19 Minutes to Transform Your Creative Journey | Make Your Ideas Come Alive

Create to create. Alright, welcome to another Evan's Book Update. Nina's here. I waited for her to be home, so Nina's here. Super exciting. This has been an interesting week for me in terms of the book update. I gave it to my publisher, and I've written everything except for the final chapter. And she was supposed to get it back to me, but she hasn't. So it's book writing day and I didn't get it back. So I didn't have anything to write. And instead what I did was create other amazing things for other projects that I'm working on. And I think about the book, and here's the kind of lesson for you guys before going into the questions. I think about the book and we've had to cut half of the book, more than half the book. We started at, no, about half the book. About half the book has been cut down. And I was talking to somebody who helped me review the book. He said, "You cut out half the book? That's like 60,000 words. That's like," it was Ahmad. That's like an entire book you just cut. And I'm like, yeah, because, you know, I will throw away, I will create and throw away more than most people just create. And I guess just being comfortable with that and we'll end up using that stuff. If it ends up being bonus chapters or some other things on the website, it's being comfortable with throwing stuff away. And I create to create. I create not for the outcome of whatever the result's going to be. I create because I love to create, and, and I take that approach and end up throwing away a ton of stuff. But I'm also working my creativity muscle to get better at it, to do it faster the next time and create new ideas. And so the book, we've cut out half. Half of it's totally gone. It's down to 60,000 words, and I have to write 5,000 more words around conclusion. But we started like 120, it's down to 60. On top of that, I want to share two other examples with you of what else I did today. I want to create a video for for Turn Up Dance Salsa that shows a girl. It's called "You Don't Belong on the Bench" and a girl kind of getting off the bench of life to come and join a dance class. And it's really meant to be something that can inspire people, whatever stage they're at in life, to get off the bench of their life to go do something that they really want to do. And I connected with a buddy of mine, Mark Drager, who's been on the channel a couple times from Phantom Media. And he asked me a couple questions about the video since that's his business. I thought, hey, I'm going to connect with him. And I wanted to read a couple of the back and forth, you get an idea of why I'm creating some of the things. And when most people have like practical understanding questions, I don't always have practical responses. And I sent this to my team as a way to— Nina looks confused. I sent this to my team as a way to inspire their creativity and their thinking, but I wanted to share with you guys as well. So the first question was, what's the objective of this campaign? Why make this video? And I sent him a link to this Asian commercial that was heartwarming and moving. And I said, "This is the original inspiration, and all the other heartwarming, touching, inspirational commercials seem to be Asian. I want something to come out of Toronto. I want a moving, inspiring piece that makes people want to do something more with their life or contribute to society. I want to create something I can show Hayden, my son, with pride, and he'll show his children. I want to add value to the world." This is probably an unexpected response, right? When somebody asks you, "Why are you creating this product? Why are you creating this service?" You know, whatever you're making, a dance class, a book, a piece of clothing. For me, it's always, I want to add value to the world. And so I create to create something that I'm proud of, that I hope will impact a lot of people. And it's not, I want to create this video to generate more sales for my business. Because if I take care of the first, create something moving and meaningful and powerful, I'll take care of the second in terms of generating sales. His next question was, what's the objective of the video? What is the video itself going to accomplish? I wrote, my aim is to have people watch, reflect, and take Take action on something they've been on the bench for in their lives. Secondary objective is to show that people can accomplish this through dance. Next question, use. Where or how will the video be used? And this is another thing, right? Like a lot of people want to figure out the whole chain of events before they create anything. So he's asking me, how am I going to use this video? And I wrote, I have no idea how I'm going to use this video. You know, the initial plan is I'm going to put it on YouTube, put it on the TV in the studio with captions, put something on our wall, just like Disney showcases their videos if you go visit their studios, something that we can be proud of. Stills of it. From there, who knows? I want to gift the world a great piece of art. More uses will be discovered, I'm sure, as we create. And I think this is a super important point because I don't know how it's all going to work out, but I have faith that it is going to work out. And if we create something moving and powerful, it's going to help a lot of people and help our business too. Target audience. Depending on your use, you may have different targets, but who is the audience? Again, another like practical hands-on, understandable question. The target audience for this, I wrote humans, people who look at themselves and wish they were more, people who are on the bench. And again, I want to create something that, that can touch anybody, that the message is relevant to anybody, that, that if I watched it, I would inspire myself. That's what I want to ideally create. And then that'll impact my business. Again, this thinking is, is maybe beyond a lot of people who want the kind of tangible nuts and bolts, practical how-to, but all of this stuff matters. When you create something that is important and meaningful, moves people, it has a big impact. And then I drill down to target audience and like, I'm not as worried about that. Humans are my target audience. Motivation. What's the mindset motivation? Pinpoint the difference. Target audience. Time of viewing. What does the audience want to get out of watching the video? What would they watch the video or continue to watch the video? This was important to me. So Claudia is our main actress. And I said, I'd like for them to see themselves in Claudia, to feel what she's feeling. This is crucial to realize that they aren't living life to their most, to understand that they're sitting on the bench of life and that they don't belong there. Applicable based on objectives. What is the next step in the brand sales process? What action do we want to encourage? And I wrote, the next step is to create a masterpiece that moves people. Do that and we'll create so many actions that we can't even fathom them right now. Just like the entrepreneur trading cards. This is a reference to before, on one of the videos, Mark talked about these entrepreneur trading cards that I made and he didn't understand why I was doing it. He said, there's no practical objective, there's no outcome. And I didn't, I, I said, I wanna create it. I want to create this because I think it's going to be impactful and meaningful. And now looking back, it got me connections to Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin and a bunch of, you know, big name bloggers. It helped us raise $100,000 for entrepreneurs in Africa for charity, had a whole bunch of business benefits. But when I created it, I didn't know what that outcome was going to be. And so just like the entrepreneur trading cards, it will help our business in ways we haven't even thought of yet, but only if we can deliver a moving video. I'm not so worried about what the outcome is going to be. I'm not so worried about what the call to action is going to be because I think too many people focus just on that, having somebody take a specific action. Meanwhile, your entire product, service, whatever you're creating, just isn't good enough, just isn't moving people. That's what I wanna focus on. If I create a moving experience that you watch and you get absorbed into and you wanna share, we're gonna have so many positive business benefits that a lot of them, I can't even think of where this thing is gonna go. So I'm worried about, like, my focus is create a masterpiece. And that was it. So I spent time working with Mark on that. The other thing was I was getting into it with Sage a little bit. Sage is one of my, clients. You guys have seen the Stephen Kelly kind of promos. And one of the things I keep pushing them to do is, is being more visionary with their marketing, being more visionary with their, with their advertising, their campaigns. And so I had a little bit of time today. And so I created campaign for SageOne. SageOne is their accounting software that is meant for startups, pure beginners. And one of the things that they want to do is try to be seen as a champion of entrepreneurs, be helping entrepreneurs, to believe in entrepreneurs. And so first of all, I thought SageOne was a super boring name, but I tried to figure out as I was driving my parents back from the airport today, how can we take SageOne and turn it into something? And the campaign that I thought of was I'm someone. So SageOne, someone, and helping entrepreneurs believe in themselves and showing entrepreneurs who had haters in their life, the little man in their life trying to beat them down, and they continued on and persevered through. And this is what I made in half an hour. I'm going to take the webcam. Can you guys see? Oh, it's all backwards. No, it's backwards. Okay, anyways, so this is Jessica Alba and it says, "Even my husband Cash thought the idea was too big. I'm someone." And then have the SageOne logo. So SageOne, someone. I know it's backwards for people just joining. I know it's backwards. Oprah, she was fired from her job as a news anchor because they told her she wasn't fit for television. I'm someone. SageOne. He was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination, having no original ideas. Walt Disney. I'm someone. SageOne. They will not run with this. They won't, but if they did, it'd be the most visionary, interesting thing that has ever come out of Sage in their marketing campaigns. And I'm trying to push them towards doing more and more and more and more. And I think somebody might ask me, why am I doing this? Like, if I know that they're never gonna use this, why would I create it? And I create to create. I create it as a gift to them. And I shared this with some of my team. Hopefully they get inspired. I'm sharing it with you guys. Maybe it inspires something in you. I come up with ideas and I create to create regardless of worrying about the outcome. Because if I only focus on the outcome, then the outcome is almost never what you think it's going to be. I think that's one of the lessons, because the outcome that I want is probably not what I'm going to get regardless. Did we lose Nina?

No, I'm going to slowly—

Nina's slowly moving out. She's tuning out. Like, we're going to the questions next.

Well, but then I don't add any value to—

You add value by being here, right? Nina adds value just by being here. Being comfortable with throwing stuff away, not having to have everything have a practical, logical understandable outcome, that creating something amazing is a gift to yourself, to your spirit, and to the people around you and to the world around you, regardless of the outcome. And so that was my theme today because I had extra time, cuz I wasn't writing my book. And, uh, that's it. Create, create to create. That's it. I'm, I'm done for my rant. Okay. Questions. We got some questions coming in. Trusting your gut, otherwise known as your intuition, is how I've gotten to where I am right now. No matter how bad things get for me, the one unwavering thought I have is that I'm supposed to be running my own businesses and that I'm going to be successful at it. Question, Sir Evanshire, do you think you'll want to start your own media group eventually? Mr. Vaynerchuk has a wildly successful YouTube channel before forming his own media group. Can you see yourself going that way? You love making videos, so it makes evolutionary sense to bolster that into something more all-encompassing. Won't it be something required to help your 1 billion entrepreneurs? Your tenacity is inspiring. Keep going, friend. This is another thing where I don't try to plan too far ahead and I end up going in strange directions, right? I follow my flow and it leads me off on paths. I don't right now see myself becoming an agency like Gary's built, right? He's built an agency where he then works with clients on their social media campaigns. I could see myself, one of the things that I've, I have like a plan for but haven't acted on yet is helping other up-and-coming YouTubers who want to make a difference and giving them guidance, mentorship, coaching, and helping them build a business. There's a lot of people who have a lot of talent, who have a lot of heart, who don't know how to put the pieces together and who need help in the training on how to be on camera, in the topics to cover, in how to promote their videos, in how to land corporate sponsorships and book deals and all that stuff. And for me, more and more, what I'm trying to do is work with people who want to have that positive impact in the world. It's important to me. It's what I'm striving to do. So if I can help bring along other YouTubers who have a powerful mission and then they can go impact millions of people too, that's high leverage and a good use of my time. I just don't have the time right now to do it. And I have, I could create it, you know, it's an excuse. I'm just not ready for it right now. So that's some, somewhere where I see it potentially going is building a network of entrepreneurs who are all on a mission, who wanna help each other out and help the planet out in some way and coaching them and guiding them along their path. So I could see that happening. I don't see myself going down an agency route though, where I'm creating, Facebook campaigns and YouTube campaigns for brands, it's really not what I want to do. Even in the brand deals that I do now, it's not about them. It's always about the audience. When I have Stephen Kelly come on and talk about entrepreneurship, it's never about how great Sage is or why you should go buy Sage Accounting. It's about you guys helping answer your questions, helping you build your business. For the companies who want me just to pitch their stuff, I always say no, which is why you haven't seen any of that on my channel, the stuff that I do. So I don't think being a marketing agency is where I'm going to go. But helping work with and inspire entrepreneurs, whether like local entrepreneurs here in my city or YouTube entrepreneurs to build something powerful, I could see that definitely happening. Okay, Anna Young, "Dear Evan, it keeps me motivated to see you motivated and passionate." Does it motivate you to see the people around you motivated? What do you think?

I don't know, that feels like more competitive. When you see people good, I don't know, motivated, you want to be motivated too.

When you see, so when you see people who are motivated around you, do you get motivated?

Do you?

Well, what do you? I can answer, but what's your answer?

I don't know. If I see people around me, does it motivate me?

See people who are motivated around you, does it motivate you?

Sure.

Nina's dropping some value bombs there. That was awesome. For me, it's a yes. For me, I find there's a couple of types of people around me right now. One is I don't find too many people around me who are more motivated than me, and that's actually bad. That's bad because there's nobody there pushing me, driving me to want to go out and do more. That's why I created the Top 10 series and the AntEspresso series. External motivation for me to feel like I'm being surrounded by Steve Jobs and Walt Disney and Martha Stewart and Bill Gates and these icons. So a little bit of their magic pixie dust rubs off onto me and gets me more motivated to do things. The two people that I then do see a lot of are one, the people who are, you know, they want to do stuff. But they have, they have blocks and they have limited beliefs and all these reasons why they can't go off and do something greater and bigger and better and more amazing and awesome and contribute. And then they either, they either open to receiving feedback or they're not. And for the ones who are not, it's usually a quick end to the conversation. And for the ones who are, if you, if you take like a little bit, if I see a little bit of energy coming back from you, that's all I need. It's game over. We'll be talking for hours. Nina will come find me and say, okay, it's time to go home. It's been 3 hours here talking. Like, if you are a little bit open to change and thinking bigger and being honest and breaking through your walls, man, it's like that conversation will go on and I'll forget to go to the bathroom and I'll forget to eat. And that motivates me to know when, because I want to see you off doing something. It's extremely unmotivating though when you don't do anything. Like, a lot of people can talk a big game and get inspired, and then they don't actually take action. I help bust through in that moment, and then they don't take any action, and the next day they wake up and they're back to their old habits and routines. And so a critical piece for you guys is anytime you feel you're in that moment of excitement and boldness and feel like you can, you can break through, do it now. Whether you're watching this video or you're watching something else, you read a book, you attend a seminar, whatever it is, you get excited about something, take immediate action on it. Don't wait. You know, I'm driving home from from my parents in the airport and I got that idea for the Sage campaign and I just started creating it. And in half an hour I had those pictures done. So when you get those moments, act now, don't wait, 'cause you won't do it tomorrow and you'll fall back to your limiting beliefs again. But definitely being around people who are motivated gets me excited. And last question. Okay, this one came from Facebook. Clavi Celestine, nice to see the coming of Evan's book. What gave you the inspiration to write this book and what message do you wanna share to your audience through this book? We can't say what the name is though. Yeah, I know. They don't know what the name is.

Yeah.

What do you have to say about this?

I don't even know how to. It's your book.

Okay. So what? It's you. I never wanted to write a book going in. Uh, so I have an agent who represents me on, on deals, tries to get brand deals and speaking gigs and that kind of stuff. And he was convinced I needed a book and I said, I don't need a book. Most people want a book because they need it for credibility because they need it to open doors because they need it for branding. All of these things, they need to get media. I don't need that. Like, my YouTube channel, my website can open up just as many doors or more than having a book is or a book would. And so I didn't need it for the ego play. Some people just want to have a book to their name. It's like on their bucket list of dreams. And I totally get that and understand that. It's just not on my list. And so I didn't want to write a book. He said, no, no, no, you need a book. You have to have a book. I'm going to help you get a book. I'm going to get you a book deal. I was like, okay, well, whatever. We'll start it. And then the book topic that I had was around modeling success. And how I did it. And it just felt like I was going through the motions and I wasn't really into writing the book on it. And then halfway through the proposal to the publishers, or to my book agent, sorry, I changed it. I changed the idea for the book to something that I was super passionate about. Like, oh, I gotta write a book on this. I gotta write a book on this. This is when like the light bulbs went off. Like, I need to write a book on this. This is gonna be so awesome. And they hated it. They hated the idea. They said, that's not a book. That's like a worksheet. That's like a workbook. It's not big enough to fill a book. It's like, are you guys nuts. How do you not see this? This is an amazing book. He said, no, no, publishers will never want that. And I convinced him, like, listen, I'm— this is the book. If you want to do a book with me, this is what I'm writing on. Take it or leave it. And he said, okay, let's do it. And we pitched the publishers and we had— we've had 5 calls in 2 days, all pretty much back to back. I ended up getting offers from 3 and then pushed one, kind of negotiate against each other to get to the final offer. And I'm super happy with the publisher that I'm working with right now. I only wanted to work with a mainstream publisher. Because again, the stuff that I work on, I want it to have a major impact. It has to have the ability to reach millions of people or I'm not interested in doing it. And people are saying, "Oh, you can make a lot more money if you self-publish and put it up. You don't make a lot of money from writing the book." That's okay. I don't need to make a lot of money from writing the book. That's not my goal. My goal is impact. My goal is not money. If I make a lot of impact, I'll make a lot of money. That's not understanding the how, but understanding the why. Why I'm doing this is important. I'm going to create amazing things. And if I do that, then I'm going to make money. And I don't know how it's going to happen, but it's going to happen. Having, having belief in that, and it's always worked out and it always will. And so I only want to work with a major publisher. And that's why I started writing the book. And it's been, this is week 40 of me recording the process. I don't remember when I actually started or how many, um, what, like what week 1 was in the video. I should go back and see. And then what's the message you want to share to your audience throughout the book? Can't talk about the message yet. Can't talk about the message yet. It's coming. It's coming. Message will be coming soon. Cool. Well, that's it. Nina, why are you sitting down? You got to stand up. You got to say goodbye. Thank you guys for watching. If you have a question about the topic today, which was Create to Create, or a question about my book or the book writing process, leave in the comments below. I'll answer in next week's video. Thank you guys so much for watching. Really appreciate— oh, when I do this, I block you. Really appreciate it. That's it, guys. Thank you again for watching. Continue to believe. And what, what are you— how do we usually end it?

And I don't remember.

And we'll see you soon.

See, this is how long I haven't been in your, in your video.

You should be out more often. There you go. Okay, see you guys. Pressure.