How to Make Work That Changes Lives!

Welcome to a pop-up edition of Creative on Purpose Live. And today I'm gonna riff and rant a little bit about art, audience, and work that matters. For those of you that don't know who I am, I am Scott Perry, and I am the publisher of Transcendent Solopreneur and creator of the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model, which is a way that I approach solopreneurship so that I am building a business that requires the least amount of effort and time on my part, making sure that I'm doing work that aligns with who I am, what I'm good at, where I belong, that funds and fits my ideal lifestyle. That ideal lifestyle involves making sure that my work is scheduled around nap time and playtime with my grandson who is going to be arriving here shortly. So I'll be ending this podcast whenever he shows up if it happens before I get to the end. And, uh, again, what I want to do today is talk about this idea of our audience and work that matters. It's actually at the heart of a topic that, um, I wrote about in my very first book, The Stoic Creative. It's available on Amazon, I think, for a dollar if you want to get it. And, um, it comes from a lot of thinking that evolved while I was in Seth Godin's altMBA program back in August of 2016. And then through a 7-year association working with Seth Godin on the Akimbo Workshops projects, I was the head coach for the Freelancers Workshop and the Creatives Workshops. I coached at the Marketing Seminar and the Bootstrappers Workshop and the Story Skills Workshop. And I can't remember what other workshops, but had a lot of insight and inspiration gleaned from those years spent with Seth Godin, who has written very articulately about the topic of art. And so, Cato's question is, during our super casual barefoot combo, you mentioned the sound check process from your musician days. Who is the sound check for? What happens when it gets skipped? What does this step reveal about the musicians, the room, and the expectations of the audience that is not there yet? So I really love this question. Kato is referencing my 30-year career as a professional musician and guitar instructor. We were talking about just the value of the soundcheck as part of a conversation that we were having on our weekly Friday on Purpose call. And I'm going to back into all of this by talking a little bit about how I am defining what art is and what distinguishes art from all the other types of creative enterprise that we engage with. And it involves— that discussion will involve the value and importance of the audience and how we can do work that matters with people we care about. So in the Stoic creative, I don't remember the precise definition I use, but I define creativity basically as the art of bringing forth anything into existence that did not exist before you created it. So for me, creativity is just a natural human instinct. You know, I know that we live in a culture where a lot of us deny our creative impulse. We say, oh, I don't have a creative bone in my body and that sort of thing. And that's just plain false. Your life, your everyday day-to-day, is nothing but creative expression. You know, when creativity is not just the fine arts— painting, dancing, you know, and that sort of thing— creativity is the art of convers— is practicing, um, conversation, emailing, uh, Any of the work that you do in your solopreneur business is creative work. Making a sandwich is creative work. We created ourselves. We created, we turned ourselves from non-walkers and non-talkers into walkers and talkers as children. All this is creative expression, bringing forth something into existence that did not exist until we made it so. Now, what distinguishes creativity and begins to elevate creativity to, uh, to art again, in my opinion, is that art is something that you do out loud and in public. It is something that you share with others. It is done with, for, and on purpose for an audience. And so, uh, I think it's in Icarus Deception, but it's something that he says many times. In a lot of his talks and so forth. Seth Godin says, talks about art as the act of saying, here, I made this for you. So art is done with more intention and it's done with more integrity and it is done with, for, and on purpose for a specific audience. And that's what elevates creativity to art. And so there's a spectrum there, obviously, And I'm not dissing anybody's dabbling in art, you know, painting or poetry writing or any of that kind of thing as an amateur creative exercise, a way of, you know, creatively expressing yourself or leveraging your creative capacity. That's great. Amateur just means that you do something for the love of it. It's not a derogatory term. And having an artistic hobby is perfectly fine. If you practice, you know, your painting all by yourself, that's absolutely fine. The fact of the matter is, in any creative or artistic enterprise, you're not doing it alone ever. Picasso, uh, you know, did not invent paintbrushes and paint and canvases. He did, you know, was seen as a maverick in the way that he expressed himself through painting, but even that was happening as a, being influenced and as a consequence of the people that he was surrounded by, the influences that he had, and the teachers that he had, and the audience that he was painting for. So creativity and art are always collaborative, even when you're doing them all alone by yourself. And so the whole idea of work that matters doing work that matters with people you care about, which is at the heart of Transcendent Solopreneurship, at the heart of, or is achieved through, the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model. We are elevating our craft, our creative enterprise, to a more artistic level by bringing more intention and integrity to the creative process and in the way that we share that creative expression with an audience that we have selected, the audience that we seek to serve. So how does all this relate to being a musician and doing a soundcheck? Well, I was a musician for a very long time. It was a solopreneur activity. It was some— a career that I built largely on my own, uh, playing music that was not the most popular music and making a very good living for a very long time playing exactly the kind of music that I wanted to play and exactly the kind of venues and for the exact audiences I wanted to play it for. So the whole idea of the soundcheck is really interesting to me because oftentimes, especially early in my career, I was building an audience through authority loops. I was, you know, and I was raising my hand and asking venue owners and musicians that I respected if I could be an opener for them. And often that was something I did for free or for very little money. And but it was a great way to build an audience by putting myself next to people that were in the same genre as I was. And One of the things that I found really interesting is that, you know, I learned early on because I started my career purely as a solo musician and, um, you know, providing my own sound system and so forth. I learned how to dial in sound, my sound, really well, really fast. And it was particularly tricky because I play a kind of exotic guitar called a National Resophonic. So it's a steel-bodied, nickel-plated guitar with a very, um, unique way of amplifying itself acoustically, which— and has a unique sound that is difficult to dial in when you're plugging into a PA system. And I learned how to do all this. So oftentimes I would, you know, walk into a venue and, um, for soundcheck And the main act would be like, "Ah, don't worry about the soundcheck. I know what I'm doing." And I just always thought that was really interesting because I would spend at least 30 minutes on a soundcheck. Often I would present the sound person with some directions about how to, you know, starting points for how to dial in the sound for this guitar that I had. And, you know, just made friends with the sound person because a sound person can make or break your show. They can make you sound really good or they can make you sound really bad. And I also needed to vet the sound person to make sure I was going to get the minimum viable quality of sound that I needed and, uh, and, and help them dial it in if they were, you know, not as skillful at their craft. Um, and, you know, these bands and these acts that would just like trust that the sound person knew what they were doing or felt like the soundcheck was this unimportant thing, um, just always, to me, revealed that, um, they weren't really taking their craft very seriously. They weren't treating it as art. They definitely weren't respecting the audience because the quality of the sound is not secondary to the quality of the show. Like, you can be the best musician in the world, the greatest guitarist, the greatest singer, the greatest songwriter, what have you. If the sound sucks, you you're gonna sound like you suck and the audience is not gonna pay attention, or they're— or worse, they're going to walk out or complain. So the sound check is not just for you, and it's not just for the audience, and it's not just for the sound man. It's for the art, the connection that's going to happen through musical expression, where you are creating the music and the audiences receiving the music. I always thought of, uh, you know, another thing that I would see bands and acts do is they, they tried to win over an audience with volume. They just kept turning it up until people shut up and listened to them. And I always thought that was a really lousy idea. Um, and, you know, audiences complain to venue owners and to bartenders about the sound, and then You get asked to turn it down, and that's always like a sign of unprofessionalism, and it's a little embarrassing, and, you know, egotistical musicians get all upset about it. I would actually dial in my sound so that I knew that I was too— my volume was too low, because what I wanted was for the venue owner or for the audience to ask me to turn up the volume, because now they're raising their hand and saying, I'm interested in what you're doing and I'd like to pay more attention. And so that idea that, you know, when you are sharing your art, when you're sharing your craft with an audience, you should be very intentional about the craft and the art that you're sharing. You should be very intentional about the audience that you're sharing it with, and you should have as much integrity in the process of how you are connecting that art with that audience as humanly possible. So, you know, there's— if you are on stage as a musician and the audience is out there, there is this void, there is this gap, and you can try to cross that void or cross that gap or close that gap with volume, Or you can try to close that gap by getting the audience to actually lean in to listen to you, to ask you to turn it up. And so the audience, again, the, you know, this whole idea of, you know, what is music for? What is a soundcheck for? You know, music is a language. Languages are used to connect and communicate. They are, you know, to collaborate, to create. And so Knowing that, you know, music is a language and that there is this connection that I desire to make, I want to make sure that the soundcheck is being leveraged to help facilitate and amplify and augment my intention to connect with the audience. If you're skipping the soundcheck, then you are disrespecting your craft, your art, and you're disrespecting the audience, and you're disrespecting the sound person and the venue, and you are not going to be an artist for very long if you are going to show up that way over time consistently. So, you know, the people that really— what I have found, and this is true whether we're talking about the art of music, the art of connection, the art of business marketing, any of any of the things that we do, you know, in our business, I think I can— I'm able to connect them to, to things I learned as a professional musician. When you take yourself and your art and your responsibility to the art and the audience seriously, without taking yourself too seriously, you pay attention to all the details, right? You pay attention to where you're setting up in the room, how you're setting up in the room, where is the audience going to be, where are the audience going to need to go, you know, and making sure that, that you, you're facilitating the flow, but also making sure that you're not creating distraction and where you set up, how you set up, what you sound like, how you dial in the sound, how loud it is, how soft it is. Um, these are things that, that all reveal a level of professionalism, care, consideration, empathy for the event itself, for the audience in particular, but also for whoever's hosting the event. And the same is true in business. If you look at the landscape right now, you see lots of online gurus and digital marketers talking about ways that you can just, you know, get, get heard above all the noise that's online, get, you know, get yourself attention by any means possible. In a overcrowded, digitally distracting platform. The way that people help try to encourage or teach you to use false scarcity, false urgency, clickbait to trick people into giving up some of their attention so that you can grab their email address and force-feed them into some sort of email sequence, some sort of funnel, some sort of whatever. And, you know, this is all go— this is all a reflection on who you are, how you go about doing what you do, and it's an indication of your level of care and concern for the work, for the art, for the, the people that you say you seek to serve, uh, and doesn't have to be done the way that we so often see it being done. I've been able to craft a very successful business where I am usually able to earn everything I need for the year before the year is half over without spending any real time on social media. I'd never generate content purely for social media. I spend less than 10 minutes a day posting my Substack articles or reposting my notes onto social media platforms. I simply leverage the tools that Substack makes available to help people that have already given me permission and trust to help them identify, clarify, and solve the problems they have or the aspirations they want to achieve. And by helping people clarify where they want to be, where they are, and what they're starting with and how they can close the gap, get— providing them with a roadmap, uh, I have been able to, with a very small list and a very modest community of paid subscribers, uh, reach my annual revenue goal before this year was half over. And it's all about the care, consideration, and the quality of the connections and collaborations that I'm inviting my followers and subscribers into. And by helping people, by solving problems for people every single day, I found that it is the best way to get what all the digital marketers promise you can get through their strategies, tactics, tools, and trickery, you know, reach and impressions and grabbing email addresses and attention. It's just like the musician days. I'm not turning the volume up every day. I'm actually turning it down so that you have to lean in and listen or raise your hand so that you can get more information. So that is my little riff rant on art audience and work that matters, inspired by Cato's question. So Cato, thank you for the question. I appreciate— looks like we got Rebecca and Bree and Monica here. Appreciate you all showing up. I don't see any questions coming in. And as I said, my grandson Jasper is on his way over now. So it's going to be time for some oranges and pancakes, a trip to the playground, followed by a nap, and then maybe a little pool time. So that's what this solopreneur is up to today. I hope your day, your week is off to a great start. I hope that wherever you are, whatever you do, that you will be well, do good, and have fun. Thanks.