My fears - making money as a creative.

I wanted to be a professional musician.

And I did eventually go on to do that. And I realized in that that I was good at being a support role. But now, like, the nuance is to prove to myself that I can kind of be the. For lack of a better term, like, the frontman. I want to be the guy that's. That's running my business and doing a thing. And what it really comes down to is, like, I'm afraid to fail. I'm afraid that if I put out mediocre videos and they don't do well, then people aren't gonna see me as a professional, and the things that I've done to help creatives won't matter. You know, there's a little more riding on it now than what there was when I was younger and wanting to be a musician. Like, now I got a family I gotta feed. I have. You know, the stakes are just higher. I want to do this right.

I think as creatives, we suffer from the same issues, like this fear of failure, the fear of, like, success. I think all creatives kind of struggle with those things. And so initially, I got so caught up in trying to grow the channel that I just. I did the whole thing everybody else does, where you go and you, like, do the little searchy, searchy on the Google machine, and you try to find, like, the right keywords to get people to do things. And I ended up just getting frustrated. And while my channel did start to grow.

I started to grow further away from it because I started to just chase the views as opposed to trying to go deeper with people. I was just looking for the width. I was like, give me those vanity metrics, baby. That's what I want, right? But when I realized that that was all pretty empty and that I had strayed away from the initial thing, which was to try to help, like, I just quit caring about it. Well, if I'm not getting the vanity metrics, I'm not getting the views. Then obviously this is, like, this is worthless. You know, I was afraid to serve a small audience. I was afraid to, like, have a smaller group of people.

I was talking to my coach, and basically we came to this place of, you know, feeling like I just wanted to put this stuff out. And she's like, well, what's stopping you? You know? And I said exactly that. That I was just so afraid that it would just be another video that flopped and another video that, like, didn't get picked up by the algorithm and all that crap. She was just straight up, what do you really want? From this whole thing, what do you want from your channel? What do you want from your business? What do you want from these things? I want to make a living through this channel, through the other things that I do. But making money is not the point, right? Like, you hear me say this a lot, if you follow me, money is not the end result. Like, the money serves the mission. And what I want is to have a small team of people that we really help creatives figure out how to get so clear on who they are and what they're trying to say so they can grow their audience and they can start to make money doing what they love to do. And I want it so that I can spend more time with my kids, so I can be more creative, so I can do the work it's much like you like, so I can do more creative things, so I can get back to connecting with more artists in different ways and collaborating on cool projects and doing that kind of stuff. And so my coach asked me, well, what does it look like for you to just act on that as if that's happening already? I realized that a lot of it was just putting out videos that were very raw, very real, that didn't take a lot of time, and it felt so good. It was like. It was like a freaking therapy session, you know, to just get up and talk in front of the camera, like I'm doing right now. And that led to all this, these new comments and connections and ideas, because people started responding because I took away all the. I got to do it right, and I started getting real with what I was trying to say, and people responded to that, and it was incredible. It was really fun.

And since then, I've probably released four or five different products to help creatives. I put out a workshop. I released, like a community. I've done a class. And then just recently, this last week, I just launched a training program. All those things, like, with each one, I would have never done that a year and a half ago because I would have been too afraid of. Of what would it look like to show up and do this wrong. What would it look like? And let me tell you, the first thing I put out, I literally had the idea, and the next day I made a video about it and launched it. Like, that's the kind of mode that. This perpetuation of being real rather than trying to do it right, it just. It snowballed from there. And now this. Last week, I had the biggest launch that I've had for this thing yet. I've made the Most money in my business, like in this business. And. And I've helped the most creators that I've ever had. Like, I have these awesome success stories of people that are doing stuff and not cause of me. Like, they're doing it. Cause they're doing the work. I just get to show up and be like a voice of hopefully just help and encouragement and like steering somebody down a way that's like, hey, you have enough. You have everything that you need right now. And it's been so fulfilling in that way.

And there's a couple things I learned. The first one being like, it's okay to serve a small audience, that you don't need all the followers. You just need the right ones. And the second thing is to stop looking for certainty. You know, when we're uncertain, that's good. That means it's going to force our hand at creativity. It's going to force our hand to make moves, to use our gut, to use our instincts. When we're constantly looking for how to do something, we can get lost in the weeds of trying to do it right all the time and miss an opportunity. And this goes against the way we're taught. Like in our education systems and all of these things, there are direct right and wrong answers. You know, if you work at a bank and you like, screw the thing up, you're gonna get fired. And, you know, while it's not that much different building your creative business or doing this thing, it is different because the learning process is the experience of it, you know, because the worst that happens here in my situation is that somebody's unhappy with the thing that I put out and I give them their money back. We don't have to feel let our ego get in the way of it, so we can live in this uncertainty in a really fun way and start to chase that fear a little bit and like, almost treat it like, you know, that's the golden goose and I gotta, like, hunt it down and like, grab it by the throat and give it a little squeeze and wait for that golden egg to pop out. Of course I want to grow. Of course I want, like, a bigger audience. Of course, of course, of course. Because my mission is to help thousands and thousands of creative people change the way they see their worth by changing the way they see themselves. Like, it's so my why is like, so ingrained in what I do here. There's one fear that we as creative people deal with a ton, and I'm not gonna reveal what it is. If you want to know what it is that look a good enough? Bitch? You're gonna need this. Like, go check this video out. I really think about this a lot, you know, this. This fear that we have as creatives that keeps us from being successful. So go check this video out. I'll see you in that one.