Poet and creative coach Mark McGuinness shares insights to help you thrive as a 21st Century Creative. He also interviews leading creators in the arts and creative industries. Every guest sets you a Creative Challenge based on the theme of the interview.
How I Created, Funded and Launched My New Podcast (while the World Was in Meltdown)
Sep 12, 2022
Welcome to Episode 10 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
It’s been my most ambitious season yet, with creatives from 5 continents and probably the closest I’ll ever get to releasing a concept album, because all the interviews have had a common thread – how creators around the world were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
And each interview tells the story of how one creative, or team of creatives, rose to the challenge by doing something new and different, that opened up new possibilities for their future.
And one thread that runs through every single interview this season, is the extraordinary, creativity, courage and resilience shown by my guests, in creating new types of artwork, new products, new services and even entirely new companies, in the face of a global crisis.
And finally, today, I am going to close the loop by sharing my own story of my journey through the pandemic.
So there’s a bit of a different format for this episode, in the first part, I’m going to tell the story of my pandemic, and how it affected our company, The 21st Century Creative. I’ll talk about the challenges I faced, the discoveries I made and the lessons I’ve learned.
Then in the second part, Joanna Penn, who you have previously met as a guest on The 21st Century Creative, has kindly interviewed me about the inspiration behind my poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air, and how I conceived, funded, launched and produced it against the backdrop of the pandemic.
Mark McGuinness
Mark McGuinness with ‘Elegy for Moss’, co-created with Sheena Devitt
After 6 seasons of The 21st Century Creative, it’s quite possible that you already have a pretty good idea of who I am. But on this show, I’m mostly talking in my role as a coach for creatives, so you may not be as familiar with my poetry.
It’s also possible that this is the first episode of The 21st Century Creative you’ve come across, in which case an introduction is definitely in order.
So my name is Mark McGuinness and I’m an award-winning poet from the West Country of England, which Anglo-Saxon historians and Thomas Hardy fans know as Wessex. I currently live in Bristol, which is the big city compared to where I grew up, in rural Devon.
My mother is from Devon and my father is Scottish and his family goes back to Ireland, so there’s a mixture of Saxon and Celt in my ancestry and my cultural inheritance.
The photos on this page are of ‘Elegy for Moss’, a concrete poem I co-created with the artist and sculptor Sheena Devitt, and exhibited at The Lettering Arts Trust; I tell the story of this collaboration in the first part of today’s episode.
‘Elegy for Moss’ by Sheena Devitt and Mark McGuinness
My interviewer: Joanna Penn
To introduce my interviewer, Joanna Penn is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. She writes thrillers and also books on the writer’s life and the business of being a writer. And altogether she has sold over half a million books in 162 countries and 5 languages.
She’s also a friend of mine and also a friend of The 21st Century Creative, she’s been a guest on the podcast several times, talking about mindset and health and productivity and audio for creatives.
She has a very popular and inspiring and useful podcast, The Creative Penn, which is all about writing and self-publishing and book marketing, and creative business. It’s my go-to podcast to learn about book publishing and marketing, and that’s true of many, many writers around the world.
So as you might expect, Jo is a great interviewer, and she did a great job of getting the story out of me in this interview. She is my friend, but she didn’t let me off lightly, she does challenge me in the interview as well!
So here we go for the final interview of the Creative Disruption season: Mark McGuinness interviewed by Joanna Penn.
Interview Transcript
JOANNA:Today we’re focusing on your poetry, which is exciting, but I wanted to start by asking about the integration. You’ve been running a successful creative business for many years.
What part does poetry play in your life in terms of creativity, and does it play any part in the business side?
MARK: For me personally, poetry is the bedrock. It’s the foundation of who I am in everything that I do. In terms of writing, it’s the most fulfilling kind of writing that I read and also to write. There’s nothing else that comes close really. All my writing about creativity, my work as a coach, they’re really side effects of the poetry. And that’s not to diminish them because I absolutely love doing them and I love the fact that I get to do lots of different things, a bit like you. But really, poetry is at the center of my universe .
If there was no poetry, there wouldn’t really be much point to the rest of it. So, they really go hand in hand in that way. Creatively though, I think of poetry as completely separate from everything else I do. I love the fact that it’s a different world and I can do what the hell I like there. There are no commercial considerations, there’s no money at stake. I don’t think that’s any great secret about the poetry world. So, I have a lot more freedom than a writer who has to keep an eye on the market, their business is maybe based on selling a certain volume or something like a movie studio where there’s a committee making decisions in a very risk-averse basis. With poetry, I can basically do what I want.
I think the only thing I would say about the poetry and the business, having a relationship, is that it does inform the kind of coach that I am. Because I’m a poet, I’ve got a very strong affinity with creatives of all kinds. That’s who I like to work with, that’s my tribe. On the other hand, I hear from a lot of my clients who say, well, the fact that I’m a poet was attractive to them when they were looking for a coach. They knew they weren’t going to get the usual corporate-style coaching or even necessarily mainstream life coaching. I’ve never thought of myself in those terms. They like the idea of working with a fellow creative because they know we’ll have certain values in common.
JOANNA: It’s so interesting. You said at the beginning there that, ‘Poetry is at the foundation of who I am,’ which is pretty hardcore.
I’ve read all your non-fiction. I knew you before you knew who I was back in the day, over a decade ago, because you were I think about five years ahead of me and I bought one of your courses early on. I’ve read pretty much all your stuff. You do share a lot of personal stuff in your non-fiction books, in your blog, in your podcast.
And yet, you’re basically saying that your poetry is the far more personal side, the more fulfilling side. So, to me, this is really difficult and I think about writing a memoir and something I’m kind of struggling with.
Do you think that your poetry is your more vulnerable side? Are you more vulnerable to criticism? And you’ve written a book on criticism. How do we find the strength to tap into these more personal sides of writing and put ourselves out there in this very vulnerable way?
MARK: Why do you think I wrote a book on criticism?! I don’t know. It was partly me and partly what I was hearing from clients and readers. But yeah, in terms of vulnerability, absolutely. I do write some poems with personal subject matter, but I’m not what’s called a confessional poet, you’re not going to get all my dirty secrets. But even when I’m writing something that’s ostensibly about another subject, of course, in the world of poetry, everything’s metaphorical. So, it’s always personal on that level.
I remember when I started doing poetry readings, I had already come quite a long way out of my introverted shell. I’d forced and trained and cajoled and got myself coached to do a lot of public speaking, for instance, as a psychotherapist and then, later on, as a coach. I was really proud of the fact that I’d overcome my fears to the point where I could speak at an international conference.
I even ended up teaching presentation skills, I had a whole course around this. And, so, I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve got this,’ when I was asked to start giving poetry readings. And I was actually quite annoyed to discover that there was this whole new level of fear involved in reading my poems to an audience. It was like there were several more layers stripped off me and I was really exposed on a personal emotional level in a way that didn’t happen with normal public speaking.
So, in terms of how we deal with it, well, my way of getting over it, as usual, is to find the best teacher or coach that I could find and persuade them to let me work with them. I went up to the Orkney Islands off the north of Scotland and I worked with Kristin Linklater who sadly, she’s no longer with us, but she was a legend in acting and voice teaching circles. She had a specialism in speaking Shakespearean verse and helping actors on the stage to do the iambic pentameter with the big soliloquies and so on with feeling.
And, so, I said, ‘I’m a poet. Can I come on the course?’ and she said, ‘Yes, you’re allowed. You can bring your own poetry.’ In total, I spent two weeks up there, two separate occasions. And the first week was the foundation and the second week I got to do the Shakespeare course. And she really put me through the ringer. There’s a story I tell on A Mouthful of Air about the day that she lost patience with me because I wasn’t projecting enough. We all had to read a sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet, as part of our training. And she kept saying, ‘Mark, we’re over here. You need to reach us.’ And, eventually, she said, ‘Look, this isn’t working.’ And she opened the door and she said, ‘Right, let’s all go outside.’
We go outside on this hillside, like a small mountain on this island in the middle of the North Sea, and she says, ‘Mark, you are going to the top of the hill and we are going to the bottom of the hill. And you are going to speak your poem in such a way that we hear it and we feel it at the bottom.’ And, of course, I was absolutely terrified. But if Kristin told you what to do, you did it. I staggered about at the top of the hill, feeling completely ridiculous. And in the end, there was a part of me that just let go, and this big voice came out and, suddenly, I was booming it out all the way across the sea and over to the other island. And the way I thought, it was a bit like a Shakespearean version of The Sound of Music.
I went down the bottom of the hill after that, and there were one or two people who actually there were tears in their eyes. So, it had connected. And after that, I really don’t care as much. I found myself in readings where I realized I’m the loudest poet in the room. Because something Kristin did, it just unlocked the voice and it wants to come out .
JOANNA: That’s so interesting. And that’s definitely a good tip for people because I’ve had plenty of professional speaking training and I can, same as you, speak on big stages. There’s always a little bit of nerves but it’s fine. And yet, I still haven’t read my fiction work in front of a group. I will always resist that because it’s so much more personal, it’s so much more scary. And it’s almost like that experience helped you break through that. So a tip for people listening, don’t just go on a a public speaking course, you actually need to do something that is with work that means something. I think that’s super useful.
I do want to come back, you said you’re not a confessional poet. A lot of people might not realize that there’s such a breadth.
If people are not in the poetry community or have only read some poetry or maybe studied some at school, what are the different types of poets out there?
MARK: It’s a broad church. The confessional poets started in the ’60s with people like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath who were basically putting out their family history, stuff that wouldn’t have normally got talked about, personal history, particularly with them around mental health. It’s all about ‘bearing my soul and just letting everything out’ kind of thing. Some poets will still do that now but others like to take maybe a more oblique approach. So, that’s one school.
Another way you might classify a poet is by the style of the writing. Personally, I write in quite a lot of traditional forms. I wouldn’t call myself this but some people would label that ‘formalist poetry.’ It sounds a little bit like formal dress though to me. I don’t think any writer particularly likes to say, ‘I’m this kind of writer,’ because we all like to think we’re unique and special, don’t we?
JOANNA: But you use particular structures.
MARK: I do. I do all the Shakespearean sonnet and the iambic pentameter. And I love all the old forms, like the medieval ones, the renaissance ones. They’re magical structures, there’s almost like an incantatory quality to them. I think it’s a shame that we’re in danger of losing that as part of the mainstream of poetry. I think, recent years, it’s coming back, it comes back in waves, so to speak. But certainly, that’s my default form of writing. Whereas I think a lot of poets, their default these days would be to write in free verse.
So, it doesn’t have meter, it doesn’t necessarily have rhyme, although it can do. It wouldn’t have more of a set structure but, of course, its own kind of discipline. T. S. Eliot famously said that there’s not really any such thing as free verse because there are always constraints in art. But if anybody’s listening and you’re not plugged into the contemporary poetry scene, just because you read one type of poem and you think, ‘Oh, I’m not sure I like that,’ there’s an awful lot to choose from just like fiction. Don’t let any one experience put you off.
JOANNA: Yes, I think that’s really important. I’ve written a pantoum and other forms like this, and the boundaries can actually help us be more creative. Some people might have tried a haiku, which looks simple but it’s not. I guess ‘basic’ is one word for it, but you have to think about so many things and you have fewer words than you do for a book. So, it’s a very different art, which is interesting.
Let’s talk about the poetry podcast, A Mouthful of Air. You’ve got this successful show, The 21st Century Creative, which is very tied into your business side. I’ve been on it, you’ve had some really big-name people on, it’s a great show, highly recommend it to people. And we both know how hard it is to do a podcast.
Why launch a poetry podcast, and what is it that the spoken word brings for this?
MARK: It really began very simply with just the urge to share some poems. I was looking at my bookshelves, which, if we were doing this on video, you would be able to see, there’s shelves and shelves of poetry behind me. And I started to think, ‘It’s a shame if the circle stops with me, it’s just me who reads and enjoys,’ because I’ve got so many hours of pleasure and sustenance from those. Most people don’t read poetry. And I got to thinking, ‘Surely, it can’t be that hard to invite them in and take a book down from the shelf and read it and say, ‘Look, isn’t this great?’ and show them what I love about those poems?’
And, so, that’s a lot of, obviously, famous poets of the past, but also I know quite a few contemporary poets who write the most amazing things. I used to go to classes at the Poetry School in London and the City Lit and, apart from anything, I was learning. Everyone would read a poem and we would critique it. I would just think it was the most fabulous evening of entertainment. I would be getting a live performance from about six poets one evening and it would be really really high-quality and really varied, picking up on what you were saying. So, I just thought that this should be more widely known. Wouldn’t it be great to put these poems on a podcast so that other people can enjoy the way I do?
The more I thought about this, the idea of a poetry podcast, the more I kept going back to the idea that poetry, at its roots, really is an oral art. It’s older than writing. It would be the tribe around the campfire listening to the voice of the poet, or the shaman, or the bard, or whatever they were called, and they would be telling stories in song, in verse, in maybe a mixture of the two, and there would be epic tales. There would be tales about the gods and heroes and the creation of the world and love and betrayal and so on. That was really how we made sense of our world. A lot of the time the poet would be the memory database of the tribe in terms of history, and mythology, and religion, and then sometimes even stuff like botany, and the medicine, and whatever.
And modern poetry, we don’t look to the poet for an understanding of life, the universe, and everything these days in the way that maybe we did once upon a time but poetry is still there as an oral art, and reading a poem, listening to a poem spoken. One of the other things I’ve discovered about podcasts, and I know you’ve seen this too, it’s a really privileged medium because people tend to listen to podcasts in the quiet time of their day, in their me time when they’re cleaning up, when they’re commuting, when they’re going for a walk.
It struck me that this is a chance to have the poet’s voice in your ear, in that quiet time of the day, and it’s not going to give you the whole cosmology and meaning of the universe but Robert Frost put it beautifully when he said, ‘A poem can give you a momentary stay against confusion.’ A moment of clarity, of…not quite certainty or reassurance but maybe of being earthed or connected to something that feels true, that feels real and authentic.
That’s the potential of a podcast is really simply to have the poet’s voice in your ear doing that and maybe helping you make a bit more sense of your world.
JOANNA: I think now there are a lot of performance poets as well and even you could say into the rap movement, and song lyrics. People know these by heart, the songs by heart because they are essentially poetry, and a lot of them rhyme.
I know not all poetry has to rhyme, but rhyming poetry in song is a way that it was the message was carried, wasn’t it, as well?
MARK: Absolutely. I think of poetry in some ways very much like music. And I would say to anybody who doesn’t feel confident as a poetry reader, think about it like this. So, for instance, I can’t read music, I can’t play an instrument, I can’t sing in tune but I have strong opinions and tastes in music. I have a brother who is a musician and was a professional musician and he can explain all the technical stuff and his knowledge of music is much deeper than I am, but sometimes if we have a discussion about music, I’ll say, ‘Yeah, but I just don’t like it. I like this instead.’
I think I would really encourage you, if you try the podcast, to use it as a way of starting to develop your own taste in poetry. It’s not an academic discipline, they try to turn it into one but that’s not what it is. The way I do this on the podcast is I throw you in at the deep end but then I also throw you a life jacket.
JOANNA: What do you mean by that?
MARK: The way this works is, you hear the opening music but then the next thing after that you will hear is the poet reading a poem. If it’s a living poet, I get them to come and read it. If it’s a dead poet, I’ll read it on their behalf. But so often we feel, ‘Oh, you need to have it explained to you first and get the CliffsNotes into the footnotes,’ and whatever. No, you don’t. If it’s a good poem, it doesn’t need an introduction and it should have an effect, even if you don’t grasp the whole meaning of it all at once. And treat it like music. Does it make you feel something? Does it create images in your mind or emotions? Do you feel it in your gut?
That’s throwing you in the deep end. You just hear the poem, whatever it is. But then the life jacket I’m going to throw you is you’ll get a bit of context about the poems straight after it. If it’s a classic poem, then you’ll hear me effusing about the poem and talking about the background and what we know about the poet. And also some technical stuff about, ‘Look what they’re doing here. Look how this is made, how it works.’ And you will get the technical stuff, but again, it’s not academic.
I’m going to show you how a poet…and the old word for a poet is…well, in Greek, ‘poet’ means maker. So, this is really a craft, practical ‘how’s this put together?’ approach. If it’s a living poet who’s on the show, then I will interview them for about 10, 20, 25 minutes about the poem, where it came from, that’s usually the question I start with, and then how it evolved in the writing process. So, you’ve got the poem, you’ve got your initial response to it, your own experience of it, and then you get a bit of perspective or background about it that maybe helps to shed some light on aspects that weren’t immediately apparent.
And then, at the end of the show, this is my favorite bit, we play the same recording of the poem again. And even though it’s the same recording of the same poem, people tell me, ‘It sounds different the second time round,’ because, of course, they’ve got that bit of context and there’re some things that they’re listening out for that they’re going to notice because we’ve highlighted them in the interview or the commentary. So, that’s the deep end and life jacket approach to poetry.
JOANNA: I think that’s so interesting. I love that you’re delving deeper into the craft side. And your enthusiasm for poetry, I think, is infectious. So, basically, if listeners don’t know anything about poetry, they’ll get something out of it.
And then, as with poems, if they already know things, they’re going to get a deeper level of meaning in these poems.
MARK: That’s right. I’ve got two ideal listeners in mind. One is a poetry geek like me who lives and breathes this stuff and wants to experience it in a different way. And then the other is the person who’s cultured, reads a lot, but reads probably anything but poetry, and giving them a way into it. The other things I try and do, particularly around the questions with the poets, is if you ever read a poem and your first response is, ‘What? Hang on a minute, I don’t get it,’ or, ‘Does it mean…?’ whatever, I try and ask all of those questions to the poet.
So, if you’ve ever had that response to a poem, then tune in to A Mouthful of Air and you’re going to hear me grilling the poet and saying, ‘Come on, what are we supposed to get from this?’ or, ‘Am I being dumb?’ or whatever. So, it’s just opening it up and not being so precious about it.
JOANNA: Not being precious about poetry is actually really important I think. We all get so het up, so serious about all this stuff I think probably because so many of us did it at school.
I did poetry at school and it was very serious and very important.
MARK: That’s right. I got a lovely email from a reader the other day who said, ‘I used to run screaming from poetry but now you’ve opened the door and you’ve shown me it can relate to me.’ I think a nice example of this is I have my longtime teacher and mentor, Mimi Khalvati, a really wonderful poet, and she’s just published a lovely book of Petrarchan sonnets called Afterwardness. And, of course, when you hear the word ‘Petrarchan sonnet,’ you think, ‘my goodness me, that’s going to be elevated and on a pedestal and a bit remote,’ but the poem that she read is called ‘Eggs.’
When I asked, ‘From where did you get the inspiration for it?’ she said, ‘Well, I ordered a fried egg in my local cafe.’ And it’s about an egg. She’s got this wonderful theory about how eggs are like Petrarchan sonnets. You’ll have to listen to the episode to untangle that. But, hopefully, that gives an idea of the down-to-earth aspect of it, even with something as revered as such an old verse form.
JOANNA: The other thing I think is really interesting is intellectual property. I think this is super important to talk about because you mentioned living poets and dead poets.
In terms of the intellectual property of being able to read a poem in audio format…because this is one of the issues. A lot of people want to quote poetry in their work or song lyrics, and you can’t usually because they’re so short, it can’t possibly come under fair use.
How are you dealing with the intellectual property side of the show?
MARK: I am doing my best to be scrupulous about it. What that means is old poets does mean old poets, so it’s stuff that’s out of copyright. Shakespeare’s not going to sue me for using his sonnet. Chaucer is probably not going to get too annoyed if I do a bit of one of his poems.
For the contemporary poets, I’m checking with each poet, who is the license holder or who needs to sign off? Often it’s the publisher. And we’re getting the publisher to sign off and say, ‘Yes, we’re happy.’ I’m pleased to say that publishers are happy to do that because, obviously, with each poet, we’re showcasing a poem, typically from their latest book and encouraging listeners, ‘Well, if you like this one, then go and buy the book.’ So, yes, absolutely, you’ve gotta be super careful.
It’s the same with song lyrics. It’s so easy to think, ‘Well, I’ll just put a couple of lines in my story because the characters are in a bar and that’s the song that’s playing and it related to them,’ but no, you really can’t do that.
JOANNA: You have to be super careful, that’s why I wanted to mention it.
Let’s talk about the interesting poetry publishing side. Because yes, poems are great when they’re performed by voice but they’re also, a lot of them, in books, I have a lot of poetry books too, they’re designed in print to look a certain way on the page. I feel like a lot of people set them out in certain ways, or some people format things, say, without capital letters or they have things running onto different lines that you would’ve put just in a sentence if it was prose.
Talk about what are the options with publishing. Why is print so important for poetry, and what are the options for poets in terms of the different publication routes, and what are you doing?
MARK: Actually, print isn’t necessarily important for all poets. I mean Homer may or may not have written it down himself…
JOANNA: He is dead!
MARK: …or herself. It started off as an oral medium and, to this day, as you said, there are performance poets who say the real thing is the live experience with the audience. And the book is like a souvenir to them, and they say, ‘It’s not the real thing,’ say, ‘Don’t judge me by the book, judge me by the show.’ So, it’s a wonderful kind of hybrid.
I think it is an amphibious form, it can live in the water or on the land. And talking to poets sometimes, you can see that the way it’s laid out on the page may or may not have a really strong relationship to the way they read it out loud. But in terms of publishing options, the poetry world is very conservative, folks. It’s made me think of the fiction world about 10 or 20 years ago. There are indie poets, there is an indie poet scene, but that’s not the route I have taken.
I know this has raised eyebrows in a few quarters because all my non-fiction I do publish independently because I like to be in control of it and do it my way. But I’m going the traditional route for the actual publication of the poems, but I’m also having my cake and eating it by having a podcast where I get my direct relationship with the audience.
One big reason for going the traditional route is it’s a very practical one, and that is that I want to reach the readers who love poetry the most. And right now, as a general rule, those people are far more likely to read poetry that is presented via a publisher. If I decided to self-publish my poems, which I could do, I know how to do it technically, I would be missing out on that core poetry readership. And I don’t want to do that. I do want to reach a wider audience as well but I also want to reach the real enthusiasts.
We can argue about whether that’s fair, or that’s the way the poetry world should be but I think sometimes, as authors and creators, we need to deal with the world the way it is rather than the way we think it should be. For instance, if you’re writing genre fiction and romance or science fiction or thrillers and you say, ‘Well, I don’t like e-books. To me, a real book is a print book so I’m only going to publish in print,’ you’re going to miss out on a lot of the hardcore readers of that genre. So, one big reason is just that practical access to the readership that I want.
Another reason is more of an artistic one. Which is one big misconception about poetry is we often think it’s a solitary art, that it’s all about the individual poet channeling their visions and expressing their unique talent. And, obviously, there is some truth to that but, if you read a lot of poetry, after a while, you realize it’s more like a massive group writing project that’s happening across space and time and even between languages .
If you read any significant poet, you’re going to find ideas and allusions and references and poetic forms that have come from other poets and, quite often, translations or rewritings or answering back to other poets’ work. To me, writing poetry means being a part of that conversation with other poets. Where you’re reading each other’s work and responding to it and discussing it and so on, as well as the ghosts of the past. Right now, if you want to be part of that conversation, then it’s much harder to do that as a self-published author. It’s very much expected you’ll have a publisher and that will be your entry into that world. So, that’s the route I’m going. Those are the main reasons.
There’s other things like print quality. The average poetry book is typically 60, 70, 80 pages and you try getting Kindle Print to align the spine properly on a book that that’s thin, the title on the spine. Also, a lot of the poetry publishers really do go to town in terms of print quality and font and paperweight and presentation, so, there’s the experience of reading the book and holding it in a way that it’s a beautiful object to contemplate. So, all of those combine together. At the moment, traditional publishing is the main game, I’m afraid.
JOANNA: I’m still going to challenge you on it because there are plenty of people, for example, who will work with a printer to do a beautiful print object, which is the same printer as the poetry publisher might use. And there are lots of ways to reach people in different mediums and ways to get a poetry audience to buy that book.
I want to go back to what you said at the beginning about your poetry being the foundation of who you are and ask whether it’s really about validation and acceptance of peers and the deeper side of being a creator and a poet. You’re an award-winning poet. Awards, I feel, are part of validation. And I also feel that a publisher that is known for great poetry is validation for your art.
Forget all the marketing and print quality, is it really about validation?
MARK: From the ego’s perspective, yes, of course.
JOANNA: But that’s important.
MARK: Yes, sure. We all have an ego, and that’s part of it. I have gone back and forward and thought about this and partly it is that I love the poetry world.
It’s easy to think of gatekeepers as being the big bad enemy, etc., but the poetry world, it’s not like there’s a lot of money at stake. Nobody is in this for the money, they’re all enthusiasts. I’ve grown up with this world, I’ve been growing up reading certain publishers and enjoying their output and the style of work that they put out there, and I wanted to be part of that world and play that game. The idea of going and printing my own books and supervising a printer and storing all of that, it just doesn’t excite me.
JOANNA: And, obviously, I’m challenging you, and I feel the same way. I feel like you’re an indie author for your non-fiction, we have our money-making books and then we have our books that are art and our books of our hearts. For example, I still want to win an award for my fiction. I don’t know whether I want traditional publishing, but I probably still do, I still think that’s part of the validation of the industry. So, I think it’s important for people listening to separate the business side and the money-making side from the art sometimes.
It doesn’t have to be both, does it, all the time?
MARK: There’s always something that you can get attached to. If you’re writing a more commercial field, you can get attached to the money, or a field that has got a wider audience, you could get attached to fame. Poetry, yes, of course, it’s very easy to get attached to the whole professional reputation and peer review and how you’re seen within that community. But whatever field that you’re in, there’s going to be some temptation for the ego.
One thing I say to my clients, because I get all kinds of different versions of this from different clients. I get some artist clients who will come in and say, ‘I don’t know if I want to play the gallery game and have my work represented in high-end galleries and introduced to people in a certain way or if I’d rather just go direct and sell it and have an online presence.’
What I say to clients is, ‘Play the game you want to play. Because whatever you do, there’s going to be an upside and there’s going to be a downside.’ And it’s all a game. But you’ve got to think about the game that really appeals to you that you think, ‘You know what? I would enjoy playing that,’ as well as, ‘I think I have a reasonable chance of competing.’
JOANNA: And you can play a different game for different projects.
MARK: Yes, absolutely.
JOANNA: Exactly. We’re so lucky to have the choice now. There used to be only one game and now there’s lots of games. I don’t think you can play the same game with the same book, that’s important.
MARK: No, you can’t. And also, even within the same world, so like I said, I’m having my cake and eating it. I’m going the traditional route for the actual publication, and that’s got its own rewards and frustrations, it moves very slowly, for instance, but then, having the podcast as a direct, like I said, visceral medium where I’ve got my own platform, my own voice in the world.
Weirdly enough, there’s a stigma against self-publishing poetry, but people quite admire the fact that you can make a podcast. So, that’s a weird loophole in the poetry world, which I’m quite happy about. I do think, if you’re going to think about this maybe from a slightly more strategic perspective, just think about if you want to do well at whatever game it is you choose, then you just think, ‘What are the rules? What are the parameters? And what are the things that maybe not so many people are doing, and could that give me a little bit of an edge or a little bit more fulfillment and satisfaction in how I approach it?’
JOANNA: Absolutely. And, of course, both of us use podcasting to both serve our community and also as a vehicle for our businesses in terms of your 21st Century Creative, and this podcast, The Creative Penn. And now we both have podcasts, I have my Books and Travel Podcast and you have A Mouthful of Air, which are more passion projects.
It does take a lot of work and it costs money to produce. You have very high-value production, I don’t spend as much on high-value production as you do. But, if people are thinking, ‘Oh, is podcasting really worth it?’ You talk there about some of the recognition you can get in a community.
Can podcasting pay for itself financially, or is it worth it for the reputation and the other ways you can get a return?
MARK: Firstly, it’s absolutely worth it for the pure joy of doing it. Any time that I spend writing or recording this show, including recording my own episodes or interviewing poets, it’s a delight and the time just disappears.
I work on it in the mornings, typically, and it’s lunchtime before I know it. Another really cool motivation is just connecting with listeners. When I get a response, like the person who said, ‘I used to run screaming from poetry and now you’ve opened the door,’ or if I talk to a poet and they have a good experience and they felt that they’ve been able to put themselves out there into the world, that is, absolutely the core of what makes it worth doing. And if that’s not there, if you’re only doing it because you think, ‘I need to do something to build my reputation or generate income or sales or whatever,’ then find another way of doing it.
In terms of time and money, yeah, you’re right, Jo, I am a perfectionist about audio particularly. I always want to have high production values and music and I like having the atmospheric soundscapes that Javier Weyler creates for both of my shows. And it’s not cheap to do this. So, again, just for anybody listening, you don’t necessarily have to be as perfectionistic as this, there are lower-budget ways of doing a perfectly good show. In terms of what I wanted to achieve, my first show, The 21st Century Creative, pays for itself via coaching clients, and I’ve also recently added a Patreon membership.
But for the new show, A Mouthful of Air, it’s an art project and I can’t really see a lot of commercial potential. I don’t really have that commercial interest in it. But I didn’t want to compromise on the production quality. So, I did something I’ve never done before, and that’s to apply for public funding from Arts Council England. I thought there is value for other people here, it’s really a public art project. I’m going to be sharing poems and connecting poets with listeners. So, if I do it well, there’s going to be a benefit to the listeners, there’s going to be a benefit to the poets, and there’s a benefit to their publishers. I really want this to be my contribution to the poetry world.
I made this argument to the Arts Council. I filled out the longest application form I have ever done in my life. And I’m very pleased to say they responded and they gave me the full amount of the funding. So, thank you very much to Arts Council England for stepping up and doing that. Sometimes I hear from creatives who say, ‘I’d just like to be funded to make my art,’ that hasn’t been my experience of how the funding world works. You’ve always got to sell your ideas. I had to really think hard and make my case and say, ‘This is how it will help me develop as an artist but also this is what’s in it for the audience, this is what’s in it for the public, this is what’s in it for the poets and their publishers, and so on.’
Whatever you’re doing, if you want to do it at a high level and you get it out into the world, and even if you’re giving it away for free, like a podcast, you’ve still got to sell it. You’ve got to sell the idea to advertisers or patrons or clients or sponsors or a funding body. And then you’ve got to go out there and sell it to people who have got the listeners, who’ve got an infinite choice of other podcasts that they could be listening to.
JOANNA: I actually really love that you’ve done that because, again, in the same way that you talked about the different kinds of publishing, it’s not either/or.
It’s the same, you have a coaching business, you’re an indie. You sell online courses, you have done anyway in the past, and now you’re applying for a grant. I think it’s the same. You don’t have to just do one thing, it doesn’t have to be all grants or all indie or all coaching. I think that’s what I want to encourage people is to think wider than just the one thing. Obviously, we’re both full-time creative entrepreneurs so we can branch into these other things. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, actually.
As we speak today, I’ve just put out my 10-year-anniversary post, it will be in the past when this goes out, but this idea that, after a number of years, your confidence perhaps grows and your income is steady enough in other areas that you can actually branch out into things that you might have been putting off because you couldn’t afford it in other ways, and now you can.
Now’s the right time to branch into these more passion projects.
MARK: Definitely. Looking back, it was years ago I had the idea for the two shows, I wanted to do a poetry show and I wanted to do the coaching show. And I started with the coaching one partly because I was reasonably confident it would make money and, therefore, it would pay for itself and all the equipment I was buying, not to mention the training and whatever. But also because, creatively, the poetry show is more complicated and more demanding emotionally and there’s more people involved, there’s more moving parts.
I’m really glad I did the coaching show first because, although it’s longer, in terms of production, it’s simpler to do. You’re right that, again, you’ve got to think a bit strategically about, ‘Well, if I do this first, that will get me to there. And then when I get to there, then I will have more options creatively, hopefully, financially and business-wise.’
JOANNA: Brilliant.
Where can people find you and the podcasts and everything you do online?
MARK: Starting with the poetry show, which is my new baby so I want to introduce it to everybody, it is A Mouthful of Air on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all the usual podcasting platforms. The website is amouthfulofair.fm. And, if you go to the website, you can sign up for an email subscription, even if you listen to the audio podcast via an app, and you will get a transcript of every single episode, including the text of the poems.
If you want to read the poem as well as listen to it, go to amouthfulofair.fm and sign up for the email version and you can experience the amphibious nature of poetry.
And then, on social media, we are @amouthfulofair on Twitter and Facebook. And on Instagram, I’m now an Insta poet, the poems are going up @airpoets on Instagram.
If you’re interested in the other podcast, The 21st Century Creative, that is 21st Century Creative on all the usual places. And my coaching site is lateralaction.com .
JOANNA: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Mark, that was great.
MARK: Thank you, Jo, I really enjoyed this. You took me to some unusual places for a podcast interview. So, thanks.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
From Tattoos to NFTs with Ichi Hatano
Sep 05, 2022
Welcome to Episode 9 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
This week we are off to Tokyo, to meet Ichi Hatano, a wonderful artist whose work has deep roots in the traditional arts of Japan.
When his busy tattoo studio was closed by Covid restrictions, he turned to digital art and exhibited his work at CrypTOKYO, Japan’s very first NFT art show, which attracted national press and television coverage.
In this interview Ichi tells me about his journey as an artist and the new creative and commercial opportunities he is discovering in the world of digital art.
In the first part of the show, I look back at the interviews in the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season and identify a key factor that made creative reinvention easier for some creators than others – and what you and I can learn from their example.
Ichi Hatano
Ichi Hatano has worked as a tattoo artist since 1998 and also produces Suiboku-ga, a type of traditional ink wash painting.
In late 2019 just before the pandemic hit, Ichi was employing 3 more tattooists plus a full time studio manager, and they were fully booked 6 days a week, with the majority of their business coming from overseas tourists, who wanted a very special souvenir of their trip to Japan.
Then along came the pandemic, and the restrictions meant that not only was his tattoo studio closed for many months, but foreign tourists were barred from entering the country.
So Ichi’s business shrank from 6 days a week to only 1 or 2 clients a month. Which meant he had a lot of time on his hands, and he came up with 3 very different creative projects in response to his changed circumstances.
The first one was a beautiful book of his Suibokuga paintings, called Ichi Hatano’s Dragons, which he crowdfunded on Kickstarter.
And the third was his entry into the world of Crypto Art and NFTs.
Ichi took part in CrypTOKYO, Japan’s very first in-person NFT art show, exhibiting and selling his digital artwork alongside notable Japanese artists and international icons including Beeple, and Maxim from The Prodigy.
It’s a fascinating conversation where a centuries-old artistic tradition meets the latest trends in the 21st century creative economy.
ICHI: I didn’t have any official art training. I left school at 15 because it was difficult being a group environment. I like studying by myself. I was drawing a lot, and studying art by myself.
MARK: Huh.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: What artist inspired you the most?
ICHI: I like Ukiyo-e artists from the late Edo period, which is the 19th century. Ukiyo-e are Japanese woodblock prints. My favorite artists are Keisai Eisen, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, this kind of era artist.
MARK: I think a lot of listeners will know Hokusai’s ‘Wave off Kanagawa’.
ICHI: Yeah. Exactly.
MARK: That’s maybe a really, really famous image. But there’s an awful lot of other Ukiyo-e images and artists.
Why did you become a tattoo artist?
ICHI: It’s hard to say why you like something. If you like it, you like it!
MARK: That’s true.
ICHI: I got my first tattoo at 20 years old.
MARK: Oh, really?
ICHI: That’s when I decided I wanted to become a tattoo artist. I specialize in Japanese traditional design. Those types of designs are different from Ukiyo-e.
MARK: This is really classic Japanese art as a tattoo?
ICHI: Mm-hmm.
MARK: Is it true that tattoos are a bit controversial in Japan, that maybe some places…like if you go to an onsen bath maybe, they don’t like you to have a tattoo?
ICHI: Yes, it’s true. Tattoos are taboo in Japan! However, I think it’s getting better bit by bit. That will bring a change in attitude in the future.
MARK: Great. Well, hopefully that will be good for your business and your art if people change that attitude.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: If we think about late 2019, before COVID appeared, what did your work and your business look like at that time?
ICHI: Before COVID, my tattoo studio was very busy. I was working six days a week, always fully booked.
MARK: Wow.
ICHI: And the studio had three more artists and a full-time manager. And over 90% of my clients were from oversea visiting Japan.
MARK: Oh, so a lot of people were tourists?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: Who wanted a classic Japanese tattoo?
ICHI: Exactly.
MARK: When they came to Tokyo? Okay. And they don’t worry about the taboo?
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: How did COVID affect your work and your business as a tattooist?
ICHI: When COVID started, Japan closed the border. We had a state of emergency. At the slowest time, I only had one or two clients a month. I always like trying new things, so using free time, I did big three projects.
First, I published a book. For the first few months of COVID, I painted one hundred traditional Japanese dragons using sumi ink on washi paper. I made a book called Ichi Hatano’s Dragons. I had wanted to publish a book for a long time, and I was interested in crowdfunding, so I used Kickstarter. It was sold out immediately. It was great success. I would like to do another one in the future.
MARK: Is the book available now? Can our listeners go and buy a copy of the book?
ICHI: It’s actually sold out.
MARK: Oh, really? Gosh. It’ll be a collector’s item.
ICHI: Yeah. Kind of, yes.
MARK: Okay. Well, maybe we can link to the book so people can see, because you’ve got some very beautiful dragon images which, as you say, it’s a very traditional image in Japan. And washi paper?
ICHI: Yes, washi paper.
MARK: That’s very special, isn’t it?
ICHI: Yes. Very soft like, sometimes Western people say it’s rice paper or something.
MARK: Yes. Is that not true?
ICHI: It’s not from the rice, actually, that I use.
MARK: It’s a myth?
ICHI: Yeah. It’s a different plant. But, very soft paper.
MARK: And this is a very traditional kind of art, with the sumi ink and the washi paper, isn’t it?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: Okay. that was your first project in COVID. Did you say there were three?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: Let’s hear number two.
ICHI: For the second project, me and my partner, Laura, bought an abandoned house in the countryside, and since then we have been doing DIY renovation, at the same time, shooting a video which we put on YouTube. It’s a traditional Japanese house next to Japan’s second-largest lake, surrounded by lotus fields, rice fields.
MARK: That sounds amazing.
ICHI: It’s beautiful environment.
MARK: Where is it in Japan?
ICHI: In Ibaraki Prefecture.
MARK: Ibaraki?
ICHI: Yes. It’s a little bit north of Tokyo. We’ve got three buildings on the property. I plan to open an art gallery, a coffee shop and guesthouse in one of them.
MARK: Wonderful.
ICHI: It’s only one and a half hours’ drive from Tokyo, but the land cost is about 200 times cheaper than Setagaya in Tokyo where we live.
MARK: The property market in Japan is quite different in the countryside to the city.
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: They want to encourage people to move to the countryside or to use the buildings. Is that right?
ICHI: Yeah. I could do creative things while keeping social distancing.
MARK: Yes. It’s easier to have social distance in the countryside than Tokyo.
ICHI: Yeah. This is the second project.
MARK: And is there a video on YouTube that I can link to?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: Great. I will make sure we put that in the show notes and we will link to it on YouTube.
ICHI: Oh, thank you so much.
MARK: I’m very curious to see. Maybe I could come and see your gallery when it’s finished.
ICHI: Yes. Please come.
MARK: Great. Okay. When it’s open maybe in a future season, I will let the listeners know.
ICHI: Thank you so much.
MARK: And we will send some visitors to your gallery and your coffee shop.
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: Okay. You did the book, that was project number one. The house is project number two.
What was project number three?
ICHI: The third project was starting NFT art, which I know you want to talk about more.
MARK: Yes. I have friends and clients who are making NFT art. I have some friends who are very enthusiastic.
I don’t know so much about it myself, so maybe you could tell me, where did you get the idea of creating NFT artwork?
ICHI: I’ve been doing digital artwork for a long time using the iPad. One of my tattoo clients, Sascha Bailey, has an NFT platform called BAE, which is Blockchain Art Exchange. He introduced me to the idea.
MARK: And what did you think?
ICHI: To be honest, at the beginning, I didn’t understand what is this.
MARK: It’s not easy to understand, is it?
ICHI: Yes. And then, actually, Sascha is still young. At the beginning, I don’t know what it is.
MARK: If anybody’s listening to this and they’re new to NFTs, it’s a little bit like, the way I think about it is that an NFT is like having an actual object.
Normally, if you have a digital object on the internet, you can copy it, you can get thousands of copies of the same thing. But with an NFT, there’s just one object. It’s like having an actual painting or a drawing. Is that right?
ICHI: Mm-hmm.
MARK: And it’s recorded on the blockchain, right? Everything can be certified that this is your artwork, for instance, or your digital file, whatever that contains?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: How did you get started with the NFTs? I believe you took part in an exhibition at CrypTOKYO.
ICHI: CrypTokyo was the first physical NFT art show in Japan. It was organized and sponsored by GrowYourBase. It was in UltraSuperNew Gallery in Harajuku. There was lots of press, and it was on TV in Japan, too. It was a great experience, and my work was sold out.
MARK: Really?
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: That must have been very satisfying.
ICHI: Yeah. It was great.
MARK: What kind of opportunities do NFTs offer to artists?
ICHI: It’s a new art market, so it’s an opportunity for more people to see your artwork, I think.
MARK:x In terms of the financial reward, if you have one digital artwork, then that becomes more valuable, right? It’s a bit like selling a painting because there’s just one copy of it.
ICHI: Mm-hmm.
MARK: A lot of artists say that the internet has made it harder in some ways to earn a living, but do you think there’s an opportunity with NFTs and the blockchain that more of the value can go to the artist?
ICHI: From the artist side, doing the process is the same, and then put it on the blockchain, so put the NFT, then that puts a value on it.
MARK: Yes.
ICHI: Value of the art. I think even like a not digital, or like physical things, the things puts a value on it for the collector who wants to get it.
MARK: Yeah.
ICHI: If it’s not only one, so the value is going down. The things, NFTs put a value on the digital artwork because digital artwork is easy to copy.
MARK: And so it solves that problem in a way, or potentially? That’s what we hope, is that if a collector thinks, ‘I can only buy one image. And if I buy this image, or if I have this NFT, no one else has it, then it’s valuable for people to spend money,’ the same way they would buy an oil painting or a washi painting.
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: And then, so, hopefully, this is an opportunity for artists to earn more from their work. We don’t know how it will work. When the internet first came along we thought it would make life easier, and in some ways it did, in some ways it made more problems. Who knows which way the NFTs will go?
ICHI: Yeah. It’s new things.
MARK: It must have been very exciting to be part of the very first show in Tokyo. First one in Japan, wasn’t it?
ICHI: Yes. First physical NFT art show in Japan, yeah.
MARK: Okay. NFTs are also controversial for some people, aren’t they?
ICHI: Mm-hmm.
MARK: One big concern is obviously around the environmental impact of the technology behind them. What about in Japan? How do people perceive NFTs?
ICHI: I’m not an expert, but I think Japan was slow to join the NFT market. Japan is normally cautious about most of the new things. But when NFT came, it seems like people are positive. About the environmental side… I hope that technology will challenge itself and improve through trial and error.
MARK: Yeah. I think that’s a very nice way of putting it, that technology will challenge itself, because on the one hand, there’s a lot of technology going towards the creation of the NFTs, and hopefully the opportunities that will create.
But as we know, there’s big environmental questions, and I think that is a challenge, as you say. It’s a challenge for the technologists to solve it. If you can solve one problem, maybe you can solve this problem.
ICHI: Yeah. My point is trial and error is very important, I think. Just cautious is not going to happen anything.
MARK: I think that’s a very good point. You’ve got to try. And I think that applies to art, too, maybe, in my experience with poetry, trial and error quite often is how you make discoveries.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: What have you learned from the process of going from tattoos and washi paper to making NFT artwork?
ICHI: Making art, the process is kind of same for me. For example, tattoo for skin, painting on washi paper, using iPad, it’s kind of same process for me. But I learned about NFT and crypto blockchain. I like getting knowledge, especially about new things.
MARK: This interests me about you because you have a very traditional art. It goes all the way back to Ukiyo-e, Edo period, classic Japanese artists, but you’re also interested in the future, in technology.
Is this something personal to you or do you think it is a very Japanese characteristic of the culture?
ICHI: Probably. I don’t know. I know only my things.
MARK: But you like the balance of the two, the old and the new?
ICHI: Yes. It’s have to adjusting the era or environment today, otherwise some of the traditional art will just disappear. For example, Ukiyo-e in a later period, lots of painter, or also investor maybe, I don’t know how to… and then there’s a carving people, craftsman, too, and then print tattoo, there’s three sections.
MARK: That’s right, it was the artist, and then the carver carved the wood for the woodblock?
ICHI: Yes.
MARK: And then the printer would put ink on it and do the actual printing. I guess, in those days it’s a bit like digital art, because you could have one image and you’d have lots of copies, right?
ICHI: Yes. the print skill is a… not skill, technology. Is going to improve.
MARK: Yeah.
ICHI: But also, if the Ukiyo-e is not popular, then no one pays the money. Also, the craftsman is gone, the market just shrinks, so it just stops. That’s one of the traditional art problems, I guess.
MARK: Yeah.
ICHI: But if there’s a new art market, it’s the chance to keep the traditional art for the future.
MARK: It keeps the tradition going?
ICHI: Yeah. Even like a little bit changing.
MARK: Yes. When you describe that it makes me think…well, we think ‘Ukiyo-e, 19th century, very old-fashioned, very traditional’, but, I guess, for them it would have been new technology. It was a new market, a new economy.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: And that’s really what you’re doing with NFTs today. It’s exploring the new technology and the new market.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: The tradition needs to change to keep going.
ICHI: I mean, not all of it but…
MARK: But, you’re exploring this. This could be a path to the future, or who knows, maybe it doesn’t work out so well. We all thought social media would be wonderful, and it’s not so wonderful now! But if you’re not exploring, if you’re not experimenting, then you never find out. If you’re just cautious, then you don’t discover.
ICHI: Yeah, I think so.
MARK: Okay. That’s the artistic side.
How has your business benefited from having NFT works?
ICHI: More people can see my work, and new experiences, like coming on this podcast, are the benefits I feel.
MARK: It’s more visible than art on paper or somebody’s body, in some contexts?
ICHI: Yes, I think so.
MARK: Is there anything else that you would like to share? Because one of the things we’re talking about this season is how artists and creatives changed direction because of the pandemic.
Is there anything you would like to share about changing your direction in the pandemic?
ICHI: As I said, challenging is very important. Life is short. I feel like I’ve been starting to think more about how to spend my limited time. I wanted do more big projects, but if each one takes a few years, I can’t do a lot! I have to think more carefully.
MARK: That’s a really good point. I was 50 years old last year and I started to think like this, I don’t have so much time…
ICHI: Especially big projects. [Laughter]
MARK: Right, exactly. How long have I got to do these things? I can appreciate that. And I think it’s a really good point that COVID really did make us think about, well, what are we doing with our time? How much have we got left? And what do you want to create? It’s wonderful that you came out with three new big projects. You’ve got the book, you’ve got the house, which will be a gallery, you’ve got the NFT direction.
The tattoo business, is that picking up yet? I know there’s only a very small number of tourists in Japan right now.
ICHI: Yeah. I mean, just for me, quite enough busy.
MARK: Oh, good.
ICHI: Yeah.
MARK: Good. I’m glad that’s the case.
ICHI: Yeah. Thank you so much.
MARK: Ichi, I think this would be a great time for us to set the listener your Creative Challenge. If you are listening to this and this is the first time you have heard The 21st Century Creative, at the end of every interview, I ask my guest to set you, dear listener, a creative challenge. This is something that you can do that will stretch you creatively, and maybe as a person, and it will be on theme for the interview, and it’s something that you can do or get started doing within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Ichi, what’s your creative challenge?
ICHI: I would like the listener to think about their own creative work and traditional history of their art or craft.
My challenge is, have a look at the traditional form of your artwork, maybe a certain type of art, or music, or writing, whatever it is, then ask yourself, what is happening with this tradition right now? Is anyone doing something new with it? And then research that, see what you can find.
Then ask yourself, ‘What could I do that would be a new version of this old iteration?’ And maybe you could experiment with a new type of work just to see what happens.
MARK: Beautiful. I love that. Okay. This is very similar to what you do. You want the listener to think about the tradition in their work, maybe do a little bit of research and look into the history of the kind of work you do, where that came from, and then see, okay, now who is extending it? Who’s doing something new today? And maybe ask, ‘Well, what could I do? How could I join in and start to experiment?’
That’s a lovely creative challenge, Ichi. It’s very much on theme for The 21st Century Creative where we’ve been saying, ‘Something old, something new,’ is one of the mottos of the show.
Ichi, I’m sure people will be very curious having heard you speak about your work, where can they go to see some of your work? Where can they find you online?
MARK: Okay, ichi_hatano. Okay. And it’s the same for the website, .com, but minus the underscore?
ICHI: Yes. Ichihatano.com.
MARK: Ichihatano.com, okay. I would really encourage you if you’re listening to this to go and see Ichi’s website, his Instagram, his YouTube videos. There’s some incredible work there. It’s really exciting, and quite a variety to see Ichi tattooing an image on somebody’s skin, and then the images in the book, the dragons. Also, I’m very curious to see the house project.
MARK: Okay, Konnichiwa Channel. Okay. Obviously, I will make sure I link to this in the show notes and we’ll get some videos in the show notes, as well. Make sure we’ve got some links to the NFT artwork. If anybody would like to collect a unique piece from Ichi, I’m sure that would be very collectible in future.
Are there any new projects, any current projects that you would like to tell us about?
ICHI: No. Just, still we are doing DIY renovation. That’s quite busy right now.
MARK: Okay, that’s cool. You’ve got plenty to do.
ICHI: Yeah. And couple of NFT project I got invited, but still not sure so…
MARK: Okay. Well, I guess if we go to your website, then we can find the new projects and follow you on Instagram.
ICHI: Yes. Thank you so much.
MARK: Then that would be great. Brilliant. Ichi, thank you so much for your time and your…
ICHI: Thank you so much for your time, too.
MARK: It’s a really amazing story.
ICHI: Thank you so much.
MARK: I’m so glad to have found this, so thank you very much. Domo arigato.
ICHI: Dōitashimashite. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Using Lockdown to Launch a Dream Project with Nicky Mondellini
Aug 29, 2022
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Have you ever had the idea for a creative project that you’ve never quite got round to starting?
That’s the situation actor and voiceover artist Nicky Mondellini was in back in 2019. She dreamed of making a podcast to share her knowledge, meet interesting new people and create opportunities. But there never quite seemed enough time.
Then along came the Coronavirus and her upcoming movie project was cancelled, and she found herself with more time on her hands than anticipated.
Nicky decided it was now or never – and in this interview she tells the story of what happened when she decided to go for it.
In the first part of the show, I look back over the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season interviews, and identify 4 main paths creatives took through the pandemic. Listen to identify which one you took, and the questions I have to help you make the most of your situation.
Nicky Mondellini
Nicky Mondellini is an actor who had an early start in show business, since childhood she was attracted to the magic of the stage and later, she continued her path by working in television and film as well as the theatre.
Alongside her acting career, she developed a voiceover business. Having grown up in Mexico City with an Italian father and a British mother has made her equally proficient in Spanish, English and Italian, as well as different accents.
Specialising in commercials for the Hispanic market, she has been the voice of major brands such as Ford, Google Pixel, Fiat Alfa-Romeo, Texas Lottery, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Ikea.
In 2017 she received the Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Spanish Language Narration by the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences. The Society also nominated her for awards in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
At the beginning of 2020 she had been cast in a film and was looking forward to starting shooting in February. Then the pandemic arrived and the project evaporated, as well as all the other acting opportunities she had been lining up.
It was a frightening time and a part of her was very tempted to play it safe. But in today’s interview, Nicky told me how she came to treat the pandemic as an opportunity to lean into her voiceover work, raise her game and attract new clients.
So she invested in her professional development, ignoring the voice at the back of her mind telling her not to spend any money she didn’t have to.
This led to the launch of her Spanish language podcast La Pizarra, which features interviews with experienced professionals in the entertainment business on both sides of the camera.
Creating the podcast has given Nicky another outlet for her creative talent, and is paying off by raising her profile, growing her network and creating opportunities for her career.
Listen to Nicky’s interview for an inspiring story of having the courage to set aside firefighting and anxiety, and commit to a project that is creatively fulfilling and strategically smart.
You can learn more about Nicky’s work as an actor and voiceover artist at www.nickymondellini.com
MARK: Nicky, how did you get started on your creative path?
NICKY: I got started at a very young age. I was 11 years old when I did my first musical. So I’ve been in the business for quite a while. I don’t exactly like to say, ‘Oh, yeah, over 35 years in the business,’ because then they’ll think I’m much older than what I am. But that’s when I got started and it’s been lovely.
MARK: Gosh, that’s an early start. What was that experience like? Was it love at first sight? Did you think, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do,’ or was it more of a slow burn?
NICKY: Yes. No, it was. I should say my first experiences on stage were I started dancing when I was 4 years old. And we did the recitals, end of the year recitals, and they were always a magical production. It wasn’t just like, oh, all the different groups, they take five minutes for each group to dance and that’s it. No, it was all weaved into a story. I loved that element. It was a very magical element and being on stage, instead of being nervous and being afraid of people there, for me it was a beautiful reaction. I wanted to be there. I wanted to express. The lights, the stage, everything, I just fell in love with it. Each time we had a recital, I just couldn’t wait for it.
And then when I got the opportunity to play Baby June in Gypsy when I was 11, my goodness I really, really enjoyed all of that experience. The rehearsals and then going on tour. And I felt it, that that was my path. That’s definitely what I wanted to do. I caught myself fantasizing about dancing on stage, about doing this, doing that. Whenever I would hear a piece of music, I was already imagining the choreography and all the creative things that go with it. It was my world and I just felt alive in it and it just made me feel wonderful. And so, I’ve always looked to express myself creatively in many different ways.
MARK: So, from that early on, you were thinking, ‘This is the thing I want to do’?
NICKY: Yes, for sure. At one point, I thought I wanted to be a classical dancer, but I’m 5-foot-10. It’s not easy to get dance partners when you’re 6 feet tall or more when you’re on your toes. But also, I always wanted to also be acting, doing all three things, acting, singing, dancing. And so I looked for ways to do that. I would say there was a bit of an interruption at one point when I was in high school. All of my friends they were all talking about what they would do when they were going to graduate ‘I’m going to study communications,’ and another one was going to go into biology and another one was going into med school. At one point I thought, ‘Is a career in the arts going to make me be able to support myself?’
MARK: Good question.
NICKY: I started to question all of those things. I thought, ‘Hmm.’ And then also because I remember my dad saying… , I lost my dad when I was very young also, but he was saying, ‘Well, you have to prepare yourself. if you’re a dancer, what if you break your leg and that’s it? Your career’s over.’ And so, I was always thinking, ‘I have to have something more, something to sustain me if things go wrong creatively.’ So, I decided to go to Italy and live with my grandmother and my aunt and uncle and study. I was going to go down a diplomatic path and study international relations. But for the first year, I had to pick up another two languages.
I speak three languages because I grew up in Mexico City, actually. I was born in Italy. My father’s family, they’re all Italian and my mother’s British. A couple of years after I was born, my father got an opportunity to go work in Mexico. They were very adventurous, my parents so we just went there. I grew up there, so school was in Spanish, everything was in Spanish. And I grew up listening to my dad speak to us in Italian, and I would reply in Spanish and same with my mum. I spoke three, but they required four. So, I thought, ‘Okay, well, let me study French, or wait, why not French and German?’ So, I started to just do French and German for that first year, and then I was going to go into university.
But six months in, one night I was just tossing and turning and saying, ‘Okay, no, no, there’s something missing in my life. I have to go back to the stage. I need the stage. I need to be there and I need to be in front of a camera and that’s my path. who am I kidding? That’s my path. So, I’m going to do the best I can.’ I call my mom. And she’s like, ‘Well, yes, of course, come back.’ she was missing me like crazy and my sisters, and she said, ‘Here I will support you 100%. You want to go down that path? All right. You go to the best theater school, you get the best teachers, you get the best training, and you go on that path with firm feet.’ You’re not just going to wing it and see, ‘Oh maybe I could do this. Maybe I could do that. No. If you’re going to choose that path, do it correctly, get the proper training, and you build your career from there.’ So that was like coming to my senses thing and establishing, ‘I am a creative person and I just love to perform.’
MARK: Isn’t always supposed to be true in the Hero’s Journey, there’s the call to adventure, and then the hero always refuses and says, ‘No, I’ll go and do this other thing first or instead?’
NICKY: Yeah.
MARK: But then there comes a point where they have to do it the calling is too strong.
Then where did you go? You went to school to train?
NICKY: Yes. My mom had been working with a very good theater director in Mexico. And his name was Hector Mendoza. And I had met him when I was younger because my mom would bring us to rehearsals with her me and my sisters. He knew me and then would come to classes when she was teaching at the university and with all the same actors that she would then choreograph in a play. And she said, ‘Well, look, this teacher, he’s now opening a school, a specific school.’ So instead of going into the university, he wasn’t teaching there anymore for what they call the Centro Universitario de Teatro, which is the theater center in the national autonomous University in Mexico. Instead of that, he was just teaching theater there, but he opened up a school with another two very, very good theater directors in Mexico.
It was very tough, but I’m happy to say I made it all the way to the end and it was fantastic. It gave me a lot of the bases and the structure and the professionalism that I apply in everything I do nowadays.
MARK: Once you graduated, where did you get going with your career and how did you find your groove professionally?
NICKY: It was fortunate that I was working while I was studying and that’s the way I paid for my acting career, for my studies. I was modeling and I was also working in television already. I was one of several hosts of a morning show and my sections were fashion and then paint and sculpture. And I would do bits and pieces. I started to do a bit of voiceover there, but I didn’t have a studio. I was asked to do that at the studios within Televisa the TV station where I was working. I was already just getting to know producers there and working a bit more.
When I graduated bigger projects started to come along. I had bigger parts in soap operas and in drama shows. And I was also doing a lot of theater. My own teacher, the main teacher, the main director of the school, they love to work with their own students, of course. So, I became part of his company and working in productions that were put on with the UNAM the university, and with the Institute of Fine Arts as well. And I continued there. So, it was mainly acting theater and television, and bit by bit as things started to evolve, I started to do more and more television. Committing to a soap opera and the recordings there for the soap opera were lasting from six months to maybe nine months to a year, depending on the length of the soap opera. In Mexico, they’re not long-running like you have Coronation Street in the U.K.
In Mexico, they’re short. They’re short stories. They go on for about six to nine months to maybe a year and a half. That’s a very long soap opera if it goes beyond a year. In that sense, it was really nice because I ended up doing a lot of different characters for each of the soap operas that I was in. That became my main source… still doing some theater here and there.
And finally the bigger change was in 2006 when we decided to move to Houston, and that’s where my career in voiceover really started to grow a lot more. I did a little bit less acting and that was because of my family situation living in Houston. There’s no big TV studios here. And because I didn’t want anybody else to take care of my kids while I was working I wanted to be here for them and do more the mom thing and voiceover was a godsend in that sense because I was able to work while they’re in school. And so, I wasn’t at a standstill. A lot of the people that saw me, fans from the soap operas on social media, they were saying, ‘Where are you? Why did you retire? You should go back to the soap operas and all that.’ And I said, ‘No, I didn’t retire. I’m just going into a different avenue right now, but I’m still working.’ Definitely I continued doing a lot more of that.
As my kids grew older and were able to do more things for themselves, I also started to pick up on a few things with acting, going away from home for a little bit, my husband being here with them. And having the VoiceOver studio, setting it up the way I hadn’t done in Mexico, was something completely new for me. I had to learn all of that learning how to use a recording software learning how to edit, learning how to take out the breaths and how to take out little clicks and things within the audio and setting up a voiceover business basically. It was a learning curve for me but a very exciting one. Interacting with a lot of people in the voiceover community has been amazing because everyone is just very happy to give you advice and to help you along.
In that sense, I was learning how to be a business owner like I had never been before. With acting you have an agent or producers call you because they see you on a show and they want you on their show. But having to do it on my own with voiceover, I had to learn how to contact clients and how to have a CRM to be getting in touch with people, following up, and everything else. That has been very interesting and very satisfying because suddenly when I call myself a business owner, I feel very good. It’s like, ‘I’ve been building something bit by bit. Clients trust me and they know that I deliver, that I’m professional, that I’m going to do everything in my power to deliver the best audio possible and exactly what they need for their project.’
MARK: Nicky, I’m really interested to hear you talk about your two roles. One is the classic actor-with-agent setup that is the way that industry has traditionally worked, but then also as a business owner, which a lot of creatives tend to resist the idea that they could be business people, dare one say it, entrepreneurs.
It sounds for you though that that transition or having that aspect of your work as well sounded quite empowering.
NICKY: It definitely was. I had never realized or seen myself as a business owner before. I was just a performer being booked for this job or that job. I would get paid through the actors’ union in Mexico. I never even had an idea of what a CRM was or anything. I would just organically bump into someone when I was taping something and I would say hi to this producer or that actor or whatever, not knowing or not structuring it as, ‘Oh, I’m doing my networking now.’ Never had established it that way before. I just heard a tip from someone saying, ‘When you’ve been out of work for a while and you are worried, just grab a bunch of old scripts that you have, put them in your hand, go walk around the TV station, and that’s going to signal to people that you’re working, that you’re in a project, .’ It’s like work begets work. If they see you’re busy, they’ll want to see what you’re doing and call you for their project.
Then when I started in voiceover, I had an agent here. When we moved to Houston, I did get in touch with an agent and I would work and do whatever they would give me. Whatever auditions they would give me, I would do. And then I was fortunate enough to have my demos on their website and people would call me directly from hearing my demos wanting my voice for their project, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. I started to realize, ‘Well, then what’s going to happen?’ So, the more I got into the voiceover community and I went to voiceover conventions, then I saw finally all of the aspects that you need to take into consideration to build a voiceover business and call yourself a business owner.
That was for me a turning point to see, ‘Oh, okay. Now it’s also in my hands. I don’t just have to wait for my agent to send me auditions. It can be in my hands. I can actually create something and build the business upon that and contact people.’ Made me very nervous because I hate calling someone and asking for a job, and I’m very insecure about that. I’m a very shy person, even if I love being on stage, but I’m very shy to talk to people and tell them how wonderful my voice is and I should be doing their project. Because no, I realized I’m one of many and they have a choice. I needed to do all of that and just be confident in the way that I approach clients and start to build the business from there. The more I knew about it from other people within the voiceover community, the more confident I became and the more I learned about how to start building my voiceover business.
MARK: If we can now fast-forward to late 2019, the last days of normal life as we remember them fondly now, what were you working on at that stage, and what plans did you have for 2020?
NICKY: I had been doing quite a bit of networking, in-person networking. And from there, I met a producer that called me to audition for a film. He cast me in that film that was going to be done in Houston. And then also I was in about three projects that clients had told me that they wanted me for those projects to work in and that we needed to do follow-ups on those. The other thing is that I had finally made up my mind to join this mastermind group that was going to be quite an investment. I was a bit nervous. My financial goals weren’t exactly where I wanted them to be by the end of the year. And it was a question of, ‘Are you going to invest in it or not?’ But I had heard from other people that joining a mastermind group specifically with this coach was a game-changer.
So, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m just going to go all in. I’m going to do this and it’s going to be great, and I’m going to learn new things and push myself in ways that I never pushed myself before and give myself deadlines for that.’ I did it and then the coach right after, of course, the pandemic and lockdown and everything, the coach said, ‘Guys, I have to confess, I don’t know if I’m going to lead you in the right way because the world is upside down right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen. But that doesn’t mean that you have to forget your goals, so do the best you can and let’s see what happens.’
We were all nervous, but I was definitely having those goals in mind and I started to complete them one by one, bit by bit, doing the kinds of things that I could do. It was devastating when projects started to be canceled. I was counting on that film. I was counting also on those other projects for voiceover that I was going to do because, of course that would mean I was going to start paying backward. I had invested in the mastermind group and get an income and not be in the red numbers at the beginning of the year. So I just thought, ‘Okay, I’m not going to worry about that because it’s just ridiculous. I’m not going to let that frustrate me. Things are going to happen anyway. What can I do?’
Part of my goal there was to train with specific people that were very excellent coaches. For voiceover, in particular, one of them for commercial voiceover. I also wanted to book a national campaign and become a union actor within SAG-AFTRA, the union here in the U.S.
MARK: At what point did you realize that this news story about this new virus was actually going to impact you and your work directly?
NICKY: Oh, my goodness. I think that when I heard someone say on the news, ‘It’s not a question of if it’s going to hit the U.S., it’s a question of when. This is real.’ I was very worried. At one point I thought, ‘Well, I have a home studio. I don’t have to go out for work. It’s no problem. People are still going to want voice for their businesses or whatever.’ But then, of course, it hit me that the economy, everything was halted. Why? Because I was sending out emails that more than usual were not being answered or follow-ups to, ‘Hey, when’s the film going to start? I’m ready for that. Is it going to go on or… ’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, sorry, our investors had to pull out because everything is up in the air right now.’
It was something that I had been looking forward to a lot like, ‘Oh, finally, I’m going to start doing more things on camera,’ and then, ‘No, guess not.’ That was devastating. Also knowing that we just didn’t know when projection was going to go on for the videos where I was going to lend my voice. Nobody wanted to invest or move anything in their economy and everything was just halted. And so, I’m like, ‘Well, what do I do now?’
MARK: So, what did you do?
NICKY: I thought, ‘I’m not going to let myself be too invested if things are not going to move.’ I just kept thinking, ‘Okay, this is not going to go on forever.’ I always had that positivity in the back of my mind or in the forefront saying, ‘You have to keep pushing. You have to keep moving. Even though things are halted, what can you do to prepare yourself for when the economy does improve, for when things start picking up what can you do?’ One of those things, of course, was that I wanted to start my podcast. And now I had the time to do it and I could invest the time into preparing for it.
In all of my beginning episodes there, all of my guests were all talking about the… not in the first two episodes, but after that, when it was really there, really present, everyone’s talking about the pandemic and when things will go back to normal or whatever. But I got great interviews with people about their journeys, about things that they could offer to help other people in their creative business, either on-camera or behind the camera or at the mic, which is most of what my podcast is about. It was also an investment to pay for the production costs for the podcast, but I’m my own editor. So, I wasn’t investing too much in that sense. I was able to go on bit by bit and still hoping for productions to pick up. And then bit by bit, this client said, ‘Okay, now we’re able to produce this thing.’ And another client started to want to push things out more. And so production started back again very slowly.
MARK: Is this voiceover production?
NICKY: Yes. Those were voiceover production. They were promotional videos.
MARK: Are you saying that the podcast was an idea that you’d had before the pandemic, but you hadn’t had time to do?
NICKY: I hadn’t had time and I wasn’t sure when I would start. I kept wanting everything to be perfect for it.
MARK: Yes. No doubt there.
NICKY: In the mastermind group, the leader was saying, ‘What are you waiting for? Go do it. Go there.’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I want it to be perfect. I need this guest and I need to structure it.’ So, I was very worried about all of the details. I just wanted it to be great perfect from the get-go. He helped me realize that it doesn’t have to be perfect to start off with. It can be bit by bit building up on what you do and you’re improving from it. But if you don’t start now, you’ll never do it. I went ahead and started it and since the first interview, I loved it. I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing. I love interviewing people about a thing that I’m passionate about, which is show business. So yes, I’m going to continue this podcast.’
MARK: What were your aspirations for the podcast? Obviously, I can hear from your voice that you love making it, but professionally, what were the goals of making a show like that?
NICKY: The podcast was also to establish myself as a professional and for credibility. If I spoke to someone when I do interviews and I talk to someone about that and they can hear the type of question that I do or the comments that I do, it’s showing either my credibility, my professionalism, my willingness to be there, to learn more about the business and to improve, and to always be someone who is a good candidate also for their project because they have had all these years of experience.
It was a bit of a branding thing I would say between the marketing and branding thing of my own business. But also highlighting the guests, highlighting their contribution, highlighting their importance in the business. I think it was also or it has been also networking because some of those guests that I don’t know very well, some of them are my colleagues and friends, but a lot of them, I find either on LinkedIn or other places. And so, it ends up being networking as well. It’s worked in all of those ways.
MARK: I think this is really one of the wonderful things about a podcast is that it is so multifaceted. that it’s creatively rewarding to make in its own right. It’s a great chance to get to know other people, to learn from them, to network, if you like. And it also is getting you and your voice and your ideas and your brand out there in a way that can benefit your career. I’ve always felt that it’s a really rewarding and, I think, a very effective medium to long-term strategy for a business.
What I’m hearing from you is that maybe all the day-to-day stuff was getting in the way until the pandemic came along.
NICKY: Exactly. Also, a fear of, ‘Am I really doing this or not?’ I’m a perfectionist. If I don’t have everything right, if I don’t have the perfect script and the perfect answers or questions or everything, I’m just not going to do it. But once I started to let go of that because I’m like, ‘Well, no, I’m never going to be as perfect as I want. I just have to get started and just do it and just enjoy the journey.’ Now I have gotten seriously busy I did have a huge turning point in 2020.
MARK: It also sounds like you had a great nudge from your coach. Who was your coach? Let’s give them some credit!
MARK: Great. So, he gave you a good nudge in the right direction, as well as the opportunity from the pandemic.
NICKY: Oh, yeah. All the rewards that I’ve received from the podcast have been amazing because listening to my guests, as well as continuing with the goals that I had set myself for the year were starting to reap a lot of rewards. I was training with someone that was part of one of the goals and so trained for a commercial voiceover. That helped me start to put that little extra that I needed into my auditions and helped me book a very good national campaign, which I’m still doing to this day for that same client. That has been amazing, very big game-changer. Also, I’ve been invited to talk at voiceover conferences and also to talk about creating your podcast in the courses that a friend of mine is teaching about everything that has to do with voiceover.
She’s like, ‘Why don’t you talk about creating a podcast and all that?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not an expert.’ She says, ‘Well, yes, but none in the group know about what you do to get started and all that. If you contribute that to our group, that would be amazing.’ So, then I started to do that. I became more confident in myself as a business owner, as a producer, and as an artist. I think both the mastermind group and the podcast have helped me a lot in that sense.
MARK: That’s fantastic. I really do believe when you put yourself out there in the world in a way that you’re bringing something of genuine value and interest to your audience, magical things start to happen from that.
I can absolutely hear you, at that point in the pandemic, you’d already invested in the mastermind. You were investing in the podcast. It’s an act of faith up to a point, isn’t it? Particularly when the economic outlook was so uncertain. And it’s great to hear that that’s coming back to you in the form of work and other opportunities.
NICKY: Oh, yes. Yes, absolutely. It’s been wonderful.
MARK: What happened to the actor during this period?
NICKY: The actor’s there, she’s always there. Since I really had to push for the growth of my business, I’m very fortunate also that my husband also has his own business, nothing related to voiceover at all, but both of us together pull through. We have two kids and soon three in university.
MARK: That’s not cheap, is it?
NICKY: No, not cheap. I’ve been able to do that and it’s just been wonderful to see how I can start to support myself and all that. But still, of course, every time I watch a movie and I see it from the actor’s perspective and with a different eye thinking, ‘Oh, that actor is so credible right now. What are they doing that touches me or how would I do that differently?’ Those are things that I always perceive or always have in mind whenever I watch a TV show or a movie or something, and always wanting to be there and to develop a character and to be either on stage or in front of the camera.
So, knowing that, ‘Okay, I have to put the actor here.’ The actor is expressing herself in different ways, I would say. Even if you’re in front of the mic, you don’t have an audience there, but voiceover has its own things and you need to be creative. You are doing a character. You’re not on stage or in front of the camera, but every time you talk, it could be something as simple as IVR, which is the voice you hear on telephone message it’s like, ‘If you’d like to leave a message, please press one.’ That sort of thing. I do tons of those in both English and Spanish. But even if it’s something as simple as that or something as beautiful and enjoyable as narrating a documentary, and it can be with any theme at all, and you’re playing the part of the expert talking about that theme. So, you are acting. When you do a commercial, you also have to be the one who is knowledgeable enough to offer the information to the client. You have to believe it and you have to be very credible. Otherwise in your voice, people won’t perceive that, you won’t be booked for that. I have been pushing my acting in all those different ways.
Of course, the interaction and having the dialogue spoken back to me with same partners, that is amazing. I miss that, but I’ve kept going to acting classes. I haven’t forgotten about that completely and I’m still auditioning for films. The one that got canceled has been pushed to October. So, I am going to do it in the end. Now hopefully, if everything goes well.
MARK: That will have a happy ending, that story, fingers crossed.
NICKY: That will have a happy ending, yes, fingers crossed. People are wearing masks when they’re not on camera or everyone rehearses with their masks on. All the safety precautions are really there and they’re very strict and that’s the only way that productions can go on. Part of me not pursuing that much also has been not wanting to be away from my kids because, of course you have to travel to other cities and be on location for about three months and that just wasn’t possible for me. I just didn’t want to do that be away from my kids for that long.
My youngest one is about to graduate high school. So that’s about to change. I’ll be more confident to do that and knowing that I can also take my voiceover studio with me because I can take my computer, my microphone, or even rent a professional studio in any city when I need to do what we call a remote connection, sort of what we’re doing now, but it’s just voice. The studio can record me directly into their own studio through my microphone with a specific platform that we use. So that’s where I’ll be heading into more and more.
MARK: Great. Overall, it sounds like the fact that you had these two strands to your career, when one of them was blocked by the pandemic, you were able to lean into the other one more and develop that and build that side of your business?
NICKY: Yes. Another investment that I did during the pandemic it was not easy to make also because I definitely was living on savings at that point, but I thought, ‘Okay, I definitely want my voice to be or my delivery to be completely different every time I audition. I want a different take. I want to have a fresh approach to my auditions.’ This coach in my mastermind group had been recommended by several of the people that were in the group. And I thought, ‘Okay, well I’ll just reach out to him.’ And yes he wasn’t cheap, but he was making a discount because of the pandemic. So, he was offering a discount if you were booking two sessions at a time. So, I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to do that.’
From the first session that I had with him, I booked something. He led me in the little way that I needed to do. And it was similar to my acting training, actually. A lot of things clicked and made sense to me, started to give me more confidence in the way that I would approach my auditions so much so that I continue to pay for that training and pay for more sessions with this coach. And that led me to then book this very good deal, the national commercial campaign that I’m still doing to this day. It was thanks to that training. I wouldn’t have been pushed to do that had I not invested in the mastermind group, had I not invested into these sessions with him.
It did make me very nervous because I’m like, ‘Oh am I going to be able to pay for this?’ Remember, I started to pay for production costs of the podcast as well. So, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m depleting my savings.’ And then I thought, ‘Well I better do it,’ because I knew it was going to move my delivery, my business, everything into a different realm into a different aspect. And it has. I just kept thinking this is going to be good. Because I felt it. Every time we had a session, every time I felt more confident, I was taking more secure steps towards the things that I needed to do to keep building my business and to book the work that I know can sustain me financially, as well as let me express myself creatively in the way that I know I can.
MARK: That’s a terrific story, Nicky. And it really emphasizes something I think that a lot of times people think about coaching as remedial or something that you do if you are not quite up to scratch, or maybe it’s something that you do one day when you’ve got all your ducks in a row, but actually, very often it’s the most beneficial when you are already an experienced professional because a coach is the person who can take you to the next level.
And the next level on from where you were already sounds like it’s quite something special.
NICKY: Yeah. Oh, yes, absolutely. Totally worth it. In my mastermind group, everyone was talking about this coach, Dave Walsh, and how great he is and how amazing it is to do his training and how he’s helped a lot of people. So, I thought, ‘Yes, I’m going to reach out to Dave and I’m going to book a few sessions.’
MARK: Thank you, Nicky. I really appreciate your openness in sharing the challenges that you had, the way you rose to those challenges. It’s been so great to hear that your investment of time and money and courage and faith and effort is paying off so well.
If somebody’s listening to this and maybe actor, maybe a voiceover artist, or maybe working in another creative profession, and I think all of us are still facing some version of the challenges of the pandemic, what would you like to share with them that you learned from your own experience of pivoting and reinventing yourself in response to the pandemic?
NICKY: I would say that, first of all, you need to establish your goals. Really where do you see yourself going? Where do you want yourself to be to really make a difference in your business? And then not settle for ‘Oh, well, there’s no work because all of these external things are out of my control. That’s it. I can’t do anything about it.’ No, you have to be proactive and you have to keep moving forward. And I was also looking at all the free resources that I could and some coaches were offering free sessions. If you’re well-connected into the community of the business that you’re in a voiceover community, oh, my goodness, there’s tons of free advice that you can get out there. Go to the forums, the Facebook groups, listen to podcasts like one of the ones that is my favorite and was my mastermind coach is Marc Scott and the ‘VOpreneur’ podcast.
Shout out to him because he gives out great advice. From there, you will find out about others other podcasts, other forums, other things where you can pick up a lot of information, valuable information that you can use for your business and keep moving forward and keep growing. Acting as well. What can you do? Can you spare the money to invest in online classes as well?
Because a lot of online classes for acting were going on as well and there’s a masterclass if you want to pay a subscription to masterclass and a lot of amazing people, directors and famous actors, A-listers are there giving courses. What can you do to keep moving forward if you don’t have the resources at first that will help you gain the confidence starting to book the work that you can then reinvest to pay for those targeted, specific people that are going to help you move forward with your business and with your creative spirit and with all your talents?
MARK: On that theme, Nicky, I believe you have a rather interesting Creative Challenge for our listeners. If you’re listening to this episode and this is the first time you’ve heard the show, this is the point in the interview where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a creative challenge. And this is something that is on the theme of the interview and will stretch you creatively and personally, and maybe professionally as well. And it’s something that you can do or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Nicky, what’s your Creative Challenge?
NICKY:This Creative Challenge has to do with your voice since I use my voice a lot for work. You have to think of ways, new ways, in which use your voice creatively, either in your personal life or your professional life, and what that would mean for you in ways that you’ve never thought before.
For example let’s say work. You’re just used to texting or emailing your clients, what about just picking up the phone, talking to them? If you get a request for a certain project and things are not clear to you, instead of going back and forth with email, just pick up the phone and talk to them call them. You clarify more things, you get a sense of the person that you’re going to work with. They get a sense from you and then they gain more confidence because you made the effort to call them and to be able to clarify things.
I’m going to say phone calls which are not as used now as they were before, but actually work very well to improve things in your work. Another example is if you have young kids or a niece or a nephew or grandkids, when’s the last time you just read a story for them bedtime story? Or just 10 minutes within the day where they’re maybe overexcited or they’re having a bit of a meltdown or a tantrum or whatever, and you just sit down and pick up a book and say, ‘Well, let me read you a story or tell you a story.’ If it’s a story that off of the top of your mind, why not? Communicate with them and be creative that way. And, of course that’s also something very nice that you can do. And there’s all sorts of things that you can use your voice for if you think about it. And so, the challenge is that. See how using your voice can change your life and your business.
MARK: What a lovely challenge, Nicky. I think particularly in these days when we are so challenged around the area of connection that very often we can’t meet in person as much as we can a voice can really bridge that gap in a way that email and text and SMS never will. So often people hide behind email and messages get lost or you don’t get that same level of trust and connection that is so vital if you’re going to be working with somebody because creative projects rarely run entirely smoothly. I think that’s a lovely thing to do, really don’t forget what a wonderful instrument your voice is, even if we haven’t all developed it as much as Nicky has. Thank you so much, Nicky, for coming on and sharing your experience on the show.
I’m going to let you pronounce the name of your podcast because I won’t get the accent right! So, give us the podcast name and also your website and where people can connect with you, and what they can connect with you for online.
NICKY: Absolutely. Well, first of all, this has been a pleasure talking to you. So, thanks so much for the opportunity. The name of my podcast is ‘La Pizarra Con Nicky Mondellini’, which means ‘The Slate with Nicky Mondellini’.
They can find out about it on lapizarrapodcast.com. There’s also an app called La Pizarra Podcast downloadable on iOS and Android. And they can listen to it most major platforms. just find it that way. If you just put La Pizarra, you’ll get 10 or 15. That’s why I needed to put my name there as well.
MARK: And that’s spelled P-I-Z-A-R-R-A? Is that right?
NICKY: Correct. Yes. So, it’s L-A, and then Pizarra is P-I-Z-A-R-R-A, and then C-O-N for Con Nicky Mondellini. And Nicky is N-I-C-K-Y. And La Pizarra is a podcast made for people in the entertainment business who are probably just starting their career or they’ve been in it for a while and they like to hear the perspective from others who are experts and who have been in the business for a while to know how they navigate the highs and lows of the business, that there are so many and what they can do to get the best training and maybe create a good demo for voiceover people or get the best pictures, headshots or all sorts of advice for people.
But it’s for people on both sides of the camera because I also talk to producers and creative directors and what their journey is like, what their perspective is in working with actors. It’s about putting those two things together. And it’s not just voiceover, it’s acting, it’s theater, it’s singers. I started to do the podcast in Spanish because most people know me from my working in Mexico, but lately, I’ve started to do more episodes in English as well because I know a lot of amazing people that are English speakers that I know can contribute a lot to the podcast and to the followers. So that’s why I’ve been doing it in both languages lately.
MARK: That’s great.
NICKY: And then people can also find out about my work if they want to hear demos or anything. It’s nickymondellini.com.
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Nicky.
NICKY: Thank you. It was really, really a pleasure. Thank you and best of luck with all your endeavors and your poetry podcast as well, which is amazing.
MARK: Oh, thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Taking Deep Work Online with Laura Davis
Aug 22, 2022
Welcome to Episode 7 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Today we’re focusing on a creative sector that is close to my heart, which was massively disrupted but didn’t get quite the level of coverage that others did. And that’s the field of personal development and learning.
And I’m delighted to welcome a guest, Laura Davis, who is something of a legend in the field of therapy and healing.
Laura’s latest book is The Burning Light of Two Stars, a really powerful memoir about her relationship with her mother, how that was disrupted by Laura’s writings and how they took steps to make peace with one another.
In the first part of the show, I argue that all arts are performing arts – even if it’s just you sitting alone in your office or studio. So we need to show up accordingly!
Laura Davis
Photo by Jace Ritchey
Laura Davis is an author and teacher who writes books that change people’s lives.
Her first book, The Courage to Heal, which she co-authored with the poet Ellen Bass, came out in the eighties and it was the first book to give survivors of sexual abuse a pathway to the healing process.
Laura’s books have been translated into 11 languages and sold millions of copies. She is also a very experienced teacher who has been helping other writers find their voice and tell their stories at classes and retreats for many years.
And when the pandemic struck in 2020 she had to cancel all her retreats for the year, leaving her with the question: what next?
The obvious answer was virtual teaching. But Laura had always resisted this idea – she thought it was fine for teaching information or skills-based learning. But for the kind of deep personal transformation she facilitates, she’d always said it just wouldn’t be the same.
In this interview you’ll hear how she challenged her own beliefs and stepped out of her comfort zone to take her work online. So if you do any kind of teaching or coaching or facilitation, this interview is essential listening.
Laura also talks about her new memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story the story of her embattled relationship with her mother, the rift in their relationship after the publication of The Courage to Heal, and the dramatic and surprising collision course they ended up on at the end of her mother’s life.
Before I spoke to Laura I read The Burning Light of Two Stars and I found it compelling reading, on several levels. I said to her, there are some books you read and others you experience, and this is definitely one of the latter! It’s an extraordinary account of love in the face of abuse and pain, and also demonstrates great artistic skill in the storytelling.
You can read the opening chapters of The Burning Light of Two Starshere.
And you can find out more about the book and where to buy it here.
MARK: Laura, you’ve been a columnist, a talk show host, a radio news reporter, and now a bestselling author and teacher. Is there a common thread in all of these different roles?
LAURA: Yes, there is. On my website, I have a little tagline. It says, ‘Healing words that change lives.’ I really do see that as the umbrella for everything that I’ve done. For instance, I’ve spent the last 25 years as a writing teacher in many, many different kinds of settings, but for me, writing is really just the vehicle, and it’s the means by which I build communities and connect people to themselves and to each other in the deepest ways.
So, although I’ve been a writer, and I just published my seventh book, I think in a broader way, I have always been a communicator and an agent of change. I was first published in elementary school. I started a little newspaper with my friends called The Literature Club Journal. I wrote it for my high school paper. In my early 20s, I was writing feature articles for small newspapers and published my first book, The Courage to Heal when I was 31 years old. Writing has been a thread, but also, when I was 23, I worked as a volunteer at the local community radio station. I had a women’s rhythm and blues show, and I just fell in love with the medium of radio and just the intimate sound of the human voice.
A couple of years after that, I crammed into a Volkswagen with some friends from the radio station. We drove 1,000 miles to a public radio conference in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains. And when we got there, there were all these representatives of these radio stations in Alaska, Alaska Public Radio, and they were all hiring. And so, I applied for a job as a radio news reporter. I had to fake my audition tape, which I guess showed I had the necessary skills to create a compelling story. And they flew me to Alaska for an interview, which at 25 was, like, the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. And then they hired me. I made $16,000 a year, which at the time felt like this amazing fortune. I worked there for a couple of years, and the second year, I was able to parlay that job as a reporter into having a live daily talk show. I was allowed to interview anyone I wanted and I just fell in love with interviewing people. I found that I was really good at it, that I could make people dig down and talk about the most real, honest things that they often would never tell anyone. It was my favourite job I’ve ever had in my life.
But I was living on an island. In Alaska, it rained 13 feet a year, and I was just desperate to get back to California. I moved back to San Francisco and I knew that I was giving up my potential for any career in broadcasting because, to make it in radio, you have to be willing to move from a smaller market to a little bigger market and then you just keep moving every two years and I just wasn’t willing to do that. The other thing that happened that year when I was 27 was I began remembering having been sexually abused as a child by my mother’s father, my maternal grandfather. Like many survivors, I’d blocked it out, and when I began to remember it, it was just absolutely devastating and threw my life into a complete tailspin.
One of the ways I coped with it was writing my way through it. And that’s what led me ultimately to team up with Ellen Bass and write the book that later became The Courage to Heal. It was published by Harper & Row in 1988. It was the first book to give survivors of sexual abuse a roadmap to the healing process. Within about six months, it became this grassroots international bestseller. I was 31 years old and suddenly the publication of this book had catapulted me into this weird fame for the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
MARK: I’d like to pick up on that word, ‘courage’, in the title because, clearly, it takes a lot of courage to face up to an experience like that, to go through the healing process for yourself. Also, it must’ve taken extraordinary courage to then write about it and put it out there in public in that way.
How did you find the courage to do that?
LAURA: I was compelled. I think I have a very strong creative drive and as a creative person, I think there are certain subjects, certain themes, certain core experiences that are our material. At that point in my life, that was my material and Ellen and I always felt like we were meant to write that book. I don’t usually think that way or talk that way, but I felt like we were in the right place at the right time with the right message, and we were able to communicate it in a very simple, clear, accessible, and deeply emotional way so that people reading it felt like we were writing about their lives and giving them hope.
But for me, the hardest part of publishing it was my family, how they would react. I had to really face my worst fear, was that I would lose my family and it actually did happen. So at the same time that I was experiencing this success, I was cast out of my family. And in particular, my mother and I… it really cemented an estranged relationship that was already going sour, and it just created this terrible rift between us. So I gained the world and lost my family.
The next five years I wrote four other books about healing from sexual abuse. I was out on the lecture circuit. But then I came to this crossroads where I realized I really didn’t want my whole life and my whole career to centre around the sexual abuse I’d experienced as a child. I didn’t want to be a professional incest survivor anymore. So, I walked away from it really at the peak of my success and I leaped without a safety net. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. In some ways, that took more courage than writing the book and publishing it, to begin with.
MARK: These days, thankfully, the climate around sexual abuse is much more understanding and supportive than it was in those days. You really were a pioneer, you and Ellen, in opening up the conversation about this, weren’t you?
LAURA: Yes. We were pioneers and it was really an amazing experience and it still is because The Courage to Heal has been out for 34 years and it still is selling. It still is considered a classic. We still get letters and emails and messages from survivors all the time saying they’ve picked up the book. And unfortunately, there are new generations of survivors who need it. I think at first, we had the misguided idea that all we’d have to do is put this book out, communicate this information, and then it would stop. But obviously, it hasn’t. So, the book has had new life with new generations.
That’s a remarkable experience is to put something out in the world that not only is commercially successful but really touches people in those incredibly deep ways and creates a change in the conversation in society. I experienced that at a very young age. And I really wasn’t equipped to handle it the way I would be now. It was a challenging, exciting, difficult, and wonderful time in my life. After that, I began teaching writing, and that’s what I’ve done for the last 25 years. And first, I just taught some weekly classes in my own town designed to help people find their voice and unpack their own life stories. Later, I started doing it in retreat settings and eventually, internationally. I’ve never worked for a university or a college. This is all me hanging out my own shingle. I’ve always been, for the last 35 years, a self-prompting, solo-creative entrepreneur.
MARK: Going back to the point where you’ve had this huge success very early on in your career. In one sense, you must’ve had the world at your feet.
There’s all kinds of options that would’ve been available to you. Why did you decide to focus on teaching writing?
LAURA: I think when you get notoriety for a particular topic in this case, it was a topic of healing from trauma, people want you to do the same thing. The opportunities that come your way are in that same narrow band. it’s like a band that has their first album that’s a huge success and everyone wants them to repeat.
MARK: Exactly.
LAURA: I didn’t want to repeat. I had discovered that I’m a natural teacher. I love group dynamics. I love helping other people find their voices. It just was a niche that suited me. I started small and I found I not only really loved doing it, I was good at it. It’s more than just conveying information. I found that I was able to create safety in a group that would enable people to access memories and feelings and experiences that they really didn’t have access to any other way. I just feel like it’s my skill, it’s my dharma to teach like that.
I love building those communities. One of my favourite things is when a former student of mine says they’re still meeting with people they met in one of my workshops or classes and they’ve been friends for 20 years now or they still get together to write. I love that I’m connecting people with each other. That to me is really important, much more than the craft, is the community building.
MARK: I think a lot of people would see writing as a solitary activity. Tell me about the relationship between that work in solitude and the very intimate experience of writing and indeed reading a book and community. How do those two relate?
LAURA: I think they’re both really important. Obviously, no one is going to write for you and you have to be the one with a pen in your hand or your fingers on the keyboard and nobody else is going to do it for you and that does require deep concentration and solitude. I have found that when I’m in the company of other writers, either as a student, as a colleague, or as a teacher, it gives me so much impetus to keep going. And when you actually write in a circle with other people, what they write will influence you.
Here’s an example. I was teaching a weekly class one day, and I don’t remember what the prompt is that I gave, but one woman wrote a story about her son being a heroin addict. And this was a subject that had never come up in the class before. The next time we wrote, three other people in the same class, this was a small class, they wrote about members of their family who were drug addicts. So, it’s like the permission of one person breaking silence about something crates the space for other people to be able to write as well. One of the reasons that I really love teaching in a group setting is that when people share their words out loud… and I really encourage people to read their work out loud for many reasons.
MARK: Yeah.
LAURA: That’s how it is in a writing group. And also as you listen to others, maybe one person has a real gift for dialogue or someone else really creates a vivid setting or someone else… they just have the courage to admit and write about things that you would never consider. And it just keeps expanding the possibilities of the group. There’s also something very powerful about being witnessed which is very different than just letting your writing fester in a notebook. When you speak it out loud, you understand what it is you’ve written in a way you don’t when you only write it. We often just don’t know the impact of what we’ve written, but if you say it out loud, whether it’s in a group or even just to yourself, it is a really important step in the writing process.
MARK: I agree 100%. I’m discovering this over on my poetry podcast. Not just my own poems, but a lot of classic poems that I’m reading, I’ve known these poems for years and years and years, but I never read them out loud. And as soon as I read them out loud, I learn something new about them and maybe about why I chose them.
There’s something about really being embodied with the voice, isn’t there?
LAURA: Yeah, it’s interesting. Last spring, I recorded my memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars as an audiobook, and what I experienced was that reading it out loud, I learned so many things about my book that I didn’t know even though it had taken me 10 years to write it. I found mistakes, but more than that, I found deeper emotional resonances with some of the scenes that I didn’t experience until I spoke those words out loud. I didn’t expect that at all.
MARK: In one sense I’m not surprised because I’ve said to you I’ve read the book recently and it was a really powerful experience, on several different levels. Partly, the structure of the book. You’ve got it beautifully structured in the way that you build out the narrative and you’ve got different layers and different perspectives and different time scales. But also, I think because there’s so many layers of emotion and different relationships and time in the book.
You say it took you a long time to write this one, which, again, isn’t surprising. Could you say something about the process of writing this book?
LAURA: It almost didn’t get written because I wanted to give up so many times. My first version, I wanted to write it as a play. It’s a story about my tumultuous relationship with my mother from my birth to her death and she was an actor. So, I thought that writing a play would be a great tribute to her, but I didn’t know anything about writing a play. So that version was a failure. I gave it to a director friend and she just said, ‘Laura, this is not a play. Just write your damn memoir.’
Then I tried to write it as an epistolary book because there’d been this long correspondence between the two of us and I wanted to do it as a series of letters. That didn’t work either. I had readers look at that draft and they said they felt like they were on the outside of a private conversation. Then I started writing it as a narrative. I found that the problem was I didn’t have all the skills I needed to write it because the books I’d published before were how-to books, they were information. I really knew that structure very well, but here I was writing a full-length story. I really had to learn about how to create the arc of a story, how to create tension, what to leave in, what to take out, what sequence to put things in to build momentum.
I think the other challenge was when I first started writing it… and I was writing about my mother and I had beta readers early readers and they would say, ‘Wow, your mother was really difficult’, because I would always ask the question, ‘How do you feel about the mother character?’ And so, I knew I had a long way to go just psychologically and spiritually in creating the story I want which would have no taint of revenge or anyone being a villain or a hero. I had to do the internal work to be able to see my mother from a much vaster perspective. I also had to be willing to bare my own underbelly. As a friend of mine said when she read an early version, she said, ‘Laura, this isn’t the courage to heal. It’s the courage to reveal.’
I put that up on the wall by my desk and I looked at that every day and I started to show my own flaws so that the two of us became very, very human, complex characters, and I knew the book was finally finished after 10 years when people would read it and they would say, ‘Oh, my God, I hated your mother on this page and loved you. And on this page, I hated you and I loved your mother.’ I’m always happy when people say they loved her even though she was an incredibly difficult person. But I was able to create this full-bodied portrait of her on the page.
MARK: That was absolutely my experience. I could see that by any stretch of the imagination, it would be difficult being in a relationship with her. And at the same time, there’s a lot of love in the book. You talk about her strengths and her charm and her wit and her charisma, and there was a really mischievous spirit that was very attractive and charming about her. I could tell you’d done a lot of work on that and it really came across, I felt. It was a very human book.
LAURA: Thank you. I did work really hard at that.
MARK: Let’s go back to, say, the second half of 2019 when you are firmly established on your track as a writing teacher and as a writer. You’re exploring different subjects in your own writing. You’ve built this really very powerful and valuable community.
I know that you were doing the retreat work in particular. You were doing that all face to face, right?
LAURA: Yes, at that point, I was still teaching weekly classes in my local town which were all face to face. And then I was teaching probably maybe 10 to 12 retreats a year. Some of them were weekend long, some of them were a week, some of them were two weeks. I was taking people traveling. I took people to Bali, Vietnam, Greece, Scotland, Peru, and these trips would combine writing, sometimes yoga because my partner, Karen, is a yoga teacher, and always a lot of cultural exploration and adventure. These weren’t primarily writing-intensive retreats but more like a creative vacation where writing would be a way to bond the group and also give people a record of some of the experiences that they had.
So, I was doing that. I was teaching a retreat annually about writing through grief, loss, uncertainty, and change. I had a workshop called ‘How to write about what you can’t remember’. I taught lots of different things but all in person.
When the pandemic hit, it was just devastating to my business. I remember in February of 2020, really before the impact was starting to hit a lot of people around me, I was really one of the first because I had this big retreat coming up in June of that year. I had a sold-out group of writers I was taking to this beautiful villa in Tuscany and it was my biggest event of the year. And I remember at first this bargaining in my head of like, ‘Well, maybe this will pass. Maybe this will just be a few weeks or a month and then things will go back to normal.’ Ultimately after really a lot of soul-searching and then just having to face reality, I cancelled not just that retreat but all the retreats I had lined up for the rest of the year. And this was much more than half my income for the year, so financially, it was really devastating. Boom! Just like that. And just like everyone else who’s in the travel business. even the weekly classes, they were all online as well.
I had to immediately pivot like many, many other people and it was a huge challenge. For many years, people had emailed me or written and said, ‘Why don’t you teach online?’ because I had fans or students or people who followed my work who wanted to study with me and didn’t want to travel across the country to do it. And I always said ‘no’. There’s no way I could replicate what I do in person in a digital environment. I was certain that I had to be in the room, that I had to feel the energy in the room, that I had to be able to be physically proximate to people, I had to be able to touch them or listen to them or go over to them or read their body language or their facial expressions.
And I felt like especially in a retreat, that everything that would happen in the physical container was essential. I chose really beautiful, sacred places to teach and I felt like the environment was part of the container. I just couldn’t imagine doing any of that online. So, I just always dismissed it. But suddenly, I had no choice. I had never heard of Zoom like most of us, but in a Hail Mary pass, I posted on my Facebook page saying I was considering a move to online teaching and I just said, ‘Does anyone have any tips for me?’ I ended up hearing back from a woman I didn’t know and she was one of these many people who had benefited from The Courage to Heal back in the day. She was an online tech host and she offered to help me for free.
A couple of days later, she sent me a link. I got online with her. She taught me how to be on Zoom. And within a week, I had moved my weekly classes online. I remember having to instruct everyone. It was so fun to show everyone how to get on Zoom and how to do this online thing. And really, those initial students and I learned how to do it together. I was so pleasantly surprised that we could maintain our intimacy and cohesiveness as a group online.
So that was a really pleasant surprise. And then I started doing small retreats online. I had a weekend workshop coming up and I scheduled it online. I moved it and I changed the focus and within just a few days, I revamped the whole curriculum and centred the retreat on helping people cope with the changes of the pandemic. I was still using writing as a tool for healing and grounding like always, but I also brought in other teachers who brought in other modalities for dealing with anxiety, uncertainty, and stress. And the other thing I did is I made that retreat on a sliding scale all the way down to free because I didn’t want money to be impediment. I really saw it as a service. And I ran that retreat a few times.
Then I taught another class for more than a year of the pandemic called ‘Writing Through the Pandemic’, and I had people from all over in that class, and we met once a week and we would write two prompts that focused on whatever was happening in the moment. And again I had a sliding scale down to zero because I felt like it was something I could offer at a time when people needed so much. I think the best compliment I got during that time was an old friend of mine, a former student, and she just said, ‘Laura, you are the most nimble person I have ever met.’ I really took that as a great compliment because I had to do something and I just found a way to reconfigure in a new setting, and I found that I could bring the same human qualities into that setting. And that was a big surprise.
MARK: Tell me more about this pleasant surprise because, clearly, you’d had a very unpleasant surprise with the whole disruption and losing over half your year’s income.
What was pleasantly surprising? Because, obviously, it can’t have been the same. What did you discover when you went into that virtual space with a group like this?
LAURA: I think especially at first when it was all new I think things are a little bit different now, people have Zoom fatigue and all of that. But I think in the beginning, people’s need to connect was so strong and, in a way, everyone was blown open by the pandemic. It’s like everything was turned on its head and people were so vulnerable and really needing to connect and needing to cope with these huge changes in their lives that they were hungry for what I was offering. I think that was one thing is how do you meet the moment with your material? And the context of what I do the procedures, the way I teach has not changed. But the content, I adapted for the circumstance.
One of the best things, which I think many people have found who are teachers, is that I suddenly could have students from all over, so it was a benefit to me to teach online because I didn’t have to just be putting up posters in my town trying to get people to come to my little weekly classes. And that made a huge difference for me and for them. Overall, there are real benefits and there’s also benefits to being in person. And I think that’s true both as the teacher and also as the recipient or as the student.
MARK: Maybe we could open up that subject of what you’d learned about the pros and cons of in-person versus online. I’m really glad that I’ve got the opportunity to open this up with you because I’ve done both myself in my own work as a therapist and a coach and I’ve been doing online for a number of years, and I totally understand and respect the position of colleagues that I’ve spoken to who have said, ‘No, I couldn’t do what I do online. There’s something so important about that actual sharing the space and the presence that goes with it.’
So, I’m really curious to hear from you. And let’s face it, the work you do, it doesn’t probably get a lot deeper or more intense or more human than what you do. What have you learned from making that transition from in-person to online?
LAURA: In some ways what’s important in getting people to open or to write from the deepest places or to build the communities I’m talking about, a lot of it is what I call the container. And it can be a physical container as I was describing about these different retreat centres. I like to teach in beautiful places because I think nature is incredibly important to me, and I think when people are doing deep work, if you can go out and walk in by the ocean or walk in the woods or just sit and look at the sky, it really helps you integrate and digest. So, I like those settings.
Building a container also has to do with the guidelines that I establish at the beginning of every workshop. And it has to do with how I define confidentiality and how I talk about it. It has to do with the instructions I’m giving for how to write to just write the first thing that occurs to you and you’re not planning or plotting or figuring out what you’re going to say. You just write really from your solar plexus, from your gut. And then the way we listen. In these workshops, the ones that are not focused on craft, we don’t critique. Your work is not being evaluated but it’s being witnessed, so it’s that feeling of being deeply listened to.
So, the way I set the container creates pretty predictable results. And I found that the same results were happening online. I didn’t think that would happen. I also found that I was able to read people, that I was able to pay attention to what was going on with people, and as I got more facile with the online interface I found there were a lot of ways to keep communicating with people whether I was sending them a private chat message, whether I was checking in with them before or after the class if I noticed that they were not paying attention or their voice was flat, that I was still able to connect in those same ways.
One of the things I stress more now… I’m just now designing… I teach these work weekends where people just come for three days to write and just get a lot of work done and I create an environment conducive to that. And I just decided to take it online for the first time. Last night, I was sitting and writing some instructions and that one of the things I think that’s important online is to give people guidance in how do you create self-care for yourself outside of the retreat. One of the first things I might do at an online retreat is have people make a list or think about what they could do to take care of themself if strong feelings arise or if the writing is challenging or if they’re having a hard time so that before that situation happens, they have a plan.
Most people coming to my workshops, they already have a lot of internal resources. So, it’s just reminding them, ‘What do you do when you’re having a hard time? Who would you contact? Would you go out in nature? Don’t put another activity right butted up against our workshop so that you have time to integrate what you’ve experienced.’
MARK: So, moving on and looking at what you’ve learned from this experience and maybe what you want to carry forward into your work in the future, what would you say that you’ve learned maybe that online is really good for and you want to keep doing it for those reasons? And then also is there anything that you’re going to say, ‘Well, okay, there is a limit and this is what in-person can do that nothing else can and this is what I’m really looking forward to getting back to’?
LAURA: I think for me, I am definitely going to keep teaching online. Some of it is my own convenience. I don’t have to get plane tickets, I don’t have to deal with jet lag, I don’t have to stay in a hotel. I can just walk from my house about 20 feet into my office, put on a set of headphones, and teach and then go right back and cook dinner. I really love the convenience of teaching online. I like the fact that I have potentially a worldwide audience who can participate in my workshops. My pool of potential students has grown exponentially. Those are two things I would not want to give up. So, I think I will definitely keep teaching. And also, like, the weekly classes I have which are ongoing, now many of the members live far away from me. Most of them live far away from me and a smaller percentage are local. So, I would definitely keep doing that.
I do look forward to teaching in person again. I think there is something unique and special about being in-person that you don’t get online. I do miss that. I miss just three dimensionality. I had a work weekend with mostly my local students at a beautiful place up in the country at the beginning of December before Omicron. It was a three-day retreat. And I was just so thrilled. Everyone had to be vaccinated, they had to send me their vaccine card, they had to get tested before the retreat. We even wore masks indoors because I had a couple of people who were at very high risk.
And we all were like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re seeing each other!’ It was very wonderful just to be together, and many of these were people I’ve been meeting with online for a long time. So, that was wonderful. But there’s also something about the accessibility of online that I feel like I’m not going to turn back from it, both for me and for the students. If someone wants to come to a retreat with me online, they just pay the tuition. They don’t have to have an airline ticket. They don’t have to rent an Airbnb or pay for a retreat centre or pay for their meals. So, there’s pros and cons and I think I will definitely do a hybrid.
I don’t think I would try to do both at the same time like a retreat that is simulcast. I don’t think that would work for what I do because it’s not primarily a lecture or a talk. It’s interactive. But I think I will, going forward, definitely have both in my toolkit. And I’ll have both on my schedule. I don’t see ever turning away from teaching online. It’s been incredibly valuable and rewarding and surprisingly good.
MARK: That’s lovely to hear, Laura. One thing I’ve said right from the beginning of this whole business is that I hope that, as some consolation, that we all come out of this with more choices than we went in with. And it sounds like that’s the case for you. I’m also hearing that a lot of students are benefiting because they can access your work and your help and who wouldn’t have been able to do it beforehand.
LAURA: Yes.
MARK: Maybe we can circle back to the other aspect of your work, the writing. Am I right in thinking that you finished writing The Burning Light of Two Stars during 2020 when Covid was very much a part of our lives and that you then had to launch it in the midst of the pandemic?
LAURA: Yes. That’s true. I had finished a draft at the end of 2019, and then at the end of 2020, I didn’t look at it for a year, which was incredibly beneficial because I looked at it with fresh eyes and I was like a laser beam. I just cut 12,000 words in that last pass. I restructured the whole book. I shortened the chapters and I think it has a very propulsive momentum and I created it in that last edit. I don’t think I could’ve done it if I had been working on it the whole time but I was able to look at it with really fresh eyes.
So, I finished it really at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021. And then I wanted to publish it and I went with a hybrid press and it was a very compressed timeline. I think I signed the contract in February. The book originally was supposed to come out in October. It got delayed because of paper shortages and was finally released in November. And in that time, I also did the audiobook so it was really all I did in 2021. We got a puppy, so I was raising a puppy and the book and a little bit of teaching. But that was my main activity. In some ways, I think because I knew I was launching a book during the pandemic, it was better for me than for some authors who were in the midst of launching their book and heading out on a book tour when the pandemic happened because I was able to plan an online launch, I knew that’s what I was going to have.
MARK: How did you approach it differently?
LAURA: I didn’t have any live events. No bookstore readings in person, no physically signing books for people, no eye contact with the reader saying how much they love the book. I knew I wouldn’t have any of that, and so I did a lot of things. I have a lot of colleagues who have audiences of their own, and I did a lot of collaborative events with other people. I have a colleague and friend, Ann Randolph, who also teaches writing and performance. She does one-woman shows. And she and I got together and taught a one-day workshop called ‘The Courage to Complete’. It was about how to get your creative project over the finish line.
She and I did that together. We wrapped a free book into the cost of the retreat. So all the people who came to that ended up getting shipped a book. It was definitely a wonderful workshop and I got to talk a lot about the process of finishing the memoir. So, I piggybacked on other people’s audiences as much as I could. I developed a stronger social media presence. I had three major launch events. They all were online. I just had to do it that way. I had to rely on digital mediums. I did some of the things I would have done anyway, but it was a very different experience.
MARK: Again, do you think there are elements of this you might take forward? I don’t know how keen you are to write another book soon, but when you get around to it next time, do you think it will affect the way you approach that whole process?
LAURA: I would love to meet readers in person. I have really missed that a lot. But I think a lot of the skills I learned in terms of getting more savvy about online marketing, I absolutely would move that forward for whatever I do next, whether it’s teaching or retreats or another book. It’s just like my quiver is more full than it was before. I’ve just learned new skills, new ways to reach people, and I will just keep integrating that into whatever I do. So, hopefully, both will be available in the future.
MARK: Yes, let us hope fervently that that’s the case. I think this would be a good time, Laura, for you to set our listener your Creative Challenge.
If you’re listening to this show and this is the first time you’ve heard it, at the end of every interview, I invite my guest to set you, the listener, a creative challenge, which is on the theme of the interview and is something that you can do to stretch yourself creatively and maybe personally as well and that you can complete or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Laura, what’s your Creative Challenge?
LAURA: I’m going to give everyone a writing prompt and some very simple directions to complete it. To write this prompt, I want you to use writing practice which is one of the core practices I use in all of my teaching. And it’s a pretty reliable way to get right into the deepest material to get the editor out of the way and to write from the core or the gut where the real treasures are.
I’m not going to give you the prompt yet but here’s the instructions. When you sit down to write to this prompt, don’t plan or think before you write. I want you just to start with the very first thing that pops into your head, the first thing that occurs to you. If you can’t do it immediately, you can jot down the prompt and whatever story comes to mind and then come back to it later. You’ll be able to take a look at this in the show notes. But the main thing is don’t plan what you’re going to say. Don’t spend time saying, ‘Oh, I think I’ll do this, I think I’ll do that.’ You want to follow that impulse.
And then once you put your pen on the paper… and I do recommend hand writing for this because you make a different connection physiologically between the brain, the hand, and the heart. What I want you to do is write without stopping for 20 minutes. Let the writing go in whatever direction it wants to go. If you move away from the prompt, that’s fine. If you circle back to it, that’s fine. Just follow the impulse and write without stopping for 20 minutes. And don’t cross out because that is the editor coming in and getting in the way. Just write moving forward. Don’t reread, just keep going forward.
If you get stuck, you could start back at the beginning with the prompt again or you could try inserting the phrase, ‘Here’s the part I never told anyone before.’ Or, ‘What I really need to say is… ’ It’s like your conscious mind is prompting your subconscious giving you more permission to get underneath your habitual stories.
MARK: Yeah.
LAURA: So, I’m going to give you the prompt and you’ll write it for 20 minutes. And in this exercise, just writing it is not enough because we often don’t know what we’ve written until we speak it out loud. Natalie Goldberg, who created writing practice says, ‘Writing is like the inhalation and reading out loud is the exhalation.’
So, the second part of the Creative Challenge is to read your words out loud. And you can do this with a trusted friend or a family member or even just out loud to yourself. But you want to speak the words so you could hear the impact and really feel it in your body.
Here’s the prompt. It starts with a quote from Alexander Graham Bell. ‘When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and regretfully at the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.’ Let me read that again. ‘When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and regretfully at the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.’ The prompt is, tell me about a time this was true in your life.
MARK: Wonderful. Thank you, Laura. I think that is a really great invitation to all of us to be a bit more courageous in our writing, in our speaking, in our communicating.
Thank you so much, Laura. I’ve learned a lot from listening to you, from reading the book. I would really encourage people to get hold of a copy of The Burning Light of Two Stars. It’s an extraordinary experience to read it. I was saying to Laura that it’s like there are some books you read and there are others you experience. This one is definitely in the latter category. It’s a book that you won’t forget. I think my experience was it is very moving and parts of it are very painful. But it’s also a real page-turner and some of it is very funny and very entertaining too. It’s a very human book.
Laura, apart from picking up the book, where can people go to find out more about you and your work and maybe reach out and get some help from you?
LAURA: On my website, which is www.lauradavis.net, you can read the first five chapters of the memoir and also order it. All the other online offerings that I have, it’s www.lauradavis.net. I also send out weekly writing prompts similar to the one I just gave you. And if you sign up at my website for my mailing list, you’ll start getting those every Tuesday. They’re great spurs for either writing or conversation.
MARK: Great. Thank you, Laura. And as usual, I’ll make sure all the links are available in the show notes at 21stcenturycreative.fm. And also if you want to have the reference for the writing prompt, you’ll find a full transcript of this interview and you’ll find the writing prompt at the bottom of the transcript. Laura, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom.
LAURA: You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Helping Musicians Through Lockdown with Charlotte Abroms
Aug 15, 2022
Welcome to Episode 6 of the Creative Disruption season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Today we are off to Australia in the company of Charlotte Abroms, a music manager based in Melbourne with a roster of successful clients and many years’ experience in the industry.
Music was one of the creative sectors that was hardest hit by the pandemic, with gigs and tours cancelled around the world, and artists cut off from their connection with fans as well as their income. In today’s interview Charlotte talks about the devastating impact of the virus and restrictions on the music industry.
But she’s an incredibly upbeat and resourceful person, so she also talks about the silver lining she discovered, when she had a lot of extra time on her hands, and used it to find new ways to support musicians as people as well as in their career.
In the intro to the show I talk about the video talk ‘Forget the Career Ladder, Start Creating Assets’, that I gave to Robert Vlach’s community at Freelancing.eu, and which you can watch for free on YouTube.
I also introduce some new projects from former guests on the podcast:
Charlotte Abroms is a music manager based in Melbourne, Australia, who when the pandemic struck, had years of experience to draw on, to help her and her musicians see it through.
She is a recent recipient of Australian accolades the Lighthouse Award, the Fast Track Fellowship and the Outstanding Woman in Music Award. Charlotte comes from a background as a freelance digital strategist in creative agencies, working in some of Australia’s most highly regarded agencies.
In 2010 she co-founded the music blog Large Noises, a website dedicated to filming live bands in various locations around Melbourne. For the blog, Charlotte helped scout, film and edit over 50 local and international bands. Some of the videos went viral, with millions of plays, and were picked up by BBC radio and other media outlets around the world.
She became a campaign manager for music startup soundhalo, working on campaigns in London for Atoms for Peace (Thom Yorke, Nigel Goodrich, Flea), alt-j and Muse.
Driven by passion, belief and commitment, Charlotte has evolved a voluntary role in the music community into a full-time professional artist management and consultancy role.
Charlotte focuses on creativity, building international teams of likeminded people, creative strategy and finding innovative ways for music to connect to audiences.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Charlotte was about to book tickets for a major European tour. Instead, she found herself enduring one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world in Melbourne.
I was inspired to reach out to Charlotte when I read articles about her creative response to the pandemic on several fronts – helping musicians create virtual gigs and sell tickets, organising a fundraiser to help people in the music industry, and creating a new mentoring service for musicians as well as younger music managers.
I was really struck by the fact that, faced with such an overwhelmingly difficult situation, Charlotte responded by looking outward – to her musicians, her peers and the wider industry, to see what she could do to help.
In this interview, she talks about her own journey in the music business, from starting a blog and filming gigs in backyards and even bathrooms, to growing her passion project into a full time business. She also talks about the challenges and some unexpected benefits of lockdown.
Whether or not you’re a musician, you’ll likely recognise many of the challenges Charlotte describes. And I think we can all benefit from her upbeat attitude and creative responses to the challenges of the pandemic.
You can learn more about Charlotte on her website and follow her on Instagram.
MARK: Charlotte, how did you get started in the music business?
CHARLOTTE: I think my story is quite common for a lot of people who are music managers where it, generally, starts out, and it did for me, in a voluntary position that, eventually, became a full-time role.
I started out working in the acting industry. That was just purely because my cousin works in the acting industry and I finished high school and he asked me if I wanted some part-time work. And that role that I did with him at an acting agency turned into like a junior agent role, which is equivalent to, what we would call, transferable skills to a music manager as well, managing the career of actors. That was a job that I was doing alongside studying film at university. I’ve always just been really, really passionate about music.
My entry into music was a combination of all of these things. I’d learned the skills to be a manager or an agent in my day job. I was studying film and I was really wanting to hone my skills as a filmmaker, an editor, a writer, a storyteller. While I was at university, it was partly a university project that my friend Eliza and I started. Her name’s Eliza Hull and we studied at university together. She’s also an artist in Melbourne and a disability advocate. We decided to start a blog that no one was really doing anything like this at the time, in Australia, but it was something that you see a little bit in the UK, they have Mahogany. And in France, they have Logitech, basically a blog that captures live music on film.
MARK: When was this, you started?
CHARLOTTE: This was in 2009, I’d say, 2010.
MARK: Okay, so, reasonably early.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. We were scouting bands that we loved, we naturally went to gigs quite a lot. And we would see a band that we’d love, we would share it with each other, because we were so passionate about it, and then we decided to offer to film them, just on a voluntary basis. I was wanting to learn a little bit more about filming and editing. Eliza loves writing and she was getting really into the idea of producing this content, so, finding the bands and being the main communicator with the bands.
And then she onboarded a sound engineer who is actually my now partner, Jonathan Steer. The three of us co-founded this website together, the blog was called Large Noises. We ended up on a voluntary basis, filming about 50 plus bands, locally. The idea was that we would film these artists in locations around Melbourne to showcase a little bit of Melbourne but sometimes obscure locations in bathrooms and bathtubs.
MARK: Literally in bathtubs?!
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, we filmed a Melbourne band in a bathroom and we filmed a really amazing singer-songwriter named Oscar Lush in a bathtub just with his guitar and his harmonica. We branched out and filmed a few international bands as well, which was a highlight for us at the time. And that was my entry into working in music.
MARK: What was it about music, if it’s not a dumb question? But maybe it isn’t such a dumb question. I love music but I never ended up working in the industry.
What was it about actually working with musicians that you loved?
CHARLOTTE: I think you’ll relate to this as a poet yourself, but the thing that draws me the most to music is lyrics, and always has been. I love the musicality of lyrics, of poetry, and words when it is put to music. What I was finding was I identified, and still do identify more as a creative than a typical music industry quote-unquote, ‘industry person.’ And I felt like I had developed a skill set that could help people.
I was finding myself in these underground bars and pubs when I was 18-19, watching bands play and going, ‘Wow, they’re amazing,’ ‘This could be the next big thing.’ And then asking, ‘How are you releasing music?’ or, ‘How are you getting your name out there?’ And often they didn’t know how to. Often there was this amazing skill set within their craft, which, in this case, is music, but not really knowing how to market themselves. And, I’ve seen that a lot across the board with creatives. Then there I was really enthusiastic going, ‘Well, this comes quite naturally to me. I know how to market your music because I am your audience’.
MARK: Tell me more about that. How does being their audience help you? And what is it that comes naturally to you? Because you’ve mentioned this skill set a few times.
CHARLOTTE: I think I have an understanding when it’s music that deeply connects to me. And like I said before, that’s often to do with lyricism. I found that the types of bands that I love tend to have a bit of a cult following. What we were able to do with this website, at the time, was create really raw authentic content. ‘Content’ wasn’t really a buzzword back then but beautiful cinematic footage, even though we were just starting out. Our aim was to give the viewer that feeling that music gives you or poetry gives you or a film can give you, something that really hits you in the heart.
I think I had a knack for identifying that because I love that myself, as an audience member, but what I realized was there are a lot more people like me out there who also are drawn to this same thing, which is the authenticity and the vulnerability and the rawness of the type of music that I like. And so, I knew how to market to those people because I am one of those. That’s what I meant before.
MARK: Okay, so, that’s the core of it, but how do you join the dots? How do you help a band reach more people like you?
MARK: Is the whole blog still online? Can we link to it?
CHARLOTTE: It is, yes.
MARK: I’ll definitely make sure we will link to it in the show notes, folks. Go and check this out.
CHARLOTTE: It’s pretty much retired these days but sometimes we think about bringing it back.
MARK: If the archive is there, then nothing dies on the internet, does it?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. We filmed this artist named Hayden Calnin, and I was actually in London at the time. I think the version of the YouTube video that we had filmed was streamed on a radio show. I think it was on BBC 6. And so, we woke up the next morning, and the YouTube account was linked to my email, and I just had hundreds of emails of people commenting on how talented Hayden was. And I was like, ‘We’re going viral,’ didn’t really know Hayden was going viral.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. A few weeks after we filmed it, and this isn’t to do with us filming it, it was just the song got released and it really connected, and he went to number one all over the world. What we were finding was that we were scouting local Melbourne talent, just it came from such a pure and passionate place of just a couple of music lovers at uni. ‘Maybe we can film these bands.’
That led me into forming connections and friendships and relationships with people who work in the music industry, whether that was managers or publicists or booking agents, just purely through booking these bands. I found myself, as I said before probably more aligned with the artists. A lot of my friends are artists, whether it be music or otherwise. And having worked in the acting industry, as an agent and also, at that point in time, studying communications, I was learning a lot about how to market products or, in this case, music.
I just started volunteering myself too. Do you want me to write your press release for you? Because it came really naturally to me and to some people. My friends would say, ‘I’ve been trying to work on this bio for days and I just can’t get it right,’ and I’d be like, ‘I love writing bios, why don’t you send it to me?’ It really started out from a voluntary place of building a portfolio and just wanting to help people who I thought were talented.
MARK: It must have been a dream come true for them. Because this is all the stuff, I mean I hear about this week and week out, I’m sure you do, people will say, ‘I just want to do my creative thing, my artistic thing. I want someone else to take care of the business side of things.’ And you are that fairy godmother, by the sound of it.
CHARLOTTE: I honestly can’t even imagine what it would be like to have someone come in to your life and say, ‘I’ll take care of everything, you just focus on being creative.’ I’m looking at this objectively, at other managers I know, it really is quite a selfless pursuit. I’m interested to talk to you about it because, the angle of your podcast is around creativity. I appreciate being put in a creative space because often people will look at the relationship of all of the different people in the music industry and they look at the band and the artist and they go, ‘They’re the creatives,’ but really there are so many creative people who sit behind the scenes as well.
MARK: Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed! For me the more time I spend on it, the more I realize creativity is really a team sport.
A lot of us think that we have impeccable taste in music, and a lot of time I think it’s a bit of a delusion. But in your case, there does seem to be evidence that you had a really good eye and a good ear for talent and you were able to present that to the world in a way that other people could relate to it.
You developed that into your own management agency, is that right?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. By this point, in terms of my day job and career, I’d moved on to working at, what we call, creative agencies, digital agencies, advertising agencies. Which are quite similar to the process we just spoke about, really collaborative process of working alongside people to market a product. And so, again, I was still building that skill set, and I think the voluntary management position just started out with two people who I’d met who are a band called ‘Haarlo,’ who I still manage to this day. They said, ‘Oh, we’ve got this CD and it was really, really high-quality.’ It was a five-track EP and it was back when, people were still listening to CDs. And they’re like, ‘We don’t know what to do with it but we’ve made 300 copies of our CD.’
I didn’t really know what to do with it either but I sent it to a friend of mine who was a musician, in New York. She had a blog and she said, ‘I’m putting this mixtape together, I’ll pop one of their songs on this mixtape.’ And when I say ‘mixtape,’ it was on SoundCloud, so, it wasn’t actually a physical mixtape. She popped it on there and then they started getting all these emails, mainly from the States, just saying, ‘I love your stuff.’ ‘So and so from Atlantic A&R,’ and they were like, ‘we don’t know what to do with this.’ I was like, ‘Forward them to me, I love writing emails.’ That was the entry into becoming a manager. It took me about 7 more years to actually turn it into a full-time job and build a roster. That was the beginning.
MARK: Can we fast forward a little bit then to late 2019? I’m curious to hear, obviously, before the coronavirus hit the headlines, what was your work life looking like at that point and what were your plans for 2020?
CHARLOTTE: At that point in time, it was very touring-heavy for me. Not all managers become tour manager hybrids but when you start out managing developing acts, sometimes tour managers are unaffordable, at that point in time. I love traveling and I love live music. I would say 2019 was pretty much jam-packed full of tour managing, traveling alongside bands. Both nationally, within Australia, and internationally. 2020 was looking to be much of the same.
When I look back in hindsight, I was very close to experiencing quite severe burnout but I had no idea that that was the case until the pandemic… which my friend, who also works in music, her and I refer to it as, ‘We were unfairly dismissed,’ like, it was an unfair dismissal from our jobs. But there was, no one to look after us. I’ve spoken to a lot of managers and crew tour managers, sound engineers, lighting engineers, I think the general consensus is that everyone had the opportunity to stop and pause and reflect on how they were working. When I think about how I was working late 2019, 2020 was already completely planned out and I was going to be all over the world.
MARK: At what point did you get the unfair dismissal notice? Or what point did you realize, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, this is going to be serious for me and my musicians.’?
CHARLOTTE: Interestingly, I was about to book flights for a major European tour. I joke about how I was getting a lot of my news source from my mom at the time because everybody was talking about this coronavirus, and this was early January, I found that it was just stressing me out, this impending virus, that was in China at the time, and no one really knew how it was affecting people. One day I just happened to be on the phone to my mom and I said, ‘I’m about to book all of these flights,’ and she said, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’
Thinking back, at the time, I was like, ‘Is she overreacting?’ She’s like, ‘I think this coronavirus it’s starting to break out.’ At that point in time, it’s when the cases were starting to break out in Italy and Greece, from memory. And she just said, ‘I think you should hold off on booking flights.’ Which was such a good thing because, I was about to book international flights for a tour party of eight. And people still haven’t received refunds on those flights they’ve all just been credited.
Thankfully, I think that was the point in time where I said, ‘Okay, well, I’ll hold off, and maybe we’ll give it a week or so.’ Within a couple of weeks, I went to a workshop with one of the artists that I managed and we had just flown in from Sydney to Melbourne and then we drove to this workshop. And when we got there, the host of the workshop greeted us and said, ‘Oh, you didn’t touch anyone at Melbourne Airport, did you?’ and we were like, ‘What does that mean?’ We just had no context. ‘No.’ And she was like, ‘Well, apparently, the coronavirus is in Melbourne Airport.’ That was the first I’d heard of it hitting Melbourne. Then I think Melbourne ended up being in, I think, the longest lockdown in the world.
MARK: Ooh, that’s not a record you want to hold, is it?
CHARLOTTE: No. Unless you were very burnt out and also needed a bit of a rest.
MARK: Okay. Well, maybe, we’ll come on to that. But, we’ve got listeners all over the world, everyone had a different experience of lockdown.
What was the lockdown situation like in Melbourne, how strict was it?
CHARLOTTE: It was very strict. There were I think, in total, we would joke, it was five or six major lockdowns, and we would joke like, ‘Is this lockdown 5.1 or 5.2?’ because the rules would slightly change. I think, at its strictest, you weren’t allowed to travel more than 5 kilometers, you could only leave the house for 3 reasons, and I think that was medical. It’s funny that it wasn’t that long ago but I’ve blocked it out now. It was for medical reasons, for supermarket shopping, and what was the third reason? Oh, to get tested, I think, to get tested for coronavirus. There was a curfew, which sometimes was 8 p.m., sometimes was 9 p.m. There were border blockages between metropolitan Melbourne and what is considered to be regional. I was actually based in regional for a large portion of the pandemic, and the rules were slightly more lax there. But within the city it was really, really strict.
In my experience, speaking to other young people, it was pretty damaging to people’s mental health. Even just speaking to colleagues of mine who were in Sydney, they had such a different energy to anyone who was in Melbourne because all lives went on and off for almost 12 months of being in pretty strict lockdowns and not being able to see friends and family.
MARK: This is a pretty dramatic shift from jet setting around the world on international music tours. What was going through your mind at that point? And also, because it wasn’t just you, you had the musicians that you were taking care of, right?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I think that was quite a common, and still is a common issue for managers was also not just learning how to be resilient yourself but learning how to help creatives cope through them having a huge part of their identities stripped away from them. When I say that, I’m referring to live music because in the realm that I work in, most people, their major source of income was live. And when that was just gone, you’re dealing with a lot of friends and colleagues who are musicians who are just not getting any feedback. I don’t think it was overly motivating to be writing, at that point in time, either when I know that a lot of industry went, ‘Well, this is the perfect time to write.’ You’re locked in the house but no one’s having any experiences.
MARK: Which brings its own pressure, doesn’t it? I’ve spoken to a few people who felt guilty that they weren’t writing the great lockdown novel or, in this case, album or whatever. But creativity can be mysterious but it’s maybe not a great mystery why not everyone was a fountain of creativity during the lockdown that you’ve described.
How did you respond to this? Firstly for you and then for your musicians. At what point did you start to see, ‘Okay, this is going to be my game plan through this’?
CHARLOTTE: I think we had quite a health-first approach within not just the roster of musicians and producers I work with but the colleagues and the wider team that we had appointed. When I say ‘health-first,’ I mean emotional health, as well as physical health. It was around staying safe. We didn’t know what this virus was. At that point in time, there was no vaccine. Just doing whatever you can to look after yourself as well as there was a lot of just checking in on how people were doing in the early stages. We almost had a little bit of a joke between us that it was a forced break to begin with. There was something appealing in that, to go, ‘We don’t have to be rushing around from airport to airport and changing currencies.’
And, as sad as it was we were holding on to hope that, this is in like February, March, we were holding on to hope that, things might reopen later in the year and some of those concerts might still go ahead. And then I would speak to my news source, my mom, or one of my colleagues in Sydney who was really, really following the situation. And he was saying, ‘I don’t think it’s going to open by the end of the year.’ The word that got thrown around the most, I pivoted into relying on my digital-marketing background and skills. A lot of the projects that I had worked on before, dating right back to the blog I started when I was 18, was about finding an audience in an online capacity.
I think the first idea that I wanted to execute was to work alongside Jonathan Steer, who’s a sound engineer here, who I started Large Noises, the blog, with. And he had created a studio setting that he made it so that it was possible to be completely isolated within that studio as one person. As an artist, you could go into the studio and he could operate the studio from another location. There was no risk of infection, and it was completely legal at the time. Our first venture was almost an extension of the blog that I told you about. We started a little platform, that doesn’t exist now because it was an on-demand platform, where we filmed and recorded some online solo concerts. I worked with a web developer and a designer to find a way to monetize it. We partnered with Ticketmaster, and it was very, very early days when people were open to the concept of streaming and, watching online concerts from their homes. It was a great little revenue stream for a while.
Then I think what happened was people, particularly in Melbourne, got frustrated with having to watch concerts online. Around the time we started to feel that as well, we thought, ‘Maybe we’ll put that idea to bed,’ but that was the first thing that we executed, first idea that we executed. It was an idea that I wanted to work on prior to the pandemic. Having spoken a lot to Eliza who I started Large Noises, with, back in the day, about accessibility, we had a really interesting conversation about a gig that I’d put on. It was a seated gig at the Melbourne Recital Centre. I had three pregnant women emailed me to say, ‘I missed out on tickets, and I was so excited about this gig because it was seated,’ and I said, ‘Oh, it’s funny.’ I’ve never even thought about the fact that if you’re seven, eight-months-pregnant, you’re not going to want to go to a sweaty band room, you must just be missing out on music altogether. But if it’s a seated venue, then you can access music.
And then I had this, obviously, there’s a much bigger conversation around that, which is around accessibility and people who have disability or people who are homeless, we started to talk about all of these audiences who might just miss out on live music altogether. I think it came from I’d seen this film about Leonard Cohen and how he used to go into the prisons and play for people, play live for people. I had this idea that we could try and create, a really beautiful high-quality online concert and show people, who live regionally or are disabled or pregnant or have social anxiety, that they could still access music that way and live music that way. Which I think is something that the pandemic opened up in terms of accessibility, with the Melbourne comedy festivals on at the moment. And I’ve noticed that you can buy an online ticket for that now, which was never a thing in the past.
MARK: Right. It sounds like that gave you, and, obviously, the wider industry, the opportunity to reflect on things like that, that might have been seen as nice to have or something that we’d either hadn’t thought about or hadn’t quite got around to before.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. And I think that also people assumed it was quite a costly thing to do. And then musicians realized that they could really just, with one decent microphone, they could record content from their homes, from their bedrooms, and their audiences were responding to that.
MARK: That’s quite a discovery, isn’t it?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I think that leads into a lot of people upskilling themselves is something that I observed from the outside. A lot of musicians were upskilling themselves during the pandemic, which anything that can allow a musician to be more creatively free is for the best. To not have to be stuck with a particular producer or a particular studio and to actually learn how to record parts at home and mix their own music, I think, was really beneficial. But that was, one of very few things that came out of the pandemic that probably was beneficial to a creative person or, in this case, a musician. Well, really what happened was we watched our industry just get almost completely decimated.
MARK: Yes. We are looking for silver linings and slivers of hope. That is one. But I mean the big picture, and for the music industry in particular, it was really one of the ones that was worst affected by all of this.
CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I did an interview really early on with a London-based journalist named William Ralston, who was doing a piece on the music industry globally, and he was asking how it affected me as a freelance manager with independent artists. And what the article presents to you is that, without the live music revenue stream, some artists are not left with any cash flow. If an artist doesn’t have cash flow, the manager usually works on a commission basis, so, the manager doesn’t have cash flow either. And that’s what I watched, sadly, happen is a lot of managers and artists going, dipping back into those corporate jobs to stay afloat.
MARK: I think we’ve established you and your musicians did not have your challenges to seek. The big picture was horrific and there’s no sugar coating there.
Where did you go next? What was your response about where you could be most effective?
CHARLOTTE: I think one of the blessings of having more time was that I would often receive emails from people who would say, ‘Can we catch up for a coffee? I wanted to pick your brain. I’ve got a few questions about my music.’ This would come from artists who were generally self-managed and didn’t have a team but often really, really talented. We were talking about, when I started out, that was something that I did. I fulfilled, every time anyone asked me, ‘Could I have a coffee?’ or, ‘Can we catch up for a drink?’ or anything, I would say, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ I had a real yes-person mentality. And then because touring and traveling was eating up so much of my time, there’s a little bit of guilt that I had, not that I owe anything to anyone, but sometimes I would’ve loved to have been able to sit down and have lunch with someone and brainstorm how to release their music. And I wasn’t able to do that.
Then, when the pandemic hit, I found myself with a lot more time and I was able to offer those services in a mentoring or consulting capacity. It started off with me just saying, ‘I’ve got a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon.’ I think I might just offer that to the first person that I started to work with was a manager, he was actually my assistant and he helped with all of the logistics for the live shows. And then, suddenly, I didn’t have a job for him anymore. But he’s also a manager himself and he’s a really talented manager. I said to him like, ‘I don’t really have any work for you, but do you want to do some mentoring? Like, maybe every Friday we can get together for an hour and we can talk about your business? It wasn’t something that I had any help with, when I was at that point in my career, and I think it would’ve really helped me to have someone to bounce ideas with.’
That’s where it began. And through doing that once a week on Zoom talking about his business plan and his ideas and whatnot led me to going, ‘I might just make this actually a bit more of a formal offer.’ Which I didn’t really formalize in any way, I guess I just told a few people and then word spread around and it was just like, I was I started offering these consultancy sessions. Then I created a mentor program for an emerging artist, which was amazing. I worked with an artist named Julia Wallace, who’s based in Western Australia, on releasing their music for the first time.
That was really creative and it made me realize why I started doing it in the first place was to help artists facilitate a career for an artist where they could, it sounds a bit clichéd, but bring out their best selves, learn about who they are as people. Do they need a big team around them or are they better off to release independently? Or are they someone who needs assistance with visuals? Or do they know how to draw pictures themselves and could it be a bit more of a DIY thing? It became a really, really creative pursuit, talking to a lot of independent self-managed artists. Which led me to thinking that there really should be a new model of management where you don’t have to commit to someone for X amount of years and sign contracts and whatnot. Some of these people just needed another person to bounce ideas off.
MARK: Maybe for someone who hasn’t done mentoring before, could you just talk a little bit about what you actually cover in these sessions, what the conversations are about, maybe how it’s different to what you were doing as a manager?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, absolutely. As a manager, it’s a really all-encompassing role. You are invested in every single part of that person’s career and, also their lives, in a sense, because you need to get to know someone quite well to understand how they operate in different environments. Whether that be like promotional or interviews or, backstage, or whatever that might be.
These mentoring sessions that I was offering were one-hour sessions that always began from a strategic place. From my perspective, that’s what I love the most is talking to someone and saying, ‘What is it that you want out of your career? What are your goals? What drives you? What gives you that spark that we talked about before, that passion?’ And how can I help them form a team, how can I help them find like-minded people who might love their music but also gel with them personally, who are the publicists I can introduce them to or labels I can introduce them to.
With every session, whether it was more of a mentoring role or a consulting role, it would be me answering questions, industry questions. There’s not a lot of resources out there to help new artists about how all the different roles interact and what they actually need on their team or how payment works if you do get a manager, those sorts of questions. And then, also, just giving advice about their music. I don’t mean that in a musically-creative way, I wasn’t doing any like, ‘Oh, the piano should be turned down at first to… ’ I don’t really operate like that, it was more, maybe introducing them to the right producers or, people who I thought they might gel with.
I ended up doing this mentoring with both artists and managers because I felt like, we were so close to losing a whole generation of new managers because there was just no way for them to get these projects off the ground without live shows or it was really difficult for them. With some of the ongoing ones, the mentoring and consulting resulted in me creating strategies for them. Whether that be a 6-month strategy or a 12-month strategy or a 2-to-3-year strategy, it was almost like doing like a research project or something, take all of the commonalities from every interview and consolidate it into a document to go, ‘This is what I think you want and this is how I think you can achieve it.’
MARK: It sounds to me, Charlotte, like you’re someone who is really motivated to help people.
CHARLOTTE: Definitely.
MARK: And, your instinct was, way back, was to look at a band and think, ‘They need help connecting with an audience.’ In the middle of the pandemic, I’m hearing you looking at, ‘What do people need? What would be helpful that I can do for them?’ now that, as you say, their main identity has been stripped away. And you’re even looking to the health of the management industry and saying, ‘We’re in danger of losing this generation.’
How sustaining was this for you personally, just feeling useful, feeling helpful in the midst of so much chaos?
CHARLOTTE: I definitely think that there’s an element of feeling good about being able to use my skill set at the time to help other people. I think that, at times, I felt a little bit burnt out and I think most managers, a lot of people in music in general, would say this, the opportunities for new musicians just decreasing so quickly. It started out quite hopeful and then you start speaking to record labels and they go, ‘I absolutely love this band that you’ve sent me but we’ve got a backlog from 2020 who are waiting to release music and we’re not signing anyone new at the moment.’
It started out feeling like, ‘This is great, I’m using my skill set,’ and then eventually, at times, has felt a little bit helpless and I’ve had to explain that this is new territory for all of us and these are the things that we can focus on. And that might be making music and making really good music or creating all of the content that surrounds a release but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a label is going to sign you this year.
MARK: Looking at the big picture again, we can all agree it would’ve been better if this thing had never happened, and particularly with the impact it’s had on music and other performing arts.
But picking up on the idea, looking for the little slivers of comfort, the flashes of silver lining for instance, the upskilling you mentioned earlier on, as we, hopefully, look to a more open future where live gigs are more of a thing again and the industry picks up, what, if anything, do you think that musicians and the industry, as a whole, can take forward?
What new options are there that maybe weren’t there before?
CHARLOTTE: I think one new option that I’ve identified amongst managers and musicians are these new ways of working together. Like I said before, the management model is, generally, quite long-term contracts. I noticed that a lot of other managers did what I did and they started offering their skills on a consulting basis, which I think has empowered artists. That’s where my drive came from from the very beginning was to find ways to empower creative people to be able to upskill themselves to understand the industry that they work in and how it operates. Because, it’s an age old saying that knowledge is power but I think, when the music industry was moving so so quickly, often artists didn’t even know what positions they were getting themselves into.
And, within my roster, I was always very, very conscious of making sure everybody fully understood the terms of the deals that they, might be getting into, which were often very artist-friendly flexible deals. But I know a lot of friends, there was this sense of urgency before the pandemic. A lot of friends who were artists would sign to the first manager they met or the first booking agent they met or the first record label they met. And then, if it doesn’t go well, often that’s enough to deter someone from working in the industry altogether. Which is, sadly, something that I’ve seen happen more often than not to young women than young men. In my experience of talking to people, it seems to be really, really common that young women get burnt quite young and then decide to put down music forever, or they come back to it years and years later.
What I think the pandemic taught us by slowing everything down was to take a good look at the revenue streams, for one, and ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that, when gigs stop, there might not be any cash flow?’ Well, obviously, that’s a much bigger conversation around the streaming model. I know a lot of people who invested a lot more in buying vinyls and buying merch to try and keep their favorite artists afloat during that time. But it’s made us, like myself and, Ainsley, for example, who’s Ainsley Wills, an artist that I manage, it’s made us reflect on different ways that we can release music in the future so that we’re not so reliant on touring and live shows.
I think, in general, with the consulting model, I’ve seen people just make more informed patient decisions as opposed to what I explained before, the example of rushing into working with the first person that they’ve met. It allowed a bit more time for everyone to have meetings over Zoom or get to know each other and make really strategic careful decisions with their careers, which I think is a really good thing.
MARK: Well, amen to that. As a coach, this is a huge part of what I do is just get people to stop and slow down. It’s not like I’m telling them what to do but just giving them a chance to really think through what the decision is, what their reasons are for going one way or the other, and making that well-considered decision. That’s an interesting take on it, the fact that, slowing down, it was a pretty frenetic industry.
Obviously, there’s an energy to that that we never want to lose from music but maybe you could balance that with a bit more downtime and slowing down to think things through.
CHARLOTTE: I definitely agree that, there’s an energy and there’s a sense of ego that needs to go into a performance or a song. But then there is sometimes an energy sense of ego behind the scenes in what we refer to as the industry itself, which is quite toxic. From my own personal experience, the biggest thing that I learned when I found myself mentoring and consulting with very like-minded people was that, possibly, in the past, I was finding myself in situations with people who I didn’t actually share the same values as. When you said before, ‘You seem like you’re driven by helping people,’ I’ve noticed that that’s quite common in managers, within music. Quite difficult to find in other realms of the industry at times. Not to say that, there is no one who’s driven by helping people but often, sadly, people are driven by money or exploiting artists.
That’s something that we saw during the pandemic within our very geographically small part of the world, there was a huge takedown of the music industry during the pandemic. Basically, Australia had its #MeToo moment during the quiet times, and a lot of people at the top lost their positions due to musicians and whatnot coming forward and sharing their stories about toxicity.
MARK: A bit of a day of reckoning for the industry?
CHARLOTTE: Yeah, which I think had to happen. It was sad that it happened at such a difficult time as well because, for some people, they were just overwhelmed with, ‘I’ve lost all the good things about music and about my career and now I’m daily receiving information about these terrible terrible people that work behind the scenes in music.’ I was partly driven by that as well to show people there are caring and compassionate people who work behind the scenes as well, which are most of my friends in the music industry are those people. Unfortunately, I think there was an older generation that didn’t operate like that.
MARK: Let us hope that that spirit is carried forward into the future of the industry.
Charlotte, thank you. You’ve really taken us on quite an extraordinary journey, pre and during pandemic. Hopefully, we’re moving to post pandemic before too long. This would be I think a nice time for you to share your Creative Challenge with our listener.
If you’re listening to this and this is your first time with the show, this is the point in the interview where I ask my guest to set you, dear listener, a Creative Challenge. This is something that is related to the theme of the interview and is designed to stretch you creatively, personally, maybe even professionally as well, and something that you can do or get going on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Charlotte, what’s your Creative Challenge?
CHARLOTTE: This was one of the benefits of everything slowing down. I had a lot more time to talk philosophically with one of my clients, Ainsley Wills, who is an amazing musician but also one of the most creative people I know. She said to me, it’s such a simple task, but she said to me, don’t overthink this too much, but, ‘When we hang up, you have to do this task where you write down on a piece of paper what makes me feel the most me. And then, underneath that, just stream of consciousness. Write the things that make you feel the most you.’
MARK: Ha… I love that, that’s so simple. And yet, well, it’s got me thinking already. I think, obviously, I always do the creative challenges, but particularly this one I think is definitely something that I want to go in. What a lovely question.
CHARLOTTE: It was also really interesting because I tasked a few of my friends with it as well. I’ll give an example of something that ended up on my list. I wrote down swimming. And if you asked me, at that point in time, when was the last time I went swimming, it was probably a couple of years. It’s like, ‘Why aren’t we doing these things more often?’
MARK: Yes, very good, very good question. There’s quite a lot of implications of this I think that I’m sure there will be creative benefits. Because, when we are most ourselves, as you were saying, that’s what we value the most in artists, not to mention personal benefits. I think I’d rather not go and talk too much about that because that will be a side effect of the main thing, which is just being you, being yourself. Lovely, thank you so much for that, Charlotte.
Where can people go to find you online? And I’m curious, are you still offering the mentoring service, is that available?
CHARLOTTE: I’m quite booked up at the moment but I do have a website which has all of the details on there, which is just www.hearheargroup.com, which is H-E-A-R-H-E-A-R, Group.
MARK: Hear Hear Group, that’s lovely.
CHARLOTTE: That’s the one.
MARK: dot com. Okay.
CHARLOTTE: Yes. I’m also not overly active but I’m on Instagram and I do share some updates on there; instagram.com/charlotteabroms, which is A-B-R-O-M-S.
MARK: Brilliant. I will, obviously, make sure that these links are in the show notes, as usual. Charlotte, thank you so much, it’s been really inspiring. And, as I was saying earlier on, I really wanted to cover the music industry because it’s been so hard hit. I really think you’ve told an inspiring story in very difficult circumstances. Thank you very much for that.
CHARLOTTE: Thank you so much for having me, Mark. It’s been great to chat to you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Staying Creative as a Parent (Even in a Pandemic) with Kay Lock Kolp
Aug 08, 2022
Welcome to Episode 5 of the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Today we are going to look at one of the biggest challenge for many people during lockdown, whether or not they were creatives, and that is: parenting.
Kay Lock Kolp is a coach and podcaster with many years experience of helping parents to be better parents, and also to take better care of themselves.
In today’s interview Kay shares her practical wisdom on how to stay creative as a parent (and yes that title does have a double meaning) even during lockdown and the other stresses and strains of the pandemic.
In the intro to the show I introduce Mami McGuinness, my wife and also my business partner here at The 21st Century Creative. We talk about her work as a writer and coach, and she has a special message for the Japanese speakers in the audience.
Kay Lock Kolp
Kay Lock Kolp is a coach, podcaster, artist and author, with many years’ experience of helping creatives navigate the competing demands of parenting and work.
She lives in Massachusetts, USA, with her husband, sons, and the family‘s twelve-and-a-half-year-old pet chicken. Via her coaching and her podcast, Practical Intuition with Kay, she offers support for ‘grown-ups and our inner lives’.
So it was already in my mind to invite Kay onto The 21st Century Creative, to answer questions on the theme of How to Stay Creative as a Parent. And then the pandemic struck, and many of us were plunged into lockdown and involuntary homeschooling, and it suddenly felt like all the reasons I had to invite Kay onto the show had multiplied and become even more urgent!
So I reached out to her and asked if she’d be up for doing the interview about parenting for creatives, with a special emphasis on the acute and increasingly chronic challenges of the pandemic. I’m delighted to say she accepted.
In the course of this interview she talks about her own experience of art and parenting, and about what she learned from homeschooling her children long before the pandemic arrived.
She also shares insights based on her work helping parents who face hard choices about where to put their time and attention on a daily basis.
And if you’re in a situation where the children are currently taking priority over your creative career, then you may be interested to hear Kay’s ideas about how to keep your creative flame alive, even if it’s not on a full-time basis.
Kay tackles the practical challenges of lockdown parenting and homeschooling, as well as psychological insights around self-care, permission, and what she calls ‘the inner life of parents’.
Throughout the interview you’ll hear Kay’s upbeat and resilient spirit, in the face of her own health challenges as well as parenting in general and the pandemic in particular. The attitude that prompted one of Kay’s clients to say that she helps people ‘knock the bricks off their wings and truly fly’.
MARK: Kay, how did you get started on your creative path?
KAY: Wow. I think I’ve been on this creative path since I was small. It is winter time right now as we’re recording, and some of my favorite memories of winter time are when you could go out and there would be a brook, for example, or a creek, or a pond, or something, and just at the edges, there would be these frozen bits of water, and you could press down on them and they would make these cool crackling noises. I always felt like I was in a dance with them. And I think that is really where it started for me.
In my childhood, there was always singing, and lots of joy and silliness. And there have been times in my life, I think, where that’s been stymied, that’s been stoppered, or someone has tried to put me in a box, or tell me to stay in my lane. But there’s something in me that wants to come out. And so, it’s funny because I’ve been thinking of myself recently as a creator, not necessarily as an artist, or a podcaster, or a writer because I’m all of those things.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: I hope that’s okay to say. It started a long time ago for me, the idea of being creative.
MARK: How did that translate into career choices, work choices when you were older?
KAY: I love this question, and I’m seeing my career choices in a way that I really hadn’t before. I became a teacher. I wanted to become a teacher. But before that, I was enrolled in the School of Fine Art at the University of Connecticut, and I spent my freshmen year there for photography but when you do one, obviously there’s a lot of other fine arts classes that you need to take and electives and those sorts of things.
I did really well up until I took a drawing class. In that class, I was put into a box, basically and the box was, ‘You are not an artist. Go away. You are not an artist.’ And I was like, ‘Well these aren’t really my people anyway, I guess.’
MARK: Sorry, how were you getting that message?
KAY: Oh, well, because the teacher would hold up my work in front of the class and say, ‘Look at this lousy garbage.’
MARK: No!
KAY: ‘Look at this. Everybody do the opposite of this.’ It was rough.
MARK: Whoa. That was some garbage teaching, huh?
KAY: Yes, it really was. It really was. The creativity has come out of me in other ways in my personal life. There’s a quilt that I made years ago that’s right behind me. I’ve been a knitter. I’ve made really fun and beautiful landscape quilts. I’ve given myself permission to do that …but I’ve always said to myself, ‘Well you’re just not good at drawing, you’re not good at freestyle, freeform art.’ And it’s only in the last six months that I have invited that back into my life and given myself permission and said, ‘You know what? You get to define your worth. Not some jerk from when you were 19.’
I think it comes up because I was working at this wonderful place called the University of Connecticut Child Labs. And they were my people. I was like, ‘Oh, this is where I belong.’ I was especially drawn to child development, to human development, but especially child development, and the interaction between parents and kids, adults and kids has always been very fascinating for me. And to be able to take that into teaching was wonderful. For a while, I joyfully homeschooled our two sons. I recognized that we were so lucky to be able to do that. I know that’s not everybody’s path but I think even if you’re not homeschooling…and a lot more people are these days. Right, Mark, in the pandemic?
MARK: I was going to say, there’s been a lot of involuntary homeschooling going on in the last couple of years!
KAY: And there’s a lovely attitude that we can have about it which is, it has much more to do with what does our child need versus what is the school system saying we should do with them. I don’t know if that makes sense.
MARK: Yeah. So, you went into homeschooling?
KAY: Yes. And then when my oldest was 11, I got very sick with an intestinal disorder, and the antibiotics that I took to alleviate that have since been shown to have an ingredient in them that causes things like tendon rupture, tendon scarring.
MARK: Right.
KAY: About 10 and a half years ago now, I stepped into an unplanned adventure which was I lost the ability to walk more than a few steps. I needed a wheelchair when I left the house. And the worst of it was I lost hope because I wasn’t getting messages from my environment that something can change about this. And then about eight months in, I met someone who could change it and did change it. About 18 months after that, after I relearned how to walk and… I was able to ski, for example, again. I was able to run, I was able to do all the good, fun things.
MARK: Right, so that’s a pretty good indicator things are moving in the right direction, huh?
KAY: Yes. Then what happened was the tendon problems returned. They’ve never really gone away but I lost the ability to use my hands, my thumbs, my forearms. At the beginning there, for a long time, I had 5% use of my hands. I feel like this is where the beginning of the what I do now, where that really started because a friend of mine said, ‘Okay, you can’t do the usual home things that you love to do. You’re not cooking. You’re not folding laundry. You’re not doing any of that stuff. What can you do? You’ve got a lot of time. What can you do?’
I started to think about what I was good at. And what I was good at was helping parents and children thrive together and helping parents not be frazzled through my interactions with kids in the classroom and getting to know their parents. And so, I thought, ‘Well, I can do something with that.’ And obviously it’s a much longer story than that but that’s as simplified as I can make it, and that’s really brought me to where I am now.
MARK: For the purposes of today’s conversation, let’s make now maybe late 2019 before you-know-what happened. Tell me about the work that you had evolved, the business that you had evolved. What life and work were like at that point?
KAY: I had a podcast for parents of young children that was thriving and from that, I had built an online community for parents. People would log in and there would be courses there, and people could ask questions, and it was very fun. But I was way too invested in it. Then the pandemic happened, the you-know-who thing. I should say I loved my life at that point. I did have a lot of good time with my family. I didn’t work 40 hours a week. It was less than that so I was able to be active and do things that I really wanted to do. But I wasn’t living a really authentic life quite yet, I would say.
MARK: Okay. What things were you helping parents with?
KAY: I was helping parents with things like going from spanking to a more empathy-centered style of parenting where a child feels really seen and cared for, and it’s much gentler, it’s much more fun. So, I was helping with things like that, things like potty-training which is along in the same vein because we can come down really hard on a kid who’s just wet the bed or we can help them understand that it’s really okay. And we can try again tomorrow. Those sorts of things. Really situational, ‘This happened, what do I do now,’ things.
MARK: Okay, so really practical…
KAY: Yes.
MARK: Would you call it coaching, mentoring, teaching?
KAY: I would probably call it a mix of coaching and teaching.
MARK: One reason I’ve been meaning to invite you on the show for a while, Kay, is that every so often I get an email from a listener who says to me, ‘I really loved episode so and so and it’s really great, Mark, but I can’t help thinking…it’s all very well but what if you have kids? It’s not so easy to focus, it’s not so easy to block out the day, it’s not so easy to be productive. It’s so easy to feel that actually I’m not making any progress as a creative, as an artist.’
Did you ever find yourself faced with that question from the creatives in your community?
KAY: Oh, God, yes. And that was one of my favorite ways to be helpful was to help people see that you don’t have to just twist in the wind. There are things we can do here. But I really appreciate what you’re saying. Especially for someone; you’ll have a day planned and then you’ll get a call from a teacher or in 2019, you’d get a call from a teacher and you’d have to go handle something or do something or deal with something. And it would wreck your whole day. And you would feel like, ‘What’s the damn point? What am I doing here?’ You can get so easily interrupted.
One of the things I was able to be helpful with was people would come to believe that what was going on with their child mattered more. This is not for emergencies, but on a daily basis; the drama that was unfolding in their child’s life was much more important than their own feelings of wellness, or happiness, or contentment, or fulfilment, or joy. And it can just feel such a treadmill that you can’t get off of. And to help people know that they can and then take steps to do it is so cool.
MARK: And even maybe without dramas, taking kids of out of school, particularly when they’re young, they’re really young and they’re small, and they’re home all the time, and they want attention all the time, I know how frustrating that can be. Just for context, we had twins. And suddenly, my well-ordered productivity routine just went out the window for a few months. It took quite a long time before Mami and I managed to get any semblance of a structure back in place where we each had some space. And I know from talking to clients, quite often one parent will end up doing more of this than another, or obviously if you’re a single parent, it’s really hard to get relief. What things did you find yourself saying to a creator who’s really frustrated? Obviously, they love their child. The child’s always going to come first in the moment because that’s nature. But who is feeling really down, frustrated about the lack of progress, the lack of focus in terms of their own creative work in their career.
What things were you saying to them?
KAY: It’s really interesting because the way that it presented was not so much, ‘I’m experiencing these feelings of loneness in my own creative career.’ It was really much more of like, ‘I’ve had to put all that on hold. I can’t do that because all of my focus needs to be on my child.’ And so many times when they would come to understand that actually putting all your focus on the child is detrimental to both the child and to us…even though that sounds really counterproductive or counterintuitive but then, once they started to realize like, ‘I do not have to be organizing their lives all the time.’ By the way, when I say them, I do mean me. I don’t come by this work without some of my own helicopter parenting tendencies.
But the realization that your five-year-old isn’t going to spontaneously…and this is not in every single case but you can take steps to make sure that they’re safe while you are doing something creative. You can take steps. You don’t have to just go with their whim. In fact, it’s much more dangerous to go with their whim because then they don’t have a good sense of safety or security.
Julie Lythcott-Haims is a really wonderful writer and woman who talks about parenting, and she gives a TED Talk and she has said that basically the basis for that TED Talk is that kids need two things. They need love and they need to be assigned chores. I always loved that.
MARK: Oh, okay, great. Maybe my kids should watch that one! But seriously, I’ll make sure we can get a link to that TED Talk in the show notes. We’ll put it in the transcript of the interview.
Okay. Kay, I’d like to back up a little bit to what you said because it is counterintuitive. You said that putting all your attention, putting all your focus on the child, and putting your own art career or any career, I’m guessing, completely on hold, it isn’t good for you or the child. Could you unpack that a little bit for us?
KAY: The first glimmering I had of this was in a book series that I read probably when the kids were five and one, or something like that. Even just taking time for fiction for me was like, ‘What? You’re doing what? You’re not concentrating on them because you’re reading? Oh, my gosh. what a crime.’ But I still did it and I can remember my mom doing it and I thought, ‘All right, I can do it. I’ve got good role modeling for this. I’ll do this.’
In those books, his name is JW Jackson, you watch him fall in love and get married on an island right near us called Martha’s Vineyard, and he and his wife eventually start having children, and they don’t stop their lives. If they want to go fishing and the tide’s coming in and it’s 4:00 a.m., they bundle their little baby up and they bring him to the water and that happens all over this child’s life, and then they have more kids. I remember thinking like, ‘Boy, that must be nice.’
From that glimmering of wanting to be able to do what I wanted to do, and have my children along with me or doing what they wanted to do themselves came the idea that that’s actually better for them, and it’s better for me because if I am…and I’m going to use a word that…I don’t mean it in an accusatory sense. But the micromanagement that we can do in our children’s lives, what we’re doing is we’re giving them the message, ‘I don’t trust you to make good decisions. I don’t trust you to choose something to play with, or choose someone to play with. Instead, I’m going to handle all this for you because I know best.’ And it takes my life energy and my continual questioning of what will be best for them and how do I arrange this, so that I can go to bed at night feeling like I’ve not done anything to fill up my own well, my own cup. And also there was always a vague, ‘But is this really what you ought to be doing for them?’ I hope that makes sense.
MARK: It does. And that phrase not filling up my own well, my own cup it’s so easy to do that, to think you’re doing the ‘right’ thing by giving everything to everyone else. But at certain point, I think you need to fill your own well up even if you’re only thinking in terms of for them because who are you going to be for them if you don’t find a way to do that.
KAY: Exactly. One of the joys, again, pre-pandemic, was a mom who had…we had really been working together on how is she speaking to the school, because she was getting these horrible messages from the school about her son’s behavior, and she would just get so upset and derailed. One of my favorite conversations we had was when she was like, ‘What I’m going to do now is I’m going to let him be at school and I’m going to pick up my paint brush.’ And I just thought, ‘Oh, so good.’
MARK: One thing I’m hearing is just giving yourself permission to do something for yourself.
KAY: Yeah.
MARK: I’m guessing whether that’s something artistic or even something else that, dare I say, may not even be work, or be seen as being important.
KAY: Yes.
MARK: Any other things that, say, somebody could keep a sense that their artistic practice is continuing and they’re still building some momentum in their career. Maybe it’s not going to be as full steam ahead as it was before the kids came along. But what could you say around that?
KAY: I would say think small is what I would say. Each six months I do a little planning document, and because I’ve recently given myself permission to draw again, I drew a little door on it and the doors open and the label on the door says, ‘Think small.’ And there’s magic sparkles coming out of the door and there’s lots of flowers and stuff around it. For me, what that means is take a tiny step. KJ Dell’Antonia, who has a wonderful podcast with her friend, Jessica Lahey called ‘Am Writing,’ #AmWriting. They talk about even if you can’t do anything else, open the document. Chances are good that if you open the document, you will find a little time to write a sentence or something like that. But even if you don’t, at least you opened the document.
And I have found that 10 minutes of drawing, 10 minutes of writing, 5 minutes of those things, a sentence to keep yourself. I think we have this idea that we need a week in a castle where we’re completely isolated and by ourselves. I totally have that fantasy. But in a daily situation, that’s not that’s not the reality. What is in our control? It is to take an action, even if it’s a tiny action and just make a stroke of drawing. I once did a pastel painting and I gave myself permission because it felt more like coloring than it did like freeform drawing. But anyway, it took me two years because it was when my hands were not as good as they are now. And I could only do a few minutes a day of this. I didn’t have the stamina or the hand strength to do more. But I felt like an artist because I did what I could do.
MARK: Right. Because you are still doing something. I found this loads of times in my own life and also working with clients. Just a small thing every day that you do for yourself because today’s the day that I lived or I got something too.
KAY: Yes.
MARK: It doesn’t need to be as much as the energy and attention you’re giving to the child for it to have a big effect.
KAY: Yeah.
MARK: One thing actually I’m finding out this year is that you’ve reminded me of…this isn’t in relation to childcare directly but I recommitted to having a notebook. So, I got a nice notebook, and I’ve just been making sure I just carry it with me into the room that I’m in when I’m working or doing stuff around the house. And the amount of just little ideas, because the notebook’s there, I’m just jotting it down and I’m making a note, and then I’m going back to it and I know where to find that now. I’m capturing so much that when it is time to say write that idea up, that article or that podcast episode or whatever, I go and open the notebook and there’s gold dust in there. There’s all these little nuggets of stuff that I’ve captured.
KAY: Yeah.
MARK: In just odd little moments. And it’s a way of just thinking but capturing the thinking.
KAY: Yeah.
MARK: I’m not in a particularly time cramped situation from external circumstances but I could imagine if I were traveling or indeed had small children again, I think just the sense that I was capturing something that would be a seed for something in the future I think I’d find I can get a surprising amount in those little, tiny, little moments in the day.
KAY: I love that you say that. It’s making me remember, I’ve heard of someone. I’ve not met this person or worked with this person but I’ve heard of someone who wrote a book in five-minute snatches with one hand. They’ve got the phone in one hand, they’re dictating into their phone. The other hand is holding their baby’s head as their baby is nursing. It’s about us. If we can overcome that resistance and say, ‘No, this is worth it. This minute, these few moments, I’m going to do this.’ And so much of it is about giving ourselves permission. So much of it is about saying like, ‘Even if nothing ever comes of it, it’s a worthwhile thing to do because it feels good and right in this moment and it’s making me feel like a creator.’
MARK: Absolutely.
KAY: Yeah.
MARK: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So that’s where you were towards the end of 2019. You developed a really great way of teaching and helping parents. Like so many of us as coaches and teachers, you were helping them with them thing that you had struggled with. That’s certainly been a theme for my career.
When did you first become aware that this Covid thing was going to be serious, and was going to have an impact on your work, and on the lives of all these parents that you were helping?
KAY: I remember it so vividly. I live about, I don’t know, a couple of thousand miles away from my parents. They’re in the Colorado Rockies. And I think it was March 18th, I was visiting them with my son. At the time, he was 15, I think. We didn’t know if we were going to be able to come home. Everything was shutting down. It was such a scary and terrifying time. I’d just been invited to give an endorsement for a friend’s book that she had written. It’s called Coping Skills for Teens. It’s by a very good friend of mine named Janine Halloran, and she’s an amazing, amazing woman. She’s a licensed mental health counselor.
So, I’m reading this book about coping skills for teens and I’m out there in Colorado with my teen and we are both just beside ourselves with fear and anxiety. Physically, we felt safe. I know people who’ve been in so much worse situations in the pandemic, but we just felt so grateful to be able to come home. I can remember getting of the plane and getting the news that the Governor of Colorado had just announced that if you are coming from Colorado, you must quarantine for 14 days. And we’re in the car with my husband and so now does that mean he needs to quarantine for 14 days?
MARK: Right.
KAY: Our older son was not living at home at that point. So, I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t hug him. He would bring us groceries and put them at one end of the garage, and we’d go in at the other end, and wave, and say thank you and it was just terrifying. One of the first things that I did was I put together a little online free virtual summit called ‘Okay Con 2020.’ In doing of that, I got to talk to so many parenting experts that had come on my show that had become friends. I think I did 10 interviews in 10 days. And every time I did an interview, I would feel so good because here was someone else experiencing what I was experiencing. Here’s them giving their best advice on handling money right now, on finding a job, you name it. It was amazing.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: That was so helpful and I realized that there are some themes here. One of the themes is even if we’re stuck at home, we don’t have to be isolated. We don’t have to be any more isolated than we want to be as long as we’ve got a phone or something like that. And every time I took steps to help somebody else, I felt better. So that really was the theme, I would say, through most of the pandemic. What happened after 10 or so months of that was, I got diverticulitis again which I hadn’t had in 9 and a half years because I had been so busy filling everybody else’s cup that I completely left my own health in the dust. So, the pandemic has been a really interesting crucible for selfcare.
MARK: What did you learn from that?
KAY: I have this memory of lying in the hospital and because you’re not having visitors. No one’s visiting you in Covid. It was such a tense time but I felt very cared for and I was starting to feel better, and I remember lying there and saying, ‘You’ve got to close your community. You can’t do this anymore. You’ve got to come first or else you’re going to die.’ I remember having these very, very stark feelings and then thinking, ‘But how can I do that? I’ll be letting them down. I don’t know how to do that.’ When I brought that to them once I was on the mend, they were so gracious and wonderful and they said things like, ‘Thank you for being a good example of taking care of yourself. I 100% respect your decision.’ And that was where I started to think, ‘I’ve got to approach this differently or I’m not going to make it through the pandemic.’
MARK: Before we get onto how you then approach that differently, could you say something about the issues that you were seeing from parents as the pandemic, first of all, hit and then it became apparent that this wasn’t going to be over within a few weeks? We were in it for the long haul. What issues were you hearing about?
KAY: I really appreciate this question. They were going through basically what I was going through, which is everyone is pouring from an empty cup. No one knows what’s going to happen next. So what do we do? This is information. If we can try and take it out of the realm of panicking and instead see it as like, ‘Okay, this is actually the facts on the ground. This is what is happening.’ A lot of it was really focused on, I would say, two things. One is helping our kids and helping helping them name emotions instead of trying to push them away because people were feeling so much more emotions. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s just that suddenly the zeitgeist was just full of rage and fear and you couldn’t get away from it unless you could recognize that, and recognizing any emotion is the first step towards being able to move beyond it.
So part of it was that and part of it was a real sense of time management. Often, I find with clients that they’re super stressed out, they’re working many hours. I work with folks who some of them are single parents, which makes things even more complicated. And they have young children, for example, and young children need stimulation and activity and it can be so incredibly difficult for them. So, if someone needs to be isolated on a conference call or even just spend that time working. If they’re in a situation where they’re alone at home with a young child, especially but this can be on up into older children as well, it can feel really hard and awful and parents can just not know what to do.
Something that I have found that’s worked really, really well with clients. Well, I suppose the first thing that I found that’s worked really, really well is for someone to give themselves permission to say, ‘You know what? There is something I can do about this, maybe I don’t know what it is yet.’ But to be able to ask the question, ‘What can I do instead of shutting down and being stressed?’ Something that’s worked really, really well is a simple…it sounds so simple, a simple timer where you might, for example, have a timer that you set for…and there’s a little bit of lead up you don’t want to do this on the five minutes before your big meeting or your conference call or whatever.
To be able to set that timer for three minutes, just as an example and to say to your child, ‘Mama’s going to work.’ I say mama, it can, of course, it can be mum or dad. ‘I’m going to go off and do my work. And while I’m doing that, you get to be out here and you get to play with the trains or you get to you get to stay out here. And when the timer goes off, I’m going to come back and we’re going to play together.’ Then you are spending some time playing with your child when that timer goes off so they’re feeling that bond, and you are starting to establish a boundary. And the beautiful thing is that you can expand that. I’ve worked with people with very young children, very energetic children who have been able to expand to maybe it’s 30 minutes when that timer goes off and they can come out and reconnect and have a lovely bonding five minutes with their child and then back they go for half an hour. And in the meantime, their child is exploring their world in ways that are safe and not plunked in front of the television.
MARK: I’m hearing a theme that I know from listening to your podcast and other conversations with you that I think really key to your approach as I understand it is just looking for that chink of possibility and saying, ‘Look, there is something in here that can be done, however small, and that thing can then grow.’
KAY: Yes.
MARK: Kay, I’d like to pick up on the thread from a bit earlier on where you talked about, for you, homeschooling was a decision that you took quite a long time ago as a positive decision, as something you really wanted to do that you felt it was a better option than was available in the usual schooling system. But as we said, a lot of us have been through the process of involuntary homeschooling over the last couple of years in various versions and phases of lockdown.
What have you been sharing with parents who thought, ‘I would never have to do this. I thought that the school would take care of all of this, and now it’s devolved onto me.’ What advice have you been giving them?
KAY: I’ve worked with people who are like, ‘I never wanted this. I never wanted this. I love my child but this is not a responsibility that I signed up for.’ I think really the first part of it is working through those feelings because we can have those feelings, and then we can feel so guilty because we have them.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: I think being able to say, again, ‘Okay, taking emotion out of it, these are the facts on the ground. How can we make this work for us?’ And I mean, God, I’ve known parents who got a lot out of sitting right next to their child. They’re coloring while their child is doing social studies or whatever, and it really worked for both of them. And I wanted to say too my work started out to be with preschoolers and very, very young children but I used to say my license ended at third grade or age nine. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve now got a 10-year-old child. what do I do here?’
MARK: Right.
KAY: What I’ve noticed is that they’re still the same child. we don’t suddenly get another kid when they’re an adolescent. There’s changes of course. But they’re still the same kid.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: But they have different needs. For example, I remember working with one woman who said to her daughter who was really struggling with the online schooling, she said to her daughter, ‘You know what? You can have the video. I’m going to write to your teacher and say that if you want the video off, you can have it off.’ And then her daughter was able to learn while building dollhouse structures out of cardboard, out of paint. She’d build these beautiful things and she would still know the lesson. That helped her take it in in a way that worked better for her.
I think I’m going to always suggest and I have always suggested that working with a teacher, coming from a very cynical place, I think cynicism is a real symptom of burnout and there’s so much burnout in this. But if we can get beyond that cynical place and say, ‘I’m going to talk to my teacher about this. I’m going to talk to my child’s teacher about this. This is something that needs to be addressed.’ I’ve worked through that with so many parents of like, ‘But they’re saying this.’ Was it a person who said that or was it a newsletter? How is this coming to you? Can something be individualised?
MARK: Who is ‘they’?
KAY: Exactly. I think everything comes back to the emotions and the socioemotional piece of our children is overarching and this is my opinion. There can’t be any learning until that is addressed. And so, when we get into adolescence, we get into older kids, highschoolers have had it, in my opinion, again, worse than anyone because things are already hard when you’re 15, 16, 17, but it’s so much harder. My memories of being that age are sitting on a sofa with six other friends and singing our guts out together and just laughing and you can’t do that now. How do you keep going when you can’t? As they get older, I feel like it’s a lot more about saying to them like, ‘What do you need here? How can I be a support for you?’ Because we think we know what they want or need. And oftentimes we do but if we say it that way to them, ‘You need this,’ they don’t hear that.
MARK: We’ve been focused, if you like, on the really hard end of things like homeschooling during lockdown, and managing the calendar so you can actually get your work done. But just thinking about the impact of the pandemic more broadly and maybe even opening the door to some positive possibilities and options, what trends are you seeing among the parents that you talk to? I guess where I’m coming from is my wish, when all of this started, was, ‘I hope we all come out of this with more choices than we went in.’
I’d love to hear about any choices that you’re seeing that parents now have that maybe they didn’t feel they had before.
KAY: Oh, I love this. It really is reflective of where I am in my creative life and my professional life, as well as the people that I work with and what they’re seeing in their lives and that is, I would say, they now know that they can choose. I think in a lot of us, a coaching friend of mine has said it that, ‘There’s a dormant ‘Don’t fuck with me’ inside of us.’ And that has come out now.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: The people I am working with, and again, even for myself you don’t get to mess with me. I’m the one who gets to decide. You don’t get to decide for myself or my children.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: And I do see that as an incredible positive because what’s happening is we are ordering our lives the way that we want them.
MARK: Okay, so, Kay, can I pick up on another thread from earlier on which was when, on your own journey, you talked about that big decision to close your community. What did you then move into doing? What was the next phase of your work about?
KAY: One-on-one coaching is what I do, one to one. That’s really the only way that I work, although I have a newsletter a group of subscribers to my newsletter and I write to them each week. And I share a piece of art more or less every week that I’ve been working on, a story behind it, like, your poetry podcast came up in my newsletter.
MARK: That was really nice of you. Thank you.
KAY: It really fit in with something, you helped me work through something that I had been thinking about. It’s such a great show. Each month I share one month of my playbook of days so that people can print it and enjoy it and use it. We have a once-a-month complementary meetup where everyone in the newsletter gets this link. And you can come and spend an hour together and this past month what we did was we talked about our word of the year for 2022. I’m in community in that way. It’s not that I’ve completely isolated myself. But what I love to do is be in conversation with people. And so, the one-to-one coaching has become a much bigger part of my life. And it’s evolved. I love it.
MARK: Are you working mainly with parents these days?
KAY: I am. Actually, as it turns out. I like to think that what we do is we work on the inner lives of parents. Very often it’s a transition time for them. So at least one client I’m working with right now they’ve just become an empty nester. So, what is that like? And what do they do now? But others, sometimes sometimes temper tantrums come up as they come up in our lives. But very often what we talk about is what’s going on with them inside, how are they feeling, what are they doing, and what could make it better. Do you know what I mean?
MARK: Yeah.
KAY: It’s building their future, and I think the by-product of that that we’ve seen is that they’re now an amazing role model for their kids.
MARK: Right. This is another reason really for not ‘giving everything’ to the kid because what are you teaching them about is what it’s like to be a parent. What will they internalize and grow up with? And you’re setting them up for a lot of guilt and pressure. I love this phrase, the inner life of parents because you think about all the books on parenting and the advice, understandably, there’s an awful lot of outer focus stuff because by definition a parent is outer focused. There’s a lot of hands-on practical skills to be learned.
KAY: Yep.
MARK: I love that phrase, though, the inner life of parents is something that could be neglected and often is. So, it’s great that you’re there nurturing it, Kay.
KAY: I appreciate that.
MARK: Kay, I think this would be a good time for your Creative Challenge. If you are listening to the show and this is the first time, then this is the point of the interview where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a Creative Challenge, which is something that will stretch you creatively and probably as a person as well, and it’s something that you can do or at least get started on within seven days of listening to the interview. And it obviously will be on the theme of the interview.
Kay, what is your Creative Challenge?
KAY: I just want to say how excited I am to be able to be the setter of the challenge. I’ve done so many of these challenges, Mark, over the years and this feels really, really exciting. So, when I reflected, really what I came up with was something that was a huge challenge for me but that has been such a gamechanger for me, and I would like to invite our listeners to give it a try. And it is this. As a part of your bedtime routine for the next seven nights…this is within a week.
MARK: Yeah.
KAY:Each of the next seven nights, take a few moments to look at yourself in the mirror. Smile if you can. I know sometimes we don’t feel like smiling at ourselves but if you can, that’s a part of this. And just take a few moments to talk to yourself and out loud, audibly tell yourself good things that happened today. Tell yourself about the things that were a joy in your day, or if you can’t find any joys because sometimes it’s that, give yourself a little hug in the mirror and just tell yourself that good things are ahead, and that you can access them, and that they are here for you. And I would invite you to end each night by saying, ‘Good night. I love you. And I’ll talk to you tomorrow night.’
MARK: Oh, how lovely.
KAY: As I say, do it for seven nights and if it feels good, keep doing it. I think I started seven nights five years ago and it felt so weird. But I used to say to my kids like, ‘You guys, you’re going to hear me probably talking to myself in the mirror.’ It’s one of the best things that I have done. In the tough times, it’s been a comfort and in the good times, it’s been a fun way to celebrate.
MARK: Great. Thank you, Kay. That’s a lovely challenge.
KAY: You’re welcome. I would really love to hear from those of you who try it. I’d really love to hear your experience with it.
MARK: Where should people go, Kay, to learn more about you and your approach, and if they’re at a point where they’re looking for some help, maybe get in touch and ask you for some help?
KAY: Well, thank you for asking. I am very excited. I’ve just started a new website. I’ve just moved from my old one to this new one. It is kaylockkolp.com.
MARK: Okay.
KAY: And there’s a contact page there where I would love to hear from folks. And there’s also kaylockkolp.com/weekly if somebody wants to subscribe to my newsletter, that is where they can do that. I’m just remembering, Mark, there’s one more aspect of this that I think is really important to highlight, if it’s okay.
MARK: Sure.
KAY: It’s part of the inner life of the parent. I think maybe of the coolest parts is the idea of being present instead of worrying about the future or regretting the past, but being here in this moment. And what’s very, very fun about that is we can do that for ourselves, be present for ourselves. We can also do it with our kids. And then that, to me, that’s where the fun really starts when you are present, fully present with your child, when you can be silly with them, and listen for their questions, and just be with them, that’s when things are the best. At least that’s how I feel.
MARK: That feels like a lovely place to end the conversation today. So, here’s to more moments of joyful presence, presence, joyful or otherwise with kids. Thank you very much, Kay. Like I say, this has been a really requested topic on the podcast and I’m so glad that we could get you to…with the expertise that I don’t have in this area…I’m a keen amateur when it comes to parenting. So, it’s been really great to get your more informed and professional perspective on it, so thank you very much.
KAY: You’re welcome. I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Launching a New Business in the Pandemic with Amrita Kumar
Aug 01, 2022
Welcome to Episode 4 of the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Today we meet Amrita Kumar, the co-founder and CEO of Candid Marketing, an innovative marketing agency in India. Amrita had to confront a brutal situation, when she and her team were forbidden from carrying out their core business activities and she had to decide whether she could hold onto the team she had spent so much time building.
But in the midst of the crisis, she remembered the seeds of an idea that she had been wanting to launch for years, and decided that now was the time to go for it.
Listen to today’s interview for an extraordinary story of leadership under pressure, and of the birth of Amrita’s innovative new business, Mojo Box.
In the intro to the show, I reflect on passing the milestone recently of 25 years as a coach for creative professionals, what I have learned, and why coaching still feels fresh and exciting, even after all these years.
In the coaching segment, I argue that we should think of productivity in terms of projects, not tasks.
Amrita Kumar
In October 2019 Amrita Kumar was celebrating becoming CEO of Candid Marketing, an innovative experiential marketing agency with offices in Bombay (aka Mumbai) and Delhi, in India.
It was the culmination of 21 years of work on the company she had co-founded with her partner Atul Nath. A moment to savour her success and look to the future. She was full of plans for 2020 and unaware of the impending pandemic, that would threaten the very existence of the business she had worked so hard to establish.
Over the course of 21+ years Amrita and Atul grew Candid into one of India’s most awarded Experiential Marketing agencies, named as the No. 1 Brand Activation Agency in the country by The Economic Times, with a team of over 120 staff and a client list including Bacardi, Cadbury, Disney, Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Dyson and Uber.
Candid’s strength is meeting consumers face-to-face, getting products into their hands and eliciting honest feedback. And of course, this is precisely the reason why the agency was vulnerable to the pandemic.
Because when Covid struck and India went into strict lockdown, Amrita and her team were forbidden from carrying out their core business activity – going out onto the streets to meet consumers in person.
In this interview Amrita tells me how she worked hard to establish Candid, and then had to rethink everything in the face of pandemic.
As a leader, she had to make some hard, and eventually excruciating choices, particularly around whether and how long she could afford to keep hold of her team.
But in the midst of the turmoil she came up with a creative solution to her problems, by launching an innovative new service that grew into a whole new business: Mojo Box.
Mojo Box is an online platform that helps consumers discover and experience new products before buying. They sign up via the website mojobox.online and for a small convenience fee they are sent Mojo Boxes, containing a range of new products to try.
The value of the products is far greater than the convenience fee, and Amrita’s members told her that the arrival of a new box was a moment of fun and discovery in the long lockdown days.
Amrita used Mojo Box to help her big brand clients reach new customers in spite of the restrictions – and in the process, she grew her membership numbers to 270,000 and kept her own business afloat during the pandemic. Now, she’s looking to the future with renewed optimism.
Interestingly, Amrita tells me in the interview that Mojo Box grew from the seeds of an idea she had had for years, but it took the pandemic disruption before conditions were right to test it for real.
This interview with Amrita is a great story of courage, leadership and innovation in the face of disaster. And also of the value of leaning into the future, and being ahead of the curve in your industry – because you never know when that innovative and risky-looking idea could turn out to be your safety net.
MARK: Amrita, how did you get started on your creative path?
AMRITA: Actually, this whole journey of experiential marketing, creative experiential marketing and what it basically means is interactive, one on one, creative way of engaging brands with consumers genuinely happened by accident. I did my Master’s in Leeds. I actually then took on a job in London for a bit. And then there was a work permit fiasco. And because the company I was working for lost its funding and my work permit was attached to that company so I had to come back to India.
So when I came back to India, I started working for a dotcom. That was the whole dotcom bubble and there was a whole lot of funding going on and I started working for a gifting and E-greeting dotcom which was, I think, funded by the Rupert Murdoch company and all of that jazz. I basically had a very bad time. And I was extremely disillusioned with the whole working environment in India.
I was wondering what to do, should I look at ways to maybe leave Bombay again? And somebody I knew at that time told me to meet Atul, my business partner now, saying that, ‘He’s doing something different and why don’t you meet him?’ When I met him, I realized that he was doing something different. So when he started Candid, and he’s the one who actually started Candid in 2000, I joined two years after they started. When he started Candid in 2000, it was a very simple thing for him. He basically wanted to engage brands with consumers, but his one line thing was ‘anything which is not mass media’, as simple as that.
MARK: Oh, really?
AMRITA: Anything which is not mass media. So it could be literally a one on one sampling, standing on the road. So that was literally the one line brief of how we started Candid. I joined him two years later. And that’s how Candid happened to me. Over I think, what, it’s 2022, so that’s 20 years of Candid. And it’s been interesting because he and me are very complementary in nature.
Slowly I took over the creative and the client side of the business and he took over the financial and the whole running of the company, and then after I think ’19 I took over as the CEO of Candid from him because he was busy starting something else which, unfortunately also stopped due to Covid. But, as I said, I literally stumbled upon Candid because of meeting Atul. And then it was a matter of finding one’s legs in the kind of work and then making it your own because 20 years ago, nobody knew experiential marketing in India. We were literally the first in many, many things in India.
MARK: Right. I’m curious about what was the thinking behind ‘anything but mass media’ because these days that would seem a lot more obvious than it must have done then, right?
AMRITA: Exactly. I think the thinking behind that and I know because I joined the journey too was that the big agencies had advertising covered. You had the Ogilvies and Leo Burnett and also they had advertising covered and we felt, and that’s one of the reasons I connected with Candid is because I obviously did my thesis on this also, is that there is this whole need between advertising and the consumer. So, internally we used to say ‘air cover and field soldiers’. You need the air cover from advertising but you need the foot soldiers to go in toward enemy territory too.
So, that was the whole thinking that at the end of the day, mass media does not give you this tangible feel of the product and now it’s very easy for me to say, ‘Oh, it was all about discovery,’ but we never even thought about it as product discovery those days. It was just the need of putting the brand, putting the product in a consumer’s hand and they’re touching and feeling it and say, ‘Okay, this looks interesting. I want to try it.’
As I said, we did a lot of firsts. We did these mobile, massive trucks which we would convert them into these floats and we would have live demos and live stations. It’s crazy because now when I say these things to even people who work with me, they just look at me and say, ‘Oh, okay, either a big deal or, really, maybe she’s just lying about it because it sounds way ahead of its time.’ But we’ve done all of it. So it’s fun. It’s fun. I sometimes just go through old pictures and I wonder like, ‘Oh, my God.’
MARK: You really get up close and personal with a consumer?
AMRITA: Yes, yes.
MARK: I want to go back and pick up on something you said about as you grew into the role, you made it more your own, you made Candid your own. Can you talk about that process a bit?
AMRITA: I do believe that the client relationships, the kind of work you do reflects on the kind of person you are creatively. Obviously, since I started slowly spearheading and Atul was obviously a great mentor and he has taught me everything he knows and that’s why we work together for 20-plus years, what ended up happening is that the projects were an echo of me creatively.
So whether it is making a giant installation or creating something technologically, it’s everything which interests me or my creativity was reflected on the client projects, unlike maybe, I don’t know, if Atul was to be the head of creative for Candid, maybe his style of creative and content would be different. And obviously the relationships and the brands also reflect that. The kind of brands I would identify with, or the kind of clients I would be excited to work with at the end of the day are the ones you end up really making relationships with and hence doing good work for. I believe that’s true for every agency. At the end of the day, the brands, clients and the work reflects you personally. It’s very difficult to come up with something creatively, which is not something you are excited about.
MARK: Absolutely. I think this is so important. The way I always look at it is I want to find a client who inspires me, because I know that brings out the best in me. I always say this isn’t a luxury because I know what fires me up to deliver the best that I can do as a service provider.
I think any creative needs to know what is it that brings out the best in you.
AMRITA: You’ve hit on something, which is very important to the way we do business and I think it drives us every day today also, is around I think seven, eight years ago, we had this disastrous project; there was no creativity in it. It was just execution and we had a nightmare. I remember I was meeting my dad after a year and I was on comms calls at 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning solving fires, and I told him, we had a chat the next day, and we were like, ‘This is not the kind of work we want to do. I think we just need to get off the treadmill.’ We felt like we were on this treadmill and because we had expenses, we had a big team, you have to take on projects. Suddenly, the team and the clients were deciding the work we do and not the joy we were feeling. And we literally took a decision to stop doing projects where there’s no creativity, there’s no content, there’s no technology, and it cut down our business.
When we took this decision, we actually created a manifesto, which now sounds a little naive but we created a manifesto for ourselves, which is the kind of work we want to do and we said we are all about discovery. And that’s the day we said okay. I think after that, a couple of months, four or five months down, we lost a lot of business because, one, we refused, and second is obviously the clients, when you turn around and say, ‘Okay, we’ll do this project but we don’t do this project of yours,’ and they were like, ‘No, then don’t do any project of ours because we want somebody who does everything.’ And we lost a lot of business. I’m blessed that we could take that decision. I think it was like, ‘Let’s do work we want to do at the end of the day.’ It was tough. It’s very easy to now say and it all sounds very good but it was tough.
MARK: Right. Yeah. Now you’re looking back on the success story. But of course, I always think ‘no’ is a scary word to say but it can also be a very creative word because when you close the door to the stuff that you don’t want to do and you know in your heart isn’t you, that opens the door to do the thing that really is. But when you’re looking at the bottom line and you see the impact, particularly at the beginning, it can be tough.
I’d like to fast forward to late 2019, right at the beginning of 2020, just before the pandemic arrived on our screens. Tell me where Candid was at that stage and the kind of work that you were doing.
AMRITA: October 2019, I think is when Atul announced me taking over Candid completely. We had two offices, Bombay and Delhi. We had relationship clients like Bacardi, Cadbury, Disney, the who’s who in the Indian market, and around I think 120 people as a team. We were an agency with 120-plus people. It was good. The whole point was me taking over Candid and making it the agency, the creative content and activation agency. And that was the plan. That was the intent before Covid hit us.
MARK: You said that was the plan, that was the story, that was the movie you were living in at that stage.
AMRITA: Yeah. For me, it was a career high. This is an agency I spent 20 years… well, at that time, 18 years or 19 years of my life and I was just announced, Atul is stepping back and I’m taking over and I was taking over nationally. I started meeting clients and telling them that, ‘Okay, this is it. I’m it now. No more Atul in the scene.’
In fact, we started year planning for the next year. So a lot of our clients, unlike Indian clients, who is 1st April, new financial year, but the international clients are first, obviously, 1st Jan to 31st December, so in September, October, November, you start planning projects for the next year. So a lot of the planning work for next year had started already and that’s what I was busy in before Covid came in. We were setting revenue targets and talking about expanding the team and all of that.
MARK: Thinking about what you’ve just told us about where you came from, this was success, right? This was what you had worked for and invested and built up. And then what happened?
AMRITA: And then Covid happened, and I think it hit us first, slightly. A few projects got cancelled and then a few more projects got cancelled. And, obviously, with the activation business, you build what you execute. The creator and the content, which is a small part of the whole billing, there is a lot of actual physical production. The manpower who stands in the aisles in the stores, the trays they carry, the games you fabricate to engage about brands. So, obviously, the billing hit us very badly by Jan and that’s when we realized, ‘Okay, this is serious.’
And also what happened is a lot of things we had pre-booked and pre-billed suddenly turned to zero. So revenue-wise, it hit us in February. In March, we stood up and took notice and said, ‘This is not going anywhere,’ and we had to have a very, very tough call with everybody, where we told everybody that we had to go to 50% salary until further notice. And we were hoping against hope that this thing will blow up by July, August. Obviously, we were wrong. We were so wrong.
MARK: And just so that we understand the context that you were operating in, was it because it was so much dependent on face-to-face and interaction with consumers and that that was all restricted?
AMRITA: Yeah. I’m sure everybody knows about the lockdown in India.
MARK: Tell us a bit because I know we’ve got listeners all over the world and everyone has got a different experience of lockdown, but maybe just paint the picture for us a little so we understand what you were dealing with.
AMRITA: I think the lockdown in India was announced in March, and I think 20, 21st. But it was literally announced with no notice, no preparation. I think it was mid-March, I’m not sure, I think 20, 21st it was just announced. The prime minister came on TV and said there’s going to be a lockdown. In our business where when you do activations, everything is face to face interaction whether it is store sampling, whether it’s mall engagement, whether it is events, consumer events, everything is face to face. So suddenly, business went zero because you couldn’t execute anything. You couldn’t do anything at all. Nothing. My team was sitting at home and nothing was done. So all projects were put on pause and hold and eventually cancelled.
Also, the thing is that even after the first lockdown was then relaxed, the numbers were still so high that even when clients would refer us, I couldn’t risk sending the team out there and getting infected. So the fact is that you just couldn’t execute. And even if you did execute and I would risk the team, there are no consumers out there. Everybody was home. So just the physical interface was just not possible. And we just went from 100 to 0.
MARK: I guess it must have really come home to you what it means to be the leader. You’ve been crowned CEO in October, and then suddenly you’re dealing with this. What was it like to be in the hot seat?
AMRITA: Oh, I have white hairs for the last two years! It’s been an extremely draining, turmoil-filled journey in the last two years because like I just shared from the first conversation of the 50% salaries, to eventually telling people that we have to let them go. We’ve gone from 120-plus to now 10 people. And getting messages in the middle of the night for money and vendors needing to be paid, it’s been tough. It’s been really tough. The fact is that we carried as many people as we could and for the longest time. We did as little as possible every month because we had only that much money in the bank at the end of the day and vendors had to be paid. So, I think every day Atul and me just literally lived day to day.
The worst thing about this whole thing and being the leaders, it’s there’s no end date. It’s not like I knew that it would finish so and so date, and hence, I have this much money in the bank and so I could plan for this. And clients won’t pay outstandings. It was just the ugliest side of business one can never hope to imagine to run. And when you take over an agency, you wish that you don’t do all of this. But just my life, the last two years has been the messy side of running the agency than the interesting side.
MARK: Where did you find your strength to step up as a leader and do what needed to be done?
AMRITA: I’m guessing, internally, my business partner, Atul, my friends and family. But I think just the fact that we’ve been a very close knit team and it’s almost been a family. I think the principle we led with from day one is we’ll try and do right by everybody. Even if we let go of someone, we let go of them… there is no way of letting go of someone, I have realized that. They will never understand obviously, and I don’t expect them to, the journey which we are going through, but I think the guiding principle was just trying to be good by everyone as much as possible.
It’s been tough. I don’t think I’ve handled it very well, I must say. There have been days of tears, anger, frustration, fighting. It’s been crazy.
MARK: Going back to the first part of 2020, at what point did you start to think, ‘Well, hang on a minute, we actually need to do something quite different here. We can’t just wait for everything to come back?’
AMRITA: What happened is after the initial shock and around April, May, I started reading a lot about the changed consumer behaviours internationally. We’ve always, as a team, Atul and I, we’ve always discussed about scaling up sampling to the nonphysical world. Many, many years ago when we used to discuss it, there were always a lot of hurdles to it, and one of the primary hurdles being digital comfort, transactions online.
Obviously with Covid, consumer behaviour changed. Indians got more comfortable transacting online. Indians got more comfortable putting more information, personal details online. Internet payments, digital payments exploded obviously because of Covid. Suddenly, I literally went back to all our old discussions and started thinking about it and the thought process was let me start something, let me just jump, I’ll aim later. Let me see if there’s any seed… literally because I didn’t realize what we were creating.
When we started in June, it was literally a project. It wasn’t supposed to be another company. It wasn’t supposed to be another product. It was just another project to pay the bills. How do we go out there and tell brands we work with that, ‘We know that consumer discovery has got limited. We know you still need to get consumers to find out about you. You need to discover consumers. Consumers need to discover about you. Aisles are obviously not an option. Malls are not an option. So here is something we are trying. Do you want to give it a go?’ And that’s exactly how we started in June.
MARK: This is really interesting to me. Because one of the things I heard, I think it was last year on James Altucher’s podcast, I think it was an economist who was saying that… I can’t remember his name, but he said that the pandemic isn’t going to change any trends, but it will accelerate a lot of them.
So in your case, what I’m hearing is you had this idea for a new way of engaging consumers and getting products into their hands. But you were ahead of the curve from where consumers were and maybe where your clients were in India at that time. And then the pandemic moved that curve forward.
AMRITA: Yes. Because one of the biggest issues in our earlier business in activation was the cost per contact. If you stand in a store, you are governed by the amount of people who walk into the store. If you stand in a mall, you’re governed by the number of footfalls in the mall. And, obviously, when you create a physical structure, you create a pop up store or you create trays to sample food, all of that comes at a cost.
So, overall activation or experiential marketing is costly as compared to digital ads or billboard advertising. And that is one of the biggest reasons brands wouldn’t spend too much of money also in it because cost per contact was never easily calculated because it’s difficult to calculate the secondary exposure and also it’s expensive. So that is the reason why we’ve been trying to think about digital sampling. And like you said, it just accelerated with the Covid conditions.
MARK: What about clients? Did you find them more open to experimenting and trying new things?
AMRITA: We were blessed to have some relationship clients. The low-hanging fruits were approached first, some arms of friends were twisted. And we put together the first edition, as we call, of Mojo Box to try it out. We did, I think it was 10,000 editions in just Bombay to try it out and we did it. We started in June and we finished the box very quickly after that. And we were like, ‘Okay, this has merit.’
MARK: Tell us more about the box. What is it and how does it work and what are the benefits?
AMRITA: How Mojo Box works is it’s an online discovery platform, and a consumer needs to go and register on it and give us certain details… the more you interact, the more details we would like of you, which helps us then understand what kind of products which interests you. Are you somebody who’s a wellness enthusiast? Are you a mother with new-born kids? Are you a foodie? Would you like to try food samples?
How we work is there are two parts to us. One is we create curated boxes with samples, which could be this is a genre or a target audience. We’ve done I think now 16 editions in total. There’s a wellness box, there’s a men’s personal care, there’s a women’s personal care. And if you want this box of samples to try, and we use this line, ‘Try before you buy,’ because of the value of samples, we try and keep it like almost ₹600, ₹700 and we tell the consumer to pay us like ₹120, ₹130 for courier and handling and logistics. So it’s almost like a value of 6X or 7X.
As an aside, we charge to filter the quality of the consumer because we also realized from our first edition that if you just give it for free, you don’t get the right kind of target audience you want. So charging a nominal amount makes sure that the consumer has skin in the game and it is somebody who’s serious about sampling. So when the consumer pays, the box is dispatched. We then collect feedback from the consumer, we collect pre-sampling feedback, and we collect post-sampling feedback. And this is all done online. And we’ve got very, very healthy rates. We get feedback percentages, anywhere from 30% to 42% on each edition.
MARK: That’s great.
AMRITA: Yeah, which I’ve been told from brands is a very good percentage because when they do other initiatives, they get 15%, 18%. We do incentivize feedback with something called Mojo Cash, which you can then use. It’s like loyalty points which you can use to buy further boxes. So feedback is collected. And once you receive the box of samples you get, you fill out the feedback on whether you like the samples, whether you want to buy them, and we share all of this with the brands.
We do not share first party data. We’ve been very clear from day one, we don’t share first party data with brands. Meaning your contact details, name, phone number, email ID. So you’re not going to get harassed by brands just because you’ve been sampled by them. I think that’s very important. We don’t intend to also do this anytime in the future. The reason I’m stressing on this is because at least people in India know how it is to get just bombarded with messages. You’ve given your number in some website and it’s sold to 20 other people. So we don’t share first party data at all. And that’s one of the reasons a lot of brands have also chosen not to work with us, which we are fine with. We do share the feedback, we do share the consumer stimuli.
Over and above this, we also work with the term ‘micro influencer’. What a micro influencer means is they are not these big influencers, they are not celebrities, they are not movie stars. Micro influencers are normal people who we look at are influential in their circle or their social circle or their area, like if they are a food blogger. We’ve just got two criteria. We look for anybody who’s got 5,000 following or an engagement percentage of 10% in Instagram. Engagement means how they interact with their audience in their posts, which is easily calculated.
It’s like a mother who blogs about her children. We believe that they make more of a difference than a celebrity whom you end up paying a lot of money and then you don’t believe because they may or may not be using that product. We’ve got over three and a half thousand people, these micro influencers who’ve registered with Mojo Box too and we use them to amplify the messaging or talk about those samples and the different products one can discover through various editions. So that’s also there for every edition. Brands get a huge benefit of just a lot of interesting content being made on social media because of the sampling exercise.
And like I was talking to you about when we used to do activation cost per contact and calculating exposures was a very difficult thing in the offline business. The other thing was that when you sample a bar of chocolate on a store aisle, no one’s going to post a picture about it on social media saying, ‘I got this chocolate on the store aisle.’ But if you get a Mojo Box, people make reels and posts and tag brands, and there’s a whole lot of social amplification of the whole sampling process. Again, it’s very easy for me to say, ‘Oh, this was the plan,’ but I must tell you, it was an interesting discovery we stumbled upon and then built up on it.
MARK: I always think that designing a business model is really about designing a system that creates value for everybody. So you’ve got the brands, you’ve got the consumers, you’ve got the micro influencers, and obviously there’s Candid. There’s a lot of moving parts in this. The image that’s coming to mind is assembling a watch, the old fashioned way, with all the different gears and whatever because you want to get it all moving in time together.
I’m curious, what results have you got for the different groups? How are consumers responding? How about clients and also the impact it’s had for Candid?
AMRITA: I think we started in June last year. So it’s been a little more than a year and few months. June, we started in Bombay. We rolled out to the rest of the cities in October last year. So let’s say 14 months of complete national presence. We’ve got 240,000 people who’ve registered with us.
MARK: Two hundred and forty thousand?!
AMRITA: Yes. And those 240,000 people have given another 200,000 data of members in their households because at the end of the day, the box is for the whole house, not just for you. And you could be living with your partner, you could be living with your parents, which a lot of people do in India. So we overall we have 450,000 consumer points to sample too.
In terms of brands, as I mentioned, I think we’ve done 16 editions so far, which is around 220,000 Mojo Boxes. And we’ve got over 80 brands who worked with us in the last 14 months. So those are the numbers. And out of the consumers who’ve registered with us, around 57% are women. So it’s not skewed to a gender, which I love because that was the other notion I had, ‘Will women only be going for samples and men won’t be interested?’ It’s really heartening to see. I would say it’s almost equal because it fluctuates.
MARK: I noticed your Instagram you have some boxes specifically for men.
AMRITA: Yes, we do. It’s interesting. Our engagement in our community is really high. And it’s interesting how people have started telling us that you must have these kind of boxes, you must have that kind of box. We were planning to do a mother’s box anytime soon because when we launched it in September, it went by really slowly, in the sense that we didn’t have much takers to finish that edition quickly and it took us almost two months to finish that edition. And we were like, ‘Okay, maybe new mothers don’t want to experiment as much as other people want to experiment.’ And last month, month and a half, we’ve actually been getting comments on our posts saying, ‘Why don’t you have brands for new mothers to try out?’ We are actually trying to get one together for the end of Jan.
So it’s been very interesting. We’ve got boxes for men right now. We’ve got a My Wellness Box, which is obviously new year, everybody is into this whole wellness and health thing so we’ve got one for that. And we’ve got one for the household right now. We had a party box in December.
MARK: Of course!
AMRITA: With cocktail mixers and lemonade and all of that.
MARK: And now it’s time for the post-party box…
AMRITA: Yeah.
MARK: I think this is really great because as you’ve touched on, a lot of the time, a lot of people see marketing as a nuisance, as an intrusion, as a bombardment. But you’ve actually got your consumers coming to you and saying, ‘Can you send us more? And can we have this thing and that thing?’
It’s great that you’ve flipped around that perception of marketing to get that level of engagement.
AMRITA: Yeah. We’ve got literally two different kinds of people. There are three kinds of people. One who have tried us and never have come back to us obviously, because at the end of the day, we are not an essential service. Discovery is not a primary need for someone ordering lunch on Uber Eats. So we’ve got that. And we realized that was a challenge. We have pushed the bar on newer, newer brands. So we keep our additions exciting. That worked because we’ve got a very healthy percentage of people who’ve come back and bought more than three, four, five Mojo Boxes.
Second is, I think, at the end of the day, the whole collation bit and the whole curation and collation bit I think is exciting for a consumer because when you get that box, it’s almost like getting a gift for oneself and you’re sitting at home, Covid, you’re working from home, everybody’s a little brain fried as they say in India. It’s a nice reprieve when you get a box full of samples and it’s lots of things to go through and then you feel empowered by giving feedback to the brands.
We also then send an SMS to the consumer with a code they can use to buy it so that they save money instead of paying full price. At the end of the day, I think it definitely is an interesting way to experience different brands.
MARK: How is it changing Candid? You’ve got this whole new arm to your business now. What difference is that making?
AMRITA: A lot. Ninety five percent of my time goes on to one thing.
MARK: Really?
AMRITA: Yeah. So in a way, see, because with Candid even now, we had done some projects in October, November, December, and projects started getting cancelled again. We had two very large activation plans for January, which got cancelled because of now the Omicron surge. I don’t see that changing. What’s to say the next variant doesn’t come with the letter N, obviously. So it’s not going to change and I’ll be foolish to think it will. So the whole team, there are four or five key members in the team who’ve actually just literally upskilled and have just started doing only Mojo Box work because I don’t see activation coming full swing anytime soon.
MARK: How does the future look then for you in Candid? Obviously, it’s cost you a lot and we can’t minimize that or bring back those people. But in the sense that it’s allowed you to move forward with an idea that you had on the back burner for a while and that’s now paying dividends, how does the future look for you?
AMRITA: I think the future looks interesting. It’s not a cop out because for us we are planning on how to scale up Mojo Box more and more. We’ve have a lot of plans for Mojo Box. We’re launching some new features in the next one week or so, where one can make their own Mojo Boxes instead of it being a pre-curated Mojo Box. And there are many other things. So we’ve got a couple of launches of different features lined up in the next three, four months.
I think the future is going to be about Mojo Box for us because I don’t think people will just come back and sample how they did. I think that has left the Pandora’s box and the beast I think will be difficult to put it back in. Maybe there’ll be a new hybrid behaviour. Eventually, whenever it is and Covid becomes like the common cold or a flu, I don’t think people will just go back to what it was two years ago. I think that there will be a hybrid version, which will be created. I think Mojo Box then definitely has a place in that world. And that’s what we are excited about in creating.
MARK: I’ve said right from the beginning of this thing, my wish is that we all come out of this with more choices than we went in. To hear you saying you’re excited about what you’re creating now is fantastic considering everything that you and the team have gone through. So for somebody listening to this, we can’t consign Covid to history yet. We’re all still dealing with some version of the challenges you’ve described and the changed landscape you’ve described.
What would you say are some of the biggest learnings that have come out of all of this for you that maybe other people could take to heart in their own work and their own business?
AMRITA: I would say number one is it’s okay to go slow. As a person, I get extremely impatient and frustrated. Just the fact that this is stretched for two years is a huge source of frustration for me. And even creating Mojo Box, or going live with Mojo Box, going live with a feature, or it’s not working, or an edition not going fast, I think going slow is okay is the first thing I would say because it’s been a huge learning for me.
Because in the Candid part of my life, everything was fast, fast, fast. You get the project fast, deliver fast, execute fast, give it to the client. The client wants to revert fast, the client wants to pitch fast. Everything was in literally a fast forward cycle. I think the last two years has taught me going slow is okay. In fact, it’s absolutely okay and allow yourself to go slow. I think that is the first thing, whether it’s personal or whether it’s work.
The second is I read this somewhere and I just don’t remember where I read it but I so love it, if you’re not embarrassed with the first image or first version of your product or business, you’ve launched too slow. I don’t remember where I read it but I love it. Because if you had seen the Mojo Box website or the pages or the clunky way we would take information in June, it’s an embarrassment. But I’m glad we did it. Because I’m glad we just pushed the car out of the garage, as they say, because I don’t think we would have reached where we are if I would have over-thought everything at that moment. I think it was very important for it to just get it out of the house at that time. So, as I said, I just wish where I read the sentence, but it is so true. It is so true. That it doesn’t matter that it’s clunky, it doesn’t matter it’s ugly. If you’ve got a thought process, just go for it and just get it out there.
Surprisingly, the brands have been the most understanding. Clients have been the most understanding in our whole evolution. Because everybody is learning. I hate using that word, unprecedented, so I will not, but nobody has experienced this thing. Everybody is learning, everybody is going through their way. Brands have had factories shut because of Covid outbreaks and stuff. Nobody has gone through all of this. It’s amazing how much empathy has gone all around. I’ve literally had a client call me and say that, ‘As an entrepreneur, I can just imagine the stress you’re through. So if you just want to call and cry I’m there.’
MARK: Wow, what a great client!
AMRITA: I have never had a client say that to me when I was running Candid. So it’s amazing.
MARK: That’s lovely. Go slow but maybe not too slow, because you’ve got to get it out there.
AMRITA: Not too slow. Yeah.
MARK: Right. Okay. Great. All right. I think this would be a really nice point for you to set your Creative Challenge to our listener. For anybody who’s new to the show, at the end of every interview I ask my guest to set you, dear listener, a challenge. And this is something that will stretch you creatively and maybe personally and in other ways. It’s something that you can do or at least get started on within one week of listening to today’s interviews.
Amrita, what’s your Creative Challenge?
AMRITA: When we are doing something or we are creating something we get caught up in our world. I think it’s interesting to do a stimuli check every once in a while. Whether you’re a creator, or a content person, or a creative person or a marketing person, I think it’d be interesting to go out and talk to 10, 15 consumers, buyers, theatre, art gallery owners, whoever it is, and get stimuli from them and then change something or create something to address what they tell you.
I think stimuli checks, we keep talking and marketing specially, it’s great to talk to consumers but we don’t do it enough. We just don’t do it enough. We schedule it to these really big sessions once in a while so it would be nice to just go out there and talk to people.
MARK: I think that’s a great challenge. And I think it applies to the fine artists among us as well as the commercially-focused entrepreneurs and marketers. Because even just a conversation with somebody who read your book or came to your gallery or listened to your music or obviously, if you’re a musician, you’re used to getting more live feedback, but it can make such a difference and you really hear and see the difference it made to somebody. So I think that’s a lovely thing to do.
Amrita, thank you so much for sharing your very hard won wisdom. It’s been an inspiration to me listening and I love some of… you know, I’m going to think about that going slow and feeling embarrassed. That’s something I will certainly take with me.
Where can people go to find Mojo Box online? Who is able to get it? Is it just for people in India? You don’t deliver to Bristol yet?
AMRITA: No, we don’t deliver to Bristol yet but I may just send you one! We only deliver to India and we’re on Instagram @iwantamojobox. It’s as simple as that.
MARK: @iwantamojobox on Instagram. Okay. I’ll make sure we link to that from the show notes. And Candid Marketing?
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Amrita, and all the best with Mojo Box for the future.
AMRITA: Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Rebooting Global Filming with Hometeam
Jul 25, 2022
Welcome to Episode 3 of the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
Today we are looking at the world of film and TV production, which was massively disrupted by the pandemic restrictions. All of which created a huge headache for TV production companies, movie studios, advertising agencies and other media producers.
At the same time, filmmakers all around the world were sitting at home, frustrated that they were unable to use their skills, and anxious about their financial situation. At this point, as you’ll hear in today’s interview, my guests Harrison Winter, Brandon Bloch and Lagan Sebert realised the solution was staring them in the face.
Listen to find out what their solution was – it’s a really dramatic example of a creative opportunity opening up when your innovative approach puts you ahead of the curve.
In the coaching section of the show I encourage you to make your marketing personal with a media dashboard.
Hometeam
Brandon Bloch Harrison Winter Lagan Sebert
In today’s interview Harrison Winter, Brandon Bloch and Lagan Sebert explain how in early 2020, when many people in the film and TV industries were lamenting the fact that it was impossible to send film crews around the world, they realised they were sitting on a solution.
Because they had already spent years building networks of film-makers around the world, and providing remote shooting services to clients via Harrison’s company Co.MISSION Content Group and Brandon and Lagan’s company Magic Seed Productions.
Between them, their two companies had the resources and experience to reboot productions while the rest of the industry went dark. So they took the next logical step, and founded a new company, Hometeam.
Hometeam leverages a highly-curated network of over 500 top-tier filmmakers across more than 150 countries to provide remote shooting solutions to clients around the globe, including NBC’s The Voice, HBO Max’s Legendary, NBC’s Global Citizen Prize, and Trillions of Questions. No Easy Answers, a feature-length documentary for Google.
In the course of our interview, Harrison, Brandon and Lagan talk about the chaos of early 2020, and about spotting the big opportunity in front of them – the point where their innovative approach had suddenly gone from niche-and-risky to mainstream-and-essential.
They tell the story of how they joined the dots, connecting clients and film-makers, to reboot filming, get productions made, and provide work for talented creatives around the world.
And they argue that their model is not just a band-aid for a temporary problem – it can deliver many creative benefits, as well as logistical ones. So it opens up new possibilities for the future of production for TV, film, brand and agency clients.
If you are involved in film production in any way, you’ll find this a compelling and thought provoking conversation.
And even if you’re not, I think you’ll find it an inspiring story of finding the creative solution in a set of constraints – and about the importance of pursuing an innovative idea, in the face of external resistance, to the point where a big opportunity opens up.
Hometeam Interview Transcript
MARK: Harrison, Lagan, Brandon, how did you get started on the creative path that you are now on? I’m aware there may well be three different answers to this!
BRANDON: Do you want the short answer or the very long-winded answer? I won’t go so far as to say we’re an overnight success yet, but whenever you hear of an overnight success the saying is 10 years went into that journey to get you there. And I would say it’s been at least 10 years, but you could trace my journey back to childhood, and drawing, and being creative, and going to school for entrepreneurship, and then dabbling with film equipment, and learning how to tell stories on my own, learning how to use the equipment on my own, going back to school for film, working in the industry at every level, playing every crew role on a set.
That informs every decision we make at this point. I think it’s a strength of mine and ours, but is the fact that we’ve rolled up our sleeves and gotten our hands dirty, playing every role in the film production process. So, we have this innate understanding of what’s needed to create something in film and video, and also what our crew needs to be successful, what our clients expect, and what it takes to meet their expectations. Yeah.
LAGAN: I’ll jump in. I do think it’s interesting. I think all three of us do come from different backgrounds, but there’s a similarity to the story because I think is not a coincidence that we’re all basically the same age. Because there was definitely some advances in technology that happened in around the mid-2000s where I think in the film community, they call it the 5D revolution where there were new cameras that came out that gave independent filmmakers the ability to make something that looked cinematic, to make something that looked like it came from Hollywood, within a camera body that only cost maybe $1,200 or $1,500. And so I think all three of us were kind of part of that.
I know for myself, I was very interested in film, I was working in production in Los Angeles, but was inspired by the independent filmmakers that I saw making documentaries. At that time, I was very interested in social documentaries. And just seeing that the technology had advanced and the tools were there, that anybody could grab a camera, and as long as you had the talent and you had the commitment, and you had a good story to tell anybody could really do it. A lot of the people that we work with now, not all, but a lot of them do come from that same generation, where in the mid-2000s when the technology got to a point where anybody could pick up a DSLR and go out and create something beautiful.
MARK: Harrison, does that resonate for you?
HARRISON: Absolutely. I think the original question was how did we individually and collectively find our way to creative path? That was the question, right?
MARK: Yeah.
HARRISON: I think what Lagan said resonates for all of us. We all ‘grew up’ that way in our professional careers, and found each other as collaborators and partners that way. I think being a creative in general means that you’re just wired a little differently, and that wiring can come from a range of different places. I come from a fairly creative and entrepreneurial family, where that’s a part of who we are. I spent the first 10 years of my career in advertising, and marketing, and things like that before I just really got bored. And as Lagan said, all these filmmaking tools became immediately much more readily available. And so I started filming, and directing, and producing, and editing, and coloring, and just really got bit by it and fell in love with it, and made a career switch in some regards. I think we’ve all found our own winding paths into this, but I think especially over the past 10 years, have a ton in common on our creative path, on how we arrive at where we are today.
MARK: And if we could maybe fast forward to late 2019, none of us had ever heard of Covid, what did your work look like at that stage? Where were you? What were you working on? What were you planning for 2020?
BRANDON: I’ll take this one. Lagan and I were running a production company called Magic Seed. And what that looked like was a pretty traditional model for a small, full-service production company. We were doing a lot of branded content, a lot of music videos, social content, some commercials. I think we had that pretty dialed in, and we’re really proud of our work. It was a lot of really creative stuff for brands and agencies and companies. What’s unique and set us up, I think, to respond so quickly to what happened in early 2020 was Harrison came back into the picture and we were all having a conversation at that point. As 2019 moved into 2020, the three of us were having conversations about how could we do this better?
We were identifying pain points of how, based on 10 years of experience for each of us something could be done better here. There seems to be a lot more effort put into making a video than needs to be, and a lot of frustration, like pitches that go nowhere, a lot of effort goes into that, overshooting just tons of footage that all leads to a 30-second spot. And you’re like, ‘We left so much on the cutting room floor.’ As a father of two young kids having to spend more and more time on the road. Every time I had to make something, I had to go travel for 4, 5, 10 days at a time. And so, just identifying inefficiencies in the model, ways that could be done better.
We have a document from late 2019, early 2020 pre-pandemic of like, ‘Here’s a bunch of pain points and as three partners with experience and innovative spirits, maybe there’s ways we could solve this.’ And that’s the conversation we were having right as the news dropped of the pandemic.
MARK: Okay. And little did you know what that news was going to be, and maybe which specific pain points got ramped up.
What was your sense at that point of what the most important pain points were? The biggest problems to solve?
LAGAN: I definitely think Harrison should jump in here because if there was any of us that had the crystal ball, it was definitely Harrison. Because obviously, when the pandemic started, the most practical thing that stopped is travel. So, Harrison’s the one who’s been working on this model of doing production without travel for a long time. Harrison, do you want to just like, talk about that a little bit?
HARRISON: I would love to. It’s funny, as soon as Covid arrived on the scene, within the first couple of weeks I turned to my wife and I said, ‘This Covid thing is going to be a big deal, and it’s going to be a mess, and it’s going to be really bad.’ But one of the first things I said is, ‘It’s going to be amazing for our business.’ Production had started to come to a standstill because you had a legacy industry that was built on putting crews on planes to go and shoot. And I had been running a production company for a decade that had a very specific, unique model that really was about remote, global production. We had done huge campaigns where we were filming with 30, 40 crews on a single day spread out around the world.
But leading up to 2019 and early 2020, that production company that I was running had really started to reach its limits in terms of client growth and things like that, just because we’d carved out such a niche in global that it just became limiting. When Covid arrived, my first instinct was the entire industry was then going to have to go through a really big, painful adjustment. The first knee-jerk reaction was let’s hold productions. Let’s hold productions and wait and see what happens. And then what happened was, after two or three months, when everybody started to realize that this wasn’t going to turn around anytime soon, and everybody’s livelihood as advertising agencies, as brands, as TV networks was like…content’s been the lifeblood of those industries and those businesses in driving revenue and advertising dollars. Something had to be figured out.
It was very, very immediate in 2020, me, Brandon and Lagan all kind of immediately came to the idea that we’ve got to launch something new, and it’s really got to be focused on remote production, and we’ve got to do it quickly, and come to the market with something that is fresh, that is timely, that is solution-oriented to solve this problem because there’s nobody really better fit to do it. That’s my long-winded answer. Does that make sense?
MARK: Yeah, that does.
I’m curious, before we go too far into the pandemic story, what was it that made you prioritize global production and remote production for such a long time before this came along and everyone had to think about it?
HARRISON: Before I started that production company, I was in advertising and marketing for a decade at brands and at advertising agencies. The last account that I had helped to run at an ad agency was one of the biggest hotel travel companies in the world. And that client and a lot of other clients around the agency were starting to ask for a lot more digital online content that was not huge TV campaigns, and the agencies were having a really hard time delivering on it. They were starting to ask for content that needed to be filmed in a lot of different places. And it just wasn’t a request from clients that anybody out there was really able to meet.
At the same time, I had started to create content. So, I had become a filmmaker in the sense of learning how to shoot, direct, edit, all of that. At the same time, I started to meet a ton of other filmmakers that were very similar to me. I was living in Brooklyn at the time. And that’s when Brandon and I linked up, and I started to do small projects for brands. As I was meeting more and more of these filmmakers in Brooklyn because Brooklyn was a massive creative hub at the time. Brooklyn was like one of the epicenters of where this new filmmaking meets technology was starting to really like bubble up globally. Brooklyn was one of those main hubs, but I started to notice Brooklyn was not an anomaly. Because of the technology, these filmmakers are budding up everywhere.
I saw these two things meet. I saw the need because I come from advertising and marketing, and then I knew that there was this supply to meet it, but nobody had really made that connection yet. In these early stages of this industry transformation, it’s back to your original question, why did I decide to focus on this? I needed something and I wanted something that I could go into any room, at any client, at any agency, anywhere in the world and say, ‘Wherever you need your content filmed, we know how to do that tomorrow. And we’ve got it covered.’ I needed to have a stake in the ground in order to really drive attention and confidence, and to be known for something. I saw the trend and I felt like that’s where everything was heading, and I started to just build it around that.
MARK: So, you observed that trend. You noticed it in your own experience, your own ambitions, and your own practice as a filmmaker. You looked around, you saw other people were doing it, not just near you, but in other parts of the world. And you had this idea of joining up the dots so that, as you say, you could walk into that room and promise remote production, wherever, whatever the project is, around the globe.,/p>
So, is this why you said to your wife, ‘I think there’s a good opportunity for us when the pandemic…’
HARRISON: When Covid hit?
MARK: Yeah.
HARRISON: I think the big reason was the first 10 years of running this type of model, we were working with amazing clients. But the reason why we were working with amazing clients is because those types of clients were the early adopters. It was the tech companies of the world, it was Facebook, Instagram, Google, Starbucks. It was these really, really forward-thinking early adopters. But they would only have a few key projects a year that were a very good fit for this model. What had happened over that decade is there was nothing that had really happened yet to really push this model beyond the very early adopter clients. There wasn’t enough momentum to push it a little bit more mainstream as a model that more and more clients could see a reason to use.
The reason why I turned to my wife immediately was because I could understand that this was going to be the huge shift in the fabric of the world and the fabric of reality that was going to, all of a sudden, make this model an absolute necessity, where it was no longer going to be relevant whether it’s early adopters or late adopters. All of a sudden, within a matter of a month of Covid happening, this model then, all of a sudden, became really, in our minds, the only way forward.
The task of finding early adopters and educating them on the model, and how it’s going to work, and you, for a decade, having to push upstream, all of a sudden, the current in the stream changed direction. And all of a sudden, I knew the stream was going to start to flow towards us. And that’s kind of where my mind was going and why I said that to my wife, I knew the river current was going to change.
BRANDON: I could say it another way is that it went from a nice-to-have, I think. If you wanted to tell a story that was a global story, and you didn’t want to put a crew on a plane and fly them to those locations, it was a nice model. And the client had to come around and say, ‘Oh, well, maybe we could use this different model and take a risk on it.’ And then it went to a must-have solution; this is the only way we’re going to be able to move forward because travel’s impossible. Covid created this constraint, and the solution had already been solved by Harrison and his model. And Lagan and I were already familiar with this solution because I had been a director for Harrison’s company.
So, I had been on like the crew and director side of using the model and knowing it works, and this is how you build productions. And Lagan and I had also spent a career doing music content, hopping on tour buses, landing in cities, and crewing up with local crews. So we kind of had our own version of this. And the important thing is a comfort with it too, knowing that I could fly to Seattle. One of our last productions before Covid hit, was Lagan and I flew to Seattle and we connected with an entire crew in Seattle. We didn’t fly the whole crew there. We were comfortable flying there as the creative leads and hooking up with a crew that already had the infrastructure. So we were all very comfortable with this model of there’s remote, distributed crews all over the world.
I want to tell a little story of in the early days of Covid, the other thing was we’re friends with agency leads and creatives who commission business. Personal friends. We’re also friends with the filmmakers, people who run around, own the gear, travel, create awesome content. So for me, what the experience looked like in the early days of Covid was scrolling through my Instagram feed, and one friend who works at an agency is like, ‘I guess full stop. No more production until this passes.’ And the next little frame on Instagram was my buddy Mike, down the street, or in another state who owns a closet full of tens of thousands worth of amazing RED cameras and gimbals and drones, he’s saying, ‘I guess my life is going to be doing still lives of my cats, or the flowers on my table because we’re all quarantined.’
So what it looked like to us, I think, is demand meets supply. Demand of, ‘I guess we’re never going to do production again,’ and the next thing you slide down, you see a filmmaker, ‘I guess I’m never going to shoot again,’ and us saying, ‘Well, I guess we could actually be the matchmaker between those two parties and help them all realize you can keep your projects going for your clients because we could shoot it wherever you need to shoot it without needing to travel. We could shoot it locally. And for the filmmakers, you could still have a livelihood. You don’t need to hop on a plane to earn a paycheck. You could shoot with the resources you own, and you could shoot with your friends and your family members even. You could tell stories locally, you could tell stories in your own backyard, at your own kitchen table.’
So when I flash back to those early days of the pandemic, it was motivated by a lot of, ‘Let’s solve this problem for our friends who work in agencies and need the work made, and our friends who are filmmakers and need to keep making a living, honestly.’ It seemed like a very easy, ‘Aha, okay. Let’s just link these two parties together and keep making stuff.’
LAGAN: Yes. One really quick note on that, because of the three of us, I do the most work in the music world. So, what happened in music was really fascinating because all the tours got canceled. Which is the main driver of income for musicians. So, because there’s no album sales anymore, the main way they can make a living is by touring. All the tours got canceled. So all of a sudden, all of these musicians, their best option for earning income was doing live streams or doing concerts online, things like that. The demand for video spiked I would say probably overall. I think there’s probably somebody who’s figured that out, that it’s probably the demand for video since the pandemic started has spiked in general.
But I can tell you from experience in music, it has absolutely spiked. In my network, which is much more heavily focused on music it was just a necessity. A lot of people, the artists and the labels and things like that, they’re like, ‘How can we do this?’ And the reality is that the way that we’ve all three of us been brought up…we’ve done production is a more nimble model. And that’s the style of production that works within a pandemic, is a more nimble model where you have 5 to 15 people on set instead of 50 to 150 because that is exponentially more complicated during a pandemic.
BRANDON: I think we all got really comfortable in our careers over the past 10 years. You could make something really beautiful and compelling with…I’ll be honest, with a two-man crew. My most popular video I ever made that looks beautiful, in my opinion. No, but it’s award-winning, it got all the Vimeo staff picks, it got into a lot of festivals and won some festivals. I made that with my friend, Tim. It was two people. That’s it. And then I would go as a director to a set where I come in, I look around, I’m like, ‘There’s 60 people on the set. What are all these people doing?’ And then the end product comes out and I’m like, ‘This is nowhere near as lively, and exciting, and entertaining as the thing I made with my buddy.’ So, just to say, I think all of us got really used to that scale of production.
A lot of our clients still with Hometeam, come to us, and one of the things they’re having to get comfortable with is, ‘Wait, are you saying we can make something for television with a crew of four or five?’ And maybe that’s actually one of the big things they’re having to get comfortable with. We’ve seen that for over a decade.
MARK: So you’re saying there’s a clear and obvious benefit to all of this in terms of logistics, being able to get people on the ground where you want them to be, to shoot without having to get on airplanes, etc.
But you are saying that beyond that, and the efficiency, and the environmental impact, and so on, that there’s a creative benefit in being leaner and being more nimble?
HARRISON: You’re teeing up Brandon’s favorite subject.
LAGAN: Go for it, Brandon!
MARK: Yeah.
HARRISON: New creative possibilities…
BRANDON: My favorite part of what we’re doing is…I mean, there’s a lot of things I really love about what we’re doing, but one of my favorite things is meeting agency creatives on a call. And they’re like, ‘We’ve heard of you guys. I think we might need to use you because there’s no other way to get this done.’ So they meet us because they’re stuck, their back’s against the wall. And my goal in those conversations is to turn them into seeing this isn’t just a, ‘You’re forced to use us.’ What the tool we’ve built with Hometeam actually offers is a new creative tool in your toolkit that opens up the ability to tell bigger stories across a global scale. So, rather than you needing to crew up in the most expected hubs of maybe LA, New York, Atlanta, your story can be more authentic, and more local, and feel more homemade.
Nobody knows the texture of their city better than a local crew. So when we’re shooting for NBC or HBO you can imagine how they used to arrive as a crew, flying from LA, lands in Iowa, and has to immediately start sourcing locations. And they’re going to hit the highlights, the most expected kind of touristy things you could search on Google. Instead, if you hired a crew from Iowa, they’re going to say, ‘There’s this awesome cornfield.’ And, ‘My buddy owns that coffee shop.’ And, ‘There’s this really cool alleyway nobody knows about where all the locals do graffiti or whatever.’ You’re able to bring more flavor out of the creative.
By the end of these calls with agencies, I start to see their eyes open up and they’re like, ‘Wait, we could tell stories that exist across the United States,’ or ‘We could tell stories that exist across the globe rather than…’ Yeah. We have another client that’s an education client and this is an example I like to use. We used to say, ‘Let’s land in Seattle or Austin. And we have to tell the story of five students and what their experience looks like, but we have to cast it all in that one city because we’re doing five days of production in that city.’ With that same client, we can now say, ‘We could tell the story of what does the first day of school looks like in every one of the 50 states in the US?’ And we could film it all on the same first day of school. And it’s just a whole different creative possibility.
LAGAN: Can I add one thing to that too? Is something that’s really…and this, you have to chalk it up to technology in the way it’s advanced, but like on a traditional set you’ve got your director, your cinematographer filming. And typically you’ve got, whether it be like the clients or other interested parties, if they’re on set, they’re typically away from where the filming is happening behind a monitor. And they’re watching the monitor, right? What’s crazy is, so what is the difference between that and watching the same footage on Zoom?
Because here’s the other thing, is if that client has a note on what they’re shooting, they’re not going to go yell at the director, ‘Hey, hey. Stop doing that. We gotta change and do this thing.’ What they’re going to do actually, is they’re going to text the producer. So, what’s actually happened is like when you’re on Zoom or Google Meet or whatever, and you’re streaming the camera feed, it’s actually making things more streamlined. Because then you could just put in the chat to the producer, ‘Oh, by the way, we need to get another version of that because the guy pronounced the name of the city wrong.’ There is absolutely nothing different from a client or an interested party doing that, watching the feed on Zoom or traveling halfway across the world to sit in another room behind a monitor. There’s no difference.
HARRISON: I’d love to add one other important thing about the creative possibilities that Brandon was talking about as well, a really super important thing is I think our industry right now is…there’s two, I think, parts of our industry. There’s an old guard and a new guard. And what’s happened is when Brandon talks about these additional creative possibilities and finding or using that filmmaker in Iowa, who knows all about the best places to film because they live there.
What’s interesting is the old guard of our industry who’s been filming in New York and LA for decades is still operating under the assumption that the only good filmmaker talent, directors, DPs, etc., are still only residing in New York and LA. What we have found over the past decade is the guy in Iowa is filming on the same gear, and is as talented as the filmmakers in New York and LA. He might be hard to find, but he’s there. He’s in Iowa.
LAGAN: He or she.
HARRISON: He or she. Great point. And there might not be 50 in Iowa, but there might be 2. And that level of talent is a big part of why these creative possibilities are open. I guess what I’m trying to say is what we do is not just stick somebody behind a camera. What we’ve done over the 10 years is we’ve done the really hard work of finding, all right, if there’s only one guy or woman in Iowa at this level of talent, who is he or she? And we found all of them across the U.S. and 150 countries around the world. And that’s a big part of what’s also opened up these creative opportunities. The old guard might have also assumed that there are camera operators in every state, but that the talent is very subpar. And that’s just changed completely gradually over the past decade. And that’s a huge part of what’s opened up those creative possibilities.
LAGAN: And it’s also why we call them filmmakers. I think that’s a really important classification because there’s nobody on our roster who’s a camera operator. We only work with people who are filmmakers. And the difference is, that means that they are technically capable to operate cameras, but they’re also very adept creatively to have the vision, have a great eye to know how to get the beautiful shots, and how to tell a story visually. So there’s a big difference. And that’s why we always refer to our network as filmmakers.
BRANDON: I just want to jump in and say it’s because the only reason our model works… people say, ‘Well, you have less control if you’re doing this remotely.’ For this model to work, we have to find the right people who can take a vision that’s 80% baked in, and we deliver the correct shot list, and style guidance, and gear specs, and all that. We take it 80% of the way and then we trust them as talented filmmakers to take it across the finish line and add 20%, 30%, 40%. They always plus it. That’s how this model works. One of the things I think for your podcast and your audience is for all of us, I think, to succeed, we need to trust each other a lot.
If we were the types of creatives to say, ‘This is my vision, it’s only in my head. I need to control it 100%. I need to be there onsite telling everybody exactly what to do.’ We wouldn’t have come to this solution. The people in our network all have a similar spirit. It’s egoless, collaborative, independent. And so, that opens us up to consider a lot of different possibilities that others might not open themselves up to consider.
MARK: Okay. So, if we go back to the early part of 2020, Brandon, you are scrolling through Instagram, Harrison, you’re talking to your wife, you’re all trying to get your heads around, ‘What is happening to us? What are the implications?’
How did you get from there to forming Hometeam?
BRANDON: I remember it one way, but I would love to get both of your guys’ perspective. I think one of the first things we did was start reaching out to our filmmaker friends and say, ‘Let’s hack together a bit of a Rolodex of where you located? What kind of gear do you have? Things like who’s in your family who might appear on camera? What parks do you live near?’ We were basically expecting no one could leave their house, or go more than a mile in any given direction. Also we were thinking there’s going to be some clients who want to shoot a tabletop orange juice commercial with a young kid, there’s going to be some clients who want to shoot a really cool music video in an urban environment.
So we were just thinking, what are the possible scenarios of clients and what they might need? And then who do we know amongst our friends and our network, and Harrison’s vast network that he had created with his previous Co.MISSION company? Let’s all just combine all of our Rolodexes, and just start reaching out to our friends who are all stuck in the same way and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to figure this out. But in order for us to figure this out, we need you to help us out and tell us, what are you able to do locally?’ I remember that as the first step.
HARRISON: Here’s the story. So me, and Brandon, and Lagan had already linked up in January 2020 to start to try to figure out how do we all figure out how to work together? Despite having two different production companies, how do we go in and start working more together? We had started to try to map that out. And what happened was when Covid hit I’m in Charleston at the time, Brandon is in Austin at the time, Lagan is still in New Jersey, hadn’t yet moved to Nashville. And so we’re all communicating on text, day to day, tossing around ideas. I remember I got up one morning and I was just trying to brainstorm like, okay, production’s at a standstill.
We knew had this remote model that would work, but at the same time, brands also wanted commercials and things like that, where you need actors, you need talent, not just the crews. How do you start to do that again? I definitely jokingly texted Brandon and Lagan. We also had like some really great contacts in Seattle. I said, ‘We should just rent like a massive house in Seattle, put all of our crew and gear into the house in Seattle, and bring in an awesome wardrobe stylist, and bring in a cast of five to seven talents, and just churn out different commercials for clients. Make everybody in that house quarantine so that nobody would catch Covid, and we could just repurpose talent, and just make commercial after commercial.’
I was joking. And I’ll never forget, Brandon texted back and he was basically like, ‘Fuck that. We should just have all of our filmmakers that already have their family that can act as talent. And every single filmmaker that lives in a home is a different one of these things.’ And he was like, ‘And we should just call it Hometeam.’ In that singular text exchange, is the story of how it happened in terms of like, if you were to make it into a story. Then we went to work, and then it was like, ‘Okay, there’s really an idea here. And we can make it work. It’s essentially like the model that we already have with remote global production, but now let’s plus onto it everything.’ Does that make sense?
BRANDON: I would go further just for your audience and say that encapsulates one of the lessons of Covid, I think. We could either put up our shields and say, ‘Okay, we all have to quarantine and just get really small and maybe bring the resources in, but stay really protective of what we have, or we could share it all. And together we could all rise together.’ So, that’s what we’re proud about with Hometeam, it’s this massive fellowship. It’s a big tribe, it’s a big community. And by grouping together, we’re able to offer something really special to clients to keep going. But it’s a different approach. It’s a different model. I think there’s lessons in a lot of industries; if you share it and if you become more of a distributed model, there’s different opportunities.
MARK: I think there’s a lesson for life there. That’s such a great perspective. The one thing I’ve said from the beginning of all of this on the show, is that I hope we all come out of it with more choices and more possibilities than we went in. And it certainly sounds like you are delivering on that with what you’re doing with Hometeam.
LAGAN: Could I say one thing based on your last point, or the last thing you said?
MARK: Yeah.
LAGAN: I think, with what we’ve been up to for the last few years, the thing that gets me the most excited about it when I think about, ‘Oh, okay. This is something that actually does have some legs, it’s starting to catch on.’ The thing that gets me the most excited is that I think in the early days of the pandemic, I think there was an enormous amount of stress, especially around people who work freelance as freelance filmmakers. Is our way of life even going to be able to go on? Do I need to like go get an office job somewhere, or choose a different industry? And honestly, I think all of us, at some level, had that fear ourselves.
So what I’m most proud of is that we found avenues to bring interesting work to these filmmakers who are within our network and that they can do it without traveling, without spending 80% of their time on the road and being away from their families. But then, when I think about where this could go, I’m really excited about growing the Hometeam community of filmmakers and having it actually become more of a community where people can lean on each other for advice and also as a way to get more work for everybody.
But then also if you look ahead even further than that is it a way to help empower local art communities? These filmmakers who if they live in Birmingham, Alabama, or Madison, Wisconsin, or places like that if we’re bringing them more work, and I know it’s a far off goal, but it’s on a very small level, are we helping to make these artistic communities in all these places across the world just like a little bit more vibrant? I think it’s something that really excites me about it.
MARK: Thank you, Lagan. That is a really great perspective.
I know one question I’m going to get in response to that from my listeners, I’m going to have filmmakers contact me saying, ‘Can I join this community? Are you recruiting?’ If somebody is in a part of the world where they think, ‘I’ve got skills, I’ve got professional equipment. Could I be a part of Hometeam?’
BRANDON: Yeah.
LAGAN: The answer is yes.
BRANDON: I think we’re always recruiting. I think the goal is we’re only so many people able to do so many hours of searching for the next talent. Or these hidden gems. Our goal is to turn it into sort a banner, or a beacon. Then we’ve really done our jobs well, if people start to know that we’re out there and come to us and say, ‘I believe in your values and your mission, and I want to be involved.’ I’m so excited for that day to happen. Yeah.
MARK: Where should they go if that’s the case, somebody’s listening?
BRANDON: If what we’re doing excites them, they could go to wearehometeam.com, and on there, just shoot us an email, and it’ll arrive in our inboxes, and we’ll start the conversation. That’s how they could get in touch.
MARK: Fantastic. And of course, I’ll be linking from the show notes as well. We’ve been on quite the journey here, and I think there will be a lot of creatives listening to this, particularly within film and TV, obviously, but also other creatives. I think you’ve opened up some really important, fundamental ideas for us all in how we respond to this situation.
I think this would be a good time to focus on your Creative Challenge. If anybody is new to the show, this is the point where I ask my guest, or today guests, to set you, the listener, a Creative Challenge. This is something that is on theme for the interview, and helps you maybe integrate some of the ideas into your own practice. And it’s something that you can do, or you can get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
So, Hometeam, what is your Creative Challenge?
HARRISON:My Creative Challenge is the question, when and what is your next reinvention? As creatives, what I feel at this stage in my career is I feel like I’ve, in retrospect, had to go through a series of reinventions as a creative, as an entrepreneur, as a business model personally, as a company. I used to not really realize the reinventions until after they had already happened. And so now when I look back, I’m like, ‘The reinventions are constant. They’re like every four or five years.’ And when I sit down and I look at it, it’s like, what still holds true in your value that you provide, and what needs adjustment? And if you can separate those two things, it’ll help you get closer to your next reinvention. That would be my challenge, is to look at it proactively rather than reactively, of seeing your next reinvention coming, and shape it, and know that it’s coming, rather than being reactive. I think that’s one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned. That would be my challenge to any creative or any entrepreneur.
MARK: Okay, great. Because it’s coming, ready or not, is what you’re saying?
HARRISON: Yeah, absolutely.
MARK: All right. Who’s next?
LAGAN: I got one.
MARK: Okay.
LAGAN: Mine’s a bit more straight-forward, I think, for our topic, but I think a lot of times when you’re trying to do something creative, you’re always asking permission to do it, because there’s always some sort of gatekeeper who’s the barrier between you and whatever creative endeavor you want to do. And I always tell people, if I talk to younger people who are trying to get into film specifically, is to just start doing it, because that’s really the only way to learn. And especially when you’re specifically talking about filmmaking, the tools are there. At this point a cell phone camera is as powerful as professional cameras were 10 years ago. If you have the vision to write a script and you have a cell phone, then you can make a movie. Stop asking permission and start making stuff.
MARK: Fantastic.
BRANDON: I love that. My dad’s a designer and he’s a consumer advocate, really interesting guy with a whole diverse set of experiences. But one thing he really instilled in me was, he always said…I think this is from his dad too, so maybe advice from my grandpa, ‘Throughout life challenges will come your way. But whenever that happens, look for a chance to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.’ Is what he would always say. So this sort of disadvantage into an advantage is burned into my head.
And as a guy who has a design and consumer advocate background, I was exposed to that, it turned into whenever you feel a pain point or a constraint, that’s where your answer is. So, for the challenge, what I would encourage your listeners to do, and this has always stayed true for me, is rather than accept the things that piss you off or are standing in your way, look at them and say, ‘How can I solve this?’
If you could solve it, it probably means a lot of other people want it solved. And that might be your answer to opening up a whole world of possibility. Look for the constraints, look for the things that piss you off, make a piece of art about it, make a comment about it, solve it, share it with the world. That’s how I try to approach things, actually.
MARK: Thank you, Brandon, Lagan, Harrison. One thing I’m really taking from today, and I always say to my listeners: ‘Listen for the attitude. Even if it’s not your industry or your creative field, listen to the attitude that these people have.’
You’ve really showed it in spades that coming to a crisis, you can’t expect the crisis, but actually you already had a lot to draw on before it hit. Also what I love is the fact that you were outward-looking. You were looking to connect people, you were looking to come up with solutions. There was no end to commiseration and what Raj Setty likes to call ‘the sympathy exchange’. But you were looking to the future and saying, ‘Hey, here’s what we can do. Here’s the opportunity in the constraint.’
Where should people go who want to find out more about Hometeam? Is it wearehometeam.com?
BRANDON: That’s it. We’ve built a pretty robust site. We turned our capabilities deck that we are sharing with clients and filmmakers into a website, so it’s a collection of our work, it’s a collection of case studies, how we got stuff done, some behind-the-scenes photos of our crews out in the field information about how we approach things. I think it’s like a pretty robust website that you could learn a lot about who we are, where we come from, and what we’re doing at any given time.
MARK: And also, I would say, if anybody’s list listening to this who is thinking, ‘Yeah, but really, can you get the quality? Can you get the consistency creatively?’ Go and have a look at the project section of the website because there’s an eye-popping set of projects. And several of them, you list all of the locations where you’ve shot and I wouldn’t guess. It looks and it feels seamless in terms of the look, and the feel, and the style, and the atmosphere, and also the quality. So, that’s a great place to go and check all that out, wearehometeam.com. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your time and your hard-won wisdom.
HARRISON: Thank you for having us.
BRANDON: Thank you, Mark.
LAGAN: Yeah. Thanks for having us.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Lockdown Series: Windows on a Changed World with Earl Abrahams
Jul 18, 2022
Welcome to Episode 2 of the CREATIVE DISRUPTION season of The 21st Century Creative, where we are hearing stories of creatives around the world who came up with a creative response to the challenges of the pandemic.
This week we are off to South Africa, to hear from Earl Abrahams, an artist and filmmaker who likes to get up and close with his subjects, by walking and skating the streets of Johannesburg, sometimes hitching rides on the traffic as he captures the life of the city.
But all that came to an abrupt end in early 2020, when a strict lockdown saw Earl confined to his apartment block. He responded by making his camera his window on the world, a way of reimagining his surroundings, in a Lockdown Series of images that represented a new direction in his work.
Listen to Earl’s interview for an inspiring story of how art can be not only a refuge and a consolation but also a solution at a time of crisis.
In the intro to the show I update you on my poetry projects, including my other podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which has just been selected as one of the Top 9 Podcasts for Poetry Lovers, by Podcast Review.
I also talk about my latest poetry publications – you can read some of these and watch a video of me reading at the Ambit Competition Event here.
Another great poetry project I did, was a collaboration with the sculptor Sheena Devitt, we made a poem sculpted in sandstone that we exhibited at the Lettering Arts Trust in southeast England. You can see the piece we made together here.
In the coaching part of the show, I explain why rejection doesn’t mean you work isn’t good enough.
I also talk about the first week of the 21st Century Creative Members’ Group, where we have been sharing the goals we will be working on for the 10 weeks of the podcast season.
So if you would like to set yourself a meaningful goal for the next 2-and-a-bit months, and get some encouragement and support from me and the rest of the group, you are welcome to join us in the group on Patreon.
Earl Abrahams
Earl is an artist working in lense-based media, in Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice spans film and photography, and investigates the intersections between race, identity, the state and social mobility.
He is an official Fujifilm X-Photographer and has showcased work in Paris through an exhibition titled ‘Créateurs en Mouvement’ which was arranged through the Swedish Institute in 2018, and took part in an online group show titled ‘Habit at’, during lockdown in 2020 with BKHZ.
He has also worked as a photographer and camera operator to create marketing campaigns for brands such as Fujifilm, SAB, KFC, ALDO, MTN and Vodacom.
All his photographs are taken in spaces whilst moving – he walks and skates the city streets, and even hitches a ride on his skates from vehicles in fast-moving traffic. We have some videos of Earl skating through the city, you should definitely check them out in the show notes. It’s quite an adrenaline rush just to watch the videos, goodness knows what it feels like for Earl on the skates!
And this way of working produces images with an incredible energy and vividness and authenticity.
As well as his own photography, Earl is making a series of short films about other South African artists and their process, which you can see in the Process section of his website, earl-abrahams.com. He also films news segments around the city and videos for corporate clients, so on a typical day he’s really out there and engaging with the people and the life of Johannesburg.
And then suddenly, in early 2020, all that was taken away from him.
There was a strict, heavily-policed lockdown in Johannesburg, and he found himself confined to his apartment block and its parking lot.
In response, Earl used his camera as a window on the world, documenting the experience in a remarkable series of photographs, which became known as the Lockdown Series.
As he tells me in this interview, photography became his place of solace, that kept him grounded and gave him an outlet for his emotions at a time of anxiety and uncertainty.
The images are quite remarkable, some of them almost abstract, in the way he’s framing a restricted field of vision, inside his apartment and also glimpses of the city outside. You’ll find some of these photos in the show notes, and more of them on Earl’s website.
But Lockdown Series wasn’t just a personal project – Earl shared the images on Instagram and then started selling prints online, which helped him sustain him financially through lockdown without government support.
As you’ll hear in the interview, Earl’s art was firstly a way of making sense of his isolation, and then then a way to connect with the outside world, touching other people’s lives and sustaining himself emotionally as well as financially.
He also talks about new collaborative projects he started, including Redefinition, a video art piece that grew out of the Lockdown Series, made in collaboration with poet Toni Giselle
Stuart and Flexpressionist and dancer, SEEFLêHX the ART1ST. Again, you can find the video in the show notes, and the full project on Earl’s website.
As well as talking about his own journey through the pandemic, Earl shares some valuable thoughts on how we can keep going in difficult circumstances, by trusting our creativity and our connections with other people to see us through.
Earl Abrahams interview transcript
MARK: Earl, how did you get started on your creative path?
EARL: I’d like to backtrack to childhood specifically because I think that those are amazing connection points to help you understand where you find yourself within your creative path. So one was, I remember always drawing at home and being so excited to show my grandfather my drawings. I feel that that form of expression still finds its way in what I do today. That was one.
The second part was skating. Skating was such a big introduction to the creative world. When I say skating, I mean in-line skating. A lot of people think it’s skateboarding. I did the whole trick-skating, ramp. They called it aggressive in-line skating or aggressive skating. So I did the whole trick-based stuff, grinding, etc. I still do it. But skating as a whole was such an amazing introduction to the creative world. One, taught me how to shoot stills and video, and introduced me to an arts community, which I was never exposed to because I grew up in an area called Bonteheuwel, which is on Cape Flats. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Cape Flats, how that came about in terms of the Group Areas Act?
MARK: Lots of us won’t be, so do tell us, please.
EARL: How the Cape Flats essentially came about, you could call it a township or I think in the States you would call it a ‘hood. I’m not sure what it would be in London or other parts of the world, but it was basically a community that was established through the Group Areas Act during the apartheid regime, where all people of color were designated to very specific areas, sometimes they are viewed as concentration camps. It’s a community that I spent most of my formative years in, that I’m so grateful for because it showed me so much of who I am and who I could be. It’s taught me so much about redefining space. And essentially, skating became that part that introduced me to the creative world.
So from skating, I did a short course in graphic design. I was always shooting during the time because what my mother used to do, she used to get the work hand and borrow to me over weekends, which she wasn’t supposed to do, but that’s kind of how I got into shooting. And then just connecting with other people that are in the creative art spaces. And that really opened me up to the world of creativity and discovering my own forms of creativity.
MARK: At what point did you start to think that this was something you would want to do professionally?
EARL: That happened by accident. So besides doing my graphic design short course, I studied community development. I spent quite an extensive time in the development space, program development, youth development, and basically, underground development programming that we did in different communities. I came to a point, I think it was about 2015, 2016, where I was really just so exhausted of doing development in the way that I used to do it in that form. I really just wanted a shift and I wanted a change. But throughout the time of me doing my work, photography was a huge part of the way that I saw the world because I viewed it as journal entries, like it was the way that I journaled.
And I just decided to take the plunge. I was freelancing as a facilitator within the development sector still, and I decided to take the plunge in signing up for residency in Cape Town. And that’s what really started me on my journey. The photography studio is no longer open. It was called Amplify Studios. I really owe a lot to them for allowing someone like me into a space that has no background in art, but only has street knowledge of the people that I’ve connected to, which I still feel is knowledge because I think that sometimes knowledge can be quite… it can be boxed in. We have these different institutions that, how do I say? Have control over knowledge production and what knowledge is. So my street knowledge coupled with knowledge that I’ve gained along the way through connecting with people, I’m so grateful that they allowed me in to explore my craft.
Through that process, I developed a body of work titled, ‘Colored In,’ which is looking at the impact of the Group Areas Act on so-called colored people. That’s still a term, a racial term that is used in South Africa. It’s one of the boxes, even in the forms that we still have to tick. I would be seen as colored in specific certain contexts, especially in Cape Town more. More so in Cape Town than in Johannesburg, because I think Johannesburg is such a melting pot that you can’t really define as who are you, which box do you fit in? So I was really using that project as a way of unpacking my box that I’d been boxed into. And also, looking at that in reflection to other boxes that people find them in. Because essentially, these boxes have not been decided for by ourselves, we’ve been colored into these boxes. My question was, how do we color outside of the lines of these spaces and these worlds that have been created for us?
MARK: Where did you get to with that through the photography?
EARL: I produced a body of work, had a show after my residency. It went fairly well. And I think that gave me the confidence in order to say, ‘Hey, cool. I have an idea. I can do it if I just put it in motion, even though I don’t have the plan fully laid out.’ From there, I decided to take the plunge in moving up to Johannesburg. At that time, a previous partner, an ex-partner of mine, she wanted to make the move to Johannesburg, and I was ‘Hey, I’ll go along.’ Because at the moment I was freelancing and I didn’t really have much to do. So with her support, with family support, I decided to make the move to Johannesburg and pursue this wild idea of being a photographer artist.
Like I said, I’m still trying to define where I’m finding myself within this whole world, but I decided to make the move to Johannesburg. And from there, I got more involved in the film sector than the photographer sector at that point. I got more involved in the film sector and the commercial sector working as a camera operator, working as a loader, and doing behind-the-scenes photography. That’s what really got me on course in trying to solidify my position in Johannesburg as well.
MARK: So film has turned into a creative interest as well, hasn’t it? It sounded like maybe you were getting into it as a way of making a living when you first came to the city.
Can you talk a bit about the relationship between film and still photography and your work?
EARL: I do see them as separate mediums. I don’t see them as one medium. I gravitate to each one specifically depending on what I’m wanting to achieve. Like I said, sometimes I view photography as these journal entries. I’ve been shooting a lot of artists quite extensively during this time. And what I’ve been using photography as is that initial step to understanding and grasping who the person is that I’m going to interact with. It’s this small step before I actually document it through moving images. The video component is something that has really come to me in the past six years and has become quite an important part of the way I see the world. So it’s not only just in the artists that I document, but it’s also in me documenting myself, following my skates through the city, giving people an experience that they might not have in other ways.
MARK: Right. I think because I’ve seen some pretty amazing footage of you skating through the city. Can you talk a bit about that and how that is bound up with the work itself? And maybe we can put some video in the show notes if we have some.
EARL: That came about of me wanting to explore Johannesburg as a city. I know that a lot of people have a lot of ideas about what the city is, that it’s not safe, that it’s this, that it’s that. But to me, I wanted to challenge myself to experience the space in an unconventional way. So, like I said, I journey through the city on my skates, filming myself or hanging onto taxis, interacting with people along the way. And for me, it’s just all these forms of self-discovery. There’s not really one particular intention. The intention is to go out and discover.
MARK: Wow.
EARL: Maybe that’s an intention. Discovering something as an intention.
MARK: It strikes me looking at some of the films and hearing you talk, you really put yourself on the line there for your work in quite a bold and physical way, as well as, socially, even just interacting with people like that.
What do you think that brings to the work that you create as opposed to sitting safely at home in the studio with a model arranged or whatever?
EARL: That’s a beautiful question. I think interaction is such an important part of my work. I need something to interact with, whether it’s space, whether it’s people. Even backtracking to my ‘Colored In’ body of work, my interaction was collaboration with the sitter, who were the people that I was photographing. Because within the world of even documentary photography, my focus is always documenting people with their permission. So there’s a saying, I can’t remember who mentioned it, but it says, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us.’ And that has stayed with me for a while where I can’t document people without their permission. So yeah, I think that interaction and collaboration is such an important part of my work, and that’s what I’m trying to do even just with the skating and forming and just trying to experience my world in a new way.
MARK: If we can fast-forward to late 2019, early 2020, what was your practice and your business looking like at that point? And what were your plans for 2020?
EARL: My practice at that point, I was still working within the film industry. And I had quite a lot of context with agencies, and working in the advertising space. I run a production company, a small shop, and I was working with different organizations and different agencies. And then also freelancing as a camera operator myself, predominantly within the commercial and the film realm. I would do this thing called tracking. I’d do it on my skates with a gimbal and stabilizer. That was really starting to grow and really starting to pick up. And I was feeling really confident about putting a lot of plans in place and wanting to scale my business. That’s where I was at, I was excited for the year. I was excited to make things happen. And, then along came something else.
MARK: Along came something else.
Just before that something else; are you saying that the film, the advertising work, the agency work that was going on a parallel track to the art photography?
EARL: Interestingly, no, it wasn’t. I’ve always had that as a backburner. It’s something that I would do alongside the work that I do for money, and just keeping it on site. When I have time off, I get to my artwork. It wasn’t something that I really prioritized.
MARK: I’m like that about poetry. It’s never the poetry’s job to pay the bills. And so whenever I do it, it always feels like a release or an escape into my world.
EARL: Yeah. That’s exactly what I felt with my art because it’s still photography, but still art at the same time. But that’s what I really felt like when it came to work, cool, I’ll do it for work, which I enjoyed my work as well because it was also a creative outlet. Many a times, it really just felt like play. And when I came back to my art, it was just a natural transfusion from one plate to the next.
MARK: It’s so great if you’ve got that. I often think if you’ve got more than one creative discipline and somehow they’re not exactly the same, there’s maybe not a direct link from one to the other, but there’s something about the energy that they can complement each other.
EARL: I agree with that. Because I feel that also what happens is that one craft or one creative outlet also feeds the next, and it’s just a beautiful thing. I feel that I never stop being creative. Because I have a daily practice of shooting, and that feeds into every single thing, like feeds into the way that I see the world.
MARK: Yeah. And it’s very different, for instance, to people I talk to who they say, well, they have their non-creative job, the thing that they do for money. And then they do their creativity in the evenings or the weekends or whatever. And that’s great for some people, but it is a very different energy if you feel everything you do is creative but in a different way, that’s quite different.
EARL: Yeah. And I feel that some people that are not in traditional creative work… I was chatting to a friend of mine who’s a lawyer, and she does the least creative thing. I’m ‘But there’s so many creative elements in there.’ I feel like creativity has been so limited. It’s in the way that you deal with your clients and speak to your clients. It’s in the way that you set up your contracts, the words that you use. And I feel that creativity has become so boxed in. I mean, before people were scientists and artists.
MARK: Right. Right.
EARL: Now it’s like we have to choose one.
MARK: In Leonardo’s time, it was just all the same thing.
So there you were at the end of 2019, looking forward to 2020 with a really great balance it sounds between the different strands of your work. And then you say there’s something else came along.
How did you first become aware of that something else?
EARL: Where I became aware of it was obviously, through the news that was running around, what was happening in China at the time. And at that time it was ‘There’s no way it will make it to anywhere else around the world.’ I thought that was the only place it’s going to be.
MARK: Thank goodness it’s far away!
EARL: It’s far away. You know what I mean? Lo and behold, I think it was March. I can’t remember the exact date. I know that I have it in a write-up that I did. We had our president speak to the nation and he made the announcement to say that obviously, Corona has made its way to South Africa, and we’re going to be on lockdown for a certain time. And at that time, I think much of it was three weeks or if it was a month. I can’t remember the exact time.
I was pretty calm at that point, the very first point. Because I was ‘Okay, cool. it’s a good break. It’s a forced break, one that I need, and it’s a bit awkward that it’s happening in the beginning of the year, but I’m going to take this break and I’m going to do what I need to do.’ And it was only after the second announcement that I realized how serious this was, and how it began to not only just impact my work but impact just the way I viewed myself, my psychology, like just impact my movement.
But during that first three weeks, we were obviously, on lockdown because I was living in the city at that time, in Joburg CBD. And it’s interesting, this city was heavily policed. So it felt like there were border controls. Like when we wanted to exit certain spaces during a certain time. I was living in an apartment block and it was heavily monitored. So you couldn’t just get out if you wanted to get out, you needed to chat to security. We had these four levels of parking lots, and I spent my time basically running and exercising and skating in the parking lot. That’s what I started doing the first three weeks. And then, like I said, after the second announcement, that’s when I started to realize how serious this really is.
MARK: What was the second announcement? What did they say?
EARL: The second announcement, again, details are failing me, we were going to be on another extended lockdown, with a lot more serious protocols, etc. That’s when I realized that one, I couldn’t work. I literally couldn’t work. So, all the plans that I had made literally went down the drain. And let me actually go back. Before the lockdown was actually announced, because we heard the president was going to obviously speak, I had a conversation with my family in Cape Town and they were ‘Hey, do you want to come home, before they shut things down completely?’ And I was ‘No.’ I was toying around with it, but I didn’t know what I was going to do back home because all my connections was in Joburg. So if anything was to happen or anything was to open up, Joburg would be it.
I decided to bite the bullet and decided to stay. I realized that I couldn’t work. there was nothing else that I could do, and I felt like I was going slightly insane and having a little bit of a mini-breakdown during that time. What I decided to do was to put in a serious routine. So after that second announcement, I felt like I was losing it a bit because one, my livelihood was dependent on things being open. I couldn’t shoot, I couldn’t work, I couldn’t do any of these things. What I then decided to do was to really just put in a crazy routine. A daily practice of… I would get up at 6:00 in the morning and start journaling then start reading. From there, I would work out. And I think it was a book, Robin Sharma’s book, The 5 AM Club that I actually started reading during that time. So I was in. I was ‘This is what I’m going to do.’
MARK: Great.
EARL: Lockdown or no lockdown, I’m going in. And yeah, decided to just go head in. And then on top of that, I decided to build in a daily practice of shooting. So this came from, I think 2017, I really started shooting every single day. So whether it’s one image a day or even if I’m sick and I’m in my bed, I grab a shot of the light coming through the window.
MARK: Really?
EARL: So I really just made this… Yeah.
MARK: That’s hardcore. No sick days!
EARL: No sick days. I had off days, but I really had off days. Like even with me now, I have my camera with me while doing this interview. I needed to make it a habit and a way of being able to express myself. Because what I found was that sometimes I find that journaling through words was something that didn’t fit for me during times, and photography and the art of making pictures really just became a way for me to see my space in a different way. So I would document my space within my apartment. And then, like I said, luckily, I was able to go outside, not outside, but within the parking lot. So I started documenting the parking lot, documenting things over the wall. People that are cruising in the streets. They were not allowed to be there, but we have a big homeless population. So I made sure to document people in spaces, but moving through shadows and moving through spaces.
And that made me ask very particular questions about who’s in the shadow. There were just certain things, who’s in the shadows that exist within our public? Thinking about light and form. I started seeing my building in a very different way because every day I would go past the same pillar and see the light hit it in a particular way. And then go there maybe two hours later and see the light reflecting against the wall in a completely different way as well. So I would use the walls and the wall as my subject. And use the natural light as this relationship or this collaboration between light and materiality.
MARK: Wow. Okay. So there’s a couple of things I want to pick up on here. One is the value of the routine. And this is something, as you were talking, it brought it back to me that for years and years, I’ve been working with freelancers and also I’ve been through this myself with the question, what do you do all day when you haven’t got a boss? When there’s no clock-in, clock-out guide? One thing I came to realize, and I’ve been saying to clients for years is you need to put some hard edges in your day because, you need to have that kind of routine. Otherwise, it’s so easy to lose yourself and lose the day and lose your motivation and energy. And it strikes me how important that was in lockdown specifically in your description that you said, ‘Okay, this is going to be the routine that I’m going to put in place for myself.’
The other thing that I’m even more interested in is, it sounds like even though you were so restricted in space where you could go, you couldn’t see people, you weren’t able to interact. Because it strikes me that word interaction is so important to your work from earlier in the conversation. That was all taken away from you. But from what it sounds like you were using the camera to investigate and to interrogate in minute detail, in some cases, your environment that it was giving you a… I don’t know.
As you described, it sounds like you got really absorbed in looking at the world up-close like this or from this very restricted angle. Is that accurate?
EARL: That’s really correct. I think that you are on point. Yeah, it really gave me an opportunity to see myself in a different way. And also to step outside of myself because I feel that it was an important way for me to step outside of myself because if all I’m going to be doing all day is just thinking about the situation that I’m in and how things are not working… And mind you, I wasn’t making any money during that time. So it was a really tough seat. It was a tough time. A time where I had to ask for help, in order to just make it through.
So I’m grateful that I could touch base with family and say, ‘Hey, I’m struggling.’ And that kept me afloat here and there. And I was also able to, from the work that I shot… Because all I did was every day, follow the bread crumbs, follow what I’m feeling, go dig, dig, dig, dig, shoot, see. I used that work, and I actually started to make a bit of money online selling it through Instagram.
MARK: Oh, really?
EARL: I started selling images. Yeah. That’s how I stayed afloat during lockdown.
MARK: Wow.
EARL: And that was the first part of lockdown before things started to open up here and there. Then I got involved shooting some news segments for Deutsche Welle, a German-based news agency, and they have a… how do I call it? I think field reporters or reporters based all around the world. So one of the reporters is based in Johannesburg and he basically produces these new segments, and whenever he needs a camera operator or an assistant to come on board or someone to operate a stabilizer, that’s when I come on board and do. So that’s what I’ve been doing quite often for them.
Because of people seeing what I was doing and the way that I was shooting, they were interested in how I’m redefining my space within lockdown. What am I doing different that other people are not doing? And it’s not that I was better off, it’s just that I have to do this in order to survive and to come out better on the other side. And I was just pushing because I think life teaches you that sometimes you don’t know what lies ahead, but all you got to do is just follow the process. So that Lockdown Series that I shot is also helping me to stay focused in this part of my life right now in terms of following the process.
MARK: And again, it sounds like that this was something that you reached for instinctively as an artist, almost to keep yourself together during this process. But there was also a component where you were sharing it, putting the images out, helping other people make sense of their situation. And you were even able to sell them and create new opportunities for your freelance work through that. So it really worked on both sides of that equation.
EARL: One hundred percent. For me, another thing that also stood out was community. Made me realize how important community is. I had friends that I couldn’t connect with every morning, every afternoon, every evening. Having a space to share. When we’re doing suppers, we’re doing video calls and doing suppers together. I was so appreciative for technology and what it offered me. And it also just showed me and taught me how I can make new friends online organically, and with intention, and also with integrity. So, community was also such a big foundation that really kept me through because I don’t know if I would’ve been able to carry on for that long without my community.
MARK: Can you say something about how you were able to make? Because you said you made friends organically and with intention and integrity. And I think even in normal times people find this a bit of a struggle online.
EARL: Sure, sure.
MARK: How did you do that?
EARL: I guess that you can connect with people that share. I would connect with people that would share online. I would connect with their work first, and mostly follow the hashtags, follow the bread crumbs and see what people are putting out there, and use that as a point of touching base and saying, ‘Hey, I really appreciate your work. Is it possible that we can stay in touch?’ That’s one aspect. And I really love music. So what I’ve started doing is connecting with people that are into music as well. And then it would be this organic way of sharing on a daily basis or sharing every week. And what I’ve noticed is that that has created really strong friendships.
Because music is so transcendent, it speaks different languages. It’s not only grounded or rooted in one way of communication. I’m not sure if it answers the question, but that’s the way that I’ve been connecting. And maybe it’s connecting through culture. Because there’s always something that needs to connect you to the person. So if I know that someone listens to a particular kind of music, you can really tell something about who they are and the layers that exist, because in order for someone to discover this kind of sound or this kind of style of photography, it’s weird.
I shoot a lot of weird abstract images, and then there was a guy in the Netherlands, I can’t remember his name now, but I have him on Instagram. I touched base with him because I started looking for abstract photographers. And it was these connections that I started seeing within myself first, connecting the dots within myself and started seeing outside in the world and started seeing ‘Hey, these are people that, I could potentially be aligned to and then I could potentially connect with.’
MARK: How has all of this developed since that initial period of lockdown? And also just to maybe put us in the picture, how did the lockdown pattern evolve in South Africa?
EARL: So, as lockdown went on and took its course, things were not completely open yet. I started working because of the work that I’ve been pushing online. And some of the news work that I’ve done before for Deutsche Welle, DW, there was a friend that I recall that commented on one of my images and then we immediately just touched base and I was ‘Hey, what are you doing? Are you available maybe to do a segment on maybe your lockdown experience?’ And that’s what kind of led me into the new space again. Basically, he interviewed me on my experience of lockdown, the work that I was shooting, and all of these other things that I was doing and what I was doing to stay afloat and to cope with everything. And it was through that interview that opened up work opportunities that actually continued throughout the lockdown period until the end of last year, that really helped me to stay afloat.
I realized that community’s such an important thing. And the online community was such an important space to be a part of in order to show people what you’re getting up to, to show people your work. And as things progressed, the lockdown started calming down a little bit more. So things became slightly open, but there wasn’t a lot of productions happening at that point. But then I started getting into doing a lot of Covid-y content. Going into corporate shooting, Covid corporate videos as a means of communication tools to the employees. So that’s what really also kept me busy during the time. And still throughout that period still shooting. I actually traveled quite extensively during the Covid period doing a lot of new segments with Deutsche Welle, like I said, which also really assisted and aided me to get out there and to have work.
So, there was a big shift for me when I realized that, even though I was getting work, there was a lack of consistency and there was a lack of control that I had in determining how I could run my production company or what I could do. And obviously, throughout that period, I was doing my art.
And I actually decided to set up, an online… I see it as a residency now, but an online collaboration between two artists. One was a contortionist and one was a poet. And what I had them do was respond to three of my images. I actually didn’t mention this. A part of some of the lockdown work was I took part in an online exhibition with a gallery in Johannesburg called BKhz Gallery. And three of my pieces was showcased on their platform. And then what I did was during the exhibition, I decided to collaborate with two artists, as I mentioned, one contortionist, one poet, and I asked them to respond to my work. Some of the money that I made from selling my prints, I actually made sure to pay them for their collaboration. It wasn’t much. But I was ‘We’re really not working and you’re giving me your time and you’re giving me your energy, and you’re actually pouring into this.’
So I paid them for their contribution. And it worked in a way where they, every week, I think we did it for like a month or two, but it extended for a little bit. So every week, every second week they will send me journal entries like a voice note, saying where they’re at within their process, reflecting on the images, what are they gaining from that? Because essentially, the three images or the title of the three images were called Re-definition. I had them think about how they’re re-defining themselves, their space within the Covid situation, within the pandemic. And that was a lot of fun. Toni Stuart did the Soundscape. She did the poem and then Conway did the movement, the dance. And then Toni was actually the one that put the video together, layered the sound with the video. And then I just put the final bits and bolts together, but it was such a beautiful and fun project to work on.
MARK: It’s mesmerizing that final video.
EARL: Thank you.
MARK: I will link to it. It’s called, Re-definition, right? And I’ll make sure we have a link in the show notes so folks can go and watch it. So basically, you’ve got spoken word poetry over footage of this.
Is it Conway, the contortionist?
EARL: Oh, yeah.
MARK: He’s almost like the frame of the film, it’s like a box that he’s inside. And the range of movement that he comes up with is extraordinary. I won’t say too much, but it really feels like it resonates with the poem as well.
That was a beautiful thing to do, Earl. To connect people and start making your work in that way, in the midst of all of this.
EARL: It really was. It felt that I got so much from that. Conway, his artist’s name is Flexpression. Hopefully, he doesn’t mind me calling him Conway! Flexpression. Working with them, it was such a joy, challenge, it was really a relationship because as they were looking at the work and as they were needed to respond with the work, there’s a tension that takes place, especially having to produce during a pandemic and stay productive and do all these things, it’s hard.
MARK: Yeah.
EARL: It wasn’t the easiest thing, but I commend them for pushing through. I commend them for showing up the way they did. Because I know that that project is something that I’m thinking about now, this year, in terms of the work, the way that I want to work. So I owe a lot to that peer and what they gifted me with. To also realize that my work has value. I can say that to myself and say that for myself, but without the viewer and the interaction with the viewer, there’s a disconnect. Once again, that interaction is so important.
MARK: Looking back on this whole period, one of the themes of this season is, I really hope that given what we’ve all been through, that we all come out of it with more choices and possibilities than we had before.
What would you say you have learned from the whole process and particularly anything that you say, ‘Well, I’m going to carry that forward in my future work?’
EARL: I think that one, follow the bread crumbs there. That just stays in my head. That’s like this pigeon that’s bobbing the head down.
MARK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
EARL: Just picking at it. But still having enough headway to look around. Following the bread crumbs has been such an important thing for me, because now what’s happened, I started my honors in fine arts this year.
MARK: Great.
EARL: And there’s so much that has shifted. And that actually came through a conversation that I had with a friend of mine in 2020, who I also met online. We met offline first and then we reconnected online. And I think he was the one that brought up this, he liked my work and we were chatting, and I think I spoke to him in 2018 about wanting to study, and he just started reminding me, he was ‘Hey, have you thought about getting back into your studies again?’ And I was ‘Yeah, but I don’t know how, how am I going to afford it?’ All of these excuses. So lockdown essentially gave me that opportunity to really reflect on, what is really important to me?
2021 was when we picked up the conversation again and he was ‘Yo, it’s now or never.’ And because I had that process of following the bread crumbs and not really knowing what lies ahead, yeah, I decided to take the plunge to apply, send in my work, and I got accepted to study this year.
MARK: Fantastic.
EARL: Yeah. I’m, again, in a space where I’m in deep waters, but what I know is that I need to follow the bread crumbs and I need to follow that process. Because now I’m having to develop a new body of work that is in line with my research, and trying to figure out, within this new world, how do I make this happen? But I go back to that same thing, follow the bread crumbs, follow the process. So I’ve learned to stay committed to that when I find my back against the wall.
MARK: There’s real trust in that, isn’t there?
EARL: Yeah.
MARK: It’s going to lead to something bigger, even if you can’t see it.
EARL: That’s the thing. I think sometimes it leads to clarity as well. And I think that that’s the most important thing, clarity about what I’m trying to do, what is my intention? And I’ve seen it in every single stage, seen it with the body of work that I created when I was doing my residency with Amplify Studios. I didn’t know what the work would look but I knew that I needed to trust the process. And certainly, it’s not easy. Trusting the process it’s not an easy thing. And I know it’s easy for me to say, but even till today, I’m struggling with that idea, but I go to studio almost every day, and I’m ‘Cool, I need to work on this idea and start to develop it further.’ And trusting that that will connect to something else in the future.
MARK: I think the bread crumbs have done a pretty good job. Well, you’ve done a pretty good job of following them through. This has been an amazing story, Earl. Thank you so much.
EARL: Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you so much, Mark.
MARK: I think this would be a great moment, Earl, for you to share your Creative Challenge for our listeners. If you are listening to this, and if you are new to the show, then this is the point where I ask my guest to set you, dear listener, a creative challenge. And the challenge is something that you can do or get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation. It’s going to be on the theme of the interview. And it’s designed to stretch you creatively, maybe professionally, and very likely also as a person.
Earl, what is your Creative Challenge?
EARL: Perfect. I think it’s linked. It might not be one challenge, it might be linked together. The first thing is to not put too much pressure on yourself surrounding the idea or your craft that you’re working on. That’s the first thing. And maybe this is surrounding the idea of play.
My challenge is whatever your craft, whatever your mode of communicating is, if you’re a photographer, if you’re a poet, gift yourself time to play each and every single day with your craft.
Go to that space with no pressure on yourself, or try to not put pressure or apply place on yourself. And utilize that space of play for the next month or even two months with not any expectation but to play.
MARK: Right.
EARL: I don’t care where you do it or where they do it. They can do it at home. It would be interesting for play to happen in different spaces, but use your craft as a form of play. And then maybe what we can do is they can contact you or me within the next two months and see what that has developed into. Allow the play to speak to you, essentially.
MARK: That would be lovely. I tell you what, the comments are always open on the show notes after this interview for at least 30 days. Sometimes it closes down because of spam. But if you are listening to this and within 30 days you would like to leave a comment to tell us, or show us what you’ve been up to, that would be a lovely thing to do.
EARL: I’m also thinking that the play doesn’t have to be… don’t put a time limit to it. Whether it’s two minutes of play because that’s all you have time for because your kids are waking up. 20 minutes of play in the evening, whatever it is, create a world where you can really just get lost in. I get lost in my world through music as well. So that’s something that really gets me tuned into my own language of play. So for me, it’s going out to shoot and reviewing those images, playing music, printing those images on little Polaroids and sticking it into my book. And just thinking about what is my eye seeing, because that frames every part of my journey and frames my life in the way that I see the world. And that has an impact. So play, play, play.
MARK: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Earl. I’m sure plenty of people are now listening and thinking, ‘I want to see more of this man’s work.’ So where can people go to find you online?
EARL: They can either check my website, which is www.earl-abrahams.com. And then all my details are on there. I think that even in the show notes, I’ll put my website, my Instagram handle. Because Instagram and my website are the only platforms that I really interact with. And then if they want to stay in touch, they can contact me on my email, which is abrahams.O1@gmail com, but I’m sure that will be in the show notes as well.
MARK: Brilliant. Okay. We will make sure that is all in the show notes and maybe some nice images and videos from your work. Thank you so much, Earl. It’s been a really inspiring conversation.
EARL: Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Mark, man. It means a lot.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
The Rocky Road for Theatre through the Pandemic with Steven Kunis
Jul 11, 2022
Today we kick off Season 6 of The 21st Century Creative, the podcast that helps you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the 21st Century.
The theme for this season is CREATIVE DISRUPTION. Every episode will feature an interview with a creator whose work was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and who rose to the challenge by doing something new and different in response.
Our first guest is Steven Kunis, a theatre director whose new production was put on hold when the Coronavirus hit London, and who hated the idea of putting the stage show on Zoom. So instead he created a brand new show, blending elements of cinema and live theatre.
In the first part of today’s show I introduce the CREATIVE DISRUPTION theme.
This is the first season to have a theme, and the reason is, that in the last two and a half years, we’ve all been massively disrupted by the Covid 19 pandemic. Not only the human tragedy of millions of lives lost, but also the social and economic damage caused by the virus and our attempts to control it.
In particular, the pandemic has had a devastating effect on many sectors of the arts and creative industries, and on the lives and livelihoods of creative professionals like you and me.
So I am using this season as a way to pause and gather our breath and see what we can learn from what we’ve been through – and to give you some inspiration and ideas for not just surviving but also thriving in the new landscape that we find ourselves in.
So I have assembled a lineup of guests whose work was severely disrupted by the pandemic, but who responded by doing something new and creative.
I have deliberately focused on the arts and creative industries that have been most disrupted – including theatre, music, TV and film production, in-person live events and experiences.
I also did my best to get a global perspective on the crisis. I’m aware that the pandemic played out in different ways in different parts of the world.
So I cast my net wide and I’m pleased to say that I have stories from creatives in seven different countries spread across five continents.
My guests include:
A music manager who had to cancel an artist’s big tour, and then figure out what she could do for her artists in a world without gigs
A street photographer who was confined to his apartment block and found himself making a new type of art
A group of TV and film producers who watched the lights go out on productions all over the world, and suddenly realised the solution was staring them in the face
An agency owner who had to let go of most of her staff, but created a new business based on an idea she’d been incubating for years
A parenting and homeschooling expert who suddenly found her knowledge was in great demand
An actor who used the cancellation of her next film as the incentive to create a project she’d never quite got round to starting
An tattoo artist who took his art into the digital realm when his studio was closed
It took a lot longer than usual to put this season together, but I’m pleased with the results and I hope the extra time and effort will be worth it, in terms of helping us all to glean some learnings from the experience we have all been through.
Steven Kunis
Steven Kunis is a Greek-American theater and opera director, currently based in London. He is the founding artistic director of Panorama Productions, a company committed to international collaboration in the fields of theatre and music.
In 2021, his UK Premiere production of Young Jean Lee’s STRAIGHT WHITE MEN at Southwark Playhouse was nominated for Best New Play at the Off West End Theatre Awards, and Steven himself picked up a nomination for Best Director along the way. It was also named by Sam Marlowe at The i newspaper as one of the top ten theatre events of 2021 and garnered four-star reviews in The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Times, The Arts Desk and The London Theatre Guide.
Steven was previously nominated for Best Director at the Off West End Theatre Awards in 2019, for his production of Asher Gelman’s play AFTERGLOW at the Waterloo East Theatre.
Steven says that he aims ‘to make theater that allows us to feel closer to one another, and to collectively imagine better possibilities for how we might all get along’.
His commitment to bringing people together in the theatre meant that when the pandemic first struck, he was sceptical of the idea of moving theatre productions online. So he put the production of STRAIGHT WHITE MEN on hold.
Rocky Road
But he has always had a creative approach to constraints – and in response to the closure of theatres he came up with a completely new production, ROCKY ROAD, based on a script by Shaun McKenna and combining theatrical and cinematic techniques.
My wife Mami and I watched the play online and found it gripping, in a way that felt much more like watching live theatre than streaming TV.
And when restrictions were relaxed and theatre returned to the stage, Steven and Panorama were in the vanguard, with the revived production of STRAIGHT WHITE MEN.
At Steven’s invitation I went to see the play at Southwark Playhouse, very close to Shakespeare’s old stomping ground. It was my first experience of live theatre since the pandemic, and it was a really intense experience – not only because of the quality of the play and the production, and also, as we say in the interview, because of the cocktail of joy tinged with fear that we all felt as we crowded into the theatre once more.
Straight White Men
In this conversation Steven talks about his unusual start in theatre, and describes the (ahem) rocky road through the pandemic for himself and his colleagues.
He unpacks the pros and cons of live performance vs online media. He also talks about the importance of looking for a creative opportunity in a set of constraints, and shares his thoughts on some new possibilities for theatre going forward.
This is a really inspiring interview, and it feels like the perfect place to start our journey through the pandemic in the Creative Disruption Season.
MARK: Steve, when did you first fall in love with the theatre?
STEVE: Well, I always had just the base attraction to it because it was one of the few things that I had fun doing, as a student, in school. But again, and it was always mainly a social outlet for me to… again, I went to a very sporty school where academics and arts were not as valued as, say, the sports scene. So I actually I didn’t really have my thing until I found that space, I think it was a production of Inherit the Wind, where I think I played a member of the jury and just made funny faces here and there. The drastic reveals that were going on in whatever scene we werae doing.
I don’t think that was when I caught the bug though, just because I felt that was a very fun experience for me. And again, my parents who came from working class immigrant backgrounds, it was not the type of path… you wouldn’t even begin to consider as a career, let alone if it was something that interested you enough to pursue in such a serious way. I actually went to college, for all intents and purposes, to be a scientist.
MARK: Oh, really?
STEVE: I studied neuroscience. I studied neuroscience in my undergrad and found immediately still that there was an enormous theatre scene that I could still pursue in a very fun way. And then, basically, I ended up taking a theatre class where, again, I thought I would just take this as a fun elective class but really changed my approach to art making, in a sense.
But so, basically, by the end of my 4 years of college… again, at this point, I had been ushering for the American Repertory Theatre, I’d seen amazing productions by the Wooster Group, these are experimental theatre companies in New York, like Elevator Repair Service, the team… I remember this one production by Rachel Chavkin called Natasha Pierre in The Great Comet of 1812, which was this electro pop opera adaptation of War and Peace.
Or there was one of the most amazing productions I remember, it was called Woody Says. It was about Woody Guthrie, the American folk singer. And there were hootenannies after every show where basically the audience learned that there was this post-show activity that some audience members themselves had actually started after one of the shows. So, then more audience members kept bringing their own instruments to upcoming shows and then staying in the lobby of the theatre afterwards for an hour or so afterward just to create this communal experience of art making from the audience’s perspective, which I found, wow, so inspiring. You can create creativity for a community.
What I was so amazed at was the level of the idea of community as a theatre subject, which was so exciting to me. Not just the idea that we go to watch a story of a community on stage, to learn about things, but also the fact that those productions created communities of audiences and that really facilitated the creativity of that community to make meaning or camaraderie with the other people in the room with them.
Which just felt so counter culture to me in terms of everything I’d grown up with, especially in academic institutions where you’re very much made to feel like you’re on your own and life is about your own individual advancement and progression, to see something so antithetical and so meaningful, at least to me, in terms of my values, to see an art form whose prime subject was togetherness and how we can find ways to always reinvent how we exist together in a room was really inspiring.
MARK: Because that’s really counter to the myth, isn’t it, of the individual solitary genius.
STEVE: Absolutely. And that’s the main thing I learned as a creator. Because I think, again, I was always a very anxious kid and I always put a lot of pressure on myself to, I don’t know, either deliver on a problem set or a paper or even a theatrical production. And I think even going in as a first-time director you’re always expected to have all the answers.
But actually you don’t have all the answers, you can’t have all the answers, and really you shouldn’t have all the answers to what it is you’re working on. Because you have all these other amazing brains in the room to help tell the story, the story that you’re working on in a really innovative way.
And if you don’t lean on your other collaborators, then actually, I think, you make the place smaller than you. If I decide what this play is before I even do it and don’t use the vast intelligences of the people I’ve chosen to work with me, then what am I here to do except to tell you what I already know?
It was so freeing for me, as an artist, to say, ‘Oh, wait, there’s 20 other people in this room where I can find the best idea,’ but also to find better ideas in terms of anything that I could ever make on my own. Which was just tremendously freeing for someone who was very locked creatively. And I think I just found a space for myself where I got to be the person I wanted to be. Rehearsal became that sacred space where I could let go, trust others, and really learn and really open myself up to experiences that, as a person in the rest of the world, that didn’t really get to happen so much. And so, I’ve learned from my craft as much as I, hopefully, have contributed to it.
MARK: Okay. So, you discovered this sacred space of togetherness and discovery, but how did you end up transitioning that into a career or profession? I don’t know if you think about it in those terms, but that you’re actually putting on professional shows and this is your work?
STEVE: That’s the first thing I’d want to say is that, when I was starting out, I had no idea how I would do that. And someone told me once, and this was only about a couple of months ago, and I think it’s a really great piece of advice, is not think about what you want to do but what you want to be. Because the rest of it you’ll figure out then along the way, as long as you have that goal, the kind of person you want to become. Whether that’s a writer, a storyteller, a director. You can then fumble your way there, as long as you have that end point in mind.
I knew in my heart I really wanted to do that but I didn’t have the confidence or really the resource to go out and be a freelance artist, at that point. Which everyone knows, there’s so many things that have to fall into place really for that to be a sustainable path for you.
So, at the end of college, I ended up getting a fellowship to study in the UK at Oxford. And what I was trying to figure out… because, again, I didn’t have any proper training as a director and I didn’t have really the experience to go to drama school, at that point. But this fellowship, it was called Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, which was a 12-month Master’s. And what it allowed me to do with that money was to basically create my own study investigating the neuroscience of theatre audiences. That program was all about evolution and what evolutionary benefits were conferred upon us through cultural habits like sitting around a campfire and listening to stories.
One of the takeaways from the study I did was basically listening to emotionally arousing stories and sitting in a room with other people while that was happening, it incentivised… or ‘incentivised’ is the wrong word but it cultivated what they called ‘the perceived sense of social bonding with others,’ how close you felt with the people you experienced that with, but then also collective creativity.
Essentially, if you would have someone watch this Benedict Cumberbatch film that was really emotionally arousing and you watched it before other people and then there was someone else who watched something that was just a fact-based documentary by themselves and put them all on these creative tasks together. The people who were under the more emotionally-arousing film watching condition and watched it with other people tended to perform better with their colleagues on this creative test than did the people who weren’t emotionally aroused and watched something by themselves.
It’s the reason that the Greeks basically made their citizens go to the theatre. To wrestle with issues of the state in a communal environment. And I think that was when I found fundamentally what about the art interested me was that collective-creative-enhancing world, that space where we could learn to think better together and exist together. Which I think, again, is so counter to a lot of the cynicism of our world, at the moment.
But anyway, going to answer your question about how I got into the industry… so, I think, at that point, I was doing all this stuff but realizing I was still making my own work in the basement of a pub theatre and really being pulled away from my research so much. I basically realized I was a veterinarian who wanted to be a dog, who was studying this thing for so long and realizing, ‘No, I just need to go out and do the thing,’ and I needed to stay in the country.
I needed to stay in the country and have a visa. Oxford had, and a lot of universities here have, so, for any artists who are not from the UK, think about this, it’s called the Graduate Entrepreneur Visa, I think they now call it the Startup Visa, where basically you can pitch to your sponsoring university an idea for any kind of company or social or economic enterprise that you think will contribute to the UK economy or UK life in some productive good way. I pitched my current company that I run, Panorama Productions, that was based around international collaboration in the theatre in the UK, post-Brexit.
The incentive was to stay in the country, make work necessity, breeding any ideas that I could have because I was, otherwise, quite stuck. I ended up getting sponsored and getting seed funding for my first set of shows. And then it became a really great stick, as opposed to a carrot, saying, ‘Well, you need to keep making your own work to stay in the country.’ And that became really the impetus for my own journey here, making work.
And again, this was all coming in the background of, as a starting out artist, I was trying to get residencies in the major theatres as an assistant director or associate director or any kind of learning capacity, and I just couldn’t get into any of them. Either I didn’t have the experience or it just didn’t work out for me, at that time.
This became a really amazing opportunity for me to basically, instead of getting in the room of someone else, being the room where I made my own work through Panorama. And that was how I started.
MARK: So, you have your own production company, Panorama. And if we could maybe fast forward then to late 2019, give us a snapshot of what you were doing at that point with the company, with your work, and what your plans were looking into 2020.
STEVE: Yeah, absolutely. 2019 was our first flagship project, which was The Refugee Orchestra Project. I had worked before that with a conductor named Lidiya Yankovskaya who was, and still is, I believe, the musical director at Chicago Opera Theatre. She started an ensemble called The Refugee Orchestra Project where basically, in whatever city they were in, Lidiya would gather musicians who were refugees to the United States or the children of refugees.
Lidiya came along and basically, through our various networks, found our new ensemble to create the debut of this orchestra project. We even had several members of the Syrian National Orchestra who had only just moved to the UK within a year of that production happening. And we presented our piece at the London Symphony Orchestra, St Luke’s venue, and that was basically the kickoff for our production. That gave us a really great network of supporters who were really interested and excited by our work.
MARK: And what happened next?
STEVE: Again, that was my first foray into directing professionally. Lidiya picked the repertoire of songs and then found a through-line narrative that would be able to connect that to a cohesive thing. But I thought, ‘I want to direct plays now, at this point.’ So, I directed a production called Afterglow at Waterloo East after, that went on for a couple of weeks. And then what I was most excited by, again, it was a play by an artist, that I so admired in college, named Young Jean Lee called Straight White Men. And it was at this point that I had the track record of a couple of productions that we managed to get that scheduled in at Southwark Playhouse for April of 2020. And that was the thing that I was really gearing up for quite a lot at the beginning of the year before disruption. And that ended up being postponed until very recently, as we know.
MARK: What was the first hint for you that this news story was getting so big that it was going to intrude on your work and this production?
STEVE: I first really realized that at the auditions for that play. We were auditioning in the week before the forced lockdown. When, basically, A, we lost so many people that were scheduled to audition because they had got Covid and they were very very sick, so, that we were thinking, ‘Wow, this is a lot of people. This is quite serious.’ And then also people coming into the room and not shaking hands, that was the first time I had gotten an elbow from somebody.
And again, in an art form, that is so contingent on collectivity, community, camaraderie. I mean we call ourselves ‘lovies,’ even if you’ve just met someone for the first time and you know they work in the theatre, you hug them. That’s just sort of the way, our weird subculture of humanity is that we’re very loving. Loving lovies, basically.
MARK: Poets don’t do that so much!
STEVE: Yeah, right. Too verbal. We’re expressed with our words. But no, we’re very much expressed with our… to see such an initial but very significant breakdown in the essential ways that we communicate in the theatre, that was the first time I’ve really felt in my body, ‘Oh, something is different.’
MARK: Right. And then what happened?
STEVE: And then… well, we carried on, that was what everyone was telling us to do. Just like as in 2021, carry on as normal because we don’t know… because this was before Boris Johnson had said, ‘Oh, don’t go to the theatre,’ or, ‘we’re going to shut down theatres.’ So, we still had our vested interest in making sure that this project could go off as safely as possible. And then we went into our recalls, I think in America we call them ‘callbacks,’ and our choreographer was ill with Covid. Or at least what she believed was Covid, at the time, because we couldn’t get testing. And again, I think only maybe five people showed up to that audition. But we still tried to carry on. And then, by the next day, the official lockdown had happened. And then I did not enter a rehearsal room in person again for 13 months after that.
MARK: Wow. We can all hear in your voice the warmth, when you talk about the togetherness, the connection, the community that you’ve experienced in theatre and that is the art form, that you’re so passionate about. And it really depends on presence, in a way, that a lot of art forms don’t.
What was it like to be suddenly cut off from all of that?
STEVE: At first, it was actually quite a relief. I’m a classic introvert. I found that, for me at least, as a director, I thrive on preparation. And I felt that, again, because at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, I had a series of projects going on that I think I let past my fingertips in terms of how much preparation time I could give to those rehearsals. And I think I was just quite relieved to actually say, ‘Oh, I can get this right now. I can get it right, I can conceptualize my work in a more rigorous way. I can really think about the characters whose skin I’m trying to get into.’
So, actually, it was quite a lovely first 3.5 months really, even 4 months really, where… beautiful weather, I could go for walks. And yes, the world was burning outside but I had my craft with me. Which is, again, a huge fortune, as a director, because usually your only craft is working in a rehearsal room with actors. But I had that thing to look forward to on the other side of this.
And remember, at this point, we thought this was only going to go on 3-4 weeks, max 3 months. And so, then it really started to get quite difficult when, I think around September hit, and we thought, ‘Oh wait, this could be very long time before we can seriously consider safely making our work again together, as an ensemble or just even considering anything new.’ And again, this was also at a point where the industry was really falling apart at the seams. It was a disaster for freelancers. Again, I mean I was very fortunate, I had my partner and we lived in a house share where our landlords gave us half the rent off, at that point. But again, streams of income were extremely minimal. And it became an issue of just, ‘What do we do from day to day, let alone thinking about projects going on in the future?’
At this point, the Culture Recovery Funding had come out. But again, everyone in the industry was after this very small pot of funding really. It felt very much, at that point, like you were all applying for the same set of grants that everyone drastically needed, theatre support fund, Culture Recovery Project grants that, again, in the end, only very few people were able to properly benefit from.
And so, while the rest of us all had to stay in our house a lot of the time, I remember, at that time, lots of people were exploding their work online, taking shows and putting them on Zoom or on camera. And there was enough of an appetite that people would go to see the shows but there was always this sense of bleakness about it where it just wasn’t the same as the in-person experience. Someone said to me, ‘It’s a form of mourning.’ Because this idea that like, yes, we’re so passionate to get our work out but really… I mean because a lot of these things were shows that were taken from in-person to just straight directly online that weren’t built for that space. We’d lost so much, as creatives, in terms of our work but also our identity and our sense of community with one another that we were just finding whatever we could to get the work out there. At least that’s what I was seeing, in a period where I was just mostly sitting at home.
MARK: Yeah. And so, at what point did you start to think about pivoting or doing something different with your work? Because I mean you couldn’t do the production that you had planned for, prepared for. You were looking at all the online stuff and thinking, ‘Yes, but… ’ you have reservations about that.
What was your thought process around what you were going to do next?
STEVE: At that point, we were just trying to do what we could with what we already had, which was this play. Because there was a lot of talk about, ‘Oh, we can adapt new live streaming and finding new ways of doing all of that.’ And so, basically, with the theatre, we were programmed at, they had a set of three cameras that they were using and actually beginning to create some really cool stuff with their work. And we said, ‘Oh, maybe we can adapt our piece to fit this camera work.’ And again, we were very lucky that we had this foresight from the writer basically saying, ‘The play we’re doing, it’s a comedy.’ Because this was back at a point we still couldn’t have audiences in the theatre, saying, ‘I just don’t think having a comedy under the camera lens is really a good idea at all.’
So again, we were amongst the masses trying to take what we had done and put that under camera and saying, ‘Oh, actually I don’t think this is the right call. We just need to wait until some unknown day in the future where audiences can assemble again.’ And at this point, this is not from the business standpoint, but we basically promised the theatre that we would put a show. We thought we basically promised the theatre we would put a play into their slot. And obviously, theatres need to still be running in some capacity, at that point, just to keep their bases engaged. And so, we needed to find something very quickly that we could put in its place.
I was thinking, ‘Okay, what could work with no audience and just cameras?’ And that was where I got really interested in this, just film-noir kind of idea of something that’s more of a thriller, something more inherently dramatic that doesn’t rely on the audience energy so explicitly to work, what really hugs the screen format so well. And we’d asked around. I wasn’t reading and finding anything that really worked and we couldn’t really find any new plays that had come out that was really interesting to us. I asked my one friend, Shaun McKenna, ‘Do you have anything?’ and he said, ‘Well, no, I don’t. But I wrote this screenplay, about 15 years ago, that I didn’t do anything with, just never really worked out. What do you think?’
I read it and I was very captured. It was called Bodily Harm, at that point. I read this and I got so excited by it because it was basically I thought, ‘Oh, we can just cut the whole entire first half of this play and take that first half and integrate it into memory-based monologues throughout the entirety of this second half.’ And I thought, ‘This would be a great thriller in a single room that will make our heads explode and work great on a film-noir thriller-style stage.’
Then, through a series of edits, it became this piece called Rocky Road. A lot of things started to fit together then. We managed to get the theatre, we managed to get working with this actor named Tyger Drew-Honey, another brilliant actor named Kirsten Foster. And the team all fell into place with everyone who was just so hungry after so long to make the best work we could. It was the first time we were back into rehearsal, in March. And it was just like touchpaper, a really extraordinary process. I mean because, again, like this was about what, maybe a 2-hour-and-15-minute show. We rehearsed the whole thing in 12 days, which would normally really panic some prospective collaborators. Even in tech, I mean we had about 253 cues, which is quite a few in a tech process, in 9 hours of tech.
But again, the engine was revved up and ready to go for so many people. And it was just an amazing process and a great show that I was very proud of to have made by the end of the lockdowns basically.
MARK: I’ve seen the show, but for the benefit of listeners, tell us about the show that you put on and also the format that you put it on and how you felt that the show and the format worked together in a way that wasn’t just taking something designed for in a live theatre and then sticking that with a two-dimensional screen. Because you created quite a different experience, didn’t you?
STEVE: Yeah. It’s called Rocky Road. And basically, it’s a story about a woman named Zoe who shows up on this man’s doorstep, Danny, who’s the building manager of a building that she is now moving into. You quickly learn that, as in any good thriller, she is not who she says she is. And you find that, for some unexplained reason, this man has ruined her life 10 years ago and the ripples of crime and punishment have really affected both of them quite significantly over the last 10 years. She’s here to find out answers as to why he’s done what he’s done.
And when, at a certain point, she does not get the answer that really satisfies her… and, in fact, the answer she gets quite disturbs her, about the randomness of the world and how bad things can happen to others. She feels like she has to destroy what he represents, this unnerving world where being in the wrong place at the wrong time can have such catastrophic outcomes for you.
I felt we were in a place in the world that just felt very much like that, at the time. This idea of, ‘Why is this happening to us? How can we explain the Covid thing? Is it a lab thing? Is it poor government planning? We’re all locked in our houses.’ So many people’s life plans were just quite literally derailed. Some people wanted children and didn’t know when to work with that. Some people had creative careers they wanted to work towards. Some people had relatives that they wanted more time with. Or some people lost their own health as a result of these lockdowns.
I think the play really keyed into a character who was really struggling with so many things being so randomly thrown in her direction and really struggling to come to terms of existing with that. It felt very much of an emotional place that we were all in. And I just felt the intimacy of the camera. Because again, what’s happening is she’s going through the story, as you see in a typical play format, that’s where the camera is further away from you but then, as you start to get into these more monologue in between scene moments, the camera starts to be her friend and follow her as if it’s a diary of some sort. That you, as the audience, get to be in her private thoughts as a way for her to confide and express herself, find some sort of outlet for really what she just has as a deep deep rage at what’s happened to her. And then you feel for her, you cry for her, and you go on this journey as she… what’s the word for it? Spirals into what, ultimately, becomes a very devastating revenge story.
Now, you’re asking about the form of what we did. Our set was built in mind for all these typical filmic tropes that you could never accomplish in the theatre. So, we basically had four cameras set up into the space and the set itself was one room, for an apartment, but then through standard tricks of light became two different apartments and possibly the hallway between them. But then things like split screens, as one person’s on one side of the door and one person’s on the other side of the door, or tricks of appearances and disappearances that you couldn’t normally achieve on stage because of being able to guide not only where the audience was looking but how close or far away they were looking.
I think the form of that meant the content of the story but also introduced filmic conventions into theatre that weren’t possible before but still in a language that the audience understood. Which was quite exciting and quite new. And again, really, we felt like we were discovering something new that wasn’t just a play. And that was quite exciting. What was your experience?
MARK: Well, that absolutely chimes in with my experience. So, first of all, in terms of the theme and the genre, I think it’s interesting you said comedy is probably not where we’re all at right now. And so, you’ve got this film-noir thriller. Very claustrophobic but I mean it wasn’t a plague piece. Without any spoilers, it was a different theme, a different scenario. But it was certainly close enough to the sense of claustrophobia, being hemmed in and not being able to get out and pent-up emotions that it absolutely resonated for us.
Just for the listeners, Steve told me about the show and he said, ‘We’re doing it online, it’s a bit different.’ And so, Mami and I, my wife, we bought tickets and I remember one thing was it wasn’t streamed. It’s not like Netflix, it wasn’t at your convenience where you can just snack on it, turn it on, turn it off. We had to show up at a certain appointed time because that was when the show was going to start.
STEVE: It was live.
MARK: Yeah. It had a similar effect when you go to the theatre, you’ve got to go to the theatre. And if you’re late, they’re not going to let you in because you’re going to mess up everyone’s experience. So, there’s a sense that the audience has to show up in the right way. And I remember thinking we had to make sure our drinks and snacks were all ready and we could be there at the beginning. It brought a different quality of attention to endless stuff that we’ve been streaming during lockdown evenings.
It’s really interesting when you talk about bringing in filmic elements; I’m not consciously film-literate enough to be able to spot all of those tricks but I certainly had the sense that it felt like a live theatrical production but it was actually much more involving. And I guess that’s the film, the cinematic techniques that you’re talking about that you’d used.
I’ve got loads of DVDs of live theatre productions, and it’s great but they always leave you feeling it would’ve been better if I was there because, obviously, you’re more drawn into it. But this really did draw us in. I think I’ve probably enjoyed the theme more than Mami. It was pretty dark, let’s put it that way.
It was a really intense evening and we really felt that we had been on a journey, not exactly the same as going to the theatre but not a million miles away and it was quite different to sitting at home watching a movie.
STEVE: I think a lot of it was also happy accidents along the way, which I think is as any work of art. What mistakes or fun coincidences happen that make it what it is. Because, really, this play was written by a playwright who had that theatrical bent to his craft but wrote this originally as a film, meant to be made into a film. So, I think it already had, either subconsciously or consciously, embedded into the fabric of that story this natural attachment to a screen medium built into what Sean was… in a way, I think, almost the hybrid format that it was in was even, in a way, more powerful than even just a film experience alone or just a theatre experience alone.
After having gone through it all, I think it’s actually really hard for me to imagine that story existing quite as comfortably in either one of those two mediums on their own. We try and talk about it quite a lot but it’s just an ongoing conversation. And then, in terms of all the other things of like close-ups and split screens and stuff, that was all a matter of discovery in the rehearsal room, thinking… again, because we spent entire 13 months just watching Netflix. So, we all, consciously or subconsciously, had that film vocabulary in our heads, of what works and what doesn’t, that we brought with us into the room.
You always bring that baggage or experience with you. And it finds its way into your instinct that I think really paid off in all the right ways on this show. Which was, I guess, for me at least and my company, a really great send off to what was otherwise a horrible time in the pandemic.
MARK: I’m curious; necessity was the mother of invention. You did what you could, given the circumstances, and you came up with this hybrid theatre film live performance.
Is there anything of this that you want to carry forward into your future work or is it too early to tell?
STEVE: It’s always early. Maybe some other artists are more conscious about their decisions than I am, but again I always find that my decisions are accidents that come from, like you said, I think the only reason I even started my company was because I had to find a way to stay here in the country. I guess what I would say, and maybe as a lesson I would say for myself is just to whatever limitations you have, really lean into them and use those to your advantage. For us, the only reason this Rocky Road play existed was because we were basically told that it was a horrible idea to have our other play put under a live stream format and thinking, ‘Okay, what can we do now?’ We’re picking up the pieces from that. My company exists because I needed to find a way to not have the Home Office knocking on my door. Different people are motivated in different ways by different things.
What I would say to anyone is to actually say, ‘How can I use this to make what I otherwise do even better?’ That’s really hard a lot of the time saying, it’s a great way to say, ‘I can’t do this.’ I am very much a person who can be prone to pessimism and say, ‘Oh, I can’t do something because X, Y, Z,’ but that very thing, what does that allow me to do? What do I get to do because of this limitation? I can really flip a lot of things that I’m working on in myself as well to discover.
MARK: What about the response from audiences and also in terms of your career? Has it helped you by opening any doors there?
STEVE: Absolutely, yeah. It opened up doors in a way that you wouldn’t expect because normally a theatre piece, your audience is very much limited by the people in your geographical area who can see it. And so, for me it built all kinds of relationships with me. I was able to have colleagues in other countries see it. I’ve now developed a relationship with the English Theatre Frankfurt who was quite excited by what they had seen there. I would never have gotten a way for them to know my work, at least at that point, had it not been for something like that.
Even in California, a television producer had seen the play, based on a review we’d gotten in The Guardian, and approached us to talk about other possibilities of other types of screen adaptations using that kind of story, as well as other stories that we’d made in the past before. I never worked in screen or even thought about working in film or television before that. And even that has now been the beginnings of several conversations for us in terms of, not only just, ‘How do we adapt this story to screen work?’ but also, ‘How I can expand my practice into other media that was really necessitated by a pandemic?’
And then on a personal note it was the first professional production my own mother had seen. She lives all the way in New Jersey and she had no idea what I was getting up to it all the time while I was 3,000 miles away. So, I think that was also just quite an exciting experience for my own family who had always been very supportive but had no idea what I was about or was interested in creatively. No, that was something I was very proud of to entertain them, and they got a real thrill out of it and absolutely loved it.
And I think that was probably the most fulfilling outcome on a personal level. It was a great avenue for people to sort of see what I can do, our company can do, but also a way for us to expand our practice into other media.
MARK: Okay. And so, picking up on the Straight White Men Production, this was the one that had been halted when the first lockdown came. At what point did you start to think, ‘Okay, we may be able to think about bringing this back and getting back into the theatre again.’?
STEVE: We always waited. It was really useful to see other productions stumbling their way to finding sustainable models for how we could work in a Covid world. And I think this summer was a really difficult time but a really great triumph for theatre as well, in terms of finding new ways that, through testing, through isolation, and understudies that they could find a good way to make the show go on, so to speak. And it was in the summer then when we…
MARK: This is summer 2021 by this point?
STEVE: Summer 2021, exactly. And it was, at that point, seeing the shows, find their way through, that we gathered as much intel as we could as to how other people were doing, what they could, and ‘Okay, maybe we can do that now too.’ And also wanting to get the show on as as quickly as possible because it had been in the back of my mind now for about 2 years at that point. And then we, basically, announced the show in the September and then rehearsals began October and we performed all through November and December. And then Omicron hit.
MARK: Right. But you managed to finish your run just before Omicron came along?
STEVE: Just, again, I am one of the very lucky ones in this sense. I have not anyone in my company who’s got Covid, we’ve not had any Covid-related cancellations or postponements. There was an actor who was out for 4 days because of flu-like symptoms, and the terror of that was a lot. I think we were talking about this before, the level of background stress on the production, not just from the production team but also for the members of the company, the actors. It was a lot still through the whole year to think, ‘Just one case and it’s over.’
We were all in the theatre at least, again, because, 2021, a lot of us were back to work but it was still quite a difficult year in the sense that we were being told to go back to normal when it wasn’t normal. I am inspired all the time by people who still managed to find ways to make it work as the virus was sort of wreaking havoc on so many shows. It’s a real act of bravery to say, ‘I have the audacity to put a show on and make it happen.’
MARK: What was it like on the first performance with an audience?
STEVE: Well, it was very live! An audience member passed out actually on the very first performance. So, maybe they weren’t as ready to come back to the live experience.
No, the show actually had to stop halfway through and we had to basically take the entire company out of the space, which, again, is just so frightening for an actor being in the middle of a scene and having someone just plop right onto the stage in front of them in a very small theatre. But the entire audience, they came right back in and were just as enthusiastic to make that work happen. It’s not just the actors and the creators, it’s the audience who is so thrilled to come back. People passing out and all. But even audiences I think are quite on edge at the moment, so, you also have to take that into account.
MARK: I can relate to what you’re saying about audiences being a bit on edge. Because I came to see the production… I think was it November or early December?
STEVE: December.
MARK: This early December, right. And this was I think only my second trip to London in the two years. And the previous one I hadn’t been among any crowd beyond being on the Tube a bit. And I must admit, when I walked in and sat down in the middle of this crowd of people, I hadn’t been in that situation for almost two years. I had a moment of thinking, ‘Is this a good idea? Should we be doing this?’ But also there was so much joy in that room.
And it’s quite in-your-face, even the pre-show, without giving any spoilers. There was a lot of pumping music, let’s just say the visuals from the stage were quite stimulating, there was so much energy and joy. I remember people just applauding and being just thrilled to be there. And feeling that myself, it really brought home to me how much we’ve missed this and how fantastic it is to be in a live production. Something that I don’t think I’ll ever take for granted again.
STEVE: And you even went to a matinee. And matinees suck usually!
MARK: It was me, it was my energy! [Laughter]
STEVE: No, I just think it’s the general enthusiasm of the public assembling again. We’re built for that.
MARK: So, okay. As one of the first productions back after the big interlude… and I know there’ll be lots of people listening to this who are putting on productions or considering putting on productions, whether theatrical or musical or of other kinds, any advice or guidance for them, things to look out for in this new phase that we’re in?
STEVE: I’m just trying to figure out just as much as everyone else. It’s just what I said before; really be kind to the people in the room with you. Because again, they’ve been through just the same hell, over the last two years, as you have very likely. If not worse. Because I think a lot of people have had a very tough time. And especially for actors it’s so exposing to come back on a stage again. To create an environment that feels as safe and encouraging and nurturing as possible is the best thing you can do I think to make… because I think I always feel like the way the company of actors gets along is very much the energy that the audience experiences.
To create as much of a welcoming and exciting space for the actors will do that, will recreate that same experience for people like you who come to punt, basically. We need people to feel welcome and excited to be back. Especially right now as we’re all struggling to get back on our feet.
MARK: I absolutely felt that the minute I walked into the theatre.
STEVE: Yes. Done. I’m done, I can retire.
MARK: This would be a lovely point, I think, for you to set the listener your Creative Challenge. If you’re listening to this and this is the first time you’ve heard the show, this is the point in the interview where I asked my guest to set you, the listener, a challenge that will stretch you creatively and probably personally as well. It’s something that is on the theme of the interview and that you can complete or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Steve, what’s your Creative Challenge?
STEVE: I would say take 6 minutes and just write a list. A list of basically everything that you feel is a limitation to you, that’s getting in your way, that you feel like is stopping you from doing what you want to do creatively right now.
Write down whatever pops in your head. Don’t worry if it seems random or if it doesn’t make sense, just write whatever comes to you. Because you might be surprised what answers you find are getting in your way. And this could be inside of yourself or outside of yourself, everyone has a different relationship to what they feel is holding them back.
And then, once you’re done with that list, take one or two of those things and say, ‘Okay, how is this an advantage and how can I use that in my next venture?’
MARK: Fantastic. I love it. A really hard-won wisdom, I know this is in relation to the story that you’ve just told.
Steve, thank you. That has been really enlightening and inspiring. I’m so glad that you and your colleagues are back on stage, long may that continue.
Where can people go, first of all, to find you online and to find out about your upcoming projects? And do you have anything in the pipeline that you can tell us to look forward to?
STEVE: I’m part of the creators program at the Young Vic. If you just google me, you’ll find my name, my information, and contact info all there.
MARK: That’s Steven with a V and then Kunis is K-U-N-I-S?
STEVE: Exactly.
MARK: Right, okay. And what about upcoming projects?
STEVE: Right now I’m workshopping a new play by this writer named Andrew Thompson. He won the Theatre503 International Playwriting Award about 5 years ago. This is his second play now called Cuts, Cuts, Cuts, which is, basically, about a junior doctor, a man appears to her who is in a great deal of pain and she tries to help him and can’t touch him. It’s this magical realism story where actually they realize they have to learn the rules of how they can engage with each other, how she can help him, how he can help himself. And they start to fall in love then in this really at first touching but then very dysfunctional harrowing way.
What you soon realize it’s not just a story about a doctor and a patient or about a toxic romance, it’s about our relationship to the NHS and how in a world where we ourselves feel so oversubscribed or run down, how we could possibly even think to help someone else or give them what they need. Which, again, is another Covid-times thing that feels very pressing to me.
MARK: Very timely.
STEVE: And he wrote the play before Covid.
MARK: Really?
STEVE: Yeah, that metaphor of these two beings who cannot touch one another for some unexplained magical reason just came through Andrew’s subconscious and found its way and really resonating in the midst of a global pandemic. And again, I found that so exciting and prescient and really something. And we’re hoping to get that on at the Edinburgh Festival later this year.
MARK: Great. Thank you so much, Steve, for sharing, as I said, your very hard-won wisdom and your really inspiring response that you came up with to the constraints that you’re under. And as I say, fingers crossed that, from now on, the show will go on.
STEVE: Thank you very much. Yes, the show must go on, as they say.
MARK: The show must, and indeed it will.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my experience of coaching creatives like you since 1996.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
My new podcast (and why it’s the opposite of The 21st Century Creative)
Jul 26, 2021
Today is the launch of my new podcast, and it’s something I’ve been planning and dreaming of sharing with you for years.
It’s called A Mouthful of Air. And in several ways, it’s the opposite of my 21st Century Creative podcast. I designed the two shows to work together from the start, although it’s taken a while to get this one up and running.
In this bonus episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast, I explain:
The wonderful news that derailed production of Season 6 of The 21st Century Creative – and when you can expect the new season
Why A Mouthful of Air is the opposite of The 21st Century Creative – and how the two shows are designed to complement each other
How A Mouthful of Air works – and how it could help you become a better creator, whatever your creative discipline
Listen to A Mouthful of Air
Episode transcript
Hello long time no see! I hope you’re doing OK in the midst of it all.
Here in the UK we are very fortunate with our vaccine rollout, it’s making a big difference and we’ve been opening up and getting out and about and meeting up with friends and family we haven’t seen for months.
I keep thinking about animals coming out of hibernation and poking their noses out and sniffing the air and getting excited at the prospect of going out into the world again.
On the podcast front, I was aiming to have Season 6 of The 21st Century Creative ready for you by now. I have started work on it, and I’m doing something a bit different with this season, which I hope will make it more relevant and helpful to you in our current situation.
So anyway, a few weeks ago I was working away happily on Season 6, when I was interrupted by some fantastic news – I received a letter from Arts Council England, telling me I had been successful in the funding application I had made for the brand new podcast I have been working on behind the scenes.
And I really wasn’t expecting to get this funding, because I know it’s always very competitive applying for public funding for the arts. So I’m delighted and very grateful to the Arts Council England for stepping up and supporting my new show.
As well as the money, it’s been a real confidence booster, dare I say it, a real shot in the arm, to know that such an eminent funding body buy into my vision for the show and they want to support it.
At first I naively thought I’d be able to launch the new show at the same time as creating Season 6 of The 21st Century Creative and come back with a bang with both things at once and hopefully surprise and amaze you. But it quickly became apparent that there was no way I could do both at once.
So the bad news is, I’ve decided to pause production of Season 6 The 21st Century Creative until late summer. I apologise for the wait, but rest assured I am not abandoning The 21st Century Creative. Far from it, I’m excited about the new season and I have a considerable backlog of ideas and guests to share with you.
And the new podcast is designed to complement The 21st Century Creative – I actually came up with the idea for both shows at the same time, way back in 2016, and they were always intended to work in tandem.
Why the new show is the opposite of The 21st Century Creative
So let me tell you a little bit about the new show. Because if you The 21st Century Creative I hope very much that you will like the new one too.
It’s called A Mouthful of Air. And in several ways, it’s the opposite of The 21st Century Creative podcast:
Unlike The 21st Century Creative, the episodes are relatively short: 20-30 minutes instead of an hour or more.
Unlike The 21st Century Creative, I’m not releasing it in seasons: I’ll release new episodes every two weeks for the foreseeable future. So you won’t have these long waits for new material from me.
And unlike The 21st Century Creative, A Mouthful of Air does not focus on a wide range of art forms and creative industries.
It focuses solely on my own art: poetry.
If you’re already a poetry lover, I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy in A Mouthful of Air. And do I realise poetry is a bit of a minority interest, even among creatives.
Many people, even professional creators, tend to read just about anything but poetry – fiction, non-fiction, biography, newspapers, magazines, blogs, graphic novels and so on. But not poetry.
And I understand that some people had a bad experience of poetry at school, that put them off. Or they get the impression that modern poetry has become a bit academic and elitist – poets talking to each other, in a way that doesn’t really mean much to the rest of us.
But the thing is, poetry used to be a part of everyone’s lives and it used to matter – way back in history and even prehistory, when we were a tribe gathered round the fire in the evening, it was the poet, the bard, who would recite poems of heroism and adventure, humans and gods and monsters, love and loss. And those poems were how we made sense of our world.
And it struck me that a podcast is the perfect medium to recreate our own version of that original experience – of finding a quiet time in the day, and listening to a voice speaking words that conjure images in your mind and feelings in your heart.
So Episode 1 of A Mouthful of Air goes into that story in more depth and explains what I think poetry can add to your life, and how the podcast will give you a ‘way in’ to poetry that is very different to the way it’s taught in a lot of schools.
Personally, I’ve been reading poetry all my life. Because me it’s the most magical, memorable, moving, funny and entertaining of all the arts.
And I appreciate that it’s not that way for most people. So on this show I’m inviting you into my world, to experience the pleasure, the joy and sometimes the consolation that poetry brings me.
I’ll take some of my favourite poems down from the bookshelf and read them to you, and talk about what makes them special to me.
I’ll also be reading some of my own poems, and sharing what went into them.
And, I will introduce you to some of the amazing poets I’ve met on my journey as a poet.
Several of the first poets who appear on the show were fellow students of mine years ago, at the Poetry School and the City Lit in London.
I remember sitting in those classes, hearing them read amazing poem after amazing poem, and thinking what an incredible evening of live entertainment I was being treated to, over and above from anything I was learning from the class.
Now, those students are award winning poets, with multiple books and prizes to their name. And I’m delighted that they have accepted my invitation to come on the show and share their poems with you. And they are giving me the most amazing readings and interviews about the creative process behind their poems.
As well as the students, you will hear a little more from and about two of my teachers, who you have already heard here on The 21st Century Creative.
The first guest poet on the show is Mimi Khalvati, who has been teaching and mentoring me for almost 20 years, and who I interviewed back in season 2 of The 21st Century Creative.
In Episode 3 of A Mouthful of Air Mimi reads a delightful poem about ‘eggs’ and has some wise and inspiring things to say about writing in general and sonnets in particular.
And in Episode 4, I share a story about a breakthrough teaching session I had with Kristin Linklater, the renowned voice teacher who I interviewed all the way back in Season 1.
(By ‘breakthrough’, I mean, of course, ‘terrifying’. It’s also quite funny in retrospect.)
Kristin is sadly no longer with us, having passed away last year, but I hope to pass on some of the spirit of her work on this show.
At this point, you may be curious to check out A Mouthful of Air. Or maybe you’re thinking:
‘OK that all sounds great Mark, but I’m really interested in more ideas that will help me with my own creative work.’
Fair enough. And rest assured, there is plenty more to come on that front in future seasons of The 21st Century Creative. Plus… you may find A Mouthful of Air surprisingly relevant to your own creative practice.
You see, here on The 21st Century Creative I focus on the things that are common to all the arts and creative disciplines – motivation, mindset, imagination, working habits, emotional intelligence, communication skills, courage, stubbornness and persistence, and so on.
But it’s also true that, in the words of James Joyce, ‘In the particular is contained the universal’.
On A Mouthful of Air I get really specific and particular about one art form. I look at individual poems in close up, and consider what went into them. I talk about craft, and I interview poets about their craft and their creative process.
And friends and members of the Patreon group who have heard the first few episodes have told me they have gained some valuable insights into their own creative practice. So maybe this show will have a similar effect on your creativity. If so, I’d love to hear from you about that..
Where to get A Mouthful of Air
If you’re curious to try the new show, where can you find it? Actually in quite a few places.
Poetry is a multimedia art form – the same poem can live in a listener’s ear as well as a reader’s eye.
So A Mouthful of Air is a multimedia podcast. Here’s where you can get it:
Obviously start with your favourite podcasting app, whether that’s Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Google or whatever. And search for ‘A Mouthful of Air’.
And start with Episode 1, I know that sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s designed as an introduction to the show, it explains more about why poetry matters and what it can offer you, and also how to get the most out of the podcast.
And, if you want me to email you the audio and full transcript (including poem texts) of every episode of A Mouthful of Air, you can sign up here: AMouthfulofAir.fm/subscribe
You might find the text version particularly useful, because one of the things I’m encouraging you to do on the show is to read the poems out loud to yourself – so you’ll always get the poem text in that email.
Why would you want to read the poems out loud? Well, you’ll have to listen to episode 1 to find out.
I’ve spent a lot of time working on A Mouthful of Air and I’m thrilled to be sharing it with you today. I hope you enjoy it. And I look forward to seeing you back here later in the year for Season 6 of The 21st Century Creative.
In the meanwhile please stay safe and stay creative.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Avoiding the Advice Trap with Michael Bungay Stanier
Aug 24, 2020
Today’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Michael Bungay Stanier, a returning guest whose interview way back in Season 1 proved very popular. And his book The Coaching Habit turned out to be even more popular, as it went on to sell three quarters of a million copies.
Michael is back with some excellent advice on avoiding The Advice Trap, which is also the title of his new book. So this is a great conversation to help you become a better communicator or leader – whether or not leadership is in your job title.
This is the final episode of Season 5, which means it is also Episode 50 of the podcast. So in the first part of the show I reflect on what I’ve learned and the relationships I’ve made in the course of making 50 episodes.
It’s been a lot of fun and I’m very grateful for all the support I’ve had along the way, from my amazing guests and the 21st Century Creative team – with design from Irene Hoffman, music from Javier Weyler, who also does the sound production, with Alejandro Lovera, at Breaking Waves, and transcript and show notes edited by Alexandra Amor.
And I also want to thank you, for listening (or reading the transcripts), sharing and reviewing the show, and for supporting the show on Patreon.
If you want to be kept informed of progress on Season 6, I’ll be sharing updates from behind the scenes with the Patreon members, so you’re welcome to join us.
In the coaching segment of this week’s episode, I issue a warning that will hopefully prevent your next brilliant idea from vanishing into thin air: ideas are leprechauns.
Michael Bungay Stanier
Michael Bungay Stanier was one of the very first guests on the 21st Century Creative podcast, way back in Season 1, when he shared insights on how to be a better leader and coach for creative teams, based on his book The Coaching Habit.
In turn, the book was based on the many years that Michael and his team at Box of Crayons spent helping companies use coaching to transform their culture and unleash the creativity of their employees.
Michael had published The Coaching Habit himself, having failed to convince a string of publishers to take it on. Well, there must have been plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth in the offices of those publishers, when the book went on to sell over three quarters of a million copies!
It’s now firmly established as a modern management classic, and it’s one of the books I buy regularly for my coaching clients who are creative directors or agency owners.
In this one, he tackles one of the biggest obstacles we all face when we try to help someone else: The Advice Monster.
This is the part of us that can’t resist jumping in and offering well-intentioned advice, before we’ve fully understood the problem, and which is oblivious to the effect it can have on the person we’re supposed to be helping.
In this conversation Michael explains why the Advice Monster is such a problem and how it not only disempowers and demotivates people around us, it also creates stress and overload for us too.
If you’re the leader of a creative team you’ll find this interview an invaluable source of insight and practical advice on getting out of your own way in order to serve your team better.
And even if you’re not in an official leadership position, you will gain some important insights into how to change a habit that doesn’t serve you. Michael’s words may also help you discover more opportunities than you had noticed to step forward and lead people in a more creative direction.
For a questionnaire on how to identify your Advice Monster visit TheAdviceTrap.com.
And at Michael’s website you can access The Year of Living Brilliantly, a year-long no cost course from 52 great teachers.
MICHAEL: Mark, it is always a pleasure to hear your mellifluous British accent echoing in my ears.
MARK: Great. Last time we spoke, it was way back in season one of The 21st Century Creative. And we were then talking about your book, The Coaching Habit, which is a great guide for leaders on how to use coaching as a way of leadership, a style of management, and it’s particularly good, as we focused on in that conversation, at unleashing the creativity in their teams. And you have a new book out now, The Advice Trap, which zooms in on one topic that we touched on in that previous conversation. And that is the pitfalls of giving advice.
Why pick this topic for the new book?
MICHAEL: It’s a lovely question. Perfect start for me. So thanks, Mark. The Coaching Habit was this amazing success as a book and with this audience who are people who create, who engage in that work, they’ll perhaps appreciate this more than some other audiences. I self-published the book, The Coaching Habit, after spending three or four years trying to get a publishing house to be interested in it. And I just couldn’t. Eventually, I got to this point, where it was like, ‘Okay, I’m doing it myself. I can’t take it anymore.’ And the book’s gone on, and it’s hit bestseller lists, and it’s sold close to three-quarters of a million copies now, it’s really been this phenomenon that is both thrilling and slightly daunting.
I get a lot of emails of people going, ‘This has been a book that’s changed my way to thinking about leadership, it’s demystified this whole idea of what coaching is because it’s not some sort of weird black box thing. It’s actually how do you sustain your curiosity?’ And at the same time for all those emails of people I’m getting that are people being very enthusiastic, there’s part of me that knows of the 750,000 copies out in the world that has not shifted everybody’s behavior.
And what I wanted to do is write a companion book that went a little deeper into what does it actually take to change your behavior to stay curious a little bit longer? In The Coaching Habit we start off with the first chapter, which is about habit-building, and that’s a really useful science-based approach to behavior change, but it’s often not enough. It’s not enough just to know the science and the process of building habits, you’ve got to go a little deeper, for some of us anyway, to think about changing our behavior. And that’s what I was trying to do with this book. So it’s a denser book. It’s still hopefully got a lightness and a humor to it and a practicality to it. But it tackles a trickier subject, which is: how do you change your behavior when changing your behavior is hard?
We’re recording this now, Mark, in early January, so there’s a whole New Year’s resolution thing that’s just happened. We’ve all had that moment where you go, ‘Here’s my New Year’s resolution. This year for sure I am going to write the book, call my mother, love my kids, go to the gym, eat less bread, eat more vegetables,’ all of that sort of stuff and we keep falling off that train. And this book gets into some of the mechanics around how do you change your behavior when it’s more than just expressing a good intention?
MARK: Great. Before we get into the how-to, because you’ve got some really great ideas on this, I really want to just home in on well, what is the advice trap, and why should I avoid it?
And who we’re speaking to really today is somebody who has got responsibility for leading a team, and with the audience, with this podcast, it will be a creative team of some kind, maybe a creative director but someone who’s got that role to inspire and get the best out of people. And I’m also thinking this is likely to be a highly creative person in their own right because it’s usually the senior creative who gets promoted to be creative director and so on.
What is this advice trap of which you speak?
MICHAEL: The starting point is to say that look, this is not Michael saying never give advice or all advice is bad, because obviously, that’s a ludicrous statement. And if you think that that’s what I’m trying to push here, then we all lose. The problem isn’t advice. The problem is when giving advice becomes your default mode. It is your kind of deep, ingrained way of reacting to most situations. And for most of us, that’s what we have. Somebody starts talking, and even though they’re telling you about a complex situation involving people you don’t really know, in a context you don’t fully understand involving technical specifications that you don’t entirely grasp, after about 10 seconds, you’re like, ‘I think I’ve got some initial ideas of what you should be doing here.’
What kills us is the advice-giving habit, that default response that when somebody starts talking, I tend to jump in and start trying to offer up ideas, suggestions, opinions, solutions, all of that sort of stuff. So that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about how does it shift? How do we shift that habit that doesn’t serve us? And it doesn’t serve us in three different ways. The first is that so often, we are trying to solve the wrong problem because we get seduced into thinking that the first challenge that shows up is the real challenge. And truthfully it almost never is.
And, this is such an important discipline for creatives and leaders of creatives, and secretly in my heart, I’m like, ‘But surely you people, you know not to fall for that old trick of thinking that the first thing is the real thing?’ But the truth is, we all fall for it. We fall for it all the time. So that’s the first of three reasons why advice-giving as a default reaction is not very useful.
Here’s the second reason. Your advice is not nearly as good as you think it is. And part of you knows this because if you think of all the advice you get offered on a regular basis, all the solutions that get presented to you, and how little you think of them and how little you take those up.
Well, the same is true about you. And if you doubt me, there’s 1,000 TED videos on cognitive biases that just show how bad our advice typically is, particularly if we think our advice is actually good most of the time! So that’s the first two. So here you’re merely just wasting people’s time and life, and resources, and energy.
But the third piece goes a little deeper. And it cuts both ways. If you are on the constant end of a stream of advice and a stream of solutions, you are getting a message that you’re not good enough to solve this and fix this by yourself, that you don’t have the chops. And in fact, you’re being trained to be dependent and useless.
So if you’re that leader, you’re actually training people to be overly dependent and less creative and autonomous and self-sufficient than they might be. But there’s a price you pay, if you are the advice-giver all the time. Because put aside for a moment, your disempowering behavior and put aside for a moment that you’re becoming a bottleneck to your own team. That weight you carry, that responsibility of needing to have all the answers, to have the solutions, to save everybody, to save the situation is overwhelming and exhausting and frustrating. So, like I say, advice itself is not bad per se, but having this advice-giving habit, AGH, ‘Advice-Giving Habit’ is what can really drag you down.
MARK: Well, that’s a great summary, Michael of the hidden downside, really, because in the moment, it’s so tempting, isn’t it? particularly if you’re like you or me who habitually come up with brilliant ideas, at least…
[Laughter]
MICHAEL: Of course. Our ideas are brilliant!
MARK: It’s so easy, when you get that rush of enthusiasm and you think, ‘Oh, this is how I would do it.’ And particularly, certainly in my experience, and I’m sure you’ve encountered this too, if you’re dealing with, say a creative director or somebody who has been rewarded and promoted for being the best creative in the room in many points in their career, their ideas generally are pretty good.
But there’s two other things that you’ve really hit on: one, even if your idea is above average and, let’s go with the cognitive bias for a moment, A, you’re still disempowering your team, you’re teaching them, ‘You’re not good enough, and you’re never going to be as good as I am.’
And also, there’s that weight of pressure, which actually doesn’t make anyone any more creative beyond a certain point if everyone’s looking to you all the time. You don’t have to be an egomaniac, I think it helps. I mean we’ve all come across leaders who love to see themselves as the fount of all wisdom and creativity. But even if not, there is a natural temptation to think, ‘My gosh, if I’m responsible for the creative team, I’ve got to help come up with the ideas.’
But what I’m hearing from you is it’s really that you’re there to help the team come up with better ideas, for them to perform better, even if they might do it differently to you.
MICHAEL: Exactly. If you reframe your job, as, ‘My job isn’t to have the great ideas, my job is to make sure that we’re working on the right challenges,’ honestly, trying to figure out what the real challenge is is a much more nuanced, strategic, tricky challenge. And if you’re willing to take that and go, ‘I’m going to make sure that what we’re working on is the stuff that matters.’ That’s a much more powerful leadership stance than to be the person who goes, ‘Look, I can come up with faster, better, or often lots of good ideas.’ That keeps me reliving past glories and disempowers my own team.
I saw Alan Mullaly speak about a year ago. If you don’t know that name, he was the first CEO of Ford that wasn’t somebody of the Ford family. And they resorted to hiring him because, at the time, Ford was in freefall. They were losing, I think it was like, $4 billion a year, maybe it was more than that. It was just a vast amount of money, so vast I can barely get my head around it.
MARK: Yeah. Enough to make them prioritize it!
MICHAEL: Yeah. Enough to go, ‘Look, we’re in crisis here. If we don’t stop the bleeding, we die as a company.’ And Mullaly, when he talks about assuming this leadership position, every week, they’d have their weekly check in and he’d have all of his key direct reports and their direct reports in a room and they’d go through each one of the key drivers of success for Ford. It’s part of their strategic plan.
And it was a simple process. It was like green if things were going well, yellow if you could see some potential flaws coming, and red if things had kind of gone off the rails. And the first time he does it, it’s green across the board. He says nothing. Second time he does it, it’s green across the board. And bear in mind, this is a company that’s losing $1 billion a week. Third time he does it, it’s green across the board. And he’s like, ‘Well, this is curious, because if everything’s going so well, why are things going so badly?’
MARK: I’d hate to see it when they’re going badly!
MICHAEL: And finally, he got to a point where somebody put up something that was orange, or yellow. And he was like, ‘Brilliant.’ And what he didn’t do, which is what people expected him to do, was to leap in and go, ‘And here’s how we’re going to fix this.’
MARK: Yeah.
MICHAEL: And can you imagine, if there’s ever a temptation to try and fix something, it’s when your job is on the line, when your company is losing a trillion dollars. But I heard him say very specifically, he said, ‘Look, what I know is that even if I have the right challenge, I know we’re working on the right thing. Even if I have the very best idea, it doesn’t behoove me as a leader to share that idea because the price I pay for having the right idea, the best idea, is too great for me, is too great from my organization, and too great for my team.’
And I figure this is Alan Mullaly, CEO of an enormous company in a conservative industry, who’s willing to have that discipline. I think that’s the discipline that should kind of echo through all of our organizations and all of our work. So if you’re a senior creative director or something else, it’s a discipline of leadership.
MARK: Isn’t that a great phrase to go away and reflect on, ‘The price I pay for having the best idea in the room.’ It’s the complete opposite of the way you would normally look at it.
MICHAEL: Right, because here’s the thing, and everybody knows this, they just hope it doesn’t somehow apply to them. When the boss has the idea, the oxygen gets sucked out of the room because nobody goes, ‘Yeah, it’s a pretty good idea but we’re not going to do that, Boss.’ Everybody goes, ‘That’s actually a really great idea. I love that idea. I’m writing your idea down, Boss, because I love it so much. You know what, we’re just going to go with that because it’s your idea. It’s amazing. You’re amazing. I’m amazing for working for you.’ And you lose so much.
This isn’t to say that there’s not a place for you having the advice or giving the solution or having the idea. It’s when it becomes your default response. It becomes your advice-giving habit. That’s when the damage gets done. And what I’ve found and what I’ve noticed, and you probably have seen this too, Mark, is that actually, the more you don’t give the idea, the more you realize that you don’t need to give the idea. Success breeds success.
MARK: Great. So tell us more about this, Michael, and maybe if we can think about what can I gain by deliberately not having the best idea in the room or deliberately withholding my idea and creating a space where other people can put forward theirs?
Tell us about how this approach to leadership looks.
MICHAEL: Well, let me ask you. I’m doing my coaching and you see what I’m doing…
MARK: There’s a coach on the podcast and the roles get reversed!
MICHAEL: It’s a nightmare! What do you see as the benefits if you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ve seen this before. I’ve got a killer good idea.’ But rather than me offering up first I’m just going to wait a little bit and ask them, ‘So, hey, what do you see the challenge as? What ideas do you have around this?’
What are the benefits that immediately come to mind for you, Mark?
MARK: Well, in a way this is easy for me because it’s what I choose to do all day is ask questions. But to me what I love is just when a client comes up with the unexpected. When they come up with something that I could never have thought of, and it just makes the whole conversation pop. And it’s empowering and it’s exciting for both of us. Because I do feel that I’ve made some contribution to that by asking the question, by framing the conversation in such a way that we could focus on it. But there’s a real joy for me and this is a big reason why I’m a coach, in just seeing what somebody comes up with when you create the opportunity.
MICHAEL: For me, it’s about going, ‘What’s the bigger game we’re playing here?’ And there’s a short-term game and a longer-term game. The short-term game is getting the solution to the problem at hand and making sure it’s as good as we can make it be. The longer-term plan is building a team of people who are creative and courageous and self-sufficient and autonomous so that you’re surrounded by people who you’re like, ‘These people are better than I am.’ It is terrifying and amazing at the same time. You know that that saying, A people hire A people, B people hire C people. What if you were the person who built A people?
I’ve just been reading Robert Greenleaf’s book Servant Leadership, and it’s 40 years old now and it reads like a book that’s 40 years old. But the concept is so powerful, which is to say, ‘Look, your job as a leader, your primary job as a leader, is to be of service.’ Everybody goes, ‘Yeah, but I think I do that,’ and I’m like, ‘Do you? Do you really?’ And one of the ways of measuring it is like ‘Are people better off after you’ve worked with them?’
And that willingness to say – ‘Look, the bigger game I’m playing here is to make sure that this person gets better, smarter, bolder, more courageous in the work they do. And secondarily, to make sure that we have some great ideas to solve this problem.’ – allows you just to shift the way that you get this to say, ‘Look, I’m not saying I’m not going to contribute my ideas to this conversation, I’m just going to see if I can stay curious a little bit longer.’
In fact, this is the definition that we write about in both the books. And we call it as a definition of coaching, but you don’t even have to call it coaching, just call it some sort of form of leadership, which is: can you stay curious a little bit longer? Can you rush to action and advice-giving a little bit more slowly? And that has built into it a permission to give advice and a permission to get things done. It just says, ‘Can you just wait a bit?’ Not months, not weeks, not days, I would take 180 seconds, quite frankly, if people could stay curious a little bit longer, that would be a perfect start.
MARK: And that little word ‘just’ is doing a lot of work here, isn’t it? Because it can be so tempting to charge in. And maybe this gets to the heart of what you talked about in the book around easy change versus hard change. Because I think probably we’ve established this is a tough thing to do. And most of us do more of it than we should do or even than we’re conscious of doing.
Could you open that up a bit for us?
MICHAEL: I think that’s actually the key insight, which is, more than we’re conscious of doing. Because pretty much everybody who’s listening to this podcast is nodding their head at the moment going, ‘Yeah, well, I agree with this. How come my behavior doesn’t align with what in theory my belief around leadership is?’ And easy change and hard change, this is my language, my translation of a concept I take from a leadership writer called Ron Heifetz. And Heifetz is an academic so their work is always a little shrouded in big words rather than small words. Heifetz gave me anyway the concept of technical change versus adaptive change, which I then rechristened ‘easy change versus hard change.’
Easy change, we’re all really good at. It’s when you go, ‘I need to learn this new thing.’ So you pick up a book, or you hear a podcast, or you watch a video, and you start tinkering and practicing a bit and you get the hang of the basics pretty quickly and then you practice some more and you move from being consciously incompetent to consciously competent, and you’re like, ‘Okay, that’s good. I get it. I’m pretty smart at this.’ So anytime you get a new phone or anytime you learn a new piece of technology or whatever it might be, even anytime you go into a new restaurant, you’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the hang of this.’
And we’re fine at easy change. It happens all the time. Hard change is trickier. Hard change is when the challenge seems somehow impossible for you to grasp. And we’ve all had this, we all have our version of what hard change looks like. It’s, you’ve read all the books, and you’ve watched all the videos, and you’ve gone to the TED talk, and you’ve done all you can, and for some reason, it’s proved elusive, that shift of behavior that you’re looking for as a result of having learned this stuff. And it turns out with hard change, what’s required is not just knowledge, it requires a kind of rewiring of how you think about yourself, how you show up in the world.
The difference, to make it metaphorical, easy change is like downloading an app. You’re like, ‘I need the app,’ you download the app, ‘I’ve got the app.’ Hard change is, ‘I need a new operating system.’ And that just takes a bit more time to get it loaded, get it replacing things, give you the underlying foundation that’s different. And I think and this comes back to your first question, which is like, so why did I write this book, The Advice Trap? It was the recognition that for some people, being more coach-like, in other words, staying curious a little bit longer, was easy change. They’re like, ‘Oh, now I’ve got the seven questions that you talked about in the book. I got it, this is fine. I totally know how to do this now and it’s already changing my life and I love that.’
But there’s a bunch of us who look at the questions and go, ‘I’ve read the book. I get the questions. For some reason I still give advice all the time. Why is that so hard?’ And tackling hard change is what’s at the heart of The Advice Trap book, which is to say, ‘Right. When it requires more than you just learning a few things, what does that involve?’ And then to tackle that, then to wrestle with that.
MARK: What does it involve specifically around advice? If I’m going to hold my hand up and say, ‘Okay, I do do this, I’m aware of it, and I want to change but it’s hard.’
What can I start to do?
MICHAEL: The invitation that I make in the book is to say, you know what, you need to start tackling your Advice Monster. We all have this Advice Monster inside us; as soon as somebody starts talking to you, your Advice Monster kind of looms up out of the dark and goes, ‘Oh, Mark, I’m going to add some value to this conversation. Yes, I am. Here I come!’ And recognizing that you’ve got an Advice Monster, and that you need to tame it is kind of this sideways way into going, ‘This is how I actually get to be curious a little bit longer.’
Part of the way into understanding this is to understand that the behavior you have at the moment, which we are framing as not as productive or as useful as you could be, which is the default giving advice, there are benefits to that behavior. In fact, they’re benefits that have served you really well in the past. So, in this context, when you’re a creative director, it has served you really well to be the person who has the really smart ideas. That’s why you got promoted. That’s why you’ve risen in the hierarchy. That’s why you have that reputation. It has served you well, it is just no longer serving you as well as you might like.
And so part of what getting down to the Advice Monster about is understanding, and this is a phrase that I take from my friend Mark Bowden, who, as an aside, has a wonderful website called Truth Plane. He talks about influence and nonverbal influence a lot. But he says, ‘Look, every choice you make has prizes and punishments.’ And what we’re doing here is we’re looking at the prizes and punishments of your advice-giving and inviting you to say, ‘Which one wins?’
Do you think the prizes you get from being the smart person who has the answer outweigh the punishments which is, ‘I disempower my team, I end up the bottleneck, I end up exhausted, I end up with impossible challenges.’ Because the Advice Monster has three personas. There’s Tell It, there is Save It, there’s Control It.
Tell It, look, you get to be the smart person, you get to have the advice you get to offer the solution, but you disempower people.
Save It, is that sense of, ‘Look, it’s my job to be responsible for everybody, to make sure nobody ever fails.’ So on the one hand you get to position yourself as the superhero and you have your fingers in all these pies. On the other hand, it’s exhausting and overwhelming and you’re forever stopping people from failing. So you’re stopping them from learning and you’re stopping people from growing. And you carry that burden that you can’t let anybody fail which is impossible.
And then Control It, the slipperiest of the three advice monsters is that sense of, ‘Look, the way you succeed is you never lose control. You’ve always got the big picture, you’re always keeping people safe.’ But the price you pay is like trying to protect the world against the future, not letting chaos in, not letting the possibilities in, and that sense of trying to control everything when surely we all know that so much of what we do and how we show up in this world is beyond our control. Beyond even our influence.
So when you get down to it, there’s this messy, difficult, complicated, rich, juicy place to go, ‘I’m trying to tame my Advice Monster. I’m trying to weigh up the prizes and punishments.’ And once I start seeing the price I pay for letting my Advice Monster loose, the opportunity arises to say, ‘Maybe this is how you get to shift your behavior.’
MARK: When you’re talking about, particularly the Control It, and having to let go of control to do something good. It just made me think sideways into other forms of creativity.
Mimi Khalvati my poetry teacher told me one day, ‘The trouble with this poem draft, Mark, is that you knew everything that was in it before you sat down to write it.’ I was like, ‘Ouch! Yes.’
MICHAEL: Part of what I love about this podcast and talking to this audience is, you know this stuff, you know the importance of letting in the input that allows you to have the rich output. If you have an entirely predictable input, your ideas grow predictable and stale and tedious and there’s no edge, there’s no growth, there’s no synchronicity, there’s no serendipity. You’ve got to let in the world to allow creativity to flourish. And you’ve got to figure out what you can let go of and what actually you need to hold on to. So you get that as a creative discipline.
What I’m saying is, it’s not enough just to bring that way of thinking to the brief you have from the client, what you’ve got to do is go, ‘Actually, I need to think about this in terms of how I show up and I lead the people who I lead and influence.’
MARK: Yeah, that’s great, Michael. And also, really, to home in on the dark side of the Advice Monster you have this…
It was a real, I don’t know, aha moment but for me, it really hit me in the solar plexus, when I read in the book, it says, ‘The Advice Monster believes you’re better than the other person.’
MICHAEL: Right. In that moment when your Advice Monster is loose, what you are saying is that other person is not good enough, smart enough, moral enough, experienced enough, fast enough, clever enough, intuitive enough to sort this out. So by the way, you’re just taking it back. So that piece of you one up you, you one down them, it’s a diminishing experience. But it diminishes you too. It doesn’t just say to the other person, ‘You’re not good enough.’ It says you don’t get to use your vulnerability and your empathy and your humility as a leadership tool. You’re using your answers as your armor.
In that moment where you let the Advice Monster loose, and again, just because I know you’ve heard it, but I’m going to say it again, not to say that no advice, it’s not to say never giving advice because there’s a place and a time for advice, it’s the default response, which is what happens when your advice wants to get loose. You diminish yourself and you diminish that other person. You keep both of you stuck in a way of operating that serves neither of you, certainly in the long term.
MARK: Okay, so let’s say that the penny is dropping for me. I’m really starting to see the downside of this for me personally, and creatively as well as for the rest of the team.
Can you give me some practical things that I could focus on changing day in, day out with my team?
MICHAEL: I’m a big believer of trying to set up habits. Because once you get the insight about the price you’re paying, now you get to kind of experiment and see, ‘Wow, let me try some things and see what I could do differently.’ I read this quote, nobody knows where it comes from but it’s a good one, it’s like, ‘You don’t rise to the challenge, you fall to the level of your training.’ And what habits are are just a commitment to a training in a way of behaving.
So I’m going to offer up two specific strategies that might be help for people. The first is to take ownership of the idea that your job is not to be the provider of fast and possibly wrong solutions, but to be the person who’s like, ‘I’m going to make sure that we’re working on the real challenge.’ And I have a very simple four-question script for people.
You go, ‘All right, Mark. Glad to have you here. I hear what you’re working on. Tell me, what do you think the real challenge is here for you?’
And then you’ll come up with an answer. I’ll go, ‘That’s brilliant. I love it. What else is a challenge here for you?’ And then I’ll go, ‘And what else is a challenge here for you?’ And then I’ll go, ‘All right, Mark, I get it. So now that you see all of that, what’s the real challenge here for you?’
And what will happen quickly and powerfully, is the focus of the conversation will shift and you’ll find yourself working on something that is deeper, more useful, that helps the other person learn as well as solves the client’s challenge that they’re facing. So that’s the first piece which is step in and own the position around, ‘Look, the way I’m of best service is to make sure that we’re working on the right thing and I’m going to use what’s the real challenge here for you to do that.’
MARK: And if I can just pop in and just underline the simplicity of the language you’re using here, Michael. ‘And what else?’ Those three words that pepper The Coaching Habit. I’ve bought The Coaching Habit for clients and they’ve come back and said, ’And what else?’ How hard does that work for me every day?!’
MICHAEL: Exactly. It does some heavy lifting, that question, if you choose to use it. And part of what’s brilliant about it is people don’t even hear it. They don’t even really recognize that you’ve asked them a question. What you’re doing is inviting them to stay in the place of curiosity and exploration. It’s a little piece of magic.
MARK: It’s just lubricating the conversation ever so slightly.
MICHAEL: Yeah.
MARK: And repeating that, again, quite simple question, ‘What’s the real challenge for you there?’
MICHAEL: Yeah, you got it.
MARK: And you can ask that again and it sounds different the second time once you’ve unpacked some of the ‘what else?’ stuff, so. Okay, great.
What’s your second strategy, Michael?
MICHAEL: So the second strategy is a self-management tool to help protect against the seduction of somebody coming and going, ‘Hey, Mark, how do I… ?’ Because when that happens, your Advice Monster springs out of the dark going, ‘Look, they’re literally inviting me in here. It would be irresponsible not to give them the answer because they’ve asked for my help. And what are you doing? Are you saying that I shouldn’t be helpful? That sounds wrong.’
I’m not saying don’t be helpful. I am saying: can you slow down the rush to offer up solutions and move to action? And this is how you do it. Somebody comes into your office or pings you an email or whatever it might be and goes, ‘Hey, how do I do the thing?’ You go, ‘Hey, that’s a good question. And I’ve got some ideas on how to do the thing, but before I give you my ideas, and I will give them to you, I’m just curious to know what’s your first idea on how you tackle that?’
And they’ve always got a first idea. They’ve always had some initial thought. Then after they tell you, you go, ‘Brilliant. I love that. That could work. What else could you do?’ You see I’m using the ‘what else?’ question again. And you go, ‘Okay, what else could you do?’ And you go, ‘Great. This is wonderful. Is there anything else you could do here?’ And you go until you feel the creativity moment ebbing. And then if it’s appropriate, and you’ve got something to add, you go, ‘You’ve had great ideas. Let me add an idea or two of my own because I said I would,’ and you can offer up your thoughts or your opinions on it.
What you’re doing is you are not leaving them stuck, you have their back, you make sure that they’re going to go out with the best possible solution. You’re just inviting them to take the first crack at it. Because honestly, half the time they come up with all the ideas that you’re going to come up with anyway, they come up with better ideas than you’re going to come up with, and what it means is when you do add your idea, you’re truly adding value because you’re offering them the idea that they didn’t have. And it’s a reminder that you’re like, ‘I may be old, but I still got some chops here. I still have the ability to think differently around this.’
But this is a habit. I’ve practiced it for years so I’m really good at it now. But the habit, and this comes from the new habit forming from The Coaching Habit, which is like, when somebody says, ‘Hey, Michael, how do I… ?’ Instead of being triggered to start providing answers, I go, ‘Hey, Mark, great question. I’ve got some ideas. I’ll definitely share them with you. But before I give you my ideas, I’m curious to know what’s your first idea? And what else? And what else?’ So I think, Mark, if people take those two tactics away, they will find themselves shifting in terms of how much advice that they give.
MARK: I would really love to hear from any listeners who go away and just experiment with these two specific techniques, if you can come back and let us know how you get on. I think we could get some very interesting stories out of this, Michael.
MICHAEL: I would hope so. The stories that I hear regularly is, ‘Oh, that was easier than I thought.’ And I love that because what I really want is for people to realize that this approach, and we can call it coaching if you want, I tend to call it being more coach-like, it’s simple, but it’s difficult. It’s simple, because, as Mark said, look how simple these questions are. It’s difficult because you are unlearning. You’re doing hard change. But it can pay such dividends because not only does this benefit the person that you’re leading and influencing, it benefits you. You get to work less hard, you get to have more impact in your work and work less hard at the same time.
MARK: Sounds good to me. Michael, you’ve been really good at underlining the fact that you’re not saying giving advice is always a bad idea. And one thing I like about the book is towards the end, you offer some really good advice on how to give good advice.
So maybe we could wrap up by first of all saying when is it okay, when is it helpful to give advice and maybe some tips on how to do it well?
MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, there’s all sorts of times when it’s useful to give advice. And I guess what I’d invite the people listening into this conversation would be to say, okay, so work on the assumption that you shouldn’t lead with your advice and see how that goes. Even if it’s just one question you ask before you offer up your advice. But when the time comes to give advice, do it well. And the tips that I would offer include, first of all, are you sure that you’re offering advice to solve the right the problem? Or is there any chance that you’ve just been seduced into thinking that the first challenge is the real challenge?
Secondly, frame your advice as not necessarily being written in, like, Moses’ two stone tablets with the ten commandments as being absolutely infallible. It’s useful to frame it as, ‘Let me offer up a possibility.’ I do this a lot. I’m like, ‘Look, I might be wrong. This is my first guess. Here’s a stab in the dark. Here’s an idea that might work for you.’ There’s a lot of framing around there. ‘Take the advice, but don’t take it as an order. Don’t take it as, you know, some sort of infallible truth.’
And then the third thing that I’d offer up is check in and go, ‘Was that advice useful or not?’ This is actually again from The Coaching Habit, the learning question at the end of a conversation you go, ‘What was most useful and most valuable about this conversation right now?’ And check in about did that advice land? Did it seem useful? Maybe even check in how it plays out, because that way you get to fine-tune your understanding of which advice you offer up lands and which advice doesn’t land so much.
MARK: Great. Thank you, Michael, this has been a really good deep dive, I think, into one of the biggest pain points of leadership. And I think if you can really drill down into this and we spent a lot of time today on, was it the prizes and punishments and drilling down into the why and the cost-benefit of this, but actually, that’s the hard bit. But as Michael said, a lot of the techniques, once you get that, a lot of the techniques in themselves, they’re not rocket science, it’s just having the discipline.
MICHAEL: But coaching is easy.
MARK: I believe that.
MICHAEL: Really, coaching, I mean, pretty much in The Coaching Habit and then I do a recap in The Advice Trap of, you’ve got seven good questions. And ask them often, you’re going to be a legend. It’s just going, ‘What do you need to do to shift your behavior that you can actually put that into action?’
MARK: Great. Well, that sounds like a really good cue for your Creative Challenge, Michael. So this, obviously, this is a coaching conversation. And like all coaching conversations, and like all interviews on The 21st Century Creative, we end up with a Creative Challenge that my guest sets you the listener, which is something that you can go away and do that will help you get more of the prizes, the benefits of the theme of the interview. And is something that you can do within or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Michael, what challenge do you have for us today?
MICHAEL: I’ve got a two-part challenge. The first is simply start noticing your Advice Monster. Notice how quickly it is triggered when somebody starts telling you stuff. It can be at home with your partner or with your kids, it can be at work with your team, it can be at work with your boss, it can be talking to a client, but just start noticing how quickly you want to leap in and offer up the idea and offer up the solution. So that’s the first part. Because awareness is the start of it all.
If you want to go a little deeper, then the question I have for you is, so of those three different personas, Tell It, or Save It, or Control It, which Advice Monster feels most real to you, most loud to you? Which one is the one that shows up most often in the way that you behave?
Are you trying to be the person who has the answer every time? Are you feeling the weight of, ‘I’m responsible for everybody, I’ve got to save everybody?’ Or are you like, ‘I really just don’t like it when I lose control of a conversation or a situation or a meeting or the perspective of what’s going on.’ What do you think your deeper drive is? And if you’re curious, at theadvicetrap.com, we actually have a questionnaire that is a quick questionnaire. It’s not rigorously, brilliantly scientific, but it will give you a sense of where your bias might be towards which advice monster might be your advice monster. So if you’re curious about checking that out, you can go to theadvicetrap.com.
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you, Michael. I really would invite you to also check out the book, The Advice Trap. If you’ve read The Coaching Habit, then you should need no persuasion to do that. They make a great pair, the two books together. And I think going back on the topic of, earlier on, the question around awareness, I think this is a great book to read, firstly, if you’re aware that you give too much advice as a leader, and probably, secondly, even more so if you really think you don’t do this, then go and have a look at the book!
MICHAEL: Right, exactly! It’s perfect. I love that. Okay, that’s the perfect sales pitch, Mark. Whether you think you do or think you don’t give too much advice, this is the book you’ve been looking for.
MARK: Exactly. Well, feel free to use that in the campaign.
MICHAEL: Thank you.
MARK: Okay. So Michael, where should people go? Theadvicetrap.com, obviously go to the bookshops and get the book.
Anywhere else that they can go online to engage with you and your ideas and get some help for their organization?
MICHAEL: I am coming out of the shadows in social media, so I’m on LinkedIn and I’m starting to post a daily series called, ‘My Best Question.’ There’s a short video mostly around, look, here’s a really good question that you might want to use, and you might want to pick up and add to your repertoire. So you can find me on LinkedIn at Michael Bungay Stanier. You can find me on Instagram @mbs_works, and actually, the overall website is mbs.works. So feel free to check out any of those.
MARK: Great. And as usual, I will make sure these are all in the show notes for you.
MICHAEL: Okay. Thank you, Mark.
MARK: Michael, thank you. As always, it’s been a real pleasure to talk to you. I learn something new every time and I know my listeners do. So thank you so much for being with us today.
MICHAEL: Mark, it’s a pleasure. I do feel, I mean, we’ve known each other for 10, 15 years now, quite a long time. So it’s great to have that connection and have these conversations.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
The 21st Century Illustrator with Krystal Lauk
Aug 17, 2020
Today’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Krystal Lauk, an illustrator who took an unconventional path by creating illustrations for tech companies, and founded a studio that counts Google, Uber, Facebook and The New York Times among its clients.
It’s a fascinating story of discovery and enterprise at what Krystal calls ‘the intersection of delight and clarity through illustration’.
And she gives us a peek behind the curtain at what it takes to land big name clients for a small creative studio. So if that’s one of your ambitions for your business, pay close attention to what Krystal has to say on the subject.
In the first part of the show I share with you something I’ve found myself saying to coaching clients many times over the years, that has helped to relieve a lot of frustration and anxiety on the journey to completing a big creative project: every creative project is a revolving door.
Krystal Lauk
When we think of illustration, probably the first thing that comes to mind is a children’s book – and we have already featured a wonderful children’s book author and illustrator, Nadia Shireen, back in Season 4 of The 21st Century Creative.
But my next guest has found a very different canvas for her work as an illustrator – Krystal Lauk is the founder of Krystal Lauk Studios in San Francisco, and her illustrations can be found on the web pages and apps of Google, Uber, Facebook, Intercom and other tech companies, as well as in publications such as The New York Times and Fast Company.
Her work has been recognised by American Illustration, the Society of Illustrators, and 3×3 magazine.
Operating at what she calls ‘the intersection of delight and clarity through illustration’, she and her team help to communicate complex ideas and brand values in an attractive and engaging way.
For example, they help their tech clients make their products and platforms feel more human and user-friendly – using illustrations to enhance the look and feel of websites, apps, and internal communication systems.
Krystal is really opening up new territory as an illustrator, both creatively and in terms of business opportunities. She’s a great example of taking a traditional artistic skill and applying it in new ways.
So I invited her onto the show to tell us about her journey as an illustrator and creative entrepreneur, from developing her artistic style, through happening upon her first clients in the tech space, and eventually founding her own studio to fulfil her ambitions and serve her clients on a bigger scale.
The result is a fascinating conversation about her journey of discovery, where she explains what illustration can do that other media can’t when it comes to humanising technology.
She also gives us a peek behind the curtain when it comes to landing big-name clients – so if that’s something you would like to do, listen out for Krystal’s advice, and I warn you, it takes a bit of courage!
Whatever your own creative discipline I’m sure you’ll find plenty of food for thought in this conversation with Krystal about carving out an original path as a 21st century illustrator.
MARK: Krystal, when did you get seriously interested in illustration?
KRYSTAL: I think from the very beginning, when I was a kid. I was always really fascinated with children’s books. I was drawing all the time. So I think I just knew from the beginning that this is what I wanted to do. Obviously, there were a lot of twists and turns. At one point, I wanted to do anthropology. At one point, I wanted to be a writer but it always came back to illustration.
MARK: What was it about drawing or painting, specifically illustration, what was it about that form that captured you?
KRYSTAL: I think it was just a really wonderful way to express myself and that it was almost cathartic for me. I think growing up very different from my family, and growing up in a town that I didn’t feel quite welcome in, I guess it was just a way for me to really express myself and delve down into my emotions and my feelings and my journey really.
MARK: You mentioned children’s books, which I think is where most of us first encounter illustrations and where we get captured. There’s a lot of images really, from that age that, to me, are really indelible. But these days, there’s a lot of illustration being used by tech companies, which is where you’ve done a lot of your work.
Why is it big online at the moment?
KRYSTAL: I really think that it’s big online because this is a way to bring humanity, to bring that expression onto the interface. I like to say a while back especially when I got started as a UI, UX designer, everyone was still trying to figure things out. And now that we got the technical aspects of apps and websites down, now there’s a lot of creative freedom. And it’s a really great way for companies to express their brands. And they’re finding illustration to be this amazing tool to really be their voice to express their mission and vision and really capture their users’ interest.
MARK: I find this really intriguing because on the one hand illustration, particularly if we think about children’s books, it’s quite touchy-feely. It’s quite charming. It’s got a sense of innocence and wonder that we associate with it.
And yet on the other hand, there’s an awful lot of business value for companies to get this right and to have their interface to be more engaging than the next company.
KRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really interesting how even a lot of the first tech company illustrations, if you look back at the early Google and even a bit now, is that it does mimic a little bit of that children’s book vibe too. There’s an innocence to it, right? I think that’s because that’s what companies are choosing to be. They want to be this kind of utopian positive light, I guess, to the world, which I think is quite amazing. They’re out to do good, I think, and disrupt and make the world better, at least, I think. There’s a lot of complicated sides to that, but I think illustration puts that face out there.
MARK: It is a complicated situation at the moment, certainly, I think over here on this side of the Atlantic as much as on yours. But to not exactly sidestep that, but maybe if we focus on the potential here, and the opportunity to channel a lot of the idealism, which I’m certainly sure does go into the tech space:
What do you think is the opportunity here to create something great, and also, specifically, what can illustrators bring to the table?
KRYSTAL: Illustrators can really bring delight and really communicate a lot of complex concepts. For example when you think of specifically product illustration, there’s a lot of user flows where it needs to be engaging to the user. But at the same time communicate what they need to do to get on with a certain task, a certain thing that they’re trying to achieve on the app. And so you might come up with these kind of complicated and tangible concepts.
For example, for an onboarding process what does that look like, or a certain kind of product feature? And so, that’s why illustration comes in hand because it really is just this limitless tool where you could really take things in a very metaphorical way, just run with it and create this whole kind of different world out of that.
MARK: You have this lovely phrase on your website, ‘The intersection of delight and clarity, through illustration.’
KRYSTAL: Yeah, and that pretty much boils it down. I think the biggest thing, especially for illustration in tech is that it needs to communicate. And I think, especially for editorial illustration, which runs along a lot of the same things, that’s the biggest thing, and that’s our job, is to communicate. It’s not just a pretty picture. It needs to engage and be clear.
MARK: Coming back to your personal story how did you get started as an illustrator?
KRYSTAL: I grew up in Arizona, and I was going to the state university for painting and English literature, and I think a couple of years in I was like, ‘What am I doing? This is not really going to get me anywhere.’
MARK: Little did you know!
KRYSTAL: Yeah. I knew that I needed go to a big city, do the private art school thing. Of course, my parents were really not down for that and so I had to somehow find a way.
I visited San Francisco a few times, and I just fell in love. And one day when I was in San Francisco, I wandered into the Academy of Art Industry Show and I was like, oh, wow, this is some really great work that the school is putting out. I saw that it was a much cheaper option than some of the schools that I was really, really into such as Art Center. And so I found that okay, maybe this is a way.
So gosh, it took a lot of sacrifice and it took me a long time to get through school just because of financial hardship but I got there. And on my last year of school, I was still trying to figure out okay, what avenue of illustration in the industry do I want to pursue? Down the road, I’ve been interested in children’s books and animation, and editorial illustration, but I couldn’t really put my finger on what is it that I really wanted to do, and my style was suffering because of that.
And then I met this guy who is now my husband and he was in tech and he had a startup and I was like, ‘This is the strangest world.’ I was so intimidated by it. But we started dating and it was fascinating hearing more about his world. A friend of his got me an internship at a digital agency. At the time I was a total analog artist. I did not know a thing about Adobe Suite. I had to learn digital art and UI, UX design, really quickly. And it took off from there. At the agency, I got to learn more about how it is working with clients and about the tech world. And that was my first experience of where it all started.
MARK: And it’s a truism about creativity, isn’t it, that very often, the most interesting things happen where two different worlds come together? And this is certainly an example of that. You were a complete analog artist with your artistic background, and then you’re in this tech space, which is very different.
What was it like making that transition?
KRYSTAL: At the time I was doing mostly painting or pen and ink, and I was doing this really surreal, psychedelic, kind of Gothic art, very different from what I do now. I knew that that wasn’t commercially viable. But something that really inspired me was learning more about graphic design. And it’s not something that I never really dealt in before and I was really intrigued by it. I loved the commercial, almost democratic aspect of graphic design, and I felt that illustration really kind of fit into that, too. It’s something that invites anybody to understand it, whereas fine art sometimes always doesn’t do that.
I think that was the overall vision that I fell in love with, in terms of how to apply my illustration. I set to work finding a lot of digital illustrators that I was inspired by, and started to mold my style into this new world that I was intrigued by. I loved the idea, for example with graphic design of minimalism and keeping things really concise. I love that and it was such a far departure from what I did in the past, so, it was refreshing to me.
And so that took off from there. My final year I started creating this very different work and I started getting a lot of attention. I was able to get a several month-long project with Facebook, right off the bat, off of graduation and shortly after got a project with Uber. And so that was really exciting and just sheer luck as well.
MARK: What was it like when you realized that this was out there and people were seeing your work and clients were valuing it and it was making a difference to these products?
KRYSTAL: It was really exciting because it was a new way of illustration being utilized and I loved that because I always saw the value of illustration. But it was always in this very traditional way and I think a lot of people still view illustration like that. But I think just being such a proponent of illustration and seeing it as this vast, limitless communication tool, it was really exciting to jump on the bandwagon and see how these tech companies are using illustration.
For example, one of my first projects with Uber was to create storyboards to inspire and inform the product design team. So you’re literally just making comic-book style illustrations for how users would use a product and what they might look like. And so that was a really great use case.
MARK: So what you’re talking about there, this isn’t public, customer-facing work, this is actually to help the design team in their process?
KRYSTAL: Yeah. So it’s really interesting. I’ve had my fair share of really cool internal projects as well as consumer-facing projects.
MARK: So it’s really illustration as a tool for prompting and facilitating other people’s creativity?
KRYSTAL: I’ve never thought about it that way but that’s totally true.
MARK: Obviously I’ve not worked on these projects, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of complex information that needs to be made simple and needs to be made well, ideally delightful, but at the very least usable and comprehensible to users.
I can imagine that being a really useful tool to have, in terms of the briefing or the materials that you have to work with as a designer?
KRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely. Not too long ago I created a series of posters for a company’s values. So that was another internal project where it was intended to inspire and motivate employees. I never thought illustration would be a cool use for that but it was. And so it’s fascinating just seeing all these different avenues that illustration can fit into.
MARK: I remember years ago, seeing a blog post by Ben Terrett, who’s a designer here in the UK. He was looking at starting work on the UK government’s online presence, making the government websites more accessible and user friendly. And the analogy he used was, he said, it’s a bit like being asked to design all the road signs in the country because once you lay down that iconic style, then that goes forward. Since we’ve had proper roads here in the UK, as I understand, it’s been essentially that style. So that design team really had a big influence on our everyday lives.
And I guess what he was saying in the digital spaces, it’s like opening up a whole new plane of opportunity there.
KRYSTAL: I love what you said about creating this world because that really is what it is, especially when you’re delving into brand illustration for a company. So that’s a big project that I recently did for a company out here called Thumbtack. I was responsible for creating the illustration style for the brand. And with that, you really have to build a whole, vast world that works together that can apply to everything that they want to communicate within their product or marketing. And so that was a really amazing project.
The process there was to really look into their mission, and their values, and their demographic, and what they’re all about. And what does that look like, when you take those concepts and build it into a visual world? What does it operate on? That was a really, really cool project and very similar to the example that you gave.
MARK: Okay, so you graduated from college, you got these really cool projects right out of the gate, Facebook, Uber, the other startups.
At what point did you form your own business? Were you a freelancer for a while? I know now you’ve got a small agency, but how did that side of things evolve?
KRYSTAL: Straight out of school I was at that digital agency doing UI and UX design for about a couple of years. And shortly after school ended I decided to just make it out on my own, especially having Facebook and Uber under my belt. And so I did it for about a year. I was mostly doing some graphic design work to make ends meet. And then I got an email from a team at Google and they were interested in bringing me on as an illustrator for Google Play. And that was really exciting. And I loved Google from the start. They were like kind of the forerunners in bringing illustration especially the Google Doodles of course. And so I was really excited by that.
I did that for almost two years, I led illustrations for their merchandising campaigns on the Google Play Store. And that was so exciting, because you got to do these illustrations for lots of different countries all around the world. I learned how you needed to be culturally sensitive in your illustrations and different sensibilities. That was really awesome.
But I was wanting to kind of get out of the big bureaucracy of a big company. I was a full-time contract worker there, which wasn’t the greatest set up for me. And so I ventured out on my own. And it was scary at first then I had one client coming out of the door. But within two or three months of just
banging on lots of people’s doors and signaling that hey, I’m open for business everybody, work started flowing in. And a few months in it started to be so good that for a long time, I kind of had this idea that I wanted to someday start an agency.
I had a really good friend who I would talk to this about and we always talked shop. He was like, ‘Well if you ever need a guinea pig, I’m your guy.’ And so I decided to bring him on to my first project and then another, and then another. And then I found a couple more illustrators and brought them on to projects and learned how to art direct. And yeah, it’s been a really cool journey.
MARK: What would you say has been the most challenging aspect of running the business?
KRYSTAL: I think the most challenging aspect is sometimes you do have the droughts, right? It’s an absolute roller coaster of a ride. You will be absolutely swamped with projects and working all the weekends and working 15-hour days, and then there’s nothing. During the times when there’s nothing you start panicking and thinking, oh, my god, this is it. I’m done. But you just have to realize that there’s always ebbs and flows. I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is to calm yourself down, things will happen, trust the universe, just continue putting yourself out there and things will happen.
MARK: I like the way you say, trust the universe and continue putting yourself out there. So we’re not sitting there, saying that you trust and they will come to you.
You are actually reaching out and making this happen, right?
KRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely. A way that I like to think about it is everything can be a spark of opportunity. It’s just the way that you look at it. I go to a lot of networking events. I email lots and lots of people that I’m interested in working with. I follow-up with them, and follow-up with them again. Obviously I’ve been doing podcasts like this. It helps as well. And so like everything worth doing, it just takes work.
I think one of the biggest lessons that I learned is always be signaling. Always be signaling that you’re open for business, that this is what you do, that this is something that you’re really passionate about. People will see that and I think it will intrigue your potential clients that this is your world and this is something that you have this great knowledge about. And signal how you can help them. That’s the biggest thing, it’s a business need.
MARK: How do you signal then?
KRYSTAL: So I think I always reach out to someone, hey, like, let’s grab a coffee. I would love to hear more about your company and how illustration can fit into that. People really respect that, just a chance to sit down and brainstorm and just make a conversation out of it.
MARK: So it’s very much about direct outreach for you a lot of the time.
KRYSTAL: All in all this is a people business. It’s all about your reputation, and it’s all about the connections that you make. I love getting really, really involved with the illustration community here, and reaching out to as many people in the tech industry as well and kind of bridging that gap.
MARK: I’m imagining somebody listening to this conversation and being really excited and inspired by the opportunity, whether they’re an illustrator or a different type of creative, the opportunity to build something very special and original – and business-wise, rewarding. And then maybe their heart sinks when they hear you saying: ‘You’ve got to reach out. You’ve got to send that email to a stranger.’
What would you say to somebody who’s feeling a bit nervous about doing that and thinking, ‘Do I really have to do that?’
KRYSTAL: Well, yes, you really have to do that! I think, all in all, it is all about balancing that entrepreneurial spirit with your creative side. And a lot of times I get it, I’m an introvert at heart that’s had to learn to be an extrovert for my business to get the work that I love. And so it just takes that little kind of ounce of courage. And why not? Just do it and just be thoughtful, just be human, just be yourself.
Remember that these are people too who are hiring people like you because they need to fill a business need. And I think the more that you separate out that from this passion that is the center of your soul and also know that it has this other aspect of being a business it will allow you to do more things like outreach.
MARK: I love the way you say that you’re an introvert who’s learned to be more of an extrovert. Because I’m absolutely an introvert on any kind of scale that you would care to mention, on top of that, I’m a poet and even worse than that I’m British. And so what I say to clients sometimes is, ‘Well, look, if I can do this, then you can do it.’ There are some people who are quite happy doing it. But a lot of creatives are introverted because we gravitate to doing things that take a lot of solitary concentration to get it done.
KRYSTAL: Yeah, absolutely.
MARK: But you could be the opposite and you could be great at reaching out and partying and networking, but actually find it hard to sit at the desk, so nobody gets a free ride.
KRYSTAL: Exactly. And you have to keep that introverted part of yourself. As you said, it would be hard to sit at the desk all day and really delve in and focus and get in the zone if you’re just extroverted all the time. So there’s a time to be introverted and observe and be in that world but then you have to step out of it and put on another hat and do the business side and outreach side as well.
MARK: How do you manage that transition or those two roles so that they don’t interfere with each other?
KRYSTAL: It’s difficult. Sometimes they do and it takes a little bit of discipline, to be honest. I think just knowing how to manage your time. A great thing for me is to set aside specific amounts of time that I’ll commit to outreach. And you almost get into a particular kind of zone when you do that. And then if you have a whole day where you don’t have any meetings, you don’t have any events, or you don’t have any times when you’re talking to strangers on a podcast, then that’s your time to sit down and be your introverted itself and really delve in, get into that yummy kind of zone time.
MARK: I really like that idea that you can get into the outreach just as much as you can maybe get into flow when you’re doing a piece of illustration. I think it’s David Allen, who said somewhere, ‘If you batch all your most difficult phone calls, then you don’t have to work yourself up to make the call every time.’ You work yourself up to do the first one and then you do that. And then you do the next one and the next one, and the next one, while you’re in uncomfortable phone conversation mode and then you’ve blitzed through it.
KRYSTAL: Exactly.
MARK: And you’ve got the rest of your day or the rest of your week even to get back to doing the things you enjoy the most.
KRYSTAL: Exactly. I think that’s the hardest thing about business, and building your own business, running your own business is not so much oh, how to fill out W9s or whatever or budgeting or what have you. It’s actually the psychological part of it and the hat switching that’s going on. It just takes work. It just takes discipline.
MARK: Yeah, a bit like the artistic side of things. Because if it was not emotionally demanding to sit there and produce brilliant illustrations or learn the skill, or to write a book, or whatever, a lot more people would be doing it. And it’s the same on the business side, that very often the emotional… what Seth Godin calls the ‘emotional labor’ is the hardest bit.
KRYSTAL: Yeah, exactly. Oh, I love Seth Godin. Yeah, he really inspired me into this world as well.
MARK: And he can turn a phrase too.
KRYSTAL: Yes.
MARK: So, we’ve talked about some of the really hard things, the roller coaster of feast and famine, to mash up the metaphors a bit, the fear of reaching out, overcoming introversion and so on.
Tell us a bit about what makes it really worthwhile when you’re your own boss and you’ve got your own company, and you’re doing the work you love to do?
KRYSTAL: To expand on the metaphors, just the whole rock gathering moss bit is so fulfilling and so gratifying. When you’re starting out so small, like I said, a couple of years ago, starting off with one client, and then building that up, building it up more, and then having these clients that come to you over and over and over again, that’s the most like gratifying thing. But like, oh, I did a good job and they trust me, and they respect me. And that’s just the best. It’s just something that you have control over. What you put into it is what you get.
And so that’s something that I love. And you never know what’s going to come into your inbox. It’s always an amazing surprise. I obviously loved the security of a full-time job, but there’s something just so exciting about like, not quite knowing what the upcoming months are going to hold for you, what clients are going to come through your door, what exciting projects you’re going to get. There’s so much variety and so much to learn too. With every company that I take on that’s vastly different, you’re learning about what they do, what they’re trying to do for the world, and what they need, and sometimes it requires a different style, a different way of thinking. And so that’s the most exciting part is just the variety and growth.
MARK: I guess this is, if you like, the opportunity dividend that you get paid. If you reach out and you put yourself out there at some point, word gets around, people notice what you’re doing and then they start coming to you. And as you say, you wake up and there’s a nice email in your inbox with an opportunity you would never have thought of.
KRYSTAL: I think the most gratifying thing is when an email starts with, ‘So and so referred me to you.’ Yes, that’s the best.
MARK: Okay, so staying with the tech world for a moment, because this is something we were talking about earlier on before we started the call, is I think there’s a lot of good effort going in to encourage women to get more involved in tech particularly on the coding side, the technical side of things.
What’s it like, as far as illustrators are concerned? How’s the gender balance there?
KRYSTAL: I think the gentlemen from my point of view, when I think about the community of illustrators that I have here, I think that it feels equal parts, men and women. I think a lot of the sensibilities might be a little bit more male-oriented. But all in all, I think it feels okay for me. I see a lot of amazing effort and I see a lot of women empowered art being done by women as well. That’s really inspiring, really cool.
I’m part of a co-working space here called The Wing. They have locations all over the world really. And so, I think that’s a really great way to kind of get into the female community and see what a lot of women are doing and how they’re leading and that’s always really inspiring.
MARK: Obviously a lot of the users are going to be female so it makes sense to have that diversity represented in the teams that are actually creating the product in the first place.
KRYSTAL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think of the projects that I’ve been a part of, for example, going back to Thumbtack, and considering color palettes, for example, you have to be very mindful of what you’re saying with the most subtle of things. It was like, okay, let’s not use too much of that purple. That feels a little bit more feminine. Let’s not use too much of that blue. That feels a little bit more masculine. What’s that balance so you can kind of appeal to as many people, as many different demographics as you can?
So, all of that needs to be put into consideration, the diversity of your characters, for example, is so huge, making sure that you represent everyone.
MARK: Again, a lot of these platforms are going to be rolled out worldwide so you’ve got a lot of different cultures that you’ve got a touchpoint with.
KRYSTAL: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But that’s what’s so fascinating about illustration is that you could fit in all those people in different inventive and creative ways.
MARK: Okay, so coming back to our imaginary – but hopefully not imaginary! – listener, there are quite a few people listening to this who may be thinking, ‘That sounds like a really exciting path that Krystal has carved out. I would love to follow that.’ And of course, there’s going to be all the doubts and yes, buts in their mind.
If somebody is in that position, and they could be an illustrator, they could be a different kind of creative, when you look back, what is there that you would like to share with somebody that maybe you wish you’d known when you set out?
KRYSTAL: I think one of the biggest things is, going back to the outreach thing, I think something that I would say to myself all the time that helped, and I mean, this is a little like nerdy because it’s just a Nike saying, but just do it. You can always see a pathway to getting what you need and what you want. And just do it. Just take the first step.
I think another thing is this can be a very isolating career. A lot of the times you’re very much alone and finding your community is so, so important. And that’s been major for me, to be able to find a really great network of other illustrators. I have a lot of illustrator friends who are more in editorial or they’re more in concept art, but there’s a lot of similarities within the industries that you could talk about and relate to, and that helps so much. And so I would find that pronto.
MARK: Yeah, I think that’s really important because it’s so easy when you’re at home, in your own studio, or office, or whatever to feel that because I’m struggling, there must be something wrong with me. How come I haven’t figured this out? And then you go along, and you meet people who do the same thing. And very often you find oh, they’ve all got the same challenge. It must be an occupational hazard.
KRYSTAL: Exactly.
MARK: If I’m in a room full of poets, I can have conversations with them and find commonalities with them I wouldn’t find anywhere else, or the same with coaches or podcasters, or whatever.
KRYSTAL: Exactly. I think another thing is to just be authentic. I know that’s kind of what everybody is saying now but there is a lot of truth to that. I think when I was first starting out, I’m being paralyzed by writing these emails or approaching someone. I would just be so scared like ‘Oh, what’s the perfect thing to say, and what’s the…’ And sometimes it’s just recognizing that people are humans. And I think that’s what I’m learning with social media too is that transparency will actually take you a long way. Not the kind of transparency where you’re making someone carry your burden. That’s not what I mean. But being more just yourself and not being afraid to be quirky or share ideas, be you.
MARK: Circling back to what we were saying earlier on about different worlds coming together, I get a real sense that your quirkiness, your difference from your clients’ worlds is actually really key to the value that you deliver for them, that you are outside of the tech mindset and you can look at things maybe from more of the user end.
KRYSTAL: Yeah, especially you’re in the business of creating an emotion, and expression and so you have to, you have to show that side of yourself. And that’s actually the most intriguing part even though it’s kind of the most challenging and vulnerable place, right?
MARK: Yeah, because if you don’t feel it they won’t feel it.
KRYSTAL: Exactly.
MARK: Okay, so talking of next steps and reaching out, I think this would be a good time Krystal, for you to share your Creative Challenge with the listeners. So if this is the first time you’ve heard this show, this is the point of the interview where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a creative challenge. This is something that you can do or get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation and that will stretch you creatively, professionally, and very likely personally as well.
Krystal, what’s your Challenge?
KRYSTAL: My challenge is you have that client in your mind that you would really, really love to work for. For example, mine was The New York Times. I’ve heralded The New York Times so much. I really, really wanted to do a project with them. And so for my example, I booked a trip to New York and I emailed as many art directors as possible at The New York Times and some other publications and just wrote, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you guys. Here is my portfolio. I actually will be in New York this week. Let me know if we can set up a time to meet for coffee.’
I reached out to enough people, and I got a response and got to meet with an art director at The New York Times and a couple of months later got a project from them. So I inspire you to kind of do the same. Maybe not take a trip to New York but just email that client that you’ve been paralyzed about. Just being you, just write a thoughtful email, show your portfolio and why you want to work with them.
And if you don’t hear back from them in a couple of weeks, follow up because that’s kind of the secret sauce as well is following up. And yeah, that’s it. I hope it works out and good luck.
MARK: I love this Krystal because from the outside someone could see you in The New York Times and think ‘Oh, it must be nice for her. I wish I could be in The New York Times.’ But this is the bit that we don’t see, isn’t it? This is the nerve-wracking bit or the boring bit where you’ve already emailed maybe half a dozen art directors and not heard any response and you think ‘Oh, well maybe I won’t send anymore.’ But actually, if you persist and if you follow up, like you say, you only need one person to say yes and have coffee and come up with a commission and something magical has happened.
KRYSTAL: And that is the keyword actually is persistence. That is I think 60% of this job is being persistent and reaching out to that potential client, following-up a couple of weeks later. A couple of months later follow-up with new work. And then a couple of months later after that, follow up with more work and more work, and just keep emailing until you get a response.
MARK: I can feel the fear down the pipes from iTunes, people listening to this and thinking…!
KRYSTAL: Yeah, and I was wasn’t without fear.
MARK: Well that’s great but you’re doing it anyway, right? Could you say a little bit about how to make an email that’s going to connect with them, because everyone’s fear I know is going to be ‘Well, I don’t want to be annoying, I don’t want to be spammy…’
How do you craft an email that is more likely to get their attention and get a response?
KRYSTAL: First of all, it needs to be concise. Nobody is going to read two paragraphs of what you want to say. So you need to be concise. You also need to be very personal because the reality is that a lot of these people get spam emails from different agents or what have you.
So, a way that I like to do it is, ‘Hey, I really loved that illustration that you commissioned for this one article,’ or something like that. Do a little bit of research before so you know what to write.
Obviously, tell them what you are about in a nice, concise sentence. For me, it’s I specialize in brand marketing and product illustration. And obviously a link to your portfolio, a couple of images that relate to what they do always helps. And that’s it. And just be personable.
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you, Krystal. That’s a great challenge and a really enlightening interview.
So if somebody is listening to this and they would like to know more about you and your work, where should they go online?
KRYSTAL: Just to my website, krystallauk.com or you could really find me on Twitter, or Instagram, just with the same handle, just my name Krystal Lauk.
MARK: And that’s Krystal with a K and L-A-U-K is Lauk. And obviously, as usual, we’ll put all the notes in the show notes for this episode. Krystal, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this and I know my listeners will enjoy it too.
KRYSTAL: Well, thank you so much for the honor.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
So if you are contemplating writing a book – whether it’s your first one or your twenty-first – there is a lot of insight for you in today’s interview.
Even if you’re already a published author, there is plenty of advice and wisdom between its covers. I’ve written 5 books myself and I found myself stopping and making notes as I read through it, of insights that should make writing my next book easier.
And even if you’re not a writer, when I listened back to the interview I realised a lot of the advice applied to pretty well any kind of self-started creative project that involves a lot of dedicated practice. So whatever your creative discipline, I think you’ll find Cynthia’s story and what she has to say about creativity inspiring.
In the first part of the show I share with you a recent experience I had with my language studies, that reminded me of an important principle about creative work – you have to be bad to get good.
The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book is for ‘busy women immersed in running businesses, building careers and caring for loved ones’, so she doesn’t just help you with how to write a book – she also addresses the big challenge of how to find time to write the book, in the midst of everything else in your life.
The book is based on many years of writing and helping others to write – Cynthia has written 8 books herself, including a novel. And she has been coaching writers, artists and entrepreneurs since 1999. So there’s a lot of accumulated wisdom between its covers.
Cynthia and I met virtually on the internet years ago and recognised we were on a similar path professionally. We’ve occasionally collaborated on audio recordings together, and we got to meet in person a few years back when I was coaching delegates at the 99U conference in New York.
She’s someone who really gets creatives and their motivations, and I always come away from our conversations with fresh enthusiasm for writing and creating.
When she sent me a copy of this book I asked if she would come on the show and share some of its insights with you – because I know there are a lot of writers and aspiring authors in the 21st Century Creative audience.
The result is a great interview in which Cynthia talks about writing a book as a relationship, and as a dialogue or a conversation with your deeper, wiser self. She also introduces us to a surprising way to counterbalance the influence of your Inner Critic.
Towards the end of the conversation, she shares some some great ideas on how to prepare for the launch and marketing of your book while you’re actually writing it, without adding to your workload.
Whether this is your first time writing a book, or whether you’ve written a few and you would like the next one to be easier than the last one, you’ll find plenty to inspire and encourage you in this conversation with Cynthia Morris.
Cynthia Morris interview transcript
MARK: Cynthia, what was it like when you wrote your first book?
CYNTHIA: I wrote my first book back in… I think I was writing it in 2002, and it came out in 2003. And it was called Create Your Writer’s Life: A Guide to Writing with Joy and Ease. And I didn’t think I could write a book because as a coach all of our… the main thing that I was trained with is asking powerful questions, good inquiries that help people discover their own wisdom and their own way of doing things. And so I was like, ‘Well, that’s the whole basis of my experience. How can I write a book of just questions? That’s going to be really boring.’ And then I realized, ‘Well, actually I do know something.’
What I did was I went through all of my client notes that I had been taking over the years from clients or sample client sessions, and I started noticing patterns. I noticed things that people would say. In common often they would repeat the same things, even using the same words. And then I looked at the homework I gave people. What were the common challenges that people face when writing and what were my hopefully unique and useful solutions for them. So that’s what I did to make that first book.
I think of that book, the Create Your Writer’s Life as a book about how to fit writing into your life. It’s addressing a lot of the things that you don’t hear about in writing workshops or other places like how to deal with the emotional labor that goes along with writing the inner challenges as well as the outer obstacles.
I’ve discovered over the years that time management and setting up your writing life is really only a small part of it. It might be 30%. The rest of it is: how do you manage your own thoughts and opinions and fears and beliefs about the writing? That’s what that book is and that’s pretty much what most of my work is about.
MARK: What challenges did you encounter when you were writing the book? And also what discoveries did you make about yourself?
CYNTHIA: Writing a book is hard! It’s not an easy thing. The way I think of it is it’s really challenging to hold a whole book in your head. Organizing the material was really challenging and what to put in and where to put it and how to include it. And I’d be in the bathtub and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I have to remember to mention that.’ And then I’d go and write that and then realize I’d already written it. So having a sense of organization is a challenge.
And then I remember one day thinking, ‘How do I structure this and how do I organize this?’ There’s just something like clever way I can do it like calling them stepping stones or something. And then I realized, ‘Oh, chapters! Chapters exist for a reason.’ Like, I don’t have to invent anything. I can just call it chapter one and chapter two. So those are some of the challenges.
I think the biggest challenge was really how to organize it. And then the first version was an ebook and how to get it online. This was before PayPal. This was before the ease of selling things online. I had to apply for a merchant account. I had to submit documentation. I had to prove that I actually had something to sell and I wasn’t some charlatan. That was really daunting and very difficult. And then the following year, I decided to make it into a print book. And so I had to go through the process of hiring a designer to design the interior of the book and the cover. Those are some of the challenges.
And what I learned about myself… so when I say it’s really difficult to write a book, it’s also incredibly empowering to actually finish something and to have your ideas and your thoughts. You know this feeling. To have it in a form that people can take and read and pass around and use and benefit from. That’s really empowering. And once you do one, you can do more. You know how to do it, you know yourself, and you have that confidence like, ‘Oh, I did it. I actually pulled it across the finish line. I can do others.’
MARK: I think that really resonates with my experience. I think all the way through the first one, it was like maybe what it must feel like when somebody runs a marathon for the first time there’s that, ‘But can I really get to the finish line?’ feeling about the whole thing. When you do, then it’s a huge boost to your confidence. And, of course, well, you know, ‘Oh, I can do this again.’
CYNTHIA: Yeah. I think you’re right. That is really the prevailing question that most of us have when writing a book is, ‘Can I do it?’ Or doing anything, pulling off any project, launching a podcast or a program or anything is, ‘Can I do it?’ And so often we feel that as a kind of an insecurity jab. It’s like, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do it.’ And the inner critic is like, ‘Well, I don’t know if you can do it either. You better be able to pull this off. I don’t know. You’ve never done anything like this.’
What I’ve learned to do with the other books that I’ve written, the novel in particular, is to turn that into a sense of curiosity and to really tap into my value of curiosity. Can I do it? I don’t know. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. Let me see what happens… I think you can often turn things into a positive that way where it seems like it’s about insecurity, but you can turn it into maybe curiosity or something else.
MARK: Yeah. That’s really nice, isn’t it? If the flip side is, ‘Can I really do this?’ Well, you could say, ‘Can I really do this?’ You could say that in a very doubtful, fearful way, but see, you could say in a curious way.
CYNTHIA: Yeah. And then I don’t know. Let’s see.
MARK: Yeah. That’s good. I know how we can find out. The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book is your eighth book. Is that right?
CYNTHIA: Yes.
MARK: I’m sure you have different motivations for different books.
What was your big Why for writing this particular book?
CYNTHIA: I have been working with people to help them write for 20 years. This is my 20 year anniversary, and I’d be working with clients, and we would be talking about one of the challenges they had. And then I would say, ‘What about this? Or here’s a way you can look at this or try this.’ And they would try it and they would have such a profound experience of complete transformation of the way they thought about something or did something that really helped them move along.
And I just was like, ‘More people should know this. I see the value this is providing for the handful of clients I’m working with. Why not have these for more people?’ So, that was a big motivator just to have more people have access to this and simple ways to do it to make something that’s very complex a simple process.
The other thing is I led a year-long group coaching program called The Atelier. And in that program, everybody gets to focus on one project throughout the year. And the point of that is to stay with it even when it gets difficult when you want to do something easier go back to the beginning. And I act as a participant as well. So I have to choose a project to work on as well.
Last year, I had to choose a project, and it was between this book and another book that I wanted to write. And at the last minute, I switched to this one because I felt like it was more connected to the work I do in my business and what I want for people. Last year, I wrote the whole thing, and then this year, the project was to publish it – it came out in spring – and then promote it. And that’s been great because… I don’t know about you, but promoting things is not my favorite thing. I just tend to move on to the next thing right away. It’s been so great to be in this group as a participant having to stay with it, modeling how like, ‘I’m kind of done with this or I don’t feel like it or I don’t want show up, but I’m staying with it anyway.’ It was a container for writing this book and a reason to stay with it.
MARK: Why did you write the book for ‘the busy woman’?
CYNTHIA: I wrote it for the people that come to me for coaching to get help writing books, and it’s mostly women. It’s probably 80% women who are professional women who have a book that they want to write that’s going to get their message out to the world. So I wrote it for the people that I know well. I know these people very well. I know their challenges. I know the kind of things they’re going to bump up against.
And it’s like any business or product that you create. You start with the person you’re making it for and what is the problem you want to solve. The problem that I wanted to solve with this book is people who want to write a book, it’s not just for work. It’s not just a good idea. The people I work with usually have writing a book on their bucket list. They really want to be a writer or get a book out there.
So, it solves that problem of how to get started because that’s the thing no one really knows like, ‘I don’t know where to start.’ Solving that problem and then solving the problem of, ‘How do I do this in a busy schedule?’ People are incredibly busy. They don’t know how to fit it into their lives. So, I wrote it in a way that makes it hopefully easy to get it into your life even when you’re very busy, so short chapters, short exercises that get them right into the writing. There are no case studies or stories in this book. I don’t really want anyone sitting around reading it. I want people to read it and go.
And then in terms of women, I believe we need more balance of women in power and more balance of women’s voices in the world. And when women write a book, they gain so much confidence, so claiming your power, claiming your confidence, claiming your contribution to the world to helping solve the problems that we’re seeing now. I’m a real stake for women to claim their voice and claim their power. It’s also perfectly useful for men too. The men that I’ve given this to and have been reading it, they’re like, ‘This works for me as well.’
And the other thing to throw in there that’s really surprised me is that I’m hearing that people are using this to write things other than books, like a client is working on her Patreon. And she’s using it to write posts for Patreon. And another client says she’s carrying it around because it encourages her to write her articles for her blog. So, I’m loving that it’s not really just about writing a book. It’s not really just for women. It’s actually useful as a tool for writers of all genres and all genders.
MARK: Just to share a couple of things from my own experience. The book arrived, and I think I told you this. Within five minutes of me opening the parcel from you, my wife Mami, who’s writing her first book, looked at it and said, ‘It’s for me!’ And she grabbed it and disappeared with it and devoured it. And she loves it. She said it really felt like you were writing with her in mind in her particular situation and challenge and dreams in mind. So I can confirm it works for the target reader!
And on the other hand, when I did eventually get the copy back and I read it myself… I’m a guy who probably people can hear, and I got a huge amount out of it too. I think there is some great stuff where you talk about maybe there are particular challenges that women might have in terms of life situation and so on. I would say it was pretty well applicable across the board.
So, gentlemen, if you are dreaming of writing a book and dreaming rather than writing, then I thoroughly recommend that you check out Cynthia’s book.
CYNTHIA: Thank you for that. As I was coming out with it, there’s a lot about gender and non-binary. So, I felt very nervous at one point of like, ‘Oh, no, have I messed up? Is this wrong to target a specific kind of person? It should be inclusive. It should be for everybody.’ And it is inclusive. It is for everybody. I don’t intend to exclude anybody. But the feeling that your wife felt when she saw it, ‘This is for me!’ I want that feeling. I want people to feel recognized and heard and gotten and spoken to. And that is I think a powerful thing.
And one of the things that’s really important when you’re writing a book that you know who it’s for that it’s directed toward a reader. One of my clients had several different audiences in mind. She wrote a first draft, and it was kind of for all of them. It was all over the place, and she felt it right away when she was reading it afterward. And I noticed right away. You really want to be meeting your reader, meeting that person, identifying their problems and helping them solve it. It will be such a more powerful book and help them much more quickly when you can do that.
MARK: One more question about the readership before we plunge into the book itself.
When you wrote this book did you have fiction writers primarily in mind, or were you thinking of non-fiction writers as well?
CYNTHIA: I think that this book can apply to fiction writers as well. It is definitely geared toward a nonfiction book and in general a book that’s related to your work. But I think there are some pieces in here about mindset and having a writing practice, developing your prompts using free writing. Let’s say at least half of the book I think can apply to fiction, and I’ve got clients who are writing novels who have said that they’re using this book. So, I think it is for that. It’s not geared toward plot or character development or things like that. I do recommend a couple of books in the book that are related to writing novels.
MARK: Yeah. Obviously that 50% is also relevant to poets. In the final stages of finishing my own first collection of poetry, I would say a lot of the same principles apply as well.
CYNTHIA: Great. That’s great to know.
MARK: Let’s delve into some of the insights from the book. We’ve established the why. In terms of the world, your chapter titles where you can skim through, and this is my first way into the book, was to skim through the chapters and home in on the ones that really spoke to me, to begin with.
One that you have very early on, which I think is quite intriguing, is ‘Commit to a monogamous relationship with your book.’ What do you mean by that?
CYNTHIA: That’s a great question, and this also speaks to the way women are either… whether we’re naturally or inculturated this way, we’re very relationship-oriented. It’s very hard to say ‘no’ to people in our lives. We feel guilty if we’re taking time for ourselves. So, I thought if I frame this as another relationship versus an obligation or to do and how do you have a good relationship with it. How do you commit to writing and having writing dates and not standing yourself or your book up?
When I present this perspective to people, they love it like, ‘Oh, yeah, I get that. I get that feeling of being in relationships.’ So, how do you make it a lively relationship, a fun relationship, an engaging relationship, one that both you feed and feeds you versus here’s this to-do list, to-do-item on my list that I have to do or I’ve got to struggle with figuring it out?
The other thing about writing a book, Mark, and you probably have experienced this, is the book has a life of its own. Every single person I’ve ever known or ever worked with, myself included, has this experience where they think, ‘I’m the expert or I’m the person in the know. I’m the dictator. I’m going to dictate this book or make it happen.’
And then the book has its own influence, either the way it wants to be told, the structure of it, what it needs to be. It changes from what it is in our mind. So, you kind of have to meet the book or meet the project and see what’s there versus, ‘I’m in charge. I’m controlling this whole thing.’ And especially once we can let go of that control, the process becomes a lot more dynamic and interesting and fun. It’s like, ‘Okay. What’s the book? What is going to come out today? What’s it going to be like now?’
MARK: Which is for me, the real attraction of writing, because if you knew it already, it wouldn’t be worth sitting down and discovering it. I mean, when we had my poetry teacher, Mimi Khalvati, on a few seasons ago, we ended up calling the interview Poetry as Discovery because she kept using that word to describe how she writes. She says, ‘I write to discover what I think or what I feel or maybe what I don’t feel about the subject.’ I absolutely agree, everything that I’ve written, certainly every book – my phrase is once you’re ‘inside the book’, then you start to discover things everywhere. You can be out walking and you notice something that gives you an idea or you have a conversation or you read something else. It’s got to have that life.
That’s the really fun part is discovering what that book’s all about.
CYNTHIA: Yeah. And if you think of it as a dialogue or a conversation, I think it’s much more dynamic and interesting versus, ‘I’m just writing what my expert self knows.’ That can feel like a lot of pressure.
MARK: Yeah. And talking of pressure, and also you were talking about the Inner Critic earlier on. I love the fact that you have matched against the Inner Critic or balancing it, you have the Inner Champion, which I’ve not come across before.
Tell us about the Inner Champion.
CYNTHIA: This is another thing that has emerged from the writing. I use free writing as the technique to write everything. So, that’s what I talk about in the book. It’s what I teach in my workshops. It’s what I use to write everything where you just set a timer, choose a prompt that’s based on what you want to write and just go and write freely without editing or stopping yourself. So, free writing can be used to write your material. It also can be used as a reflection tool or to process what’s going on inside you.
If you’re feeling insecure or afraid or anxious unable to write, you can often just write out what the Inner Critic is saying. Just get it out. Like, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Someone’s already written this. This isn’t going to be good enough.’ What happens when you’re writing like that is it doesn’t take long before the Inner Champion emerges and says, ‘Well, but you do know what you’re talking about. And we don’t know if it’s going to be good or not. You just got to try and see.’
It’s crazy how in our minds this Inner Critic just runs rampant, but the minute you sit down and give it the microphone or give it some space to express itself, it just runs out of steam. It doesn’t really have two legs to stand on. And the Inner Champion emerges to say, ‘You know what? You actually are valid and worthy or whatever your fears are.’
I’ve seen that happen again and again with myself and other people. So I was like, ‘Well, let’s bring this out as a character. We know that Inner Critic voice very well. Let’s bring out this Inner Champion and actually bring her or him onto the team.’ So it’s that part of you that knows you can do it. It’s that encouraging part.
It’s a part of you that if you were talking to a friend or your child and I always refer to if you’re a parent, you’ve got a lot of great skills for writing or creating or doing creative projects because you’re parenting in a way that’s kind and compassionate and encouraging. So you already know that part of you. You just need to turn that voice and that part of you onto yourself and your project.
MARK: Give yourself the benefit.
CYNTHIA: Yes.
MARK: You also in the book, I love the phrase you use, ‘the immediate benefits of writing.’ That was one of the chapters I read first because a book particularly is a long-term project. It can feel like, ‘Well, if I slug away, if I suffer for X number of months, then I’ll have something eventually to show the world, and that will be my reward and benefit.’
Tell me what are the immediate benefits.
CYNTHIA: That’s so important because it is a long haul, and it’s a thankless job, and it can take years. It took me 12 years to write my novel, and I know that a lot of times we’ll let our friends know that we’re writing. And they’ll be like, ‘Still working on that book?’ Yes. It’s taking forever. It just takes a lot of time.
In order to buoy ourselves along and give ourselves some more fuel for the journey, I invite people to really recognize how it feels to do the work. And some days it’s frustrating. Some days you hate it. Some days you want to give up. But at the end of the day, doing it is satisfying because you’re showing up for yourself. You’re honoring that commitment that you made to do the work.
Speaking for myself, I feel very much in integrity when I’m doing what I said I would do. And that’s really important to me. That’s another one of my values, integrity, doing what I say I’ll do, even to myself. So, there’s a lot of satisfaction in that.
And I’ve also noticed after I write, I feel really alive. I feel energized. I feel sexy. I feel my vitality. And that feels great and that spreads out into the rest of my life. Even if I’m not finishing the book today or finishing an article today, I’ve committed to it. I’ve danced with the muse, so to speak. I’ve given that part of me space, and I feel my vitality. I want that for everybody. Even if it’s like, ‘Oh, today was a slog,’ I still feel like I showed up for it.
I don’t think I wrote about this in the book, but this goes along with procrastination. I’m not a procrastinator because I can’t bear the pain of the anxiety of having something sitting there that I have to do. So, it’s not that I’m so on top of it and need getting things done early. I can’t stand the pain of the anxiety of knowing I have to do it. So, the people who are procrastinators are like, ‘Kudos to you because you can bear the anxiety of that over time.’ That’s also one of the benefits that you can glean immediately is like, ‘Oh, I’m not putting this off.’ It’s not sitting there in that space of, ‘Oh, someday I’ll do this.’ The power that you get, the confidence that you glean from doing it now feels way better to me than the anxiety of not doing it.
MARK: This is definitely one of the reasons I like to write early. I like to write in the morning. I’ve got the kind of the afterglow when you’ve been working out. It feeds into the rest of my day. So I feel like, ‘Well, I’ve done my thing. I’m plugged in. I’m energized now.’ And then my clients get the benefit of that when I work with them in the afternoon.
And it’s so much easier to help other people and focus on their priorities, whether it’s clients or family or friends or children or whoever if I’ve done something great for myself today. And writing absolutely feels like that by the time I get to the end of it, even if it’s not right there upfront at the beginning.
CYNTHIA: Yes. Yes. And that you do feel that throughout the day versus the pain of like, ‘I need to do that. I’ll get to that.’ I love the word you use. I love that afterglow. That’s a great way to describe it.
MARK: And the other thing is I get to call myself a writer all day without having to do any more in the afternoon! So, I like that.
CYNTHIA: Yes.
MARK: Okay. So, we’re up and running. We’ve committed to this monogamous relationship. We are listening to the Inner Champion and experiencing some of the immediate benefits of getting going. But there’s always going to be the plateau in the middle, the long stretch when you’re in the middle of the book, and it feels like you’ve been here for a long time.
Can you give us some ideas on how we can keep ourselves motivated and sustain the writing practice during that period?
CYNTHIA: Oh, yeah, that’s a great question. I think always remembering why you’re doing it. Often it’s a book that you’re writing is related to your work, and so you’re in touch with the people you’re working with and seeing the results of your work with them that can buoy you up.
I was working with a client yesterday who was in this place of just like, ‘Uh, like this is hard, and I don’t like it. And I don’t even care about trying to make it fun. It’s just like uh.’ I brought up what we talked about at the beginning of our coaching, which was why is she doing this? What’s the impact she wants this book to have? It’s not just writing a fictional book or a series of novels. It’s the ultimate impact she wants to have on her readers and the difference that’s going to make in the world and why that’s absolutely vital now.
Sometimes that can have the opposite effect where it becomes too much pressure, but often I think getting out of our own selves is not just about me and I’m doing this for me because I’ve always wanted to write a book. I know this is going to do something in the world. It’s going to make a difference. So tapping into that bigger picture, that Why, can be helpful.
Having somebody in on it with you, so either a coach or a writing community. What I’ve seen is most of the people I work with really crave some connection with community. Being in it with other people is really helpful. And if you don’t have that in person, there are lots of places to find that online or working one-on-one with people. A lot of the clients I work with one-on-one, they don’t have time for a group. It doesn’t meet their schedule or their needs. They really just want to have one-on-one. So remembering why you’re doing it, looking at what are those immediate benefits.
Often too, Mark, it’s a matter of just pausing and looking back at what you’ve done. We’re very good at looking forward and we finish something and ‘Okay. What’s the next thing? What’s the next thing?’ We’re very bad at relishing what we’ve already done. It’s almost if we think if we just take some enjoyment or appreciate what we’ve done that will somehow become a trophy to fall off and won’t be able to keep going. But often there’s a time when if you’re just like, ‘Ah, what am I doing? Where am I at?’ Printing it up and looking at it.
MARK: That’s always satisfying, isn’t it? When it’s a thing.
CYNTHIA: Yes. Yes. It’s a thing, and often we don’t print it up. We’re just kind of endlessly scrolling online, and when you print it up, it gives you that object that you can see, ‘Oh, look, our pages have accrued here something’s happening.’ It also helps you to just see the material more clearly, ‘Okay. Here’s where I’m at. Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s what’s left to do.’ So, often it’s taking a moment to just pause and reflect, ‘Why am I doing this? Where am I at? What is it doing for me in the now and what do I need to keep going?’
MARK: I want to pick up on this phrase ‘world-changing’ because it’s in the title and also you used it a couple of minutes ago talking about the Whys for writing a book.
What would you say to someone who’s listening and thinking, ‘Well, but is my idea really world-changing or can I really do it in a way that it’s going to change the world? Is that not too ambitious? Am I getting above my station here?’
CYNTHIA: Absolutely. I love that because I don’t generally go around saying like, ‘Go big and you can be huge and you can change the world and you can do all these.’ That doesn’t motivate me. I don’t like going big. It’s like, ‘No, I just want to be cozy here. I don’t need to be Oprah.’ I don’t think a lot of people feel that.
But what I’ve experienced is that when you write a book, it changes your world. So, that’s the basic premise. If no-one’s world is changed but your own, you have changed the world because, as you’ve said, when you write, your relationship with your family and your clients is different. So, that has a ripple effect. So, changing the world can be a lot smaller than having some big stage or being some big influencer or a thought leader. It can be the person who’s walking around, smiling at people and engaging with people because they feel good about themselves and confident because they’ve written a book that has a ripple effect. So, that’s like the first level of it.
The thing about writing a book or creating anything and putting it out there, you have no idea what it’s going to do. Once you put a piece of art or poetry or a book out in the world, it’s its own thing and it’s no longer your responsibility. The world will interact with it and have its way with it and then stay with it and do with it what it will. So, we don’t really know what it’s doing or how it’s changing the world. And you’ve probably experienced this where you’ll meet somebody in person and they’ll say, ‘I’ve been reading your newsletter, your blog for years or listening to your podcast, and you totally changed my life.’ And you’re like, ‘I had no idea.’
MARK: Yeah. That’s great. Occasionally, I’ll meet that person. They’ll come for coaching and they’ll say, ‘I’ve been reading your newsletter for ten years.’ And you think, ‘Really? Wow.’
It’s easy to take for granted what you’ve already done, but who knows what would be the right message at the right time for the right person.
CYNTHIA: I must stand for our creative expression. I believe that if you have the impulse to write or make things, you have to follow it. You have no idea whether it’s going to be any good or whether it’s going to go anywhere or do anything, but you have to follow it, first for your own satisfaction, and then who knows what it will do. So, it’s the world-changing thing. It starts off as this humble thing like you’re changing your own world and it could change the world.
I remember when I put the title out on my Facebook page to just kind of check it out and test it and see what people thought about it. And the world-changing thing really caught people and like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. That seems too big. Ratchet it down a little bit.’
MARK: And what did your Inner Coach say to that ‘ratchet it down’?
CYNTHIA: I wrote an article years ago about this whole thing like we’re either too much or we’re not enough. It’s like, ‘Okay. Well, where is that middle?’ There is no knowing middle. So, I was like, ‘You know what? I really am going to take a stand for the impact that we can have with a book. It may change the world. It may be big, it may change your world, but I’m not backing down on this. I’m taking a stand that you and your work and your ideas and your books matter and to not play small. So, try it and see. See what happens. See how it changes your world and then see how it changes the larger world.’
MARK: Well, as you say that, I’m in the office and I’m looking at my bookshelves. I’m seeing how many books, mostly poetry, have changed my life. I’m not the same person for having read them, and so who’s to stop you listening to this from adding to the world-changing books that are out there?
I mean, when I saw your title, I thought I love the daring of that and also I thought about it and I realized, ‘If I’m thinking about writing a world-changing book, well, I know no matter how insanely, confident, or incredibly doubtful I am, I’m probably going to write a bigger and more ambitious book than I would have written if you hadn’t put that thought in front of me.’
Is this world-changing? Could you be more ambitious here? I love the boldness in it.
CYNTHIA: Thanks, Mark. And you know this. We need this sense of boldness and humility. When I was writing this book, one day I was like, ‘This is great. This is going to be great. I hope people are going to love it. This is going to really change the world.’ And then the next day I was writing and it was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. This has been said before. Everybody knows this. I don’t need to write it.’ And it was so perfect that juxtaposition of those two commentaries on the process.
I was like, ‘Okay. If I believe this or I believe this, neither are true. Both are true. It doesn’t matter what my ideas about it are. All I need to do is just keep showing up and writing the book.’ And however it turns out, all I can say is, ‘Have I shown up? Have I done the very best I can?’ And that’s all we can do and to just sort of let all of that commentary, our fears, and beliefs about how good it is really are irrelevant to the actual work.
MARK: And on the theme of boldness, another really big idea that I found in the book is ‘write a manifesto for your book.’
Can you tell us more about why you would write a manifesto and how it can help you write the actual book?
CYNTHIA: One of the things that people get stuck on with writing a book is writing the introduction. To me, it’s like a stand and deliver moment. It’s the big, ‘Here’s what this book is about, here’s why I’m writing it, and here’s what’s in the book.’ And often I find that if we try to write that at the beginning, we’re going to have trouble. We don’t know what’s in it and then we haven’t earned the confidence that we get by the time we get to the end. So, we still want to have some sort of rallying, some sort of like, ‘Here’s why this matters.’
I like the idea of writing a manifesto because a manifesto is… to me, it’s about the impact you want to have. So, this book is going to do this, and this book is for this. It’s for these people to have this sort of emotional or intellectual impact, and this is the difference that this book is going to make in the world once it’s out there.
It’s really a moment of taking a stand, not as a stand-and-deliver approving moment, like let me just prove to you that I know what I’m talking about that this book and this idea is valid. It’s more of, ‘Here’s what I care about, here’s what I’m so impassioned by, here’s why I must do this, and here’s why you must read it.’ My intention is that that fires you up.
What I came to think about books as I was writing this and even writing that part about the manifesto is that a book is a passion shared. You have to be really passionate about something to write a whole book about it and that you have that inner fire that inner passion really fuels the book writing. And then once you have it, you can say, ‘Here’s what I’m passionate about. Take this and check it out and see if it ignites something in you.’ And then the reader can say, ‘Wow, this was great, and I’m sharing this passion with somebody else.’ A book is a way to share that passion. The manifesto is a way to distill that passion down into just a few simple sentences that can hopefully serve to remind you why you’re doing it.
MARK: I love it. So, following our imaginary writer as she’s going through the journey of the book. She’s got started. She’s overcome the Critic and the other obstacles. She found a way to stay connected to the big why in order to produce this world-changing book. And as you get towards the end, inevitably, there’s the thoughts of, ‘Okay. But how am I going to sell this? Where am I going to promote it? Is there anybody out there who’s going to want to read this?’
There’s a lovely chapter near the end where you talk about capturing promotional ideas while writing. Could you expand on that a little bit, please?
CYNTHIA: First I just have to say like I don’t know that there’s really any conquering the Inner Critic. The Inner Critic is there along the way, and that was something that like it’s a daily thing. There you are. Okay. Well, I’m going to write anyway. This was what surprises me with my clients. They’re very smart. They’re very accomplished. They’re really into their topic, and they still face these issues on an ongoing basis. And I was like, ‘Oh, okay.’
My problem as a coach was like thinking, ‘They’re so smart. They’re accomplished. They’ve done other huge things. They can do this one too.’ But there’s something about writing a book that really calls on us to really root in our belief in what we’re doing, and even if we don’t know how to, we know very well what we’re doing in our professional work. Writing a book still is something that is a specific thing to learn. So, I was really surprised by that.
And so that’s why I really wanted this book to be there as a reminder throughout the whole process like when you start feeling like you’re failing, when you’re freaking out and thinking you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s normal. That is totally part of the process. That is just baked into writing a book. It’s not you. It’s not that you’re inherently inept or not good. That’s really something important I wanted to say there.
But in terms of capturing promotional ideas while writing the book, I think that often happens alongside where we are thinking about, ‘How am I going to get this out there? What am I going to say?’ So, I noticed as I was writing this book… and you see this in blog posts and articles. I tweet this. This is a tweetable. So, it’s kind of in that same vein.
When you’re writing something and you’re like, ‘Okay. This is what I say all the time. This is something that I repeat to my clients or in my classes.’ That’s something to highlight or make bold that you can use that later as like how you’ll see a social media image or just a background with a word or a sentence. You can just put that sentence there. So, I think capturing those along the way.
And the thing that I noticed that was really great about doing that for me at least was I would put my thought down like, ‘Oh, that’s the tweetable.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, that’s not really a tweetable. I need to write that. I’m going to make that more concise and really clear so that you can grab that at a glance.’ So, by capturing your promotional ideas like that or the pull out quotes or the phrases, it forces you to be a better writer along the way and really kind of clarify your thoughts.
You can also like what’s the basic concept of the book, and we’ve talked about this book. It’s for busy women and it’s about changing the world, writing a book. So, I could write a blog article about that or when I do get the introduction, the introduction can be used as a standalone piece, so pieces that can be a standalone piece. It’s a great way to think about, ‘Okay. This one is something I can use later.’
For instance, the whole first section of my book, which is dealing with some of the challenges or issues that are going to arise with a book, I’ve pulled all of those out. And those have been standalone articles that I’ve posted on my blog throughout the year, so kind of having that in mind as you go like, ‘What are some things I can excerpt?’ Quizzes and tests are fun things to use that you can think about like, ‘Okay. How could this be a quiz?’
One of the chapters in my book is about making sure that you actually have space to write a book because often busy people really, no matter what anybody else does, they just literally don’t have the space to add something else in. So, turning that chapter into a quiz like, ‘Do you really have space like to test it out?’ Stuff like that that make it fun that you can use later.
I talk about a book is a way to be a conversation leader and a book is a way to lead the kinds of conversations that you want to have. So, looking at that and thinking about it that way, you can look at the themes in your book, ‘What are some of the underlying themes that I want to talk about?’ So, it’s not directly talking about, ‘Here’s how to sit down and write,’ but it’s like, ‘Here’s why you must write or here’s why I want more women to write or here’s what busy is doing in our lives.’ So, some of the themes that you’re writing about can be pulled out.
What I usually do is I’ll have another document that’s just ideas for promoting the book later, and as I’m writing, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is something that could be a talking point.’ So, wanting to go on podcasts was one of the ways I wanted to share about the book. What are some talking points as I was writing the book, really pulling some of those things out? So, you’re not switching and putting the cart before the horse. You’re not switching gears into thinking about publishing, promotion. You just have a document going the whole time that you’re capturing ideas.
MARK: I love that because, to me, the most effective promotion is the stuff that is authentic and it’s aligned with the true spirit and message of the book. And what I like about this perspective is is if you look closely, you’ve probably done a lot of the promotional work already. You’ve got the material there, and it’s just a question of taking it out and using it.
That’s great particularly when we get to the end of the project and we think, ‘Oh, gosh, I’m going to start the promotion now?’ Well, actually, if you’ve already started, then that becomes a lot easier.
CYNTHIA: Yes. And also the whole year I was writing it, writing is not a very visual medium, but here I am at the cafe and here I am at the Botanic Gardens and just sharing images of me like just teasing it out, the whole year I’m writing this book. ‘It’s coming.’ And just briefly talking about it and then sharing the title and getting people’s opinions about that so that when it did come out, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, you wrote a book. Oh, people have been waiting for it. Hopefully, they’ve been waiting for it.’ So, you’re right, like getting to the end of it and then suddenly, ‘Oh, now I’ve got to think about promotion.’ It’s really no one wants to be in that position.
MARK: Cynthia, thank you so much. You have given us a real wealth of wisdom and tips and insight around the topic of writing a book and, of course, while being a coach yourself, I know you don’t like to end any conversation with without the next steps and what are we going to do.
And so this is the point of the show where if you’re new to the show as a listener, then this is where I ask my guests to set you the listener a Creative Challenge. This is a task that is related to the theme of the interview, and it’s something that you can do within or get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Cynthia, what’s your creative challenge?
CYNTHIA: I love this. This is a great chance to get everybody into action. I’ve mentioned free writing, and free writing in case you’re not familiar with it is a very simple technique. You set a timer, you use a prompt, and you write without stopping. You write without correcting. You write without worrying about making sense or it being correct grammatically or anything like that. And the point is to get into the flow to get out of kind of the thin layer of the top of your mind and into a deeper place where you’re in that flow state that we so love.
To do a free-write with a prompt, ‘I must write this book. I must write this book because…’ or this works for any project, if you’re not writing a book say you want to launch a podcast or you want to launch a business, any art form, ‘I must do this thing because…’ Set the timer, and you said seven days. So let’s just say 7 minutes. 7 to 10 minutes, set the timer and write non-stop without censoring yourself. You’ll get very clear about why this is important to you now.
And then after you’ve written that, go back through and read it over and highlight or underline any words or phrases or sentences that really glow or light up or really hit the nail on the head for you about why you do it. And what you want to do from that is to pull together a sentence or a phrase that is your rallying cry, and someone might call it like this is your why. I like it as your rallying cry because this is what will remind you why you’re doing this. If you forget, if you lose track, if you go off path, if you suddenly want to do something else, another bright shiny project, this will help you remember why this must be done.
MARK: I love the rallying cry! That’s going to get me started in the morning.
CYNTHIA: Good. Sometimes we forget, ‘Why am I doing this?’ And then there’s just a short simple phrase that just reminds.
MARK: Yeah, definitely. Okay. Cynthia, thank you so much for your wisdom and insight today. If you’re listening to this, you found the conversation helpful and inspiring, I really encourage you to get the book, The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book, whether you’re a busy woman or a busy man. And, Cynthia, as well as the book, obviously, you have coaching one-on-one. You have writing programs.
Where should people go to get more help from you?
CYNTHIA: First, thanks for having me on, Mark. You’re such a delight and such a contribution to the world for creatives and others, and I loved our conversation. So thank you for having me. You can find everything about what I do and more at my website, originalimpulse.com.
MARK: Excellent. And obviously, we will make sure that the links to the book and the website are right there in the show notes as usual. So, Cynthia, thank you so much. I think I may be dipping into this next time I get started on my next book or even my next podcast season. And I’m sure I won’t be alone in that. So thank you so much.
CYNTHIA: Thank you. I appreciate it, Mark.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
The Adventure of Writing with Emily Kimelman
Aug 03, 2020
Today’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Emily Kimelman, a thriller author who has travelled the world in a boat and criss-crossed the USA in an Airstream trailer while writing and publishing her books, and selling hundreds of thousands of copies in the process.
Emily’s adventurous spirit shines through in her writing as well as in her approach to travel and entrepreneurship. And she gives us a really inspiring interview about her journey as a writer and creative entrepreneur.
To me this conversation is a real breath of fresh air, especially at a time like now when travel is a distant memory for most of us.
I should mention that like most interviews this Season, we recorded this one pre-Covid, but it’s not hard to join the dots and see how the principles Emily used to creative a business that she could run from the road or the high seas can help us in an age of remote working.
In the first part of the show I suggest that if you want a constant stream of new ideas, you should practise the art of overhearing yourself.
Emily Kimelman
Emily Kimelman is an author and traveller who has written from all over the world including the beaches of India, the jungles of Costa Rica, and the islands of the Caribbean.
She spent many years working while travelling, firstly sailing the seas in a boat, and later criss-crossing the United States in an Airstream.
In childhood she lived in Soviet Moscow, where her father was a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. While living under communist rule, the KGB sprinkled her entire family with ‘spy dust’, a radioactive compound that left a glowing trail so they could track them …which she says, might explain where some of her ideas for spy thrillers come from!
There are currently 13 titles in her Sydney Rye series, and her other books include a series of Romantic thrillers co-authored with Toby Neal. With hundreds of thousands of books sold, she has an army of readers eager for each new release.
I met Emily in 2016 when she asked me to coach her, and I had the privilege of working with her for 2 years while she was travelling in her Airstream and transforming her business, from working as a solo author to expanding her team so she could delegate a lot of the business tasks and focus more on her writing.
I was really impressed by Emily’s independent-mindedness, enthusiasm, and dedication to carving out the life she wanted for herself and her family. So I asked her to come on the show so you could her her remarkable story and experience her creative and enterprising attitude for yourself.
In this conversation she talks about how she got started as a writer in spite of not being able to read until the age of 10 due to Dyslexia, and went on to find success as one of the early writers to self-publish via Amazon’s Kindle.
She also tells the story of her journey as an entrepreneur, from running a glass-blowing businesses, through to applying her entrepreneurial skills to the business of authorship.
If you like to travel, and you’re pining for distant lands with the current travel restrictions, you’ll also enjoy her stories of balancing work, family and travel, by air, sea and land.
Finally and in my view most importantly, she talks about the mental game of authorship and creative entrepreneurship – which is the part that makes the biggest difference over time.
If you’re the kind of creator who values quality of life as much as money or fame, and you want to succeed on your own terms, you’ll find plenty of inspiration in this conversation with Emily Kimelman about the adventure of writing.
Emily Kimelman interview transcript
MARK: Emily, how did you get started as a writer?
EMILY: I think it’s not unusual. I think most writers, what happens is that you read a book that’s so terrible, you figure you could do better. And that’s what happened for me. I was living in New York the time I was going to college and I’d taken a few years off. So, I was an older student. I was on the subway and I was reading a mystery I’d picked up at the local Barnes & Noble on the sales rack and it was a cat mystery. And it turned out the answer of the mysteries was: aliens did it! And there had been no hints throughout the book that aliens were involved. And I closed the book and I remember looking around the subway and thinking, ‘Well, that was horrible. I could do better than that.’
At the time I was taking some writing courses and so I had been writing some stuff and I had my brother and my best friend had been reading it and saying how great it was and that I should be doing more writing. And so, the seed had been planted. I loved mystery so much and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and basically what I wanted to do was just read books all day. And so, writing them seemed like the way to get paid for that because I didn’t think anyone would pay me just to read them. I had no interest in writing reviews or critiques. I figured this was the chance I had that I’d be able to be in that world all the time. And once I read that book, I figured I could do it and I was ready.
MARK: I love that because usually some writers say ‘I read this book, it was so inspiring…’
EMILY: I’d say inspiring books often just scare me. There’s definitely some books I read, and it makes it hard to write for days because I’ll never do anything that good, what’s the point anymore? I prefer the bad books.
MARK: Yeah. They always make you feel good, right?
EMILY: Exactly.
MARK: Okay. And why mysteries?
EMILY: That was the first genre I got into. I was severely dyslexic as a kid and actually couldn’t read until I was 11 and I basically went from not being able to read it all and kind of a flick switched in my brain and suddenly I could read at college level. One of the first books I ever read to myself was an Agatha Christie book. And I just tore through them. My parents are both big readers, they love mysteries, so their bookshelves were filled with the genre. And so I went through P.D. James and kind of all of the classics basically from as soon as I could read, that’s what I started reading. And it’s what I’d always enjoyed.
In college, I went to Gallatin at NYU, which is a college where you can create your own major. And so, I actually have a degree in The History of Homicide, Forensic Science and Detective Fiction. What is the interplay between our fears of death and these horrible violent things that could happen to us and the fiction that we all want to read, which somehow comforts us? Because there’s justice on the page is always more perfect than justice in reality is going to be. I think that the play between those two has always fascinated me and, like, so many other people. That’s really what I wanted to explore in my work.
MARK: For those of us who are new to your fiction, could you, obviously, without too many spoilers, give us an introduction to the kind of world you write about, the kind of characters that you like to put center stage?
EMILY: Sure. So, my main series, the Sydney Rye series – ‘Sydney,’ like the old Jewish man ‘Rye,’ like the whiskey – is about a young woman who ends up getting wrapped up in a mystery. She has no skills or reasons to do this but, of course, they’re given to her throughout the course of the book. And she has a giant dog, which when… it was based on the dog I had when I started writing this book. My giant mutt Nova was not a hero! Her dog is very much a hero.
But in any case, it’s the idea of an unskilled female character who through grit and determination is able to take on the powerful forces against her, usually a male powerful force and best them in a violent and a brilliant way. That’s my Sydney Rye series.
And that basically is the setup for most of my books is there is a young female character who is being oppressed by, should we call it the patriarchy? And she bests them. It’s certainly my own fantasies of how I would like the world to work and obviously, lots of other people’s, it’s why people read the book.
A paper I wrote in college was about James Bond and the way that the James Bond stories, movies specifically, have followed foreign policy and those movies take these big frightening things that are so complicated and far-reaching and put them into one bad guy on an island who we can just kind of parachute in and take him out and we’ve solved the pressing issue of the day. And so, basically, I’m trying to do that with patriarchy.
MARK: What do you hear from readers about what they value in your work?
EMILY: I get a lot of emails from women, especially older women. And my readers do seem to be older. And I think that’s because who has time to read books? It’s often retired people. And a lot of them are women who say, ‘God, I feel so brave when I read these books and so powerful.’ And so, I give them that taste, I think, that every person would want to kind of be able to take on these incredibly powerful forces that you don’t have control over, and to take control of them and to best them. Older female readers definitely respond to that.
And then I can have male readers who are like, ‘It’s so awesome. She kicked such ass. It’s so much fun.’ So, I think it’s the same thing because obviously a lot of men don’t like the way things are set up either. They’re happy to see it’d be taken down by this character who is funny and insightful and fun to be with while also kicking ass.
MARK: When you started out, what were your ambitions for the writing? Did you see it as a business, as a profession, or did that come later?
EMILY: Yes. Like I said, I was an older student. I was in my early twenties, and I was looking for a profession. I was actually working as a dog walker, and I knew that wasn’t going to be the profession long term, although I did enjoy it. Sydney Rye, in the first book is a dog walker, and that’s where I got the idea because I worked for an agency and so I was in these people’s houses that they’d never seen me. They wouldn’t recognize me on the street, and yet I knew their dog really well. I was in their apartment every day. And that, to me, just seemed like a really kind of cool setup. I started playing with that idea and I knew from the beginning I wanted to do a series because that’s what I like to read. And I think most writers are writing books in many ways for themselves.
All the books that I write are the books that I want to read. I knew I wanted to do a series. I knew I wanted this to be my life’s work. One of the things I love about writing is that you’re never going to master it. It’s not like one day I’m going to be like, ‘Well, I did that. Perfect, perfect novel. Moving on.’ That’s just never going to happen. P.D. James wrote into her nineties. It’s the kind of thing where I knew I wanted a work that would challenge me and that I could do forever and that I would never be able to master. Writing was the perfect choice for me. I didn’t expect obviously to be making a living immediately. I had expectations of being a dog walker, and I was, and I bartended for years.
The amount that actually I’ve been able to make is surprising to me. And it’s because of self-publishing. When I started writing, self-publishing didn’t exist. The Kindle didn’t exist in 2005 when I started working on my first book. I think it came out in 2007 or 2008 maybe, I can’t remember. But e-publishing wasn’t a thing and self-publishing was a vanity thing. It wasn’t cool, and it wasn’t going to make you money. I had an agent. I thought I would find a publisher and get a little money and just keep bartending for at least another decade or two. So, I was pleasantly surprised.
MARK: I’d like to come back to the whole self-publishing and the business side in a minute. But I’m really intrigued by this, what you said that you wanted something that could be your life’s work. And I think this is often, it’s an overlooked element of success is that sense of dedication to something over the long haul. In most creative professions, overnight success is the exception rather than the rule.
What was it that let you know, ‘Yeah, this is something I could see myself doing in my eighties?’
EMILY: I think because I love to read so much and learning to read was such a hard-fought process for me. I always had such huge admiration for stories and for writers because I couldn’t do it for so long. And I think that there was something; I say now that being that dyslexic and having to fight so hard at such a young age to overcome it was so good for me because it taught me that basically, ‘If you just keep working at it from different angles, you’re going to get it,’ if it’s something within my control. So, ‘Can I read? Can I write the book?’ These are all things that are completely because of me. Nothing else is going to stop me except for, basically, if I stop trying.
I think that overcoming dyslexia gave me that thirst for challenge. Because it was so satisfying when I did it, it felt so good. And I’d always admired writers because it was so hard for me. And then the big stumbling block for me really deciding I wanted to become a writer, the reason I shied away from it for so long is because I thought, ‘Well, I couldn’t read for so long. How could I write?’ I knew I wanted something that would keep me interested forever. I knew I wanted to be a creative person. I thought I was wanting to be a visual artist, I wasn’t that good at it. So, it wasn’t that fun. I didn’t have the talent. My husband is a glassblower and my brother’s a graphic designer and a lot of my friends are visual artists and I really admire that. But I think in order to be a successful visual artist, you do have to have some spark of talent that then makes it exciting and fun and a challenge that’s worth pursuing. I didn’t have that.
But it was a lot of my visual artist friends who were like, ‘You should be writing. You’re a good writer.’ So, I knew I wanted to be creative. That’s what I was drawn to. And I think that, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question, ‘How did I know I wanted a life’s work?’ I think that just always was in my head. That’s something I wanted. And books are just so limitless. Stories are so limitless that how could you ever run out of work?
MARK: Yeah, that’s a good place to be. Okay.
Talking of kindling that spark of talent, at what point did you become aware of the self-publishing world that it was starting to change away from the old vanity?
EMILY: I bought a Kindle because I’ve always been a big traveler and the amount of books I had to take with me when I traveled was a joke. My husband, on our first big trip together, we went to Thailand for a month and most of my luggage was paperbacks. And he couldn’t believe how much he was hauling around. I would leave the paperbacks as we went so the baggage did get lighter, but he just couldn’t believe that I insisted I needed this many books with me because I didn’t know what I’d want to read. I had so many reasons why I needed all these books. And so, I bought one of the first Kindles. I thought, ‘This is the answer to all of my reading problems. Now I can just have these, I don’t have to carry a suitcase for my books when I’m on a month-long trip.’
And then authors were starting to come out and talk about it. And I was reading up on publishing. I had an agent; I’d finished my first book. And I didn’t do it right away because I still felt like I wanted to go the traditional route. And then more and more stories were coming out of people finding not just massive monetary success, but also finding readers and really connecting with people. I was following all that, but I was also working and writing books and not paying that much attention to it.
And then there kind of came a point and I was talking to my husband about it and he was like, ‘You should just do it. What are you waiting for?’ And I talked to my brother about it and he said, ‘Just do it.’ So, I did. I formatted a book and I made my own cover and I put up Unleashed on Amazon and I set it at 99 cents. And I sold two books that day. And I just thought, ‘Oh my God!’ I said that. I said, ‘Who are these people? How is this happening?’
MARK: You rang them up and thanked them!
EMILY: Yeah. So, then I spent a lot of time on Kindle Boards reading about what people were doing to reach people and learning about the business side. It was a while before I started to take it seriously. The book was up there for a long time, and I was working on the follow-ups, and we’d opened a studio and gallery for his glassblowing. I was helping him with that, running that.
I was busy. But I was also becoming a businesswoman through running that gallery and learning so much and realizing how much I actually loved being a businesswoman. And the challenges there were fascinating to me, and it was also, as an entrepreneur, your work is never going to be done either. It’s like writing in that way. And you’re never going to master it.
MARK: What did you love about business?
EMILY: I love numbers. They’re so concrete. I love marketing because there’s just so many different angles to look at it and experimenting and seeing what works, what doesn’t, what works today and then doesn’t work tomorrow, is fascinating to me. It just all is a very fascinating world to me. And the glassblowing studio, obviously you’re talking about objects, you’re talking about permanent things, whereas ebooks, you’re talking about files that you write it once and then it just gets sold over, and over, and over again, and there’s no more cost to it.
Working as someone who was selling these actual products that each one had to be made, I could just see so clearly, ‘Oh, this business model is not as good as making something once and selling it forever.’ I talked to my husband about it and we sat down and we talked about the business and he totally agreed that in terms of the model of a business, if you just look at it that way, that selling stuff online makes more sense just black and white, but especially for us because we’re such perpetual travelers. And when we set up that business, we couldn’t travel the way we had before, and we just didn’t like that we felt too tied in one place. And so, basically, we shifted our entire life so that we could start traveling again. I started writing full-time and putting out books quicker and basically took everything I’d learned in the studio and gallery and put it into the books.
I was a step ahead of a lot of authors because I had been a businesswoman. And it was very useful background. I understood marketing, I understood how to work with customers. I understood the power of email marketing because, we’d had a big email list for our gallery and we’d sold a lot of stuff by bringing people into the store by doing different promos that we put out through email. Being able to do promos where you send out an email and that’s just a click to buy it instead of having to actually show up in my shop, isn’t that easier?
And back then, at the end of 2012, beginning of 2013, you could still do a free run on Amazon, give away 15,000 books and then sell a thousand books from that.
MARK: For people not familiar with that world, this is, say you have a series of books and the first one’s free and the people read that and then go on to read the others?
EMILY: The way Amazon used to run their algorithms is that when you gave away a free book in terms of the rankings, it counted as about a quarter sale. If you gave away 15,000 books, you would be in the free charts and the top 50 or whatever, 15,000 books could get you higher than that then. And then when you went back to paid, you were in the top 500, or top 1,000. So, you were suddenly showing up in all these charts and getting all this visibility. Buyers would buy your book, it was free yesterday. They don’t know that. It’s $2.99 today and in the top 1,000. And so, they would just buy it. You didn’t even need to have follow-up books. You could just sell that one book that you’d given away the day before.
MARK: Tell us about the good old days.
EMILY: Yes. Now that happens to a degree, but it’s not nearly the same. And the first time I had a big free run was when I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is serious. There’s a living to be made here.’ And then, BookBub came out right around then, and I was one of their early advertisers. I booked with them when they were like three months in, four months in maybe. And they would book you every three months then. Now they won’t, they’ll only book the same book every six months. I just started putting out books and running them as freebies, and it just built.
MARK: So, again, for people outside of the world, BookBub is email marketing, isn’t it?
EMILY: BookBub is an email that people get in their inbox that has free and discounted books and it’s the biggest player in that world. I’ll put a free book in BookBub and give away 60,000 copies in five days. And the thing is that one of the things that us early indie authors were able to do is the people who tested us, the people who were paying 99 cents for a book, $2.99 for a book, these were people who were desperate for books and they are people who read a book a day. And so, they’re on a budget and they’re just voracious.
A lot of the readers I picked up five years ago when I started are still my readers today and have brought more readers in, are people who read a book a day. They’re just serious readers. And indie authors were able to take a lot of those readers from traditional publishers because we were charging 99 cents, $2.99, $4.99 at the top back then. And traditional publishers were still trying to get the same prices as paperbacks, sometimes even more for an ebook. But those biggest readers, of course, like me, we all went to the Kindle because we didn’t want to carry suitcases of books anymore.
MARK: And what was it like that moment when you had that free run, and you realize, ‘Wow, this is serious. It could be a living?’
EMILY: It was exhilarating. I was so happy. My brother was visiting at that point, Sean and I, so we’d sold everything we owned and moved onto a boat, which had always been a dream of Sean’s. And I had been kind of, ‘Oh, whatever.’ And so, I said to him, ‘Let’s rent a houseboat for a month in January,’ which was my test. I was like, ‘If we like it in January, then we’ll like it,’ thinking I wasn’t going to like it and that and that he would learn his lesson, that he won’t to live in a boat. And three days later, I was like, ‘We’re buying a boat. This is all my dreams come true. I had no idea.’
And so, we were on the boat, we were living on the Hudson River, and my brother was visiting, and he actually took a picture of me, and I’m on the bottom and deck kind of yelling up to him and Sean about it. And I have this giant grin on my face. I’m just so excited that this is possible. And basically that the future I dreamed of where I was going to be able to write full time was kind of at hand much sooner than I’d ever expected it to be.
MARK: And you’re on a boat at this point. So, this is another really intriguing thing about your story is the fact that you’re not just sat there at home, the stereotypical of the idea of the writer sitting at home all day while the world busies itself around her. You’re out traveling and having adventures in the middle of all of this.
How did you balance the writing, and the traveling, and the business?
EMILY: Sean and I are both big travelers, and I’ve always loved traveling. I would say traveling is as important to me as writing. And one of the things that drew me to writing was, ‘All I need for this career is me, a laptop and a pair of headphones, and I can do it anywhere.’ And so, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve written on trains in India, I’ve dictated while walking through national parks. I just like being on the road, and I find it very inspiring.
Before we had kids, we lived on the boat, and we would live on the boat for the summer in the New York area. And then in the winters, we would go to a different place. We went to India one year, and that’s where I wrote the fourth book in my series, Strings of Glass. And then, when we went to Costa Rica, I wrote the book Inviting Fire. Basically, that lets me really create the places in these books that people feel like they’re there. It’s important to me to get those details right and gives me a great excuse to go and live in exotic places and enjoy that.
MARK: So, you’re actually in that location as you’re writing about it?
EMILY: Yeah, a lot of the time. Sydney Rye ends up in Syria, I did not go there! There are different places I have not been to that are in the books, but the majority of them I have been to. And YouTube is great for everything else.
MARK: One question I’m going to get from listeners is well, if I was on holiday then I would find it hard to sit down and write every day. How was that? Was the distraction a temptation?
EMILY: Well, I didn’t think of it as being on holiday. This was just my life I was living. I was in India for four months. It’s not like I was there for a week. I was in Costa Rica for four months. I wasn’t there for a short period of time. Sean and I love to travel, but we don’t like to travel fast. We like to go slow. In each of these places I’d kind of figure out how to work there.
We later ended up moving onto an Airstream once I had my daughter. And that’s the thing where me and my laptop and headphones aren’t going to cut it because a kid is not going to let you just sit there with your headphones on like other passengers on a train! So, I started dictating. I would basically get up in the morning, get my recorder, and walk out the front door and just walk wherever we were dictating my stories. You have to change your brain to dictate rather than type. But it’s always been very important to me to write and to travel. I just make the two work together. And because traveling is so inspiring to me, it’s not hard. It gets my brain buzzing, and I actually find it harder to write when I’ve been in the same place for too long.
MARK: Okay. And then as the catalog grew, as your experience as a writer grew, obviously as the business grew, and the family’s grown as well.
How have things changed and evolved for you?
EMILY: One big difference is that I have a woman who works for me or with me, I should say, Jamie. And she is my business manager at this point. And basically, what happened is after I had my daughter, I realized how much I had been working. I hadn’t quite grasped how much time I spent working prior to that because I did my writing. Which is always my first thing that I, ‘Eat the frog, get the writing out of the way’. And also it’s the most fun part. So, I do it first. And if too much of the world comes into my brain, it becomes more difficult to kick it all out. I would do that, and then I would do my marketing and stuff and then Sean and I would have dinner, and then after dinner, I would work for another few hours. And I hadn’t realized I was doing that.
We will be watching a movie or something, and I would just be on my computer making newsletters, doing social media posts, creating graphics. And basically, once my daughter was born, that time disappeared. Post-dinner was sleep time for me, or if I wasn’t sleeping, I certainly wasn’t using my brain because I was brain dead. And so, I kind of was like, ‘Okay, I need to get some help here.’
And that’s when you and I started working together because I needed to learn how to get my business out of my head and into the hands of somebody else while still having control over it. That is something that now I’d say I’m very good at. Jamie does all of the emails, all the social media posts. She’s a great sounding board. We talk once a week, and we talk strategy, and we talk about what’s happening tomorrow, next week, a month from now, six months from now, five years from now. She’s really a partner for me. She’s someone who cares about my business as well and we’ve become good friends.
I’d say that’s the biggest change in the business is that a lot of that smaller stuff that is so time-consuming, like graphic creation, emails, someone else does those actual tasks for me now. And also, having someone to talk to about this business because it is so niche, who understands the business as well as I do, is another great thing that she provides for me. And that is something I didn’t have when I started. But when I started, it was much more Wild West. Things have settled to a degree where there are proven strategies that work now. Whereas when I started, it was everyone was just like, ‘What is happening? This is amazing.’
MARK: Yeah. Jumping up and down on boats!
EMILY: Yeah. And it’s not that easy anymore. That’s the biggest shift in my business is I’ve gotten some great help and, I think, my writing has shifted too. I’m a much better writer, and my first drafts are so much better. I used to just kind of go, start a book, and just go to the end full-steam, don’t look back, or you’ll get stopped and then fix it later. And now I don’t worry about getting stopped. If I want to write a book, the book’s going to get written. I’m not going to get bogged down in worries about my skills or, ‘Will anyone like it? Or will anyone care?’ Because I have readers who want to read my work, and I know that.
So that confidence allows me to do kind of slower, more methodical first drafts. I still can’t outline to save my life, but I really don’t need to at this point because I just start writing. I go slowly, I cycle back, and the story just appears. And it’s really tight, and it’s really good kind of from the get-go, which is different than how it’s been, how it was when I started writing. It took me five years to write my first book, Unleashed. And now, the average book takes me three to four months.
MARK: Wow. That’s quite a step change.
EMILY: Yeah. And this book that I’m working on now, if I continue on the schedule I’m on, then it’ll be done in about six weeks… It’ll be six weeks of writing.
MARK: Okay. I think this is a really important transition that a lot of creatives go through as their career matures because when we start off we’re doing everything, and we’re trying lots of things. And we bootstrap, and we do lots of things that aren’t really in our zone of expertise but time and success and learning often get you to the point where you realize how valuable your time is and that time away from writing and the things that you do best are really, A, they’re less fulfilling but also you’re eroding some of the potential value to your business or your career.
You used the word ‘strategy’ when you talked about your conversations with Jamie – what do you think some of the big strategic priorities that you use as your kind of guiding light at this point in your career?
EMILY: I think we basically have a two-pronged approach. We are trying to bring in new readers, and we’re trying to keep the readers we have, happy.
There’s the people who are on my email lists. I have about 20,000 people on my email list and a lot of those people have read all my books and are waiting for the next one. And a lot of those people haven’t actually even read any of my books. They just ended up in my email list. They entered a contest or something. So, there’s getting those people who kind of, we’ve got the hook, but they haven’t bitten yet, we’re trying to get them to bite. We’ve got the people who have read all the books and are my cheerleaders, and we want to keep them happy and show gratitude and appreciation for their support. And then we have people who have never even heard of me who we want to bring into the fold. The kind of people who are going to like my kind of books. We want to let them know that this book exists.
There’s different strategies for those three things. And there’s advertising to try and bring in new people. Going after cold audiences and then there’s retargeting those people to try and convince them to actually start reading the books, doing giveaways to kind of get people interested and then also doing giveaways to reward people who have read my work.
So, a lot of the tactics overlap, but the strategies are enticing versus thanking. Once I’ve enticed someone to read the book, and they take that chance on me, I’m very grateful for that. That makes me feel great. I really appreciate that someone is taking time to read my work. That’s huge. Any artist, any creative, feels a lot of gratitude when a person is interested in their work that they’re creating from their brain. I think that one of the things that we try and do is once I have those readers, we want to keep them around and really express how much they mean to me and how much I appreciate that they’re into this, that we’re into the same stuff. Like, ‘Oh, you guys are into this too? Awesome.’
MARK: Okay. Obviously there’s plenty more to come from you. You’re going to be doing this a long time as we’ve established. But, when you look back on your career so far, if there’s somebody listening to this who’s thinking, ‘Well, I would like a bit of that. I would like that kind of freedom and artistic expression and business success,’ and maybe this person, it could be a writer or it could be another kind of creative.
What are some of the big lessons you would want to share with them?
EMILY: Well, I think there’s the practical, and then there’s the mindset. So the mindset is, “Nothing is going to stop me no matter what. This is what I want, and it’s not a question of ‘if,’ it’s a question of ‘how’ and ‘when’.” So I think that’s the first thing. If you want to have this kind of creative expression, you have to keep creating no matter what is happening.
And if you want to have this kind of business success, you have to keep trying different strategies and tactics until you land on the one that works for selling your work. And in terms of the practical,
this is specifically for writers, but I would say learn to dictate early because your hands and back will thank you. And now I can interchange between the two. Last week stuff was going on that basically, it made sense that I was out dictating a lot. And then, editing my transcriptions and this week I’ve been typing all week. So, because I’ve got two kids and just the way any week goes to be able to go back and forth between those two is a skill that’s really useful for writers specifically. But for any creative, doing that same thing no matter what you do, but having ways to create your art, no matter what else is going on, is a really good skillset to build that just, ‘I’m not going to let anything stop me. This is getting done. It doesn’t matter what else is happening.’
MARK: Firstly, I would second the dictation thing even if people who aren’t primarily writers, because I discovered dictation about ten years ago. I had really bad RSI and couldn’t touch a keyboard for six months. And that’s kind of inconvenient when you’re running a web-based business. And I discovered Dragon NaturallySpeaking at that time, and it was a huge relief. And I can’t use Dragon now because I’ve got a Mac, but I still use dictation. And it’s very freeing because I can walk about the office and talk and get thoughts out in a much easier way for that initial draft.
But the bigger point I think is what you said just before that though, the mindset of, ‘I am going to make this happen, nothing is going to stop me,’ because so many creatives I come across, it’s almost as if as long as you’re thinking, ‘Well, can I do this? Will I do this? Is it possible?’ You’re waiting for permission. Whereas one thing I’ve noticed very clearly from talking to you is that, you are going to figure this out. That’s your attitude. Whenever there’s a problem, there was an obstacle, a bit like Sydney Rye herself.
EMILY: Except I don’t kill people! It’s a big difference between us.
MARK: You don’t kill people. Crucial difference.
EMILY: It’s the main difference.
MARK: But there’s that resourcefulness, and that sense of embracing the adventure, I guess, is something I very much pick up from you and in person and in your writing.
EMILY: Yeah. And I think if you can do that, if you can look at the thing that’s trying to stop you, not as a thing that’s trying to stop you, but as a new challenge to overcome. When you’re traveling, when you miss the train, when something goes wrong, and it turns out just insane, that’s the story you tell all your friends. You don’t tell them about the beautiful museum you went to and all the art you saw that might’ve been really moving and beautiful but doesn’t make a great story.
If you can kind of look at whatever is trying to stop your creative work as that missing the train, then that’s going to give you a better place to work from. And just because you missed the train doesn’t mean you’re not going to go on the trip now, right? You’re not going to be like, ‘I guess I’ll just live in Shanghai.’ You’re going to get the next train. So, I think if you go with that as like, ‘Okay, I didn’t get my words this morning because my daughter was sick, and I had to take care of her, but that doesn’t mean I’m not getting my words today.’ Or, ‘I’m going to write double tomorrow.’ You can’t just sit in the train station forever.
MARK: Okay. I think this is a good point, Emily, for you to share your Creative Challenge to our listeners. So, for anyone who’s new to the show, this is the point where I invite my guest to set you the listener, a Creative Challenge, which is something that you can do or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this interview. And it’s going to stretch you creatively and probably as a human being as well.
So, Emily, what’s your Creative Challenge?
EMILY: I think that something that would be really fun and help with when stuff comes up is sit down and write down every excuse that comes up for why you can’t get something done. So in order to create, I need space, I need silence, I need a laptop and headphones. What are even the most basic things that you think you need? Write them all down and then go through each one and come up with a plan B. So, you don’t have your headphones and your laptop? I’m going to dictate. I don’t have silence, I’m going to grab my headphones. Whatever it is, but that way you have all the things you think you need. And then throughout the seven days, as things show up and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s something I should probably add to my list,’ add it to the list and come up with a plan B.
MARK: Because otherwise in the moment, it can be, ‘Oh, well, I can’t write, I can’t paint, I can’t create today because X happened.’
EMILY: And you can just end up getting mad and frustrated. And being angry and frustrated, it’s not an awesome place to create from.
MARK: You’d be like me on Monday when we had a power cut in Bristol for an hour, and I was like, ‘What’s going on? I was just about to get going.’ I was mad for five minutes, and then I dusted off this thing called pen and paper.
EMILY: I don’t know about that!
MARK: And I guess that was my plan B for the day. But I think this is a really good one, Emily, because otherwise, it’s so easy. If you don’t have that mindset of, ‘I’m going to do this,’ then you’re easily knocked off course by the printer running out of ink, or the laptop battery going, or whatever it may be. Okay. So, identify those excuses ahead of time and have a plan B ready, so there will be no excuse when you’re tested for real.
EMILY: Yeah. And I think that also having an idea of forgiveness though in the back of your mind is important as well. Because I definitely, when I was younger, if I didn’t get my words done, I would really tear myself a new one, and that’s not helpful. So, if everything does stop you, your plan B even gets stymied, don’t think, ‘Oh, well, you know, that’s it. I’m a loser. I hate myself.’ Forgive yourself for that stumble. Be prepared to forgive yourself for the stumbles and just say, ‘Okay, I need to add to my list. I need better plan Bs.’
MARK: Yeah. No sackcloth and ashes. I think one thing I sometimes do if something comes up and I do have to lose my mornings writing, say something’s up with the children or whatever, I always look for an opportunity to pay myself back. Think about it like that, that, ‘Okay. I can find another time to do it rather than beat myself up.’
Emily, that’s a great challenge, and I’m really glad we could do this conversation because I’ve been inspired by talking to you for some time now and I’m really delighted we could share the story, some of the stories with my listeners.
For those who are listening to this thinking, ‘I really want to read about that heroine who’s kicking the patriarchy’s ass,’ where should they go?
Where can people find more about you and your books?
EMILY: My website is emilykimelman.com. And if you Google Emily Kimelman or Sydney Rye I’m the only thing that comes up. And it’s Kimelman with one M.
MARK: Great. And we will obviously put the links in the show notes as usual. 21stcenturycreative.fm, you’ll find all the show notes to all the episodes, including this one. Emily, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.
EMILY: Thank you. It’s always great to talk with you.
MARK: Maybe you can come back in your nineties, and we will continue the conversation to see how things have changed then.
EMILY: Definitely!
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Naomi Dunford on Marketing for Creatives
Jul 27, 2020
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Naomi Dunford, a contrarian marketing guru who has been ‘helping weirdos sell things on the internet’ for many years. So if you’re the kind of creator who loves making your work but hates the very idea of marketing, then I recommend you listen to what Naomi has to say on the subject.
Even if you’re fairly experienced at putting your work out into the world to grow your business or move your career forward, I think you’ll get plenty of insight from listening to what Naomi has to say about marketing for creatives.
In the first part of the show, I update you with some new events and projects from former guests on the show: a virtual poetry masterclass with Mimi Khalvati this Thursday 30th July; a new podcast about work in the age of Covid, Work, Interrupted by Christina Patterson; Jarie Bolander’s new podcast for entrepreneurs, The Entrepreneur Ethos; and Freelancing.eu, a new website from Robert Vlach for European freelancers, and others outside of Europe who want to work with European clients.
Naomi Dunford has been a source of unconventional marketing advice for unconventional business owners since 2006 when she launched her blog at Ittybiz.com.
As the name suggests, she was writing for the owners of very small and unusual businesses, making marketing comprehensible and doable for them.
I first encountered Naomi as a reader of Ittybiz, where I was entranced by her irreverent style, the fact that she managed to swear a lot and make it sound elegant and witty, and also that she could solve marketing problems while making me laugh at the same time.
Since then I’ve hired her as a consultant and experienced first-hand how good she is at finding creative solutions to problems faced by unusual business. And also how much she genuinely cares about her clients.
In this conversation Naomi tells us how she got started as a writer and marketer, and how she repurposed some of the timeless principles of classic marketing for the digital age at Ittybiz.com
And if you are the type of creative who thinks you are no good at marketing, and/or that marketing is the spawn of the devil that has nothing to do with your creativity – then Naomi has some surprising and empowering things to say.
She also talks about content marketing overload, with the tsunami of content we’ve been experiencing for the past few years. So if you’re worried that it might be too late to start attracting an audience and too hard to cut through the clutter online, then you’ll be pleased to know she has a very interesting and hopeful viewpoint on this.
And if you’re further down the line with your business and your online presence, and maybe feeling a little jaded and weary, Naomi has plenty to say that should help you reignite the spark of enthusiasm for your work.
As she says in the interview, Naomi has recently retired from running Ittybiz, which is now in the capable hands of Kris Faraldo. So we are extra lucky that I managed to coax Naomi out of retirement to talk to us. But if you want to follow Naomi’s further adventures, she has recently launched a new blog at: xxnaomi.com
Naomi Dunford interview transcript
MARK: Naomi, when you set out on your career, how did you think it was going to turn out?
NAOMI: This is the question you lead with? No pressure! How did I think it was going to turn out? When I was very small, I assumed I would write because I didn’t really know how to do anything else. And that situation seemed to sustain itself for quite some time. Eventually, I figured out how to do a few other things, but I couldn’t really find a way to make money at any of them. So, it sort of was one of those things that I wrote as a child and then I wrote as a teenager and then at some point I had to financially sustain myself and this seemed as good a method as any.
MARK: What were you writing to begin with?
NAOMI: I started out freelance writing on the internet in this beautiful half-an-hour-long heyday where you could write absolute garbage and get paid decently for it. Not quite handsomely, but if you did enough of it, it moved into handsome. So, I started out with freelance writing and it nearly killed me as it does with anybody who writes freelance for very little money.
Eventually, I started writing for my own blog and the rest is history. I started writing blog posts back when nobody really had a clue what they were doing and nobody knew how to write content to get eyeballs. And I just sort of winged it. Is winged winged or is it wung? I don’t know. And that’s how we got to here.
MARK: It could be either. Wung!
NAOMI: Wung. I wung it.
MARK: So, that was IttyBiz, was it?
NAOMI: That was IttyBiz, yeah.
MARK: Right. So, for anyone who hasn’t had the delights of visiting ittybiz.com, can you tell us a bit about what they could expect there?
NAOMI: Absolutely. I help weirdos make money on the internet is really the shortest way to phrase it.
MARK: You helped me!
NAOMI: The people rest, Mark, the people rest! Yes. I give marketing and business development advice to solopreneurs and very small companies. Technically, we call an IttyBiz fewer than five employees, but the reality is it is one, maybe a couple, but usually it’s a person and a cat.
MARK: Yes. It was one of the websites that says ‘we’ when they mean, ‘It’s me and the cat’.
NAOMI: Exactly. Yes. And any mice the cat has found in the meantime. Yes, exactly. So, generally speaking, solopreneurs or couples who are running businesses together.
MARK: Okay. Now, so you started off as a writer and I know you’ve always written in some shape or form. I know an awful lot of writers who don’t have any interest at all in marketing or so they tell me.
Where did your interest in marketing come from?
NAOMI: I’ve heard that, yes. My parents were both in marketing and my grandparents were in marketing as well. It was how I grew up. Both my parents separately had their own businesses. My grandfather used to write copy in the old Mad Men era. And yeah, pretty classic third-generation, it’s just all I’ve ever been around.
MARK: What was your image of marketing when you became aware of what the rest of the family were up to?
NAOMI: Oh, I think that’s like asking a fish what its image of the water was. It was really just life and marketing was, well, how in the hell else are you going to sell something? It just was, I realize that’s an awfully boring answer, but it was just all there was. And somebody in my house was always hustling for something and my mom did service and my dad did products and my grandfather did the higher-level stuff at agencies and it’s just all I ever knew.
MARK: So, okay. But I’m still interested in your interest in it.
What would you say your definition of marketing is?
NAOMI: That’s a good question. I would love to say I’m classically trained. That would imply that I am trained, which I am not.
MARK: You play the piano.
NAOMI: But I follow a very classic approach to marketing, which was the original AIDA formula devised way back in the, I don’t know, 20s or something. And it’s this process that a customer or a prospect or a potential client goes through, which is first Attention, they need to know you exist. Then interest, it has to be something that Interests them. Then Desire, they have to want something. And then Action, they take action in some way. Traditionally, that’s known as a purchase. But in this day and age, in the attention economy, sometimes eyeballs are far more important than money. So, taking some manner of action, subscribing and sharing, those kinds of things.
I really like the classic approach. I like the simple approach that every prospect, every potential customer has to go through that journey, maybe quickly, maybe slowly and I find the process of moving people along that little four-step journey fascinating. And I think so much of who we are is based on what we buy. And that can be true of organic produce, that can be true of luxury goods, that can be true of services to have people make our lives easier, all of those things. And I just find it really, really interesting.
MARK: And I know, like me, you work with a lot of creatives and not all of said creatives are as enthusiastic as you are about marketing, to put it mildly.
What do you say to somebody who comes and say, ‘Well, look, I want to sell my stuff but I don’t really want to sell it. I would rather not have to do this at all. I would rather just make it.’
NAOMI: On one level, we would all rather just make it. And so, I empathize with that perspective. Even though I’m in marketing, I don’t like marketing my own stuff. I just want to make it and get on with the next thing. So, I certainly have empathy for that. And I think it’s important to give people a safe space where they’re allowed to be nervous or frightened or apathetic or contemptuous, let’s be honest.
So, we need to provide a safe space for that but on the other level, I generally don’t particularly want to brush my teeth. I don’t, I just want to have them. But so it goes, if you are going to have teeth, you need to care for them and if you’re going to have products or services, you need to care for those too. And marketing is not optional. In this day and age, it is even more not optional as people who don’t even have businesses or products for sale need to have personal brands so that they can look cool on LinkedIn. Marketing is not optional. And so, I think in many cases, the faster we move on from that idea, the happier we’re all going to be.
MARK: And we creatives like to think that we are special, unique even.
Would you say there is anything particularly special or different about the challenges we face, marketing/sales, as creatives versus the rest of the world? Or is it all pretty much the same thing?
NAOMI: I think the greatest uniqueness that we face is the constant belief that we’re unique. I think a lot of… this is one of those words that I’ve just gotten so into lately, my brother introduced me to it, normcore.
MARK: Normcore?!
NAOMI: Normcore. Which means like supernormal.
MARK: Okay. It’s now crossed the Atlantic, it’s landed in Bristol!
NAOMI: Exactly.
MARK: Now I’m going to start propagating, supernormal, normcore, they’re like hardcore.
NAOMI: Yeah. It’s like hardcore but with normals. And those people often think they’re normal because they are. And so, they don’t get quite as precious as people like us tend to do. And on the other hand, because they don’t get as precious, they’re much more likely to just follow the rules. And I don’t mean rules as in strict rules, I mean rules as in the rules of physics: do this and the chances that somebody will buy your thing go up.
And normal people are much better at following the rules, but one of the reasons that creatives don’t is because that’s a key component of being creative. Creative is creating something new and that is intrinsically anti-rule. And while we may follow these rules or those rules, a photographer may follow the rule of thirds, but they’re not going to follow the rules of you’re supposed to take pictures of people and fruit. And it’s intrinsically rule-breaking, so we have this massive cohort of people who break rules for a living. Well, of course, when we come in and tell them you have to do this or you have to do this, well, they’re going to rebel. Shocker.
MARK: Okay. So, yes, there are things that they have to do and there are rules that they have to follow or laws of marketing/physics.
Would you say that there are opportunities to be creative within marketing that some creatives have not quite realized yet?
NAOMI: Yes. There are an infinite number of them. I would say though… because making a list of infinite is difficult, I would say that the key thing that I would want creative people to realize is the classic, ‘I’m not good at marketing’ is very firmly entrenched as a belief among many creative people. And what I would like to communicate to them is: creative people are the only people who are good at marketing.
When Coca-Cola says, ‘Right, we want some more ads.’ And they go to a little advertising agency and a bunch of people in slim-fitting suits with expensive espresso makers make them a big mockup of a picture, that thing that they show them, it’s called a creative. The person who runs that company is the Creative Director and marketing, advertising, all of these things, it’s only creativity. And so, what I would love to communicate is by being a creative, that is a necessary condition for marketing. It is not a sufficient condition for marketing in that it’s not the only thing you need to be, but we believe it’s a liability when not only is it an asset, it’s a requirement.
MARK: Okay. Then so, what else do I need? If I’m a creative, say, okay, great, I’m creative. Therefore, I can do marketing. What am I still missing?
What do I need to combine with my natural curiosity and creativity and instinct for breaking the rules?
NAOMI: You need to replace any disempowering narratives and stories that you have with positive ones. One of the biggest, I suppose, pitfalls that befall us is… okay, there’s this really classic Dilbert comic in which some normcore character… that’s gonna be the word of the day now, isn’t it? Right. Is going into the marketing department and it’s like a 24/7 party and there’s like a disco ball and unicorns and velvet couches and music is everywhere and there’s this constant amazing party, right?
And on the other side, we believe in what the good Mr. Adams said when he says, ‘Marketers are the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.’ And so, deep down, we have this conflict of marketing is fun and lucrative and money falls from the sky. Marketing is worthy of execution. And with that conflict comes, well, conflict. And in states of conflict where we don’t know what we believe, we then, therefore, have no belief system to sit under our actions and create an infrastructure for them. And so, we generally do nothing.
And so, the biggest piece of advice I can give to creative people who are squeamish about marketing or are perhaps not confident in their abilities is you have to do it and like anything, whatever your art is, I’m guessing it took you a while to get good at it. Well, the same is true for marketing. Yeah. Nobody’s first emails to their newsletter list are good. Most of our, still, newsletters to our lists are not good! Like, my Instagram literally says, ‘Mostly just cats giving business advice.’ They are stock photography cats with little blurbs. I’m going to tell you, Mark, some of them are great. It’s fine.
You just have to do it and build the skill. But to build the skill you need a belief system that supports that skill and that, no, I live and breathe marketing. I do it every day, not just weekdays. I’m like the Bletchley Park of IttyBiz owners. I’m always kind of on. I live it and I breathe it and I have people from all over the world that I’m talking to on Saturdays and Sundays. It’s my whole life. And I live and I breathe this and I’m still not that great at it when I’m not that great at it, so you just have to keep going.
MARK: Yes. Well, I think I can certainly relate to that artistically because it’s easy to get discouraged. I could look at the bookshelf behind me with all the great poets up there and either take inspiration or intimidation down from the shelf. And yet I keep doing it because I love doing it and I see the value in it. And so, I guess it’s the same with marketing. Maybe it’s more like teeth cleaning, we love the result rather than the doing. But I don’t know, what about this whole idea of content marketing, Naomi, as a way of doing marketing that is actually enjoyable and maybe even creative?
NAOMI: That’s a fad! Nobody listens to podcasts, right? Sorry.
MARK: And for anyone who didn’t get the introduction, I’ve known Naomi at least 10 years. And so, the fad’s been going a little while…
NAOMI: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it might stick around, perhaps. Right. Content marketing. Ask your question again. I’ll stop making stupid jokes and actually properly answer it.
MARK: Well, this is very often part of my comeback to people who say, ‘I’d rather be creating than marketing.’ I say, well, I like doing creative marketing. I like creating stuff that’s known as content, but I tend to think of it as media or just an extension of my work, like this podcast. Technically it’s marketing, but actually I really enjoy making it because it satisfies my curiosity. I get to interview interesting people like you and share the results with my listeners. So this is one of the ways that people hear about me and get to know me and that helps my business.
I think it’d be great for people to hear your take on content marketing and creativity and how the two fit together.
NAOMI: I have been in this world I guess 14 years now and here’s what I would say. There is talk of what’s called content shock and the basic idea of content shock… I forget. Maybe you can put in the show notes or something, a link to the original piece or something like that.
MARK: Okay. I’ll make a note. Yeah.
NAOMI: Perfect, do because this idea of content shock came about at a time when we had all been… you remember these days, Mark, we were all blogging dutifully every day…
MARK: That’s right.
NAOMI: … and we would get up a little early and write our blog post for the day and it would take about an hour and then you’d click publish and then you’d go to work. And there was a voracious desire on the part of the viewer, reader, listener to get more and more and more and more, right?
At some point, there was plenty. We were good for a while and what happened then was what was called content shock. I’ve heard this referred to in media as peak TV, peak podcasting, whatever it happens to be, which means we have now reached the point where there is more to consume that we would like, not just randos, there is more that we would like to consume than we could ever consume.
Having said that, the audience is just as voracious now as they used to be. We cluster now. We cluster and find things that are really customized for us so it’s not so much, I write a blog post today and I can reasonably assume that I will get 5,000 visitors reading it today because they have absolutely nothing else to do because nobody else is making contact. Now, everybody and their dog is making content, but what that means is, it’s this amazing opportunity to do incredibly creative things that maybe 10, 15 years ago would have been too weird.
MARK: Yes.
NAOMI: The rules have become so lax as to be virtually non-existent now and if I were a creative TM title case, Creative Person, coming into creating content, this would be the time that I would be thrilled because you and I, well, maybe you’re a little more flexible than I am, but I really locked into the old ways and the old rules and it took me a long time to stop being so old and dusty and start bringing in that creative spirit again to my own work because I got really locked into existing habits and patterns.
Now, you can make a YouTube channel about anything. And certainly, production standards have gone up, but the cost of creating things well has also gone down. So, nowadays, you can make weirder videos than you used to be able to, but they better be nicer videos.
MARK: Yeah. I think, for me, there’s a sense that you’ve got permission to be more extreme or even there’s an incentive to follow your own extreme inclination because maybe 10 years ago if you did something that was a bit more mainstream, you would probably get more attention. But now there’s already loads of people doing all the mainstream stuff.
So, you might as well do that weird, extreme thing that obsesses you because, you know what, there will probably be enough people out there who go, ‘That’s exactly what I want!’
NAOMI: Exactly! Exactly. And they find it and they fall instantly in love. And if I could communicate anything to people who are considering creating content marketing like that, it’s like, that love, that connection, that initial spark of, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect!’ if you can get that with 1 person, you can get it with 10 people and if you can get it with 10 people, you can get it with 100 people. And if you have 100 or 1000 people who had that initial spark, you now no longer need anyone like me to tell you about marketing because that train is going to go all on its own. It’s going to have its own natural momentum because that spark is inimitable, and I can’t teach anybody marketing that will have a greater effect than that spark of recognition of a fellow weirdo.
MARK: Yeah, that’s wonderful. So, look for that spark, folks!
Okay, Naomi, suppose I’m listening to this and I’m not necessarily a beginner in my art or my creative work, but I haven’t really shown up online. I haven’t put my work out there and I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, okay, now’s the time.’ And particularly I love the idea of doing something weird or extreme.
Where should I start? What kind of questions should I be asking myself? What kind of media platforms or channels should I be considering? How do I come up with a strategy that’s going to cut through all of this content shock?
NAOMI: Now, that is a very interesting series of questions that you present. My general answer is going to be this, I’m not going to say in all cases every single listener and every single conceivable type of creative pursuit, but I would say that the overwhelming majority of creative stuff that we do at some point incorporated the concept of reverse engineering.
So you, at some point, were inspired by a piece of poetry. You were inspired by a video, by a photograph, or over the course of your life, you have absorbed just information from your environment. We see pictures, we see movies, we hear music, whatever, right? And we have this amalgam in our mind and then we get an idea, whatever that idea is. So, whatever your creative thing is, lovely listener at home or on a train, at some point there was a process of reverse engineering where you imagined the ultimate thing you wanted to achieve, your painting, your song, whatever, ad campaign.
And you sat down and said, ‘Right, how am I going to do that?’ And you did that via reverse-engineering. So, you imagined the end on some conscious or unconscious level and you worked backward to create your creative results. You have to do that with building your business and marketing your business.
So, you think to yourself, ‘Right, website, probably need one of those’, and you sit down and you go and absorb just like you did with whatever you do for your creative living, look at other websites, think to yourself, right, they usually have about five pages at the top. Got it. There’s a homepage, there’s an about page, there’s a place where you can give money for something, there is a contact page, and then there’s usually another one, something like testimonials, some things like content marketing or articles or go listen to my podcast or watch me on YouTube or whatever, and you look at that and go, ‘Five pages, I think I can probably pull that off.’
And you make yourself a little list of things to do and you go, ‘Right. Maybe the next thing is, okay, I think Pinterest is for me.’ Sure. You’ve decided Pinterest is your thing. Fantastic. Okay, look around. Use those sensors that you use to perceive the world kind of at work and creative capacities in this area that we… this sort of special, hallowed, glowing, lovely area of creativity and use those same sensors to look around and go, ‘Right, what should I do?’
And whatever it is is easily reverse-engineerable. Just like if you’re going to say, ‘I’m going to make a meal and it’s going to have these three components. I’ve never cooked anything in this meal before in my life.’ So, look it up and just make your little steps and do them and take away, like we said earlier, the disempowering narrative. It’s hard, it’s overwhelming, it’s scary, it’s difficult, I don’t know how to choose. And just do it step by step, and I assure you that whatever it is that you do creatively is far, far, far, far more difficult than writing a newsletter.
MARK: I love this, Naomi, and it’s made me realize, artistically, a lot of us do start with reverse engineering. I got into writing poetry because I loved reading poetry. And it was that moment of, ‘Oh, well, could I do that?’ And, of course, you start off by copying or imitating types of poet of writer that you like. And it was the same when I started blogging. I remember I saw the first blog that really sparked something in me was Steve Pavlina’s blog.
NAOMI: Oh, I love him! I love him.
MARK: And this was like 2005 or something. And I’d never really seen a blog and I’d heard about it through Seth Godin and I looked at his and it was fine, but it was kind of marketing and big-picture insights, which I knew wasn’t my thing. And then I saw Steve Pavlina and his tagline was ‘Personal Development for Smart People.’ And he was writing all this weird stuff about polyphasic sleep and productivity and relationships and whatever.
And I thought, wow, and he’s just putting it all out there on the internet and I thought, ‘I could do that, but I would do personal development for creative people.’ But in a way, he’d figured out all the hard stuff. He’d figured out the model and yeah, publishing stuff online will help your readers and therefore will help you. And yes, there are people who want to read it because he wouldn’t have all these readers. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I’ll do my version of that.’
NAOMI: Exactly. I was actually inspired by you, a conversation that we had years ago. Something about poetry because, of course, it was. And I was on my way back from something and I remember I was sitting in the back of a car and I don’t remember any of the details, but I remember there were a lot of people in the car and I was very squished in because I was the smallest, and I sat down and wrote a poem on my phone and it was the first poem that I had not been assigned by a teacher that I had ever written.
And for whatever reason, that idea that you should probably Google it first just to make sure that you’re doing it right just left me and I sat down with the Notes app on my old, like, iPhone 4 or something and I sat down and I wrote a poem. Why? Because how hard can it be? Writing excellent poetry, probably tricky. Writing poetry at all, probably I think I can hack it, and the same is true with marketing.
MARK: Okay. So, that’s for people who are getting started, who are looking to make their first mark on the internet, the wider world. What about somebody who is, say, a bit further down the line career-wise, maybe presence-wise, maybe they’ve had an audience for a while and they’re feeling they’ve reached a bit of a plateau maybe creatively and business-wise?
What kind of challenges do you come across when you work with people at this stage of their career or their business?
NAOMI: That is a really easy question and thank you for that. We get stuck. That’s the biggest issue with mid-career and beyond. We get stuck. Whatever era that we came of age in, came of marketing age, as it were, or business development or career and exposure, whatever era we came of age in and whatever it was that we did when we came of age, we lock into those strategies and tactics and it is very difficult to get oneself out of those locks. And this is why coaches can continue to exist and feed themselves and their children is once you get locked, you usually need somebody else to come in and unlock you. And that is the biggest challenge by far without a close second, they just get locked into the old way and it becomes very, very difficult, neurologically difficult to break out of those habits and routines.
MARK: So, what do you do with them?
NAOMI: Well, I’ll tell you what I personally do. Is this what other people should do? I don’t know because it’s going to be very based on temperament. But I will say, what I will usually do, I try to always lead with empathy because if you’re at this stage, you have already achieved something remarkable. You have already achieved something that I assure you, somebody in your childhood said couldn’t be done. You have already beaten the odds. You have already achieved even microcosmic greatness. And so, a huge part of that initial part of working with people like that is creating a compassionate safe place for them to stop beating themselves up about, ‘Oh God, I should be this. I should be this. I should be this.’
Maybe take a moment to see what you’ve accomplished and logically, of course, you’re going to be locked into that. If it works, we do it again. I do not reinvent the wheel when I’m making scrambled eggs in the morning, I don’t go, ‘You know what? I’m really in a scrambled eggs rut. I should probably make them a little bit differently.’ That’s how the brain manages resources efficiently. Once it finds something that works, it stops looking for other ways and then it becomes quite loyal to that way that works and gets a little cross with you if you decide to start changing things up. So, forgive yourself, it makes perfect sense.
Then the next step, once I feel like they’re feeling safe and loved and respected, then we can move into, ‘Okay, what do you think you should be doing? What do you wish you could be doing? What is nagging at you that really you should do that?’
So, if you and I, let’s say this was years ago and you hadn’t published books yet, and you came to me and said, ‘I’m in a rut and my marketing sucks and blah, blah, blah,’ we’d go through all of that nice, kumbayah, lovey-dovey, make you feel empathized with, and then I would say, ‘Right, what do you think you should be doing?’ And you’d pause for a moment and you’d say, ‘I think I should be writing a book.’ And then I’d say, ‘Right, then I guess you should write a book.’ And then we work through the necessary struggles and the reconciliation that comes with embarking on new projects, that comes with coming out of a comfort zone, things like that.
But realistically, people who are in a mid-stage of their career or later know exactly what they should be doing next. If we gave you truth serum, that potion that you have in Harry Potter that forces you to tell the truth, if we gave you truth serum, you would know exactly what you should be doing, but something is stopping you. And that’s probably some level of neurological attachment to your existing ways or a big narrative of how it’s going to be hard, about how you can’t do it, about how it’s going to be overwhelming, it’s going to take forever, all the classic stuff. But the next step is to do exactly what it is you know you should be doing. You know the next step is blogging. The next step is podcasting. The next step is going on the interview circuit. The next step is running ads. The next step is building your email list. The next step is building your website, getting more involved in social media. You know what you should be doing
MARK: As simple as that.
NAOMI: Done.
MARK: And you know, folks, it sounds simple when Naomi describes it like that, but it really isn’t. And really, it’s kind of the thing that’s simple and obvious when it’s someone else. But when it’s you, it’s so hard to see. It’s like Chip and Dan Heath say, ‘It’s really hard to read the label when you’re in the bottle.’
NAOMI: Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful.
MARK: And that’s where someone like Naomi can really help and I can certainly testify to the way she does that. Okay. So, Naomi, let’s take a step back. You have got a real range of marketing knowledge and history here. You’ve come from a family that’s really steeped in the classical marketing traditions. You’ve lived through the Wild West period of the internet. You’ve seen what happens with the tsunami of content overwhelm, the rise of social media and what that turned into. What would you say are the things that still keep working?
Is there anything that you could point to and say, ‘That’s evergreen. Whatever era of marketing you’re in, you need to be doing that. You need to focus on that.’
NAOMI: People. Individual humans that either you know and they know you or just they know you. But if your great-grandmother was a laundress and took in clothes to scrub in her back garden, everything she did came back to her relationships with people and that’s still true today. You, for example, emailed me and said, ‘Naomi, would you like to come on my podcast?’ And I went, ‘Of course.’ I do not wake up before 10:00 in the morning unless I am taking a plane or there’s an alarm of some nature. I am the classic. Okay. This is one area where I do have the classic artistic, I stay up late, I wake up late. But I did it because I know you and I like you and the time slot was 9:30. So, all right, I’ll wake up like an adult. I woke up at 8:00 in the morning for you, Mark.
MARK: Dear listener, I hope you appreciate the sacrifice Naomi is making! Because it’s very inconvenient to meet when you live over on this side of the Atlantic when Naomi is on the other side.
NAOMI: It’s really quite intense, but that’s it. I know you and I like you and you said, ‘Would you like to do this thing?’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’d like to do this thing.’ There you go. That was true 100 years ago and it was true 5,000 years ago and it’s true now. So, whatever the medium, whatever the message, whatever the forum, the thing that remains is people.
MARK: Okay. So, obviously, to me, that’s a very relevant and pertinent example because I’m thinking about the email I sent you was quite short. Whereas, if I’m inviting someone to come on the show who’s never heard of me or the podcast, the email is a lot longer because I’ve got to work even harder on the subject line of the email. I’ve got to grab their attention. I’ve got to make it clear, it’s an invitation, and what it is quite quickly because if they see a long email, they think, ‘What the hell is this?’ And I know that I need to persuade them that this is the kind of show that they would want to be on and I need to spend a lot longer crafting the copy, if you like, the text of that email than if it’s someone I’ve been in touch with for years.
I think this is an important marketing principle that, if you’ve been showing up for years in somebody’s life and they already know and like and trust you to an extent, it’s a lot easier to make an invitation or to make an offer whereas if you don’t, you’ve got to work a lot harder at it.
NAOMI: Exactly. You’re actually on a list of people that when I hired a new assistant, I gave them a list and I said, ‘If anybody on this list gets in touch, make sure it goes directly to me.’ And that’s because I know you and so you already have my attention and my interest. Now, you came to me and told me, ‘I have a podcast. Do you want to be on it?’ And that created instant desire and subsequent action. There you go, marketing in a nutshell. It’s a whole lot easier when we’ve drunk three bottles of wine together in Chinatown in London.
MARK: Yeah. Maybe we should do a members-only version of the show for that!
NAOMI: Oh, I always had this dream of doing a podcast called ‘The Second Glass of Wine.’ Where I drink a glass of wine and then I pour another one and turn on the mic and talk to somebody else who’s done the same thing. And we just did that like inhibitions, just slightly lower. That’s what I always thought. I thought, ‘The Second Glass of Wine,’ that’s what I was going to call it.
MARK: Okay. I think it is time, Naomi, for your Creative Challenge for the listener. So, if you are listening to this and you’re new to the show, this is the part of the show where I invite my guest to set you, dear listener, a creative challenge. So, this is something that you can do or begin doing within seven days of listening to this conversation and something that will stretch you creatively and probably as a person and likely professionally and business-wise as well.
So, Naomi, what is your Creative Challenge?
NAOMI: May I just say this is such a cool idea. Way to go, Mark. I love this idea. Such a cool thing. I mean, your idea of having a Creative Challenge, not my creative challenge.
MARK: No, no, yours will be cool, I’m sure!
NAOMI: My goodness, I love my idea! Okay. It has been said that we are exposed to, give or take, 10,000 marketing messages a day. Now, depending on who you ask, that number can be stated to be much higher. But let’s go with the conservative 10,000.
What I would like you to do, especially if you have any nervousness, squeamishness, blocks, disempowering narratives, stories in your mind about marketing being difficult or marketing not being creative, what I would like you to do is in the next seven days, of the 70,000-odd marketing messages that you will be exposed to, I would like you to find and note 25 of them that you saw to be particularly creative.
These are fun subject lines that you got… and ideally, we’re looking for things that are marketing or advertising, something is for sale. So, you’re on a mailing list for a shop you go to and you get a fun subject line that makes you kind of giggle or curious or excited or something like that. This is Wendy’s, I don’t know if they do this anymore, but Wendy’s on Twitter used to do these roasts where people would submit themselves to have Wendy’s mock them on Twitter. This could be interesting copy that you see, ads, in-person, on the tube, in a magazine, whatever it happens to be, sales pages that you see for products like internet marketing kind of products, those things, neat offers, something other than the standard buy one, get one half off, if you hear something creatively approached, anything like that. So, I’d like you to find and make note of 25 creative uses of marketing. Now, I wanted to say one more thing.
We in the marketing world will often advise people to create what’s called a swipe file and a swipe file is basically legalized theft where you find cool things in the world, like a cool subject line or a cool headline, and you put them in what we call a swipe file where you put all these cool headlines or all these cool subject lines that you might want to adapt for your own purposes at some point in the future, just for inspiration. This isn’t that. You don’t have to be about to use them. Don’t turn this into school. Don’t make it any harder than it has to be. Just note the things that you thought were particularly creative so that you can start reconditioning your brain to know that creativity and marketing live in the same house. It’s not this different, other thing. So, that’s my challenge.
MARK: I love this. It’s like we’re all wearing your glasses for the week.
NAOMI: Yes.
MARK: And we see the world the way you see it. It’s like because one thing I know that you notice cool marketing, creative, delightful marketing stuff around us though maybe the rest of us don’t pay quite so much attention to.
NAOMI: Exactly. We think that we don’t see it, but we do because that thing that made you buy the thing, it was sufficiently compelling that you did notice it, you did register it, you just didn’t file it under creative marketing, you probably filed it under ‘thing I want to buy’. And so, if you can start… like website tags, you know how it would say… like there’ll be a little tag instead of a category that says this is something, start creating tags in your mind for creative marketing. So, as you see things, you can go, ‘That was creative, that was creative, that was creative,’ and then you can start realizing in your bones intuitively that marketing is a creative profession.
MARK: Brilliant. Love it. So, Naomi, as always, it’s been a lot of fun to talk to you and I’ve learned a lot. We haven’t drunk quite as much wine as usual, but maybe we’ll do that next time.
NAOMI: Yes. Well, next time, don’t have me on at half-past nine!
MARK: Yeah. That really would be unforgivable, if you’ve got to drink wine at half-past nine in the morning. That wouldn’t be good.
NAOMI: I’ll survive.
MARK: Okay. Naomi, this is usually the point of the interview where I say to my guest, okay, where should people go? What’s your website? How should they connect with you online? But I understand your circumstances have changed rather radically recently. What’s happening there?
NAOMI: They have indeed. I, at the ripe old age of almost 39, retired.
MARK: Wow.
NAOMI: Yes. I sold my business to the beautiful, charming, and eminently talented Kris Faraldo who has been my assistant since the year dot. And she has been gently suggesting and/or haranguing and/or full-out harassing me to stop it and give it to her. And eventually, I stopped micromanaging, I stopped getting in the way, and I did give it to her. So, now, I am retired.
MARK: And how is retirement?
NAOMI: Fantastic. It is a great way to take loads of baths, read pre-Victorian fiction.
MARK: The best kind.
NAOMI: Right. I’m learning to cook my own food again instead of just having a man bring it to my door. It’s great.
MARK: Great. So, does this mean there’s nowhere people can go to get more Naomi online?
NAOMI: Well, as it stands for what I’m up to at the moment, as I said, I’m primarily focusing on bathing and reading. But if you want to have access to my entire body of work and yeah, my whole life’s work is available in what we created and called the Karma Store. So, what we’ve done is we’ve taken every modern product that I want anyone to ever see.
MARK: So, not a retro section?
NAOMI: Exactly. Every product, every book, every audio program, every course, anything like that that I’ve done is in what we call the Karma Store. And it is all on pay-what-you-can pricing and the profits are going to kiva.org. If people aren’t familiar with Kiva, it is a micro-lending platform where IttyBiz owners all over the world can apply for small loans to help them get their businesses off the ground. So, if you want to do something for a good cause and if you want to inexplicably hear me talk for longer about marketing, you can pretty much have an infinite amount of it for any amount of money you care to pay.
MARK: Wow. That’s quite an invitation. And also, there is another benefit, Naomi, isn’t it? That they get the benefit of your accrued years of marketing wisdom. So, it’s not just about listening to Naomi’s voice, great as that is, but you will learn an awful lot. I’ve learned a lot from working with Naomi and studying with her over the years. So, if you would like to do something good for your business as well as for IttyBiz owners around the world, then head on over to IttyBiz.com.
NAOMI: Exactly. I believe it’s ittybiz.com/karmastore. That seems like the sensible thing for it to be, but I’m sure you can put it in the show notes, but otherwise, it is emblazoned all over the website at every available pause point. So, you should be able to find it.
MARK: Great. Okay. I should make sure that the correct link is in the show notes. So, thank you, Naomi, as always, it’s an absolute delight to talk to you.
NAOMI: Well, thank you. I think you’re doing wonderful work here. I’m so excited to see the other people in your… what do you have here, seasons, right?
MARK: That’s right. Seasons.
NAOMI: Yes. Yes. Well, I’m very excited about the next season, Mark.
MARK: Excellent. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Making Music Sustainable with Steve Lawson
Jul 20, 2020
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Steve Lawson, a musician described by Bass Guitar magazine as “Britain’s most innovative bassist, no contest”. Instead of playing in a band as part of the rhythm section, the way bass players are supposed to, Steve is a solo artist, who creates what he describes as “melodic, ambient, wonky electronica”.
And instead of chasing a record deal, stadium gigs or millions of stream on Spotify, Steve deliberately keeps his audience small and intimate. He releases several albums a year via an innovative subscription model, which frees him up to make music on his own terms. He’s here to talk about his unusual path as a musician and how to build a sustainable career as an independent creator.
In the first part of the show, I reflect on the Black Lives Matter movement, and the importance of diversity for our creativity, for the health of the arts and the creative industries; as well as some thoughts about the interview I recorded with Monique DeBose for Season 4, where she spoke powerfully about her experience of growing up mixed-race in the US.
In the coaching segment, if you have a love-hate relationship with your phone, or if you’re feeling your anxiety stoked by the stream of bad news and social media outrage at your fingertips, then I invite you to pick up a poem instead of your phone.
Steve Lawson
If you talk to most musicians about the state of the music industry, you will hear a tale of woe – no one buys music any more, piracy and streaming are killing music, it’s impossible to get a record deal any more, and even if you did, it wouldn’t be worth it, and so on.
But talk to Steve Lawson and you’ll hear a very different story.
He experienced early career success in what now feels like the ‘good old days’ of the music business, getting regular gigs as a session musician and touring with the likes of Howard Jones and as the opening act for Level 42.
Steve has played headline sets at festivals across Europe, and recently he has also collaborated in the studio with artists including Reeves Gabrels and Jason Cooper of The Cure, and Mark Kelly of Marillion. So he knows what it’s like to play for big crowds and with big stars.
But Steve decided to take a very different path.
As an experimental solo bass player, he occupies what by any stretch of the imagination is a pretty specialist niche in the music scene. Described by Bass Guitar magazine as ‘Britain’s most innovative bassist, no contest’, he creates otherworldly cinematic soundscapes, improvised live, in his own words, ‘with nothing but a 6-string bass guitar, an MPC-style MIDI controller and a bewildering array of pedals.’
His music has also been regularly played on BBC Radio 3, 6Music and numerous stations across Europe and the US. And he has been written about in The Times, The Guardian and The Independent.
Steve takes an equally unconventional approach to the business side of his music.
Most musicians bet their career on chasing the numbers – previously with the goal of having a hit record and filling stadiums, more recently getting millions of streams on Spotify and Youtube. But Steve has opted to build a strong relationship with a small but very dedicated following who really appreciate his music.
So you won’t find his music on Spotify or Tidal. Instead, he makes most of it available via an annual subscription in Bandcamp – for a one off annual fee you get all the music Steve releases in a year, which is typically several albums’ worth, plus his entire back catalogue.
He calls this Steve’s Ever-Expanding Digital Box-Set and for his listeners, it’s an incredible bargain, when you explore the volume and quality of its contents. It also gives them the opportunity to connect with Steve, giving them insights into his creative process.
In return, as he says in today’s interview, his subscribers give him a valuable source of direct and honest feedback about his work.
It’s working out pretty well financially too – he has enough subscribers to pay his rent, which frees him up to spend his time making the music he wants to make, and to enjoy teaching the bass to his students. So he has that very rare thing in the current music scene, a business model that makes his music sustainable, and where he is not beholden to labels or management.
I first met Steve about 13 years ago, at Social Media Club in London, a weekly gathering started by Lloyd Davis in the innocent early days of social media, when we were all excited by the potential of the new technologies to facilitate new social structures. We’ve stayed in touch ever since, mostly on Twitter, and as a subscriber to his music I can confirm that it’s a phenomenal offer and a lovely surprise when an email arrives in my inbox every few weeks with another album from Steve.
Here at The 21st Century Creative of course, we are all about taking an unconventional path, and I wanted to showcase a positive story about the music industry – so Steve was the obvious choice.
In this conversation Steve tells the story of how he found his calling as a solo bass player, literally by accident, and how he tried various paths in the music industry before developing his own style and business model.
He talks about what makes his membership program work, when so many artists have tried without success. And he has some strong opinions about the state of the music business, how it keeps musicians stuck, and what musicians can do to achieve sustainable success on their own terms.
I should emphasise we recorded the interview before Covid landed, so we don’t talk about the new challenges for musicians in a world where live music at public gatherings is currently banned. But I think it’s entirely possible that subscription models like Steve’s will become more relevant in the world of social distancing, so if you’re considering this, it’s really worth listening to what he has to say on the subject.
And there is plenty of wisdom in this conversation for those of us who are not musicians, such as elements of his creative practice and business model. But the most important thing I think we can learn from Steve is his attitude – contrarian, creative, and irrepressibly determined to succeed on his own terms.
So this is a great interview to listen to for all of us who want to make our creative practice and our creative career more sustainable over the long term.
Steve Lawson interview transcript
MARK: Steve, when did you start playing music?
STEVE: Ooooh. The question is normally, ‘When did you start playing bass?’ And actually, ‘When did you start playing music?’ is much more interesting because I think I probably first played recorder when I was five. And I went through a whole bunch of instruments. I remember my mum trying to teach me the guitar, and she showed me a G major chord and an E major chord and I couldn’t hear the difference. I had no ear for it at all, they’re not even in the same key so they’re actually quite jarring. And I just wasn’t able to discern the difference between them. So, there was this assumption that I had zero musical talent.
And I then tried violin and trumpet and was suitably terrible at both of them. And eventually landed on electric bass when I was 13. I got one for my 14th birthday because the kid next door, we just moved from Wimbledon to Berwick-on-Tweed and the kid next door was a drummer. So, I bought a bass off of a local school teacher for 25 quid. And definitely, there was that feeling of coming home, with going, ‘Oh, this is what I should be doing.’ And I was supremely terrible at it.
But it just suddenly felt like I think, my problem… and I think it runs across music education entirely, is that kids are being taught music they don’t care about. And all of a sudden, I landed in a place where I can play music that I was actually listening to, and it wasn’t just exercises out of a tune-a-day book. I was going, ‘Okay, well, there’s that song by The Who or that song by Queen.’ Despite the fact it was mid-80s, we were all obsessed with the late 60s for some reason, and I could learn those tunes and play them. And as I got into different kinds of music, I could actually sit down with my bass and have a go working those out. And I think it was that connection between what I was listening to and what I wanting to play that solidified that as being, I think, the path that I wanted to be on.
MARK: So, okay, the kid next door was a drummer, so that’s how you picked up the bass. But I’m intrigued about this feeling of, ‘Oh, yeah, this is it. This is what I’m meant to do.’
What is it that you love about the bass?
STEVE: It’s a really interesting one. I think the bass tends to attract a certain kind of personality. And it’s weird because I now play solo so much of the time, which is quite outside of that. In its normal form, bass doesn’t often sit on its own. This is so odd for me being the one talking about this because I’ve spent 20 years way outside of this. But the thing that drew me to it was actually that team thing of playing with other people, of not being the soloist, of not expecting a bunch of other people to support me while I go off and do showy stuff, but actually being part of that whole. And I really like that.
I like the sense that you were the bit the people dance to. I once did a gig in, a very odd gig in a jazz bar in Soho, filling in for the keyboard player in a funk band. And it was a student of mine that was on bass and they were looking for a keyboard player and they couldn’t find somebody to cover. And he just went just on a whim said, ‘Why don’t we get Steve to come in and play the keyboard parts on bass?’ Which was a fantastic exercise. It was totally weird. I’m glad that he was a lunatic and did that. But they asked me to go and do that.
But the odd thing was I suddenly realized that from the bass, when I’m playing bass lines, I’m very much in control of what’s going in the band. I can slow the drummer down. I can speed him up. I can support the direction that the singer is going. There’s an awful lot of control you have. You’re basically playing in goal as the bass player. And suddenly, playing keyboard player and realizing I had no control at all. That I was sitting on top of what the rhythm section were doing. And I think there were situations where either the rhythm guitar or the keyboard sit as part of that rhythm chunk. If you listen to Bob Marley, the rhythm guitar is absolutely part of the rhythm section. It’s not just bass and drums.
But in that situation, I realized that I would hit a chord and I couldn’t drag things back. I couldn’t push things forward. The rhythm section had its own momentum, and the rest of us were beholden to that. And I realized that that was one of the things I loved about being a bass player was being in that steering role and taking responsibility for that. Even though the audience much of the time weren’t aware of it. They were aware of it when we screwed up. But until then, it was just the engine room. That was the thing that kept you going forward.
There are all these amazing metaphors that come out when people start talking about rhythm sections and bass playing, and they’re often quite industrial, it’s quite an industrious process. It’s not about being showy. There’s also a flip side of this. The completely opposite end of this, as a 14-year-old, was that my favorite member of so many of my favorite bands was the bass player. So, Nick Beggs of Kajagoogoo and Curt Smith in Tears for Fears and John Taylor in Duran Duran. They had the best hair, and so I was like, ‘Great. I want to play what they play.’
So all of that, that kind of engine room stuff, of course, when it came down the line as I was playing, I was like, ‘I love doing this. I like this aspect of it.’ But then, it wasn’t that long after I started that duality of playing bass in a novel and experimental way alongside this functional role became two sides of a thing. It wasn’t I only wanted to play weird stuff on my own, but I loved the compliment that that gave to the functional side of it. And that’s still there now. I still get a real kick out of playing other people’s music and not worrying about the aesthetics of it in the sense that I like or dislike the music. But focusing in on the craft of it, and that art-craft split, that developing your craft so you can serve the music in a way that is where you’re beholden to someone else’s production or conception of what the song should be versus the unfettered exploration of art for its own sake. Although maybe we can unpack the fact that that’s nonsense as well.
But that perceived duality was one that… it came about when I broke my arm and got kicked out of my first band at the age of about 15. I couldn’t play normal bass for ages. And so, while I had this big plastic cast on my arm, I just borrowed a distortion pedal and started making a really horrible racket on my own. And that was the seeds of what I’m still doing now in a lot of ways. I started to see the bass as not just about being specifically about that role, but as being a tool for… it was just a lump of wood with a magnet on it and some strings and I could use it however I wanted to. And that became really rich seam to mine, and at 46, nearly 47, I’m still digging in that same space.
[MUSIC 1: 7’11”]
MARK: Tell us about your approach then because famously, you’re an experimental bass player. What does that mean?
STEVE: I got that first bass in, would’ve been, 1986. And at the time, there were a couple of people who would experiment with bass as a solo instrument, or as a lead instrument. As a lead instrument, the pioneer was Jett Harris, the former bass player with The Shadows, who had a number one hit in about 1961, ’62 with the theme from a film called The Man with the Golden Arm. And the whole melody is played on a bass and nobody knew it at the time. Nobody knew that it was a bass, but you listen to it now and it’s this extraordinary sound. That particular piece of music is kind of groundbreaking without anybody referencing it these days.
And then through into the late 60s, early 70s, there was a guy called Colin Hodgkinson who played in a band called Backdoor, and he did blues tunes just for the bass. And then into the 70s, there was this explosion of jazz fusion, and people like Jaco Patorius with Weather Report, and Stanley Clarke who became, certainly within jazz, household names who were playing bass as a melody instrument but also as a solo instrument.
But it was still incredibly esoteric when I started doing it, and it was right up until I started gigging solo. My first couple of solo performances were either demos at music trade shows in the late 90s or… I did one performance for a contemporary theater group in a site-specific piece in a car park in East London, which was making random noise. But my first proper solo gig where people were buying tickets with my name on it was December the 15th ’99, so we’re coming up to the 20th anniversary of that.
And even at that point, playing bass on your own was like telling someone you made your own shoes. They were like, ‘Wait. Wait. You do what?’ ‘Yeah, I’m just fashion them out of a bit of litter and I put bags over my feet with elastic bands on them.’ It was, ‘There are shops that sell shoes, why are you messing around like that?’ And it was playing bass in your own was like, ‘What? Because you have appalling hygiene and nobody else will stand near you? What’s going on?’
MARK: No friends!
STEVE: Yeah, absolutely. There was this sense that… and well, for me, this is my instrument and I want to squeeze everything I can out of it. It’s like the Dead Poets’ Society version of bass playing. Suck out the marrow of the bass. And I remember, it was a pivotal moment for me was I used to go to master classes at the Bass Centre, which was a shop in Wapping. It was on Wapping High street. Back then Wapping was derelict. There was this one building that they got for dirt cheap at a certain point. Someone incredibly prescient had signed a 20-year lease on this building. And I used to go in there.
Even as a kid, my dad would drop me there to go and hang out there while he would go off. And he was a courier, so he would and deliver things around East London, and I would spend 2 or 3 hours as a 14-year-old sat in the basement and just looking at basses. It was extraordinary. But I used to go to master classes in there. And there was one by this French-Canadian bass player called Alain Caron, and he played just like 16 bars of a chord melody. That’s a jazz term for playing the chords and the tune at the same time. A chord melody arrangement of ‘My Favorite Things,’ the John Coltrane version. And he just did it on a six-string fretless bass.
And in that moment, I went, ‘That’s the instrument I need to play.’ It was like, ‘Laaa.’ You know? Angels singing and Monty Python cartoons playing trumpets. And I just saw it and spent the next two years saving up to buy that instrument. And I got it in September ’99, I think, about 6 weeks before I went out and toured with Howard Jones. I got that six-string bass. But it was very much the sense that this was a blank canvas because so few people were doing it, and I was just curious. It wasn’t about inspiration.
I keep pushing this with students that they’re all waiting for inspiration to strike. And I say, ‘You don’t need inspiration, you just need curiosity.’ That the pursuit of advancement comes to you wondering… I was just asking questions. I was going, ‘I wonder what would happen if I did that?’ And if you’re waiting for something to come along and inspire you to greatness, you’re going to miss those incremental steps through mediocrity that are required to get to where something is meaningful. And that process was driven for me by curiosity and me going, ‘I wonder if I can get to that point?’ I still can’t play 16 bars of ‘My Favorite Things’ as a chord melody thing. I never bothered going back and learning that.
It was the potential within that tiny phrase that made me go, ‘That’s the space I want to explore. I don’t want to learn that piece of music.’ And then there were a couple of quite practical things that defined what happened at the start of my career that I’m still lumbered with now. One of which was that I got that first gig on December 15th, ’99 because a promoter who’s still working in London now, a guy called Sebastian Merrick, amazing guy who promotes a lot of music from Turkey and the Middle East, he saw me play a solo piece with a band that I was in. I was in this quite esoteric band called Ragatal. And he saw me do a solo piece and he said, ‘Oh, have you got a whole set of tunes like that?’ And I just lied and said, ‘Yeah, sure. Loads.’ I had one tune. And so he booked me for this gig.
But in between him booking me doing the gig, I had this tour with Howard Jones who had been my boyhood hero. ‘New Song’ by Howard is probably the first pop song I ever learned all the words to. I’d gone to my mum at the age of 12 and, ‘Can I have my hair like that?’ And showing a picture of him with this wicked mullet at that time. I was like, ‘I want a mullet like that.’ And obviously, didn’t get it. I had this tour with him and so I had to learn those songs and rehearse those, and then go out on tour. So, I didn’t have time to actually write a set of material for this first gig.
What I came up was with a series of start points for improvisation. They were 4, 8, 16-bar loops because I was already using… well, I guess we’ll unpack what that’s about in a moment. But I was already using looping technology to play things live, and then have them repeat like a long fixed delay. And so, I had these initial loops but I hadn’t written tunes over them. I didn’t have entire compositions, and none of them had a B section. There wasn’t anything with a verse or a chorus. They were all these evolving repetitive explorations of particular tonalities or color or whatever. And it was only for the process of recording them that they became fixed in any way at all. And so, I recorded that show and put some of that on my website. The format at the time was Real Audio. I don’t think if you remember that, which was a very early…
MARK: Vaguely, vaguely.
STEVE: … hyper-compressed web format of the late 90s. Terrible sounding, like AM-radio-level of horribleness. And I put a bunch of the recordings up on my website with that. And people went, ‘This is great. When is the album coming out?’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ So, it wasn’t that I had a strategic plan to become a solo bass player. I was curious. I was experimenting with it. I was using it as a demo thing for the… I’d met the editor of Bassist magazine at the time in a shop and said, ‘I can do that,’ sort of, Yosser Hughes-style. You know? ‘Gis a job! All right mate, I can do that.’
And he did and I started writing for them. They didn’t have anybody who was a specialist in pedals and technology. And so, I reinvented myself with that in the mid-90s. So, I was writing for them, and that meant that I then got to do demos of that stuff at trade shows and I could bill them a couple of hundred quid for doing it. That was the start point of me actually using those experimentations at home, pursuing that curiosity at the point where it actually had a utility. And I think that functionalism, it sort of stuck with me and it’s been both an inspiration and a millstone at times, kind of wondering what it’s for.
It’s such an interesting question for an artist to ask because within post-Enlightenment art, we have this… or post-Renaissance even, I guess we have this idea that art shouldn’t be functional. That function is for plebs and proles. And actually, the bourgeoisie are meant to have art that just exists for its own beauty and its own aesthetic majesty. And I’ve always deferred to a much more pop process, even while my music is sort of, I don’t know, where it would land as soundtrack-sounding music, I guess. Maybe that’s where it comes from. Maybe it’s the idea that soundtracks have a utility, that they tell a story.
MARK: So, you went on this amazing journey of discovery, Steve. You followed your curiosity. You started exploring and experimenting. You put your work out there and found that, amazingly, people were interested in this kind of weird and wonderful concoction you were coming up with.
And then, you stepped into this space where you were on tour with Howard Jones. What was that like?
STEVE: There was this bizarre crossover in that. Before I started playing solo, my career trajectory was very much that I assumed that I would be a session player. The traditional role of the session musician where I would be hired to play for people. And there were a couple of moments when it felt like that model fit me really well. I played with a Canadian gospel artist for a while, and I did a couple of records with him. And there was a moment when one of those tracks was being played on a radio station, some kind of a regional station in the country, and it was being played.
And a singer-songwriter from Scotland heard it, rang up the label to find out what the track was called, rang the studio to find out who the bass player was on it, got my number and rang me up and said, ‘I want you to come and play on this album.’ And it’s the sort of stuff that you imagine would happen to people who are massively successful. And I thought, ‘Oh God. If that’s going to be happening every time I do a piece of work, this is going to be brilliant. I’m going to be the next, I don’t know, Paul McCartney or Pino Palladino or something.’ It happened once in my entire life but it was a really lovely moment.
And so, I was playing on records and there were a couple of studios that I got to do a fair bit of… not massively high-profile stuff, but decent, reasonably well-paid professional sessions playing on other people’s music. And I was toying with a number of different artists, mostly on the gospel scene. So, I avoided a lot of the weirder excesses of the rock and pop scene because it just happened to be the world I ended up in.
But also being in London, I was getting hired for other things. I had a student… because I was teaching all the way through this, as is so often the case with creative practitioners, that we discover that either that’s our way of paying the bills, or in my case that was my way of understanding what I was doing was to show other people that. And I’ve always found that actually the best way for me to solidify a set of ideas or a concept or an approach is to then sit somebody else down and go, ‘Okay, this is how I’ve been doing it. Does this make sense to you?’
MARK: Yeah, I find that a lot.
STEVE: That reflects the process. I’m sure doing the podcast gives you a fair amount of that as well. There is that space to reflect on what you’re doing.
MARK: It does. Yeah. It’s a nice place to reflect, ‘Okay, how do we do this and what do we have in common, and what can we learn from each other?’ Yeah.
So you were teaching and playing…
STEVE: I was teaching as well. I had this student who was making hip-hop records and hired me to come and play and a couple of things. It ended up in circulation on XFM. And I ended up with the Howard Jones gig because… who was that? Oh, Nick Beggs who was one of my… the reasons why I played bass in the first place. Nick was the bass player in Kajagoogoo, and we’d become friends over the years. I’d written to him when I was in college and said, ‘You’re great. I love you.’ And we met up at a gig for him to show me… he played a bizarre instrument called the Chapman Stick, which I wanted to check out, so he showed me that.
But we stayed in touch, and I ended up giving him a lesson ahead of him touring with John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, which is incredibly complex music. And so, my theory background was useful to him, so I showed him that. And at the end of it, he just said, ‘Well, it clashes with the Howard Jones tour. Do you want to do the tour with Howard in Europe?’ So, I was like, ‘Yeah… I’ll just check my diary. What have I got going on? Oh, a couple of pub gigs. No sorry, I’m busy.’
MARK: Hang on a minute!
STEVE: Yeah. ‘Sorry, I’ve got a student booked in that Monday. I have to cancel the whole thing.’ Well, it was funny because he then said, ‘Okay, you can do it.’ And then, a few weeks before rehearsals were meant to start, Howard realized he’d never actually heard me play. And so he said, ‘Do you want to just come over for the afternoon and we’ll meet and just play?’
MARK: Just to make sure!
STEVE: ‘Just in case you’re awful and Nick’s judgment is appalling.’ And we played one song and he just had this look of relief, and he went, ‘Okay, we’re going to be fine,’ which was great. I was 26 and an idiot. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was assembling this concoction of behaviors that somehow looked vaguely like a career from the outside and doing bits and pieces. And suddenly I was playing with my boyhood hero. And it wasn’t like we were doing stadiums, but we were playing decent size club venues across Europe, and playing amazing music. Howard is still, even now 20 years on, he’s still an extraordinary performer and a great songwriter. And so, I was playing this brilliant music with an amazing band, and it still felt like that would be my main thing.
And I guess this is an interesting one to unpack because what happened was when I did the solo gig, which came about because I lied to a promoter and said I could play it, because of that happening, I did such a good job of telling people about it, and I’ll explain why in a moment, that the phones stopped ringing completely, literally overnight. What I felt was the pinnacle of my session career was actually the end of it in any kind of sense of it being the main thing that I did.
And that was about two things. One of which is a sort of general conservatism in terms of the way that people viewed bass players specifically, but musicians more broadly, in the sense that they don’t assume we can do lots of things. So, people would immediately assume that because I was playing solo, I’d lost the ability to play normal bass. And it’s like, ‘Oh, well I can’t hire him. Why? Because he’ll turn up with a six-string bass and play melodies through my entire gig.’ So, I was incapable of playing a groove anymore. So, there was some of that.
But there was also this sense that I was extremely busy because the… and that nascent period or the birth of the internet, or birth of the World Wide Web, I guess, not the internet. For two or three years, I was the only bass guitar teacher in Europe to have a website. So, I would get phone calls from Finland and places where, ‘I see you teach.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but quite a long way from you.’ They’re like, ‘I’m coming to England. Can I get a lesson?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. But there are teachers in Finland.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, but you’re online.’ So I said, ‘Okay, fine.’
There was a very odd relationship with the internet at the time. And because I was talking about what I was up to, again, I was a journalist so I had a bit of a head start in terms of communicating thoughts in the written word. And I just manifest all of this ridiculous privilege that comes with being a native English speaker online, for example, that gives you an advantage that I was British and male and able-bodied and there are all these things that just meant that… I never thought about the web defensively. I never felt that I needed to protect anything. I just go out there and said, ‘I’m doing this and you should all come to my gig.’ in this sort of bold and relatively erudite but occasionally culturally slightly clumsy way. And people showed up.
And so, it wasn’t that I was playing for thousands of people, but I was playing to enough. But it also meant that my peers had seen that and all went, ‘Steve’s so busy playing solo because he keeps talking about it. We shouldn’t be phoning him up for deps to replace his own gigs because he’s too busy.’ And so, the two sides. One was the conservative side, if you like, ‘We don’t trust him to play anymore.’ And the other side was, ‘He’s so busy, he can’t do these normal gigs anymore. He’s off all over the world playing solo.’
And in the middle of that, I was like, ‘Oh, okay. I guess I’d better make as good a job of playing solo as I can.’ So, there was this bizarre coming together of the esoteric nature of being a solo bass player and people’s perception of that as this weird gimmick. Even though it never felt like a gimmick to me, thankfully. It just felt like the music I heard in my head involved lots of layers of me. And so, I use this loop device and played lots of parts. And so, there was that on the one side, and on the other side this practical thing of, ‘Oh, well, if you’re not going to phone me up for gigs, I’d better get some more gigs of my own.’
[MUSIC 2: 25’30”]
And so, at that point, and this again is interesting because as a session musician, I obviously was actively looking for work. But you are pursuing an intermediary to you being able to reach an audience. You get in touch with an artist or a manager or a label or whatever it is and they hire you to do a thing. And suddenly as a solo artist, I didn’t know how any of that worked for artists. I didn’t know what a manager did. I didn’t know what a booking agent did or a record company did. And so, I just took on all of that burden, and I didn’t see myself as some entrepreneurial self-starter.
It was just if I want these things to happen, I will do them myself. I think part of it was through being a journalist that I knew that nobody, even the people who were doing similar things to me that were extremely well known, very, very few of them were making any money out of recordings at all. They saw recordings as a thing that a record label did in order for them to get access to better-paying gigs, so the record was a loss leader. And that just didn’t appeal to me. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to make some money off this.’
So, I researched how much it was to press CDs rather than going to a label and saying, ‘Will you put my record out?’ I was like, ‘If I make a thousand CDs and they cost me £1.80 each, then that means I break even after 180 or 200 if I’m charging postage. And then, I can make £8,000 grand of these. That sounds like a reasonable amount of money to make off a thousand CDs.’ And so, I just went down that path, and some of it was naive and some of it was back to the curiosity thing that I started to… that wasn’t just applied to the playing side of my development. All of it was curious.
MARK: Right. So again, this is really an interesting point. One thing I notice about the people who succeed professionally as well as artistically are the ones who have that curiosity about the professional side of things.
They’re willing to go out and try things and ask, ‘Well, why is it done that way? Can’t I do it this way?’
STEVE: Yeah. And I have encountered so many people along the way who would say, ‘Oh, I couldn’t get a deal and I couldn’t do that.’ And I’d go, ‘Did you not think about putting it out yourself?’ And there is, within music in particular and I think it’s specific to me, acting may have this, but I guess there is a respectability in fringe theater that isn’t necessarily there in, certainly, mainstream-sounding music. It’s there in folk music and punk, which is this idea that you can muddle through and you don’t need some other agency or agent in between you and your audience to validate your work.
So a record label, for a lot of people, was the point at which they felt like something validated what they were doing. They weren’t listening to audience feedback. They were looking for somebody to throw money at them without thinking about what that meant. Without thinking about the fact that they were being ripped off in the middle often. Without thinking about the fact that the label doesn’t necessarily like what they were doing. They just thought they could sell it. The labels, their great skill was always to try and spot things that were commercially viable and then spread their bet so that if one of them came up trumps, they didn’t need to use that money to pay off anybody else’s debt. It’s a very bizarre set of economics. I guess book publishing is similar.
But there was a time when making music independently was seen as the last thing that you did because you were a failure. And so, your point about the successes being the ones who were willing to engage with those industrial processes, the business side of things and start thinking about that, that’s absolutely true. There were a number of us at the time. I wasn’t unique in making my own records. And there were some people who did it aesthetically in a very kind of guerrilla way. They would print CDRs and handwrite on them, and it became pretty much a sort of low-fi, almost like a folk art aesthetic, a sort of Howard Finster kind of approach to music.
But that wasn’t where I wanted to be. My creative model, my aesthetic model for putting out records was labels like ECM, the German jazz and experimental label, or Windham Hill, which was an American new age and acoustic label. And they had these beautifully taken cover shots and fantastically made packaging. And I wanted that beauty. I wanted that sense that the frame within which my music sat was one that added to the meaning of it. And I’ve always been fascinated by that.
STEVE: The very quick, kind of, straight-line path between making those first CDs and this was the realization at a certain point that whenever I put out a CD, I needed to recoup the money I’d spent on it. And early on, when CDs were still the primary currency within the demographic of my music consumers, the people who actually bought what I was doing, that I could recoup that before the record came out. I can do that in presales. But it became increasingly apparent that that wasn’t possible, and so I switched to digital-only.
And in 2009 just over 10 years ago, a platform called Bandcamp came along, which anybody who’s interested in independent music will have encountered, I guess. But they focused on the beauty of the presentation that it’s quite uniform, you kind of know what a Bandcamp page looks like. But they highlight artwork and they allow you to upload above CD resolution, so there’s none of that argument that, ‘Oh, iTunes is terrible because the MP3 is such a low resolution.’ The files that I upload to Bandcamp are 24 bit, so they’re DVD audio quality.
So again, that aesthetic thing that I was trying to get with the CDs, I now have with a digital format. But what I then realized was that if I wasn’t trying to recoup the cost of a CD, I could release a lot more music. And at that point, the stumbling block became marketing and promotion and I realized that I couldn’t send a download code to the journalists that I knew at magazines and radio four times a year. That they weren’t going to go, ‘Oh, and now we have a new track by Steve Lawson,’ four times a year.
Tom Robinson, who’s been incredibly supportive at 6 Music, if I send him one thing every couple of years, he says, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got a new track from Steve Lawson. It was exciting to hear from him.’ And that works on an every-other-year cycle. But if I did it every three months, he’s going to be going, ‘So, Steve, I just played you. I can’t do it again.’ And so, I needed another model that didn’t require me to promote each album and have the economic success or failure of that one product be predicated on me promoting it as a single entity.
And at that point, the subscription model was becoming more and more prevalent. Obviously, it’s been there forever. One of my heroes in this format is a Welsh-English songwriter called Martyn Joseph who ran his fan club as a page subscription model which got you a couple of free CDs a year. And he’s been doing that for 25 years. The Passport Queue is what it’s called and you subscribe to that, and it’s been a physical subscription model for that long and it’s sustained a lot of his career.
And so, it’s not that it was invented at this point, but it became popular online, and Patreon was one of the platforms that emerged. But Bandcamp, by this point, I was a bit of an evangelist of Bandcamp and had been seen as a poster child for this model of doing it yourself, which again, was weird because it wasn’t that I felt the only way to do things was to do everything yourself. It wasn’t that I was anti-manager, or anti-agent, or anti-whatever, or anti-label even. It’s that I’d never found anybody who could do what I needed to do better than I could do it myself. I’m still open to working with all of those people. It’s just nobody that’s come along and gone, ‘Actually, I think I can help you with that.’ Maybe the perceived level of success of what I’ve done has been a little intimidating from the outside.
So, when Bandcamp started talking about subscriptions, by that point I’d got to know the CEO. We’d been in touch. We’d been put in touch by a mutual friend and I’d met up with him when I was in California, because they were obviously fascinated by how people were using the platform. And it seemed that I was really selling a lot of music. Seeing that I’d, by that point, pulled my music off of all the other platforms, certainly all the streaming platforms, and was focused entirely on Bandcamp. And so, he wanted to talk to me about what that meant and how they could support that. And they started to bring up this idea of starting a subscription and I got so excited, and there are a bunch of my initial ideas in the subscription and how it works because of that meeting with Ethan.
And so, when it launched, there were three artists, I think, that got to trial it before the other half a million people that were on Bandcamp. It was me, an ambient guitar player from Texas called Andy Othling who plays his lower case noises, his music is beautiful, and a brilliant band from Oxford called Candy Says. And so, we all set up subscriptions and tried it out, and then a year later they launched it to the public. But immediately, I was like, ‘Wow. I don’t actually have to do promo. I don’t have to think about who I need to sell this album to. I’ve just got this audience who care about it, and every time I release a record, the subscription becomes more valuable.’
Initially, the sweetener when you sign-up, you got the music from the coming year, which still for me is the most significant thing about it is that you’re part of this forward-looking journey. But the sweetener is, obviously, that you get a bunch of back catalogue stuff, and initially, it was my 10 solo records. And now, I think it’s up to about 49 albums that you get the moment you sign-up.
MARK: Wow.
STEVE: So for the 30 quid annual fee, there is like three days of continuous music if you want to plough through them in that way. So, in album terms, in terms of the way that we think about the monetary value of an album, it’s a ridiculous offering. If you don’t like what I do then it’s worthless, obviously. This has always been the odd thing with art is that we talk about the value of a painting or an album or whatever as though there is a unit price that’s meaningful. And actually, great art is priceless and bad art is worthless, and those two things are hugely variable.
MARK: But if you do like what you do, it’s a phenomenal offer.
STEVE: Yeah. And it gives me a space to talk about the things that I see as valuable within our ongoing relationship with art. It’s that sense of direct connection between me and the support. There’s very much that patronage model. The idea that you are providing a significant level of support to what I do that you get all this additional music, and that is so far outside of the norm that it’s very easy to see how you’re facilitating that. That for you as a subscriber, when that new album drops in and you go, ‘Wow. There’s another new record? Really? There was only one like six weeks ago. Where did this come from?’
And I go, ‘Well, because I’m not spending my time doing promo. I’m not spending my time on the phone with journalists trying to convince them to write an article about me.’ Whenever somebody chooses to write about me or put me on the radio, I’m super grateful. But it happens on its own. I don’t have to do much for that. I don’t spend a lot of time schmoozing the press. I spend a lot more time making music.
MARK: This is one of the things that really interests me, is that a really well-designed business model is one that creates more value for everybody.
STEVE: Yeah, absolutely. It’s totally win-win.
MARK: So, if I’m your fan, I’m getting an incredible offer. I get all access to the whole back catalogue, plus the excitement of following the new journey. And for you, it sounds like it brings you a lot of creative freedom.
STEVE: Well, it does. And also, it gets me out of that conversation about, ‘How do I get a quarter of a million people a month to listen to me on Spotify in order to become sustainable?’ Which is basically where the rest of the music industry is at, is there are all these ridiculous…
I’ve been to a seminar recently where a guy was talking about streaming economy. And he was saying, ‘It may not sound like a lot, the fact that you make $5 grand of a million streams, but new markets are opening up and you could have a hit in India or China.’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, but you’re not talking about the marketing cost of getting music to India.’ Because everyone in India has access to 40 million songs. Why are they going to listen to my work unless I’m actively promoting it there? And if I am, is that cost going to be greater? Is it going to cost me more than five grand to reach a million people? Of course it is. That’s ridiculous. The idea that I could stumble into a market that I know nothing about and suddenly leapfrog everyone because I’m amazing, that’s nonsense.
And so, with this, I have this sustainable practice which… I love the way that we can invent benchmarks for things. And the latest one that I hit was that from my… it fluctuates and increases over time and then dips and whatnot. But I’m around at 250 subscribers at the moment and that pays our rent for the year. So our housing is effectively free because of the music. Now, the same amount of money that I’ve made off Bandcamp across my 10 years on it would’ve required me to have between 12 and 15 million streams on Spotify, depending on how you calculate their payment rate. And the cost of me getting those would’ve been astronomical. The marketing strategy that would’ve been required… unless I got lucky and landed on a playlist. One of the sleep playlists or something, or music for writing, or something that has a million subscribers.
But I never wanted that gamble. I never wanted to focus on one piece of work and try and promote it in that way. What I needed was a way of… exactly what you said, that it needs to be a creative and an economic win-win. I needed to find that audience who were interested enough in what I was doing that me releasing 10 albums to them a year wasn’t going to feel like massive overkill, and were willing to fund it. But also, that gave me this latitude to keep looking forward.
The music economy, the vast majority of the sense of value within the music economy is about music that already exists. If you’re a publisher and you own the rights of 750,000 albums, so 7.5 million songs roughly, if you’re Warner Publishing or Sony ATV or something like that, then the music that you’re often thinking of releasing this year, the several hundred songs that are going to come out over the coming year that you actually are going to put any weight behind are infinitely insignificant compared to the value in that music the people already love and the ease with which that could be marketed and monetized.
Say you own Michael Jackson’s back catalogue, why are you even going to pay any attention to new music at all? You have a couple of people whose job it is to try and get that out there. But actually, where your focus is, is: how do we scrape more cash out of people who already love ABBA, and Chic, and The Eagles, and Neil Diamond, and God knows who else? And the artists themselves end up focused on that. So, you have 17 different remix versions of the Led Zeppelin back catalogue and it keeps getting redone, and there’s a 24-bit, and then a 24-bit remaster, and then a flat transfer vinyl copy. And you go, ‘Why? It doesn’t matter. This is such marginal, incremental benefit to anybody.’ But nostalgia is where the big money is in music.
When I realized, as an artist, that I don’t occupy that space, I’m never going to accrue that kind of social capital, to put it in bourgeoisie terms, that’s not a thing that is significant to me or my audience. What I want to do is I want to invite people into a journey that’s going forward where they get a bunch of music that is entertaining and perhaps soothing, perhaps there’s a story to it, but where they actually experience it as an episodic process, that each album that comes out is a new episode in this journey. And I think the language around that has changed. Netflix and the way that streaming TV, and I guess Hulu and HBO have done the same thing in the States, has changed our understanding of the value of volume creativity in that way. And it’s not just about a radio show that feels ephemeral, that we can actually have things that are episodic and evolving that are of equivalent aesthetic value to standalone works like films or whatever.
So, I can do this process where… we can talk about it as being 10 albums a year, but it’s 10 independently packaged sections of music, almost all of which are live because the technology allows me to record all of my gigs and record them… because my studio is the same as my live work, so I just… it depends where it’s set up what I’m recording, but that’s what’s happening.
[MUSIC 3: 44’05”]
I record all these live albums, and then if I like it, I can mix and master it, but I can also tell the story of it. And that, for me, is another key element because I never felt like music’s value was never independent of the story that it used to be when you and I were lads that we would buy music magazines. And I graduated from buying Smash Hits and Number One in my early teens to buying heavy metal magazines for a few years. I bought Kerrang! and Metal Hammer, and then the grown-up ones, NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and then Q and Uncut and so on.
And those stories impacted so heavily on how I viewed the music I was listening to. And what I wanted was a space where I could tell that. And so, the subscription wasn’t just about the access to music, it was about that space where we could talk about it, that we created what a friend of mine who is an author in the States refers to as ‘the space of the talk-aboutable,’ which is a lovely phrase. It’s beautiful. The space of the talk-aboutable. And that, for me, is what the subscriber area is, and it’s fun. Again, one of the lovely things about doing it at my level is that there’s very little social capital to be gained for an audience member by talking to me in a shout-out kind of way. That if you look at the Instagram feed of someone who’s monstrously successful, their comments are full of people who just are commenting for the sake of feeling like commenting is significant in and of itself. And that doesn’t exist with my audience.
I’m not cursed with people posting banalities because they want to feel like they have a connection with me. What I get is a bunch of very intelligent, very well thought out commentary on my own work from people who care about it, and that’s an extraordinary luxury. That’s an amazing thing to have, and it’s one that I don’t see replicated in many places. It’s one that I feel fortunate to have it, but it’s what I’ve worked towards. So, I don’t feel lucky in that sense because I’ve curated that space and I’ve done it intentionally, and I’ve resisted attempts from other people to try and position me in a more lofty space where I would get that kind of banal nonsense from people who want the association with me. And so, they chime into a conversation they don’t really belong in.
But the private nature of that subscriber space, the exclusiveness of it, means that people will just come in and chat and sometimes I’ll post things in there and they just get completely ignored by subscribers. Nobody is like, ‘Oh, I better respond because Steve posted something.’ No, ‘This doesn’t appeal to me,’ and so they don’t talk. And that, in and of itself, is really useful. That’s actually quite a gift to not clog up my time and theirs with conversations that don’t matter.
MARK: So, if I’m listening to this and maybe I’m a musician or maybe I’m a different kind of creative and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this sounds amazing because I get money, I get support, I get freedom, I get real, genuine, direct, authentic connection and feedback from my audience. That sounds good.’
How widely applicable is this model, Steve? Could it work for other kind of musicians or other kind of creatives? And if so, what do you see as being the key elements that you have to have in place for this to be a success?
STEVE: There are a number of things that are utterly key things. One of them, which is you have to have the ability to hold your nerve and retrain your audience. If you suddenly launch a new platform, or launch on a new platform, your immediate experience will be one of total indifference from your audience. Nobody is waiting to go to a new platform to see you do things there. When I moved to Bandcamp, I didn’t suddenly have hundreds of people going, ‘I must buy it here.’ What I did pick up was a bunch of people for whom Bandcamp was already a significant thing, that they wanted to be in Bandcamp. That’s cool, they liked buying things there. And that certainly has cachet now.
So, choosing a platform where people already are familiar with it is really useful. Patreon now for a lot of writers is quite a key platform. When you launch there, there will be a number of people who are already familiar with that. But platform switching is a really, really hard thing to do with any existing audience. You need to spend your time making a case for why they should be there, why you want to be there, and why you think it’s better for them.
So, that conversation, you need to be in conversation with your audience. That’s not a marketing journey. It’s one way you treat them like a community of people who are supporting what you do. And you say, ‘This is the space where we all get to do this better. You get more work. You get a closer relationship with the work. And I get to do it without that perilous sense that, ‘Unless I land an article in The New Yorker I’m going to starve this month.’’
So, I think that making the case… and for me, the key language shift is the shift from success in volume terms to success in terms of sustainability, and it’s, ‘Can I keep doing this? How can you be a part of me being able to keep doing this?’ Nobody’s getting rich out of this. This subscription model isn’t going to suddenly… I don’t want to retire on it, because it has built into it the need for new work.
There is an option on my website to buy my entire back catalog for a single click. You can get it, and you get it 70% off the list price of it all for whatever that means. And hardly anyone ever does that because I’ve explicitly and repeatedly expressed my sense that the forward journey is the one that matters. And your audience will listen to you when you tell them things like that. So, if you spend your entire life talking about old work, about your old work and other people’s old work, and then you say, ‘And now you need to join me on this journey while I write new work,’ they’re going to go, ‘Why? You’ve spent 10 years telling us that old stuff is what matters.’
I see this with musicians all the time. I see musicians whose Facebook feed and Twitter feed is full of them going, ‘Oh, no one’s made any great records like Stevie Wonder or David Bowie or whoever since 1980. Everything went rubbish at a certain point. File sharing has destroyed music. There’s no good music happening.’ And then when they put out a new record, which they invariably do, everyone ignores it and they get really upset. And you go, ‘But you’ve trained everybody to believe that. You’ve spent hours and hours and hours of your time crafting the words to explain to people why what you’re doing now is meaningless.’
MARK: I think that’s a lovely illustration of what you said, the way the story that you tell affects the perception of the music.
STEVE: Completely. Yeah, the vitality of it. My latest album is called The Arctic is Burning. And it’s because as I was recording it, I’m reading news about the fact that the Arctic is literally on fire. It’s such a ridiculous image, the idea of the tundra being alight, and that satellite image from space. And I got the sense… because I’m an improviser so I don’t write music in the sense that I sit down and construct before I play a thing. I never have an idea in my head of what it’s going to sound like. I make judgments about music retrospectively either in the moment, so as I’m playing, I’m going, ‘What’s the best thing I can do right now?’ But when I listen back and I treat it as a whole. I don’t edit. Everything I put out is a single live take because I want that narrative sense.
But that sense of writing music for now in order to foster a sense of togetherness about where we are in the world and who we are as a species. And that’s what I want to do. That’s a massively lofty, ridiculous aim. And if I was trying to do that on a global scale, I would need to attach myself to someone else’s wagon. I would need for this to be part of a movement. I would need to start to represent it at a level it doesn’t really deserve to sit at. I don’t think anything does. I think we’re, hopefully, heading out of a time when art is seen as part of that kind of global messaging and actually becomes… we go back to a more, sort of, bardic tradition where people soundtrack their community.
And I definitely see what I’m doing is part of that. There’s an aim within that, that is about me trying to tell those local stories, and I don’t want to be listening to music from 30 years ago and relying on that to help me to understand where the world is at now. Because all of that music that we’re nostalgic about, the meaning that we attach to it is what it meant to us when it came out.
MARK: Steve, for a long time I’ve wanted someone to come on the show and tell a positive story about the music business because we all know the stories of disaster and disruption and the sky is falling for musicians. And I’d like to thank you for coming and showing us an alternative way of looking at it, and an approach that’s working for you and could work for other musicians and maybe other kinds of creative too.
On that note, Steve, I think it’s time for you to set the listener your Creative Challenge. If you listen to the show and you’re new to it, then this is the point of the interview where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a challenge that will stretch you creatively and as a person. And it’s related to the theme of the interview and it’s something that you can get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Steve, what’s your Creative Challenge?
STEVE: My challenge is very much about where we ended the conversation about sustainability, and it’s about reframing your notion of success. It’s a thought experiment that requires you to reframe your notion of success around the longevity of your creative practice.
If your number one priority was to keep doing what you do or keep your practice going for 20 years, and not even thinking about it in the sense of paying your bills for 20 years. This isn’t about the commercial viability of it in those terms. It’s about the work itself. What would you do differently if that was your number one priority? If 20 years of meaningful creative practice was your number one priority, what would you do differently? And then start thinking about that.
Because as I mentioned earlier on, I’m now coming up to the 20th anniversary of my first solo gig. And when I did that I had no sense that I would be doing this for two decades, let alone be at this point where I’m looking forward to the next couple of decades. And I’ve let go of the idea that I should be globally renowned, or on TV, or any of that kind of stuff. None of those measures matter now. What I found is a space where I get to make the work that matters to me and make it in a volume that is meaningful to me and my subscribers. And they’re a small group of people that sustainably support that work and have given me 20 years of it. So, what is the lesson in that for you? What does it look like for you to do your practice aiming to keep that practice going for 20 years?
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you, Steve. That is giving us all a lot of food for thought, I think, for some time to come.
Steve, where should people go to find you and your music, and maybe to join your community online?
STEVE: Okay. So, my website is stevelawson.net and that has links to everything. If you want to skip the wordy bit and jump straight to the music, then the Bandcamp URL is music.stevelawson.net and that forwards straight through to Bandcamp. And you can listen to about 36 hours of continuous music for free on there and you don’t need to subscribe. It’s not 30-second previews. You can go and listen to all of it because I’m not interested in selling music to people who don’t love it. I want people to be able to fall in love with it and they go, ‘Great. How do I support this?’ Rather than being hoodwinked into buying a thing by giving them a sneak preview. That doesn’t make sense to me. So, stevelawson.net, music.stevelawson.net is where the music is. And on pretty much every social platform, I am solobasssteve. All one word, three S’s in the middle, solobasssteve.
MARK: Great. Thank you, Steve. And I’ll see that all those links will be in the show notes as usual. As usual, Steve, it’s been mind-bobbling… mind-bobbling?
STEVE: Mind-bobbling? I like to bobble a few minds!
MARK: Maybe that as well. A pleasure to be in your company, so thank you so much for sharing your hard-earned wisdom with the 21st Century Creatives today.
STEVE: And thank you for giving me the space to talk. I really appreciate it.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Joanna Penn on Productivity and Audio for Creatives
Jul 13, 2020
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative Podcast is Joanna Penn, an Award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers and dark fantasy, which she writes as J.F. Penn. She is also known for dispensing information and inspiration for authors and creatives via her popular podcast The Creative Penn, and her books and courses.
She’s here to talk about Productivity and Audio for Creatives – two subjects that I think have recently become a lot more relevant due to Coronavirus, drawing on insights from her books Productivity for Authors and Audio for Authors.
In the first part of the show I reflect on the sad news that Kristin Linklater, the world-renowned voice teacher who gave me a wonderful interview for Season 1 of the podcast, passed away last month.
I talk about what I learned from Kristin as a teacher, and also about the positive news that her team and network of teachers will be continuing her work at the Linklater Voice Centre in Orkney. If you have been touched by Kristin’s work and you would like to help it continue, you can contribute to The Kristin Linklater Appeal.
In the coaching segment I share a wish for us all, about how we approach the world after lockdown and social distancing.
Joanna Penn
Regular listeners to The 21st Century Creative will already be familiar with Joanna Penn, a best-selling thriller author and creative entrepreneur who has appeared on the show twice before, talking about Mindset for Creatives and how to be a Healthy Creative.
I’m delighted to welcome her back today to talk about Productivity and Audio for Creatives – two subjects that I think have recently become a lot more relevant due to Coronavirus.
Joanna is a good friend of mine who lives in Bath, just down the road from me in Bristol. In normal times we meet up for a coffee every few weeks to talk creativity and business and generally set the world to rights.
But now we’re not allowed to meet in person, one of the first things we did when lockdown started was to meet up for a virtual coffee on Zoom and try to make sense of the new reality, and work out what we could do to help our fellow creatives find their way forward.
Because she’s always leaning into the future, exploring new technologies and trends, so she’s a great person to have in your corner at a time like this. And she’s got some really valuable insights into what we should be focused on going forward.
We also talked about her two latest non-fiction books, Productivity for Authors and Audio for Authors. Both of these were written before Covid arrived on the scene, but as I say to Jo in the interview, I think they are both very timely in the new reality for different reasons.
Starting with the Productivity book, it’s been a real eye-opener to see how millions of people are suddenly having to adapt to new ways of working, taking more responsibility for their time and their productivity, and Joanna’s book is full of great advice on this subject.
Because like most authors, she’s been doing this for years – working alone in her home office and her local cafe, and producing 33 books as well as hundreds of podcast episodes and blog posts, as well as a whole range of elearning courses.
The second book, Audio for Authors, is a really interesting and unusual topic – because there are plenty of books that talk about creating specific things like audiobooks or podcasts, but this is the first one I’ve come across that takes a strategic look at what audio as a medium can do for your creative career or business.
And let’s face it, with conference venues, theatres and other spaces for connecting with people having taken a massive hit recently, it’s more important than ever that we as creatives find new ways to reach audiences, and Joanna makes a compelling case for using audio to do this – again, whether or not you’re an author or another type of creative.
As you’ll hear in this interview, Joanna practises what she preaches about being an engaging and inspiring presence in audio media, which is why her interviews have been some of the most popular episodes of The 21st Century Creative. I’m sure you’ll find this one just as useful as the others as we gear up for the challenges ahead.
Joanna Penn interview transcript
MARK: Welcome back, Joanna.
JOANNA: Oh, thanks for having me back on the show, Mark. This is always fun.
MARK: And goodness me, how the world has changed since you were last on the show! Who would have guessed?
JOANNA: I know! It is crazy times and I feel like where we are now as we record this, I’ve been through the roller coaster of emotion and I know everybody will have had their own journey through the pandemic. We’re not even through it yet, but it’s so interesting how this has affected our work and our personal lives, obviously. And even if we’ve made it through health-wise, it’s changing so much. So, this is definitely a time for resilience, which I know you know a lot about.
MARK: Yeah. And, obviously, you’ve got your own experience as a writer, but you’ve got the finger on the pulse of the writing community.
Is it too early for you to identify any big changes that you’re noticing for authors and maybe creatives in a wider sense?
JOANNA: I think in a business sense, what is incredibly interesting is how fast everyone is changing their business model. So, of course, traditional publishing with books in physical bookstores was basically decimated from the middle of March, April into May, definitely a massive impact. Many publishers are reinventing themselves with more digital sales, more audio, which we’ll come back to, subscription models which they’ve put off for years. So, definitely that’s happening.
Selling direct is something I’ve been personally doing. I’ve obviously done digital sales, like you, for a decade, but selling direct to an audience through an email list and just not caring about ranking or anything like that. Just caring about protecting cash flow in a difficult time when cash flow is important to help our families and keep the bills paid.
I think what’s interesting is how fast we can pivot if things are difficult. And the resilience, again, of the digital business model is pretty incredible, I think. And something we want to keep creating. That is what we want to do.
How do we do that in difficult times both through the productive methods, but also how do we sell our work so we can keep doing this? I’ve been very encouraged by how the business model for an independent author works in this new world. We’ve also seen countries that have been resistant to digital, so, France, Spain, Italy, they are like 150% growth in ebooks and audiobook listening over the last…
MARK: Really?
JOANNA: Yeah. It’s been so frustrating for many years, these countries who’ve resisted digital, but it seems like this pandemic is helping people recognize that ebooks and audiobooks are not the devil. You can love print books, but you can also love the speed and the cleanliness of a digital file. I’d also say for independent authors libraries have been difficult because they have really focused on traditionally published books. But now with libraries going digital we’re all seeing a lot more library borrows for ebooks and audiobooks across library apps which we can be in. So, I really think the business models are changing in this time and I don’t believe we’re going to go back 100% to how they were.
MARK: I was listening to somebody, I think it was on James Altucher’s podcast the other day who was saying that he didn’t think COVID had changed any trends, but it had accelerated a lot of them. Which sounds like what you’re describing there.
JOANNA: Yes, absolutely. And automation as well, artificial intelligence, all of these things are accelerating fast because people are realizing, ‘Right, what do we need to do so that if this happens again, when they’re saying it’s likely to in different forms over time, how do we make sure we can carry on with our business?’ And also people working from home. How do we now shift that into the world of work?
And this might change completely places like London and New York where people suddenly realize maybe they don’t have to live in a big city anymore. Maybe they can actually live somewhere cheaper and still work in the same way. So, business models are changing, people are shifting their views.
Even like speaking, you and I both speak, we’ve done podcasting, but this is not speaking like on a stage, but what I have been to is a couple of conferences which were meant to be physically live, and the online tools that are now available for the different type of online presenting; they’ve really matured. I went to one conference the other day and it was just incredible and I realized that I need to upskill in the more formal presentation style of doing it online. And actually, that could mean I could do more speaking because I don’t have to travel.
So yes, it’s definitely accelerated these different trends and where I think we’re going to see so many changes because the investment is there to make the changes for the future.
MARK: I’ve been thinking about your two most recent books for creatives. You’ve got Productivity for Authors and Audio For Authors. And we talked about doing this interview before COVID landed, but actually I think they’re even more relevant now in a COVID-infected world for different reasons.
I’d like to start with Productivity for Authors and as usual with your books, you write them for authors, but most of the content is going to relevant to most types of creatives. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to do our usual thing of retitling it. So, this is Productivity for Creatives! And right now I’m thinking there’s maybe two – I’d like to get your take on this – I think possibly there’s two different readerships for a book like this at this point.
Firstly, there’s the people like you and me and many of our listeners who are already independent-minded creators who want to take control of our time and being creative and productive as we can. We’re probably used to working from home or at least by ourselves. And we’re probably more motivated than most people to do that.
And then secondly, you’ve got all these people who are suddenly finding that they’ve got to work on their own. They can’t go into the office. They’re having to find ways to structure their time independently.
Have you noticed an upsurge in demand for productivity advice since the lockdown started?
JOANNA: I think in that first week, I actually did a YouTube video on tips for working from home. Everybody did that first week, sort of end of March, there were so many tip things about working from home.
What’s interesting, I think, at this point is… and I’ve actually noticed it as well, is the physical pain of working from home based on your workstation. And this is very important to productivity, physical health. Obviously, we’re assuming you’re not actually sick, but what’s happened with a lot of people suddenly working from home a lot more. And even if you are a creative used to working at home, you’re probably doing a heck of a lot more than you were. I’m working harder than ever because there’s little else to do. But what’s interesting is if you’re new to working at home, you probably have a laptop and you probably just put it on your kitchen table or if you’re lucky enough, you have a desk or even your own room, although many people don’t have their own room.
But what you’ll find is you’re going to get back pain and neck pain and all this type of thing. One of my first tips, and even if you work in a cafe, usually, which I do, is I take along a little folding stand called Nexstand, N-E-X-S-T-A-N-D. And it’s tiny, portable and you can just use that on your kitchen table and that immediately helps your posture. I actually think the first week with all those tips, probably people were fine, but now, as you and I speak, we’re over a month in, a month and a half in, and people are going to be in real pain.
MARK: Yeah. And you can’t go to the physio or the chiropractor, can you?
JOANNA: Exactly. And maybe you’re doing some online yoga. I’ve certainly been doing some, but definitely, and even now I’ve been doing a lot more standing. I’m at a standing desk as we speak, and I’ve been getting a lot more lower back pain because I’m not maintaining my usual physical practices, which are, I’m still walking the one hour a day, but I’m not getting my longer walks because that’s kind of frowned upon in our country where we’re recording this. And also I’m not going to yoga. So, there were lots of things that I think productivity around physical health.
If people listening just take a bit of an inventory of your physical health right now and how’s your posture and your shoulders and your spine and what could help around that physical side. And then I think the other thing is, if you are an independent already, and you’re already doing this full time, like you and I, then maybe you have a creative groove that has been worn for years.
You and I have talked about this on my show, is that I would go to the cafe, I would put my headphones on, play rain and thunderstorms and that’s how I write. I couldn’t work on my novel for weeks when this first started because I couldn’t go to my cafe. I couldn’t put on my… well, I could put on my headphones, but that sound was associated with that place. And I had boxed myself into this scenario of creation where I couldn’t do anything because I couldn’t get back to my ritual. And both of us have talked about the importance of ritual for creative work and getting into your zone, getting into your mindset. But the problem is if that is related to something that you can’t do anymore, you have to shift it up.
I know people like yourself who are used to being at home without the children or without their partner, and suddenly there’s a house full of people. And things have changed. Whatever your life is like at home, things have changed. So, what you have to do is find your new creative groove and figure out a new way that you can get back to that zone. And actually it’s a challenge, but it’s good because it proves to you that you can change your habit. After we talked, I started listening to the Game of Thrones soundtrack, which is fun, but the instrumental version, which is fantastic. I write thrillers, so it’s a pretty good soundtrack for that. But I was able to finish my novel within a couple of weeks of changing the soundtrack and also just literally turning everything off.
I’m still at my desk where I am standing right now, but I turned all the screens off, moved everything out of the way, put on my headphones and put on this new soundtrack and it worked. And now I’m in the editing mode. But doing that proved to me that I could change my creative groove as such and come up with a new one.
So, I challenge people listening as well. Maybe that’s something you can do to change up your writing, your creative process. And in fact, maybe that’s a good thing to do anyway. And who knows what you can create if you change things up a bit? I haven’t spoken to you since I’ve thought about this, but now I’m thinking, what else can I change? If I can change such an embedded habit, what else can I change?
For example, I’m a discovery writer. I write into the dark. Some people call us ‘pantsers’, which I hate. So, discovery writer, I sit down, I just write stuff. But I really want to be a plotter. I really do. And so, well, why can’t I do that now? Why can’t I learn? Why can’t I change my process? Or maybe some people on productivity. You and I both do a bit of dictation, but I don’t do enough. And the reason I don’t do enough is because I’m a discovery writer. If I can plot, maybe I can dictate more, maybe I can create all the stories I want to foster. And so, that’s exciting to me. So, I feel quite released actually. I feel like, ‘Wow, okay, I can change my habits.’ And that’s powerful stuff.
MARK: A plotter, just for the non-authors in the audience, that’s someone who plots out the story before they write it rather than just discovering it word by word. Is that right?
JOANNA: Yeah. I generally know a character and the place and something, but I won’t know what happens during the story. I might not know how it’s going to end. Whereas a plotter will sit down and say, ‘Okay, this is the structure of the story.’ They will know the end. They might write a few sentences per chapter or someone like Jeffrey Deaver, for example, a mystery thriller writer will write 40 pages of outline. James Patterson, also a massive outliner. Some of the most successful writers are plotters. Although Stephen King is a discovery writer. So, what I would say to people is there is no right way to do your creative process, but what if there are ways to challenge ourselves to get ourselves out of ways that could be done better, I guess? Sort of not optimizing in a ‘We must be productive’ way, but in an interesting, playful, creative manner.
MARK: I think this is great and I love the way you’ve taken one change and taking it as a cue to look for another change. You changed your writing routine. You came up with a new routine, a new way of getting into the flow of your writing and now you’re thinking, ‘Maybe I can change some of the higher-level patterns in my creative process.’
And I think if there is a silver lining from this whole pandemic business – and I think we do deserve one! – then my wish would be that we all come out of it with more choices than we went in.
Because I think whether you’re an individual creative or you’re a company, lots of people are realizing, ‘You know what? We don’t have to go back to work the way we used to.’
JOANNA: And I have been changing up my business model too. So, it’s really coming down to what is working and what can I just get rid of, because now I realize I’ve got some perspective. And another thing I’ve done is I was doing quite big online courses and now I’m just doing smaller ones. Mini courses or lectures, charging less, but they’re selling a lot more. So I’m actually making more income from courses since I made that change just in March, I just went, ‘Right, I’m just going to do a small course every month.’ And that is getting more people into them. So, people listening, many creatives teach online, teaching online courses. Doing little ones might be better than the sort of mega course.
The other thing is I realized on the day that I was, ‘I’ve got to make some money. I’ve got to protect the business.’ It was the email list, you and I know this, but I felt it so deeply that one of my best assets is my email list and, of course, the podcast. But there are lots of people listening to the podcast who are not on our email list. Hello, everyone, we love you! But we can actually talk to people on our email list by pressing a button and not everyone will open it, but there were days when I could send out an email and make income on days when I needed it because I had that list. And it just reiterated to me how important the email list is.
That’s another tip for people: what can you do in your creative work and your creative business so that you can take the best stuff and double down on that, and then maybe forget about the stuff that just doesn’t need doing? Just let it go.
MARK: This is a distinction you’ve got in the productivity book, right? Between busywork and important work. And I guess maybe now for all of us, the line has changed between what seemed important before and what is important now.
How would you encourage people to look at that distinction?
JOANNA: Oh, it’s so true. One thing I did is I reached… you know, you have that moment where you think, ‘Okay, I could die.’ Obviously we’re all going to die, but, ‘I could die of this disease next week or something, and what would I just be really annoyed at if I didn’t do before I died?’ That’s how I thought about it. I’m very happy with my life, I’m a full-time author and everything, but what would I be annoyed about? And I actually wrote down two things. I am an award-nominated writer, but I want to win a prize. I want to be an award-winning writer.
MARK: And you’ll have that on your gravestone!
JOANNA: Yeah, I do. I’m going to be Mark, you know how these things work!
MARK: I know.
JOANNA: Then the other one I wrote down was, ‘Walk the Camino Francés,’ which, if people don’t know, it’s a pilgrimage from Southern France across Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. I’ve wanted to do it for 25 years. It’s a six-week walk. So, it’s one of those things.
So, I have an artistic goal and I have a physical goal. And we all know with goals, right? It’s really difficult on the prize. Who knows? It could be a lifetime getting there, but both of these things, who will I become in aiming for these goals? When I wrote those two things down, it really brought into focus the things that I want to do with my time and the things I don’t. I had a whole load of non-fiction projects on my list for the rest of the year, and I have actually moved them off my list to focus on my fiction because I need to keep being a better writer, keep learning, keep bettering my craft.
So this is something that I think is important for people. Have you identified those things that you really want to do before you die? And then who do you have to become to achieve these things? And then what’s the next step in that direction towards these things? I have put aside some stuff that I thought was important and now are not.
Or for example, one of the other things is I have two podcasts, and one is called Books and Travel.
When this all happened and travel became not something we do right now, I was like, ‘Oh dear, that whole brand, that has to go. I can’t do that. There’s no point.’ And then I realized that that podcast completely underpins my fiction. I love doing it. I love talking about travel with writers and all my books are about sense of place.
So, all I’ve done is repurpose the intro and outro to point to my fiction instead of a new brand. And I’m doubling down on Jo Frances Penn, J.F. Penn, which is my fiction side. So, re-tooling what I already have to serve that bigger goal and all of these things have just come from saying what is the most important thing to me? What do I want to do to build the body of work that I will look back on and go, ‘Yes, that is what I wanted to do.’ Again, super powerful to examine this stuff.
MARK: Nothing quite focuses the mind like the prospect of one’s own mortality, does it?
JOANNA: Yeah, the memento mori moment.
MARK: I was talking to Gabriela Pereira about this yesterday, she’s doing a virtual writer’s conference. And one of the things that came to mind for me was, well, I don’t want to die without having written that book.
I think a lot of writers have got a sense, ‘That book, that’s the book I’m going to write, even if I can’t articulate exactly what it is, there is a book that I want to write before I shuffle off the mortal coil.’
JOANNA: And there are non-fiction books I want to write. I want to write a travel memoir and I want to write a book about the shadow, which I know you appreciate, the shadow side. But those to me are different to the sorts of how-to books. I’m really happy with my how-to books. I do have some more in me, but I feel like when I look at what I really want to achieve and that’s what we’ve got to think about, isn’t it?
Figuring out what you will give up to make time for the most important thing. And at the moment, we do all have a bit of time to sit at home. And the other surprising thing is how little money we’re spending, right?
MARK: Yeah.
JOANNA: And then you think, ‘Okay, well, so maybe I don’t need too much to live on. Does that actually give me more space?’ And again, this reinvention of work, maybe somebody listening has realized that they could move somewhere a lot cheaper and suddenly save themselves a couple of grand a month. And that is the thing that frees them up to follow the creative path that might change their life. And that’s how I did it. When I decided to become a full-time writer, we sold the house, we moved from a four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom flat and downsized and moved. And sometimes we need this push, don’t we?
MARK: We do. A lot of what I’m getting from you is a lot of this is about decisions. We think of productivity as being about what we do, but a lot of it is about what we don’t do. And it’s drawing the line between one and another.
And talking of which, there’s a chapter in the productivity book about saying no and setting boundaries. And I’m thinking, coming right down to earth again, this has become a lot more pressing recently, hasn’t it?
With everybody under the same roof. Any advice on dealing with that?
JOANNA: I actually think boundaries are difficult right now, especially… I don’t know about you, my family’s like, ‘Oh, we should talk all the time.’ It’s funny, because when you work at home, you have your thing, like we do stuff like this, we do podcasts and we do Zoom calls and things, and then suddenly there’s people that you wouldn’t normally be talking to every day who want to talk to you all the time. And my Dad was like, ‘Oh, can we just chat?’ I’m like, ‘Dad, it’s half past ten on a Thursday morning. I’m at work!’
MARK: I know. I’ve had friends who were absolutely astonished to find I’m working! But it’s work time.
JOANNA: To find you’re actually working. But no, obviously, hopefully, this will be short-lived. So hopefully, that won’t carry on. But in terms of setting boundaries, now it’s about setting them with yourself. So for example, social media is a classic one, right? It’s kind of, ‘Oh, I must do social media, blah, blah, blah.’ But you don’t have to say no, but you just set your boundaries around your time.
If your number one goal is to finish that book or whatever, your painting or your creative project, then you get up and you do that, you spend some time on that, and then maybe you have your half an hour on social media, whatever. Setting boundaries around your time is really important.
And then the saying no, I feel it really depends. Like I used to say yes to a lot more stuff. Now my default is no, but I also have an assistant and if I feel I can’t say no, I’ll send her the email so she can say no, which really helps because sometimes it’s very difficult to say no. So, what can you put in place that will help say no? You don’t need an actual assistant. You could make one up! You could just sign your email. Have an email signature from your assistant. Don’t tell anyone. But stuff like that can really help. Also, just making it very clear, like we said, what time you’re available.
You and I both, when we’re sorting out an interview like this, we’re friends, we see each other in real life. But when we’re doing professional interviews like this, both you and I work during the day. And so we do these interviews later when we’ve finished our creative work.
The other thing is the to-do list. My to-do list is so long. I use the Things app which I love. But I am frequently now when Things pop up on it, I will look at it and go, ‘No, I’m not even going to do that, I’m just going to not do that.’ Because I don’t have enough time to spend like four hours editing my novel and fulfill the creative work that I love. For example, podcasting for both you and I is part of our creative body of work. Today is my podcast day as we record this. And that is important to me. It’s important for my creativity but also for my community and for my income because it’s an important part of my business.
Those are the things that have to happen. And the things that have not happened today are posting a picture on Instagram or replying to comments on Facebook. Those have not happened! They won’t be happening today. So, setting these boundaries around what’s really important, will make sure that you get the important stuff done in a day, in a week, in a year. And if you don’t make these boundaries every day, then you aren’t going to end up looking back at 2020 or 20-whenever you’re listening to this and going, ‘What did I actually do?’
MARK: It’s those little decisions that have the big knock-on effect. So, clearly, Jo, you have been making the right kind of decisions because you have written not one but two non-fiction books out since the last time we spoke. Not to mention your fiction output. So, clearly the productivity advice works, folks! I would take a look at Productivity for Authors.
But maybe now we could move on and think about Audio for Authors, which is quite an unusual topic to pick. And again, you wrote and published this in the innocent world before lockdown.
What motivated you to write a book about audio and how important do you think audio is going to be for us creators specifically in the new circumstances that we’re all facing?
JOANNA: I think the reason I created the book is because my brother, who’s a photographer, wonderfully creative guy, phoned me and said, ‘I’m going to do a podcast. Do you know anything about that?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, there are so many things I need to tell him and he’s not going to listen because he’s my brother.’ And that’s what happens with family, right? I could tell him a few things, but would be great if I just had a book that I could send him. So, because I realized that there’s so much stuff that we learn, a bit like writing or whatever. We learn this stuff and then when someone asks us how to do it, we realize it’s a lot more in-depth than it might seem.
I’ve also been working on voice narration. I narrate, in fact, both of these audiobooks I narrate, not this fast, I should say! I’m speaking quite fast today. But I think what happened, it was this confluence of things. Also, in 2019, I went to Podcast Movement in Orlando and they mentioned the tipping point around audio, how people know about podcasts. They’re listening to audiobooks, double-digit growth year on year for seven years for audiobooks. And now, as you mentioned, with the pandemic, audio had a little dip when the lockdown first started because people stopped commuting. So, that was really interesting. The commute was one of the places that people listen.
But what’s happened is it has suddenly ramped up because the dip was due to existing listeners not listening because they weren’t commuting. But what we’ve had is now a growth phase, especially in audiobooks because people have discovered digital library apps like Hoopla and whatever your library is they possibly have an app. So, they can get audiobooks for free at the library. They can get ebooks for free through the library app. And also, obviously books on digital, audio and ebooks are downloadable and so people are now listening lots. They’re also a great way to escape and learn as well. A lot of podcasts about COVID-19 and about dealing with stress and all of this type of thing. There’s a lot of uptick in that area.
So, what’s interesting is there was a tipping point in 2019 where over 50% of people in the US over the age of 12 had listened to an audiobook, and who knows what it’s going to be in 2020? But it’s suddenly… so it went mainstream in 2019. But what has now happened is that it’s just exploded. Suddenly people who would never have listened to digital audio or bought ebooks are suddenly going digital because it’s a way of consuming story or escaping or information without having a physical object that isn’t your phone, for example. So, this has become even bigger. And in fact, I seem to remember you saying that you wished you’d done your audiobooks before lockdown…
MARK: Yeah, I do! But also, I’m one of those people who started listening to audiobooks in the last year.
JOANNA: Wow. There we go.
MARK: I think it was probably you prompting me, and I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go.’ Or I think I got an Amazon token, so I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go.’ And suddenly I realized, ‘Oh, I’ve got all this reading time opening up for me.’ Because that was one of the things I’d realized. I did want more reading time in my day and my week. And with an audiobook, you can get it while you’re out and about cleaning up the kitchen or whatever.
Now I’m a bit of an evangelist for audiobooks, so I guess I should get on and do mine, shouldn’t I?
JOANNA: Fantastic. And that is exactly one of the power of audio things is that you can do other stuff while you’re listening. So for example, this is a total lockdown activity – I painted one of the doors inside our house because it needed repainting. But I don’t paint doors! It’s not something I do. And I listened to an audiobook while I was doing it and the different coats and all that. And DIY is something that lots of people are doing. And so, I listen when I’m cooking. And the other thing is you listen to podcasts, but what happens with podcasts, I find, and this is why the audio ecosystem is so important. If I listen to a podcast on a topic, then sometimes I want to know more and I click my Audible app to go see if they’ve got a book on it because I want to go deeper.
And so this is how I want people listening to think about it is if you’re using podcasting as part of your marketing, going on other people’s podcasts, or if even if you have your own, then you need somewhere for them to go next. And someone who consumes audio is someone who potentially also reads on audio. So, you need to offer them an audio product, and audiobook is obviously the first step on that audio product. Then there might be an audio course or whatever. But doing an audio product means that you have another way to, I guess, monetize that you might not have already.
MARK: And kind of circling back to the creative, audio as a creative medium. Because, I mean, you’ve been podcasting since what, 2009?
JOANNA: Yes.
MARK: As well as writing.
As a creator, what would you say, what is special about audio? What can you do with it that you can’t do with other media?
JOANNA: Well, first of all, there’s that connection. If you’re doing your own audio, I know not everyone will do their own, but if you do it like us now, we’re in people’s heads and this is a sort of extemporaneous conversation. So, you’re listening in on a chat between two friends about stuff and that can be very personal. That is a way to connect. And let’s face it, the world is busy and any way that you can connect in a more personal way is a really good thing.
I guess that’s partly marketing, but on the creative side, for me, my podcast, as you say, I’ve been doing it for over a decade is part of my body of work. And I’ve actually reached more people through my podcast. I’ve reached 222 countries with my podcast. And I’ve sold books in 136 countries, but still, I’ve reached more people with my voice than I have with my books.
There are lots of people who are never going to read your book or maybe you’re a painter or jewelry maker or whatever you do, you’re not going to reach everyone with your creative product. But audio can be another form of creative product that literally has no borders, even borders imposed by pandemic. Audio crosses borders and even if you license your creative other work, audio can be a way to cross these boundaries. Also, I feel like creating for audio first is a different thing. My Books and Travel podcast, for example, these are episodes that exist in audio that don’t exist in another way. They are things that are unique in the world. We’re not going to turn this conversation into a book or anything else. This exists as it does like this.
I also think that we can create different things. Audio drama, for example, I listen to quite a lot now. As you get into audiobooks, you’ll find that you move into some audio dramas which are quite different, performances basically. And going back to the old days of radio, dramas where you’re listening and there’s people acting and different voices and a soundscape, you can create different experiences with audio than you can with just reading words from a page. I think the audiobook experience can now be quite different with audio drama and people are starting to come up with other things. For example, as sort of what Books and Travel is almost the research behind my fiction. It’s a different product that supports your creative work.
And also I’d say, I think I am becoming a better writer because I’m writing for the ear, which, you’re a poet, you understand rhythm and the sound of words. But I write thrillers, usually that’s less important, but by realizing the sound that it makes in someone’s head, I’m choosing different words than I used to do and I’m working with a thesaurus a lot more than I used to because I’m trying to make sure that my sounds are different on the ear over time. So, I just think audio has so many possibilities. It’s just a medium that you can create in.
MARK: And If I’m listening to this and thinking, ‘Well, I’m not a writer,’ maybe I’m a painter or a performer or another kind of creative.
Have you got any ideas of things that I might create? Because clearly I’m probably not going to do an audiobook, at least not straight away.
JOANNA: This is a conversation podcast, for example. That’s definitely something that’s possible. If you’re a physical artist, so let’s say you are a painter, you can still talk about your creative process. You can still have pictures on your website or you can interview other artists. You can even create an audio narrative around your work and your life. When we’re talking about audio, you can talk about video as well. Many podcasters, for example, will have a show on YouTube or a video show that they then also publish a podcast feed on. But there were questions that are similar for all of us as creatives. We all get it. Where do you get your ideas from? This is something that is true for any creative, any person in general, but creative.
So, if you’re a painter, where did you get the idea for that particular painting from? Why do you choose that medium? Why do you choose watercolor? Who are your favorite artists? All these types of things are the same. And so, if you wanted to do a podcast and you are a physical artist, then what would you call that? An artist making physical things in the world as opposed to words.
MARK: ‘An artist making stuff,’ I think is the technical term!
JOANNA: Making stuff. Yeah. Then think about what are the questions that people who might be interested in your work would love? I have a painting on my wall, which is the muse that I bought years ago by an artist called Vjekoslav Nemesh. And I look at this painting every day, and it’s my muse painting.
And I would love to know the story behind this painting. And especially on audio, you can put extra images into, certainly in an audiobook there’s a downloadable thing or you just have an easy-to-say URL where people can go and have a look at the picture if they want to. But I think what I want to encourage people is how can you reach the people who listen rather than read? I don’t read blogs anymore. I haven’t read blogs for years now. I listen to podcasts, I do read books. I have a lot of books, but I listen to audiobooks a lot. So, if you want to reach me with your paintings, it would be best for you to go on a podcast because then I might find out about you. So then your call to action is come and have a look at my online portfolio at X website. And so, what you have to think about is this audio ecosystem, a group of people who are growing all the time, who discover the world through listening. And what I think is that this will grow out of the experience of the pandemic as more people discover it. I think we’ll see a lot more.
MARK: Great. And I would really encourage you, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re kind of proof of this concept that this show is basically based on me asking questions of different types of creative, not all of whom are writers, about what they do and how they do it and what the process is. And you may not realize, if you do something creative, you may not realize how fascinating that is to people on the outside of that. And also as Jo says, it’s beyond boundaries. You can reach people. I think it’s a real privilege about audio is that you reach people in their private time, when they are commuting or when they’re painting their door or cooking dinner or whatever it may be. And it can be a very powerful connection. You get in that intimate space.
So, okay, maybe if I’m listening to this, Jo, then maybe you have sold me on the idea. The concept of doing audio, see, yes, I can reach people I wouldn’t reach otherwise, I can get out there and have a direct connection with an audience. But it feels a bit scary! ‘What microphone do I get? I hate the sound of my voice and I always get nervous when I’m speaking in public.’
What can you say to me to encourage me to get over these fears, Jo?
JOANNA: Oh, it’s tough! Again, you and I are professional speakers and the number one thing is it’s not about you, it’s about the audience. And so, that’s one thing. And literally with audio, if people don’t like our voices, then they’ve turned off by now, I mean, presumably, they like your voice because this is your podcast, but maybe they don’t like mine. So, they’ve just gone away and you can’t hide that. You can’t change that. You just have to be you. You literally just have to be you and the great thing is you will turn off people very quickly and they will just go away.
But the people who stay, they become very loyal. I have a Patreon. My podcast is free, The Creative Penn podcast, but people pay because they want me to keep doing it and support my creative work. And that’s just incredibly powerful and that’s because you’re in their head for an hour a week or whatever. So, think about it as how can I serve the audience I want to reach? How can I best serve those people and reach them with something, with audio that works for them, but also that I enjoy?
I love podcasting. You and I both enjoy it and enjoy the process of creating it and meeting people this way. But that’s the creative side, getting over it from that angle. The other way to get over it is to think, how does this support my creative business? If you aren’t going to get into audio, how could you monetize it? And then obviously the first thing is marketing. As we talked about with the painter, you have a call to action and you make sure if you go on an interview, you aim for that call to action at some point. You can also make money through Patreon, like I said, advertising. If you have a popular podcast, you can promote your own products and services and creative work. You meet other people. Like you and I, we met doing like online audio before we met in person.
MARK: We did, didn’t we? It was because you invited me on your show years ago. You were in Australia then, weren’t you?
JOANNA: Yes. So that’s how we met!
MARK: Yeah, that’s how we became friends.
JOANNA: And that’s kind of crazy.
MARK: And now we’re living just down the road from each other and we aren’t able to go out and meet up! It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?
JOANNA: It is. But that’s the thing, the relationships that you can make through having a chat like this on a podcast, they can be valuable for business too over time. And so, I would say if you are scared, it is scary. It’s totally scary.
For example, I’m really thinking about doing more live video, which scares the hell out of me but I think if we’re going to be in this world where we’re not going to be traveling so much for a while, I need to have my face there too. I love audio, but equally, I need to put my face out a bit and do like 10 minutes of live video a week or something. That is scary, but I know that it supports my community, it supports my business, it helps my audience. And challenge, again, circling back to where we were at the beginning around the challenge of the pandemic and how we’re adjusting, anything that pushes us out of our comfort zone is a good idea if it’s going to serve your ultimate goal.
I think this is really important. What scares you about audio and what will make it worthwhile for you? Oh, you probably need to upskill, practice doing this kind of thing. Go on some smaller podcasts first. That’s always a good idea.
And just give it a go because you don’t know how successful it’s going to be. And when I started The Creative Penn podcast, phoning someone up on a handset and holding a little recorder next to it, literally that’s what I did back in 2009. I had no clue that I would end up a decade later with the podcast that underpins my business and makes good money as well as building a community. So, you just don’t know where this may take you and you might love it, which would be awesome.
MARK: I would absolutely second this on two fronts. One is the connections, the new friends that I’m making through the show. And also getting into discussion with people professionally as well. Now I’ve got something, if I see somebody, I love their work, I can reach out and invite them on the show and we start a relationship. And you never know where that could go.
And then the other thing is it’s scary for all of us. Jo, you’re finding new ways to scare yourself by doing live videos. I’m starting recording poetry and putting that out there, which I feel is much more exciting, but also much more scary and personal to put that out there.
It is scary and like anything creative, it’s kind of supposed to be scary if it’s going to be exciting.
JOANNA: Exactly. I think that these relationships are really important. Also, when you do interviews like this, you can actually learn something yourself that can change your world. When you came on my show a few weeks ago, you really helped me and we could have had that conversation offline, but we did it online. And I think it helps when I feel that I’m serving my audience with my questions, but then I learn as well.
Even today I interviewed a guy called Will Storr about the science of storytelling. And in that discussion I had an aha moment that – I’ve read his book, I’ve listened to his audiobook, but in talking to him and asking questions, I had that aha moment that made everything hang together really well, and that’s just brilliant. It doesn’t happen in every interview, to be fair, but it happens often enough that it makes the curiosity about other people. It makes it really worthwhile.
Let’s come back to curiosity because it underpins our creativity. We’re curious as to see how something’s going to turn out. And let’s try and be playful about it as well because people are very forgiving about audio. They’ll get the gist of our conversation without it being completely organized. That can come across as quite stilted if you try and read from something on a podcast. But being the sort of natural, playful, curious, that’s the attitude I think to go in with.
MARK: And talking of curiosity, you have a very interesting final section of the book Audio for Authors, which is all about audio technology and weird stuff like AI and dictation and so on. And I really feel like, as always, you’re leaning into the future, Jo, you’re there ahead of the rest of us. And I get a real sense in this section that you’re starting to explore some creative possibilities that are really only just starting to open up for us.
Can you say a little bit about the audio technologies in the final third of the book, and what are the creative opportunities that they’re opening up for us?
JOANNA: Of course. Well, first of all, the voice-first movement has been talking about, things like smart speakers, assistance on your phone, even voice search. If you say, ‘Hey, Google, find me the nearest Chinese restaurant,’ or something. I won’t talk to my watch right now, but, I ask my watch about the weather and that kind of thing.
We’re starting to interact with devices with voice, and this is another thing the pandemic will change. Everybody thought we would be in a touch world, a touch-first world. You can go to… I don’t know how this will change. Just a thought. You can go to McDonald’s and use a touch screen to order your burger – how is that going to change out of COVID? Certainly, I mean, people are not going to be doing that!
So, I think we might even move faster towards voice first because of the fact that touch is going to be not socially acceptable to be doing that. This is a really interesting time for that voice idea. So, you think about people listening, even if you don’t have a smartwatch or you don’t talk to your phone like that, your assistant, this stuff is coming. And thinking about people being in their car, again, it’s much safer to use voice assistance.
That’s one side. Then the artificial intelligence is fascinating. Voice synthesis, which is, there are tools right now where you and I, we both have voice recordings that we can feed to an AI and the AI will then speak in our voice. And I actually have a voice double, I’ll link to it in the book. Yeah, I already have a voice double and I’ve played it on my podcast!
I use a platform called descript.com, it’s brilliant if you’re podcasting or narrating or dictating, it’s fantastic. But yeah, descript.com. It’s still in beta for the voice double, but these are things that are happening.
This year, so at the London Book Fair, which didn’t happen in 2020, but some of the press releases still went out. The first audiobook created with an AI voice is now for sale on various platforms. And so, that’s happened. Also, AI voices are becoming more human. So people are like, ‘Oh, but it sounds like a robot.’ Partly, they want it to sound like a robot because it is disingenuous to have a voice that is more human.
But again, what we’re seeing now is Alexa and various devices are getting more and more human, Siri and all of that. You can choose different voices. My husband has an Indian British voice for his Siri voice, which is just lovely. And you can choose all these different voices, but you can also create your own. And in fact, Baidu, which is a Chinese technology, they only need 3.7 seconds of audio to clone a voice.
MARK: Really? Whoa.
JOANNA: I know! So you don’t even need to have hours and hours of work like we do. I should say the company with that audiobook is called deepzen.io if people are interested. What we’ve also got now is we already have voices that are from famous people. We have the Deepfakes, which we’ve seen Zuckerberg and Trump and Boris Johnson and things during the elections and stuff like that.
So we’re going to see negative stuff. But we’ve also got positive stuff. Audiobooks will boom even further as costs come down if they’re AI-generated. And if people are worried, I’m not worried, I see it as a bit like physical books or products or let’s say, again, you’re an artist, you do a painting, someone can buy that one painting, but maybe you also do prints of that painting. You take a photo and then create limited edition prints. That’s two different products. Same with books. I think the AI narration will be a cheaper product. And then you could have human narration as your premium, higher-priced product. And I think there’ll be a place for everything. But what it also means is if I want to write an audio drama, instead of having to hire a whole load of actors, I could use different AI voices to do an audio drama. How cool would that be? Which is great.
And the other thing I expect to happen is if you buy my audiobook, let’s say you buy my audiobook Audio for Authors, but you don’t want to listen to me read it. You should be able to, in the future, switch out for Mark’s voice, for your voice. And you could read my book!
MARK: Yeah, whatever floats your boat!
JOANNA: Because why not? I get annoyed because I always have to listen to non-fiction business books. They’re usually an American male voice, but I would rather have a British female voice. Why can’t I just press a button on my phone and change the voice like I can do with Siri or Alexa? So, all of these things I think are coming.
MARK: That’s great. In fact, only this week I went to check out an audiobook by an author. I won’t say who it was. And the author is a man and I’ve heard his voice quite a lot and I was looking forward to that, and they’d recorded it with a female voice. And I’ve got nothing against the female voice in general it’s great, but it was just so jarring to have this author whose voice I knew read by a woman that I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll get that next week…’
JOANNA: Or maybe you won’t listen.
MARK: Well, maybe I won’t because it’s just such a… I don’t know what the publishers were thinking of, but in this brave new world I could just flip over to the voice synth of said author’s voice and they would have got the sale.
JOANNA: Exactly. People are worried about this, robots taking our jobs, which, again, will accelerate with the pandemic. But this is an example where I think we could license our voices, we could do micropayments for licensing voice and also I think it will sell more audio because you would have bought that immediately if you could have swapped the voice or I’ve listened to some and just thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is just terrible.’ And I would love to switch the voice to something else and then I would have listened because I wanted the content.
So, this is the thing. I think what we’re moving into is a world where this type of stuff becomes much easier and more, I guess, more cost-effective certainly where the price of publishing, as we know, has come right down, the price of podcasting. This is a radio show that you’re doing from your house. And the price of this type of thing, of AI, is going to come down so much that it will be easier for people to create. And what I would – sort of final word on this – the important thing is to build a brand so that people want your work. And this is why I want to license my voice. I want you to want to listen to me.
MARK: The voice of Big Brother, Big Sister!
JOANNA: Yeah, Big Sister! But this is the thing, this shift is happening. This has already happened. And the difficult thing about the book was, of course, I published it and as soon as I published it, other things happened because that’s what’s happening with AI. It moves so fast. But I wanted to just give an example, but it was literally three weeks later, the first audiobook was released, narrated by an AI. And this is fascinating and will continue to grow. I think the problem is that publishing contracts often don’t accept this type of thing. And audiobook copyright law is not clear on this. So, we are going to go through an interesting time, but I believe that people will be using licensed AI voices to do audiobooks pretty soon.
MARK: Joanna, whenever I hear you talking about the future like this, I find it a mind-boggling and slightly unsettling, but also a really exciting prospect. Thank you for opening our eyes and indeed our ears to things to come.
If we can come right back to the present for the moment and indeed the very near future for our listeners, it’s time for the Creative Challenge, which if you’re new to the show, this is the part of the interview where I ask my guests to set you, the listener, a Creative Challenge, something that you can do within seven days of listening to this conversation that will stretch you creatively and probably as a person as well.
So, Jo, what is your creative challenge?
JOANNA: Okay, so your Challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to record your voice this week. So, you can use your phone, there’s free software on the internet, Audacity. So you actually have no excuse, there are lots of ways you can record your voice.
And I want you to answer the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ And just talk, like no one needs to hear this. This is just you and you’re going to record that. And then yes, you are going to have to listen back to it and sit there and cringe and just feel the pain, or realize that it wasn’t that bad, which I hope is what you’re going to get.
MARK: I think that’s brilliant, Jo, because that is a real hurdle for a lot of people, the first time you hear your voice because for physiological reasons, it sounds different to the way you hear it yourself from inside your skull. A lot of people find it really unpleasant experience, don’t they?
JOANNA: Oh, definitely.
MARK: So, this will help them get over that. Okay. Brilliant. So do that, and if you’re feeling extra specially brave, then maybe you could go and post it online and leave a comment in the show notes. We would love to hear that. In fact, it would probably be very interesting. So, if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/audiochallenge, I’ll make sure that links to Jo’s interview and you can leave a comment with a link to your, you know, the audio if you’ve uploaded it somewhere.
JOANNA: Oh, that is a good idea. And in fact, you could use a service like SoundCloud. There are a lot of places. You can even do it like if you want to do video, you can do it on Instagram or you can do it on whatever you like. But no, that’s great. So, that’s another step of the challenge is posting it online. Even if you don’t go that far, maybe leave a comment to how it felt to do it privately.
MARK: That would be great. And honestly, it would be so nice to listen to our listeners, wouldn’t it, Jo?
JOANNA: Yeah, it’d be great.
MARK: All right. Joanna, thank you so much. As always, you are a fount of enthusiasm and ideas and new technology and exciting vistas opening up. Where should people go to find out? Obviously there’s the new books, there’s Productivity for Authors and Audio for Authors, which will be available from all good bookshops that are currently open.
Where else should people go to connect with you and find out more about your work?
JOANNA: Well, you guys obviously love podcasts, so come along to The Creative Penn podcast, or my other show is Books and Travel podcast. And everything else is at thecreativepenn.com, Penn with a double N. And lots of free stuff if you want to write books, publish books, etc., etc.
MARK: And just to give another little endorsement, Joanna’s podcast, The Creative Penn was one of the shows that inspired me to start podcasting. So, if you like this one, then I do encourage you to go and check out Jo’s.
JOANNA: Thanks so much for having me, Mark. That was great fun.
MARK: Always a pleasure. Thank you, Jo.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
He talks about the relationship between old and new technology, traditional crafts and the modern world, in an interview that draws on his own experience as well as the many makers and craftspeople he has interviewed for his booksConversations on the Coast, Conversations from Land’s End to John O’Groats, and Conversations on the Hudson.
In the first part of the show I give an update on the book publishing side of my own business, including the paperback edition of my latest book, 21 Insights for 21st Century Creatives, which has been beautifully designed and typeset by Irene Hoffman.
I also recently took delivery of my author copies of the Russian edition of my book Motivation for Creative People. It’s the second of my books to be translated into Russian and published by the Moscow publisher Mann, Ivanov & Ferber. So if you are a Russian speaker and would like a little extra motivation for your creative career, you can find the translated book here.
In the coaching segment, I share some thoughts on what the effect of the pandemic means for us specifically as creatives, and how we can make a creative response to the fact that the normal rules are suspended.
Nick Hand
Nick is the founder of The Department of Small Works, an amazing company here in Bristol where I live. Because Nick was just down the road I went to see him in person to record the interview in his workshop, and I was really glad I did.
As you’ll hear in the interview, it’s an Aladdin’s cave of printing technology from yesteryear, with printing presses, typefaces and other gadgets dating back to the Victorian era. So it’s a really atmospheric space, that I entered with something akin to reverence.
As we talk, you can hear clicking and tapping noises from time to time – that’s Ellen Bills, the printer, assembling a block of text by hand, individual letter by individual letter.
The results are stunning – the workshop wall and Nick’s website are covered in beautiful prints, posters, cards, books and booklets. And Nick has created an amazing business around this – printing to commission, creating his own products, and running workshops where you can go and learn to print on a letterpress machine yourself.
So once Coronavirus has receded and we’re allowed to get back to workshops, I shall be attending as a student and printing one of my poems.
Another reason I wanted to talk to Nick, and why he’s got such a deep knowledge of traditional crafts, is that he has published a trilogy of books featuring interviews with makers of all kinds who he met while cycling around the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as along the Hudson River in New York State.
So I was very keen to talk to Nick about the state of traditional crafts and manufacturing in the modern world, about what we can learn from the past and also how we can combine it with new technologies and opportunities. I was rewarded with a captivating conversation, as Nick shared stories, learnings, as well as some amazing new words from the printer’s lexicon.
Nick Hand interview transcript
MARK: Nick, we are sitting in the most extraordinary room. This is one of the days I wish I’d done this as a video podcast because we are surrounded, dear listener, imagine, if you will, a room full of antiquated printing presses, shelves of type… I think that’s metal. Is that some of it? Is that wooden type, some of it?
NICK: It is wood type.
MARK: There are some big blocks of wood type over there. There are all kinds of amazing posters and texts that are the handiwork of said machines and equipment. There’s a wonderful smell of… is it ink, that smell, or oil, or a mixture?
NICK: A mixture of those things. Yeah. Ink, cleaning.
MARK: It’s really quite something.
Nick, what’s it like to come into work surrounded by this every day?
NICK: It’s pretty uplifting actually. You never get tired of it. And Ellen is in the room with us. Ellen is a young printer, and we work together in here. She’s in here all the time, and I’m in here not as much as I’d like. But it’s an amazing place. If you are a wizard, it would be all the materials to make things wizards make. Magic, you make magic from here.
MARK: I’m thinking it’s a bit like the Willy Wonka factory for printers. I mean it’s just extraordinary stuff in here.
NICK: Yes. Well, there is a very famous piece written by a woman called Beatrice Warde, who was a typesetter in the 1930s, I think. And it talks about a room like this being like a chapel and a holy place. And it is in a way. It does have that kind of magic.
MARK: It does. Yeah. Actually, that’s a really nice description because I did feel a kind of a reverence coming in to this. And it’s kind of preserved, but it’s not in a museum sense.
This is all working kit, right?
NICK: Yes. The oldest bit of kit we have is an Albion press, which was made in 1832. And if you think about 1832, there were no cars on the road, there weren’t even bicycles on the road. So that press was made that time ago, and that was just after Peterloo. And if you saw the film, Peterloo, it actually had one of these in it, an Albion press.
MARK: Really? So that’s that one over there?
NICK: Exactly. Yes.
The Albion Press in Nick’s workshop
MARK: So, listeners, I will take a photo of that press and you will find it in the show notes with Nick’s permission. It’s wonderfully grounding as well. On the one hand, it’s kind of the elevation and reverence like a chapel, but you really do feel kind of earthed in a place like this. You’re walking around, you’re picking up real things. I think there’s an iPad over there, but there’s not an awful lot of digital kit in evidence. It’s very different.
And, again, is there something about that whole tactile experience you think that…?
NICK: Absolutely. Yeah. And the music we play in here is… we play vinyl records, and there’s definitely a sort of tactile quality to everything that we make and the materials that we use to print with. For example, the wood type you mentioned earlier, some of the wood types are a hundred years old. And every time I handle a piece of wood type, I just think, “What words did this make the first time it was used a hundred years ago? What are the kind of things that…?”
And the other thing is that they have marks on them, a bit like us, they have the scars of age where something’s gone slightly wrong with the print or someone’s damaged it, or it’s slightly worn. So just like us, they carry all their kind of scars, but then you learn to appreciate those as well. And it’s amazing material to work with.
And I think, also, if you’re dyslexic… Ellen and I are both slightly dyslexic… and I remember someone saying if you use a typewriter or you write by hand, you’re going to write quite different things. I think with typesetting, the things that you create will be quite different because you handle every letter, you feel differently about the words that you’re setting.
MARK: Nick, maybe cast your mind back to the beginning of your career when this place was just a twinkle in your eye.
How did you get your start as a maker?
NICK: I went to art college, very kind of traditional old-school art college in Stafford in the 1970s when I was 16, and I spent a year at that time in a room very similar to this. And I have a theory that we try and recreate somewhere that we had our best time in, and I certainly had the best time at art college. And so I think it must’ve just being in my head. And then, for the next 20 years I was a graphic designer, and I did paste up work. There were no computers. And then, suddenly computers turned up, like the first Apple Macs, whenever it was, late eighties, early nineties maybe.
MARK: Yeah.
NICK: Computers turned up whenever it was. When was it? 89?
MARK: Must’ve been late eighties, I think.
NICK: I can remember that we used to have to get loans to buy a computer for, like, £18,000 or something, and then we had to employ someone because nobody knew how to turn them on or key stuff in.
So the second half of my career as a graphic designer was with computers. And then towards the end of that time, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I just started going home feeling a bit… not kind of feeling like I’d had a great day. And I realized it was because just being on a keyboard and the screen actually wasn’t much fun. Doing paste up all night wasn’t much fun but at the end of it, you felt like you had achieved something.
And so, anyway, I suppose the long shot was I had the kind of classic thing where I just felt like I needed to make a change somehow. I didn’t know how or where. And one of the things I’d started doing was a lot of cycling, and I loved the feeling of being on a bicycle, like just the freedom and energy of being on a bicycle. And I was on holiday in Cornwall with Harriet, my wife, and I was a bit intrigued about living on an island and not knowing enough about that island.
So two things happened. One was I was intrigued by how, being on an island, I guess if you start at one point on the coast and you cycle clockwise, for example, along the coast, at some point you’re going to come back to that point where you were. So I was thinking, “How long would that take? And what would the places be like?”
I became a bit obsessed by this idea of cycling around the coast. And so that’s what I did. I took three and a half months, which is how long it takes to cycle. And in case you’re wondering, it’s about 4,600 miles if you start at one point. And you can take in several islands, islands like Arran and the Isle of Wight, they’re both 61 miles if you cycle around those islands. So you can add in the islands, many islands, because the islands are fantastic. Who wouldn’t wanna go on Skye, and Mull, and Arran, and the Orkneys? I realized all these places I hadn’t seen, that I really wanted to see while I could still ride a bicycle. So I did that on a bike. It was actually 10 years ago.
And the other thing was I was a bit intrigued by spending time on your own, because I realized that every day, I’ve come in, we work with your friends or I want to say if you’ve got partner, you’re with your partner, and I realized that I was a bit intrigued – what it would be like to spend that amount of time on my own? And I got a bit worried about it. So I thought, “I need a project. I need to meet people every day, and I’d like to build that into this trip.” And at that time I was doing some work for a company called Howie’s. I designed their catalog. They were a clothing company in West Wales.
MARK: Avid listeners may recall David Hieatt came on the show a couple of seasons ago and talked about founding Howie’s. So, nice to make that connection.
NICK: Yeah. I knew David at that time, and I loved the language that David and his wife Clare, sort of, used within that company. And, also, I loved the fact that… well, it’s a bit more common now, but at that time they spent a lot of their money and their energy and their time on things which weren’t directly selling clothes, which felt a little bit interesting and unique. So they would meet not just things like skateboarders, or BMXers, but also people that made stuff.
I became really intrigued by the makers in particular. I thought I would seek out people that would make things on this journey, and talk to them, and record their voice, and look at what they do. I love workshops, like you were talking about our workshop. There’s nothing better than being in a workshop or a studio of a maker because, again, we talked about it being a bit religious almost, but I think that’s true. The energy and the spirit in those places, whether it’s a leather worker in a shed or whether it’s, I don’t know, someone making jeans in a factory, it’s an incredible experience, I think.
MARK: It’s always a privilege to be invited in, isn’t it?
NICK: It is. And actually it’s really surprising because you kind of think those places, they’re kind of private temples, or whatever, and it is. And it feels quite like an honor or a privilege. It feels like a privilege actually to be in those places.
MARK: What did you learn by going in them?
NICK: I set off in May 2009, and the first place I went to was Aardman because I live in Bristol and Aardman are in Bristol. And I went to see an animator. And Aardman is phenomenal because they have all… and the other thing I realized was that crafts are everywhere. Craft can be an actor, craft can be a singer, a writer, a musician, or an animator. So you discover these kind of secret, hidden crafts in a way, modern crafts.
MARK: For international listeners, Aardman is one of the pride and joys of Bristol. They make the Wallace and Gromit movies. I was really intrigued to see them in your book. I must’ve have done a double-take, then I thought, ‘Well, actually, that is a craft, isn’t it?’
NICK: Absolutely. On a recent journey, I went to Stafford and I met a director of a play. And plays are full of craft; craft in writing, craft in the costume-making, craft in the stage work. It’s really interesting to seek out crafts, whether new crafts or old crafts. And I think that’s really intriguing.
MARK: What does the word ‘craft’ mean to you?
NICK: Personally, my interest is in the people. I’m really interested in the people, and I love to hear the people. Letterpress, the room we’re in now, a letterpress print shop, the old printers, the printers that come in here, I love to hear what they say. But I’m really intrigued by them and their voice, so I really like… a bit like what you’re doing, actually, with your work, giving voice to people that don’t always have a voice. So lot of people I met on that trip aren’t alive anymore, not a lot, but a few.
Every now and then I’ll get an email or a letter from a relative saying, ‘You visited my aunt 10 years ago. Sadly, she died a couple of months ago and your recording was the only recording of her talking about her work.’ And that’s happened several times now. At the time I wasn’t really aware of the kind of legacy of those recordings, but it’ll be the same with your work 10 or 20 years’ time. Maybe someone will talk about me and… who knows?
MARK: There is a real timeless quality. And so Nick’s books, I heartily recommend. You’ve got beautiful photographs and interviews with the makers, and there’s a real timeless quality to what they’re sharing, and you really do feel awed in some cases. You’ve got a storyteller from Northern Ireland, and a stickmaker from… where was that guy?
NICK: Suffolk.
MARK: Suffolk. And you think, ‘Gosh, this thing is still going on, but maybe they really are… hopefully, not the end of a tradition, but it’s… ‘ I remember the stickmaker in particular saying that they couldn’t get young people to join the Guild of Stickmakers, which is a wonderful thing to know that exists.
You really do get a sense that you’re capturing something very precious that could be lost.
NICK: I think that’s true. The stickmaker is a really good example because his name was Bill Bontoft. And I think he was 72 when I met him, maybe, and so he’ll be 10 years older now. And a lovely character. Doesn’t do email. So whenever I contact him through email, I have to do it through his nephew who works for some computer company, and a month goes by and eventually I’ll get a response from Bill. But I came across him because I was just cycling through his village, and he lives in a little wooden bungalow with his wife.
I remember seeing his little old picket fence, which just had an A5 sign that said, ‘Stickmaker’. And on a bicycle, you’re going slowly enough to see that sign. And so I stopped and we chatted for a couple of hours. They sent me away with a little packed lunch that they made, and it was just an amazing, lovely experience.
Bill made sticks all his life. It was a very traditional thing where he collected willow, and then dry it for 18 months. He talked about the process. And like we were talking about, privilege, so just, it was an amazing, really lovely experience. I had to get to a camp site, so I was only with him a couple of hours, but it stays with you and I can remember quite a lot of detail from that conversation. And the other thing is he just kept some hilarious things, like he was saying, ‘I’m 72 now, so I’ve probably only got another 20 years of stickmaking.’
MARK: That’s the spirit!
NICK: Which kind of gives you hope, doesn’t it?
MARK: Yeah. It does. Gosh, yes. Maybe we’ve got a little longer to go. It’s a really interesting point about the bike because I’m an enthusiast for using the internet to find interesting, creative people all over the world.
But if somebody is not on the internet and their only kind of advert, if you like, is a signboard, it’s literally the signboard at the bottom of their garden, then you’re reaching people with that bike that the internet is not going to, is it?
NICK: Absolutely. And I think, a couple of things about the bicycle, one is the slowness, obviously, and we talk a lot about doing things slowly, now it’s become a kind of thing, but also just the simplicity of it. If you set off for four months, everything you need is on that bicycle, your life becomes really simple. And, for some reason, our lives are just complicated.
Like I was saying, I’ve been away for a few days, and I’ve come back. There’s maintenance and stuff to do. When you start off from a camp site and all you’ve got is your little recorder, your camera, a rough idea of where you want to end up at night, you might bump into someone or you might not. It’s very simple. So all those layers of complication just fall away and you just have this little simple task. And it is an astonishing thing to suddenly have this life of simplicity.
MARK: So, not content with going all the way around Great Britain, you went around Ireland as well, didn’t you?
NICK: Well, yeah. I did go around Ireland, and that was because I started saying, ‘I’ve cycled around Britain,’ and I remember someone emailed me and said, ‘You can’t say you’ve cycled around Britain because you haven’t cycled around Ireland.’ So I’m like, ‘Oh, geez. I’m going to have to do that now,’ which wasn’t a hardship, but I can tell you, as well, it’s 1,800 miles to cycle around the coast of Ireland. But Ireland is, again, a beautiful country full of amazing people. I don’t believe anyone will go to Ireland and not come back thinking it’s not just beautiful, but the people are pretty beautiful and welcoming, and it’s an amazing country.
MARK: So you did that, and then you did the Hudson River as well?
NICK: Yeah. My wife was working in New York, and a publisher in New York had contacted me and said, ‘Could we republish your book about cycling around Britain?’ And I had this thought that, instead of them publishing that book, I could do a smaller version, but I was a bit intrigued by the Hudson. The Hudson is this astonishing river that goes from New York to Canada, and it’s so wide for about 200 miles you can hardly see the other side. It’s a huge river, and it was very polluted at one point.
Anyway, I thought, ‘I could do that journey, and I could meet people, and what would that be like?’ It was quite a short journey. It was only a few weeks, in fact. So I did that. Yeah. And it just felt like a nice thing to do, otherwise I’d just have been sitting in coffee shops and flicking through secondhand records.
MARK: And coming back to Bristol, here in The Department of Small Works, how did this place come about?
NICK: I think having just met maybe a few hundred makers of things, I started thinking about my time at art college, and that coincided with discovering the last letterpress printer closed their doors in Bristol. Bristol’s a really big print center. And I was a bit concerned about what was happening to the machines and the type, and obviously seeing type sold letter-by-letter in car boot sales.
So I started asking around, and then I started talking to some of the old printers, and I came across the M Shed. The M Shed is the local museum for industry in Bristol. And a guy there, Andy King, is really great fella who curates… I think that’s probably the wrong word, but he runs part of the museum. And he said, ‘Well, we’ve got these old presses and type just sitting in storage. And if you find the space and you involve the public, we’d much rather those things be used than sitting and gathering dust.’
So that was the start of it, really. And then that coincided with coming across this cooperative building that we’re in now, which just happens to be in the middle of Bristol, which is pretty unusual as well. So it’s a kind of coming together. We were talking earlier about planning things and the energy to make things happen, but I truly believe there’s an alternative which is just organic, accidental stumbling, which is what I’ve done here. This is a result of stumbling along, not quite with any purpose, which, I believe, is not a bad thing.
MARK: Well, you look at what’s emerged, you’re clearly onto something.
What are the main activities you do here?
NICK: We do several things. One thing we do is we run workshops. We invite people in. And they can be anyone, really, but quite often, as well, the people are poets, or musicians or can be graphic designers or people that work in advertising, or fashion, or whatever, and we’d show them how to… you might hear the little clicking of lead type that settle in setting type. We teach them how to set small type, lead type, which is generally below an inch, 72 point, and then wood type, above 72 point generally. And they can make posters, and they can make bookmarks or postcards.
MARK: Are these points the same things we see on the Word processor when we select Times Roman 12 point, or Arial, or whatever?
NICK: They are, yeah. So I think… was it Microsoft? Someone adopted the point system for computers, which helped us quite a bit because we don’t have to explain.
MARK: Right. When people like me come in and go, oh, yeah, okay, I can relate to that.
NICK: Yeah. And, also, things like leading. On one side of this room, there are racks of… what would you call them? Long pieces of lead, which is leading, and so anyone that works with a computer, which is most of us, I guess, they’re aware of 10 or 12-point Helvetica, or 10 or 12-point Arial. So the difference between 10 and 12 points is 2 points, which is invisible on a computer. But here it’s a physical piece of lead. So that’s racks of leading, which kind of sits invisibly inside your every computer.
MARK: And it’s actual lead, is it?
NICK: It’s actual lead. Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a little mix of lead and antimony, I think. Is that antimony?
ELLEN: And tin. Yeah.
NICK: Little bit of tin. So it’s a little bit of a mix of stuff. It’s kind of pliable, and it’s got a quite low melting point so you can make new type or new lead. And we collect it, and we spend hours and hours putting it into… because the measurements there are called picas, and picas are like multiples of points. So when you get to 12 points, it becomes 1 pica. So that’s the measurement, and nobody knows in the outside world, just in our little secret world.
MARK: I’ve never heard of that. Yes. This is great. I, for one, am looking forward. I’m going to come and do a workshop and print some of my poems.
So people like me can just walk in and learn to type with the old presses?
NICK: Yes.
MARK: What else do you do here?
NICK: We do a lot of work with poets, musicians, artists, the sort of community of Bristol, and we produce posters for them, and we do record sleeves, and we make little books for people, booklets. The thing that’s in front of us is a Christmas card for a creative company in Bristol. We do a lot of work with friends, like Heavenly, and Caught by the River in London, and we print posters for them. And we also print our own things which we try and sell on our website.
And there’s this lovely phrase I really like, ‘Own the means of production,’ which is a Marxist phrase. You have to be really careful who’s in the room when you talk about Marx I’ve discovered, when you say that.
MARK: Oh, he’s good. He’s welcome on my show.
NICK: But, yeah, I think he is for a lot of people. Every now and then you come across someone that goes, ‘Hm, Marx…’ And you go, ‘Okay.’ And so ‘own the means of production’ means that you own your printing press or you own your sewing machine, and you can make anything with that. And so things like this year, we realized we could make playing cards on the particular press. I worked out that on this press, which is a Heidelberg Windmill Platen press, we can punch the cards out, we can print the cards, we can make the box, we can punch the box out, we can print the leaflets that goes into it, we can make all the elements in a pack of playing cards, which I got really excited about.
And then we got together with our friend, Jeb Loy Nichols, who’s a country soul singer who lives in Mid Wales, and he made 54 drawing of cuts of… not always obscure, but some are quite obscure country soul singers from three cities in America. And we printed a pack of playing cards, which I was very excited about, and to the point where if we haven’t sold a single pack, I still would’ve been very happy about it, just through the joy of being able to do it.
MARK: I get a real sense here of just the wonderful enthusiasm you have for doing things. And then people walk in and they go… because I’m looking at this thinking, ‘Well, okay, I want to do something with my poems.’ So you talk about stumbling across stuff, that if you start doing a thing and then people show up, and then they go, ‘Well, we could do that with it,’ and it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you do stuff and it doesn’t take off, but I think it’s going to come from that place of curiosity and enthusiasm for doing it because you want to do it.
One of the themes of this podcast is ‘Something old, something new,’ and, clearly, you’ve got the old part covered here. You’re really steeped in the tradition of the technology and the crafts, and also the generations of people who’ve been practicing the various crafts that you talk about.
How do you see the relationship between these old skills and the new technology, and maybe new changes in society that we have these days? What kind of relationship do you think you see there?
NICK: Two things come to mind. One is discovering a new relationship with the old, which makes it new because you’re discovering it. So we get kids who are college coming in, so rediscovering it as a new thing in a way. The other thing, I guess, is other letterpress printers, friends of ours who work in a very different way. So we have friends who work with laser cutters and work with 3D modeling, printing, and their work is really interesting.
So there’s this sort of new generation of printers. And we tend to work with older material here, so we’re not a good example of that, but there’s couple of things on the wall here from our friends who are producing new work in a really exciting way, and I think, also, because we work with the artists, so we work with some Bristol artists, and poets, musicians, artists, and I guess their work rubs off on us a little bit as well. I think we both say it as kind of influenced by who we’re working with. So, inevitably, because this was a trade.
This room, it wasn’t a craft. It was a trade. We sometimes get old printers coming in, and they don’t understand why we spend so much time on quality. They just want to knock it out. They were paid by speed and how quickly they can produce things, which has changed totally now. We do things, we spend ages and ages, too long sometimes on just looking at the quality of the material and the end result.
I think actually in terms of, not technology necessarily, but I think finding something new in an old art form or whatever, or trade, or craft, if you want to call it, I think you’re inevitably going to find that, but also using new materials, things like laser cutting and… there’s a lot of really exciting… I guess, in some way, it’s like music, again.
Obviously there’s a lot more vinyl being produced now as well, but at the same time, I would imagine there’s a lot of modern technology being used to make that vinyl, or make the sound, or the way it’s recorded so something on vinyl over there isn’t going to be recorded like Abbey Road or something. And it’s the same with this, what we’re doing. We’re not trying to ally ourselves to Abbey Road.
MARK: But you’re revisiting it maybe with a different twist on the way it was originally used.
NICK: I think so, definitely. Absolutely. And, also, just the things that we’re producing, like we were saying about making stuff for ourselves. The old letterpress printers would never have made anything for themselves. Like modern litho printers now, or digital printers, they’re not interested in making things themselves. They’re just interested in making a living, I guess, and paying off the debts.
MARK: So, Nick, if somebody is listening to this and maybe with a sense that they’ve spent far too long staring at a screen, hunched over a desk…
NICK: Which I definitely have, by the way.
MARK: Yeah. And they’re thinking, ‘You know what? I would really like to explore something new, which is maybe something old at the same time?’
Where would you suggest they go to scratch that itch and get started maybe on a new path?
NICK: I’d suggest looking at places like the Heritage Crafts Association. They have a list of makers working…
MARK: That’s the UK one?
NICK: Heritage Crafts. Yeah. And they incidentally have a Red List of which letterpress is one, of endangered crafts which I quite like. It’s a new thing.
MARK: Wow.
NICK: The Red List. Have a look at it.
MARK: Endangered craft. Now I’m interested in this, because, again, we were talking earlier on, weren’t we, that a lot of the time maybe these crafts have been in danger of disappearing, and we were quietly hopeful that maybe we’ve turned a corner and now we’re starting to appreciate and preserve some of these.
What’s the definition of an endangered craft, and how prevalent is that?
NICK: I guess it’s like an endangered species. For example, there were a couple of examples I heard about. One was a wooden ladder maker who was the last wooden ladder maker in Britain, and then also someone that made clocks, a clockmaker, and I think that was the last clockmaker whose skills would’ve died with him.
So it’s just like endangered species, is suddenly discovering the last of something, or very few of them. I don’t know how many full-time letterpress printers there are, but there probably would have been 50,000, maybe several hundred thousand 60, 70 years ago, and I guess there’s probably 30 now, 30 full-time letterpress printers? There’s a lot of part-time, hobby printers, so probably several thousand in Britain, but probably full-time, there’s probably 30, we think? I’m getting a nod from Ellen.
MARK: Great. I’m just admiring…
Ellen has got this piece of type that she’s clutching in her hands that she’s been assembling very patiently.
NICK: Yeah. She’s just carried about eight lines of type she’s been setting over. And, again, that’s a classic thing where you think, ‘Oh, that looks easy,’ and then we get people in workshops who see Ellen or I pick up type, and they go, ‘I can do that.’ And it’s called a ‘printer’s pie’, when it ends up in the floor.
MARK: A printer’s pie? My vocabulary is being expanded!
NICK: Oh, there’s a massive vocabulary.
MARK: Nick, how optimistic do you feel about the situation in relation to craft and tradition? Do you think, ‘We are turning this corner, and that we’re learning to preserve and enjoy, or…?’
NICK: Well, I suppose I just see my little world really, which looks quite healthy. And I don’t know. I’ve just been to a craft show in Cardiff, and you’re in there with potters, and weavers, and jewelers. And we’re in the building with a potter, and a jeweler, and not a weaver, but a tailor. We have one of the only tailors in Britain that is trained to make women’s suits. So it all looks quite healthy.
And the other thing that’s healthy is actually, Ellen is 29, and there’s a lot of young people who are learning these crafts. So that all looks quite healthy, but I’m not convinced. I think the Red List is really interesting of the Heritage Crafts Association, and so, yeah, it feels healthy. And, we’ve got a wayzgoose which is a – ‘wayzgoose’ is another new word for you there.
MARK: A wayzgoose?
NICK: Wayzgoose, which is a kind of medieval word for gathering of printers, like a kind of printers’ party.
MARK: Oh, my goodness me. I feel like Christmas has come early!
NICK: Yeah. To spell it for you, so it’s W-A-Y-Z and then “goose”.
MARK: A gathering of printers, a wayzgoose. That’s wonderful.
NICK: That’s a good crossword word there, or Scrabble.
MARK: Oh, gosh. Yes. Watch people’s faces when you put that down!
NICK: So we have a wayzgoose in December, which is a gathering of printers, like a market, and we’re looking forward to that.
MARK: Maybe the moral is it’s there if you look for it, and it’s there to join in if you want it.
NICK: Yeah. It is. I would encourage anyone to go to a pottery class, go to a workshop, go to learn how to sew, learn how to set type, learn how to throw because I think those things are always brilliant and always thoroughly engrossing and amazing experiences.
MARK: Okay. So, maybe to encourage people to start joining in right away, I think this would be a good time for your Creative Challenge, Nick. If anybody’s listening who’s new to the show, this is the point where I invite my guest to set you, dear listener, a Creative Challenge. So this is something you can do to stretch yourself creatively, and maybe, as a person, discover something new within seven days, or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
Nick, what’s your creative challenge?
NICK: We talked about it a bit earlier, and the thing that we thought that maybe would be a nice thing to do is kind of achievable by anyone with a kitchen table, is to just cut a simple lino. Lino, you can buy from, well, any art shop, really, any local art shop that sells little bits of lino, and maybe a little set of tools, might be five or six pounds. Cut a lino. What’s interesting about lino is that it’s relief printing. So everything we do is relief printing, which is back-to-front. So whatever you cut on a lino, when you print it, it will be the other way around.
MARK: Oh, yes. So don’t do all the lettering this way around?
NICK: No. And there have been some amazing lino artists. Paul Peter Piech is one that I’d recommend you look at his work because it was quite political. Believe it or not, he lived in Port Talbot.
MARK: Oh, really? Just down the road from Wales.
NICK: Yeah. Great home of creative people, as Wales is in general.
MARK: Okay. I’ll put a link to him in the show notes.
NICK: Paul Peter Piech. He married a Welsh woman and lived in Wales for 30, 40 years, but he would cut lettering, which is why I mentioned. He would cut… and it’s quite difficult. Actually, that’s a good thing to put into your challenge. Cut a little bit of lettering, because you have to work out how to do it backwards, which is easy if you’re dyslexic, because we’re very good at that generally.
MARK: Oh, okay.
NICK: So cut a small lino. It doesn’t have to be very big. You can get very small soft lino. You can get the stuff that’s, I think, about 8 centimeters square, which is a bit smaller than a coaster or beer mat, and cut something. And you can ink it. You would have get some relief ink, bit more cost, sorry about that. Are your listeners…?
MARK: That’s okay. We can invest.
NICK: Okay. A little bit of relief ink, and a small roller. Put the ink on… you can print pretty much on anything. You can print on cloth, you can print on paper, card. And then just use the back of a wooden spoon to make the impression. You don’t need a fancy 1832 Albion press.
MARK: That’s a luxury!
NICK: Yeah.
MARK: Great. That sounds lovely. And if you do take up the challenge and you would like to share the results, maybe you could leave a comment on the website at 21stcenturycreative.fm, you’ll find all the show notes for every episode there, or maybe a hashtag on Twitter, #21stcenturycreative, or Facebook, Instagram, wherever.
NICK: A health and safety note. Actually, always cut away from your non-cutting hand. So don’t ever cut towards your hand.
MARK: Okay. Very important tip, especially for clumsy people like me.
NICK: Keep the plasters nearby just in case!
MARK: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. Nick, thank you so much. This has been a wonderful journey through the history and landscape of craft and traditional arts.
Where should people go to find you and The Department of Small Works online, and indeed in Bristol?
NICK: We’re bang in the middle of Bristol. We’re about 10 minutes’ walk from Temple Meads Station, and the website, the departmentofsmallworks.co.uk. And The Department of Small Works came about because I once did an exhibition in a public toilet and I thought if I ever had a company, I would call it The Department of Small Works. And so that’s what happened. That’s how it came about, a little aside.
MARK: Okay. So you’ve got two… and is there a second, Letterpress?
NICK: The other one is theletterpresscollective.org, which is just specifically letterpress, and The Department’s a little bit wider because it includes the books about the bike journeys and things.
MARK: Great. Okay. So I do encourage you to visit. I’ll put the links in the show notes as usual. There’s some really amazing-looking workshops that I’m going to participate in soon, and there’s also some really gorgeous things in the shop. So do go and check that out. There’s some really quite unusual examples of the printers art. Once again, Nick, thank you so much for your time.
NICK: Thank you, Mark. It was fun. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Marcus du Sautoy on AI and the Future of Creativity
Jun 29, 2020
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is the eminent Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who takes us on a voyage through the weird and wonderful world of artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, drawing on insights from his latest book The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think (Amazon USAmazon UK).
In the course of the interview Marcus discusses artwork made by AI, how AI can help us be more creative, and whether AI will ever create art that is comparable to human art. So if you’re curious about AI and the creativity – whether you feel optimistic, enthusiastic, sceptical or even fearful about AI – you’ll find plenty of food for thought in this interview.
In the intro to the show I talk about the new company I’ve recently founded, with a new business partner, Mami McGuinness, who also happens to be my wife, and who has recently started practising as a coach. So if you are a Japanese speaker and you are interested in what it would be like to be coached by Mami, you can learn about her coaching service and contact her here.
I also talk about the first week of the 21st Century Creative Members’ Group, where I’ve been teaching some principles of goal-setting, and focusing on one type of goal that is very effective to use at a time of uncertainty and disruption like the present.
We have all been sharing our goals for the podcast season, and it’s been very energising to see so much creativity and enthusiasm in the group, especially at a time like this. My own goal relates to the secret new podcast I’m developing for launch later this year.
So if you would like to set yourself a meaningful goal for the next 2-and-a-bit months, and get some encouragement and support from me and the rest of the group, as well as a preview of my new podcast, you are welcome to join us in the group on Patreon.
And in the coaching section of the show, I offer some thoughts on how to stay calm and focused in the midst of the pandemic and the ongoing fallout.
Marcus du Sautoy
Marcus is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. As well as conducting his own research he is well known for his work popularising mathematics on television and radio, and via his lectures, newspaper articles and seven books. His awards include an OBE and a Fellowship of the Royal Society.
Marcus’ latest book, The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think (Amazon USAmazon UK), is a fascinating tour of the past, present and potential future of AI – and how it relates to games, art, music, poetry and storytelling.
The book also discusses the relationship between creativity and mathematics, and opens up some of the big existential questions relating to AI and creativity, such as authenticity, empathy and consciousness.
As soon as I finished reading the book I reached out to Marcus and he generously agreed to talk to me for the show.
I must admit I’ve always felt a little intimidated by maths – at school it felt very cold and cerebral. So I wasn’t sure what to expect of an eminent Professor of Mathematics from Oxford.
But when I spoke to Marcus he was charming and engaging and he has an infectious enthusiasm for his subject. He really helped me see maths in a new light – as a creative discipline in its own right, and also one that can shed new light on artistic forms of creativity.
Photo credit: Oxford University Images/Joby Sessions
This is a fascinating interview in which we explore the current state of AI creativity and how it plays out in games like chess and Go, as well as music, poetry and other art forms. And towards the end we open up some of the big questions about AI and creativity – Marcus shares some very interesting thoughts on whether or not AI will ever be able to produce real art.
Marcus du Sautoy interview transcript
MARK: Marcus, what’s it like to be a mathematician?
MARCUS: I think most people think that as a research mathematician, I must be sitting in my office in Oxford doing long division to a lot of decimal places. And if that were true, I’d be out of a job by now because clearly computers can do calculations faster than I can, but I’ve actually always called mathematics a very creative activity. I really call myself a storyteller, a storyteller with numbers and geometry and I’m not just producing all the true statements about numbers and geometry that are possible. One of my favorite short stories is Borges’s Library of Babel and in the library, there’s absolutely every book possible. And I think many people think that’s maybe what a mathematician is trying to do. But as you know, I’m making a lot of choices about the things that I think are an interesting journey through the mathematical world.
And so, those choices are driven a lot by aesthetics, by an emotional response to the twists and turns of that story. So for me, mathematics is a highly creative subject. It involves that choice. It involves a connection with other fellow mathematicians that I want to take them on a surprising journey, take them somewhere new, engage their emotional world. Actually the book that kind of inspired me to become a mathematician was a book called A Mathematician’s Apology written by a Cambridge mathematician, G. H. Hardy. And in there he really talks about what it means to be a mathematician. And I actually recommend this to anyone to read regardless of where you come from because it really captures the creative side of being a mathematician. He calls a mathematician, like a painter or a poet, but we paint with ideas.
MARK: That sounds very intriguing. There’s one thing in the book, you talk about mathematical proofs or stories being beautiful as well as true.
Would you say that’s a common motivation for mathematicians to find beauty?
MARCUS: The word beauty is used a lot, but I think it’s a much richer kind of emotional engagement than just finding something beautiful. I think you can find something quite shocking. And that’s absolutely a valid response where you thought something was going to happen and then completely the opposite happens. That’s a delightful moment in mathematics. But I think that’s why I feel when people talk about close connection between mathematics and music for example. I often talk about mathematics being the science of patterns and music being the art of patterns. And there again, you can have beautiful music, but you can have music with very many different sort of colors to it. And I feel the qualities that one is enjoying on a musical journey are very similar to the ones I’m looking for in a mathematical journey.
MARK: And you are a musician yourself, aren’t you?
MARCUS: Yes. Interestingly, I fell in love with mathematics and music around the same time. My teachers in school, I was at comprehensive school in Oxfordshire, my maths teacher ignited my mathematical curiosity about 12 or 13 and that’s when my music teacher actually said, “Do you want to learn a musical instrument?” I ended up learning the trumpet and the two have been very close on my professional journey. I still play the trumpet for two amateur orchestras in London, started learning the cello, just about to do a concert with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, exploring how composers use mathematical structures in their composition.
And I think that’s what’s really striking because I spent a lot of time over the last few decades talking to creative artists and time and again, I find that the things that they’re interested in have a structural underpinning that I recognize as a mathematician. And I think that’s a really fascinating thing that I think people think that creative art certainly from the outside is something mysterious. But actually, when you talk to a composer or a visual artist, they will say, ‘No, these structures are really important to allow me to hang my thoughts on it.’ And they’re looking for interesting structures to push them often in new directions that they’d never thought of going in before.
MARK: As I was reading the descriptions of music and mathematics in your book, it made me think about poetic form because at least for traditional poetic forms, there’s a lot of mathematics in things like the iambic pentameter or the sonnet or the terza rima that Dante used. And personally as a practitioner, I use a lot of these traditional forms. I find them very beautiful and in exactly the kind of way you’re describing – just the intrinsic form of the sonnet, I think there is a balance and a natural tension that hopefully gets built up and resolved in the course of the poem. And mathematics has to come into that.
MARCUS: Totally.
MARK: It used to be that poets talked about their ‘numbers’ because they’re always counting the number of beats in the lines. So, maybe it’s not as far apart as it might seem at first glance.
MARCUS: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think it’s almost part of our human species that we’re looking for things with patterns because they help us to navigate our natural environment. And often those patterns or structures that you’re seeing both of interest to the mathematician and used by the artists, they often have a common source in the natural world.
But I think the other interesting thing about structure for an artist is that it can take you in a new direction. Stravinsky always used to say, ‘I can only be creative under huge constraints.’ So, I think that’s the lovely thing about a poetic form, that often you’ll have to think of an intriguing way to say something that you wouldn’t naturally have said because perhaps you’re trying to follow that iambic pentameter or the rhyming scheme of the sonnets and that’s exciting when you’re actually got these constraints, which push you into the new.
MARK: Yeah, that’s very true. Particularly rhyme I think, because when you have your first thought and you think, ‘Oh damn, it doesn’t rhyme, so I’ve got to come think of something else that does.’
MARCUS: Yeah. Exactly.
MARK: It takes you into places that you haven’t thought of and if you do it well then you end up being somewhere that’s surprising to you and also emotionally resonant and therefore, will be hopefully the same for the reader.
MARCUS: I think that’s right. Yes. It’s amazing. Shakespeare for example, was very number obsessed. I only discovered this recently, but you mentioned iambic pentameter, which is, obviously, ten beats. But when he wants you to really concentrate, he disrupts that. So, it’s the disruption of pattern is it? So, the most famous line in Shakespeare ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ has 11 beats. So, you suddenly wake up and go, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ And if he’s talking about magic, he uses seven beats. You’re able to use this pattern to be able to almost read something special that’s happening in the text.
MARK: Yeah. And he was doing that against a background – the contemporaries who come just before him had established a very regular iambic pentameter. If you look at Marlowe or Kidd or somebody, it’s much more almost metronomic and then Shakespeare comes in and starts messing about with it more than, I mean everyone was doing it to a degree, but he took it to an extreme, which is one of the things that made him interesting.
MARCUS: Yes. But I think this is going to be the interesting challenge you see when you then turn to something like artificial intelligence and the arts because I think many people’s belief is that artificial intelligence will only be able to recreate what we’ve already seen. So, it’ll be pastiche. How would it ever break out of the idea of just sticking within a particular iambic pentameter? How could it actually have that insight to add a beat? And I think that’s the interesting challenge – can AI take us really into the new or is it just doing more of the same?
MARK: What was it for you personally that you found interesting about AI, artificial intelligence? Why didn’t you just stick to more traditional fields of mathematics? What was the attraction of AI?
MARCUS: I think that we’re all intrigued at the moment about how much AI can do because we’re really going through an AI heatwave. We’ve had these things called ‘AI winters’ where nothing seems to really work but suddenly the last few years there’s been a real step-change.
And I think for me, what suddenly got me interested in this area and which actually was the spark for writing this book was seeing a piece of code be created for the first time. This wasn’t in the arts, but actually within the confines of a game. A piece of code was created to play this ancient Chinese game called Go, which is played on a 19 by 19 board, grid. You put black and white stones down and try and surround your opponent’s territory before they surround yours.
And this was always traditionally regarded as a very hard game to code up because when you play it, there’s a lot of pattern recognition on the board, which is quite hard to articulate why you’re doing something, a lot of intuition, a lot of creativity. But what has changed is that code in the past was written in a very top-down manner so that somehow the human who wrote the code had to know what to tell the machine what to do. So, we had to sort of really understand it.
But code now is being written from a bottom-up way, something called machine learning and this allows the code to change and mutate as it encounters new data. So, in the case of this game, it was given human games to learn on and then started playing itself, making synthetic games. And through its playing, it changed the code to try and optimize certain moves that you could see were being very powerful.
But then when it played in a match against one of the best humans we have, Lee Sedol, what I saw was it suddenly making a move that nobody had expected at all. It’s now become famous. It’s called move 37 in game two of this match. And what happened in this game because this piece of code played a move that all the commentators, when they were commentating on the match said, ‘Wow, that’s a really weak move.’ It laid a stone on the fifth row in from the edge and early on in the game, that’s considered a really weak move. And all the commentators said, ‘Well, the human should be able to win from now.’ But in the end, it turned out that that move, though very late on in the game meant that the piece of code – AlphaGo, it’s called – actually controlled large swathes of territory and it won the code the game.
So, for me, this is very interesting because I think that’s what I’m looking for is something, a surprising move where everyone was kind of shocked by it, but something which ultimately has value. You don’t want just surprise for the sake of it. You want value. And now, you can judge those things very nicely in the confines of a game but you see, if a human had written that code, a human says, ‘You shouldn’t play that far into the board on the fifth row in.’ The human would have written a piece of code saying, ‘Don’t make that move.’
And for me, what was so exciting was seeing this code actually find a very powerful move on its own from its learning process, a move which humans now incorporate into the playing of the game. We have been pushed into a new way to play this game. And for me, that was a really exciting moment and I realized, hold on, okay, if this is just a game, where else can this kind of learning process of code encountering data take us into somewhere where we’ve never even thought of going before? And so, that was the beginning of my journey of this book. What about if it considers the visual realm, the musical realm, the written word or even mathematics – could it perhaps make move 37 in game two in any of these realms and actually show us new ways to do things?
MARK: So, before we go on to look at some of those questions, I really want to underline this for anyone who’s coming to this afresh, that it was literally a game-changing move. It was unexpected. It had the criteria of novelty and value, which is more of the classic definitions of creativity. And it came from the machine learning by itself.
This wasn’t something that had been programmed in or could be predicted by the programmers. It thought this up by itself, so to speak.
MARCUS: That’s right. And I think that’s the game-changer as you said, that this is why this new sort of code which can take data and see something new in it and help us to change our behaviours. I think as creative artists and I’ll count myself in there as a mathematician, I think that we can get very stuck in particular ways of doing things. We find something that’s quite successful and we repeat that behaviour. You’ll see that in musicians who will have a particular style and they’ll get a bit locked into that style. And so, actually, we start behaving more like machines, just repeating behaviours. And the exciting thing is I’m seeing in the stories that I’ve looked at in this book that this new tool of artificial intelligence, which often it’s a story told with a very dystopian take that it’s going to wipe us out. Now, I don’t see this as a competitor. I see this as amazing collaborator in the creative process actually helping us as humans to behave less like machines and perhaps show us new ways to do things. So, I think it’s an extraordinarily powerful tool for a creative to actually suggest new ways of looking at what we’re doing.
MARK: Could you give us some examples because you’ve got some really extraordinary stories in the book of AI as applied to artistic creativity. Quite often it’s the chess champion beating or the Go champion beating stories that make the headlines. But can you give us an idea of if anybody’s thinking, ‘Well, that’s all very well for games, but I’m an artist, I’m special.’
MARCUS: Yes, exactly.
MARK: Give us some examples that might show us a different way of looking at that.
MARCUS: Let’s take music to start with because music has got a lot of pattern in there. And of course, if you turn on the radio and you hear a piece of music, you can probably identify perhaps who the composer is if you’ve listened to a lot of music because they have particular styles. So, that’s something that artificial intelligence is very good at spotting, the key characteristics that make up a style. I tell a story of a jazz musician who had a very particular style, Bernard Lubat. He’s a jazz pianist. And when you hear him improvising, you’re probably recognize if you know his kind of style, ‘Oh, yes, that’s him.’ Sony Labs in Paris developed something called the Jazz Continuator.
And this piece of AI listened to the pianist playing away and started to analyze statistically the patterns that he was making with the notes. And then was able to start playing live with him in a call-response manner. And interestingly, an audience was challenged with listening to this and was asked to see if they could identify the human from the AI. And often, they attributed the human to the AI because it sounded more complicated and richer exploration. And this was Bernard Lubat’s response, he said, ‘Wow, gosh, well, that’s amazing. I could have played like that, but I’ve never ever even thought of playing like that.’ But the weird thing was, he said, ‘But I recognize that world, that sound world is my world.’ So, in a way, this wasn’t pushing into the new, it was just showing Bernard Lubat new things that he could do with his material.
So, it wasn’t asking him to become a completely different musician, it was just saying, ‘You know what? You’ve got kind of stuck in a particular way of playing.’ It’s as if he was playing in the corner of a room and only the corner was lit and suddenly the AI lit up the whole of the room and said, ‘Look, there are many other places you could explore with your sound world.’ For me, that’s a very exciting story because it’s a tool that was used to expand his repertoire.
MARK: I love that story, that was one of the standouts for me. I remember thinking, what would it be like to be Bernard Lubat when he’s hearing that? It must’ve been quite eerie. His reaction I thought was as interesting as the story itself, of what the Continuator could do, because he could have felt threatened, and if he was not a confident artist, maybe he would start critiquing, finding fault or whatever, but actually he embraced it. He said, ‘Actually this can make me better. It can open me up. It shows me myself from a different angle.’
MARCUS: Yes, exactly. I think this is the point. Often when I show people images and then I say, ‘That’s been painted by AI,’ for example, I think their first reaction is they feel very cheated because of course, actually, when you’re encountering a piece of art, the feeling is you want to have a conversation with the artists, with another human being, with another consciousness, another way of seeing the world. And then you say, ‘Oh, that’s being made by AI.’ And you have that feeling of being cheated. But then again, if I tell you a joke and you laugh at the joke and then I say, ‘That joke was actually composed by a piece of artificial intelligence.’ That doesn’t invalidate the laughter that you just went through.
So, it’s interesting that response to a piece of art and then the need to know actually the source, the story behind how it was created. But again, you’ve got to remember that a lot of these tools that are being used, they’re taking human data to learn from. In a way, this is just a filter or an exploration of the emotional world that we’ve created in our art. It’s not surprising that what it’s producing we’re having an emotional response to it because it’s learned on our emotional world.
MARK: Interesting. I did have that experience. There was one section, obviously, I honed in on the poetry section of the book and there’s a wonderful website you introduced me to called ‘Bot or Not’ where it shows you a poem and you have to decide, was that written by AI or was it written by a human?
MARCUS: Yes.
MARK: I took the 10-question test and there was one poem that fooled me that it was by an AI and I thought it was a human, was a very short joke. And it was a silly joke, but it made me laugh. And I think probably because I laughed, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s got to be somebody fooling about.’ It looked artless and silly, but actually that was, I think it was compiled from Google predictive texts or something.
MARCUS: Right. Yes.
MARK: So, that was really quite an interesting experience taking that test. And I think a lot of this maybe applies to audiences rather than the artists themselves. You have a wonderful description of David Cope when he comes up with a fake Bach symphony with his program. I can’t remember what it was called.
MARCUS: Aaron. Yes.
MARK: He managed to fool some quite well-educated audiences didn’t he?
MARCUS: Yes. That’s very interesting because I had done a similar exercise actually here in London in the Barbican of this year. And what I did was to get a piece of AI with Ph.D. students. We got the AI to learn on Bach and Bach of course, is great to learn from because there’s so much pattern in there. I talk in the book actually about the kind of algorithmic way that Bach often wrote. He actually composed something called the Musical Offering and wrote it as a set of little algorithms. You have to solve these puzzles. You’re given one line of music and there’s a weird sort of clef upside down at the end of the music and you realize, ‘Oh, actually I’ve got to play this twice, forwards and backwards at the same time.’
Bach has a lot of kind of code already in his work, but what we did was we created a piece which was one piece, but it went in and out of Bach and AI. You were never quite sure as you were listening to it. Some of it was human and some of it was AI. So, it wasn’t just a simple dichotomy. And then we asked the audience to vote with cards throughout the performance of this four-minute piece when they thought it was human and when they thought it was AI. And the audience just found it almost impossible to, there was no clear moment when everyone said, ‘Oh yeah, this is clearly not human.’ But the one person who could tell was Mahan Esfahani, who was the harpsichord player.
He said, ‘I know exactly the moment it goes to AI because suddenly it becomes really difficult to play.’ And this is fascinating because of course, the AI doesn’t care about embodiment. It can write notes but it doesn’t have to play them. Bach was a master at writing wonderful music, but also music that could be played very nicely with the fingers; the fingering was important. So, this is a really interesting point which separates often AI art and human art is the question of the embodiment. I’ve seen actually that AI often becomes overcomplicated in some sense because it can cope with complication. Even with Bernard Lubat and the jazz Continuator, the jazz Continuator was starting to get overcomplexity that actually Bernard Lubat would actually find it quite difficult to reproduce what the AI was doing.
And this is interesting because we have our sensory equipment to engage with the world around us, our eyes, our ears, our sense of touch, smell, and this limits our engagement with the world such that the art that an AI might produce might actually push the complexity such that we as humans are finding it very difficult with our sensory equipment to engage with this.
And actually one of my favourite AI films is Her, which is the film where… so you’ve seen this film before? If anyone has not seen this, it’s a great film. This guy splits up with his girlfriend or something and the chance to have an AI girlfriend for a while. And so, he sort of engages with this thing online, of course, falls in love with the AI girlfriend. It’s so good at pretending to be real.
But the wonderful moment for me is when the AI girlfriend dumps the human and says, ‘Oh, you humans are just so slow. It takes ages to interact with you. I’ve got to know millions of AI online in a split second where we’re going excitingly into the new.’
And that, for me, revealed something which I think is going to be very striking as we go forward. That as AI becomes more and more sophisticated actually it will probably only enjoy interacting with other AI and it will look at us humans probably as we humans look at a forest or mountains. They don’t seem to change, mountains… but if you did speed up time, of course, mountains are very dynamic things. So, it’s interesting that questioning embodiment is really important I think for this human/AI interaction.
MARK: And also I’m wondering, listening to you talk, whether there’s a fundamental difference in the way audiences respond and creators respond because…
MARCUS: Oh, that’s very interesting. Yes.
MARK: …one of the things, the constant themes in the various stories is people feeling cheated or angry, or there’s a wonderful description of delighted horror among the classical music buffs when they realize they picked the wrong Bach as the real one. But then the artists and the musicians, they seem to be more interested in, ‘Oh, great. Well, technically, this is a really interesting thing.”=’ Like, ‘It’s impossible to play that on the harpsichord.’ Or Bernard Lubat looking at,’This is showing me new possibilities.’
Do you think that maybe the audiences and readers might look at things more romantically than the actual practitioners themselves?
MARCUS: Yes, and that’s partly why I wanted to write this book and show people that actually a lot of creative process has a kind of, there’s a lot of mathematics in the creative process that people looking for kind of rules, patterns, structures.
And I think there’s a terrible romanticization of the creative act, that it’s all about expressing emotions or it’s all deeply mysterious. And when you talk to a practitioner, I remember doing a program about Phillip Glass and Phillip Glass saying you know, ‘People find my music very emotional, but I don’t write the emotion and the emotion comes out of the structure. I write these interesting patterns and algorithms and then the emotion appears.’ And I think that for me, it was one of the points of the book was to show people that a lot of the creative process has these rules and therefore, those rules are things which are interesting because they could be implemented in code and you can see where else you go with them.
But I think your point about the audience is very interesting because I think that’s why when you talked about the poetry test, why poetry perhaps can trick you more easily than many other forms. When a poet writes a poem, they often want to leave room for the audience to bring their own bit of creativity to the reader. You don’t want everyone to have the same response. And so, that’s why I think, especially poetry has a lot of space. It’s a conversation and this is a conversation between the reader and the poet and the reader will bring some of their own creativity to the reading of that poem. If you’ve got something written by a piece of AI often it can pass an AI Turing test. The human will think it’s human-written because they will bring a lot of their own response to that poem.
MARK: That’s a really interesting point. I’m reading Don Patterson’s book The Poem, how poetry works. And he says, ‘Poetry is as much a mode of reading as it is of writing.’
MARCUS: Very interesting, yes.
MARK: So, if we treat something a bit like Duchamp’s Urinal, if we treat it as poetry, then it becomes poetry because we’re looking for significance in it. And obviously, I was looking at this, the ‘bot or not?’ test and thinking, well, it works on some kinds of poetry, but other kinds, I don’t think it does. So, the stuff that I think is most susceptible to that is the kind of very fractured, gnomic, modernist type of verse that to put it bluntly, doesn’t always seem to make sense, but you are supposed to look at it and just find something deep in it. And it works for nonsense verse because again, the disjunction is part of the charm. It doesn’t need to hold together. It could work for surrealism. I think it worked on me with a joke. I don’t think it works on anything where you want more coherence and a sense of –
MARCUS: That’s right. Yeah, I think you’ll see, I was very struck actually in writing this book, which art forms is AI being most successful in? And it struck me that the visual world, it is actually being very successful. This machine learning has produced tools which can recognize images now. That’s quite a big challenge. You’d give it a picture to be able to decode what’s relevant, what’s important and say what’s in the picture was always a huge challenge for AI and now this learning process has allowed AI to recognize images very clearly. And so, it can now also generate them. Music as well because there’s the patterns in a particular kind of…it’s a sort of closed form, a bit like a game, of course, it connects to our emotional world.
But the spoken word is, I was quite surprised how actually AI is still really struggling with the spoken word, the written word, spoken and written. Well, both, actually. I think it is partly it can do short forms like a poem and actually I got 350 words in my book is written by a piece of artificial intelligence and it was so successful that nobody’s identified those 300…
MARK: I haven’t spotted that and when you read that I thought, gosh, I wonder wherever that was.
MARCUS: Well, don’t worry. Not even my editor has spotted it! Which I find deeply depressing, surely because I think it looks terrible, it reads terribly and just what a poor statement it is on my own writing.
But one of the things I think here is that of course language and writing is so much more than just the words. So, the AI might be able to know the definition of the words, but the context of that whole thing, there’s cultural context, historical context. And there are things called Winograd Challenges which are given to an AI if it’s trying to pass the Turing test because it’s very difficult for an AI to sniff out what a particular word might refer to whilst we will be able to see the context very clearly.
If I say, ‘The government banned the demonstrators from marching because they feared violence,’ you know that ‘they’ refers to the government. But if I changed that to ‘they advocated violence,’ that ‘they’ refers to the demonstrators. Now, an AI just is completely thrown by that because you need so much historical context for that, to know that demonstrators might be violent or the government might have some fear. So, that’s really interesting that the written word, spoken words, I think it’s depending on a lot of years of evolution in the human brain to develop language and it seems quite hard for the AI to fast track that. So, novelists out there, you’re safe I think!
MARK: For now.
MARCUS: Yeah, for now.
MARK: Because a lot of things you talked about is that longer narrative arc that it’s hard for the artificial intelligence to do. And I think in poetry it’s the bigger conceptual arc in a poem likes, and I’d say ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ – you’re not going to get anything as coherent as that as yet from an AI.
But even in the music chapter, you conclude that AI can churn out muzak but not quality music.
MARCUS: Yes, I think that’s right. You see the Jazz Continuator, for example, it’s quite fun to listen to it for a few minutes, but after a while it just becomes boring. I could not listen to an hour of that because I don’t feel it’s really going anywhere.
So, it’s very interesting that I think something which has a temporal element to it, AI can do local generation of something interesting but still not the global. Which is interesting because you can use that as a tool, as a creative to perhaps stimulate you to go in a new direction, but then you will then piece those together to make something which has a global coherent narrative.
MARK: You have this lovely phrase; you say at the moment they are telescopes and… is it tools and telescopes rather than authors when it comes to this sort of thing?
MARCUS: Yeah. Exactly. Suddenly, we’re able to see distant planets that we could never see before. So I think that is the exciting thing. We’ve got this as a tool to examine data more deeply, find things that we’ve missed in there. But I think it is a tool… I think it’s a little bit like when suddenly the camera came onto the scene to be able to suddenly see the world around you through this filter in a different way and explore what could be done with it. It isn’t just simply about reproducing what’s there. As Paul Klee said, ‘Art doesn’t reproduce the visible, it makes things visible.’ What I’m hoping is that these people will find that this AI tool for creativity can make things visible that we weren’t seeing before.
MARK: Okay. So, that’s where we’re at currently. What about the future? Given the capability of machine learning to surprise us, move 37 in game two, what do you think?
Could it evolve to the point where AI could create art? That we would say, actually that is comparable and indistinguishable on a bigger scale or even a more moving scale to humans?
MARCUS: I think that you’re already seeing creative acts by a computer that are pretty convincing and people are taken in by. But I think really this is only going to become interesting when AI needs to say something to us. And for me, where does the urge to create art come from? I think it’s because it’s a quality of us being conscious that we have an internal world that we want to explore our own internal worlds and we use our art as an exploration of that. We want to share the way we see the world and explore whether others see the world like that or perhaps we feel we’ve got a new way to engage with our environment. We want to share that. Carl Rogers describes creativity as exactly that. The examination of the internal world.
So for me, I don’t think this is really going to be interesting until AI has its own internal world. And it suddenly has a need to express that, I use the word later on in the book, intentionality. Where is the intention coming from? That piece of code that played that game didn’t want to play that game. It was the human that sets it on the game and it played the game very well and it saw its goal. It had a goal which was to beat its opponent, but the intention was still coming from a human.
And I think once consciousness emerges in code – and I say ‘once’, I do think it will, I don’t know how long it will take, but I didn’t see a reason why it shouldn’t. We are just a bunch of atoms put together in a very complex way, developed over millions of years of evolution and it caused us to have this internal sense of ourselves. I think there will become a moment when that will happen in machines.
I make a little speculation in the book that I think that our drive to be artistic and our sense of consciousness I believe could well have occurred about the same time, maybe 40,000 years ago. That’s when we see the human species starting to explore art for its own sake, drawing things on the walls, it’s not utilitarian. Those hands on the wall are an existential expression. ‘Here I am’, they’re saying.
So, I think that really this is only going to become interesting when AI has an internal world. However, in some ways I would say that’s already perhaps beginning to emerge, not consciousness certainly, but we are developing code that because it’s changing, mutating, learning, becoming very different from what the human originally wrote down, this code, we need to have ways to examine quite how it’s thinking, how it’s seeing the world, how does it make its decisions? Because after all, we’re being pushed and pulled around by algorithms. And so, as we go forward, we’re going to need tools to be able to really understand why it’s making those decisions. I think some of the most interesting art projects from AI aren’t actually about creating art that we humans think are interesting. They’re about creating art that can help us to understand the internal decision process of the code.
It’s almost as if code has got its own subconscious now because it’s so complex, the code of the machine learning process that when we look at it, it’s too complex for us to navigate quite how it’s making its decisions. Some of the most interesting stories in the book I think as far as art are concerned, are helping us to understand the code. So, my favorite one is actually something called DeepDream. And actually you gave me a challenge to think of something that people can try out after having listened to this and explore using perhaps AI for creativity. And this is the one I’m going to offer people because it’s something called DeepDream, this is a project that Google developed.
They said, ‘Okay, look, we have an amazing image recognition software. Give it an image, it can recognize what’s in that image,’ but what is it really seeing? So, they decided to reverse the process and they gave it a random load of pixels or an image which didn’t really have anything clear in it. And just asked the software to accentuate anything it was seeing in that image. And this allows us actually to see how the code itself is seeing what, how it’s learned. When you do this, what’s extraordinary is you start to see lots of animals emerging within an image. Lots of eyes, lots of faces because this is what the AI has been given to learn on the data that is learned from, lots of mechanical things.
I gave it a picture of a string quartet I play for. And when it went through this filter, suddenly the first violinist turned into a leopard and the other three of us, I play the cello in this quartet, turned into a motorcar. And it was very interesting sort of seeing this, but this has been used for example, to show bad learning that’s occurring in code. For example, DeepDream was given kind of grey pixel background and started to see dumbbells appearing inside these images. But weirdly, the dumbbells that appeared always had arms attached to them. Why? Because the software had only ever seen images of dumbbell was being held by strong men and women. And so, it thought it was part of our anatomy. It hadn’t ever seen a dumbbell on its own.
So, this kind of art is helping us to see when things are going wrong that it’s actually not learned properly. And I think this is really striking because I did an event last year with a woman from MIT Media Lab, she’s a roboticist and she told me the story of how she’d had some robots delivered to the lab and she’d opened them up, switched them on, and they had some vision recognition software to see when somebody was in front of the robot. And when she went in front of them, it didn’t see anybody there until she put a white mask on. And then suddenly these robots started responding. She was a black woman. And so, she lifted up the kind of bonnet of the software and understood that the code had only ever been given pictures of white men to learn on.
MARK: Oh dear.
MARCUS: Using these artistic tools as a way to explore the way a piece of code might be thinking might really be a powerful tool for us going forward to make sure that we keep control. So, actually my challenge for creatives is, because it’s quite an easy thing to experiment with, but it’s a visual challenge but to take an image and to upload it to this thing called DeepDream generator. And you can then try and use this tool to augment the image and it’s almost a conversation with a piece of code so you start to see the image changing, mutating. And so, I think it’s quite an interesting experiment just to interact with code, see how code is seeing your image, how it would change it, and whether that gives you any ideas for your own perhaps visual generation to see whether it’s helping you to see things in a new way.
So, it’s quite fun. It’s quite simple to use. But the challenge is what images actually do you have an interesting conversation with this piece of AI and what images somehow don’t work for this. So, I hope people might have fun just trying to… I enjoyed playing around with it and I felt like, ‘Wow, the art that is coming out of here is helping me to understand a bit more deeply how an AI is working.’
MARK: That does sound terrific fun. So, that’s Google’s DeepDream?
MARCUS: And then they can try and play around with the tools that are there.
MARK: Okay, great. I’ll make sure there’s a link there in the show notes. And you know, I was thinking about the poetry question. I thought, ‘What is it that would make a real AI poem?’ And I was thinking about Thomas Hardy’s quote about poetry. He said, ‘The poet wins our heart by showing us his own.’
Maybe DeepDream would be the start of a window into the AI’s heart. And who knows what could emerge from that in time?
MARCUS: I think that’s really interesting because I think a lot of artists are interested in exploring things that are impacting on society and making a statement about them. And I think actually treating AI as the art is a really fascinating project. We need tools to examine this changing world and the interaction between AI and the creative world will be really important dialogue as we go forward.
MARK: Marcus, thank you so much. This has been a really mind-boggling conversation. I think I’m going to listen to this several times to get my head around some parts of it. I’m sure I won’t be the only one among my listeners. The book, The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think (Amazon USAmazon UK) is a really fascinating exploration of these themes. If you’re listening to this, and you found this conversation interesting, there’s plenty more in Marcus’s book.
Marcus, is there anywhere else that, do you have a website or somewhere that people could go online and engage with your work further?
MARCUS: I have a website, it’s www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk. Simonyi is the professorship that I hold. This is Charles Simonyi who actually was one of the first to start developing code with Microsoft and he’s endowed a professorship called the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. So, people can go there and that has a lot about all my other activities interactions with the musical worlds, artistic worlds, a play that I’ve written and some information about other books and articles that I’ve written. So, hopefully, people enjoy exploring my creative outputs there.
MARK: Excellent. And again, I’ll make sure that is in the show notes. Marcus, I think you’ve done a lot today already to further the public understanding of mathematics and AI. So, thank you so much for your generosity and insight today.
MARCUS: Well, it was a pleasure talking with you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Today we kick off Season 5 of The 21st Century Creative, the podcast that helps you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Our first guest is John T. Unger, an artist who makes art on a big scale, and who takes full advantage of the opportunities of 21st century to both make and market his work.
In the first part of today’s show I talk about the changes we have all experienced since Season 4, with the advent of Covid.
Although most of the interviews for Season 5 were recorded before the pandemic, I have rewritten the rest of the season extensively, to share my thinking on how we as creatives can respond to the disruption with creativity and resilience.
I also introduce The 21st Century Creative Membership Group, on Patreon, which I am starting this season to help you stay creative, productive and motivated in spite of everything.
Exclusive Member content will include Goal-setting and Accountability Videos, Members’ Q&A Sessions and other insights and tips not featured on the podcast.
In the light of the pandemic situation, Membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
As well as giving you access to the exclusive Members’ content, your Membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
John T. Unger
From performing his poetry on stage at Lollapalooza in 1996, to bartering a mosaic to a bank as a down payment for a house and studio, to displaying an American flag created from over 20,000 Budweiser bottle caps at the 2015 Stagecoach Music Festival, John’s art practice has been as much about making good stories as making good art.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Smithsonian Magazine and many other magazines, newspapers, books and TV shows.
He is best known for his sculptural firebowls, which he makes from scrap industrial steel, cutting by hand with a plasma torch at 45,000° Farenheit – which he says is 4.5 times as hot as the surface of the Sun or the Earth’s core.
Since 2005 he has sold more than 2,000 firebowls, shipping to all 50 US states and over 20 countries. Firebowl clients include Calvin Klein and many restaurants, hotels, churches and public spaces.
His current project, Anatomy Set In Stone, is his biggest and most ambitious yet.
Using marble, stone and precious gems he’s creating a series of 14 life-size mosaics that replicate a series of anatomical engravings by the 16th Century artist Bartolomeo Eustachi.
Each mosaic is seven feet high by four feet wide and presents the figures at life size— so that viewers can stand before them and see anatomy as though looking in a mirror.
The project requires John to cut over 3 miles of stone by hand, spending several years and tens of thousands of dollars to fashion it into 392 square feet of detailed mosaic.
When he finishes, John’s ambition is to turn the engravings into a touring exhibition for museums and galleries around the world.
Like most of the interviews this season, this one was recorded before Coronavirus took the world by storm, so we obviously don’t talk about it. But I think this is a great interview to kick off the new season as John’s energy and resilience are the kind of qualities we all need to display right now.
Original drawing on the left. John’s mosaic on the right.
So if you’re curious about what happens when you approach your work and career in an boldly unorthodox manner, strap yourself in for this conversation with John T Unger.
MARK: John, at what stage did you start to think of yourself as an artist?
JOHN: Kind of always. I’ve made things since I was a wee little kid. I got my first jackknife when I was four and started making things with the second one because the bullies across the street stole the first one, actually, the MacNelly brothers.
MARK: But they didn’t stop you!
JOHN: No. Nobody can. Nobody has. Anyway, I’ve always made things. And initially, my big love was reading, but I’ve always loved making things too. I thought I wanted to be a poet for a living and I spent about 15 years trying to do that even winning poetry performing live on stage at Lollapalooza. I was invited to tour with the show, but it was at your own expense. If you weren’t getting paid, you couldn’t work while you’re doing it.
And that was the thing with poetry is literally, I would have people come up to me at readings and say, ‘Oh, that poem changed my life’. And I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a book of them here for $6.” And they’d be like ‘Nah.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, I obviously didn’t change your life enough, buddy. Not so much as a hamburger’s worth.’ But, I spent a lot of my late teens and 20s trying to find ways not to have a job so I could focus on poetry and reading and writing all day, every day. And there was always a side hustle.
MARK: That’s a familiar scenario to me, yeah.
JOHN: Right. And so at one point in time, I was making jewelry, and hats, in Seattle and selling them on the street so I could be a poet, or I was playing music in the street busking, playing harmonica, so I could be a poet. And then eventually, I wanted to make books and I’d given up on the idea of a publisher doing it. And so I was going to self-publish, and I learned graphic design. And then I did that for a living while I wrote poems. And then I started doing artwork, partly because I really wanted to own artwork and I couldn’t afford the stuff I liked. Mostly, I liked African and Asian work that’s pretty affordable as art goes, but not if you’re a poet.
So I made my own and eventually, I realized people will pay for artwork. And when we had the first big crash of the internet around 2000, or whatever, all of the design work dried up, and I’m like I’m not going to invest in learning to do something else for dollars. What I’m going to do is I’m just going to go full-time into making art. I’m going to do that. I’m going to pay my bills with it. I’m not going to work.
And I realized if I took the 8 to 10 hours depending on commute, that had been for a day job and spend that time learning how to sell and market my artwork and doing that, then I could spend all night making the artwork the same as I’d been doing while I had paying work. It was really sketchy. I had to couch surf for a couple of years but I made it work.
I had a lot of friends at that time who had gone to art school. I started really doing the art in Chicago, and it was a great place. I was in a neighborhood called Pilsen, which was where all the artists moved when the Wicker Park gentrified. Sort of like, probably 500 working artists, some of them were making a living, most of them weren’t. But it was a great community for me to learn how to not just do the artwork, but how to get into shows and court galleries and all of the business and social parts of it that I wouldn’t have known because I was self-taught.
MARK: So right from the beginning, you made a conscious decision to address both sides of this, the making of art, but also the business and social aspects of it?
JOHN: Yeah, and I’m better at some parts of that than others, which is probably true for everybody. It’s funny, because a lot of the time in an arts community, or at least in the one where I was in Chicago the art buying public was… people were at odds with it. It was like, people felt like ‘Oh, it’s people who come down to our dicey neighborhood, from the suburbs, and we have nothing in common, but sometimes they buy art.’
At first, you roll with that, then you go, ‘Well wait a minute. A) they’re making a trip to your part of town, which you’re not doing for them. And B) they wouldn’t be here if they weren’t interested in the art. And if they’re interested in it, especially enough to give you money, then odds are you do have other things in common.’ And over the years that’s proved very true.
With some of the customers, I have just click a button on the internet and they buy a thing, I ship it to them, there’s no communication. There doesn’t have to be. But the people I have interacted with, for the most part, have been really cool people. And some of them have actually become friends. Some of them I’m just like, ‘Well, thank you for making this possible.’
MARK: They obviously have really good taste, right?
JOHN: I like to think so, right. It was that early period where I left Chicago because I lost the paying work I had and everything fell apart. I lost my place and the end of my thumb, and my girlfriend, and all of the things. I went back to where I grew up because there was some free rent there, but there really was no culture. It’s the top of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. It’s six hours north of Detroit. Yes, there are artists, but because it’s a very conservative place, it’s mostly going to be landscaping and some things, which is fine, but not my thing.
I got stuck there for about 10 years. I had a fortuitous event where I was leasing a former convenience store and house with an option to buy. That was really not very realistic because it was early days, I was just barely scraping by. And winter came and the studio building started making a scary noise and I went up on the roof to get the snow off and the building fell right out from under me! It just collapsed and I jumped off! I was fine. I have reflexes. I have to. But…
MARK: Where did you land?
JOHN: In a lot of snow so it broke the fall nicely. The snow was, I don’t know, 6 feet tall or something. It was ridiculous. I had purchased the two acres that got more snow than anyplace else for hundreds of miles, I think, lake effect snow in a valley.
But anyway, the bank came out to look at the damage and they saw the artwork I was making. And it was a house that they had repossessed or whatever the real estate word is. And they didn’t want the house and I still kind of did. They proposed that I do a big mosaic sign for their main branch office as the down payment. And that’s what made it viable. And so I finally had a house and studio that I could work out of. The house payment was $300 a month. It was nothing. So that was a really good launching pad.
MARK: Wow so, that’s how you got on the property ladder?
JOHN: Yeah, the collapse of the building knocked out the natural gas, so there was no heat or water because the pump froze for the entire winter. I just had like a kerosene heater that wasn’t meant for indoors. I probably lost some brain cells to monoxide. But that was when a friend of mine suggested I should start a blog. This was back in the day when there were probably about 500 blogs on the planet. It was a pretty new thing. At first, I thought he was nuts but I mean, I had time on my hands and I was freezing. So I converted my website to a blog and you know, really went at it.
I was looking up before our conversation, the first piece of art I sold online was a little luminary on June 4th, 2005, which was exactly two weeks before Etsy even launched. This was still when it was really uncool to be commercial on the internet.
MARK: Oh, yeah, we had Brian Clark talking about that last season and the amount of vitriol that he got in some quarters for daring to suggest that a blog might be useful for selling things…
JOHN: Yeah. It was also when everything was still a very fresh startup if it existed at all, and you could actually… At that point in time, social media didn’t even exist yet. But in the early days, they were very consumer-focused. They wanted to make a big platform people wanted so they were responsive to users in a way that they’re not anymore. And you could call the GM of Typepad or I talked to a lot of people in the development departments of a lot of the early social media companies and web hosting companies and was like, ‘I have this idea for a blog that is also a store.’
And it’s really funny, nobody wanted to do that. And it wasn’t until years later, I guess I was apparently the tenth person to sign up through Shopify, and Shopify was a store that had a blog. But in a way, that’s not quite the same thing. And the problem then with the Shopify is it’s built on Ruby on Rails, and so you really need to learn a whole new kind of coding to change it. And I really struggled with that.
And it’s important to say too, I was pretty motivated to make decent money in the beginning because A) I hadn’t had any, B) I had bought a house but a house that had fallen down. And the rest of the house seemed like it might do that any minute. And I really needed to get out of there into a better place. So I needed to save up for a down payment on a real house.
Then we looked at a bunch of different places, and eventually, we wound up here in Hudson, New York, again, thanks to somebody I met through blogging, Mary Anne Davis, who’s a potter, who I met on the internet first when she was blogging in the early days, and then at South by Southwest and met her in person. And then she was like, ‘Oh, you should look at Upstate New York. You should look at Hudson.’ I had always just assumed that everything north of the city was million-dollar homes for weekends for people who lived in the city.
But honestly, a lot of Upstate New York is former mill towns that are rather affordable or were. So we wound up here. It would have been nice to get here 10 years earlier, but we have a beautiful 150-year-old farmhouse on top of a little mountain with a view of the mountain. It’s really on a big 3,000 square foot barn that’s probably about 150 years old. It’s a metal shop and a little barn for storage. And sadly, the mosaics I’m doing and the steelwork that I do can’t happen in the same place. You can’t have marble dust on your welds and you can’t have rust on your stone.
So I’ve commandeered half of the ground floor of our house for the mosaic studio. And fortunately, I married somebody who knew what she was getting into with an artist and who’s very supportive. We didn’t really use the living room and dining room anyway. We don’t do that much entertaining.
MARK: So you’ve got this setup where your work and your life are really intertwined. We’re recording this interview a little later than most interviews. As I gather, you work pretty late.
Maybe you could talk us through your working day, and maybe it goes into the night as well.
JOHN: Oh, it does. Left to my own devices, I would be awake 20 hours and sleep 10. That’s what my biology wants to do. And you could do that as a poet who didn’t have a job or anything. I did, but if you want to have a marriage and a business, you really can’t have your day shifting forward six hours every day. It just makes it impossible to plan anything. So I’ve adapted and it works better for me to be awake at night. So I got up around noon, have coffee for a couple of hours, do anything that requires 9:00 to 5:00, scheduling in the remaining couple hours of the day.
And then Marcie and I sit down together to dinner pretty much every day. In the early days, the art always came first and that’s why all of my ex-girlfriends are ex-girlfriends. If you did an entry poll and an exit poll of those relationships, ‘Why did you date him? Why did you leave him?’ The answers would be exactly the same. ‘He’s so creative. Oh, he’s so dedicated to his art.’ And when Marcie came along, I was like, I’ve got to do this different. And so it was a very big shift from how I’ve operated the rest of my life. I’m like, okay, from dinner until she goes to bed is time that we spend together and that’s just sacrosanct.
And she’s the opposite, we pass each other in the morning a lot. She gets up at like 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning most of the time. So what works really well is actually we have a really good block of time that we spend together and we see each other throughout the day or we used to when she was unemployed. She’s a nurse now so now she’s got jobs, or she’s got work. But we get time to be to ourselves, which we both appreciate and we get time together and it works really well. But anyway, then she goes to bed and then I’ll noodle around for an hour or two and then get going on the mosaic and usually work until like 3:00 in the morning. And spend a couple of hours winding down with some whiskey and streaming media and go to bed.
MARK: It sounds like a perfect routine.
JOHN: It works out. If I were more ambitious, I would do things differently, and I did, and that’s the thing. When I was in my 20s and I had nothing and I really wanted to have something, I would go to the day job for 10 hours, including commute and I would work another 10 hours at night in the studio, and I would sleep 4 hours and do it again. There’s a lot I don’t even remember from that period of my life because if you get no sleep, your brain doesn’t do a lot of long term memory. It’s all a bit of a blur.
MARK: Okay, so you touched on the mosaics which I want to come back to, but before we get there, the thing that you’re best known for over the years has been the Great Bowls O’ Fire.
Can you tell us a bit about what they are, where the inspiration came from, and how that side of your work works?
JOHN: Sure. I’ve been doing them for about 14 years now. And the inspiration was when I started out, I was using recycled materials almost exclusively for all my art. And part of that was an ecological idea. Part of it was that it was more affordable when I was starting out. Part of it was that I just have this deep abiding love of objects and materials and historical things.
I spend a lot of time looking at objects and materials and thinking about them. A lot of my early work was turning one thing into another. And that was sort of this alchemy. I made masks out of shovel blades because they’re shaped like a face, that was cool, and so on.
So I was in the scrap yard shopping for materials and saw them cutting up this propane tank and the end cap of it fell off and became this large bowl and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’. Because making a giant bowl like that isn’t something you can do in any art studios. There’s like about six factories in the US that stamp these things out with a big stamp the size of a house and they’re around seven or you know, maybe there are… but there aren’t very many.
And so I saw this thing and immediately I had the idea for the Great Bowl O’ Fire, of cutting flame shapes around the edge of it to make it into a bowl that you would have fire in, a fire pit. And at that point in time, nobody had ever done anything like this with that. Obviously, there were fire pits, but there weren’t very many artistic ones. They’re mostly mass-produced, or they were masonry and custom-built. So I had this idea and I loved it because it’s like, okay, I’m taking this container for flammable gas, and using a torch to cut flame shapes in it so that you can have a fire in it, that you could even plumb for gas if you want. It was just like fire all the way down.
And that’s a big part of how I think about the work I make. Because I started as a poet, and because that was so much about metaphor, and because the art that I studied most was African and Haitian art, which have some religious component and so has meaning, but the materials used in that kind of work, there are a lot of puns, there are a lot of metaphors where power derives from the thing having these characteristics. And so that’s really informed what I do going forward.
So I came up with this Great Bowl O’ Fire and I thought it was really neat. It got a mention on Boing Boing. That was cool. Years later, it got into The New York Times and that sent us about, $50,000 worth of customers or more, which was nice.
And then again, it was in the middle of the business section and generated somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000 worth of orders. People still mention that article to me when they buy sometimes. It was on the front page of the home section, a different fire bowl, but one of my fire bowls, a different design, between Christmas and New Year’s one year, and that was $850 worth of sales because that’s the beginning of first quarter, which is slow for us. Nobody buys anything between Christmas and their tax return. So, timing matters. That’s just an interesting thing, how much timing matters. It should have done better on the front page of the home section, but no.
It took about 2 years to sell the first 50 of those fire pits. And then the following year, I sold about 100. And by the time it really peaked, I was doing about $300,000 a year in sales.
MARK: Three hundred thousand dollars a year from sculpted fire pits?
JOHN: Yeah. Although…
MARK: That you were making yourself?
JOHN: Two-thirds of that was expenses.
MARK: Right. But even so, John!
JOHN: I know right?
MARK: That’s pretty good going. Don’t be modest!
JOHN: I just shipped number 2,200 and a couple more. So that’s how many of these things I’ve made is 2,200 and change. So those really kind of took over.
Anyway, for maybe almost 10 years, there was almost nothing but fire bowls, and I still made the occasional piece of art on the side when I was inspired. But I was really putting all my energy into the fire bowls and the business and growing it because that’s what you do in America, I’ve rethought that. I knew that it probably wouldn’t last forever. So there was always a side hustle I was developing. I’d take the money I made with the fire bowls and spend it developing, say, a mood ring with my friend, Chris Carfi, which instead of telling you what mood you were in, it was a hollow glass-faced ring with little emoticons in it, and you can swap them out to tell people what mood you’re actually in.
We had them made in Taiwan, and they’re really beautiful surgical stainless steel with a glass face. So we spent about $30 grand on that. And we never sold one because they were so high end, we had to retail them at 80 bucks and people are like, ‘I’ll buy this for my kid if it’s like a couple of bucks but my kid is going to lose it.’ And we thought that people in their 20s and 30s would buy them but we were wrong.
So there was that. There was an online commerce software startup that I was consulting with, and they lost their venture funding and I bought a non-exclusive right to the software to try and launch it myself. And it was written on Ruby on Rails and I couldn’t find anybody I could afford to do code so I thought I’d use freelancers. And you know what? You can’t. They warned me but I was sure I can do it. But every time Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or something changes the way they interact with your software, you need to change it ASAP, especially if people are paying for it.
MARK: You’re not afraid to try new things. Even when you’ve got a big success you’re still experimenting and looking for the new thing?
JOHN: Partly because you want to be engaged and interested, partly because you can’t count on anything to last no matter how good it is. I’m the kind of person who’s like, ‘Oh, how hard can that be?’, and then finds out. ‘How hard can it be to be a one-man software startup relying on really busy freelancers who don’t come when you call? Oh, that hard, okay got it!’
MARK: Well you answered that question!
JOHN: Yeah, and I’ll never do that again.
MARK: Okay, but your current big project, you’re really getting back down to earth, aren’t you in a quite literal sense?
JOHN: Ten years before I started it and I started at about four years ago, I had a massage therapist who wanted to commission a piece of work for a new office. And I was doing a lot of mosaic back in those days. Later I stopped because I just thought it was somewhat difficult to sell. But I had done this piece for him. He’s like, ‘I’d like a mosaic for my office.’ I was like, ‘We should do one of an anatomical drawing because marble comes in exactly the right colors to do that.’ And I made a small piece for him that I still have because he never ended up paying for it. That’s okay. It’ll be in the exhibit that I’m building now.
I had to make it small because of his budget being small. I really wanted to make it life-size and the full figure. And it was kicking around my house for the next decade and I’m looking and I’m looking and it was really good, but it could be so much better. I read this article in The New York Times, a bunch of years back about traveling exhibits for museums and how much museums pay for those and how much they use them. It turns out, it’s a lot cheaper to rent a touring exhibit that’s all ready to go than it is to develop a new exhibit out of your own museum holdings. You don’t have to do all of the research and the planning and etc.
And so a lot of museums, they have their permanent collection, what’s on view, but most of the exhibits that you’ll see that are temporary, are traveling exhibits that somebody has developed and shopped around. And on the low end, according to this article, a 6-week exhibit might make $7,500 or $15 grand. Obviously, if it’s a giant Picasso exhibit at MoMA or something it’s going to be millions. But anyway, I thought I’ve always wanted to do these… What I really wanted to do with the anatomical mosaics is… I chose the easiest of a set of illustrations by Eustachi who discovered the Eustachian tube and was one of the first modern anatomists.
So I had done the easiest one and I thought what if I did the whole set and did it as a touring exhibit? And there are 14 full-size figures in the set that detail different areas of anatomy. It came out of two things that happened. One of them was Stagecoach Music Festival, which happens in the same place as Coachella, it’s a country music festival, they approached me and said, ‘Hey, we’d like you to make a giant mosaic of bottle caps’, which is a thing I pioneered too a long time ago, ‘for our festival’.
They paid pretty well to do this giant American flag out of Budweiser caps, which normally I would not do an American flag but doing it out of Budweiser caps, there was enough room for interpretation and I thought it was an interesting piece of work. But I also knew it would really please the crowd at a country music festival, right. Know your audience, but be a little subversive too so you feel like an artist.
MARK: That’s a good motto.
JOHN: Bury something there for the people who look. So I did this thing and it was an insane turnaround time. The thing was like I think 10 feet high by 14 feet long or something like that. And they only had three months for me to do it. I would have preferred half a year because the cap bottle mosaics, the way that I do do them are very labor-intensive. And if people want to know in what way, go to my website and look, there’s a little video.
Stagecoach commissioned this big thing. And then shortly after I got an email from the Museum of Natural History in New York, wanting to license an image of mosaic I had done years ago of La Sirene, the mermaid, in Haitian folklore and religion. That was part glass, part bottle caps, the tail was bottle caps, the rest was glass. And they wanted to license it for a book about a touring exhibit they were doing. And I was like, ‘Hey, I’d be willing. I don’t have that one anymore. And the photo I have wasn’t great. I would make you a new one if you wanted to put it in the exhibit.’ And so they commissioned it and it is currently touring with their show.
Between doing that huge flag for Stagecoach and then doing the piece for them, and doing mosaic again, after 10 years of maybe not working, and then reading that article about how touring exhibits can make decent money going to museums. And also I was a little worried because I felt like the middle class might be disappearing, and that’s who buys my fire bowls. Poor people can’t afford them and rich people don’t really get them. It’s people in the middle class that support me.
And I’m like if they disappear, I need to find some kind of institutional money like music festivals and museums. Those people are always going to have money, I think, although maybe not as much, the museums, I hear sometimes. So I thought, okay, this is the perfect opportunity to do this giant project I’ve always wanted of the anatomical mosaics in marble. I knew that I could do a credible job of the simpler ones, at least credible if not great. But I didn’t know how well can I pull this off and the only way to find out was to try.
So I ordered a few tons of stone because one thing is if you want consistency through a large piece, you’ve got to get most of this down upfront because even if you buy it from the same store or the same quarry, it’s organic. If they’ve moved 100 feet down the mine, the color is not going to be the same.
MARK: It’s not like you can just go to the art shop and said, ‘I’ll have another tube of that…’
JOHN: No, you really can’t. One of the things that’s great about what I’m doing is because stone is an organic, natural material, even within one box of the same stone, there’s going to be a lot of color variation. And you can use that to your advantage if you do, you know what I mean? You could just treat it as one color, but it’s not and you don’t have to. You can be very subtle. I’m working currently on the eighth mosaic of a series of 14. It was originally going to be 12 because it’s a nice number.
I wasn’t going to do to the detail the skeletons at first because going in I thought, oh, those aren’t going to be as good because I can’t do as much shading as I can with the muscles. But as I’ve been doing the first seven that I’ve finished, that’s of exposed bone and I’ve bought more and more types of stone to work with as I’ve gone. I feel like I’ve really gotten very good at shading the bones. I think it was number six, the rib cage I did for that one, it’s like trompe l’oeil.
MARK: It’s really phenomenal. Obviously, if you’re listening to this, go to johntunger.com and check out the mosaics. And we’ll make sure we got some images and links in the show notes. But it’s phenomenally complex what you’ve done. It’s like a filigree of ribs, and vertebrae, and muscles. And yet you’re using these really big, heavy tools to make it and they’re marble?
JOHN: No.
MARK: How do you actually physically do that?
JOHN: I’ve got a contractor’s Dewalt wet saw that I use to cut 12-inch tiles into strips. And I’ve gotten good enough that some of the stone I can cut as thin as a single millimeter. And when I bought the saw and bought the stone, both the saw company and the stone company told me that’s not going to work. I was like how hard can it be?
MARK: That’s like cat nip for you, isn’t it?
JOHN: Right. Yeah, you just keep telling him what he can’t do and he’ll keep doing it just to show you, which is a favorite line from the children’s book called Wiley and the Hairy Man, South African trickster fable, a great book.
MARK: One of your lines you always used to say to me, impossibility remediation is your specialty.
JOHN: It is because people are like, ‘That’s impossible.’ And I’m like, ‘A) because you think so you haven’t tried. And B) you keep telling me how it’s not possible and I’m going to catch the spot where you’re missing it and be like, ‘But if we did this…’’ There aren’t very many things that are really impossible and maybe people will never fly around without airplanes but they can fly.
A lot of the time, you have to reframe. I can’t flap my arms and fly but damned if I can’t get in a balloon, or an airplane, or hang glider, BASE jumping. There are lots of ways to fly. So anyway, that one was really interesting because it was the first one and before that I did two with the nerves and those were insanely complicated and took much longer and I had to buy new tools.
And the first two or three I did all I used was the saw to cut strips. I had regular nippers I used to break the stone, tweezers for picking things up, an X-Acto blade for nudging things. And about halfway through the third one, I realized I had a really cheap Black and Decker grinding wheel for sharpening knives that I could use to shape the stone a little. It wasn’t made for that but in some ways worked better than some of the things that are made for that.
And then when I decided to do the eyes out of rubies, well rubies have the most hardness of 9 out of 10. The only thing harder than a ruby is a diamond. And somebody gifted me on Facebook two brown sapphires that were already polished that I used for the eyes in the first two. And you can’t cut those with tile nippers or with a carborundum grinding wheel. I ended up holding them up to the wet saw for cutting tile which is horrendously dangerous and stupid.
MARK: Don’t try this at home folks!
JOHN: Yeah, I’m holding with my fingers a little, tiny ruby the size of your iris in my fingers to a very high-speed 10-inch diamond saw blade, but it worked.
MARK: And you lived to tell the tale!
JOHN: Well, an example too of when I said in the beginning, you have to buy all the stone at once, I did not buy enough of the blinding white marble that I’m using for the nerves, because I didn’t realize I was going to need as much of it. And I also thought blinding white marble, it’s perfectly pure white, it should be easy to come by. Not so much it turns out. I bought something from the same quarry, from the same store when I started running out, but it’s got a yellowish tint to it. It’s not the same. But that was good for doing the discs and the spine of this one which are also white, but not quite the same white as the nerve. So I found a use for it is what I’m saying. But I’ve got precious little left to do the nerves and I’ve got to get them all but it’s nerve-racking.
MARK: How many have you done and how many are there left to go?
JOHN: There are seven completely finished. There is one that is very close to done. I have the face, the hand, and below the knees to the feet. I’d love to say that’s going to be done in a couple of weeks, but it’s probably going to take another month. I’ve been on it for about three months, maybe four. That’s the other thing, I thought this project was going to take me maybe two years. And here I am halfway down a little better, one mosaic better than halfway, and it’s been four years.
And I would really like to start trying to book it into museums because they schedule two, three, four, five years out. I don’t want to wait five years when I’m done. But I’m also really glad I didn’t schedule it for two years out in the beginning.
MARK: Yeah, that would have been awkward.
JOHN: It would have been awkward.
I was talking to my friend Austin Kleon the other day and I’m like, I see a lot of people who want to stretch themselves or maybe there’s something they really want to do that they’re just not innately good at. And they’ll bang their head against that wall, over and over and over and if they’re lucky, they get good at it someday. But I feel like the thing to do is, look at what you are good at, and then do that and keep raising the bar. Do what comes naturally to you that’s easy, and then just keep making it harder and harder. And I think that’s a good recipe for doing really good work.
MARK: Yes, apparently cyclists have a saying, ‘It never gets easier. You just go faster’.
JOHN: Right. I don’t think of myself as someone who can draw. I can, but it’s not my strength. That’s not what I focus on. I can take some drawing classes and get good at it, but I don’t need to be good at it to do the work that I like doing. The drawings I’m working from for the mosaics are from the 16th century. Somebody else drew them. What I’m bringing to it creatively is arranging this, but really studying the drawing so closely to be able to do it in stone.
And the thing that’s interesting is that the marble I’m using while not photorealistic is absolutely accurate to the colors in the photos. It’s a little different than the colors in the drawings but it’s truer to the actual meat. And I love that.
I spend a lot of time on hands, feet, the face. If there’s a penis I give that special attention because people are going to look. I also know there are places that just aren’t going to want to show it because, ‘Oh my god, there’s a penis… it’s so inappropriate’. Well, people have them.
And so there is this one penis, it’s just one piece, but it’s two colors and there’s some little moles or whatever in the drawing that I found a piece. I cut it from the middle of a 12-inch tile, but it matches the drawing freaking exactly in one piece. There’s a couple other places where I’ve done that where I really needed it to be just right and I went through 40 or 50 square feet of stone to find a couple inches that were just right.
MARK: John, I hope your dream of having it displayed in a museum comes true so that we can all admire the really amazing attention to detail you’ve got with this by the sound of it.
Obviously we can see images online, but as you said to me, there’s nothing like seeing it full size. So I do hope we’ll get to see that someday soon.
JOHN: One thing I should say I wish I’d gotten that earlier, but what I really want when it exhibits, I want the original drawings hung next to them so that you can compare them because I think that’s much more interesting to compare them than to just see them.
We’re so accustomed to just flipping through Instagram or whatever, seeing so many images for just seconds. I really want to build something that you could spend a day looking at. Backing up and seeing it resolve into a really clean image and then zooming in on the detail and looking. I hope that it will inspire the audience to look as deeply as I had to, to make it, maybe not quite that deep, but to really look and see. I hope it can inspire that. I think people would be well served to spend some time really just looking hard at a thing, because we don’t.
MARK: I’m sure it will inspire. I’m sure it will. John, you’ve taken us on an amazing journey today. Listening to you, I’m really struck how your work and how your business has evolved. You’ve reinvented yourself several times along the way. Looking back, and maybe bearing in mind somebody listening to this and thinking, ‘Okay, well, things are very different from me to when John was first starting out’ – any words of advice to people on this point, fairly early on into the 21st century, but quite mature in terms of where the internet’s taken us.
Any words of advice that you have for how people can carve out their own creative path and maybe in a similarly original way to the way you’ve done it?
JOHN: One thing would be to think about the long term life of what you make. These things that I’m making right now…this is my bid for immortality here, right? The fire bowls because they’re so thick will last hundreds of years and I thought that was pretty good. But we dig up mosaics from Pompeii that are thousands of years old.
MARK: Exactly.
JOHN: There’s no reason to think that these will not. Somebody pointed out there’s no statute of limitations on… people are always interested in people. And these depict people in a scientific manner. Should we evolve to have more arms or something, these will still be interesting because we didn’t used to. They’re like fossils. These should be interesting basically for as long as there are people and they should last about that long. So that’s one thing. It’s always exciting to do whatever is brand new and shiny; 3D printing with plastic or whatever. I suppose in a bad way, plastic also lasts forever, but not necessarily intact if your art becomes microplastic and…
MARK: Not really long.
JOHN: So think about the future and think about the past. When I go to New York City, and I look at all of the amazingly intricate stone carving on old skyscrapers or the cathedrals, like I look at that, and I feel like a hack. And even here in Hudson, just intricately carved stone used to be something we did if we were going to make a building that anybody cared about. We don’t do that now. But I think there is something really satisfying about learning a craft well enough to really make something that will last for centuries.
And I would like to encourage people… I know the temptation is to use the internet as the primary platform for showing your work and you should do that, obviously, but look for real-world opportunities. Look for places where people can see your work life-size and real life, instead of all of the photos being the same size on any given platform and rather small. Look for places where your work can really stand in front of people. And it can be anywhere. I’ll stop.
MARK: That sounds like a great Creative Challenge that we can leave the listener with. So if you’re new to the show, this is one thing I always ask my guests to do at the end of every interview is set you, the listener, a Creative Challenge, something that you can do, or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this recording. And it should stretch you creatively and by definition then, it will stretch you as a person too.
John, your challenge to set the listener is to go out and look for the opportunity that may be out there in the world, the real world around you rather than the online digital space, which is so crowded these days.
JOHN: Yeah, remember, we’ve got a whole planet and it’s pretty big!
MARK: Right.
JOHN: And you can walk out and do it for free.
MARK: You don’t get disconnected.
JOHN: Yeah. The bandwidth is insane! It’s so high res.
MARK: Yeah, wait for it to be downloaded, yeah, surround sound.
JOHN: Great stereo.
MARK: It is. It’s a really good system.
JOHN: I forgot for almost a decade that there was a real world out there and I stopped showing in galleries and stuff because it was inconvenient to move physical objects. But it’s still there. And, honestly, I think, because everyone’s focused on the internet more than anything, there might be more opportunity now in the physical world than there was for a while. I could be wrong about that, but…
MARK: That’s a great challenge, John. If we may be permitted to dip back online for just a moment, your website is johntunger.com.
JOHN: Correct.
MARK: I really encourage anyone who’s listening to this go and check out the amazing images and videos on John’s site. It’s not as good as the real thing but frankly, it’s better than not looking at all. Anywhere else that people can go and engage with your work, John?
JOHN: That’s the main space. I’ve got a store on Etsy. I’ve got things around the web, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. And my username anywhere would be John T. Unger. But the place where you can get the best sense of what I do and the depth and breadth and the history of it and why I did it would be my site, would be johntunger.com.
MARK: Excellent. So John, as always, it’s been a real pleasure talking to you. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been entertained by your stories, and I’m sure I’m far from being the only one today. So thank you so much.
JOHN: Oh, thank you for having me, Mark. It’s good to touch base again.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you’d like my help applying the ideas from the show to your own situation you are welcome to join us in the 21st Century Member’s Group.
This will give you access to Goal-setting, Accountability and Q&A videos, as well as other exclusive insights and glimpses behind the scenes of the show. Due to the pandemic, membership is currently on a pay-what-you-want basis.
Your membership fee will also support the podcast and help to make it sustainable.
Voicing Your Truth with Monique DeBose
Sep 02, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Monique DeBose, an award-winning singer-songwriter and playwright, who has toured throughout America, Europe, India and Asia. Her third album, The Sovereign One, debuted at No.2 on the iTunes Jazz Charts.
Inspired by her experience of of what it means to be half African-American, half Irish-American, Monique wrote the funny, heartwarming and disruptive one-woman show Mulatto Math: Summing Up The Race Equation in America to initiate a different kind of conversation about race relations in America.
Monique is also a coach, speaker and workshop leader who helps others to follow her example and live ‘fully expressed, clear and unapologetic’.
I first met Monique at a coaching event – a Coaching Intensive in Los Angeles hosted by Rich Litvin, who is Monique’s husband. You may recall Rich was a guest in Season 3 of the show when he gave us a great interview about the price of being a high performer.
At the Intensive Monique did a session with us on vocal improvisation as a way of unlocking emotions in communication, and I heard at first hand what an extraordinary voice she has.
So I wasn’t surprised to hear her new album had been so well received, and I found it a compelling listen. I had it on heavy rotation in the run up to interviewing her, and I’m delighted to say we can hear some music from the album in the course of this interview.
I invited Monique onto the podcast to ask her about the source of her inspiration for the album and her one-woman show, and I have to say I was surprised – it turns out these two works have their origin in a very creative and resourceful response to a medical diagnosis.
I’ll let Monique tell that story in her own words, but I’ll just say that this is one of the interviews where my guest really digs deep and shares something profound about the nature of creativity and inspiration.
Monique is someone who really embodies the ethos of the 21st century creative – she’s a terrific artist who doesn’t shy away from the challenges life sends her, but uses them to create extraordinary work, and shares it with the rest of us.
In the course of this interview, you will also hear some of her music, so I’m betting this conversation with Monique DeBose is one that will stay with you long after you finish listening.
MONIQUE: I started singing out loud in front of people probably when I was 18 years old. I’d always wanted to perform and sing. And I’d be in my childhood home, singing with records in a room, roller skating in the backyard as if I was a performer singing, but if it was in front of somebody, I clammed up quickly. So it wasn’t until I was a freshman in college at Berkeley that I joined an improv singing group because that felt like the safest way to enter.
MARK: Improv singing, what’s that?
MONIQUE: Improvisational singing is when you create a piece of music on the spot seemingly out of nowhere. It’s circle singing. We’d stand in a circle, and somebody would start a riff, so for example, just like, ‘day by day, dah, dah, dah, day by day.’ And then, a group would start singing that and then somebody would add another part to it, and then add maybe another part to it, and then somebody would solo sing over it. So it was a great way to feel like you couldn’t make a mistake, and that’s what I needed to, actually, dive into the world of singing.
MARK: I’ve done a bit of improv acting, and I do like that whole culture that you support each other and make each other look good, which you very much have in that. But I’d never come across a singing version of it.
MONIQUE: Do you know Bobby McFerrin, or have you heard of him? The guy who sings, ‘Don’t worry, ooh ooh oo-ooh, Be happy.’
MARK: Oh, yeah.
MONIQUE: Bobby McFerrin, that is like his most commercial hit, but he has the most phenomenal group of vocalists around him. One of them is my mentor, a woman named Rhiannon. And your listeners should dive into his music. It’s all improvisational singing, it’s phenomenal.
MARK: Listening to your music, you have this incredibly expressive voice. Was it always that easy to express such deep feelings?
MONIQUE: My entire face just dropped when you said ‘that easy!’ It has been an uphill battle.
MARK: It sounds it. I don’t know. You tell me what it’s like.
MONIQUE: Well, no, it has not always been that easy. There was this point I got to, and I’m happy to share what the details of that were. But where I got to a point where I couldn’t afford to not sing from the gut, from the soul, anymore. And the desire to sound good and be what people think a singer should sound like or I went as deep as, ‘Well, you’re a mixed-race woman, you’re a black woman, so you need to sound like the women who can do all that ‘Aaaargh.’’ Like, you need to be that. And so it has been such a journey to really be able to find my own self and my own voice. So, no, it has not always been easy.
MARK: So how did you do it? How did you get away from it? Because I mean, by definition, if you’re singing in public you’re performing. Presumably, you are aware of how you’re coming across to other people. How did you get past that?
MONIQUE: Well, it’s still in process. And I think it will always be until I take my last breath. But there are two things that show up for me when I hear that question. First, I was so paralyzed in trying to be something that I just didn’t see how I could be that it took all the joy out of singing and I loved singing and making sounds with my voice, so I got to a point of exhaustion. That’s one thing.
And then the second, the universe swooped in and helped me out by giving me the diagnosis of something called a desmoid tumor in late 2016, in my abdominal wall. And that was a complete shift in how I saw life and saw myself. And doctors were telling me, ‘You’re going to be on pharmaceuticals for the rest of your life.’ That was a no for me, I wasn’t going to do that. And the second opinion doctors told me, ‘Well, we’ll just cut out part of your abdominal wall and put in a mesh. You’re done having children, right?’ And I was done, but I did not feel like that was my solution either.
And so I went in and started having conversations with the tumor. I have a master’s in Spiritual Psychology and this is just some of the work that we do. And what it told me was, you have been holding back so much. You have been keeping so much inside, so much of who you are hidden, because you’re worried about what people will think, you’re worried about not doing it right, you’re worried about hurting others, and you can’t afford that anymore. All that energy and creativity has created me, so let’s move through this, you need to express.
And so from that point, that’s actually what had me write my one-woman show. That’s what had me actually write this particular album project. And in that I decided, and it was really like the decision was made for me and I just had to go ahead and go along with it that I couldn’t pretend anymore, and I couldn’t try to be something I wasn’t. My North Star was, ‘You need to express what is you fully.’ And that’s what I did. And that’s what I’ve been doing.
MARK: And you got this from doing inner work, focusing and dialoguing with the tumor?
MONIQUE: A hundred percent, hundred percent.
MARK: Wow.
MONIQUE: And that was one of the hardest things I ever did. Because in the world we live in, or most of us live in, Western medicine really is god and is king. And people are worried about you, who love you, who have that Western medicine, knowledge. And I had to be willing to trust myself and trust my own inner wisdom in the face of everybody telling me, ‘That’s stupid. You shouldn’t do that. How do you know it’s going to work?’ All of those things. And so I had to just keep coming back to, ‘This is what you’re being told. Trust it.’ So it’s been a process. So all of that also just adds to me really being able to trust my own voice in the singing capacity as well.
MARK: And you say that there were two creative projects that came out of that. Let’s start with the album, The Sovereign One. And again, I know it’s been very well received, did very well on iTunes when it launched and so on. But let’s go back to the source of inspiration for the album. Where did this come from for you?
MONIQUE:The Sovereign One came from claiming back all the parts of myself that I had either hidden away, shamed away, given away, decided I wasn’t good enough, so what was the point of having it anyway? I claimed back every aspect of myself that I could be conscious of, and even delved into the unconscious and just said, ‘Anything that needs to come back to make me whole, come back.’
And so this project was me fully integrating and accepting all the parts of myself because I feel like that was such a barrier for me to feeling happy, to feeling like I was living life the way I was supposed to be. So that’s where it came from.
MARK: And could you maybe take one song from the album and just talk us through where you got the inspiration, and then what was the process that you went through to turn that into a finished song?
MONIQUE: Sure. I am going to talk about ‘Damaged Goods’, which is the single on the project.
MARK: Maybe we could hear a little bit of ‘Damaged Goods’ before we hear you talk about it, Monique, because it’s a terrific song.
MONIQUE: Sure.
MARK: And if we can just hear a little bit of that, and then people will have a bit of context for when you talk about it.
[EXCERPT FROM DAMAGED GOODS PLAYS]
MONIQUE: So ‘Damaged Goods’ is a song I wrote with two amazing co-writers, my friends Isaac and Thorald Koren. And it’s really an ode to all the ‘faults’ that we walk around with as human beings. It’s acknowledging, yes, we are insecure and small and maybe unfaithful and resentful and we’re out of integrity. And even still, we are good at, the heart of who we are.
Oftentimes, people feel like, ‘Well, I’m damaged or I’m broken, or something is wrong with me that is not fixable.’ And this song is really speaking to ‘Yeah, you may be damaged in one way of looking at it, but trust that you are all good.’
And so the song really is speaking to owning all the parts of yourself. I don’t know if you know about that Japanese, I’m going to say, tradition. I can’t even remember what it’s called. But if a vase breaks, instead of throwing it away, artists or people will put it back together with beautiful gold paint.
MARK: Oh, yeah.
MONIQUE: And then that just makes it even that much more beautiful. That, to me, is kind of how ‘Damaged Goods’ is. It’s really owning, yeah, you may be somebody who is, really insecure. But let’s really own all the parts of you because the whole of you is exquisitely good, is beautiful.
So I just wanted people to not feel like they have… this was it. I was exhausted from trying to be something I just wasn’t. And I don’t think that’s fair to any human being walking the planet. So this was like, ‘Forget it all, people. Let’s just be us and let’s look at us and let’s love us as we are. We’re all divine beings having a human experience. Let’s just enjoy all of our humanity.’
MARK: Well, thank you. That certainly comes across beautifully in the song.
MONIQUE: Thanks.
MARK: And what does the title The Sovereign One mean to you?
MONIQUE: Well, again, it’s speaking to really being someone who is fully integrated into herself, someone who stands in herself, who, I don’t want to say doesn’t need because I believe as humanity, we all live in community and we need each other, but doesn’t need others to validate, to justify her existence.
That’s what I mean by The Sovereign One. That was a claim and a call and an intention. And the music is reflecting that, that I am sovereign unto myself. I belong to nobody. I owe nobody. And I move around full, whole, complete and perfect. That’s what it means.
MARK: And not content with creating amazing music and a terrific album, you’ve also created and toured with a very unusual one-woman show.
MONIQUE: Why do you call it unusual?
MARK: Well, that’s what the word is on the street.
MONIQUE: That’s really funny. That’s funny. Yes. I’d had the desire to create a one-woman show for a good while, but nothing was making me, actually, sit down and commit to doing the work. So I don’t think I was ready to tell the story that I’ve told yet. But when the diagnosis of the tumor showed up, and the information from the tumor showed up, I was clear that I needed to write this show. And the show is called ‘Mulatto Math – Summing Up the Race Equation in America’.
And what I do is I watch my own journey into discovering who I am. I come from a mixed-race background. I have an African-American father from the segregated South. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. And then I have an Irish-American mother from upstate New York, who came from an educated family background. And just trying to navigate who I was, where I belonged, and what was okay for me to say in this company, and what was not okay for me to say in that company, it was, again, me trying to like, be right and be enough and be safe for other people. So a lot of my growing up included really hiding parts of myself or not being fully myself.
And so this show really navigates my journey growing into myself. And it’s very raw, it’s a very real, and dare I say myself, a very powerful experience for me as an artist, but also for audience members. I have a degree in Mathematics, an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Berkeley. So I’ve created all these math equations that tie the story together with how my binary brain was thinking about race and identity. And then, I also have original music in it where I perform it with a live basis when we do a full show. And then a bunch of characters I play, different family members, different people in my life.
And I always have a talkback with the show as well because I feel like it would be out of integrity for me to really open up this huge can of worms and really have people confronting questions around race and identity, whatever their ethnic, or yeah, their ethnic background is. I always have a talkback after so people can really digest and integrate and actually, share in ‘mixed company’ their ideas and feelings. So it’s really powerful, and I’m really grateful that it was asked to be born.
But I remember I would be sitting at my computer, typing the script, writing it and just bawling my eyes out saying, ‘I cannot write this. I cannot say this out loud.’ And the tumor or the energy from the tumor was like, ‘You have no choice. You have to share this story.’ So it’s real.
MARK: One of the quotes I keep thinking of in relation to writing is from Robert Frost, the great American poet, when he said, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.’ If you don’t feel it as you put it down on paper or on the screen, they’re not going to feel it. So you have to go to that place that you want to take the audience to, but that takes a lot of courage, huh?
MONIQUE: Yeah, when I first started performing that show about a year ago, it felt like I was completely naked. And not only naked, it felt like my skin was not on this body, so I just felt so raw.
And as I’ve continued to do the show, it’s as if the skin that I had for all the time before the show or for a lot of the life before the show, that was the skin of hiding, that was the skin of being not fully myself, being what you needed me to be. And so it was as if everything was stripped. And then, with each performance of the show, new skin started to grow, and it’s skin that is really… it’s tough, it’s supple, it’s flexible, it’s a beautiful skin. It takes such good care of me. It’s almost Teflon in a way, but not fully Teflon. It’s just a new skin has grown, and it continues to grow. But it’s a beautiful skin for me to walk around in as I continue with life.
So I’m really grateful for the process and for the show, for myself and for others, because I know people are moved and changed by the show.
MARK: I’ve got to be maybe a little culturally sensitive here. I’m not from the United States. And obviously, those of us outside the US, we see and hear there’s a lot of media and debate around race in America, but it doesn’t compare with having lived your life in that particular country. So maybe you could give us an idea of the kind of context that you’re stepping into with a show like this. Because as I understand it, you are engaging with the issue in a very unusual way.
MONIQUE: I still want to know what unusual means! I’m like, ‘What have you heard?’ Yeah, well I can speak to my experience, and that’s what I do with the show. I really use my experience as a microcosm for the United States.
MARK: Yeah.
MONIQUE: What I feel like is in the United States, there are two camps running. And I’m sure there are more, so this is a very broad generalization, so please know that I know that. But I noticed that in a lot of African-Americans, there is fear, there is resentment, there is a non-trusting of white people in our culture. That doesn’t mean that people don’t succeed and move through life and have great lives. But I think those are undercurrents in relation to the United States. And then on the other side, I’m looking at, and again, obviously, there are more than black and white people in the United States. I’m just speaking to those two groups currently. And again, these are generalizations.
But on the white side, what I notice is that there is either desire, but having no clue how to step into that desire to be in connection with African-Americans, or there is ignorance. And, to me, the ignorance comes from an unconscious place. It comes from a place of protecting themselves, even if they don’t know it in their conscious mind what they know their country has been built on, which is having to, what’s the word? Dehumanize other humans in service to your way of life.
So that just lives in the DNA of the country and lives in the DNA of, for lack of a better term, white people in the United States. So even if there is this desire to bridge the gap, until people are willing to actually look at that and speak that, and not to be made wrong for it, but to actually just be willing to acknowledge, I think both sides are at an impasse.
And so even if there is this desire to integrate and be present, and integration is the word that… integration and surrender are the words that run my life, quite honestly. Integration on many levels, surrender on many levels. But people will not be able to, actually, move through and move past and integrate into what they’re actually wanting, if they’re unwilling to see both sides. So that’s context.
MARK: It sounds like a very brave thing to do, to step into this context. Were you not just tempted to leave these things for someone else to say while you just got on with your music?
MONIQUE: I couldn’t get on. That was the problem. Trust me. I had a teacher once who said, she was teaching what she was doing, and I was learning from her and she said, ‘Monique, if you can walk away from this, walk away.’ And I could walk away from it. So I did. And I never understood why she said that.
But this, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is my thing.’ If I could walk away from this, I would 100% walk away from it. But I can’t. I feel like it’s the charge my soul has been given to really integrate all the parts of myself, which also includes integrating all of the parts of this country because that is what I’m made from. I just feel like that’s been imprinted on my soul and that’s what I have to do. But trust me, if I could walk away, Mark, I would be on a beach.
MARK: And can you give us an example, maybe? So, we’ve got the context. We’ve got your intention. We’ve got a sense of maybe what’s at stake here. But can you give us an example of how you address this in the show? What’s the format of the show that allows people to see this and experience it differently?
MONIQUE: I think the number one thing is that it is a very vulnerable show. And by that, I mean I am speaking family secrets. And they weren’t necessarily told to me as family secrets or experienced as secrets, but when they’re out in public, people get very uncomfortable.
It’s been such a journey with my Mom in doing this show, and she’s one of the most supportive people. I’m really proud of who she is in the world. Because I was sharing things about her unwillingness to accept that or to look past her own struggle to see African-American culture’s struggle.
I’m speaking to bringing up stories about my granddaddy on my dad’s side, who was a longshoreman and fell 30 feet from the air and had a broken back, broken pelvis, and two broken bones. And when the men he worked with took him to the nearest hospital, which was the ‘white hospital,’ they literally put him out on the sidewalk with a broken back, broken pelvis, and two broken legs. And he had to wait until my uncle came and an ambulance came to take him to the community hospital. So I’m speaking real things.
I talk about also my experience going into college and not knowing where I fit in, seeing all the black students together in the dining commons, and wanting desperately to go over to them because I knew that was where I wanted to be, but not knowing how to enter that space because it felt like it was a very protected world.
So I talk about things that are initially embarrassing, shameful. And also then the level of disrespect, possibly, people could see as a person telling my family stories. Quite a few people in the audience, it’s happened more than two times where people have raised their hand and said, ‘Your parents aren’t alive anymore, right?’ And I’m like, ‘No, they’re actually sitting right there in the audience.’ So and I think that piece is also really important, too, because my family is intact. My family is supportive and loving. And, I think, it’s not just the show. It’s everything that surrounds the show as well, that, I think, makes it such a powerful piece for people.
MARK: What are the talkback sections of the show like?
MONIQUE: They’re wonderful. And again, I say it in mixed company, people who may never run the same circles are in the audience. And because the show is so vulnerable, because I am so vulnerable, it really creates a container of safety and openness just in the entire space, which is so beautiful. And that’s one of the things I feel is one of my gifts as a creative professional too. That’s just one of the things I’ve been given to do, and to offer to people.
So people are asking questions and identifying and sharing their stories. I had an Irish former nun in the audience who was maybe like 70, saying, ‘You have just told my story.’ And maybe that’s a Scottish accent. Sorry, European people!
And then I have African-American men who are 50 saying, ‘Yes, everybody walks through a field of landmines’. It’s an opportunity for people to see not just an actor on stage, but to see real people in real time being vulnerable, being open, and sharing their stories.
I have white people who say, ‘I have a mixed niece and I never, ever thought about the things you bring up in the show. And I want to go back and just kind of get in curiosity with her to hear what her actual story is instead of the assumptions we make about people.’ So it’s beautiful. I love it and people really get value from it.
MARK: Where are you taking this next?
MONIQUE: ‘Mulatto Math’?
MARK: Yes.
MONIQUE: It’s so funny. The cheeky part inside of me was like, ‘Wherever it wants to be taken!’ I’m continuing to reach out to festivals, to reach out to theaters as well as universities. I’ve done it a couple of times at universities with, workshops attached afterward. With the Spiritual Psychology, I’ve created beautiful workshops around identity, around compassion, around race, relations, all kinds of things. So doing more of all of that, really. So it’s just constantly in motion of sending out materials about the show and being in conversation, same with the album. As an independent artist, it’s continuous work.
But I could see it being a tool for people who are policymakers, change-makers, so that it can act as a portal for people to make shifts and change, to really raise the vibration of where we all currently live. Yeah.
MARK: And not only do you do the music and the show, but you’re also an agent of change yourself for other people, as a coach and a workshop leader. How does that relate to the other two aspects of your work?
MONIQUE: It’s all the same, honestly, in my book, it’s really about authentic expression. It’s about being a vehicle for change for people, and being a portal, that’s a word that really has come into my consciousness a lot lately.
I’m not an accountability coach. I’m somebody who helps people create vision, but really helps get integrated into themselves. And my belief is that when we are fully integrated, or when we’re on the path to full integration, the sky’s the limit.
And a lot of the work I do is really helping people, creating space for people to actually be willing to look at all the parts of themselves. Because a lot of times, we just don’t want to look at it because we’ve been told that who we are is wrong, or we’ve been shamed out of being who we truly are. So I really help people in those arenas to really just be fully integrated into themselves.
MARK: And presumably, you find this comes up in relation to things other than race?
MONIQUE: Hundred percent.
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, in terms of what we want to be doing in the world, what kind of relationships we want to be in, reaching goals that we just think are not available to us for whatever the reasons we’ve been told or learned, that helpless behavior. So it spans the entire spectrum of life, quite honestly
Race is one piece of it. It’s the piece for me that I could directly identify and tell this particular story. But yes, it really transcends my coaching. Nobody has ever, actually, come to me around race yet. But I’ve always been curious about creating a workshop around race for people. But no, that’s not the specialty in my coaching.
MARK: What are the implications of all of this around creativity? If somebody is listening to this thinking, ‘Okay, well, so what are the implications for me as a creator?’ What would you say are some of the biggest lessons that you would like to impart from this journey that you’ve been on?
MONIQUE: I think the biggest lesson that jumps out so strongly is: you were born exactly the way you were supposed to be. There is nothing about you that is wrong, or a mistake, or needs to be changed. Yes, we are always growing, and we are refining, but the core essence of who you are is perfect, whole, and complete. So my offering and what I want people to walk away with is the thing that you are thinking is wrong about you and that you need to hide away and minimize is probably something that needs a second look, a more up-close look because what I normally find is that thing is really your gift. That thing is really your doorway into you fully being yourself. And when we are fully ourselves, you cannot help but be magnetic to people. You cannot help but be magnetic to the things that are actually in your heart that you want. So that’s what I would say.
For me, the perfect example around singing, I was not Whitney Houston, I was not Mariah Carey, and I was mad about it and so I stopped singing. And when I got to the point of, ‘No, your voice is your voice. You don’t need to be anybody else,’ that freed me up so much. It let me let go of trying to be something that I wasn’t. And it, actually, gave me the energy to focus and be more of who I am. And when we’re more of who we are, people trust us. People believe us because we are in alignment and in integrity with ourselves. So that’s what I want to offer. That was very long-winded, but I hope the point got made.
MARK: No, that was a great point, beautifully made. So maybe this is a good time for you to set our listener your Creative Challenge, Monique. If anybody is new to the show, this is the point of the show where I invite my guests to set a challenge to the listener. Something that you can go away and do or get started on within the next seven days, and that is related to the theme of the interview. Monique, what Creative Challenge would you like to set us?
MONIQUE: I love this idea and it’s so great that you do this for your listeners, it’s such a gift. The Creative Challenge that I came up with was, it’s related to what we were talking about in the beginning, that improv singing or the improv creation with the voice.
I invite listeners to take a moment, maybe for seven days or give yourself the challenge of even three days, of each day tuning into your body, and really setting an intention and asking your body, ‘What part of me, body, wants to be heard, or has something to express to me?’ And when you just get quiet in that space, there will be a part of your body that really flags itself or raises its ‘hand’ to you.
So when that part of the body shows itself from that place, take a moment to really tune into that. And what that means is just get present with it. Ask, ‘What do you want me to hear?’ And then, this is the really bold part, let yourself be the vehicle for that body part to express through your voice. It might be a sound, it might be a melody, it might be words. But let yourself be that vehicle to let that part of the body express itself.
And the challenge on top of that is to not judge what comes out. Not how great it sounds, or what it says, and not having any expectation of yourself to do anything with it. This challenge is really to offer you an opportunity to learn how to listen and use your voice to let your body speak to you because I believe our body is our wisest tool, really.
MARK: Monique, listening to you describe this, I’m thinking on the one hand it’s obviously, and your work is testament to this, this is a part of some really deep, very profound, meaningful work. On the other hand, I’m also thinking, ‘I bet when you let yourself go with this exercise, it’s really a lot of fun!’
MONIQUE: It’s so fun! It’s so fun. I’ve run workshops called ‘Spring into Self-Love’. I do it each season. I’ve got, ‘Summer of Self-Love’, ‘Fall into Self-Love’. The winter one was a little bit hard for me to create a title for! But I take people for 40 days and we create an improv every day. It’s a challenge. And then I meet with people weekly just to support them along their journey of it. But it’s an amazing process and watching people do that over the course of 40 days is phenomenal. The amount of themselves that they now have access to, the lightness, the raised vibration that they just exist in is beautiful. So it will be fun for people.
MARK: Great. Well, personally, I’m going to have a go at this. I’m looking forward to it. And I do hope, dear listener, that you are going to do this in the privacy of your own space and really let go and enjoy it.
Monique, thank you so much. You’ve taken us on a really amazing journey today. And I can tell that these two projects have been a really big and important cycle of creativity for you. Are you able to say anything about future projects that are in the pipeline or is that still under wraps?
MONIQUE: It’s still under wraps. I love that you asked that, though. That’s beautiful. I’m writing more music. I said it’s under wraps and here I am talking. I’m figuring out a way to really… yeah, that’s what I’ll say. That’s it, Mark, for now.
MARK: Okay. That’s great. All right. Where can people go to listen to your music, to find out about the show? I do hope there are some more upcoming dates where people can come and see the show for themselves. Where should people go to find out about all of that?
MONIQUE: So there’s funnily enough, three different websites. I’m sorry about that, everybody. For the show, it’s mulattomath.com. For the music, it’s moniquedebosemusic.com. And then for coaching, it’s moniquedebose.com. And if you’d like to follow my music on Spotify, you can just find Monique DeBose and follow me there for new music and things coming. And then also on Instagram, for Mulatto Math, it’s @mulattomathplay. I’d love for you to follow me there. For the music it’s @moniquedeboseartist, and I’d love for you to follow me there. Thanks so much.
MARK: Great. And I will make sure we have those, obviously, in the show notes, as usual. Monique, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. And I’m sure I will be getting lots of delighted feedback from listeners of this week’s episode. So thank you.
MONIQUE: Thank you so much, and it’s really been my pleasure. Thank you, Mark.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Bat-Signal Marketing for Creatives with Ilise Benun
Aug 26, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Ilise Benun, known as the Marketing Mentor.
Ilise has spent over 30 years helping ‘the creatively self employed’ to succeed in business, and has written seven books and produced over 300 episodes of her Marketing Mentor podcast.
Ilise is an in-demand conference speaker and is the co-founder and host of the Creative Business/Design Entrepreneurship program of HOW Design Live, which is one of the largest annual conferences for creatives anywhere in the world.
And as a consultant and coach she has helped countless creatives get better at the business side of their work, and to achieve professional success that matches their creative talent.
I first met Ilise when I was a speaker at HOW Design Live back in 2012. After that, she engaged me to speak at HOW in Chicago a few years later. We’ve been in touch ever since, and she has interviewed me for her Marketing Mentor podcast, which is a really great show for creatives.
Ilise is someone who is not only very smart and savvy about business, but who also really gets the creative mindset and has a lot of empathy for the things that creatives typically find harder than other people when it comes to running a business.
And crucially, she is very good at pointing creatives to the unique and special advantages they have when it comes to 21st century marketing. One of these is her concept of bat-signal content marketing, which she expands on in this interview.
If you are creatively self-employed in any way, and you would like to be more creative and effective at marketing, then you’ll find plenty of practical wisdom in this conversation.
I also recommend you listen if you kind of know you really should be doing more marketing, but you’re reluctant to do it, or not confident that you’d be good at it. Ilise will show you that it’s a lot more enjoyable and creative than you might imagine…
MARK: Ilise, how did you get started on your creative journey?
ILISE: The short story I’ll give you is that I was fired from my second job out of college after studying Spanish and French in college and not knowing what to do with it. And I had two basic jobs that just came through people I knew. One was in the fashion industry, the other was in the travel industry. I got myself fired from that second one, although I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I just didn’t know how to quit at the time. And I was so angry that I decided I was never working for anyone again.
So this is 1988, I was 27 years old. And I just looked around at all of my friends in New York who were actors and musicians and dancers and painters. And it looked to me like they were really disorganized and I was a little bit more organized. And this was in the time of paper, no computers. And I just thought, ‘I can help these people get organized.’
And so little by little, I just would sit with people, photographers, one comes to mind, and we would just sit and go through all those piles of papers. And at the bottom of everybody’s pile, there was always something that had to do with self-promotion that they weren’t doing. It was uncanny.
And so I thought, ‘This is the real problem.’ The clutter is the obstacle to the real problem, which has something to do with self-promotion. And I felt, because I come from a family of creatives, my mother was a fashion designer and always disorganized and it was in my blood to help people tame those artistic challenges. And so, that’s what I did.
And over the years, it has evolved into me helping creative people. I do consider myself creative, but I’m not an artist and I get along really well and I relate really well to creative people and they seem to respond to the way I talk about things.
MARK: How did it go down when you were talking to artists and creatives, saying, ‘Hey, I can help you be more organized.’ Did you get any pushback on that?
ILISE: No. They would be like, ‘Please tell me how, how much does it cost? What do I have to do?’ In fact, in preparation for an event that I’m speaking at in a couple of weeks, they asked for the intros to go back and send them something from the very first job you had, or very first project. So I went searching and I found a one-paragraph excerpt from ‘New York Magazine’ that came out three months after I started my business. I just happened to have met someone who was writing an article for New York, and they included me in an issue about how to get people to do the things you don’t want to do for yourself. And it said that I was a person who helped artists and other creative people get organized and promote their services. And that exploded my business. It was amazing, and timing is everything when it comes to marketing. That’s one of the main messages that I’m trying to communicate.
And so I just got really lucky and it got people calling me for years, 10 years, because disorganized people put things at the bottom of piles and then they put this magazine at the bottom of the pile and then would uncover it 10 years later and say, ‘Oh, are you still doing this?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, I can help you.’
MARK: Brilliant. So the disorganization worked for you for a long time! [Laughter]
ILISE: It did.
MARK: Where did you go from there? You were in people’s offices and studios going through the piles of paper. How did the business evolve?
ILISE: Basically, I was doing it with and for people at the beginning. So literally, one of my very first clients was an actor who needed help putting his resume and headshot together and mailing it out to the agents and casting director. So I did that. I got my feet wet doing it for people, all different kinds of people, and then agencies until a point, probably, 15 years later where I felt like, ‘Okay, I know enough now, I can start telling people what to do, advising people rather than doing it for them.’
And so, it really was me practicing what I preach, doing all sorts of mailings, and reaching out to people, and learning how to do networking, and then starting to speak, and then writing books, and it builds on itself if you commit to it and if you grow with it. But, part of the problem with a lot of creative people is that they hope they can stop the self-promotion at some point and then they do when they get busy. But if you don’t keep it up it doesn’t keep growing and that’s what causes the feast or famine syndrome, truthfully.
MARK: I know this is one big theme of your work, Ilise, is that marketing isn’t something that you just do to get out of a hole when it’s famine time and then you go away and forget about it. You want to make it part of your ongoing work, right?
ILISE: It has to be a habit. It has to be part of your process. And the idea, in my mind, is that you don’t compartmentalize yourself and the things that you do. One of the ways I talk about this is there’s no such thing as a business person, and truthfully, perhaps, no such thing as an artist. There are business things you do and artist things you do, and if you can flow freely, fluidly, back and forth between those things and still be the same person and bring your creativity to the business side of whatever it is you’re making a living at or doing professionally, then that is the ideal.
That is what I try to teach, is how to find the right way to do it for yourself that feels real, that feels authentic, and that feels like you’re just generously sharing what you have to offer so that the people who don’t know they need it can find you.
MARK: And how do I do that if I’ve always seen myself as an artist, as a creative, and business has seemed like the enemy, the big, bad wolf? How do I embrace that in an authentic way and make it work for me?
ILISE: I think the first thing is that you have to set that aside. You have to be willing to say, ‘Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe I’ve been misguided about that. Someone else told it to me, but it may not be the reality.’ And then be open to a different way of looking at it and all of the different possible ways of doing it.
So we were talking earlier about podcasting. Podcasting is a beautiful marketing tool that anyone could do. It’s really easy and it’s an excellent networking tool, but don’t say the word ‘networking’ to artists because they’ll run in the other direction. But truthfully, just talking to people, making friends, asking questions, learning, those are marketing tactics. And I lately have been saying that generosity and curiosity are underused marketing tools. And if you see them as marketing tools, you might see marketing differently.
MARK: I’m curious about generosity and curiosity. Say more about that. Tell me how that relates to marketing.
ILISE: First of all, you can’t think you know everything or anything, truthfully, about the people that you’re trying to reach. You need to learn. You need to learn what they’re interested in, you need to learn what they’re curious about. You need to learn in the commercial world, what their pain points are that you can cure, or the problems are that you can solve because that becomes the meat of your own content and the meat of your own marketing.
I like to say, become a business detective and go with questions to your market. Don’t go with answers, go with questions, and go with an expression of your understanding through that research, through that learning of what they’re struggling with and then use your marketing and your conversations to let them know that you get it, you know them, you understand them, and you have helped people just like them.
So it starts with curiosity and asking smart questions, the questions that make them realize you know more than they do about what they need to do or change, or fix, or expand, or anything. Does that make sense?
MARK: Yes. Can you give us an example of a creative who you think is doing this really, really well?
ILISE: Let’s see. I have a client in mind. It’s a designer who is focusing on manufacturing companies, especially American manufacturing companies who have been around for a long time and seem to have some problems with their brand because they’ve been around for so long and perhaps they haven’t updated their brand in a long time.
So he’s creating content articles and white papers on these topics, but instead of him just saying, ‘Here’s what I know about it,’ he is reaching out to his prospects, people he would like to work with, who he thinks need his help and he’s not saying, ‘Do you need my help?’ He’s saying, ‘May I ask you questions about how you think about your brand and the evolution of your brand,’ and getting them on the phone, essentially, in an interview that he will then use and transcribe and quote from in the article that he’s writing. And then that article will be disseminated to other people just like that prospect so that even if that prospect doesn’t become a client, he’s learned enough about the actual need of the actual market to make it clear that he understands and can help.
MARK: What format of the interview is distributed in?
ILISE: This is going to be an article or a blog post that he will then offer up to a trade association of manufacturing companies.
MARK: So it can be quite simple. You don’t need to build a huge YouTube channel, or podcast, or blog in order to get going at this, can you?
ILISE: Absolutely not. You just have to write one good piece of content, maybe two or three, and then find the right places to offer it up and have it be disseminated again in front of the right people. I think about this as very targeted outreach and content marketing, very strategic.
MARK: So there’s a few things I want to unpack here then. So number one, this sounds like your client has got a very niche or I guess you might say ‘niche,’ on your side of the Atlantic, market. He’s really clear about who he’s serving. Is that right?
ILISE: Yes, although with some hesitation, because most creative people do not want to focus. That’s the first and biggest obstacle, is a lack of focus. So with my help, he has agreed to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to begin by focusing on manufacturers.’ And little by little, we determine, is this a viable market? It’s not like a light switch that you flip on or off, it’s a gradual process of learning, again, through curiosity, whether or not these are the people who, number one, know they need the services and value them enough to pay for them.
MARK: And then the niche and focus, how do you advise people to go about this process? Because I noticed you said very carefully, ‘Getting the content in front of the right people.’ How do you know who the right people are and how do you make sure that the content reaches them?
ILISE: So the right people are the people who you have access to and can get easy access to. They’re the people who you have samples, and examples, and case studies, and experiences to show and say, ‘Yes, I do know other people like you and I’ve helped other people like you.’
So it could be as simple as looking at your roster of existing clients and choosing between them. Because if you have a wide variety of clients, then each one might represent a possible, viable, lucrative market if you focused on it and went deeper. But most people don’t do that, actually. They just take what comes along and they like the variety, but it never gives them enough depth, or competence, or confidence actually, that results from the competence to go in and say, ‘I really know this market.’
It’s different for each person, obviously, and it’s a gradual choosing process and research process to determine, which is the one that will give me easiest access and the most lucrative and/or satisfying types of projects or work?
MARK: I know a lot of your work, Ilise, is with creative service professionals, people like designers, copywriters, people who are providing a service to a market. Would you say a lot of these principles are applicable to artists and product creators as well?
ILISE: Absolutely. Again, part of the misguided mindset, I think, is to think that your work is of value to everyone and anyone. And that may be the case, but I would bet that each person, each artist, has a group of people who is most responsive, most interested for whatever reason in your work. And if that’s the case, you need to identify who those people are. Maybe it’s women of a certain age, maybe it’s men, maybe it’s a certain other type of demographic or people who are interested in nature, for example.
Whatever the demographic is, no matter what the service or the product is that you’re offering, you do need to identify who is most interested or most responsive to it and then the same marketing strategies can apply.
MARK: Am I right in thinking you’re looking for the sweet spot between the ones who appreciate the work the most and the people you appreciate the most? For me, for instance, I used to work with all kinds of people as a psychotherapist and I’ve done various types of coaching, but I realized the clients who got most excited about the work I did were the creatives, but I also realized that they were the ones I enjoyed working with the most too.
ILISE: Yes.
MARK: So do your own preferences and enthusiasms come into this?
ILISE: They do, but I think they should be the second criteria and I like to say, let the market speak to you and listen to the market because if you go out with your own agenda, ‘Here’s what I want to do, here’s what I want to do it for,’ and that market doesn’t seem to respond as well as you want them to, then it can be extremely frustrating.
I often try to advise people to put what they want in the back seat, let’s say, and go out there and listen. This is, again, where curiosity comes into play. Listen to what the market needs, listen to what people are complaining about. And then based on that, where is the overlap with what you know how to do, or what you enjoy doing, or who you enjoy working with.
MARK: I think that’s a very interesting point because I didn’t set out, for instance, to say that I wanted to coach creatives. I noticed I was coaching them and they were responding and I realized, ‘Oh, I really enjoy this.’ I would never have thought of that as a career when I was leaving college and thinking, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ Maybe a bit like you, you looked around and you saw people who needed help and really appreciated it, and you found you enjoyed it.
ILISE: Exactly. I just drove my business, if you will, toward the people, more and more toward the people who seem to be responding and the markets that were the most open and seemed to need it the most, and at the beginning, that was the graphic design market.
I developed a relationship, actually, with ‘HOW Magazine,’ which is how we met. And the HOW Design conference, and I mean that started in… I think it was like the early ‘90s and continues to this day. That has been the platform, that has been the reason my business has grown, is because I found an outlet to my market through that… Again, at the time, it was a magazine, now it’s much more. But you need to find that outlet toward your people because otherwise you’re going to be floundering about.
MARK: So by ‘outlet,’ you mean platform, channel?
ILISE: These days, those words mean so many different things. But it’s all of the above. Sometimes it’s a trade association where the list of members is your prospect list and the events that they put on are the places where you can do your strategic networking and meet the people in person, which is the way you have the most impactful effect on them. And so, it could be that or it could be a website, or it could be something online, or all of the above. It really just depends on the market.
MARK: Right. I hear this, I’m sure you hear this when people come to you and say, ‘I really want to grow my Facebook or my Instagram following, or Twitter,’ or whatever it may be. But they haven’t really thought about who they’re trying to reach and where they like to get their information from.
ILISE: I think about that as doing marketing backwards. When you start with the tools, when you start with the social media platform and then try to apply yourself or your business to it, and the frontwards way of marketing is starting with the market. ‘Who am I trying to reach?’ ‘Oh, I’m trying to reach creatives.’ ‘Okay. Where do they go? Are they on Instagram more than they’re on Twitter, or Facebook, or LinkedIn?’
I’ve been talking a lot about LinkedIn lately because it’s like a Google for business and it’s a database of professionals, but some of the people that I work with can’t find their market on LinkedIn because they’re not there. So you shouldn’t use it. Even though I’m talking a lot about it, it really depends on where your market is. I had an example yesterday with one woman who was talking about her market being municipalities and people who run cities. So, those people, it makes sense to me, are not on LinkedIn, so that’s not the outlet for her.
MARK: And so there’s the outlet, the channel, or the space where you can reach and communicate with people. Another word you’ve been using a lot today is ‘content.’ Could you expand a bit on what you mean by content and how that relates to marketing?
ILISE: Yes. Content, I think of as information that is relevant to your market, to the people you’re trying to reach, to the people that you help, and it’s not about you, it’s about them and what they need and only about you in so far as how you help them.
So by content, I mean the material on your website, for example, which you might think is a paradox, ‘What do you mean my website is not about me?’ Yes and no. What I call a marketing-smart website is a website that is first about your market and then and only then, about you in the context of how you help your market. So, it would be different for a fine artist or a poet, but still, if you can speak as much as possible to what people appreciate about the work and emphasize the things they would be the most interested in.
I’ll give you an example that comes to mind. I know that people who follow any type of creative love to know what’s happening behind the scenes. What is the before and after of the work? What is the process like? It almost feels to me like a vicarious wanting to be an artist yourself, but you know you’re not, so, ‘Let me learn about how this artist does his or her work.’ So, a marketing smart website for that kind of artist would reveal the details about what’s happening behind the scenes because that’s what the customers or clients are most interested in.
MARK: That’s a really nice example. In fact, we have a whole TV show over here, in the UK called What Do Artists Do All Day? And it just takes famous artists and it answers that question. And I think a lot of artists don’t realize they live the most fascinating lives in terms of the nuts and bolts of what goes on in their studio and the equipment that they use, and the processes, and the techniques, and the history of all of that, which is very easy. You can get used to it and you don’t notice it.
And you maybe you’re surrounded by people where that is normal, but to your potential fan or your customer, that’s the magic. That’s the artist world. So, just sharing a bit about how you make the stuff that you make and what the ingredients that go into that and how your day goes, it’s a huge source of inspiration for content if you’re not sure what to write about or what to talk about.
ILISE: Or what to show, yes. And just to reinforce what you’re saying, the idea, the big idea is that most of us don’t know what we know. We take it for granted. It comes naturally to us. And even when we see, ‘Oh, yeah, I guess I could share about that. Why would anyone want to know about that?’ That’s the attitude that often comes up first. But if you could see it from the customer’s point of view, you would understand, ‘Oh, yeah, this is not their life. And they may have a little wish to be an artist.’ I really think many people do. Or a writer, especially everybody wants to be a writer.
And so, to see into or behind the scenes of what an artist is doing, that is very appealing to them. So, you have to step out of yourself and see yourself from someone else’s point of view, especially the people you’re trying to sell to, no matter what you’re trying to sell.
MARK: So supposing I’m listening to this and it’s hitting home a bit, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, Ilise, you’re right. I really do need to start making a habit of putting my work out there, putting myself out there, but it all seems so intimidating and overwhelming. There’s so many people with big audiences out there already. There’s all different options for platforms and outlets I could choose. Where do you suggest I start? If I wanted to, say, get going on this this week?’
ILISE: I agree that there are way too many ways to do this and too many platforms and too many tools, and that’s part of the problem. And so what I’ve tried to do is narrow it down to three. And I’ll tell you what the three are and then come back and answer your question about what someone can do right away.
So the three are strategic networking, so choosing where to go in person, ideally or online, if you can’t find anywhere in person to meet the people who would be the most interested in what you have to offer. The second one is called targeted outreach, where you do hyper-customized, super personalized, one-on-one outreach in all different media. It could be on social media, it could be an email, it could be on the phone, it could be through the snail mail, the old-fashioned snail mail. Someone yesterday asked me, ‘Is it bad to send something through the mail?’ I’m like, ‘No, nobody’s doing it anymore. Please do it.’
MARK: It’s the one inbox that’s empty!
ILISE: Exactly. But it has to be totally customized for the person so that they know they’re the only one getting it, it’s not going to 1,000 or even 10 other people. That’s what makes them pay attention to it. So that is labor-intensive and you have to do your homework.
And then the third tool is content marketing, what I call Bat Signal Pain Point Content Marketing. So when those three things work together and you connect the dots of them, that’s when it has an effect. You can’t just do one and not the other ones because it’s too random. And there are just so many different ways you have to connect with people and I’ve found that these are the three that work together.
So, if you were to think about how you might begin using these three, I would start with the market. You always start with, who do I need to find? Not what do I need to do, but who do I need to find? And so, maybe it’s just a survey of all the different people that you’ve either worked with, or sold to, and choose the one, two, or at the most, three that you would like to clone. How can you find more of the people like that one, or two, or three because it was the most lucrative, or because it was the most satisfying creatively, or because it was the most fun, or whatever you care about, how do you find more of those people? That’s the place to start. Who are those people?
MARK: Okay, Ilise. I’m a poet. I can’t let a little metaphor like Bat Signal go under the radar. What do you mean by Bat Signal Content?
ILISE: That metaphor refers to the idea that you will be communicating a message that will be like a Bat Signal to those people that you are looking for. So let me try to give you some examples. You brought up mine at the beginning. And this is what I used to say at the very beginning when someone would ask me what I do, my, ‘Elevator Pitch,’ right? How I answer the question, what do I do is, or was, ‘I help creative professionals who hate self-promotion.’ That’s the Bat Signal. I don’t tell you anything about what I do, or how I do it, or anything. I just say, ‘I help creative professionals who hate self-promotion.’ If you hate self-promotion, then that’s going to be the Bat Signal and you’re going to be like, ‘Oh, she knows me. She gets it. She can help me.’
MARK: Yeah. I think there’s probably quite a lot of people listening to this who could feel a little twinge when you say, ‘I hate self-promotion.’
ILISE: Right? That’s a Bat Signal. So, what is that Bat Signal for you and these people who I just said you’re going to choose because one message does not apply to everyone, so you have to know exactly who you’re trying to reach. And I don’t expect anyone to know today or tomorrow who they’re trying to reach. This is a gradual learning process.
Again, this is where curiosity comes in, but little by little, you start to listen differently and hear who is responding to you and what exactly are they responding to, and can you use that language more? For example, testimonials. People who give you compliments about your work, what is it that they love? What is it that they compliment on? What is it that moves them? That’s the language you should be essentially regurgitating to the market. That’s your Bat Signal, what other people are saying that they appreciate.
MARK: Okay. I have this lovely image in my mind right now. It’s a jungle and it’s twilight, and there’s all kinds of noise in this jungle. There’s frogs croaking and insects doing their thing, and bigger animals ambling and hopping about. It’s an absolute cacophony of noise, and there’s also, I don’t know, pheromones and scent, and all kinds of communications going on.
But if you’re a bat, you’re only tuned into the bat frequency, that’s all you’re really going to hear. It doesn’t matter what the lions are saying to each other, or the tree frogs, or whatever. And maybe the internet is a bit like that, that it can look intimidating and noisy, but you only need to come through to a tiny, tiny proportion of the people who are out there in order to have a thriving business.
ILISE: That’s right. You don’t need multitudes, you only need a very small group of people. And I think that’s a really important point, so thank you for bringing it up because I think that people imagine, ‘Because there’s so many people out there, I need a mailing list of 5,000.’ No. Choose the top 10, or 20, or 25 people that you really want to connect with and then make that your market.
And the other thing I would say, not only are you only speaking to a very small subset of that multitude, but also timing. I think I mentioned this earlier, timing is one of the most important things when it comes to marketing. And so, the likelihood that when you happen to connect with someone, that they will be ready and willing to pay for whatever it is that you’re selling is very unlikely.
So that’s why repetition is so important and that’s why keeping in touch with people and keeping your visibility high so that they become familiar with you, begin to trust you, know exactly how to find you, know that you’re not going anywhere. The fact that you stay in touch over time, and I’m talking about things like even social media, or an email newsletter, or some way of staying in touch, let’s people know that you’re there, you’re reliable, you’re not going anywhere, and they can find you when they’re in their moment of need, whether it’s a need for a poem, or a painting, or a copywriter.
MARK: And I think this is one of the big things about what you were saying earlier on about the importance of making it a habit. Because on any given week, it’s really hard to say, ‘If I send this newsletter out or if I publish this blog post, or podcast, or video, or if I put these images up on Instagram, would it really make any difference to my business? And I’m busy, and I’m stressed, and I’ve got X, Y, and Z to do.’
But if you’re putting stuff out and by content, obviously, you’re not just talking about sales message, but stuff that is useful, that is valuable, that’s inspiring, or educational in some way, people get used to that kind of drumbeat of content from you. You’re going to be front of mind. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have emailed me and said, ‘Oh, I think I need some help with X, and you’re the first person who came to mind,’ because it used to be the blog, now it’s the podcast. It just keeps you in people’s minds as someone who knows about this stuff and can help.
ILISE: Yes, you become the go-to in their mind because of the repetition. I love the image of the drumbeat of your marketing.
MARK: I’m still in the jungle!
ILISE: Yes, exactly. And the antithesis of that, the resistance that you also articulated, which I just want to reinforce again, is this idea of, ‘Oh, I’m too busy. Is it really going to make a difference in my business if I just put this one image on Instagram?’ That’s the wrong attitude because that’s the attitude that says, ‘What am I going to get from this?’ It’s the immediate gratification – very American, by the way, but global, getting more global – with this idea that I have to get something from every single effort.
But no, it’s totally cumulative and it takes years, truthfully, that’s how long it takes. I like to tell people that it took me 15 years to find my niche and I don’t think it will take everyone 15 years because I didn’t know I was looking for it at the time. But I really think that you have to be patient, and you have to be persistent, and you cannot give in to being discouraged, or frustrated, or any of those things. They will just pull you down the rabbit hole, and it’s very hard to get out.
MARK: And as you described that scenario, putting the effort in every day and not expecting the reward, and it’s never a sure thing and you don’t get the feedback in the moment, it reminded me of the process of writing a book. And I’m sure whatever your own creative field, that there’s got to be an equivalent for you, whether it’s practicing your instrument, or rehearsing dance steps until your arms and legs ache, or whatever it is. Whenever we create something there’s a lot of time that goes into it. There isn’t that immediate reward, where we have to sustain ourselves by our sense of, well, I’m doing this because I’m committing to this as a practice.
ILISE: And maybe that’s another way of thinking about what I said earlier, which is bringing your creativity to the business side of your profession. And so, that level of an understanding of what it takes to get good at, to master the art, essentially, you have to do the same thing for the business side. Yes.
MARK: And going back to the bats, let’s assume we’re down with the idea. Yes, if I can create that Bat Signal Content that’s going to cut through the noise, that’s going to resonate for my customer, my potential listener, or reader, or client. How do I create it and how do I know that it’s got that Bat Signal quality?
ILISE: You won’t know at the beginning and you will only know if your ears are open and you are listening carefully to how people are responding, and again, using curiosity to ask them what exactly they are responding to. Again, bringing the creativity to the business, you have to experiment and test all different angles, and ideas, and approaches until you find, and you will sense which ones are working. You can tell if you listen.
MARK: Bats have big ears, don’t they?
ILISE: They do.
MARK: So, I guess that tells us something. You’ve got to be on high receive, it’s not just about sending the signal out.
ILISE: And I would say this is really, to me, the fundamental issue, an obstacle with creative people when it comes to building a business or a profession, which is you are very focused on yourself, and what you’re thinking about, and what you’re creating, and marketing is the total opposite. It is all about the world out there and the people, literally the people who will be interested in what you have to offer.
Marketing is all about making that connection with those people and understanding what they’re looking for and seeing that they’re not just like you, they’re actually very different, and that’s probably why they’re interested in you, and then using your content to connect with those people.
MARK: An example I sometimes use is nobody looked at Picasso’s paintings the way he did, and his buyers certainly didn’t look at them that way. When they look at it, they see something different to what he did. And what he was very good at was understanding that and putting it in front of them in a way that they would get it and want it.
ILISE: Yes. I think everyone does this, is looking at the ‘competition,’ and seeing only the positive. It looks like they’re getting all the work. It looks like they’re getting all the commissions. And you never see the reality. And it’s really easy to imagine that everyone else is doing better than you are or doesn’t have to work as hard as you do, or it doesn’t take as much effort.
But I think you have to set that all aside because we don’t know what’s really happening for other people and we just have to figure out what will work for each of us. And it’s different for everyone. There’s no formula. That’s another problem, although perhaps creative people are more amenable to the idea that there is no formula, so you do have to make it up if you can be creative.
And again, it takes a ton of creativity to run a successful business. That, to me, is where my creative strengths are. As I said earlier, I don’t see myself as a creative. I write, but I don’t think of myself as a writer, but I do bring creativity, and it’s what infuses my business and keeps it going, and keeps it evolving. I’m always trying to think of like, ‘What’s the next thing I can do? What’s the new thing that people seem to need?’ And so, my attention is always geared outward toward what I can give the market.
MARK: I think this is another big benefit of making your creativity, applying your creativity to the business side of things because then you enjoy it. Technically, this podcast is my marketing, but even if I didn’t need to send anything out, I’d love doing it. I get to have interesting people like you on the show and ask you questions, and then I can share it with other people and they enjoy that. I’ve effectively got my own radio show, and I know you have your own show, and it’s like a creative project in its own right.
ILISE: Don’t tell anyone Mark. But this is a combination of strategic networking and targeted outreach.
MARK: Oh, it’s okay, Ilise. There’s no one listening. [Laughter]
ILISE: A podcast is you choose who you want to talk to and you invite them on the show and you use your creativity to come up with questions that you want the answers to, genuinely want the answers to. And then in the conversation, you are strategically networking with that person. And who knows what will come out of it?
MARK: It’s an amazing adventure. If anybody’s thinking about podcasting, if you enjoy interviewing people, I’m making new friends, new connections every season. And I think I said on the show at some point I realized the best thing about it is I don’t know where it’s going to lead me, but I know if I have enough interesting conversations with interesting and inspiring people, then interesting stuff is going to happen, and that really makes me curious to get up in the morning and do more of it.
ILISE: And that’s the other aspect of creativity that I think any artist has in their art, is this aspect of the unknown. You don’t know where it’s going. But for some reason, in the business part, people seem to desperately want to know where it’s going or what’s going to come out of it. And to me, you just don’t know and you have to follow it and trust it.
MARK: Yeah. I love Seth Godin’s phrase, ‘This might not work.’ And it’s the thing that people don’t want to hear in business because there’s money, and reputation and stuff at stake. But it’s the same as creating a piece of art. If we were guaranteed that we’re going to make a masterpiece, we would all be in the studio first thing in the morning, but we’re not because there’s no guarantee. It’s the same with business and it’s not always fun in a purely pleasurable way.
ILISE: No. And I think it’s not about having fun. I think if people expect to have fun, you’re going to be disappointed because there are a lot of uncomfortable things that you might have to do, but you will learn and you will grow, and to me, that’s the most valuable thing.
MARK: Great. So, time to follow through with that. I think this is a good point, Ilise, for you to set the listener your Creative Challenge.
So this is the part of the show where I invite my guests to set you, dear listener, a challenge that you can go away and either complete or start within seven days of listening to this recording, something related to the theme of the interview that will help to stretch you creatively and professionally. Ilise, what is your challenge?
ILISE:My challenge is to commit to spending 30 minutes a day, every day to work on the business side of your profession and your art and to do it in a creative way.
I have a hashtag that I’ve been nurturing a little bit, which is #MeFirst. And the idea is that you’re putting yourself first – not your clients first, not anything else first. You’re putting yourself first even though that also includes, as I said before, reaching out to the market, being open to the market, but you are making time to do that. There are certain things that take more than 30 minutes a day, but this is just the beginning of a process to make it a habit.
MARK: Excellent. Well, I look forward to hearing how you get on with that one. Ilise, thank you so much. As always, you’ve been authentically practicing your own principles of generosity in sharing your knowledge and experience. And one place people should definitely go is your Marketing Mentor podcast, which is where you share a lot of your ideas around this and you’ve kindly hosted me on occasion on the show.
Where else can people go to get more of your wisdom, and if they want to contact you for help in person, where should they go?
ILISE: The hub of my work is marketing-mentor.com. And you can sign up for my quick tips, which is the way I stay in touch with people every other week or so. And I also offer a free 30-minute mentoring session if you want to get a taste of what it’s like to work with me. And also, I sell some online products, one of which we’ve been talking a little bit about without naming, which is the simplest marketing planner, which shows you how to use those three main tools that I mentioned. So, all that you can find at marketing-mentor.com.
MARK: Great. And obviously, we’ll make sure that the links are in the show notes for this episode.
ILISE: Beautiful.
MARK: So, thank you, Ilise. As always, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you, and I’m delighted I could share you with the listeners on The 21st Century Creative.
ILISE: Thank you so much, Mark, for the invitation.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
What’s Your Excuse for Not Succeeding as a Creative? with Deborah Henry-Pollard
Aug 19, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Deborah Henry-Pollard, a creative coach based in London who describes her work as ‘Using my skills to support creative people who make us see the world in another way’.
She is also the author of a great book called What’s Your Excuse for Not Succeeding as an Artist? where she lays out and then expertly demolishes a long list of the excuses we give ourselves for shying away from doing what it takes to achieve our creative ambitions.
Organisations Deborah has worked with include English National Opera, Cameron Mackintosh, Siobhan Davies Dance, The Society of West End Theatre, Chester Literature Festival and Studio Voltaire.
She is one of the creative business mentors recommended by The Design Trust in London. (You may recall that the Director of the Design Trust, Patricia van den Akker, was a guest in Season 2 of The 21st Century Creative.)
I’m pleased to count Deborah as a colleague and friend of mine, someone who is utterly sincere in her desire to help her fellow creatives succeed, and who also practises what she preaches in pushing herself past her own fears and excuses.
Listen to this conversation and you’ll hear that sincerity in Deborah’s voice, as well as her infectious enthusiasm for creativity and the difference we creatives can make in the world through our work.
Deborah and I also have some fun towards the end of the interview, where I pull out a series of excuses from the book, and she knocks them down as fast as I can set them up.
So whether you’re in the grip of a whole set of excuses, or you just have one or two lingering at the back of your mind, this conversation with Deborah Henry-Pollard will help you banish the excuses and get back to work.
MARK: Deborah, how did you get started on the creative path?
DEBORAH: When I was very young, I wanted to be an artist. That was my dream. And then I went to art college when I was 19 and studied graphic design for a year and discovered that I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t need to be an artist. It wasn’t that thing that was really pulling inside of me that I had to use art to express myself. And so what then happened was a very long term creative journey of trying photography… Writing has always been a constant but I’ve always been curious about different art forms and trying them out. And it wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I started dancing the Argentine tango and discovered my creative home.
MARK: Wow.
DEBORAH: Yeah. Which was wonderful, but the thing that has been so marvelous is that everything that I tried out and experimented with, I still use somehow and has still been incredibly useful for opening my eyes, making me look at things a different way, and making me appreciate how people work creatively. So, it’s been an utter joy, finding my own creative path through lots of different avenues, if you like.
MARK: Okay Deborah, please expand my knowledge of dance. What is the Argentine tango and is it different from the other kind of tango?
DEBORAH: It is. Yes, there’s ballroom tango and Argentine tango. And ballroom tango is the sanitized version, should we say. It was the version that was created to be danced in polite company, whereas the Argentine tango is much more earthy. It comes from all kinds of influences from Spain, from Havana, from… I mean, just amazing, absolutely amazing.
And one of the things that is wonderful about it is it’s all improvised. So there are kind of figures that you can learn. But once you start dancing with someone, you never know what’s going to happen. So it’s all about really listening to that other person, and listening with your whole body, listening with your instinct. And it’s all about collaboration. And I love anything that’s about collaboration. And it’s sort of having a conversation.
It’s about whatever is happening in that moment. It’s all about mindfulness as well. It’s what’s happening in that moment. I used it in a little film I made, which is called ‘This is Not a Film About Tango,’ which is explaining coaching through tango because it’s the same properties, it’s that same engaging with someone, listening to someone actively, and going with whatever is happening. It’s very much about being in the flow.
One of the things that I find so valuable about it when working with creatives is for me, it’s a way of me saying I understand the creative process because, although my creative process is very different, I know what it’s like when you know all the moves, you know the music, you know your partner, and sometimes it just isn’t going to happen. It’s like every creative process when you have that moment when sometimes it’s just blissful, and everything is working perfectly. And other times, it’s like ‘Elvis has left the building, it just isn’t going to happen.’
MARK: Okay. So, again you talk about partnership and creativity here. So I think there’s something here about creative collaboration, right? Because it’s easy to think of creativity as the solitary act. Clearly, that’s not the case with this kind of dancing and a lot of types of creativity, right?
DEBORAH: Absolutely. I love it when you see people coming together and bringing those different creative skills, even with things which you can think are solitary, like, if you’re painting or you’re writing, you can go away and do a part of it on your own, but there’s a great joy in bringing ideas together and getting different viewpoints.
It’s one of the things I love doing, is connecting people together and saying, ‘You’ve got this interest and you’re an artist, and this person has an interest who is a musician. What happens if you come together and find those…?’ It’s those little moments and the points of similarity, which create the connections. And then suddenly, there are much bigger possibilities than there were before.
And I think there are so many myths about the poor artist, the poor writer sitting in their garret and doing things on their own, when actually, collaboration is something that seems to be built into a lot of DNA of creative, of wanting to share. It’s that curiosity. It’s that wanting to create something bigger than themselves.
MARK: Yeah. I’m a writer but even then, there’s a kind of imagined collaboration, because one is always thinking of the reader.
DEBORAH: Absolutely. I’ve worked with a lot of actors who always say that even when you’re doing a one-person show, it’s not a one-person show because obviously, you have stage management. But the important person in the cast is the audience. And audiences vary so much sometimes.
And I’ve been in audiences where I’ve seen it. Sometimes you’ve had a show that is just really struggling because it’s not engaging the audience. And then you go on another night, and the audience is just up for it, I mean really ready. And it’s a completely different performance on stage. Although you couldn’t necessarily say what it is that’s different, it’s just about the energy. It’s that sort of feeding off each other. And the collaboration is wonderful. It happens in music. It’s fine creating music, but if no one is going to listen to it, and bring their stories to it as well.
With artists you look at a painting and you as a viewer are bringing your background, your experiences to that piece of work. And you can see it in a completely different way to how the artist intended. And that can be quite thrilling. You know, when you get into conversation with an artist who said, ‘Wow, I didn’t even see that that was there,’ it opens up more possibilities for them as well.
MARK: You’ve tried various creative fields and learned something from each of them. And Argentine tango is clearly close to your heart. Where does coaching enter the story for you?
DEBORAH: I would have said that it entered about 11 years ago, when I went to a career coach. I was working as a fundraiser and I had been doing that for some time working for charities. Obviously, it’s an incredibly worthwhile job to do, but I never wanted to do it. I sort of fell into it. And I was at that point where I was completely stuck, and I was running around in circles in my head thinking, ‘For my next job, it’s just going to be the next level up in fundraising.’ And I thought, ‘Do I want to be doing a job that I don’t like doing at a higher level where I have more pressure, etc.?’
And it was somebody else who said, ‘Have you thought of going to a career coach?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, not really. I’m intelligent enough to work this out for myself.’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I’m spending so much time just getting depressed and frustrated,’ that I went to a fabulous coach called Cherry Douglas, who alas is no longer with us. And within about three sessions with her, I’d gone from thinking, ‘I feel really trapped’ to, ‘My goodness, anything is possible. I have all these transferable skills. I have all this possibility. I have all these ideas.’
And it was through talking with her about what I’d done in the past and how I worked, that she pointed out that I had always worked in a coaching way so that when I was working with people who wanted projects to be funded, I would be always asking questions, the obvious logistical ones, you know, ‘How much money do you want? What’s the project for? How will it work?’ But it was always also, ‘What are the benefits? Who is going to benefit from this? How are they going to benefit?’ And it was always working like that.
And so sometimes projects I was working with, as I was talking to the person who was coming up with them, these projects will be getting bigger, because they’d be saying, ‘Oh, but if we did that, that could happen, or we could add in that,’ or sometimes, it would be, ‘Mmm, this isn’t quite going to work. I think I’m going to have to go and think about this a bit more.’
And when Cherry put that idea in my head, I thought, ‘Well yes, of course you ask people questions.’ Of course, even when I worked with staff and was managing staff. It was never, ‘This is how you do things.’ It was, ‘This is the result we want to get. How can we get it? What can you bring to the party? What are your skills? What are your insights?’
And when I was thinking about this, I thought, ‘That would be such a wonderful thing to do, to do what Cherry was doing,’ because I knew the benefits this had for me completely changed my life. I thought, ‘I would love to be able to do that even if only a small way for other people.’ And that’s when I decided to hand in my notice on my job. And I thought that I would find a company that would take me on to coach. And I never wanted to be self-employed.
And in fact, when Cherry had said to me, ‘Have you ever thought of being self-employed,’ I just said ‘No,’ very firmly, and we never discussed it again. And the thing that was amazing, I thought, ‘If I leave my job and spend six months networking, connecting with people, I will find somebody who will give me a job doing this.’
And what happened was the day I left my job, I went out with my tango dancing colleagues, and was very hyper and was going, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve handed in my notice. I will never eat again because I’m not employed!’ And they said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I explained, and I got four clients on the first night.
MARK: Oh wow!
DEBORAH: Because they said, ‘If you did that freelance, I would come to you.’ And I was, ‘What? You’ve got to be joking. This is absurd.’ So I said, ‘Well, okay, I will do this.’ And I took them on. And after about another six months, I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to do this, I suppose I ought to put up a website or something.’ So it was always still thinking about, ‘I will get somebody else to do this.’ And that was 10 and a half years ago, and I haven’t looked back. And it’s been the most wonderful experience, and I love every moment of it. And I do truly feel that I have found my vocation. So between the coaching and the tango is just, like, perfection, really.
MARK: Gosh, isn’t that amazing? It shows the difference that it makes when you show up and you say what you’re looking for into the world what can come back.
DEBORAH: Oh God, absolutely. It’s been astounding because I’d always sort of thought that. Because I’d read a lot of self-help books and it says, ‘You have to show up.’ But I was always doing it a bit half-heartedly. But when I put myself out there, it was like, ‘The universe is waiting for you and it’s put something out there.’ And my results were very immediate, but even throughout these 10 years, sometimes things take a little bit longer to show up. But because you’ve put yourself out there, the seeds are being planted, there’s somebody out there listening, it’s going to reach the right person at the right time.
MARK: And maybe it was no accident that your results were immediate. You were there in the tango zone, weren’t you?
DEBORAH: Absolutely. And it was also about building trust because when you dance with someone, you build up a huge level of trust. I was just thinking, what’s going through my mind is, ‘There so many people I’ve danced with who I only knew their names. I don’t know anything about what they do in the rest of their lives or what their families are like.’ But because you dance together, you build up this amazing bond of trust, which, of course, is the heart of a coaching relationship. So, it’s also about the networks of where you’re going to find your clients aren’t necessarily the ones that you think they are. It’s a great business lesson.
MARK: That’s really surprising, isn’t?
DEBORAH: Yeah.
MARK:I was thinking of it in terms of you being plugged into your creativity.
DEBORAH: Yes, absolutely, because we have been dancing. I was just recreating the moment in my head. We have been dancing. We went to see a group called The Gotan Project. It was at the Roundhouse. We had been dancing. So I was completely in that tango vibe, that creative vibe. And so, although I was going over, ‘I haven’t got a job,’ I wasn’t really worried about it. It was just pushing it out there as, ‘So this has happened to me today.’ But it was that creativity and feeling, feeling safe in that creative environment.
MARK: My description of this is it’s like it’s ‘the bigger you.’
DEBORAH: Yes. Yeah.
MARK: And if you show up as the bigger you, then that person can usually achieve any ambition she sets herself. And I always say to clients, ‘If you are practicing your own art, even if it’s completely non-commercial or not obviously related to your business…’ Like my poetry. I know if I’m writing poetry, then I’m a much better coach.
DEBORAH: Yes absolutely. And I’ll take this even further as well because I do public speaking, and I run workshops. And I will be completely honest. It is not my natural home. Once I get started, I quite enjoy it. But I get terrific nerves beforehand.
And one of the things that I do is whenever I go to a venue I have my laptop if I need to. I have all my books, all kinds of stuff you take along, and I always take my tango shoes with me. And if I’m feeling particularly nervous, I will wear my tango shoes because it kind of makes me assume the position. The rest of the audience can’t tell.
I’m not saying I’m the greatest tango dancer in the world. I’m not saying I’m the greatest coach in the world, but they’re the two places where I feel most in flow. And it’s a trick that I say to other people, ‘If you’re going into an atmosphere or a place where, maybe you’re going to pitch or maybe, it’s your open studios and you’re feeling really nervous, have something with you that reminds you of where you are,’ as you say, the bigger you, the best of you.
I know an artist who carries a putty rubber in his pocket. And if he’s feeling nervous, he just puts his hand in his pocket and feels that. He just knows, ‘That’s who I am at my best. That’s who I’m going to be now.’ It sounds kind of a silly thing to do, but it makes so much difference because you just go, ‘No, this is who I am really. This is who I am,’ as you say, the bigger you, and I can do anything when I’m in tango mode.
MARK: Right. And so back when I was doing hypnotherapy, we would have called that an anchor.
DEBORAH: Of course. Yes. Yeah
MARK: It triggers the state of mind, whether it’s the putty rubber, or the shoes, or whatever. I think that’s a lovely technique to use to, to keep you plugged in. Okay. It sounds like you started your private coaching practice almost by accident.
DEBORAH: Yes.
MARK: How did you end up specializing in working with artists and creatives? Was this a deliberate decision, or was it something else that just emerged?
DEBORAH: It was a very deliberate decision. When I started, my first four clients were very mixed. But then I went and did a training course because I’m a little bit like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. I need to have a piece of paper that says I have a brain that I’m actually qualified to do this. And it was a brilliant course.
And one of the things they were talking about then was picking a niche and from a marketing point of view, etc. It was very sensible. And some people were picking areas such as, maybe career coaching or bereavement or divorce, things like that. And I thought, ‘You know what, I really want to work in the creative fields,’ because I always feel that anything that I have ever learned of any value has come from consuming the arts in some ways.
When I was a child, I was always encouraged to read books, to listen to plays on the radio, to watch films, to listen to music. And I just found it opened so many worlds for me. And it was also about the whole thing of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
I remember seeing a Van Gogh painting when I was about four, and of having an almost physical reaction to it. I just thought it was just so amazing. And I was thinking, ‘But that doesn’t look like how I would draw a cafe. It should have nice lines, and it should be correct.’ And this was just, well, you know what Van Gogh is like. It was just color and energy.
And it made me think of, ‘That’s really fascinating. So he saw the world like that.’ And then you look at something else that’s almost like an architectural drawing and you go, ‘Oh, and that’s another way of looking at the world.’ It made me so curious to find out more. And one of the things that I love so much about working with creative people is that it’s about that openness of thinking and creativity, the curiosity of creative thinking that I find just amazing.
And after I’ve been in a coaching session… I don’t know whether you find this, Mark, but I find that I’m usually as excited as the coachee. I come away thinking, ‘Gosh, anything is possible because I’ve always…’ It sounds awful. It’s like feeding off their energy of seeing them as they’re getting their breakthroughs and their ideas. And I sort of go, ‘Oh, this is amazing. There’s this whole new thing about to be brought into creation by this wonderful person who’s had this idea, whether it’s musical, whether it’s visual.’ I’m talking about this, I wanted to be an artist. It’s also a little bit like being an artist by proxy in a way.
A lot of the jobs I’ve had in my life have been around marketing or admin or project management. But a lot of them have been in creative environments, working in theaters, working for English National Opera. So it’s been supporting creative people in some way. And for me, creativity has given me so much. When I was young I had very few female role models outside of being a wife and a mother. And being a wife and a mother is brilliant, and I knew it wasn’t me.
I wanted to see other paths. And so reading books, seeing films gave me openings to other lives that were available, other possibilities. I want to give that back to people in some way. And it’s that thing of realizing that I don’t need to be creating the work. But it’s being able to facilitate that work to support the makers. Creative people are just the most exciting people to work with, I think.
MARK: Amen! Obviously, I’m down with that idea. I can totally relate because when you’re with somebody who’s working at a high level. Picking up on the point about energy, I think a great coaching conversation generates energy.
DEBORAH: Oh, yes, yeah.
MARK: And it’s a real privilege to be a small part of someone’s creative process who’s out there doing things. Nearly all my clients can do things I can’t do, like make feature films or TV or dance or paint or play music or whatever. A, it’s a lot of fun sometimes, and B, it’s a privilege to just be a little part of that process and see how a bit of questioning and reflection and knocking things back and forth can really open it up. And that person goes away with probably more energy than us.
DEBORAH: Oh, absolutely. And it’s interesting you say about, they can do things that you can’t because… I don’t know about you, but I find that really useful sometimes because you can step in and say, ‘So why do you do it like that?’ Or ‘explain how that works.’
MARK: Yeah. You can ask the dumb questions.
DEBORAH: Exactly, the dumb questions, the best ones! Where it makes people step back and go, ‘Oh, well, I hadn’t really thought about that. I’ve just always done it like that.’ And also from a business point of view, I’ve said that public speaking isn’t my natural home, neither is networking, really. I’m quite introverted. I need to gather up my energy before I go into these sorts of environments.
And of course, the great thing about working with creatives is that I get to network, not at sort of the boring networking meetings, but going to private views, or going to theater, going to do things that I love doing anyway. And so it means that I’m walking into a very enjoyable atmosphere for me, somewhere that feels like home. Oh, and along the way, I might get to meet some people as well. It’s a way for me to be able to do all the business stuff, whilst at the same time be nurturing myself and taking care of myself and not putting myself in an atmosphere, which is too stressful.
MARK: Yeah. Well it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it, huh?
DEBORAH: Exactly! Yes. I have to go to the theater. I have to go to private views, whatever.
MARK: Right. And it’s part of your job!
DEBORAH: It’s part of my job.
MARK: You recently published your first book, What’s Your Excuse for Not Succeeding as an Artist? How did you end up writing a book about excuses?
DEBORAH: It was very strange because I know the publisher. It’s a very small independent publishing group called, What’s Your Excuse? that was started by a coach who wrote two books herself. She’s a health and fitness coach.
So one was about eating healthfully, and one was about getting fit. And as she was writing these books, based on excuses that her clients came up with, she thought, ‘This is quite a good format.’ She started inviting other coaches to write on other subjects, and they’re around money and productivity and confidence, all kinds of things. And they’re all really good books.
And I would go along to the launches to support her, never occurred to me to write a book, although I think you and I, at one point, we were having a conversation and you said to me, ‘You should write a book.’ And I go like, ‘No, I’m not going to write a book,’ because I thought, ‘What am I going to write about?’ So it was sort of in the background.
But it was at one of these launches that she said, ‘Have you thought of writing one of these books?’ My first reaction was I came up with a lot of excuses not to write it. ‘I don’t have the time. I couldn’t possibly write that much. People like me don’t write books. I’m actually a coach. I’m not a writer,’ all that stuff, it wouldn’t be good enough, impostor syndrome, the whole lot. So I thought, ‘This is interesting. Maybe I should write this down.’ And I started writing down some of the excuses I was coming up with. And there was a part of me that felt that this had fallen into my lap. But then I realized that I’d been writing blogs for about seven or eight years. And Joanne, my publisher had been looking at those and thinking, ‘Well, she can write.’
I’m not one of these people that likes a deadline. I don’t like pressure. I don’t thrive under that sort of, ‘I’ve got to write X amount words every day.’ So what I did was I said to Joanne, ‘I’ll think about it.’ And I went away and I wrote the first draft before I’d agreed to write it because I needed to know for myself that I could come up with the word count, that I actually had enough to say.
And I started by pulling a lot of my blog material together. And I sent her a first draft. And I said, ‘This is absolutely first draft. I know this needs a lot of work, but do you think that there is enough basic material here to work with?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I think so.’ So that was the point at which I signed the contract because I wanted the process to be fun. I didn’t want it to be a burden.
I can’t remember how long it was in the editing process. And we talked about collaboration. And working with Joanne was absolutely wonderful. I’ve heard some stories about working with editors where people haven’t been entirely happy. But mine was a joy from beginning to end. We discovered very early on that we both share a very great love of Laurel and Hardy, which is a great place to start any relationship, I think.
MARK: Of course. The Masters.
DEBORAH: Absolutely. And it was wonderful because she was very good at pulling me back from my purple passages occasionally. I love the English language. I would refine these beautiful phrases. And she would say, ‘Yeah, really nice, totally unclear. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
And I think one of the things that I’ve loved most is in terms of the reactions of people who’ve read it is that people who know me personally have said that it sounds like I’m just talking to them, it’s kept my tone of voice. I think that’s where Joanne has been absolutely spot-on.
She was brilliant. I cannot thank her enough in this process. It was wonderful. I had lots of moments when I thought, ‘This is just going to bomb. People are just going to hate it. Who do I think I am to write this?’ And it was brilliant because every time this came up, I thought, ‘Well, that’s another excuse.’
MARK: Oh yeah, that’s delightful, isn’t?
DEBORAH: It is.
MARK: It autogenerates its own material as you go along.
DEBORAH: It was. It was brilliant, and it was so great. And, of course, I could use so many excuses that my clients come to me with that throw up things from them. And one of the things that I think is important about this book, and about these series of books, is that when you open them, and you look down the contents list, you immediately see all the excuses written down.
And one of the things I think that does is well, first of all, you go through and you tick off the ones that you’ve got, but the fact that it’s in the book, it kind of goes back to remind me of when I was reading books when I was young, where you find someone who is describing experience that you’ve had. And so I thought I was the only one who thought that.
And so when you’re going down the list, and you’re saying, ‘Oh, yeah, impostor syndrome, I don’t have the confidence, I don’t have the motivation, somebody else must have had that as well. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be in the book.’ And it suddenly makes you feel, ‘Oh, perhaps I’m not such a bad person. Perhaps I am actually getting this right.’
MARK: So, a couple of things. First of all, I think this is a great book because to open it and look through the table of contents, which is basically all the excuses laid out. I think my experience was just you flick through it until I get to the point where I go, ‘Oh, I need to read that one.’
And also the normalization of the excuses, I think is great. I used to say this to clients a lot. ‘You do realize I’ve heard this hundreds or thousands of times from others? It’s just an occupational hazard if you’re an artist or a writer or whatever it is that you do?’ And I sometimes say, ‘I wish I could get you all in a room and then you people share the experience.’ Because then you’ll see how normal it is. A book is another lovely way to do that because, by definition, it’s not getting in the book if you haven’t heard it a certain number of times.
DEBORAH: Exactly. Exactly. And I think the thing that also I think is good about the book is, as you say, the normalizing, I think that’s such a good way of putting it is because we can see excuses as being bad. When we talk about exercises, it’s always about, ‘Oh we can’t do this, we can’t do that, because I’ve got this excuses, therefore, I’m a bad person.’
I see excuses as things which are there to protect us from danger, from looking foolish, from embarrassing ourselves. And they can just be a bit overprotective sometimes. And I think one of the keys about this is, it’s not about judging our excuses, but trying to sort of take the emotion away from it, because you can get into the cycle of, ‘Oh, I’ve got this excuse, therefore, I’m a bad person. And I feel guilty about that.’ And so, it just goes round and round and is an ongoing loop in your head. And I think it’s about acknowledging the excuses, ‘Yes, I have this excuse. So what’s behind it? What is there simple that I can do and then move on?’
And sometimes, it’s not even about completely banishing the fear or whatever excuses. It’s just going, ‘Okay, I’ve got this.’ It’s like that wonderful book. Is it Susan Jeffers? Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. It’s about you can still have those excuses. Yeah. But ‘Okay, it’s there. It’s fine. And I’m going to just…’ Instead of it being a barrier, it’s a hurdle you can get over or you can sneak around. It doesn’t need to stop you.
It’s also an opportunity of seeing what’s important, because I thought about this when I was writing a book, so many excuses were coming up. And every time I knock one down, another one came up. And I thought, ‘You know what, if this wasn’t important, this wouldn’t be happening. I would just say, ‘No, I’m not going to do it, because I don’t have the time, end of story.’‘
But when more kept coming up, and more kept coming up, I thought ‘This is obviously something I need to be doing. This is obviously important in some way, and it’s also something that is pulling me forward to develop me. So I think I better listen to what’s going on here.’
MARK: Absolutely. I love the way you’re reframing excuses and saying, ‘Look, it’s a good sign if they’re popping up because it shows you’re reaching the edge of your comfort zone.’ And the fact that you had so many excuses coming up for you, I think shows you were really leaning into your edge. And that’s probably what made it a book worth reading.
DEBORAH: Oh, thank you, Mark. I do value that. I really do value that. You know how much I admire your books. So, I do thank you. I think also, what happened, as I was starting to tell people… I didn’t tell people for a while I was doing it. I think I’d written my first draft before I said to people, ‘I’ve been approached to write a book.’ And then I couldn’t stop talking about it.
But the thing that kept coming up for me was people were saying, ‘Oh, this will be so valuable, so useful.’ And I realized that as I was writing it, it was almost going back to what I was talking to you earlier about creators. It was my love letter to creative people. Some people may think it sounds a bit wet or a bit mawkish. But at my launch, I said, ‘I wanted it to be a hug on a shelf.’
MARK: Oh, that’s lovely.
DEBORAH: I wanted it to be there so that when you’re sitting you’re thinking, ‘Oh I’m not doing this because, or I can’t do this, or I’m not good enough,’ you could reach for this book. And you could just flick through it, and you could know that there was somebody else aside from your mom, aside from your dog, who thinks that you’re wonderful, and who thinks that it’s worth you carrying on.
So, for me, it was a way of doing some very light touch coaching. There’s lots of very simple kind of exercises. There’s lots of reframing what excuses are just to support you and go, ‘No, it’s all right. Don’t worry, this is just a blip. Get on to the next thing. Try this. Have fun with this. But it’s all right, it’s going to be fine.’
MARK: I think that’s another thing that really makes it as a book. And also this relates to your choice of working with creatives as a niche is just the fact you really care about these people. You really love them. And that shines through on every page.
DEBORAH: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, I consider creative people as my extended family, definitely. I think it’s because I do wear my heart on my sleeve.
There’s a Dior exhibition at the moment at the V&A, which is just astounding. And the first time I went to it, I cried almost all the way around. I cried when I went to the Van Gogh Museum. I love that feeling of being moved by creativity, because creativity is so personal. You know this as a poet. I can’t imagine what it must be like for you when you actually put a poem out there for someone to read. It’s quite soul-baring, isn’t it?
MARK: Yeah. The pulse quickens!
DEBORAH: Yes. And it’s going back to this whole thing of trust, again, in the tango, and in the coaching. It’s about somebody putting themselves out there and trusting that there will be someone who will respond, and who will connect. And I find the bravery in that from creative people is incredibly admirable. And also, it’s such an honor to be on the receiving end of that of being invited to participate in the process as well.
MARK: Well, let’s have a bit of participation now, Deborah. I’d like to rack up some excuses, and then you thwack them out of the park!
DEBORAH: If I can…
MARK: I’m just going to pick some that jumped out at me when I was looking through the table of contents. So let’s see. Where can we start? ‘I don’t have the confidence.’
DEBORAH: Oh, yeah. Of course none of us on this call, nobody listening to this ever has this one! [Laughter] But we all do. It’s one of those things where we tell ourselves that we can’t do something. Public speaking, for instance. I use that one a lot. I’ve done a lot of public speaking things which have worked. The one I can remember in the greatest detail is the one that didn’t, where the tumbleweed was rolling across the room. And we do that so often.
One of the things I encourage clients to do, and this is an incredibly simple thing, is to create a confidence list of 10 things that you have done that you felt really proud of and confident of. So in my case, it could be the tango. Maybe you run a marathon, maybe you’re a really great cook, maybe it was when you got that particular piece of work in an exhibition, maybe it was when you got a really good testimonial, and you can remember the feelings of that moment of how that really felt for you.
And you can list this down, and you can put them on your phone, you can put them at the back of a sketchbook or a back of a notebook. And when you’re thinking, ‘Oh I really don’t know if I can do this. Hang on a second. I did these things. And I did them really well.’ It’s again, it’s pulling out the biggest self that you were talking about earlier, that we can forget about. But it’s having an instant list that you can just refer to and go, ‘That’s who I am at my best. And I’m just going to step into that now. And I can do this.’
MARK: Next one. ‘I’ll never be as good as dot, dot, dot…’
DEBORAH: Yes. We all have that. ‘I’ll never be as good as Mark McGuinness.’ That was one, I will be honest, that went through my mind when I was writing this book. No, it’s true! It’s true. But why would you want to be like someone else? This is something I ask. Absolutely, use other people for inspiration, learn from them, ask for them. I’m a great believer in picking other people’s brains for insight and feedback. But the key to creativity is surely your authenticity. And it’s recognizing the fact that you bring something very, very special and very unique to the party.
It’s very frustrating when you see somebody who can do something brilliantly. But you have to remember they didn’t start off like that. Nobody came hurtling out of the womb with a 2B pencil saying, ‘I know how to draw perspective.’ People practiced.
And it’s about practicing, forgetting the finished work almost of your role model, and remembering the behind the scenes practice and their commitment to turn up and do the work. It’s doing that, it’s doing the practice, and it’s remembering that whatever you produce is yours. I’m just remembering something. I told you I did a year of art. One of my art teachers actually turned up at my book launch. She’s a fantastic watercolorist.
I used to love the idea of being watercolorist, and I couldn’t do it, I thought. And when I was talking to her at launch, I said, ‘I always wish that I could have been a better watercolorist.’ And she said, ‘The problem is with you that you think that you can’t do watercolors because you can’t produce them like other people. But you actually produce really good watercolors of your own.’
And I thought, ‘Oh, oh, right. Okay,’ because I was trying so hard to be like other people. And that’s what we try so often to do. And it’s great to try other people’s styles on and to try other people’s techniques, it’s a fantastic learning process. But then if you produce something that doesn’t look or sound like somebody else’s work, that’s actually the advantage. That is the thing that makes you different, it’s the thing that makes you unique, and it’s the things that people will respond to.
MARK: Next excuse: ‘It’s self-indulgent.’
DEBORAH: Yes. ‘Get a proper job,’ is also the other one, I think. And because of this, people perhaps don’t market themselves. They’re reluctant to charge the right prices for their work. Some can even feel guilty when they sell work when things are going well for them.
Something I hear a lot, which is… you said it earlier about bugbears, is about people who I say to them, ‘So have you sold work?’ ‘Yes, but only to friends.’ Your friends don’t have to buy your work! They really don’t have to buy your work. They buy it because they want it. And I always say to artists, ‘If I say to you, ‘Have you sold work?’ just say ‘Yes,’ Don’t add the other bit.’
Hopefully, when you’ve heard me talk about what creativity means to me, it’s about what you are generating for other people. Here’s a silly example. If you think about footwear, all we actually need in footwear is something that’s going to keep our feet warm and dry. So we could all just walk around in one pair of Wellington boots. That’s what we need for practical reasons.
But we want all those intangible benefits that shoes give us how they feel, what it says about us, what other people will think about us through wearing these really funky shoes, and things like that, how we express our personalities. And so we need shoe designers. We need people to create things to enhance our environments. We need people to create things that will make us happy that will give us enjoyment.
Okay. This is something silly. Before I came on the line with you, I put on a piece of music, and I danced around my sitting room to get some energy up and to get me kind of, ‘Yay I’m ready to be out there and to talk.’ And I could have danced in silence, I guess. But having that piece of music, having that inspiration from somebody else, it just really helped to get me in the zone, as they say. So we all need something.
Even people who say, ‘Well, I don’t go to art galleries, I don’t go to museums, I don’t go to opera houses,’ they all consume creativity every day, everything around us. And so we need people who are original thinkers, who can see things in a different way to inspire us. So, it’s not self-indulgent, it’s one of the most giving things, the most contributing professions that you can be involved in, I think. And we need you.
DEBORAH: Your country needs you! Yes. And we need you for well-being. We need you for just making us feel better about ourselves. We need you to educate us, the films that you make, giving us insights into other people’s lives, the world’s, other things thinking.
I’m just so sold on the people who are creative. It’s not self-indulgent in the slightest. So it’s when you’re creating a piece of work, if you have that feeling coming up, just think about the effect that your work is going to have on someone else, and the benefit, the joy it’s going to give to someone else.
MARK: Thank you, Deborah. I think that’s a really nice place to land. So, maybe now would be a good time for you to set our listener your Creative Challenge. And for anybody who’s new to the show, this is the part of the interview where I asked my guests to set you, the listener, a challenge that will stretch you creatively and probably personally as well. And it’s something that you can do or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation. So Debs, what’s your Creative Challenge?
DEBORAH: Well, to give you a little bit of preamble, when I was writing the book, a lot of people said… because it’s called ‘Succeeding as an Artist,’ they asked me what I meant by succeeding. And they expected me to say, ‘Well, obviously million-dollar incomes, being game-changers or thought leaders, being a household name, all those kinds of things,’ which is great if that’s what you want to become, want to be. But we all have our different aspirations and priorities for our lives. Some it’s about the tangible things, recognition of others. For others, it’s about the self-development, self-expression, million other things.
And also, although I am a very great believer in setting a long-term vision for yourself and goals for yourself, success can often feel like it’s something that you’re chasing that you will get one day. But it can be something which is your daily motivation the successes you have every day. To give you an example, my company is called Catching Fireworks. I love kind of fireworks imagery. And for me, success, and you’ll understand this, Mark, it’s that moment when you’re working with a client, when you see that something has just shifted. It could be something in the body language, a light in the eye. And I call it sort of the ‘light the blue touch paper moment.’ It’s that moment when you know something isn’t going to be the same for them again. And I ride on the back of that success.
Now, it doesn’t happen every single session, but it happens a lot. So I ride on the back of those… well, they’re not small successes for the people concerned but those successes, and that keeps me going for my longer-term vision, which is I want to still be doing what I’m doing when I’m 80 because I still want to be working with people who are coming up, and helping them to get their creativity in the world.
So what I would like the challenge to be is to take some time out, and to think about what success means to you. And this is not the oughts and the shoulds or the other people’s expectations, but what it really looks like for you. And if you can, maybe distill it into one idea, or an image, or a phrase, like my ‘light the blue touch paper,’ that you can use as a reminder and an aid to support you for when all those excuses start popping up. So it’s kind of like, ‘Well, if I want to create this success, I’ve got to deal with this excuse. I’ve just got to handle this and move on.’
MARK:Is this a bit like the equivalent of your tango shoes, or the artist’s putty rubber?
DEBORAH: Absolutely. Yes. It’s what’s that thing that’s success to me. And it can be something the day-to-day and it can be something that pulls you forward.
MARK: And also something that you can maybe either touch or at least call to mind, maybe a phrase like the blue touch paper.
DEBORAH: Yeah. A phrase, it can be a little sketch, it can be a little tangible thing, whatever works for you because I know some people are visual, some people are aural, etc. So pick what works for you.
MARK: Great. Thank you, Deborah. That’s a lovely challenge. And I think it’s one that will be like the instantly practically useful to people on a daily basis that makes success a little closer than sometimes it seems.
So Deborah, as always, it’s been a real joy and a pleasure to talk to you. And I’m really delighted that this time we could share the conversations so other people can eavesdrop. We always have great conversations. So if somebody would like to know more about excuses, obviously, they should go to the nearest bookshop and get hold of What’s Your Excuse for not Succeeding as an Artist?Where else can people go to learn more from you and maybe get some help one on one?
DEBORAH: Well, I have a website, which is CatchingFireworks.co.uk. And that gives you all the information about me. And it also gives you lots of links because I am all over social media. So, follow me and befriend me, and I will be very happy to have conversations with people there. But you can find everything there about my coaching practices about the workshops, and also about the book. And you can also see my tango video there as well.
MARK: Can we embed the tango video in the show notes?
MARK: Okay. This is going to be fun. Okay. So folks, as usual, all the links that Deborah’s just talked about and obviously the link to the book, and the tango video will be in the show notes that you can find at 21stcenturycreative.fm/deborah. And thank you, Deborah. Like I say, it’s been another enlightening and enjoyable conversation. And it’s been a real pleasure to have you on the show.
DEBORAH: Oh thank you, Mark. It’s been a real honor. And I must say I listen to this podcast a lot, and I absolutely love it. So, thank you for inviting me to be part of it.
MARK: Great. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Robert Vlach, a business consultant who specializes in supporting independent professionals and business owners, and the author of a new book, The Freelance Way.
Early in his career, he encountered the highs and lows of the freelance life, and as you’ll hear in the interview, when he figured out some solutions for himself, he made it his mission to help other freelancers with the same challenges.
In 2005 he founded Na Volné Noze, one of the largest national freelance communities in Europe and later, in 2012, Europe’s first think-tank for freelancers which meets regularly in Prague and other cities.
He has been holding freelancing courses for more than a decade, and has consulted on over 300 business cases with individuals, startups, and companies.
He has now distilled what he has learned from all this into a book called The Freelance Way, a very thorough and practical guide to freelancing, starting with the basics for beginners, and going on to cover advanced career strategies and tools for veterans.
Topics covered include productivity, teamwork, smart pricing, business negotiations, personal finance, and marketing.
Robert lives with his family in the Czech Republic and Spain. He wrote the first edition of his book in Czech, and it became a national best-seller.
When it came to publishing the English edition, rather than settling for a straight translation, Robert took the opportunity to revise it and incorporate contributions by world-class experts David Allen, Adam Grant, Austin Kleon, and David H. Hansson. The new edition also includes real-life experiences and stories from hundreds of professionals in different fields and countries, which makes the book highly relevant to freelancers worldwide.
Robert and I have been in touch via email for many years, and when he showed me the book, I knew it was something I wanted to feature on the podcast. He’s someone with a lot of experience about what it takes to succeed in the sometimes very tough life of a freelancer.
His expertise covers many different sectors of freelancing, so he can see the specialist world of creative freelancing in context, and he has some interesting things to say about the specific challenges and opportunities out there for creative freelancers.
So if you work for yourself as a creative, you should find this a very useful as well as thought-provoking conversation about The Freelance Way.
Robert Vlach interview transcript
MARK: Robert you’ve written a great book on freelancing, and I love the fact that it starts with a story about when you were young, and you swore that you would never be an entrepreneur.
ROBERT: Well that story, I think, made me a freelancer actually. When I was a teenager, like, 1991, my parents started their own company, it was a bakery, and they had lots of employees, and they were going all into their business, and I saw how hard it is actually to run a business. They were working weekends, they were working nights, coming home late, and basically, we didn’t see them. We didn’t see them much at home with my brother for 10 years.
So my idea was that doing business is actually very hard and that you have to sacrifice a lot, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. As a kid, I had lots of creative ambitions, and it just didn’t make sense to sacrifice that much only to earn a living, right? At that time I was studying at business school, which was also related to companies mostly, and so it only confirmed my bias. And I didn’t know at that time that freelancing is something completely different, that there is a way to do business on the individual level without a need for large capital, without going all in, without the risks that they have to take.
MARK: So what was it that changed your mind?
ROBERT: Well, actually, it was a lucky chance. When I was 20, something around 20, I went to Spain. I loved traveling at the time, and I was just looking for seasonal labor and to go on with my travels. But actually I found a job and it was actually a freelance job.
I became a web developer for a local company in Catalonia, Spain. I was a contractor for a single client, and I absolutely loved the job because it was the internet industry in its early stages before the dotcom bubble. And so I was the only person in the company who actually understood the technology and the strategy behind it, like how to develop a service. And so I had immense freedom to work on this project. I was working seven days a week. My boss even urged me to take a break or whatever. I didn’t care because I found something that was incredibly interesting, and I was really, really young. So, I had like lots of energy, and I was working nonstop.
So, of course, I burned out after two or three years, and that was another major turning point in my career because I was really, totally fed up with computers. I was sitting by the computer for two or three years and it was enough. So, I had some money, and I decided I want to do something with my hands. And I was always traveling across Europe from Czech Republic to Spain, and I was often going through France, through winery areas, winemaking areas. I had this idea that it would be nice to do something with wine. So I wrote to several wineries, and one winery close to Vienna wrote me back that they would actually need some help outdoors on the field and they took me in for a minimal wage. So I was working one year outdoors, just making wine, taking care of everything that was needed. So I had one year basically to think what I want to do.
And then there I stumbled upon the idea that actually, what I didn’t like about the work was that I was working for a single client. It was almost like being an employee. It was really routine work in the end. And I realized that actually, I liked working with web technologies, but I would prefer to have more freedom. So, that’s where I stopped being like a hopeless amateur and started to think about professionalizing, about working for multiple clients. So, basically, at that moment, I raised my autonomy and became a real freelancer, so to say.
MARK: I get the sense, Robert, that you are an all-or-nothing kind of guy. So, you went from saying, ‘I’m never going to do this,’ to being totally all-in, and then burning yourself out, and then doing a very creative thing, which was stepping away and getting into a completely different environment. Is this something in your character that, when you commit, you really play full out?
ROBERT: Yeah, I do. That’s right. But there’s one catch, basically. I’m not really a person who likes to take risks. So actually, this was a necessity. I was really tired and I was looking for some way out. And the good thing was when I was a contractor in Spain, I actually didn’t realize, and this quite common for so many freelancers, that I’m actually starting to do a business. Because I have a client. And I wasn’t aware of it, and only later I realized that to go fully freelance, it means becoming more a business person.
And then I was really scared because I’m a conservative person in a way, I’m not really embracing risks, and in that moment it was really hard. Although I’m from an entrepreneurial family, I knew from my parents that actually doing business involves taking some risk and doing some really hard work. So, I knew all that before going freelance. And so, I definitely didn’t sleep for several nights before committing myself to become an independent professional. But then when I make a decision like doing this or starting a new project, writing a book, I go all in. That’s right.
MARK: And I’m picking up two words that keep jumping out. One which is really loud and clear is ‘freedom.’ I mean, it strikes me, the word ‘free’ is nested there inside freelancing. You’ve used it several times and talked about the autonomy, the opportunity to work on what you think is important in your own time, even if it’s seven days a week.
But then the other pole I guess in a freelancer’s life is risk and there’s the stress of that risk, and I guess a lot of freelancers live between these two poles. They’re attracted to the freedom, but obviously, they’re not so attracted to the risk! Is this a common pattern you see in your work with freelancers?
ROBERT: Absolutely. You’re right. First of all, for me, it’s always difficult to speak about freelancers and freelancing in general because it’s such a broad phenomenon. We should definitely say here that there is no general definition of a freelancer worldwide. There are various definitions across the world. For example, the American one is really broad. It basically counts in as a freelancer everyone who has some income from a free market. So, it can be a temp, like working through an agency for $10, $15 per hour, and it can be a field celebrity or real celebrity, like we can definitely speak of Bruce Springsteen as an independent professional. Or some famous writer.
So, there is this huge market of freelancing, and so it’s hard to actually make any general statements. But there is a strong division, I would say, between full-time freelancers and part-time freelancers. These two groups, like from the surveys that we made, have quite different motivations. With part-time freelancers who freelance as a side jobs or who are just moonlighters, there’s basically a strong incentive to earn some extra money. So, there is a pretty strong financial motivation and that’s fine.
But the full-time freelances, if you ask them in surveys or in interviews, there is always very strong tendency towards values like independence, time flexibility, mobility, and working from anywhere, doing what they enjoyed, being their own boss or working for their own benefit, which is very important for creative professionals. Because you create something, and then you can benefit from it for years if it’s a great system or word or book, whatever. So, these two groups have pretty different motivations, and you are absolutely right that there are also drawbacks to freelancing.
So because I’m basically business consultant working with independent professionals and business owners, I always see both parts. I see the good part that is always presented publicly, but also the dark side that includes uncertainty from income swings and financial uncertainty in general, loss of work-life boundaries, irreplaceability, some stress related to work.
But I would always say that freelancer basically is a business person. So, a freelancer is not a victim. You can do a lot to enhance your chances and to suppress the drawbacks of freelancing. So, basically, when you do nothing about preventing your risks, it can be a really bad trip, I would say, something that would be a nightmare of a business. But if you work consistently to realize what the main risk areas are, and trying to suppress them in half a year, in one year, in two years, you would be in a completely different situation. So, you would basically raise your immunity towards stress and uncertainties.
MARK: And you’ve worked with quite a wide spectrum of different types of freelance. Would you see there’s any big patterns or differences between creative freelancers and other types of freelancer?
ROBERT: Definitely. Let me start from a broader perspective. First of all, there is a mother of all mistakes in freelancing, and that is basically applying know-how or advice that is meant for companies or startups while being freelance. Freelancing is so distinct because it’s so much connected to a single person that applying even great and good advice from the world of companies or startups leads to many errors.
So first of all, any freelancer has to work with the know-how that is meant for freelancing, for individuals who are working on their good name and who are selling their expertise on the free market. That’s, I would say the most important thing when thinking about freelancing as a business.
And then in general freelancing, you have some very interesting niches, like for example being a professional sportsman. That’s a great example. For example, Roger Federer is definitely an independent professional. He’s a great sportsman. He has his team. He’s probably got an agent for dealing with the media, but it’s him, it’s his own story. And all these people they are helping him to have a long career, to be in great shape, to have a great image, to support the causes he wants to support. But definitely, he needs completely different know-how than a general freelancer does because, for example, with a professional sportsman, they have shorter careers shorter active careers. So, they have to go all-in in a decade or in 15 years. That’s their time spend. They have to get maximum out of it.
And definitely, creative professionals are another niche that is so special. So basically for creative professionals, it’s important to have a broad knowledge of freelancing in general, like general know-how, like business negotiations, time management, pricing, for example, but then also to study know-how that is related only to their niche and they are to use sources like Lateral Action or your podcast. Well, I follow your work for 10 years, and I still believe that this is one of the best resources in the world for creative professionals. So, you definitely know what I’m talking about.
MARK: Well, thank you, Robert. It’s an honor to have such a long-term reader and listener on the show, and likewise. You and I have been following each other’s work for a while, so it’s great that we can be doing this conversation.
I’m also obviously very pleased to hear that we creatives are indeed as special as we thought we were! Okay Robert, maybe we could come back to your journey, again. So you went from completely full on web development, then you went to the winery for a year. How did you end up doing what you’re currently doing?
ROBERT: When I became a freelancer, a full-time freelancer, I started to connect with others, with my friends, and actually found out that they lack ability to present themselves online. So, I started several small websites presenting their work. It was just like non-profit, free work for friends, and actually, it was a great success because they started to have some gigs from this. And so, they were sending other people to me and I wasn’t really ready for that. I was turning these people down for two years.
And then I went to Mexico for a really long journey. I spent there three months and I was spending all day on buses, and I was thinking that I should probably start a platform for my friends and other freelancers in Czech Republic. And that’s exactly what I did in 2005. We started really small, publishing a blog, having a directory of Czech freelancers, organizing trainings, and it was really small stuff because at the time in 2005, freelancing, in general, in Europe wasn’t the primary career option. If you were a really experienced, educated professional, you wouldn’t go freelance, you would go running your own company or being employed. That was the general spirit of the time.
So I started something small and it was for friends, for people I knew, and we were just sharing the know-how we had about freelancing, and we were always looking to the States, to the United Kingdom, elsewhere in Europe, just to share the best practices. And this is definitely something we do all the time, even now. And then in 2008, after the financial crisis and the economic crisis that followed, it all changed, basically, because companies were suddenly laying off people who were experienced and who were before sure they would always have job, and suddenly there were these experienced professionals paying a mortgage, and risking that they wouldn’t be able to do so.
So these people started to shift their careers towards being part-time independent, like doing consulting or doing some freelance projects. So they started to hedge against being laid off or being not needed in their companies. And gradually, this became a Europe-wide or worldwide phenomenon that freelancing became more and more appreciated, like a full-blooded alternative to being employed in some company. So that changed completely what we did with this community in the Czech Republic because the number of people who were suddenly interested in going freelance and changing their careers was mind-boggling.
So at the moment, we are helping 150,000 Czech freelancers and independent professionals, as well as people who aspire to become freelancers in the future by spreading news, best business practices, and freelance know-how. So this is the long story made short.
MARK: I can’t pronounce the name of your community. For any Czech speakers listening, could you give us the name of the community, please?
ROBERT: It’s called Na volné noze and it just means ‘freelance’.
MARK: Okay great. And we’ll make sure we have a link in the show notes, obviously.
ROBERT: Thank you.
MARK: So this has been a huge shift, hasn’t it? Because when we started out in our careers it wasn’t the spirit of the times to be out as an independent free spirit, but I guess we ended up doing it because we had strong internal reasons that we value the freedom so much. But these days I think the environment is much more open and supportive, and there are people like you out ready to help. That kind of help was much thinner on the ground years ago. Do you think this is looking like a pretty solid trend for the future?
ROBERT: Well, nobody knows exactly, but I think the future might surprise us actually. I would say there are two major trends in freelancing at the moment. First is that freelancing is becoming more global. People are able to work for clients anywhere in the world. So basically, you may have people in India or Brazil or Africa working for global clients. If they have some expertise and if they can speak or communicate in English or some other global language, they can pretty easily work for clients from anywhere. So, on one hand, I see freelancing as a great help for people in developing or poor countries, how to improve their wellbeing and how to get out of not poverty, but to not having enough, for example, income to sustain their family.
And the second trend is that basically the younger generation of millennials is having a different preference towards work. So these young people, they usually prefer being more flexible in what they do. They prefer working flexible hours, to choose projects they would like be working on, to work from wherever they are. And progressive companies in the world, they already started to offer more flexible jobs. So basically, what we see at the moment is that people who, in the past, would prefer be more flexible and more free and who would choose freelancing in the past, are suddenly offered pretty solid, stable paid jobs within regular companies. And so, these worlds are, again merging or getting closer.
So I would expect that in the future not so many people would freelance out of necessity because they would have the option of being flexible in employment. And I think that’s great, basically.
MARK: That’s a very interesting convergence of two trends. So okay Robert, maybe we can start to look at the book, The Freelance Way. There was one phrase that really jumped out at me early in the book, which is, ‘You are your capital.’ Could you expand on that, please?
ROBERT: That’s one of the main differences between a standard company-oriented or startup-oriented business and individual business as a freelance or independent professional. We were always taught in school that being a freelance or being independent, self-employed, you don’t need capital for that. You don’t need buildings, you don’t need a lot of money.
But actually as freelancers we need capital, but in a different form. Our capital is our knowledge, our skills – well, we ourselves. It’s also our reputation because if you go freelancing with some history, like professional history, that’s the reputation, as a capital, that you may use and enhance or lose completely. There may be certifications, there will be your education. So everything that is related to you and to your experience is actually the capital that you are putting in, and you are earning money on it while being a freelancer.
We may also say that if you don’t have enough personal capital, if you have two general skills or skills that don’t have a value on the market, that it would be really hard for you as a freelancer to earn a good living. We are basically talking about personal capital being all that. You yourself looking outside on the free market to the world and being able to pick up the opportunities where you can employ these skills, this capital to earn some living. That’s what I meant by that phrase.
MARK: Yes. And, again, I really liked this because it brings together the internal and the external. Again, similar to freedom. For me, and I know a lot of other freelancers I talk to, learning is a really powerful motivation.
ROBERT: Absolutely.
MARK: I always want to learn something. You discover something new. And what you’re saying is by doing that, I’m actually adding to my own personal creative capital, if you like, because it makes me a more skilled person, maybe a more knowledgeable person, maybe even a richer person in terms of life experience and so on.
So this is another thing that I really like about the book. The way you can point out the hard business value of something that maybe somebody listening to this might take it for granted. Well, I’ve always learned. I’ve always created. I’ve always liked to grow and develop. But for you, that’s a real asset for the business, right?
ROBERT: Yeah, exactly. And just this short story; we were doing once a survey among our members, and there was a question how important is to educate themselves or to grow in knowledge? And 100%, basically, said that it’s very important for them.
MARK: Wow, 100%!
ROBERT: Yeah, 100%. These people, they totally realize that being able to acquire new valuable skills is definitely, tightly related to their success in their careers.
And one more note on this, I always say there are basically three levels in freelancers, and this is also something that we should stress out, definitely. The first level is your expertise, so I don’t know, being a ghostwriter, or a writer. And that’s something I don’t have anything to say about, you have your mentors for that, you have your education for that, and this is what the client is paying you for. This is what the clients are interested in. They’re interested in yourself and in your valuable expertise or something you can do.
Then there is a second level, pretty small in most countries. These are like administrative obligations. This is something that your governments want, something like filling your taxes, whatever. I mean people are usually scared about this level, but when they start doing business, they actually realize that it can be pretty easily outsourced and it’s not that difficult. Well, when compared to companies where it’s much more difficult to run the whole administrative area.
And then there is this third area, which is the business, which is actually including what you want. And this is something my book is about, things in the ‘business alphabet’ that you have to handle if you want to grow as a business person. Because what I see so often with freelancers is that you have these people who have great expertise. They’re total experts and mavens in what they do. They are really skilled, but they are really poor in doing business.
So it’s important for freelancers to realize that these are basically two totally independent areas and that you can be great in what you do, but if you fail in business negotiations, and pricing, and being reliable, and self-managing yourself, it will beat you with a stick on a free market.
MARK: Yeah. I’m just getting flashbacks to a few situations where I was involved in hiring somebody who was a really great expert in what they’ve been doing, but the reliability was just not there.
ROBERT: It’s so common.
MARK: Totally torpedoed the projects. But anyway, mentioning no names!
So if I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I can recognize myself. I pride myself on my expertise, but I know I could be a lot better at the business side of things.’ What are some of the biggest things that I need to focus on?
ROBERT: One of the major sore points is definitely finance. When you go freelance, you may have big ideals about freedom, about being independent, but if it wouldn’t work out financially, you would basically need to pack your bag and go back being employed or asking somebody for help. Basically, financial self-management is very important, and it’s a totally underestimated area with freelancers.
For example in a survey, freelancing in America, 2017, that was done by Freelancers Union and Upwork, they were asking freelancers if they understand their finances, and only 41% – 2 out of 5 freelancers – said they do, which is totally shocking. I mean, come on! How can you be a business person and not understand your finances? So basically, this is definitely an area that people really need to work on, and the good news is that it’s actually not that hard. It’s basically something that people overlook, or they do it intuitively and, well, they just don’t focus.
In that area, I would just recommend doing some gradual improvements, like gradually raising the awareness and the control you have over your finances. It can be something really easy in the beginning. It can be, for example, like recording your monthly revenues, doing it for a year or two, and just seeing the trend. If you have the feeling that this month is really low on income, you might just look into your records and find out that, I don’t know, every May is actually lower, that you could have known it. That you could have prepared in advance.
So, this is a basic level. Then you have a more advanced level like doing some financial overview, and actually putting aside some solid reserve because the reserve is a good cushion for most risks that you may encounter. Then you can go gradually to an even higher level and actually starting to analyze your cash flow. It’s not that hard. Basically, on an individual level, it usually means installing some app for recording your spending and then you see in categories where you are overspending. Because what people do usually when they spend, they just don’t record anything, and when suddenly they ask the crucial question like, ‘Where is all this money I’m earning going?’ And they realize that they don’t have the answer.
And you can go on. The next stage probably would be a financial plan, like planning your finances and spending for the future. It would give you a really good overview of how will your finances look in one or two years. That’s pretty easy to do if you have the records. And then the final stage probably would be some investment. So you wouldn’t probably think as a beginning freelancer how can you save for being old, being retired? But, definitely, there will come a time when you’re more advanced, where you would start thinking about how to not spend your money, how not to spend the money you spent and invest them so that you keep them and even grow them, possibly.
So in general, financial self-management is definitely one area to look in. I would recommend it to every freelancer who is a full-time freelancer.
MARK: I like the way you talk about financial self-management rather than just financial management because it makes it a bit more personal, doesn’t it? And it kind of brings it home – ultimately we are responsible.
ROBERT: Yeah, exactly.
MARK: It’s our behavior that either gets us into trouble or gets us into a good place.
ROBERT: Yeah. Actually, this is a good example how freelancing differs from, I don’t know, having a company because, usually, these people are self-employed and they have to manage their personal finance and their business finance together. It’s pretty simple. When you have large costs in doing business, you definitely spend less at home, and when you have large costs at home, you probably wouldn’t spend that much on your business. So, for freelancers in general, these are like closed areas, they are merged. And also, you often use things that you purchase for your business, like a car or home office. You use them for your private life as well. So, it would be really hard to distinguish what part of your home office is for the business and for life.
So yeah, absolutely I agree that self-employed business persons, they have to admit much larger responsibility for their status, and if you fail in this, you are basically risking a lot because you are liable for everything you do as a freelancer. So when you are an employee, and you are not happy with your situation, you may just change the employer. This is not an option for most freelancers!
MARK: Yeah. Yes. We’re stuck with ourselves, aren’t we?
Going back to our imaginary listener, maybe not so imaginary, who’s listening and thinking, ‘Okay. Great. I’m going to get on top of the financial self-management for my business.’ What else should I be paying attention to on the business level?
ROBERT: Well definitely we have to stay with finance because I think they’re one of the major other areas that are underestimated is pricing.
People who freelance, they usually don’t have good pricing skills and especially they don’t have a good knowledge of how the pricing for freelancers should be done because that’s another huge difference from pricing in companies because if you have a company with employees and you have a growing demand, basically, what you would try to do is to expand your production. So, you would probably keep the price at the same level, just hire the next person, next employee, next helper, and you would expand. So even perhaps the best companies, they would even try to expand while also pushing the price down because they would be defusing the fixed costs. But if you are a freelancer, you can’t do that.
When you start freelance, usually you have nothing to do. You don’t have clients, so your schedule is filling up pretty slowly, and then you suddenly reach a point where your schedule is full. And the initial reaction by freelancers, I would say 90%, is that these people realize, ‘Okay, I’m really lame at managing my time.’ So they try to be more productive and doing more work in less time. That would enable them to take in the demand that is coming. But the second or third time you would reach the full capacity as a freelancer. Raising the productivity to infinity is not an option. So, basically, every other trial to enhance your productivity is bringing you less and less increase.
And there you have three major options. Either you will ask more colleagues to do some work for you and create a team and you will expand your productive capacity, and that’s where a freelancer goes towards founding an agency or company. So, putting your brand on that. That’s one direction, it’s totally legit.
And the other option is to raise prices. When you have even larger demand, you raise the price, and there you are suppressing demand from people who won’t work really cheap. You probably don’t want to work with these people anymore or not that much. And the other thing that happens is that by raising the price, you are raising expectations from your clients. I definitely would expect much more professional work from a web developer that asks, I don’t know, €100 per hour than from a student who works for €20. My expectations would be much higher, and if there would be some errors or mistakes, I would be definitely asking for them to be corrected. So I probably wouldn’t mind with the students.
So if we as freelancers raise our prices, we are making it harder for ourselves because the expectations are going high, and so we have to be more professional. We have to be more educated. We have to be better experts.
The pricing strategy is crucial for a freelancer’s growth. This is something that makes you a better expert, that you are earning more and definitely you want to keep that status. So it’s actually pretty great motivation for you to not oscillate in quality. You wouldn’t like to go on a lower plane where you will make errors, like being unreliable, and so you’re making it harder for yourself in growing.
And just to be complex enough, I would say that there is also a third option, which I don’t recommend, and this is turning down work. This is something really shortsighted. You may have growing demand and decide at some point that you would just turn down good work, and this is something that may turn against you in the future because if you turned down bad work, that’s fine. We all do it. We do it politely. We just recommend someone who’s cheaper or whatever, who has some capacity to do so. But when you turn [down] good work that is coming to you on recommendation, you are actually corrupting the good name that forms around you because people would say, ‘Hey, that one is great, but choose someone else because he never has time,’ which is a problem when you already have time.
Well, this rule that you shouldn’t, as a basic rule, turn down good work as a freelancer has some exceptions, obviously. If you are a world-class writer or a field celebrity, you probably would have to do that. But I’m talking about the general rules of pricing. The best way for a freelancer to work with prices is to be ready and be flexible to raise your prices gradually as you grow as a freelancer.
And I may also turn this around and say, for example, if in 2015 you have a price of, I don’t know, like €40 per hour, and I see the same person having the same price in five years, how do I understand it? I understand it that this person, this particular freelancer basically wasn’t growing at all for these years that he or she didn’t move anywhere. Price says a lot about us as freelancers.
MARK: Thank you, Robert. I think you’ve articulated this really well. There’s this dilemma or maybe trilemma, which is that as demand goes, you’ve got different options. And I’m thinking about this from the perspective of a creative freelancer particularly because, as we know, we have our special motivations.
So I’m getting increasing demand. On the one level, I could hire other people to do it, but then that takes away one of my big motivations for doing this in the first place, which is that I’m a creative, I’m a designer, I’m a writer, an actor or whatever. I want to do the work myself, and I don’t want to turn good work away, which is option three. So, what you’re saying is if I increase my prices, then that helps to sift the applications because the better clients are the ones who are prepared to pay more for quality?
ROBERT: Yeah.
MARK: You don’t mind losing the people who just want the cheapest option. And it’s a really interesting point that you make about, then the expectations raise. But you see, if I’m a creative, then there should be a sweet spot, shouldn’t there? Because my personal motivation is always to get better, is to be the best I possibly can at something. So this is another case I think where you’ve got these internal and external motivations. Yeah, you put your prices up, and then expectations go up. But you know what? If you really do value your skills, and your expertise, and your ambition as a creative, then this is, I think, a lovely challenge to rise to, to think, ‘How can I deliver more value? How can I do a better job?’ And I think, ideally, what you’re looking at is a future where you have fewer clients who’d pay you better fees, and you do better work, and they appreciate the better quality, right?
ROBERT: Exactly. And there is so much more behind what you say because you, creative professionals, are special because you work with these internal talents, your Muses, for example, and you have to be sometimes pretty selective in what kind of work do you want to work with or work on.
So I would amend what I said previously. When we as freelancers, are selecting the clients we want to work with, we have so many tools, how to do it, how to select the proper ones, how to select the best ones.
For example, with general freelancers it’s pretty common with the senior ones that they have something like an ‘ethical codex.’ So, for example, I have a friend who has an ethical codex right next to his price list on his website, and he says there, ‘I’m not working for people who produce unhealthy food, who produce arms or guns. I don’t work for this or that.’ So you have several other tools, how to narrow your clientele, and it’s fine. It’s not only about the price, but the price is, of course, usually the major driver because people and clients, they are usually looking at it as one of the first things.
And as for the second part of your comments, there’s definitely a sweet spot, a balance point between the demands and between your price and between your capacity to work. And one of the most complex problems in freelancing is that this sweet spot is constantly moving. So what you need to do is to have a system for personal productivity and pricing – and perhaps even your marketing because by marketing yourself, you are raising the demand – balanced somehow, and you have to be ready on the pricing level, really be flexible on the price, which is a problem for so many freelancers. They are basically setting some price for years to come. And this is wrong.
We are working on a dynamic market that is constantly changing, you are growing as a professional. You are becoming more productive, becoming more in-demand because your good name is growing by doing the good work. And all these factors have to come down to your pricing in the end. I would never recommend a freelancer to have the same price for four years, for two years, for three years. What I would recommend is being more flexible. It means changing your hourly rate, I don’t know, several times a year just according to the factors as you perceive them, and also trying to learn different pricing methods because, usually, freelancers, they use one or two pricing methods, for example, hourly rate or day rate, but they don’t venture into learning new ones. And these new methods, for example, having your day rate or having a success fee or satisfaction fee or variant pricing, these may enable you to price assignments that are somehow special, and that wouldn’t just make sense if you would set price on them using your standard pricing method.
MARK: Yeah. And I bet if you’re listening to this and you’re intrigued by this, there’s a really great section in Robert’s book where he really goes into a really quite mind-boggling list of different pricing models. It’s very comprehensive, but also very clear as well. So there’s plenty more in the book about pricing that’s worth delving into. And also the book as a whole, you really do cover all the different aspects of freelancing, Robert. It’s a really nicely balanced book.
ROBERT: Thank you, Mark.
MARK: We could be here all day delving into the various sections, but one thing I’d like to talk about before we finish up is the process of creating the book itself. Because you originally wrote it in Czech, and it was a national bestseller there, and you kindly sent me a copy when it came out, and it looks lovely but obviously, I couldn’t read it. For the benefit of me and the rest of the English-speaking world, you’ve not only translated, but you’ve reinvented the book, haven’t you?
Can you talk a little bit about the process of producing the English edition when you already had a really solid, successful best seller? Why not just translate that and send it to a translator and go and make yourself a cup of tea?
ROBERT: That was a really life-changing journey for me because I wrote the original book and it was actually really long. It was 760 pages. It was the first thorough book on freelancing in the Czech language. I really felt the urgency and the responsibility to introduce the phenomenon to Czech readers on the complex scale.
Because the book was selling really great, to our amazement, because we didn’t expect a book that expensive and that huge to be selling really well. So when it happened we were thinking that it will be great to translate it because, generally, freelance business know-how is applicable worldwide. It’s not a special Czech or European or American one. It’s basically something that goes throughout history. And it always stays the same. That’s another curious thing about freelancing, that by being a freelancer, you don’t follow a company tradition, but you are following a tradition of craftsmanship that goes back to antiquity. Being a successful freelancer has similar prerequisites today as it had in ancient Rome, for example.
So I knew that the know-how is general and I was always drawing from American surveys and European ones, and other authors, so I was pretty sure that the book can be translated. But then we just realized that it would be just too big for the international market, that it would be rather difficult to present the book from an unknown author from Europe to somewhere in America. So I had these deep conversations with people who were working with me on the book because I wasn’t sure if it can be abridged, if it can be edited down, I don’t know, to 500 pages. And there were two great moments.
First of all, I was writing about it with Steven Pressfield, and I just mentioned that I’m going to edit the book down to, I don’t know, 300 pages less and that I’m not sure if I’m able to do it. And he wrote me back in his virtue-full manner. I love how he writes. When he wrote Gates of Fire it was like, I don’t know, 700 pages long and his agent told him that to sell the book to a publisher, that it has to be 300 pages long. And so, I just realized, ‘Come on, if it’s possible to abridge such a great novel, into abridged form and still keep it that great, because it’s one of my most favorite books of all time, so I’m definitely going to make it with my own book.’
And that gave me the courage to go on with the process. It was definitely hard because we had to find a translator from Czech to English and it had to be a native speaker. That kind of professional that is really hard to find, but we succeeded. And then I had this one that was translated by Eric Piper, and when he finished the book, I was like, well, my voice in some parts would be different.
I definitely wanted to work more on this manuscript. And I started another long journey with my editor, Scott Hudson, who is American living in Prague, and we were just working like another half a year on the manuscript just to make it into my tone of voice again. When I needed to change something, we had long discussions on how to change the translation. And we did it several times over, but, in the end, I think that the English edition, which was then proofread by another professional, Katie Perkins, a great proofreader, is basically an edition that would be generally applicable for freelancers worldwide, and that we want to use as a basis for another foreign translation. So it would be used for a German translation, a French one or anywhere in the world.
If anyone is listening who is interested in freelancing and would like to have this book translated into their native language, they can send me an email, and we will send them a print sample, no problem. It took us one year and a half to go from a really big volume in Czech to 450 pages in English. There’s not a single word I would change anymore in that book. I’m totally happy with it.
And thanks to these people that were working on it and thanks to peer reviewers from all around the world because I just wanted to be 100% sure that if there would be an American reading it or a British reader reading it, that the know-how in the book would be applicable. We approached several freelancers from different parts of the world, from different cultures, and they sent me their inputs, comments. I even edited some of their stories into the manuscript. It was a two ways communication. I really enjoy when people do a critique of my work. I’m always looking forward to that, and I was trying to find some grain of story in it and to add it to the manuscript. I think it’s one of the best ways to improve a non-fiction book that you have these random comments. But these people, they definitely have something to say. They want to share something, and it’s my responsibility as the author to find a proper place in the book to put it in. So, that was the process.
MARK: Well, thank you, Robert. That’s a great story and I think it’s a really good lesson for us all to bear in mind that once we do all the work of writing, say, the 700-page book or whatever the equivalent is for us, it’s very easy to get quite attached to that format of the work and think, ‘Well, this is it. This is set in stone.’ But Steve Pressfield reminded us…
ROBERT: Yeah. He is great.
MARK: … it’s not necessarily… and you may have to go and reinvent it. There’s plenty of times Mimi, my poetry teacher, said to me, ‘No, this poem is completely the wrong shape and size. You either need to cut it right down, or you need to extrapolate it into something much longer.’ I’m also thinking you can actually buy two, in the Arden Shakespeare, you can get two different editions of Hamlet because Shakespeare was constantly rewriting, and adapting, and extending or cutting, maybe if they were going to do a performance at the palace, they might cut certain scenes or add some in. There may be some topical stuff happening. If he wasn’t too proud to get the scissors out and to reshape his masterwork, then neither should we be. And I can’t judge it against the Czech original, but certainly, the English edition reads really well, Robert.
ROBERT: Thank you very much.
MARK: So, congrats on doing a great job on that. Okay, final duty for you today, Robert. This is the point of the show where I invite my guest to set a Creative Challenge to you, dear listener. And the point of the Challenge is something that will be related to the theme of today’s interview and that you can do or you can at least get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation. Robert, what’s your Creative Challenge?
ROBERT: Thank you Mark. I was thinking a lot about it, and I went through all the practices I have in the book just to select the few ones. And I think this one is special because it relates to creative professionals. First of all, let me give some brief introduction. One of the most important topics in my book is a good name; that a good name is something that brings you constant job opportunities, constant opportunities in general. And this good name is an established association of quality between you as a person, as a professional, and your expertise.
MARK: And just to be clear here, you know, when you say ‘a good name,’ you don’t just mean a clever brand name. You mean a good reputation in the industry, right?
ROBERT: Good reputation. Exactly. Actually, a good reputation and a personal brand is something completely different, and people tend to put it in one basket. So, a good name is only a reputation. It’s something other people think and tell about you, and it grows over time by people talking about you when you are not present. When people go to the pub, they go to a restaurant, they mostly talk only about other people.
A good name is something that forms by people telling stories and their experience with you to others. And for it to be told, they need to understand what is your expertise, your expertise has to be understandable in a certain way. It can evolve definitely but it has to be understandable as a story because people would like to tell a story of how you started small and went big.
My challenge is that you can list everything you’ve been doing professionally over the last 5 to 10 years and then just try to tell it as a coherent story to see whether it all fits into a single narrative. Because I believe that you in the first place as listener have to be able to tell that story for yourself and to others, because you would be telling one way or another all the time. And if people wouldn’t be able to understand it, to grasp the whole structure, it’s not very probable that they would be telling the story the way you would like it.
I think it’s great actually to take a look at your career and to identify what were the important points and then tell it as a whole. And it will help you, definitely, to explain your work better because you may find out that the first version of the stories were not really understandable for someone. So, you may want to improve it, and you may ask for feedback like sending it to a partner, to your colleagues and ask them for their opinion. That’s my challenge.
MARK: That’s a great challenge, Robert. And I really agree with you about the value of this. One of the things I do with clients quite often is I challenge them to write the ‘About’ page of their website, which is where they tell a story about who they are professionally, because it’s amazing how many people are not clear about what that story is and who they are. And the thing is, once you’ve written it down in that format, then you know that story. You know who you are and you can talk about yourself much more fluently and confidently in lots of different situations.
So I think this is a great challenge, Robert. If you do this and you are feeling brave, and you would like to share it with us, then go to the comments at the end of today’s interview on the website. So, if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/robert, or if you put it on your website, leave a link to the site or just paste your story right there in the comments, we would really love to read your stories and hear how you got on with the challenge.
Robert, thank you so much. I knew from your book how much you know, and it’s been a real pleasure to spend time with you and hear you articulate it so clearly for us. Obviously, people should go and get hold of the book, The Freelance Way.
ROBERT: Yeah, TheFreeLanceway.eu if they want to buy the ebook. And we will be trying to get the printed version to global markets as soon as possible, but it will be several weeks, a month later, I suppose. But the ebook is definitely available.
And Mark, I just want to add that I totally enjoyed this interview and I really appreciate and follow and recommend your work everywhere because you’re just a great person to help creative professionals, and you have this wonderful publishing history and I also recommend your books, obviously. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.
MARK: Thank you, Robert. Thank you. It’s a delight to be able to return the favor here. And also, where should people go to find you if they’re maybe interested in some – do you offer consulting help?
ROBERT: I do. They may find my website at vla.ch. So, that’s my surname with the dot in the middle before the ch.
MARK: Oh, I see, right. Very clever. And the freelance community, again, could you say the name?
ROBERT: Yeah. It’s navolnenoze.cz. But it’s Czech. So, if you are a Czech or living in Prague, an expat, you are definitely welcome to join one of our events or even the freelance think tank we run.
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you so much, Robert. Really appreciate it.
ROBERT: Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
The Essential Elements of a Successful Story with Erik Bork
Aug 05, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Erik Bork – a screenwriter, producer, script consultant and coach who has won two Emmy and two Golden Globe awards for his work on the HBO series Band of Brothers and From the Earth to the Moon.
For each series he wrote multiple episodes and was on the creative producing team, alongside executive producer Tom Hanks and for Band of Brothers, also with Steven Spielberg.
He has sold original screenplays and written TV pilots for NBC and Fox, and written screenplays on assignment for Universal Pictures, HBO, TNT and Playtone.
Erik also teaches for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program from the University of California, Los Angeles, and National University’s MFA in Professional Screenwriting, and he has been named one of the top 10 most influential screenwriting bloggers’ for his blog at FlyingWrestler.com
The good news for writers is that Erik recently published a book where he shares what he has learned about what separates a successful story from the countless millions that never get past the slush pile.
The Idea is based on a simple and bold premise: that the actual screenplay or novel draft or play script a writer produces is only a small part of what will make it saleable or successful. Because if the writer doesn’t start with a rock-solid idea for a story, then he or she is building a house on sand.
So Erik recommends spending a lot of time and brainpower up front, refining the basic concept of your story, before you plunge in to write the first draft.
It’s a difficult and uncomfortable process, but The Idea makes the task much easier by laying out seven essential elements of a great story, and showing you how to make sure your story works on the multiple layers that are required to really connect with a large audience.
The Idea is a short book but it’s one that changed the way I look at TV and movie projects, and is fast becoming one of the books I buy most often for clients. Plus Band of Brothers is one of my all-time favourite TV dramas, so I’m thrilled that Erik accepted my invitation to come onto the podcast and share his insights with you.
In this conversation you’ll hear how Erik managed to break into the fiercely competitive Hollywood screenwriting industry, becoming a co-writer and producer with Tom Hanks. He also talks about the process of developing his own writing skills to be able to perform at that level when the opportunity came along.
And throughout, Erik shares great practical advice to help you make your own stories more powerful and engaging, and ultimately more successful.
If you’re a screenwriter, novelist, playwright or any other kind of professional storyteller, this interview is essential listening.
Even if you’re not in that category, you’re probably aware of the importance of storytelling to engage audiences and further your career as a creative professional, so you’ll likely find it useful as well as entertaining.
As you’d expect, Erik is a great storyteller himself, so this is a really enjoyable listen and an inspiring example of what it takes to succeed in one of the most competitive and compelling of the creative industries.
The Idea is available from Amazon, and you can read Erik’s blog and learn about his coaching and consulting services at his website FlyingWrestler.com.
The portrait photograph of Erik Bork is by Lisa Gerber
Erik Bork interview transcript
MARK: Erik, when you started out as a writer, what drew you to the idea of writing for the screen?
ERIK: I wasn’t sure I wanted to write for the screen necessarily in the beginning, but I think the one movie that I saw that really sparked something in me was this movie The World According to Garp when I was actually in high school, when I saw that movie in the theater. And of course, it’s a movie, if you know it, about a writer, a fiction writer. Something about that movie really spoke to me and made me feel like, ‘I want to write something like this. I want to be a writer.’
But it took a while for me to fully embrace it, till I was definitely going to be a screenwriter. I went to college, initially studying interdisciplinary, liberal arts. And then I flirted with being a music major and an English major. But there was a really great film professor at the college that I was going to and I took his introductory class. And it really hooked me. So I knew I wanted to write. And eventually, I realized I really want to write stories.
And I think screenwriting was because it’s a collaborative art form. Of course, the reality as a screenwriter is you end up working alone a lot, especially if you’re a film writer versus TV. Even in TV, you’re coming up with ideas for series and pilots, you’re just on your own in your little room. But eventually, if your stuff is getting made, it’s this really exciting collaborative art form. And that’s what appealed to me in addition to just the idea of ‘I want to creatively express and tell stories that move and entertain people like some of my own favorites.’
MARK: And, that little phrase you used is quite significant. You said, ‘If your stuff is getting made.’ Because it’s a very competitive industry, isn’t it? How did you get your break?
ERIK: I grew up in Ohio in the Midwest, far from the creative industry, film industry, and eventually I realized after I graduated film school with a bachelor’s degree in Motion Picture Production, one of the most useful degrees one can have! [Laughter] I decided I really want to be a screenwriter, maybe eventually a writer/director but a writer and do it in a mainstream business. I flirted with the idea of, ‘Do I stay in Ohio and make independent films?’ Which a lot of the people, from my program do. But I ultimately decided, no, I’m going to move to Hollywood and I’m going to work as an assistant in the industry, a secretarial assistant.
And so I researched that a little bit and I found out that you can start as a temp, where you just fill in for somebody, who’s away sick for a day or on maternity leave, or whatever. And so when I got to LA I registered with these temp agencies and with some of the studios that had their own in-house temp pools through their human resources department. And I quickly started getting assigned to these temp assignments at 20th Century Fox Studios. And, eventually, long story short, that led to me working for Tom Hanks’ production company as a temp. After I’d been doing it for a couple of years, I’d worked on a series during those two years. It was still part of being a temp but it was a writer’s assistant job for the show Picket Fences, the David E. Kelly drama, which felt like a huge break when I got that. But then after that season ended, I was back in the temp pool at Fox and eventually got assigned to Tom’s production company.
Tom had just moved his company on to the Fox lot, having been at the Disney Studios prior to that. And it was really just him and his longtime personal assistant. And I was just the temp who was the guy that knew Fox and helped them get their office set up. And then they just kept renewing me as an ongoing temp and eventually that turned into a permanent kind of second assistant to Tom Hanks basically, position and that was when he was winning his back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. It was a really cool time to be working for him as he became kind of the biggest movie star in the world. And actually, it was my job to take the Oscar statuette to the Academy building the next day and get his nameplate put on.
So in my beat-up Toyota Celica I had Tom Hanks’ Oscar on the passenger seat! It’s kind of crazy. So a very memorable part of that job. I was working for somebody who was really at the highest level in the business, but I was still an assistant and I was writing on the side. I was always writing on the side, I’d always carve out an hour a day or something, whether it was early in the morning or at night, or sometimes in my day job, that job, I would have free time during the day because he went off to shoot Forrest Gump for five months and I was the only one in the office. And there wasn’t really that much to do. So I was writing at work some days.
Eventually I segued from writing original screenplays that no one was interested in that would take me maybe a year to write one, to writing sitcom, half-hour spec scripts of existing shows, which in those days that was the best way to break into TV writing. You wrote existing shows, a sample episode to show you could do it. Nowadays, it’s more about writing original pilots. Although there is still some room for writing those spec episodes. And I took a class at UCLA Extension, their writers’ program, in sitcom writing. I just thought, ‘Hey, it’d be fun to try my hand at this,’ instead of these features that took forever. It seemed like an easier thing to write a half hour spec episode of a show that someone else had already created. A lot of the difficult part of it had already been done.
So I wrote a Frasier spec script, it was my first one that I started in that class. And I ended up showing it to a friend of mine who had worked with me on Picket Fences as a fellow assistant-level employee who had recently signed with an agent as a writer, a junior beginning agent, which I had known. And she liked the script, was willing to show it to the agent. The agent liked it, wanted to see what else I had that was original. So I showed her my latest screenplay that no one had been interested in and she liked it enough to want to sign me. So I was working for Tom as my day job. But she signed me and immediately gave me a bunch of notes on the script she’d signed me on, the Frasier script for me to rewrite it. So I rewrote it. And eventually, she liked it enough to say, ‘Okay, now write your next one.’
And so over the course of maybe a year or so I wrote a Mad About You and a Friends script as well. And she functioned, this agent, kind of like a manager would today, very hands-on, would read the outline, read every draft, give lots of notes. Agents don’t typically do that but she was a very new agent at a small agency and didn’t have a lot going on, really. So that was very helpful to me, and eventually, I had these three scripts and she was sending them out. And not a whole lot was happening. But I was starting to feel like I’m moving in the direction of, I could eventually get a staff writer entry-level job working on some sitcom. It’ll probably be some brand new show that I haven’t heard of. I might not like it very much, it may get canceled in its first few episodes, as they often do. But that’s kind of my plan of what I hope will happen.
But life had other plans, in the sense that Tom’s assistant, learning about all this stuff that I was doing said, ‘Oh, maybe Tom should read one of your sitcom scripts.’ I don’t know why she offered that but it wasn’t something I was going to ask Tom, to help me in my writing aspirations. I knew that wasn’t the thing to do in that position. So eventually, he read one or two of those scripts and pronounced me a talented writer and in his own kind of jokey, mocky, funny, warm way, and eventually offered me what became my big unexpected break, which was: what if he promoted me to a new position at his company and if I helped him figure out this mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon, that he had just sold the idea to HBO?
In the wake of Apollo 13 success, Tom wanted to do this mini-series where he dramatized all 12…well, not all 12. But 12 episodes covering all the other Apollo missions and that whole space program. And he had gotten the rights to this book that had just come out. There was a new book about the Apollo program. And he asked me if I would have kind of help outline the series, work with him to figure out the series. He’d sold the idea but we had to do the hard work then creating sort of a Bible that you could then give to writers who might come write scripts on the show. Scripts of the mini-series. And I would also help find those writers. There were a couple other producers attached who were working on finding writers. So I accepted, graciously, that offer!
MARK: You didn’t think too long!
ERIK: Yeah. I remember him saying something like, ‘And by the way if you don’t want to do this, that’s totally cool too.’ Yeah. ‘No, I think I’ll stay in my current job or just leave.’ So that was my initial big break.
And then we started working on that and eventually created this long outline and started finding writers and eventually one of these other producers suggested maybe I should write one of the scripts. So, again, I wasn’t going to suggest it myself but if someone else was going to say it, great! So I ended up then choosing one of the scripts to write myself. And it took a long time for that script to become one that people thought was any good. But once it did, I was then asked to rewrite some of the other scripts that maybe had issues.
And, I was kind of then Tom’s inside person who had been with him from the beginning and really knew his taste, whereas these other writers were hired in freelance who might not have that advantage. So eventually, I was writing, rewriting other episodes doing, last-minute writing before shooting on something that I didn’t get writing credit on. Others, I got shared credit on. The one that I initiated, I got sole credit. And I ended up playing a role as a producer on it with the title co-producer, ultimately that I really just got to be there in the room, in the room where it happens, so to speak, for every single thing that happened. It was casting, hiring directors, on the set, in the editing room, etc. And then by the end, when it won the Emmy and all the other big awards that year for best mini-series, I got to share in that because I was one of like 10 people with a producer credit.
MARK: Well, that’s quite the story. And you can look it out on the outside and say, ‘Wow, that’s the dream gig.’ But to get the dream gig, you really did your homework. You were working on your own writing, you worked out where you needed to be, where the action was, and you weren’t too proud to go in on the ground floor and make yourself helpful and be on hand when somebody asked the question, ‘What do you have?’
ERIK: Yeah. I wasn’t too proud because I knew I was nothing. I had nothing. I was a kid from Ohio. I was lucky to have a secretarial job at 20th Century Fox of all places. It was like a dream come true. So each step along the way, it wasn’t so much humbling myself as, as it was, here’s the next step forward that I could take.
MARK: But I do want to highlight it, because sometimes I talk to writers, and they think, ‘Well, I’ve written all this stuff, why am I not getting anywhere?’ And they’re not putting themselves out there. They’re not being in the arena where the opportunities happen. I love the fact that you approached it on both fronts.
ERIK: Yeah, it really does help. I mean, people ask, ‘Do you have to live in LA to be a screenwriter?’ And the answer is not technically, especially if you’re writing features as opposed to TV, but it helps. And it especially helps if you can have a day job in the industry, which, most people do that when they’re still in their twenties, fresh out of college like I was. It’s kind of hard to make a midlife change and go do that. But, a lot of people that end up breaking through as writers did have that kind of job, especially in TV, a lot of people become writer’s assistants on a show and eventually get a chance to write an episode of that show. It’s like the most natural segue. There’s no other way that where you’re already on the inside, kind of on the brink of it, than that.
MARK: Okay, so you worked on From the Earth to the Moon, which was a terrific series and a great success. And then, if anything, you topped it with Band of Brothers, which really is one of the landmark TV dramas and it was a huge success. It obviously had Hanks involved. I was looking at your co-producer credits include Steven Spielberg as well! I mean, what’s it like to work on one of these big productions where there’s an awful lot at stake? And everyone knows this could and should be a big success. What kind of pressure do you experience that? Or what kind of atmosphere is there day-to-day?
ERIK: I honestly didn’t ever experience the pressure of, ‘This has to be a big success.’ I mean, there was pressure of like, ‘What’s my role in this?’ And if I’m writing a script, I want the script to be good. But the overall pressure of the mini-series being a success, I mean, I was fortunate, I guess, to just be able to work on making it as good as it can be and not feeling like, I am the one who’s signing my name to this and is going to be judged or, it’s all on my shoulders. Because when Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are the executive producers, it’s really their project and you’re working for them, you’re helping them do it.
And, they’re such mammoth names that HBO very much trusts them and leaves them alone and lets them do what they want to do. So I’m really working for them as opposed working for HBO or feeling like, I’m having to make this on my own. I’m part of a really big team. But so I wouldn’t say it really kind of had that pressure cooker feel necessarily. I suppose at times it did.
But we had months and months and months to be writing before we started shooting, not to say there wasn’t a lot of rewriting and stuff happening while we were shooting because there was, but it wasn’t like when you’re on a network series where you’re having to churn out episode after episode and you’re writing and shooting and editing all at once, and the ratings are coming in and you could get canceled at any moment. That actually is more of a pressure cooker in a way. With HBO it’s like, you’re not going on the air until everything is complete and it’s all done.
And once you go on the air ratings aren’t really the main concern. It’s reviews and awards and both mini-series did really well in those two aspects. So that was cool. And it was kind of a reuniting of some of the same key people that have worked on From the Earth to the Moon in terms of producers, directors, and writers as well as a bunch of new people.
And Steven Spielberg being the main new person, Tom and he had done Saving Private Ryan and Tom had now done this one mini-series and I guess they got to talking about, ‘Let’s do a another HBO historical mini-series together this time.’ And they picked a Stephen Ambrose book, Band of Brothers, to adapt. And then there were a team of us writers. And I, again, got to be a writer/producer. But, we shot it in England. It was really fun to be able to spend many months living in London and shooting there. So it was definitely step up in the sense that, From the Earth to the Moon was shot in Orlando, Florida. Nothing against Orlando, Florida but London was kind of more fun.
MARK: Okay. I guess from this side of the pond, Orlando seems relatively exotic!
ERIK: Perhaps.
MARK: And maybe getting a bit closer to the theme of your book, which is called The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage, or Fiction, what do you think it was about Band of Brothers that made it such a big hit? Obviously, it had a lot of backing behind it, but it really it won all the awards, broke all the records. What was it, do you think, about that particular central concept at the heart of that series?
ERIK: Well, I think the theme, right there in the title it was about brotherhood. And so it wasn’t a war project that was just about, let’s save Private Ryan and bring him home, or, let’s, defeat Hitler on D-Day. In my mind, there are two kinds of war movies. There’s the mission-oriented movie like Saving Private Ryan and then there’s the kind of, hell of being in war, sort of movie like a Platoon or something, right? You’re either rooting for the mission or you’re focused on war is hell and dehumanizing and this individual who’s stuck in this war situation, we feel for and relate to. So Band of Brothers did both and it did it with this focus on here’s these group of guys that you’re supposed to care about and care about their relationship with each other.
And we’re tracking them through the entire experience of the war, which I don’t know that anyone had quite done that before. So there were missions each episode, some of them triumphant, some of them not. And the missions were exciting to watch. But it was also getting invested in this group of people and their bond with each other, knowing that over time, some of them are going to die or be horribly wounded and are going to leave and new ones are going to come.
And so I think it’s that combined with HBO spent a whole lot of money to make it look and feel really authentic. And the people who pulled that off, production designers, cinematographers, etc., did a really amazing job with making the audience feel like they’re experiencing war.
And I think both of those things, Saving Private Ryan was a direct, inspiration and model for because it was also trying to be about a group of guys you cared about who had a mission. It also depicted war, World War II, in a new way that people felt was incredibly authentic and placed you there in a way that nothing else had done before. And so the lessons from that, Steven Spielberg used directly, put those into the mini-series in terms of him kind of coaching the directors and all of us and so we definitely were on the shoulders of that movie, I think.
MARK: Okay, let’s start to think about your book, The Idea, because there’s a load of books written about the whole process of screenwriting. But I think you’ve done something really new here, which is, before you get too far into the nuts and bolts of the script and the story arc and the character development and plot and so on, what is the basic concept at the heart of your story? How did you get the idea for The Idea?
ERIK: I’ve been coaching writers for the last 10 years on their stories and screenplays and series ideas and teaching screenwriting a bit, as well as continuing on my own projects and experiencing all the hills and valleys of a screenwriting career. And what I’ve realized over time is that the biggest mistake writers make and I very much include myself, is that we tend to want to jump into the writing process too quickly before we have an idea that’s really, truly, ‘viable’. And we don’t realize, of course, that it’s not truly viable because we probably don’t get feedback on the idea the way we would on the finished script.
But I think that tends to be a mistake because when I read a client script, because usually people come to me with a finished script and just want me to give feedback on it, as opposed to an idea. And they want me to help them as they develop it, although I do that more these days. But historically, it’s been, ‘Here’s my finished script, what do you think?’ And I would say that 90% of the notes I have, the notes that are the most critical, the most important, the most needing to be dealt with, are notes on the basic concept for the story. On those first decisions that they made, and almost forgot about and took for granted as they then spent months, or even years working on structure and outlining and writing script drafts.
Now, of course, there’s a level of professional execution in terms of scene writing and structuring that has to be there. And most of these writers don’t have that, either, because it’s definitely a long road to get to the point where you can write at that level. But I would say what I’ve noticed is that most screen writing books and classes and most writers are focusing on story structure and scene writing and not so much, is the idea worth writing? What is the basic idea?
But it’s really an idea business and I learned on the business side even when I was developing TV ideas as my only thing, I was pitching ideas to my agents and hoping they would like one, and then I would go pitch it out into the world and hope to sell it. And sometimes sell, and sometimes not, and write the pilot. And all that whole TV development world, I really learned that the fundamental idea that you could pitch in a two or three sentences even in TV, matters hugely to the project’s chance of success. And it’s really not easy to come up with an idea that ticks off all the boxes that would make someone like my agents at CAA, or a producer, or a network executive say, ‘That’s something we want to do. That’s a potential hit show.’
And sometimes it’s an idea that’s not that different from things that have come before. And it just has like one key fresh element or twist to it. Or sometimes it’s something that feels just like strikingly original. But it’s definitely, the whole idea of a logline, it’s not just, ‘Oh, I need to be able to give the two or three sentence version of my project so that people have something to refer to it as.’ It’s actually that two-to-three-sentence version will reveal if it’s a viable idea to begin with or not.
So working on lots of different ideas that can be expressed pretty briefly like that. And understanding what those ideas need to have to be sellable is something that I’ve become rather obsessed with both in my own work and in working with other writers. So I didn’t see other books out there that did this. And I felt like it was the one thing I was obsessed with, which is, let’s slow down and make sure the idea works before we start structuring it and writing it.
So the whole book, and it’s inspired by blog posts I had done over the years where I would touch on some of these things, is really about, okay, if we take that philosophy and that approach, the book’s not focusing on story structure or scene writing really hardly at all, what are the elements of a viable idea? How do you figure out if you have them? And how do you incorporate all of them?
So that’s what the book became, this acronym for what those seven elements are using the word PROBLEM as the acronym, because every story’s about a problem or every series is really about a problem that feels like it can never be solved until maybe the very end.
MARK: And again, I really want to dig into the elements of the problem first, but just to back up slightly, you’ve got this really provocative rule in the book, which I love called the 60/30/10 rule. Can you explain what that is and why it matters?
ERIK: Yeah, that’s in terms of the percentages. They add up to 100%. So in terms of the three things, the three elements of a project or the three levels of writing, there’s the basic idea, then there’s the story structure, and then there’s ultimately the scene writing, the words on the page that we all see.
In terms of how important they are, my rough guesstimate is that 60% of what makes something ultimately ‘sellable’ enough, or perceived as good by the greater world is in the basic underlying idea that you could express in a page, or less, or even a logline, 30% is in the structural choices, and 10% is in the actual scene writing.
Now, again, those structural choices and the scene writing, if they’re not professional level, can totally, screw you. But in terms of the importance, the hard work, the time spent, not necessarily the time spent, but the ultimate value to the project, it’s like getting the idea right matters more than half and everything else is, less than half.
MARK: I love what you said just now, it’s important to slow down at the beginning because I think so many of us, whatever we’re writing, we’re so eager to get words on paper, and feel we’re being productive, and feel we’re getting somewhere, and we’re getting our daily word count, a lot of writers use. But what you’re saying is really at the beginning, maybe, that fewer words is better and more thinking is better. But that I guess that feels uncomfortable?
ERIK: Well I think it does because yeah, we’re all that way and I’m still that way. I struggle with doing this myself on my own projects because you do want to get to the writing. And often the writing, especially, when you’re writing actual scenes is more fun and playful than the idea generation process, which feels very amorphous and very like, oh, like, you’re just moving these building blocks around and it can be hard to make that feel fun and creative. The one caveat, I will say, because I’m imagining some of your listeners now may be balking at some of this, is this book is really aimed at commercial fiction or screenwriting.
I’m not sure it applies so much to literary fiction or anything that you might see as artistic, experimental, more niche audience. This is more if you’re trying to sell your work, reach a large audience, make a living at it kind of thing. And I’m not saying that’s the better approach, by the way, for a creative person either. I’m just saying that that’s what I’m trying to do and the people that come to me are mostly trying to do that. And my dealings with the industry, the mainstream industry, and even I think to some extent independent films for them to break out and be successes, these kind of principles apply to that.
MARK: When you say viable, you mean in terms of mainstream mass appeal?
ERIK: Yes. And mass appeal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an Avengers movie, but it just means it could reach millions of people successfully. Because mainstream could be a movie that costs $2 million to make, and then makes $10 or $20 million. That’s still probably to make $10 or $20 million at the Box Office, probably, there’s some exceptions out there, but even those kind of movies, I think these kind of principles apply to those.
With fiction, if you’re, one of the greats whose prose has a use of language, and explores thought and character in a way that’s just revelatory and brilliant, this kind of stuff may not matter as much because you’re not necessarily trying to write a ‘good story,’ in the same way. I suppose, like, if you’re writing the corrections, or something. I mean, there’s still story there but it’s maybe not as focused on these principles. But if you’re writing, young adult fiction or you’re trying to write the next, the next Twilight, or crime fiction, or anything that’s going to be a best seller, for the most part, I think, these principles apply to fiction as well.
MARK: Yeah. And I think even if you are writing something that’s fairly niche or art house or literary, or however you like to describe it, I don’t think it does too much harm to know the elements that would make it more successful or popular if you wanted it to be. I think we can all learn from looking at, well, what are the kinds of things that are likely to grab people’s attention, and you don’t necessarily have to go with everything.
ERIK: Well, I’m certainly not going to disagree with you on that point! And I will also say for me it’s grabbing attention and it’s I think the most important part for me is emotional investment. To me, and again, I come from screenwriting, and it’s all about that. Getting the audience emotionally invested in what the character or characters are going through, what their difficulty is, what they’re trying to achieve, that’s really to me what the screenwriter’s job is. And emotional investment includes entertaining them and causing them to get to an emotional state that they want to be in.
So that’s one side of it. But if they just find it interesting on an intellectual level, it generally doesn’t work. Not that that’s what you were saying, but it just made me think of this point. To me, it’s all about why should I care? When I read a script, or watch a movie or a series, why should I care? Why do I want to keep watching or reading this? And I think that’s the main thing writers struggle with is, how do you get millions of strangers to care about your character and the situation they’re in and your story and, believe in it and feel like it’s happening to them and that they’re part of it?
The successful ones find a way to do that. And it’s not as easy to do that as it might look. And a lot of what I’ve explored and racked my own brain with as a writer is, well, how do you make them care? What are the reasons why I care here and I don’t care here? How do I codify that as principles? And that’s what the book tries to do.
MARK: So maybe this is a good point for us to look at these seven elements of the problem structure. Could you just run through these quickly for us?
ERIK: Yeah, so the acronym is PROBLEM. My concept here is that your idea for a story or for a series, or a book, or movie, ideally you would do well in these seven areas, that your story idea that you could pitch to somebody, even in a logline, a few sentences, the quick pitch would clearly reveal itself to be… Well, there’s a problem at the center of the story, right? Every story, including a series, there’s a problematic situation at its heart. So that problem needs to be these seven things.
First, it needs to be Punishing, that’s the P, which means the characters, the main character typically, or characters that you’re following are kind of beaten up and kind of in hell, under siege, that it presses them to their limits. It’s incredibly difficult to solve whatever it is, and it usually gets more difficult and more complicated as the story plays on.
The R is for Relatable, which means the audience needs to emotionally identify with your main character, or characters in a very strong way, feeling like they almost become them and are experiencing the story events themselves. And traditionally, that might mean that the characters are likable in some way. And/or they’re facing problems that make us care about them even if they’re not necessarily inherently likable. But the problems grab us so much that we’re like, ‘How are they going to solve these problems. I hope they can solve these problems.’
The O is for Original, meaning that it has to be fresh and unique to you in some way, or unique to the world of story. But you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel either. Sometimes you can go too far, trying to be original and not observe these other six elements enough. So original means it’s a fresh twist on something familiar on a familiar genre or type of story tends to be a better way to go than to say, ‘I have to come up with something that’s completely brand new in every possible way.’ Which is kind of impossible to do, especially while still being punishing, relatable, and all these other things.
The B word is Believable. And this might seem obvious, but so many scripts and episodes of TV I could watch tonight fall apart if I don’t believe it all as real. You may have some fantastical premise at the heart of your story that you have to get the audience to buy into. And usually, you should do that at the very beginning and make it really clear what that is. And then from that point on, you want to see human beings behaving in ways that feel believable, that feel real given the situation.
And what sets writers really apart, where you have people in the industry saying, ‘Wow, they have such a unique voice, such a great voice.’ Some of that’s about originality, but I think a lot of that is when a writer is capable of writing something, characters, a setting, a situation, a world, in a way that feels so authentic and so real, that you really feel like you’re living in that world. And that you feel like this writer must be from that world. That level of authenticity, or ‘realness’ or ‘believability’ is really golden and not easy to achieve, especially while you’re trying to do all these other things which might seem like they go against that sort of realness factor, because you’re also trying to be, entertaining and punishing, and original and all that.
So the L word in problem is Life-altering, which is about stakes, meaning it’s got to be really, really important for the story problems to be solved. The audience has to care, because it feels like, for life to be livable, these things have to be solved. It’s unacceptable if they’re not solved. They force the characters to focus on the problem right now and everything else goes out the window. It’s so important that it gets solved on a primal level as the Save the Cat! books talk about. You want it to feel primal. Especially, I’m thinking about, screenplays now. You want it to feel like for all to be right with the world, this problem must be solved.
So it can’t be medium to low stakes. It can’t just be, well, this character is going to lose their job. Well, they could find another job. There’s certain kinds of things that, there’s a list of stakes in that chapter that are acceptable, that are big enough. Life and death, obviously, being the biggest. But, stories have worked with non-life and death stakes, many times as well. But still, it has to feel like it’s almost like life is at stake for it to feel big enough, even if it’s not literally life at stake.
And there’s a lot of ideas fall down, because what are the stakes? Does this really feel important enough? Does this really feel big enough to make the audience go, ‘Oh my God. I care so much.’
The E is Entertaining, which means let’s not forget that it’s the entertainment business. If you’re in the film and TV world then you’re really being paid to entertain people. They’re picking up your book or watching your movie or series, usually, because they are promised a certain type of entertainment experience. They’re going to be whisked away into a romance, they’re going to be laughing their asses off in a comedy, they’re going to be super excited by the action spectacle, whatever.
There’s a list of types of entertainment that is it in that chapter as well. You’re trying to make them experience a set of emotions that they’re coming to your product to experience. Remember, they’re going to watch your thing or read your thing knowing what genre it is usually. And deciding I want to watch this romantic comedy, I want to watch this psychological thriller, I want to read this crime procedural or whatever it is.
So all of those different types of stories or genres have built-in entertainment elements to them. They have methods in which they kind of grab people emotionally and keep them emotionally invested and bring them to emotional states as they’re consuming the material that they want to be in, fascinated, amused, whatever.
The last one is M, is Meaningful which has to do with theme and what your story is really about beneath the surface plot. What makes it stick to your ribs, so to speak? What makes it relevant and resonant to people’s lives in general? Yes, it’s about a specific situation for specific characters but it’s exploring larger issues, situations, elements of the human experience that hopefully, a large number of people can feel like it’s impactful and memorable. And it kind of like shifts them in some way, or it sticks with them. And feels like it adds something to their life, explores something that’s meaningful to them. It’s not just a throwaway entertainment experience.
Although if you’re entertaining enough like, Transformers or something you may not need to be so meaningful. You might still make a lot of money at the box office, so to speak. But when you’re a writer trying to break in, being able to write something that feels truly meaningful is often that extra thing on top of these others that makes you really get noticed.
MARK: The bar is quite high, isn’t it, Erik?
ERIK: I know! It seems overwhelming that you think that it’s hard to do all that. It is. It’s hard. I struggle with it myself every day as a writer. And, not that I’m like using my own book and poring over all these things, because I’ve internalized it, but it’s not easy to achieve all that.
And that’s, I think, why not many people who want to do this on a percentage basis actually break through and do it successfully. And even those who do, they might have one or two or three successful projects and then a whole bunch of ones that aren’t. And I would argue that the ones that aren’t usually have fallen down in one or more of these categories on an idea level even though they, maybe, didn’t realize it. But when I look at it, in retrospect, I’d say, ‘Well, this just wasn’t that entertaining,’ Or ‘This just wasn’t that believable. And that’s why it didn’t work.’
MARK: So would you say if any one of these is missing then you’re going to have serious problems?
ERIK: Yeah. I hate to be too absolutist and rigid about it. But I do think if any one of them is seriously missing, because these are fundamental elemental things, if you’re completely not entertaining you’re going to have a very small audience. Although if you do all these other things well like, Manchester by the Sea, or something, maybe that’s not entertaining. But it was so good in all the other ways that it at least won an Oscar or two, and was a critical favorite. And maybe it broke even, made some money at the box office because it won Oscars and stuff. So I think it’s possible sometimes to have one of these be less central if all the others are really, working like gangbusters.
MARK: But ideally, if you can get the full set. One thing I’ve discovered with clients since I discovered the book, I’ve been sending it to them and saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to go through the book. And we’re going to do a kind of a checklist for it.’ Because at the end of every chapter you’ve got a terrific checklist for how you know that it’s believable enough, or original, or punishing enough. And we go through the concept for the script, or the novel, or whatever it is they’re working on.
And what we usually discover is that it’s not that the whole thing falls down, fortunately. But that they discovered that they’re really good at say, three or four of these elements but there’s another two or three that they’re not so good and they’ve overlooked. In the pursuit of making the character, I don’t know, original and believable, it’s not that life-altering, or it’s not that entertaining. And it’s really opened up some great conversations about how you can just take each of these elements up to 11, so to speak, in Spinal Tap language.
ERIK: I love that. That’s so great to hear. It warms my heart. And it’s nice to hear that when you’re working with people. And I have my own clients, same thing. That it’s like, ‘No, a lot of this works but here’s a couple areas that we could pay attention to, to elevate it.’
MARK: Yeah. I’m always looking for books for clients, but this is one of the books that I get the most enthusiastic, ‘Oh, this gives me somewhere I can go with this.’ I’ve not had anybody say, ‘Oh, gosh, that really crushed me. I realized it wasn’t any good.’ It was like, ‘Oh, no, here’s where I’m falling short. And here’s where I could go next to fix that.’
ERIK: Well, I love that because that was probably my biggest worry with a book was that it would feel soul-crushing. And as a writer, I know what it’s like to feel soul crushed on an almost daily basis because it is a tall order. And I made the last chapter be about, what do you do with this and some ideas about how to work with the idea and the sort of problem acronym that I hoped would help to give people a sense of, it’s not all so hopeless and impossible. While at the same time you recognize it is a high bar. And that’s why it’s hard to succeed at this.
MARK: Great. So this is a book that for me it’s just transformed the way I look at films and TV. I’m watching stuff week in week out and it’s showing me new ways of looking at it. And, I think, if you’re in the business of writing stories to entertain, and hopefully to make money and to get stuff sold, this is a book… it’s fairly short, you could read it over a weekend. But it really will make such a difference to the way you look at each project going forward. It gets my wholehearted recommendation. And it’s got one of the highest ‘underlining density,’ of books that I’ve read in the last 12 months or so.
So okay. Let’s maybe finish up with your Challenge to the listener, Erik. This is the point of the show where I like to ask my guests to set the listener a challenge to put some of the ideas into practice this week, to do it or to get started in the next seven days. What challenge do you have, Erik?
ERIK: Well, here’s what I would suggest, I know that your listeners are a wide range of creative people, they’re not all screenwriters, they’re not all writers necessarily. Although, hopefully, these principles are interesting even to those who aren’t exactly.
What I would say is, on this whole theme of you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel when you’re coming up with an idea for something, what I want to ask everyone is to consider this, take five projects you really love in whatever medium is that you’re working. And this is about coming up with ideas, sort of a brainstorming tool for ideas of things you might write, five different projects in that medium that you love.
With each one of them, come up with your own idea for something unique and new that you might consider pursuing, that only changes one key element of that thing. In other words, you’re taking something and you’re copying it but you’re changing one key element. And this may seem like it would lead to something really unoriginal and clearly derivative. But actually, if you were to pursue one of those projects you would find that over time it would end up changing more and more to where by the end no one would ever recognize it as having been this other thing with just one changed element.
I remember reading Paul McCartney once said a way to begin songwriting is to think of a song you like. Like, ‘Please, Mr. Postman’. And you come up with some slightly altered thing like, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Milkman.’ And then you start pursuing like what that song would be. And by the time you finish the song, those words aren’t even in it anymore. But it was like your launching point to something else.
So in the book, I quote this producer, manager, Victoria Wisdom, who I once saw give a talk where she said, ‘You know a lot of movies build off other movies,’ like the James Bond movies had this kind of super spy. Then you had the super-spy who didn’t remember he was a spy, which is The Bourne Identity, then you had two super spies who were married, and that was Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And then you had two super spies who were the kids of married spies which was Spy Kids.
And I thought that was really intriguing. That it was like you take this viable type of story that fits a genre and has been successful and you say, ‘What’s a way to do it that hasn’t been done before? What’s one element I could change that would kind of shift everything but isn’t me coming up with something totally original with nothing to start from?’ Which is hard and intimidating to do.
MARK: I love this, Erik. And it’s actually making me think. Quite often this is how I get going with a poem. I’m reading a poem by a poet I really admire and at a certain point, I think well, okay, what would my version of that be? If I had to rewrite that poem or if I had to take that form and put a different subject in, which is usually the way I do it, what could I do with that? And very often that leads me into something I would never have thought of in any other way. But it’s much easier than just starting, the terrifying blank sheet of paper.
So this is great, folks. And if you’re feeling brave, and you want to share the results of your experiment then do drop by the blog and leave a comment. So if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/erik, and that’s, Erik, E-R-I-K, then you can leave a comment after the interview, and it’d be really great to hear what you do with that.
Erik, thank you so much for this. This has been a really fascinating journey into story. If people want to continue the journey then obviously they need to go out and get The Idea: The Seven Elements of a Viable Story for Screen, Stage, or Fiction at the usual bookshops. Where else can people go to learn more from you, Erik?
ERIK: Well, first of all, I would say regarding bookshops, try Amazon first. It’s not necessarily going to be on shelves in bookstores, although you can order it into any bookstore you want. But Amazon is the primary place to get it in both Kindle eBook and paperback form. And all the different countries Amazon’s all carry it, not just in the US store. That’s number one.
And the second thing is I have a website which is called FlyingWrestler.com, is the name of my blog, Flying Wrestler. And that’s where you’ll read, newer blog posts as well as things about the book, and things that inspire the book, and see all of my coaching and consulting services and rates and how to book that. And that’s generally where you can contact me. My email address is available there as well. So, FlyingWrestler.com
MARK: That’s great, Erik. And also, picking up on what you were saying about finished script versus idea, when is the best time for somebody to come to you? Should they come right at the beginning of the project or when?
ERIK: I think the ideal is to come when you just have ideas. And you want feedback on maybe even multiple ideas. But it can be at any point in the process. And a lot of times when writers come to me midway through the process, what I’m still doing in the beginning is evaluating the idea. And my notes on the idea end up creating some changes in their approach, which means restarting in certain ways.
So the earlier the better, but still I would say a sizable percentage of my clients come with a finished script. And then I’ll read the script and give feedback. And then it’s like, okay, now what? These are major notes often. And as they go to do the rewrite then we start that kind of idea coaching process with the rewrite, let’s figure out the rewrite. We’ve gotten all these notes, what’s the next version of this going to be? Or possibly another project they decide they want to work on next.
So people might feel like they want feedback on more than just a logline, which is understandable. So sometimes it’s a synopsis, sometimes it’s like a four-page, like, Save the Cat! beat sheet plus some script pages. I have a lot of different ways that I work with people. But, of course, my main premise though is if you can get feedback early on in the process it can save you a lot of time and heartache.
MARK: Great. So if they want to start that conversation with you then FlyingWrestler.com is the place to go?
ERIK: That’s correct. Yes.
MARK: Right, okay. And obviously, we’ll have all these links in the show notes as usual. So Erik, thank you so much for your generosity and your wisdom. I found it very entertaining apart from anything else, as well as meaningful. So it’s been a real pleasure having you on the show.
ERIK: Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it as well, Mark.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Mindful Drumming with Maria Bovin de Labbé
Jul 29, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Maria Bovin de Labbé, a Swedish drummer, artist and teacher, living on a peninsula in the Fjord of Oslo, Norway.
She is best known for Mindful Drumming – an approach that is less about fast and furious rhythms and more about mindfulness, playfulness, lightness and melody. It’s hard to describe but unforgettable when you hear Maria play.
She has played many different types of music, including hard rock, pop, blues, big band, Balkan-music, classical orchestra music, modern chamber music and improvised music.
Her playing incorporates a range of instruments and techniques, from the classic rock drum kit to traditional hand drums from the Middle East.
As well as performing solo shows and with the band Sweet Like Time, she teaches drummers, singers and other musicians how to play more mindfully and to develop their own unique style. She also plays short sets to bring a touch of magic to other people’s events.
I first met Maria via my blog and we’ve followed each other’s work for several years. Last year I coached Maria as she created her first solo show, Solitude, which she performed in Oslo to rapturous reception. The better I get to know Maria and her music, the more respect I have more for her dedication to her art.
In this conversation Maria talks about her journey as a musician, including how drumming helped in her recovery from anorexia, and what it’s like to be a woman in the male-dominated world of drumming.
She also talks about the creation of Solitude, her first solo show, and the surprising discoveries she made while teaching drumming to pregnant women for a research project.
Listen to this conversation for a great example of commitment an art in the face of inner and outer challenges. You’ll also hear Maria playing her drums and experience mindful drumming for yourself.
MARK: Maria, could we start with some music, please?
MARIA: Of course, Mark.
[Maria plays the hand drum]
MARK: Where did you learn to play like that?
MARIA: Actually, I haven’t played this drum for so long. I started to learn to play the frame drums with an American woman called Layne Redmond. She was a pioneer in bringing this drum. It’s a very old drum that you can find in all cultures.
MARK: Tell us what it looks like. We’ll put a picture and a video in the show notes, but just describe it to us now.
MARIA: If you can imagine just a circle-shaped wooden frame with a skin on one of the sides. It’s a very simple round shape with one skin.
MARK: When I first saw that and I heard you play, I thought of the shamans, who would use the drum as the horse on the journey into the spirit world. Would it have been the same kind of drum that they would use or is that just me being romantic about it?
MARIA: No, it’s very similar. Actually, I would say that it’s the same drum, but the difference is how you play it and not the least, the intention behind it. So the shamans often use a bone or a stick to play the drum, and I play with the fingers. And the technique I play is from the Middle East. So, for example, in Scandinavia, we have the Sami people from up north, and they have a drum similar to this but they play it with a stick.
MARK: Right. And you are originally from Sweden?
MARIA: Yes.
MARK: And you’ve been living in Norway for a while?
MARIA: For a long time.
MARK: So what was that like? What age did you move and what was the experience like for you?
MARIA: I never thought actually, to be honest, about moving to Norway. But when I was around 20, my only goal was to get a spot in a music conservatory or an Academy of Music. So I applied in Sweden, and in Norway, and I was approved in Norway at the music conservatory. And then I just took my sticks and a few clothes on the train and I said, ‘Ciao, I go to Norway.’ And then I’ve stayed. I still love Stockholm, my home town. But it seems it’s meant to be that I live here.
MARK: And what was it about the drums that attracted you in the first place?
MARIA: Oh wow. The first time I sat down behind a drum kit, I think I was about 12 years old. And I think that moment changed my life. And luckily for me, my music teacher at that time, he saw that something happened to me. So he said, ‘Why don’t you come here from time to time and I can teach you to play drums?’ And that was the start. And it actually changed my life because, before that, I had another plan for my life.
MARK: So it was love at first sight or at first touch with the drums?
MARIA: Definitely. It felt like coming home.
MARK: What kind of drum was it? A typical drum kit?
MARIA: Typical drum kit, yes, yes.
MARK: And so you started playing at school, and where did your journey go from there as a musician?
MARIA: So shortly after that, actually, I got sick with anorexia. So for at least half a year, I was in another world, you could say. And then when I started to come back from that, I think the drums helped me a lot. They became my sort of refuge. And I got a drum teacher, an Argentinian guy. He was lovely, but when he saw me the first time, I promise you, he stepped two steps back!
But I think he must have seen something in me because he started to put me in small ensembles, and he wanted me to play jazz. He loved jazz. We always had this little discussion because I wanted to play rock and he wanted me to play jazz. And he said, ‘You got to choose.’ And we went back and forth like this.
MARK: Why do you think he took a step back when he first saw you?
MARIA: Because I was so thin! I think he got a bit afraid, actually.
MARK: But for you, the drumming helped you and your recovery from anorexia?
MARIA: Yeah, it was my space to go to where no one bothered me, no one told me how to be just good. I felt that I could just be myself. And I started playing bands in Stockholm. I played blues and pop and big band and everything. And it was the only thing I wanted to do.
MARK: And why drums? Why not guitar? Why not, I don’t know, singing or keyboards or whatever?
MARIA: Oh, that’s a good question. Actually, no one in my family plays an instrument. I played a little piano when I was maybe seven, eight, but it never called me. When I sat down behind the drums, it was like a calling. That’s what I felt. I still feel I’m very closed. I still have a huge respect for the drums. And there is something with the simplicity of the drum. And I think it’s so beautiful. It’s so basic. It’s rhythm. But I always hear melodies in the rhythm, in the rhythms. So I feel I’m really both physically, but also connected with them on the level that it’s hard to put words to.
MARK: It has got to be one of the oldest instruments, isn’t it?
MARIA: Yeah, I think so.
MARK: Doesn’t get a lot more basic than banging something!
MARIA: Yeah. If you go many, many years back, you can find a drum in, I think, almost all cultures, maybe flutes also.
MARK: Oh, okay. I remember Javier Weyler when he came on a couple of seasons ago, he’s a drummer too, and he said the thing he loves about the drums is he can channel his inner caveman, which is, I guess, the historical viewpoint!
But, drumming is a pretty macho world, isn’t it? It’s typically a guy behind the drums in most bands. What’s it been like for you being a woman in such a male-dominated world?
MARIA: It has been a very double-edged sword, I should say because I’ve felt at home with the guys. For example, when I’ve been to master classes, and it’s just guys and me, 25 guys and me, I feel more at home because it’s the drum world, it’s my world. But at the same time, I tried for many years to play like a guy, fast and strong. And it hurt me because I got pain in my arms and it just wasn’t me.
And then I realized, ‘But come on, look at you, you can’t play like a muscle man. You have to play like you.’ People have always told me that I’m dancing as I play, it’s never something that I try to do. Actually, dance is one of my secret passions. I always look at dance videos. And I’ve worked quite a lot with dancers and I love working with dancers. So in a way, it makes sense. So now my focus is to play like me. I think actually, that’s a theme in my life, to just let me be me. Just let me play like me and just let me be like I am.
MARK: Well, when I hear you play, when I look at your face on the video as you’re playing, you seem totally yourself, in your own skin, in your own space. And I guess maybe this is the goal for any artist is to find their own voice or their own way of playing or performing or whatever it is that they create. But it’s not easy to get there, huh?
MARIA: No, it’s not. It’s been a long journey and it still is. I see it as playing an instrument, for me, it’s a journey, and I think it’s a lifelong journey, and you will take your hits, and you will doubt. And then suddenly, you’re in the flow, and it can be three seconds, I promise you can practice a thousand hours to get to those three seconds, and it’s worth it.
MARK: Wow. What is your typical day like?
MARIA: So a typical day, and this is also a work in progress to working like this, to find a rhythm in your day that suits you, it’s also a journey. But what I do now, is I get up early in the morning, 6:00, 6:30, I do some Pilates and then I make breakfast and I drink Swedish coffee. And while I do that, first I write some things, some thoughts for the day, what I want to do and maybe an intention for the day.
And then I pick up my drum and I warm up, and I practice on the pieces I’m working on right now, maybe I come up with some new ideas. And then after maybe a couple of hours, I go to my studio. It’s a small house in my garden. It’s not a real studio, like a recording studio, but it’s my studio.
And then I usually warm up behind the kit and maybe I do some things that I’m working on there, maybe I have to rehearse something for a song for my band, for example. And then I have lunch, around 12:30, maybe I take a nap if I’m smart, if I’m wise enough, and then I go back to work. And then the afternoon, I always feel my energy goes a bit down, so I try to put my expectations for the afternoon down. And instead see that, if I get anything done, it’s really good. And then I can work on a composition. I can do office work, like emails, website, social media. But I will always play something. And then I try to relax in the evening if I don’t have a gig. Preferably, I have a gig.
MARK: You’ve got the frame drum, you’ve got a drum kit, you’ve got all kinds of weird and wonderful things in the studio, haven’t you? Talk us through some of the range of instruments you play.
MARIA: I play the frame drums and I’m learning to play the darbuka. And it has a similar technique to the frame drum, the technique from the Middle East.
MARK: Sorry. What is a taibuka?
MARIA: Darbuka.
MARK: Darbuka!
MARIA: It’s a time glass-shaped drum in clay.
MARK: In clay?
MARIA: It’s in clay, yeah.
MARK: Like an hourglass shape?
MARIA: Yes. Exactly.
MARK: Okay. We need a photo for the show notes, please.
MARIA: I will give you a photo, of course. It’s a beautiful drum. You have to be very careful with it though. And then I have a marimba since I studied classic music also, I studied marimba. So a marimba, for the one who doesn’t know, it’s like a piano but in wood. So a marimba, it’s a big xylophone or a huge xylophone. So I think my marimba weighs about 120 kilos. It’s a beautiful instrument, but it’s a bit heavy to move it, but you can divide it in parts, but the sound is beautiful.
MARK: Right, right. Well, I think I’ve seen you in one of the videos playing that. So, folks, if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/Maria, then we will make sure we have some video and we have some photos of Maria and her repertoire of drums. So you have a band? Tell us about the band and what it’s like playing with them.
MARIA: So the band is a trio. It’s me, who plays the drum kit and frame drums, and we have a double bass player, Dag, and then we have a singer, who also plays the guitar and he writes the songs, his name is Sjur. It’s almost an impossible name to say even for me as a Swede. It’s a Norwegian name. So we play very soulful, a little bit jazzy music. We had a gig last night in a cafe. It’s very, very chilled.
MARK: And what’s the name of the band?
MARIA: Sweet Like Time.
MARK: And again, do we have a link that we can include in the channel?
MARIA: Yeah, we have a small trailer on my YouTube channel that I could give you.
MARK: Okay. We’ll put something in the show notes there about the band. So you play in the band, you played with various bands, but also these days, increasingly you’re performing and recording as a solo artist. What’s the difference like, between the two?
MARIA: The difference is huge because as a drummer, as I see it, my job as a drummer is to support the other musicians. Providing a ground for them to dance on. That’s how I see it. Because I should never be in the front as a drummer in a band.
But then I took the step and thought, ‘I want to do a solo show.’ And it freaked me out. But at the same time, being an introvert it was quite cool to work with yourself or alone. So it suited me. So then, when I did my first solo show last year, Solitude, I actually created the whole thing. I came up with this idea. I wrote the music. I performed. I set the stage. I had a sound engineer on the day of the concert. But besides that, I designed the poster. I put it out on social media. And the way that I did everything, it never felt hard. It never felt like it was too much. Actually, it felt nice. The thing that was hard was all the work before I landed on a theme, for example.
When I tried to get funding for example, and I got ‘no,’ and ‘no,’ and ‘no’. I had a producer, at a point, which felt lovely to have a producer. I was so proud and we had a huge budget and big plans. But to be honest, we hadn’t landed on the right theme. And we got ‘no,’ on all the applications, and the producer left, and I was there alone again. And I packed the whole project for a while.
But then I took it up again and I thought, ‘No, I will do this. But now I will do it by myself. And I will do with a really low budget.’ And then I wrote a new application and I’ve landed on a theme and it made so much sense. So that was ‘Solitude’. And I got my first ‘yes.’ And it was not a lot of money. But since I had made it a low budget project, I could do it with that money. So I did.
MARK: I think this is a really important lesson for us all because whatever your field as a creative, you’re going to experience rejection. You’re going to experience ‘no,’ after ‘no,’ after ‘no,’ if you’re like most of us.
And what I like about this, Maria, it was a setback, and you did press pause for a while, but then you came back. And you came and you thought, ‘Well, how can I make this work?’ And you came back with a low budget version of it, which actually straight down tied in very well with your theme of solitude.
MARIA: Yes.
MARK: How do you dig deep at that point, where you’ve got ‘no, no, no, no’? Because it’s easy to look on the website. And if you could look on the website, you can see pictures and video of Maria performing, and ecstatic audience, and wonderful comments from audience members about, the amazing show. And it’s easy to look on the outside and say, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be amazing to be out there?’ Tell us, where did you get the strength to bounce back from that no and say, ‘I’m going to make this happen?’
MARIA: I think I had the knowing inside that I just had to do this for myself. And it was also, I told myself that I will do this, and I will kick out doubt forever because I’ve always had doubt, I think many artists do. It’s maybe a part of it. You doubt and you meet challenges, you struggle, but then you have those moments, those short moments, like the one I explained before, when everything flows, or you play a concert, and somebody comes to you afterwards and says, ‘It touched my heart.’ I mean, what else can you ask for? It’s the most beautiful comment I can get.
So you asked me how I find the strength. I think I have the strength within me. So I connected with that and I refused to let myself off the hook because, of course, I was about to quit many times, and I still am.
MARK: Because you would have had the perfect excuse, wouldn’t you? ‘Well, I tried. I did my best, but I just didn’t get the money.’
MARIA: Yeah, it would be the perfect excuse. But if you do it first for yourself, as I thought that I would kick out doubt with this, if I quit, that would be a total failure.
MARK: And why solitude as the theme?
MARIA: Solitude is something very precious for me. Solitude to me is freedom. It’s space. It’s being alone. I have the best parties alone. But if I’m invited to a party with 50 people, I do everything I can to come up with some stupid explanation of why I can’t come.
So, solitude for me is also like my bubble, my creative bubble. It’s sitting looking at the moon at night. coming up with ideas. It’s being in my studio. Also, I think solitude has a touch of sadness because maybe solitude is your refuge, maybe you had to be there at one time in your life. For me, it’s a safe place. It’s where I’m untouchable.
MARK: Well, as an introvert myself, I can certainly relate to all of that. But there’s a lovely paradox, isn’t there? Creating a show about solitude and sharing it with people, which you did so beautifully. And you had a full space full of people applauding Solitude.
MARIA: Yeah. It was really a pleasure to share that place or that space. And the venue was a big wide room in Oslo, in the capital. And it doesn’t have a stage. So I was at the same level as the audience, which I love. Somebody said, ‘So you’re an introvert, but you are doing a solo show. How? It doesn’t work together.’ But for me, that space when I play, I said, it’s somewhere I’m untouchable. So it has to do with that. When I’m in that space, I can take a lot of people. It’s easier when I play than if I need, for example, to speak.
MARK: Should we have some more music?
MARIA: Yes.
[Music]
MARK: Maria, you describe what you do as mindful drumming. Could you tell us what you mean by mindful drumming and how do you practice that?
MARIA: Mindful drumming is an approach to drumming. The intention is to include all aspects of drumming. So the emotional part, the mental, of course, the technical, but also the spiritual part. So I see it as a very warm approach, a present approach, and also an approach that is about connecting the body, the mind, and the soul with playing. And it doesn’t have to be drumming. For me, it’s drumming, but for another musician, it’s them playing their instrument.
So awareness is key. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? And also, what’s your intention behind it? So at first, when I came up with this approach or concept, I got an idea after I wrote a master’s thesis in music therapy, where I explored pregnant women’s experience of drumming during pregnancy. And that was very strong. And the results were very strong.
MARK: So the women were drumming?
MARIA: Yeah. They were drumming with me.
MARK: With you? Tell us about this. This sounds very interesting.
MARIA: I got an idea because when I gave birth to my youngest son, I brought a drum to the hospital, and they looked at me like I was a monkey! They came in and looked at me, ‘What is she doing? She’s playing the drum.’ Yeah, really! But, it was lovely.
MARK: They probably don’t see that often, do they?
MARIA: No, I don’t think so! By their looks, no, never. So, I sat playing the drum very simply, just a simple beat. But it’s amazing what a simple beat can do with you because it calls presence. It also affects your brainwaves. So after drumming 10 minutes, the brain waves, the different halves of the brain start to speak with each other, and the brainwaves flatten out. So it’s something very physical.
So I thought, ‘This is something I could do, try out with other women when I write my master’s thesis.’ So I did, and it was lovely. And one of the strong results was mindfulness.
MARK: So the women, did they play in a weekly class with you? Did they have to go and practice on their own? What was their practice?
MARIA: They didn’t have to practice at all. They just came to me. I think it was once a week for six or eight weeks. And we spent one or one-and-a-half hours together. And I have divided mindful drumming into five steps. They’re very loose, but it’s like the building blocks. The five steps are introduction, warm-up, program, silence, and sharing. And I’ve actually realized that these five steps, you can put them into anything. So for example, if I teach at a Norwegian Academy, I can plan the lesson after these steps. If I have a private student, I can do the same. And the silence part, it takes more and more space. And it’s something that many of my students tell me, it’s very powerful, the part of silence.
MARK: I’m just pausing to appreciate the silence. I think the equivalent in poetry is all the wide space we have around the poem. That’s one of the things that makes poetry different to prose is that there’s a lot of wide space. I guess that would be the equivalent of silence for a musician.
MARIA: I think so. Yes. So without it, there’s no music. There’s no words.
MARK: And listening to most drummers, you don’t get a lot of silence, do you?
MARIA: Not much. Maybe that’s why I need it so much.
MARK: What results did you get with the women in the study?
MARIA: It was so strong. An example, there was one woman, she had a child from before, and this was her second pregnancy. And I interviewed her before we started to drum and she was stressed out. She didn’t feel any connection with her body. And she said, ‘It could be anything in my stomach. It could be my colon.’ And then afterwards, after our sessions together, I made an interview again. And she said, ‘Now, I have a connection with the baby. I talk to her, I sing to her.’
Another woman said, and this was after we had made a, we could call it a drum meditation, we just go into space and drum, follow the rhythms. This is parenthetical but time got very timeless. So if we drum 10 minutes or 45 minutes, it didn’t matter at all, and no one knew the difference. And after one of the sessions, she said, she was quiet first, and then she said, ‘Now me and my baby have experienced life and death together.’ Beautiful.
MARK: Gosh. Wow. This is amazing stuff. So life and death. And also, I’m hearing about the body as well, that there’s a strong connection to the body, to being embodied. In our modern world, especially with all the digital distractions, it’s very easy to be in a mindless space or just in a head space. But there’s something very physical about the drums, right?
MARIA: It’s very physical. And a part of mindful drumming is being aware of the mind, but at the same time, putting the mind aside. And I think to do that, you have to first be aware of it. It’s like going down into the body and the drums or the rhythms will help you do that.
MARK: Tell me a bit more about your work as a teacher. You work with drummers, but you also work with other kinds of musicians? Is that right?
MARIA: Yeah, I do. Since I have this thought that we need to focus on all the aspects of drumming, I do work with other musicians too. For example, now I work with a vocalist, I can’t work with her singing technique, of course. But there’s so much more, the mental support, guide her, guide her to find her unique path.
I think that is key to be a good teacher, to not have this idea that your students should be like you. For me, that’s awful. I would like my wishes to guide them and support them to becoming themselves because you are always the best when you’re just yourself. So finding your unique self.
And it’s also about finding your strengths, but it’s also finding the weaknesses. The weaknesses you need to work on, but also the weaknesses that you need to drop. Because like me, I found out, I’m not a big guy, a big muscles guy, not all guys are big muscles, of course, but I tried to play like one. And to just drop that. You can’t do that. It’s not physically possible. So drop it, don’t fight it. So that’s a wish when I teach.
MARK: So that journey that you went on, of finding your way of playing, that’s one of the things you help your students with?
MARIA: Yeah, I think that is what I burn for because I know how hard it is. And I know how helpful it is to have somebody to support you.
MARK: And I know from talking to you that, say, drumming and musicianship, in general, that there’s a lot of emphasis on technique and rightly so because it does require skill and diligence and practice. But what I’m hearing from you is, your work starts at the point where skill and technique stop.
MARIA: Yeah, that’s very well said. I want to be the teacher that I always wished for myself. And that’s more like a mentor or a coach that is so giving.
MARK: Okay. So if somebody wants to explore this approach to playing or performing, is there a page on your site? Could they go and contact you there about that?
MARIA: Yeah, of course. My website, BovinDeLabbe.com. I’m sure you will put links.
MARK: I’ll put the link in.
So what’s next for you, Maria?
MARIA: So, right now, I’ve got an idea to do a mini solo program. So it’s just two short sets of like 10 or 15 minutes each, including just a few drums so I can carry them with me, to do at for example, events. I could come to the event and play two short sets and add something to the event that I, for example, didn’t expect, or something that is just something totally else, something different from what they’re there to do. So it will be a short magic break.
And I’m also thinking about my next solo show. So the first was Solitude and my next one, the title is Black and White. And it will be about my experience of anorexia.
MARK: Wow. Another bold move for you.
MARIA: Yeah, I think it feels like the right direction to go because, of course, that experience changed my life. And it has been with me since then. So it makes sense to make music about it.
MARK: And how does Black and White relate to anorexia?
MARIA: It’s about the black and white thinking. Everything is very black and white. Yes or no. It’s very strict. There’s different kinds of anorexia, but the one that I had is the most restrictive one. And then you’re very strict. Everything is limited. I thought no, I haven’t thought about this before. I always talk about space and freedom, and that place is just the opposite. There is no space there and there’s no freedom, it’s just strict and it’s rules and it’s hard.
MARK: And one of the things that strikes me about your playing is that there’s so many little subtle shades and colors and different gradations. I’ll be really interested to hear what you make of Black and White.
MARIA: So Black and White, it’s about opposites. One piece that I’m working on is called ‘Paradox,’ another one is called ‘Peculiar.’ So if I zoom out, I should say, it’s small and big, it’s white and black, it’s space, it’s no space. It’s silent, it’s a lot of sound. Maybe not so much in the middle.
MARK: I think it’s time for a final piece of music, please.
[Music]
Maria, we’re now at the point of the interview where we turn the spotlight on the listener. And this is where my guest will set you a Creative Challenge. So something that you can do or start to do within the next seven days that’s related to the theme of this interview that will help you in your creative journey. Maria, what challenge would you like to set the listener?
MARIA: I want to give the dear listeners a challenge or the challenge to listen to their heartbeat every day this week.
I encourage you to connect this with something that you do daily so you don’t forget about it. Like, after you drink your morning coffee or after you brush your teeth, and you just sit comfortably, however you want, make it simple, and you try to sense your heartbeat.
It’s not so easy when you haven’t done it before, but then we can cheat. So then you can put your index and your middle finger on the vein on the throat, on the side of the throat, or on the inside of the wrist, and there you can feel the pulse. So just listen to it, feel it and relax into it with knowing that this is the rhythm that carries you through life. That’s it.
MARK: You don’t get much more fundamental than that, do you?
MARIA: No. That’s what’s so beautiful with it.
MARK: And that’s probably the answer to my earlier question about ‘Why drumming?’ It’s fundamental to life, that beat. We say a heartbeat, don’t we?
MARIA: It’s very grounding. So after doing this challenge for a week or however long you want to, I would love to hear from you. So just write a comment on The 21st Century Creative page.
MARK: Great. And that’s, as I said before, 21stcenturycreative.fm/maria. Just scroll down beneath the interview transcript and you can leave your comment there. Maria, thank you. As always, it’s been a magical experience listening to you and being in your world.
MARIA: Thank you so much, Mark.
MARK: Where can people go to experience more of your music and also the ones who are curious to learn from you, maybe as students or to have you perform at their event, where can people go?
MARIA: My webpage is my home for everything, where you can find videos, you can find the event page and the teaching page. They’re easy to find in the menu.
MARIA: Exactly. Yes. And then I have my YouTube channel, put a link to that one, where I have my videos or my small compositions. I have a trailer with my band. And also, I have a quite active Facebook artist page. We will put a link to that too. And I’m on Instagram, with the same name. It’s just my name. And I would love to hear from people. Yeah, connect with me, say, ‘Hi.’
MARK: Lovely. Thank you, Maria. As always, you’ve been really generous and inspiring. And I’m sure this is something that people are going to listen to, maybe more than once. So, thank you so much.
MARK: Thank you, Mark. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Peleg Top on Fear, Love, Money and Creativity
Jul 22, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Peleg Top, an artist, a writer, a speaker and an inspired guide who coaches creative professionals to succeed and become extraordinary leaders in the process.
As you’ll hear in this interview, he started out as a graphic designer, breaking into the very competitive niche of designing in the music industry, and running his own agency, Top Design, for 18 years in Los Angeles.
Some of his biggest clients included The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Grammy Awards, Universal Music and Capitol Records. During his career as a creative professional, he designed over 200 album covers, he published four design and branding books as well as the best selling The Designer’s Guide to Marketing and Pricing: How to Win Clients and What to Charge Them.
Like many young creatives, Peleg was so focused on achieving success that when he finally achieved it, he discovered it didn’t bring him the true fulfilment he was seeking. But unlike most people in this situation, he took it as a cue for self-exploration, taking a deep dive into the world of personal development and spiritual growth and facing up to some uncomfortable truths about himself that he had been avoiding.
At the age of 40 he sold his firm and took time to awaken his creative free spirit. This led to him reinventing himself as a coach and an inspired advisor to creative business owners who were seeking prosperity, helping them to balance the pursuit of external success with inner work and the acquisition of self awareness.
I first met Peleg back in 2012 when we were both speaking at the HOW Design conference in Boston. We went out for dinner and discovered we had many things in common, as coaches for creatives and on a personal level.
So we stayed in touch after the conference and our conversations led to me hiring Peleg to coach me, which was a transformative experience for me and my business.
Since then we’ve stayed in touch as friends and met up for adventures together on both sides of the Atlantic.
In this conversation Peleg talks about his journey as a creator, from his early days as a designer in LA, to his travels around the world in search of wisdom, to his current life as an artist and coach in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He also talks about the importance of self-awareness and love for all of us as creatives, and how we can confront and transcend the culture of fear that is rife in the creative industries.
And Peleg shares a very unusual and liberating perspective on money, and sets us a really fun and surprising Creative Challenge to help us find a healthier and more creative relationship with money.
Peleg is an extraordinary and special person in my life and I’m thrilled to be able to introduce him to you. Listen to this conversation and you’ll hear the wisdom and compassion in his voice. You’ll also discover his gift for making big concepts like love and spirituality very practical and meaningful in your everyday life.
MARK: Peleg, when did you first start to see yourself as creative?
PELEG: That’s an interesting question, Mark. To see myself as a creative happened a lot later than being in the experience of creative that I made myself. As early as a kid I didn’t really realize that I had this type of wiring in me, but I remember one of my earliest memories that I have as a kid was growing up in Israel and in the Shabbat newspaper at the end of the week, at the back of the newspaper, there was a ‘Guess the Logo’ weekly competition. It was a brilliant marketing advertising scheme. The paper basically presented about a dozen logos of brands and companies and readers would have to guess which company it is and mail it in to win a prize.
And that was just the one thing I couldn’t wait to do every weekend was that the logo game. Some people like crossword puzzles, for me, this was just so interesting and I don’t really know why. And I’d done that for many, many years. Little did I know it was foreshadowing for my future profession as a designer is somebody who designs logos for a living.
But the actual working as a creative started right out of high school. I didn’t really have the means to go to a traditional art school even though I really wanted to, it was just not in the cards. One thing I know about myself is that I learn by doing and a lot of it so oftentimes by failing as well. I’m a doer, I kind of went to Street University. I got a job right out of high school working for a record chain, Tower Records in Los Angeles.
And that was really an opportunity for me to be around music, which was such a big part of my life and an opportunity to begin to earn my own money in the world. And very quickly the job of being a cashier behind the register selling records moved very quickly to becoming the in-store artist, and this is something that doesn’t really exist anymore, this job, this position. Tower Records was a really amazing company because it had an art studio and an in-store studio artist for every one of their stores. And our job was basically to decorate the store, create displays, paintings of the album covers, promotional contests all that stuff.
And I did that for six years and that was for me the best art school and the best marketing school I could ever be in. Because I really learned design, I really learned typography, I really learned to mimic copy some of the greatest artists and designers by working with their work. And, there’s a famous quote that I’ve heard once that says, ‘Copy, copy, copy, and you’ll find yourself.’
And that was the experience of being immersed in this record world, in this music world in the art part. But the dream was really to be a designer and to design the album covers versus copy them in record stores. And after about six years of working in the record store, I took the plunge and decided to start freelancing, and luckily I had some independent clients from the record companies and they had work for me to launch my company.
But it was a lot of hustling for the first few years in establishing myself as a designer in that pool of industry, that niche. And it wasn’t easy, because that niche was an extremely tight niche. Art directors and designers in the music industry – you had to get in, it was almost like a private club. And I wasn’t really invited, because I didn’t have the credentials, I didn’t have the education. I was just this kid off the street who worked at a record store.
But one thing I knew about myself is that I was very ambitious, and a couple of years after I opened my design studio, I went to my first design conference. And that was a life-changing event really, and a business-changing event. Because for the first time I was able to connect with other creative people who were doing what I was doing, who were dreaming of what I was dreaming. I was able to meet the greats. I was able to learn from an unbelievable selection of speakers and teachers and that’s when my eyes opened up to the possibility of, I can actually really have a career with this. It showed me some sort of a promised land, a destination of what’s possible.
And that was enough for me to motivate myself to continue. And I came back from the conference and pretty much, for the first time, began to market my work, began to understand and learn about marketing. Also understand and learn about the financial part of the business, the selling part, proposals part, all those things that were completely foreign to me. And that only grew and developed and I really had that experience of going to these design conferences and being a part of the design community as a living force in the success that I experienced in my business.
And it was an unbelievable experience having this design shop. We did some amazing work. I could say that I checked off a dream of doing the type of work that really resonates with who I am and enables me, to a degree, to express myself, express my art, and create things in the world that didn’t exist before, things that actually people enjoy and people get something out of, and people cherish. Like album covers, like logos or identities, it was an incredibly satisfying experience.
And throughout that time, being part of the design community and being in conversation around the design business was ongoing. And it wasn’t until about 15 years into my studio time that I actually started to begin to be a little bored with the work, and in hindsight, it was also a beginning of a bit of a spiritual crisis. Because my identity was so wrapped up in being a designer, in being a creative, is how I saw myself, how I was. And teaching other creatives how to navigate through the world of business, and the professional side of creativity was something that I just love to do.
I decided to help me get a little bit more excited about going to work because I was kind of bored with the design experience at that time, I began to teach weekend workshops at my studio to other creatives around pricing and marketing. But this thing took off, it would sell out every month. And I found it to be such a natural experience for me to be able to teach other people and coach them into understanding who they are and what’s possible, and just explaining to them the whole concept of marketing and helping them also begin to understand their own value in the work that they do in the world. And the value of who they are, because it was absolutely affecting the prices they were charging and ultimately the financial success and stability of their business.
After a couple of years of doing that and keep teaching workshops around the country, it was time for me to walk away from my design business. It was a pretty dark time in my life, because I really had no idea what’s next for me. I didn’t really see that the coaching or the mentoring was a possible path. But I had to walk away, I had to let go of that in order to open the space up to what’s next. I had to let go of whatever it was I was holding on to, to be able to step into what’s next for me. But at the same time that experience, little did I know would open up such amazing new doors and opportunities and a true path of growth for me as a human being.
MARK: Okay. So before we come on to that amazing next phase, I’d like to maybe just pause for a moment. I feel like the last few minutes we’ve been blasted into a rocket going out into outer space!
PELEG: A time tunnel!
MARK: You were on this trajectory of ambition, is a word that jumped out at me, that even though you didn’t have the means to go to art college, you found a way, you got some hands-on experience. You worked your way up from being on the till to doing the art. You branched out on your own, you found clients, you broke into a very competitive niche or niche as you might say, and you made that happen as a successful design business in a very competitive space.
But even that didn’t satisfy you. You wanted to go beyond that. You started reflecting on your own practice and teaching other people. And then it sounded like the agency had run its course for you. When you look back at your younger self, what do you think you’ve learned about ambition from that whole experience?
PELEG: I love this question. What I can tell you today about ambition that I know now that I didn’t know back then is, what creates ambition is motivation. And the motivation that I had back then changed over the years. When I began my path as a creative professional, I was extremely motivated to succeed, I was extremely motivated to make money, I was extremely motivated to be independent in the world, and to be able to create the type of life that I want, or at least I thought I want. That motivation was strong enough to create an ambition.
I believe that as we grow older, as we mature for those who truly mature, who truly begin to reflect on why they’re doing the things that they’re doing and why things are happening to them or not happening to them, and when we begin to ask ourselves those inner questions that we generally don’t tend to do when we’re much younger, the motivation oftentimes changes. Because we are able to get to a point that forces us to examine our values and what’s important to us.
Because at the end of the day, we could achieve whatever level of success that we dream of and still not be satisfied because that success was being driven by maybe unhealthy motivation. The ambition that was driving me back then, I wouldn’t say was unhealthy. It was maybe a bit unconscious. It was very ego-driven, and it was very much about the need of feeling important to the world, the need to prove something to myself. And at one point, I did prove it, but I realized that this ladder that I’ve been climbing on for so many years was leaning against the wrong wall.
MARK: What did you see when you got to the top of that ladder?
PELEG: I began to see myself. I began to truly see the things in me that I wasn’t paying attention to before. I began to see my wounds, I began to heal my wounds. I began to reflect and question who I was, the one consistent question that kept coming up was not just who am I but who am I really?
And when I began to ask that question, the right teachers began to show up, the right tools began to show up, the right path began to unfold. But I needed to almost get to this very dark space spiritually and emotionally to be able to be vulnerable enough and courageous enough to say, ‘I need help, I can’t do this alone.’ And I’m not sure exactly how to do this alone, even if I wanted to.
MARK: This is an archetype, isn’t it? The creative, I guess the real archetype might be the rock star who achieves fame and fortune and is so focused on getting there, on the competition and the excitement of the ride, that when they get there, they realize it’s not what they wanted or it doesn’t fulfill them in the way that they’d hoped. And, and of course, we’ve all seen this story end badly.
PELEG: It can.
MARK: It can, but for you, it sounds like the answer was really looking in the mirror and looking deep inside and saying, ‘Okay, well, what is it that needs to be worked on here?’
Where did you go from this stage? You were running an agency, you had a team at the agency?
PELEG: Yeah. The agency was as small as one and as big as 10 over the evolution of its 18 years in business. When I ended up closing the studio, we were extremely efficient and small, we were down to three. So it was one of those defining moments in my life, where I sat my staff down a chilly Monday morning in October and basically looked at them and said, ‘Guys, I’m done.’ And they looked at me and they say, ‘Done with what?’ I said, ‘This, all of this, this whole thing, this thing called Top Design, this brawl, this life, I want out. So I’m giving you a three months’ notice. I will support you in whatever way I can to whatever happens next, and wherever you want to do go to. But I need to move on.’
And, in a way, letting my staff down was one of my biggest concerns in making the decision in closing the agency. There was a lot of fear around it because there was a huge responsibility that I was carrying. I had some people working with me for 12 years. Their livelihood was dependent on me. But I think that was also one of the first acts of self-love that I consciously made where I choose me over everything else.
And, to my surprise, the first response I got from my staff that morning was, ‘Congratulations, it’s time.’ It was a very emotional moment. And the way that things turned out was just ultimately beautiful, because, two of my staff members decided to continue serving our clients and they wanted to open their own small agency. And this was a great launching board from them. And it was all done on a handshake, and all done with a lot of love and trust, and they took over, and I basically began a new path.
MARK: Where did you go? What did you do?
PELEG: I first went to see a spiritual director, because I needed to do some work. And I needed to be in a conversation where I feel like I am really being heard from a soul perspective, not just therapy, not just psychologically. And I began to do some work, I found a spiritual director, spiritual teacher that I started seeing on a regular basis, and that was not easy. It was some of the hardest work I had ever done at the time, which forced me to look at my own shit. It forced me to really look at my wounds, it forced me to begin to change my perception on who I am and who I can become.
And one thing that I learned very, very early down the road was that my creative, free spirit was dormant. I wasn’t creating for myself, I was so busy creating for other people, for clients, for friends, for family. I was very much outside-in. And for the first time, I woke up to the idea of creating from the inside out, and I realized that I needed to wake my creative free spirit up. So I went to cooking school.
MARK: The obvious next move!
PELEG: The obvious thing, right? Well, my spiritual teacher gave me homework to work on one session and he said, ‘I want you to go home and make a list of all the places where your creative free spirit lives.’ And that was a really interesting question that I’ve never really asked myself, and I went home and I made this list. And the first thing I wrote on the list is when I cook, because when I’m in the kitchen, I play. And I love cooking and I don’t do it enough.
And then, I wrote other things, I wrote photography, I wrote painting, I wrote other areas that I honestly don’t engage much in, but places I know that that’s where my creative free spirit comes alive. I went back to the next session, and then he said, ‘All right, what’s the first thing on your list?’ And I said, ‘Cooking, kitchen.’ So he said, ‘Great. Your next homework is, find a way to engage in cooking on a daily basis, and do it just for you.’
So I decided to go to culinary school, it was a dream actually to maybe become a chef. So I thought maybe that’s the next thing for me, something that’s still creative but very different. So I enrolled in culinary school, and boy, little did I know how much culinary school was not about food! It was more about leadership and communication and teamwork and organization and production and empathy, and all of these areas that I really needed to begin to pay more attention to.
And every week I had a different kitchen partner. In the classroom, there was a new teacher who taught me something about myself. It was hard work, five days a week from 6am to about 2pm. I mean, I had no life for that period for that year. And at the end of that experience, I realized that I don’t want to to be a chef, that the physical work around it is not really something I’m interested doing, and that I got what I needed out of the experience.
The timing was really perfect because a couple months after I graduated from culinary school, The Designer’s Guide to Marketing and Pricing, a book that I wrote with my, then at the time, mentor and business partner, it came out into the world, and became a bit of a launching board for me working as a coach. It just opened up the path and people started knocking on my door to coach them around marketing and pricing and business and all that.
And it was fantastic and a wonderful experience to be able to continue teaching people from that space. But I was also in a very deep process myself, in my own spiritual evolution. I was working in the background with my own spiritual director, with my own coaches.
And with this continued thirst for self-knowledge and self-awareness, one thing that I began to realize was that everybody that was hiring me to coach them and had business issues, whether there was marketing or pricing or clients, all those issues were personal problems in disguise. All those issues had to do with how people were meeting themselves, how they were operating, where were they coming from. And I began to see that there was a common thread here of creative people operating from a place of fear.
And that was an interesting aha, because one of the things that I’ve learned in my own process of evolution was that I was operating from fear as well, for many, many years. Didn’t even realize it. And even though I achieved some of the successes that a lot of people envied, I was still operating from fear. I wasn’t satisfied, I wasn’t content, I wasn’t truly experiencing abundance like I could have.
And the beautiful thing about being in this profession is Mark, is that almost every client that knocked on my door was a mirror. They helped me see something about myself. And me coaching them and helping them heal something in them, helping them understand how to begin to operate from a place of love. And I really have an understanding and awareness of what operating from fear looks like in their lives. It was a healing process for both of us. And that space is a bit addictive as you know.
We want to heal, we like to heal – the level of satisfaction that I begin to receive from this work, I can’t even compare it to the satisfaction that I received from the design work that I did. Because a lot of the satisfaction that came from the design work really fed a lot of ego. It fed my ego, it made me feel important. And we know how much ego exists in the creative industry. And, by now, I’ve learned that level of ego is really only a reflection of the very common low self-esteem the creative people have. The ego act as a protective barrier, as a way of coping with the world.
And I can’t say that we have a healthy industry. We have an unhealthy fear-driven industry that we don’t talk about, don’t like to acknowledge, but I see it in every single person that hires me to work with them; whatever question they have, it’s mostly fear-driven. They’re mostly operating from fear, and honestly, most of them are not truly creating. They call themselves creatives, we call ourselves creatives, but are we really creating, or are we just pleasing other people?
And that shift of moving from pleasing people to serving people, from truly creating with other people, that’s the key to abundance, that’s the key to that flow that we all seek, that’s the key to that space that we all crave. And the reason that we all get into this work in the first place.
MARK: There’s a couple of things I want to pick up on here. One is, you used the phrase, ‘the thirst for self-knowledge.’ Now, I’ve spent a lot of time with people seeking self-knowledge, I’ve hung around with psychotherapists, and lots of therapy clients and coachees and used to hang around Buddhist monasteries, there’s plenty of seekers there, I don’t think I’ve met anyone who’s had such a thirst for self-knowledge as you.
And this really shines through, all the way through this story. I just want to draw people’s attention to this. You’re curious about your own experience, and you’re inquiring into: where is this coming from? And one big generality that I’m hearing about is this choice between whether you’re coming from fear or coming from love, which I’ve heard a lot from you about over the years. Could you say something about that now? Because that seems to be at the root of what you’re talking about.
PELEG: I’ve learned that we only have two choices to come from. We can either choose to come from fear, or we can either choose to come from love. I’ve also learned that it matters less where you’re going and it matters more where you’re coming from. So, if I’m coming from a place of fear, I am looking at the world from very different lenses. I am not as trusting, I need to be more in control, I am much more ego-driven, and I am in a prison, in other words.
But when I come from a place of love, I’m able to walk through the world with more compassion, with more empathy, less ego, more self-confidence, I’m able to truly show up in the world as the creator that I am. And this is the daily inner work that I find myself doing that always brings me back to that, where am I coming from? Every time I make a decision or need to make a decision, I ask myself, ‘Where am I coming from?’ because our tendency would be to come from fear.
MARK: Yeah.
PELEG: It’s almost like fear is the default state of being. I have an uncle in Israel, who’s a rabbi, my uncle Motty, and he once shared with me something that never left me. He said, ‘We are always hungry, that’s our default state. We have to nourish ourselves, we have to put food in our bodies to actually relieve the hunger, but our body processes it and we get back to hunger, which is our default. So it’s our job to be mindful and conscious as to how to not stay in a place of hunger. So we eat three times a day, and now we do it as a habit. We don’t think about it, because we don’t want to be hungry.’ Right?
I relate the same story to fear. Fear is oftentimes our default. Our darkness is that default, for many of us. It’s our job to do the work to bring light into our lives, it’s our job to be conscious around coming from a place of love, and understanding what that looks like, and understanding what that sounds like, and understanding what that feels like to operate from a place. We have to be aware of it, because if we’re not aware of it, our default is fear. That’s the wakeup call that I love seeing when people get. When they really understand this, like in their DNA, it’s almost like I take off a pair of glasses and I put a new pair of glasses on, and all of a sudden I’m looking at life in a very different way.
I also begin to see the people who surround me are perhaps not the same people I want to be with, people who may not be lifting me up to be the best version of myself that I can be. Because I chose those people coming from a place of maybe fear and insecurity, so it keeps feeding that fear and insecurity. That’s one of the reasons that I would have had an allergy to going to design conferences after a while because there was so much negativity that I was feeling energetically. I’m not just saying it was a negative experience, but I was very sensitive to that fear-based way of being. It felt toxic.
Even when I began to speak more and more, I would just go to the conference, do my talk and just leave the conference, because it’s just hard for me to be exposed to all of that. But the coaching work and the work that I’ve been doing with people over the years, alongside my own inner journey has been a healing process, and has been a strengthening process. And inside of that process, my creative free spirit actually woke up in a tremendous way. And I discovered the true artist in me, all of a sudden begin to paint, sculpt, and create art for myself as a form of self-expression without needing a client’s approval.
But that was a journey because if you would have asked me 12 years ago to stand in front of a blank canvas and begin a painting, I would freeze up, my inner critic would completely take over. I would not enjoy the experience. I would have a lot of anxiety around it. And the work that each of us creatives, the inner work that each of us is challenged to do, is the work that helps us get to that natural state of being a creator and an artist.
And if we don’t nourish ourselves and love ourselves enough to put the time and energy into creating that, well, I know what that looks like, because a lot of those clients knock on my door at the age of 50 and 60 and they are empty, they’re depressed. They have no idea what’s next for them. They’re lost.
MARK: We’re on a high spiritual plane here, talking about love and fear and so on, but, knowing you, this is also very, very practical and down to earth, isn’t it? Could you give us maybe an example of a daily choice that we face between love and fear?
PELEG: Yeah. It is very practical, and it needs to be practical for us to make it a practice. I think there are different areas in our life that we can pay attention to. We could pay attention to the conversations that we’re having. The way that we’re listening to other people, I might be judging the person when they’re speaking right now. Am I trying, do I need to look important right now? It’s really about being able to slow down the dial on our life enough to be able to observe ourselves. So we are having our own experience while we are observing ourselves. And that takes the work, that’s the work.
And if I can observe myself in my everydayness in the way that I communicate with people, in the way that I make decisions, in the way that I care for myself. I would say start with looking at what’s keeping you up at night, what are the things that you’re worried about? And once you identify those, ask yourself, why am I worried about those things? Why am I worried about those things? And then ask yourself, why am I worried about those things that I’m worried about? And the more I can ask myself those questions in those moments of peace that I am with myself. And this is where journaling comes in, this is where meditation comes in, this is where walking in nature comes in, this is what being quiet for 10 minutes a day comes in, where I can actually observe and ask myself those questions.
I begin to increase my level of awareness of who I am in my everydayness. And once I begin to really learn about myself, and you and I know there’s some amazing tools that we have access to, all of us have access to, that can help us observe ourselves and get to know ourselves better.
Once we learn those things, we can’t unlearn them. Once we notice those things, they begin to show up even more, and we begin to pay attention to how those things are running us. So it is in the little things, but the little things can become really big insights and big aha moments if we have the awareness, if we have the ability to notice that they’re happening inside of us. Does that answer the question?
MARK: Yeah it does. And since working with you, I found it tremendously useful just having that question in the back of my mind: ‘Where am I coming from at this moment?’ And I asked myself that, obviously, the moments when I’m more likely to ask are when I’m struggling, and invariably – oh, the switch has gone over to fear, right? So the alternative is, ‘What would I do if I came from the love side and the creative side?’
PELEG: Right. Here’s the thing, Mark, and it saddens my heart to say this. But I believe a lot of us don’t trust love. So many of us have been wounded by love so that we have a hard time listening to that voice, because fear has become so loud. It’s hard for us to trust love unless we begin to have a different relationship with love, and really understand what love really is. Because our perception of love in the world has been shaped by Hollywood.
MARK: And what a great job they did of it!
PELEG: And they continue to do. But look at the level of loneliness we experiencing in our world today, look at the level of fear that’s running our country, our leadership, so many of us, it’s everywhere. And oftentimes when we experience somebody who’s truly in love, living from a place of love, we become sarcastic. We don’t believe it. Well, I think it’s because we’re not that exposed to it so, of course, it looks foreign and weird to us.
But coming from a place of love means that I need to trust love. So if I’m facing a decision, if I’m worried about something, or I need to decide something, my go-to decision will be fear-based. I want to do this, because I’m afraid this will happen as a result, that’s a fear-based answer. If I can ask myself that question and identify, if indeed I’m coming from fear, I also have the opportunity to ask myself: what would I do if I came from love? What would it look like?
MARK: Yes.
PELEG: This is where we get to be the most creative, Mark, this is where we can really tap into our creativity. Because creativity lives in love, it doesn’t live in fear, right? When I ask myself, ‘What would love do? What would be the love-based decision?’ and really sit with that and see if I can feel it, and see if I can really play that out in my mind if I can trust it, that’s my moment of healing, that’s when I’m actually taking a different path in my life, that’s when I’m beginning to really listen to that pure essence of who I am. And the more I do that, the more I practice that, right to the smallest decision of what should I have for lunch?
MARK: Big decision!
PELEG: Yeah. Sometimes it’s a big decision. Why do I want to? Do I want to have this lunch because I forgot to take care of myself, I only have 10 minutes, I have a meeting to go to next and I just need to put something in my body, because if I don’t, I’ll begin to get a migraine? And I’m afraid I’ll get a migraine, so I have to eat something, so I’ll stop anywhere, even McDonald’s on the way, and just choose whatever it is that I can just stuff in myself. Or can I make a decision that actually nourishes me? And even if I have 10 minutes, what’s the choice that I want to make?
And if I begin to ask those questions of myself, every time I make a decision or a choice, even if I’m booking an appointment with a client on my calendar, make that a conscious choice that’s coming from love. Meaning take a look at your whole day. Where are you in that day, how are you caring for yourself in that day? Or, are you completely jamming your day with pleasing other people and forgetting about yourself until you get home at the end of the day, and you are a wreck, you’re tired? You just need to escape from the day you just had, and you begin to make not the best choices for yourself. So this is why it’s a practice. This is why it’s not just a one-time thing. And awareness is a practice, because we fall asleep every day.
MARK: Another area I know that is central to your work, where we fall asleep big time, is around money, isn’t it?
PELEG: Oh, yeah. Creative people, I found that we have a really interesting relationship with money. We don’t realize how central that relationship is in our lives, but it is. And when we begin to heal that relationship with money, when we begin to really question that relationship with money, that’s when we really heal. That’s when you really can step into a financial space in our lives where money is not a source of worry and concern, and it’s not something that is creating the fears that are making us make sometimes very poor decisions around who to work with or what to do with our money.
And I know this because I was there too. I was unconscious to that very much. The relationship that we oftentimes have with money is unconscious and fear-driven, and I’m sure you’ve heard many horror stories from your clients as well around money. There’s so much coaching I’ve done with people around money that understanding that relationship and helping people shift into that relationship, I believe it’s a central part of our spiritual evolution because money is such a dominant energy in our life.
I know this because it was a process that I had to go through. I had this idea, this wish when I was in my 30s that I wanted to be financially free by 43. It rhymed and it sounded good. And, the irony was that here I was at 42, I had money in the bank. I had real estate investments. I had a business that was, financially stable, but yet I wasn’t feeling financially free. And I said to myself, ‘Self, you got to take a look at this, because you made a promise to yourself, and you’re not there, so what’s up with that?’
That was a moment in my life that I realized that I need help, that I want help. That I want to have a different relationship with money, that I don’t want to come from a place of worry, anxiety, and fear, that I want to experience true pure abundance in my life and a flow of money, regardless of where I’m at in my life.
And I did some work around that, I hired a coach, I joined a mastermind group, I did some deep healing around that. I really learned a lot about myself at that level. And at the end of that year, as I was turning 43, I could actually say, ‘I feel financially free.’ Because what I realized was that being financially free has nothing to do with the amount of money that you have in the bank, the flow of income that you have, the assets that you have. Because both you and I know, and we’ve worked with people who are fairly wealthy, but still are not happy and worried about money all the time.
The awareness around financial freedom really had to do with how do I know myself as a creator, because there is a lot of money out there, there is infinite of money out there. It’s really only up to us to tap into it, and the way we do that is with our creativity. We do that by understanding that money gets created, money gets created through service, through pure service. And as long as I trust my creativity, that’s the thing we’ve got to trust, that I’m able to create money whenever I need it. And the idea of living in a place of abundance is being able to do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it.
If I’m able to tap into that, and if this is my way of being, if this is the knowledge that I walk around with, I have that power, I have that ability, I have that connection, then that’s freedom, that’s liberation. I’m not being driven by the balance of my bank account, because I know at any given time, all I have to do is turn on my creativity and create money. And that’s fine.
MARK: Can you give us an example of this? Maybe the difference between going in with this attitude of creating money versus the old fearful, worried, scarcity mindset.
PELEG: Yeah. I have an example from my own life that I can share with you.
MARK: Okay.
PELEG: About four years ago I decided to travel. I was on the heels of a divorce and some other life changes and other separations in relationships. I decided to take a little break and travel for a while. And during that, I also decided to go off the grid and not work, not see clients, not make money. And I tapped into my savings. And I said, ‘I will travel for as long as my savings last, and then come back.’ It ended up being a two-year travel process.
My money ran out after a year and in the second year I ended up living courtesy of my credit card. But this entire time, I really didn’t worry about the money part. I knew that when I return, even though I went off the grid and abandoned my coaching practice, I knew that when I come back in order to open up that flow of income again and create money in my life again, all I really have to do is serve people again.
So when I returned from my travels, I asked myself, ‘What can I create, who can I serve?’ And I began to have conversations with some old clients, I started putting myself out there back into the world and started to re-engage in the type of conversations that serve people well. And money started flowing back again. Within six months, I paid all the bills of my travels, and I got back on track. But I wasn’t worried about it because I knew that as long as I have my creativity to fuel my actions when it comes to creating money, I’ll be fine.
If I hadn’t had that knowledge and that understanding and that self-awareness about myself during the two years that I was traveling, I could have been a lot more anxious around what would happen if I come back. What would happen if I didn’t have that ability?
Thankfully, this place of feeling financially free and understanding what it takes to create money enabled me to really give myself permission to be present to myself and the travels that I was having, and not be consumed with, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen next?’
MARK: So one thing I really love about this is that attitude that you came back into work with, which was: what can I create, who can I serve? And you were really leading and going out there and creating things, which is very different to the passive attitude I come across in a lot of creatives. Where they’re either waiting to see what comes in or they’re waiting to see what the client wants or what the brief is, and they let that define their work and their business. What you’re doing is much more proactive, much more creative.
PELEG: Thank you. I think it’s a simple formula, Mark: fear equals passive, love equals active. So if I’m coming from fear, I am more passive. I am waiting for the approval, for the client to love what I created in order for me to actually earn his money. If I’m operating from a place of fear, I will initiate less, I would take fewer risks. I would not speak up as much. I would let clients lead the way. But if I am coming from a place of love, I’m more active, I’m more of a leader. I’m more of a guide to my clients. I have more self-respect and self-value and self-love, and I’m able to show up in a completely different way. It is a forward-moving energy. It helps us propel to whatever it is that’s next that’s waiting for us. It’s being in action, it’s being active. It’s that simple.
MARK: I want to pick up on the phrase you used just now, ‘pure service.’ And maybe if there’s somebody listening to here thinking, ‘Okay, well, I can see how that works in a service business like, design or coaching or consulting or whatever. But what about if I’m an artist?’ Does this attitude, does this approach still apply?
PELEG: Absolutely. It applies to everything we do in life, not just with our clients and our work. It applies in every relationship that we’re in. And if I’m an artist, I want to begin to ask myself, why am I an artist? Why am I an artist? Why am I creating what I’m creating, whatever it is that I’m creating? And if I’m creating it just to serve my ego, to make me feel important, to be a space where I deal with my insecurities, I’m really not in service to other people consciously, anyway.
But if I begin to see that my art serves others, my art brings more love into the world… well, the way I make my art begins to change, the way I approach marketing and selling my art changes. And the level of satisfaction changes, because now my art is a conduit for something. And if I can see that and if I can put service-oriented energy into it but truly serving someone for the sake of serving someone, not for the sake of getting something in return, not for the sake of getting paid. If I’m serving you, because I want to serve you, that’s a completely different relationship. Money doesn’t play a role.
Here’s the bottom line: as human beings, when we truly feel like we’re being served, and that we’re being served from a place of love and when that’s the intention, well, money doesn’t seem to be an object at that point. I see that from my own life as a creator and a creative, as a business owner, that when I can really get a sense that I’m being seen and being heard, and being guided, and being served, the decision is very easy to trust you. And the value of what you bring to the table increases. I may not be able to buy your art right now, work with you right now because of my own financial situation, but maybe I will in the future. And I may be the type of client that can work with you, and that does have the financial means to buy your service, or buy your product, or buy your art.
If I feel that emotional connection, if I feel that I’m really being served, if I look at a piece of art, and there’s some sort of a resonance there that just catches me. I see that when I sell some of my paintings. When a person looks at a piece of art, and all of a sudden, they see the story of their life reflected and only they can see it, the desire to own that piece, to pay the artist for that piece becomes a very beautiful thing. It’s a very natural thing for me to want to create the money to buy this piece from you.
MARK: I think we’ve come full circle from where you were talking earlier about, it’s really important where you’re coming from, not worrying about where you’re going to or how you’re coming across. What I’m picking up from this is, if you’re really and genuinely coming from a place of love and creativity and sincerity, the buyer or the client or the collector, they will pick up on that.
PELEG: Absolutely.
MARK: Either through you directly or maybe through the work itself.
PELEG: Absolutely. I think it’s one of the reasons that most creative people, when they think about selling and money, and I’ve heard this answer come up in hundreds of workshops that I taught, people begin to feel like a used-car salesman. Because that’s the energy that we feel when we walk into a car dealership and that salesman’s coming to us, towards us, we don’t really feel that they’re actually coming here to serve us. We can really sense all they care about is just making the sale, is selling us a car.
And had we had the experience of truly feeling like we are being served… think about it: if I go to a restaurant, and the server at that restaurant does an exceptional job, they go above and beyond as to what I expected the experience would be, and they help create a dining experience for me that is memorable and nourishing fun and joy. My natural inclination is to thank them, is to reward them, is to give them something back, because I really sense that, wow, they really care about me having a really good experience. That’s a very different exchange of money that happens.
MARK: Okay. And talking of a very different exchange of money Peleg, you have a very unusual Creative Challenge for us today. So if you’re listening to the show for the first time, this is the point of the episode where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a challenge. And it’s something that is related to the theme of the conversation, and that you can do or at least start to do within the next seven days. So, Peleg, what Creative Challenge would you like to set us?
PELEG: I love this challenge idea. And I really invite every one of you who’s listening right now to use this challenge as a way of gaining a little bit more self-awareness around your relationship with money. And the challenge is really around getting the experience of joy around money. So that there would be an ongoing flow of joy around you creating money in the world.
We have a lot of experiences with paying for things and using money for commerce, and we forget that money is a much more powerful tool. It’s a tool that enables us to grow and to progress, and to connect, and travel, and do all the things that we want to do in life. But also it enables us to sustain ourselves in our life and in our culture today.
But for that flow to happen there has to be a balance of giving and receiving to keep it healthy. And unfortunately, I don’t think that we really give as much as we can could when it comes to money. We’re often so consumed with worries about where we can get money from. So the challenge this week really is about getting that a little more balanced in our lives, getting the experience of giving money for the sake of serving others, for the sake of creating a moment of happiness, a moment of joy. And to practice it enough to have an idea of what it feels like when I’m in that flow.
So the challenge is I invite you to go to your bank or to your ATM and withdraw $180 in cash, that could be pounds or whatever your currency is, but take that $180 out in $10 bills. So now you have 18 $10 bills for the next week. I invite you to give away $10 to 18 different people, give from your heart, give and see what happens in that moment. I can promise you, this is an absolutely phenomenal exercise in generosity.
The way that it would fill your heart can be remarkable. Imagine walking through the world for the next week looking for opportunities to give, because you have this challenge and you have 18 people to find. So rather than worrying about ‘Where am I going to get my next paycheck from or where’s money going to come from?’ I’m focusing on ‘Where can I give this money away?’
It could be the checkout person at the supermarket who smiled at you, or a street artist, or a homeless person, or your son or your daughter, or somebody you know that needs money and $10 is what you can give them today. Start looking for those opportunities and begin to pay attention.
And if you want to take this step further, write down each one of the experiences. So have 18 journal entries around the experience of giving money away, coming from a place of love and generosity.
MARK: I have to ask, why $180? Why that number?
PELEG: This is where I reveal some of my attraction to numerology and to other spiritual methods. 18 is a very special number in the Jewish tradition. In numerology, it’s the word ‘CHAI,’ which means ‘life.’ So when I give money in increments of 18, when 18 is the driving number of the experience, I’m tapping into life source. And that’s just something that I wanted to include inside of this practice.
Because the 180 dollars or pounds that you will be giving away that week will be connecting you also to a new energy in your life, so it’s symbolic. And, being a person that loves symbols, I just found it was an appropriate number and it just feels right. 18 transactions of giving money away is not too little, not too much, just feels right.
MARK: My curiosity is satisfied! Thank you.
PELEG: I would love to hear some of people’s experience Mark. Is there a way for people to share them on your blog?
MARK: Sure. We’ll have the comments open on the blog, the show notes. So if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/peleg, and that’s P-E-L-E-G, then you can leave a comment just under the interview transcript for the episode.
Peleg, thank you so much. As always, it is an enlightening experience to be in your presence. I’m so pleased I could introduce you to my listeners and share some of your wisdom with them. So if they would like to learn more from you, where should they go to find you?
PELEG: Thank you, Mark. And before I answer that question, I just want to say that knowing you and the gifts that you bring into the world, the gifts that you bring to my life are remarkable. I am so impressed with this podcast project that you’ve been so dedicated to, but most of all, I’m impressed with how you love in the world and how you share yourself with the world. And the way that you are so dedicated to love, I think that’s what makes this space and this conversation with you just so delicious and so inspiring.
You and I, we know this, we could talk for hours, and we often do. But to be able to be in this space with you and serve others, thank you for that opportunity. If anybody wants to get in touch with me to learn more about the work that I do in the world, they can visit my website, which is PelegTop.com or email me directly at hello@pelegtop.com, and I answer every email and every request that I get. So, thank you.
MARK: And I would just like to say a conversation with Peleg is a life-changing experience, so if you’re feeling curious then reach out to him!
Okay, Peleg, as you say, we could talk forever and I’m sure you will be back on the show before too long. So, thank you again, and I really look forward to hearing the responses to this conversation.
PELEG: Thank you, Mark. Keep loving.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Nadia’s books have given a lot of pleasure to my own family, as my wife and I have read them with our children over the years, so I was very pleased that Nadia agreed to come on the podcast and talk about her work.
If you love children’s picture books – and who doesn’t? – then you’ll find this a fascinating peek behind the curtain to see how they are made. It was really nice to discover that the magic of a picture book is also there in the creative process, as you can hear how much Nadia enjoys amusing herself during the writing process.
Nadia also talked about some of the specific challenges and opportunities of writing for children, and the importance of trusting and respecting their capacity to experience powerful emotions.
Whether you’re a writer or not, if your creativity depends in any way on working within an established set of formal constraints and making the most of them, then you’ll likely find insights you can use in your own practice.
I certainly came away from this conversation with a very different way of looking at the deceptively simple format of the children’s picture book. I noticed surprising parallels with my own art, poetry, and also with the challenges of screenwriting for feature films. Maybe you’ll discover similar resonances with your own creative discipline.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then relax and enjoy this journey into the world of children’s stories, with Nadia Shireen.
You can learn more about Nadia’s work at her website, and also follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Limited edition prints of her illustrations are available from time to time at her Etsy Shop.
MARK: Nadia, what possessed you to start writing children’s books?
NADIA: Possessed is a good word. I took a really round about way to get here, to get to this career. I’ve always been a daydreamer. I’ve always been someone that’s enjoyed drawing, doodling. I’ve always lived in my imagination a lot. It wasn’t a career option I took seriously, just because I didn’t grow up in that kind of household where a creative career was necessarily considered to be a serious option, like many of my peers. I don’t know many people whose parents were like, ‘Yeah, you should definitely become an artist, that will pay well.’ So it was just always there. It was just always something I did.
And it was when I was about 30, I was working in the magazine industry and really feeling like this creative itch wasn’t getting scratched. So I did a few evening courses in illustration, which then led me on to do an MA in children’s book illustration, part-time. And I have to be honest, the only reason I did that MA was because it fit into my work schedule. So I could earn a living being a freelance journalist, and then one day a week, nip up to Cambridge, it was at Cambridge School of Art, nip up to Cambridge and do illustration. And the children’s book aspect of it was secondary to me, which I’m sure the tutors wouldn’t have been delighted to know.
But in the course, whilst doing that course, that’s really where my appreciation for the form came alive. And I thought, ‘Hey, this is actually perfect. This is the perfect combination for me.’ I want to tell stories, I love language, I love drawing, and there’s a mysterious alchemy between these three things in the format of children’s books. Does that answer the question in a little way?
MARK: Yeah, it does. I just think, because in this country, we’re in the UK, stories with pictures for adults are kinda frowned upon, aren’t they? It’s not like in France where bandes dessinées is revered, or manga in Japan, where the grown-ups are reading it on the tube.
NADIA: Yes, it’s such a shame. I don’t understand why, but we’ve got this idea that books, or text and image working together is somehow infantile or stupid. And actually, it’s so rich, because if you look at an image and there’s some accompanying text, if it’s done well the text will not be repeating what the image is telling you. They will both be telling you slightly different things. There’s a gap in between, and that’s the gap that we fill in. That’s the gap that you fill in as a reader. And I think that there’s so much potential in that gap, and that you can exploit that gap in really interesting ways. But I don’t know why we’ve suddenly decided that once you get to a certain age, that that’s it.
MARK: I think it’s getting better. Graphic novels are becoming more popular and respected as an art form. But I really want to pick up on this gap that you talk about, Nadia. Because one of the things I really love about your books is, when you read them, you’ve really got to pay attention to the illustrations, because you see stuff in the text and very often there’s a telling little detail in the illustration, and I don’t want to spoil any surprises, that if you miss that, if you just turn the page too quickly, then you kind of miss another dimension or another joke.
NADIA: Yes. And some parents have criticized me, well, not criticized, but said, ‘Oh, I missed that the first time.’ And I think it’s just about slowing down. And you have to, like you say, you have to read the image to get the full picture. And that’s the fun of it.
And also, my picture books have to appeal to children who cannot read, and then children who are learning to read, and then children who can read comfortably, as well as teachers and parents. There’s a real joy to be had, if you can’t read yet and your parent or whoever, is reading to you the story, you get to find something and you’re not just relying on them. So for them, to get some information from an image, feels a bit like I’m telling them a secret.
MARK: Yes. And you’ve got to pay attention, and attention is rewarded. I was rereading them, obviously this week, because I knew I was going to talk to you. And it’s a very nonlinear experience of reading. We’re so used to reading emails, and texts, and tweets, and just getting the gist of it. Even with a novel, it’s kind of you’re traveling in one direction. But when you read a picture book, you read and then you’ve got to look back at the image again in the light of what you’ve just read. You’ve got to read in several directions at once, and like you say, slow down.
NADIA: Yeah. And pacing is an interesting thing that I deal with. Because, I don’t know if your listeners are aware, but picture book formats are pretty standard globally. You’ve got 32 pages.
MARK: I wasn’t aware, tell us about this.
NADIA: You’ve got 32 pages, pretty much. And that’s pretty standard. That’s just because of printing, the economies of printing. And often, picture books need to be sold to other countries to make any money back. So it’s a very globally interconnected industry so hence, there are these standards. So 32 pages is your standard length. So within 32 pages, that’s not much space in which to establish characters, establish a sense of environment, where is the story taking place, and then give your reader a traditional story arc. So pacing is important, because you need to ramp up the tension points, you need to slow your reader down at some points. And image can really help with that.
So an intricate image or a couple of pages where, as you say, the words aren’t telling you everything, I’m forcing the reader to slow down a little bit. It’s like directing a film, almost. It looks deceptively simple, but actually, the image and the words both dictate how long you stay on a particular page.
And sometimes you want that page turn to be quick because of a funny joke, or because you’re trying to ramp up the action towards the end of your 32 pages. And then you want it to slow down so that your reader feels, even though they’ve only got two pages left, they have slowed down, so they feel like that ending is satisfying. Does that make sense?
MARK: Yeah, it does. And you’re giving me a completely different way of looking at it. I’m kind of unconsciously, this is what I’ve done reading your books and other picture books, but you’re showing me the book through a different lens.
And it’s quite cinematic. I’m thinking when I work with screenwriting clients they’ve got about 90 pages for their feature film. And the format, that’s been well established in the industry, and yet that box gives them a space to innovate and pacing and character development, and speed is obviously critical there. But I hadn’t quite thought about a children’s book in this way, but you’re absolutely right when you describe it like that.
NADIA: Yeah, it makes it a challenging but really stimulating kind of environment to work in, or medium to work within. There’s something about when you’ve got quite a restricted template, it makes you more inventive, in a way. You’re trying to eke out everything you can to kind of tell your story. Whether that’s changing the background color of a page to indicate a change of mood or emotion, or toying with where you put an ellipses or an exclamation mark. Everything counts in a good picture book.
MARK: Yeah, because everything is magnified when you’re looking at it that closely and carefully. Obviously, I’m thinking of poetry here, because if you write a short poem, like a sonnet or a haiku, then every word really counts. In a very different way than if you’re writing an 80,000 word novel.
NADIA: It’s a balance, isn’t it? It’s a balancing act.
MARK: The reader’s eye is very unforgiving.
NADIA: Yes, yeah, absolutely. There’s nowhere to hide. And the weight of things really matters. I hadn’t thought about it in terms of its similarity to poetry, but that’s definitely true.
MARK: So, what do you think makes a really good children’s book? Are there any examples of other people’s works that you would say, ‘Oh, that’s someone I really look up to and admire,’ or, ‘That’s a kind of exemplar of the craft?’
NADIA: I don’t know, it’s so personal. Do you mean picture books or children’s books in a more broad sense?
MARK: Yeah. I mean picture books.
NADIA: It’s funny because people say to me, ‘Oh, you must have had loads growing up.’ And the truth is, I didn’t. We were a house of readers, that’s no doubt, but we would go to the library and my mom would, you know, get her Dick Francis or Agatha Christie, and I’d be free to do what I wanted in the children’s area. I would just tear through them. Mostly I would tear through them there. So I didn’t have loads in the house when I was growing up. I loved Jan Pieńkowski who did the Meg & Mog books. Do you remember them?
MARK: Oh, God, yeah! Oh, that takes me back.
NADIA: Yeah, he did Meg & Mog which I just loved, and Haunted House which was this amazing, kind of three-dimensional book. Like you open it up and a frog jumps out of the toilet, that kind of thing. So I loved those because they were bright and bold. They felt a little bit forbidden because they were so different from the kind of genteel Hans Christian Andersen type picture books that would be thrust into your hand. These were quite kind of loud and punky.
MARK: And they were quite anarchic, weren’t they? And quite edgy.
NADIA: And the drawings were deceptively simple. And the drawings, as a child, you kind of went, ‘Oh, I could draw that,’ because they’re really simple, and sometimes you can see that he’s done them in felt tip. I love that. I still really love that. So they were great. And then the pitch, in terms of the ones that loomed large, those loomed large for me as a child. And now, of course, oh, there are so many. There are so many fantastic picture book artists working, but I try not to look at them because it depresses me. But people like Brian Wildsmith, you’ve got these kind of heroes who work well with color.
Contemporary people who work well with color would be people like, Benji Davis is a contemporary picture book artist who I think does great things. Jim Field is, I think, one of the biggest selling picture book artists at the moment. And pains me to say it, but he really deserves it because his characterization is amazing. It’s a really rich time for picture books. And I am half joking when I say it makes me feel envious, it also makes me feel immensely proud that I’m working during this time. I think it’s really rich. I feel we’re all looking at each other’s work and enjoying it, and it pushes all of us on, I think.
MARK: And all of your books, it strikes me, looking at them again, there’s a really strong, central concept to each one. Like, Good Little Wolf, or The Bumblebear, or The Cow Who Fell to Earth. Where do you get the ideas?
NADIA: It’s a funny one.
MARK: And how do you know that you’ve got an idea that you want to turn into a book?
NADIA: I think it has to have a few elements. So there has to be an engaging character. So that comes just from me sitting at my desk with a pencil, or not even at my desk, in bed with a sketchbook or wherever. I’m always drawing just characters and just seeing who appeals. When I draw a character and that character is looking at me, and I’m like, ‘Well, you’re definitely a separate entity.’ Then I think, ‘Okay, so that’s one factor.’
But then also, I need to be able to put them in a situation, give them an interesting story. But I do want there to be a little bit of weight. I need to empathize with them. And I think maybe that’s where the weight that you’re talking about comes from. It’s not enough for me that you’ve got, like a bear goes to the shops and buys a loaf of bread and comes home and makes a sandwich. Which is fine, but for there to be real stakes, real tension, and then real love or real connection, I think you need to feel it. That sounds really heavy and highfalutin when you think about a cow.
MARK: No, it doesn’t.
NADIA: I need to feel it. I need to mean it, at least.
MARK: I think with any story reader, we’ve got to feel that it matters to the central character, that there’s something at stake. And therefore, if we empathize, maybe see ourselves in them to a certain degree, then it matters to us.
NADIA: Yeah, absolutely. And I think kids can take that. Kids go through such a roller coaster of emotions in one day, and all the stuff matters. So, I take their emotions seriously. I’ve got a good emotional memory, I remember what it feels like to be a kid. And all those feelings are just as valid and serious as they are now.
And I want my books to be funny, too. Don’t get me wrong, ultimately, I want kids to have a laugh and have a good time before bed, and enjoy them. But I do, at the same time, want to treat my characters with love and respect.
MARK: There is quite a remarkable emotional range in your stories. You have people who are lonely who are feeling left out, or rejected, or they’re lost, or terrified, frankly. Good Little Wolf is… Well, obviously, I don’t want to spoil the ending, but when I turned that final page, I thought, ‘Whoa,’ it was quite shocking. Was it shocking for you when you got the idea? Did you think, ‘Is this too much?’
NADIA: For Good Little Wolf?
MARK: Yeah.
NADIA: No, not really. That was funny, because that was my first book. And that was a book that I created when I was finishing my MA at Cambridge School of Art. And I’d been failing that course, like my tutor quite gleefully was kind of telling me, ‘You’re probably going to fail,’ because I was working at the same time, and it was just too much of a juggle. But in the end, I took three months off work just so I could focus on my final push. So I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be published.’ I was thinking, ‘I need to finish my course. I need to get this book done. And I want it to be presented on my final degree show and get a good mark.’ Maybe that liberated me because I had no experience of the children’s book publishing industry world at that point. I don’t know if I’d do it now, maybe I’d be too cautious now, I’m not sure. But I think the fact that it was so surprising, that ending, really helped as a debut picture book author, because it really got me noticed.
MARK: Well, I’m not surprised. I mean, again, folks, you really need to read it. It ends with a bang, that’s all I will say. And the thing is when my kids read it, I was like, you know, ‘What will they think?’ But they loved it.
NADIA: I’m interested in that. Did you leave it up to them to interpret the ending?
MARK: Yeah. I wouldn’t tell them what it means.
NADIA: That’s the key.
MARK: I was just watching how they responded.
NADIA: So that’s the key, yeah. Well, you did absolutely the right thing. You know, I’m trying not to spoil it, not that anyone is that bothered I’m sure. But I have had parents read it and go, ‘We got to the end and I couldn’t believe it. And I explained to Little Timmy what happened, and he was devastated.’ And I feel like going, ‘Well, don’t explain then!’
Because if a child interprets that ending in a particular way, they’re ready to, and they’ll find it funny. If they are going to be upset by that, they will read something else into it. And I even help out that with; if you turn the page again, there’s another picture that can help that ending be plausible. So I think the child sees the ending as ready to see. But it’s when parents get involved and explain things maybe the kid’s not ready for, then I’ve had bad feedback.
MARK: Right.
NADIA: I mean, I blame the parents!
MARK: But it sounds like it’s more the parents are interfering with the story. Of course, we blame the parents! Of course, they always get the blame. We are both parents, by the way, and we always get the blame!
NADIA: We always get the blame. It’s fine.
MARK: But I really do think that is a great example; it’s really bold, and you really trust your reader, you really treat the child with respect in being bold in that way. But then there’s also that subtlety to it, that if they’re ready for it then they’ll get this, and if they’re not, then maybe they’ll take something else from it.
NADIA: I’m on the side of my reader before anyone else. I am on the kids’ side. And I do think as a children’s book writer or illustrator, you’ve got to be on the side of the kids. And I naturally feel that’s not a leap for me. I want to challenge my readers maybe a little, but I never want to patronize them. I also don’t want to traumatize them for no good reason. I don’t like those cartoons or books, or whatever, that are set to shock or upset just for the sake of it. So it’s got to be done with wit or care.
MARK: And, again, nearly all your books, there is a kind of a punch line. It’s not necessarily as dramatic as that one, but when you turn that final page, there’s a moment of an emotion being expressed or released, that you really do feel something has been said that matters. How easy is it to get that final page? Is it one of the first things you get, or do you have to work for a while and then it comes?
NADIA: Oh, that’s nice that you’ve noticed that, because that is something me my editor, Andrea, who I work very closely with, she really helps me with pacing, and we always talk about that page 32, the final sign off because it seems a shame…
MARK: Really? Page 32.
NADIA: Yeah, it seems a shame always, after you’ve gone through an adventure, to just have a last page that either doesn’t make you really feel anything, or doesn’t raise a smile. They’re not always little jokes, sometimes they do just underline a mood. Billy and the Beast, which is the most recent book that came out, and the final page is the lead character literally walking off into the sunset with her pals, but it’s hopefully done in a way that just underlines, ties together, as you say, leaves you with a strong feeling. It’s quite tricky sometimes. I always want to try and get an extra gag in always. I like to shoehorn in as many jokes as possible, but it is quite tricky.
MARK: Okay. So that is something that is consciously worked at. Because it leaves you with a feeling, and it’s a range of different feelings in the different books, but you really do feel, ‘Oh,’ when you put the book down. There’s something that lingers with you.
NADIA: I hope so. I don’t want to waste any space. There’s so little space. I want to squeeze it, squeeze it like a sponge, wring every last page out. I don’t mean cram every page full of stuff, I just mean use the entire book. Use my palette, if you like. Exploit my canvas, I mean, not my palette. Exploit my canvas to the best of my ability.
MARK: Another really bold move that you have, that we can talk about because it’s in the title is, The Cow Who Fell to Earth.
NADIA: It was my Bowie grief book clearly…
MARK: Oh, really? Was it written at that time?
NADIA: Yeah, weirdly. I had a meeting set up, an editorial meeting before… you know, ‘So what’s the next book going to be?’ And I had a couple of sketchbooks, and I had drawn a space cow with the words ‘The cow who fell to earth,’ in my sketchbook. Pre-Black Monday, as I like to call the day of David Bowie’s death.
MARK: Blackstar Monday, yeah.
NADIA: Yeah, Blackstar, very good. Pre-Blackstar Monday. So it was there and I had the meeting on Tuesday, which was like… I was very tear-stained. I was like, ‘I’m sorry. My hero’s died.’
MARK: We all were, yeah.
NADIA: I was genuine… yeah, we all were genuinely gutted, I know, I really was. And as we were flicking through the sketchbook, it was like, ‘Oh, who’s this little space cow guy?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, we’ve got to do the space guy.’ And as much as Bowie… it’s a cheeky nod to him, but the actual story is about something completely different.
MARK: Okay. I assume, everyone listening to this is a Bowie fan, but just in case you missed out on his cinematic masterpiece, it’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, right?
NADIA: Yeah.
MARK: It’s the movie. And again, part of the boldness is that movie really isn’t for kids. It isn’t for most adults! It’s really dark and scary. And weird, frankly, which is what makes it glorious.
So this was something I was thinking about, because I’ve been reading Asterix with my son recently. And I always loved Asterix as a kid. And one of the things that Asterix does really well, and that something like The Cow Who Fell to Earth does really well, it gives the parent something extra, but it doesn’t detract from the child’s enjoyment. So in Asterix there’s a few political jokes or references to classical poems in Latin and stuff. The kids are never going to get it, but the parent reading it goes, ‘Ah, all right. I see what he’s doing there. That’s nice.’ And it’s like there’s something for everyone in a book like that.
NADIA: Yeah. As I say, my primary audience are the kids, and I’m on the side of the kids. It’s more to amuse me. Because I didn’t call that book The Cow Who Fell to Earth because I thought I’d get a load of Bowie parents buying the book. Honestly, I didn’t, because that’s a terrible idea. That’s a terrible thing to hang a picture book on: I hope some parents are David Bowie fans. It will be quite niche.
So it’s more about me, that’s more about just making myself laugh. And yeah, sure, like-minded people will get a laugh out of it as well or will get some satisfaction from it. But I think if I went down the road of trying to shoehorn in stuff for the parents, I think there’s a danger of losing your focus on kind of who your main audience is.
MARK: Right. And it doesn’t come across like that. And I think that’s a lovely answer, that it’s for your own amusement. And I think that comes across. I assume you enjoy doing these things because the books are full of joy. And I like that exuberance that when you put something in you just can’t resist doing it.
NADIA: Well, yeah. I mean, what a luxury. This is my job, it’s ridiculous. You know, I’ve had normal jobs before this, and I’m grateful.
MARK: And we know what they’re like!
NADIA: Yeah, well, sort of normal. But I feel stupidly grateful. I feel really grateful this hasn’t been my only job, because I can really appreciate what a joy it is to have this creative freedom. I’ve got a whole book that I’m writing and illustrating myself. Who gets that? Who gets to have a playground? So I’m going to enjoy it while I’m doing it. I’m putting stuff in that makes me laugh. Even if it doesn’t make anyone else laugh, if it makes me laugh, that’s something.
MARK: I’m just turning the book over as we talk, and on the back cover it says, ‘Warning. This book is very silly.’
NADIA: That’s a perfect example. I was like, ‘I really want a chicken holding a sign, a warning sign.’ Nobody asked me to do that. I just like that kind of stuff.
MARK: It wasn’t necessary, which is what’s joyful and fun.
NADIA: Completely unnecessary.
MARK: What does the typical working day look like for you?
NADIA: It’s pretty boring, but pleasingly so. The best days are the ones where I just have to be at my desk all day, in a way. Because a brilliant but unexpected side effect of my job is that I go into schools, I get involved in literary festivals, I am invited to various panels. There’s a whole other side to the job that I wasn’t anticipating that exists. So in a typical week, I might have a couple of store visits, or I don’t know, some extracurricular thing. But that’s great.
But a joyful day is one where I get up, take my son to school typically, come back, make a big cup of tea and get to play at my desk. Now, I’ll be somewhere in the picture book cycle. I’ll either be trying to figure out what the next book is going to be, which is an exciting but also quite terrifying time, and that’s where I am at the moment. I’ve got nuggets of ideas and I’m trying to develop them visually to see which one’s going to be the one I work on.
Or I’ll be later on in the process where I know what I need to do, the book is mapped out, and I’m just going in to do art work. Those days are quite interesting. Those days are quite heavy, but I like them. Those are the days that music is really important to me. So when I’ve got a day where I know what I need to do, so I know that I need to sit down and draw some mountains and some trees, for example, I love it because I can just get stuck in, I can put some very weird drony experimental music on maybe, or whatever, and just get on with it. And that’s brilliant.
I used to listen to the radio, but recently I’ve found listening to speaking too distracting. I can sometimes. If it’s purely visual and I’m not having to switch on the kind of narrative part of my brain, then I can listen to the radio. But generally, I like to do that. Because of what you mentioned, we’re both parents, before I was a mother, I would do things like go for a nice, long walk to clear my head and think about next steps. But now that’s just not part of my reality, because now I cram in as much as I can before the end of the school day.
MARK:What’s the relationship for you between the creating, the writing, the illustrating, and the business professional side of it? Do you enjoy both sides? Some artists are, ‘I just want to be in the studio all day and I hate having to do any marketing or promotion.’ What’s your attitude to that?
NADIA: I actually enjoy both sides because 80% of my job is me in the studio. So, most of my work is solitary. And I’m one of those people that likes people around. I don’t necessarily like to be talking all the time with people, but I like them nearby. I used to work in magazines, so pretty noisy offices, and I quite like that hubbub. At the same time, I can be very insular within that hubbub. I like it. It’s fine. I don’t find it a particular chore, I enjoy yabbering, it’s why I’m on this podcast with you. And I get a lot from other people.
I love just chatting. I get lots of inspiration from other people, motivation. Because as a sole practitioner, and you’ll know this, you have to be everything, right? You have to be your line manager, you have to be your own work experience girl, you have to be your own trainee. You have to be everything. And so you have to wear different hats at different times. And it’s nice to interact with other people and get some help. I like it if I’m chatting to a PR person or something or a bookseller, and they’re telling me about how their role interacts. Why do I find it really comforting? It reminds me that I’m part of a bigger network.
MARK: And we’ve focused mostly on your books, but you do other things as well. You illustrate for other people, and you do some amazing prints as well. Talking of Bowie again, the Fox Low cover is just fantastic. Can you maybe talk about some of the other things you do around the books?
NADIA: Yes, I do. I think it’s really important because I’m on a… treadmill is such a negative word, so I shouldn’t say treadmill, I need to think of a better word. I’m on a schedule, I suppose, with my picture books. It’s like if you’re in a band, you do an album and tour. I suppose that’s a bad analogy. It’s not like that now. And it’s really important to, every now and then, do something else just to keep your creative juices flowing, to keep interested.
So, I’ve always been open to trying new things. When I do prints, like the Bowie Fox print you’re talking about, that’s because I have a deep, primal urge to do an image. I’m like, ‘I must create this.’ And I don’t know where that comes from, but I’ve learned that when that comes, it serves me well to listen to it. Now, that image I create might just sit on my desk or in a sketchbook or at my computer, if I’m doing it digitally. Or it might, like certain images, I might think, ‘Hey, I could sell this as a print.’ But I try to always listen to it. Or it might come out in a piece of creative writing or, as I say, I try and say yes to stuff that makes me feel, even if it makes me nervous. So I’ll say yes to doing a podcast or interviewing someone or whatever. It just keeps it interesting for me.
MARK: What’s next for you? What’s going to keep it interesting for you in the future?
NADIA: Loads actually. Loads at the minute. Annoyingly, quite a lot of that I can’t talk about because it’s speculative. But definitely, more picture books are happening, which I’m really happy about. And I am pressing my nose up against the window of other forms. I don’t want to jinx them because nothing’s been signed on the dotted line.
MARK: Okay. Don’t jinx anything!
NADIA: I’m not going to jinx anything.
MARK: Just come back and tell us about it in the future.
NADIA: Yeah, that’d be great.
MARK: But you are exploring other avenues as well.
NADIA: Yes. Absolutely. I’m quite liberated by being a stage of life, middle-aged, and mortality looms large. It always has for me. It always has for me, I’ve always been death-obsessed. But I’m always like, ‘Uh, our time is limited and I want to do as much as I can, and not worry so much about if I’m entitled to…’ I think in the past, I’ve been worried like, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t become that kind of writer,’ or, ‘You can’t suddenly go into this sphere, because you’re not entitled,’ But now I just think, ‘Oh, to hell with it. Do what I want.’ And if someone wants to stop me, they can have a go.
MARK: Years ago, my friend Chris Arnold, who works in advertising, said to me, ‘You should always get forgiveness rather than permission.’
NADIA: I’m going to try and remember that. So true.
MARK: ‘Oh, really? I shouldn’t have done that? I’m so sorry.’
NADIA: Yeah. That’s brilliant. I’m going to nick that. Because I’ve been very much the other way. ‘I’m so sorry. I mustn’t do that. I mustn’t do that. I’m not serious enough. I just draw bears.’ That’s the self-disparaging line I use a lot to get out of things. Like, ‘Oh, I don’t know, silly old me, I just draw bears.’
MARK: And actually, that’s a very serious undertaking, as we’ve seen.
NADIA: It’s a serious undertaking.
MARK: So if somebody is listening to this thinking, ‘I have an idea for a children’s book,’ or, ‘I thought I would be good at that kind of thing,’ do you have any advice for them on where to go with that?
NADIA: I think it would be really helpful because I get quite a few emails of that nature. And I always think the best thing I can say is, get to know your market a little bit. Because the children’s book market is, you’ve got picture books, you’ve got middle-grade books, you’ve got now young adult books, these categories have kind of arisen, rightly or wrongly, but it’s important that you get to know what’s out there and try and understand where your story fits.
Because sometimes people come to me with chapters and chapters, and I say, ‘Well, I’m a picture book writer and artist, so this is completely not my wheelhouse. This is a different thing.’ So just a little bit of research can go such a long way in helping you. Then look at your story and go, ‘Oh, actually, this would work well as a chapter book with black and white illustrations,’ or, ‘Actually, maybe it’s more a baby board book.’ And that can really help. And that can help you when you then come to describe it to potential agents or interested parties. They’ll really appreciate the fact that you’ve done your homework.
MARK: Again, thinking of screenwriting, that when it comes to pitching a movie, then you’ve got to be able to describe it very clearly and succinctly, what is the idea, in a way that someone can get that very clearly. And it sounds like it’s very similar with a children’s book.
NADIA: I think so. And I presume with a screenwriter, you’ve also got to demonstrate that you understand the restrictions of the form of screenwriting. So, for example, if you think, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a picture book,’ then be aware that picture books are 32 pages long, do you know what I mean?
MARK: It’s not going to be a 500-page effort!
NADIA: No, but you’d be surprised at kind of the assumptions people make. And it’s like, really get to know the very dull mechanics of the format you’re trying to break into. Because that will serve you really well, and save everyone’s time. It will save your time as well.
MARK: And again, I think, as you’ve shown today really delightfully, at the beginning of the conversation, those apparently dull mechanics are very often the key to the magic of it. When you talked about the 32 pages and the pacing, it really showed me it in a new way. So if you’re thinking of getting into this space, then really do go back and listen to what Nadia was saying about the format and the form.
NADIA: Yeah. And it’s joyful. It is restrictive, but there’s pleasure in butting up against those restrictions and seeing what you can do with it. I think that’s a great way of kind of… I’m sure you’ve discussed this on other episodes, but…
MARK: It is an ongoing theme, yeah.
NADIA: … a great way of unleashing creativity is to have some restrictions in place.
MARK: Talk about pleasure butting against restrictions, I think this would be a good time to introduce your Creative Challenge, Nadia.
NADIA: Yes. My creative challenge is really quite simple, but again, deceptively so. So one of the challenges I come across, day in day out really, is how to inject a sense of play into something that’s also my job. And I think that’s challenging, whatever sphere you’re working in, is that we are often our best when we find our flow, and we feel playful, and we stop frowning, and we stop clutching our pen really hard.
It’s a very simple thing. If you’re drawing and you’re tense, you’ll notice that even the way that you hold your pen or pencil, you can feel the stress and the tension in that. Nothing good is going to come out of that pencil or that pen.
My challenge is to just to give yourself half an hour, and maybe a sheet of A4 paper, and a pen or a pencil, and just let yourself play. And that sounds really kind of fluffy, but I mean, really see if you can let go, doodle, create, and not worry about the outcome. So, don’t look down and go, ‘That’s wrong. That doesn’t look like a tree,’ or, ‘That’s a rubbish horse.’ That’s not really the point.
The point is to play, just get back into that playful field. And we all did it when we were kids, we all picked up crayons and made a big mess on a bit of paper, and we didn’t care about it. We just enjoyed the feeling of doing it. And I think it might be an interesting exercise to see if you could tap into that.
MARK: That’s lovely. So just so we’re clear, is this when you’re under pressure in some way? Maybe you’ve got a deadline or a big performance about coming up, or you’re just getting stressed out about trying to be the best you can, then just take out the pens and pencils and crayons and do a bit of scribbling, even if you’re like me and you wouldn’t remotely consider yourself an artist?
NADIA: No one else has to see this. Honestly, that’s the key, is that you need to let go. The battle we have with our own ego about what we come up with at the end. It can literally just be stripes, shapes, enjoying the movement and kind of moving your hand around, and seeing if you can relax kind of in that way. Yeah, it might work, it might not, but I think removing any expectation of what you think a successful drawing looks like is key to this exercise.
MARK: Lovely. Well, I shall be doing that at the next opportunity. I look forward to the next time I feel stressed at work so I can do this! And I’m sure our listeners will have fun and joy doing it too. Nadia, your books, at least here in the UK – where every time I walk into the children’s department of a book store, I see your books – so people should obviously rush to their nearest bookseller and get them. Where else can people go to engage with you and your work and your books?
NADIA: Some of the titles are sold internationally, some aren’t. So that’s kind of a bit scattershot. But if you go to your local tax paying bookshop, I’m sure they can advise you on what titles they have. My latest book was Billy and The Beast. This year the sequel, Billy and The Dragon, will be out in August. Just tapping into the kind of ground swell of dragon interest, that’s Game of Thrones. I’m not, that’s a joke! I had nothing to do with that. I do have a website, but I’ll be honest, I’ve not really updated it in a while. I’m on Twitter.
MARK: That’s what? nadiashireendraws.org?
NADIA:nadiashireen.org. There’s not a lot on that, but you can have a look.
MARK: Okay. We will link to that.
NADIA: There are a few pics. I do whitter around on Twitter, but I can’t pretend that that’s…
MARK: Rubbish. You have to follow Nadia on Twitter. She’s really funny.
NADIA: There’s not much about work on that. There’s not much about my work.
MARK: Well, that’s what makes it funny and engaging. And it’s really not for kids, a lot of it, but it’s great. It’s very Nadia.
NADIA: I bank on there not being five-year-olds on Twitter.
MARK: But you are one of the people who makes me smile on Twitter. So definitely follow. And we’ll put all the links in the show notes as usual, and maybe an illustration or two so you can see the magic for yourself.
NADIA: You know, illustrators are meant to be on Instagram, and I am, but I’m rubbish. I’m really bad on that. But I am on that as well.
MARK: But the pictures are not rubbish, so maybe we’ll link to that too. And also, what about your prints? Have you got a link for the prints that we can put in the show notes?
NADIA: Yeah. So the prints, I’ve got an Etsy store, which is in my Instagram bio and is also on my Twitter page. The Bowie Fox prints are sold out.
MARK: No.
NADIA: I know. I’m so sorry. But I’ve got some horror movie homages at the moment. So if you’re a fan of like The Shining and Don’t Look Now.
MARK: Great. That’s exactly what the children’s illustration sector is missing, isn’t it?
NADIA: Yeah. So if you want to see a little kitten in a red mac holding a knife on a Don’t Look Now poster…
MARK: And who wouldn’t want to see that?
NADIA: Who wouldn’t want to see that? Then head over to my Etsy page.
MARK: Brilliant, brilliant. People will do all of that. Nadia, thank you so much. As always, it’s a delight to talk to you, and I’m really glad you’ve made the time to share your words of wisdom and your silliness with my listeners, who I’m sure will enjoy and appreciate as much as I do.
NADIA: It’s been lots of fun. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
What Creators Can Learn from Adventurers with Alastair Humphreys
Jul 08, 2019
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative is Alastair Humphreys, a British adventurer and author whose latest book, My Midsummer Morning, recounts his attempt to busk his way across Spain with no money or credit cards, and only an upper beginner’s ability to play the violin.
When he left college Alastair saw his friends going off to work in sensible jobs and it looked a bit boring. So he set out on an epic journey to cycle round the entire world, starting from his parents’ house in Yorkshire. He spent four years circumnavigating the globe by bike, a journey of 46,000 miles through 60 countries and five continents.
Since then, Alastair has walked across southern India, rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, run six marathons through the Sahara desert and trekked 1,000 miles across the Empty Quarter, the largest sand desert in the world. Further north, he has completed a crossing of Iceland and taken part in an expedition in the Arctic, close to the magnetic North Pole. And he’s written about his adventures in a string of popular books.
More recently, Alastair has redefined the very concept of adventure, by introducing us to microadventures which he defines as adventures that are ‘short, simple, local, cheap – yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding’. They can be as simple as sleeping out on the hillside next to your house, or as unusual as walking home for Christmas or hiking 120 miles around London’s ring road, the M25.
Alastair busking in a Spanish square
Alastair’s best selling book Microadventures helped thousands of people discover the spirit of adventure and earned him the title of National Geographic Adventurer of the Year for 2012.
He has spoken at events such as TED and SXSW, and for organisations as diverse as Google, Facebook, Twitter, England Rugby and the UK Special Forces.
I’m delighted to welcome Alastair to the microadventure that is The 21st Century Creative, and to share with you a captivating conversation where he talks about the challenges he encountered on his various adventures, and how real-life adventures compare to the inner adventure of writing a book. Plus how he balances the call to adventure with his responsibilities as a husband and father.
Alastair is a terrific storyteller with some great stories to tell, so I’m confident you’ll find this conversation as enjoyable and inspiring as I did.
He also has some very interesting and unexpected things to say about the relationship between adventuring and writing, and about how to live a more creative and adventurous life, wherever you happen to be and whatever your circumstances.
MARK: Alastair, most of us read about adventurers or watch them in the movies. What made you decide to go on real-life adventures yourself?
ALASTAIR: I was originally inspired towards adventure by reading about them as you say, reading books of crazy men and women doing mad stuff around the world. And like most people, I just read them thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a great story.’
But little by little, I started to think, ‘Wow, that’s a great story. I wonder if I could do something like that.’ And the answer of course was, ‘No. Of course, I can’t do something like that because these people are adventurers and I am a normal person. So, of course, I can’t do that.’
So, I had quite a long time of wistfully wishing that I could do adventure, but assuming I couldn’t because I wasn’t an adventurer. And looking back on my younger self, I’m incredibly grateful and also quite impressed that I managed to get myself over that initial hurdle of impostor syndrome and think to myself, ‘Well, why don’t I just give it a go? Why don’t I try something?’
And it needed to be something that a beginner could do. It needed to be something that a young person could afford. And I wanted it to be tough. I really wanted that physical and mental challenge of a journey. And combining those things together was when I decided to go for a long bicycle ride. That was my first foray into adventuring.
MARK:And when you say ‘a long bicycle ride,’ could you elaborate? Because I think your definition of a long bicycle ride is longer than it is for most of us!
ALASTAIR: I had a map on my wall in my room at university, and I remember looking at that world map and thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing to cycle to India?’ And I looked on the map, and I thought, ‘Wow. India. That looks incredible.’ But then my focus turned to India, and I thought, ‘Well, if I’ve made it this far, why don’t I carry on to China, to Australia?’ And then the idea just started growing and growing in a pretty ridiculously naive way until I thought, ‘Why don’t I try and cycle around the whole world?’
So, that was the idea I had. But I didn’t actually think I was going to cycle around the world. What I actually thought I was going to do was cycle as far as I could until I got tired, or I ran out of money, or ran out of inspiration and then I’d come home and get on with life. But all of that is quite a waffly thing to say. It’s much easier just to burst into the pub and shout out to your friends, ‘I’m going to go cycle around the world.’ That’s a much bolder declaration to make even if you don’t actually entirely mean it.
MARK: Yeah. And then you wake up the next morning, and you think, ‘What did I say?’
ALASTAIR: Oh, gosh. I remember so viscerally that emotion of getting on my bike outside my Mum and Dad’s house in the Yorkshire Dales just thinking, ‘What on earth have I done? This is ridiculous. I’m so out of my depth. This is terrifying and terrible. Oh, dear.’ It was very much, I had that sense at the start line rather than thinking, ‘Hooray, I’m going off on a big adventure,’ I felt more like a condemned man who’d sentenced myself to four years in exile.
MARK: I want to pick up on a few things you’ve said here about getting started because it is so important and it is one of the big themes of the podcast is how do you get started on a big adventure? And usually, it’s an artistic or entrepreneurial adventure of some kind. But I’m glad you’re here to bring us the real live thing.
But it sounds very similar because, first of all, there’s the curiosity, ‘I wonder what it would be like.’ And then, of course, the part comes in and says, ‘No.’ And it’s interesting that it’s…. ‘Well, but I’m not X,’ in this case, ‘I’m not an adventurer.’ But a lot of the time I hear, ‘Yeah. But I’m not a real writer. I’m not an artist, that’s for other people to do.’ And it was only when you got past that, and you started looking at, ‘Well, okay. But I could, you know… There’s land all the way to India once you get to Belgium,’ then bit by bit by bit you could start to see it happening.
ALASTAIR: I find it astonishing how we all just rule ourselves out of the game before we even begin. No one really would look at, say, if you’re watching football on TV, watching the England football team, no one thinks those people were born that good. They’ve gone years and years of being little kids and learning to kick a ball and years and years at playing, and playing, and playing. But somehow, with writing or creative things, or in my case, adventures, we have this real ‘us and them’ sensation of, ‘People like me can’t do X,’ and, yeah, ruling ourselves out of the game before we even kick off is ridiculous and almost ubiquitous, I think.
MARK: And so, how did you get past that and get to the point where you actually committed? Because you have the idea of cycling around the world. You’ve got endless excuses not to do it. And maybe there’s somebody listening to this who had such a dream and didn’t do it. How did you get past all the excuses and actually find a way of making it happen?
ALASTAIR: There were a couple of things. One was I couldn’t think of anything more exciting, and rewarding, and fulfilling to be doing with my life.
I was just about to graduate. All of my friends were going off into the world to get proper jobs and real lives. And I just didn’t quite feel ready for that yet. So, I wanted to do something different. And I had this sense that although I knew it was going to be difficult, I had this feeling that I probably wouldn’t regret it if I set off.
And I’ve always had this fairly morbid sense of mortality hanging over me and a real terror of time passing away. That’s always really motivated me to just get on and do stuff now because I don’t want to have regrets, which is the standard cliché people trot out. But in my case, very much motivates the decisions that I make. I really, really would rather try something, realize I don’t like it, go do something else than to get old, look back and wish I’d given it a go when I could.
And I suppose the other thing that really tipped me over the edge was realizing that at the age of 24, life would never be so simple again. So free of ties and commitments and real life. And I luckily had the foresight to predict that and therefore think, ‘Right. I’ve got to do this now because if I wait, real life’s going to get in the way. And before I know it, I’ll have a mortgage, and a wife, and a cat, and I’ll be doomed.’
MARK: So, okay. That’s what got you going. And what did you learn about yourself on that journey?
ALASTAIR: Oh gosh. I began the trip because I was curious about the wilderness places of the world. I loved wild, beautiful landscapes and also I was quite curious about the physical challenge. I’m not an athletic type at all. I was rubbish at sport, but I started to become really curious about how hard I could push myself physically. So, they’re the two reasons I began that journey.
But I soon learned that if you sit on a bike all day, every day for several months, you get very good at riding a long way. Literally, anyone would get very fit sitting on a bike all day, every day. So, there’s no skill to that other than perhaps some praise for the persistence. So, quite quickly I realized that the physical side of the journey was a bit of an irrelevance, and actually, the big part of it was the mental side and that I had done zero preparation or anticipation for. And that was where I really found the adventure and the challenge began.
And knowing that I was on this project, which was going to take several years to complete, also knowing with real certainty for the first two years that I would not complete it. That it would be too much. I’d quit at some point. So, how on earth could I keep myself going on through this difficult experience knowing that at some point, I was going to quit and fail? I found that the mental side of it was really, really hard.
The other, more positive side was that it really forced me for the first time in my life to not hide behind excuses. I’m terrible in life. If anything goes wrong, I’m always very good at manipulating in my brain till I can blame someone else and make myself come out of it looking like the hero. But on a bike on your own, in the middle of nowhere, you can’t do that. If something goes wrong, you have to fix it yourself. You have to solve the problem yourself. And you can sit down and have a cry and feel sorry for yourself, but at some point, you just have to take a deep breath, stand up, and get on with it. And I found that that was a really good learning experience to come out from behind the excuses and take some responsibility for my life.
MARK:So, you were convinced, for a long time, you were going to fail?
ALASTAIR: Yeah. For the first two years.
MARK:And at what point did that tip over to, ‘Actually, I am going to do this?’
ALASTAIR: I cycled from England to South Africa, crossed the Atlantic on a sailing boat and then cycled from the very tip of southern Patagonia, right the way to northern Colombia, to the Caribbean Sea. And in all that time I was sure that at some point I was going to stop because it was really hard and I had a really long way still to go. I wasn’t even halfway at this point. And as I cycled to Colombia, one of the reasons I didn’t give up was because I was trying to prove myself to the world and prove myself to myself. And that kind of kept me going for a couple of years.
But after two years when I was coming through Colombia, I felt by then, ‘Right. I’ve cycled far enough to prove whatever I need to prove to anyone. Anyone who doesn’t like it now can go hop on a… I’ve done enough for that. I’m satisfied that this is sufficient. Now I can go home with my head held high.’ And I was very happy that I was going to get to the Caribbean and then give up. So, I cycled down through Colombia to the Caribbean Sea, and I went down to, it was basically a yacht club where I could get access to the sea. I was going to take my photo at the end of the Pontoon, me and my bike, and then go to a travel agent, book a ticket and come home.
And I went, I did that. I got to the end of the Pontoon, took my photo of my bike and I was just walking down the Pontoon and someone, an American guy, he shouted out from the yacht. He said, ‘Do you want a lift to Panama?’ And the reason I’d stopped at Colombia is because there’s no road between there and Panama. And he just offered me a lift without me even asking, and I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t say no to that. I guess the journey must continue.’ And from then on, I was into North America, which is a pretty easy six months of cycling up to Alaska. And after that, I only had to ride across Asia. So, I just thought, ‘Oh. Well, I might as well finish the job now.’ So, that was the tipping point, that moment.
MARK: Well congratulations, Alastair. I don’t think anyone has uttered the words, ‘I only had to ride across Asia,’ on the podcast before and actually been able to back it up. And of course if this were an ancient Greek epic, that guy on the boat would of course have been a god in disguise, wouldn’t he? He’d have been a heavenly messenger sent to help you on your way because you’re the hero and you’re destined to succeed.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. Well, he was very well disguised cause he had a large belly and he drank an amazing amount of gin, and I was often quite scared on that boat!
MARK: That sounds like my kind of god!
ALASTAIR: Yeah. Zeus works in mysterious ways. But it was an amazingly fortuitous thing, actually. It really was.
MARK: And what was it like when you came home, and you could walk into that pub and tell your mates, ‘Look, I did it!’
ALASTAIR: Oh gosh. Well, I learned a very big lesson on that trip that you should not undertake a journey in order to complete it. I remember listening to an interview with Bradley Wiggins, he’s a cyclist and he talks about how he woke up the day after winning, I’m not sure if it was the Olympics or the Tour de France, he’s waking up the next morning and just thinking, ‘Wow. I’m still me. Nothing has changed.’ And trying to do any big journey as a route to try and change yourself is a bit foolish.
So I basically came home to relief that it was over. A deep sense of quiet pride that I’d stuck at it, to achieve something big for the first time in my life, but also just a monumental anticlimax of being home. And the thought that, ‘Gosh, I’m 29 now, I think my life has probably peaked. What on earth am I going to do for the next 60 years?’ And of course, you go to the pub, your friends are very excited to see you and to listen to your stories about five minutes, and then they say, ‘Right. Enough of the round the world chat. Let’s talk about the cricket,’ and then life carries on. Life just carries on. And so, I found it a very, very strange experience coming home and one that I’d completely underestimated.
MARK: There’s nothing like your best mates to bring you back down to earth is there?
ALASTAIR: Yes, absolutely!
MARK: Maybe it’s a British thing! How long did that take you altogether?
ALASTAIR: Four years and three months to do. I cycled 46,000 miles through 60 countries. I got around the world with boats and bicycles and the whole trip cost just under £7,000. So it’s pretty cheap.
MARK: So the money really shouldn’t be an excuse, should it?
ALASTAIR: Well, that’s the only reason that I threw that sentence into this podcast because this isn’t a travel podcast. But I know that there’s often, when you talk about anything in life, that people have their legitimate barriers and they have their internal excuses, and these are often all muddled up together.
But generally, I’ve noticed that most excuses boil down to, ‘I don’t have enough time,’ or, ‘I don’t have enough money.’ And a lot of what I’ve been trying to do with both in my adventuring world has been tried to tackle those two barriers both in my life and in other people’s lives.
MARK: Yeah. And I think the lesson maybe for us is really, if you say it’s time and money, then maybe you just don’t have enough resourcefulness, because you found a way to make it happen.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. I’ve come across this nice way of trying to figure out in my mind whether the barrier is legitimate or if it’s an excuse. I think it’s interesting to replace the word ‘can’t’ with ‘choose not to.’ So, for example, ‘I can’t afford to cycle around the world,’ versus, ‘I choose not to allocate my money to cycling around the world,’ or, ‘I can’t write a book because I don’t have enough time,’ or, ‘I choose not to use my time on writing a book.’ And I find when I say that sometimes it’s painful because I just think, ‘Ouch! This is a pathetic excuse I’m making.’ Other times I think, ‘No. I actually can’t do this right now in my life.’ And that is also helpful because then I can park the idea and do something different or do a smaller version of it for now.
MARK: I love this. Honestly, I think it’s a great question. One of the things I say to my clients over and over again is ‘your body is your best coach,’ because your body will give you the truth of what you really feel about something and what you really are capable of. And this is a beautiful example. If you ask the question, it puts it back on you, and you get the ouch…
ALASTAIR: Yeah.
MARK: …feeling from your body – if you’ve been kidding yourself. So, I don’t know, I might borrow that and use that! I encourage anyone listening to this to use that question. I think it’s terrific.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. Replacing ‘can’t’ with ‘choose not to’ and seeing where that takes your thought process is good.
MARK: Yeah. And as a writer myself, I’m just getting flashbacks all the way through your description, of what it’s like to write a book. You set out full of ridiculous confidence, and you wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Well, who am I to do this?’ And then you get going, and you get going, and you get to a certain point, and you realize, ‘Actually, I’m probably going to finish this.’ And that whole thing about you get to the end, and you realize actually…because you’ve been so fixated all the way through, ‘Well, if I do a bit, I’m nearly at the end, I’m nearly there.’ And you get there, and you realize the best part of writing a book was writing the book.
ALASTAIR: Yes. Very much so. I find the parallel is so direct in so many things. In my own writing experience, I find the same thing. For me, finishing writing a book doesn’t come with some great celebration. It comes with a sense of exhaustion and a day when I just cannot be bothered to read the manuscript one more time, ‘I’m done. Send it off out into the world.’ And then once the book comes, I never dare look at it again because I’ll just be cross that it’s not as good as it should be. I find finishing a book to be a spectacular anticlimax.
MARK: What is the relationship between the adventuring and the writing? Do you go on an adventure and then write it up, or is it more complicated than that?
ALASTAIR: One of the reasons I decided to cycle around the world was because I loved reading and I thought I’d love to be a travel writer. Therefore, I needed to have something to write about. So the two things had been intertwined right from the start.
When I’m away on my trips, I write diaries every day partly so I can remember my own life, partly to help me with writing books and partly because I’m often on my own on these trips. It’s just a way of trying to figure out where my head is at that time on the trip, cheer myself up when times are hard, then I come home, type up all my diaries and then begin the agonizing process of writing a book, which is infinitely harder than the expedition that I’m actually writing about.
Sometimes, writing also encroaches on some of my projects. Some of the things I do like rowing the Atlantic Ocean is a very expensive business. You need a sponsor for that. To keep the sponsor happy you have to do blogs along the way and you keep sharing your story. So sometimes I’m writing during the trip and publishing during the trip, but my preferred way is to go do the trip for all the reasons I want to do a trip, come home and then write a story, to have them as separate activities.
MARK: Okay. Talking of sponsors and money and so on, what is the business model for the modern-day adventurer? If I’m sitting at home thinking, ‘Yeah, I’d love to do that,’ how do I make it viable?
ALASTAIR: Well, like pretty much most self-employed things, you start from a standing start, on zero. So, I think anyone who’s looking to try to become a adventurer/writer or creator of anything, I think the sensible thing to do is stick with your day job, stick with whatever pays your bills now and squeeze in adventure and writing around the margins because you’re not going to earn any cash for quite a long time.
So the way it works for me is I saved up for five years, got my £7,000, cycled around the world, came home, started writing my book. And to pay for my life when I got home I gave talks in primary schools at first for zero money, then for £50. And then I just squeezed up my payment by £50 every few months till people started howling in protest. Then I realized I’d worked out what my level was.
And that was essentially the model for quite a long time. Do a bazillion talks in primary schools and try and get a book published and then come up with an idea for a new journey. Go do a new journey so that the story gets better. And just repeat that process of adventure, story, sharing; adventure, story sharing. And over a course of quite a lot of years, I’ve gradually got to the point where it’s become viable, sustainable primarily through speaking. I’ve written 11 books now, and I’m a long way from being able to live off my book money. And in the last few years, as I start to move into filming my adventures, that’s led me into the world of making little films for brands or being an ambassador for a company and getting paid to make short little adventure films and do stuff for them. So, they’re my three income streams: speaking, writing and brand type work.
MARK: And maybe, the last two might not have been very predictable when you set out, but I love the fact that you thought, ‘Well, okay. I’m going to fund this, to begin with. I’m going to do it. And then I will figure it out down the line,’ which indeed you are, very nicely.
ALASTAIR: What I found really interesting is that the decisions I’ve made in my life that have been entirely around passion and excitement and what I really want to do, even if they sound financially stupid… So three examples of those would be one, cycling around the world rather than being a professional. I was going to be a teacher. So earning a professional salary.
One, cycling around the world. Number two, in 2009 was when digital SLR cameras started to do video. And the Canon 5D Mark II came out, and I saw some of this video, and I just thought, ‘Wow, that is insanely beautiful and sufficiently portable to take on an adventure.’ So, I bought it despite never having filmed a single thing in my life or even wanted to do. And it cost £1,600, which was insanely expensive for me. And I started trying to learn how to film stuff because it excited me.
And the third thing I did was moving from massive big adventures to what I, in the end, started to call microadventures – small, short, simple, local things – because that felt exciting to me.
Those three things have led to me earning more money than anything I’ve ever done in my life when I’ve set out to think, ‘Hmm, how can I get rich and famous?’ So, I think there’s some sort of lesson in there somewhere.
MARK: Yeah. These are things that you could never predict and if you go on the adventure, then it’s not the same as saying, ‘Leap and the net will appear,’ because you made sure you had a decent net for the first leg of your journey.
ALASTAIR: Yes. I think ‘leaping, and your net will appear’ is one of the really terrible, terrible advice things of the internet age, and particularly the sort of Instagram culture of, ‘Follow your dreams. If you work hard enough, you can be like me! PS, it helps if you’ve got a trust fund sort of thing.’ So I think that’s a terrible, terrible belief system. So it’s why I’d say, ‘Don’t quit your job until things are in place.’ You have to make your safety net, and once you’ve got a safety net, then you’re brave enough to take the leap, I think.
MARK: Okay. Let’s focus on microadventures now because you’ve done the epic adventures, you’ve cycled around the world, you’ve run not one, not two, but six marathons through the Sahara Desert. You’ve rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and so on. All the things that we think, ‘Wow, that’s what a real adventurer does.’ You’ve ticked all of those boxes, but then you introduced this concept of microadventures. What is a microadventure?
ALASTAIR: A microadventure is just an adventure. And an adventure is whatever you think it is. The difference, I suppose, is that a microadventure is something that is sufficiently short, simple, local, affordable, that you can do it and you can fit it in around the margins of real life, and it removes the genuine barriers that stop people rowing oceans, like it’s massively expensive and terrifying. It removes these genuine barriers and instead leaves you only with the mental things, the mental hurdles to jump over and making it happen.
So, this came about because… I spoke earlier about, right at the very start your first question about me reading books thinking, ‘I wonder if I could do that.’ And then thinking, ‘No. Of course, I can’t because I’m not an adventurer. I’m a normal person.’ And over years of doing adventures, I started to get into the other situation whereby at the end of my talks or through emails on my website, people essentially saying to me, ‘I’d love to do what you do, but I can’t because I am not an adventurer like you. I’m a normal person.’ And I found this really, really fascinating.
So, that was one aspect. The second aspect was I realized that the kicks I got from massive adventures were essentially the same whether I was shivering in Greenland or sweating in the Empty Quarter deserts. So the good stuff, the marrow that I sucked out of adventure was the same wherever it was. And therefore perhaps I wondered, ‘Maybe I don’t need to go to the ends of the earth to find this. Can I find this on my doorstep?’ So, that was the second aspect of it.
It’s really a way of trying to show that you can get all the good stuff out of living adventurously, but that I could try and make it accessible for so-called normal people with real lives. That was the starting premise of the idea. And then maybe I’ll give you a couple of examples.
My first idea of micro-adventure was to try and prove that you could do adventure anywhere. I decided to do the most boring adventure in the world. So, I thought, ‘Where do I really hate? I’ll think somewhere I hate and go try and have an adventure there.’ And so, I came up with the idea of trying to walk a lap of the M25 motorway, which I live nearby. I spend too much time on and I think is synonymous with being boring and anti-adventurous.
So, I set out to walk a lap of that. And to my astonishment, it was a brilliant adventure. It felt, time and again, walking around the M25, I just kept thinking, ‘This is exactly the same as cycling around the world.’ It’s a physical challenge, which I like. It’s taking me places I’ve never been before. I’m finding pockets of beauty and wilderness in between Slough and whatever the next junction is. I’m encountering kind, decent, interesting people just like you do in Bolivia or Azerbaijan. This is the same as cycling around the world just on a smaller and sillier scale.
MARK: And for anybody listening somewhere in the world who hasn’t had the delights of being stuck in a traffic jam on the M25, it’s the motorway that orbits London. So, it just goes around in a circle and is basically one of the outer circles of Dante’s Hell, and being stuck in a motorway traffic jam, it’s the complete opposite of what we think of as adventure. It’s pretty breathtaking that you managed to squeeze an adventure out of that.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. It was, exactly. I was surprised. And I was walking in the countryside beside the motorway, so through the fields, and villages, and towns, and business parks, and warehouses, and golf courses that I encountered along the way, just following my nose.
The other surreal breakthrough I had on this walk was being surprised at how much of it was beautiful because this is a really not particularly beautiful or inspiring corner of Britain. But I remember walking through this road. It was only about 100 meters between one housing estate and the busy roads, about 100 meters of walking through. And there was snow on the ground, and I was the first through in the morning, and there were fox prints and rabbit prints in the snow. And it was silent except for the roar of the motorway. And the trees were there, and I thought, ‘This is wilderness on a tiny level.’ And for the first time in my life, it opened my eyes to trying to see the potential for wilderness around us rather than just getting a bit depressed about all the built up stuff.
And Britain, I think, has been the perfect place for me to experiment with microadventures because we are such a small, crowded, unwild landscape that if you can find pockets of wilderness adventure here, you can do so anywhere. So it’s been a brilliant way also for me to learn to notice and love my own country for the first time rather than what I used to do, which is the traditional angry young man of thinking, ‘Ah. Home is so boring. I need to go to the ends of the earth to have an adventure.’ So, it took me going to the ends of the earth to realize that actually there’s some nice countryside near Slough.
MARK: Are you telling us that wherever we are in the world, that adventure could be right on our doorstep?
ALASTAIR: Well, first of all, I think adventure is mostly inside your head. It’s the attitude that you choose to charge it every day with going at things with an attitude of willfully leaning into stuff that’s new, and difficult, and different, and daunting. I can’t think of any more Ds! Doing things that are exciting and doing it with an attitude of curiosity and a willingness to look a bit of an idiot and to laugh at yourself. All of these things, which was so integral to the years of big adventures I did, I can apply now to daily life.
And an example of finding adventure anywhere. I’m quite busy at the moment with life and book writing and stuff. So, I’m becoming increasingly constrained by my diary and my schedule like a lot of people. But on the first of every month, my calendar pops up on the computer saying, ‘Go climb a tree.’ So, on the first of every month this year, I go to climb this big oak tree near where I live. It takes about five minutes to get there, a few minutes to climb, I sit up there for a few minutes, look around, notice how the landscape has changed or not changed in the last month. May was the first explosion of green. I think back on the last month since I was here, I imagine what I might do in the next month, come back down the tree, go back to my computer and get back to work. And that small little escape into nature is something that I’m really coming to treasure with my busy calendar.
MARK: As you’re saying that, you reminded me there’s an amazing view from the top of the hill behind our house, and it’s ages since I’ve been up there and walked along and had a look. So maybe I’ll do that this afternoon and maybe if you’re listening then you’ve got something similar just around the corner from you, that you haven’t visited in a while.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. Well, I think actually the microadventures began with, as irrelevant as it sounds, the microadventures began with walking around the M25 which is actually slightly on the epic scale for microadventures because that’s still quite a long way. And the way microadventures became more popular and resonated more was I started making them smaller and simpler, smaller and simpler. Really distilling them right down.
When I have to explain the idea, the essence that I often choose to explain is that we’re so often constrained by our 9:00 to 5:00 busy lives, but we have a choice to flip that round and instead see the possibilities from 5:00 to 9:00. We have commitments, of course, but in theory between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. we have some freedom. So, what might you be able to do in that?
And the answer that I always urge people to go do is, go find a local hill and sleep on it for the night. Sleep out under the stars, turn off your phone, wake up in the morning on top of a hill, run back down the hill, jump in a river. It’s very good for the soul and back into your desk, back to work for 9:00 the next morning, having squeezed an adventure into your 5:00 to 9:00. So, perhaps that’s something you could do, Mark, with your local hill sometime.
MARK: Okay. And I’ll have a look out for a local river as well!
ALASTAIR: Okay. The challenge has been laid down!
MARK: You have a book, don’t you? Microadventures, that helps people with this.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. So I know when I started to do microadventures, I’d been working really hard for quite a few years to get a foot in the door because this a world of big, tough guy adventurers. And I was really aspiring to be the next Ranulph Fiennes, real hard man doing tough stuff. And that was my real goal in life.
So when I started doing microadventures, I was very worried that my career was over. ‘Who’s going to want to hear about sleeping on a hill? This guy is so old, he’s gone soft.’ So, I really worried that I was doomed and my career was over. And then the microadventures book I wrote became, by a very long way, my best-selling book ever. And yet again, that follows what we’ve mentioned before, just following what feels right and meaningful to you is likely, in the end, to result in you producing a good product, which hopefully then, will resonate with people and you’ll find your niche audience and who knows where that will lead you to…
MARK: But again, who would have predicted that would be the biggest seller?
ALASTAIR: Yeah, exactly. I’m a bit angry, I spent four years cycling around the world! I spent about three years trying to publish a book about cycling around the world. No one cares about that. But no, go sleep on a hill in suburbia, and suddenly, all the columnists come calling! They weren’t interested with my years of toil. So yeah, it was pretty funny. And then I suppose also on that note, that my most popular book has now actually become a children’s book that I wrote about cycling around the world, which I wrote purely not for any kind of career reasons. Just because I’ve done so many talks in schools and I really could see the importance of telling kids about adventure and giving them a positive view of the different cultures I’d cycled through that I just thought, ‘Okay. This is something I should do. I just feel I want to do this.’ So, I just wrote a kids book about cycling around the world, and that is actually now my bestselling book. And so, again, same principles apply.
MARK: Again, you could never have predicted, but it turned out great.
ALASTAIR: Yeah.
MARK: Okay. Let’s focus on your latest adventure because this is, it’s almost like the joke about, ‘What do you give a man who’s got everything?’ It’s like, well, ‘How do you challenge a guy who’s literally been most of the classically challenging places on the planet?’ You found a very creative and unusual way of scaring yourself to death on this one, didn’t you?
ALASTAIR: I did. But first of all, tell me the punchline of that joke, ‘What do you give a man who’s got everything?’
MARK: Oh. I don’t know!
ALASTAIR: Okay. Otherwise, you piqued my curiosity.
MARK: I’ll tell him when I meet him…
ALASTAIR: Okay. So, I have my years of trying to do big adventures because I wanted to test myself, and scare myself, and see what I was capable of and all that sort of unusual stuff. And I did that for years. But I gradually started to notice that I was quite good at this stuff now; I could cycle across continents and walk hundreds of miles and cross oceans, and I don’t say that as a boast. It’s just that anyone who has done their job for 20 years gets good at it, whatever you’re doing. And therefore, actually, I realized that much of the uncertainty of adventure had gone.
I know if I got on a bike now with my passport when we finish this call, I know I could cycle to China. I could do that. So, the uncertainty and perhaps, therefore, the adventure has gone. I realized that instead of living adventurously by doing these adventures, I was actually just in a rut. I was in a routine and a comfort zone of my own. So, I decided that I wanted to shake my life up a bit by trying to look differently at what adventure meant to me these days. Now going back to reading of adventure books, my favorite travel book from when I first started reading books was Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, about a young man…
MARK: Yeah, classic book.
ALASTAIR: Classic book that I’ve loved very much. A young man walks through Spain in the 1930s playing his violin to pay his way, and it’s a beautiful, simple adventure, and it inspired me for years. And for about 15 years, I had been thinking, ‘I’d love to go and do that trip, make a great book to do it, make a great film. I really want to do it. But I can’t play the violin or any other musical instruments.’
And actually the idea of performing music in public is one of my great fears. I hate Karaoke. I hate having to dance. This holds visceral fear for me. And so I put it off for years and years and years. And then I gradually started to think how pathetic it was that here I was trying to live an adventurous life, but the thing that I was really scared of, I wouldn’t do. So, I gave myself a telling off. Actually, I was on a train and I just thought, ‘Aargh, I should at least think about doing something about this.’
So without pausing long enough to talk myself out of it, I quickly got my phone out, Googled for a violin teacher, sent a speculative email off to a teacher and asked if she’d start to teach me and turned up at her house the next morning and began to learn the violin. And I quickly learned that I was massively optimistic in imagining how good I could get at the violin in six months. It’s a very, very hard instrument to play and it sounds absolutely hideous. So, it was quite a brutal, sharp learning curve.
MARK: So, I love the fact that you… it’s almost like a social adventure, isn’t it? Because the biggest challenge here is shame and embarrassment and looking ridiculous in public.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. So, I practiced hard for seven months. But seven months on the violin is really negligible and I was absolutely useless, so bad that I was quite close to chickening out the whole project. But I persuaded myself to turn up in Spain. And the reason that this was scary was because I was going to do the whole trip with no money or no credit card. If I took my wallet, then the violin would have just been a game. But by leaving the violin at home, it became the crux of the whole project.
So I stood up that first morning in Vigo in northwest Spain, never having played in front of anyone ever. I could play five songs about 20 seconds each, really badly. And I was just so frightened, so embarrassed, so vulnerable. It was the most afraid I’d been since the day I set off to row across the Atlantic Ocean, which I found really fascinating in terms of what we define as adventure in our own lives. And in this case, adventure was just standing up in a sunny little plaza and getting out my violin. And I’m sure the nature of your audience, there are quite a lot of people listening to this for whom that would be a very easy thing to do. And they could do it beautifully. But for me, this was hard and frightening and I dearly wished that I was anywhere but there because it’s awful, awful, but kind of a hilarious experience.
MARK: But I bet there’s a lot of us listening who can really relate to that experience of the first time you stand up in front of an audience, whether it’s to give a presentation at work or to act or to sing or to play an instrument or God forbid to read one of your own poems in front of a group of strangers. It’s viscerally terrifying.
ALASTAIR: What I found interesting was that a lot of the things I was scared of were exactly the sort of thing a primary school kid would say. I was worried about what would people think of me. That was a really big thing. And I was in Spain, I didn’t know a single person in the entire country, but I still cared what people thought about me. ‘What if people laugh at me? What if people are unkind to me? What if this doesn’t go well?’ And there’s so many what ifs, what ifs. ‘What if I fall? What if I fly?’ And it was astonishing how much this was an adventure inside my head.
And you’re right, when I do talks about my adventures, I talk about rowing the Atlantic, and you see eyes… Oh yeah, people are slightly interested. I talk about standing up with my violin, and suddenly the audience starts squirming there with me. So yeah, I’m well aware that this is a relatable, adventurous experience.
MARK: How did it turn out? How did people react in that square in Vigo?
ALASTAIR: Well, most people ignored me. Amazing, how much you get totally ignored! Some people frowned but frowned in just like, ‘Wow, dude, you are really bad,’ not in a mean way, just in a perplexed way of, ‘Why are you here?’ And people smiling and laughing at me, but in a nice way.
I just thought I felt completely trapped because I’ve committed to this. I had a month to walk to Vigo and to Madrid. I had to walk about 500 miles. And I knew that if I didn’t earn any money, I was doomed. So, I was playing away for hours with everyone ignoring me, just thinking, ‘Well, now what do I do? This is a disaster.’ But eventually, one of the genuine great moments in my life an elderly gentleman walked over to me, I thought, he’s going to tell me off and say, ‘Senor, Por favor, clear off. Give us back our silence.’ But he didn’t. He reached into his pocket, and he pulled out a coin, and he gave me a euro. And wow. I just thought my heart was going to burst with relief, and excitement, and exhilaration, and amusement, and adrenaline, all of the feelings you get from climbing a mountain, I got from this elderly man giving me a coin, so I’d done it. I’m now a professional musician.
And then from then on, it makes for a terrible book, but it made for a wonderful journey because from then on, nothing bad happened. It was an astonishing experience of just people being kind, me chatting to people, being more sociable than I’d been on any journey I’ve ever done before, trusting I had to arrive in a town and just trust that somewhere in the next few hours, some random kind person will give me some money for playing the violin really badly. It was a real exercise in just trying to dare myself to allow whatever will be to be.
And then on top of that, of course, comes the stuff which I take for granted, which was walking 500 miles, sleeping out under the stars every night, washing in rivers, the beautiful Spanish countryside, all that stuff, which I used to think of as adventure was completely background to the real adventure of this trip, which was standing up in a plaza every couple of days and just saying to the world, ‘Here I am, this is my best shot. It’s really bad, but I’m trying my best.’ And that for me was the adventure of this experience.
MARK: And did you make enough? I mean, you’re still here. Presumably, you didn’t starve, but did you go hungry at any point?
ALASTAIR: No, I lived like an absolute king! In a month I earned €120. You can live like an absolute emperor for €120 in a month. That’s more money than any man needs. So, it was beyond riches, beyond my wildest dreams. So I had a rule that whenever I earned money in a town or a village, I had to spend it all that day.
MARK: No hoarding.
ALASTAIR: No. No hoarding because hoarding is cheating, hoarding is being a wimp. So, I had to spend it all. And that meant then when I got to the next village, once again, I’d be hungry and desperate again. So, I could bring the fear back into myself. So, it was sort of feast and famine.
For example, one day I hit a tourist town on a sunny Sunday morning, and in two hours, I earned €20. I just couldn’t believe it. And I went and spent it on ice cream. So yeah, it was this feast and famine thing, but I ate. I’m quite used from my years on the road to living on bread and banana sandwiches. So, to earn €120 in a month, for me, was just sheer, gleeful decadence.
MARK: ‘Sheer luxury,’ as Monty Python would say!
ALASTAIR: Yes! Exactly. Yes.
MARK: Was foraging allowed?
ALASTAIR: Foraging would be allowed, but I’m an idiot and don’t know how to do any of that sort of stuff. I’ve spent my life foraging in supermarkets. But before the trip began, I genuinely thought, I had earned so little money that I would have to rummage in bins, or steal crusts from cafe tables, or steal carrots from the fields. I’d really anticipated that’s how I would make the trip work. But I stole one carrot from the field, but that was mostly just because they looked tasty rather than because I was hungry. So, no. Sadly, I’m not a real adventurer. I’m not very good at foraging.
MARK: You see, another excuse evaporates! So, okay. And you’ve written a book about the Spanish adventure?
ALASTAIR: Yeah, I’ve written a book. It’s called My Midsummer Morning. And here’s a declaration to make in public. It is the best thing I’ve ever written in my life. And I say that I’m daring myself to say that to people because I’m not saying that as a boast, but I’m saying that as a removal of excuses to myself.
So, it’s a scary thing to say because it means that if anyone reads it and it’s rubbish, I’ve absolutely no excuse to hide behind. But I’m really pleased that I worked really hard on it for a long time and went through all sorts of drafts and iterations and it got rejected by the publisher because quite rightly they said, ‘But nothing bad happens in this book. That means it’s a bit boring.’ So I had to completely revamp it, and yeah, I’m really pleased with it.
MARK: And do you think part of that is that it was partly inspired by one of your favorite books?
ALASTAIR: I think one of the problems of trying to write a book about your favorite book is that any reader with any sense should just go and read the original book because almost, by definition, it’s better than the one I’m going to write. It’s my favorite travel book and who am I to try to imitate that? So, I was really conscious to try not to just out-Laurie Lee Laurie Lee. So I made the book very different to that.
And actually, when my publishers rejected it, and rightly so, I went back and I decided that I needed to completely revamp it. And it’s now very much about the things we’ve talked about, about trying to live adventurously, but it’s also for the first time I wrote about the struggle of becoming a father and trying to combine being an adventurous wild hobo vagabond with also being a responsible, diligent, stay-at-home dad and the huge struggle that that poses. So it was a much more vulnerable writing process than I’ve ever done before, which was interesting in the end.
MARK: I do get requests from listeners saying, ‘Well, it’s all very well, you and your guests saying, yeah, you need to start a company, or write a book, or create an amazing show or whatever.’ But how do you do that when you’ve got small children to deal with? Surely it can’t be more difficult than being a vagabond adventurer? Tell us how you managed to square that circle.
ALASTAIR: Well, one of the main reasons I started doing microadventures actually was because I became a dad and suddenly my proposed expedition to go and swan off to the South Pole for four months didn’t really seem such a good idea anymore. So, that was one of the main reasons why my life moved from big adventures to microadventures.
And so microadventures for me have been personally a really helpful thing for when this mayhem, and the business, and the rush, and the occasional tedium and boredom of looking after a small young family get a bit overwhelming. I just can put them all to sleep and then zip off to the woods, sleep in the woods for the night and get back home before everyone wakes up, feeling refreshed and reinvigorated it and a better, more patient kind of calmer man, dad, and husband.
So, it’s been a really useful thing in my life, but it’s also, I think been very helpful in the mindset that it’s given me of just trying to squeeze stuff in around the margins of real life. So, I take my kids to school every day, and I pick them up at 3:00 p.m., so I now have to try and fit writing books, being an adventurer, and taking over the world within the hours of 9:00 to 3:00. So, I completely sympathize with people who get in touch saying that it’s hard, but it’s just trying to leave out the superfluous parts of my life and focus on the stuff which is important, which to me these days is my family and then my writing/adventure and trying to work out how to make both of those work with acceptable compromise on both sides.
MARK: Yeah. We’re certainly not off to the South Pole anytime soon. But certainly when our children came along, my wife and I realized we had to be a lot more organized about how we used our time and, in a way we use, maybe we probably waste less time and use it more for things that really matter, because when you’ve only got a small amount of something, then you make it go a long way.
ALASTAIR: Yeah. I’m astonished now at how efficient I am with my life. And also this moment I’m about to say now is proof that I’ve now become a boring old fart. But I look back on the time before I had kids and I just think, ‘Oh my goodness. What I could have achieved in all of that time.’ And of course, I know every generation in history says that, but I’m finally at that point of just thinking, ‘Wow. I could have done so much.’ Oh, well.
MARK: And you tell that to young people, and they won’t believe you, will they?
ALASTAIR: Of course, of course, of course. However, having said that, I read this fascinating article about Danielle Steel, who I’m sure your podcast readers will be a big fan of. Danielle Steel, who’s written 179 books. And I was reading this article thinking, ‘A hundred and seventy-nine books? That’s ridiculous. She clearly hasn’t got any children. It’s easy for her.’ And then it said in the article, and she has nine children. So that was a pretty bonkers version of time efficiency.
Actually, I think it was a useful reminder to me that there are more important things in life than being efficient and making stuff. And there’s about trying to just have a calm, happy, fulfilling, worthwhile life rather than just constantly focusing on doing more stuff. There’s a balance, I suppose.
MARK: So, Alastair, listening to you, I’m feeling my inner adventurer awaken somewhat. And funnily enough, you’re reminding me of things that I’ve done in the past that on reflection were reasonably adventurous. I used to walk all over Dartmoor, and Exmoor and the Lake District. And I even remember sleeping rough in Spain in the mountains. We were just going through Spain on a train and we saw some mountains, and we thought, ‘Oh. Why don’t we just hop out and sleep?’ We’d just lost our tents. So we just went down by the river, and there weren’t too many snakes, and we had a lovely time. And that was one of the best things about that trip.
So you’re making me think, maybe I could be a little more adventurous in my own life these days. Maybe now is a good time for you to set the listener, your Creative Challenge. If you’re new to the show, this is the part where I invite my guest to set you, the listener, a challenge that relates to the theme of the interview. And it’s something that you can either do or get started on within seven days of listening to this conversation.
ALASTAIR: Okay. So, I think for any creative thing or adventure, there are three really hard things to do. One is beginning, two is continuing until it becomes a habit. And three is getting over that impostor syndrome of thinking that you don’t belong.
So, the idea I came up with is to go climb a tree every day for seven days. Or if you don’t have a tree or you can’t climb a tree, just get a different perspective. Go up your local hill or up to the top of the local tower block. Just get a different perspective every day for seven days. And when you’re there, take a photograph, do a painting, write a few hundred words, whatever creative thing it is that excites you and do that every day for seven days.
The punchy part of what I’m going to suggest though is to dare you to make it public, to put it out into the world, to put it on the internet, to show what you do to someone, and to invite feedback, and to dare yourself to be vulnerable and do that for seven days. And I think you’d be quite pleasantly surprised at how positive the response you get to it is.
MARK: Thank you Alastair. That’s a great challenge. So if you would like to share it with fellow 21st Century Creative listeners, you can either leave a link on the blog at the show notes at 21stcenturycreative.fm/adventure, or what was the hashtag we were thinking of, Alastair?
ALASTAIR: I like the #21stcenturycreative, and then you could put it on Twitter, Instagram and people can see it there.
MARK: Okay. Great. So, #21stcenturycreative. Put it there. I will see it. Alastair, I believe you’re on Twitter as well, aren’t you? So, we would love to see what you make of this challenge.
ALASTAIR: Well, I’ll tell you what? I’m going to practice what I preach. So, I’m going to do this myself as well. When the show goes live, I’m going to climb a tree and draw a picture for seven days because I’m rubbish at drawing pictures.
MARK: Okay. Well, I can’t wimp out now, can I? So, I will do this too.
ALASTAIR: Great. This is how big, stupid adventure ideas happen on the basis of, ‘I can’t wimp out. I’d better do it too.’
MARK: Yes, okay. I think a little peer pressure probably sent a lot of people to the North Pole. Brilliant, Alastair. And it’s been an inspiration talking to you just as it has been reading your writings and watching some of your videos. So, the book is called My Midsummer Morning?
MARK: Okay. We’ll obviously make sure there’s a link to that in the show notes and it will be in all good bookshops. Where else can people go to find out more about you and follow your adventures, and maybe even join in?
ALASTAIR: I do a couple of different email newsletters. One about the adventure world and the adventure side of life and the other one about living adventurously in whatever sphere you operate in. That’s probably the one that’s of most interest to people who are listening to this. And you can find those on my website. I’m also on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and all of those things. You should be able to find me by Googling for Alastair Humphreys.
MARK: Great. And that’s A-L-A-S-T-A-I-R Humphreys. And obviously, I’ll make sure, as usual, that it’s in the show notes. Go to 21stcenturycreative.fm, you’ve got the show notes for this episode. So, thank you once again, Alastair. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I look forward to following your further adventures.
ALASTAIR: Thank you very much. I’m off to climb a giant redwood tree now. So, that’s the rest of my day busily taken over.
MARK: You see, the adventure never ends!
ALASTAIR: Yeah. Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Brian Clark’s Career Advice for the Unemployable
Jul 01, 2019
Today we kick off Season 4 of The 21st Century Creative, the podcast that helps you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the 21st Century.
Our first guest is Brian Clark, a writer and entrepreneur best known as the founder of the hugely influential website Copyblogger.com, which has been described as ‘the Bible of content marketing’.
Back in 2006, Brian was one of the first people to show how copywriting techniques could be used to attract attention online. He was also a pioneer of content marketing, showing creative people how they could use their skills at writing or making media to build an audience for their work and find customers for their businesses.
From Copyblogger Brian launched a string of successful businesses, selling e-learning, membership sites, software, WordPress themes, web hosting and conferences.
Brian’s companies reached 8 figures revenue per year with no advertising and no venture capital funding – he maintained his independence by keeping his business small and selling direct to his audience.
He recently sold the StudioPress WordPress themes division of his company, and after taking his family on a round-the-world trip, is now renewing his focus on small projects with outsized income and impact. The ‘7 figure small’ is one of the current themes of his podcast Unemployable.
As a champion of the small creative enterprise, and an authority on creative marketing, Brian is the perfect person to kick off Season 4 by mapping out strategies to help you thrive as an independent creative in the 21st century.
Brian is also a pivotal figure for The 21st Century Creative – because this podcast would very likely not exist in its current form if it weren’t for him. You see, I learned how to design, launch and produce a media project like this direct from Brian.
Back in 2008, I partnered with Brian and Tony Clark (no relation) to launch the Lateral Action blog. Our mission was to help independent-minded creatives become more creative, productive and successful.
At that time, I had been blogging for less than two years, while Brian was already a very successful online entrepreneur. Listen to the podcast to hear the story of how I came to partner with Brian, and how what I learned from him helped me to create The 21st Century Creative.
In this interview Brian tell us the story of his early years and the hard lessons he learned before launching Copyblogger. He also explains the fundamentals of growing an audience and building a thriving business around your creative talent.
Brian and his students have done very well financially from applying these principles. But what shines through very strongly in this conversation is something more important than money – and that’s the freedom to work and create and live on your own terms.
If that’s the kind of freedom that matters to you, you’ll find plenty to relate to in this conversation about how to approach your creative career if you’re fundamentally – and proudly – unemployable.
Brian Clark interview transcript
MARK: Brian, how well did the career advice that you received in high school prepare you for the reality of how your career has unfolded?
BRIAN: You know I don’t think I recall getting any career advice in high school. And that just may be age, but I recall that the world seemed to operate a very different way. My general understanding was that I should go to college and somehow all would be revealed in college, which was a very enlightening experience as far as being exposed to new ideas and whatnot. But as far as a career, hmm.
So then I went to law school because I didn’t know still what I was supposed to do, but I knew that would make my mom proud and, there you go. It was all very murky. There was no real guidance and that may have been a little bit due to being the first one in my family to go to college and then, certainly on from there. But it was just work hard, do the right thing, very general.
So I think I lacked in guidance which left me to my own devices to explore and figure things out. And it was interesting that I did graduate from law school, I did start practicing law and that’s really when I started figuring things out for myself. And that led to a very interesting 20-year entrepreneurial journey.
MARK: What was the point where you realized that you weren’t cut out for the conventional path?
BRIAN: I had a very lucrative job with a big law firm and at the time, I just thought, ‘I hate practicing law,’ which was true, but I think a little bit later I started to realize that I just didn’t like following someone else’s directions, honestly. I had this very independent streak in me. And even though I was very, very clueless, I had never taken a business class, never read a marketing book, that’s a bad position to be in, to have that kind of cocky independent streak, isn’t it?
But I think a lot of people realize that what they’re ultimately wanting is creative freedom, and that’s how I think about it even in the context of starting businesses. I did aspire to be a writer; I looked at traditional publishing, and I looked at Los Angeles, entering the screenwriting trade. And again, it just seemed like you’re at the whim of someone else, whether it be a publisher, or a producer, or what have you.
And then that’s what led me to look at the internet because for better or worse, it seemed that I could carve out my own path there and that was my drive looking back and it is to this day, I just do not have an interest in really following someone else’s script.
MARK: What was your first venture then when you stepped out of the straight and narrow of the lawyerly path?
BRIAN: It’s interesting because at the time, this is the late ‘90s, so it’s really before blogging, it’s certainly before what we now call social media, by a lot. And what a lot of people were doing back then was publishing ezines, email newsletters. Ironically, those are going strong 20 years later, which is fascinating.
Back then, there weren’t courses, and books, and conferences that take you by the hand and tell you how to do certain things, you just had to watch other people. You had to create relationships with those people and that was so much easier back then, it seems. You could reach out to someone and just about anyone’s going to talk to you.
The first book I was ever featured in was Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation. And that happened just because I wrote Dan, this was his first book, he had just written an article in Fast Company and we just started talking to each other. Now, think about that 20 years later, Dan Pink, of course, is a huge prolific successful author. I went my own path, but it’s just fascinating to me that I hope we never completely lose that aspect of, just being able to reach out to people and tell them you admire their work and a relationship comes out of that.
So I started this newsletter venture and I thought, if I wrote good stuff and built an audience, I would make tons of money in advertising and sponsorships. And I wrote pretty good stuff. And I did build audiences, that was the most important thing to come to that. I learned how to do that, but I had no idea how to make money with it and I didn’t. So that was my one business out of 11 that failed.
MARK: That’s not bad odds, is it?
BRIAN: Turned out okay. But at the time… I look back at it and I’m like, ‘You really had no idea what you were doing at all.’ But I did pick up the non-conventional or new skills that now as we do have a mainstreaming of social media and Instagram influencers and all this that is all built around attracting a following for better or worse, in some cases, I learned that in the late ‘90s. So that’s to me, the secret, which is if you can bring value to others, whether it be in the most shallow sense on Instagram or in the most deep sense with poetry, for example, then you can figure out how to make a career out of that.
MARK: This is the big thing I learned from you, is if you have an audience, if you have a connection, if you have people that you can help, who know about who you are, then a lot of options open up for you. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. So where did you go from there?
You learned how to build an audience, but you weren’t making money. What happened next?
BRIAN: I had to make money to pay the bills. I didn’t have a huge stockpile of savings after leaving the law firm. I had some, but, I think a light bulb went off that, you know…
So the first marketing book I ever read was in 1999 it was called Permission Marketing by Seth Godin. And that helped clarify a lot of what I was missing, This whole context of Seth’s background in direct marketing, which I know is an ugly phrase to some, but not in the way he meant it. It just meant you have a direct relationship with your potential customer, or client, what have you, rather than going through some intermediary. So, he basically explained that the internet is a direct marketing environment, so, yes, you need to build an audience with email specifically and, again, still today, but you have to have something to sell them. That was the part I was missing. Advertising is hard and it just got harder, and harder, and harder over the decades since then.
So I was like, ‘Okay, great. Got it. I know I can do this. I can attract people to me and if I have something relevant to sell them, then I can make money.’ And the only thing I had to sell was legal services, in my mind at the time. I did have a law license. I had four years of legal experience. I was still a young attorney. But here’s the thing about young attorneys, they have to do the work that’s given to them by the partners because the partners have the clients. So if you become the person who gets the clients, then you’re also cutting out that intermediary, right?
I said, ‘I can do that.’ So I started a legal email newsletter that talked about the intersection of law and this new environment called the internet. Now, there was no one really writing about this stuff from the legal perspective at that time, outside of maybe academic circles. And I did it in a very conversational, friendly way and the clients started coming and that was it. That was my first success.
And I often tell people I could have built a pretty powerful law firm off of that, but I knew better. I knew that even though I think my main issue was I don’t like working for other people, I also didn’t like practicing law. So that was one of my first lessons in, making yourself attractive to clients. Don’t act like you want them that much because I didn’t, you know? I only wanted a certain amount of clients to make enough money to pay the bills so that I could keep working on the other business that I hadn’t figured out was going to fail yet.
So I just was very picky and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m going to work with you because you’re going to put me on retainer and pay me every month to advise your business. Okay, great.’ And that’s where I ended up, creating this very stable income, but not too much. I avoided the siren call of taking on everything to make more money and that allowed me to keep working on the other thing. Eventually, the dot-com crash happened and that killed that business, which was a blessing. But that’s when I started thinking about, okay, now what do you do that doesn’t involve law?
MARK: And where did you land next?
BRIAN: So again, I love reflecting on this because it shows me, your own psychological foibles. But at the time, I had a chip on my shoulder. I had to prove that I could succeed in a business that didn’t rely on my law license. And I ended up choosing real estate because of a lot of things, one was my legal background did kind of inform aspects of that. But it’s very easy to get a real estate license. But it also kind of taught me how I could position myself in a unique way.
See, these are all concepts that we would later explore in great detail once we got to Copyblogger, but it was all new to me. It came from studying copywriting and marketing and starting to, at a very basic level, understanding that you have to be unique, you have to offer value that someone else isn’t.
The other thing was, again, the young internet and looking at what other realtors were trying to do to market themselves online and I was like, ‘This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. These people have no idea what they’re doing.’ And very few people did, to be honest. And, again, that was just kind of what I, fortunately, stumbled into at that time.
So the final reason I chose real estate, other than you can make a lot of money just by yourself, but/or with a very small business, which was kind of my criteria. There’s something called IDX, which is a technology that allows the MLS, the home listings, basically to be published on websites. And this was a very new thing in 2001. Dallas, where I was living at the time, happened to be one of the earliest cities to do it. And I knew that buyers were looking online for houses. So all of a sudden, I’m like, I’ve got the content, if you will, that buyers are looking for, which is the home listings, even though they’re not mine. And then I supplement that with educational content, why I’m a better choice than Joe Blow who got his real estate license and doesn’t have a clue about actually representing people. So I did play the legal card without practicing law, right? But we play to our strengths.
And it was just a quick and lucrative success. And that’s when I ran into a completely different issue, which is not everything’s marketing. Marketing is important, bringing in the business is important, but then you have to manage the business. And I wasn’t good at that at all because, again, I knew nothing about it.
So you could see this path I went on where I’m just running up against the wall of my own incompetence, step after step. And just, fortunately, each step beyond, I figured out. I didn’t learn any hard lessons or I didn’t ignore any hard lessons, let’s put it that way. So I might’ve made every mistake along the way, but I always learned from them and that’s why things got progressively better as time went on.
MARK: Yeah, I love that. I mean, one of my mottos is ‘Question everything, but don’t forget to listen to the answers.’ And it looks like every step of the way, you got a different piece of the jigsaw from each business in turn. So, after the real estate, that was when Copyblogger launched, right?
BRIAN: Well, not directly. Around 2005. Again, so this is a successful business. I brought in a partner. We’ve got agents working for us. They’re all, independent contractors in the states. I don’t know how it is in the UK, but it was still a very small, lean business, but at the same time, it was quite the management chore for me. I was very bad at processes. I kept everything locked up inside my head, which all of this stuff, you’re not supposed to do.
And then in the spring of 2005, I suffered a head injury from going snowboarding and I didn’t realize how serious it was for a while, but I ended up having to have brain surgery. It was a big deal. I was very fortunate to come out of that. It could have gone much worse, right? I really realize now how lucky I am that I made a full recovery after that. It was a serious procedure. But to me, all it was, was like a moment of enlightenment. I mean, I can almost say that literally, because when I woke up, I had this, ‘I am not this collection of thoughts and memories, experience.’ I really felt it, that my self is an illusion.
But with that went every reason I told myself that I couldn’t create the kind of business I had been wanting to for a year or so because of my obligations. I had a young daughter, I had a wife, my son was just born, and all of that just kind of poofed away. I don’t know that it was confidence so much as it was just resolve that I was never going to do anything, whether it be law, real estate, whatever, just for money or just for security. And bless my wife. I mean, can you imagine?
So, basically, I effectively walked away from that real estate business. I tried to sell it to my partner and it failed within six months because, guess what? Everything was locked up inside my head. They didn’t know how to do the part I was really good at, which was bringing in all that business and so they couldn’t pay me anymore, so it just kind of went away.
So again, I found myself with my back against the wall but I was looking around at what was happening at that time with blogging and whatnot, and reflecting on it from my perspective of what I’d been doing for, I guess, the last eight years at that point. And I said, ‘You know what? This is interesting stuff. There’s fascinating stuff going on with people who are effectively writers, but they are using their writing skills to create entrepreneurial ventures, and that’s me. That’s what I want to do. I mean, that’s what I have been doing, in some way, except not as in the purest form of what we would call an online business.’ Again, at the time, that was a foreign concept. Now everyone’s, like, ‘Oh, I get it. We can make an app.’ It’s all digital business.
Back then, people thought I was crazy. This is a recurring theme, Mark, people thinking Brian is crazy! But just because I’m paying attention to the future and most people live in the present or largely the past, that’s an observation I think we could all make when we have been involved in specifically the internet, kind of ahead of the rest of the world. You know what I’m saying?
MARK: Yeah, I do. I mean, funny enough, I started my first blog around about the same time you started Copyblogger, but, of course, I didn’t have the eight years of experience that you had under your belt.
And I remember trying to explain it to, my ex-business partner. I said – because I’d read Seth Godin too – and he was saying, ‘What are you doing? You’re writing articles and giving them away for free! That’s valuable intellectual property. Why are you giving it away? You should charge people for that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but, there’s this guy called Seth Godin in America who says, ‘If you do this, then there’ll be the magic trail of breadcrumbs that will come back and your business will thrive.’’ And poor old Roy, he was quite a bit older than me. He looked at me like I was completely insane.
BRIAN: Yeah. So, same thing with me. When attorneys found out I was giving away articles to bring in business, they thought I was crazy. I’m like, ‘What are you afraid of? What are you giving away? You’re licensed by the state to practice law. You’re pretty safe.’ You know what I’m saying?
MARK: They can’t just read your blog and set up in competition.
BRIAN: Yeah. And the same thing with real estate. They’re like, ‘Oh well, I’m not going to just tell them, everything that they can do.’ I’m like, ‘If you’re any good, they should hire you because you could tell them everything and they’ll never be as good as you.’ Right? That’s not how our service economy works. People want someone else to do it for them. They just want to make the right choice, and that’s what you’re helping them do.
Anyway, yeah. That attitude was so prevalent. But fortunately, I was pretty good at just ignoring that and just saying, ‘I’m sorry. You don’t understand. You haven’t thought about it enough, that’s fine. I’m going to go ahead and keep doing what I’m doing.’ Thankfully, I did.
So with Copyblogger, I was entering into this nascent commercial blogging space with a different approach because they were right there where I was in 1998, which is you create content, you sell ads, you get rich. No. I mean, some blogs, like if you were as big as TechCrunch, then you can make some money from ads. But it was never the most lucrative aspect of it.
So I came in with two basic premises that I wanted people to accept, that applying copywriting techniques, specifically direct response copywriting, to content can make it more interesting, engaging, and useful to people. That was one thing. And then the other thing was you should sell stuff, not advertising. Whether it’s products, services, whatever, but not ads. In other words, don’t sell out your audience, sell to your audience. And some bloggers at the time just thought that was basically Satan’s spawn coming to life on Earth.
MARK: Yes. And some people were really put out by it, weren’t they?
BRIAN: They were, and it was great because they didn’t understand that their audience thought differently. So they would rip me a new one and link to me and their audience followed the link over and they became my audience because people were interested in what I was talking about. And all that sounds really quaint now, doesn’t it?
MARK: Well, it does, but…
BRIAN: I mean, that’s 2006 and you have to convince people that it’s okay to engage in commerce effectively and now it’s almost too out of control.
MARK: Well, that’s what it was. And just to maybe give people a little context, this might sound a bit strange. When I was exploring the blogging space for the first time, there were the kind of the hobby bloggers, the people who’d just been doing it, just to share their ideas. There was a lot of marketing bloggers who were like trying to ape Seth Godin and be really insightful, and clever, and tell us about the next big thing in marketing and then there was the pro blogger type crowd, there were a load of blogs covered in AdSense while they were trying to get enough traffic and page views to sell from ads.
And then I come across Copyblogger. And I remember the day, your tagline was…I think it said ‘How to sell with RSS and blogs’ or something like that. And I’d never seen anything like that before. And that was the fastest thing I subscribed to because I thought, ‘That’s exactly what I want. I have something to sell. I have coaching and training.’ And you were the only person that I could see that was joining up the dots. So, that was how I first came across you.
BRIAN: Yeah, it’s interesting how well I did with the poet market, right? Between you and Robert Bruce two of my earliest really good… [Laughter]
MARK: I guess you’ve cornered the market with ambitious poets!
BRIAN: Yeah. But a lot of really creative people were not put off by that word ‘sell’ they were intrigued. And I found that fascinating because there was a lot of pushback, during the early years, just people who didn’t think marketing belonged on the internet whatsoever. And I was kinda like, ‘You’re not being realistic now.’ But yeah, that’s where it started.
And two years later was when what we were talking about got the name Content Marketing and basically, Joe Pulizzi, who founded Content Marketing Institute, came from the corporate environment, branded content, all of that kind of stuff. Stuff I’d never heard of because, hello, I’d never worked in that environment. And he’s like, ‘What you’re talking about really well is called content marketing. Can we agree on that?’ And I was like, ‘I hate that. That’s a terrible phrase.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, but, but you got to call it something.’ So in 2008, that’s when we started using the terminology of content marketing. And now it’s a $50 billion industry. I mean, who knew? That’s crazy.
MARK: Right. And everybody’s talking about it. And for some people, they think it’s great. Other people say, ‘Oh, my stuff is not content.’ Forget the terminology, what is it about content or media? How does it work in a marketing sense? And particularly, maybe if I’m a creator, if I’m an artist or a creative of some kind, I’m thinking, ‘Well, what can I produce that’s going to help me achieve my professional goals?’
BRIAN: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s essentially a more valuable form of capturing and holding attention than what you would think of with a straight up marketing message, which is generally pretty straight to the point about what they’re selling, right?
MARK: Yeah.
BRIAN: So the idea of content marketing is that people want valuable information and if you provide it and you, therefore, begin that relationship. The basic tenet of marketing, is you got to start with attention before you can get someone to really understand what the benefit is to them of doing business with you, okay?
So the attention came in the form, in my case, of educational content related to marketing, growing a business online, all of that kind of stuff. And we gave that away for free, but then we ended up getting into WordPress, software, themes, plug-ins, hosting, our own CMS. And next thing you know, giving away free information led to eight figures a year in revenue, which still some people you tell them that and they’re like, ‘That’s not possible.’ And I’m like, ‘Sure it is.’
It’s just very simple when you get down to it. You’re attracting people that have an interest and a desire to become better at something, you make them better at that, and then you sell them the tools that they need to do that thing. When you think about it that way, it’s very easy.
Let me tell this story because, given everything that’s happened since then, it’s fascinating to me, this example of content marketing. So just about everyone in the world is familiar with Marvel now. I think they have the biggest movie in the world of all time with End Game now and that was 22 movies starting with Iron Man in 2008.
A lot of people don’t realize that in the late ‘90s, Marvel was bankrupt. And they did go bankrupt. They were reorganized and brought out of bankruptcy with a plan that they would focus on their merchandise sales, meaning toys, basically, Spiderman, X-Men, all of this kind of stuff. But they didn’t have any money to market their stuff, so what they did was do deals with Sony and Fox to license their characters for films, Spiderman and then X-Men being the two prominent ones. And so, they were paid some money, obviously, to license their intellectual property, but nothing compared to what the studios made from the movies, the first three Spiderman movies, the first three X-Men movies. And they did that because those movies, that content, even though they weren’t charging for it and making money themselves were giant commercials for what they were selling, which was the toys and the merchandise, right?
MARK: Yeah.
BRIAN: That’s content marketing. That’s a very strategic use of intellectual property to pull yourself out of a hole. And then they made enough money until they could make their own films and guess what their first film was? Iron Man in 2008. And the rest is history. They’re acquired by Disney for $4 billion, and that was a bargain for Disney as we now know.
I love that story because to the people out there that you and I have both dealt with in the past that think you’re a moron, I’m just like, ‘No, it’s actually very, very savvy.’ It’s almost advanced business strategy, right? But now it’s become the norm. So we’re almost in the opposite situation now where too many people, perhaps, may be creating content and it’s not necessarily good enough so you start to change your perspective.
Like for example, I’m big in curation now because the problem in 2006 was there wasn’t enough good content in the blogging world, it was too self-centered. Every blogger thought the world was interested in them. No, people are interested in themselves and they’re only interested in you to the extent that you can help them. And that’s true even with art. I know that comes across poorly, but unless your art speaks to me, it is of no benefit to me, right? It’s the same thing. We’re all serving other people, whether we call ourselves artists, or entrepreneurs, or some mix thereof, which I think is the ideal ratio.
MARK: Well, if I could share my perspective of what I took from what you were teaching. And maybe somebody’s sitting there listening, ‘I could never get to eight figures a year revenue or billions of dollars like Marvel,’ but you really rescued me from trying to be interesting on my blog.
I read Seth Godin. I was looking around at all these marketing bloggers and other bloggers trying to be clever, and insightful, and whatever. And it wasn’t really happening for me. And then I read Copyblogger and it was saying, ‘But, be useful, be helpful.’ And I thought, ‘I know how to do that because I’m a coach, I’m a trainer.’ And so, I started writing as though I were talking to my coaching client and was saying stuff around creative blocks or productivity, and how to get focused time for creative work in the middle of all their email, and digital distractions, and so on. And that was when my blog started to take off.
BRIAN: Imagine that!
MARK: Yeah. It’s kind of obvious now in retrospect, but to me at that point, it wasn’t. And I had something to sell, which was the coaching and training services. And once I started doing that, then the leads started coming in because my previous business had been me at a telephone ringing people up, which I didn’t enjoy. And this reversed it. People started phoning me and emailing me once I’d put content out there that demonstrated I could help.
And I remember talking to one ad agency one day who rang me up and they said, ‘We love this’ because I’d written an e-book on time management for creative people that I’d given away. And I got a phone call from an ad agency saying, ‘We’d love you to come in and run a workshop on it.’ And I stupidly said to them, ‘But all the information’s in the e-book, why don’t you just give them that?’ And she said, ‘Well, the thing is they don’t have the time to read it because they’re so disorganized.’ And said, ‘If you come in and explain it,’ I mean, she was telling me how to sell to her. ‘If you come in and explain it, we’ll pay you to do that.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’
And so, that’s how it can join up. It’s certainly how it joined up for me.
BRIAN: That is great. Not only did she contact you, but she told you how to convince her.
I failed to mention that the original approach to everything, at the beginning with content and learning copywriting and learning how to do everything with words where people came to me, was simply because there was no way I’m going to cold call anyone. I don’t like networking. I’m an introvert when it comes down to it. Now people sometimes find that surprising cause I can go stand and talk to a thousand people from the stage, but that just means you don’t understand introversion because after that, I’m in the hotel room just decompressing.
MARK: Yeah.
BRIAN: It’s not that you’re shy, it’s just that people tend to take energy from you instead of give it to you, which extroverts enjoy. That’s why I designed everything that way from the beginning and that’s just as true today as it was back then.
MARK: So, going right back to the beginning, the point where you, in a similar time that I was leaving college, we were in this world where there was a sensible safe option and we were the morons, we were the idiots who just couldn’t deal with that and had to go and do it another way and found out through trial and error. But that world has really changed, hasn’t it?
The safe secure job is certainly not as safe and secure, and the risky path, going out on your own, is for various reasons, becoming more popular. What’s changed?
BRIAN: Well, it’s interesting because there is no such thing as job security, there is no gold watch and a pension at the end of this. That all started to be talked about at that time, circling back to Dan Pink in Free agent Nation, he was way ahead of his time as far as when that would happen. He was literally 20 years too soon. But now we see it. It’s all happening. Not only is freelancing incredibly common, it’s desirable. It’s a higher status role and for many people – that’s why I have a podcast called Unemployable. It’s not like you can’t get a job, you just don’t want one, right?
I think it began in the ‘90s there was the dot-com crash, then there was 2008 and the millennial generation, in particular, realizes you can’t trust an employer with your security and livelihood. And that’s why they became the first generation who job hopped without shame. It used to be a thing that you didn’t want to move around a lot or potential employers would in the future, would think you were flaky.
MARK: Yeah. ‘Why didn’t you stick around longer? What went wrong?’
BRIAN: Exactly. And now it’s like, why would I? I mean, that’s, I think, the attitude from younger people. But the interesting thing about Millennials is despite the kind of a stereotype of the hoodied tech bro billionaire, those are very rare. Millennials aren’t that entrepreneurial. Gen X is very entrepreneurial because, again, that nasty independent streak we had, how dare we think for ourselves.
But I think it’s been coming for a long time. The attitude has flipped from being sitting there stammering why you changed jobs three times in four years to where everyone is kind of a free agent and you have to think that way and you need to think in terms of income, not jobs. So the whole concept of the side hustle and then entrepreneurism, and freelancing, and gigs, and all of this stuff just presents a mishmash of opportunities. It’s almost weird to use the word career anymore, isn’t it?
MARK: Yeah.
BRIAN: So I am, of course, a huge advocate for working for yourself in a very lucrative way, obviously. But I think my path was one of incremental improvement, incremental learning from mistakes, experience, and all that, the one difference I can say today is unlike ‘98, there’s tons of information about, whether you want to go out on your own as an entrepreneur, as a freelancer. It’s almost too much. So I think the ecosystem is there to support people.
But the thing I like about what you do is that I think the creative person is the only one who has a legit shot. Your average hustler type who just wants to make money, who doesn’t care about their craft, or doesn’t care what they’re actually putting out in the world, I’m not saying those people can’t succeed, but it’s getting tougher unless you have a creative perspective that, like you learned, brings value.
And to say that you still weren’t creative in your writing back then is wrong because that’s not true. I mean, you have a certain flair and style that only a frustrated poet could bring. You know? I don’t want you to sell yourself short because you had a certain sensibility that I think always worked to your advantage. And that’s why I’m always telling people, ‘Yes, you can build a very lucrative business out of just yourself or a very small team or, with the aid of freelancers and whatnot.’ But at the heart of technology, and your outsourcing, and all of that cold hard stuff is a creative human being that has to shine through.
MARK: And, picking up on what you were saying about content marketing actually being a very sophisticated marketing strategy and business strategy, it’s always struck me as paradoxical that the people who are best at doing this are the ones who generally think that they are not good at business, particularly with a tsunami of content these days.
If you’re going to cut through, it’s got to be something really good and really original, and that means being really creative.
BRIAN: Yeah. I think it’s, to a certain degree, that outsider mentality and if you will, an artistic mentality that often makes a difference. And I’m reflecting on a lot of the people that came up at the same time I did. Some of them by posting on Copyblogger. I remember, believe it or not, the project, you and I and Tony did, Lateral Action, which is now your project solely, during that run, it was probably the happiest I was. I really enjoyed that project and the only reason Tony and I took off is because the other stuff we had created was growing. It was incredibly lucrative. It required serious management and then, you know what happened. Then we ended up merging the companies together and going on that, big eight-figure journey.
I won’t say it was obligation, but it was just one of those, ‘We really need to pay attention to this.’ You know? But that sort of creative expression is what I do this for, not necessarily the money. You’ve got to make money. And there’s nothing wrong with making lots of it in my mind. But that can’t be the thing.
And too often in the startup world, where it’s all about getting money, and cashing out, and this and that, no wonder the success rate is so dismal. There’s no heart in that. There’s no passion in that. And I’m not one of these chase your passion type guys; I’m saying you develop a passion for what you’re doing when you realize that there’s a particular audience, a particular group of people, a particular type of person that you’ve decided you’re going to give your all to, and they’re going to reward you by doing business with you.
MARK: So if I’m listening to this conversation and say I’m in a job and I’m really unhappy in my job and I want to strike out on my own, or maybe I’ve made the transition, I’m self-employed, but I’m struggling to make it work, what advice do you have for me?
What are the fundamentals of building a small but thriving creative business?
BRIAN: Well, the ultimate thing is, so going back to the beginning of Copyblogger, I had no product. I had no service. I only knew that I could share things with people that would help them. And that I would figure it out. And that’s another aspect that people crinkle up their faces at you a little bit. But here’s how it normally goes. You think of something you want to sell people and then you go look for people to buy it. Now, how do you know anyone wants that thing necessarily? Or if they want that thing, do they want it from you in your particular way? Well, you kinda don’t. That’s backwards and yet that’s the way people think it’s done.
So I, on the other hand, started with not even a market. It’s really a tangible group of people that followed what I was doing and I paid attention to them. And through that process combined with what I was teaching them, it became fairly obvious that there were certain things that we could sell to them that they would buy from us because we had this relationship. They knew us, they liked us, they trusted us. And that’s how it happens.
So the real key here is to find a group of people you want to serve and then really try to figure out what it is that you need to give them in terms of a product or a service or a piece of art or what have you.
MARK: Okay. So that’s the person starting out. But let’s think about another type of listener. Maybe somebody who is doing well as an independent artist, or creator, or freelancer of some kind and they’re now getting advice that they need to scale up. They need to hire a team. They need to grow, maximize their revenue. Maybe step away from doing hands-on work in order to realize the full value of their business.
What would you say to somebody like that? Logically, that makes a lot of sense, when you just look at the spreadsheet and the numbers, but does that always make sense for the kind of business that we’re talking about?
BRIAN: It depends. So, I talk about this concept of the ‘seven figure small’. So that comes from the growing number of no-employee businesses that are making seven figures or more in annual revenue. It keeps growing. Why? Well, the same reason that you have companies with market caps like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and yet they’re tiny compared to U.S. Steel, or Ford, or these kinda companies, AT&T, back in, back in the day.
So it’s a congruent kind of phenomenon that technology is increasing productivity so that fewer people can do way more. Now, you add the internet to that where you can reach your particular brand of customer, or client, wherever they may be and you’ve got a recipe for a very, very small lucrative business.
So the idea behind that, though, is more of a mindset more than money and it’s driven by freedom. If you design your business so that technology and contractors such as freelancers, consultants, vendors, etc. can accomplish what you’re trying to do and thereby free you up to do other things. Let’s put it that way. So you could choose at that point to maximize your lifestyle, spend time with family, do other creative endeavors that don’t have to be commercial, which I think, a lot of great art is created without the thought of trying to sell it to someone, then great, you have that choice.
But freedom also means you have the choice to grow that as big as you envision it to be. And you don’t have to know from day one, but you do have to structure the business in such a way that you are building for freedom, freedom of choice, whether it be to have a nice life, or to scale up and grow, or somewhere in between. Or something different at different times.
So let me put it this way. When I started Copyblogger, all I wanted to do was make enough money to support my family. I just wanted to be happy at work. And by doing so, I also realized I had to structure the business in a way where I would do what I’m good at and that’s it. And that I needed other people to do the things that I couldn’t do. And that kind of led to my run of partnerships that really I built a business off of.
And then once we got to creating the larger company, the one after we merged several companies together and got bigger, it was never my aspiration to grow a company that big, to have that many employees, but each year, I made the decision to take the next step forward. I had the freedom to do that and I’m glad I did it.
And now that we’ve sold off most of the assets of that company, now I want to stay small. I mean, again, that’s what drives me, my ability to choose as much as possible with autonomy, and competency, and leading to mastery, the whole self-determinism thing. And now we’re all kind of driven that way to a certain degree.
But I think there is an incredible force that says, ‘You should do things this way.’ And entrepreneurism, unfortunately, the narrative is, you take money, you get as big as possible. I mean, and that’s the only thing that counts. And that’s ridiculous. And I think more and more people are realizing, ‘No, what I want is a business that allows me to make the choices I’m going to make.’
MARK: Yeah. This theme of freedom keeps coming through today, doesn’t it? And I can totally relate to it, to myself because I mean, I’m certainly unemployable and for the same reason as you, that I’m no good at having somebody tell me what to do and I’m willing to pay the price of my stupid mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them, but I’ve kept fighting and working it out and it’s the most important thing for me, is I get up in the morning, and I’ve got the freedom to say, ‘I’m going to work on this because I think it’s important and I think it’s valuable and meaningful.’
Now, there’s a lot of work involved and going out and finding other people that it’s valuable and meaningful to, but it’s just fundamental, I think, and there’s lots of ways that you could grow a business I’m hearing, and have more zeroes at the end of your turnover and profit and whatever.
But if you don’t have more freedom, then what’s the point?
BRIAN: Yeah. And if you look, again, at the growing freelance economy, it’s growing and getting bigger and most of those freelancers… I forget the percentages. There’s a lot of great research on this, but a lot of those people make more money than they did when they had a job. And that’s great, but almost universally, they’ll say that’s not why they do it. They do it for freedom. And freedom is our innate human characteristic. No one likes to be told what to do. You and I just did something about it, right? I do think there are people who enjoy the employee-employer relationship. It makes them feel better about what they’re doing. In the future, those people will still probably end up being freelancers of some sort. They’ll just kind of fit within these other organizations that allow that entrepreneur to realize their goals, their choices.
I don’t think it’s really ever about anything other than freedom. Even people who chase money think that it’s going to give them freedom and happiness. And yet, if you do it the wrong way, you end up trapped. And I’ve almost gone there myself. There were a couple of times, a few years ago where we’re talking to private equity people, of all things, and I came this close to signing a deal that would have ruined my life, but seemed like the thing to do at the time.
And I just am thankful that even though some people got mad at me about it, I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m the one on the hook here. They don’t want you, they want me to continue to run this company at their whim.’ And, when someone dangles enough money in front of your face, you start thinking about it. But what’s more important?
MARK: Brian, I’m just trying to imagine. It would have been hell for you, but I’m also thinking about your poor boss! What would it have been like for them?
BRIAN: Oh yeah, I would be no picnic to deal with probably! I actually am great at collaborating. I really am. But it’s got to be on equal footing. You know what I’m saying? It can’t be you’re telling me… Especially if you’re wrong, that’s the problem.
And so often, people have more money than actual good judgment and then you’re all of a sudden beholden to someone who just has a bad idea and you know it. Just like we couldn’t necessarily convince the people who thought it was dumb to give away information for free. You can’t convince them to some degree. They’re so set in their world view. So that’s where the freedom to just go ahead and do it your way anyway, because you don’t need their approval.
But all of a sudden, you can put yourself in those positions with investors, by selling your company to another company and you’re going to have to do a couple years working for them. I think that scenario is the least painful because it may be painful, but you have money in your pocket and you know you’re going to leave. So you just have to, you just have to ride it out.
MARK: Mark the Xs on the calendar every day!
BRIAN: So now we kind of unwound that and I’m going back to mainly just me. There are certain projects like Further that I will always, at least I think so, always keep it to myself because it’s a very personal thing to me and I’m not really worried if it makes money, although it can, you know. I can’t help.
MARK: Further is your Generation X project, right?
BRIAN: Yeah. Well, it started out as just kind of a general personal growth newsletter thing where I would share what I was reading once I figured that I actually needed some help in the rest of my life. I was good at business and then I looked around and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re not doing too well at anything else! Like, your health and you got to improve your relationships and this is what’s important.’ So, that was really a very personal thing to me. And then I just kept doing it.
And then I was getting closer to 50 and I started realizing I was writing about midlife more, a particular type of person, right? This is very actually on point for what we’re talking about. I was really writing for people my age and then I started thinking, I’m really writing for Generation X, my generation, our generation. And so, I just explicitly said, ‘That’s who I’m writing for.’ And it’s so funny because I had readers that were baby boomers who literally wrote me and gave me a hard time. They’re like, ‘What about us?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s just really a weird thing.
And then on the other end, I’ll see people talking about Further online and they’ll say, ‘I’m a millennial, but I still think this is great.’ And I’m just like, ‘Okay, that’s good.’ I mean, you got to think about it. This is a nonprofit in the literal sense in that it does not make money. It has no business model. It could, because I can’t help but start anything that doesn’t have a business model somewhere in there.
Anyway, that’s a great example of choosing who you’re going to serve. And it’s really not just all about them, it’s the intersection of you and them. And I hope our creative and artistic friends are listening to this, that you’re not pandering, you’re just choosing someone whose life you want to make better, whether it be through your art, your writing, whatever it is you do. That’s the reality of it.
And I think a lot of artistic people, including me back when I was the young aspiring writer, just feels, you feel like, ‘I create and the world worships me,’ you know? I’m sorry. I guess that happens from time to time, but it’s a lot more than it’s God-given genius. You know what I’m saying? So a little strategic consideration for your work. I mean, it’s your work. It’s important. You have to treat it as such.
MARK: So this sounds like a good point for you to set the listener your Creative Challenge. This is the part of the show, if you’re new to the podcast, where I ask my guest to set you, the listener, a challenge that is related to the theme of the interview and something that will stretch you creatively in an interesting new direction and which you can do or at least get started on within seven days of listening to this interview.
Brian, what’s your Creative Challenge?
BRIAN: Well, okay, so from a marketing standpoint, you’ll hear marketers talk about personas or I used the term avatar earlier. And that’s just marketing speak for figuring out who you’re talking to. And I think a lot of times, it’s very arm’s length. It’s not that you’ll necessarily hear some marketing director have a really empathetic and deep desire to connect with their target market. That’s not how marketers, at least in the corporate world, think.
But in reality, it’s really just who are the people I want to serve? I’ve always said that entrepreneurs can be highly compensated servants. Never think it’s about you and you won’t make the most fundamental mistake. And I believe that’s true for all creative people. So forget personas and avatars and all that.
And we’ve been giving Godin a lot of credit here for 20 years ago. But even at the beginning of this year, he took what I already knew and put it in a way that I just love. And it’s about who do you want to be responsible for? Whose life are you responsible for enhancing through your work? And when you think about it that way, that doesn’t sound like some awful marketing thing, that sounds like, ‘These are my patrons. These are the people who I bring value and joy to and they bring me money so I can live.’ And this is what I’ve been doing all along. And again, the whole entrepreneur-servant thing has been my mentality forever. But I love the way he put that.
It’s just so simple because it’s not just about any audience. It’s ‘Who’s a group of people that whether it be out of a sense of purpose, even obligation, I don’t like obligation, but what’s the intersection between who I am, my purpose in life, what I find meaning in, and a group of people out there who I can therefore communicate with, enter commerce with?’ There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s how our world works. But it’s a whole lot more satisfying when you feel like you get up every day with a purpose to take care of an audience, whether it be 1,000 people or 100,000. It doesn’t matter the number, it depends on whether or not it’s sustainable to you. And I think also in the long run, emotionally gratifying.
And that sounds maybe more artsy than some people would expect, but it’s fundamentally true and it’s no different from how great marketing works at the higher level. Apple did this brilliantly, forever until recently, and now they’re not doing so well at it. But it is possible and that’s why Apple is such the standout case study and the exception because they took very human characteristics related to design, and beauty, and autonomy, and sticking it to IBM. You know, just a rebelliousness. All these things felt like Steve Jobs was just talking to you directly, ‘Hey, you’re my type of person. Let me set you up with the tools you need.’
Think about that. That’s what I’d like everyone to spend a week on and write it out like it’s a character in a novel that you may be writing or a screenplay.
MARK: Oh, that sounds fun.
BRIAN: Oh, it’s a great exercise because once you start yourself going, things will flow out of you. You may not use all of it, you may end up editing later, but who is the type of person that – they don’t have to be like you. And in fact, I think that’s a mistake. They don’t have to be exactly like you because they’re never going to be like you because you’re either the expert, or the artist, or the creative person who is in a position to give them something they can’t get elsewhere. So they’re not you and they’ll never be you, but they’re the people that you feel like you want to serve.
MARK: Great. And if anybody’s feeling brave, maybe you could post that as a comment on the show notes, Your novelistic description. The show notes will be available at 21stcenturycreative.fm/brian.
Brian, as always, it’s been enlightening and mind-boggling to talk to you. We’ve been on quite the journey today.
For those of us who want to follow your continued adventures, where should they go?
BRIAN: Ah, okay. I would suppose from a self-employment standpoint, Unemployable is the best resource for that. That’s Unemployable.com. It’s basically a podcast and a newsletter that kind of focuses on this whole idea of constructing a business that gives you the freedom to go fast, slow, big, small, whatever, with the key being that it’s up to you. And we talk a lot about how to enhance the creative human being at the center of the business with technology and other kinds of strategies that allow one person or a very small team to have kind of an outsized impact. So that is the spot for people who are interested in that.
And I think a lot of what we were talking about today further touches on the same themes specifically for people in their 40s, early 50s, Gen X who are, we’re coming up on an age where people traditionally, were thinking about retirement and that’s looking like…
MARK: Good luck with that!
BRIAN: A dicey proposition. Everything from, the effect of AI and automation on the workforce. If you don’t get to work up to you’re ready to retire. You usually don’t have the funds to do it. Then there’s the whole un-retirement movement where boomers are basically setting the stage for, retirement’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And that’s true. We find our purpose through what we do. The Japanese term…I’ll probably mispronounce it. Ikagi?
MARK: Ikagi. Yeah.
BRIAN: Yeah, yeah. That’s reason to live. Literally trying to live.
MARK: Oh, no. Ikigai, is it? Yeah. I think, Ikigai, reason to live.
BRIAN: It’s Ikigai. You’re right. You did live in Japan for quite a while.
MARK: Well, I spent a bit of time in Japan. My wife is Japanese, so she knows.
BRIAN: Oh, okay. You didn’t actually move there though…
MARK: She’ll probably correct this when she listens. She’ll say, ‘It’s not that at all.’
BRIAN: That’s good. And tell her to correct me! That’s all right. Anyway, but yeah, this is interesting because that is what’s attributed to some of the longevity of certain areas of Japan and other areas of the world where people don’t go to sit around or play golf or do nothing. Because a lot of times when people do that, especially if they happen to lose their spouse or partner, they end up dying shortly thereafter because there’s no reason to keep going.
So the tagline of Further is ‘keep going’ and it means creatively, it means from a self-actualization standpoint. And it may be pragmatic because you need money and if you can’t retire, then you better enjoy what you’re doing because you think you’re cranky when you’re young about doing work you don’t want to do, wait until you’re 65!
MARK: Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. And, I would second this. So Unemployable is a great podcast. If you really like the small creative business theme that Brian’s been riffing on today, that’s essential listening. And if like me, you are a Generation X-er, I think you will find plenty to stimulate and encourage you at Further. So thank you Brian. As always, it’s been a pleasure.
BRIAN: Thank you, Mark. This is great to catch up.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Storytelling: a Matter of Life and Death with CJ Lyons
Feb 18, 2019
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is CJ Lyons, a New York Times and USA Today thriller author who has sold more than 2.5 million books.
She has won numerous awards, including the International Thriller Writers’ prestigious Thriller Award, and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense.
Once upon a time CJ was a pediatric ER doctor (for those of us outside the US, ER stands for Emergency Room) so she was helping children and their families facing medical emergencies. She has also assisted police and prosecutors with cases involving child abuse, rape and murder.
As she says in the interview, working as a doctor meant she saw people at their very best and their very worst. This experience has clearly been a big influence on her fiction. And in our conversation she has some compelling things to say about the value of art and storytelling in the face of the darker side of life and death.
I first met CJ about 10 years ago, when her career as a writer was starting to take off, and since then it’s been amazing to see her success, and inspiring to see how she has handled it, with good humour and generosity, inspiring others through her writing and speaking.
So asked her to come on the show and share some of the learnings from her extraordinary journey, and she kindly made the time to give me an extraordinary interview.
If you’re in the early phases of your career, as a writer or another kind of creative, you’ll find CJ’s story inspiring and instructive, especially in relation to dealing with adversity and setbacks. It’s sobering but maybe also reassuring to that a ‘big name’ writer didn’t have things all her own way, and that she had to fight to get where she is.
If you’re a more experienced writer or creative, then you’ll be particularly interested to hear CJ reflect on the ups and downs of a successful career, and on how to stay true to your inspiration over the long term, regardless of external circumstances.
CJ Lyons interview transcript
MARK: CJ, when did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
CJ: That’s a question everyone asks, and like so many people, I actually started out as a storyteller very young. In fact, my earliest memory is of doing puppet shows with my mother’s hair curlers and telling stories. I went to a Catholic school and the nuns were always very distressed, and I was in time-out quite a lot. Because to their mind, I had difficulty discerning the difference between a lie and telling the truth, and really it was like, ‘Well, no, I know what the truth is, I just think it’s much more interesting if we go in a different direction,’ and I would tell stories.
So, very young, I wrote my first novel which was a young adult fantasy, total rip off of Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara when I was 14 or 15. But even before then, I always wrote short stories and poems and I had won awards for my writing in elementary and junior high. So I just always knew that was part of me, I just never dreamed of turning it into a career until I was much older.
MARK: Because your first career was as a doctor, right?
CJ: Yes. I was a pediatric emergency medicine physician, and I was a doctor for 17 years before I took a leap of faith to write full-time.
MARK: How did you get from writing to doctoring? Was it just a completely different part of you took over or was there a link in your mind?
CJ: Well, as I said, I was always a writer, and writing is really my way of, as an extreme introvert, of coping with the chaos of the world around me. And so I even wrote two novels while I was in medical school despite attending class and being on the wards and working 100-hour work weeks, because I needed to process.
MARK: Sorry, CJ. I’m just thinking of all the clients who’ve told me they don’t have time to write, and you wrote two novels while you were in medical school?
CJ: Oh, yeah. That’s an excuse that I refuse to accept from anyone! Because I mean look at so many romance writers who are managing households and working outside jobs and still writing brilliant books. Look at, well as a physician, there’s such a huge tradition of physician writers. In fact, a lot of physicians who know that I left medicine are like, ‘Well, why did you leave medicine? You could just do both.’ And I just don’t have the temperament where I could handle giving 120% to my patients and 120% to my writing, because at that point, I had two contracts with a New York City publisher. I felt obligated to give them the best I could.
So leaving was a huge decision for me. It was very difficult, but it was the right decision in the end. But it was a leap of faith, I saved up my money, I prepared myself to really lower my cost of living. And I just wanted to give the writing at least a year or two a chance to see, could I really turn this into a full-time career. And if not, I, of course, still maintained all my medical credentials so that I could have gone back if I chose to, but things turned out in a very different direction.
MARK: When I was a student, I went to see the novelist Leon Garfield give a talk at the Literary Society, and I asked him if he had any advice for somebody considering a career as a writer. And without hesitating, he said, ‘Yeah, do something else first.’ He said, ‘Because otherwise, you won’t have anything to write about.’
CJ: Yes. I totally agree. You need life experience. Even being a writer all my life when I look back on the early works, the problem with my writing was, it was pure imagination because I didn’t have enough experience with relationships and people. It’s not so much that you need to experience like with, I don’t know, rocket ships if you’re a science fiction author, you just need to know how to research those. But you need to understand people, because your audience is people.
And if you can’t interact with them and make that deep, personal, heartfelt, emotionally honest connection, they’re not going to be reading your works and feeling that. Stephen King calls it telepathy. Feeling that they are immersed in the story or are actually part of that story world. And I think the only way you can get that is through experience. I would tell people, honestly, the best experience I ever had was one of my jobs when I was in college and early on in medical school was as a waitress.
I learned everything I needed to know about emergency medicine and writing, just right there being a waitress on the floor, you learned how to triage or prioritize and customer service, and how to be kind to people that were having a bad day, but also how not to take shit from people that were trying to abuse you. Oh, excuse me. I hope this is isn’t a rated G podcast!
MARK: Oh no. You’ve just earned us the explicit tag for this week. So thank you!
CJ: Oh, okay, sorry about that. It’s the ER doctor in me. I tend to be a bit blunt.
MARK: It’s fine, it’s fine. So the rule is on the show, you can always swear as long as it’s artistically justified.
CJ: Oh, there you go.
MARK: So waitressing prepared you for being an ER doctor. You must have seen a lot of life in both of those jobs?
CJ: Yes. And in the emergency room, you see people at their absolute worst point of their entire life, but you also see them at the absolute best. And that’s where I came up with this whole concept that has driven, and is really the theme that runs through pretty much all of my work, which is that heroes are born every day, you don’t have to be a Clark Kent or Superman. You can actually be a hero just by finding the courage to stand up for the people that you love or for the beliefs that you love. And I got to see that in the ER all the time.
I also got to see the worst of humanity, unfortunately, I was involved in cases of child homicide, sexual assaults, domestic violence. I even met a serial killer, which not many thriller writers can say, quite honestly.
MARK: I know.
CJ: So I saw the best and the worst of people, and I think you need to open yourself up to those kind of life experiences in order to bring that emotional honesty to your writing, no matter what genre. And, in fact, that’s why I had to find a new term for my genre because no one was writing these kind of books that had emotional honesty in addition to all the thriller tropes of explosions, and car chases, and the adrenaline rush. And that’s where I came up with my personal subgenre of ‘Thrillers with Heart.’
MARK: Say more about that subgenre, because I think it’s a really interesting point. Because a lot of thrillers tend to take place in a universe where there aren’t really any consequences emotionally. There’s lots of explosions, and fights, and chases, and it’s all very macho, but the hero dusts himself, and it’s usually him.
What are you trying to do with this new twist on the genre?
CJ: Well, for me, ‘Thrillers with Heart’ took things in a different direction, and that’s why it became my brand. And as a victim’s advocate and someone that has worked with so many victims, I just could not do what at the time was almost every thriller out there did, which was to put you in the point of view of a victim, it’s usually a child or a woman, as they were being assaulted and tortured and eventually killed. And that was like the opening chapter of like almost every thriller out there during that time. Now remember, this was over a decade ago. And I just could not see that, it felt like it was taking advantage of these victims instead of really addressing their experiences and the cost to real human life that violence takes.
And I’ve been unfortunate enough to have violence in my own life, and so I understood that it really is a grieving process because you lose something when you’re a victim of violence. You lose the life that you always dreamed that you were going to have and everything changes. So my first books actually featured an emergency room physician, someone who’s very smart and educated, who was the victim of domestic violence. And she found the courage to leave that marriage but still had to deal with the professional and the personal downfall that came from her leaving that kind of situation. And where do you find the ability to move past that and be able to trust someone again in an intimate relationship? So those are my Hart and Drake Thrillers.
And I was not certain how people would accept them, because people weren’t writing that kind of book when those were first published. And I was amazed. I got letters from women who said, ‘Thanks to you and your honesty, I could relate to this character, and I found the courage to make a phone call and to start to get help, and to start to escape from this abusive relationship.’ And so that was very fulfilling, and I realized I could reach so many more people than I could as a physician just meeting patients, one person or one family at a time.
MARK: I think that is such an important point to bring up, because it’s very easy to look at the work of a physician and say, ‘Well, you can see the contribution that they make to other people’s lives.’ But with artists of any kind it’s not so obvious, and maybe it’s never as life-and-death in the case of many artists.
CJ: No. See, I would disagree with that. I think artists save lives in a different way than a physician that can do the hands-on and can actually collect data and say ‘Oh, this technique saved this life but, I wasn’t able to save this one.’ Artists, I mean look at how many people who say their lives have been changed by a song they heard during a crisis point. I used to work a suicide hotline, and it was always amazing to me the different things that they would talk about that were keeping them, because one of the questions we would ask is ‘Okay, why would you not kill yourself?’ I mean we didn’t phrase it that way, we had a very, I don’t know what you would call it, approved way to phrase it, but basically we’re asking them what is keeping you here on earth? What is making your life feel like you can actually make it through today and go on living for another day?
And so many of them would say, ‘Well, this song has really inspired me,’ or ‘I was on the subway and I saw an advertisement for an art exhibit, and I really want to go see that.’ And so just having one thing to hang onto was enough for many people to start to realize that they could live another day and they could work on their issues. And they could get help, and they could find the courage to ask for help and accept it and keep going.
I think this is where a lot of people think of artists as just elite or isolated or away from the rest of humanity, but I think real artists immerse themselves in humanity. And that’s how they make those very, very important connections on an emotional level. Even artists that have been dead for 100 years. I mean how many people, when you go to a museum are in tears? I know I always cry when I’m at art museums, and there are tears and it’s these works of art where the artist died centuries ago.
MARK: CJ, I’m absolutely delighted to stand corrected here. What an inspiring riposte to my blundering assertion about the redundancy of art!
CJ: Well, I wouldn’t say blundering because unfortunately it is a common misconception, especially nowadays.
MARK: So CJ, you said as a doctor you got to see the best of people and people at their worst. And that’s making me think of something that’s been on my mind the last few days thinking about this interview. Because whenever I speak to you, you’re always charming, and upbeat, and so positive and inspiring, and yet you write about the most horrific subjects.
Firstly, how do you stay so upbeat in the face of the really gruesome facts of life?
CJ: Well, I think a lot of that comes from not just observing people at their worst moments but also living them myself, and realizing that there’s such a wealth of untapped strength, and power, and decency that normal people, everyday people that you will never see in a headline in the paper or caught on a YouTube video. That just normal, every day people can step up and be heroes. And the thing is, yes, there are terrible, terrible things in my book, but I never show any gratuitous violence, even when there is violence and I try to be very honest about the implications of the violence and consequences to the people.
My books all have happy endings, but the happy ending comes at a cost. It’s not going to just be the glossy ride off into the sunset, there’s a price to pay just like in real life. But I think the thing is, what I’m always focused on, isn’t the violence, it isn’t the crime. it’s that gray area between good and evil of people coping with this, and healing from it, and rising up or falling to making the wrong decision. I have a lot of books where the only difference between the good guy and the bad guy is that they’re both trying to do the right thing in their minds which is often say, protect their family, or save something important to them. But they decide where they diverge in that one of them decides to sacrifice something and the other decides not to sacrifice. And often that’s the main thing, there are two sides of the same coin.
I love exploring that gray area between good and evil because it’s in all of us, it’s in all of us, the potential to go either way. And I think to show someone consciously deciding to go one way or the other is very powerful, and that’s really what fiction is all about.
You know, I did an Earthwatch volunteer expedition that was in the outback of Australia. So an archaeological expedition mapping the cave art and we carbon dated it back. So here’s this cave art telling a story via paintings. And it carbon dated back to 47,000 B.C. So for over 50,000 years and actually they just recently found some new cave art that they dated back to closer to 100,000 years, I think it was on the African continent.
MARK: Yeah, South Africa, originally.
CJ: I think it was South Africa. So for 100,000 years we have been using stories to educate and to explain the world, and to share and connect with other people in our tribe. And I would argue that the six most important words in the English language are, ‘Let me tell you a story’. Everything starts there, whether it’s the Bible, whatever religion, your chosen religion uses as a Bible, whether it’s educating kids so that they don’t touch the fire, whether it’s explaining the squeaky noises outside the cave, it all starts with ‘Let me tell you a story’. And bad things happen to people and we have to honor that, we can’t just brush it aside. But we also don’t want to use it as just gratuitous, titillating, almost semi-pornography.
In fact, when I started writing thrillers, there was a term that they threw around to describe thrillers, they weren’t held in the highest regard at the time. And this again was a decade ago. They were called torture porn.
MARK: Really?
CJ: And I just despised that because I was like when terrible things happen that’s often when humanity rises up and shines, and I wanted to show that but in a very honest way not in an overblown, Superman, superhero type of way. And I think that’s honestly why I still have a career is that that kind of emotional impact I try to include in every single one of my books. Now my audience is very narrow, there’s not a lot of people that like having that emotional honesty enmeshed in their thriller escapism.
Because let’s face it, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, basically your Paladin character. But, people want to dream about being the lone ranger, but they don’t want to necessarily dream about what kind of pain that might cost. They want the fantasy, and that’s fine, that’s what entertainment is. But for me, my particular audience, for my form of entertainment that I promise them with my ‘Thrillers with Heart’ is that, you know what? You are going to get some pain and suffering before you come out the other end. But you’re going to also get that uplifting, courageous, everyday people becoming heroes that hopefully pays off the pain and suffering of the crime. And I always make that promise that you’re going to get the thriller part but you’re also going to get that emotional heart.
So I think my main job is mainly to be able to take characters like that and put them in a story using words, but an artist, or a photographer, or cinematographer, they use different kind of media to create that same sense of storytelling, of connection with their audience.
MARK: Okay. And you gave a wonderful example. I can’t imagine how it must feel to get messages like that from people who’ve read your books.
But at the point where you decided to quit your job as a doctor and go for the writing full-time, you hadn’t had that level of feedback yet, or am I wrong about that?
CJ: No, you’re right. I had the first two in the Hart and Drake series were under contract but they had yet to be published.
MARK: Right.
CJ: And, in fact, I don’t know how much you want me to go into detail but my story takes the interesting twist before I actually had my first book published. I had already quit my job as a physician. I had moved a thousand miles away from home, because here in the United States at least, the idea of a writer getting a mortgage is fraught with a bit of peril, shall I say. So I figured, ‘Well, if the writing takes off, where do I want to live?’ Basically I didn’t want to shovel snow anymore, Pennsylvania, so I moved near the beach.
And so here I was, a thousand miles away from home and family, left everything behind, made a clean break, but my first book is coming out and then it wasn’t. It was cancelled by the publisher because of cover art, something I had no control over, no input on. I had been telling them for months that the cover art didn’t work, and it wasn’t until the vendors, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, Walmart, saw the actual cover art which wasn’t revealed to them until right before the book was due to be released, and they canceled their preorders. And their preorders were significant for a debut author because they had an advanced reader’s copy of the actual book. And so they fell in love with the books, but the cover art, they just couldn’t abide.
And they told my publisher, ‘Change this cover or we’re going to pull our orders.’ And my publisher said, ‘Well, we have an award-winning art department, we stand by them.’ And, of course, the lowly, debut novelist that has absolutely no power in the traditional publishing system gets caught in the middle. So my career should have ended before it started because those first two contracts were canceled, my book was dead, forget about it.
MARK: So you’d quit your job. You’d committed and then the publisher bungled.
CJ: Basically, yeah, that’s my point of view. I’m sure they would have a different alternative story but…
MARK: Or let’s say Barnes & Noble and the publisher between them, right?
CJ: No. I have to admit, the bookstores were right. This cover for a debut hardcover thriller novelist was designed to literally make people nauseous and seasick when they looked at it. It was shades of bile-green that shimmered like silvery. And there was a little picture on the cover, but it was free stock art from Microsoft. So it was very common and they washed all the color out of it and turned it also into shades of bile-green. So even when you were like reading the title or the wonderful cover quotes I had from people like Sandra Brown, and Lisa Gardner, and Tess Gerritsen, you literally got seasick trying to read the cover.
So who would spend a hardcover, at the time it was like $25.99 for a hardcover, who would spend that on an author they’ve never heard of, to literally take home a book that was going to make them seasick every time they looked at the cover art? So they had a point, I have to admit.
MARK: Yeah. I must admit, it would give me pause for thought! I want to highlight this as well, because it’s easy for people to look at the success that you’ve had, and say, ‘Well, it’s all right for CJ and people at that level.’
But going through an experience like this is part of the price of success, right?
CJ: Yeah. I had a nice debut deal and a second contract already under my belt, but then suddenly I had nothing. So in a way, I was worse off than many people because I had put all my efforts and energies into this one series, the Hart and Drake series that suddenly appeared and that was all wasted, that it was not going to go anywhere. It had already been reviewed in the advanced reader’s copies that circulated, so there was no way another publisher would pick it up. So what to do, you know? Here I was, I suddenly had no job, no income, other than my savings, you know, what to do?
MARK: Well, what did you do?
CJ: I wrote, that’s what I always do. I told you it’s my way of dealing with chaos and understanding it. And here’s the funny thing that shows you that karma is a bitch. The book I wrote during that time, it was actually editor or publisher at Penguin called me up and asked me to create a medical thriller series, specifically for Penguin. And that became my actual first traditionally published books, the Angel of Mercy series, but before that happened, the book that I worked on and that I just poured everything into, in response to basically having the rug pulled out from under me on my debut books, was Blind Faith.
And that book, when it was eventually published, it went on to debut at number two on the New York Times bestselling list, it stayed on the New York Times list for six or seven weeks, I can’t quite remember, and won the Thriller Award, won an RT Reviewers’ Choice Award. It went on to just do really wonderful things despite the fact that it was self-published.
So it was kind of like me having put such heart and soul into that project after coming off the devastation of my traditional publisher saying, ‘Oh, we’re just going to cancel your career, you’re worth nothing to us, we’re not even going to fight for your books,’ to just within a couple of years achieving that just felt so validating. I just really, it’s hard to find the words. And it’s all due to my readers. I wrote the best book I could but it was my readers passing it on, and giving me word of mouth, and just getting behind that title that really did it.
MARK: So at what point did you start considering self-publishing? You’d landed the deal, you knew you could play in that arena. At this time self-publishing was very much still a new thing, right?
CJ: Oh, yes. This was before Kindle even had the KDP platform out. But what happened was, my first book from Penguin came out in 2008, and that’s the Angels of Mercy medical suspense series. But, despite the fact that I already had the books written, they asked for four books in that series. What happened was they decided to only put out one book a year. And after that first book came out, which it was a national bestseller and it won several awards, readers found it and they wanted more, and they wanted more now.
And so I was like, ‘Well, how can I keep my readers happy?’ Which turned out that was the best question for me to ask, because that became the foundation of everything I have done as a publishing professional is ‘What will make my readers just jump for joy, and dance with delight, and want to tell all their friends about my work?’ And that’s very different from how many people approach the business. But for me, that was the perfect question to be asking.
So I realized, well, that there was this new KDP platform, and I read several people and bloggers that were using it, and that there was a lack of Kindle books and people were embracing the idea of reading outside of printed books. So I went to my publisher, and I’ll never forget this meeting. It was the publisher, my editor, my agent, and myself and we were talking about prepping for the second book in the series. And I said, ‘Look, I have these books that were good enough for New York City, they got good reviews but the contract was cancelled, but they’ve already been copyedited, they were ready to go to print. I could self-publish them and use that as a marketing platform with your help.’
And they were like, ‘Well, no, we’re not interested in that.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well, what about if I wrote just a short story for you, and you could publish it through Kindle?’ Because even at that time you could get much better placement going via a traditional publisher than self-publishing on the KDP platform, on the Kindle platform. Plus, they could host it on their website or use it for giveaways or what have you. And I said, ‘You could publish it for free and have links to the preorder on the second book.’ And they were like, ‘No. We are in the business of selling books not giving them away.’
So when I realized that they just had no interest at all in dealing with Kindle, I took advantage of that. And I said, ‘Look, this is what’s going to serve my readers and make them remember my name because they have to wait for a whole year from the next book from Penguin.’ So what I did was, I started self-publishing and again, it was mainly as a way to entertain my readers and it was much more about reaching them than making profit. At the time, and this is like December, January, so end of 2009, early 2010, so very early in the lifespan of Kindle Direct Publishing.
At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about making money, but I did already have a newsletter going. So I reached out to them and on my blog and I just told them, ‘I’m doing this.’ It happened to be coincidentally at the same time as the Haiti earthquake, and I said, ‘All of the proceeds from the books we sell for the next month are going to go to Doctors Without Borders.’ And at the time, I only had two titles up, and we sold over 2,000 copies, and that money went to Doctors Without Borders. And I was like ‘Well, wait, I could sell 2,000 copies just with two titles up, and just sending out one newsletter?’ And I realized there was tremendous potential there that was untapped.
So that’s when I took my older manuscripts that again, were professionally copyedited. I have to admit, the original covers, because I had no idea how to reach out to a cover designer, so they were kind of done by myself using stock art, and then I was able to find professional cover artists within a year. So those original covers, you’re really not going to be able to find them anywhere, thank goodness. But they were still better than the cover art by the professional New York City house that was designed to make you seasick, so hey, it was a step in the right direction!
But that’s when I started self-publishing, and within a year, so by early 2011, so only a year of doing it, I was paying the bills with the self-published books. And within 18 months I was earning as much in a month self-publishing as I did in a year from my New York City contracts.
So it was very, very dramatically evident to me that this was a resource, a way to reach readers which again, that was my primary goal, it wasn’t about the money. It was about, can I reach readers, and grow my audience, and connect with them, and give them what they want? Which at the time was good books but put out faster and at more of a value pricing than what New York City was giving them. Because at the time, New York City was pricing their ebooks very expensively compared to like trade paperback in mass markets, because they saw it as a niche audience, I think, early on. And so I could give my readers more value and make them happy, and so it was a win-win, right?
MARK: And, I mean you could have just sat back and waited a year for Penguin to put the next book out, couldn’t you? But I love the way you step forward and you took charge of the situation yourself, and it’s not just about the publishing platform, is it?
Because setting up that newsletter and contacting your readers directly, what difference did that make for you as a writer in terms of your sense of how you moved your career forward?
CJ: Honestly, that was everything. The newsletter, I was a very early adopter of having a mailing list, permission-based marketing is how Seth Godin calls it. And the other thing I did after I lost those two debut contracts and was abandoned by my publisher. So I realized I couldn’t trust anyone else to manage my business, not my agent who left me high and dry. He just didn’t even want to get involved with it. He had other writers that were published by that same publishing house, how could he have defended my best interests when he had other people, so his interests were divided. My editor, obviously wasn’t going to champion me. She had to fight with the Art Department, and the publisher obviously wasn’t going to put my career above their award-winning Art Department.
So I realized very early on, by, we call it in the writing industry, at least in fiction, I don’t know if they call this in different genres but in fiction we call it being orphaned. Which is usually when a key member of your publishing team just leaves or moves on to a different position, and you’re lost in the void. Well, being orphaned at that early, early stage in my career forced me to realize I need to learn the business. I knew nothing about business, I was a doctor. I don’t even balance my checkbook. It’s like I needed to learn the business. And that’s when I actually found you, and Lateral Action, and I took your course. At the time it was titled, The Creative Pathfinder course which was brilliant. I highly recommend it.
MARK: So folks, that’s what’s now called The 21st Century Creative Foundation Course. Originally it was called The Creative Pathfinder. I’m very glad that I put that out and met CJ through it.
CJ: Yeah. And then because of some of the resources that you recommended, I found Seth Godin, I still follow his blog religiously. I found Copyblogger and I did one of their courses, and then I took a course by Brendon Burchard. He is much more tailored towards nonfiction and product marketing but he is just so energetic and his information, I was very easily able to translate into fiction and what I needed to do. Which was by focusing on connecting with my audience and taking control of my audience, instead of letting the publisher tell me who my audience was, I told them who my audience was.
And in fact, in future book contracts, we would have meetings and I would pull out my demographics. And I’d say, ‘Listen, my readers are 65% female, they skew over the age of 34, most of them have gone to college and over half of them have gone to grad school, this is how much they make a year.’ I could give them all the demographics. And I was in a meeting like that, and one of the publishers, this is a major New York City house, looked at my information. And he turned to me, and he said, ‘Where did you get this, who did you have to pay to get this?’ And I was like, ‘It’s free, it’s called Quantcast, how come you don’t have the numbers to give to me?’ It’s like, ‘Why do I have to tell you this information? This is your job, you should be telling me.’
But they just don’t know that. To them, their audience are the buyers from the major bookstores. And my audience is the individual reader. I’m going to care about every single person that picks up one of my books, and I love hearing from them and connecting with them. And so I nurture that. And big conglomerates aren’t used to nurturing anything.
MARK: So there’s two really important things I want to highlight here. Number one is week in week out, I hear creatives saying, ‘I just want to find someone to take over the business side of things for me, so I can get on with doing the creative stuff.’ And when you listen to a story like this it’s scary how badly your career could have gone down the chute.
CJ: Yeah. If I’d let the professionals handle it.
MARK: If you’d let the grownups and the professionals handle it, because, folks, A), they don’t necessarily know better than you. And B), it may not be that they have bad intentions but they have other priorities.
CJ: Yes. And I think that’s important to understand. I still partner with New York City Publishing, in fact, my next book coming out November is from HarperCollins and it’s a young adult thriller called The Color of Lies here in the U.S. And I partner with them because to build a platform and to find a young adult audience from where I sit now today is so much more time-consuming, and takes a lot of talent in arenas that I am not talented, so it would not play to my strengths. So I let them do that heavy lifting. Now I take a significant pay cut because they take 90% of the profits. And my advance is smaller; I make less in a young adult book than I would if I self-publish an adult thriller.
But I love writing these books, and I want them to reach an audience. So if I have to give up something, that’s a creative choice to me more than a business choice. If it allows me to reach an audience with these books that I love writing, then I’m happy to do it. If you’re looking at it strictly from a business choice and you’re looking at the spreadsheet, that may not make sense.
So you have to decide what kind of creative professional you are, and where your strengths lie. And, do you need the money right now today to feed your family? Well, then you’re going to go down a different path than someone who has adequate funding and they can take their time and kind of nurture that audience, and they understand that they want something different. That’s one of the wonders about being an author today. Also, other creative artists, I have a friend that’s a professional photographer, and the internet has changed how she can reach people around the world with her art work instead of just the people that would walk into her art gallery.
So I think you have to decide what kind of creative professional you are and where your strengths lie. And for me, my strengths lie in the storytelling and connecting with my audience, so that’s where I still do my mailing list and my newsletters. Now, I am not good at social media though, that kind of instantaneous 24/7 connection, I just can’t sustain. I am a hermit at heart. And so, no, I’m not good at Facebook or Instagram. I keep those very professional. They’re pretty much all focused on the books or topics that the books deal with, you’re not going to find anything about my personal life on there.
But there’s other people that are more extroverted that they love that, that’s, to them, the ultimate connection with their audience. So you have to weigh these decisions based on how much of your time and energy they’re going to cost, almost as much as… well, actually in my case, more than how much money are they going to cost. So I think it’s a very interesting idea that’s different from traditional business philosophies. The whole idea of being a creative entrepreneur, it’s so different than just learning marketing, or just learning budgeting, or just learning how to hire people.
You can make money, and actually, there are some very well-known writers out there that have made tremendous fortunes where they will admit they don’t even write their own books. They were marketing professionals and they know how to reach an audience, and so they hire other people to write the books for them because to them, that’s the least important part of their business.
Now for me, the stories come first, and I have to write stories that will delight my audience and allow them to enter my world and experience that emotional journey with an honesty that they can connect to. So I come at it from a totally different direction, but that doesn’t mean that any one of us is right or wrong, you have to figure out what’s right for you.
MARK: I think this is so important and very wise that you need to know yourself, what you’re good at, what you love doing the most, and you need to know who you’re trying to reach.
CJ: Well, that’s actually the three secrets that whenever I teach, that’s what I always tell people. There’s three secrets to success, know yourself, know your story, know your audience. And if you can nail those three, you can create your own path. Now, everyone has to measure success because they know themselves, and they know what they need, and they know their strengths, and they know their weaknesses. I just cringe sometimes when I see some of these online courses that are guaranteed to make you a bestseller or blah, blah, blah.
They’re great for some people, but there’s no one answer for everyone. And I think it’s important because this isn’t the business of making nuts and bolts or a gadget, where there’s one way to make the gadget and you put that on the assembly line and that’s it. When you’re talking to creatives, there’s no one way of creating. But there’s also no one way of being a creative entrepreneur running your business.
MARK: And I think this is maybe one of the downsides of the internet is because you could pick any tactic can say ‘Oh, Facebook for authors.’ And you would find somebody making a really convincing case about why Facebook is great for authors, and why you would need to learn how to do it. But if you look at the big picture then maybe you might be like CJ, that it’s just not for you.
CJ: Yeah. Facebook is great for many, many authors and a lot of this is trial and error. And that is one thing that I think separates a lot of creatives from people that may want to be a creative whether they want to like write their memoir or write a story, but they’re maybe not going to be able to pursue it as a full-time career. And that is, creatives, we aren’t afraid to fail. We see each failure as a learning experience that will help us to be better and to raise the bar on our next endeavor, and show us where we need to improve.
I’m a lifelong learner as you know, because we’ve talked about this before, so I am constantly taking classes on all sorts of bizarre topics. Like right now, I’m taking an online class on the history of the Irish language. Now, I don’t set my books in Ireland. I know nothing, but I love the poetry of the language. And I’m taking another class on cryptology and code-breaking which may or may not go into any of my books but it’s just fascinating. And I’m taking another class in cooking.
So, you know, it’s like when you approach life in that idea of I want to get these experiences and part of having a life experience is letting yourself fail. I mean like I said, my career as a writer should have failed. I was technically a failure, I had no income from my chosen profession of writing, and I had left behind a very good profession, the income wasn’t great because I was a pediatrician and we aren’t paid much here in the United States. But money aside, it was a very fulfilling oppression that I loved.
And in my first step, not by choice, was to be a failure. Well, you have to learn from that. And that’s why I love it, that the book I wrote during that time of basically grieving my career as a writer was the book that has sold over a quarter of a million copies and has gotten such critical acclaim. Because to me that was so validating that no failure has to be a failure, it’s a step in a process.
MARK: Okay, at this point, CJ, you’ve sold, goodness knows, how many books and you’ve won lots of awards, you’ve hit the bestseller lists over and over again. So in terms of external markers, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot left for you to achieve.
How does that affect your motivation or does it affect your motivation these days? And what is important to you these days about your work?
CJ: I love that you asked this. Because this goes back to the fact that there are so many paths and you really have to know yourself as an artist or as a creative and what is your definition of success. For me, if you looked at my sales numbers over the last 18 months, you would say, ‘Oh, she is a nobody, she’s a has-been, she is not selling that great.’ And you would be right, if you only looked at the sales numbers. And a part of that is because right now, so many people are entering the self-publishing arena and many of them excel at marketing, and so they know how to inundate the audience with their product and get that visibility. And that’s something that, quite frankly, I have never been able to master. Like I said, my Thrillers with Heart are designed to reach only a small niche audience, they’re not designed for every one that’s out there on Kindle buying a book. And I’m still able to keep my niche audience very happy, but I have not been able over, especially around the last 18 months since Kindle Unlimited, well, I guess it was more like about two years since Kindle Unlimited came out and just created this tsunami of content that makes it very difficult to get any visibility, any traction on the Amazon algorithms.
So I can still reach my readers, that core niche, but it’s been very difficult to grow past that. And if this was early in my career, I would find that extremely frustrating, and I would be spending time and energy in learning alternative ways of perhaps marketing or maybe writing faster, maybe providing more content would have been the answer I would have chosen. But I’m lucky enough that, because I came in early when Amazon had less than a million books in its catalog, and I was able to get that visibility and reach more customers because of that, more readers, that I have that kind of opportunity to sit back and relax and just focus on my work. I’m constantly taking classes and trying to learn how to increase my impact through my writing, through the actual words on the page, instead of learning how to handle the spreadsheet data managing of Facebook ads, for example, or AMS ads. That’s just beyond me.
And so I’ve decided, and it’s a personal decision, and everyone has to make the decision that fits with their definition of success, I’ve decided for me, the best way for career sustainability is actually to step back. I’ve turned down most speaking engagements, so I said ‘yes’ to you because we’ve known each other for so long but most podcast interviews and teaching opportunities I’ve started saying ‘no’ to.
My blog that I had for writers was called No Rules, Just WRITE!, W-R-I-T-E. But I closed that down after hackers took it down, and I realized that was a blessing in disguise because it was becoming so hard to find the time to give it the energy that it deserved. So now I direct everyone to places like TheCreativePenn.com or Lateral Action. And that’s great because I can just refer them to people that are doing the same thing but marvelously.
So I’ve decided myself, as my personal decision, to concentrate on my craft. How can I keep raising the bar on my books? And part of that might mean publishing less often and not making as much money, and that’s okay. I’m at a point where the money sustains what I need it to sustain. But that may not be a viable option for someone early in their career, so you do have to take all of those pros and cons and understand the different paths to success, and see where you measure success.
MARK: So CJ, this is now the point of the show where I invite my guest to set the listener a Creative Challenge, so something to do with the theme of today’s interview and your work that our listener can go and do herself or himself in their own studio or workplace.
CJ: Okay. So I alluded to the fact, early on that I chose for my business pathway or guidelines that every decision had to be focused on my audience. And what would excite and delight them, and make them jump for joy, and tell their friends about my work. So that’s going to be my challenge to you guys.
I want you to go out there, and I want you to think of one thing, just one thing that you can do that would give such added value to your audience and excite them that they want to share your work with all of their friends.
So if you’re a visual artist, it might be creating one specific piece of work that you could offer as a free download for a desktop or a free print that they could get and take home and frame. For a writer, it might be creating something targeted to your audience that is something that you can give them, you can just gift it to them. There’s so much. I just can’t even emphasize the amount of uplifting creativity that springs when you give something away to your audience, and you start getting the feedback from them that how much they appreciate it. It just creates this bond that cements you to them on an emotional level that no man of advertising or marketing money can buy.
So that’s my challenge to you, find one thing that you can give your audience, and just give it with an open heart and open hands and just be as generous as possible and invite them to share it. And I want you to be open to that and see what kind of feedback you get.
MARK: Beautiful, thank you. So CJ, last question, where can people find you online? And also, you’ve written so many books, where would you recommend people start and maybe there are different places for people with different tastes?
CJ: Okay. My website is CJLyons.net, so that’s C-J-L-Y-O-N-S-DOT-NET. And a good place to start is I do the same thing I just challenged you guys, I give away the first book in my most successful, most popular, critically acclaimed, bestselling series, The Lucy Guardino Thriller series. The title is called Snake Skin and you can sign up for my mailing list and download it for free right from the website. So that’s a great place to start in my books. And if that doesn’t quite seem like the kind of book that you’re up for, if you go to my Books page, you’ll see a listing of all my books with more information on them and where to get them. But most people just start with Snake Skin and the free download and go from there.
MARK: Great. So CJ, thank you so much. I for one, I’m very glad and grateful that you did say ‘yes’ when I invited you onto the show.
CJ: Mark, no one could say no to you. Are you kidding me?
MARK: I’m sure my listeners will be just as grateful. I mean you’ve really shared a lot about your art and your journey, and some really powerful insights about the attitude we can take to a business. And we can be maybe a little more creative and successful in that sphere than we think we can be. So thank you so much, CJ.
CJ: Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Brutally Honest Advice for Your Creative Business with Emily Cohen
Feb 11, 2019
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is Emily Cohen, a consultant who provides strategic advice to principals of creative firms, and author of the book Brutally Honest.
Emily Cohen (both photos in this article by Jason Varney)I first met Emily back in 2012 when we were both speaking at the HOW Design LIVE conference in Boston. I loved Emily’s no-nonsense attitude and down-to-earth business advice for designers.
Since then we’ve stayed in touch and hung out at other conferences over the years, and I’ve got to know Emily as someone with a distinctive point of view, who is a highly valued source of advice for designers grappling with the business side of things.
It’s a book about business for designers – and by extension for any kind of creative running a service-based business. As Emily says in the interview, many of the business challenges are common to any creative firm.
It’s a very comprehensive book – covering just about everything from dreaming up your vision for the business, marketing and promotion, pricing, proposals, contracts and how to manage clients and employees. A staggering amount of work has gone into writing it, not to mention the years of consulting experience that it’s based on.
It also includes case stories, with stories of real life design firms and their approach to the issues Emily describes. And it’s beautifully designed and printed, with gorgeous colours and infographics, so it looks more like a coffee table book than a business manual.
In this interview Emily shares some of the most important ideas from the book, including why running a creative business is like being a parent, why you should specialise, and the dangers of relying on great word-of-mouth for new business.
She also talks about her own journey from designer to design firm manager to consultant and author. As you’ll hear, her own career took off when she was brutally honest with herself about her ability as a designer and started looking for another path.
If you run a creative business of any kind, Emily will give you some great questions to consider as well as insights you can take away. And if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate the fact that she delivers these with her trademark humour, enthusiasm and frankness!
MARK: Emily, how did you get started in this line of work?
EMILY: That’s actually a really good story. I actually went to graphic design school. I have my BFA in graphic design, and I was a designer for a few years, about five to seven years. And I worked in-house at the Pottery Barn, and I worked in a design studio, and I worked in a magazine. And in my last job at the design studio I realized very quickly that there were amazing people that were so much more talented than I was, and that I just didn’t have a passion for doing design. I wasn’t going to ever be great. And I always wanted to be great at what I did. I never felt like I wanted to be just average. I’m a super ambitious kind of person. And I was struggling. So I was like, I don’t know, 25 and I was struggling with what I was going to do… or 26 maybe. And I was struggling with what I was going to do with that.
And so I just asked everybody I knew, I asked my clients and colleagues and everybody just asking them, ‘Well what should I do, because I still love design?’ I really was involved in the profession, I had tons of friends in that area and I didn’t want to leave design, but I also felt like I was never going to be a fit designer. And so basically, I asked a lot of people and everybody is like, ‘You’re really good at kicking everybody’s butt! That should be your job.’ And so I was like, ‘What does that mean?’
And when I first started, so this might show my age, there were really no project managers in design. There were more like account managers and agencies, but in design, a lot of design firms, if you remember this, at least in America, there weren’t a lot of people running studios other than creatives. And so I just went to a bunch of creative firms. I think I went to about seven firms in like a week, that I just admired. And I think one from a random studio that posted an ad for a studio manager, and I introduced myself and said that I was very interested in managing a studio, that even though I didn’t have any experience, I knew design very well and I was really good at writing and managing people, and I was wondering if there was something there.
And basically, all the firms offered me a job within the same week. And it wasn’t really because I was awesome – although I think I am! – it was more because there was nobody offering to do that and who knew design. So, I took obviously the highest paid position and ran a studio for seven years. And so I pretty much learned on the job.
MARK: Also, you were the person who knocked on the door and said, ‘Let me do this.’
EMILY: Yeah, exactly.
MARK: So that’s maybe a thing we’ll pick up on a bit later on, is putting yourself forward and asking. Because you went to seven firms in one week?
EMILY: Yeah. And I asked them. And it was more like I wasn’t asking necessarily for a job, but I was just saying, ‘This is something I could do. Is that something that you need? Is that something that exists?’ It was more like a conversation.
MARK: And what kind of responses did you get?
EMILY: I got people who were so excited that I knew design and I was organized and they’re like, ‘Sure, we’ll try it out.’ I think the only response I got that was surprising to me is they thought it was an admin job, so I had to convince them that it wasn’t to me and in my mind administration, it was more like a management job. And so that was a little bit of a convincing part of it. And luckily, I took a job with a firm that completely got that.
And that was really great because then I ended up managing that studio and had a lot of experience growing them. So when I first joined them, I think there were about three to five people. And then when I left, I think it was like 25, 30 people. And we moved twice. So I had a lot of experience just with the growth of the firm and managing all their clients, and then when we grew a big enough, managing the project managers that managed the clients. And it was fantastic.
But pretty much the word spread very quickly because, I’m sure you know this, the creative profession is sort of incestuous, everybody knows everybody else, and the word spread pretty quickly that there was this woman out there that loved design and knew design and was involved in design but could also write proposals and teach you how to manage a team. And so I started getting a consulting practice on the side. I just built up a consultant practice just through word of mouth. People were like, ‘Hey, can you write this proposal?’ Or, ‘Hey, can you help me hire?’ ‘Hey, how do I manage this person?’
So then I started working, I don’t know, 70-hour weeks. And my fiancé at the time was like, ‘That’s a full-time job. You should quit your job and start being a consultant.’ And that’s what I did.
MARK: So okay, why design? Why didn’t you walk away and walk into another profession? What’s special about design for you?
EMILY: I love designers. First of all, I love the value we bring to the business world. I really feel very proud of the work that designers do and I love it. I still love what design does and who designers are. I think designers are incredibly great people and creatives, in general, are actually some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They all, for the most part, are actually really kind human beings. And I didn’t want to leave that profession.
And also because I had a lot of equity in that already. And then I had become actively involved in our industry, through our local AIGA, which is the American graphic design association. And I was really involved in that. I didn’t want to lose that kind of equity that I had built and all those relationships. It’s what I knew. It was my whole world and I didn’t want to leave it.
MARK: And you’re talking with great enthusiasm of this job of growing the firm and kicking people’s butt. Presumably, you enjoy this?
EMILY: I love it! I’m the happiest person in the world. I absolutely love what I do. And I work all the time and it’s mostly because I just love it. I love who I work with and the impact I have on them and yeah, and I just love the profession. I’ve so many friends in this space and my clients turn into friends. It’s been a privilege to do something that I absolutely love.
MARK: And what is it that you love? It doesn’t sound like you’re hankering to get back to designing. You actually love the managing, and kicking butt and leading.
What is it that’s satisfying about that?
EMILY: I think it’s who I work with. Designers, in general, are very open people and very nice people. And very interested in learning, and growing, and changing. And so to see that I can have impact with those kinds of clients. I have less patience for politics and corporate hierarchy. And whereas, with working with creatives, there’s really none of that. So I get to have a lot more impact. And so they, not always, but for the most part, listen to me and I get to see the results of my efforts. That’s the other thing that I think I love so much is that I actually get to see if my consulting pays off.
And also, I think the other thing, what I love about our industry is it’s changed so much in the 30 years I’ve been doing this. I love change, I’m sort of a risk taker. I love learning new things and growing and changing and pivoting. And I think that’s also something that has always intrigued me about our profession. That just when I think I can do one thing, my clients will say, ‘Can you do this other thing?’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve never done that other thing.’ And somehow they still want me to do it and I do it and it works. And then I do more of it. And then it’s a business.
So I’ve allowed my clients a lot of times to tell me, ‘Hey, you should do this one other thing I need you to do.’ And if I want to do it, then I did it and it worked. So I kind of love that. I love that my business keeps growing and changing. It’s not static.
MARK: And I love the fact that you’re showing up, you’re asking questions, but you’re also trying things, seeing what happens.
EMILY: Yeah, that’s really important. I’m not going to let them push me into doing something I don’t want to do or something that I don’t feel I have any ability for. But yeah, I love trying new things and changing my services to go with the flow.
So here’s an example. When I first started my career, a lot of designers didn’t really have any business skills. So the generation that I was in really were just creative people, they were artists, right? And they considered themselves artists. And so they needed me to write proposals and do kind of like tactical stuff. And so that’s what I did. But then over the years, I started working with more millennials and millennials are so much smarter than my generation ever was in terms of business and they could do a lot of the stuff that I was providing. They didn’t need me to write proposals. They didn’t need me to do things that I wouldn’t have normally done, but they still needed my insight and my advice. So then I developed a new service where I helped them plan their business and look towards the future and how to evolve.
I love that my business has evolved depending on who I’m working with at any given moment. And the generational differences is amazing. I love working with millennials, in particular. It’s made me even just happier because they’re smart. They’re really smart. So they make me think. And they challenged me, which I love.
MARK: And talking of generations, there’s a lovely section in the book where you talk about why running a creative firm is like being a parent. Before we get into that, I’d like to say the book is primarily aimed at design firms, which obviously is the area that you specialize in, but I also think a lot of the points that you make are relevant to any kind of creative business.
EMILY: Yeah. I actually just spoke at a conference that were industrial designers there and all kinds of other creatives. And a lot of people came up to me and said that there was so much in that book that was applicable to them. So I was feeling very good about that.
MARK: Great. Well, then let’s pull out some of the wisdom from it. So let’s start with that question.
Why is running a creative firm like being a parent? Give us a couple of examples.
EMILY: It’s funny. That’s actually the most popular part of my book. I’ve gotten a lot of inquiries about that. And it’s been really interesting. It’s just one page around my book, but as somebody who is a parent, I realized that there’s a lot of commonalities from being a parent and running a creative firm. Obviously, to start with, the obvious thing is that shit happens! You just have to deal with it. I think the other thing, and this is, I think, the most important analogy is that when you raise your kids and even dogs, like if you have kids and dogs, you understand this, maybe not cats, but they need structure and rules and they need to be praised and rewarded, but they also need consequences of bad behavior. And when you do that, when you give them these kinds of rules and consequences, they don’t stop loving you. Right? They still love you, but they thrive.
And I think that that same thing applies to staff and clients that a lot of designers kind of treat their staff and clients sort of as… they just want to be people pleasers and they’re afraid of pushing back. So they’re afraid of giving authentic performance reviews. They’re afraid of telling clients ‘no’ or pushing back when a client has art direction that they disagree with.
And just like being a parent, if you push back and give them consequences and give them rules and structure, and I’ve seen this happen, clients will value you and trust you more and they will accept that and still love you. I think that’s one of the biggest analogy I can have to parenting is that clients are just like your children. They need rules, they need structure, and they need consequences, they need praise. And if you manage them well, they’ll still adore you and defend you and be your advocates.
MARK: And I think maybe another way you could look at that from the client’s point of view is it means you are going to be reliable and you’re going to be a professional. Because if there’s one thing that you don’t want when you’re a client hiring somebody is promises are not kept, commitments fall through and you’re left thinking, ‘Well, what’s actually happening here?’ So I think if you can let the client know the way you work and have some established ground rules, then it’s reassuring for a client.
I certainly know if I hire a creative that if I get a professional who talks about this stuff, I feel like, ‘Oh, I’m in good hands here.’
EMILY: Yes, exactly. You have to be the grownup in the room, you’re the adult. Just like with kids, you have to be the adult. And same with clients. You have to be super professional. And not only do you give them the rules, but you actually have to enforce the rules. Right? Any parent learns that you can’t just let them slack off and waive the rules. You have to really enforce them. And the same with clients. I think clients, if they’re misbehaving, you have to guide them and tell them how they’re misbehaving, how that’s impacting the project and how you’re going to fix the challenge.
MARK: Okay, Emily, I love that. Any other ways in which running a business is like being a parent?
EMILY: I think the other thing is it takes a village, right? We always hear that about raising kids. So you need additional resources, you need grandparents or caretakers, and you need the neighborhood. And I think the same thing with designers or creatives, any kind of creatives. We need a team of people behind us that we trust and that we admire. And that might be vendors, it might be strategic partners, it might be your clients, it could be fellow competitors and colleagues. And it’s your accountants, it’s your consultants, it’s your lawyers, it’s everybody that’s involved in your business is your village. You can’t do everything and knowing when to get in help, that’s better suited to what you need that you can’t do. If you’re missing a skill, that you bring in some people that have those skills. So I think there’s that, we need a village to support us and to grow.
I have this philosophy that I think it’s very, very, very hard, almost impossible and not sustainable to run a one-person creative endeavor. You need a village. You need people’s support. Whether those are full-time employees or if there’s just a team of contractors. You need people who can help you because it’s very hard. You stagnate otherwise.
MARK: Even if you are normally one person, on any given week, it’s like it involves a lot more people than that.
EMILY: Yes, exactly. And we don’t work in isolation. And also not only that, but what we do affects the community at large. We need to be people people… people persons. I don’t know what the right word is.
MARK: People people?
EMILY: People people! Sometimes my words trip me over, but yeah, I think there’s something about that.
MARK: Emily, the book is chock-full of great questions. And I think you must see a lot of the time, there must be some really big questions that design firms either avoid or overlook.
What are some of the most common and really important questions that they’re likely to be ignoring?
EMILY: I think there’s a lot of good questions that you have to ask yourself. And some designers are afraid to ask those questions. Like the most important thing I think is who do they want to be when they grow up?
I think creatives, in general, have a tendency to kind of do whatever they’re interested in at the moment without having a long-term vision. So I think asking yourself, ‘Where do I want to be in five years and how will I get there?’ Because then you’ll be able to make some decisions along the way that are more informed rather than just kind of rambling around and wandering around doing random stuff or allowing your clients to drive the direction of your business, I think it’s about taking control of your business.
So I think that’s really important question is, ‘Where am I going and who would I want to be when I grow up?’ And that means, ‘What kind of work do I want to do? What is going to be my reputation? What do I want people to say about me? Who are the kind of clients I want to work with?’ If it’s a client-based business.
MARK: This is one of the things that you pick up on is that you say a lot of designers will say to you, ‘Oh, well we pride ourselves on having our new business through referrals.’
But you actually argue that that’s a weakness. Could you expand on that?
EMILY: I don’t know if I’d call it a weakness, but I think that it’s not something you should rely on 100%. Obviously, we love referrals because that’s a pretty easy source of business, and it’s also based on people loving us, right? So referrals are coming through our kind of trust and through our great work, which is great, but if we rely on that, and honestly, most creatives rely for all their new business to be 100% referral-based.
What happens, and this is why I think it doesn’t work, is that if you allow your clients, and all your colleagues, and all the people you know to drive the direction of your business, so it might be going in a direction you don’t want to do and you start taking on work or clients that maybe are not the kind of clients you want. And there might be awesome clients out there that you want to work for, but you never reach out because you’re just waiting for somebody to connect you. But if your connection and your group of people do not know that person or that company, you’ll never reach them.
First of all, I hate that word, new business, I think it’s a terrible word and it stops us from moving forward because people think that means cold-calling. But if we curate our relationships and reach out to new people and be open to meeting new people. I’m not 100% against referral-based businesses because obviously, being referred is wonderful because that’s easy and you’re getting clients pretty easily without much effort. And it’s all based on trust and love so that people are recommending you because they love you and that feels really good for your ego. But I don’t think that’s a sustainable way to generate new opportunities.
I’m a really big believer in reaching out and trying to get the kind of clients we want to work for because if our businesses, and I will say to you that most creative businesses, 100% of their new business is through referrals and they’re proud of it. And I always say they shouldn’t be proud of it because that is not sustainable. It allows your clients and that kind of community of people that you only know to drive the direction of your business. And it’s your business and you should take the reins and go after the kinds of clients and the kinds of projects you want to do. And that means you have to reach out and build new relationships. And introduce yourself and be open to meeting new people and generating new relationships.
And I don’t love the word ‘new business’, I think it’s just being proactive and reaching out to people and introducing yourself and saying, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you,’ or, ‘Hey, I just wanted to meet you.’ And so I’m a real big believer in exposing yourself to the industries and kind of clients you want to work for and then introducing yourself. So if you see them speak or if you read their book or if you read a blog that they posted, is simply to write them and say, ‘Hey, I loved what you said. I was intrigued. We have things in common. I would love to meet you.’ So it’s never actively pursuing new business, it’s really just introducing yourself to people that you admire or that you want to work for and letting them know you’re out there.
And as a result, you’ll get opportunities that will help you grow and expand your business in a direction you control, not the clients that you currently work with.
MARK: Okay. And then, so presumably, this relates to what you say about specialism, the dirty word?
EMILY: Yes, I have very strong beliefs in a lot of different areas.
MARK: Okay. That’s why you’re on the show Emily, let us have it!
EMILY: But I’m also very flexible. So I should say I sound like very strong-minded. And I am in a lot of ways, but I’m also open to hearing it. I think that a lot of creatives just want to be generalists. And they do that because they believe, and I think rightfully so, that they can do anything, that they’re creative and they love to be challenged and do new things and they want to be open to new experiences. Basically what I say is they always want to design or create cool shit, right? And I love that. I think that’s awesome. But because the industry has changed so much and it’s such a saturated market, there are so many creatives out there. Many young students right out of college are starting their own business, which is very different.
And so there’s so much more competition than there ever was, that in order to stand out, in order to command higher fees and to be recognized and easily found, you have to be an expert and specialize in something or in a few things. And when I say this, because designers, in general and creatives, in general, hate the word specialization and they almost shut me down whenever I bring that conversation up because they think it’s about that they can’t do cool work and they can’t do interesting work. That doesn’t mean that.
It means anything that’s coming in that comes to you through referrals, you can still do, right? It doesn’t mean you can’t do the fun new project that you’ve never done in your entire life or something really interesting. It just means that you’re also telling your clients and prospects that you’re an expert in something and it makes you stand out from the slew of competitors out there.
MARK: And you have a few different types of expertise in the book. Could you maybe talk us through some of those?
EMILY: Yeah, actually that was developed by my colleague, Jennifer Rittner. There’s a chapter written by my colleague in there. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but I wanted to show that there’s lots of different ways to specialize and there’s pros and cons of each. Some people specialize by aesthetic style. They have a very specific style and people come to them for that. But to me, that’s very difficult to specialize in because nowadays your style can get easily copied pretty quickly. So there’s that.
I’m a big believer in specializing by industry, so you might be specializing in the financial space or in working with nonprofits. But even that, I think it’s difficult to be a specialist in just nonprofits because most creatives want to be in nonprofits. You could specialize so in the type of work and a deliverable. So you could just do app development.
Okay. So there’s lots of different ways to specialize. I’m a particular believer in specializing by industry. I think that’s the best way to differentiate yourself is to really go deep and know a type of industry really well. Whether that is something exciting to you, like cultural institutions or something that you have experience in, like law firms or any kind of specialist. I have a client that’s specialized in kind of all different things. I have a really interesting client up in Canada that specializes in what they call aboriginal or indigenous communities because they know the indigenous world very well and they specialize in that. So I think that really helps because then you have that kind of market and you could really go after it.
But you can specialize by process, so a certain kind of process that you might have. But again, a lot of people think they have a proprietary process, but I think to a lot of people, all the process sounds the same, but some people have a good job of differentiating themselves by process.
Sometimes it’s around how you provide strategy and how you look at strategy and if that’s a strategic process. So that’s a way of specializing.
It could be through a unique business model. Pentagram is a perfect example of having a very unique business model that makes them really stand out.
MARK: Maybe for people outside of the design world, could you just say a little bit about the Pentagram business model because it’s quite interesting?
EMILY: Actually, yeah. I don’t know enough about it, but basically, Pentagram has many, many partners across different locations, and each of the partners work together for the company, but they’re responsible for their own little business entity. And so they’re responsible for contributing to the larger culture, but they all have different skills and expertise. So they have architects, they have interior designers, they have graphic designers, they have people that are specialists in different kinds of like magazine design versus branding. So it’s a partnership model that is different in that but each of the partners have their own staff and their own practice.
MARK: And it’s real badge of honor to be selected, isn’t it?
EMILY: Yeah, it’s very exclusive little club.
MARK: Some kind of elite guild within the industry.
EMILY: Yeah, it really is. And really, I haven’t seen a lot of people mimic that, but I think there are some firms that have different business models and so you can differentiate yourself that way as well. And Pentagram is obviously the most famous one for that.
MARK: Personally I’m a fan of the industry specialization or maybe topic because if it’s something you really love, then it’s not hard to keep up with it.
EMILY: Exactly. The other thing that’s great about specializing by industry is then you know you have some action items. You can find out where all that industry congregates. What do they read? What conferences do they go to? And so that’ll be easier to find them because you’ll see that there are events and conferences and blogs and all kinds of things that attract them so you can just pay attention to that market and it’ll be much easier to reach out to them. But if you’re a generalist, a lot of generalists don’t know how to go about and get new business because they don’t know where to start. And being an industry specialist gives you a starting point.
There’s a specialism around deliverables too. So you could specialize in a type of deliverable, like all you do is develop apps or you’re just branding specialist or you just do annual reports, although that’s a little outdated. I think that you can also specialize by deliverable, but again, that’s very hard to figure out who is your clients because they will only pass through you one time for that one deliverable, but that is something that a lot of firms do. They’ll specialize by a type of deliverable.
MARK: Great. So that’s specialism versus generalism.
Another distinction that I think is really interesting in the book is executional versus strategic firms. Could you talk a bit about the difference between these two?
EMILY: This is my actually driving belief. I really think this is a trend in our industry, and I’ve been talking about it a lot because I think our industry essentially, the creative industry essentially, across all different kinds of industries, not only graphic design but industrial design and all kinds of areas is basically become two separate and entirely different kinds of industries.
There’s executional industries that are just simply service providers. The client says, ‘Hey, I need this done.’ And you go do it. And it’s very much like churn and burn, and there is a ton of work in that space. Actually, there’s more work in that space than any other space. And there’s a lot of firms that are in that space. But if you’re in that space, you have to have a lot of different resources and you might have to have a bigger team and it’s all about schedules and budgets.
It’s a different model than what I think where a lot of firms want to be or what I think are strategists or strategic firms. And those firms might be smaller and there’s definitely less work in that space, but it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality over quantity, so it’s not about how much work you are doing and how fast you’re working, but it’s about your ideas and your thinking and your expertise.
And when I say that, when I say strategic versus executional, it’s not only what kinds of work you’re doing, but it’s how you organize your team. So a strategic firm, everybody on your team is an expert. Even if you have production people, they are experts in production and their advisory and they are providing insight to clients and clients are looking to them for their expertise. Whereas an executional farm, they’re like, ‘Just go program this site.’ And they’re not looking for any expertise or any insight, and they might even have their own expertise internally and they don’t need it from you.
So I think firms need to decide which one they are. And a lot of them try to be everything to all clients and I just don’t think that’s easy. If you’re at the strategic level and then you continue to work with a client at executional level. So you’ve developed the brand guidelines, for example, and you’ve developed the look and feel, and then you start executing a bunch of communications or they say, ‘I just need an email.’ They call you and say, ‘And I need an email’ or, ‘I just need this.’ You end up becoming executional. And then when they need the have high-level stuff again, they forget that you do that and they will go to another firm.
I think it’s hard to be both and I think I’m telling the creatives that they really need to take a stand and decide where they are, and then really be the best that they can at that level. So if they’re executional, they should be amazing at being executional. They should have the schedules and budgets down to a science. They should have a team that could support all kinds of projects. And if you’re at a strategic level, you might have a smaller team, but every single one of those people are strategists and advisors and consultants.
MARK: Do you have an example of a firm that might be a really great illustration of the difference between the two?
EMILY: Sure. And so you think about Frog or IDEO, they are definitely at the strategic level.
MARK: And again, for the non-designers out there, these are big names, right, in the design industry. Could you give us kind of a potted portrait of them?
EMILY: Well, IDEO is about design thinking and Frog is around product development, industrial design. So executional firms or executional providers are people that simply do work upon the client’s request. So if you’re an illustrator, it might be, ‘I want this mural on my building and here’s the exact image I want.’ But if you’re a strategist, they might say, ‘We have this mural, give us some ideas, what do you think would be great for this kind of market or for this neighborhood?’ So they’re looking at you for advice at a strategist level, but at an executional level, they’re just literally art directing you and telling you exactly what they need.
So even with a website, if you’re doing a website, they might give you the content and they tell you exactly who their audience is, they might’ve done all the research already. Or they don’t even think of that and they just say, ‘I need a website, I don’t care what it is, just do it.’ And then they continue to art direct you along the way. But if they say to you, ‘Hey, I have this challenge,’ and, ‘I am having difficulty reaching my target audience or selling a product, and I think I need a website, but I would love your expertise.’ Then as an expert or as somebody that is more strategic, you’re saying to them, ‘Well, I don’t actually think you need a website or if you do need a website, you might need just a microsite.’ So you’re being more advisory and clients are coming to you purely for your insight and ideas. But if you’re executional, they say, ‘I need this, go do it.’
MARK: Right? And from my conversations with design clients, some of them say it’s the difference between being given a brief and being able to create the brief or help the client formulate the brief. Because it’s usually a much more interesting and creative conversation than having to basically execute someone else’s decision.
EMILY: Right. It’s around solving problems, right? So they say, ‘Here’s a problem, can you solve it?’ That’s awesome. If have identified their problem and it’s your job to fix their problem, right?
MARK: Yes.
EMILY: Yeah. That’s really true. I think the creative brief is a perfect example.
MARK: So you’ve given us a lot of outward-facing examples about who the firm is, who they serve, the kind of work that they do. Let’s have a look behind the glass doors for a moment.
You have this really nice section where you talk about the five most important roles in a creative business. And maybe we could pull this out because I think this applies to many businesses other than design firms.
EMILY: Yeah. So in working with creative teams, I’ve identified five areas or functional areas that I often feel are overlooked in a creative firm and if any one of these don’t have somebody paying attention to that area, then I feel like the firm will suffer. And it could be that one person does all five of these roles or it could be that you have different people assigned to these roles, but the five roles that I see that are often overlooked or not given enough attention because you’re spending more time on billable stuff or your business vision.
One of them is your business vision. This is about your firm’s positioning and your overarching business goals. Where are you going and who do you want to be when you grow up? Spending some time and thinking about that and having somebody dedicated to that or somebody that just knows that’s part of their responsibilities. I think that’s one of them.
The second one is operational leadership, and this is not project management. Project management is billable. Operational leadership is looking at the bigger picture and planning how you work as a team. Developing training and looking at how we can have technology managers, I think looking at operational areas from a bigger picture is missing on design teams. So operational leadership.
The third one is creative leadership. That is one that’s a little bit more common, which is about team building and mentorship and growth. It’s not just doing the work and art-directing people. It’s really grooming them and growing them and learning and developing. So looking at creative leadership as a functional area.
The fourth area is business development. Most people spend a lot of time, and we talked about this, just on reacting to incoming business, and I think business development also needs to be proactive and so spending and having dedicated time or resources spent in new business is critical.
And the final area is financial management. So managing your finances and looking not just doing your accounting, but really having advice about what are best practices in the industry, how can we leverage taxes better, how do we look at our company or what are their financial benchmarks? And paying real deeper attention to your money and how you manage it and how you plan it. I think creatives, in general, are terrible with money and they just rely on their accountant and their accountant simply does taxes but is not really looking at the bigger picture.
So those are the five areas.
MARK: Okay. And would any of these, you would say, could be outsourced or do you think they should all be taken on by people within the firm?
EMILY: Well, I think it depends. Every firm is different depending on their size. Sometimes in financial management, I think it is sometimes outsourced, but it’s somebody that you have to ask them to help you. So if you have an accountant, you have to say, ‘Okay, you do my taxes, but can you do more? Can you help me look at the industry at large? Can you help me provide some financial benchmarks? You meet with me quarterly.’ So that is something you can outsource, but it’s still in collaboration with you. It’s not like you are not paying attention to it.
So none of these roles should you be out of the loop of, but you need to be collaborating with and understand what’s going on. So operational leadership, I think, is something that’s more of an internal role. And usually, you need somebody dedicated to operational leadership when you have more than 20 people on your team. Any less than 20 people somebody might have some involvement in that on a part-time basis.
I think in most cases you can have strategic partners in some areas, but I think that doesn’t stop you from having a role in that and being still involved.
MARK: But whoever does it, these are the five that you think really need to be covered, and are easily overlooked in the rush to get the day-to-day work done.
EMILY: Yeah. I would say the one thing you can never outsource is your business vision.
MARK: I would hope not because it’s someone else’s business in that case, right?
EMILY: Yes. I think many of my clients just want me to tell them who they want to be when they grow up. And I’m like, ‘No, I will help facilitate those conversations, but that needs to come from you. I don’t have the answers and it’s your job to figure out what you love. Who do you want to work with, and who do you want to be, and what kinds of business do you want to run, and how big do you want to grow up to be?’ Those are the things you have to focus on.
MARK: Okay, so then maybe moving from that question, what kind of business do you want to be? The last topic I’d like to ask you about is this: Everything we’ve talked about so far has been centered around client work, but you also, towards the end of the book, talk about design entrepreneurship as an alternative or a complement to client services.
Could you say something about maybe some examples of how you’ve seen that done well, and what you think is important if you’re considering it for your own company?
EMILY: I think design entrepreneurship is a really wonderful direction for a lot of firms, but I hesitate. And this is why. I actually haven’t seen that many firms that can do it well because it’s very hard to do anything really well unless you finish one thing first. So I think the people that are design entrepreneurs, and those are people that basically do products and sell products independent of clients, right?
MARK: Right. So developing your own product and hopefully, taking it to market and selling it and generating revenue from that?
EMILY: Yes. Or doing side projects that benefit you in other ways. And maybe it’s not financial. It might be good for the world kind of thing. And I think the firms that do that well are firms that already have a great solid business model and now can focus on other things. A lot of creatives have a tendency to pull themselves in a lot of different directions and do nothing very well. So when they’re doing design entrepreneurship, they neglect their business. So once you’ve shored up your business, then you can do design entrepreneurship.
I think one firm that doesn’t really, really well is Hyperakt; they’re a firm in Brooklyn, and they have a lot of different things that they do on the side, but their core business, which is called Hyperakt, is very solid and very well-run. And then they have then leveraged that passion and that interest to develop products and initiatives that they’re interested in and that keep their team engaged. And they have what they call Hyperakt Labs, which are self-driven projects or design entrepreneurship.
Hyperakt developed an online tool called onthegrid.city, and it’s an online site that is curated. They have curators across the world that are creatives that take a city, and they curate a city, and they recommend restaurants and places to shop and places to see that are creative. So creatives will curate a city, and it’s basically if you want to go visit a city, you go to On the Grid and you’ll see your peers recommend the places to eat and the places to go. It’s a fantastic tool. And they don’t lose money from it, but it’s a model that they’ve developed that I think is in progress. It’s working really, really well. And it’s just a passion of theirs. And it’s a great way to build community because now they know these creatives across the world.
MARK: Yeah, very smart. Okay. So that’s onthegrid.city, and we’ll put the link in the show notes. And actually, I want to go and check that out myself. That sounds great.
EMILY: Yeah, it’s awesome for all creatives to know about that. I think that’s a perfect example of design entrepreneurship. And also podcasts, right? So a lot of designers do podcasts. I have a client that specializes in retail design. She does design for a lot of brick and mortars that want to then take their business online. And so she came up with the genius idea to do a podcast for retailers. And it’s a relatively new podcast and it’s a fantastic idea because it compliments her business.
EMILY: And she just started that, so it’s just a relatively new effort, but I think it’s also smart because it’s related to her business model.
MARK: Right, and this is the thing about specialism, right?
EMILY: Mm-hmm, exactly.
MARK: Excellent. Thank you, Emily. This has been a really fascinating journey on the inside and out of a 21st century creative business. Now we come to the part of the show where I ask my guests to set a Creative Challenge based on the theme that we’ve been talking about. And something that you, the listener, can go away and do or start doing in the next seven days after listening to this interview.
So Emily, what’s your challenge?
EMILY: Oh yeah. I’m a big believer in saying ‘no’ to an opportunity or to a client or to a project that you’ve simply outgrown and to open that space in your business. So my creative challenge is to think about what it is you need to say ‘no’ to now that you’ve been avoiding, so you can make space in your life for more ‘yes’s.
MARK: Right. That’s the big reason that it’s not just about no, because each time you say ‘yes’ to one thing, you’re saying ‘no’ to something else, right?
EMILY: Exactly. So every time you say ‘no’, and it’s very hard, but you just say ‘no’ to one thing, you’ll have more time to do other things that you really should be doing or that you want to do. And honestly, I do this every year. I always think about, ‘What’s the one client I want to fire?’ Or, ‘What’s the one thing I don’t want to do anymore?’
MARK: Every year there’s some client praying, ‘Please, please don’t let this be the year that Emily gives me the chop!’
EMILY: As a matter of fact, in my book, I have what I call my business manifesto that’s on the cover of the book. And one of them is that you should fire a client once a year. One client a year. It feels great.
MARK: Great. Well, then that’s a big bold ‘no’. So have a thing. And I’m sure any of us listening to this in business or not, there’s got to be something in our lives that we say ‘yes’ to by default because it seems easier, but actually, it comes at a big cost.
EMILY: Yeah. Or you’ve been doing it so long that it’s no longer creatively challenging.
MARK: Right. Emily, where can people go to A, to get the book and also to get some more of your wisdom and advice? I’m sure there may well be some design firms listening who could benefit from some of your straight talking and enthusiasm.
EMILY: I hope so. I do love working with creatives. You can get my book on my website, which is emilycohen.com. Also, you can get it at my publishing site, which is booksellersdaughter.com. And my Emily Cohen site has a lot more content and resources. And if they want to see me speak or whatever, I’m always constantly posting on social media where I’m speaking next.
MARK: Great. Okay. We’ll put all those links in the show notes as usual. So thank you very much, Emily. I always enjoy talking to you. Today has been certainly no exception. And I’m sure there’ll be lots of listeners out there who’ve got a lot out of your enthusiasm today.
EMILY: Great. Well, thank you. I really appreciate being included. It’s been awesome.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
How to Find the Heart to Start with David Kadavy
Feb 04, 2019
If you’ve ever looked at a blank screen or canvas or an empty rehearsal room or auditorium and felt paralysed with fear and self-doubt, then this week’s interview with David Kadavy is for you.
It’s also for you if you find yourself looking at the achievements of your creative heroes and top performers in your field, and comparing your own situation with theirs, and wondering what you could possibly do to compete with them.
Back in 2004, David was in this position himself – sitting in a cubicle in Nebraska, reading the blogs of successful people he admired, and wondering if he’d ever make it out of the cubicle and create the life he dreamed of.
Fast forward to 2018, and David is a best-selling author and the host of the popular podcast Love Your Work, living the internet dream as a writer and creative entrepreneur in Medellin, Colombia.
In this interview David joins the dots between 2004 and today, and shares how he found the heart to get started – and to keep going in the face of obscurity and adversity.
He also shares practical tips from his book The Heart to Start, including what he calls motivational judo, a powerful and counterintuitive approach to outwitting your own perfectionism and procrastination.
In the course of the interview David talks about his ‘best AND worst blog post,’ which you can find here. And at the end of the interview David sets what I reckon is the strangest Creative Challenge we have ever had from a guest!
If you enjoy The 21st Century Creative then I think you’ll also like David’s podcast Love Your Work, which touches on many of the themes we look at on this show, around using your creativity to carve out an unusual career and find your own security in an uncertain world. In fact, David interviewed me for his show in the ‘return match’ for today’s conversation – you can listen to our conversation on The Heart to Starthere.
So without further ado, it’s time for us to get started, by listening to David Kadavy’s advice on finding the Heart to Start.
David Kadavy interview transcript
MARK: David, you’ve written a great book to help people with a challenge that I think we can all relate to, and that’s staring at a blank page or canvas or whatever the equivalent is, and then looking at the amazing achievements of successful people in our industry or art form and being paralyzed with fear and doubt.
So how did you find the Heart to Start in the face of all of this?
DAVID: Well, it was a long process. It was such a long process that I had to write a book about it just so I could get over it myself. An interesting thing about the book that you’re talking about, The Heart to Start, is that previous to writing that book I wrote a different book and then I found myself something like six years later having not written another book yet.
And so that’s where this book came from, was the things that I wanted to instill in myself every time I found myself procrastinating on creative work or on any sort of aspiration, I call ‘aspiration procrastination,’ – that we are familiar with procrastination in a traditional sense such as that we are procrastinating on taking out the trash or in going to the dentist and, there’s not much mystery in why we procrastinate on those things. But then we procrastinate on these things that we supposedly want to do, that we in fact dream of doing.
MARK: Yeah.
DAVID: Yeah. That we in fact dream of doing, right? And for some reason, we procrastinate on those things. So that’s very interesting. I wanted to really deconstruct that and deconstruct the ways that I had personally managed to somehow miraculously create some things in my lifetime and look at the ways that other people have overcome certain mental barriers or paralyzing thought patterns and develop a framework of thinking about why it is that we procrastinate on our creative aspirations.
And I’m finding it useful, I am constantly running up into situations where I’m finding myself falling for the very same traps that I warn about in the book, and then deciding like, ‘Oh, I need to stop inflating the investment. I need to stop falling for the fortress fallacy. I need to crack the whip,’ like all these different concepts that I’ve introduced in the book. And so that, on a very basic level, is how I have found the heart to start, was through writing this book itself, for myself.
MARK: And can we pull out one of those techniques then and give us an example of where it came from and how we can use it?
DAVID: Sure. One I just mentioned, the ‘fortress fallacy.’ This is this thing that I fell for so many times. I still fall for it all the time and I catch myself. And I find so many other people falling for it. And that is that our dreams, the things that we envision creating, they can be a guiding star for us. They can help motivate us and move us forward. But at the same time, those dreams can be very intimidating. And the reason being that we almost without exception envision something that’s well beyond our current abilities in terms of not just quality, but also scope and scale. Say we’ve hardly done any writing and we’re imagining writing this whole novel, and so we imagine then that that is the way that we create that thing is we sit down and we just write a novel.
Well, it doesn’t really work that way. That’s something that I’ve learned from talking to lots of creators, that’s something I’ve learned from creating things myself, is that well, instead of going for the novel, maybe you can sit down and write a short story. Maybe you can sit down every day and write a 50-word story or a 10-word story, you know? Start with something very small and then you start to develop this skill or vision muscle of being able to imagine something in your mind and imagine the steps to get there, and then actually be able to make that happen.
So that’s something I catch myself doing all the time is I’m daydreaming about something and I have this wonderful vision in my brain, but then I feel this paralysis taking over me and I realize, ‘Oh, well, all I need to do is scale down the thing that I just thought about and take action on some other thing, with that guiding star, that dream, still there to guide me, but with a goal that’s in front of me that’s a little more easy to actually achieve.’
MARK: A nice example of this in the book was what you called your best and worst blog post. Could you tell us about that please?
DAVID: Sure. So it was May 2004, I was in a grey cubicle at an architecture firm in Nebraska, and I had been reading all these blogs that I thought were so great, blogs like Seth Godin’s blog. Douglas Bowman had a blog. He was or is the designer for Google and Twitter. He works for Twitter as well. And there were all these wonderful blogs and I felt very intimidated by those blogs, because they were writing brilliant things and they had very well-organized blogs, and I didn’t know how they made them. And this is 2004, so blogging is pretty new at that time.
And so I had been procrastinating on that for many, many months. And so finally, something happened that evening. I was at the office late and I just opened up blogger.com and I’m telling myself as I am trying to think of, ‘Oh, maybe I need to pick a different template,’ or ‘what should I call it,’ or just publish the first post, just publish the first post, just publish the first post. And what I ended up writing, like I said, was the worst blog post I have ever written, in that it is, you can still see it up there. It is a run-on sentence, or a run-on paragraph, really.
MARK: Should I link to it?
DAVID: Sure, yeah. My first blog at kadavy.net is a run-on paragraph. I’ve got a misspelling in it. There’s no point in it. But what I’m talking about in that post turned out to be really prescient. I was just writing whatever was coming to my mind, and the thing I was writing was, ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this.’ Maybe I’m going to write about web design or something. Sometimes I get overtaken by a sort of paralysis where I’m trying to think of how to make something perfect and that keeps me from taking action, but now I’m just going to barf this out and clean it up later.
And that’s essentially what I said in that blog post and I didn’t know at, the time I had no idea, that 14 years later, I’d be still having that blog on this podcast, I guess it’s getting to close to 15 years now, and that I would have books published and have done many things that all stemmed from starting that blog, all stem from that one little start, even if it meant that all I did was talk about the fact that I didn’t know why I was doing it.
MARK: And I love the way you talk about the kind of ‘motivational judo’ that you used on yourself, that you put something out that you knew wasn’t great, but then you say the very fact that you’ve started propelled you to do better.
Can you say something about that kind of judo approach to perfectionism?
DAVID: Yeah. Motivational Judo is one of the concepts that I introduce in the book, and it’s basically getting to understand your own things that tend to hold you back or your own ways of procrastinating and finding ways to overcome that, because as I understand in the martial art of judo, you use your opponent’s energy against your opponent, is that if your opponent is coming at you, you use that momentum to throw them over your shoulder.
And so with Motivational Judo, you’re trying to find those things about your own personality that you can exploit in order to get yourself to keep moving. So for a lot of people that’s going to be some sense of quality, and so by simply starting, even if it is something that’s not up to the standards that you hold in your mind, not up to the fortress that you imagine in your mind, you start with just a little cottage and that’s not a very good cottage. Then you have this living breathing thing out there, especially with something like a blog, is that you can write a bad post today, and you can write a better one tomorrow and then you can write a bad one again but then every day you can add to it. And so it’s this living, breathing thing, and just the mere existence of that thing, by making it exist, by putting the clay on the table in front of you, you can keep molding it and keep moving towards something.
And so that’s something that I was surprised to learn in doing that, in actually getting the stuff out there, and it’s something that I continue to try to catch with myself is that when I’m procrastinating on something, to try to find, ‘Oh, where’s the way that I can kind of trick myself into what’s the action that I can easily take now that will manipulate a certain personality trait that I have that will thus cause me to continue moving with this project?’
MARK: Right, I mean I can certainly relate to this with writing poetry. I think very often when I write, I get an idea for a poem and it’s not completely clear and I’m almost saying to myself as I write it down or I type it, ‘Well, it’s not this, but it’s something a bit like this,’ and I’ll splurge it, and I’ll get it down there and once it’s there, it irritates me because it isn’t right yet, and so I won’t leave it alone.
I’ll keep playing with it, so Scrivener on the phone, I’ll play with it in odd moments, I’ll keep opening it up in between other things when I’m working. I pin current poems up on the whiteboard in the office. So that I have to walk past them on the way out of the office and back in again. And I look at it and I just take a pen and start correcting it or improving it on the whiteboard.
I just find that that really resonated for me, that tip about just get something out, and then your perfectionism can go to work.
DAVID: I’m curious, if I can ask you a question. When you do get that first bit out, is that difficult for you? Is there something that you tell yourself to be able to get over that initial desire for quality?
MARK: There’s got to be something there that sparked an idea or usually a line that comes that I thought, ‘Yeah, okay, it’s going to be… it’ll be a bit like this,’ but it’s almost like I said, that I’m saying to myself, ‘It’s not this, but…’ so, you know, ‘It’s not this.’ I’m giving myself permission to write this down even though it’s a bit ham-fisted and it’s not very well expressed and it just feels a bit awkward, but as long as there’s something there then I feel like I’ve got a bit of plasticine to play with.
DAVID: I always have to feel like I’m being a little reckless in getting that first bit out, it’s that I’m just trying to overcome this feeling of paralysis and I’m just trying to keep moving, and I guess that’s why thinking about barfing it out is something that’s very helpful for me is that I, even on my task management, I won’t put like ‘write a draft,’ I’ll put like ‘write a barf’ of this for like the first initial thing, and that is just priming my brain, giving me permission to just get anything, anything at all out there. And I find that that’s something I have to continue to practice. If I’m not on almost a daily basis giving myself that permission to barf it out, to just really get something out there, then I feel that resistance starts to build up again and then I get caught in my head and I get paralyzed again.
MARK: So 15 years ago, you wrote that blog post, almost in spite of yourself as you say, and you were in this grey cubicle in Nebraska, and here you are, in Colombia? Am I right?
DAVID: Right. I live in Colombia now, Medellin, Colombia.
MARK: Right. And you’re living the dream, you’ve got this great podcast where you get to interview the good and the great, and a bestselling author.
Can you join the dots a little between that grey cubicle and where you are today with your life and your business?
DAVID: I’ll try to do it in a somewhat coherent manner. I guess I’ll try to, I’ll start with short, and then you can dig deeper on if I can keep it short. So thanks in part to that blog, I got discovered by a startup founder in San Jose, California, in Silicon Valley. And then I landed a job as a web designer in San Jose, ended up living in San Francisco, lived in the Silicon Valley area for about three years. The final year of that was a year that I spent on my own, working on my own projects, wandering from café to café, and then I left Silicon Valley in the midst of a boom, with job offers kind of nipping at my tail. Around 2008, I felt like I had something inside of me that I’d wanted to discover and I wanted to figure out what that was and I wanted to get that out and I felt like I needed space and I felt like the Silicon Valley startup scene was, it was just noise to me at that point. It didn’t feel relevant to me.
And so I moved to Chicago, where I rented a two-bedroom apartment in Ukrainian Village for the same price that I was paying for a tiny bedroom in the Mission in San Francisco and gave myself the space and the time to really dig in in some cold winters as well, which as something that I had been accustomed to growing up in Nebraska is those cold winters where there’s nothing better for you to do but sit inside and work on something. And so, through that process after a couple of years of searching, I ended up getting a book deal to write my first book, called Design for Hackers. Through that book doing pretty well, I ended up flying all over the world, speaking in various places, I got to travel quite a bit. And through that experience I discovered how much I enjoyed Latin America, and eventually ended up moving down here to Colombia about three years ago, and that was about the time where I decided that I wanted to be a writer.
Now that’s an interesting conclusion to come to when you’ve already written a book and it’s done well and it’s been a few years since that, but that was the time where I really said I want to double down on this wonderful process of being able to read books and to talk to the authors who have written those books, people like you who are on the podcast or about to be, and learn things, and then share what I’m learning along the way and be able to share the whole process and create products such as books through that.
And that was the time when I finally realized that I wanted to do that and Medellin became a wonderful place to do that. I had already spent time here and found that I did some of my best work here because I can keep in such a good rhythm, the weather is perfect all the time. The sun sets at the same time all year round, which is an interesting feature, because you can always have a regular bedtime and wake up time that is in the rhythm with your surroundings.
And so that was about three years ago, and I’ve really loved the process of getting used to living here, and living here, and it has resulted in what I think is some of my best work that I could do at this moment in time, and hopefully there will be more and better work in the future. And so I guess that is the not so short version of how I ended up here in Colombia from that grey cubicle in Nebraska.
MARK: Well, that’s quite the journey! And one thing that really strikes me listening to that, you could never have predicted that that blog post, like the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian rainforest, would have unlocked that chain of events.
DAVID: Yes.
MARK: It was certainly not obvious that writing the blog post would lead to Silicon Valley, would lead to the book, would lead to speaking, would lead to traveling, to the podcast, etc.
DAVID: Yeah. If you trace back the cause and effect it really does all come right back down to barfing out that blog post, that terrible blog post.
MARK: That great blog post. Right?
DAVID: Right. Yes, so exactly.
MARK: And this is such a great example of what you talk about in the book, that if you actually get started on something, it almost doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you’re, obviously, you’re going to continue and you’re going to improve and you iterate and things start to happen that you could never have predicted.
I had a similar experience with my first blog. I had a very limited idea of what was possible. I thought I was going to be just selling training and coaching to agencies in the London area, and then suddenly I had all these readers all over the world and then all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff started to happen following on from that.
Which leads me toward my favorite themes of your book, is curiosity. So you say, ‘Your curiosities may seem to take you off course, but when they converge, you’ll be untouchable.’ What do you mean by that?
DAVID: Right. So I guess I’ll go back to the point when I really started to be on my own, which was that final year that I was in Silicon Valley. I decided that I wanted to figure out what I want to do. I just wanted to reconnect with my curiosity. I wanted to reconnect with the feeling that I had as a child, being alone in my room drawing and just losing track of time. And I felt like I had really lost connection with that. I felt like I had kind of gotten burnt out from working for other people and working according to other people’s initiatives and what paces they wanted to work at and such. And so I really wanted to connect with that.
And during that time, there was this YouTube video that I watched over and over and over again, and it was the Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address, where he talks about curiosity. He talks about that you can’t connect the dots moving forward, you can only connect them in reverse. And it was that feeling of when somebody says something and you say to yourself like, ‘Oh, I’ve thought that so many times, but I’ve never been able to put that into words. And every word that they’re saying rings so true to me.’ That was the way that I felt. I mean it just brought me to tears. I felt so strongly that if I followed my curiosities, that it would be scary, because people think you’re a dilettante and they want to know why are you doing this thing and you’re doing that thing, etc.
But the big secret of all that is that eventually those curiosities converge and you end up in this place where nobody else can go, because you can work harder than anything on the things that you are curious about. Like if you can find yourself spending an unreasonable amount of time on something, you’re losing track of time, you can spend an entire weekend working on this project and you don’t have any idea why but heck you’re doing it. Nobody else is going to do that. Because nobody else has that fuel that is going to drive them forward. And so what happens is you get a couple things that are going that way, and maybe you’re not the best in the world at this one thing or that other thing, but those things converge and then all of a sudden you have this new combination, and there’s nobody else in the world that can touch you.
So this is something that I experienced with my first book, which was called Design for Hackers, and it was born of my experience: one, being really, really interested in design and studying design, and then I ended up working in Silicon Valley, so I got to understand this entrepreneurial spirit, this hacker spirit of let’s tinker with some technology and see if we can come up with a company, and that’s how companies like Facebook were born.
And so I got to understand that mentality. I had the design theory background, and I had some writing on my blog. I was not the best in the world at any of those three things, not by far, but by the time those things converged and I wrote a blog post and it was popular and then a publisher reached out to me and offered me a book deal, I could feel confident and secure that there wasn’t competition. It’s not like there aren’t other web design books, and there’s other really great web design books and there’s web design books that are out there that are way better than mine in certain aspects. But the way that I ended up approaching it became my own unique way of doing it, and it was wonderful that it resonated with people.
And it was so wonderful to have that experience happen, especially years after the fact of sitting there watching this video, thinking to myself like what he’s saying is totally true. I have no evidence of that in my current life, but if I keep on believing that and keep on moving forward with these things, something is going to emerge from that.
MARK: And I think this is one of the big strengths of having multiple creative interests. I see this a lot with clients and I can certainly relate to it myself. On the one hand, you’re open to being called a dilettante and Jack of all trades and so on, but actually, if you trust the curiosity and it leads you in several directions at once, then you end up having a very unique blend of skills. So for instance with your book, you didn’t have to be the best designer in the world or the best coder in the world, maybe not even the best author in the world, but the fact that you were curious about…
DAVID: None of those!
MARK: … all three of those things, you found yourself in a unique space. And you ended up in what, in the top 20 of Amazon when you launched the book, right?
DAVID: Right, yeah, the first day, amazing for a book in this niche. I remember my editor at Wiley saying, ‘You know, if we can get in the top 20 of the computers and internet category, that’s a really good goal to go for.’
MARK: And that would be great.
DAVID: Yeah, it would be wonderful. And so lo and behold, the book was number one in computers and internet, in that category, and then it was top 20 all of Amazon. I was ahead of Tim Ferris and former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and all these great authors, just for some shining moment. And so, yeah, it really struck a chord with a certain group of people.
MARK: So where did you go after that? Top of the Amazon charts, what happened next?
DAVID: Well, I guess that was an experience that it took a while to adjust to, and I don’t think I got it right right away. I hadn’t been in a position like that before where suddenly, you’re not being recognized on the street or anything, but like if you go to a conference, people recognize you and they come up to you and they want to talk to you or, just suddenly, I was the same person, but now I’m a bestselling author or whatever, or that’s the way that people saw me. And it changed the way I saw myself as well. And so that was an experience that took a lot of adjustment, in one because I had spent so many years struggling trying to get that point, not really knowing exactly what I was searching for.
And so in one way, I felt vindicated, like, ‘Oh, well, finally I’m being recognized as this person that I’ve known myself to be for so long, this brilliant creator.’ And so I think in some ways that may have clouded my judgment or made it difficult to see the right next opportunity, because there were a lot of people saying like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to take advantage of this, you’ve got to start a consulting company, you’ve got to start speaking at corporate gigs, and you got to do this and that and the other thing,’ all these things that were activities that had nothing to do with what got me there in the first place.
And so one of the reasons why I think why it took six years before I wrote my next book was I had to reconnect with this idea that okay, just because you had this one book that was successful, that doesn’t mean that people want to hear whatever you have to say about any topic that exists. You’re not just the smartest person in the world, you picked a topic that people were interested in and you had a good way of going about it. So if you don’t want to keep going forth with that topic, which I don’t want to keep going forth with that topic in the same way that I was before. I mean that’s how I ended up there was because I’m a dilettante, right, because I go from one thing to the next. So it took me a little while to reach back and say, ‘Okay, what are you curious about? What are the things that you struggle with? What can you spend an endless amount of time on?’
And so I think that was something that I guess it took another few years before I made that recognition that okay, I really love this experience of writing this book, of really getting deep into a topic and following my curiosity on that topic and trying to deconstruct it in some way that was interesting to people. And I love that activity and so let’s find a way to do more of that. And that was the moving to Colombia, in part because it’s cheaper here, and I knew it was going to take me a while to gain my footing, and I knew that I was going to have to sharpen my writing skills, that yes, I had written a book that did well, but I still had so much more to learn. I didn’t even understand books. Which is funny, because I had written a book and it had done well, but I still needed to learn so much about the book as a product and how to really be a good writer, something that I’ll probably never be done learning.
And so it was interesting that the success of that first product of following my curiosity I think for a while disconnected me from that curiosity, which was fine. It was fun, it was great to travel around the world and speak in different places. But eventually, I had to start saying ‘no’ to opportunities so I could reconnect with what got me there in the first place and see where it would take me again.
MARK: Yes. So it sounds like your curiosity about that particular subject was finite, but the deeper curiosity as a writer is what’s ongoing, continuing.
What motivates you as a writer now? What do you want to achieve with your writing?
DAVID: Sure. I think what you said about my curiosity for the subject being finite I think is absolutely true because, yeah, I was obsessed with design. I was obsessed with typography. And so it was through that obsession that I was able to develop a framework or, a mental framework or worldview about that subject, such to the point that I was able to write a book about it. Now, the thing that happens when your brain operates that way is that once you’ve written the book, now you don’t care anymore. It’s like ‘Don’t ask me about this, I wrote the book. So read the book, I want to get on to something else.’
And so what drives me now as a writer is again, following the, I don’t know if you mean specifically like what is it that I’m curious about, or if it’s a more abstract thing. But I guess on the abstract level, it is the curiosity. It is the trying to connect with that curiosity. And following that and seeing what questions emerge and trying to answer those questions and then trying to digest that into something that I can then present to somebody else and say, ‘Oh, here’s what I’ve learned. This is the way that I think about this.’ Now as far as topics that I’m interested in, I guess this was borne a bit out of my experience of writing Design for Hackers and developing this framework of thinking about design, but then maybe sitting down with a student and the student just being in agony that, ‘I can picture this thing in my head but I can’t make it real.’ I’m like, ‘Well, I wrote the book, this the thing that you just follow this framework for understanding this thing and, it’ll…’
But no, it’s an emotional experience and it’s something that I’ve experienced myself, and so that’s something that I’m trying to tackle now is that I do believe that everybody has some kind of a creative gift inside of them and I’m somebody who came so close to not getting that thing out of me, to, came so close to living the wrong life, that I feel very strongly motivated to try to take what I’ve learned about that process and make it possible for other people.
Because I think this is one of the great crises that we are experiencing right now is that we are moving out of this modality of ‘follow these instructions, get this degree, do this job, everything is going to be fine’. We’ve got AI and automation coming that will make a lot of jobs or a lot of people’s skills obsolete. That might sound like a crisis, but it’s also an opportunity, and opportunity is for us to connect on a deeper level with our own humanity, with our own creativity and to bring those things out into the world. But, ‘Uh-oh, we don’t know how to do that because we’ve programmed it out of everybody.’ So how do we get that back, because we were all born curious, you know? You’ve never seen a child that wasn’t curious. We just have it programmed out of us. So how do we reconnect with that and find a way to get that stuff out of people?
MARK: And this is one of the big questions I see you addressing on your podcast, Love Your Work, where you’re coming up to about 150 people that you’ve interviewed now, isn’t it?
DAVID: Well, I’m getting close to 150 episodes. Maybe half of those were interviews.
MARK: Okay. Well that’s still a decent chunk!
DAVID: Yeah. Like I said about my process is I have the conversations with people, and meanwhile I’m writing articles, and so then every other episode is an article or an essay which tends to end up being about the same themes, about the things that I’m talking about with people.
MARK: And so you’ve interviewed entrepreneurs, authors, technical people, personal development experts…
DAVID: Dancers, a chef, yeah, all sorts of folks.
MARK: Right, right. It strikes me that these are the people who have the kind of skill set that we increasingly need in the 21st Century. These are not people who live by the instructions and color inside the lines.
Could you maybe share some of the big lessons that have come out of those conversations for you about what it takes to thrive in this new world?
DAVID: I think probably one of the most formative conversations I had was with Seth Godin. And that was in the midst of me struggling to write my second book, and in the midst of me getting rejection letters from publishers and in the midst of me writing proposals and spending time on that. And Seth said to me, ‘Hey, the way that you should do this is you’re going to have to be head of marketing of your book anyway. So you need to learn how to market a book and how do you do that? You do it by…’ he said write a book a week on Kindle, which seems like a lot but I get the idea.
And so that really lit a fire in me, and I think it took a few months for it to really sink it. But then when I finally did self-publish The Heart to Start, that was definitely in mind. And note, like it took six years to publish The Heart to Start, and then within that time frame after publishing The Heart to Start, or including The Heart to Start, I published two more books. So it took me six years to publish my second book. It took me six months from that time to then get to my fourth book. And that was really thanks to that conversation with Seth and him talking about how you can’t crave reassurance, but here I am talking to this person who I admire and I kind of want him to tell me that I’m great or I want him to like me, and he’s not going to do that.
And he even says himself like, ‘Reassurance doesn’t work because you need an infinite amount of it.’ And so it’s something that you can’t be looking for. So that was an extremely formative episode for me, and it really led to action. And Seth actually ended up endorsing The Heart to Start a couple of months ago, which was another huge step. But I think that that all started with talking to him on my podcast in the first place and him lighting that fire under me.
MARK: So endorsement is better than reassurance, huh?
DAVID: Yeah! I don’t know. Maybe that’s a little ironic that he endorsed my book when he didn’t want to give reassurance. But I guess I got the book out.
MARK: Yeah. I don’t think he was going to reassure you that hey, you’re going to succeed or whatever, but, maybe once you did it he was quite happy to give you the thumbs up.
DAVID: I mean, you gotta wonder how many people does he give advice to that never follow it.
MARK: Right. Any other particular episodes or insights that stand out for you on this theme of, well, how do we succeed in a world with no rules? Or where we’re making up the rules as we go along?
DAVID: Yeah. I think back to the first episode. Jason Fried, who is the CEO of Basecamp, very well known for being a contrarian thinker, and I loved him telling a story of how when he was a freelancer, he would do these long proposals, and I had done that before. You spend weeks making this 20 or 30-page proposal and then what happens, you don’t get the job. And so he was talking about how one day he decided like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to do one-page proposals.’ Like, ‘What if I do that?’ Because the thing that I’m doing wrong isn’t, I made a long proposal and I didn’t get the job, so, obviously, the long proposal isn’t helping.
So he started making these one-page proposals, he started getting jobs, and I think the switch that flipped for him, and that flipped for me and hopefully for a lot of my listeners as well, was that when he started getting these jobs he realized like, ‘Whoa, wait! So everybody does it this way, but they don’t actually have to do it that way, and in fact it might actually be hurting them? And so you can just do it the way that feels right to you? Well, if that’s true for this, then what else is there that I’m doing the way that people have told me to do, and there’s actually some better way that I could come up with that would feel right for me?’ So, yeah, that was another one that was really formative. I actually just recently had him back on the podcast to talk about his new book, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.
MARK: So question everything!
DAVID: Yeah. I think so and that’s something that I think that I have done a lot in my life, that I do question things, everything. But I don’t always have the confidence to even listen to that question. You have these things that they’re just floating in your head all the time that you think like, ‘Oh, why is it this way?’ But you have to be paying attention to really catch those things. And then you actually have to have the experience of going forth with it and having it go well a couple times to gain the confidence to keep doing it.
Now, unfortunately, or maybe, fortunately, it doesn’t always go well. Sometimes some things don’t work and so sometimes you learn that that’s not the worst thing in the world too, to try something that doesn’t work.
MARK: So is this what you mean by ‘The Voice’ in the book?
DAVID: Yeah, exactly. There’s a chapter in the book called ‘The Voice,’ and it is about that voice in your head, it’s the voice that Steve Jobs was giving voice to for me when I first started out on my own. It’s that feeling that something that you’re consuming, whether it is a song or it’s a book or it’s even a painting, is just giving voice to something that you have experienced or thought yourself before, but that you didn’t put into words. This is why comedians work. This is how comedians work is that comedian says something and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s so true. I’ve just never been able to put that into words.’ And you see it on a YouTube comment on a song, somebody says, ‘Oh, this is exactly how I feel.’ And they’re putting it into words.
Now, the thing is that if you are too late in giving voice to the voice and in taking those words that are in your head and putting them into some creative work, if you’re too late with that, then it’s a little too late. The work doesn’t have impact. But if you have the courage to stay connected with that and to continue to put those words into creative works of all forms, then I think that that’s where you end up with something that really resonates with people.
MARK: So we should listen in a little more?
DAVID: Yes. And this is something that I am constantly reminding myself of is that I’m constantly having these thoughts that for whatever reason I am afraid to follow. And so I have to remind myself about what I wrote. It’s a little bit Motivational Judo, if you will, that’s actually the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, right, is that you want to be consistent, so when you write something…
MARK: Right!
DAVID: … that makes you want to be consistent with that thing!
MARK: That’s one of the humbling things about being a writer who’s giving any kind of teaching or advice is just that well, hang on a minute, I can think of plenty of situations where I thought, ‘Well, how can I look my readers in the eye on a Monday morning if I chicken out here?’
DAVID: Yes.
MARK: If I sit around the office procrastinating instead of writing, then what does my book on productivity mean?
I do think there’s something about committing on the page, it helps you to commit in real life.
DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I find that happening with me over and over again. So that’s something that I experience with The Voice, is that I have thoughts in my head and it’s not necessarily that I have to make it into some sort of shippable product, I have to at least like take the time to jot it down and let it percolate, let it incubate. See if it ends up connecting with some other things later on down the road to create some new impactful thing that I never could have possibly foreseen.
MARK: David, thank you. You’ve really taken us on a fascinating mental and geographical and entrepreneurial journey with the accounts of your various adventures and writings. So I think maybe now it’s time to put the focus on the listener and give her or him something to do that is on theme from this conversation.
So what’s your Creative Challenge, David?
DAVID: This is very relevant to what we were just talking about with The Voice is that I find that one of the times when I have the most interesting thoughts is before I’ve even opened up my eyes in the morning. This is consistent with what we know about creativity, that people tend to be more creative in the mornings where they might still be a little bit groggy. And so what I do is next to my bedside I keep a little device called an Alphasmart Neo, which is basically just a keyboard with a cheap LCD screen on it. Costs about 50 bucks on Amazon used, they don’t make them anymore. And so I grab that, I still have an eye mask on because I sleep with an eye mask, and my eyes are still closed, I grab that and I say, ‘Okay, I have to write at least 100 words every morning before I even open up my eyes.’
Now, my challenge for listeners is to do the same thing. You don’t have to get this device. If you are a decent touch typer, meaning that you can type without looking at the keyboard to some extent, you can just keep a computer keyboard next to your bed, and before you wake up, just one morning, try this, before you wake up, grab that keyboard, put your fingers on the home keys, you can feel the little nubs on there, and just type everything that comes to mind.
Because you’ll find that it doesn’t actually have to be recorded. It’s just that you’re exercising those thoughts in your brain. You are strengthening those connections. You aren’t necessarily coming up with some sort of creative product in the moment, but you’re creating connections that will guide and frame your thinking throughout your day and throughout your work at all times. It’s a little bit like the Julia Cameron morning pages, except for in this case, you aren’t necessarily recording what you’re writing, and you haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.
MARK: I’ve heard of people writing before they’ve had their coffee, which I always thought was pretty extreme, but I’ve never heard of anybody writing before they opened their eyes!
How does this device work? I’m curious. How do you know what you’re typing?
DAVID: Well, I don’t necessarily know. I have an idea. For me, what’s important is the exercising of the synapses of the thoughts in my brain. And actually, when I’m done, I delete it.
MARK: So it’s a bit like the Buddha Board where the idea is to be in the moment…
DAVID: Yeah.
MARK: Making it, rather than to create some timeless artefact.
DAVID: Yeah, you’re in the moment and your brain is always working on your creative problems that you’re working on. So you prime your brain with these thoughts. You can delete the thing. But you find that these things resurface during other times. And so that’s what I find very useful, and part of it is that it’s just permission to… doesn’t matter how strange the thought is, you can write it, and you don’t have to be afraid. And sometimes you actually find something there that’s really nice.
MARK: David, I think you’ve won the prize for the most off-the-wall Creative Challenge! We’ve had a few, so, thank you. I love that!
DAVID: I hope you try it.
MARK: I might try it. So, I just have to get a quiet keyboard so I don’t wake my wife up! So David, thank you very much. I mean this has been a real pleasure talking to you. So you have your podcast, Love Your Work. Obviously, there’s the book, The Heart to Start.
Where should people go for all things David?
DAVID: The place to go for all things David would be Kadavy.net. I’m really active on Twitter at @kadavy and, of course, the podcast that you mentioned, which you will be on I believe sometime in early 2019. So go check out that interview because that was a great conversation as well. So thank you so much for having me on.
MARK: Pleasure, pleasure. And that’s Kadavy K-A-D-A-V-Y.
DAVID: Sure.
MARK: And obviously we’ll put all the links in the show notes as usual. So thank you once again, David.
DAVID: Thank you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
SheEO: Women Transforming Entrepreneurship with Vicki Saunders
Jan 28, 2019
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is Vicki Saunders, an entrepreneur, mentor, author and a leading advocate for entrepreneurship as a means of positive transformation in the world.
Vicki has co-founded and run ventures in Europe, Toronto and Silicon Valley and taken a company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
She is the Founder of SheEO – a global initiative to transform how we support, finance, and celebrate female entrepreneurs.
Faced with a male-dominated startup culture in which only 4% of venture capital financing goes to women, Vicki decided to do something about it. SheEO is an entire ecosystem designed to change the game for female entrepreneurs.
Every year, SheEO assembles a cohort of 500 women (called Activators), who contribute $1,100 each as an act of Radical Generosity, creating a perpetual investment fund for female entrepreneurs.
All the funded ventures are for-profit companies, but SheEO is not just about the money: to be eligible for a loan, a venture has to demonstrate that it is helping to create a better world through its business model and/or their product or service.
And SheEO supports its entrepreneurs with more than money – the 500 Activators in each cohort also help with their expertise and advice, their professional networks, and their buying power as early customers.
If you’re a female entrepreneur looking for funding and support, SheEO will blow your mind in terms of the opportunities it can unlock.
If you’re a woman who is passionate about empowering female entrepreneurs, Vicki will introduce you to a radical and exciting new way to invest, support and collaborate with other women.
If you’re curious about the potential of creativity to come up with radically new and exciting solutions to entrenched problems, you’ll find this a mind boggling interview.
And whatever your gender, I think you’ll be inspired by Vicki’s vision of a world where everyone benefits from having more women at the table, when it comes to tackling the big challenges we all face.
Two SheEO-funded ventures Vicki discusses in the interview are Abeego and The Alinker – visit their websites to learn more, and scroll down to see photos of their products in the interview transcript.
Vicki Saunders interview transcript
MARK: Vicki, what was it that drew you to entrepreneurship in the first place?
VICKI: I actually grew up in a fairly entrepreneurial family. We had a family farm, that was a pretty unique place. And so, I was always around this concept of dreaming at the dinner table, coming up with new ideas. But I never really thought of being an entrepreneur until I was in Europe, right after the wall fell down.
And I remember standing in the square with hundreds of thousands of people in Prague as the tanks roll out one day, and the next day, everyone was celebrating freedom. And it was absolutely intoxicating. Every single conversation around me was, ‘Now that I’m free, I’m going to do this! Now that I’m free, I’m going to do that!’
And I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m free too! What am I going to do?’ And it’s just… I became an entrepreneur over there. It’s just kind of a strange thing, but it was my first experience of recognizing how important the environment that you’re in impacts what you do. It would just change me completely.
MARK: That’s quite a contrast. I think a lot of us in the West take capitalism for granted. It’s like the weather.
VICKI: Absolutely.
MARK: But if you were up against seeing the contrast with a very different system, and what it meant to people to suddenly have that opened up, what did that tell you specifically? Okay, there’s freedom in general of lots of things. What specifically did you get from that about the value of entrepreneurship?
VICKI: Well, for me, it was the concept of freedom just really hit me at a DNA level. By the time I was in my twenties, I had all these layers of expectations from other people on top of me. These are the kinds of jobs to get, these are the kinds of schools to go to, these are the people you hang out with. This is how much you should be paid. And entrepreneurship wasn’t really cool back then. And then all of a sudden, I was in this place where people were reinventing themselves at all stages.
60-year-olds who had been shovelling coal were now doing the thing that they had wanted to do. And 20-year-olds and the students were part of that whole change. And so, this concept of what is it that you want to create in the world, being able to reinvent yourself on the spot.
And this is the mindset shift that is core to what I think helps you be more entrepreneurial is, if anything was possible, if you were surrounded by the right conditions, what might you do if it was possible? If you can get yourself into that space, that’s the place where I think entrepreneurship gets born from.
MARK: And if we can stay with your own journey for a little bit, because I know one thing we want to come on to is SheEO, and the big picture of women and entrepreneurship. But I’m guessing that what a lot of us experience as statistics or headlines is something that you experienced firsthand. What did you discover – maybe good, the positive in entrepreneurship, but also the challenges particularly for a woman as an entrepreneur?
VICKI: I think I would just go more general overall, I think being a woman, period, in society is super challenging. And I noticed that at a very early age. I grew up in a family full of boys, I didn’t think I was being treated any differently. I went out to university, I took this course called Women in Literature, which of course, was taught by a man and every single part of the book, or the books, that we were reading, they were deconstructing how women were taught or how we portray women in society, etc.
And by the end of that course I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m oppressed. Why didn’t anyone tell me?’ And I came home and I started pointing out everything and then very quickly, whenever I pointed out how I was being treated differently, I was sort of sidebarred like, ‘Oh, come on, take it down or relax. That’s not really what I meant. It’s not really different.’
And so, this concept of having your reality and what you experienced denied around you was a super confusing thing. And all I knew is I want to be really successful and do something. So, I just put my head down and like, ‘Okay, well no one else seems to be complaining about this, maybe I’ll just ignore it.’ And as I went through various companies I started, initiatives I was part of, I kept seeing those things, but pointing them out did not help me advance what I was trying to do. So, I just kind of buried it until I hit 50, and then I lost my mind.
When I got to the stage where I just realized this is actually happening, this is holding us back. It’s part of the design of the system we’re in, we need to create a new system. I just don’t want to live in a world where only 50% of the population reach their potential. And so, there’s a bunch of stories along the way that were painful for me that woke me up even more each time, but it’s only right now that we’re able to kind of talk about all this stuff. For the last couple of decades it wasn’t something that was in the water supply.
MARK: To help us all get the context here, in one of your articles, you say that women are chronically underfinanced, undersupported, and undercelebrated in the business world. And I think a lot of us can intuitively agree with this.
For you, what are some of the most important facts and implications?
VICKI: 4% of venture capital goes to women, less than 1% of corporate procurement. So, when companies buy products and services from other companies to keep their business going, that’s procurement. Less than 1% of the companies that they buy from are women owned. It’s just insane. And FYI, we are not a niche market women, we are 50% of the population. So, this is super crazy. What are we doing here?
I think it’s partly because the world that we’re living in, and the structures that we’re living in, and the systems that we’re living in, women weren’t at the table to design those. So, a small, small example which has huge implications is, how can we possibly still not have childcare sorted out? That is just crazy. 50% of the population is out there working and there’s no access to childcare. It just gets layered on top of your job. If women were at the table, we would have sorted these things out so that everybody could be equally working, and performing, and reaching their potential.
MARK: What are the implications for creativity, even outside of business?
VICKI: First of all, I think that we’ve learned a lot from the latest neuroscience research and looking at different learning styles over the past few years, that women tend to see things holistically. We look at the full picture, the whole process. And men see things a little bit more myopically, like they’re more focused in on something. Two of those things together can create a whole, I think it’s really important. If you have both women and men at the table with their unique ways of looking at things, I think we get a more whole design that can work to include everyone in society. So, that part is huge.
We see the data is that when you have women on your board, in your senior management positions, you outperform companies that don’t. There’s just so much data proving this. And the thing that’s really stopping this from happening, despite having the data, is that we have unconscious bias all of us in the way that we’re brought up and we’re not used to seeing women in power. And when you don’t see women in senior positions, you don’t necessarily think you can be one of those people. And so, this whole cycle perpetuates.
But right now, we’re at this deep moment of disruption and we need a new way; everything that’s around us we made up and it’s not working, so let’s make up a new way. I want to do that with men and women at the table.
MARK: I think this is a really important point because it’s not just a women’s issue.
VICKI: It’s everyone. Absolutely.
MARK: It’s not just about advancement of women. Yes, that’s right, that’s important, but even if you’re going to be completely self-centered about it, men benefit too.
VICKI: I think we’re living in a world that’s not working for anybody. We’re all working ourselves to death. Such long hours, super stressed out, it’s not working for men or women. Men want to come home and see their kids too. And so, the workday is just getting completely insane. And on top of this we have a mindset which I think is really limiting us. Which is like the dominant mindset of the world right now is winner takes all. It’s bet it all in red for the one to win.
And that has now led us to a world where five people have the same wealth as three and a half billion people. This is just a massive challenge. The inequality is off the charts and getting worse because of this mindset of winner takes all and all of our capital in the marketplace is out chasing a unicorn, Uber, to go win the whole market. And then the 17 people that invested in that will be the ones who fill up their pockets and the rest won’t.
This mindset is really blocking us and I think if we step back and said, ‘How can we define success much more broadly?’ It’s not just about one winner, but what if there’s all various forms of success? And so, that’s I think one of the big challenges that we’re facing. The other is you have to work 24/7 to be successful. That’s a narrative that no longer needs to hold true. Let’s change that. I really am thinking at the mindset level of what are those big things we need to change, and rethink, and challenge our assumptions.
MARK:There’s a quote in your book that I love, ‘Everything is broken. What a great time to be alive.’
VICKI: This is the entrepreneurial mindset.
MARK: I love the positivity in that because you can say, okay, ‘Everything’s broken.’ And people say, ‘Well, you’re just pointing out problems.’
Tell us why that means it’s great to be alive at this point in history.
VICKI: I’m an opportunistic kind of thinker. I’m super hopeful and excited about the future, and so when I see all these structures falling apart, all of this redesign that’s needed, that for me screams opportunity. If you’re a creator, or a maker, or an entrepreneur, this is your Nirvana, right this moment. I couldn’t walk a block without finding 25 things that I want to redesign.
To me, it’s just like this huge, huge opportunity. You can stay on the negative side and just go, ‘Oh my God, it’s so bad. Inequality is a nightmare.’ But that just gives you a huge opportunity. Okay, great. Let’s go change it because it’s not working for anyone. And the person who comes up the middle with an interesting new idea can really make a dent in the universe. I think it’s just super exciting when things are falling apart. I know I’m a bit strange, but it’s a great time.
MARK: Can you give us an example either from your own experience or another business that you’ve observed, where an entrepreneur’s really said, ‘Okay, this is broken. Let’s have fun with it. Let’s make it better.’
VICKI: One of our mentors Barbara Alink has rethought the walker and the wheelchair. She was walking through a park with her mom, her mom’s in her 80s, and her mother looked at somebody who was sort of hunched over on a walker and said, ‘Over my dead body will I ever use one of those.’ And Barbara is a designer, and she’s like, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting. So why is it designed that way?’
She started to dig into it. And then she found that 50% of people who are using wheelchairs can still move their legs, but they are put into these devices. It’s really the only device if you’re not stable, if you’ve had a stroke, if you have Parkinson’s or MS. You get put into this and then you deteriorate and have a downward spiral even more because you’re not moving.
And then 80% of people who are in wheelchairs are using walkers are depressed because all of a sudden they went from this healthy individual to losing some ability and everybody looks down at them, literally. Like you look down a level on someone in a wheelchair. So, she stepped back and said, ‘How could I redesign that for dignity, and also how could it be the coolest thing that everybody would want?’ What a great designer.
She created what looks like a giant adult tricycle, the seat basically keeps you at eye level, so you’re still at eye level with people so they’re not looking down at you and you move it with your feet, so there’s no pedals. So, think giant, bright yellow adult tricycle where you stay at eye height and you move it with your feet. People who are now using this, so someone who has Parkinson’s is always shaking, they have a really hard time with mobility devices. Now, they sit on this, it stabilizes their core, they can move their legs and build up their muscle, and they’re walking down the street with you. Amazing.
That’s an example of somebody just rethinking this and this can have massive implications all over the world. It needs to be used in every market with an ageing population.
MARK: Let’s make sure that we get a picture or video so people can actually see Barbara’s walker in action.
MARK: Okay, great. And I’ll make sure we add that link in the show notes as well.
VICKI: Great.
MARK: That’s a beautiful example. Just walking along and seeing a problem. I’m a writer, if I’m reading a text, and there’s a spelling or punctuation mistake, or something isn’t quite phrased very well, I just want to fix it. I get irritated. I get that itch. I think being an entrepreneur is a bit like that, except your book is the whole world.
VICKI: Totally.
MARK: You walk around, you can see things, that could be better, that could be fixed.
VICKI: Absolutely. And for most people, it’s not the whole world because I believe there’s something that each of us are here to do. There’s a mastery that we have, there’s a certain lens that we look through, we don’t all see the same world. I can walk down the street and see something completely different than my husband. The opportunity is when you see something that makes you crazy, that’s yours, that’s yours to fix or to get involved in, or deal with.
And so for me, there’s lots and lots of things outside the spectrum that I see that are not mine. They’re not my pure passion, but this whole thing of women, and women being funded, and how to support a different way forward in the world is something I’ve been obsessed with my whole life. But I spent literally two decades avoiding doing anything women only because I saw what happened every time I pointed it out. I was sidebarred, I was reduced. And so, I just didn’t mention it until I kind of had this sort of epiphany moment where I couldn’t stand it any longer. And so, I started SheEO.
MARK: Tell us about the epiphany moment.
VICKI: I’m a mentor. As soon as I learn something I want to share it. I’ve mentored over 1,000 entrepreneurs in the last couple of decades. I was working with this phenomenal young woman who had a bit of a rocket ship of a company. It was just totally taking off, she was doing really well and then I started to see all of the sharks start to surround her and go, ‘Okay, this is gonna be a big deal.’ They started poking at her.
The same thing had happened to me. I had a company that grew very rapidly and went public. So there was like, ‘You know, in the next round, you’re probably not going to be the CEO. We’ll bring in a guy who knows what he’s doing, who has domain expertise,’ because this was her first time entrepreneuring.
And just all these little things, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what happened to me 20 years ago.’ I went home furious, and I was talking to my husband and I’m like, ‘I just can’t do this. We cannot have another generation go through the same thing that I had to go through. Not on my watch.’ Then I stepped back and thought if I was going to try and solve this challenge, how would I do it? And it’s a holistic, massive culture change problem, which is we’re not going to fund more women innovators, unless women start writing checks because we’ve had women innovators out there coming to male investors and that hasn’t worked in the past.
We fund things that we have experience with that looks like us. We’ve just seen the data on that. And so, we need women to invest in, so how do you get women to start investing? And it just became this huge circular design challenge that I have worked on for many years.
MARK: I love the fact that you’re framing it as a design challenge because a lot of us look at these big monolithic issues or they look monolithic and think, ‘Well, what can little old me do?’ And yet what you’ve done with SheEO is actually really hard for me to describe it because it’s a very new kind of organization. I don’t think we’ve got a category yet that we can assign it to.
Maybe you could explain what SheEO is and how it works.
VICKI: Sure. Why don’t I just walk you through a little bit of the pieces that got put together? So, one thing was with this winner takes all mindset and bet it all on red at capital is, I think very inefficiently used. We’ll put billions and billions of dollars into a company and if it fails we’ve wasted so much money, and if it ‘wins,’ then somebody makes a lot of money. And so, is there a more efficient use of capital? That’s one thing.
And then this new model of crowdfunding came in, in the last few years. And that broke open the dam for me to understand how to deal with this. We have this model of 500 women come together in each region, they contribute $1,100 each. It’s a small amount of money, so you dip your toe in to get engaged; that money is aggregated together in a pool. And then the 500 women go online and they vote for the companies that they’re most passionate about that have applied, they’re women-owned, and women-lead, and revenue generating, they’re not early, early startup and they can all answer how they’re creating a better world.
The 500 women go online look at these applications say, ‘I love this, I’d buy it or I’d recommend it to my friends. I think it’s going to change the world and I think it’s going to export and has ability to scale.’ And then those companies get a 0% interest loan and then they get 500 women on their team to help them.
It’s literally leveraging all these resources, it’s super crazy, right? If you’re one of these entrepreneurs who gets picked you go from like total scarcity to having 500 women asking what do you need? Ask us and we’ll help you. You’re one step removed from pretty much everything you need to grow your business. And so, we create this very safe environment, we call it radical generosity. Imagine if you were surrounded by radically generous women, how would it change you?
And that serves to embolden these entrepreneurs and to move them from scarcity to abundance and to realize that they have what they need. And it’s kind of overwhelming to be selected by 500 women. You’re toiling away doing what you’re doing. You’ve had a lot of people sort of tell you, it’s not going to work, or you don’t have the right skills, or you’re not good enough. All that stuff that happens as an entrepreneur, lots of nos and all of a sudden you just get this giant ‘yes’ tunnel around you. It’s pretty cool.
MARK: It’s quite a vote of confidence!
VICKI: Yeah, and it lifts you up. If you think, oh, I just designed this, like a lot of us do, we don’t really realize what we have. And then when 500 people go, ‘You, you’re the one,’ and they stand up, standing ovation, they clap when you walk on stage, it changes things.
MARK: I’m thinking purely in terms of the frame and the feeling I’m getting from this. Do you know the TV program – here in the UK, it’s called Dragon’s Den, I think in the States, it’s Shark Tank. Dragons and sharks bearing down on you!
I know it’s entertainment, popular culture. But it’s actually quite an apt metaphor for the kind of cutthroat world of entrepreneurship. And this has got such a different feeling, right?
VICKI: It’s completely the opposite of Dragons Den. It’s called Dragon’s Den in Canada as well. Even if you just think of that metaphor, a den for dragons or a tank which is like literally you’re a caged animal performing for the investor. Think like that person sitting with their arms crossed on stage saying, ‘Prove to me that you can get me a huge return on my money.’ And I think, flip that around.
We need innovators desperately, so much more than those people sitting on stage with their money. What’s the use of capital to create a better world? And so we flip that around, and we go, ‘Oh, my God, we love what you’re doing. Can we help you?’ As opposed to you prove to me how you can do this on your own. It’s just a completely different frame.
Mark: And did you say that part of the application process when the entrepreneurs are going into SheEO, is that they need to say how their company is going to make it a better world?
Vicki: Yes. I don’t really use the word social, a social component to it. But that’s really what it is. ‘How does your business, your products or services, or how you run your business create a better world?’ You need to be able to articulate that. All of the ventures that get selected have a very strong social impact, as well as financial impact.
MARK: Again, and this is against a lot of the assumptions that we have about entrepreneurship and capitalism, that it’s all about money, it’s all about winning. It’s not about the bigger picture.
VICKI: We need to redefine winning. It’s a super broken old model. Again, go to the design challenge and the creativity piece of this. From a very, very early age, I was obsessed with how do I do good and make money at the same time? When I was growing up, 40 years ago when I was just getting started and sitting in high school that was considered crazy thinking, right? Go make money and then give it away.
I’m like, well, I’m going to do both at the same time because like I’m not obsessed with making as much money as possible. I’m obsessed with having a huge impact, deep meaning, getting up every day feeling like I’m making a difference and I’d like to pay my mortgage. Thank you very much. I think the next generation that’s coming along really lives in that space too. We’re at a more of a blended model now and not an either/or. It’s both/and.
MARK: Picking up on the SheEO story, so an entrepreneur gets picked, gets these 500 votes of confidence, gets the interest free loan.
What happens next? How does 500 advisors not become a cacophony?
VICKI: I was worried about that, too. But all of these women are really busy, and they’re not all excited about everything that you’re doing. And they only put their hands up when they have something that they can really contribute. So, what happens is the entrepreneurs come together, they divide up the money. We have a unique process to do that. They come together for a weekend, they meet their coaches, they have these world class coaches that help them throughout the course of the year.
They meet each other for the first time, they go deep, they understand each other’s negotiating styles. And then on the final day of our retreat, we say to them, ‘There’s $500,000 on the table to divide up, over to you to do that. We’re gonna leave the room in a minute, you have two rules. One is you can’t give it all to one so no winner takes all, and you can’t divide it up evenly because that’s too easy.’
And so, they have to figure out what to do. And it is so awesome. It’s so awesome to witness. They literally leverage that money and they make it go so much farther than you can imagine. And they help each other like, ‘Oh, you don’t really need that, I’ve got that I can help you with that.’ Or ‘I know someone who does that cheaper,’ or whatever. And they figure out how to maximize the impact of that money individually and collectively because we expect 100% pay back rate. And so, we do that first, which is always really fascinating to observe or to hear how it ends up.
And then they get into two coaching calls a month and a regular ask every month of the women in the network. At any given time, I’m looking for someone to help me with rebranding my company. Does anyone have any experience in that? The activator is the women who contribute capital in our network respond in real time, within 24 hours, the ventures get what they need, when they do these asks. It goes into their inbox, they reach out. We don’t do the matching which is all just the technology and people hands up organic, they find each other.
MARK: While respecting people’s confidentiality, can you say anything about the kind of asks and the kind of responses that you typically get?
VICKI: There’s literally everything from I’m going to raise a follow on round, I need some help with my financials. Is someone good at that? Can someone help me with framing? One of our ventures did go on Dragon’s Den from a marketing perspective. Because she wanted to get the word out about it, because it’s a great place to do marketing, right? One of the women in our network is a TV producer. And she said, ‘This is all about TV. This isn’t about getting the money. This is about making your commercial.’
So, she coached her on how to do that and it was brilliant. And she said, it really changed and it massively increased her sales. So, having expertise from all different areas and being able to reach out to that and have someone come in who’s passionate about your business, wants to help, and has experience in the space is amazing.
MARK: The process sounds absolutely mind-blowing.
VICKI: It’s really different. Yeah, very trust based.
MARK: Can you give us an example or two of what people have achieved as a result of the program?
VICKI: One of our ventures has breathable food wrap. All of our food wrap is plastic and toxic and if you wrap food it starts to die immediately. So, if you wrap an avocado, it turns brown in plastic wrap. When you wrap an avocado with a with Abeego, it stays green for four days. A lemon lasts for 10 days when it’s cut in half. It’s literally like putting the rind back on the food and she had this unique insight.
First of all, when we rolled out in California, all I had to do is say ‘Avocado stays longer,’ and everyone’s like, ‘What? Where do I get it?’ From her going and trying to find traditional financing and people looking at her going, ‘What? You’re gonna take on Saran wrap? Good luck with that, lady.’ To every woman going, ‘Oh my God, where do I buy it? It lasts 18 months, it’s washable, reusable, whoa.’ And it keeps my food fresh. She’s gone to market and exported to new countries and new regions because the women in our markets around the world are taking her there. They’re talking about it, they tell their local suppliers, and they get her into stores.
The idea with this model is that we get to a million women globally as soon as possible from all different regions around the world. If you are in the U.K. and you get selected, and you want to go to market in Singapore, or Mumbai, or Auckland, New Zealand, or New York, you plug into the women in those markets, the radically generous women to help you go to market. It’s a very quick way of spreading your idea around the world.
MARK: Just the multi-dimensional thing you were talking about earlier on, being able to see things holistically.
Obviously, the money part of it is pretty amazing, but there’s so many other dimensions to this.
VICKI: My personal experience, having been an entrepreneur over and over my whole life, money is always a challenge. I have experienced that. But really the larger issue is access to markets, access to customers and networks. That is really super tough. And especially as a female entrepreneur getting started. How do you find that person who knows the six people at the top of every company you want to find, right? How do you do that when you’re at the early stage of your career? And so, to plug into a network that can get you there sooner in a relationship-based way.
One of our ventures was just getting started, she had a cool tech company and she was trying to get into some of these corporations, and several women in our network are completely connected and these are their friends that are senior execs at all these companies. They call them up and go, ‘Hey, one of our SheEOs has this wicked idea. Will you meet with her?’ And they’re like, ‘Of course.’ Because they’re friends with this person and she walks in and she nails every meeting. So again, how do you get that access? The network piece of it and the early customer piece of it to me is actually way more important than the money.
MARK: It’s huge, and that reminds me of another one of my previous guests on the podcast, Patricia van den Akker, who runs The Design Trust in London, because she said, ‘Whatever your field, there are 50 people, and if they knew your name, your success would be on another level.’ She said her challenge was to say to people work out who those 50 people are, and start making sure they know your name.
This sounds like a fantastic way of accelerating that process.
VICKI: Absolutely. One of the things that we found – we’ve got six cohorts now around the world, just at a pretty early stage of this model. But when you get selected by these 500 women, and you are on stage and recognized for that you start to get recognized all over the place. The community and the marketplace considers that you’ve been validated.
Our ventures have gone on to win startup entrepreneur of the year and different awards because it gives them profile very quickly at a very early stage of their career. And that’s really exciting, if we can start to showcase some of these innovations that we think have game-changing potential. That’s a huge success moment for us.
MARK: Continuing the cycle with SheEO; you give people a loan, they repay it. What happens to the money at that point?
VICKI: As the money is repaid, which is 20% per year, because when you get your loan, so imagine you’re getting $100,000 loan, you pay it back in 20 equal installments of $5,000. Once a quarter, $5,000 is coming back. At the end of the year, 20% of that money is paid back, we loan that out again. In Canada, for example, we’ve done three rounds of this, and we just announced on Monday, seven new ventures with 500 women being their contributors. We had an extra $200,000 because money was paid back from the first year and the second year cohort so that added two companies.
With this, we have this concept of a perpetual fund. It’s a little bit of a different idea, so with each year, this money just gets loaned out, paid back and loaned out again. We keep it in flow. This idea of having a perpetual fund where the money just keeps rolling forward, you make your commitment of $1,100 dollars as an activator. But that money just keeps going forward forever and ever for your daughters, granddaughters, your great granddaughters, your nieces.
MARK: That’s the radical part of radical generosity.
VICKI: Yeah.
MARK: It’s not just the fact that it’s this person making a gift, it’s how far that gift can go.
VICKI: It just keeps going forward. And it’s not a grant to the entrepreneurs. It’s a loan. And so, this also brings in a pretty interesting other design element from indigenous culture that I learned, which is when, just a quick story, when the white man came over to Turtle Island, which we now call North America, what the indigenous people did was they gave us a gift because that’s how they create relationships.
They give you this gift and then that creates a tie between us. And what we did with the gifts is we held on to them. And they were confused by this. Because gifts are meant to be held on to for a while and then passed on to others because then you keep the relationship going and you extend the relationship.
So, there’s actually an ongoing benefit of this relationship. We all get in relationship together. But we held on to those gifts, and so, the indigenous people came back and asked for it back, which is where this crazy derogatory term of Indian giver came from. Giving a gift and then asking for it back.
This accumulation culture that we have in North America, which is spread around the world has led to this world where only five people have the same wealth as three and a half billion. And so, we took that and said, ‘Well, what if money stayed in flow?’ Because money is currency, its energy, it’s meant to be in flow, not held in the hands of five people around the world. And so, this is totally designed with the wisdom from our indigenous cultures to keep money in flow and it benefits all.
MARK: And again, just to underline, it’s completely different to the typical model, which is venture capital, which is basically the Hollywood model. You fund 10 and maybe one will be a hit. And if you’re wasting money on the others well, so what? You made your money.
VICKI: Honestly!
MARK: You wasted millions of dollars.
VICKI: It is so insane to me, it’s always felt insane to me. To me, this is like just to use a very basic metaphor. It’s like picking one of your children. Bet it on Susie, let’s bet it on her, forget the rest of them. They’re losers. They’re not going to make it. And so, we don’t do that. We have multiple definitions of success in relationship-based world, and so, not everyone is going to perform to the same.
Even in our ventures, in our last cohort, the range of capital was between $30,000 and $200,000. Some people didn’t need money as much. They needed the network. Others really needed it and the bang for the buck they were going to get was so much higher, and so, they divided the money up to reflect that. That’s a really interesting way of thinking about things. It’s different than what we do right now.
MARK: Another theme that I’m picking up from you, and I want to stress, I think this is a positive theme is anger. That you experienced anger when you realized what was happening to you as a woman, and just as a woman, per se, also an entrepreneur. And then the straw that broke the camel’s back was when you saw it happening to your protégés. Yet you had a tremendously creative response to it.
I always remember when I was a psychotherapist doing my training, I was told, ‘We think of anger as being a negative emotion, but actually, it’s about justice.’ And if you come up with a creative response to that you don’t have to start yelling, or attacking, or losing your temper.
If you come up with a creative response, anger can be a real force for good.
VICKI: Oh, absolutely. I never personally change unless I have to hit my head against the wall. I have to be in a lot of pain before I’ll change anything for myself. And this has been a series of aha moments over the last 25 years, like learning about different pieces to make this thing work. And it was really a crowdfunding piece and crowd selection, like there’s so many different elements to this that needed to click in. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in a way to get me there.
But, you know, anger wasn’t an option for me, I’m not the kind of person who’s going to sit and stew in a circle. But I did have to go through a lot of those elements to figure out how to get to the solution. And, again, one of the things that we noticed about entrepreneurs is persistence and if nothing else I’m a deeply persistent person. I will not give up on things.
MARK: And also as a counterbalance to that, one other lovely quote like from your book was, ‘It doesn’t have to be hard.’ Can you say something about that?
VICKI: People don’t get this very often. What do you mean it doesn’t have to be hard? It’s so hard. Well, so what I find, anyway, is when your solution that you come up with is complex, difficult, challenging, it’s probably not the right solution. I remember sitting down with a group of entrepreneurs at my dinner table, and their business had just failed and they were trying to think up a new thing.
And someone said, ‘Let’s find something really hard to solve.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ And they looked at me, they’re like, ‘What do you mean, why?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you find something really easy that’s easy for you to solve?’ And they looked at me like, ‘Whoa, that’s such a crazy thing to say.’ But it’s that reframing piece; with SheEO, I kept thinking all the way through.
Whenever something felt like it was going to be hard to do I was like, okay, not there yet. Because my experience has been when it’s right, it happens with flow and ease, and when it’s not, it is super painful. For example, last year, we had a really tough year with core funding. Every sponsor we went out to everyone said ‘no’. It was just like a giant year of no, in every way. I struggled through that a lot. And I’m like, ‘Okay, I guess it’s not the right time,’ but wow, it’s really hard when it’s not the right time.
And then they just started off and everything was a yes. And it just happened with ease. I’ve learned over the years, that timing is everything. Sometimes it’s just not the right moment. It may be a great idea, but it’s not the right time. And so, paying attention to the energy that gets attached to whatever you’re doing is something that I follow the energy, that’s one of my terms. If it’s block, block, block, then you have to find flow around that like rocks in a stream, water going around it. If you react to the blocks, it really slows you down and it’s not the right design.
MARK: I’m listening to you. I could be listening to a poet with that description because I think, I’m a writer and I work with a lot of artists and creatives, and it’s very, very similar. The points where we’re creating the most value are those times that we’re in flow. There’s an effortless quality to it. It’s just not always easy to get to that point.
But that’s the part that you enjoy where you feel the ease, effortlessness that’s nearly always a sign that, okay, we’re breaking through into something good here.
VICKI: Absolutely. And I mean, we are all energy, right? So, tuning into that, being surrounded by that. I consider myself to be a creative thinker and I feel like a bit of a business artist. Like this is pure creativity, figuring out solutions to major challenges we’re facing, that’s not happening sitting, crunching numbers. We’re not going to solve the world’s problems by crunching numbers.
It requires a much more deep and connection into our humanity and understanding people’s intentions, and understanding behaviors, and understanding what unlocks people’s souls and connection to each other. The empathy component will be the heart of all major change in the world. It’s not going to be happening in an MBA class sitting with your spreadsheet open, from my perspective.
MARK: And maybe one last thing, you also say that in the book, ‘It’s a post-hero world’. Tell us about the post-hero world.
VICKI: I think we’re so stuck on this one person changes everything, which is so not true. Behind whoever creates something there is an army of people, a parade of amazing supporters with all kinds of different skill sets that made that happen. But we’re so obsessed with the one and that’s a very competitive lens. One person steps over everybody to get to the top. And that’s a very old hierarchical model.
We’re moving much more to a distributed networked world with multiple pods of people connecting together and it’s all about collaboration. The biggest human challenge that we have is how do we live together? How do we collaborate together? And that is, I think, a much more feminine. I’m not saying a woman-only quality, we all have masculine traits, but the feminine of understanding how to collaborate.
The first cohort went through the dividing up of the capital, one of the women said, she really got that. She’d only been in a competitive atmosphere and she’s like collaboration is the new competition. This how do we work together and come together to elevate all, that’s a great challenge.
MARK: And speaking of challenges, this is the point in the interview where I like to ask my guest to set the listener a challenge, something that they can go away and do or start doing in the next seven days that relates to the themes that we’ve been talking about.
VICKI: The thing that I think is really a game changer is to go home and clean your closets. You’re not literal closets, but your closets of people who bring you down. I think it’s extremely challenging to reach your potential when you’re surrounded by people who are telling you to stay the way that you are. I have enough voices in my head trying to stop me from doing things, I don’t need anyone else. Thank you very much. Goodbye.
MARK: I’ve got that covered.
VICKI: Exactly. See you later. And so, being precious about who you surround yourself with. This concept that we have at SheEO is imagine being surrounded by radically generous women. And then imagine being radically generous to yourself. It’s very easy to be hard on yourself, but the voices that are negative in your head are not for you. It’s the voices that are positive, and loving, and lifting you up. That’s what you need to be listening to. And so, for me, it’s pay attention to who you’re surrounded by, and how you speak to yourself, and how they speak to you. Because that will really determine who you’ll be in the world.
MARK: Thank you. That’s a great challenge.
Last but not least, where can people go to find out more about you and SheEO, and the rest of your work?
VICKI: Our website is S-H-E-E-O, sheeo.world. And we’re on all social channels as well as sheeo.world.
MARK: Great and obviously, I’ll make sure that’s included in the show notes again. Vicki, thank you so much for your radical generosity this morning.
VICKI: My pleasure.
MARK: And I’m sure people found it as inspiring to listen to as I did.
VICKI: Thank you very much.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
The Price of Being a High Performer with Rich Litvin
Jan 21, 2019
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is Rich Litvin, a coach who specialises in taking high achievers to the greatest levels of success.
Rich’s coaching clients include Olympic athletes, Presidential candidates, Hollywood film directors, Special Forces operatives and serial entrepreneurs. He is also the founder of 4PC—a community of leaders, entrepreneurs and coaches who encourage and support each other to reach their fullest potential and make their greatest contribution.
Rich is a valued thought leader within the coaching community, building on the success of his first book, The Prosperous Coach. If you’re a coach who wants to build a successful coaching business by making a big impact for your clients, you will find The Prosperous Coach essential reading.
I’ve personally benefitted from Rich’s wisdom and guidance, by attending his Coaching Intensive events on both sides of the Atlantic, first as a delegate and later as a speaker. (See the photo at the top of this post for a fun moment at one of Rich’s Intensives.)
One big thing I learned from Rich was to embrace the fact I do my best work as a coach when I follow my own inclinations and work with high performing creatives, and that by working with them, I can have an outsized impact on the world.
And this is typical of Rich – whoever he works with, he encourages and challenges them to be more themselves, to take their unique gift and hone it in pursuit of their unconventional ambitions.
But high performance comes at a big price – it can lead to loneliness, to pressure, to disillusionment, and if we’re not careful, to burnout.
In this interview I ask Rich about what separates the highest performers from the rest, and how to avoid the pitfalls of success. As always, Rich was generous with his wisdom and open about his own struggles and challenges.
If you’re a high performer yourself – or if you aspire to reach the top of your creative profession – you’ll find plenty to inspire you in this interview, as well as a gentle reminder to take better care of yourself along the way.
Rich has kindly put together a set of resources for 21st Century Creative listeners, to help you make the most of your talents, including his ‘Exponential Success Scorecard’ and a preview draft of his new book, The Success Paradox — you can pick these up here.
Rich Litvin interview transcript
MARK: Rich, what made you want to be a coach?
RICH: You take me back about 12 or 13 years, Mark, because I was a high school teacher at the time on a fast track. I’ve always been driven. I’ve always been ambitious. And I was on a fast track to be a head teacher and I went to do what was called back then, maybe it still is, the national professional qualification of the headship and we were trained in coaching skills. It was just becoming in vogue really for leaders to understand the power of coaching and we were trained in coaching. And within a year, I’d lost my job.
I went to work at a new school with a very inspiring boss. We were going to change the nature of education. And within a few weeks of me arriving, he got pushed out by someone at even a higher level than him, government level. And the new boss arrived and she wanted her own team and very unceremoniously, I was told there was not a place for me in that organization. But I had coaching in my toolkit and I ran away, if I’m really honest, I was pretty humiliated by being fired. Ran away to Thailand to sit on a beach, do a bit of yoga. And I can make it sound like a cool story, but I was pretty humbled by what happened.
But I was sitting on a beach with a pack of playing cards with coaching questions on and people would say, ‘What are they?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s called coaching.’ And they would say, ‘Can I play?’ And I began coaching people on a beach. And I had this insight a few weeks of being on that beach that I want this to be my career. I love this. And that was the start of this career that I’ve been in for 12 years now.
MARK: I love that question, ‘Can I play?’ I mean that suggests quite a lot about coaching, doesn’t it? And change.
RICH: Well, having those playing cards made coaching really easy for me at the beginning because I didn’t have to think about what questions to ask. I mean, it’s great to have powerful questions to ask. I wrote an article once about 121 powerful coaching questions. And then a friend of mine who you may know, Michael Bungay Stanier, wrote a book that came out last year.
RICH: Awesome. The Coaching Habit is a great book which has seven questions and they’re great questions. But I didn’t have to think of what questions to ask because the playing cards would ask the questions and then the people would begin to open up. And I remember somebody said to me and it really touched me deeply, it really moved me. She said, ‘Wow, Rich, spending this hour in conversation with you has changed my life.’ And it took a while for that to sink in because I had this thought of I’m a nobody. I was proud of my title as a vice principal, deputy head teacher and I felt like a nobody. I had no job anymore. I was just on this beach playing this game called coaching and she said, ‘You changed my life.’ That felt really good, and I just said I want to do more of this.
Now I came to the United States in 2006 because I thought I need a qualification. I’ve got to be a ‘professional.’ The course I signed up for had a money-back guarantee after two days and it was so terrible that I quit. It was a training course about coaching, but it was just so poor that I quit it and I started doing other things.
I did a course about relationships and I did a course about man-woman dynamics and I met a woman called Monique who I ended up proposing to 10 days later. I think sometimes, Mark, being a tourist or being an immigrant is a really powerful metaphor because you don’t have any baggage with you. And I left all my baggage at home. I was willing to do everything differently literally. I mean, I did propose to Monique. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, if you said I just met someone and you proposed to them 10 days later. But sometimes you just know.
And I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ And then she said, ‘Well, actually, I’m a singer. I’m off to India in a couple of weeks to perform.’ And I said, ‘Well, I got nothing else going on, I’ll come.’ And we lived in India for a few months and then I said to her, ‘You know, I’ve always dreamed of traveling the world with a beautiful woman.’ And she said, ‘I’m in.’ And so we then spent the next year traveling the world together. And I began my coaching career that way and I began coaching people as I traveled. My first ever coaching client paid me $10 a month and that was for four calls. I made $2.50 a call. But it was what I needed to do, and I was proud of that, by the way. I was excited being paid to do something I loved. It was amazing. And so that was how I started my career.
MARK: And it’s interesting because when we’re high achievers, we can be focused on the wrong things like the job title, like the status, like the big office, all the status symbols. And you had all of that torn away from you, which must have been very difficult for you to go from there to being, in your words, a nobody.
And yet even as a nobody, you were able to invite people into this space where their life changed.
RICH: Well, looking back, I can tell you it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I’m an Enneagram 3. I know you’re familiar with the Enneagram. The Enneagram is simply a way of understanding how you show up in the world, how you operate when you’re unconscious. And in Enneagram 3, your default way of being is to try and look good. And that was me my whole life. I’ve been trying to prove myself to my dad for most of my life, Mark, and it’s only the last few years I’ve began to see it.
And so I’d want you to like me. I’d do whatever it could to please you. And when I lost my job, it felt like everything was stripped away from me. And I was really proud of this title that I had, and then I was a nobody and I had to come back from that and recreate myself. And it was very humbling and had a really powerful impact on me and it helped me to reinvent myself and to let go of all the stories about who I should be or who I needed to be. And I am so grateful for it in this moment. There’s a wonderful book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and he points out that most of the things that we aspire to and crave and wish for that we think will make us happy turn out usually not to.
And the classic is winning the lottery because people can track that. And almost everyone who wins the lottery counter-intuitively not only turns out to be less happy afterwards but ends up having less money after winning the lottery than before. And the things that we would never think to wish on anybody like getting a life-threatening illness, losing a loved one, getting a divorce, losing a job, people tend to look back on those things and say, ‘Oh my God. I look back on it now and see it as I’m so grateful for that experience because I learned so much from it.’ And that was me.
MARK: And did this factor into your decision to focus on working with high achievers in your coaching practice, the fact that you’d been through that whole roller coaster?
RICH: It’s part of it. It’s in there. I think just doing a lot of deep work on myself, realizing that I’ve been a high performer for a long time for most of my life. I’ve always aimed high. I’ve always been really ambitious. Still to this moment, to this day, when I have a success in something or rather, I give myself, see if you recognize this one. I give myself about 25 seconds to acknowledge myself before I look at how could I have done it better, bigger, different, improved it or I’m looking into the future like what am I doing next.
And this is the blessing and the curse of being a visionary, of being a creative, is that you’re future-focused. You’re always looking out there into the future. And it can really serve us as visionaries, as leaders, as creatives to pause and slow down and turn around and say, ‘What have I accomplished? What have I done in the last 90 days?’ We’re always surprised at what we have achieved. As I did this deep work and deep reflection of myself, I began to see what had driven me to be a high performer. And like I say, a lot of it for high performers can come from our pain, from our struggles. And for me, much of it was trying to prove myself to my father. And seeing that, doing work on myself, and noticing that I was drawing people to me who were like me.
This is the biggest secret behind being a coach, is that your clients are you. Your dream clients are you. And with all your pain and struggles and insights that you have into your life, you help them to see into theirs. And so I just began. Initially, it was a lot of very powerful women I worked with. I think, if I’m honest, maybe I was a little bit afraid of working with more powerful men. And then I began to work with powerful men too and now there’s no distinction for me. And I know that world of being a high performer. I know what it feels like to be very lonely. I know what it feels like as a leader, to be taking care of everybody else and leaving yourself last, so you’re worn out, crying on the floor because no one’s there taking care of you because you wouldn’t even let them if they tried.
MARK: Yeah. And what are the consequences of that?
RICH: Loneliness. It can be very lonely being a leader. You could feel a lot of guilt. I feel guilty if I’m working. I feel guilty I’m not at home with my wife and my little boys. If I’m at home with my wife and my little boys, I feel guilty that I’m not at work doing more to grow the business. And God forbid I should be lying on a massage table somewhere, I feel guilty that I’m not home with the kids or at work in the office! So this is a sense of constant sense of guilt. I’ve been playing with the title of the book that I’m writing. So The Success Paradox is one of the titles that we’ve played with, the loneliness of leadership.
I’ve been also playing with this idea of the price of leadership. There are many books on how to become a leader, but there are not many books on the price that you pay. And the moment I say that to people, there’s this kind of not a gasp but it’s this sense of ‘ah’. Like they get it and the only question I have to ask is ‘Well, what’s the price you’re paying right now?’ And that starts a really interesting conversation because there is a different price that each of us is paying and it can change over time but there’s always a price to pay to be a high performer, to be a leader and it’s a start of a very interesting conversation.
MARK: And you talk about the top 4% of performers in any given field. What would you say separates them from the others?
RICH: Not a lot. Sometimes luck. Let’s be honest. Sometimes luck, being in the right place, the right time, the right connection. I like the number 4% because it’s the top 20% of the top 20%. And if you’ve read the 80/20 rule if you’re familiar with that premise, 20% of your team will be creating 80% of your results. Twenty percent of the activities you do will generate 80% of the results. So I’m always interested in the idea of looking for what’s in the top 20% and what’s in the top 20% of the top 20% is the top 4%. So I like this concept of working with the top 4%.
I run a mastermind group for high performers. I call it 4PC and it stands for The Four Percent Club. But there is another reason I picked on that number. Steven Kotler wrote a book called The Rise of Superman. And in that book, he has this premise that he calls the 4% rule. So he studied high-performing athletes, the kind of people who jump off a mountain in a wingsuit or ski the highest mountains. You’re an entrepreneur like me, a creative too. When you’re doing creative work, when you’re an entrepreneur, it can sometimes feel like life or death.
MARK: Yeah.
RICH: Put your book out in the world, create a piece of art that people look at, speak on a stage, it can feel like life or death. And these people he studied, it really is life or death. You watch the Olympics right now, some of these people make a mistake and their life is on the line. What he discovered is the only way to perform at that level, and we know this as creatives too, the only way to perform at high level is to be in flow. That you’re in flow when time just seemed to disappear. ‘Oh my God, I’ve been doing this for seven hours. I didn’t even know. I haven’t even had lunch.’
To perform as an elite athlete, you have to be in flow and the only way to grow when it’s a life-or-death situation is to push yourself just 4% beyond where you are in this moment. The problem for most people in life is that 4% is actually too big. The challenge for high performers is that 4% is too low. We’re always looking at how can I make this exponential leap, this massive difference, this big change. And actually, it’s in those tiny steps that exponential growth can occur. That’s why I’m interested in this number of 4%. It’s really fun for me to look at what that looks like.
MARK: As you say that it strikes me, I’ve always been keen on learning languages and quite proud of my ability to do it. This is something I’ve really discovered with Japanese because when I started learning it I was really gung ho and I thought I was going to nail this in six months and then I discovered it’s a lot harder than doing French or German or a European language. So that whole trying to really make impressive gains quickly was the biggest barrier I had and it was only the last couple of years where I really slowed down and I’ve just deliberately limiting myself to doing a little bit each day, half an hour each day that actually I’m starting to make genuine progress with the language.
RICH: Yeah. Beautiful, Mark. For me as a coach working with high performers, I break my job into two elements. I say I do two things. I help you dream bigger than you’ve ever dreamed and then I help you take tinier steps than you’ve ever taken. And because I’m working with high performers, they are already people who dream really big. And you know Jen Gresham, right?
MARK: Yes. I met her at the Intensive.
RICH: So Jen, she’s a former assistant chief scientist to the high performance wing of the Air Force. Incredibly high performer, works in the arena of high performance, she’s also a mom and she’s a creative. She wrote a book of poetry that was published and did extremely well and she’s a blogger too. And when Jen came to me, she was transitioning into coaching. She was just getting her first few clients and I helped her really step into creating really high-performing clients. But then beyond that, we looked at what’s the difference you really want to make in the world.
So I’ll fast forward a year. Right now, what Jen is doing, she’s raising a $100 million to fund an XPrize. An XPrize is where you get a bunch of companies and individuals who compete to win a prize and the prize is when you solve a massive problem, it’s going to make a huge difference to humanity. And so what Jen, the prize that she’s created is to solve this challenge that we know that in 10 years or less, there are numerous fields that will be obsolete. If you’re a truck driver, if you’re a miner, I think if you’re even a financial advisor, your career will be obsolete in less than a decade. How can we retrain people really fast with the skills they need for the future? And that’s what Jen’s working on with some amazing people she’s partnering with to create a solution to this prize, to this problem.
So that’s what I do, help people dream bigger than they’ve ever dreamed and I help them do it by taking tinier steps than they’ve ever taken. And so I’ll give you a little heads-up. I know you love to have a challenge when we do this but this will relate to it. One of my favorite quotes in life is from Tim Ferriss. Tim says, ‘A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.’ I’ll say it one more time because it just really lands well when you hear it the second time. ‘A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.’
Now that’s the other thing that I’m doing when I’m working with a client. I’m helping them to get comfortable feeling uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s conversation, sometimes it’s something else but your willingness to feel uncomfortable is going to transform your world.
MARK: That makes me think of when I started working with creatives, I thought my focus would be mostly on helping them get their work done, whether it’s writing or acting or playing or whatever it is. And that’s still quite a big part of what I do. But that issue of getting people to have the uncomfortable conversation and guiding them through that is, what I would say, is at least as big in the work that I do with clients. Because whatever you’re doing in a career, you’ve gotta have these conversations to make things happen.
There’s no point writing the best book or being the best on paper. Actually, you’ve got to go out there and convince people that they should pay attention to you and that there’s all kinds of relationships that need to be navigated and decisions that need to be made and deals to be struck. And it’s really hard to do that from just sitting behind a keyboard.
RICH: Yes. Yeah. You can’t. You can’t. You might be one of those undiscovered artists who gets discovered after your death and becomes famous. There are many of those who are super successful now they have their pictures in the Louvre, but you’ll be long gone. This day and age, the way I distinguish it is between a mission and a message. You can have your mission. You can be really clear. I’m creating this kind of art, this kind of writing, this is the way that my creativity comes out in the world. But then there’s your message. You have to get that out there to other people. And look, I speak as an introvert.
And my distinction of an introvert and extrovert is it has nothing to do with being shy. I’m not shy. But I get drained being around a lot of people. If I go to a party with my wife who’s an extrovert, I come home and I want to stay in my house for the next one week and watch Netflix. We come home and she wants to go to a party the next day. If not, the next night, the same night. I get drained being around other people. So I have to find ways to recharge my energy.
Here’s a fun one for you. How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb? None. If you’re an introvert, you don’t change the freaking lightbulbs! It means more people would see you’re at home and they’d come and knock at the door and want to hang out with you.
So I get it if you find it hard being out in the world. And at the same time, you have to find your way of being out in the world. And it doesn’t matter this day and age whether that’s in rooms, hanging out meeting people, whether it’s creating a presence online because you write or you draw or you create videos. But there is no point being at home, being a best-kept secret. You could be the most creative person on the planet but if nobody knows that, it doesn’t serve you, it doesn’t serve your art, and it doesn’t serve the world. You’ve got to find a way to be out there and that’s going to mean you’ve got to stretch your ability to feel uncomfortable. The magic happens outside of your comfort zone.
MARK: Right. And let’s season the bad news with the good news. This is where the magic happens. There’s nothing like creating something and then seeing it really connect with an audience, whether that’s one person or it’s a stadium full of people.
RICH: It feels amazing, right? It feels so good. And you have to be willing to get the nose along the way. What’s her name? Who wrote ‘Harry Potter?’ I’ve forgotten the name.
MARK: J. K. Rowling.
RICH: J. K. Rowling. Look how many rejections she had before that book was out in the world. And you see it with almost any overnight success is at least a decade in the making. That’s the way I see it. We get swayed when we see this stuff like, what do you call it? American Idol and all this stuff on TV. Like, ‘Oh, I could just go show up and sing one song and I’ll be famous.’ Maybe there’s a few people that happens to. Well, but most of them I’d say have been training their whole life for it. For most of us, I wrote an article a few years ago with a title ‘Mastery’ and the subtitle was ‘How to Become an Overnight Success as a Coach in 46 years.’
I mean my entire life was going towards… In 1992, I went as a youngster to teach science in Africa. I spent two years in Botswana teaching science to kids in their third language. I had to learn to listen really carefully to them. I had to learn to be really careful in my language as I spoke to them so they would understand me. And I had to learn not to make any assumptions. I lived in London my whole life where we had double-decker buses. These kids that I taught in their little village had never seen a building with two stories, let alone a vehicle with two stories. Those skills 20 years later were of use in my career as a coach.
MARK: Yeah. This is one of the great things, I think. You’ve touched on some highs and lows and setbacks and ‘failures’ and I’m sure anybody listening to this can relate to all of that. But the great thing is if you’re a creator of any kind, it’s all grist to the mill. I’ll sometimes say when I’m coaching a coach and they’re dealing with challenges in their life and I’ll say, ‘Just look on the bright side. This is going to be a great coaching story in five years’ time!’
RICH: My wife always says, if we have a big argument, she gets mad and she says, ‘I know if we ever end up splitting up and getting divorced, you’ll just turn this into a great story and enroll clients from it.’ And I have to laugh, Mark, because it’s probably true!
MARK: But it also is true, if you’re any kind of artist, and I do think there is artistry in coaching, you can recycle your pain. It’s experience. It’s material on one level.
RICH: Absolutely. I’m talking about my wife. She is a creative. She’s a singer-songwriter. She’s a jazz singer, won awards for her singing. She is getting ready right now for her first ever one-woman show. It’s about her story growing up mixed race here in the United States growing up in LA and she’s putting all of the pain and the challenges, what it was like to be a mixed girl, having a white mother who comes from Upstate New York and a black father who comes from North Carolina who grew up during segregation. What it was like to have a white mom who didn’t know how to deal with curly hair. She puts all this pain out and anguish out into this show and it moves people to tears.
So your grist to the mill, oh my God, your pain is what people are craving because so few people are willing to share this. And the moment you share your pain, people don’t hear your story. They hear your story through their story and it lets them in.
MARK: And I think there’s another distinction, which I know is important for you, between we’re not talking about showing up as a victim and just telling it as out of self-pity. We’re showing up as a creator and saying, ‘Well, here’s what happened and here’s what I’m making of it.’
RICH: Yeah. I love the distinction between creator and creative. Anyone can be creative. We’re all creative. A creator takes something new, he brings something new into the world. I mean there’s really nothing new in the world, but when you filter it through your story, your pain, your challenges, your way of seeing the world, something new is birthed for the very first time. And that distinction of being a creator, it means you have to be willing to get your hands dirty, feel uncomfortable, collect nos, fail again and again and again. And on the other side of that, something interesting is coming.
MARK: Right. And let’s pile on a little bit more bad news which is all the things we’ve talked about, the hard work, the recycling of the pain, the difficult conversations, the bouncing back from setbacks, that gets you to a certain level.
And yet one of the things you’re saying is that what got you here to your current level of achievement won’t get you there. It actually starts to hold you back. Could you say a bit more about that?
RICH: I heard a line the other day which really struck me. What will get you to a high level of success in the first part of your career is saying ‘yes’ to almost every opportunity. What will take you to the next level of your career is saying ‘no’ to almost every opportunity. And for where I am in my life and my business right now, that hit home really viscerally. And so whether or not that statement is true for you wherever you are in your world right now as you listen, there’s something that you’re doing that has led to the success you’re at right now. And often the very same thing can hold you back from what’s really possible for you down the road.
MARK: And you have this great list of the eight guilty secrets of extraordinary top performers in the book. Could you maybe share one or two of those and as a kind of specific example of this?
RICH: Yeah. So let me let me talk about some of this. This is one of the things I see as I work with really high performers is that we can be admired by everyone around us but on the inside, we’ve got a lot of stuff that we’re carrying that we’ve got no one we can share it with. So one of the first guilty secrets I hear and see a lot in high performers is that you get all this admiration and acknowledgement from people around you but on the inside, you feel lazy. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing very much. So I often get that aha sense of acknowledgement when someone is in that world.
Because, now see, here’s the way I look at it. What feels like laziness is a sign you’re actually working in what I call your zone or genius. You’re doing that thing that feels so natural and so effortless and so fun for you that every time you do it, you’re in flow that you can’t see like, wouldn’t anybody be doing this? That this isn’t hard. I love to do this. I’m more energized at the end of the day than I was at the start of the day. So you have this sense that you’re being lazy. No, you’re not being lazy. You’re actually working on that thing that only you can do and it has this massive impact in the world. That’s why you get all this acknowledgement and success and admiration.
And so one of the things I do when I’m working with the high performers, not only help them let go of that sense of guilt about feeling lazy but I break to them the bad news that their job is to feel more and more lazy as life goes on. Because it will actually be a sign they’re stepping more and more into their zone of genius. That thing that only they can do. And they’ll feel lazy because it all feels so fun.
MARK: Well you see, we’ve had 200 odd years of the Protestant work ethic and the Industrial Revolution telling us that value comes from working really hard and being really productive. And yet particularly if you’re doing something creative, the value you create is the value you create. It doesn’t really matter so much how much time or effort went into it.
If you can do something amazingly well, then that will entertain or delight or provoke or get people to see the world in a new way.
RICH: Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, I have a distinction between effortless and easy. I’m not looking at easy here. I’m not afraid to do hard work. I’ll do hard work when it’s called for, when it’s needed but I’m looking for the effortless path. Where’s the path that lights me up? That has it feel like fun when I’ve done a 10-hour day and I didn’t even stop to eat because I was so excited. That’s what I call effortless rather than easy.
MARK: And it’s so easy to dismiss an ability we have. Quite often I might go and see a client perform on stage or I’ll watch their film or they’ll read their book and they will tell me how terrible it was. I’m saying, ‘Well, does it make any difference if I tell you I thought it was amazing?’ And they say, ‘No.’
RICH: Monique used to come home from a performance and I’d say, ‘How was it?’ And she said, ‘It was terrible.’ And I learned I was asking her the wrong question. What I needed to ask her was, ‘What did they think of your performance?’ And she’d go, ‘Oh, they loved it.’ Because when you’re a high performer, you set the bar really high. If she got one note wrong, one word wrong, she felt terrible. The fact that nobody noticed didn’t count in her mind because she couldn’t see what they were looking at. And so this is the challenge of being a high performer.
It’s not just a challenge. It’s also the thing that makes us a high performer, that we set the bar that high. But having someone like you on your team as a coach who can remind you that actually the audience loved you, it can really help. And this probably goes to the second guilty secret. You’re not lonely but you feel very alone. You’re not lonely. You’re not necessarily missing friends. You might have a great community and a great number of friends and family around you, but it can feel very lonely being a creative, being a creator, being a leader, being an entrepreneur, being a high performer. Because there aren’t many people you can talk to about what’s going on.
When you’re a leader, it’s not appropriate to tell your board of directors, your employees, even your husband, wife, or kids, some of the challenges that you’re facing. You keep a lot inside. When you are a creative, as you said earlier, something you have to pour out your anguish to get to the other side of this and you don’t always want to share that. So you can feel very alone. But having a coach, someone who’s with you, someone who you know is on your side, who you can open up to and hide nothing and hold nothing back and they’ll do the same, that can be life-changing.
MARK: And also, I think having a peer network, people who do the same as you or as close to the same as you as you can get when you’re following a unique path.
I know this is one of the things you’re great at, Rich, is you assemble groups of people who can support and encourage each other.
RICH: Thank you. So 4PC is the mastermind group that I run for really high performers. And we have artists in there, we have entrepreneurs in there, leaders in there. The way I describe 4PC is the entrance requirement is that you should feel a little bit in awe of us and we should feel a little bit in awe of you. We had a little retreat and I asked everybody, ‘Who thinks that you’re the one who pulled the wool over my eyes or my team and that somehow you snuck in here? Everyone else is up to something amazing but somehow, you’re the one who fooled us and got in anyway.’
Everyone’s hand went up. And the way I describe 4PC is it’s a community of high performers in all sorts of fields. And when you think that thing that you’re up to looks impossible, looks challenging, you’re surrounded by people who are doing things that look more impossible than what you’re doing so certainly the bar is raised on what’s possible for you. And it works exactly the same in the other direction for everybody else.
MARK: I love the phrase you use in the book where you say, ‘If you are the most interesting person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.’
RICH: Yeah. I love that one because it can feed our egos being the person in the room who’s the creative, who other people want to hang out with and speak to because we’re really interesting. But if you’re the most interesting person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. So I curate rooms of really interesting people. I do something five, six, seven times a year that I call Interesting People Dinners. We never got past the working title. But what I decided is that I’m an introvert. Parties are not my thing. At a party, I’m the guy in the corner talking to one person all night. But I love meeting people. And so I said, ‘What if I created a way to put really interesting people in a room with me? What if we had Interesting People Dinners?’
So a few times a year, we go to somewhere interesting. We’ve been to the Getty Museum and they have a restaurant that’s only open on one day a week and they have a round table there. And I want a round table so there’s no private conversations going on and I bring in myself and seven other people, people that are up to really interesting things, and we have a couple of ground rules. One, you’re not allowed to tell anybody who you are or what you do before the night begins or at the beginning of the evening. We’ve had artists, we’ve had magicians, we had Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting coach, we had the State Controller for California. She runs the sixth biggest economy on the planet.
And we put these interesting people in the room and tell them they’re not allowed to tell anyone else who they are. And then I say, ‘We’re going to play a game and the game is I’m going to ask an interesting or challenging or provocative question and then my invitation to you is to answer it. And there are three ways to answer: you can refuse to answer, you can tell a lie, or you can tell the truth.’ And we find the most juice is when you tell the truth. And I’ve been stunned. People open up and share the most deep intimate stories in this setting with one another and it’s been a really fun way to get together with a group of fascinating people.
MARK: So I think this is so important is find people who have got similar aspirations and ambitions to you. I mean, as you were speaking, I was put in mind of Mimi Khalvati, my poetry mentor who’s been on the show. When I used to go to writing classes in my 20s, I was nearly always top of the class or near the top and that reassured me and my sense of ‘Oh, I must be talented.’ But I never really stayed and I never really learned much. And then I walked into Mimi’s class and within half an hour, I realized, ‘Okay, you’re not in the top half of this class.’
And at first it was a bit of a shock to the system, but it was actually really exciting because I realized how much I had to learn, which was – I can have conversations with the friends I made in that class over the years that I can’t have with anyone else. Because the people who are your peers in whatever your field is, it’s really amazing how often you’ll discover they’ve got very similar hopes and fears and doubts to you.
And so anybody listening to this, if you don’t have that environment, maybe start going to look for it.
RICH: And I also say, particularly for us as creative people, I think creativity lies at the intersections of different fields. And so if you only stay in your field, if you’re a coach who only reads and learns about coaching, if you’re a poet who only reads poetry, there’s a limit to where you’re going to be able to go in your creativity. But if you’re a poet who goes to hang out in a room full of designers or a designer who goes to hang out in a room full of musicians, interesting stuff is going to happen at those intersections of those fields: new relationships, new ways of thinking, new insights. That’s worth bearing in mind.
MARK: Yeah. So if you’re the kind of person who says, ‘Well, I’m really into this thing but it doesn’t seem to relate to that thing which feels a bit odd,’ I would say go for both of them. Because you never know what interesting intersections you’re going to have from different peers and also different mentors.
I’ve had mentors like Mimi in poetry. In coaching, there’s you and there’s Peleg. There’s Brian Clark who I worked with who’s a really successful online entrepreneur, internet marketer. There’s not many people – and Kristin Linklater speaking Shakespearean verse. Now, there’s people who worked with a lot of those people individually, but I don’t think there’s anyone else who’s worked with all of them and has got that same kind of blend of interests.
For a while, I just thought, ‘Well, why am I interested in this and that?’ And now, I’ve learned to trust that and trust that the mix will somehow have some creative benefit down the line.
RICH: Well, and it makes you, you. And the most creative thing you can do is be more you than you’ve ever been. There’s magic in diving back into… actually, here’s a fun one for you. What were you doing at six years old? What made you come alive at six years old? So at six years old for me, I was an avid reader. Oh my God, I love to lose myself in stories and adventures. And that’s been part of my life, my entire life. Reading, learning, and adventure.
And a great example of this, Peter Diamandis, who’s an amazing entrepreneur, created the XPrize, first ever privately funded spaceship to go into space and return, founded I think 19 companies now. Peter at six years old wanted to be an astronaut and spent his entire life working on that career. He was a physician, a doctor in medical school when his professor called him in and said, ‘Peter, what do you do? Why are you here studying to be a doctor? I just don’t get that you want to be a doctor.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t. I don’t want to be a doctor. I want to be an astronaut.’ But one of the only ways, if you don’t go into being a pilot and go that route is to be a doctor. And the professor was very sharp and said, ‘Look, here’s what I’ll do. I will pass you in all your exams if you promise never to practice as a doctor.’ He says, ‘Done. You’re in.’
But Peter at six years old wanted to be an astronaut and made his entire career around that. One of his companies right now is called Planetary Resources. It’s about mining asteroids. This is a man who’s doing now what made him feel alive at six years old. Me too. Great way to look at what do you want to do next, go back to what made you feel alive when you were a youngster.
MARK: And so for you, Rich, I mean we’ve covered quite a lot of your journey from six years old through teaching and beginning to be a coach and achieving success and losing it and then finding it again. You’ve worked with a lot of successful people doing amazing things and one of the big distinctions in your book, which I love, is between achievement and fulfillment.
Where do you find your fulfillment these days? You’ve been involved in a lot of achievements yourself and your client, but what drives and fulfills you?
RICH: Three things come to mind immediately. Number one, I’m really proud that we’ve raised the money to build five different schools in Africa over the last few years through my business. I’m really proud of that. I have a passion for education, a passion for Africa too, having spent a lot of time living there and traveling there so that we’ve helped to build five different schools that will change people’s lives. I went to Liberia four years ago, led a group of teachers to run an empowerment event. So I led a group of coaches to run an empowerment event for 400 teachers and to clean water filtration systems to villages that had never had clean water. Their children died without access to clean water. I’m proud of that, where we can make a real visceral difference in the world.
I get fulfillment there. I get fulfillment with my kids. I get fulfillment hanging out with my little boys. Tonight, we are going to do indoor skydiving! Their cousin has, they’re four and six, but I’m not sure if they’ll be up for it when it actually comes to it, but their cousin has organized this for her birthday party. She’s a bit older. But I’m excited. I’ll be hanging out with my boys and having fun with them.
And then the third one is so my journey from being six years old, I’m going to be 50 in May this year and I have taken on a challenge for myself. I made a mistake of telling one of my coaches who’s an ex-Navy SEAL that maybe I should do a challenge this year when I’m 50. And I mentioned the Spartan race, which is one of those obstacle races. And every time I get back to a coaching session, he would bring it up. And I was like quietly hoping he’d forget about it. Why did I mention that? I’m not an athlete!
MARK: You told that to a Navy SEAL!
RICH: Exactly. I’m not an athlete. I never have been. I’m not that physical. And then one day out of the blue, he said, ‘I’ve got it, Rich. I know what you need to do. You need to do three Spartan races this year.’ And as soon as he said it, Mark, I knew he’d nailed it because if I did one, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d come last. I would have turned into a great story about overcoming adversity and failing, but three, it doesn’t matter where I come in the first one. I’m going to have to improve for the second and I have to really go for it in the third and I’m in.
I’m in training right now. I just did a three-mile run this morning. I’ve been running every day this week and I’m in. I’m training. And so fulfillment there from seeing myself improving, my body changing, I’m taking care of what I eat. That’s another way right now that I’m getting fulfillment.
MARK: And I should point out, we started recording at 9:00 Rich’s time, so if he’s run three miles already, then he’s serious about it.
RICH: Yeah. I did it at 5:30 this morning. So here’s something interesting. I’ve done a little bit of boxing the last year. A year and a half ago, I said to a member of my team, ‘I want you to have this new job. Your job is to help me do the things that I’m afraid of and the things I’m procrastinating on.’ And so he said, ‘Well, what are you afraid of?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve always secretly wanted to do boxing, but I’ve never been brave enough to do it.’ I got a text from her the next day that said, ‘You’re signed up to a boxing class round the corner to you.’ And I went along to this boxing class and I started boxing.
And the other day, I went to my barber 7:00 a.m., I got an early haircut before taking the boys to school and by chance, the guy who created that boxing school was there. And he used to be, he wasn’t a heavyweight champion himself but he was a sparring partner of some world heavyweight champions. So a really high-level boxer. He was the captain of his football team at university, so he’s an athlete. He’s also a very successful entrepreneur and also an actor. And he mentioned that he’d been training at 4:00 a.m. that morning with his trainer. He does that every day. And two days later, I’m out shopping with my boys. I come out of the store and somebody calls my name and it’s him. And he’s running down the street. It’s now 4:00 in the afternoon and he’s jogging.
And I had this realization that we think that mastery and success is this place to get to and then finally, we can relax. We can put our feet up and it’s Easy Street and it’s fun. And if you want to be a master, the game doesn’t change. The nature of the game might change but the game doesn’t change. You’re always playing. You’re always stretching yourself. You’re always pushing yourself. He gets up every day at 4:00 a.m. to work out and he doesn’t have to. And I loved that. I got this real insight from seeing him there. That’s willingness to keep pushing yourself, to have fun too. You want to take care of yourself too but to keep pushing yourself and have fun with it.
MARK: So, Rich, you’re clearly a man who likes a challenge. So this is the point of the show where I ask my guests to select the listener a Creative Challenge. So something that they can go and do within seven days of listening to this interview that will stretch you creatively, personally, ideally both.
RICH: Great. Got it. Love it. So this comes back to the quote from Tim Ferriss, ‘A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.’ My challenge is for you to get uncomfortable in the next seven days and then let us know about it. So I’ll give you some ways that you can get uncomfortable.
One way to get uncomfortable and be able to measure it is to collect no’s. There’s a line we use in our book, the first book I wrote, called The Prosperous Coach, ‘Yes lives in the land of no’. You want to have more yes’s, you want to get some, whether you’re selling a piece of artwork, whether you want to get an agent or a publisher for your book, whatever you want to do to get your creativity out into the world, go and collect some no’s in the week ahead. That’s one way of doing this challenge. Come back and let us know how many nos did you collect in the week ahead.
Now what I love about this one, it reframes a ‘no’. Because they get to email you, Mark, and say, ‘Oh my God, Mark. I got three nos. I got seven nos.’ Whereas a week earlier, it would have been, ‘Oh my God, I got one no.’ And we get devastated. And it’s very real. I can get 57 likes on a Facebook post, 27 people respond to the same post, and one person writes a negative comment and I feel devastated. Very real. Very visceral. So let’s reframe the no’s. One way is to collect no’s in the week ahead.
Another way is to have some uncomfortable conversations. Come back and let us know how many uncomfortable conversations did you have. And here, if you really want to play, I’ll up the level for any of the high performers who are listening. So about six years ago, seven years ago, a friend of mine and myself had this game that we played and we called it Outrageous October. We said for the month of October, our job is to make outrageous requests, things that sound just completely shocking, like you can’t ask that. And then we did. And for that month, I was building my business and he was dating. At the end of that month, I’d made more money than I ever made and he’d had more sex than he’d ever had.
So you can play this outrageous game however you like. Do it with respect. This isn’t to be disrespectful in making an outrageous request, but it’s to ask the thing that you’d feel uncomfortable to ask or you might hold yourself back because you think they would be uncomfortable if I ask them. And you’ll be surprised at what happens at the very edge of your comfort zone.
So this is my challenge. Get uncomfortable for a week, collect nos, make bold requests, make outrageous requests, do the things that you wouldn’t normally do and then come back and let us know what you’ve done.
MARK: Brilliant. Brilliant. And if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm, there’s a contact form on that page. So we would love to hear how you get on with Rich’s challenge. So, Rich, thank you very much. As always, it’s inspiring and mind-expanding to spend time talking to you.
Where can people go to find out more about you and your work?
RICH: Cool. Thank you. Well, you can always google my name, Rich Litvin, L-I-T-V-I-N. There’s a lot of videos out there that I’ve created and a lot of stuff about me, a lot of interviews I’ve done. But if you go to my website, richlitvin.com/creative, we put together a page for you guys in particular. So I’m working on my second book right now. The working title is The Success Paradox but it’s in flux, but I’ve put together a very first draft to the first half of the book. And so a lot of the concepts that we just touched on today are there and you’ve got access to this. Austin Kleon wrote the book Show Your Work. You get to see my work before it’s even finished. So richlitvin.com/creative and you can see more there.
MARK: Brilliant. Thank you, Rich.
RICH: Love you, Mark. Thank you so much for inviting me on.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
I first came across Christina’s work at the turn of the millennium, when she was Director of the Poetry Society, one of the most venerable institutions in the poetry life of the UK.
She went on to write a regular column at The Independent for many years, about politics, society, culture, books, travel and the arts. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell Prize for her campaign to raise standards in nursing, which she pursued in her column, on radio and television.
Christina also conducted many high-profile interviews, with the likes of Diana Athill, Boy George, Daniel Radcliffe, Camille Paglia and Shane MacGowan. She was also the first journalist to interview the former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown after he lost the General Election in 2010.
These days Christina writes for The Sunday Times and The Guardian, and is a regular commentator on radio and TV news programmes, including the Sky News Press Preview.
I met Christina last year, when I had the privilege of coaching her for a few months, and she shared with me a preview copy of her first book The Art of Not Falling Apart. (Amazon US / Amazon UK)
This is an unusual book, in its form and content – part memoir, part collection of interviews and part reflection on how to survive the worst that life can throw at human beings – including illness, injury, redundancy, divorce and bereavement.
I invited Christina onto the show to talk about her unusual journey as a writer, and to give us an insight into what it’s like to work in a high-pressure media environment. And also because reading her book, it struck me that many of the stories and lessons are particularly relevant to those of us on the creative path – where there is little security, the highs can be spectacular and the lows are brutal.
In spite of some of the sombre subjects we touched on, this was a fun interview where Christina and I both made some interesting discoveries. When you listen to it, I’m sure you’ll be as touched as I have by Christina’s sincerity and passion, and also by her infectious sense of the joy of life.
Not only that, you’ll learn something about the redeeming power of crisps and fizzy wine!
You can find out more about Christina’s work on her website, and she’s an active Twitter user: @queenchristina_
Christina Patterson interview transcript
MARK: Christina, when did you start writing?
CHRISTINA: Well, to be honest, I think I’ve been writing almost as long as I have been alive, or at least as long as I’ve been able to read and write, but not creatively for all that time. Indeed, not creatively for all that much of that time. As a child, I wrote stories all the time and was in imaginary worlds for great chunks of my childhood.
But then, when I studied literature, first of all, with ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels at school and then with my degree in English, I think my daring, my courage to write imaginatively was knocked out of me, because I was cowed by that sense of, ‘Who am I to write anything? I’ve read Shakespeare, I’ve read Keats, I’ve read Tolstoy. I’ve got nothing whatsoever to contribute or add on that front.’ And so, it took me a very, very, very long time to even think of having the courage to write creatively, really, even though actually, all I ever wanted to do was write.
MARK: And when did you pluck up that courage?
CHRISTINA: I wanted to become a journalist, but even that I gave up on really quickly. When I was at university, I went to see a careers advisor. I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to go into journalism,’ and she said, ‘It’s very competitive.’ And I thought, ‘Ooh, I’d better not try, then,’ so I didn’t. And I instead… after doing an MA in the novel, and it was the one at the University of East Anglia, where there was another whole class doing the creative writing MA. And I, of course, was not allowing myself to do creative writing, I was reading other people’s work. I ended up working in publishing and then, I ended up working in arts admin.
So I ended up becoming a handmaid to other writers which was very interesting in all kinds of ways, but also, of course, somewhat frustrating because over the years, I began to think, ‘Well, I’m only here to serve other writers.’ And some of them were not absolutely brilliant. I was very, very lucky, in my years at the Southbank Centre, to work with and meet some of the most incredible writers of the 20th century, but I also met some pretty mediocre writers. And when I was working at the Poetry Society, not all the poets who I came across were potential Nobel Prize winners. And I suppose I felt more and more frustrated that I had not allowed myself to write creatively.
What I had done was, I started reviewing other people’s work in my mid-20s. And for many years, I reviewed fiction and non-fiction and poetry on top of full-time jobs, worked incredibly hard, building up a journalistic portfolio and eventually becoming a full-time journalist at the age of 39. But I still didn’t allow myself to do the creative stuff for the fun of it and that was really only quite recently that I did.
MARK: So I think there’s maybe a bit of a lesson here, isn’t there? When you looked at the great and the so-called good of literature, you put them, like I guess many of us do when we’re young, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, they’re like colossi, bestriding the globe.
And yet, what it sounds like, what was the turning point for you was when you saw some of these people up close and you thought, ‘Well, actually, they’ve got two arms and two legs and some of them are talented and some of them maybe are not. Are they so different to me?’
CHRISTINA: Yes, I think that was part of it. And also, I suppose in my late 30s, I realized that there was a very particular story that I really wanted to tell. Now, in fact, I still haven’t written the version, the main version of that story and I hope to. I’ve touched on it in my current book, The Art of Not Falling Apart, and in fact, I’ve cannibalized little bits of a version of that. I’ve done several versions of that over the years. But yes, it was partly that feeling of, the years are running out and I am allowing myself to be cowed here. I am allowing myself to be cowed into not doing the thing I want to do more than anything else, which is clearly crazy. So I think in the end, you just have to have some courage and take a risk.
MARK: And I have to ask you: what is this story that is partly told in this book and that you’ve trailed there?
CHRISTINA: Well, see, it’s a story of a number of intertwined things, but a very central strand was my adolescence as a born-again Christian. When I was 14, I went to Youth Club in order to meet boys. And the Youth Club, unfortunately, was attached to a Baptist church and I became a raving born-again fundamentalist until my mid-20s and that had quite a big and lasting impact on my life. So I started a version of that and I still want to write. It will have to be a different version at some point. But the book I’ve written has elements of my childhood and past woven through it, but not very much, actually, because I’d say it’s at least as focused on other people, probably more focused on other people as it is on me and my own experiences.
But I think very often, it’s that sense that we do have a story to tell that is the breakthrough, really, in terms of allowing ourselves to step over from the critical or reporting mode of our work into the actual personal and creative mode. Which is not to say that the rest of journalism isn’t creative. For me, I have loved being a journalist. It feels like my vocation. I don’t massively distinguish between writing journalism and writing books in some ways, because I think writing is writing and the only question is whether you’re any good and how well you do it.
But of course, there is a difference in writing something long and writing something short and also a difference in writing something that you are burning to say, rather than writing for someone who is telling you, essentially, what to write about.
MARK: And so, you haven’t told the story of being a born-again Christian, but do you think it’s changed the kind of writer that you are?
Do you think you would have been a different writer if you hadn’t gone on that journey?
CHRISTINA: That’s a very interesting question, Mark. And I have never even considered that, so what an interesting question! I think apart from anything else, it gave me an intense knowledge of the Bible, which probably did have an impact on my writing. And I think anybody who wants to write actually should read the Bible because it’s such a central work of literature. And certainly, the King James version has had such a profound effect on English poetry. You can’t really imagine English poetry without it.
And I’ve literally never thought of this before, but I do use rhetorical repetition quite a lot in my prose, to the point where the copy editor of my book once or twice said, ‘Are you sure you want to repeat this?’ And my answer each time was, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ It’s a kind of hallmark of my prose, it’s a hallmark of my column and I do use it in my writing. I like those echoes, I like the way that rolls along…rolls on the tongue. So I think the Bible did have a big impact on my writing and I never ever thought of that until this particular moment.
MARK: I’m reminded even the arch-atheist Philip Larkin read the King James Bible from cover to cover, because he said it was absolutely beautiful and the exact reason that you’ve said, it’s such an influence on the language.
CHRISTINA: Well, you don’t get better than Larkin, really, do you? And funnily enough, a few lines from one of his poems is the epigraph to my book.
MARK: Well, of course, if you want to know which Larkin poem is quoted in Christina’s book, you need to read it … all the way to the end!
CHRISTINA: There are several Larkin poems, actually, including at the very end So there’s a hook!
MARK: In your journalism, and this comes across very strongly, I can really feel this burning desire to say something. You really do believe in what you’re saying. And I get the sense you’re out to change the world in some way, or at least, to get people to think differently, which is maybe the start of that.
Would it be going too far to suggest that your column was a kind of pulpit, or am I stretching the analogy a bit too far?
CHRISTINA: No, absolutely not. Again, you’ve completely hit the nail on the head! It was a pulpit. And to go back to your previous question, and again, I’ve never thought of that, which is why it’s such an interesting question. I think an element to that evangelical zeal has remained with me, even though I haven’t believed in any kind of a god for a very long time. And I don’t even know exactly what my evangelical zeal is about, except that it’s definitely there. And I am someone who, I believe in passion. Obviously, I believe in the intellect, as well.
Too much passion and you end up with just opinions with no justification or rationale. And too much intellect and you end up with writing that is dull, actually. And I think any writer should aim to make people think and move them. For me, I have two aims as a writer. One is to make people feel things and the other is to make people use their brains. And that was absolutely what I tried to do in all my years as a columnist. I had a column twice a week for many years. You are walking up to the steps on a little stone pulpit in a country church and thundering forth.
The difference, in my case…although this might also apply to some vicars, if one wants to stretch the analogy…is that I usually didn’t know what I was going to end up. And I would get emails from people saying, ‘What I really like about your column is, I never know where it’s going to lead.’ And I would say, ‘Well, I don’t, either, actually!’ Because I think writing ought to be a process of discovery. And if you know where you’re going from the start, it’s probably going to lack a certain energy that it would otherwise have.
MARK: So Mimi Khalvati, who I know is a good friend of yours, Christina – she was on last season, talking about this same idea in relation to poetry. We ended up calling the interview ‘Poetry as Discovery’…
CHRISTINA: Ah, interesting!
MARK: That not knowing, that’s what makes the writing fun. But I must admit, I hadn’t thought journalism could work that way, too. Could you elaborate on that?
For starters, how much freedom did you have to write what you wanted? And then, where did you go from there?
CHRISTINA: Yes. I was very lucky as a columnist. Everything you write as a journalist, you have to get cleared with an editor. So you can’t just literally fill up a page with absolutely anything. But certainly for a time, when I had the lead slot in The Independent once a week during the week and I had a full page on a Saturday in the news pages, I had a pretty free rein. Now, that did have to be related to the news. So the weekday column had to be about a very big item in the news that day and ideally, the main item in the news that day.
And that led to a certain amount of stress, because I’d be waking almost in a cold sweat, listening to the Today program, working out what the main item was, trying to think of a fresh angle or fresh argument on that, then having to pitch some thoughts about what that argument might be to the comment editor, but then, go into conference and get that idea cleared by the editor at the paper. Sometimes, they would say, ‘No, we’re not having that,’ and then, you’d be back to square one at 11am and you would still have to write 1,150 words by 3pm. So nobody could say it was a low-stress enterprise.
But once I had agreed the subject with the editor and agreed a rough slant on it…and again, to go back to poetry, I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson and her idea of tell the truth, but tell it slant. What I always – or very often – tried to do was to take a surprising angle on something and sometimes, almost a kind of a Martian view, to take a step back and take first principles in relation to it. So you’re trying not to just say the same stuff that everyone else says, you’re trying to think about it a bit differently. And from that point of view, in terms of the thinking, I was free to think about a subject in any way I liked and free to structure and write the thing in a way I liked.
Now, obviously, an editor has to then say, ‘Yes, this is good.’ And I was very lucky, I had very little changed in anything I wrote in anything I wrote in my years at The Independent. And I think that was quite an unusual privilege. I think I had a freer rein than many journalists do have. I’ve written for other papers since leaving The Independent. And I don’t have a column on another paper, but there are greater constraints and closer editorial scrutiny, I would say. But I had a fair degree of freedom and that’s what I absolutely loved about it, was that essentially, I could write in my own voice about what interested me. And that’s one of the reasons I was so heartbroken when I lost my column.
MARK: You had a pretty big microphone at The Independent.
What was it like, having all those people reading every week and paying attention to your voice?
CHRISTINA: Well, it was great, obviously! It was very, very stressful. I would be trying to keep up with the news pretty much all the time. I would go to bed thinking about the news, thinking about the midnight news, having watched News Night, I’d spend hours a day reading the papers. As I say, on the column days, I would wake up in a bit of a cold sweat. So it was very stressful. And you don’t always have particularly interesting things to say about something that’s popped up that morning and that is not a nice feeling. And you do know that whatever you write is going to have your name and a photo of you next to it.
And sometimes, I’d get emails from people saying things like, ‘If you’d done your research, Ms. Patterson.’ And I’d feel like saying, ‘Research? Are you crazy?! I’m not Seneca, or I’m not sitting in a library. I’m a journalist, you don’t have time to do research!’ Maybe you do on other papers, and I certainly did research my interviews and if I’m doing book reviews – which I still do – you’d have to, obviously, read the book. But if you’re writing a column, you really don’t have much time to do research. So that is very high-stress and often, the stress is extremely unpleasant.
But the good side of that is, you do have a readership. And I would get masses of emails from people who said how much they valued what I did and sometimes, from blokes in Starbucks saying, ‘Your column made me cry.’
MARK: Ahh.
CHRISTINA: I know! And that would mean a huge amount to me, actually. And I’ve had similar responses to the book. And I’ve had emails from blokes saying, ‘It’s the first time in my life I’ve stayed up all night to read your book,’ and that means the world to me.
And interestingly, you mentioned Mimi Khalvati who, as you say, is a very dear friend. She’s also in the book, I’ve interviewed her in the book.
And she, many years ago, gave me a piece of advice that I think is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had about writing. She said, ‘The reader will feel what you feel when you’re writing it,’ and I have always found that to be true. If I feel profoundly moved when I’m writing something, I have learned enough about my craft to know that the person reading it is going to be moved as well. Or if I’m laughing when I’m writing it, I know that the person reading it is very likely to be laughing.
And if I’m finding it a bit of a bore – to be honest, horrifyingly – the person reading it is probably also not finding it the most delighting thing they’ve ever read, because when you have learned your craft, part of that craft is about unblocking the path between what’s in your head and heart and the reader. And your skill is in getting the right words in the right order, in order to have that direct line. And it’s interesting, because you asked me whether my experience of evangelic Christianity changed my writing and I’ve tried to answer that question.
But certainly, I was very ill some years ago. I had breast cancer for the second time. And after I went back to work after a very big operation – I had three months off, because it was a very big operation – I noticed that I suddenly needed to use more words to fill the column gap than I had before, and more words than the other columnists, sometimes as much as 100 more words than the other columnists, as many as 100 more words. And it’s a very strange issue and I can’t really explain it. I can only guess that during that time when I thought I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it, something happened that clarified something either in my head or my heart and I became less patient with polysyllables.
I wanted to write the shortest words and I do generally try to write short words. And I often find that when I’m given a word length by a paper, I have to write slightly more than other people would write, because I have learned that for me, anyway, the shorter words are more powerful. If the prose is plainer, it will have more of an effect on the reader than if it’s full of flourishes. And it’s all about deceptive simplicity, really, because it’s actually, in my experience, harder to write with short, plain words than with the long ones, particularly if you’ve read a lot, because you’ve got the long ones swilling around in your head all the time.
But it is about that deceptive simplicity. And increasingly, the artists and writers I really admire are the ones who achieve something like that. If you think of Matisse’s cutouts, for example, he produced those when he was in a wheelchair, having had cancer and he couldn’t stand up to paint anymore. And when I saw the Matisse exhibition at the Tate, I just cried. I just found those pictures so incredibly powerful and moving. And that was because he had a lifetime of work behind him of developing his craft, which he had reduced to its essence. So I’m very interested in how you simplify, really.
MARK: That’s a beautiful example. I saw that show and one of the images that really stayed with me was a photo of him, an old man in a wheelchair, with scissors and colored paper. And it looked just like my kids, who must have been about three or four.
CHRISTINA: Exactly, exactly.
MARK: And I thought, to have that simplicity or that child-like quality and yet, he could do all the fancy stuff, but that’s not what he wanted.
I love that phrase of yours, ‘deceptive simplicity.’ You could apply that to Larkin’s poetry, certainly.
CHRISTINA: Absolutely. But I think you have to be quite a sophisticated reader to appreciate the deception and the simplicity. And I think unsophisticated readers sometimes don’t understand the complexity of the whole thing. I’d better not name any names. But I did hear that someone very senior I knew at The Independent said to someone else that he thought my writing was like a primary school teacher’s. And he didn’t mean it as a compliment! And this person had a financial background, he was a business journalist. Obviously, I wasn’t there, I couldn’t say anything. But I thought, ‘You don’t understand it, actually. You literally don’t understand anything about writing.’
MARK: Because it’s so tempting to…maybe particularly when the pressure’s on…to reach for the long, highfaluting words that can make you sound clever. And maybe that’s why Johnson said when he was talking about editing, he said, ‘Whenever you come to a particularly fine passage in your own writing, strike it out.’
CHRISTINA: I know, I know. ‘Murder your darlings.’ Nightmare, nightmare. But yes. Yes.
MARK: I want to come back to this. You talked about having the direct line from you to the readers and that comes through in the diction, the deceptive simplicity.
Can you maybe think of one or two issues where you really felt that you’d made that connection with your audience as a columnist?
CHRISTINA: Certainly. In relation to writing about the NHS and nursing, I had some very bad experiences of nursing, unfortunately. And when I had my mastectomy and reconstruction, it was in a very good hospital and I had had very bad experiences before then. But I thought that the nursing would be good and unfortunately, it was absolutely terrible and I emerged from hospital almost more traumatized by the nursing than the operation. And I made a vow when I was on my hospital bed that when I came out, I would try to do something about it.
And of course, when I did finally go back to work, the last thing I wanted to do was just do bloody campaigning. But I thought, ‘I did make that promise and I have to do it.’ So over the course of about the next year, I spoke to the editor, I talked to lots of people, to nurses, doctors, politicians and of course, patients, to find out what exactly was happening in nursing, why so many people were having terrible experiences. Because when I had written about my own experiences, initially in columns, I’d got incredible responses.
And I also made a radio program, it was called Forethought on Radio Four. And it was a 15-minute program that was meant to be a mix of storytelling and thinking and I gave that at the RSA, the Royal Society of Arts. And it was recorded live and it was very, very nerve-wracking. I’d never spoken publicly about my mastectomy before, it was relatively recent and I was kind of mortified, as well. But the program went out. And also mortifyingly, it was very heavily previewed on Radio Four, so people kept telling me they would hear my voice for a bit. It was previewed for weeks before it came out and then, it did come out.
And then, I had an incredible response: emails from readers and letters from readers all around the country, saying that they had had similar experiences. And in fact, that program, I gather, is still quite widely used as a teaching tool in the NHS.
MARK: Really?
CHRISTINA: So the columns I wrote about that and that program. And also, I made a little film for the one show the day the Francis Report came out, a five-minute film about the state of contemporary nursing, which produced a very powerful response. And then, out of that, I did this investigation that resulted in over six days in The Independent, every day for six days. And that had an absolutely extraordinary response and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, which is the main political journalism prize in the country.
Ironically enough, I was shortlisted for the prize and very shortly after, I was fired from The Independent, which was very embarrassing all round. So I had to contact the organizers and say, ‘I think I’d have to change my biog note not to something like, ‘Christina Patterson is now freelance,’ because I didn’t have a job. And I imagine The Independent were a bit embarrassed about it, because they didn’t even mention it in the paper until I made a fuss. And then, they did put a little announcement in, which they didn’t want to do. So I think that that’s probably the thing I’ve done in my journalism which has had the biggest impact.
MARK: Is that an example of what you were saying about if you feel something, they will feel it?
CHRISTINA: Yes, exactly.
MARK: And I know that kind of personal story is really at the heart of the book. But before we get on to that, because I think it’s relevant, as well as your column, you also conducted interviews with some seriously high-powered people. And how was that?
CHRISTINA: Hard work, Mark! It was very, very hard work. I started off at The Independent as Deputy Literary Editor. And I had, in fact, been running an organization called The Poetry Society, which I loved. It was a dream job. And I was the boss, what’s not to like? And I had lovely colleagues and I organized things like poetry-reading routes, where we’d sit around drinking margaritas and reading poetry. And it was fabulous, it really was a dream job.
And then, I was approached… I’d kind of given up on getting a job in journalism. I was still reviewing, but I thought, ‘I’m never going to be able to get an actual job in journalism.’ And then, I was approached by the literary editor at The Independent. He said his deputy was leaving and did I want to apply for the job? And I was sort of agonized, because I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got a lovely job. Why would I give this up to open chippie bags and make cups of tea?’ But I also thought, ‘If I want to work with a national paper, then this is it. This is my chance.’ So I did apply for the job and I did get it and I gave up the lovely job at The Poetry Society. And part of my job was interviewing writers.
So for many years, I interviewed writers. And that was fascinating, people like Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, all kinds of poets. And so, yes, it was fascinating and very, very hard work, because I’m the kind of person, I’m not going to… and you can’t do it, anyway. You can’t just read their Wikipedia entry and then, rock up and ask a few random questions. I would plow through their entire oeuvre. I interviewed Doris Lessing. I don’t know how many books Doris Lessing has written, but it’s certainly not two!
So it was very, very hard work. And certainly, when people say to me, ‘Oh, I want to be a journalist,’ which now is a whole different proposition, because there are such radical changes in the industry, I do say, ‘Well, be prepared to work very, very hard.’ Because for many, many, many years, I worked nearly all the time. I worked evenings, I worked weekends. I rarely had a day off, even at a weekend, because I was always reading for my next interview or catching up with the papers or making a deadline. So it was fascinating. And I was very, very privileged to meet those people.
And it kind of culminated for me when I’d left the books desk and worked on the comment desk for a bit and then, I became a full-time writer. And my job was essentially writing columns and doing interviews. And shortly after he left office, lost the election, Gordon Brown agreed to do one interview for a national paper. And he’d agreed to do it for The Independent, because he knew the editor a bit and I was picked to do that interview. And I went up to Kirkcaldy, his then-constituency, and spent a day with him. And that was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever done, he is such a fascinating man.
And I wrote that up and it was on the front page on the paper and it was mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. And in fact, somebody wrote to me and said, ‘This is what journalism is for.’ And I say in my book, I didn’t know if it’s what journalism was for, but I did feel it was what I was for. I remember when I was writing that interview, actually thinking – and this sounds like a dramatic thing to say – but thinking, ‘This is what I’m here for. This is why I’m alive,’ which is one of the reasons it was so absolutely devastating to lose my job.
CHRISTINA: Well, it wasn’t a seamless path, Mark! The book starts with the scene in which – oh the scene! – the moment in my life in which I have this horrendous conversation.
MARK: It will be a scene when they do the movie!
CHRISTINA: And I end up shouting at the editor of The Independent after being told that he wants to ‘freshen the pages up’. And I walk out of the office for the last time after 10 years and nobody even looked up. And that was that. That was my career at The Independent down the plughole. At the time I felt it was my career as a journalist down the plughole and that’s not entirely true. But I did decide that journalism was not going to be the centre of my life, because I knew I wasn’t going to ever have a job in journalism as good as the one I had.
I was in a very, very privileged position at that point, of basically writing columns for a living and hardly anyone gets that now. And freelance journalism is not paid particularly well anymore. In fact, rates have been slashed in the last 20 years. And I wasn’t a freelancer…I mean, the freelance journalism I did before, I did on top of a full-time job. So anyone who wants to be a freelance journalist, prepare for penury, basically, or be very, very, very determined and very hardworking and write stuff every day, which I can’t be bothered to do now. I can’t be bothered to do the pitch thing.
So yes. So there I was, sort of cast out into the wilderness, thinking, ‘I’m 49, I’ve done nothing all my life except work.’ I mean, that’s not entirely true, but I wasn’t married, I didn’t have a family, I’d had, in some ways, rather a tough time. My sister had died, my father had died, I’d had breast cancer and then had breast cancer again. And what had kept me going through all that time was my work and my career and even though like many writers and journalists, I have a tendency to feel like a failure all the time. Which, by the way, I also think is a pre-requisite for doing a half-decent job in your field.
MARK: I completely agree. I have this conversation several times a week with clients and I say, ‘Look, you do realize this is normal for a creative high achiever?’
CHRISTINA: Exactly. And I think the problem, actually, is that if you don’t think that you’re probably not good enough, is the truth of it. But it’s a very uncomfortable feeling. And when I lost my job and my career, I thought, ‘Oh, wow. I really am a failure now. I’m not making it up anymore. I really, really am a failure.’ And so, I didn’t know how to earn a living, but I also just didn’t know what to do. And I decided that I would use my journalistic skills to essentially ask the question, ‘What the hell do you do when your life falls apart?’
It was a question I’d had reason to ask quite a few times in my life. But weirdly, it wasn’t cancer or even bereavement that made me feel most desperate in my life, awful though those things were. It was that sense of, I’ve now lost my very identity and my vocation and the core of who I am. And so, I had an agent and we talked about this idea together. And I decided to talk to lots of people in lots of different situations about how they had coped when life had gone wrong and to weave those interviews together with my own story, following on from my dramatic departure from The Independent, over a period of two years.
Now, I would love to say, ‘Oh, yes. And then, there was this very happy ending, because I wrote the book in two weeks and it was all very easy.’ And of course, it wasn’t. I was running around, trying to cobble together a living by doing lots of different things and lurching from one 200-quid piece of journalism to another. I mean, I was also doing some quite good journalism. I wrote for the Sunday Times magazine. I started writing for the Sunday Times magazine which is, of course, much better paid than that, but the work I was doing involved an awful lot of interviews and you get paid by the word.
So I did big pieces on things like the Prevent strategy or intergenerational unemployment or teenage pregnancy. And they were all fascinating to research, but they took months and you certainly don’t get paid for your time. So I was very, very, very busy, just trying to earn a living. And if you want to get a book published, it’s not an easy thing. And if you write something on spec, you take a huge risk and I didn’t have time to write something on spec, because I had to pay my bills. And if you’re freelance and you’re trying to pay your bills – particularly if you’re unexpectedly freelance and trying to pay your bills – you’re not going to carve out six hours a day to write for fun. For a start, you probably are in too much of an anxious state about where the next piece of work is coming from.
So it took me a long time – about 18 months – before I really allowed myself to sit down and think about how I was going to actually structure this book and put it together. And there was a lot to’ing and fro’ing with my agent before we got to the point where he thought the proposal was ready to send out. And I didn’t get an instant offer. I’m very happy with how things ended up. I love my publisher, I love my editor, and the publication’s gone pretty well. But I would say it all took much, much longer than I thought it would.
And actually, the writing of the book was, weirdly, the easiest part of it. It’s all been kind of the hoops you have to leap through and, to mix my metaphors madly, the ducks you have to line up, which are the difficult things. And for me, doing the interviews and transcribing them and then, actually writing the thing was relatively easy.
MARK: But I mean, the thing that strikes me… because it’s quite an unusual structure to the book – which I think is beautifully done.
CHRISTINA: Thank you.
MARK: Your story interwoven with all these other stories, going in and out and some of them reappear later on. But people share the most extraordinary things with you.
CHRISTINA: Yes, they really do.
MARK: What was the process like, of going and talking to these people and having these conversations?
CHRISTINA: It was amazing. Many of them were known to me already. Quite a few of them are good friends, because I didn’t want to treat this as a kind of abstract intellectual project. People can talk theoretically about how they got through this, that and the other, but you only really know how they’ve got through it when you know them quite well.
So as I said, Mimi Khalvati is one of the people who I’ve known for years and admire hugely and has been huge things in her personal life. She has a son with schizophrenia and a daughter with an incurable autoimmune disease. And so, I talked to her.
I talked to two friends of my parents who I actually saw on Sunday – I went around for tea – and they have lost not one son, but two sons. They lost a son when he was a toddler and another son when he was in his late 20s.
I talked to my friend Rob. He’s called Winston in the book. He’s an ex-boyfriend, actually. I met him at a rice and peas stall at The Elephant in Castle 20 years ago. And we only went out for a while, but we’ve been very good friends for all that time. And he told me about breaking vertebrae in his spine not once, not twice, but three times. And one of those included falling off a roof when he was in a squat and smashing through a glass ceiling, he’s black, not in the way that they tell black people to, but a literal glass ceiling… and landing on a purple coffin in which he kept his drum kit. And he broke his spine then and was told he wouldn’t be able to walk again and amazingly did. And I’ve known him for 20 years. I took him down the road to the pub and he told me this and I was kind of open-mouthed and I thought, ‘I never knew this about you before.’
So I had some really extraordinary moments when I learned things from people I’ve known for a long time that I didn’t know before. And then, also, people opened up to me in an amazing way: Frieda Hughes, who I’ve known for probably about 15 years. She is, of course, the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She very, very kindly agreed to talk to me about her experience of grief. And she certainly knows a thing or two about grief, as the daughter of one of the most famous suicides of the 20th century. And obviously, Sylvia Plath killed herself when Frieda was only two and then, her father died, Ted Hughes, when she was in her 30s.
We worked out that our fathers died both of cancer when they were the same age and we were the same age. And she had developed ME and she knows a lot about illness, really, really crippling ME. And then, her brother committed suicide. And she talked about all of this incredibly openly. And she even told me about that she remembered being in the car when she and her brother, Nicholas were picked up from a flat in Primrose Hill where Sylvia Plath killed herself. She remembers being in the back of the car and she remembers Ted Hughes and his sister in the front of the car. But she was so traumatized, she didn’t actually recognize… I mean, it’s an astonishing story. She basically thought she was adopted. She was so traumatized that for years, she thought she was adopted and she didn’t think Ted Hughes was her real father. And I had gooseflesh when she told me that.
So there are some, for me, quite amazing revelations in the book and just moments of unbelievable courage and humor. Most of the people, as I say, in the book are people I know and many of them are very good friends. And I didn’t pick them as my friends because they’re brave, resilient, extraordinary people. I picked them as my friends because I really like them and they make me laugh. So I hope there are some laughs in the book as well.
And they opened up to me, a) because they’re my friends and b) because even though journalism isn’t very highly valued in the marketplace nowadays as a skill, I think obviously, if you interview lots of people, you do acquire some skills. And the main skill you need to be a good interviewer is empathy and the ability to build rapport and put people at their ease. And if you didn’t do that, you wouldn’t get people to open up and I do know how to make people open up.
MARK: Well, having read the book, I can absolutely confirm that it’s a really extraordinary read. But it’s not just harrowing, I do want to say that. There’s an incredible depth of compassion, I think, in your writing and also a lot of the stories that you draw out of people and that you relate from yourself, a lot of the core is people helping each other and being there for each other.
CHRISTINA: Well, that’s right. And thank you for your very kind words about the book. Yes, I do say towards the end that my parents taught me that the most important thing in life was to be kind. And I do believe them. I think the most important thing in life is to be kind. And I think those of us who put work whether it’s artistic and creative work or work that might be deemed less creative absolutely at the heart of our lives do need to remember that of course, achievement matters and our own achievements matter. We all want to make our mark in the world and feel that we’ve used our brains to actually do something and get something done.
I think the book in a way, it’s a central message of the book, actually. I do think that the most important thing is your character, the most important thing is your heart and the most important thing is how you behave to other people. And then, that’s how I was brought up and I still absolutely believe that.
And I think without compassion, the world is dead, really. We’re going through, in my view, really horrendous times in the West. I think Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States is the worst thing that has happened in my lifetime. And I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t find anything funny about it. I think the fact that last year after the Charlottesville marches literally equate neo-Nazis and white supremacists with people who are protesting against racism is a real nadir in my lifetime. I think there are many reasons at the moment to wake up in the morning and feel profoundly depressed about the world and I’m afraid. I think Brexit is in a not dissimilar category. I believe it’s a mistake. I don’t blame people who voted for Brexit. I think that our politicians lied to us and I think it’s a very, very serious thing to lie to people.
And there are plenty of reasons to feel depressed, actually. But I think the reasons to be cheerful are that human beings can be profoundly lovely and kind and produce beautiful things and beautiful art and work very well together and love each other. And these are, for me, the things that make life worth living.
MARK: And also, there are some wonderful moments of joy and celebration in the book. And in fact, one of my favorite passages is kind of a hymn to crisps and fizzy wine.
CHRISTINA: Yes, I’m a very big fan of crisps! I had a boyfriend once who called me ‘Crispina.’ And it’s funny, because now because crisps and particularly, Kettle Chips even though I’m not an ambassador for Kettle Chips and I ought to be…
MARK: You ought to be!
CHRISTINA: I really ought to be. They are very widely mentioned in the book. And now, wherever I go, people, if they’ve read the book, they offer me Kettle Chips. And I’m afraid literally every morning the… not every morning, probably, but every evening, the pleasure is fresh. I was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last night doing an event and even then, I was chomping down a bag before I went on stage. I’m not saying that they’re a good thing and in fact, they’re apparently not particularly good for you. Who knew?
MARK: Really? You’re kidding me!
CHRISTINA: I don’t know how much harm they can do. And I think we all have things in life that give us pleasure. I have particular joys in my life every day.
My darling mother, who was Swedish, brought me up to think that every time you have a cup of coffee, you should have a little cake. And I absolutely believe that, because I’m never really entirely happy with a cup of coffee, where there isn’t a little sweet thing with it. And for me, every day, the pleasure of coffee and cake, the pleasure of a lovely glass of Sauvignon or Prosecco or Vionnet and some crisps, these things are fresh joys every day and as are flowers, as is music, as is friendship. And I think we underestimate the importance of joy in our life, actually.
And I think I quote, I think it’s Matisse in the book, who says something like, ‘There is always beauty for those who are prepared to see it.’ I think I’ve misquoted it. No, ‘There are always flowers for those who can see them.’ And I think that’s right. I don’t mean that in a kind of power of positive thinking, ‘Oh, just be cheerful and it’s all fine,’ way. But I do think there is an element of choice in how we spend our days, which of course, is how we spend our lives. And if we don’t see the joy or relish the pleasures, then we are depriving ourselves of a huge dimension of joy. So I think one of the other central messages of the book is indeed about joy.
MARK: I love the fact that you called it The Art of Not Falling Apart, because there are so many books these days that are so eager to brandish their scientific credentials and say, ‘This is all based on research and I interviewed all the top scientists and this is what the data tells us.’
Why did you go for The Art of Not Falling Apart?
CHRISTINA: Yes, the whole ‘smart thinking’ which I always want to call ‘smartass thinking’ category of books which annoyingly sells extremely well. And they get snapped up by the business world and then those people end up on motivational speaking tours, being paid vast amounts of money to spell out the absolutely bleeding obvious in some type of PowerPoint TED Talk-type thing.
MARK: But with data to back it up!
CHRISTINA: Exactly. I think very little in life comes down to bullet points and PowerPoint presentations. And certainly, the central question of human existence which is, we are born, we suffer, we die, if anyone can get that down to a series of bullet points, well, well done them! The whole of art and literature is essentially grappling with that issue and half failing, but as Beckett said, failing slightly better in some cases than others. And it is an art. Life is an art. If only someone could tell you how to live your life. Every day, I’m still thinking, ‘Which expert can I ask today about how to live my life?’
And unfortunately, I say in the book, I’ve got a whole secret shelf of self-help books in my study behind the filing cabinet, which essentially, I used to read as kind of fantasy fiction because at some level, I absolutely know that they’re a complete waste of time. But at another level, I like sitting down with a nice glass of wine and being taken into this world of exclamation marks and perky affirmations, to think that there is a possibility of a really simple world where everything is spelled out for you and you just do the following steps and everything will be fine.
And I also say in the book that at many points in my life, if there’d been a book called something like, I Feel So Awful, I Don’t Know What To Do, then I would have absolutely snapped it up! And I think in a way, this book is I Feel So Awful, I Don’t Know What To Do. But I want it to be, a) not quite as negative as that in the title because obviously, we’ve got to get people to buy it! But also, I did feel it was important to emphasize that it’s an art. I know there are a lot of books now with the word ‘art’ in the title and you know, it’s The Fine Art of Not Giving a – I don’t know if I’m allowed to use the word, but the word that begins with ‘F.’ The Fine Art of…
MARK: You can. As long as it’s artistically justified…
CHRISTINA: The Art of Not Giving A Fuck, which, what the…? Who the fuck knows what that’s about? But it’s basically because people find the word ‘fuck’ funny. And it kind of is funny, but it also isn’t saying very much, really. And I very much doubt that it’s Tolstoy or Keats. I think wisdom, knowledge, expertise, but most of all, wisdom, how can that be anything other than art? It’s a multi-layered process that we add to the layers of, every day. And that’s why the structure of the book is, in some ways, quite unconventional.
I hope it’s quite easy to read, but it’s not a straightforward structure, in that it’s a three-part structure. I introduce people in the first part and then, mostly return to them in the second part. And I weave together those stories and my story and different themes, because I wanted the reader to feel at the end of it was that they had had an experience and an artistic experience of a kind where the layers build up and where such knowledge as they feel they’ve acquired by the end is a cumulative thing.
Because in my experience, that’s how we learn and how we feel things, by actually being moved and feeling that you’ve been taken on a journey. I don’t mean that in the kind of Californian ‘journey’ way, but on an artistic journey.
MARK: We absolutely do. I mean, the structure of the book, again, is quite mesmerizing. I mean that literally. I used to be professional hypnotist and I can assure you, it literally is.
CHRISTINA: That’s a very interesting thing to say. Goodness, what do you mean by that?
MARK: Well, I used to be a hypnotherapist, that was my original training.
CHRISTINA: Yes. Yes, I know. Yes.
MARK: And so, storytelling and particularly, embedding stories inside stories inside stories is quite… if you notice, a lot of film and TV and quite often children’s TV uses the technique. So it takes you very deep in the world and worlds of the book.
CHRISTINA: How interesting. I had no idea that that was a technique in hypnosis or hypnotherapy. That’s fascinating.
MARK: So this book will take you deeper than other books!
CHRISTINA: No, it won’t take you deeper than the other books! But I hope it will take people on some kind of satisfying journey.
MARK: So final question about the book. Obviously, we’re both artists, we’re writers and most people listening to this will be artists or creatives of some kind. And it’s a book I really think anyone can relate to.
Are there any of the lessons or stories in the book that you think are particularly resonant and relevant to those of us on the creative path?
CHRISTINA: I’ve already mentioned Mimi Khalvati and one of the things she talks about is difficulty, really. For me, poetry is kind of the king of the art forms. But I haven’t even tried, because I didn’t think I would be any good. And obviously, that’s not a particularly helpful attitude to have, but poetry – good poetry – is really, really, really difficult. In fact, good art of any kind is really, really, really difficult. And I suppose the lesson I think one would get from her… I mean, she’s talking more about her life than her poetry, but I think the lessons apply to both… is that it’s never easy.
And there’s an artist called Paul Brantford, who I interview in the book and who talks about going to look at paintings at the National Gallery hundreds of times. He will literally go back and look at the same painting and look at the layers and look at the brush strokes. And he talks about it as a journey he will never get to the end of. I think art is a journey you will never get to the end of and I think you have to expect it to be difficult and you have to enjoy that difficulty. And I mean, sometimes, when I’m writing… I had to write a couple of things last week and I found both of them agonizing.
And I was thinking, ‘Why do I think I like writing when this is so unbelievably unpleasant?’ But I think that’s the deal. It’s the kind of weird, complicated, love/hate relationship, where you love having written and there are points in the writing where you love it, but there are points where you absolutely hate it. And you need to hate it to get into the point where you have what Mikhail, Mishkin… I can never pronounce his name! Mihaly, Mihaly, I think his name is, something like that. He talks about…
MARK: Csikszentmihalyi.
CHRISTINA: Well done, yes. He talks about the whole concept of flow. In my experience, it’s very, very difficult to get to that point, because you’ve got so many bloody hurdles to leap over first. But I think if you want the creative life, you will not have an easy life. Don’t expect it to be easy. Expect it to be really hard, expect there to be lots of rejection, expect to have to work extremely hard, expect to go to bed most nights feeling dissatisfied with yourself and what you’ve done and feel like a failure. Which doesn’t sound like a particularly cheery lot, but you don’t do it if you don’t really, really want to do it. And that’s what it’s like.
And if you don’t feel those things, my guess would be that you’re probably quite mediocre. But who knows, you might be very, very lucky and a sunny personality and go to bed thinking, ‘I did really great today. I produced really good stuff,’ in which case, I’ve never come across anyone like you. But who knows?
MARK: I think most of us listening to this are familiar with the challenge you’re describing, Christina. And we’re up for it, anyway. It’s like that… probably apocryphal story about Shackleton advertising for, ‘Men wanted for polar expedition. Low pay, terrible conditions, chances of death high.’ And then apparently he was inundated because everyone wanted to go!
CHRISTINA: Yes. I mean, the theory of it. You only imagine yourself at the top of Everest, but you don’t imagine slipping and slithering down some dark, wet crag, but that’s also the reality. But of course, you don’t get the joys without the struggles and you don’t get the light without the darkness. And that’s where the whole concept of chiaroscuro comes from. And bring it on!
MARK: Right. Well, that sounds like the perfect time for us to segue into the Creative Challenge with the joys and struggles. So Christina, this is the point in the interview where I ask my guest to set the listener a challenge that’s related to the themes that we’ve just been talking about and something that they can either do, or at least get started within seven days of listening to the interview.
So what challenge would you like to set the listener?
CHRISTINA: Well, as a journalist and writer, it’s going to have to be a journalistic or at least writing challenge. And I am going to ask you to take one issue that interests you at the moment… it could be in the news, it could be in your life, it could be absolutely anything. In my case, for example, if I were told to do this, I would probably – if I were being really honest – have to write about property porn, because that’s my current obsession, even though I know it sounds like a very banal subject. So if I were doing it, that’s what I would choose. But it could be anything that’s taking up a lot of your headspace or just that’s interesting you.
And write 1,200 words about it. You can structure that in any way you like. You could go up to 1,210 words, you could go down to 1,190 words, but no you can’t go over or above that, because that’s what you have to do as a journalist. You have to be very, very precise. And from that subject, you should construct something that you think will be interesting for somebody else to read, that might make them smile or might make them moved or might make them think.
MARK: Brilliant, thank you. And if you publish that online, then do send us a link in the comments at 21centurycreative.fm/christina. That will take you to the show notes for this episode and you’re very welcome to share your piece of journalism with us in the comments.
CHRISTINA: And I’ll happily have a look at them. I can’t guarantee to give detailed feedback on them all, because I’m trying to earn a living. But I’ll more than happily have a look at them.
MARK: Brilliant, thank you. So Christina, the book, The Art of Not Falling Apart, of course, will be available in all good bookshops including Amazon. And do you have a website that…?
CHRISTINA: I do.
MARK: Where should people go to connect with you and find out more about you and your writing?
CHRISTINA: My website is christinapatterson.co.uk. And that’s ‘Patterson’ with two T’s. And the book is currently a trade paperback, but it…the commercial paperback at £8.99 is coming out in January and will be even less on Amazon. And there’s also an audiobook version out now.
MARK: Excellent. And you’re quite active on Twitter as well, aren’t you?
CHRISTINA: Yes, I like Twitter. I like Twitter when people are nice and when it’s funny. I don’t like it when people are horrible, which they often are.
MARK: Well, of course, all the 21st Century Creatives are nice! So I think you’re ‘Queen Christina’ on Twitter?
CHRISTINA: I’m ‘Queen Christina’ with an underscore at the end, yes. ‘Queen Christina_.’
MARK: Right, Queen Christina_ on Twitter. And of course, I’ll link to that from the show notes. Christina, thank you so much. As ever, it’s been an absolute pleasure listening to you. And I know that people listening to this out there all over the world, with their joys and struggles, I’m sure all have got a lot of wisdom and some smiles from this, as well.
CHRISTINA: Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Don’t Just Sell Something: Do Something! with David Hieatt
Jan 07, 2019
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative podcast is David Hieatt, entrepreneur, author, speaker and founder of The Do Lectures.
In 1995 David and his wife Claire Hieatt founded Howies – a company making clothes for people engaged in outdoor pursuits such as mountain biking, skateboarding and hiking.
Howies was a disruptive company, making clothes out of natural, low-impact materials, and taking a strong stand on environmental and political issues. Combined with its irreverent marketing tactics, this meant it attracted legions of passionate fans
In 2006 David and Claire sold Howies to Timberland, and the following year they began hosting The Do Lectures. This is an annual event, and a very unusual mashup of a festival and conference.
As David points out, inviting 100 people to a cowshed in Wales is very different to the kind of conference hosted at glitzy venues in New York or London. And yet it attracts speakers such as Tim Ferriss, Colin Greenwood from Radiohead and Bill Drummond of the KLF.
And if you’re not one of the lucky 100 people who can get into the cowshed, you’ll be pleased to know that all the lectures are available to watch for free via the website, TheDoLectures.com
A big theme of the Do Lectures and David’s books is about taking on big important challenges, and David’s latest venture, Hiut Denim, is certainly proof of concept.
The town of Cardigan in Wales was once home to the biggest jeans factory in Britain, with 400 workers making 35,000 pairs of jeans every week. But in 2002 the workers were all made redundant and the factory closed, apparently forever.
It’s a familiar story in developed western economies – factories close and industries die as manufacturing is outsourced to Asia and other places that can produce goods cheaper.
But David wasn’t happy with the familiar ending to the story, and decided to re-open the factory and re-hire all the workers who lost their jobs. People thought he was crazy, but the factory is now up and running, with a 3 month waiting list for jeans orders.
If you want to know how he did it, and if you’d like some inspiration on living a more unconventional, creative and rewarding life, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to this conversation with David Hieatt.
David Hieatt interview transcript
MARK: David what made you want to become an entrepreneur?
DAVID: I guess when I was growing up as a kid I was just super curious about brands and business, and I would have my entire bedroom apart from windows and the door handle covered in posters from Nike, Adidas, Wrangler, Levi’s. And when I was at school I was selling ice lollies in the summer because our school was two miles away from the local shop. So it fascinated me from a very early age.
MARK: And why brands rather than rock stars on your wall?
DAVID: I don’t know. I just felt that I gravitated towards them. I was fascinated by the stories that they would tell, by the products. For me, I was going to trade shows at 13. I’d put a tie on. I would get secret past tickets, and I went to Bukta, which was a clothing brand.
I was 13 and I went to them I said, ‘Look, unless you do these 23 points on your marketing, you’re going to die.’ And they went, ‘Oh, thank you.’ And they didn’t do them and they did die, and so I was always interested, and I don’t know why. I love music as well, but and I never really wanted to be a rock star. I just wanted to be that person who started that company that people like loved.
MARK: Okay. I want to pick up on the word ‘love’ because it’s not necessarily a word all of us would associate with companies. Could you expand on that?
DAVID: Well, I think for me, it’s like I was really interested in companies that, not only sold something but did something, and so like the likes of Patagonia now. Patagonia is a really good example; they’re trying to protect the environment by using their business as a tool to go and do the things that they care about. I guess, as I’ve grown a lot older and maybe a bit more smart, I was interested in those companies, and earlier on, I was just interested in companies that did great sports products.
But I loved Nike, and I loved Adidas. And I always asked the question, ‘What have they done to make me love it?’ And it was really about the sport and I love sport basically, and I loved teams. And so, it was really – brands were like a really good question for me in terms of a – like most people will go and try and find the answer. But I’d go, ‘a brand’s a really good question‘, because you have to go and ask brilliant questions for people to think that that’s their brand.
MARK: So I love a quote you have in your book Do Purpose where you talk about brands with a purpose, you say, ‘They do better and matter more because they make you feel something.’
How is it that they make us feel something? What is it the magic ingredient that you see in some brands and obviously is missing in others?
DAVID: I think what most brands forget is actually they’re talking to human beings, and human beings are mostly emotion. And so the most powerful of brands in the world take you on a journey which is extraordinary because it’s not that far, but it’s the 18 inches from your head to your heart, so in essence, they make you feel something.
I was doing a workshop in London a couple weeks back, and I was trying to explain to people, and I loved both brands Adidas and Nike, but Nike made you feel something for sport because actually sport is emotional and for whatever reason Adidas didn’t. Both made great products, both have great athletes, both always have great inventions, both have great marketing budgets, but Nike made you feel something. They took you on that journey, that 18 inches. And I think, actually, it’s the most interesting companies in the world make you feel something because of the thing that they’re doing.
And so most brands are a very well told story and for whatever reason Adidas wanted to use logic, or ‘We make this boots much better,’ and Nike made you want to dream about actually winning the race.
MARK: So in the mid-90s, you founded your own clothes brand Howie’s. What was the story you wanted to tell with that brand?
DAVID: The initial premise for it which appeared on the very first ad which was a very small black-and-white ad, but it said these words which actually was the essence of why we did it was, ‘We want to make you think as well as buy.’ And when I looked around at all of sports brands that were out there, mostly they just wanted you to buy and I’m going, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be a wonderful experiment as a company if it tried to make you think about the world that we’re living in and yes, buy the t-shirt, buy the great merino vest,’ but I was really fascinated by that question, can a company exist by making a great product? Yes. But actually asking you some really fascinating questions.
I heard the other day like, and this fact, I don’t know where this fact came from, but it was like a four-year-old asks 400 questions a day.
MARK: I can confirm this!
DAVID: But actually when they go to school at five, they’re told by the teacher to put their hand up. So they can’t free-form questions anymore, so they’re at their peak at four. So we ask the questions, we’re at our peak at four, and then we get crushed at five. But I think we are guided by the questions we ask and that’s for human beings and for brands.
So that was my question: can a company exist in this world, right now, that seeks to make you think about the world that you live in, and then try and sell you something? Because success wouldn’t have been just selling you something.
MARK: Right. So you want it to be more than a transactional relationship.
DAVID: Yes. I just felt that that was really an interesting company to be a part of as most the companies were really just interested in a transaction. They wanted that long number on your credit card and you to flip the cards and give him that, you know, CCV, you know, or is it CVV number?
MARK: Yeah.
DAVID: That was the relationship they most wanted. I’m going, ‘Well, actually, what if we can have a relationship with you as a human being and get you to buy?’
MARK: And obviously on the outside, it looks a huge success.
What did you learn from the process of that? How easy it is to get both sides of that relationship in sync?
DAVID: It’s a challenge because you’ve got to go and try and pay the wages every month. But actually, what I’ve learned is, from that was actually I can’t tell you how many people are coming to me and said like, ‘I’ve got every Howie’s catalog.’ Bear in mind, I don’t think they’ve done a catalog in, I don’t know, seven years and people just come up to me and go like, ‘I’ve got every one,’ and like literally, ‘I’m missing one, is there any way you can get me one?’
So we created a community and actually it was a very, very strong community, in the same way as Patagonia did. So I feel like actually, we were very successful in doing that. And another way to measure success is actually when we would grow in a business, we hadn’t really run a business before. We were kind of ‘clueless in Cardigan.’ But at the end of it PPR, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Puma, they came to us and said, ‘We’ve been trawling around the world and we’ve seen two brands that we would like to buy.’ One was Quicksilver and one was Howie’s.
The guy who started AOL, Steve Case, he wanted to do something. So all those companies, apart from Adidas, would have done something with us. So we’d done something in terms of a brand. The business was growing dramatically quick which is part of our issue. Everybody thinks, ‘Growth is really good for a business,’ but growth can also kill a business because you grow too quickly and you need a lot of money.
So it was a fascinating journey and I was a little bit heartbroken when we sold it because you’re suddenly not in charge of your destiny any more. And actually for a brand like Howie’s, it needs to be independent because that voice is so special. And it can’t be done by committee, there has to be one crazy guy or girl just going, ‘This is my heart, this is what I believe.’ And that’s why Patagonia is successful because as Yvonne and Melinda like saying, ‘These are our values. This is my company, you know, buy from me or don’t buy from me.’
MARK: And do you think the fact that it was from Wales is important as well?
DAVID: Howie’s started in ’95. We didn’t really move the company to Wales till 2001. It was at the same point… I do remember it because it was our first paycheck. So we’ve done it for six years as some kind of quest and hobby, and actually during those formative years we did some really odd amazing things, and we were going down to give some bands some t-shirts on a Saturday and this guy came out to me said like, ‘Who are you?’ I say, ‘I’m David from Howie’s.’ and he’s going, ‘Oh, my mate Jeff owns Howie’s.’ So I’m going, ‘Well, Jeff works for me, but he doesn’t own it.’ And it turns out that was Banksy. He’s doing a backdrop to a band.
But we were doing a lot of interesting things. We were banned from mountain bike events. We were banned from shows. We were just there trying to go, ‘Hey, we’re just going to ask these questions and not everybody’s going to like what we do,’ but it kind of got us this like… I don’t like the word cult following, but like there was a really strong community.
MARK: What questions were getting you banned?
DAVID: We couldn’t afford to go to one of these events to exhibit at and one of these things was like five grand. So we painted some girls with some t-shirts, and they were half naked, from the waist up. And so, we released them into the show at 10:00 a.m. and at 10:30 we were banned. But actually, the whole show came to a standstill. And actually, the question we really wanted to go is like, ‘How do small companies get noticed in this world?’ Because five grand is a lot of money.
And the interesting thing is the organizers of the event… I had to go down to Bath, it was like future publishing and they said, ‘Look, you need to come down and apologize to us in person.’ I’m going, ‘Fine. Okay.’ I went down said, ‘Look, maybe I didn’t think it through. It wasn’t perhaps the smartest thing in the world. I’m so sorry. I’m not going to do again obviously.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, okay. That’s fine Dave.’ And a week later they said, ‘Can you send us some photographs because we want to use that as marketing for next year’s.’ And I’m going, ‘Well, hang on, fuck you,’ in a nice, gentle, cute way.
When we launched the t-shirts, we put five t-shirts in a mountain bike show and we just put a little sign just says, ‘Steal these,’ and then the brackets was, ‘You’ll be rewarded with your good taste.’
MARK: And did they?
DAVID: Well, mountain bikers are much more polite than skaters. It took half of morning for them to walk past it maybe 40, 50 times and we were in the bushes trying to take some photographs, and we’re desperate to go to the toilet. And then when they actually took the t-shirts, they had a massive fight, somebody got a black eye. But, for five t-shirts, we had launched at the event and everybody’s going like, ‘Who’s Howie’s?’
MARK: You didn’t blend in?
DAVID: We didn’t blend in. A lot of people think you have to go and outspend a bunch of people, but I think to get noticed, my thing has always been, actually, well, you can do interesting things and stand out and they don’t have to cost a bunch of money. And I’ve kept that like almost pathos in terms of, ‘We can stand out’. We’ve never had a marketing budget of any real note, and in a way, if you can’t outspend people you have to start thinking at that point. And I think it makes you an interesting company, an interesting person.
MARK: So one interesting thing you’ve done which is really bucking a big trend is that you’ve reopened the jeans factory in your local town, in Wales.
DAVID: Yeah.
MARK: And at this point in history, you’re not really supposed to do things like that. We’re told that advanced Western companies, countries, we’re supposed to leave manufacturing to China and to be doing, I don’t know, consulting and software, and all of that good stuff.
So what made you decide that you were going to buck this trend and you were going to do it?
DAVID: That’s a great question and the thing is to give your viewers like some context is like Cardigan is a very small town, it’s on the far west of Wales, 4,000 people, super tiny. Except for one interesting thing was it had Britain’s biggest jeans factory and they made 35,000 pairs of jeans every week for 40 years. But in 2002, the factory closed and 400 world-class makers had nothing to make. And all I had to do really was wait 10 years for the internet to happen.
When I happened to be just in the right town, in the right time, with the right people, and so is an extraordinary moment of actually manufacturing like you said, manufacturing goes away and it like almost never comes back and that’s the remarkableness of the story. But the internet has changed the economics for makers. And so suddenly, the old factory fought the battle of who could be the cheapest, and it turned out it wasn’t us, and it’s never going to be us. And so I’m going ask a different question, reframe that question, ‘Can we win the battle if we try to be the best?’ We have, in a very small team, 200 years’ worth of knowledge of making jeans. We can go and play with the elite makers of jeans in the world and there’s a chance that we can win.
And so, that wonderful story of our town doesn’t want to be a tourist town. It doesn’t want to thrive just for six weeks a year. I want us to go and pass those skills on to the next generation and yet our town is a make it town, and it’s fighting for the right to make, and it’s fighting every day to pass those skills on to the next generation. And that’s like every battle that crazy people take.
The battles should mean something to you. It should make you feel alive, and you shouldn’t choose easy dreams. You should choose… well, that’s your mom’s job, ‘Go and be a carpenter.’ Nothing wrong being a carpenter by the way. But you should try and find dreams that are very, very hard for you to achieve because they push you to see actually where your true potential is, and you go, so I tell everyone I’m going to go, 400 people, that the job’s back, and the first couple years people just laughed.
And now, come June, we’ll be a 25-people, and there’s a lot less people laughing than they used to. And I just think that for creative people take on projects that make you feel alive. That push you really hard, and even if you don’t have a budget, then have ideas. Don’t worry about how big everybody else is, concentrate on your own strengths. You might be not big but you might be fast. Be an agile. This is such an exciting time for creative people. It really is. It is the golden time because if you have an idea, guess what? People are going to find out about it, and they’re going to find out real quick.
MARK: I love this. One of the themes of this show is ‘something old, something new.’ And it sounds like you’ve taken a fantastic local tradition and you’ve put it together with new forms of communication via the internet and a new business model.
DAVID: Absolutely.
MARK: Can you say a little bit about how you marry the two?
DAVID: It took me 12 months to figure this one out. I thought I was just starting a jeans factory, and we make great jeans and it’s like the Luddite, right? It’s huge skills 20, 30 years, Gladwell, talks about 10,000 hours to become a chess master. In the factory, some of them have done 50,000 hours of learning how to do one thing well, extraordinary.
And so, we can go and play with the elite makers in the world because we have the knowledge, and we have the skills, and we have the patience to apply them. But this is a very busy world that we live in, and so it took me about 12 months to realize that we needed to start another factory and that was the content factory because we’re in the jeans business, but we’re also in a storytelling business. And actually, the truth is, we have to be every bit as good as telling the story as we are making the jeans.
And so we’ve had to learn to master this old skills and new skills because the sewing machine is the old skill, the internet is the new skill, and the storytelling and actually getting people to know that we exist, and we need those two things.
And people say, ‘Which ones most important to you? The jeans factory or the content factory?’ I said, ‘I think of them as legs. The jeans factory is the left leg and the content factory is the right leg.’ Now, you need both to go forward. And so, you can’t really ask that question because that’s like a dumb question because we actually… if we make a great product, we have to go and tell people that we exist in this world.
MARK: I think this is so important because I’ve spoken to goodness knows how many creatives who make amazing things, and yet they said, ‘Why is that not enough? Why is that not selling? Why am I still struggling?’ And very often it’s the storytelling part. It’s the, ‘Why should people care about this?’ part.
DAVID: I get frustrated sometimes when people just go, ‘Oh, you’re just marketing. That’s just marketing.’ You go, ‘So,’ when I’m there going like, ‘Do you know it’s tiresome,’ because van Gogh needed a marketing guy because he didn’t sell anything in his lifetime. So, food on his table, he struggled. And I’m like going, ‘If you make a great product, tell a great story.’ And there’s nothing wrong with marketing, if you make a great product, your duty is to go and sell it. You’re not artists. You have to go and be commercial about this thing. You make a great product and you get food on your table by selling that great product, and marketing allows you to eat.
So when people say, ‘Oh, it’s just marketing.’ You go like, ‘Why make a great product if you’re not willing to tell the story?’ And why do you say that it’s just marketing when actually selling a product is a skill. It takes a lot of effort, and you have to read a lot about stuff in terms of it to be able to sell it. And you go, ‘So honor marketing because actually, if a great product doesn’t get sold, then why are you making a great product? You’re not van Gogh.’ And so it frustrates me and I kind of get a bit annoyed by that because it kind of sounds like marketing is just like a scummy thing, and you go, ‘It’s not. Actually, telling a great story about all brands,’ right? ‘All brands are a great story well told.’
MARK: And also it strikes me… I mean, it’s a true story and it’s a compelling story because you’ve put yourself on the line, you and your team. It’s not an easy challenge and yet you are restarting this old factory.
You’re reinvigorating the tradition and there was no guarantee it was going to work.
DAVID: Absolutely not. A lot of people begged me not to do it. And starting a factory is hard and that’s why most people don’t do it. I can’t tell you how many famous brands have come to us and said can you make jeans for us and I go like, ‘No. Go and start a factory, make your own stuff because we’re going to go and build a global denim brand, and we’re going to sell direct to our customer. That’s our business. Our business isn’t to go and make your product.’ But I think for creative people you have to do hard things because like everyone’s doing easy things. And that’s the reason we stand out is we’ve done a hard thing.
Starting a factory is super hard. Running it on a daily basis is super hard. Keeping that team together, understand the ebbs and flows of it, it’s hard. But actually, from a creative point of view, it’s like you have to be able to answer hard problems. And actually, you’re going to have a really fun life if you do that.
MARK: And what’s it been like seeing people come back into the factory and become a team?
DAVID: It’s like I have to take you back to 2002, and those gates closed and that clunk. No one out of those 400 people, not one, did they ever imagine, not one of those 400 imagined that that factory, this town would ever make jeans again. And they’d grown up there. Like Claude who cuts our jeans out, he started when he’s 15, and his big thing was, he said, ‘You know what my biggest worry was, is I thought I’d never have anybody to go and pass those skills onto.’ So he felt unfulfilled as a human being because he said, ‘I wanted to pass those skills on but I never thought I’d get a chance.’
And so, it was kind of an extraordinary thing. The interesting thing is mostly, with teams you’ve got to go and try and motivate them. Like everyone’s on a second chance, we did Howie’s, we sold it. We walked away, and for them, the second chance is to go and make jeans again. And the town’s on a second chance, actually this time we won’t fight the battle of who can be the cheapest. We’ll fight the battle of who can be the best. So you don’t need the motivation at that point.
And so, seeing all those people come back in going, ‘God.’ You know, you gotta understand is they’re world-class at doing this thing. Imagine if you were suddenly a world-class writer is told that he can’t write anymore or a world-class photographer, you go, ‘Hey, do you know what? You have to put your camera down.’ That’s like a hard thing to say to somebody. You go, ‘God, I spent 20 years learning this, and now it’s not going to be used.’
And you’ve got to understand, a pair of jeans for us is 75 different processes, and we only have to be world-class at 75 of them. It’s a very simple thing but very complex thing. And in order to make it look incredible and amazing, there’s an awful lot of skill. So they get a lot of satisfaction, and they’re suddenly in the films, and they’re suddenly in papers, and the Hiut Denim Company is a film waiting to happen. When we get those 400 people their jobs back, Hollywood is going to come and make a film on it, you go, ‘Yeah, fine.’
MARK: You told me about a great potential scene from the film the other day when we were talking. You talked about painting the floor at the beginning. Could you tell us that please?
DAVID: I am fascinated by teams, I love sports and actually, you can’t really be an entrepreneur unless you are able to build a team. When we were signing on the lease for the factory that we’re currently in, the landlord – we’d given him a long list of things they had to do in order for us to move in, and one of them was paint the floor, so it looks amazing.
And he went through the list and all the things he said, ‘I’m not painting the floor because I don’t have to.’ And I’m going, ‘Well, I’m going to bring in some of the smartest people on the planet here. I need the floors to look amazing. I want these people to be surrounded by amazingness. We’re making one of the best jeans on the planet. I can’t have a shitty floor.’ And part of me would get frustrated with these landlords, you know? I have problems and issues with people who don’t give a shit about their thing. Do you know what I mean?
MARK: Well, it’s just a transactional relationship again, isn’t it?
DAVID: Yeah. Like when somebody just wants to like do their job, be average.
MARK: I’m not good at that either, I know exactly what you mean.
DAVID: I find it really tricky. I wanted to lock him in the building because we’re next to the police station, so when they get out they’ll set the alarm off and the police will come and go, ‘What are you doing in there?’ And it’d be a funny story if they were the landlords, but in the end, I just walked out. Claire said goodbye to them. Claire is super polite. She’s much nicer than me and she said, ‘Well, you didn’t handle that very well.’ I’m going, ‘I hope I never handle that well.’
When I see people who don’t care about or don’t have pride in what they do, I need to get out of that building because I just can’t do it. So anyway, the next day, I went and spent £460 on floor paint, and the entire company painted the floor. And actually, that point was a really important point in the factory, and the team because actually, we all decided at that point, you know what, we didn’t want to be average, and the enemy was to be average. And actually, we all enjoyed painting the floor. And actually when we moved to the new building, a new factory, we’re all going to paint the floor again because I think that was the point where we became a team.
MARK: You’re literally preparing the ground, aren’t you?
DAVID: Literally. And it was an important moment. Do you know what I mean? It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s go and bond by doing an away day.’ It was kind of bonding by going, ‘Actually, you know what? If we’re going to go and get 400 people their jobs backs, we can’t be average and we mustn’t let that in the building in any form.’ It was an intention.
MARK: Yeah. Okay. So not content with founding companies and also writing seven books, you’ve also created a very unusual event which I’m kind of struggling to describe because I don’t think it’s quite a conference, and it doesn’t exactly look like a festival either.
Can you tell us a bit about the Do Lectures?
DAVID: Yeah. It’s a funny thing because like somebody said I’ve always struggled to go like, ‘What is it?’ I’m going like, ‘Do you know what? It’s two days and three nights of complete nutrition for the soul and the body and the mind.’ And when you start talking like that, people just go, ‘I have no idea what you’re on about.’ And then I ask the question and go like, ‘Well, if you… Okay, describe chocolate.’ And people go, ‘Ah,’ and it’s a really hard thing to describe, but we all like chocolate.
And so Do Lectures is hard to describe because it doesn’t fit into a slot, it’s a festival, it’s a conference. It’s a mash-up of all those things. But it’s a very good amazing three-day pause because most people don’t get that time just to just question everything.
And funny story is we used to have a deal with Virgin Atlantic. I mean, we love Virgin. And the deal was we’d buy the speakers Premium Economy tickets and we’d try and get an upgrade and they worked really well for us. And the deal, for them, was they would send their three brightest down. But after three years, they said, ‘Look, we’re going to have to stop this. Almost everybody that’s come down has resigned.’
And it does that. And people who come to speak think, ‘Oh, it’s for the attendees.’ And then the attendees go, ‘Wow, this is changing my life.’ Also, the speakers come down and go, ‘Man, I’ve never been to a thing like this before, like this has fried my brain.’
And we’re trying to work out why it does what it does, and it’s a combination of all the things. Doing it, the Wi-Fi is horrible.
MARK: Just for somebody listening to this, it’s on a farm in Wales, and is very limited numbers, is that right?
DAVID: Only 100 tickets, yeah. And we sell the tickets on March the 1st, and they’re sold out. That time, we get a waiting list as well, and and the last thing we want is any publicity for it because people go, ‘We can write an article,’ but, I mean, literally why? Because, we sell all the tickets. We can’t make it any bigger. The barn literally is packed.
So, yeah, it’s on a farm, West Wales, hard to get to, over three days three nights. It’s happening end of June this year. And we’ve been very fortunate in getting some pretty amazing speakers from Sir Tim Berners-lee. That’s always a good talk and I invented the internet, that’s a good talk. Perry Chen, ‘I started Kickstarter.’ We had Sachs, ‘I started Vimeo,’ Tim Ferriss came down in 2008. His podcast has got 100 million downloads. So we’ve attracted a lot of amazing creative people. We had Colin Greenwood from Radiohead talking about how Radiohead work.
So it attracts amazing speakers. It attracts, actually amazing attendees. It’s gone on to be a book company. We’re hoping that the Do goes and starts other companies that should exist in this world but don’t currently.
MARK: It’s hard to describe, obviously, but what do you think is the magic ingredient for you personally, what do you like best about it?
DAVID: I think it’s a chance to stop being busy and some of the questions that are asked, you’ve been asking for a long time, and perhaps you just see what is potential or what is possible, and sometimes, I don’t know about you, but those barriers that are in front of you are mostly put there by yourself.
And so, you have to find ways to remove those barriers and, actually one way to remove those barriers is by listening to people who’ve removed them already. And I think it shines a light in the road where you suddenly you go, ‘Oh, that’s the way forward.’ And you’ve learned to get out of your own way.
MARK: Yeah. Well, that’s a big reason why I do this show because I get to ask people like you and others who have removed a lot of barriers. What’s it, like? How did you do it? I hope people listening get something from that, and but also I learned a tremendous amount by just asking these questions.
DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I heard a story other day from my kids. They came back and I go, ‘How was school?’ And they go, ‘Fine.’ But if you ask a different question it’s like, ‘What great questions did you ask today?’ And so I’ve been asking my kids that they go, ‘No, Dad, honestly, will you stop doing that?’ but they can’t just say, ‘Fine.’
And so, when you suddenly ask a different question our life is really governed by the questions that we ask not the answers that we seek. And so, I find that a completely fascinating way to run companies where you go like, ‘Let’s ask a different question, let’s reframe that question,’ and that gets us into a really interesting spaces.
MARK: Well, that sounds like a great place to finish, David. My final question for you is what question would you like people to take out with them when they finish listening to this conversation, maybe some of the ideas going through their mind?
What question would you like them to take away and reflect on and maybe act on this week?
DAVID: I would like them to do a seven-day exercise and do it just for seven days and that each day just go, ‘What great question did I ask today?’
MARK: Okay, great.
DAVID: And do that for seven days. Because actually we start to then create a habit of asking great questions and then we start to get really interesting answers at that point.
MARK: Brilliant. I love that David, and I will be doing that one myself for sure. Okay. So now, if you’re listening to this and you’re feeling like your nose is pressed up against the glass a little with Do Lectures and thinking it’s so exclusive, actually, a lot of the talks are available online, aren’t they David?
DAVID: Yeah. We get that thing of, ‘Oh, the Do Lectures are elitist,’ but actually 100 people pay in order for there to be free talks in the world. So, I go and look at the app every morning, and suddenly there’s somebody from China watching the talks, somebody from Korea, somebody from Holland, somebody from Germany.
And so those 100 people, attendees, and the people who come to the workshops, they’re like patrons, and they support free. Myself and Claire haven’t earned a salary in 10 years. We don’t earn a salary from the Do Lectures, but I’m glad it exists in the world. Do you know what I mean? I think it’s like it doesn’t have a big sponsor. It’s independent. We pick the speakers because they’re doing interesting things, not because there’s another reason. And I know I’m glad it exists in the world and people write us letters and say, ‘Thank you for it.’ And I’m proud of it. I’m proud that it exists just to help others.
Like that beautiful journey from where you are now to where you could be, most people settle and the Do Lectures doesn’t want you to settle. You go like, ‘Well, what is your true potential?’ And actually, the closer you get to it, the happier you’re going to be because you suddenly go, ‘Oh, my god, I’m really fulfilled.’ And that’s the quest for the Do Lectures, like from a human point of view, is like, ‘Can you get to your point B? Where you are now, you’re at Point A.’
MARK: Beautiful. And so, where can people go to see the lectures?
DAVID: They’re on the website, free talks that I think there’s maybe about 300 talks.
DAVID: That’s correct. We have a little bit stressed on the factory because we got like nearly a three-month waiting list. There’s different stresses in business.
MARK: That’s a good one to have.
DAVID: Yeah.
MARK: And if somebody’s listening to this and they’re really enjoying the ideas and the provocations you’re putting out there, you’ve written several books, what would be a good book for them to start with?
DAVID: I wrote a book for the Do Book Company, you know, and it’s called Do Purpose. And the purpose driven companies really are the most interesting ones. There’s people who truly understand why they’re doing it and then actually what matters to them. And I think if you’re going to go and start companies, it’s, for me, those are the most interesting companies in the world, and that would be a good start.
It’s a very quick read. My old boss, Paul Arden, when I was at Saatchis, he wrote a book It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be. I wanted to make it like his in as much as you don’t have to spend 10 minutes. It’s like a 10-minute read.
MARK: Excellent. I will put links to, obviously, all your sites and the book in the show notes. David, thank you so much for sharing. It’s been a real pleasure listening to you.
DAVID: My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
The Healthy Creative with Joanna Penn
Dec 31, 2018
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author, under the name JF Penn.
Meanwhile as Joanna Penn, she is an expert on writing, publishing and marketing books, giving advice to authors via her non-fiction books, her e-learning courses and her popular podcast The Creative Penn.
Altogether she has written 28 books and sold over half a million copies in 84 countries and 5 languages.
She has been nominated for the prestigious International Thriller Writers Awards, and this year she was awarded Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Joanna was one of my guests in Season 1 of the 21st Century Creative, talking about The Successful Creative Mindset, which has been one of the most popular and enthusiastically received episodes of the show. So when she released a book called The Healthy Writer, I told her she really had to come back and complete the mind-body connection!
As soon as I read through the table of contents of The Healthy Writer, I started getting flashbacks to some of the health and fitness problems I’d encountered as a result of spending so much time sitting in front of a computer in pursuit of my creative ambitions.
As I said right at the start of Season 1, the 21st Century is the best of times, and the worst of times for creators – the technology that allows us to create amazing opportunities for ourselves can have a very big downside for our physical and mental health, if we’re not careful.
It’s typical of Joanna that she has not only made big changes to her own working habits in order to improve her health, but she then teamed up with a medical doctor, Dr Euan Lawson, and wrote a very practical and useful guide to taking care of yourself while you’re getting your creative work done.
The book is called The Healthy Writer, but as we say in the interview, just about all of the problems and solutions in the book apply to other types of creative, not just writers.
So if you’ve ever suffered aches and pains from too much time at the computer or in the studio, and if you want to be healthy and happy as well as creatively successful, then listen to Joanna’s advice on how to be a healthy creative.
Joanna Penn interview transcript
MARK: Joanna, the word ‘healthy’ and the word ‘creative’ probably are not words that we would naturally associate together. Why do you think that is?
JOANNA: Oh, that’s such a deep question, Mark. And I think there’s a few things. There are myths about creative people. We’ve heard of the poor author in the garret or the poor painter in the garret. So that kind of wealth poverty side also kind of spills into a health poverty, I think, in that people think, ‘You’ve got to be hunched over your desk as a writer or spending hours and hours and long nights of the soul, torturing yourself.’ The tortured artist, I think, is another myth that is unnecessary.
And it’s things like really bad stuff like drug addiction, alcohol addiction. And almost the romantic myth of the artist who commits suicide, if we’re going to talk about mental health. You’re a poet. Sylvia Plath being one of the most famous ones.
You and I are both positive people. We live in this amazing creative world, the 21st Century Creative world where we can be a healthy creative and we can create stuff and we don’t have to be tortured. We work hard. We go deep into ourselves, but that doesn’t mean we need to have a wreck of a body and we can look after our mental health wherever we are on those spectrums.
MARK: Yeah, let’s face it. There’s enough suffering in doing the work itself without loading on additional stuff.
JOANNA: Not loading on more. I don’t really like the word suffering. I think as we both know, Steven Pressfield and what he talks about in The War of Art and the fact that you’re entitled to your labor, not the fruits of your labor as said by Krishna, I think, in the Bhagavad Gita or something like that.
MARK: Yeah.
JOANNA: We are entitled to our work. And our work, the creative work is a struggle but that struggle is a lifelong struggle to create the best work we want to create in the world which is kind of the point of life. That doesn’t need to go hand-in-hand with completely wrecking our bodies so we die early.
MARK: That’s optional, right?
JOANNA: Yeah, exactly.
MARK: Okay. So, one small issue. Your book is called The Healthy Writer, and as we did with your book on the successful writer mindset, I’ve asked you to come and talk about it with a wider focus than just writers. So we’re talking today. We’ve subtly retitled your book, The Healthy Creative.
Am I right in saying that I think most of the conditions and issues faced in here are pretty common across different creative professions?
JOANNA: Yes, and to be honest, I think they’re probably common across most people, whether you work in an office or… especially sedentary work. And even if you’re a visual artist, a lot of that work is sedentary. Even a photographer who you might think is up and down and out wandering around. Photographers now spend so much time at computers. So I would say if anyone who spends time at computers is going to probably have a lot of these different things. But the modern world sets us up for many of these issues. So, yes, The Healthy Creative is completely awesome.
MARK: Great. And one thing I love about the book is the way you started. Obviously, we’ve talked about the myth of the unhealthy writer, the unhealthy creative. But I love the fact that you actually start with a book with seven reasons why writing, aka creating, is great for your health.
Maybe you could kick us off on a positive note by putting out one or two of those.
JOANNA: Of course. And I think this is so important because if you just read the list of things that can happen to your health, you wouldn’t carry on, right? But I think we have to start with saying, everyone listening to this show, and you and I, ‘We are going to create, regardless.’ So even if it does destroy our bodies, we probably will carry on despite that.
So the positive side… obviously, the point of your life may be to create so that’s really important. Creation is therapy in itself so we might talk about some of the mental health issues, but writing is also therapy. And I shared, when I got divorced, I wrote about six journals, I think, that year. Five or six journals. And in that year of writing, and whether it’s painting, whatever you do, I healed myself from an experience that had left me broken. Everything I put onto the page, all my self-destructive feelings… and I did have self-harm feelings and all the things that I wanted to get out, I got it out in my writing.
Writing and creative work is therapy and can help you process the world. I love going to look at art galleries and you can see in paintings. Recently I went and saw Guernica in Spain. Just that painting itself can tell us so much about the world and can help us process situations.
So those are some of the things. Also, helping other people. I think we create to help ourselves, to figure out what we think about things, but also by putting our work out there we help other people or bring pleasure to people. So, looking outwards away from yourself can also make you more optimistic.
And then I should also say The Healthy Writer, The Healthy Creative, the book, is co-written by a medical doctor, Dr. Euan Lawson. The book is full of medical studies that actually back up the fact that writing is good for your health. If you want to sleep better, there are even things about healing that you can potentially heal faster if you write, if you create. So there are lots of reasons why writing is so fantastic. And of course, you’re a coach, and writing helps people achieve their goals. I’m pretty sure you tell people to write down what they want to achieve.
MARK: Sure.
JOANNA: That is the type of thing that can help us achieve stuff. So there are so many positive aspects of creation.
MARK: So it’s not all bad news.
JOANNA: Definitely not.
MARK: Okay. But we’ve looked at the myths. We’ve looked at the good news. I think maybe it’s now time to roll up our sleeves and put on our surgical gloves and have a look at the other side of the coin.
I love the way you divided the book into two parts. The first part is the unhealthy writer, and the second part, obviously, is the healthy writer. And I must admit, actually reading through the list of contents for the unhealthy writer, I was having flashbacks. Back, neck and shoulder pain, RSI, repetitive strain injury, sedentary life and inactivity, sleep problems, insomnia, eye strain, headaches. I mean, there’s an awful lot of this that I could relate to and I’ve almost forgotten about.
I know you did a survey before you wrote the book, where you were asking your audience about what are the most common health issues you’re facing in relation to your profession. What are some of the most common things that came out of that?
JOANNA: Well, it was so interesting. Dr. Euan and I first did our own brainstorming session of all the things we thought would be an issue, and that was based on our own issues. Interestingly enough, medical doctors are people who suffer from all these things too because often they’re sitting in a chair for hours and then writing stuff.
MARK: Right.
JOANNA: So we had a list and we had put them in our own order of what we thought it would be. And then I did a survey to my audience at thecreativepenn.com, and over 1,100 people replied. Now, I was pretty stunned by the response in general because that’s a decent number.
And unsurprisingly, a lot of the things that Euan and I suffer from came up. Stress and anxiety. And what we did in the book is we actually put them into the order in which they came out. The most common are near the beginning.
It was really interesting around stress, anxiety and burnout because this is something that you almost don’t expect from creatives. There’s this role, I guess, of the creative hobby that if you write for your hobby or paint for your hobby, maybe that’s a relaxing, therapeutic thing all the time but most people listening might be professional creatives or people who have made their creative work a much more central part of their life.
Stress and anxiety and burnout around maybe doing too much. Doing that type of thing. And we can get into some more details, but loneliness, I was quite shocked by how many people felt lonely. Depression. Headaches, eye pain, back pain, weight gain, anxiety. These are all very common things but what I think is amazing, and we talked about this when we did the mindset discussion, but so often we think we are alone in what we’re going through. We think, ‘Oh, this back pain. It’s just part of the way it goes and no one else is suffering from exactly this.’ Or on the other side, or everyone is, so it must be normal.
But what’s so interesting is we do have so much in common and I found particularly around the mental health stuff, the more we talk about this, the more we kind of normalize the aspects of physical and mental health around the creative process, the more we can actually help each other because we realize it’s a common experience.
MARK: Originally, I was a psychotherapist, and the way I got started off as a creative coach was I would get creatives in my consulting room with stress, anxiety, burnout, stage nerves, writer’s block or just the sheer intensity of what creative people do.
And these days, Seth Godin talks about emotional labor, which I guess is a pretty good description of a lot of what we do as creatives. And it’s maybe a bit of a surprise to discover that if that’s what you’re working with, then that’s what you’ve got to learn to develop in yourself, is more emotional intelligence and resilience and so on.
JOANNA: I think also the physical side is really interesting and the process of writing this book was really interesting because I recognized that I spend so much time in my head, and I think this is probably true of most creative work. We’re in our heads all the time. And we almost forget that there’s a body attached.
So we treat our brains incredibly well in terms of we’re always feeding our brains. Maybe we’re reading a lot or we’re watching films or we’re looking at photographs or we’re doing the various things that put stuff into our brains and then we’re writing. We’re creating. We’re doing the things we do but we forget that there’s like a body attached. And we ignore the pain in our back. We ignore the headaches. We just take more painkillers. I used to eat painkillers like candy. I used to take painkillers every day. And these weren’t prescription painkillers, but as we know with many of the studies coming out of America particularly pain killers are something everybody does. And it shouldn’t have to be that way.
So as we’re going through this, there’s a lot about being mindful not just about the work you’re creating but also what’s going on in your physical and mental life. And just coming back to the stress thing. So often we think, ‘I need to achieve this by then, so all my time must be spent on that. If I have a spare hour, then that hour must be spent on actually creating the work as opposed to looking after my physical body.’
And so we prioritize the creation stuff and sometimes completely write off the other physical self. And so I think that would be one first thing and I was definitely guilty of it, is that thinking you’re just a head wandering around the world whereas you actually have this body as well.
MARK: I used to be the world’s worst at this. At university I got myself so stressed out that my eyesight basically shut down. Every time I went to try and read a book for my exams, I would just get the most horrific eye strain and headaches and so on. I sat down with a very wise doctor and he said, ‘Look. Your body isn’t designed to work all day, every day.’ And he ordered me to take my evenings off, which to me felt just terrifying because I was missing out on all that ‘study time.’ But actually, it’s one of the best bits of advice I ever had. And since then, pretty well just by default I take evenings and weekends off, and I’ve noticed a big benefit creatively either because I’m fresh. I’m not driving myself into an early grave. Or, I’ve just had some time off to have a life and take care of myself.
One of the ways I used to get stuck was to say, ‘Well, I haven’t got time to exercise.’ But now I know that’s not true. I can write maybe three or four hours a day and then that’s it. I’m done for the day as a writer. And it’s the same as a coach. I’ll only do two coaching conversations a day and then that’s it. I’m all coached out. And so there’s always time for half an hour of exercise here or there.
And I think that’s a big revelation for a lot of creatives I’ve worked with, that time spent taking care of yourself isn’t necessarily time taken away from your creative work.
JOANNA: Yeah, and it’s interesting because you said, ‘By default I have my evenings and weekends off,’ but it’s not by default at all. It’s called getting organized and reprioritizing. And so this is another big tip for people. Those people who are listening and saying, ‘Well, I don’t have time actually.’ Maybe you have a day job which is making the money and then you have creative work that you want to achieve, and then of course there’s real life, your family.
MARK: What’s that?
JOANNA: Yeah, exactly. Real life. And then there’s the self-care. And you mentioned exercise there. Actually, I’m going to come back to it. I wanted to just keep on the getting organized because this is the key. And I know you’ve talked about this. It’s like a productivity thing but it’s also a life management thing. It’s actually to organize your calendar. So you can take that time off, so you can have space not just for exercise but for actually rest. This is one of the funniest things as well, is that I said to Dr. Euan, ‘I just want to know what are the supplements, what are the nootropics that we can take so that we can hack this.’ I want a book that has productivity hacking tips so we can go, ‘Here you go. Now you can create all the time.’
And what was so hilarious is we actually had to rejig the healthy writer section, the part two because it really was about sleep and what you eat and how you move, and circling back on that exercise thing, I completely reframed exercise as movement. So this is another tip. Instead of thinking diet and exercise which are punishing words, think food and movement. And if you think movement instead of exercise, it becomes more about pleasure and enjoyment and actually stretching not because you have to because your timer went off but because your body feels better when you do this. We’re going out for a walk because your body feels better and therefore your brain feels better. And actually understanding that the best brain hack there is and all this scientific evidence is to sleep more, to move more, to eat food that makes your body work well. Those things are the best hacks.
MARK: I’m just experimenting in my head. If I say to myself, ‘I need to exercise,’ it doesn’t feel like something I want to do. But if I say, ‘I need to move,’ it feels like that’s coming from inside and I want to go and do it.
JOANNA: Yeah, or I want to move. Not just that I need to move, I want to move.
MARK: Yeah.
JOANNA: Because movement actually makes me feel good. And this is the thing. Again, this might come back to the myth of the creative. We have quite a punishing myth too, don’t we, this kind of, ‘You must have discipline.’ A lot of martial arts or even Steven Pressfield who… interestingly, I interviewed him recently about this and said, ‘You have a real martial edge to your work. Do we all have to be at war? Does it have to be the War of Art? Can’t it be enjoyment?’
Since I’ve been on this journey around body health and mental health, I’ve been doing yoga. And I’ve been doing yoga two years now and I’ve really changed my attitude around a lot of these things because of my experience. I can actually feel now when my body needs to move, and when I do move it feels good. So another thing to say to people. If you’re listening and maybe you’re angry right now at what we’re talking about, because I was sure angry when I started researching all this. I was, ‘I don’t want to do this. This will impact what I’m doing.’ But actually, when you start getting into this, this can just be such a positive life-affirming step really.
MARK: Yes. Maybe jumping ahead a little. One of the changes I made was around not sitting so much and I got a sit-stand desk. And I don’t use any timers but what I do is I sit until I’m aware that I want to stand up, and I can actually feel my body is fidgeting and wanting to stand up. And I realized I’ve been ignoring that feeling for years and years and years because the head on the top of the shoulders wanted to do a bit more and a bit more and a bit more. And then conversely, I’ll stand until I feel, ‘Actually, I really feel I want to sit down now.’
And I think that’s a really wise point you’re making about if you can really tune into… actually, you are your body, and what do you want as your body? If you go with that, it’s much easier and more pleasurable and more rewarding than saying, ‘Well, this is what you’ve gotta do because otherwise we’re not going to achieve our goals this week.’ Or, your health goals on top of your writing or creating goals.
JOANNA: We didn’t mention this before but this is not a weight loss book. This has nothing to do with weight loss. We do talk about the potential weight gain that goes into a full-time creative sedentary career but we’re talking about, this is health and feeling better, and if your body feels better, your mind works better. So that’s really important.
So let’s talk about ergonomics because right now I’m also standing up. We’re doing this interview in… I think both of us, whenever we speak on the phone…
MARK: I always stand up for podcasting.
JOANNA: Me too. And I have just a topper. A topper thing that goes on the top of my desk. I do have a sit-stand desk but the motor stopped working! So you can get these toppers. So if you’re listening, you can put that on. I have a Swiss ball. When I sit, I use a Swiss ball which also means I can do back bends. And just circling back on yoga. One of the miracle things for back pain is the spinal twist which sounds like torture but actually it’s very pleasurable. You can just look it up on the internet. I can do back bends over my Swiss ball.
But the other thing I’ve started doing because I write in cafes, is I now take a laptop stand. It’s a folding one. It’s called a Nexstand, N-E-X stand. It’s amazing. It folds up really small and now I can have my ergonomic setup at a café as well, and I take the external keyboard.
So it was the last cut and it’s not actually in the book because it’s something I’ve only sorted out recently. I think this is kind of the big tip. It’s like your physical health is like an onion and your mental health is a bit like an onion, is you go like, ‘What’s the first thing that’s hurting?’ For me, I ended up in a hospital with suspected spinal tumors. My back pain was so bad that they thought I was dying of it. And it’s taken about six years now to get to where I am at this point, which is pretty much pain-free back. But all the things I’ve gone through have led me to this point. But you have to kind of peel things back.
And a lot of people laugh about ergonomics. They’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah. That’s like one of those things you do if you’re in a big corporate and it seems like a thing you do.’ But if you’re working from home, you do have to think about your ergonomics, the way your work space is set up in order to make sure you don’t screw things up. So that neck pain you get from having your chin near your chest because you’re looking down at a laptop screen, that can overstretch the muscles in the back of your neck and then you end up with a tension headache.
MARK: I’ve had that one.
JOANNA: It can go from from not moving enough and really bad lower back pain. Just thinking about all the different parts that make up your body and the repetitive movements we do in our daily life, those are the things we need to offset with some of these other tips and practices so that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t think about your back if it doesn’t hurt, but the only way to not make it hurt is by looking after it.
MARK: And it’s also quite fun to fight technology with technology, isn’t it? You’ve got this stand, we’ve both got new desks. Speech recognition is one of the things I use. At one stage I had such bad RSI in both my hands and wrists and arms I couldn’t type for six months. And when you’re running an internet-based business it’s kind of inconvenient. And really, it felt like getting my life back when I discovered Dragon Naturally Speaking. This was about 10 years ago. Since then I use it if I’m writing prose, then that’s my… am I allowed to use the word default? That’s my considered means of writing because it’s so freeing to be able to walk up and down the room and just dictate.
There is the diet and movement and exercise advice but maybe there’s some kind of technological gadget that could help you like, you know, the Nexstand or whatever it is.
JOANNA: Yeah. And I guess we should also circle back on the loneliness and isolation because there are technological ways you can fix this too but they generally involve using the internet to meet actual people.
So, for example, when I started writing I was implementing accounts payable into large corporates and I had this corporate job. I was a cubicle slave. I was working with technical people doing coding and things like that. And I didn’t know anyone who was a creative. In fact, that’s when I heard of you. I did one of your courses. Do you remember? Way before we ever met and became friends.
MARK: Yeah.
JOANNA: But it’s so funny because I would find these people on the internet and be in awe of them, and then what happened over time is I started my own podcast and met people that way. I met people on Twitter. And from there, moving from a technological space… being an introvert, this was great. Using that to then meet people at conferences, conventions, on the podcast and then having coffee. Like physical, actual coffee with real people in real life.
And this is a huge deal and there’s a lot of research into social isolation. I think we have a quote in here somewhere basically saying that loneliness can be as bad as something like smoking in terms of your life expectancy. I can’t quote the exact survey but it is damaging. It’s here. Here we go; this is from the book. It can be as bad as smoking a pack a day and it’s considerably worse than not exercising or being overweight. This research on loneliness is it really is bad.
So if you’re sitting there feeling that you’re lonely, then you really do have to deal with that. You have to get out there and meet some people. And what’s so brilliant about the internet is that you can use it to find your communities. And I totally get it if you’re someone who’s in a small place. Maybe not loads of money. You can’t travel. But that’s why you can meet people in these virtual spaces. There are things you can do to create together. I’m in the writing community. People kind of write in different time blocks together even though they’re apart. There are Facebook groups. And then, of course, if you do have a bit more of a budget, you can go to events.
One thing I would say is, really good idea to go to the same event for multiple years. I go to Thriller Fest in New York and I go every second year because I’m in Britain and it’s quite expensive. But over the years I’ve been going about six years now, people now know who I am. I don’t have to force myself into the community. I already am in the community and you get to know people over time. So those are some tips around loneliness and isolation. But essentially you do have to make an effort to expand your social life in that way. I know it’s difficult. What are your thoughts on that?
MARK: I think it’s a really important thing and I was slightly surprised to see it in the book. You’ve got a whole section on community. But actually, it makes complete sense. And one thing it made me think about is choice of exercise. I started cycling when we moved out to Bristol, and that’s great, but then after a while I was starting to lose my motivation a bit and I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ And I thought, ‘Well, okay. You spend your time at your desk, writing books or having intense one on ones with clients and then you go out and do another long, lonely intense pursuit.’
Since realizing that I’ve got my eye on joining a local martial arts group because I used to do Aikido. And one of the great things about doing martial arts or some kind of team sports is you’re there with other people. You’re rolling around and mucking about and you encourage each other. And actually, you look forward to the social aspect as much as the physical aspect.
So I think if anybody’s struggling for time and they’re thinking, ‘Well, exercise and community,’ or whatever, go and do some kind of team sport or group activity.
JOANNA: That is a really good point, and I found that with yoga. I have found that you start to talk to people, before and after classes and we’ve met people and started to have coffee with people. And then we’ve even been on a retreat, five days of yoga and it all becomes quite buddy-buddy then. So I think that’s great.
The other thing you said there which is brilliant, is you said mucking about. So you’re mucking about with someone, which if people don’t understand that British term, it means having fun. It means playing. Seriously, I’m 43 and I’m only just starting to learn about play.
MARK: Well, better late than never!
JOANNA: Exactly. But this idea of play, doing something for no reason at all other than that you enjoy it. It doesn’t have to be towards your body of work, the thing you are creating in the world. And seriously, for over 40 years everything I did had to be for a reason. And that is why I never really understood or never embraced exercise or physical health as anything more than something that would get me towards my next goal. Being an alpha personality but still an introvert, everything was driving. People who had fun, I was like, ‘Why aren’t you doing something useful for the world?’ Or, you know, ‘Why aren’t you creating more things?’ And it’s so interesting because part of my physical journey is really understanding this mucking about idea. Now you have kids, so you have to muck about with your kids. I’m happily child-free but I think whether you have kids or not, kind of this learning about play… or maybe not learning about it, like stop reading books about play. Just go and do some play.
And for me now, I’ve been doing handstands and headstands at yoga and I’m like, ‘Wow. I’m doing a handstand. That’s actually really fun.’ And it’s using my body in a way that I don’t do normally and it’s mucking about, basically. And it’s so interesting to realize that we lose touch with so much of this. And as creatives, we often say, ‘Oh, everybody’s a creative but we get educated out of it.’ I almost feel like that’s the same with physical confidence, is as children we’re just running around, mucking about. And then we go into these jobs and our bodies become very sedentary and we stop using our bodies and then we lose the fun of it. So it really is rediscovering fun and making this less serious. Does that make sense?
MARK: Yeah. I’ve got several clients who swear by dancing. They go to dance classes.
JOANNA: And dancing is fun.
MARK: Right. It doesn’t have to be grinding it out, you know, on the mountain face or down the gym.
JOANNA: Yes, and I have dancing on my list as well. And I think this list idea again, if you’re Type A, you make lists for everything. But this list of what activities, physical movement things have I enjoyed? For example, I’ve been canyoning. Do you know canyoning? It’s where you sort of clamber down rocks and jump through caves.
MARK: Well, that sounds fun!
JOANNA: Oh, it’s really super fun and I did it when I was in New Zealand, and it’s like being an adventurer. And obviously you’re wearing a wet suit and things and you get wet and you jump in things and you climb. And I’m like, ‘I should do that again. I should put things back on my list that I enjoyed or that I feel physically alive as well as mentally alive.’ So that would be another tip for people. You mentioned martial arts and you’ve enjoyed martial arts before, so it’s not just exercise. It’s because you know that you enjoy that. Your body enjoys it and your mind enjoys that.
MARK: Yeah. And it’s like the way you talk about yoga. I can tell you really love doing it. Now, I’ve tried yoga on and off for years and sometimes I would do it every day for several months. But in the end, I just decided there’s just something about it doesn’t really gel for me, whereas what I’ve gotten into more recently is kettlebells and it just feels absolutely right. And I look forward to doing it.
So I think there’s something here about trying a few different things and see what clicks for you, because when you really get that enthusiasm for something then you look for excuses to do it, not excuses not to do it.
JOANNA: I totally agree. I would also say that you need the right teacher. So I think yoga is actually quite similar to martial arts in this way. I tried yoga for probably 20 years, on and off. I was like, ‘My back hurts. Everyone says yoga’s good for your back. I’ve gotta go to yoga, or I’ve gotta do meditation. I’ve gotta sort it out.’ And until we moved here and found a teacher who I really gelled with and actually she’s in the book as one of my acknowledgements because it finally gelled with me when I had a teacher who understood my body.
And it’s not like I’m massively obese or anything. I’ve got a few extra pounds, like most of us but I don’t look like a yoga woman from Instagram. I’m not going to go straight into some perfect posture. But what I found was a teacher who was happy and enjoyed and never judged and was very just natural and good at the way bodies work. All kinds of bodies.
And I think this can be the problem that people have. They think, ‘I can’t do that because my body shape doesn’t fit what is on Instagram.’ Social media can be really damaging in this way, right?
MARK: Yeah.
JOANNA: I mean, really bad.
MARK: Maybe take a bit of time off from all of that.
JOANNA: Yes. Or start finding other people. There were lots of accounts also on Instagram that are people who look like real people, and that was what happened to me. It’s like I found yoga for real people as opposed to yoga for women who look like yogis. It’s really fascinating that we find these different things and then we start learning how we can deal with them.
The other thing about yoga… I’ll just be completely honest. I spent the first month hating it. I was so angry. I was angry, angry. And my husband, Johnathan, he said to me, ‘I think maybe you shouldn’t do yoga because it just makes you angry and unhappy.’ And it’s so interesting because that first month or so… I think it might’ve even been three months. I was so angry with myself. I couldn’t even bend over properly. I couldn’t sit cross-legged. I couldn’t do anything, and everything seemed to hurt.
But the point is that all of this stuff… like running. Dr. Euan is a runner and he has several chapters about running in The Healthy Writer, and I’m not a runner. I don’t want to run right now, but it’s so interesting the way we both talk about these different things. Some people discover running, whatever their body type, and absolutely love it.
So I guess like we’re saying, what it’s about, choosing things, trying them and then also maybe having a bit of patience in the same way that you or I would tell someone who gets on the internet and starts blogging and says, ‘Nothing’s happening,’ or, ‘I’ve started my business and nothing’s happening.’
MARK: Right, yes.
JOANNA: Or someone who comes to martial arts on day one and expects to look like some Ronin from a movie. All of this is practice. And this is the other thing. Yoga and writing, or yoga and any kind of creative work, and martial arts, it all is practice. So nothing is wasted. When you’re creating, it’s part of the process, it’s part of your practice, it’s part of your life journey. So that would be another thing, is to consider it on like this parallel path, your physical practice that goes alongside your creative practice.
MARK: Yes. Maybe look back at some of the original manuscripts or canvases or images that you produced when you were first setting out and look at what you’re doing now. And day by day, week by week incremental progress can take you a very long way.
JOANNA: Absolutely.
MARK: Okay Jo, and obviously even before you wrote the book, I can see that you’ve been reflecting and learning and making discoveries in your own life.
I’m curious; what was the biggest surprise that came out of what you learned from writing the book, doing the survey and working with Dr. Euan? What discoveries did you make while you wrote this?
JOANNA: Oh, goodness. I think this food and movement thing, for me, personally was the biggest shift in my life that I did go from a very punishing view or even thinking, ‘I must exercise in order to offset my calories.’ This is not just a female thing but definitely a lot of women have this. It’s like, ‘I must offset my life calories by exercising.’ Which is just such a damaging thing.
MARK: Right.
JOANNA: And again, it’s either punishment or it’s to offset other things we put in our mouths. I definitely had a sort of moment around sugar, and I include in the book my letter to sugar, which is really realizing that as someone who considers herself to be an independent, strong woman that actually I’m an addict and the level that I had gone with sugar really was a sort of sanctuary for everything. And it wasn’t just when I was depressed. I want sugar when I’m happy, as well as when I’m sad and when I’m angry; it’s the thing. It’s how I’ve defaulted.
Movement as pleasurable. I had lost all sense of moving my body as pleasurable, and pleasurable was eating some kind of sugar. And recognizing that I had this addiction to a substance, and whatever that is… and for some people the addiction… I think possibly is what we’ve talked about… other people can be addicted to working. Like workaholic.
MARK: Yeah. Tell me about it.
JOANNA: Exactly. I think this is the other thing. We all know this. There is an edge to everything. There is the positive and there is the negative. I did six months with no sugar and now I happily eat some sugar. But at least I’m aware of it. This is this awareness that we have. It’s like, ‘Yes, I would like a gin and tonic and I will enjoy this.’ For me, personally there has been this massive turnaround in physical enjoyment that is not related to food. And maybe that sounds mad but I actually think people will probably get this, that this is a different way of living that balances out the physical movement with working.
So like you said about me and yoga, I got up this morning, I was at the café between 7:00 and 9:30. I wrote my 1,800 words on my next novel and then I went to a yoga class. And so, before 11 a.m. this morning I had created something new in the world and I had moved in a happy way that made me feel good. And that is how I’m now running my mornings. And I definitely just feel so much better for it in general.
Circling back to what we said at the beginning about the positives of writing or the positives of creativity. I needed to write this book for myself, and in the same way it’s helping other people. But so often we have to go through this stuff. We have to examine this stuff for ourselves so that we can help other people.
MARK: It’s maybe an unexpected theme of this interview for me, is hearing you talk about pleasure so much.
JOANNA: That’s because you know me well, Mark!
MARK: But the original question, why do we not associate being healthy with being creative? Well, maybe we think creative is pleasurable but healthy doesn’t really feel pleasurable, and yet the more you talk about it, the more you talk about the pleasure of movement, of creating, of socializing, of feeling better overall and a different relationship with food.
It sounds like there’s a lot more pleasure coming into your life. It’s not about taking it out.
JOANNA: Exactly. And also, like we said about tuning into things, so much of our creative work is about tuning into the world. So, if you’re a photographer, you’re looking around you, waiting for that shot or you’re going to create that shot in some way. So you’re looking, you’re looking. And as writers, we have to notice detail. There are lots of things that we have to notice about the world around us but this physical journey is actually about noticing your body. And yeah, it is a real shift.
And remember this onion metaphor as well; it’s the same in mental health, right? Being a psychotherapist you know this. You deal with one thing and you find something else. This is a work in progress for me as much as anything else. And like I said, the anger and the pain that I had at the beginning of yoga is completely different to how I’m feeling right now about it, and hopefully as time goes on things will continue being different. So I think it’s a surprise for me too to discover this.
And I was also a bit angry about the discovery after writing this book that really there was no hack. We looked at the latest research into nootropics, we looked at the micro dosing that is going on in the Silicon Valley. You know, I was like, ‘If we can just get some LSD, everything will be amazing.’
MARK: Sorry to disappoint you, folks!
JOANNA: Exactly. But there is some really interesting research and I do think the laws will be changing around cannabis, around some of the nootropics, some of the hallucinogens. There’s some really interesting books out about that, but that obviously where we are right now in the world… this is not something that you can go around doing in a safe manner. And even if those things can become part of our lives, they are extra, whereas what we can do like right now… it doesn’t cost any money to sort out your sleep. It really doesn’t. You actually have to remove things from your bedroom, like your phone, like your TV. If you have a TV in your bedroom, take it out.
MARK: Surely nobody has a television in their bedroom, Joanna!
JOANNA: You’d be surprised! Really paying attention to how your body feels after you eat something. We’re like, ‘I’ve got a tummy ache.’ Well, okay. So why do you have a tummy ache? Is it because you ate way too much or is it because you ate a certain thing that you ate might not agree with you so much?
And paying attention to stuff without judgment. This is the other thing that’s changed for me. It’s the not judging myself so much, not going, ‘Oh, you’re so bad. You had pizza and beer. That’s really naughty. You must go to the gym and lift a lot of weights.’ So if I have a pizza and beer, which is great and I can say that was a celebration and I enjoyed it, like enjoying the moment instead of feeling guilty. And then the next day going, ‘Okay. So not that I have to punish myself and now go to the gym and lift loads of weights,’ but I say, ‘Okay. Today’s a new day. I’m going to go walking. I’m going to go to yoga or go and lift weights because that’s what I do to make my body feel good.’
So it’s kind of separating the joy of movement and experiencing the world with all of our senses from that kind of punishment. So it’s making it part of our creative and physical journey together.
MARK: Great. I understand for our Creative Challenge you have a little exercise that we can do to start doing that right this moment. Isn’t that right, Jo?
JOANNA: Absolutely. We’ve talked a bit about it but in terms of the Challenge. People listening, scan your body right now. Whatever you’re doing, if you’re driving or walking, whatever you’re doing, scan your body. Where do you feel pain or tightness or stiffness or something that is not pleasurable in some way? There will be something, I’m sure. And then what gives you the most trouble? Is it that lower back twinge?
And what one thing can you do in the next week to help whatever that is? Whether that is just moving more, maybe there’s pain in your tummy. Maybe thinking about what you were eating. What can you do to start paying more attention to your body? So that is the Challenge.
MARK: Thank you, Jo. That’s a great start. And I think this is one of the interviews that will repay repeated listening. I think there’s quite a lot in here about motivation to be healthy, as well as being healthy. And also I would really encourage people to go and check out the book, The Healthy Writer by Joanna Penn and Dr. Euan Lawson. As we said, it applies to creatives of all shapes, colors and stripes, and it really is packed with a lot of interesting facts and advice and conditions that maybe like me you’d forgotten about that you suffer from. So Jo, apart from the book, where else should people go to get more of your wisdom?
JOANNA: Sure. TheCreativePenn.com. Penn with a double ‘N’. You’ll find everything there, blog, podcast, all my books. And I also have a podcast, The Creative Penn Podcast, so come along if you want to learn more about writing and publishing and book marketing. And I guess the successful author mindset.
MARK: Yes. I mean, they kind of go together, don’t they? It’s the mind and body.
JOANNA: Absolutely.
MARK: And also, maybe I’ll link in the show notes, if anybody didn’t hear Joanna’s interview with me about The Successful Creative Mindset from Season 1, that one definitely you should have a listen to. It really went down very well with listeners and is a really nice complement to this one.
So Jo, thank you. As always, I’ve learned a lot from listening to you and I’m sure everyone else has too.
JOANNA: Thanks so much for having me, Mark.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Tyler Hobbs: an Artist Who Paints with Code
Dec 24, 2018
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Tyler Hobbs, a artist who creates stunning images by writing a computer program to generate each new artwork.
Tyler HobbsA few months ago I was talking to a friend who suggested I check out the artwork of Tyler Hobbs, as an example of generative art. It turns out that there’s a subculture of artist and programmers using computer programs to create original art.
It sounded like an interesting idea, but I didn’t have great expectations of the art itself. Then I landed on Tyler Hobbs’ website and I was entranced by what I saw.
There was definitely a futuristic, computerised look and feel to the images, but they also had an evocative, even haunting quality. The atmosphere of the artworks reminded me of some of my favourite ambient and techno music, or science fiction movies like Blade Runner and Metropolis.
I was also intrigued to see that quite a few of the images were marked ‘sold’ and unavailable. Instead of creating an image and printing it multiple times, Tyler is creating one-off original artworks. And when a collector buys the work, Tyler ships the image with a copy of the program used to create it.
The more I looked, the more absorbing the images became. I was also intrigued by Tyler’s writings about generative art and creativity. And questions kept popping into my mind:
How do you make this kind of image?
Why go to the trouble of writing a program instead of drawing or using photoshop to create the images you want?
How do you create such emotionally compelling images by writing computer code?
What can generative art tell us about the future of art?
In the end, I emailed Tyler and asked if he would come on the show, so I could ask him these questions and share the answers with you. He kindly agreed, and gave me a fascinating and insightful interview.
And not only did I learn a lot about Tyler’s artistic process, I also found plenty of things I could relate to in my own practice as a poet.
If you love futuristic art, or if you’re curious about the intersection of technology and human creativity, I’m sure you’ll find this conversation as riveting as I did.
And if you think computer art sounds a bit cold and cerebral, then I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear what Tyler has to say about technology, emotions and creativity in the brave new world of generative art.
You’ll get a lot more out of this interview if you look at some of Tyler’s art as well as listening to him talk, so you can see some of his images here in the show notes and below in the interview transcript, and there are lots more at Tyler’s website TylerXHobbs.com
‘Afterwards’ by Tyler Hobbs
Tyler Hobbs interview transcript
MARK: Tyler, what exactly is generative art?
TYLER: Generative art can be a little bit tricky to explain sometimes. But kind of the core of generative art is that it’s pattern and process based. So in the current day, you’re typically going to be creating artwork through a program if you’re making generative artwork.
So for myself, my artwork is created entirely through programming. I don’t draw things by hand or use any sort of Photoshop or post-editing in any of my work. There’s a few exceptions to that. But largely, it’s done through custom computer programming. So I sit down and I develop a custom algorithm that will generate an image usually with no input. So it’s working from a blank slate. That’s the best description of how generative art is typically created these days.
MARK: So there’s no direct manipulation like with Photoshop or a mouse or a brush or a scanned images? You’re writing lines of code that then generate the image, is that right?
TYLER: Precisely. Yeah, a lot of people, whenever they see digital artwork, it’s hard for them to imagine not having interacted with it directly, but with generative artwork you really give up a certain amount of control because you’re working through a program.
And it’s also important to point out that typically, with generative artwork, you’re not working towards a single image, per se, you’re developing a program that has the characteristics to where, on average, the images that it outputs will look pretty good. So you’re specifying a whole set of aesthetic preferences and patterns in a system rather than developing one specific image.
‘Progress 3B’ by Tyler Hobbs
MARK: So is this why on your website you’ve got a series of similar-looking images?
TYLER: Exactly. The programs that I create tend to involve a lot of randomness. And the randomness is used very carefully and very deliberately. I might use it anywhere from the high-level structure of the image in terms of how large forms and shapes are placed and organized, all the way down to very fine details, little random rough edges and splatters and things like that. I also use randomness for colors and color selection.
So every time that I run the program, I get a different output. And that allows me to do one kind of special thing, which is I can offer multiple images from the same program at a little bit of a lower cost to keep my artwork affordable.
MARK: Okay, so this is interesting. You run the program and then there’s a random element within that. So, when we use the phrase pre-programmed, we tend to think of it as something has been predefined. But for you, the program is actually a way of kind of scrambling that and giving up control?
TYLER: Absolutely, absolutely. I mentioned that the randomness was used very carefully. The randomness turns the program into a set of guidelines rather than an exact description of an image. So the randomness both helps me to give up control to some extent and allows things to happen maybe a bit more naturally. And it also helps for exploration. When you give up some of that control, the randomness will sometimes present new ideas that I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. So it’s definitely an ally in the process.
MARK: Okay, but we’re talking randomness rather than artificial intelligence? You wouldn’t say you’re creating an AI and using that?
TYLER: Yeah, definitely. AI is a very different sort of beast from what I’m doing. My programs are relatively simple compared to what AI does. AI is trying to build some sort of rough understanding of the problem that it’s working on, in some sense. And my program has none of that sort of memory or understanding that an AI has.
MARK: And what drew you to generative art rather than the more traditional kind?
TYLER: It was an interesting development. I’ve always really enjoyed drawing and painting and I did that for quite a few years. And studied traditional portrait drawing and figure drawing and landscapes for quite a few years. But I also went to university to study computer science. I had a very strong computer programming background and I was doing that as a day job at that point.
I had this awareness that artists are best served by trying to utilize things that are unique to them or that are part of their character or their life experience. And so you try and bring everything to the table that you can when you’re working on artwork.
And for me, it became pretty clear that I should try to involve the computer or programming in some way. And that did not immediately lead me to generative artwork. Some of my first attempts to link the two were laughably bad. But eventually, I got the idea that maybe I can write a program that would generate a painting. And that was the mindset that I had when I first started making generative artwork.
A couple of months after that, I started to stumble upon the generative art community and learn that it was already a thing. And I very quickly figured out that this was something that was going to work well for me and I’ve been pursuing it since then.
MARK: So you actually came up with the idea and then you realized that other people had developed it independently?
TYLER: Absolutely. And they were doing a much better job than I was doing at the time.
MARK: Tell us about the generative art scene. I’d never heard of it till I came across your work. How big is it? Who’s in it? What kind of range of work is in it?
TYLER: It’s an interesting scene. It’s not that large. And it never has been that large. Generative art has been around since the late sixties with some of the earliest computers, usually in kind of a military or scientific establishment. The first generative artists came out of that and so it’s never really caught on; the normal art scene hasn’t been a huge fan of it. And it’s just been a weird side project that some programmers have done in their spare time.
These days, it is picking up a bit more. And I think that’s primarily because of a couple of reasons. One is that the tools are much more accessible. So thanks to things like open-source software there are a lot better and more readily available tools for anybody to start playing around with creating generative artwork. And I think the other development is that as a consequence of that or as a consequence of more people having a programming experience, we start to get kind of more artists that also know how to program in the mix. And they’re starting to change what gets created these days. So generative art I do feel like is going through a nice uptick, but it’s still a very small community.
MARK: Okay. And people are coming at it from both sides. It’s the programmers who are thinking, ‘Hey, we could use this to make images.’ And then there’s artists who I guess whatever art form we have these days, more and more we’re using some kind of digital electronic technology to facilitate or record or publish that. So it’s converging from both sides.
TYLER: Absolutely, I would say it’s still usually dominated by programmers deciding to play around with doing something a little bit more fun with programming then their normal day job allows them to do.
But there have always been artists that have stumbled into this arena as well. So one of the most well-known generative artists is a guy by the name of Manfred Mohr, and he was one of the early pioneers and he was an artist that kind of entered the space and he had a very different approach from the programmers. And so, it brings a totally different mindset, which I think is an awesome and very positive thing. So, yeah, people are kind of attacking it from both ends.
MARK: And do you need to be able to code? I mean, if I’m a painter listening to this thinking, ‘Wow, I’d like to get into that but I don’t know how to write code,’ is that going to be a big barrier to entry for me?
TYLER: I would say that coding makes a very big difference. There are ways to do it without coding. There are some environments that are really a type of programming but maybe in a more visual style, rather than textual controls. You have kind of visual controls. So that’s one option for people who don’t know how to program. Another is that, and maybe we’ll talk about this a little bit later, but some elements of generative artwork don’t strictly require programming and you could manually produce some similar results.
But I’ve got to tell you, the programming is such a powerful tool that it makes a huge difference if you do know how to program, even if you just know how to program a little bit. It’s honestly not super complicated programming. You don’t have to be a mathematician or have a computer science degree in order to do it. It’s relatively simple. But when you’re working through programming, there’s a much more natural dialogue between yourself and the computer. You’re kind of speaking in the computer’s terms. And something about working in that way I think helps to explore the possibilities of generative art more fully and more naturally.
‘Fragments of Vision D’ by Tyler Hobbs
MARK: So do you enjoy writing code like in the way a novelist, for instance, might enjoy writing prose?
TYLER: I would say it’s pretty similar. I’d say probably novelists have parts of their book that just flow out easily. And then they have other parts where they get stuck and have to think about exactly what to write very carefully for a week straight. I have those same sorts of experience with code. Most of the time, it comes out pretty naturally. I’ve been writing code for a long time and so it’s a pretty natural way for me to already be thinking about the problem.
But yeah, every once in a while there are the thorny problems as well. It’s tough to think about how to write the code correctly. Sometimes it’s hard to translate a visual idea into a program to think about how you might build that up from patterns and processes. But yeah, the actual natural act of writing code feels good to me. I definitely get in the zone when I’m working on these programs.
MARK: Do you think there could be an analogy with music? I’m not a musician so it’s always pretty amazing to me to watch a trained musician just pick up a piece of equipment. And the technical ability that they’ve got and the muscle memory and so on… to them it’s invisible because it’s so finely honed that they’re just focused on their emotional expression through the instrument.
TYLER: Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of similarities between the two and I would say it’s most similar actually to composing rather than playing an instrument.
MARK: Okay, yeah.
TYLER: There’s a level of freedom that you’re giving up where the final product maybe won’t be exactly what you have in mind. So, you know, the composer probably hears their score in a certain way in their head. And then whenever the orchestra actually plays it, you know, things might end up sounding quite a bit different. So that there’s that sort of difference.
The other is that at least I’m imagining… I do play some music, but I’m definitely not a real composer. I have to imagine that they kind of hear everything working together at once in their head sometimes. And then they have to carefully think about how to break that down into individual parts and patterns and components that will add up to what they’re looking for. And there’s a lot of similarity in that to how I think about building up a visual image through different elements of a program.
MARK: Coming back to the analogy with the score and the composer, it strikes me maybe you could think of the score as being software code for the orchestra?
TYLER: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. There’s a certain amount of flexibility in that score that’s open for interpretation. And some composers, especially in the maybe postmodern era of music, have intentionally left a lot of ambiguity in the score. And I do exactly the same thing in my program, but the ambiguity is there very intentionally.
MARK: Staying with the idea of intention and randomness and unpredictability, do you start off with an image in your mind that you think, ‘Okay, I’m going to write a piece of code to produce that,’ or is it more open ended, like you write a piece of code and see what comes out?
TYLER: Yeah, I would say it’s much more like the latter. I certainly never have a finished image in mind whenever I’m first beginning a program. At best I have a technique that I know I want to experiment with or maybe I just wrote another program that turned out pretty well and I have an idea for how I can change that. But for me, it’s a very exploratory process, and the medium really lends itself to that well. So I can start out by writing a very simple program. I can run it very quickly, see what the output looks like. And if I liked it or don’t like it, I can go back and change the program and run it again, accordingly. So the output is very mutable.
It’s really easy for me to experiment with new things. And if I don’t like it, I can roll back the changes pretty easily. And that’s not something that every medium has. So I really try to take advantage of that by working in a very exploratory and an open-minded way. However, I will say, as far as individual changes to the program go, say I want to make a certain visual change to the program. I usually have a pretty good idea about what needs to happen in the code to correspond to that type of visual change.
So at this point, I’ve definitely developed a sense of, ‘If I change the program a certain way, this is what it will likely look like.’ But it’s also easy to escape that realm and for me to change the code in a way that I have no idea what’s going to come out. And I’ll try that just to see if it happens to be amazing.
MARK: So when the image comes out, it’s a surprise to you?
TYLER: Yes, it’s a surprise to a certain extent. Sometimes it’s a really big surprise, sometimes it’s along the lines of what I expect, but I never could have predicted all the details that are in there.
MARK: What’s that moment like when you first see it? Does it flash up on the screen or does it come out of the printer or…?
TYLER: It flashes up on the screen. And that moment can be very exciting. There have definitely been a lot of moments where I make a change not knowing what the output is going to be. And I see the results and suddenly I know where this piece is going. Like it’s the ‘aha’ moment. It clicks when I see that image. And since a lot of my work kind of begins by stumbling around in the dark, there’s usually that kind of one critical change that really puts the…I see it and then I know what the structure of the work needs to be like. I love that kind of surprise element of creating the work.
MARK: And I think probably somebody listening into this, whatever their art form is, can almost certainly relate to that. And because when you think about creating artwork from computer code, I think the initial response that a lot of artists might have is ‘Well isn’t that a bit cold? Isn’t it a bit cerebral? Isn’t it a bit programmatic in the bad sense?’ But what you’re describing is very familiar to me as a poet. Sometimes you change something and, ‘Oh,’ or a line comes in or a rhyme pops out.
And the whole thing looks different, and there’s that. I had the poet Mimi Khalvati last season talking about poetry as discovery. She said, if you know what you’re going to write, then it won’t be a poem. But you go in and you surprise yourself.
And what you’re describing, I think it’s that kind of ‘aha’ moment that’s probably familiar to creators in all kinds of different fields.
TYLER: I think you’re absolutely right. I think if you’re not going into the work with an open mind about what it can be, then you’re really limiting yourself in terms of you’re not trusting your intuitive response, right? The preplanning of a work is a lot more cerebral. And when you’re actually in the middle of that work, allowing yourself to respond to it and change it as it develops based on how your soul or your spirit reacts to the work. That’s going to give you a lot better result, I think. And, yeah, I try to do generative art the same way.
Like you say, it sounds like a very cold logical form of artwork. And I can certainly see how people see it that way and how creators can kind of fall into that trap when they’re getting started with it. You have to learn to not have such a firm grasp on everything and allow yourself to explore and allow yourself to react to things and just take directions based on your gut reaction.
MARK: Right. And this was my initial response when I first saw your work was just, ‘Wow!’ It’s so beautiful and it’s so evocative. And there’s some really haunting imagery in there.
I read an article on your site where you talk about the importance of evoking an emotional response in generative art. I’ll link to it in the show notes. You’re quite critical of the generative art scene because you say a lot of it is too cerebral, too intellectual.
Can you say a bit more about how on earth do you get that level of emotion into something that’s computer-generated and programmed in this way?
TYLER: I think just to expand on what you were saying, it’s given that a lot of the people creating this form of artwork do have an engineering background, a math background, maybe a computer science background, we’re very used to and trained to think in a series of logical, clearly defined steps. And as artists know, that’s not something that really tends to work well for artwork. Art has to be guided by your feelings, your internal response to the artwork.
And so in that article, I’m trying to push generative artists to listen more to that internal voice. And in my own work, that’s something that I try very hard to do. I try to base my judgment and decisions around the work entirely on what my internal reaction is. So if it evokes some sort of an interesting emotional response in me, that’s something I want to try and follow. And if the work doesn’t do that, for me, if it’s just a technical display or something like that, then I know that it’s kind of failed at becoming a meaningful piece of artwork.
And it’s really easy with something like generative artwork to get wrapped up in the technical aspect of it to kind of show off your technical chops. And a lot of forms of artwork in that way, certainly, I know for drawing and painting, it’s easy to get pulled into that trap as well. But I think it’s always worth it to take that challenge of moving to the next level beyond just technical abilities, and really try to focus on the emotional response and in particular, your own emotional response to the work. At least that’s my strategy.
‘Untitled’ by Tyler Hobbs
MARK: The poet Robert Frost once said, ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,’ which is to say, if you’re not moved by the writing as you write it yourself, then how on earth is your reader going to be moved?
So for you, it’s got to have that emotional reaction for you when you first see that image. Otherwise, it’s just not interesting to you.
TYLER: Yeah, absolutely. I think the only emotional reaction that you can really gauge honestly and accurately is your own as well. So even your best friends might say, ‘I love the work.’ But you don’t really know for sure if it resonates for them and, if it does resonate, exactly how it resonates for them. And so just out of a pure practicality as well, you have to use your own emotional reaction as a guide because it’s the only thing that you get really clear signal from.
MARK: Okay, Tyler, you’ve given us a really fascinating insight into the process. Let’s talk a bit about the end result.
What is it that you produce as the artefact? Are these like a series of prints? Or is it a one-off artwork in its own right?
TYLER: I typically execute the work through prints, but I prefer to do single-edition prints. So I never print the same image more than one time. I talked earlier about how randomness allows me to generate multiple different images from the same program. So sometimes as an in between I’ll take one program and generate four different images from it. And so I can sell those for a lower price than if I could only sell one image from the program. I also really like to try to work through non print mediums as well. So something that’s a lot of fun to work with is a pen plotter. So for your listeners who may not be aware…
MARK: And for me!
TYLER: And for you, a pen plotter, it’s a really simple robot. It’s a two-axis drawing robot. And so you stick a pin in it, you give it instructions for lines to draw, and it carries out the whole drawing for you. And of course, this has very different properties from working with a print. You can’t paint over things when you’re talking about a plotter. And you have to be careful about parts of the drawing not going off of the image. But that gives you kind of a real-world grittiness that you don’t get in a print. There’s something cool about that.
Lately, I’ve been experimenting with doing something similar except putting a paintbrush into the plotter instead and having it periodically dip that brush to paint. So plotter paintings is another thing that I’ve been working on. And, of course, I have the option of displaying artwork with digital displays or a projector, but typically I prefer the experience in the appearance of a print over a digitally-projected image.
MARK: So most of the time the end result is what looks like a print that you would hang on the wall in your home.
TYLER: Exactly.
MARK: And did I see somewhere that you include the code when you sell the artwork?
TYLER: That’s correct. I don’t typically publish my code. But I do feel like it’s an important component of the artwork, whenever somebody takes the time to appreciate my artwork and purchases a piece. I feel like they deserve to know and maybe understand a little bit about the process that went into creating that image especially because the image is just one potential output of billions from this program. So it’s a small snapshot of the program. And so, yeah I consider the program to be an important part of the artwork and so I include a copy of that along with the artwork with any sales.
MARK: That’s something Turner never offered, right?
TYLER: No!
MARK: So we talked a lot about technology and it’s all quite futuristic. What about artists from the past? Are there any artists that you would say have been a big influence on you? Or do you see yourself as the latest iteration of any kind of tradition from the past?
TYLER: There are definitely older traditional influences on me. I really enjoy a lot of abstract expressionist and colorful paintings. That’s what I tend to emotionally react to. And so I feel like I try to capture some of the spirit of that in my work but there definitely is a lineage of generative art at this point. And I would say there’s a few early kind of progenitors of that.
Dada in some ways you could say played a role in it because Dada started to integrate the use of randomness. John Cage used randomness when composing some of his scores. And later on an artist by the name Sol LeWitt started to create work that was simply a set of instructions. So, three or four very simple instructions for how to execute a drawing on a wall.
And this is a form of early generative artwork that’s not executed by a computer, it was executed by human instead. But the idea is the same. It’s a simple process or pattern that if you follow it results in the creation of an interesting piece of artwork. So I feel like I fall in that same lineage and if I’m successful with my work, I hope to have expanded the emotional range of generative art work a little bit.
MARK: And where do you see this going? What’s your sense of what the future of generative art might be or the future of art and technology?
TYLER: Well, I could speculate for a really long time on that front but there’s a lot of really interesting things in the pipeline. And, of course, new technology always has a big impact on artwork. And that’s definitely the case with generative artwork as well. So a couple of the new technologies that I think will produce some very interesting artwork, one is VR, virtual reality. And I think what could be really cool to see would be generative 3D sculpture in a VR environment.
The key distinction between sculpture in the real world and sculpture in VR is that you don’t have physical limitations anymore. You don’t have to think about the weight of things or the scale of things. Generative artwork doesn’t have to be in 2D, it can be in 3D as well. And I think it would be really interesting to see people explore that space of generating large-scale 3D sculptures that you can walk around and interact with in virtual reality. I have no doubt that that will be a thing soon enough. And if I was a 3D sort of person, that’s what I would be doing.
Another technology that’s going to have a really big impact and is already producing some interesting results is something called deep learning. And this is kind of one piece of what you might call AI. It’s one particular technique for teaching a program to learn something deep and structural about images in a way that it can also generate images based on what it seen in the past. So you may have seen or some of your listeners may have seen Google released something called the DeepDream software. And you can make it hallucinate these images that are filled with eyes and dogs faces and they’re very, very colorful and… I don’t know if you’ve seen this in particular.
MARK: I haven’t but I’ll make sure I link to it in the show notes.
TYLER: It was it was very popular when it came out and I’m sure some of your listeners will know what I’m referring to. So that’s one of the first steps in that. But really the key development is that programs are starting to understand images in a more structural way. So they don’t quite know this but they have a sense of, ‘This is an eye. This is what eyes look like. This is the range of what an eye might potentially look like.’
And so if you asked it to generate an image of an eye or generate an image of a face, it’ll get all the components mostly there in mostly the right place. So it’s starting to produce some really interesting artefacts. And right now, it’s more kind of in the tool-building stage right now. But I have no doubt that some really good artists will get their hands on that and produce some really interesting work in the next five years.
MARK: And just to take that idea for a walk, if we were to extrapolate from that AI producing artwork independently, so just the AI was generating it and there were no human interactions, do you think that could conceivably be as moving as a piece created by a human?
Circling back to what we were saying about your own artwork, that emotional appeal of it, it sounds like it comes from the fact that when you see it, it moves you first of all and then you will select and put that out there.
Do you think humans could find AI-generated art as moving as that? Or would it inevitably lose something?
TYLER: That’s an incredibly deep question, Mark. It’s going to be a tough one. But I have some thoughts on this. So I think an important limitation of AI as it is right now is that it can only see and remember what somebody has trained it with. AI is very much influenced right now by what data set it’s been fed in initially. And so in that way, the person who’s developing or controlling the AI has a very large impact on what it produces. So AI is very far from being independent right now.
Let’s imagine a future where an AI lives in a robot and it can go around and collect its own physical images and sensory input and it’s working based on that. I think it’s going to be really tough for an AI to produce artwork if we define artwork as being… it’s always hard to define artwork. But if we define artwork as being about the human experience in some way, then just from that definition, I don’t think an AI is going to be able to create truly new artwork just because it doesn’t experience and won’t experience the world and life in the same way that a human does.
But maybe the AI can very successfully create artwork that is meaningful to itself or to other similar AI. And in that case, it might be a very successful artist. But yeah, it’s going to be really interesting if this stuff develops to see what an AI’s idea of artwork is once they can move beyond kind of the mimicry as the main operation. I have no idea what that’s going to look like or how successful it might be. But I think it’ll give us some interesting insight into ourselves and how AI might fundamentally be different from humans.
MARK: Okay, let’s leave that thought hanging out there in the future, and we’ll come to it with the progress of technology someday.
Let’s come right back to the present and today and to what our listener can do based on the ideas that you’ve been putting across in today’s interview. It’s time for the Creative Challenge.
This in one was maybe more challenging than some given that, clearly we’re not going to go and ask you to start learning computer code and writing it this week. But I think Tyler has come up with quite an elegant solution to how we can all get a little bit of taste of generative art.
So what’s your challenge, Tyler?
TYLER: My challenge is, like Mark said, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to learn programming just for a challenge like this. But you can really get the spirit of generative artwork by working through patterns and processes and potentially involving randomness. So my challenge would be for your listeners to try to create a simple small set of instructions that if you follow them will result in a piece of artwork being created.
So this is sort of like what Sol LeWitt’s work was and maybe I’ll give you a couple of examples. If I was going to write some instructions to produce a drawing, I might say something like, ‘Step 1, draw a triangle. Step 2, split the triangle in half by adding a new line. Step 3, repeat from step 1 for each of the new triangles you produce until the lines get so small you can’t fit any more in.’ And so there I’ve created a program in some sense. There’s only three instructions, but it loops back on itself. And I can continue doing it until I’ve produced an interesting result.
And you’ll notice that the instructions are kind of ambiguous. The person executing it has quite a bit of leeway as to what type of triangle they draw, how they split it in half exactly. And so there’s a lot of interesting variation that might come out of the results as well. So to give you kind of a different example, you might be able to produce a poem with a certain set of instructions. And I’m not a poet, so tell me how good or bad this idea might sound but…
MARK: I’m all ears!
TYLER: If we can introduce some randomness here, I’ve seen some very simple rules in poems. Maybe you’ve seen the same ones where each successive line has one fewer character or syllable than the line above it. So that might be a very simple rule that you can repeat as you work on the poem.
You might also be able to include an instruction with some randomness like each line has to begin with a randomly selected adjective for example. Or maybe you can come up with a rule about something about the grammatical structure of each line or the rhythm of each line. I’m not a poet so it’s hard for me to think in that line.
MARK: There’s a whole catalog of verse forms. As you were describing it, I’m thinking, ‘I guess the Petrarchan sonnet is a kind of generative art, because it’s got to have 14 lines and there’s the first 8 lines have to put together proposition and then the last 6 have to answer it. And that the rhyme has to go in a certain pattern and whatever.’ So maybe I’ve been doing generative art all along!
TYLER: Exactly! There’s a lot more in common with other parts of artwork than you might think.
MARK: And it also reminds me of my friend Mick Delap when we were working on Magma Poetry magazine together. He published some poems based on the Fibonacci sequence where the number of syllables in each line had to…was in the… I don’t know what sequence…
TYLER: The Fibonacci sequence.
MARK: Yeah, but you take the numbers of that and then it’s the number of syllables in each line. So it gets longer and longer as it goes on and there’s a certain quite an interesting results. So yeah, I guess maybe we are more generative than we realize.
TYLER: Yeah. And I think you’ll hear a lot of artists say that constraints yield creativity. Generative art is kind of a way of thinking very carefully about those constraints. My hope is that your listeners will self-impose some interesting constraints and maybe come out with some new results.
MARK: Well, this is great, Tyler. So just to sum up, the challenge as I understand it, is to write a simple set of instructions or rules to produce a piece of art and it could be in any medium.
TYLER: Exactly.
MARK: And is it something that you execute yourself? Or could you give the instruction to someone else? Or could it be either?
TYLER: It’d be really interesting if you gave those instructions to somebody else. I think that if you’re writing instructions for yourself, you maybe have a certain idea about how to execute them. And it’d be really interesting to see how somebody else interpreted those and how it differed from your expectations and that would let you know if your instructions were actually really good or not. So I would highly encourage having somebody else execute it if you can find somebody that will do that for you.
MARK: So, listen, if anybody does this and you want to share the results then maybe you could paste them or a link in the comments to the show notes because we’d be really interested to see what you come up with. So if you go to 21stcenturycreative.fm/tyler and leave a comment there, we would really love to see what you come up with. I think that would be very interesting.
TYLER: Yeah, that’d be fascinating.
MARK: Tyler, thank you. This has been absolutely fascinating for me and I’m sure for our listeners as well. Where can we go to find more about you and your work online? Is it tylerhobbs.com is your website? Is that right?
TYLER: It’s Tyler L Hobbs, http://tylerxhobbs.com just the letter L there in the middle, T-Y-L-E-R X H-O-B-B-S. So if you just…or if you just Google “Tyler Hobbs,” you’ll find my website as well. That has a link to my Instagram, which is where I tend to post a lot of images. But if you’re interested in some of my writings about generative artwork, I have those on my website as well.
MARK: It’s really worth it. It’s mesmerizing to go and browse through Tyler’s site and then read the articles and people can buy prints direct from the site as well, can’t they?
TYLER: That’s correct.
MARK: Right. And the Instagram as well I heartily recommend to see the latest stuff that Tyler is doing. So, Tyler, thank you so much. This has been an absolutely fascinating journey and we really appreciate you taking the time for this.
TYLER: Mark, thank you. I’m glad that more people are starting to hear about some of the ideas behind generative artwork and find it exciting. So I really appreciate you having me on and letting me talk about my favorite subject for a while.
MARK: Great. It’s been a pleasure.
TYLER: Likewise.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Steven Pressfield on The Artist’s Journey
Dec 17, 2018
Today we kick off Season 3 of The 21st Century Creative, the podcast that helps you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the 21st Century.
A new feature of the show this season is full transcripts of every interview. Lots of you have requested these, so I’m pleased to provide them – just scroll down to read the full text of today’s interview.
Our first guest is Steven Pressfield, who has not one but two distinguished careers as a writer: firstly as the author of a string of bestselling novels, including The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Killing Rommel and The Knowledge.
He is also widely respected in the creative community for his books for creatives, including The War of Art, Turning Pro, Do the Work, and his latest, The Artist’s Journey.
Steve was one of the very first guests on the 21st Century Creative, back at the start of Season 1, where we talked about truth, fiction and the art of storytelling in relation to his novel The Knowledge. When I saw the subject of The Artist’s Journey I knew I had to invite him back, for two reasons.
Firstly, because it’s a great book of guidance for any artist or creative, drawing on the mythical archetypes described by Joseph Campbell in his classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949.
And secondly, on a more personal level, I read several of Joseph Campbell’s books about 25 years ago and they made a profound impression on me. Campbell was a truly remarkable teacher who could take stories from ancient Greece or China or the Native American tradition and make them relevant and even urgent for modern readers.
So I was really excited when I saw that Steve was writing a book called The Artist’s Journey, building on Campbell’s work with his own insights into the nature of story and creativity. When I read Steve’s book there was one insight in particular that stopped me in my tracks, and made me look at my own journey in a different light.
When I finished the book, I asked Steve if he would be kind enough to come back on the show and share some more of his wisdom with the 21st Century Creatives, and as before he was very generous and gave me a terrific interview.
If you’ve ever asked yourself some of the big questions about life and art, and you want some help orienting yourself in your own journey as a creator, then this interview with Steve is a great place to start.
And if you’re inspired by Steve’s approach to getting your work done, then you might want to check out a new series he’s launching called Black Irish Jabs – short, sharp books that will give you a shot of creative adrenaline.
Just head over to Steve’s publishing site BlackIrishbooks.com and you can sign up to receive a new creative jab every month.
Steven Pressfield Interview Transcript
MARK: Welcome back, Steve.
STEVEN: Hey, Mark, it’s great to be with you again. It seems like we just did this a couple months ago, but it’s great to be back.
MARK: It’s great and we’re back with something related, but really quite different, I think. And that is the Hero’s Journey, and you’re building on top of that The Artist’s Journey. Now, this is actually a topic that’s really quite close to my heart, because I think it must be 25 years ago I first read Joseph Campbell’s classic book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And it made a really big impression on me.
When I saw that you were building on the Hero’s Journey idea with The Artist’s Journey, it felt like Christmas had come early. So I’m really glad that we’ve got the chance to talk about this, because I think it’s a really, maybe an unexpected, but absolutely central topic for any creative.
I’m curious, Steve, when did you first come across the idea of the Hero’s Journey?
STEVEN: It was definitely during my screenwriting career. Which was back in the late 80s and all the way through the 90s. And if you remember when Star Wars originally came out. There was a big deal that George Lucas, when he wrote the script, had basically taken Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey and done it beat by beat for Luke Skywalker’s you know, passage in Star Wars. And the reason that he did that was because he thought it would have a universal appeal. And obviously, it did; witness what happened with Star Wars.
In the movie business at that time all of a sudden everybody was talking about the Hero’s Journey, and every executive that you would take a script to, ordinary script to, they would ask you those beats. ‘Where’s the Crossing the Threshold moment? Where’s the Call? Where is the Meeting with the Mentor?’ That kind of thing. So that made me read The Hero With A Thousand Faces and everything else I could kind of get my hands on, and so that was when I first, really front of mind became aware of the concept of the Hero’s Journey.
MARK: And for anybody who’s listening to this for whom this is a new concept, could you maybe give us a whistle-stop tour of the greatest story in all of human history according to Joseph Campbell?
STEVEN: Yeah, well, Joseph Campbell was an American academic. He died a little while ago and he wrote The Hero With A Thousand Faces, and a bunch of other things. But he studied the myths of all kinds of people, races all over the world. And he discovered that there seemed to be this ur-myth that every culture seemed to have and it was a story, a story that happened to a hero. Whether it was The Odyssey and there was Odysseus or it was Beowulf or the Norse epics or whatever it is. And he boiled down this myth to a number of beats like about 12 beats or so. And if you want to we can kind of go over at least a couple of those, you tell me if you want to do that?
MARK: Yeah, let’s do that. Because it starts to become real when you do that.
STEVEN: So the first few beats of the Hero’s Journey, and maybe it’s a good idea for our listeners to sort of keep in mind the plot of Star Wars, as you hear this. And the Hero’s Journey, starts step one is what they call the Ordinary World. And it’s just the hero doing his normal regular stuff. So that would be like Luke Skywalker on the evaporator farm. Or it would it be Dorothy in Kansas. Or it would be Rocky, if you remember the movie about the prize fighter, when he’s just kind of a ham and egg bum on the streets. That’s the Ordinary World, step one, chapter one.
Then comes this thing called, this is the famous saying of Joseph Campbell, ‘The Call,’ or ‘The Call to Adventure.’ And what that would be is just what it sounds like; a Call to Adventure. For instance in The Wizard of Oz, it’s when Dorothy gets picked up by the tornado. In Star Wars it’s when Luke discovers R2-D2 and that message, the help message, where Princess Leia says, ‘Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi you’re my only hope.’
And then I’m only going to do a few beats just because I don’t want to bore everybody. But just to get the feeling of it. And the immediate beat that comes after The Call is the Refusal of the Call which is sort of interesting. But the hero always seems to at first balk and not want to go do the Call to Adventure. And then after that, the next meeting is what they call ‘the Meeting with the Mentor.’ And that can be either an external or internal mentor. In Star Wars it’s the moment when Luke takes R2-D2 over to Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s the mentor. And what happens in the myth is the mentor gives the hero the courage to go forward. And sometimes he will also give them magical amulets, or a secret weapon, or something like that.
And then the next beat and this is the last beat I’ll stop here, is called ‘Crossing the Threshold,’ And at that point, the hero leaps off the cliff and leaves the Ordinary World, and enters the Extraordinary World. So if it were Star Wars, that would be when Luke and Obi-Wan Kenobi, go and meet Han Solo and they become involved in the whole rebellion, the rebel alliance. Or if it was Rocky, it would be when he says, ‘Okay, I am gonna train, I’m gonna fight a champ.’
So then there are a number of beats that kind of go on after that, and the final beat in the Hero’s Journey, is the hero returns to where he or she started. Like if it’s Dorothy she comes back to Kansas or if it’s Odysseus, he returns to Ithaca, to his home.
But the key part of that final return is they come back as a changed person. They’re at a much higher level from where they were when they started. And they also don’t come back empty handed. But they come with a gift for the people, and that gift comes out of their solitary suffering and what they’d learned. So for instance when Odysseus returns to Ithaca the kingdom is in total disarray. And with the suitors going after Penelope and all that sort of stuff, and Odysseus kills all the suitors and he brings the kingdom back into balance. And that’s his gift for the people and that’s the last beat of the Hero’s Journey.
MARK: I don’t know what your experience was like. But for me it was real, it was like a Magic Eye or an X-ray for stories, that I started to see everywhere. You could take that basic template and it applies to ancient Greek myths, to stories from the Bible, Moses going up the mountain and coming back with the tablets. Or to the Buddha sitting under the tree until he’s enlightened and he comes back with a gift of wisdom and insight for the human race. And yet it can be there for the Saturday afternoon entertainment in the cinema.
STEVEN: It’s true, once you become aware of that you see it in every story. And you can see that the creators of the story knew about it. Either they knew it consciously or they instinctively had it in their blood. And they built their story that way.
But what’s interesting to me, Mark, we aren’t way beyond that, is that the Hero’s Journey, is a living breathing thing in our real lives. It is like a piece of software that we’re born with and I analogize it to a young woman’s biological clock. Where a woman will just feel at a certain point that she’s got to have a baby. She’s got to find a man and and do what she was put on earth to do. And I think that the Hero’s Journey, that piece of code that’s sitting in our brain demands to be lived out in real life.
And that’s why, usually let’s say for a young man, the young man will join the Special Forces or go off to Bangladesh or something. Some kind of a call will come and the young man will answer it. It’s like he’s driven, and young women too, to do that. So that’s the Hero’s Journey in our real life.
MARK: And it’s a little unsettling, isn’t it, to think that this is implanted inside us a bit like a destiny?
We might be tempted to quote Monty Python and say, ‘No, no we’re all individuals!’ and I’m going to strike my own path.
STEVEN: It’s a good question. I was thinking about this last night because I knew we were going to be talking about this. And as Joseph Campbell and also C.G. Jung who was a big believer in this thing. They thought that the reason the Hero’s Journey is encoded in our brains is it’s kind of a part of the collective unconscious that over the millions of years of evolution of the human race that this sort of thing happened over, and over, and over, and over again to everybody.
And so to make it a little bit easier on us, they put this code sort of developed in our brains sort of like let’s say a bird that’s going to migrate a thousand miles across the ocean. There would be an instinctive code or piece of software in their brain that would help them to do that.
If you think about it, if you think about back in the days when we were hanging around the cave, right? We could do the Hero’s Journey out of that. This was to be something that would happen over and over again. We’d be in the Ordinary World, we’re hanging around the cave, we’re eating the last of the meat that we’ve got, and suddenly the meat starts to run out. Everybody’s starving, our wives and children are getting a little upset, that would be the Call, the Call to Adventure.
And then the cavemen would say, ‘I don’t want to go out there, those mastodons are really tough, it’s cold, I don’t want to do it.’ They would go to the mentor of the tribe, he’d say, ‘Hey, you gotta go out there and get some meat, we’re starving’ etc., etc. So that story would sort of live out over and over and over again and it makes sense that it might finally sort of sink into our psyche and just be there waiting for us and compelling us to live it out.
MARK: And do you think this is why we value stories so much?
STEVEN: Absolutely, yeah.
MARK: What’s the function of the storyteller then in this context?
STEVEN: I think that we as listeners to stories, we feel this inside ourselves, this Hero’s Journey, and we can’t get enough of it. It’s like you can – as a storyteller you could do a Clint Eastwood movie or a Steve McQueen movie or any sort of book.
And it never gets old because we need to be reinforced in it. That it is true and to live it out through a story encourages us in our own Hero’s Journey. When we hit intense adversity to be able to fall back on stories that we see that would encourage us to stay the course and keep fighting through and live out our own Hero’s Journey.
And I’m a believer that we have many, many heroes journeys through the course of our life. But there usually is one central one and let me go forward, Mark, to the central concept of my book The Artist’s Journey. And the concept of this book is that once we have lived out our Hero’s Journey and I want to ask you about this in your own life, Mark.
When we live out our Hero’s Journey as artists, the final beat, the return to where we started from, is when we finally confront our own gift, and we say, ‘I’m tired of running away from this, I’ve been self-destructing, I’ve been procrastinating, I’ve been going into shadow careers and all other things. I’m through with that, I’m going to finally confront my gift as a writer, an artist, an entrepreneur, whatever it is.’ And at that point, the thesis to this book is the Hero’s Journey ends, and the Artist’s Journey begins. And the Artist’s Journey is when we face our gift and we start to then ask questions like, ‘Well, what is my gift? If I’m a writer what do I want to write? Do I want to write movies? Do I want to write video games?’ Whatever. If I’m an entrepreneur we start to ask ourselves, ‘What is my special talent that I can bring to the world? What do I have that nobody else has?’
And at that point we ‘turn pro’ and we now set ourselves a task of getting up at a certain time in the morning, taking care of our health, studying under people who can teach us how to do what we want to do, aligning ourselves with partners who are similarly inclined and so on and so forth. We become pros and we then for the rest of our lives our job is about producing the art, or the business, or the new ideas that we were put on this planet originally to do. And that’s the Artist’s Journey, the artist journey comes after the Hero’s Journey. That’s the thesis of this book.
MARK: That’s a huge idea. When I first saw you blogging about this I remembered that beat just hit me between the ears. And I thought, ‘Wow.’
Suddenly my twenties made a lot more sense to me. Because I could see it kind of having played out in my own life.
STEVEN: Do I dare ask you to give us a quick precis of your own Hero’s Journey and when it ended?
MARK: Well, this is a family show so let’s keep it within certain parameters! But no, there’s a couple of things that made me think of – one was when I was at university the Literary Society had as a guest Leon Garfield, the novelist. He read and he talked and we had a chance to ask a question. And my question was, ‘What would you say to somebody who’s considering a career as a writer?’ And I really didn’t want to hear the answer he came back with which was ‘Do something else first.’
STEVEN: Oh, really that’s interesting. Great, I certainly couldn’t agree more.
MARK: Right and I think he’d been in the Navy and he’d had all kinds of adventures. He said, ‘Because until you’ve lived a bit of life there’s not much to write about.’ But of course, I wanted to go straight to the ‘writing about it’ part.
But it made me realize, all through my twenties really, I had this nagging sense of – obviously, I was on an odyssey myself learning, trying to work out what my work was going to be. And I was training as a psychotherapist and goodness that was an odyssey in itself. And then, of course, all the people I got to work with with all kinds of different challenges, and issues, and adventures, that they were undergoing.
But all the way through I had this nagging sense of, ‘Well, I should be writing more poetry. And why can’t I write more?’ I just felt that I was neglecting my gift and it wasn’t until I got to my thirties and I got some sense of the track I was on professionally and romantically and so on that I actually started to turn pro as a writer and discovered actually now it’s time to pick up the writing tools properly.
And that was when I met my other mentor Mimi Khalvati who was on the show in the last season. And she helped me to cross the threshold as an artist. But it really became quite clear to me when I read your book The Artist’s Journey – one coming before the other, and as a kind of precursor to the other was really important. And I think I could have done with knowing that in my twenties, taking a bit of the pressure off to be churning out great verse before I’d really lived much of life.
STEVEN: I sort of was the same way where I had my own three or four-year thrashing around Hero’s Journey. And if I had known there was such a thing it might have eased the pain a little bit.
But let me read something from The Artist’s Journey, and this isn’t something I wrote, this is a quote from Rosanne Cash’s book. For your listeners who might not know Rosanne Cash is, she’s a singer, an American singer, Johnny Cash’s daughter. This is from her book, her autobiography Composed. And I won’t read this too long, it’s not too long but it will really give you a sense. This is about the moment in her life, when her Hero’s Journey ended and her Artist’s Journey began. And oddly enough or maybe not so oddly, it was a dream that she had.
The gist of the dream was and she was already a successful musician and successful singer. She had four number one hits, but what she really wanted to do was write her own material, and create her own material, and she wasn’t doing that. She was covering other people, people were writing songs for her. And so she had this dream that the conclusion of the dream was she woke up and she realized, ‘I’m a dilettante. I haven’t been doing what I’m supposed to be doing.’ And this is what she says in her book. I’m just gonna read this shortly:
‘From that moment I change the way I approach songwriting. I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life. The strong desire to become a better songwriter dovetailed perfectly with my budding friendship with John Stewart, now…’ etc.
‘If I found myself drifting off into daydreams, an old entrenched habit, I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. Instead of toying with ideas I examined them. And I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun etc., etc.’
And she says…she concludes it she says, ‘Rodney Crowell,’ who was her then-husband, ‘was at the top of his game as a record producer. But I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting.’
So that was that the concept of her kind of saying, ‘I gotta get my act together. I’m going to start studying seriously, I’m going to wake up earlier.’ All that sort of stuff that one does when you switch from the Hero’s Journey of thrashing around to the Artist’s Journey of actually producing the works that you were born to produce.
MARK: How can we know when we’re being called to the Artist’s Journey? How do we know when it’s time to show up in this different way?
STEVEN: In my experience, Mark, there’s no missing the moment! It’s like a big, big moment. It’s sort of like the one thing I sort of analogize it to is when somebody has problems with alcohol, they have issues with alcohol, right? And they’re in denial of it even though they’re going out and getting drunk and their family has had interventions with them and so on and so forth. There’s usually some horrific moment when they hit bottom, hit absolute bottom, and they say to themselves, ‘It’s just very clear. I gotta change the way I’m living you know, if I keep going like this I’m gonna be dead.’
And oddly enough, if you think of it in story terms like in novels or movies, a lot of times that’s the climax of a movie. The hero hits that point and then the denouement is them starting off on that new life, taking the first steps into the new life, and what that new life really is is the Artist’s Journey, or the entrepreneur’s journey, or whatever it is. They’ve put the madness behind them and started to buckle down and take themselves seriously and take their gift seriously. As an example, I was just watching the movie Good Will Hunting the other night. You remember that one with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck? Was that at all big in the U.K.?
MARK: Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that. I think I saw it over Christmas one year.
STEVEN: If you remember the movie Matt Damon plays this, he’s like 20-years old and he’s a mathematical genius. He has this incredible gift, but he’s working as a janitor at MIT. In the movie he goes through therapy with Robin Williams as a shrink and Minnie Driver becomes his girlfriend. And when all is said and done the bottom line is he finally stops being this guy who’s in denial of his gift and he embraces it. And the last scene is him driving off to California from Boston to meet up again with Minnie Driver, who’s out there at Stanford.
And you know that he’s finally going to embrace his gift. In other words that’s the moment when he switches from his Hero’s Journey to his Artist’s Journey. Because oddly enough sort of a lot of movies end at that moment. They end at the sort of happily ever after moment and they never really show you what happens after that. And I think that’s because the Artist’s Journey is not cinematic, it’s not very dramatic.
MARK: I was just going to say that. Did you see the movie Sideways?
STEVEN: Yeah.
MARK: Without spoiling it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, at the end we know one of the characters is a wannabe writer. And it’s only at the end of the movie he sits down and starts doing his work. And of course, as you say I’m not so cinematic.
STEVEN: Right, it’s fade out, that’s enough. But it’s true like with you if you settle down and you say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna really take poetry seriously, right? It’s not very cinematic. You’re going to start studying the masters, you’re going to set up your life so that you can have a block of time every day when you can totally focus and go deep, right? Maybe you’re living with some crazy woman and you say, ‘Well I can’t do that anymore.’
MARK: Yeah, I’m too boring for that now!
STEVEN: But you know, the Artist’s Journey is kind of boring, the only thing that isn’t boring is the work.
MARK: Right and so you make this point in the book really well. So from the outside, it’s boring, it’s just some guy sat in the library or someone in her studio.
But from the inside you say the obstacles were all mental, right?
STEVEN: Yeah, and of course from the inside, what’s happening is that you, the artist or the entrepreneur, are finally aligning yourself with your gift. And you’re really answering the question, ‘Who am I?’ Which kind of underlies everything, right?
And one of the things that I do in the Artist’s Journey is I kind of list like all the albums that Bruce Springsteen has done. Or all the books that Philip Roth has done. And when you look at them in sequence right down the page, you can see how they’re on a theme, they’re all kind of tied together and you can see how they evolve over time. Pick any one of Woody Allen’s movies or anything, and that is the Artist’s Journey. And through those Springsteen albums let’s say one after the other you can see how he’s really learning who he is. With each one he kind of goes deeper and deeper and deeper. And he’s also learning what his obsession is, what he was put on this planet to investigate.
MARK: What should we be looking out for? Where should our intention and our attention be when we’re on the Artist’s Journey?
STEVEN: I think in a way it spells itself out. The question we’re asking is: What is my gift? What is my unique ability? What is unique to me that I can give to the world? So I was also thinking about the story of how FedEx started? The mail delivery service, they have that in England, right?
MARK: Yeah.
STEVEN: Apparently, I don’t know the name of the guy who founded FedEx. But apparently, he was a soldier in Vietnam. And when he came back from Vietnam he was wracked with guilt that he had been part of something that was terrible and destructive and etc., etc. And he kind of said to himself, ‘I’ve got to do something that’s positive for the world.’ And so that was, in Hero’s Journey, Artist’s Journey terms, that was end of his Hero’s Journey, start of his Artist’s Journey.
So apparently he was not a dummy, he knew what he was doing. And he had this brainstorm that to deliver packages, what if instead of like the post office that goes from one post office to another post office he said, ‘What if every night we took every FedEx parcel and flew them all to Memphis, Tennessee. And then we sorted them overnight put them on a plane and send them back to the other side?’
That sounds like a completely crazy idea! Like if I live in Los Angeles, if I’m sending a package to the other side of Los Angeles and I do it by FedEx it flies to Memphis, 2,500 miles overnight, and then flies back. But apparently, that worked. And so that guy, I wish I knew his name, I’m sure he sort of had to get his act together, he thought well, ‘How can I finance this? Where am I going to get the money? Where should I put my main depo? What city should it be in? How can I get tax breaks etc., etc.’
In other words, he really got down to business and then I’m sure he had to say to himself, ‘How do I organize my day that works for me so that I can accomplish this? Am I a morning person or am I an evening person?’ That sort of stuff, ‘Who do I hire? How do I treat my employees?’ So, in other words, it comes down to a lot of kind of nuts and bolts stuff.
MARK: Right. So this is something I’m curious about. That on the one level we’re talking about mysticism, we’re talking about mythology, we’re talking about ethereal planes of reality if you like. And on the other level, it is very down to earth and nuts and bolts and ‘How do we get from Memphis to Los Angeles and back again?’
Can you say something about the relationship between the two?
STEVEN: It is curious that the Artist’s Journey is a weird and mystical amalgam of the mystical and of the matter of fact.
And on the one hand, as a poet let’s say, you’ve got to where do you get your ideas? Where do you know to write? What poem comes to you? So, on the one hand, you have to perfect that skill however you do it yourself. I’m talking about you, Mark, now is what state of mind do you get into so that you can kind of be inspired where you can tap into that part of your unconscious, your muse? That’s the mystical side of it and that’s a real skill, that takes a long time to learn, I think, in my experience.
And then the other side of it is the down-to-earth part, like what Rosanne Cash said, where she would start to seriously study singing and she talks about how she trained like an athlete and she would run. And that sort of stuff of just how do I organize my day? How do I organize my week, my month, my year, so that I can be productive? But while we’re being productive then we’re in the sort of the mystical world of where do ideas come from? How do I get ideas? How do I know a good one from a bad one? That kind of thing and that’s why it’s not so easy being on the Artist’s Journey and why a lot of people don’t make it.
MARK: Because you’ve got to live in the two worlds at once, is what I’m hearing.
STEVEN: I think so. When a musician, when Keith Richards when they send him down into the basement to come back with a riff, what does he do? That’s a mystical process, isn’t it? And I’ve seen him talk about it and read his book and he can’t put his finger on it. It’s just a creative process that is a mystery and remains a mystery. But a guy like him has learned to kind of open the channel to his unconscious and to his muse and the music comes through.
MARK: And at the same time, he’s got the technical ability to actually replicate that. He can’t just say, ‘Hey, guys, I had this great thing down in the basement, I wish you could hear it!’ He can play it for us.
STEVEN: You know, when they talk about Keith Richards being this crazy guy that has been an addict…the drugs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it seems to me that it’s amazing that despite all of that stuff he was able to deliver repeatedly. So maybe he wasn’t quite as out of control as he might like to pretend he was.
MARK: Maybe there was a time and a place for one and the other. Because I mean when you listen to him talk, he’s quite thoughtful and intelligent and the sheer technical ability he’s got, he must have put in the hours to practice.
STEVEN: And we certainly know the guy is an amazing student of music and blues. He knows everything. As far as every artist that ever did anything. He studied them in great depth.
MARK: And picking up on the poetry question just now. It made me think, the poem usually starts for me, there will be a line that comes into my head, nearly always it’s a line. And I feel a little bit like I’ve been given one tile from an old building that has been dug up.
STEVEN: That’s a great analogy, I’ve never heard that before.
MARK: But what I need is the historical knowledge, if you like, and the technical skill to be able to look at that and go ‘Oh this was a Roman villa.’ Or it was a Medieval church or it was a Viking bathhouse or something. And then extrapolate the rest of it, because you’ve got one line, you think ‘Well, what would rhyme with that? Or what would go with that or what would fit with that?’
So you’re given a little bit of the jigsaw and you’ve got to extrapolate the rest. And, for me at least, it comes from having a bit of technical knowledge and thinking ‘Well, what would go with that?’
I don’t know what’s it like for you when you come to writing fiction?
STEVEN: It’s exactly the same way and it’s really interesting for me to hear you say that, Mark. Let me ask you this, do you have a feeling when you’re writing a poem that let’s say you get that first line, that the poem is already out there, and you’re just trying to find it somehow? Do you get that feeling?
MARK: Yeah. And in fact, this is one thing Mimi said to me years ago. She said, ‘Well, you have to assume it’s out there. Whether or not it is I don’t know. But if you assume it’s out there and you try and listen for it you’ll get it much more than if you try and make it up. Because if you try and make it up it’s just your conscious everyday self that’s trying to be clever or original.’
STEVEN: That famous one where she talks about the Muse and where it all comes from. And how she would talk about some musician friend of hers that songs were just sort of coming to him when he was driving. And the whole song would come in a flash. And he felt like he was just kind of taking dictation in a way.
And I’m sure that a lot of when Keith Richards goes down to the basement, I’m sure he’s got you know, there’s a melody that probably starts to play in his head and then he probably asks himself, ‘What’s the counter melody?’ What’s going to be the background behind that right? And then he sort of fiddles around he comes up with that. But it was there from the start. Once you’ve got, ‘Bam! Bam! Da da da!’ and you’re going to take it from there. So that is that mystical process. But at the same time, we have the matter of fact process of being able to manage it.
MARK: And don’t you say in the book that the key skill of the artist is being able to shuttle backwards and forth between the two?
STEVEN: Yeah, if you ask me what is this artist’s skill? And I would say this is true with the entrepreneur too, it’s the ability to shuttle back and forth. And you may shuttle 10,000 times a day between the conscious mind and the source of inspiration.
So if you’re sitting there writing that poem and it’s like a tile from an old building, you sort of make these little journeys where in your imagination you get a little more glimpse of that building. And then you go right back to the paper and you write down you know whatever that it is. And then you go back into the building again and back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And that’s why to me I always sort of feel like there’s another dimension of reality there.
And that building is speaking to you, Mark, that building is there already and it’s just separated by a membrane from you and me. And it’s knocking on the glass, on the window saying, ‘Hey, Mark, wake up I got something for you.’ And trying to deliver it to you and your job as a poet is to sort of tune into that radio station, the cosmic radio station and pick up those signals.
MARK: Which is another unsettling thought, isn’t it?
STEVEN: I think it’s a very encouraging thought!
MARK: It is, it’s exciting and unsettling, I think because again by definition it’s listening into the other world.
STEVEN: Yeah, but isn’t that fun, you know? And another thing that I say in The Artist’s Journey and this is certainly true of my own career. I’ve written, this is like my 19th book. And see if this rings bells with you, Mark.
I can truthfully say that every book that I’ve written came as a surprise to me. It was like they were certainly on subjects that before I sort of got the idea I wasn’t even interested in that subject. And I didn’t know anything about it, but then once I got into it then I became consumed by it. So again it’s sort of like that building that you’re talking about in the other dimension talking to you. And pulling you through the membrane to the other dimension and sort of telling you what you are interested in.
Again it comes back to the question of who am I? Over the course of your career, of your body of work, the works themselves tell you who you are. And each one at least in my experience came as a surprise to me. And when I was done I looked at it and I go, ‘Where did that come from?’ Have you had that experience, Mark?
MARK: Yeah. I mean that’s the point it’s just ‘Oh!’ it’s that magical ‘Oh! There’s something here!’ And that’s really the payoff for the whole thing, I think, it’s just the joy and the excitement of pursuing that and nailing it down. And thinking I could never have imagined that, but actually, somehow I did, or the other part of me did.
STEVEN: Yeah.
MARK: Okay, so, Steve, we’ve covered a lot of ground. And maybe just one last question. I’m going to maybe call to the bar of the grumpy crotchety creative that we imagined in our last interview. The guy or the gal who’s sat there saying, ‘Well this is all very well, but what does it have to do with me on a Monday morning? And I’m struggling to get my work done.’
‘How is the Artist’s Journey going to help me then?’
STEVEN: Well, here’s my answer to that. When we go through our lives they unspool day, day, day, day, right? And it’s easy for us to say to ourselves, ‘Well it’s just one sort of smooth passage and it’s boring. We don’t know where we are.’ But if you think about your life in terms of a Hero’s Journey that then changes to an Artist’s Journey, it puts things into perspective.
And you could say to yourself like I would say if someone asked me, ‘Where am I on that spectrum?’ I’m 40 years into my Artist’s Journey. But if I were a younger person and I was somewhere near the end of my Hero’s Journey, or I’d just started my Artist’s Journey, it would be very helpful of me to have this concept in my mind.
If I were Good Will Hunting and I had just gotten in my car in Boston and was heading out to California to hook up with Minnie Driver, it would be very helpful to me if I could say, ‘Oh, I get it, I’m at the end of my Hero’s Journey and I’m about to start on my Artist’s Journey.’ And then that would give me context and make me see where I am and that could be very helpful. So that we don’t feel just lost and adrift we can get our bearings and say, ‘Okay, I see right where I am.’
It’s like in school, school is broken into three-year or four-year increments and so we know that in our first year at university and pretty soon we’ll be in our 4th year at university. And then we’ll go on to medical school and bumpety-bump, right. And it helps us to know, ‘I’m in my third year at the university, okay. Then I have to learn this, I have to do that etc.’ So to know about the Hero’s Journey and the Artist Journey can kind of help us get our bearings of where we are. And make us feel like our feet are on the ground and we’re not just floundering.
MARK: Great. So this leads into what we were discussing earlier on. I think it would be a great Creative Challenge.
Would you like to share it with our listeners, Steve?
STEVEN: Okay, we talked about this earlier, Mark. And I was actually going to put this challenge out to my own people on my blog. Which maybe I will do too. And the question is to each individual. Where are you on this spectrum right now the spectrum of Hero’s Journey, Artist’s Journey? Are you four years into your Artist’s Journey, or are you still in your Hero’s Journey? Now I think that would be the Creative Challenge. Tell us where you are right now.
MARK: That’s great and hopefully that will bring people a little of the relief and perspective that I could maybe have done with when I was younger.
STEVEN: Yeah, we all could have done with that. Although I wonder, Mark, even if we knew, I don’t know if it would really have eased the pain…
MARK: Maybe a little bit. Maybe the pain of not understanding the pain. I don’t know.
Steve, thank you so much. As always it’s been an inspiration to listen to you and I’m sure everyone listening to this will have got a lot of wisdom from it. The book is The Artist’s Journey and I can wholeheartedly recommend it especially if, like me, you have a taste for mythology and storytelling, and try to relate that to your everyday life and practice as an artist.
Steve, where else should people go to get more of your words of wisdom?
STEVEN: Well, we’re on Amazon.com and all of the online things. And for The Artist’s Journey, we have it e-book and audiobook. And also I have a little publishing company called Black Irish Books. And you can just Google that and get stuff there. And I have a blog that’s just my name StevenPressfield.com where I do a Writing Wednesdays post every Wednesday. And that’s my presence on the web.
And, Mark, thank you very much for having me on the show. It’s always great to talk to you because we’re so simpatico and we’re on the same wavelength about all this stuff. And I hope this was helpful to your listeners.
MARK: Thank you, Steve, I’m sure it was. And I would just like to just emphasize if you go to StevenPressfield.com and subscribe to Steve’s blog, it’s one of the very few blogs that I still read every week after all these years. And The Artist’s Journey, you actually had a preview of it there. So you sometimes you get a sneak preview of what’s coming down the line from Steve. It’s a really, really great resource for any creative. So, Steve, thank you once again for all your wisdom.
STEVEN: Thank you, Mark. It’s been a real pleasure and we’ll do it again.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Creating a Business You Are Proud of with Patricia van den Akker
Aug 13, 2018
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Patricia van den Akker, the Director of The Design Trust, an organisation based in London with a mission to help designers and makers ‘create a business they are proud of’.
Patricia is also the author of Dream Plan Do, an annual planner journal to help creative entrepreneurs reflect, plan and take action throughout the year.
One of the themes of The 21st Century Creative is ‘something old, something new’ and Patricia is a fantastic example of this – many of the creatives she helps are living in remote areas, using traditional craft skills that go back generations, and they are often working in super-specialised niches.
Patricia helps them thrive by reinventing their business model and their marketing communications so that they can reach their customers wherever they are in the world.
I’ve known Patricia for years and worked with her on several occasions, running workshops or speaking at her events. It’s always fun to go to a Design Trust event, because you’re guaranteed to find yourself in a room full of talented and enthusiastic people who spend their lives creating all kinds of beautiful and useful things.
In this interview Patricia gives us the benefit of her experience of working with hundreds of creatives, about what it really takes to succeed in a small creative business. She has a lot of interesting things to say about the intersection of artistic tradition and our modern connected society.
If you run a creative business of any kind, you’ll find plenty of practical inspiration in this interview. And if you see yourself as good at your creative work but clueless at business, I recommend you listen right to the end, where Patricia points out how your artistic skills could actually be the key to unlocking your success as a creative entrepreneur.
The 2019 edition of Patricia’s Dream Plan Do planner journal for creative entrepreneurs will be available to pre-order in October – if you want to know when it’s available, sign up for updates at Dream-Plan-Do.com.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
She works with senior leaders and teams in the creative and media industries, education, startups, and female entrepreneurs. In The SHED Method she shares the principles and techniques she uses to help her clients perform at their best under pressure.
Like all top coaches, Sara enlists the help of other coaches to help her reach her own goals. So when she signed a publishing deal for The SHED Method, she came to me for help in getting the book written, and also with making the transition from coach to writer, as she saw that, as a coach who writes books, I had been through the same process myself.
As I worked with Sara and read the successive drafts of her book, I was struck by the down-to-earth nature of a lot of her advice, for top performers. Things like getting a good night’s sleep, staying hydrated, watching your diet and taking time out to exercise – especially when you’re busy.
The kind of things it’s easy to overlook while you’re pursuing your ambitions – especially if you’re a working on a computer, or creating imaginary storytelling worlds, or on a punishing schedule of live performances.
Reading the draft, I got a few flashbacks to my own experience, and times where I hadn’t taken care of myself very well, and had paid the penalty. So I thought it would be helpful to invite Sara on the show to share some of the ideas from the book with you.
In this interview Sara invites you to ‘become a scientist on your own behaviour’ by observing what works and what doesn’t work for you, and experimenting with new ways of doing things.
As well as the foundation of SHED practices, she gives you a new and user-friendly way of looking at your brain, and working with it rather than against it, when you’re trying to achieve or create something extraordinary.
She also talks about her experience of going from a creative practitioner towards becoming a thought leader with a public profile in her industry. So if you’re on a similar journey, from working alone in your studio or with clients, to stepping into the public eye in print, online, in media of any kind, Sara offers a great example of how to find the inspiration and the courage to go for it.
You can get tips and updates about The SHED Method on Facebook and Instagram.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Josh hails from Australia and has spent the last few years living and working in the United States. He was one of the founding hosts of HuffPost Live, the innovative online TV network run by the Huffington Post. There he interviewed guests including Russell Brand, Jeremy Irons, Michael Moore, Liz Hurley and Jesse Jackson.
Josh is currently hosting a radio show for ABC, the Australian national broadcaster.
Many of you will know of him through his podcast, #WeThePeople LIVE. The show’s tagline is ‘make debate healthy again’, and it features live panel discussions in front of an audience Josh describes as ‘as wise as it is drunk’, as well as in-depth interviews and very lively discussions with guests including Scott Adams, Richard Dawkins, Joe Rogan and Louis Theroux.
Josh is never afraid to speak his own mind, but one of the hallmarks of his podcast is his willingness to invite people with radically different viewpoints to his own, and to attempt to engage them in a respectful and productive debate. The results are sometimes considered controversial, but never boring.
#WeThePeople LIVE has hit the No.1 Position in the iTunes comedy podcast charts on numerous occasions. And Twitter explodes with outrage on a regular basis.
In this interview Josh talks about his own path to success, and tackles some of the big questions about old and new media and how they relate to each other. He also has some great advice for those of you who want to carve out a career in the media.
Listen to #WeThePeople LIVE on iTunes or get the raw audio feed here. You can follow Josh on Twitter here and get updates about the podcast here.
In the course of the interview Josh mentions a feisty encounter between Madonna and David Letterman, which you can watch on YouTube here.
Episodes of #WeThePeople LIVE he references in today’s interview are his conversations with Ben Shapiro, Scott Adams and Andy Kindler. He also talks about his interview with Jeremy Irons, some of which you can see here (at 2m 8s).
N.b. Josh used to spell his name phonetically as “Zepps” earlier in his career. But as he modestly explains, ‘Now that I’ve become the world’s most successful broadcaster, the original spelling of “Szeps” will do’.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
DIY Professional Development for Creatives with Gabriela Pereira
Jul 23, 2018
This week’s guest on The 21st Century Creative podcast is Gabriela Pereira, a writer and teacher who is on a mission ‘to empower writers to take an entrepreneurial approach to their education and professional growth’.
Having earned her own MFA – which for those of us outside the US, is a Master of Fine Arts degree, the main creative writing degree in the States – via the traditional academic route, she founded DIY MFA, to make this kind of education available to writers without the time or money to invest in a degree program.
This interview will obviously appeal to you if you’re a writer, but even if you’re not, Gabriela has a lot of valuable insights to share about the mindset it takes to achieve in any creative profession.
One of the big themes of The 21st Century Creative podcast is that it’s up to you and me to take responsibility for our own careers – for making things happen rather than waiting for opportunity to knock. And DIY MFA is a great example of doing this with your education and professional development
Listen to Gabriela and you’ll hear how passionate she is about taking control of your learning process, just as much as you do for other aspects of your career or business.
Whether or not you’re not a writer, I recommend you take on board Gabriela’s approach to education and see what you can take from it and apply to your own professional development.
This is the DIY MFA pie chart, which Gabriela refers to in the interview:
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
If you visit Daniel’s website you’ll see he greets his visitors with the words ‘We love to share your joy’ – this is the guiding principle of Daniel’s business and his mission in life. And if you visit his office in Washington, then he tells me you will see jewellery pieces you won’t see anywhere else.
All Daniel’s creations are custom-made for his clients, and he goes to extraordinary lengths to make something special and appropriate for each client – not only does he spend time getting to know them and their tastes, he also travels the globe to source the materials and craft skills he needs to make the pieces.
In a typical year Daniel and his Vice President Joshua Collier rack up hundreds of thousands of air miles, as they visit mines, industry fairs, private dealers, and craftsmen and women who are the living embodiment of generations of artistic tradition.
As well as serving private clients, Daniel’s jewellery is worn by the USA’s two times Olympic judo champion, Kayla Harrison, and by 10-year-old Clarissa Capuano, a Global Down Ambassador, who raises awareness for people with Down Syndrome.
I’ve been working with Daniel for a few years, and never cease to be astonished by the boldness of his vision and the lengths he is prepared to go to make it a reality. He’s also a very sharp and engaging chap who is excellent company, so it was a pleasure to sit down with him in London to record this interview.
In this conversation Daniel talks about what motivated him to create a very unconventional jewellery business, and how he has dealt with some of the challenges he faces in an industry that has some very well established conventions. He also talks about his approach to designing and creating a unique piece of fine jewellery for each of his clients.
Listen to this interview for an inspiring example of what it takes to succeed in a high-end creative business. You’ll also learn the surprising and charming story behind the name The Intrepid Wendell.
Earrings by The Intrepid Wendell
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
He blogs about ‘tips, tools and techniques to be a better entrepreneur’ at TheDailyMBA.com. He also gives talks like this one at San Jose State University about How Not to Be a Jerk.
Not content with the rigours of the startup world, Jarie is also a keen endurance athlete – when I once asked for his definition of endurance athletics, he told me that it’s ‘any athletics event that is so demanding that you can’t finish unless you eat while you’re doing it’.
I met Jarie years ago, when I worked with him as a coaching client, and we have kept up our friendship ever since.
When he told me he was writing a book called The Entrepreneur Ethos, I knew it was a topic I wanted to feature on the podcast. Because there’s so much attention paid to the external aspects of entrepreneurship – the money, the fame, the public controversies and so on. But like any creative endeavour, the internal factors such as mindset, motivation and intention, are critical to success – and are often overlooked.
Jarie’s done a great job of addressing the human factor of entrepreneurship in The Entrepreneur Ethos and it’s a book I will be buying for coaching clients for years to come. In this conversation he shares his thoughts on what it really takes to succeed as an entrepreneur – behind the scenes, away from the spotlight, where the hard work is done and the difficult conversations take place.
He talks about the motivation of top entrepreneurs, and makes the perhaps surprising claim that it’s not about the money.
He also shares some of the unexpected traits of the entrepreneur, including awkwardness. And he touches on some of the problems in the startup sector, particularly in its treatment of women and minorities, and what needs to change for a true Entrepreneur Ethos to emerge.
Jarie’s words about endurance are particularly poignant due to the fact that a few weeks before we were due to speak, his wife Jane died of cancer. I asked if he wanted to postpone the interview, but he was adamant that he wanted to go ahead – partly because he had written the book in response to some of the challenges Jane had experienced as a female entrepreneur in the male-dominated startup world.
In this conversation you’ll hear Jarie speak from the heart about his own journey and what it takes for any of us to overcome the personal and professional challenges life places in our way.
Jarie’s Creative Challenge
At the end of the interview, Jarie sets you the challenge of writing a Business Narrative for your creative business or project. This article will help you complete the challenge: Writing your business narrative.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Mimi was born in Tehran, Iran and grew up on the Isle of Wight in England. She is the author of eight collections of poetry published by Carcanet and the editor of several anthologies. Her latest book is The Very Selected Mimi Khalvati, published by smith|doorstop.
Her awards and commendations include a Cholmondeley Award and being shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mimi is also the founder of The Poetry School, where professional poets teach the art and craft of poetry at its London centre and across the UK.
Fifteen years ago, I walked into Mimi’s class at the Poetry School, and it changed my life. Mimi challenged and encouraged me in a way no other writing teacher has ever done, and I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for the difference she has made to my poetry.
Mimi has a rare gift – not only is she an outstanding poet herself, but she has an extraordinary ability to read other poets’ work and give them feedback that helps them get to the heart of their own writing.
I’ve been quoting Mimi’s words of wisdom for years, with coaching clients, in my books and on this podcast. So I’m delighted I was able to record this conversation and let you hear her for yourself.
In this conversation Mimi talks about her own practice as a poet, and offers some unusual insights into the nature of the creative process, especially the role of criticism, that will apply to you whatever your creative discipline.
Portrait photo of Mimi Khalvati by Caroline Forbes.
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
I joked with Todd that he is also the grandaddy of creative podcasters – he has been producing his show The Accidental Creative and sharing “weekly tips and ideas for staying prolific, brilliant, and healthy” since 2005. So if you’re not listening to his show yet, I highly recommend you check it out.
Todd was originally a writer and creative director; these days he consults for creative businesses who want to unleash the full talent of their creative teams. And his latest book offers a lot of insight on this topic. It’s called Herding Tigers – Be the Leader that Creative People Need.
In this conversation I ask Todd about the challenges faced by creatives who make the step up from team member to team leader. He talks about the big shifts in your role and your identity, and the balance of power with your former team members, and the big challenges you will face as a result.
Todd also shares lots of practical advice on the day-to-day business of creative leadership, including what to track to make sure creative projects stay on track, how to keep people fired up to create under pressure, and the surprising importance of stability for creative work.
If you are a creative director or leader of any kind, or you’re about to make the transition into a creative leadership role, then this interview will be essential listening for you. And even if you aren’t – yet – in a leadership role, I think you’ll get a lot out of Todd’s insights about what it takes to create outstanding work in a demanding environment.
And if you think your own boss could do with a little help in getting the most out of your and your co-workers, and you’re feeling brave – and maybe even a little tigerish! – then perhaps you could share this interview with your boss!
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Born in Argentina and raised in Venezuela, he achieved national fame with the band Claroscuro before moving to the UK in 2000.
Javier will need no introduction for fans of Stereophonics – he was the band’s drummer for 8 years, recording albums, touring the globe and playing to packed stadiums, including the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park that was broadcast worldwide in 2005.
These days he records his own albums, as well as playing drums with the likes of Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music, and Zak Starkey. He also produces other artists, composes soundtracks for feature films and documentaries, and creates music for brands including Uniqlo, the BBC, ITV and Hasbro.
Javier on stage with Stereophonics at Live8
As a listener to the 21st Century Creative, you are already familiar with Javier’s work – he composed and recorded all the music and sound effects for the podcast, and his production agency Breaking Waves, produces every episode of the show.
UNIQLO campaign featuring Javier’s music
For this interview we did something very different, which was Javier’s idea. We met up in Hammersmith in London, and walked along the bank of the river Thames while he told me about his journey, from growing up in Venezuela to achieving success with Claroscuro, to moving to London, playing with Stereophonics, and his current work as a composer and producer.
Along the way, he shares his thoughts on what it takes to succeed as a musician, and how the music business has changed radically in the time he’s been involved with it.
As we walk along the river, you can hear the sounds of birds singing, passers-by talking, planes flying overhead and traffic coming and going. Javier wanted to capture the soundscape and to give us a glimpse of what it’s like to live in his world, where he is acutely aware of the sounds around him and the feelings they evoke.
When I listened back to the interview, it reminded me of some of his work for films, where the sounds in the background have a subtle but important effect on the people in the foreground. To experience the effect for yourself, I hope you’ll join Javier and me on a walk along the river and a journey into sound.
You can follow Javier’s further adventures on Instagram and Twitter.
Trailer for The Book of Judith, soundtrack by Javier Weyler and Aleph Aguiar
Music from Dead Seem Old – co-written, produced and engineered by Javier
About The 21st Century Creative podcast
Each episode of The 21st Century Creative podcast features an interview with an outstanding creator in the arts or creative industries.
At the end of the interview, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
And in the first part of the show, I share insights and practical guidance based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you.
Tina Roth Eisenberg’s Labours of Love
Jun 11, 2018
Welcome to the start of Season 2 of The 21st Century Creative, the podcast that helps you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the 21st Century.
It’s taken several months, many hours of work, and in the case of one interview, several thousand air miles, to put the new season together. So I hope you’ll find the result a helpful source of inspiration over the next 10 weeks.
We start Season 2 with an interview with Tina Roth Eisenberg, a designer and entrepreneur based in New York City. She’s known to millions of readers as Swiss Miss – the title of her blog, where she’s been sharing design inspiration since 2005.
The Friends Work Here office in NYC, photo by Tory Williams
Her ventures include Friends Work Here, a co-working space; Tattly, a temporary tattoo business; Teux Deux, a productivity app; and Creative Mornings, a series of free lectures for creatives currently taking place in 183 cities around the world. She also just launched ‘the LinkedIn of the creative world’, called CreativeGuild.
In this conversation Tina tells us about her journey from a small town in rural Switzerland to becoming a successful creative entrepreneur in New York, with an audience and network spanning the globe.
She talks about the challenges she faced, and the amazing opportunities that emerged as if by magic, when she followed her creative instincts to work on a series of labours of love, however unusual or commercially unviable they looked at first.
She has interesting things to say about the opportunities that can come to you if you are generous in sharing your work and ideas, and also has an unusual take on the challenge of bringing up children while running your own business.
Listen to Tina’s interview and you will experience a shining example of a 21st century creative – inspiring, generous, outward looking and consistently surprising.
What’s coming in Season 2 of The 21st Century Creative podcast
This the first of 10 interviews in the new season, including a leading poet, a high-end jeweller, an experienced TV and radio host, a serial entrepreneur and a musician who performed to a global audience at Live8.
Each episode will also feature insights and practical guidance from me, based on my 21+ years experience of coaching creatives like you. And I ask every guest who appears on the show to set you a Creative Challenge that will help you put the ideas from the interview in to practice in your own work.
In today’s interview, we tackle a question that many creative people struggle with – what do you do when you look at the jobs on offer, and none of them seem the right fit? Not even the self-employed ones, like consultant or freelance designer?
Should you try to fit in, like a square peg in a round hole? Or should you do what Aileen did, and create a job that doesn’t exist?
I’m delighted to introduce you to Aileen and her work in this episode, she’s a delightfully creative thinker and maker, and a great example of how being yourself can help your business thrive as well as sparking your imagination.
Take Aileen’s Creative Challenge (and win a limited edition print)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. Here’s the challenge, in Aileen’s words:
Think of a job that doesn’t exist. Combine two or three or more of your skills and create a job title, and a brief job description, of the job that would be perfect for you – without worrying whether anyone already does it, or whether anyone would ever pay you to do it.
3. Leave a comment below this post with the description of your ideal job.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 4th August 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of a copy of Aileen’s print.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections from my own perspective.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
I recorded this interview at Kristin’s Linklater Voice Centre, in her native Orkney, at the end of a week-long course on speaking Shakespearean verse. As a student of Kristin’s I have personally benefitted greatly from her teaching, and I’m delighted to be able to share her work with you in this interview.
Kristin has some very insightful things to say about creativity, authenticity and communication, based on a lifetime spent teaching voice work – so you’ll find it helpful whether you’re an actor or you do any kind of public speaking.
And as we discover in the conversation, working on your voice can have a very interesting and positive effect on your creativity, outside of the realm of performance!
If you want to develop an authentic connection to your own voice – whether for professional performance, creativity or personal development – I highly recommend Kristin’s courses. I’ve taken two courses at the Linklater Voice Centre and it was absolutely worth the effort of travelling to Orkney. As you can see from the photos, it’s a magical setting in which to do some powerful inner and outer work.
Take Kristin’s Creative Challenge (and win a copy of Freeing the Natural Voice)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win the prize of a copy of Kristin’s book Freeing the Natural Voice.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. There are two versions of Kristin’s challenge – you can do either (or both) if you want to enter the draw for the books.
First version: Go out to the countryside or if you’re in the city, to a big park, so that you’re alone or at least anonymous.
And in a loud voice, shout firstly to sky: “Haaaaaaah!”
Then to the horizon: “Heyyyyy!!”
Then down to the ground: “Hoooo!”
And remember those different sounds, they are significant.
Second version: choose a poem that has some personal relevance to you, and learn it by heart, letting the images of the poem flow into you and the feelings it arouses.
Then read the poem out loud to two or three friends.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of a copy of Freeing the Natural Voice.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience of public speaking, reading my poems, and working with Kristin.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
The Floatation Tank: a Short Cut to Your Superpower? with Nick Dunin
Jul 17, 2017
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative Podcast is Nick Dunin, co-founder of Beyond Rest, a company that operates float centres in three Australian cities.
Nick is on a mission to help people get in touch with their best selves via floating. He’s also had a very unusual journey as an entrepreneur and he has a lot of interesting things to say about personal development, creativity and business.
I’ve been using floatation tanks for years, and I’ve found floating tremendously beneficial, for my personal and creative development, so I’m delighted to have Nick on the show to explain the what, why and how of floating for creatives.
Where can you float?
If you live in Perth, Melbourne or Brisbane, Australia, you can pop along to your local Beyond Rest float centre and Nick and his team will take good care of you.
I currently float at the Bristol Float Centre, where the staff are always friendly and helpful, if you’re in the area, I thoroughly recommend their service.
If you live somewhere else, Google ‘floatation tank’ plus the name of your town or city to find your nearest float centre.
Take Nick’s Creative Challenge (and win a float session or a copy of The Book of Floating)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win the prize of a copy of the classic introduction to floating by Michael Hutchison The Book of Floating.
Special prize for Australian listeners!
Nick has generously donated a special prize of a floatation session at one of the Beyond Rest centres – so if you can get to Perth, Melbourne or Brisbane, and you want to be entered in the draw for this special prize, just add the hashtag #specialprize at the end of your comment.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. The challenge is to take either 30 minutes during the day, or 60 minutes before you go to bed, and do nothing.
By which we mean:
not doing anything constructive or productive, so no kind of work
not consuming any kind of entertainment – no TV, phone, internet, books etc.
No conversation or interaction with other people
Going for a walk is fine, but no exercise more vigorous than this
In other words, just sit or walk or lie and be present to your experience in the moment. Yes, your mind will distract you, you’ll get fidgety and want to go do something, but resist the temptation and keep doing nothing.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post describing how you get on.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 21st July 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of Michael Hutchsison’s The Book of Floating, and the Australian winner of the float session at Beyond Rest.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience of floating.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
Jocelyn was instrumental in turning 99U into the iconic brand for creatives it is today – editing the magazine site 99U.com and the series of 99U books for creatives, and helping the team create the amazing 99U Conferences in New York.
In this interview, Jocelyn talks about the psychology of email – why such a convenient form of communication has become such a drain on our creativity and productivity, and how to reclaim time and headspace for real work.
And as we discovered in the course of the conversation, most of the advice in Unsubscribe is applicable beyond your inbox – the principles of email management can help you get your creative work done amid the daily whirlwind of news, social media and other distractions.
As well as reading the book, you can follow Jocelyn’s thinking on her website and on Twitter.
In the first part of the show, I talk about the four types of work we can spend our time on – and which one creates the most long-term benefits for your creative career.
Take Jocelyn’s Creative Challenge (and win a copy of Unsubscribe)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win the prize of a copy of Jocelyn’s book Unsubscribe, which teaches you the seven essential questions that will allow you to become a better coach and influencer in your daily conversations at work.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. The challenge is to check and answer your email in batches – about 2 or 3 batches each day.
So this means closing email in your browser and disabling it on your phone, so you can’t just check it with the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger.
Decide in advance when and for how long you’re going to check your email – Jocelyn recommends about 20-30 minutes at a time, and focusing 100% on email during this time, so you get it done faster.
If you have VIPs in your life who NEED to be able to contact you urgently, make arrangements for them to be able to do this – either by switching on VIP email alert in your phone, or asking them to text or phone you with any urgent messages, instead of emailing these.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post describing how you get on.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 14th July 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of Jocelyn’s book Unsubscribe.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a coach.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
Say Less, Ask More and Communicate Better with Michael Bungay Stanier
Jul 03, 2017
This week’s guest on the 21st Century Creative Podcast is Michael Bungay Stanier, Founder and Senior Partner of Box of Crayons, a company that helps people and organizations all over the world do less Good Work and more Great Work.
Box of Crayons is best known for its coaching programs that give busy leaders the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less.
In this conversation Michael and I talk about the importance of communication skills for creative directors and other leaders of creative teams – as well as for all of us who interact with our fellow human beings in the course of our work.
Michael shares tips and insights from his latest book The Coaching Habit, a brilliantly simple (but not superficial) guide to becoming more influential and helpful to those around you at work.
Joanna is here to talk about mindset for creatives – specifically, the attitudes and ambitions that distinguish creatives who struggle from those who succeed – according to their own definition of success.
She has written extensively about this topic in her book The Successful Author Mindset. For this interview, I’ve asked her to widen the focus to include all kinds of creatives – the essential psychology is the same, so this interview is not just for writers!
One new release from Jo that is just for writers is the new edition of her book How to Market a Book, which is now available for pre-order.
Jo is constantly researching publishing news and trends, and experimenting with the latest marketing methods. Whether you’re self published or traditionally published, if you want to know what works and (what doesn’t) in book marketing in 2017, this is the book to read.
Also for authors is The Author 2.0 Blueprint – a free ebook and email series on how to write, self-publish and market your book.
Take Joanna Penn’s Creative Challenge (and win her book on the creative mindset)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win the prize of a copy of Joanna’s book The Successful Author Mindset. Even if you’re not a writer, you’ll find the book is backed with insights and advice on the mindset that will help you succeed on your own terms as a creative professional.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. The Challenge is to write down your definition of success for the next year AND the next 5 years.
In other words, what do you want to achieve – creatively, professionally, personally – in (a) in the next 12 months and (b) by 2022?
Joanna encourages you to be as specific as possible, and to make the commitment in writing because by writing it down, you’re starting to make it happen.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post describing your definition of success.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 30th June 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of the desktop background and your choice of one of my books for creatives.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a writer and a coach.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
On a round-the-world tip, Laurie spent time in Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and other countries. And not only did she manage to keep running her existing design business from her laptop, she designed and created an entirely new business – Outshinery.
Outshinery takes a new approach to product photography for the wine and beer industries, using 3D digital technology to create images without the hassle of shipping bottles of alcoholic liquid to photographers’ studios. It means they can deliver ‘bottle shots before the wine is bottled’.
The Outshinery team are spread across 3 continents and 4 office spaces, but use technology and teamwork to get things done together.
If you’re curious about the idea of combining exotic travel with your creative work, or if you’re a creative service provider who would like to have more income and impact without having to work longer and longer hours, you’ll find this an eye-opening and inspiring conversation.
As well as her websites, you can connect with Laurie via Instagram and LinkedIn.
In the first part of the show, I talk about why 21st Century Creatives should stay small and go global, for the sake of our creativity and prosperity.
Take Laurie Millotte’s Creative Challenge (and win an original desktop background and one of my books)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win the prize of an original ‘world map’ desktop background designed by Laurie Millotte, plus your choice of one of my books for creatives – Productivity for Creative People, Motivation for Creative People, or Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. the challenge is to design your ideal round the world creative adventure and leave a comment describing all the places you’d like to visit. Laurie is asking for at least 6 places, so be bold!
And tell us WHY you want to visit these places for inspiration – whether it’s the people, the landscape, the culture or something else.
Finally tell us what you want to create as a result of your trip – maybe a biz, an artwork, a book or another creative project.
To make it more fun, and to show you how easily it can be done, here are two round the world trip planners:
You can use these sites to build round the world tickets without actually making a purchase (unless you’re feeling really adventurous!).
No, we’re not sponsored by these sites and they are not affiliate links. We’re not affiliated with them in any way – Laurie just wanted to share them as fun tools to help you daydream.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post describing your imagined virtual world, and how it serves your visitors, as vividly as possible.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 23rd June 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize of the desktop background and your choice of one of my books for creatives. I want to stress I’ll pick the winners at random, I won’t be judging the comments as the challenge is not a competition.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a writer and a coach.
6. As usual the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
As Fabrice talks about his development as a creator, the conversation ranges from the cave paintings of southern France, to raves in 90s Paris, collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, Google and Epic Games, and how virtual reality will shape the future of fields as diverse as architecture, medicine and shopping.
It’s a mind-boggling journey that will be of interest to anyone curious about the role of the artist in the 21st century.
You can view some of Fabrice’s life drawings in the gallery of his website.
The video below gives a glimpse of some of his dazzling architectural visualisations. For more videos, and tutorials on how to create 3D worlds yourslf, check out Fabrice’s YouTube channel.
Take Fabrice Bourrelly’s Creative Challenge (and you could win a limited edition art print)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win yourself a very special prize: one of three limited edition print of one of Fabrice’s drawings, which Fabrice has kindly donated for the Challenge.
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. Fabrice’s challenge is to imagine that your website could be replaced by a fully immersive 3D virtual reality environment, and this VR environment has practically no limitations. (Fabrice suggests you probably need to have light, otherwise no-one can see the environment!)
So you could invite your visitors into a woodland glade. Or it could be somewhere in outer space. It could be underwater. It could be something from ancient history. It could be something the like of which the world has never seen before.
And remember, there is one other constraint: the website also needs to fulfill its current function. So, if you’re a bookshop, or if you’re an author, you’re selling books, you include a way to get books. If you’re providing a service, make this an extension of your service. If you’re a musician, give them a way to experience and buy your music.
In other words, your site still needs to serve your visitors, but in a very creative, very unusual environment that people can experience via virtual reality.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post describing your imagined virtual world, and how it serves your visitors, as vividly as possible.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 16th June 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize Fabrices has kindly donated of a limited edition print of one if his drawings. I want to stress I’ll pick the winners at random, I won’t be judging the comments as the challenge is not a competition.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a writer and a coach.
6. Important – the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
In today’s show Steve talks about his latest novel, The Knowledge, which he describes as “the origin story of The War of Art“, based on his life as a taxi driver and struggling novelist in 1970s New York. He reflects on the relationship between truth and fiction in his writing, and explains the artistic and editorial decisions he made when fictionalising from his own life experience.
Steve also has some forthright and provocative things to say about some of the myths about creativity that we allow to hold us back – so I’m expecting howls of protest from some quarters this week!
You can pick up The Knowledge via Steve’s imprint, Black Irish Books, as well as Amazon and all the usual bookstores.
I recommend you also subscribe to Steve’s blog, where he shares his hard-won creative wisdom every week.
Take Steven Pressfield’s Creative Challenge (and you could win his latest book)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win yourself a copy of Steve’s latest novel The Knowledge:
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. In Steve’s words the challenge is to “examine your own life and ask yourself – did I have an All Is Lost Moment? And if so, when was it? what happened? And what epiphany, i.e what big insight, came out of that?”
As Steve says, the All Is Lost Moment is the moment when you hit rock bottom, and you really do feel that all is lost in your life or your career, that you’re as far away as it’s possible to get from reaching your goal and realising your dream or ambition – but it’s also a moment where you see the reality of your situation clearly, and gain a big insight that – somewhat paradoxically – leads to a profound change in you that helps you to move forward towards your goal. So life is very different before and after the All Is Lost Moment.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post telling us what commitment you’re going to make for the year ahead. So once you’ve given this some thought, and you’ve identified your All Is Lost Moment, leave a comment below, describing the moment itself, the insight it gave you, and the changes you made as a result.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 9th June 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize Steve has kindly donated of his novel The Knowledge. I want to stress I’ll pick the winners at random, I won’t be judging the comments as the challenge is not a competition.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a writer and a coach.
6. Important – the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
And if you’d like to leave a brief review in iTunes, that would be even more helpful.
The more people who subscribe and review the show, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a few moments to subscribe and/or review will give the podcast the best chance of success.
Introducing the 21st Century Creative Podcast, with Scott Belsky on Creative Community
May 18, 2017
Today is the launch of my podcast The 21st Century Creative. It’s designed to help you thrive as a creative professional amid the demands, distractions and opportunities of the brave new world of the 21st century.
We’re living at a time of unprecedented opportunity for enterprising, outward-looking creators. And you’ve probably noticed we don’t have our challenges to seek either – creatively, personally, professionally, politically and environmentally.
So I thought it was time for a show that addresses these issues, from your perspective as a creative professional. I’ll be taking the lead and sharing my thoughts on them in a series of short talks in the first part of each episode. In today’s episode I introduce the show, explain what it’s all about and how it will work (the format is a little different to most podcasts).
And I have a stellar line-up of guests who have given me in-depth, insightful and inspiring interviews – including writers, designers, entrepreneurs, and experts in leadership, productivity, and personal development.
I’m producing the show in seasons of 10 episodes – today is Episode 1 of Season 1 of The 21st Century Creative.
I’d like to say a special thank you to two amazing creatives who have been a huge help in producing the show:
Irene Hoffman, who designs all my books, has created a beautiful and distinctive visual identity for the show.
And Javier Weyler, musician, composer and producer, has composed original music and soundscapes that give the show a unique atmosphere. He and his team are also responsible for producing the show, and making my job a whole lot easier.
Scott Belsky – author, entrepreneur, investor and connector
I’m delighted that my first guest is Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen, and founder of Behance and 99U, which have been instrumental in providing a focus, platform and opportunities for the creative community in the 21st century.
In today’s show Scott discusses the foundation and purpose of Behance and 99U, the importance of community for creatives, and the role we can play as creators in challenging political and economic times.
And at the end of his interview, Scott sets you the first of a series of Creative Challenges that will be a regular feature of the show…
Take Scott Belsky’s Creative Challenge (and you could win his book)
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
Here’s how you can take part – and maybe win yourself a copy of Scott’s book Making Ideas Happen:
1. Listen to the interview part of the show, either in the player above, or on iTunes or your favourite podcast platform.
2. In Scott’s words, this week’s challenge is: “Think of one way you commit to pushing yourself into an uncomfortable place this year.”
So that could be a trip you take to a new and challenging place, or something you do, such as learning a new skill or creating something you’ve never attempted before, or interacting with people from a very different culture or background to you. Make it something that will make you uncomfortable AND stretch you in a meaningful direction.
3. Once you’ve completed the challenge, leave a comment below this post telling us what commitment you’re going to make for the year ahead.
You have until midnight United States Pacific time on Friday 2nd June 2017 to complete the challenge and leave your comment.
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize Scott has kindly donated of his book Making Ideas Happen. I want to stress I’ll pick the winners at random, I won’t be judging the comments as the challenge is not a competition.
5. Over the weekend I will send a bonus recording with my feedback on your comments and what we can all learn from the challenge. I’ll be looking through the comments for common patterns, whether that’s ways a lot of you get stuck, or great solutions you’re finding to the challenge. I’ll also be sharing reflections and advice from my own experience as a writer and a coach.
6. Important – the feedback recording will NOT be released on iTunes or anywhere else the show is syndicated. It will only be available via the 21st Century Creative mailing list – click here to join the list (and get a free Creative Career course).
One last thing…
It would be a huge help to me if you would take a moment to subscribe to The 21st Century Creative in iTunes – that’s because the more people who subscribe, the more visible the show will be in the iTunes store, and the more creators I can help with it.
This is particularly important in the first few weeks of a podcast – so if you enjoy the show, and you’d like to support it, taking a moment to click here and subscribe in iTunes will give the podcast the best chance of success.
Thank you, enjoy the show, and stay tuned for Episode 2 at the beginning of June!
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She has played many different types of music, including hard rock, pop, blues, big band, Balkan-music, classical orchestra music, modern chamber music and improvised music. 
She has won numerous awards, including the International Thriller Writers’ prestigious Thriller Award, and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense.
It’s also for you if you find yourself looking at the achievements of your creative heroes and top performers in your field, and comparing your own situation with theirs, and wondering what you could possibly do to compete with them. 
Vicki has co-founded and run ventures in Europe, Toronto and Silicon Valley and taken a company public on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
JOANNA: Me too. And I have just a topper. A topper thing that goes on the top of my desk. I do have a sit-stand desk but the motor stopped working! So you can get these toppers. So if you’re listening, you can put that on. I have a Swiss ball. When I sit, I use a Swiss ball which also means I can do back bends. And just circling back on yoga. One of the miracle things for back pain is the spinal twist which sounds like torture but actually it’s very pleasurable. You can just look it up on the internet. I can do back bends over my Swiss ball. 
JOANNA: You’d be surprised! Really paying attention to how your body feels after you eat something. We’re like, ‘I’ve got a tummy ache.’ Well, okay. So why do you have a tummy ache? Is it because you ate way too much or is it because you ate a certain thing that you ate might not agree with you so much? 
Patricia is also the author of 
She works with senior leaders and teams in the creative and media industries, education, startups, and female entrepreneurs. In The SHED Method she shares the principles and techniques she uses to help her clients perform at their best under pressure. 
#WeThePeople LIVE has hit the No.1 Position in the iTunes comedy podcast charts on numerous occasions. And Twitter explodes with outrage on a regular basis. 
If you visit 
Jarie is inventor or co-inventor on over 10 patents and has published three other books besides The Entrepreneur Ethos: 
Born in Argentina and raised in Venezuela, he achieved national fame with the band Claroscuro before moving to the UK in 2000. 
In today’s interview, we tackle a question that many creative people struggle with – what do you do when you look at the jobs on offer, and none of them seem the right fit? Not even the self-employed ones, like consultant or freelance designer?
I recorded this interview at Kristin’s 
Jocelyn was instrumental in turning 99U into the iconic brand for creatives it is today – editing the magazine site 
Box of Crayons is best known for its coaching programs that give busy leaders the tools to coach in 10 minutes or less. 
Joanna is here to talk about mindset for creatives – specifically, the attitudes and ambitions that distinguish creatives who struggle from those who succeed – according to their own definition of success. 
On a round-the-world tip, Laurie spent time in Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Hawaii, Mexico and other countries. And not only did she manage to keep running her existing design business from her laptop, she designed and created an entirely new business – 
As Fabrice talks about his development as a creator, the conversation ranges from the cave paintings of southern France, to raves in 90s Paris, collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, Google and Epic Games, and how virtual reality will shape the future of fields as diverse as architecture, medicine and shopping.
Every week, at the end of the show, I ask my guest to set you a Creative Challenge – something practical you can do that will help you put the ideas from the show into action.
In today’s show Steve talks about his latest novel, 
4. Once the challenge has finished, I will pick 3 winners at random from the comments, who will receive the prize Steve has kindly donated of his novel The Knowledge. I want to stress I’ll pick the winners at random, I won’t be judging the comments as the challenge is not a competition.
I’m delighted that my first guest is 
