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Lesson Info

Make Your Space

making your space. Now there's a couple different types of space. There's time is actually space, right? Because if you don't have time for something, what do you got? You got nothing. You can't do it without time. There's physical space. I need a studio, preferably with the view of the ocean. The stories that we tell ourselves matter I don't have enough time is the number one excuse. The number one excuse that I hear for not doing what you love in this world is because I don't have time. And the next time you say I don't have time, I want you to make one simple swap. I want you to say it's not a priority to me. Instead of saying you don't want to go to your daughter's soccer game, that's not a priority to me. How does that feel? Bam, Right, because that's what it actually is. I don't want to take pictures. It's not a priority to take pictures. That's just this amazing. It's like a spanking a little cup upside the ear. Hey, you figure this out busy is not busy. Busy is a lack of priori...

ty. My least favorite thing to say in the world. I will. I promise. I've been very, very busy. A lot of stuff happening. Creativelive I had this little book that just dropped. Doing those things is very hard. I found myself. Hey, man, what's going on? Oh, so busy that has become this horrible sort of, um, it's a default actions. The default statement. It comes out of our mouth. You know, when I started using busy when I first picked up photography, you know what? It got a lot of attention. Oh, you're busy. What do you busy doing? What is that? It's a cue to just get to talk about ourselves, but that actually doesn't get any work done. Busy is not busy. Busy is a lack of priority. When you say I don't have time, try using. It's not a priority for me. This is an amazing little chart. The author Steven Cove A took this from President Eisenhower, Made a two by two matrix for it. This is some of that. This is amazing. Amazing little graph. We Most of the stuff that takes our attention is down here. It's not important, but it's urgent. Hey, can you get this for me? Right now. Hey, your boss steps in. They had need that report. The TPS reports Did you do everything you can to minimize these things? Outsource them, giving them away? Because that is that it will eat your life. Not important, but urgent. Not important, but urgent. Mom, can you give me? Teach Tommy to take care of that for himself? Not urgent, imp. Urgent, urgent, Not important. Also not urgent and not important. That is what we run to when we don't know what else to do. Right? I'm gonna send a few of the emails like you haven't sent an email in six weeks. That person forgot about that email, but it's not urgent, It's not important. And you're doing it important and urgent. That is a no brainer, right? Something is an like I need to do this now. And it's important as do with family with your business of the court, think or important aspect to your life. Do it now. But here's the thing. This is where all of the best stuff is not urgent but important. This is what we do last. We do basically all of the other things before we do this. This square right here will change your life if you can make time for things that are not urgent but very important. I put that on par with discovering what you're supposed to be doing with your life. How long does that take? Last time I checked. It takes about 304 pages. Critical. I can't over emphasize this enough. So I think a lot of times I switch it and nothing happens. I did this exercise. I audited my time again. This is all about making a plan. Like, how are you gonna the number? One thing is I don't have time. I recommend you audit your time. This is gonna be a very depressing exercise. I audited my time and I was completely shocked. I did it. I had some help doing it with some team and I have my team and I had bye bye, 30 minute increments. And I thought I was doing one thing and I was doing something very, very different than I won't go into the details because it's tedious and it's about me. I think if you did it on your own time, you would be shocked. There is a little thing on your phone. Most phones. If you're in IOS, have a thing called screen time. Check it out. Very like eight hours. Is that an average of something that I've I've seen my friends minds, if I'm tend to run a lot of the business off my phone because I'm on the move a lot. But what? That's eight hours of screen time. Okay, that is crazy out of your time. It will reveal a lot. Make the changes that you want to make through goals and habits. This is a thing that trips people out. Remember when I didn't want the man to keep me down? Didn't want. I want to do my creativity when lightning struck. That's not how it works. Rial creators create professionals. Not that you all aspire to be professionals. They show up toe work. They sit down every day now, always at the same time that they try. They work on schedules and that schedules create. That schedule creates results. What I would love for you to do is figure out When are you most effective? When are you most effective? For most people, this is not everybody. For most people, it's usually in the morning. The front half of the day, usually the least productive is noon to dinner time. Some people again are creative at night. I don't care what it is for you. I don't care when it is. But if you pay attention to it, it will tell you a lot. If you're unsure, try first thing in the morning when you're groggy and you think you don't have anything to give. It's actually a really good time because there's not a lot of negative voices in our head. Especially before we look at our phones. Try that. Try early in the morning. Okay? I'm calling your bluff here real quick, guys. Okay? Because you have a dream and that dream hasn't happened. And I'm telling you, it hasn't happened for a reason hasn't happened because it's not clear you haven't imagined you haven't made a plan. You haven't started executing against it. But here's the deal. When is the time to start? Yesterday. Not sure if you want to grow your instagram following because that you can start tomorrow. It's gonna be harder tomorrow. Then it was today. It's gonna be harder the next day. More competition. It is always getting harder. It's not getting easier. Your that. The story that you're telling yourself about. I'll get it. I'll get around to it someday or tomorrow. Here's the funny thing about tomorrow. It literally never arrives. It's always tomorrow. So wherever you are right now, I want you to start. And if it's late in life and you are worried about making a change, wondering if it's possible I want to tell you a story about the Cuban American artist Carmen Torretta. She had her first gallery show as a painter. At aged she had a retrospective at the Whitney at 101. How bosses that that is the most boss. So wherever you are right now, it's time to start. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get toe work and the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will, through work, bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great art idea. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us show up and get to work in this case, I want you to be a professional and by professional I don't mean a professional artist. I mean a professional at taking action in your life. Remember, small daily creative habits. They understand, help us understand that we can create. And through that lens we can create our life. Speaking of small daily habits, I want to tell you a story about my friend Brandon Stanton. Does anyone know? Brandon? Brandon is the creator of humans of New York. Brandon Stanton got fired from his job as a bond trader in Chicago after failing out of college twice and then going back, finally figuring it out. Got a random job offer from a friend. He had suddenly made it. He could hang his hat on this important job he had as a bond trader. Chicago, making good money, became obsessed with markets because it gave him an identity. I'm now comfortable and well off. I'm respected by society. And then one day he showed up to work and he was what fired. He was fired. He talked about being fired as if the most important thing had been stripped from him. But he also realized in that moment that he suddenly had all kinds of time. Remember, time is this one thing that we all have that keeps us from the things that we want. We tell ourselves story about it. So he told himself a new story. He made up a new strip, not the script that the world had written for him, but a new script. And that new script was this. I love taking photographs. And more importantly, I realized that I was giving all of my time to this job. But when I want more than anything else is to control my time for the rest of my life. I want to decide how to spend my time. And you know what? The wisest, most brilliant thing I can possibly think of doing that will get everyone. Support is moving to New York with no money. How many people sign up and tell you that? Boom. Nobody. No one's parents say you know what? That's a brilliant idea. He literally he literally sold some of his photographs to his bond trader friends he described like a Yeah, Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember those photographs? Yeah. You want to buy one Solan for, like two or $400 to have enough to move to New York and figure it out. This is the part where you don't have to have the whole story. You do not need a map, you need a compass. Brandon checked his compass. He wanted to move to New York and Platt photo plot photographs. Wanted to shoot 10,000 photographs of New Yorkers. Put him on a map. Is that anything? What the humans of your it looks like today? No, For those of you know it, he has somewhere on the order of 40 million followers. He's raised tens of millions of dollars for charity. He is one of them, like the most powerful artists of our time, if you like, he's really, really means changing awareness about pediatric cancer. About he's got a book coming out on an international book coming out in 2020. I want you to pay attention to it. His story is about consistent daily action in perfect, consistent daily action. When he decided to do was to go to New York and take pictures and put him on Facebook that now you look back, it's like obvious. Of course, she's gonna tell these great stories and people are gonna just, you know, weep and engage with his content. No one thought that then, but he still did it now. And because this is what he wanted to do, you followed his compass, not his map. Small daily actions. None of Excuse me. None of what he did would have been possible if he sat back and planned and strategized none of it. It was only through small daily actions. His first post zero likes one comment, just like every first post on every platform. So wherever you are, whatever age, it's never too late. The only thing you're doing wrong is not starting. There's two kinds of space, right? We talked about the time I'm gonna cover another one, which is physical. And maybe there's three physical and emotional physical space. We all want a studio with the view. Creativelive was launched in a room that was about this big. Most of us have a basement or on extra bedroom or a corner of our bedroom. Just start. Most of us commute to work. If you commute, how can you make use of that time? How can you make use of that space. How can make use of this space why you're commuting? Maybe it's a pair of noise canceling headphones that unlock that two hours while you're commuting. I have left a lot of noise canceling headphones on a lot of airplanes. Maybe some of you found them gold. Pure gold. I don't want to get too prescriptive, but I want you to know that there is time and there is space in your life if you want it. And if you assume as you say, I don't have time and I don't have space, what you're really saying, it is not a priority to me. Rituals are very, very helpful for creating. If you just spent five minutes on the train in the morning writing down your goals, morning pages would be surprised. I think this is the most powerful kind of space that there is the head space and the heart space, because this is from where we derive our compass. Right there is what social tells us or what society tells us what our parents and people that we care deeply about. I believe that this thing intuition is the most powerful force inside of us. We know. Here's the cool thing. You've got this thing in, you looking backwards. You know what you're supposed to be doing If he get quiet enough, if you experiment enough, if you play enough, you know it's there. This is going to trip you out and by pump up the volume, I do not mean the music in your headphones, although that could be very powerful. Sometimes I mean the volume of work. There's this apocryphal story that I share in the book, and the word a pocketful means. We're not sure if it's true, but everybody sites it is true. So we pretend it's true. I had to look that up, so that's what I'm sharing it with you. There's an apocryphal story that I share in the book about a ceramics class and on the first day of ceramics class, this half of the class you all will only have to make one piece of art the whole semester. Make it good, but you have to make one piece of art you all over here. I do not care about the quality of the art at all, but I am giving you your grade. Based on volume based on the number of pieces and how big there and how much they weigh. Volume of work at the end of the semester. Who that was better and read. Every here is pointing over there, and it's obvious if we say it right, it's obvious how. How long did it take you to figure out Everyone pointed this side of the room in 1/4 of a second? And yet what do we do? We Yeah, I want principled, Precious. I want to be perfect and just make it Just crank it out. I think there's any Warhol quote somewhere. I'm gonna I'm gonna blow it cause I'm the sheriff early. Just make the work. And while everyone else is judging you your work What are you doing? You're making more work. Volume is the key. Volume is everything. And right now you're saying Wait a minute. Volume is everything. What about my skills? The cool thing is, if you made 10 pieces during the semester, your ninth Peace is better than your second piece is better than your first piece. It's in volume. If you remember earlier talking about repetition, the are endear. That is literally how in literally the Onley way, you can find your personal style volume have to crank it out. Now with volume, you must give yourself permission to suck. I had a hard time with this one. I really did. Member. I'm a striver, never enough. Always feeling less than always struggling to get recognition or adoption or connection. It was very hard for me to give myself permission to suck, but you can see that pump up the volume and permission to suck that kind of go hand in hand and required, right?