62: Real Artists Don't Starve with Jeff Goins

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Before we jump into today's episode, I am so excited to share with you my upcoming course, Delegation Ninja. This is one of the most fun things I have ever created, partly because I know how incredibly helpful it is going to be for so many of you who want to stress less and free up more of your time. This is the thing that I am always giving an infomercial about to friends and family and colleagues about the benefits of delegating. Whether it's who to hire, how to delegate effectively, what tools and apps and systems you can use, common mistakes that people make, the barriers that get in the way. I am so stoked. This is an eight week course. It's kicking off June 3rd and I would love for you to be part of it. So if you want to learn how to clone yourself or pretty close, head on over to pivotmethod.com delegate and learn all about it. Hope to see you in the course. And now on to today's show.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am so thrilled to have Jeff Goins here today. Jeff is a best selling author, keynote speaker and very popular blogger with a reputation for challenging the status quo. In three years he built a million dollar business, published multiple books and became an online marketing expert using his skills in writing and business to help others succeed. He' the author of four books including the Art of Work, the in between and his latest greatest which I'm so excited to talk about today. Real Artists Don't Starve. Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age. Jeff, welcome to the show hey, Jenny.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Yeah. We have a fun anecdote, which is when my dad first moved to Nashville, where Jeff lives, he ended up at Jeff's book launch party. So my dad and Jeff have met even before we have, which is kind of a fun fact. And my dad said that he wasn't sure what to talk about with anyone at the party. And then all of a sudden, he said to someone, I'm Jenny Blake's dad. And then they said, oh, okay, now I get it. Now I get why you're here.

Well, what was funny about that is, like, a friend of a friend had invited him to that, and he walked up to me and, like, this was my, like, a book launch event the day after my book came out. And it wasn't a big hurrah. There was like 25 or 30 people there. It was small. And your dad comes up to me and he goes, who are you? What do you do? And I was like.

Who are you? What do you do? Why are you here? It was funny.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. I wrote a book.

That'S happened to me more than once at an event that I'm keynote speaking at. And someone will come up and say, who are you? What are you doing here? Oh, yeah, I'm going up to. Speaking of you.

I love that you wrote this book because.

Thank you.

The term artist has been expanded to so many things now. In a way, we're all artists. And so many of us are trying to straddle that line between doing creative work and earning a living from it. And the first step in that, as you talk about in the book, is the mindset that that is even possible. I would love to hear you share a little bit about why you think that the starving artist thing is actually a myth.

Yeah. So, I mean, I use the word myth like it's like a story, you know, and myths are true because we believe they're true. They become true for us, you know, so for children, the myth of Santa Claus becomes real. You know, it becomes this thing that, you know, for many years, you sort of orient your life around. And the starving artist story is just that. It was a story that.

It has not lasted forever. During the Renaissance, I was surprised in my research to find that starting with Michelangelo, many artists were paid really, really well. When Michelangelo died, he had a fortune worth over $50 million in various assets. And he was getting paid incredibly well for the time, getting the equivalent of million dollar commissions for things like the Sistine Chapel. And so at Some point. And this was around kind of the Romantic period. We got this idea that artists needed to starve and suffer for their work. And this idea began with a guy, a French guy named Henri Merger, who basically wrote what became La Boheme and eventually Rent and you know, all these other kind of Moulin Rouge, all these stories are kind of derived from this series of short stories that he wrote in the 18th century, 19th century, I think. And he was a starving writer. He wasn't making it as a writer. He's trying to write poems. And so he wrote, you know, kind of these fictionalized short stories about bohemians. And it kind of kicked off this movement. And for hundreds of years we have believed this myth that artists have to suffer or starve for their work to be serious. And if they don't do that, then they're not a real artist. And ever since then we've been living as if this were true and believing it because we believe this myth, it becomes true. And so when I became a full time writer, I kind of looked around. I had other friends for succeeding in their own creative crafts and fields. And I was like, well, do you have to starve? What's the deal? Because I kept seeing two groups of people, people were starving and people who are thriving. And I didn't see any difference in the quality of the work. And so I started talking to all these thriving artists, asking them what they did and how they did it. And I started writing it down and began to put it into this book. And I realized, oh, today because of all the opportunities that exist for musicians, entrepreneurs, writers, I mean, you name it, you can get your work out there in front of an audience for cheap, if not free. So today, more than ever before, to starve as an artist is a choice, not a necessary condition of doing creative work.

It's so powerful how you say that, that it's a choice. And you cite examples of why people are sometimes conflicted. There's ideas of selling out or being, quote, too commercial, or even, you quote Lewis Hyde and his kind of cornerstone book, the Gift, that art used to be a gift and now it's kind of being forced into an economic view. And then even Kevin Kelly had a quote once, I'm paraphrasing, but he said art is useless. Like, compared to tools, art has no function. It's not a hammer, it's not a computer, and yet it's priceless. So I think a lot of those sentiments have created a mixed feeling among some artists where they wonder, do I deserve to charge for my art, what is worth charging for? I'm curious if you ever had a starving artist mindset or mode in your business when you're first starting, but moreover.

How people begin to shift the mindset around feeling that they deserve to charge and create a business around their art and that that's not selling out, right?

Yeah.

I still struggle with that mindset. And I think it's just fear. Honestly, I think I'm not afraid of selling out. I'm afraid of being called a sellout. Right. I think the ego in the creative life, I mean, it is what drives us a lot. We're more worried about being famous than we are about being successful. And so it's not so much that we're afraid of monetizing our art and getting paid well to do things that we enjoy doing and think are meaningful in many cases. Almost every artist I have ever talked to, regardless of the medium, they'd like to get paid to do it. They're just afraid that they've got to compromise something in order to get paid. And I found that not to be the case. Typically, you don't have to, you know, quote, unquote, sell out, but you do have to sell. And I struggle with this because I think what I'm struggling with is how people perceive me. And it is true that if you succeed in anything, it's going to attract more critics than if you don't, just because you've got more attention. But what's fascinating about this is I talked to all these guys that you thought, all these researchers, and, you know, I talked to the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who lives here in Nashville, who wrote a book called.

Art. What is his name of his book? I'll come back to that in a second.

It's Artwork, because that's a big one. Anyway. Go ahead, continue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was called Arts Inc. By Bill Ivey. I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting that mixed up with Lisa Congdon's book. But basically, he talks about what you're talking about, which is in the 20th century, there's this thing that we've never seen before, which is commercial art. And we don't really know. We don't really know what to do with it. We used to have the patronage system. Then we had kind of the Romantic period. And then in the 20th century, you have people like Balm, Dylan, who are these massive cultural icons. And in the art world, we've never really experienced that before. There weren't pop musicians in the Middle Ages.

And so it was kind of a new thing. And it set this expectation that we all, we either are starving or we're one of the lucky ones. We're Michael Jackson or Jackson Pollock or something. You're either at the top of the game or you're nobody. And the truth is there's all these people out there, and I talked to a lot of them when I was writing this book who are doing just fine. They're making a living off their art. They're supporting themselves and, or their families and significant others. And they're just like. They're treating it like a business, but they're not compromising the quality of the work. It is possible, but you actually have to want it to be possible. And I find so many people have this dichotomy between art and business. And the reason I wrote this book is because learning, learning to be good at art actually teaches you some really great business skills, so long as you're willing to use them in that capacity without feeling guilty or slimy about it, which is just a choice that you have to make. You have to choose to believe that you can do good work and sell it out in the world and be good at marketing and sales and admin, and not actually be a sellout in terms of the quality of your work.

I like how you're describing the spectrum, because ultimately, yeah, being able to sell one's work is how to keep doing that work, that what's the least sustainable is just to be a starving artist. Because actually then having so few resources, being constantly worried about paying the bills, that creates a chokehold and scarce tunnel vision around creativity. So it's actually the least most effective way to be creative. And I like how you say in the book the goal is not to get rich, I mean, unless someone wants to, but to build a life that makes creating your best work not only possible, but practically inevitable.

Yeah, I mean, again, the idea is, and I love Lewis Hyde. I got to talk to him and I asked him. He wrote the book the Gift, and if you're unfamiliar with that book, you have to go out and buy it. I was first connected to that book, I think, through Seth Godin. He talks a lot about it in his book Linchpin. But it's this idea that art is a gift and you and I should be doing our art. We now understand that as a lot more than painting. Right? Putting our creative work out into the world, whatever that looks like. It could be marketing, it can be painting, writing, sewing, whatever it is, but putting it out in the world generously, without waiting for somebody to pay you to do that. And I agree with that. I started my career writing a blog post a day for 365 days a year. And I did it because I wanted to practice, I wanted to get better, because it felt good to give a gift to the world. So I. I believe that. But when I talked to Louis, who kind of codified this idea that art is a gift, and you can't wait. You can't sell a gift in the market economy. Like, you can sell a widget. And I said, do you think artists should starve? He says, no, I think artists should be paid as well as doctors or lawyers, you know, like. And he said, and I never said that starving and Bill Ivey said the same thing. I never said that starving made the art better. And I think we believe that, like, deep in our core of insecure creative tendencies. Because for years, I did this. I sat on the couch and I read bloggers and I sneered at them, and I was like, these aren't real writers. Real writers are in the mountains somewhere typing on a typewriter. These aren't real writers. And I stared at them. And then for six, seven years, literally, I just kind of sat on the couch working my job, complaining to my wife, and she's like, when are you actually going to write that book that you keep talking about? And I realized I wasn't doing the work. You know, it was easier to kind of stand on the sidelines and criticize what I perceived to be selling out, when really they were just using the tools available to get their work out there, and they were making a living off their art so that they could make more art. And so I believe that it's not about the money, but at some point, you've got to make money, you've got to master your mindset, and you've got to master the market. Ultimately, you got to master the money part of it, so that. Not. So that you can make art to make money, so that you can make money to make more art.

Yes, yes, I love that. Speaking of the market, you talk about the different options for how to get out there and fund one's art. And one is the role of the patron. And I thought that was so interesting to revisit the subject of patronage, because at least in America and startup culture is so much about bootstrapping. Like, don't get any help. You know, sweat equity. Build your business the ground up. Struggle, struggle. And then you provide examples of people who actually have patrons. And I Think a lot of people actually have a hard time even asking for patronage or asking for that kind of support. So I'm curious what you see as the role of the new patron, maybe even sites like Patreon that are democratizing that process.

Well, I don't think patronage, the idea that money needs art and really art needs money. You know, they both need each other. And there's a fascinating article.

Online about how the banking industry and the fine art industry are in sync with each other. They complement one another. And a lot of New York City's fine art was paid for by some of the big banks and bankers of New York City, particularly in the modern art movement. And so it's always been true that art has needed money and that it's not always been easy to sell art like you can go sell bananas at a banana stand. You know, it's not one of the core essential needs that we feel like, you know, human beings can't live without. It kind of feels like, you know, something that's excessive. It's a nice little. It's a nice little, you know, addition to life. So patronage is just the process of paying for art and getting art out into the world, whatever the means are. And so in the Renaissance, it was having wealthy people like Lorenzo de Medici, who was Michelangelo's patron, and many other artist patron at the time, just here's money. Go paint this thing or go create this thing, or go sculpt this thing. And.

The same system exists today, just looks different. So you can't go around going, hey, who's going to pay me to write blog posts? In the same sense that it was true for Michelangelo to do that. But like you said, there are tools, crowdfunding campaigns, Patreon, Kickstarter, a number of websites today where you're basically saying, I'm going to create this thing and you're going to pay me for this thing, selling it to you, but we're creating it together. And that's one model to kind of chase. Another thing that I found fascinating when I was reading about all these artists throughout history is the biggest win when you got a patron was not the money, it was the influence that the patron had. And so I think today in particular, when I talk about.

Cultivate patrons in terms of getting your art the attention it deserves, you've got to get people to advocate for you. And you need what we call today influencers. And I know some people don't like that term, but it's just there are people in influence in any industry. These are the gatekeepers, these are the tastemakers. And if you get your work in front of these people, it can tip the scales in your favor. And it turns out that it's not that difficult, particularly in today's world, where there's all these a million tiny little niches. It's not that hard to find a group or a community where there's some gatekeeper that you can get in front of. It's not like, you know, 50 years ago when there were, you know, four people in charge of, you know, a certain industry, and if you didn't get in front of those four people or, you know, you didn't get on the three main television stations that you were done for, it's not like that anymore. So there are tons of communities out there. I was emailing with somebody today who's got a community of 50,000 artists on Facebook, and I emailed this person. I said, hey, can I send you a copy of my book? That's a gatekeeper? She said, sure. So there's all these communities out there. Patrons are just people that help us get our art into the world by using their influence and any other resources that they have. And, yes, sometimes it's money, but a patron is not a customer. They are a champion of your work. And what made, for example, Michelangelo so successful was he got in front of Lorenzo and he didn't argue with him. The story goes that Lorenzo was. Was walking past Michelangelo and he was sculpting a faun.

And he was supposed to be an old faun. And Lorenzo made the comment to Michelangelo. He said, well, if it's an old faun, maybe he should be missing some teeth. And then he just kind of kept walking, and Michelangelo kept working on the sculpture. And the next day, Lorenzo DEI Medici came back, and he saw that some teeth were missing on the faun's face. And then, the story goes, the next day, he invited Michelangelo into his palace and he became his patron. Michelangelo is a teenager at the time, and when he was in the Medici palace, he met future popes. He met some of the most wealthiest and most influential people in Florentine society at the time, and basically sat at the table where the Renaissance was birthed. And so it was the influence, the relationships and the network that he was given, not just the money, that really made the difference. And today, those kinds of patrons are all around us. You are a patron to many people, Jenny. If you've got a blog or a podcast, you've got a Twitter account, you've got a Facebook group with 10,000 people on it. You've got access to a group of people that people want. So we are all patrons to each other. And at the same time, we can also benefit from that patronage.

I love what you said about being patrons to each other and so powerful in the book. You write a network is your insurance against anonymity, and that's so powerful. And because I love anything that puts the power back into people's hands, that you don't have to wait around for a patron, we can be each other's patrons. And I know you've done this, this network as insurance. Even where you are in Nashville, you've really helped cultivate a community there. So I'm curious, when you first moved there, how did you go about connecting to the point where you're now, I would say, a big leader in that community of creatives and writers living in Nashville, Tennessee?

Well, thanks. I appreciate that. Well, it started with frustration, I think, as most dreams start. Like I said, I was sitting on the couch and I was following people like Michael Hyatt and John Acuff and these people who are I now consider my friends. And I was going, how do. Like, how do I get in on that? You know, and what do these people have that I don't have? And remember, I thought I was, you know, just as good as, you know, these published authors and bloggers and stuff. And I was sneering at the. And then finally I got over myself, especially when my wife said, when are you going to actually write a book? I was like, oh, yeah, doing the work is a lot harder than talking about doing the work. And I said, well, what are they doing that I'm not doing? And I started doing that stuff, blogging, getting involved in online communities. And then what do they have that I don't have? And the answer to that was a network. And a network is just a collection of peers. So it's different from a patron in the sense that you have some influencer who advocates for you, who introduces you to a community that otherwise is really difficult to get into. And you do that, obviously, through relationship, and you do it through deference and respect, how Michelangelo did it with Lorenzo. But then you've got to kind of join the community, which I call a scene. And so it's not just about.

What you do and how you do it. It's also about where you do it. And I argue that every place has a scene. So the scene that exists in New York City is not the same that exists in Nashville. And we can go, oh, I Wish I could be a part of that scene, but I don't live there. And the truth is, just about any place you go to in the world, there is a scene. And so when you join that scene, you've got to pay attention. Like, what works here, that doesn't work there? What I observed in Nashville is here I am sitting on the couch wondering what it's like to know all these people, and I'm like, wait, I just saw them take a picture and put it on Instagram or whatever. And they're all at that coffee shop that I go to too. And so I just kind of started showing up at meetups, at events, and you know how this goes. And it feels really scary and it feels sort of impossible to break into when you're kind of on the sidelines. But if you just start showing up and you keep bumping into people, not in like a super stalkerish way, but in like, like where you're persevering and you're just persisting. One of the ways that I met Michael Hyatt was I just kept running into him and it was kind of like me being intentional to just kind of get out of my shell and go, okay, like, I'm gonna go to this conference, I'm gonna go to this meetup, I'm gonna work from this coffee shop today, that kind of thing. And if you become a part of the scene, the necessary thing that follows is a network. And it sounds sophisticated.

Like very strategic, but it's just. They're just your friends, right? They're just people that you. That are doing similar work and you're sharing what you're learning and they're sharing what they're learning, and it's just friends. And I realized creative work never succeeds without a network. I mean, it never does. Even when you find so called lone geniuses, you're like, oh yeah, you know. But they have this collection of people that were advocating for them, and as you said, Jenny, they kind of become patrons to each other where you're all kind of validating each other's work. And this happened with Hemingway and lots of other authors in the 1920s. Paris expat community. Hemingway, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, they're all kind of a part of the Picasso was a part of that. They're all part of this avant garde art scene. But because they all supported each other while they were growing in their work, they all became, became incredibly famous and successful. Even the Bronte sisters who lived out in the middle of nowhere in England, did this for one Another. The three of them were a network. They promoted and shared each other's work and helped one another succeed and collaborated with each other. It was a really powerful thing. I think this is challenging for creatives because we think, well, it's solitary work, and I've just got to be doing the work. And part of the work is sharing it with other people. And we forget that. Getting feedback, getting advice, talking to people about the work and what it's like. That's twerk, too.

So on the subject of collaboration, is what you described as the Lone Ranger artist, or the one struggling by themselves, thinking they have to do it all alone or be totally original? You shared these incredible statistics. Well, they're not stats, but they're facts. That on Beyonce's album, she got criticism, the Lemonade album. That she had 15 writers on one song. On Rihanna's album, one of her albums, she had over 30 writers contributing. And Kanye west had over 100 writers contributing on one of his albums. So that's such a contrast to how we think about. And I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on whether there's such a thing as too much collaboration, where the criticism against Beyonce, well, she didn't really write it. It was with 15 other people versus that's actually how the work gets done.

Yeah. There's this great book by a guy named Keith Sawyer who's literally a creativity expert professor, and he calls it group genius. And he basically argues that throughout history, from psychotherapy to great works of literature to even modern music, the best creative output always happens as a result of collaboration. And my favorite story is about how J.R. tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings. And the way the story goes is that he had written the Hobbit. It had done pretty well. The publisher wanted him to write another book, and he called it the New Hobbit. And he was writing it, and he just was like. It was really hard. And he and his friend C.S. lewis went out to lunch, and Lewis asked Tolkien, how's it going? He goes, man, I'm bored to death. This isn't working. He wanted to quit. And Lewis just gave him a little bit of feedback because he had read the first few chapters that he had, which were pretty.

He said, well, Tolkien, don't you know that hobbits are only interesting when they're put in unhobbit, like, circumstances? And if you've read the Lord of the Rings or watched the movie, like, the first part of it, they're in the Shire, and the story doesn't really start until they Leave the Shire. And you're like, oh. Because when they're in the Shire, everything's great, all is well with the world. And that's hobbit like circumstances. Once they get put out of there, that's when the story takes off. Well, that happened because two friends got together and talked about it. And Tolkien and Lewis were a part of basically what we would call a mastermind today. There was 19 of them, most of which were professors at Oxford that would get together every Tuesday night, and then they would smoke and drink tea, and they would share their works with one another.

And they did this for decades. And Tolkien literally wrote the Lord of the Rings by getting feedback from that group every single week.

It's so powerful. I want to shift gears now. We talked about mindset market and this last area, money ever elusive, the source of so much confusion and struggle sometimes. Okay, I just love that you addressed this topic of don't work for free. Exposure won't put food on the table. And you and I are both part of a Facebook group for professional speakers. And it's so funny, you know, inevitably once a month or even more frequently, we'll see something roll in where someone's getting offered to speak for exposure. And maybe the organization won't even reimburse for their travel. And yet it can be so tempting when someone is starting out, that exposure can be tempting. I'm curious what your thoughts are on when to do things for free or give away art or creative work for free, and when to put a stake in the ground. Demand, as you described Michelangelo and others, the respect of being paid and being paid well for one's work.

Yeah. Michelangelo is interesting because he basically got paid 10 times more than his peers. And he's a fascinating figure that I talk a lot about in the book because he was the first wealthy artist, according to many researchers, of all time. So there were other people that were famous during the time. Leonardo da Vinci was pretty famous, but he wasn't very wealthy. Michelangelo was an aristocrat, $50 million, remember? And what he accomplished was he broke the glass ceiling of what was possible for artists. And after him, many wealthy artists came during the Renaissance. And he kind of set the example, and it's a fascinating thing. And the reason he set the example is because he grew up with this idea. His dad told him this, his family told him this, that he was connected to nobility, that he came from noble blood, and they had just kind of fallen out of nobility. And I spoke with one professor who's an expert on the life of Michelangelo. And he said it wasn't true. It's not true. It ended up not being true. But he grew up with this story being told to him, and he believed the story. And because he believed it, it became true. He didn't believe himself a starving artist. He believed himself a nobleman. So when he decided to become an artist, he's like, well, I'm gonna be a noble artist. I'm gonna be an aristocratic artist. And so, you know, what do you do? Well, you demand 10 times the commission that everybody else is getting, and you end up creating a lot more value just by requiring it. And so we all know talented people who deserve to be paid for their art, but they don't require it, they don't demand it, because they don't. It doesn't happen. So at the same time, I'm not opposed to being generous. I am here today because I believe that art is a gift. And I started a blog and started. Started my writing career giving away lots of my writing. So how does this work? Well, I think there's kind of two parts to it. Part one is never give your work away expecting anything in return. If you're going to give it away to be generous, then be generous. But don't ever trade your work for an opportunity, because it usually leads to nothing. And you just need to assume that it's never going to lead to anything. And it just. It can often sort of hurt the future of your work. I recognize. Read an interesting study where they compared unpaid internships to paid internships. And if you took an unpaid internship, you were half as likely to get a job afterwards, whereas if you got a paid internship, you were twice as likely to get a job after that. And so it really sets a precedent. And so what I want to say here is that you shouldn't get into the habit of giving your work away for free. And this is where a lot of artists, musicians, creatives have gotten to, you know, designers, you name it, web developers. You know, we've all got those friends who are just doing too much work for free sometimes. We are those friends, we are those people. And so never, you know, if you're going to give your work away, then give it away. Don't expect anything in return, and have a limit to how much you're going to do that. Like, I do some free speaking gigs for nonprofits or friends or whatever, just because, like, I'm happy to do a favor for somebody. I don't advertise it, and I have a limit of how many I'm going to do in a year. And it's not very many. Not because I'm trying to be stingy, but because I'm trying to put food on the table. And if I consistently give all my best work away for free all the time, then guess what? I don't get to do that work anymore, period. Which means I can't give it away anymore. So, again, we're not making money to be greedy. We're making money so that we can keep doing the work. The other part of this is you, like Michelangelo, actually have to believe that your work is worth charging for. And I know so many creatives who don't think this. And the best way that I know to trick your mind into thinking this way is to just charge something. Just force yourself. I don't care. Like, I don't care if you start with 20 bucks. It doesn't matter. When you charge for something, there's a dignity that comes to the art. Like, if you charge me for something, Jenny, and I, you know, I pay you for it, it could be anything. There is a dignity that. That you receive and that I give to you, and it's. It's a valuable exchange. And when you're getting paid, you tend to do. And the person who paid for it tends to value it more. I had a friend, speaking of speaking, I had a friend one time who wanted to be booked as a speaker.

By this nonprofit organization, and they didn't have a budget to pay for him to come and speak. And he had a friend, a very wealthy friend, who was a fan of the nonprofit organization. He said, I will pay the honorarium. It was $25,000. I will pay this for so and so to come speak. And so my friend got on a plane, flew out there. This is several years, got off his plane, got off the plane and called the event planner and said, hey, I'm here. And they said, you're where? He goes, I'm at the airport. Do you have a driver? Do you need to take a taxi? Like, what do you need me to do? And they said, oh, yeah, we canceled that.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

There's no event. It's not happening. He goes, oh. So I asked my friend, I said, what did you do? He says, I got back on the plane. Plane. I flew home. I tore up my friend's check, and I never took a gig for free again. Because if you don't pay for it, you don't value it. And so these are the rules. Are there exceptions? Sure, but these are the rules. If you're going to thrive as an artist today, you have to charge for your work. You have to charge something. Start somewhere. And as your confidence and skill grows, you can increase your prices. But your price does not start at zero. It can start at one or two or three, but it does not start at zero. It's worth something. And you have to believe that your work is worth charging for. And if you have to fake yourself out by just putting some prices on a website or whatever, just to begin, then fine, do that. But don't set a precedent that you give your best work away for free. This is not the way you're going to get to do this full time. Yeah.

I think what ends up being tricky about it, and I know not everyone here is listening, gonna go into speaking, but what's tricky is that every now and then, the exposure thing works and it leads to something else.

Sure, of course.

But one of my speaking mentors gave me great advice, which is people tend to hire you for whatever the amount you were hired at that event. And so early on, what I started to do to build my confidence, when I was first starting out, I started with an extremely low rate, maybe 250 for a workshop.

Yep. That's what I started to.

Yeah. And I set a goal to double it every time. So every next time. The next time someone asked me, it was 500. The next time it was a thousand. The next time 2000. Then I let the market say no. So for many years, I would say 5,000, or then for several years, I would say 10,000 and never get it. But I always said it, and I always let people negotiate me down. And the more that I talk to other speakers, and this could go for any industry. Industry. I realized that one of the biggest differences between me earning less was I just wasn't asking for as much, and they were. And it wasn't because there was any real difference in the quality of our work or in the reach of our reputation or any of that. It was just that I hadn't been as audacious with the initial figures that I was putting out.

Yeah. And I mean, similar to Michelangelo, like, was he one of the best artists of all time? Time, yeah, of course. But at the time, you know, when he's charging 10 times, other people are charging. I mean, was he the best? I don't know. He lost a competition. He and Leonardo were competitors, and he lost a competition where they were bidding on a job together. And Leonardo beat him. And still he had this audacious belief, you know, that he was the Best. And so he thought like the best and acted like the best in charge. Like the best. And when you have that sort of audacity, it tends to become true.

Some of what you're talking about. The highest paid speaking gig I ever got.

Was a $15,000 speaking gig. And like, you know, I speak. It's not the only thing that I do. And so, you know, I've got some young kids at home. And so, you know, I take the gigs when they come, but it's not my primary brand winning thing. But this gig came along and I was like, yeah, sure, I gotta go do it. And I went. It was this really large corporate conference. 15,000 people there. I spoke to a room of 2,000 people. And afterwards, I'm standing outside signing books. This is in Las Vegas. And I'm standing next to this guy. There's 150 speakers there. And I'm standing next to another guy who's a speaker. And he'd been there five years in a row. When I was asking him, I mean, this was the best speaking gig I ever had. And I was like, best paying. And I said, how do I get invited back? And he was giving me all this advice and he just kind of. And he was talking about. I said, well, why do you keep coming back and what do you get out of this? And he talked about how it was lead generation for his business, and he was a lawyer and he was helping companies with compliance issues. And he goes, well, you know, because, well, you know, they don't pay you. And I just looked at him. I was like, okay. He looked at me and must have been like, wearing it on my face. He's like, did they pay you? I said, yeah, sorry. And I mean, but that, like. I was like. What you're talking about was like, right in me, front of. Front of me, same deal. We spoke to the same room, stayed in the same hotel, ate the same buffet. We're both got the same deal. And yet, because I asked for money and he didn't. I guess that's how it happened. It wasn't like I was a keynote speaker and he was a workshop guy. We did the same exact thing. But because I asked and he didn't, I got the best paying speaking gig of my career at the time. Time. And he got nothing.

That's where network is so important and helpful, too. Especially if you can have friends in your profession who are willing to be transparent about financials. I've had friends ask me work and say at the same time. They made the introduction to say, and by the way, this is how much I made so that it was a benchmark for me. And I've helped do that for other people too, where it's like we can collaborate and help each other to say, here's what to ask for, here's what you're worth, you know, because you only make that mistake twice that that guy made, where not twice, once where you realize unless there's really a good reason.

The last question before we start to wrap up is you quote his, what's his name, Charles Handy, on this idea of portfolio people. And you talk about portfolio lives and there are so many great, they're not quite paradoxes, but spectrums that you cover in your book Starving Artists to thriving Artists. Well, one common thing that I hear even among people reading Pivot is there's so many different things I want to do. Don't I have to pick one? And yet on the other side, in some cases, there is such a thing as too scattered a focus. So where do you. Because I'm with you. I really think that the way forward now is portfolio careers where we have multiple streams of income and activities, and that both keeps it fun and more secure on the income side. But then when is it too far where someone is not focused enough to let any one of those streams really take off and grow their momentum.

Right. I love this idea of the portfolio life. I named my podcast after it and I read about it in this book by a guy named Charles Handy who wrote the Age of Unreason, which was a book that came out in 1989. This is so fascinating and I highly recommend everybody listening is go pick up that book the Age of Unreason. You can find it on Amazon used book or something. And in that book he has a chapter on portfolio. And he says.

In the future of work, we're not going to have one 40 year career. We're going to have many careers. We're going to have a portfolio of work. And he says in the future we will all be portfolio people. What's fascinating about that is we're living in that future now. We're living in what's called the gig economy. And you talk a lot about this. I mean, it's just, it's not going to happen that you're going to work at the Same company for 40 years. They're going to give you your pension. And that's not how it works. The company that you're working at now. Right, right now probably won't even exist in 15 years. And who you are right now, and the skills that you have and the market that you're serving may be completely different. I like this idea of thinking about your life. And he thinks about it really as your whole life as a portfolio.

In work, you need to be thinking about.

How do I chunk this out? And Handy talks about, don't think about hours per week. That's the old way of doing it. Especially if you're a freelancer. Think about days in a year that you need to work in order for you to make a living. You know, you've got 360, 365 days. Yeah. And especially if you've got, you know, you're an entrepreneur or you're working from home or you're a freelancer or something, and you've got some autonomy over your schedule. You know, how can you organize your life in such a way that you're making a living, but you're also doing, you know, your work in kind of different areas? And so I agree that you don't want to be too scattered. And so my practical advice to this is pick one skill that is sort of the core skill for me, that's writing, and then pick two or three things. No more than five, I would say. But pick two or three things that are sort of ancillary skills to that core skill. So for me, that's marketing and kind of online, online marketing and business, and then speaking. And so writing kind of drives these other things. And so people read my books and blog, and then I teach online courses and sell some digital products and make a living doing that. Then I kind of go out and speak, and I've got this diverse portfolio of different things going on because I like doing different things. I like marketing, I like a little bit of business. I like writing, I like speaking. But when I try to master one of these, I find that I get bored. And Robert Greene and his book Mastermind Mastery talks about this, which is. I mean, it's kind of ironic because he says the future belongs to those who take different skills and combine them in interesting ways. And so he kind of redefines mastery not as doing one thing really well, but doing a few things and combining them into your own unique portfolio. And so you don't have to be necessarily the best public speaker in the world, because what does that even mean? You know, you can be the best public speaker talking to millennials, or you can be the best. Best.

Writer who's really funny, but writes for a serious business audience. We can kind of choose the craft that we want to master and create it through this idea of portfolios. And you can also do that with the jobs that you take and the businesses that you start and the things that you do. And I typically think of that in about five year increments. So I remember working at an organization before I quit to do it right full time, full of millennials, and every six months they had a new dream that they were going to chase. I think that's a little too frenetic. I encourage people to make what I call seasonal commitments. Spend two to three years doing something to at least learn the skill, learn a skill that you can take into the next season of life. But if you're changing jobs every six months, I don't know how you feel about this, Jenny, but if you're changing things quickly, you're doing too many things all at once, it's not going to work. I mean, you are being haphazard and irresponsible. The idea of a portfolio, much like an investment portfolio, their portfolio of work is picking a few things, not one thing. I'm picking a few things and I'm investing a little bit of time in these areas. And over time, it becomes a really interesting and unique portfolio. At times I, I will sort of, I'll call that, you know, I'll trim things out and go, okay, I don't want this stock. You know, I don't want this thing. I'm going to pull this out and I'm going to add this here. But there's certain things that I'll probably keep, and that's what I do. You know, like every year or two, I'm going, okay, I still like writing, you know, do I want to ramp up speaking, do I want to ramp it back? Do I want to do more or less of the online marketing stuff? Are there any new skills that I want to try to, you know, begin to develop? But I'd pick a core skill. I'd find a couple of other things, things that complement that skill that you can, you know, are sort of like secondary things that you can do that really color the thing that you're doing. And then I'd make a seasonal commitment. You know, I have a friend who says never.

Never attempt to do anything. Change a dream, start a blog, build a business. Never attempt to do something that you aren't willing to slog it out for at least two years before you see any results. And I love that. I mean, that's pretty cool. Counterintuitive to the startup, you know, you know, gets a billion users and you know, 12 days kind of culture that we live in. Some things just take time.

Jeff, thank you so much. This has been so enlightening and I was saying to Jeff, before we hit record, I looked forward to every time I got to pick his book back up so real artists don't starve. I highly recommend it to all of you who are building businesses and and who want to or do see yourselves as an artist slash entrepreneur. Jeff, where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?

Thanks for having me. Jenny. Big fan. Love what you're doing with the podcast and love what you're doing just with the word pivot. It's such a, such powerful word. I'm a big fan of it and thank you for having me. You can find me at my blog, goinswriter. That's like coins but with a G. Goins Writer.

Awesome. Thank you so much Jeff.

Thank you.

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