CREATIVES - START DOING THESE 3 THINGS NOW!

Today we're talking about three things that I think creatives and artists should start doing right now in order to grow the business side of their work. What's up, friend? My name is Lennon Bone. With soundandpatterns.com on this channel, I bring together committed artists and creatives just starting out in their career to seize upon a proven path to cultivate your thousand true fans. With these fans, I believe that you can build the strongest foundation for your success as well as generate a healthy income and build a stable audience for the work that you create. So if you're new to this channel, welcome. If you've been here for a while, you're noticing this is a bit different for me. You can't tell necessarily, but I'm actually in the bathroom closet. So my wife and I moved recently from our house and we downsized into an apartment with our two girls. And so my wife is an artist. And. And the time that I have to make this video is here in the evening. And so I'm using her space. I might actually use this more often. It's kind of fun. She also just brought me a horse feather. If you don't know what a horse feather is, it's bourbon, ginger beer, a little bit of bitters and limes. You put a little bit of lime juice in there. Super, super good. So I want to discuss three ideas with you today. And so these three points, you know, as an artist and a creative that's really just kind of getting. You're not started making work, but you're started trying to promote. I know that it can feel difficult to even feel like you're getting traction. You see, everybody's got all the followers and there's all this stuff. You see the potential. And that can actually be really, really dangerous. Because if you're looking on YouTube, for instance, the ones that have a million followers, you know that these are the 1 percenters. Like, these are so, so, so rare. And for you to feel like you need to be reaching that level, I think is just completely unnecessary. So with that in mind, the first thing I think you need to start doing right now is figuring out what you actually want from your art and from your art career. What do you actually want? When we don't know what we want, all of a sudden, everything has the same amount of urgency. I'm so guilty of this. I can remember when I was first starting putting this stuff out, it was the same amount of urgency to get a new camera, to get a lighting rig, to start making videos, to have an Instagram account that was just banging to do a podcast, to do all these things. I am releasing a podcast soon though, by the way, to all the stuff I felt like I had to do right away when I had no grip on what the end goal was. And now that I have a very clear vision of knowing that, I want to build a community around creatives and artists so that you guys can meet and collaborate and encourage each other. If anything that I'm doing right now isn't feeding into this end game goal, then it's not worth doing right now. But that's step one, know what your end goal actually is. Number two, you need to start respecting your time. More time is literally the only thing that we don't get back. And so when somebody says, you know, are you investing time into the right things? That's a real situation. And what, again, when we don't know the end goal, we don't necessarily know where we should be investing or respecting our time. A big, big issue for me has just been managing time as a whole. And what I would end up doing was kind of working on one thing for a little while and then getting distracted on my phone or checking email, it didn't matter. I just picked the next thing and kind of went for it based on what was around me. And when I started to actually categorize things, put things in an order where my brain says, okay, I'm doing these styles of things, these types of things today and right now, then it makes it easier for me to flow and just get in a rhythm as opposed to, okay, I need to be at the coffee shop here for this hour, and then I got to go to a client meeting for this hour, and then I'm going to go into the studio for this amount of time, and then I'm going to be at home with the kids for the next two hours and then I got to come back. That stuff, you know, we make it work, life's going to happen. And I deal with that on a weekly basis as well, but to the best that we can respect your time and start to build out similar processes and time chunks for you to be able to put your brain in the right place to execute on a more focused basis. And then the third thing, and this may be the biggest thing, is you just need to start treating yourself like a professional. If you don't see yourself as a professional, in the creative field, as an artist, as a musician, and you are in trouble because nobody else is gonna see you as such. It actually took me years when I was doing music full time, mind you, to call myself a professional musician. I lament that so much. Cause I think if I had been able to say that earlier, then I would have been able to have the mindset to shift the people around me to a point where I probably made more money sooner. There's that saying that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at. I think that's such a powerful statement. Because when you start to see yourself and you look at yourself as a professional, then all of a sudden you don't need to take every job. You don't need to do everything for free. All of a sudden, you need to do as a professional the way a CEO would treat their business. You have to do what's right for your business. And you start to see that not everything is actually an opportunity. Sometimes, as my buddy Tim Schmoyer says, there can be distractions that disguised as opportunity. Just start to write it down every day, I am a professional. Or if you need to just wake up and say it every day, you know, I am a professional because I deserve to be one. Nobody's gonna call you a professional if you can't call yourself that first. I will say this as a caveat. It's very different to go around boasting, saying, I'm very good at this. This is what I do. You should see how good I am. That's not a professional. What you see from a real professional is that they have the confidence that they don't need to talk about it all the time. They just know it internally and trust when I say that that energy presents itself, that makes a big difference. So I just want to put that out there. So in this next video, we're going to go over goal setting and why you may not be setting the right goals and understanding how to set said goals. So check this video out and I'll see you guys over there.