Autonomous Creative

I’ve been talking a lot over the past year about one of the biggest contributors to the painful income gap most creatives experience: relying on selling low-cost products via a LOT of marketing, especially social media. There isn't anything inherently wrong with that approach, if you love producing content for Instagram and marketing 24/7. But if you don’t? The best way out of that crunch is to design a high-ticket offer that you can sell to just a few clients. The number one thing I hear...

Happy summer solstice (or winter solstice, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere)! Yes, I know it was actually yesterday, but I’m already going at a summer pace over here. Summer is just built different. I’ve got 2 teens whose lives utterly transformed a week or two ago when school let out. I teach art college, and summer is downtime. I’m a gardener, which means I’ve been extremely outdoors for the last several months, and now begin to get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Many years, I’ve...

The bad news is: You think you can learn yourself out of this bind. You can’t. The good news is: You already have what you need. Here are three lessons I’ve learned as a coach, from my awesome clients. 1. Things don’t have to be hard to be worthwhile It’s the nature of scarcity to make us value things that are rare. (Think gold. Sure, it’s pretty, but if it weren’t rare it wouldn’t be worth much.) The flipside of scarcity-based value is that we devalue things that are plentiful. You’re...

I’m so incredibly proud to introduce the second cohort of the Autonomous Creative Incubator! We’ve all been working so hard for this day, and it feels incredible to be helping launch these new businesses into the world! Six short months ago, these awesome creatives committed to building new businesses. Why did they take this huge step? Because they all needed to create time, freedom, and autonomy in their lives. I mean, don’t we all? But it turns out, the way that actually happens in reality...

What’s one of the most consistent things I hear from every single successful creative I’ve talked to? There was this time when I just started doing this thing. I just started making this thing, and I did it because I wanted to do it, and because it was what made most sense to me creatively, I fully committed to it and I had no idea what was gonna happen, but that’s what opened all these doors.” But those doors won’t open if you’re not out there doing stuff. Listen, I know it’s a cliché. I...

Your creative endeavors, broadly speaking, bring all kinds of important benefits to your life. Your creative business, however, has a single MOST important job: Getting you paid, and paid well enough that you are not scrambling and struggling. What, specifically, does that mean for you? And how can you take charge of making sure you bring in the money you need? um…it involves a little MATH. I know when I mention math, creatives of all kinds tend to tune out. Mention business math? Less tuning...

What if all that hustle and all those late nights… Those projects you poured your soul into… The marketing strategies you keep putting on checklists and telling yourself you definitely need to try… What if all those years of blood, sweat, and brainstorms are literally what’s preventing you from reaching the creative career success you dream of? Wouldn’t that piss you off? Yeah? Well, you certainly wouldn’t be an outlier. A couple of years ago, a group of impressive, accomplished, mid-career...

Pre-s: If you’re struggling to write a book, you don’t want to miss this. My friend and colleague, Gabriela Pereira, the creator of DIY MFA, is hosting one of her amazing, FREE Writing Sprints this weekend, and you can click here to sign up! This is a free virtual writing retreat where writers can create their own goals and build their community by connecting via social media. Once you sign up, you’ll be invited to the secret headquarters, where you’ll get access to a series of videos to...

Pre-s: If you’re struggling to write a book, you don’t want to miss this. My friend and colleague, Gabriela Pereira, the creator of DIY MFA, is hosting one of her amazing, FREE Writing Sprints this weekend, and you can click here to sign up! This is a free virtual writing retreat where writers can create their own goals and build their community by connecting via social media. Once you sign up, you’ll be invited to the secret headquarters, where you’ll get access to a series of videos to...