39: Unmistakable: Why Only is Better Than Best with Srinivas Rao

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I'm really excited to have one of my earliest blogosphere friends here on the show today, Srini Rao. He is the host of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast and founder of Unmistakable Media. Since starting the show as a podcast for bloggers at the beginning of 2010, Srini has interviewed over 600 people from all walks of life, including entrepreneurs, authors, artists, performance psychologists, and even bank robbers, among many other fascinating people. Srini's latest book, which is the topic of today's show, is why Only is Better Than Best and it hit stands this week. When he's not using the Internet to make things, he's out chasing waves and an avid surfer. Srini, welcome to the show.

Thanks. I hope I can live up to that introduction.

Of course. It's so wild to think that you first interviewed me for. You were doing video stuff at the time. I think it was 2009, maybe 2010. And it's amazing to see how interviewing has been such a common thread throughout everything you've done these last seven or eight years.

Yeah, I mean, it's like you said. I mean, we started in 2009, really as the podcast for Bloggers, where more than anything, it was a very accidental sort of start. It wasn't like I had this plan when I set out, because I started out with a blog like most people, and the byproduct of that blog was this weekly interview series called Interviews with Up and Coming Bloggers. And I'm pretty sure you were probably in the first hundred interviews that I ever did, because I know I've known you for a very, very long time. And, you know, it really, you know, I was in this course, and one of the lessons was to, you know, every week there was a lesson, and each lesson was the kind of thing you could do in one week very easily. And I, you know, since I didn't have a job, I just graduated from business school, I was like, okay, well, let me dedicate myself to this thing. How hard can it be? I have all this. And so one of the lessons was interview somebody as a way to get traffic to your blog. And so I did one interview, and then that led to a second one and the third one and so on, until here we are, you know, six years, no, maybe seven years later, 600 interviews, and unmistakable Creative is, you know, far. Like, it's needless to say, the ship sailed off course.

What have you learned doing 600 interviews either about people or about podcasting?

Okay, so I think, personally, I think what I've learned about podcasting is far less interesting than what I've learned about people, because what I've learned about podcasting, you can go and read and every marketer's guide to podcasting or whatever. Podcasting for Dummies. I mean, what I've learned about people. God, I mean, it has been. It's so funny because in some ways, the original blog was called the School of Life. And I guess you could say creating Unmistakable Creative gave me my own school of life in a lot of ways.

I mean, the thing is that you see so many different ways in which people somehow arrive at where they're at. I've always said straight and narrow paths are not what usually lead to interesting destinations. And no matter who it is, from, like you said, a bank robber to a drug dealer to a performance psychologist to an entrepreneur to a venture capitalist. I mean, every one of them has had an appearance on the show. And when you look back at how they've arrived, where they're at, the path is almost never linear. It's not this sort of plotted out trajectory and life plan. You know, everybody's life somehow doesn't go according to plan. And I remember, I think I. One of the very first posts you ever commented on that I wrote at the school of Life was this piece titled When Life Doesn't Go According to Plan, which I have no idea if you can even find it anymore, but it doesn't. And so I think one of the big things I've learned, like I said, I mean, to comprise lessons I learned about people in psychology from 600 interviews would take an entire book bigger than the one that I wrote.

But, you know, the thing is, when our lives don't go according to plan, we can fight and we can resist whatever has happened or we can see that as opportunity. You know, I mean, if I look back at my life and this is fresh on my mind because I was writing about this in the morning from something bad. There has always been something good. And of course it doesn't seem like it at the time because, you know, when something bad happens, you're consumed by that thing that's bad. And it seems like the worst thing in the world because it's happening to you. It's all consuming, it's all you can think about. You know, anybody who's ever had a breakup knows this. You're basically like consumed with grief and shit and tears and.

You think that it's the end of the world. But I look back at, okay, I graduated from business school and I didn't have a job, which at the time was the worst imaginable thing. Graduation was more like a funeral. I don't really look at my graduation for Pepperdine from my MBA program as one of the highlights of my life. In fact, I look at it as one of the low points of my life because, you know, I was melting in a cap and gown, no job, you know, on, you know, waiting for me on graduation. And, you know, my. I remember, I remember very distinct. My parents were like, hey, we'll go celebrate tomorrow. I'm like, there's nothing to celebrate. This is my funeral. And but the funny thing is, from that came two things that I could dedicate my life to, which were surfing and writing during that seven or eight month period. And both those things fundamentally altered the course of my life in a way that they never would have. I mean, you know, like, how different would things have been right now if I'd had a job waiting up on graduation?

Like, 2014, you read the book was probably the worst year of my life. And from the worst year of my life, I got one of the best friends of my life, Brian, my business partner, and Derek, who was also on our team. Those are good things that came out of something really bad. And then at the beginning of 2015, to add insult to injury, right when you thought things couldn't get any more devastating, this thing that I had built with my own two hands, this conference, an event that had been wildly successful the year before after already going through a horrible 2014, right at the beginning of 2015, we had to pull the plug because we didn't sell enough tickets. You know, in that same week, my business partner got into a car accident in which he almost died. It was. I mean, like, he got really lucky because the person who hit him hit his back door. If it had been the front door, like, you know, just a thing. And I remember telling him, I said, hey, by the way, I'm like, you should know, at the beginning of 2010, I was having, you know, I got in a car accident. In a week, somebody stole my towel from the beach when I was surfing, along with my car keys. And that ended up being one of the best years of my life. So, you know, I think maybe that one of the bigger lessons is something good always seems to come from, you know, something that, in the moment, seems really bad. And then the other thing is that everybody has their challenges, right? There's no way that you're going to go through this entire experience, especially when you attempt to do things of great significance. It's just inevitable that you're going to end up having situations that are challenging or push you to your limits. And so I think in a lot of ways, what I've learned about people is managing psychology through dark times. I mean, it's something that I've found as a common thread. It seems like every single person that I interview has this sort of crucible, but that thing becomes a very defining moment in their life. And then probably the big one, which we'll wrap this sort of monologue with this, and it's something that a mentor told me, and I try to remember this almost to the point where I think I should probably go get it tattooed on one of my arms, is he says, your temporary circumstances don't have to become your permanent identity. And in so many cases, they do. For so many people.

I love how you say in the book that our scars become shells that later protect us in some way if we let them, if we're open to that darkness. You said.

Yeah. I mean, the thing is that often the kind of strength you gain and the resilience you developed is only developed by going through tough things like you can't get it any other way. I was having a conversation with one of our listeners, a guy named Jeff Sandquist, and I said, there's a real difference between reading about something and experiencing it. So I've never lost a parent, and I can read every book imaginable about grief and loss of parents, and I can, you know, think about it and talk about it and intellectually understand it. But somebody who's actually gone through that experience is going to have a level of understanding about it that I never will. And the only way they can gain that kind of strength is by experience.

One of the things that completely jumped off the page is your definition of unmistakable. So I would love for you to share what your definition of unmistakable art is.

Sure.

And then the second part is, I'm curious how these darkness, you know, it's always darkest before the dawn, these blessings in disguise, how do you think that relates to creating unmistakable art? Two part question for you.

Yeah, so. Two part question. So let's, let's talk about how do I define unmistakable art? So I think for the purposes of answering that question, we need to define both art and unmistakable. Right. Because typically, I think when we think of art like the, you know, Seth Godin always says art is not necessarily the industrial act of putting paint on a canvas. Right. Because what you do as a writer, what you do as a podcaster, what you do as a coach is art. What I do as a storyteller, as a podcaster, as a producer of animated shorts, you name it, that's art. When Nancy Duarte designs a slide presentation, it's art because it's beautiful. I mean, if you've ever seen something she's done, she's taken something as mind numbing and mundane seeming as PowerPoint.

Makes my Achilles heel.

Yeah. And she's turned it into a work of art. Like, I mean, how many people can say that? By the way, Al Gore came to us to have a presentation design that drove significant amounts of environmental change and was the basis for the film An Inconvenient Truth. I mean, not many people can point to a PowerPoint presentation that they design. That's the seed for a film that is done by a former vice President. That's, you know, so that. That's art. In terms of unmistakable, I mean, the way I define unmistakable is that it's something so distinctive that nobody could have done but you, and it's immediately recognized as something that only you could have done or something that you did. And the example I think that comes up over and over again for me in many conversations is my friend Mars Dorian. Because if you, you know, or anybody listening to this knows Mars Dorian, you can take one look at something he's done, and you're like, the only person who could have done that is Mars.

He's such a perfect example.

It is. I mean, Mars stuff rolls through your Facebook feed and you're like, yeah, Mars did that. I can take. You know, he wouldn't even put a signature on it. I know that, like, I can take one look at any book cover that Mars has done. And so really, I mean, the funny thing is the sort of core idea of unmistakable came from him and a conversation that I had with him. So it was, you know, very fitting that he ended up doing all the chapter illustrations in the book. So, yeah, I mean, and, you know, the other place that this came from, I think, was, you know, you asked, what did I learn from hundreds of interviews? Like, you know, I started to notice certain patterns when I was looking especially at people who are starting things and, you know, kind of comparing them to the people who had built presences or who had managed to get to a certain point of success in reaching an audience or, you know, however you define success, you know, we. What happens is that you often see this thing that happens where people who are starting something or building something, they will look to some sort of authority figure, and they buy into this very sort of debilitating narrative that if you do exactly as some authority figure says, you will get exactly the result that they have promised. If you notice people like Seth Godin, whose work influences a lot of people, Seth Godin doesn't offer you any tactical advice. It's very rare you'll come away from reading a Seth Godin book with 10 insights or 10 actionable insights on how to do X. What's funny is you'll come away with 100 that you would have never come up with if he had given you the xyz. And the thing is that in that process of constantly looking to an authority figure to validate everything that we do or following supposedly step by step by step, this blueprint or plan that is in their course or in their coaching program, what we end up doing is we play it safe. And so at best what you end up with is a pale imitation of one of your predecessors or somebody who is your mentor. And at worst, something that gets completely ignored because in that process of following the instruction to the letter and saying, okay, I'm going to do exactly as this authority figure or this course or this program tells me to do, instinct and intuition and all the things that you would have never thought of on your own or you would have thought of on your own get denied. So you look at Unmistakable Creative, you land on our website, you know it, it doesn't follow any of the rules of so called website best practices and our about pages of cartoon, which is probably not good for SEO and stuff like that.

It was so powerful too. Just want to say on the subject of validation, at one point in the book you say your for your parents validation was a bottomless pit. And that validation is like a drug that the more we depend on it, the higher dosage we need for it to work. And that's so interesting how you couple that need for validation with a hindrance to unmistakable art. And then what I love about unmistakable is it raises the bar. There's so much out there about be creative or what's your purpose. You know, these really broad sweeping cliches. And when I read your book, I was so inspired to think that's the next level is what is unmistakable, what is yours without even a need for a signature. And that's not necessarily easy to do. I'm wondering if you have.

So that's the thing, right? If it was easy, then everybody would do it. And the thing is it's not supposed to be easy to do. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to take years of work. We don't want to admit this. The whole 10 year overnight success is a cliche. But it's a cliche for good reason. Because there's enough evidence to support that, you know, like, I mean you've known my work since 2009. I didn't fall out of the womb this way. And it's very easy to think that, I think when, when we don't know, you know, what has actually gone into somebody's work. And then the other thing is, you know, I have gotten a world class education from people who are just phenomenal at what they do.

And so ingredients are like if you had to pull out even either what you've learned from people you've interviewed or for yourself. I think longevity is one like longevity. Longevity is certainly not enough.

Yeah, longevity. Longevity and commitment. And I, you know, I've said this on a handful, but I think it bears repeating. I think our perception of longevity is really warped in the world that we live in because what happens is we have sort of access to what I call instant applause like we have never had before. And that's only really happened in the last 10 years or so because, you know, our ability to create things and share our stories and share our ideas has been completely democratized. So, you know, if you want instant applause, all you have to do is take a picture of yourself with a baby and put it on Facebook. I know. Or a puppy.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I know because every time I meet, you know, a friend or a cousin or somebody who has a really cute baby, I must think, so I take a picture with one of their kids and put it on Facebook. And so, you know, I get to see all these comments from girls and I'm like, okay, that's, you know, that's just proof of what I'm talking about. But the thing is that that's, you know, that's not lasting. Like, you can't create a career off of something like that.

So, you know, all joking aside, the thing is that your priority has to be sort of a long lasting connection that occurs between a creator and audience. And that is something that is built over time. So, you know, we don't think of longevity in terms of, you know, for most people it's like, oh, a year, that's a really long time. Like, no, it's not.

Yes. I love that you said that in the book.

Yeah, it's really not. I mean, a year is a really miniscule amount of time if you're serious about what you're trying to do. So obviously time is one of those critical ingredients. I think what you're exposed to is also a critical ingredient because I think probably the big advantage I've had is the sheer volume of such intelligent, thoughtful and creative and insanely interesting people that I have been exposed to. My.

Sort of example that I draw from is not just sort of bloggers and online marketers, but it's like you said, artists and bank robbers and people who've done amazing work, that they've created social movements, they've written things that are really honestly meant to be turned into movies. Because I guess for me, I'd never looked at, okay, will interviewing this person make the show grow or is this going to be some popular person? It's almost never the wildly popular, well known people that become our most.

Liked Interviews, it's the people that nobody has ever heard of. And that's one of the comments I'll often get, is, where do you find these people? And so I think curiosity, if you're really going to extract an ingredient from that, it's curiosity. Almost all my decisions about what I work on, what I do and what I want to try is based on curiosity. So I'll give you an example from something that I'm working on in the moment. So I'm giving a keynote on Friday at this event. I'm the opening keynote for it. And I'd been watching my friend Eric Wall, who's a graffiti. Graffiti artist and a keynote speaker. He mixes live music and painting and all this stuff into this amazing keynote. And I'm like, well, I can't paint, so I'm not going to try that. That would be a disaster. But the music part always really appealed to me. Music has always played a big role in my life. I was in band in high school, and if you see our animated shorts, you can see the role that music played. And music does something very special to dialogue. It changes dialogue and makes it much more emotionally compelling. All you have to do is watch a TV show like Friday Night Lights or watch the. Like the movie Meet Joe Black and just isolate a monologue and listen to how music brings about emotion. And so I thought a lot about that. I was like, wow, why couldn't I take that into the keynote speaking room? And so when I'm closing the talk, I've figured out a way to actually incorporate instrumental music into the closing of the talk in such a way that it takes the entire last 30 to 45 seconds of the talk and amplifies the emotion by using music. So that's. Why am I doing that? Because I'm curious. I want to see whether this theory of mine will work. And there's nothing to lose, really. And so that sort of curiosity, innate curiosity, and then the funny thing is that I borrowed that from somebody else, but I'm incorporating it into my work in a way that it is my own. The artwork at Unmistakable Creative. That's not a coincidence. I spent 30 days teaching myself how to draw, only to discover that I couldn't draw. But I figured out that I could collaborate with people like Mars Dorian to really bring all of my ideas to life visually. So you've got sort of, I guess if we're looking at ingredients, longevity, curiosity, collaboration, and. Yeah, longevity, curiosity, collaboration.

I want to add intuition. And then let's come full circle. The idea about adversity. I actually think that those really challenging times, as you use the surfing metaphor, the impact zone, that that has gotta fuel unmistakability. That every time we get knocked down and we learn how to pull ourselves back up, it's gotta feed the art somehow. I'm curious, this latest round for you, you said 2014 was really excruciatingly difficult and you write about it very poignantly in the book. How do you think that has further shaped your views on unmistakability?

Well, the thing is, I think difficult things teach you a lot about resilience and persistence, which takes us back to longevity, right? So it's kind of like, okay, you make it through that. You're like, wait a min, I've made it through that. You know, it's funny, one of my, one of my mentors also says, you know, your problems don't go away. What changes is your capacity to handle them. So like, you end up being able to take on bigger things. You know, that's, you know, you and I were chatting just a few days ago and like I was telling you the kinds of things that I'm bitching about. I'm like, okay, this is ridiculous. Like, none of these are, these are like, you know, like you listen to the quality of the problem. You're like, okay, that, you know, Brian is like, these are champagne problems, dude. I'm like, yeah, no, fair enough.

I also think adversity reaffirms commitment. That every time you get knocked down while trying to pursue your art, whatever that is, it reaffirms. It asks you to recommit and re up and get better at it. And that those experiences, that's part of it too. At least for me. It's like, I'm not letting go of this, you know, and you even talk about, like kind of too invested to.

Quit the idea of, well, and that's the thing, right, is, you know, you. So the other thing is, I think, you know, maybe another thing worth mentioning about the impact zone is there's this idea that.

You'Re going to avoid being wrong. You're going to avoid screwing up or you're going to avoid things blowing up in your face because we have this deep seated fear of being wrong that I think in my mind goes all the way back to when we were kids. Because you remember those moments in class where you raise your hand when you have the right answer, keep quiet when you don't know you have the right answer. And God forbid you raise your hand when you think you have the right answer, only to find out you have the wrong answer. Well, that's humiliating. And the stakes keep getting higher as you get older, so you stop taking risks, and your capacity for risk goes down. But, you know, you look at the impact zone, I always say, you know, there's, you know, there's no way that you can avoid. The only way to avoid being in the impact zone is not to surf, because inevitably, at some point or another, you're going to end up in the impact zone if you're in the water, it's just, you know, part of surfing, and I think it's part of life as well. I mean, as far as how it fuels unmistakability, you know. You know, we talked about resistance and, you know, resilience and persistence. But, you know, I think that the other thing is.

Somebody asked me the other day on Twitter, they're like, how do you deal with creative blocks when the circumstances of your life are troubling to you? I said, you view your circumstances as colors to paint with, and they will allow you to paint in a way you couldn't paint before and allow you to see what you could never see in any other way.

And I think it's a real test of, like you said, commitment and faith. But I think it also. It's revealing. It's revealing in terms of what it reveals about you as a person, what it reveals about the people around you, and many, many other things. And, you know, I talked about the fact that, like, in the book, I said, you know, for, I think, God knows how long. I mean, I'm 38 now. For 36 years, the idea of seeing a therapist made me cringe. I was like, therapy is for crazy people, not for people like me. Until I found myself in a therapist office and wondered why I hadn't gotten there sooner. You know, I thought, wow, I should have actually come and done this way early on. It would have been a good move. Not that I had any major issues to solve, but it would have avoided a lot of problems. So, yeah, I mean, I think that there's really more than anything I would say is viewing those things as colors to paint with. And you kind of have to ask yourself what you learn from it. I mean, for us, as a business, what we realized was our foundation was shaky. We had existed, really as a hodgepodge of projects, many of which made a lot of money, but over the long haul, our sort of core of the brand, unmistakable. And the podcast suffered because we poured all this energy into this event. And when it was Done. It was like this. Just deflation. So I learned probably the biggest thing from that experience was momentum and how important momentum is. People will ask, what are you gonna do on Tuesday after your book comes out? I'm gonna tell them, start the second book, probably. I will be writing on Tuesday morning, because that's what I do every day. It's just another day as far as I'm concerned. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly grateful. It's exciting. But I think there's this great line in Steven Pressfield's book, Do the Work, where I think it's the very end of it. And he tells the story of how he goes to Paul Rink's house, his mentor, and he says, I told him what I did, that I'd finished something. And he said, great, now start the next one.

The thing is, there's a reason for that, because creative momentum is incredibly powerful. If you lose it, it's also incredibly detrimental. It's very hard to get it back, and it takes a long time to build up to that. So I think those are some of the big lessons that come from bigger challenges. That was.

Speaking of the book coming out, one of the sections I really loved in the book is called the Drop. And you describe it as the liminal moment between paddling and standing is known as the Drop. Even though the drop is brief, it determines what the entire ride will be like. I'm, as you know, really interested in studying change. And so much of change is being in a liminal space. And now here you are, your book comes out this week. You're in the Drop. So talk to me about that, like, both for you personally and why do you say that the Drop determines what the entire ride will be like? Because I'm not a surfer, but I'm curious how that informs the rest of the ride.

It might. It might help to do, you know. So just for the sake of clarity, for anybody listening, I will try to explain it as best I can. I would recommend that you actually, like, just do a search for a surfing video on YouTube also, because it will make it that much clearer.

Or go learn a surf or something.

Yeah. Which would be even better. Yeah. Not that I want more people in the water, but, you know.

So the thing is that, you know, there. So there's a lot of elements of surfing where, you know, like, it requires a tremendous amount of presence, you know, a decent amount of athletic skill. But the Drop really is. Here's what happens, basically, is you're paddling, paddling. So you see A wave coming, you start paddling so you can catch that wave. And if you've ever seen waves, what you, you may not know if you're not a surfer is like, watch surfing videos. Surfers don't ride straight. They ride parallel to the waves wave, so you're actually parallel, you know, and the wave is parallel. So the drop is the moment between when you push yourself up on the board and when you're actually standing and if you screw the drop up or if you hesitate on the drop or if you are choppy on the drop, like there's a couple of things to happen. If you hesitate, it's actually worse than committing completely and falling. Because sometimes if you hesitate, you're going to get tossed anyways by the wave. And then you end up, you know, in situations that are hairy and messy and because you hesitated, you have a chance, you know, that your board will hit you in the face and all sorts of stuff can go wrong. Whereas if you fully commit, you'll fall. But the thing is that you were fully committed, so the fall is easier. Like your board was basically the way you approached it was set up in such a way that the fall was going to be something you could handle. And you know, the thing is, in that moment, if the drop is smooth, it determines literally what the entire ride will bike like. So if your drop is, you know, like there are moments when I've hesitated on the drop and I've made a wave, but throughout the entire wave I'm struggling to, you know, stay on the board without falling and adjusting my balance and doing all of this stuff because I wasn't committed in my mind, like I hesitated, I wasn't fully just all the way in. And it's funny because you're not the first person to mention that. That same phrase has come up maybe a dozen times. My friend Erica Learmark sent me a text about it yesterday. Every person in their life who was in a career transition or a change of some sort has mentioned this to me.

And P.S. erica Lehrmark was a former stripper now turned business coach who you recently interviewed and I've been following her work for years. Talk about a pivot. Amazing.

Yeah, and so pivot is, you know, Exactly. I mean, now I know why it resonated with you. Because I mean, the core of your upcoming book is about this is making changes. So the thing I think the drop really is, is about, and this is about change. If we're talking about change is often our attempt to change is a very half assed commitment. It's like one foot in, one foot out. And so the result is that we're flailing. We don't go all the way in. And I'll kind of give you an example from my own life about talking about the book coming out is probably not the best example. But in 2013, Greg Hartle, who's a mentor of mine, he basically said, shreen, do you want to be doing any of these things in five years? All the things I'd done in the time that we had built what had been School of Life and Blogcast fm, I had been a book marketing strategist for an author. I had updated social media for a pro surfer, which was the worst gig ever. I was a freelance writer at a website called Search Engine Journal, where I had to write about marketing. I looked at all of these and I was like, do you want to do any of these things in five years? And I was like, not really. And so we basically said, okay, we're not going to do any more of those things. We're going to focus entirely on the podcast, and that's going to be the core. Which is scary because you're saying, okay, all these things that are sources of revenue, I'm willing to walk away from. And then in the book, I also give the example of Pixar. For those of you who are not familiar with the history of Pixar, they didn't start out making these amazing movies. It was about 20 years before they started making these incredible movies. It was like John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. And I think Lucas sold a division of Lucasfilm to these guys, which ended up being spun out as Pixar. But they were actually making this graphical image computer, which is what all these films ended up being made on eventually. And somewhere I think they realized they're like, okay.

They were in the red, really deep, because they were spending so much money on these computers. And Ed Catamol said the only way to save Pixar at that point was to do what they had been yearning to do from the outside set, which was to do computer animation. And so what ends up happening, of course, is a string of hits and nothing. I mean, I don't know that Pixar has made any bad movies, but, I mean, that was 20 years in the making before you get to that point. Which means the bigger the wave, the crazier, the more ambitious the idea, the more committed you have to be to seeing it through from the outset. So it's really. I think the drop is a metaphor for computer commitment and the more committed you are, the more likely the change is to happen. Whereas if your commitment is on the fence and this isn't, I think we have to be careful about.

Making this seem like a narrative about quit your job and just go and change the world and don't worry about security, which is nonsense, because people have real responsibilities. So I want to make sure that I'm mindful of that in saying this. So that's not what the lesson here is. But. But even in the process of those things, are you really committed? Are you going to show up every day and work on this thing that you say you want in your life that will allow you to make this transition that you want to make? Whereas you look at a lot of people when they attempt to change, when they attempt to do something. And this is another thing I think I said in the book. Certain people have these very sudden bursts of inspiration that for a Saturday afternoon, they're like, okay, I'm going to try to change the world this afternoon, and I'm going to make my dent on the Internet. The Internet is basically littered with the digital graveyar of people who have attempted stuff like this. And I know, because a good amount of my earlier projects are like this, where I was, okay, I'm going to try to do this in an afternoon. And you kind of realize once you start to tease apart a lot of these stories that, wow, okay, wait a minute. These are many, many years in the making. So I don't know. I know I kind of went off on a bunch of different tangents.

Well, I love the way you define the drop and that it's about commitment. And clarified. Thank you for clarifying. It's not about being reckless. It. In fact, when I hear you talk about it, you have a great Memento Mori type question in the book about reflecting on death and those of ourselves and the ones around us. And you say, have I created the most audacious and ambitious pieces of art and started the most daring projects that I want to see exist in the world? And that, to me, that's the commitment. It's to the most audacious and ambitious pieces of art that each of us can and wants to. Can create and wants to see. And to me, that's what I love about the concept of unmistakable. Again, it raises the bar. It's not just saying, are you out there surfing? No, it's like, are you committing to the drop? Are you committing to taking risks, to truly put yourself out there? And as you said, it's not always easy to understand what our unique stamp or blueprint or thumbprint is that we leave on the world, but that the process is part of the fun.

Fun? Yeah.

I mean, or if not all the fun.

Well, yeah, exactly.

I mean.

I think the part of it is that you have to be willing to be misunderstood, criticized, and all these things and your choices potentially will be frowned upon in the short run. I think there was a certain point at which my parents really began to question this. And at the beginning of 2015, I was at a point where I was beginning to question it. So I said, listen. And I'm like, you know, my business partner Brian gave me some of the best piece of advice ever. He said, look, they just want to see that you're not going to chase some pipe dream forever that's going nowhere. He said, here's how you appease them. He said, tell them that you'll look for a job by the end of the year if it hasn't worked out. And so I did. And then the book happened and they kind of were like, okay, wait a minute, this isn't a joke anymore. You're serious? I think so.

Often our friends and family, they just want to make sure we're fed and safe and have a roof over our head. And so as long as they didn't have a plan.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, friends and family are, you know, they all mean well. And that's what we have to be very understanding of, is that they mean well, but they don't necessarily want what's best for you. They want what's good for you. And there's a difference.

One of the things I also really love is you suggest a 30 day project that has nothing to do with your work.

Oh, yeah.

As a way to get the creative juices flowing. I love that. I want to do that. That's homework for everybody listening.

That is so powerful. I can't. You know, you asked me what is one of the elements of unmistakable. I mean, that honestly is one of the things I attribute to how, how I see the world. Now, that drawing project led to the idea of animated shorts. It led to all the album covers that you see. It led to working with Mars. I mean, when you open this book, you can tell there's a lot of thought behind visuals. Every chapter had illustrations. It's not just a chapter heading, even the book cover. The amount of back and forth that went into design and making sure that when you opened it, we were very adamant. They're like, this cannot look like a business book. In fact, I. We were trying to find this blend between comics and art and hopefully we've accomplished that. But again, I can trace almost all of it back to a 30 day project where I taught myself how to draw. I said that project was the impetus for us going from being a website to being a brand.

Unmistakable why Only is better than Best out this week, which is so exciting. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Yeah, so unmistakablecreative.com is where you can find our work. The podcast you can subscribe through to itunes and then if you go to unmistakablecreative.com book you'll find info there. And of course it's in bookstores and Audible and Amazon.

Awesome. Srini, you're amazing. It's been so fun to watch your epic progress over the years and I'm just really glad to be walking these paths together.

Yeah, thanks for having me. This has been really fun.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter at ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.