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Episode 142—Jeff Goins on Amateurism, Clarity, and the Myth of the Starving Artist
105 Plays5 years ago
"You've gotta find new ways to have fun in old things," says Jeff Goins. It’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, producers, and filmmakers about the art and craft of telling true stories, how they got to where they are, how the cope with crippling self-doubt, and the routines they enlist to get the work done. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara and today’s episode is a tight 30, man. When you get somebody like Jeff Goins (@JeffGoins) on the show, author of a quintillion blog posts and several books, including Real Artists Don’t Starve, you adhere to the time allotment. So this was a tight window, but I think it’s packed with great stuff. Amazing what you can get done in a tight window if you focus and don’t dither. This episode was made possible by Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
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Transcript
Podcast's Future Uncertainty
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Speaker
I tell you man, this was one of those weeks where I simply did not want to do this. I wanted no part of this. I didn't want to edit. I didn't want to package this. I just wanted to pack it in. Who would miss it really? Would I get a flood of emails saying, where's this week's show man? I doubt it.
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but I'd get a flood of personal regret. And that's enough to keep going, especially when you're a pro. And pros show the fuck up.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
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Speaker
That's right, baby, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the badass writers, the producers, the filmmakers, about the art and craft of telling these true stories.
00:00:47
Speaker
how they got to where they are, how they cope with crippling self-doubt and the routines they enlist to get the work done. I'm your host Brendan O'Meara and today's episode is a tight 30. Coming in high Chin Music Man.
00:01:08
Speaker
When you get somebody like Jeff Goins on the show, author of a quintillion blog posts and several books, including Real Artists Don't Starve, his latest, you adhere to the time allotment. So this is a tight window, man. Coming in on the hands, better clear those hips and drive that ball up the middle, but I think it's packed with great stuff. Amazing what you can get done in a tight window if you focus and you don't diva.
Sponsorship by Goucher College
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Speaker
But first, a word from our first sponsor, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts and Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year low residency program.
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Speaker
Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting
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Speaker
you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash non-fiction to start your journey now. Now! Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA in non-fiction.
Engagement and Subscription Encouragement
00:02:34
Speaker
So yes, of course, a little housekeeping is in order as it usually is. You know where to subscribe to the show, don't you? If you want to be in the know and get a little blip of goodness every CNF Friday, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Google Play Music, Spotify and Stitcher.
00:02:55
Speaker
That's enough, I think. Keep the conversation going on Twitter, at Brendan O'Marron, at CNFpod is the way to tag me. If you're into Insta, at CNFpod is the handle. There, where I post all the audiograms and quote cards from the show. It's new, so there's not much there yet. But follow along anyway. It promises to be fun, and I'm all about fun.
Host's Personal Reflections on Writing
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Speaker
I'll let you know something that I finished a significant draft of the baseball book, baby. I had some fun with that on Instagram stories. I chose to celebrate by getting beers and a meal out with a wife. Back in the day, I might not have cared or given a shit and said big effing deal.
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But this time I chose to celebrate the work. This is a big milestone in the creation of a thing. I have come around to the idea that celebrating is important. You know, I'm not done, of course, but one phase is closed and I'm ready for the next. It felt damn good. And so I had a couple IPAs and I had a delicious vegan meal at my favorite restaurant in Eugene.
Guest Introduction: Jeff Goins
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Speaker
So anyway, yes, Jeff Goins is here and he's the author of The Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve and he sits in that great Steven Pressfield Seth Godin pocket of empowering you to make a go of it, really following your taste and just getting into it, man. We talk about how he was read the dictionary as a kid and breaking down the barriers between who we think the geniuses are
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You know, spoiler alert, they're more like us than we think. And a whole lot more. He's at Jeff Goins on Twitter and visit goinswriter.com for all sorts of goodies.
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and to buy some of his stuff, you know, classes, books, you name it.
New Sponsor: Bay Path University
00:04:51
Speaker
All right, before we get to that, here's one last sponsor, a new sponsor. Welcome, Bay Path University. That's right. It is sponsored by, also sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. You got options. Discover Your Story. Bay Path University, founded in New England in 1897,
00:05:12
Speaker
is the first and only university to offer a no-residency, fully accredited MFA focusing exclusively on creative non-fiction. Attend full or part-time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will
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Speaker
form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays. Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland, with writers including Andre De Bute III, he's been on the podcast,
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Speaker
and Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August, January, and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA. That's it, friends. Here's me and Jeff Goins.
Goins on Parental Influence and Early Reading
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Let it rip.
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So I understand when you were when you were younger, your mom used to read the dictionary to you on on long car rides. What was that like? And how influential was that for you? Like, I mean, what was anything like growing up? You just sort of, it's just what you used to do, right? And I didn't think anything of it. And a sixth grade spelling bee in the winning word was acquiescence.
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uh, you know, people were surprised by that. And I beat this eighth grader and he cried on the way home, which was, you know, actually kind of felt pretty good. Um, which was the only time I ever made an eighth grader cry. But, um, yeah, you don't reveal the things that influence you are unique until you realize other people haven't had those same experiences. So it was only years after the fact when I realized that things like spelling and writing always just came very easily to me.
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that I realized, oh, this is really important to my mom. And it became very important to me because of our relationship. In what way did she maybe foster what would eventually become a career in words for you? My mom was not very good at math, but spelling was something that she was a stickler for. And the fact that words meant something that was very important to her
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And her father, my grandfather was a journalist and an artist. And so he was essentially a professional writer. And I'm sure that influenced her because that influenced her and she was very close to him. That influenced me. And I think it's just the idea that words are very special. They mean something. They really do have
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power to give life or destroy life. This idea that sticks and stones may break my bones, but names never hurt me. It's like the biggest lie you can teach a child. Words are incredibly potent.
Achieving Writing Clarity and Influences
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If you think about our world today, you think about the world of even politics, wars are waged over words. Elections are won or lost over words. Power is gained and lost through simple words. So words are
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incredibly powerful tools and I learned that from my mom. Good or bad, right or wrong, how you use a word can affect a lot.
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In your writing, you write with such clarity and fluidity, and of course that always comes from immense attention to detail and a ton of work and rewrites. So how did you cultivate that skill to write as clearly as possible when it's obvious that you have a
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You know, a repository of vocabulary at your, in your arsenal, but yet you, you know, you choose to have it come across a very clear and, um, in direct to a reader. Well, I think it's Nathaniel Hawthorne who said that easy reading is damn hard writing. And so if you want it to read easily, it's actually requires a lot of writing and rewriting, as you mentioned.
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But I really agree with Stephen King that the best way to become a good writer is to read a lot and write a lot. So it's really difficult to know how to write well if you aren't reading a lot of good writing. And so I think what I'm always striving for is to write like the authors that I admire, the people that I look up to. How do they do that? Because you read something.
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And you go, oh, like, that's cool. I can do that. And then you try to do it. You try to write it. I can't do that. Haven't they do that? You know? And so reading a lot and writing a lot, at least reading a lot of good stuff, will exacerbate the gap between where you are as a writer and where you want to be. And so if I am striving for anything, it's to sort of meet the standards set by my own writing heroes and even peers sometimes.
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How did you keep yourself from becoming demoralized when you realized the gap from what you wanted to write, from what you were capable of writing, was very wide and in turn narrowed, but how did you not be demoralized in that time? One of the things that helped me a lot, and I don't know that I did this consciously, but I started reading a lot of biographies of famous writers and artists.
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to know their story, to know where they came from, as much, it is as helpful as knowing what they created, right? So it's
Coping with Skill Gaps through Biographies
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helpful to read The Great Gatsby and then to understand the story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald was this insecure, young, but also kind of arrogant writer who
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Um, couldn't get this girl to like him and, uh, you know, strove and strove and strove to get published so that she would like him and marry him. And, and I go, Oh, I know what that's like. I know what it's like to be a guy. You can't get a girl to notice him. Maybe, you know, maybe what he did with this masterpiece is not so far out of reach as I thought. And so to understand, not just, not just look at the final creation of some of your favorite, um,
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writers, musicians, creative geniuses, but to also understand the story about how they got there, I think that keeps you from being demoralized because you see them as human beings. Like, F. Scott Fitzgerald was not confident in The Great Gats, but he was incredibly insecure about it and wracked with self-doubt. He wanted to call the book the high-bouncing lover. And so to understand how these choices sometimes get arbitrarily made, you go,
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Oh, so that's what it takes to be a genius. It kind of sounds like just, you know, what it takes to be a human, you know, they're full of these peccadillos and quirks and faults. And, uh, I'm not excluded from.
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the process of becoming a genius if the people that we call geniuses look like flawed humans too.
The Value of Being an Amateur
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And you wrote in your most recent book one of the sections and it was begin as a copycat and as a master and of course you're referring to Fitzgerald with Gatsby. Anyone who's read your work knows what a tremendous fan of Hemingway you are. So as you were starting to develop your own voice, who were you copying to find your own voice?
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Hemingway, Steven Pressfield, Seth Godin, Anne Lamott. I love the poetry at Emily Dickinson. I really liked that sort of terse, punchy style. It really spoke to me. So Hemingway and Pressfield were really big influences.
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Yeah, there's something to be said about a short sentence, right? It really does get to the point, if you can shorten the distance between the first capital letter and the period of the sentence, right? Right, yeah. And of course, you write so wonderfully about being an amateur, but of course turning pro. What are some of the things these days that your, what amateurism are you swimming in at the moment?
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I've sort of redefined that a little bit. A friend pointed out to me recently that the word amateur comes from the Latin word amateur, which means lover. And a true amateur is actually somebody who just does it for the love of it. That's the original meaning. So, gosh, you know, in some ways, I want to become an amateur again, as a writer, and in many ways still feel like I'm not as good as I'd like to be. But in another field, speaking, I love
00:14:46
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I love the dynamic of a live audience. I love how things that you can't get away with as a writer, you can't get away with, you even should get away with as a speaker. For example, repetition. You can say the same thing over and over again as a speaker to really drive home a point. Whereas in writing, that can come across as redundant. And so to understand how the written and spoken word
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can influence each other. And yet these are very different disciplines and unique crafts. That's something I'm getting more into and really respecting as a different craft and trying to master in a new way. But I'm also still just trying to love it and experience it as a true amateur in the noblest version of that word.
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In the last few years, let's say, have you come across moments where the work itself, the writing itself became laborious to an extent where it's like, I just don't have the fire for it? And if you have lost it, how do you rekindle it? I don't know how you rekindle it. I think it's important.
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to be honest with your writing as it's important to be honest in any relationship. My wife and I have been married 11 years now and we sometimes contrast our relationship now with our relationship when we first met. We're both pretty skeptical of this idea that you can go back to being young kids in love and that that's even the point of being in a relationship. At the same time, we don't want to become these hardened
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curmudgeons who are, you know, grouchy with each other all the time. But it seems to me that there's some sort of middle way between those two extremes of resenting this thing that you've done for so long and being kind of doe-eyed about the whole thing. And C.S. Lewis talks about this when he talks about a marriage and he likens it to the difference between, he talks about the difference between being in love and loving something.
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And being in love, he describes as this very emotional, self-conscious kind of way of relating to a person. And I think about when I first started dating the woman that's now my wife, I was so nervous that I would get really gassy when we would go on these dates. And I'm grateful that I don't have gas all the time around her anymore because I'm not nervous. Being a little bit comfortable
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Speaker
is okay. And Lewis likens that kind of, you know, loving someone versus being in love with them to going on vacation to the same spot every year, you know, some some place at the beach, and, and you love it, you're like, I love this so much, I want to move here. And then one day you move there. And all the things that are new and exciting about that vacation spot lose their luster. And what's
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If you stay there long enough though, he says, what replaces that excitement is a quieter love. You notice things that the tourists don't notice because they don't stick around there long enough. You maybe don't go to the beach anymore, but you find a rolling brook through the woods behind your house that nobody else can find, or you find these hidden trails or that candy shop that nobody knows about. You find things that are subtle.
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Speaker
that other people might miss because they didn't have the discipline to stick around. So I'm using an analogy to describe an analogy that applies to writing. But I think the same thing is true with writing. So are there times when it's boring or it used to feel easy and now it feels like work? Yeah, of course. And there have been times where I go, I don't want to do this right now. So I'm maybe not going to do this for a little while. I'm going to work on something else. I'm going to speak more.
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do more events or coaching or something or just take some time off of working on a new book. And the more I trust that, the more I fall in love with different aspects of the vocation. So this past year, I was supposed to start writing a new book and I just couldn't. I was going through some personal things, struggles, trials, questions, beginning to understand who I was and who I wasn't, things that I thought would make me happy and how they didn't
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Speaker
And without really even needing to, just sort of as a way, a form of self-expression and self-understanding, I started writing poetry again, which I really hadn't done since I was a teenager. And I just kind of fell back in love with poetry, reading it, writing it, experiencing
00:19:58
Speaker
life through, you know, the poetic verse. And, and that was a very old thing, because writing for me was always something that I returned to. I like how Elizabeth Gilbert says this, she says, writing is my home, not in the sense that it's the place that I came from, but it's the place that I always go back to. And, and so when I feel sort of stuck, when I feel like this isn't working anymore,
00:20:28
Speaker
I follow that I listen to it. I trust it. I don't just simply force myself to keep going now If I have a commitment a deadline, you know, I do my job but beyond that I let go of it a little bit and I see what can be kind of born in its place and there's always something old that I'm returning to because writing and art in general is play it's a form of play and so you've got to have you've got to be able to
00:20:53
Speaker
find new ways to have fun and old things. And that's true for a relationship and it's hopefully true for our vocation too as artists. And when you're in search of that love again and to find it in places where you might have, you know, unexpected places, where do you end up feeling the most alive and most engaged in the process? Always at the beginning, always at the start of something new, because that's a place where
00:21:23
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dreams live. It doesn't have to be anything just yet. It can be anything. And for me, the fantasy of this could be anything. This could be the next big book about such and such. This could be the most amazing poem that I've ever written. When you're playing with it, just at the outset, that's really fun. I used to think that we, you know, I used to think that I wrote books so that I could finish them and share them with people. And that's what it was about. It's never about that. It's always about
00:21:52
Speaker
getting into a new project and all the possibilities that it represents. And yet it doesn't have to be anything yet. So in some ways it can be all of those things without having to be any of them. And so the beginning of a project for me, you know, the first 20, 30% is usually very, very fun.
00:22:12
Speaker
And I love what you wrote on your blog about the three buckets of ideas, drafts, and edits. And I was wondering if you could speak to that, what that is, and how you came to that. The three bucket system is just my creative process. And like any framework, it's not something that I sat down and said, OK, this is how I'm going to do creative work. It was just what worked.
00:22:38
Speaker
Emerged and I said oh, it's like these there's like these three little buckets and here's how this works and I'm doing this intuitively But I'll I'll kind of draw circle around and say this is what it is and give it a name so that people other people can understand it But the three bucket system is how I write anything Work on anything really is it starts with an idea ideas are always coming I may get an idea while talking to you and my job here is just capture the idea write it down So all day long I'm capturing ideas putting them into my idea bucket
00:23:08
Speaker
which is just a folder on my phone that syncs with my computer. I use an app called Bear right now to do that, which syncs seamlessly across devices. So I just have a little folder in that app called Ideas. I just write an idea down or 10 or 20 or whatever, but I write down at least one new idea every single day. And then during my writing time, usually in the morning, after I drop off my son at school, I'll go to a coffee shop
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Speaker
and I'll work on an idea and turn it into a draft. So I'll pull something out of my idea bucket and I'll draft it. I'll write about 500 words, which takes about 20 to 30 minutes for me. And I'll save that and then I'll put it into a new folder called drafts. And then after that, I'll edit something from a previous day, not the same day. So I'm never writing and editing in the same sitting.
00:24:02
Speaker
Because it's important that I'm getting some time away from something that I've written before so I'm not too emotionally attached to it And I can come back to it objectively so it could just be the thing that I wrote the day before which it often is and Then I'm editing that so pulling something out of the drafts bucket. I'm editing that and then saving it a new folder called edits and once you've got something in each of those three buckets your job as a writer is Not to come up with some brilliant idea write it and edit it and share it with the world all at once and
00:24:32
Speaker
your job is to simply move something from one bucket to the next every single day, just to keep the buckets full. And so that's my job is to make sure I have enough ideas that I always got ideas in the idea bucket, uh, make sure that I'm always writing. So I always have something in the drafts bucket, uh, that I can edit. And then to make sure that I'm always editing so that I have pieces ready to publish whenever I need them. And so whether I'm working on a book or not, whether I have a deadline or not,
00:25:01
Speaker
This process helps me regularly publish new material on my blog. It helps me work on the next idea that could turn into a book. It helps me come up with ideas for new podcasts and even just stuff to, you know, ideas to share on social media. It is the process by which I work through my best ideas and get them ready to share with the world.
00:25:24
Speaker
And how have you over the years gotten comfortable with creating enough bad ideas and doing enough bad writing to get to good and great ideas and good and great writing? I've done it the other way. I've waited for a really good idea to come and not been willing to work through the bad ideas. I mean, if you look at all my writing, I mean, I've written
00:25:55
Speaker
Tens of thousands of words this past year. They'll never be published because they're not very good ideas and There is a part of me that's tempted to share them I spent so much time on this but I go back and read them I go this is not very good and I did the other thing for a long time which was I waited for a good idea and I wasn't willing to work through several bad ideas to get one good idea and I never published a good idea. I never shared anything worth sharing because I was waiting for perfect
00:26:25
Speaker
I was waiting for good to come to me instead of willing to work through the bad to find the good. And I think that is a distinction between an amateur and a professional is the amateur tends to wait for the good to come to them, whereas the professional works through the bad to get to the good. They understand that there is no other way to get to a good idea than to wade through all of the crap that you've got to get through to get to something pretty good.
00:26:54
Speaker
And in your most recent book too, which is just a wonderful treatise on debunking the starving artist myth, I wonder why that idea and why do you think that idea of the starving artist became such a sticky idea for people? Because it can be true. I mean you can starve as an artist and in the book, at the end of the book, I argue that sometimes it's easier to believe a beautiful lie than it is to
00:27:24
Speaker
I accept a difficult truth. And it actually is kind of a beautiful lie that artists can starve. It's romantic. In the romantic period, it was associated with genius. And so as a result, we go, well, I'm suffering. I'm starving. I'm struggling as an artist. Therefore, I must be a real artist. And so what I wanted to do in the book is show clearly throughout history that creative people didn't have to starve to create works of genius. In fact, some of your most favorite artists
00:27:53
Speaker
didn't starve at all. Michelangelo was the richest artist in the Renaissance. And not only that, he set a new precedent in the Renaissance for artists to be aristocrats. And so there were many painters and sculptors who followed in his footsteps who were very wealthy people during the Renaissance. It wasn't until the mid to late 1800s during the Romantic period where this notion of being a starving artist was associated with genius.
00:28:23
Speaker
And it was pretty short-lived, you know, even you know coming out of the era of well first of all the all the impressionists many of them were Wealthy people, you know, they were sons of wealthy people or they had patrons even Vincent van Gogh who's like the iconic starving artist Made a pretty good living wage and his brother bankrolled him for the ten years that he was a professional artist He lived better than most of his peers so it really is a myth and
00:28:52
Speaker
myths or stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of the world around us. And so in that book, certainly, you can be an artist and starve, you certainly have that option. But my challenge is you don't have to starve. If you are a real artist, whatever myth you choose to believe, whatever story you choose to tell yourself, whether it's the story of the starving artist, I have to suffer so that my work is serious and important, or the story of the thriving artist, which is I
00:29:23
Speaker
need to make money so that I can make more art, whichever story you choose to believe is probably going to end up coming true. So choose wisely. How did you figure that out for yourself to have that business mindset around your art and to approach it like a business and build a team around you so you could really do the thing that we have come to know you for? Well, bills will help.
00:29:50
Speaker
Will also give you a wake-up call. Oh, I have to make money off of this damn and I understood one way or the other I was going to have to make money and I was going to have to make my art I wasn't willing to not do it and and I had responsibilities that I you know, like all of us had to Take care of and so I thought well I can either work a day job and then do this on the side which is Perfectly fine or I can find a way to make money off of this or make money off of
00:30:19
Speaker
part of this that will give me more time and more freedom to do more of this kind of work. And it sort of started with that. And then quickly, I just started to realize some of my heroes and friends and people that I looked up to that were doing creative work professionally, they were very good at what they did. They weren't broke. And they had some business acumen, whether it was natural or something that they had to learn.
00:30:49
Speaker
It was part of the job. Being an entrepreneur, being a marketer is part of the job of being an artist if you want to do it successfully. And so as I began to just understand the stories of people who had gone before me and succeeded in ways that I wanted to succeed, I realized this is part of the job. Being an artist is not just somebody who sits around and paints or writes all day. It's somebody who understands how to take their ideas
00:31:18
Speaker
and sell them in the marketplace, whatever that looks like in your current context. And many of history's greatest masters either understood how to do that or they had somebody who worked with them and for them who understood how to do that. And today, more often than not, that someone is going to be you.
00:31:36
Speaker
And how do you strike a certain amount of harmony between the social media presence and the way you contribute to that community, your own writing, and then how generous you are with your time to do podcasts like this? Because you grant interviews to bigwigs and small podcasters and everything in between. You're a big contributor to the artistic community.
00:32:02
Speaker
I wonder how you structure your time so you can give so generously of yourself to so many things. You know, nobody ever calls somebody a small wig, huh? That really hasn't caught on yet, but maybe you should try to coin that here. Big wigs, small wigs. Yeah, mentors of mine, friends of mine exemplified as well. Seth Godin is a great example of that. So I try to fall in the footsteps of those whom I admire and emulate the kind of behavior
00:32:32
Speaker
That I've appreciated and benefited from and Seth is definitely one of those influences I was just trying to keep it really simple. One of the things I've learned from Seth is Say no to a lot of things so that you can say yes to almost everything within a certain sphere So there are lots of things that I just won't do because I don't want to do them. I'm not good at them It's not my lane and so I'm not perfect at this but I've tried to structure my life in such a way where I
00:33:03
Speaker
Um, I don't do anything in the mornings except create. And I realized, cause there was a season in my life where I was like promoting things, you know, having meetings, doing phone calls all the time. And I wasn't writing, I wasn't being quiet and still and creative, uh, for the first half of the day. And I was just not fun to be around. And I was working, I was working hard. I was succeeding, but I wasn't working on the thing that got me here. I wasn't working on my craft. And so now I really protect that time.
00:33:32
Speaker
I rarely take a meeting or a phone call or do something before noon because I'm writing. I'm going to spend all morning today all the way through lunch working on a book. And so that allows me to be more open and free with the afternoons. And so I have designated times where I will meet somebody for lunch or do a phone call or do an interview.
00:33:59
Speaker
during these specific periods of time and I don't really care how big or small your wig is. If you want one of those blocks of time and you ask, there's a line sometimes and you just wait your turn and I'm happy to do that. But I think early on I didn't understand that I need to structure my day in such a way where it works for me, what I want to do, works with my energy. In the morning I'm feeling
00:34:26
Speaker
I'm very anxious, I drop my son off, and at eight o'clock in the morning, I'm ready to go. So I want to work, I want to work on a book. I've got all these ideas that I've been thinking about sleeping on and I'm ready to go. And when I'd have to go to a meeting, I would get completely drained of that. And so I've tried to restructure my days in such a way where they follow my energy. So after working on a book for four hours this morning, I'm excited to talk to a person. And I love this sort of thing. I love meeting with people.
00:34:55
Speaker
Engaging with people talking about ideas so interviews podcasts Webinars those feed me because it's another opportunity For me to do creative work to test out ideas get feedback say something a certain way. Oh, that's interesting I'm gonna write that down or something. So it is all part of the process for me. Hmm
00:35:17
Speaker
And just a couple more things, Jeff. I had circled in your Real Artists Don't Starve book, something you had mentioned about limiting beliefs. And I wrote in the margins, like, this is a good podcast question just for everyone, and especially for Jeff. And I wonder what limiting beliefs you cope or have coped with, and how you work your way through that so you tell yourself a more empowering story so you can get the work done.
00:35:46
Speaker
I only have one limiting belief and it shows up under lots of different guises and the belief is I'm not good enough. I'm not a good enough person, not a good enough husband, not a good enough dad, not a good enough writer, artist, entrepreneur, you name it. And the biggest thing that I've dismantled in the past year of my life is flipping that. What if I didn't have to do anything to be good? What if I already am good and then I just am free to do whatever I want?
00:36:17
Speaker
And that has changed a lot both personally and professionally. If you don't have anything to prove, all of a sudden you have a lot of freedom. You can try things that are exciting and sound fun. You can attempt great things and not be afraid of failure because the failure doesn't define you. Because you're good, you're fine. And you can also succeed and not be stuck in that success. People don't realize how much of a trap success can be because you achieve this thing
00:36:45
Speaker
And now people either expect you to repeat that or top it, but that's not always possible. That's not even always healthy. And if I'm not my success, if success doesn't, isn't one, another way that I earned being good enough, worthiness, whatever you want to call it. Um, like I just have inherent self-worth and dignity. I can succeed or not succeed. I can fail or, or, or not. I can try something. People go, why are you trying that? I thought it might be fun.
00:37:14
Speaker
You realize that all of your work and all of your life in a sense can be this great playground You know, how do you win at the playground the flight? I mean you don't like you you climb up the ladder You go down the slide you go. That was fun. I'll do it again. I'll go swing over here So that was a very has been a very liberating experience for me. I don't have anything to prove I don't even have anything to achieve It's just fun and I'm gonna keep doing it until it stops being fun. I
00:37:42
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Jeff, for people who might not be familiar with your work or where to find you online, where can they find you online and get more familiar with your work? You can find me on my website, my blog, at goinswriter.com. Lots of free things there for writers, creative professionals. Check out my podcast and blog. Sign up for the newsletter. Do whatever you like. Have fun.
00:38:09
Speaker
Goinswriter.com.
00:38:25
Speaker
Nothing wrong with a high and tight 30, amirite? It has a different vibe to it, but no less valuable. Like I said, no dithering. Thanks to Jeff. Go check him out on the socials, and thanks to all our sponsors for the show, Goucher College and Bay Path University.
00:38:42
Speaker
tag teaming this Royal Rumble. Be sure to head over to BrendonOmera.com that's me for show notes to this show and over a hundred forty others and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter ever growing a great piece of newsletter goodness I love new newsletters I'm hooked on them I like mine it's got its own little spin I hope you dig it too
00:39:04
Speaker
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00:39:20
Speaker
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00:39:45
Speaker
I will jump in the fire with you baby. Can that possibly be it? It is. Oh man. If you can do interview. See ya.