Jeff Goins: Real Artist's Don't Starve

Transcript

[0:00:16] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Jeff Goins, author of Real Artist’s Don’t Starve. For centuries, the myth of the starving artist has dominated our culture but what about all those graphic designers and writers and musicians and artist who actually make a great living from their work? What is it about their creative process that’s so different? In this episode, Jeff shares some of the key insights that he found while researching this topic. The result is a very entertaining interview where you’re going to get some amazing wisdom that could propel your career as an artist. Jeff also told some really great stories and I actually cried laughing when he was talking about his paper route as a kid and you’re going to crack up when you hear about the effect he has on teenage girls in Taiwan. Trust me, it’s hilarious. Now, here is our conversation with Jeff Goins.

[0:01:37] Jeff Goins: I remember sitting in Franklin Tennessee at a coffee shop called the Frothy Monkey, which is like this old house that has been renovated into a restaurant. It was an abandoned house and it was turned into a coffee shop and a restaurant. I’m there pretty much every day, they know me by name. I’m sitting there writing or answering emails. Throughout the day, I would just hear people kind of come through, I’d overhear, eavesdrop on their conversations and I would hear people say like, “You know, I’m working on my music right now, it’s going great.” “I just can’t get my break. I can’t find my big break. My day job is okay but I really want to be making art. I want to be doing more art shows and getting into galleries but I just don’t think I can make any money off of it.” I would just overhear over and over again and as I started writing and I’ve been writing full time for about six years now, eventually you have conversations with your friend and they go. “Man, I’d love to do that but there’s just no money in it. I’ll starve, I’ll go broke.” I kept hearing this over and over again and I’d go, “But I didn’t starve.” I don’t want to be one of those guys who’s got this survivorship bias, where I write a book because I was the one guy who jumped out the airplane building with his parachute on the way down and actually made it work and didn’t land with a splat. It made me curious enough that I was like, “Who else is out there?” Because I kept running into two groups of people. People who I would call starving artists, where they would say, “Well, here’s my art, I would love to do this but I know that I can’t make any money off of it.” “It’s just going to be a hobby.” That was a familiar voice to me, something that I said for many years, when I graduated college, I played with a band we toured north America for about a year, we spent a month in Taiwan, we were huge in Taiwan by the ways, Charlie.

[0:03:37] Charlie Hoehn: Are you serious?

[0:03:40] Jeff Goins: Kind of, yeah. We would play these, we didn’t play in Taiwan, we played in and around the Taipei area. Yeah, we played shopping malls, we played like all girls like prep schools with thousands of young women and literally, we played the show and I – they had a balcony and there was all these young Taiwanese girls in skirts and uniforms, plad uniforms as a part of this prep school. In America, we were nobody obviously because anybody listening to this has never heard of –

[0:04:16] Charlie Hoehn: What was the name of your band by the way?

[0:04:18] Jeff Goins: It was called CTI1421.

[0:04:21] Charlie Hoehn: Of course you didn’t catch on.

[0:04:26] Jeff Goins: We’re playing this song and I remember pointing up to this young lady, 15 year old girl in the balcony and I’m just like, my ego is enjoying this too much and I point up at the balcony and like wink at one of those girls.

[0:04:43] Charlie Hoehn: And you’re like, “Real artists don’t starve!”

[0:04:48] Jeff Goins: Get this, she fainted.

[0:04:48] Charlie Hoehn: No.

[0:04:52] Jeff Goins: She just fainted and after the show, they rush us off the stage and we had to run out and climb out the back window and go out the alley way.

[0:05:00] Charlie Hoehn: How are you a writer? What is wrong with you? How could you?

[0:05:06] Jeff Goins: You know, for 30 minutes I felt like Elvis Presley you know? It was like the Beetles playing at Sullivan and we saw that over and over again in Asia, we saw, it was a very conservative culture. In schools they were taught not to clap or make noises because that was a sign of disrespect, a sign of respect is them sitting down and just not moving a muscle to show you that they’re paying attention to you. As soon as we would give them permission to get up, move around, they would go crazy and that prep school story was a real story and that’s an example of it. Anyway, during that year, I made about 8,000 –

[0:05:44] Charlie Hoehn: I kind of don’t even want to talk about your book anymore.

[0:05:48] Jeff Goins: Yeah, this is way more interesting.

[0:05:49] Charlie Hoehn: Super interesting. So you made $8,000 that year?

[0:05:53] Jeff Goins: Yeah, you know? $8,000 that year, seriously, $8,000 a year.

[0:05:57] Charlie Hoehn: You made a young girl faint by winking at her and pointing at? Are you kidding me?

[0:06:06] Jeff Goins: I’m not kidding.

[0:06:07] Charlie Hoehn: Do you know how few people in the history of civilization can say that? That’s unbelievable.

[0:06:16] Jeff Goins: I think if it’s 2006 and you’ve got a guitar, just about anybody could have done that if they were willing to go to Taiwan. I mean, it’s very interesting, they were very much at the time like stuck in the 80’s and all the teenage boys that I would talk to were like into Metallica and Megadeath and it’s fascinating.

[0:06:36] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:06:38] Jeff Goins: Yeah, I just think it was like a very proper, conservative culture and as soon as you gave them expression to let it all out, they went nuts. I don’t think I made her faint, I think she was ready to have –

[0:06:50] Charlie Hoehn: No, you made her faint.

[0:06:52] Jeff Goins: Fair enough. Yeah, it’s a very small claim to fame and a fun one. During that year, we were playing, did not make much money, we stayed in people’s homes mostly to keep expenses way, way down and we’d get some – You know, people will give us some money for gas, they’d feed us a casserole and they’d send us on our way. Every few nights, I’d be staying with a different family and they would say “Hey, it’s great that you’re doing this while you’re young because when you get older, you’re going to have to get a real job and you know, we all know there’s no money in art, there’s no money in music anymore.” They weren’t saying this to be mean, they said this in their own nice ways but almost every night, I was hearing this from somebody else. They were like, there were well meaning grownups, telling a 23 year old kid how it is and saying, you know, “It’s good that you’re doing this now.” “But, you eventually won’t be able to do this.” And I was like “Yeah, you’re right.” I believed it. You know, I did that for a year. I quit the band, I moved to Nashville which is the opposite order in which you tend to do those things. I moved to Nashville to chase a girl, ended up marrying her so I was good in that.

[0:07:56] Charlie Hoehn: What? Your life is just like one long fantasy, this is ridiculous. You better start spitting out some failures pretty soon buddy.

[0:08:04] Jeff Goins: Yeah, there’s plenty of failures. I got to Nashville and eventually started working for a nonprofit and ended up – all along the way, living in Nashville, I just had this assumption that you can’t make any money off of your art, off of your creative work. So as a writer, as a musician, these were always things that I dabbled in but never took very seriously. Eventually I did and that’s a whole other story but I wrote this book because to date, now, I understand that being a starving artist is a mindset. It’s not a necessary condition of doing creative work. I was sitting in these coffee shops and I hear people talk about it as if it were a given that you have to starve if you’re an artist, musician, creative, writer, whatever. I began to discover that there is this secret class, you know, this underground movement of people that are making a living. They’re making a killing off of their writing, off of their music, off of their art and they’re not superstars. I’m not talking about Katy Perry, you know? But they’re killing it. I found that they all – I talk to a lot of them, I interviewed them in the book, I found that a lot of them had many things in common and these things that they have in common, I call them rules. Are the things that every starving artist I know and have talked to, these are the things that they actively avoid and say, “I don’t need to do that. I don’t need to market my work.” Or, “Eventually if I do enough work for free, I’ll get paid.” I wrote the book because I realized there are two groups of people who are talking about the same thing. How to make money off of your art and they’re talking about it in very different ways and I thought, well, one group needs to know what this other group believes and understands.

[0:09:49] Charlie Hoehn: Awesome, this is amazing. I wish we had three hours because I would spend the first just focusing on your experiences in Taiwan. But let’s get into the mistakes first so we understand like okay, what are the things that subconsciously we’re probably not even aware of that we’re doing wrong. That yeah, that most people screw up and what is it that successful artist are doing differently?

[0:10:21] Jeff Goins: Yeah, just some examples. Starving artists tend to think that you have to be born with it, you have to be born this way and thriving artists which is what I call the successful creatives and just to be clear. I use artist in the same way that Seth Godden would use the term – any creative gift that you have to share with the world, I consider that your art. We all can be artist, it doesn’t mean we all necessarily are artist, that choice is up to you. A starving artist believes you’ve got to be born with it if you’re not born with it then you don’t have the talent, you don’t have the gift. When in reality, a thriving artist understands that there art is work, it’s a choice and it’s something they have to keep choosing every single day. That’s one example, there’s 12 of them in the book. I’ll just list a couple. Another one is this idea that you have to be original. I remember driving through Nashville, like I said, I’ve lived here 11 years and then my back seat were a couple of young women talking about some kick starter. They’re talking about some kick starter that turned into this 10 million dollar brand overnight basically. It was just a great idea and they said “Man, if we just had one great idea, that’s what it takes. With one great idea, we can make a million dollars and they were being 100% serious.”

[0:11:39] Charlie Hoehn: I know, man. My least – sorry to interject here but one of my telltale signs for an entrepreneur who is going to fail is somebody who requires other people to sign NDA’s before they talk about their idea. “Yup, you’re not going anywhere, sorry, good luck.”

[0:11:59] Jeff Goins: Yeah, starving artists, try to be original whereas thriving artist understand that you have to steal from the greats who have come before you. You have to steal like an artist as Austin Cleon would say. Then, you know, one more important idea would be that a starving artist are stubborn about everything whereas thriving artist are stubborn about the right things. I came across this great Jeff Baso’s quote where he said about Amazon. He said, “We are stubborn on vision but flexible on details.” Without fail, most starving artists I meet are very stubborn about all the details. They’re caught up in the minutia and what I mean by that is they go, “Man, if I don’t – if this song, if this book, if this idea doesn’t make it, I don’t know what I’ll do, right?” They don’t really have a plan for, not if failure happens but when failure happens. Whereas thriving artist understand that their job is to create a body of work that failure and successes will come but they have this stubborn vision that they’re going to keep producing enough work that eventually people are going to notice them and they’re going to get the credit that they deserve. I like how I heard Ryan Holiday recently put this. He says, “Don’t write your last book, write your next book.” I think starving artist tend to go, “Okay…” I think we all know what this feels like, you’re working on this thing right now, your project, whatever it is. It could be a book, it could be a business, it could be whatever and this is, it’s your baby and you’re like, “This is the thing. This is the thing that’s going to make me famous or make me a bunch of money or this is just the best thing I’ve ever done and if people don’t love it, man, I don’t know what I’ll do.” If you hear yourself say that, look out, you are in for trouble. Versus saying, “This is just the next thing that I’m going to create and I want it to succeed, obviously I’ll do everything I can to setup for success but it’s the next thing in a line of things that I’m going to produce and my job is to stay stubborn about the vision and be thinking about the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years of creative work.”

[0:14:13] Charlie Hoehn: I think that is so helpful to so many people who listen to this. I mean, I speak with artists who – or authors who have that underlying assumption going on that this is the thing that’s going to propel their career to the next level, it’s going to make them a speaker. It’s going to put them on the best seller list, which who knows what’s going to happen after that? But life’s going to be different, you know? Instead of thinking like this is a season of my life in which I bear fruit and I’m going to continue doing that. I’m going to continue producing better and better harvest in different harvest as my life goes on and it’s going to build upon itself, it’s not going to be the one thing. It’s so rare that you come up with a staggering work of genius so to speak, that makes the world stop and acknowledge you for the rest of your life. It’s so rare that that happens. The only way you can get there is to create a bunch of work before it.

[0:15:19] Jeff Goins: We don’t understand that that may not actually be the healthiest thing for you, right? As with JD Salinger, right? Write’s The Catcher in the Rye, is incredibly successful.

[0:15:29] Charlie Hoehn: Disappears.

[0:15:33] Jeff Goins: He disappears. He’s apparently overwhelmed by the success and goes into hiding. I mean, I know, this is something you care about Charlie but like – it’s not necessarily a good thing for you to blow up overnight, which as authors, we all kind of secretly want and are hoping for. But I’m six years into this, five books in. I have become more comfortable with the incremental success because every once in a while, I get a little bit too much. I’ll get too much recognition.

[0:16:10] Charlie Hoehn: A Taiwanese girl will faint, when you walk by her, you know, like “This power! What do I do with it?!”

[0:16:17] Jeff Goins: I’m drunk with it, yeah. No, but every once in a while, like I’ll realize the cost of influence, fame, success, whatever you want to call it. It’s not bad, I’m not like, “Oh feel sorry for me.” I realize, I’m good with what I have right now. I don’t need a billion dollars, I don’t need to sell 10 million books tomorrow because what I have right now is enough for me to try to figure out how to manage this and deal with this right now. Obviously, I want to grow and reach more people and I want all of those things but if this is my track, this is my path and it’s slow and steady versus overnight success. The older I get, the more comfortable I become with that.

[0:16:56] Charlie Hoehn: How do you know that you are on the right path for you as an artist?

[0:17:04] Jeff Goins: I think you know you’re on the right path when you realize you’re on a path and you’re not wondering around in the wilderness going, “What am I doing?” I mean, truly, like I used to think there was like a set route to success and I wrote a book called The Art Of Work which is about finding your vocation, your calling, your purpose, whatever you want to call it. It’s a process of finding meaning in your life and the work that you do. The best analogy that I can think of – because several years ago, I realized I’m supposed to be writing books, this is more than just a good idea. This is something that people need from me and I need for myself and –

[0:17:50] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me about that moment.

[0:17:53] Jeff Goins: Yeah. I was 27, living in Nashville, surrounded by creatives, right? Jealous of what other people around me were doing. I was a marketing director at a nonprofit and I was helping other people’s ideas spread and there was something in me, I call it an itch. There was something in me that I just couldn’t quite scratch and so I just started itching, you know? I just started trying to find a way to alleviate this feeling of something’s missing. I started going to conferences, I started reading books and one book I read was called Let Your Life Speak, by an author named Parker Palmer and he said, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I need to listen to my life telling me who I am.” I began to go, “Well that’s interesting, who am I? Are there things that I’m doing that are not necessarily aligned with my identity, with my values and who I really am.” You know, I was working for a nonprofit, we’re doing good work. I wasn’t in a job that I hated, quite the opposite, I was good at my job, I had a good boss. I was very comfortable and I realized, that was actually a dangerous place to be because I could stay there. I wasn’t going to get fired, there weren’t going to be any major downsizing necessarily. I could probably coast there for the next five to 10 years, getting gradual raises and increases in responsibility. There was just something in me that I know that would be settling that would be not enough. I ended up joining this coaching group. My boss actually paid for it and it was – here in Nashville, it was a small cohort of professionals who would get together every other month and on like the second month that we did this. Not the coach but one of the other students in the cohort which lasted a year long. We’re in month two, he asked me, he said, “What’s your dream?” I said, “I don’t know, I don’t really have one of those.” I was so afraid to talk about my dream because I’m 27, most of my friends who had chased their dreams had like quit their jobs, gone and tried to start a nonprofit or the next charity water or they try to start an online business or whatever. Six months later, they were broke and back at Starbucks. Dreamer to me meant flaky person. I was very reluctant to even put a name to it. He said, “Really, because you know, I would have thought, you know, knowing you, I thought you would have wanted to be a writer.” That kind of took my breath away. I had been writing for most of my life, it had always been a part of me but never something that I was like, all in on because I didn’t think you could make any money on it. I said, you know, “I guess I’d like to be a writer, some day.” He just looked at me and he said “Jeff, you don’t have to want to be a writer, you are a writer, you just need to write.” I was like, “What? I am? Really?” The lesson that I learned was that activity follows identity. That before you can go do something, you have to become someone and so I thought. What would happen if I started thinking like a writer? What would I do? How would my behavior change? I said well, if I’m a writer, I guess I should start writing. I literally started calling myself a writer which I know is potentially a dangerous thing but it was my way of forcing me to do the work. If I introduce myself at a party or at a networking event or at a coffee shop and they said, what do you do? I’d say, “I’m a writer.” What’s the next question that they’re going to ask me? “What do you write?” I thought, “Well, I better get to work, I don’t want to make myself a liar.” And so it wasn’t about faking it till I made it but it was about believing it until I became it.

[0:21:45] Charlie Hoehn: How did that guy know that you were a writer?

[0:21:51] Jeff Goins: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. Basically, he knew that I had a blog and I think he just saw what I was doing and he could tell that underneath all the things that I was talking about, my actions spoke louder than my words. The fact that I was focusing a lot on my blog at the time and reading, you know, the War Of Art by Steven Presfield. You know, I was just like – it was something that I wanted to do and be but was too scared to voice myself. Plus, he’d been thrown out of therapy, I think he could just sort of see into people. Yeah, I think sometimes, we are the last ones to recognize our greatest gifts. You know, Derek Server says, “What’s obvious to you is amazing to others.” I think it’s so obvious to us sometimes. We take it for granted. The fact that I won the sixth grade Spelling Bee and I beat an eighth grader and the winning word was “acquiescence” and that felt normal to me. The fact that my mom read me the dictionary on long car rides and road trips when we go, you know, drive 12 hours to go to Niagara Falls or something for vacation and she’d be reading me the dictionary, that was just normal.

[0:22:59] Charlie Hoehn: I didn’t know you were a fellow Spelling Bee geek. I was the exact same. I was a huge weirdo about Spelling Bee’s.

[0:23:07] Jeff Goins: Yeah, I was this fat kid growing up in the 90’s wearing oversized, like multiple flannels because you know, everybody was trying to be Kurt Cobain and when I won the sixth grade spelling B. First of all, that year I had a paper route and I was so chubby and so prepubescent. I had long hair that I was often mistaken for a girl. One time, my mom made me get a haircut and she gave me bangs. You know, that didn’t even help the whole confusion thing but one day. I was going and collecting dues for the paper route and I met this older gentleman, 65, 70 years old and you know, when you go and collect dues, they give you tips, that’s the whole reason you’re doing it is for them to pay for their subscription, hopefully get a tip. He gave me like a $20 tip and he said, “Well aren’t you an enterprising young lady? I have no doubt you’ll be a great entrepreneur someday.” I was like, “You were right about one thing.” I stood there and like first of all, he’s giving me money so I feel a little bit guilty about correcting him. Second of all, you know, I’m just like, I don’t know what to do right now, they didn’t prepare me for this one. I trained on how to be a paper boy with the Beacon News. I took the money and that was the worst thing I could have done because I missed my moment to say, “Actually sir, I’m a dude.” Every time after that, every month after that where we would interact with each other, he would call me a “lady” or you know, “little miss” or something. I felt like I missed my chance to correct him. You know, if anybody ever calls you like you know, Bill, instead of Bob, you know. Or Tammy instead of Terry and you like miss your opportunity. You kind of feel bad. I do. You feel bad, you can’t like correct them and you kind of have to live with this false identity. And so I did the only thing I knew how to do, I quit the paper route. So when I won the sixth grade spelling bee and the whole school, 300 kids, cheered I was like, “Oh this feels good.” I mean I didn’t play sports. I didn’t have a lot of that and so if we were to get sort of therapeutic about it, it was probably something that at a very early age I cling to and made a part of my identity. Words, creativity, spelling, writing, communicating, it was a part of me for all of my life. In college, during finals times at 2:00 in the morning when I was stressed about a test the next day I would go to the computer lab and write for an hour. I would write a short story or an essay and I would email it to myself and it was the way that I would sort of calm down and distress. I would write. I like what Elizabeth Gilbert says about writing. She says, “Writing is my home not in the sense that it’s the place that I come from but it is the place that I always return to.” And that’s what writing for me has always been not necessarily like I always wanted to be writer but it was the thing that I kept going back to and so when my friend Paul said that and he saw that in me and you look back and you look at it and you go, “Oh well that makes a lot of sense.” When I was playing with the band we were playing a dozen shows a week sometimes more. As many as five or seven shows a day sometimes. I remember two conversations, one, a friend of mine who was a musician said, “Man if I don’t play. If I could not have played music I don’t know what I’d do.” And I remember thinking I would just do something else. I thought, “Well that’s probably not a good thing for a professional musician to say.” The second thing, was out of playing a dozen shows a week being at the top of my game playing guitar, the best I could have ever imagined playing, which was good. I mean, not Jimmy Hendrix but I was better than I ever thought I could be just by simply practicing so much. My favorite part of the week was on Saturday afternoon when I would write a blog post recapping everything that we as a band had done that week. Got chased by some Taiwanese girls in the street. That’s another thing Charlie, after we played that show we would get noticed by these young Taiwanese school girls and they would literary chase us and follow us around town. It was bizarre.

[0:27:21] Charlie Hoehn: Oh my gosh.

[0:27:23] Jeff Goins: Yeah so to quote Parker Palmer when I started listening to my life, I felt like it was telling me that I needed to be a writer.

[0:27:34] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Gosh these are priceless stories. It is very rare that I have tears in my eyes from laughing and I’m sorry, I was just cracking up listening to that. That is so funny.

[0:28:30] Jeff Goins: If I could use my pain and shame – if I could redeem some of that childhood trauma and entertain people it’s a win for me.

[0:28:38] Charlie Hoehn: Exactly, yeah. So gosh, I mean we could talk about this stuff forever but I love what you are saying and this is something that I advocate to a lot of people in a slightly different way. Which is like take a history of the activities that you repeatedly, involuntarily turn to when none of the grownups were telling you to do it. They weren’t bating you, they weren’t paying you. There was no one forcing you to do these things. You were just doing them because that’s who you are or you were doing them with your friends because it was the most fun for all of you and really sit with that because that’s at the core of who you are. It’s easy to get distracted by all of these other stuff that’s going on. I mean talking about your friends going off to start non-profits to do the next charity water and stuff. Yes, there are some people that are meant to do that. But generally speaking most of those people probably just want the prestige and status that comes with that sort of thing and you’ll never really going to be fulfilled by that at least not long term. So I love this advice. Now what I am curious about Jeff is, I want to hear some of the stories of the really successful artists that you found in the book. What have they done and even better than that, I’ve love to hear some success stories if you have some from people who have read your book and applied this stuff.

[0:30:14] Jeff Goins: Yeah, so one of the reasons why I wrote the book is because I think being a starving artist is a mindset. It is something that you can change. I actually believe that now is the best time to do creative work. So that translates to, now is the best time to be a writer, now is the best time to be a musician, now is the best time to be an artist as long as you understand the opportunities available to you and that you are willing to do the work. And so many people I hear they are talking about like, “I wish it was back in the hay days of publishing when Stephen King was writing multiple books a year and getting paid a million dollars apiece for each book.” And obviously things have changed but the bottom line is that it is now easier for more people to just get in the game than ever before. I would argue that it is easier for you to find the audience that your message, that your creative work is designed for and if you can do that you can make a living off of it. So what I did was I just started interviewing working creatives and I heard tons of different stories and in the book, I compare those stories to historical examples and one thread throughout the book is Michelangelo who is arguably one of the greatest artist of all time and I found this story about him published in The Guardian in 2003 where an art historian named Rab Hatfield discovered several, many previously unknown undiscovered bank accounts belonging to Michelangelo. And basically what he found was that Michelangelo was the richest artist in the Renaissance. Not only that, when he came on the scene he became the richest artist who had ever lived up to that point and after him, people would obviously exceed his wealth but he sat a precedent for artist. He wasn’t an outlier in the sense that he was an exception to the rule. What he did was he was kind of the first and he set a precedent in the Renaissance that many artists followed. And he made it possible for artists to be wealthy for them to be aristocrats themselves whereas before they were in many ways blue collar, working class Joes. So Michelangelo when he died he had over $50 million in assets to his name and so that’s just an interesting story, right? I never heard that and if here’s a guy who was on the top of his game creatively and also was the richest guy and didn’t have to sell out to do that, didn’t have to starve to do that, what does that mean for us? And he’s an archetype, an example that we can follow and he is an artist who embodies all of these 12 principles, these rules in the book. Yeah, so when I read that story I was like, “Who are the modern-day Michelangelo’s?” I had come across them anecdotally and so I just began to seek them out and find artists, musicians, film makers, writers who were making a living today off of their art. I found hundreds of them and I shared a lot of them in the book. You know one example of a visual artist that I mentioned in the book was a woman named Melissa Dinwiddie who was a calligrapher. She would do these art pieces called Ketubahs which are for traditional Jewish wedding ceremonies. It’s like a wedding contract but it is done in this beautifully handwritten font and she used to give these to friends who were getting married and she had a lot of friends in the Jewish community and one day a friend asks her: “Hey can you do this piece of hand lettering for me? Can I commission you to do something?” Melissa had just gone through a divorce. Her ex-husband was the breadwinner so she was trying to find a way to make some money but she was very afraid to charge for her work. So her friend said, “I want you to make this for me” she says, “Great, cool, yeah I’ll do that” and her friend says, “No, I’ve got to pay you. You’ve got to let me pay you” right? And she said, “Well I don’t know about that” and they went back and forth and they agreed on a very large sum of $20 because that was what they both concluded you would pay for a piece of random art work at Target. And so she did the piece, she gave it to her friend and her friend gave her $20. It was the first real money that she had made off of her art and she said, “That changed everything.” The fact that she went from zero to something just got the ball rolling. It got her to think about how she could start charging for her art, how she could start licensing her art, how she could start doing custom commissions and all these different things and today, Melissa is a fulltime artist and teacher. Creating art and helping people with online courses in different things that she is doing. For her, it just began with a very simple decision to charge something and she says that the moment when she got paid to create something – She said before that, “You know I kind of considered myself an artist, I was creative but the point at which I was making a living off of my art,” she thought, “Nobody can dispute that I am an artist. This is indisputable proof.” I think there’s something powerful about that and I like that story just because I talk to so many creatives who go, “I don’t need to charge for this. I don’t need to make a bunch of money off of this” and that’s true. But there is something very validating about the moment when you get paid, when somebody asks you to come speak at a conference, when a publisher says, “We want you to write this book and we are going to pay you to do it.” Or when customers actually give you hard earned money for this work that you have spent so much time and effort on. It’s an incredibly validating experience for sure.

[0:36:08] Charlie Hoehn: It is but I’m wondering Jeff, I know artists and I’ve struggled with this myself too sometimes, I’ve gotten paid really well for some things and then there were other times where I find myself going down the path where I’m doing free work and I’m like, “Oh I got to charge this.” I’ve seen it with some of my friends who are massively talented, should be making crazy amounts of money and they often find themselves in these loops where they’re doing a lot more work, for much less than they’re worth. How do we break out of that? Is it just a mindset shift or is that a tactical thing that we have to be aware of? What do we do there?

[0:36:51] Jeff Goins: Yeah, I think to be very clear this is the most surprising thing that I found. By the way, each of these 12 rules in the book, these are things that all of the thriving artists had in common and these are the 12 things that starving artist actively avoided. So there are other things that thriving artists may do or they couldn’t find any correlation between that and artist who didn’t succeed but my definition of a thriving artists is you are making a fulltime living off of your art. That could be $50,000 a year, it could be $500,000 a year, it could be $5 million a year but you are making a sustainable income that allows you to do your work, pay your bills, eat more than Ramen unless it’s a gourmet Ramen which is totally a thing now and you’re happy. You’re fulfilled right? So it doesn’t count if you’re a political satire cartoonist for a newspaper, what you really want to be doing is the next Calvin and Hobbs. So you really have to be doing your work and thriving at it in every respect. So this thing and the rule here is that the starving artist works for free and the thriving artists always works for something. So the rule here, is never work for free in which I find that challenging. But what I’ve discovered is that there is a difference between giving your best work away for absolutely nothing and doing what I call practicing in public, which is just like marketing. It’s showing your work as Austin Kleon would say, “It’s doing the work and then putting it in a channel where it has the greatest likelihood to succeed.” And it’s also different from an apprenticeship, right? So I know your background story with Tim Farris and if you’re going to go volunteer or work for somebody for a little bit of money, you are going to gain an incredible wealth of experience for a season that can lead to a lot of other great paying gigs. That’s okay, that’s not working for free. That’s basically getting an education.

[0:38:57] Charlie Hoehn: That’s the modern apprenticeship, yeah.

[0:38:59] Jeff Goins: Yeah, it’s getting an education for free. Like you are actually profiting from this because education costs tens of if not hundreds of thousands of dollars but I –

[0:39:07] Charlie Hoehn: And relationships.

[0:39:08] Jeff Goins: Yeah, right. So my point is this Charlie, I still do gigs for free. I’m sure you do too but as I’ve gotten older and maybe a little bit more mature and been mistaken for females less often. I just can’t stay too serious for too long. I’ve just realized that when you work for that illustrious word “opportunity” and you haven’t been very clear on what that opportunity is, it ends up not leading to anything. Steven Pressfield wrote a blog post about this one time called Opportunities Are Bullshit. And he goes, “Look, I know” and it’s really big in Hollywood, screenwriters being asked to write a film treatment for free.

[0:39:56] Charlie Hoehn: Such a good post by the way. It’s an amazing post.

[0:40:00] Jeff Goins: Yeah, just Google it is a great article but basically, I mean here’s a seasoned writer and novelist and former screenwriter who’s been through all of it and he says, “Every time I did a gig for free that was going to lead to a “opportunity” it never led to anything.” I am sure there is that needle in the haystack moment, the story of the guy who says, “Yeah you can jump out the airplane and build your parachute on the way down.” But you are not hearing from the 99 other dead guys and so I think that’s true. So if you got into a speaking gig for free then you need to negotiate something out of it like, “Well can you introduce me to five other event planners? Can I get the video from this which would cost me thousands of dollars to produce myself? Can I get something out of this?” The other thing is it doesn’t have to be a bunch of money. I used to do writing projects for free because I was trying to build my portfolio. Which a lot of people do but I’ve been doing this for months and months and months and I was like, “Ah…” it’s not leading to anything. I have to make some money and a friend emailed me kind of like Melissa’s friend and said, “Hey I want you to do this.” I was like, “Okay great. I’ll do it for free” and they’re like, “No I want to pay you for this” and what they asked me to do was write copy for signage in a National Park in Canada and they’re going to pay me a $100. And I remember that moment going from never getting paid for my writing to getting a $100 for a week’s worth of work of writing and I was like, “This is incredible” and once I got a $100 it was easier to get $250 then $500 and so on. So there’s a couple of lessons here. One, you always need to be working for something. If that something is exposure, you need to get really, really specific. If I am going to write a blog post for your audience, can I link to my book? Or a free lead magnet that allows me get email address out of it? If you are going to help so and so for free – like I was talking to a filmmaker recently and he said, “Early on in my filmmaking career, somebody came to me and said, “Hey we want you to do this project and it’s a music video for Snoop Dog.” He said, “Yep, I’ll do it absolutely on one condition. I can say that I did this and put it all over my website and put it on my rail and all of this.” They said, “Yeah absolutely, you can do that.” That’s very, very valuable and he says, “I got hundreds of gigs from that one free gig” that’s not working for free. That’s working for something. It’s just delaying gratifications, delaying the money to later.

[0:42:43] Charlie Hoehn: Great advice. So let’s give the people listening to this a challenge, right? I think everybody has some creativity in them, everyone 100%. Maybe not everybody wants to be an artist for a living but what would you challenge people to do after listening to this podcast apart from buying your book which is excellent. What would you challenge them to do?

[0:43:12] Jeff Goins: I think the first step going back to the beginning of our conversation, is really thinking about your identity and I know it is a little woo-woo but it’s important. I love the quote that “Most of us climb a ladder in life only to realize that it is leaning against the wrong wall.” So to spend some time listening to your life, which it doesn’t have to be like this deep Zen spiritual practice. It can be but it can just be practically looking at the timeline of your life as I did. Going, “What was I doing when I was five? Oh I was drawing pictures of superheroes and trying to make my own homemade comic book.” So what was I doing when I was 10? Reading the dictionary. What was I doing when I was 15? Writing songs. What was I doing when I was 20? Starting a blog and you start to see a bunch of different experiences but then you also see a thread. I think it begins with a question, who are you really and who do you want to be? And how is your identity and the role that you are playing in life, how are those intersecting or not. I do think we are all artist in our own way but also, I think it’s a choice and so the first chapter of the book is called “The Rule of Reinvention” and basically it’s about the choice that we get to make every single day. If you don’t like this story that you are living then tell a different story, change it. One of the guys that I talked to in the book was a major league baseball player. For his first year playing for the Chicago Cubs, where you get a million dollar signing bonus, a minimum of half a million dollars salary a year, playing for crowds of 40,000 people. He was bored by that experience because what he realized was, “I’m good at this but this isn’t who I really am. Who I really am at my core is a storyteller.” So he quit major league baseball to go back to school, go to film school and become a professional storyteller. Now he’s producing a documentary about his parents who were Cuban immigrants who have this incredible story of leaving during the reign of Castro and all of that. I think the first challenge is to, if you are an artist, you need to start calling yourself an artist. If you’re a writer, you need to start calling yourself a writer. If you want to start a business, you need to start calling yourself an entrepreneur but and this is an important but, you can’t stop there. The next necessary step is as soon as you start doing that is you start to have to acting as if that’s already true. So professional writers get up every day and they write. So if you are calling yourself a writer, you have to keep earning that title every single day. Derek Sivers says, “If you stop doing the work, you lose the title.” So you have to keep re-earning the title every single day and if you’re an artist, you have to be making something every single day but I think that’s my challenge. Call yourself a “blank” then start doing that work every day Then lastly, we talked about practicing in public. I would challenge you, the number one best practice that I saw with professional artist, writers, creatives is they were constantly practicing in public. All that means is they were doing something every day where they were sharing part of their work. It could be a work in progress, a painting that they were doing, a novel that they were writing. They were sharing pieces of it every single day, often online, you know, Instagram, blog, Facebook, whatever. The whole point of that was so that they could stay on it, it made them show up and do the work and if they didn’t, people would notice. It also builds an audience over time. Eventually when the book comes out, when the thing launches, you’ve got a fanbase of people who are cheering for you and you don’t have to worry about how am I going to go market this thing because people have been watching you do your work. Call yourself a blank, a writer, an artist, whatever. Start doing the work and then do something every day to share what you’re doing and I think you do that over and over again, something good is going to happen.

[0:47:03] Charlie Hoehn: Wow, this was amazing. I wish I had given a warning at the beginning to any Taiwanese women who are listening to pull over your car to the side of the road, you don’t want to crash it and faint mid driving. Jeff, this was phenomenal. How can our listeners connect with you and follow you?

[0:47:24] Jeff Goins: Yeah, thanks Charlie, I love this podcast, big fan of your work, a listener of this podcast, I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you again for including me.

[0:47:31] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:47:31] Jeff Goins: You could find me at my blog, goinswriter.com, that’s like coins but with a G. Or since we’ve been talking about middle school a lot, as I was often reminded in sixth grade, groins without the R. Goinswriter.com. I have a large community of writers there, so lots of free resources for writers and authors there. You can sign up for the email list and get my weekly email updates. That’s at goinswriter.com.

[0:47:57] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent. Check out Jeff’s other book, The Art Of Work. Right?

[0:48:02] Jeff Goins: Yeah.

[0:48:04] Charlie Hoehn: Okay, The Art Of Work. I didn’t want to botch that. It is a phenomenal book, I was telling Jeff before this episode that I highlighted basically everything in your book. I went through multiple pens. It’s just really good. Thank you so much Jeff, this was fantastic.

[0:48:21] Jeff Goins: Yeah, my pleasure.

[0:48:22] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Jeff Goins for being on the show. You can buy his book, Real Artist Don’t Starve on Amazon.com. If you want to win a free copy of Jeff’s book, send me a screenshot of an email that you sent to Jeff under a fake Taiwanese name. Tell him that you’re the girl he made faint all those years ago and that you’re so happy to have finally found him. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.