lot of money.
For example, I been spending that last five years building a collection of pin-up illustrations. But really I have been making a lot more money doing party caricatures. Moneywise, I should just stop doing pin-up and focus on doing more party caricatures. But do I really want as my epitaph as an artist: “here lies Jim, he was great fun at parties”.

Taking input from non-artists:
I had this editor that had to make changes to whatever I did, regradless if the piece needed them or not. This would have been so bad if she knew what she wanted but often times she didn’t. So she would pass the piece around the office until someone said something she could agree with and then go “Okay Jim, now do this…”. So after 4 years of art school and 15 years in the field, I’d often times end up having to take art direction from the office intern.
Another editor for a different magazine would log on to my computer when I was at lunch and re-work my stuff while I was gone. He was a perfectionist that couldn’t ever leave stuff alone after the deadline for copy was up. What made this even worse was that he would do this when we had a print deadline coming on! He went through 4 designers this way, and the magazine which was a quarterly, never made it’s print deadline once. I’m sure to this day, he believes that when the publisher finally pulled the plug on the magazine, that it wasn’this fault.

Communication:
It is hard in a relationship when your partner has some deep, unspoken need that they want you to fullfill…it worse when this happens with a client. So I try very hard to start any job with questions about what it is they really want from me and my art? A lot of times, what they say they want, what they actually want and what they need, can be three separate things. It often becomes a case of streering them where they need to go. When they say things like “I’ll know what it is when I see it” is when you should start billing them by the hour.
The problem is that often people who aren’t artists are calling the shots. So they aren’t trained in communicating what they want visually. Art directors are a good bridge between artists and clients because they are use to understanding the need between what the client need and what the artist can do. Sometimes though, the job requires you deal directly with the client. Then it becomes like asking your partner what they want from you during sex? Sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they do know but can’t tell you. Sometime they believe that if you really loved them, you be able to figure it out…or if you were a real artist you’d be able to deliver it anyway.