Lessons

Lesson Info

You Stand Out

the job of sit down for this one, cause it's a doozy. The job of this book in this class is to help you be unapologetically you time. Now that would feel we feel really good, wouldn't it? Would feel amazing unapologetically you sometimes when tell you what, you're gonna be too big for some people to big and spirit. Too noisy, too loud to something too tall, too small. But you know what doesn't your people. But there's a challenge rate. How do I find out who I am? How do I find out what I love? I feel like you can You can figure it out with some of the things we've talked about already. I'm gonna tell you a little story. First of all, tell you a story about what's possible. You guys know Daymond John Shark Tank, The people's shark. They're gone. I was with Damon in New York two weeks ago and he said something simple but profound. Which is how this guy operates. Um, like, you know what I loved, man. I loved fashion and I loved making stuff and selling it peanut butter and jelly. I put th...

ose two things together and that became Fuku, a $1,000,000,000 brand. I love fashion. I love making it. He started Boubou selling hats on the street corner in Queens for 20 bucks. And if he couldn't get you to buy one for 20 he was willing to go down to Ansel Adams first sales for his photographs. 25 cents for menus in Yosemite. Anybody know that to be true, That'll blow your mind, right? This idea of starting small is so lost in our culture was obsessed with scale. Drew is up, you're saying and creative life is more than 10 million students. You know where creative life is born? It was born in a gritty warehouse about 3/4 of a mile south of here. And the first, the first broadcaster Creativelive, was in a room that was that big. 50,000 people showed up on the other end of that start small and with some success. It doesn't always go like that, but we're obsessed with scale. What you need to be obsessed with is starting small. Now I told you what Damon did. He looked in his past and said, I like fashion, and I like selling things and creating business. And he did so in the street corner in Queens. I approached this idea of being a photographer because my grandfather had passed away. Tragic, horrible heart attack. No, I I remember the phone call like it was yesterday, and I was given this cameras and I knew I wanted to pursue that cause I'd ignored it for a long time. But you know what? I didn't really know much more than that. And so if you don't know much more than I want to start a bakery, that's okay. I said Okay. I want to be a photographer. What am I doing? Spending my time. How? My spending my time. Right now, what I was doing is I spent a lot of time skiing, fly fishing and travelling, and these are things that I was doing. So I said, Okay, great. I'm gonna try and combine those things. Photography with the things that I love to do. It sounds so basic, but that's how it all started. Start small. I didn't know what to do next. So here's what I did do. I went to Barnes and Noble instead down here in University village. Used to be a lot different. Um, and I couldn't afford a magazine. I could afford exactly one lot per week. It was $2.16. And I will tell you, I promise that this person ever I showed up every week and I gave this person $2. in change because they didn't have enough, and I knew I was gonna be there for, like, six hours. So I took that. This is before Starbucks was in Barnes and Noble, and I took that Starbucks and coffee and it's not Get in there. And I stood in front of the magazine rack for between four and eight hours writing down the recipe. What I consider the recipe for every photograph that I liked, who wrote it, who took it, Who's in it? Where was it? What was the action? And then I went to the front of the magazine, whose publishing this magazine. Here's the name of every photo editor. Here's where their addresses in New York and I would send them pictures of my work. I didn't have any expectation of getting anything returned, but I just started small in perfect actions. This to me, gives us some way to start peanut butter and jelly. If you're lost peanut butter and jelly, go to Barnes and Noble. Deconstruct the work that you see in other people and you're side Wait a min. If I just deconstruct the worked everybody else is doing, how am I possibly going on? That's not at the them. That's not me. Here's the cool thing. I deconstructed all that stuff, and I found out that you could just dear it handful of acronyms in this book that I want you to hang on to. What I was doing is that was deconstructing the work that was actually out there in the world. If you're a needle point ist, go deconstruct what is huge and needle point community right now. If you want to be a dog walker, look at the other businesses that are walking dogs now again. Right now, most of your saying like wait a minute, I don't want to just be like them. The goal of this book in this class is to be unapologetically me. I'm just giving you a great place to start deconstruct the work that you love in the world. I love this dot Walker They've always got a bunch of dogs. What are they doing? Introduced himself to the people? Maybe you can help out. What I like to do is learn as much as I can. And that's what I was doing it. That magazine racket, Barnes and Noble. I was deconstructing the work that I saw in others. Then you know what I started to dio. I started to travel to those locations that I saw by Hook or by crook sleeping in the car. I would was action sports, so I would drive two Utah sneak my way onto the course. This is I'm coming out like a thug in this class, right? Sneak my way onto this course after dark or before dawn, dig up a pit in the snow, hide on the course in order to magically be in the middle of the action sports mecca of the world. I would pop up lo and behold them in the middle of the course, and I started taking pictures of the same people. They were in the magazines. How much did that cost me? The price of gas and a few bagels. I'm not saying you need to do this I'm giving you the idea of what it looks like to deconstruct the work of other people and then emulate them. I wasn't even a very good photographer. You just cracking up, aren't you? Do you love it? It's really and it's very cold. I want to spend every minute I can in this room with you. I'm so excited to be here. Um, when we emulate the work of others, we start something magical starts to happen, right? We're and raptured with. Wait a minute. You start to feel like what it feels like to do the action. Tell you that's very imperfectly right to beat, to dig a hole because the other photographers might have been in a better, more advantageous place to get good pictures too, then had credentials and they had bigger cameras and they had all this other stuff small and perfect actions. But you know what? I was pretending and it was working. I was emulating them enough to start to get I would take 1000 pictures, get one or two that worked. That made me feel amazing. Then I would go home and I would analyze those pictures which ones were working which ones weren't. What about them was working? This one is a great photograph of someone who is just got on the world Extreme skiing Championships tour. Nobody knows who they are. Not a lot of magazines gonna wanna buy that photograph day that didn't work. Note to self over index on the big men and women in the industry. Okay, certain analyst. And right now, if you're like me would be skeptical. I'm saying Yeah, OK, great. I just did this and then my pictures look just like everybody else is. And you told me just five minutes ago chase that I need to be unapologetically me. How do you know? Where is the me part? Repeat? Because here's what repetition does. Repetition is a the mother of skill. Repetition is be the Onley weigh Your personal style will emerge because all we're all doing when we start something imitation is an amazing way to learn something, right? It's an amazing way to learn. You like OK, I'm gonna start break dancing, so I d o c You're like, OK, I gotta got it. So I actually have to get on the ground. Okay? You start to emulate you start to see what works for you. What doesn't. And pretty soon you're imitating other people you like. You know what? I'm really good at standing on my head. So head spins are gonna be my thing. But you only figured that out from getting on the ground and doing what everyone else is doing. First somebody tripped out by my example. I get it. This is super important. This is the mechanism. This is what gets people to love you. Work is being unapologetically you in. The only way you can do that is a repetition. This is the short cut that everyone's looking for. How do I just happen in my personal style? And you know what? You know how long it took me to find my personal style photography? About eight years daggers. But I was slow. I really waas like like those of us who are maybe more in tune with ourselves. And I remember all that programming that I had received told me it wasn't a creator. It told me I was a jock. It told me I needed to go to medical school to be approved. It told me I needed to cut concrete in order for the folks at home. There's a loud noise outside, so I was slow. But you know what it worked. And the cool thing is that I have run this filter on every success that I've ever had, and it's like a laser beam and it works for anything, everything. It's a process for getting good, and it's a process for discovery, because what happens if I'm you know, 23 years into that process and I'm not really getting good results. I asked myself the question. Do I love this snow? Is it working and through just asking those two questions you can find out? Is she like, Should I keep going or not? My friend James Victoria hangs in the MoMA. The things that made you weird as a kid, I was gonna make you great today. That's unapologetically you. Now I find that this is a good time to take a break and ask some questions. We're sorry. Rather ask if you will have some questions because we've covered a lot of ground. Okay, we're halfway through imagining what we want for herself with this one precious life or what we want this cake toe look like on Sunday, I'm imagining the Sprinkles on the chocolate frosting, and I usually make vanilla. I'm going to go crazy and make chocolate. That's literally how you do something different, right? You imagine something different? I designed a plan. I went to the store in about chocolate frosting instead of vanilla. I actually did it executed against that plan and make the cake and spread the chocolate. And now, lo and behold, I'm gonna share it. My friends, I'm gonna amplify that work that I did. That is the idea system applied to a cake. And you can also play your life questions. Now we're gonna go all the way to the back second back row. You could certainly stand up. Tell us who you are gonna give you. Mike in 10 nine is coming back. Teamwork. And remember, when he says his name, we're gonna We're gonna say hi back. Yes, we are. I am. Alan. You Hey, um So what do you do when you're doing collaborative projects? And you can't get people to properly commit? Ah, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Change friends, your bum. But answer perfect example of thank you. I'm not known for tiptoeing exit, so I want the mike. Nice try. I said that that way on purpose, because I believe it's true. I also want acknowledge how powerful collaboration is because that's actually part of community and you'll learn through doing it in the same way that you learn to ride a bike. That collaboration is really, really important. Building community is the most misunderstood lever that we have, and so we're gonna get back to it at the end of this at the end of today. For now, though, if it sounds like you're frustrated with the people that you're collaborating with because they are not holding up there under the deal and when they're not doing that, you really do need to find some other people. And then here's the like. This is therapy for you, Me right here because I have done the same thing because I have a lot of energy because I'm on my path and maybe this is the thing that their parents wanted them to do. And that's not their path. You recognize that you do not say I don't want to be your friend anymore. We're not gonna do this anymore. I'm out of here. They say it is like Sounds like we're working on sort of different wavelengths. I'm gonna go work on this stuff over here. When you get fired up, we're in this project or something else. Call me. I love the work that you we're not lighting anything on fire. We don't need to, you know, don't need Teoh to be a negative person because positivity is so valuable. I've got shoes on. That's a positivity and optimism. Gary sent him to me and asked me about the worm. Positivity is so powerful, so you don't have to be negative. And you don't have to tell yourself a story. We're gonna talk, cover mindset a lot a little bit later. Today. All those things matter. But I want you to get away from the people that aren't if you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, you want to spend your time around people that inspire you, invigorate you. And look, it's gonna take a village, right? It's gonna take a village to do anything. This idea of a solo artist of nothing is solo. Everything involves community, but I do want you to be around people that inspire and motivate you. Here's another cool thing, but there's a lot of people here today that would show up instead of skip. Okay, make some friends a little bit later today. Okay? Any other questions? Well, so doing film work right up here with the money? Sorry. You know, it's good we're doing doing film worker. I've spent thousands of dollars and it just went toe pot because I couldn't find out people to properly, like commit Yep. And so just like I guess, How do you find the people locally? I guess, too, be able to properly commit. This is a room of tough love, my man. Are you ready for this one? Go ahead. You actually have to get good at finding the right people. And it's not about the people. It's about you because and it's fine, this is You go back to the zigzagging line. There is no world where you step on that line and everybody shows up for everything. And everybody is in interests airline, and that just doesn't happen. So the gaffer's always going to show up a little bit late or the grip is gonna be a little bit more expensive than her estimates said she would be. And the that's just you need to be flexible. I keep your knees bent. The reality is, it's on you to find those people. It's not on them to bend to your vision, okay? Because those people are out there. This is why building community is so critical. And it doesn't matter if you want to sit in your basement and code your app Awesome. You conduce that. And when you put it out, you're not gonna have a single user because you sat on your basement, okay? Everything. Both these things have to happen right now. You re like, Oh, my God, I have too much to do. Don't worry. We'll get there. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Yeah. I'm gonna go to Drew. We've got some questions from the Internet folks out there that's out of the Internet. High Internet way here. You. We hear you, wherever you are, Drew. Let's hear from someone in the Internet. Maybe I don't know if you know where they are or not, but we'd love to know. Yeah, we'll ask. So Bell has a question. I'm stuck between past traumas and all these great things that I dream to do. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to turn thinking into action on the feeling that lots of small gains are not quite enough to get me all the way to my future. So how would you? How would you encourage Bell with with that people that are coming out of trauma or a discouraging environment that they're in people's voices in our lives, I think have a lot of power. I want I want to go right at something real quick. Which mental illness? Israel. Okay. And if you need help and you're somewhere right now and you can get professional help, please do it. It's like we need to remove the stigma and our culture for that. So if you're truly in a place where you need professional help, I hope you're getting it now. Beyond that, we all have trauma in our lives and saying that doesn't diminish your trauma or your trauma or my trauma, her trauma. But that's the reality. What I'd love to see you do is to take what is the smallest action that you can take the smallest step. That is how you start, even if that's getting out of bed, even if that's taking one photograph with your IPhone and sharing it one and then you know what? The next day, when I want you to do, I want you to do the same thing again. You might not want to get out of bed, but what about remember, remember our path? Remember our meditation practice? I didn't meditate This morning. I meditate religiously every day. I didn't meditate this morning, and you know what's going on in my mind. It's not like you terrible person, because E used to say that now I just say I'm back on it tonight, back on it tomorrow That's conditioning, and that is the muscle that we're talking about building. So start a small, literally as small as you possibly can, as small as you can and then repeat and when you are able to after doing that, enough right now we want to make a something for the Internet or for everyone who is male and wants to be good at basketball. That's my target audience. You know what's the smallest possible audience that you can make something for your mom, your friend, your brother, your sister, your coworker. Smallest daily action. Possible. Smallest possible audience. Share it with one person. Make somebody's day, even if it was because you were just thinking about that is. And I also advocate a bunch of other things. And I go into great detail in the book about it, about like, literally what activities. I think you should be doing mental health support. Here's a fun little nugget you know Liz Gilbert, Eat, pray, love, Big magic. She's amazing. I mean, any time Julia Roberts stars you, that's it's pretty amazing, you know, she told me her number one job in life. Mental health. She does it between four and six hours per day, and she's one of the best writers of our time now right now. And I hear that voice inside you like, Yeah, I got three kids. I got two jobs. No way. I'm spend 600 doing anything, but I feed my kids and putting food on my table. I get it. I also believe that you can, and I also believe that there's a story going on your head. So we're gonna talk about mental health and mindfulness little bit later. It's in the book, in great detail. Smallest possible action for the smallest possible audience. That's how you start any other questions from the Internet. Good. Right now, can we move on to somebody else here in the room. Okay. We're gonna do right back here. Uh, yes, sir. In the yellow top. Let's get him A that you You're in the yellow shirt. He's looking around like someone else. Got a yellow shirt showing up. Who are you? My name is Tyler, and I'm a creative Yes, Tyler in a meeting. So I had to kind of give it a title. Um, my question would just be done. All sorts of, um kind of achievements and different facets of creativity from writing now. Teoh, you started as a photographer. You didn't kind of different paths. How do you choose one when you really do have kind of a clear vision of, like, I want to do this, but I want to do this and I want to do this. It's like it's kind of like a goal 80 d for me, where it's like, I know what I want to do. But how do I you focus on one. Do you put all your eggs in one basket or do you, um, you just kind of try to figure out where it starts and then let it evolve and hopefully lead into other things? Um, what kind of path have you taken with that? It's a great question. I want you to know that the path is never straight right? I started off wanting to have a thing that I was going to do with my brother in law called Big Art. And I was gonna take photographs and I actually was painting that's higher. I learned about light was through first oil painting. That was way too slow so that I moved to acrylic and I was doing the same thing you're doing. And then I realized after doing all those things that I really didn't, it wasn't all that inspired by painting. I taught me a lot about light and the concept of building something. Building furniture in our studio was a little bit too slow. And then when you sold it like man, I put like 40 hours into that table. But I sold it for bucks like that's a pretty bad hourly rate. I was inspired equally inspired by all those things. And then I really started getting honest with myself. And it was through small in perfect regular actions that photography started just sweeping me off my feet like Wait a minute, I'm Super 80 date a D d and impatient. And how fast does it take to picture thousands of a second? I like that. I like talking about art. I went to the school and for the philosophy that I can talk about a picture and why I took it and what it means. And I think that's a gift that I had, and I just started putting these things together in small ways and putting him out there in the world. Now, the cool thing is, I do not. I advocate. This is like anybody here think of themselves as a hyphen. You do lots of things pretty much everybody. The cool thing is, it's the first time in history the world where we get to do that right used to have, like our parents, they had one job. We are gonna have five jobs the next generation five at the same time, right? And right now I am an entrepreneur here. I'm staying in front of the founder of CEO 100 CEO of Creative Live. But if I given up my identity as a photographer, as a creator, I just wrote a books woman author. I'm already lots of things, but I do want you to think about one thing. And if you try and do everything, you end up sort of doing nothing. So it's in these actions and in with intuition, most of what I find that people do. Everything is. They've told themselves a story that I want to do everything and what it really is, isn't it's an excuse to knock it serious and remember, Go back to the personas early on like I don't think that every person should be a professional creator in the classic sense. I believe that everyone is creative, but you don't have to make a living off. This is really important for anybody who's listening right now, but I do find that most people, me included, knew what I wanted to do, didn't want to commit, because what his commitment make makes you scared because, he said publicly that you have to do it. But I found nothing more valuable than saying that putting it out in the world because words matter. That's why I printed that photography card Chase Jarvis photographer and the cool thing that happened when I was able to focus this acceleration because I knew and it was not a straight path. So you're on your path. I can tell, but starting to get serious. We're gonna talk about lifelong learning in the third part in execute. But what you need to know right now is that in learning something deeply, deeply, and I like to use the word mastery, I do not. I don't know. I cut 40 pages on Master out of the book because Robert Greene already wrote the book on Mastering It's way Better than I Could Ever Do. But what I do love about mastery is that when you've mastered something, it puts a really crisp lens on anything else. Ever know people like Tim Ferriss, who are good at way too much stuff is because he's learned how to learn after mastering the first thing that he met. Okay, so I'm an advocate of mastery. I don't think it's required. But I do love going deep on something. And this is where you have to trust yourself and remember that life is long. It's fun to say Life is short because it does. I can't believe how old I am. I can't believe years old. So life feels short sometimes. But in the process of figuring out who you are, what you want to be, life is long feel free to explore. But also listen to in here because it knows. And I think you're telling yourself a slightly different story than you want to hear because it's gonna be hard, uncomfortable and that you have to tell somebody that you love and that cares deeply about you that you're about to make way less money and be way busier and all these other things. But you know what it's worth. Okay, I get back you later on that. All right. Um, I'm gonna get moving on this one. Okay, so we're speaking of personas. I find it helpful if I also have deconstructed the lives of many folks. And in doing the research for the book, I consider the about 20 years of research on the book and about two years in preparing for the book in the class, and I found that it's helpful to understand these sort of personality characteristics that we all have. I just talked to you good, sir, about how you I think that you might be a d D and want to start a bunch of new things because it feels good to start. You get energy from starting right now, I'm gonna take this, and that actually is a good quality. What I found is there's a handful of personalities that I deconstructed all of my friends, they didn't know I was running studies on them, deconstructed all them myself. My peers, a lot of people that the instructors here creativelive and I just found a few buckets. And I think it's really helpful to look at the buckets in the first bucket I want talk about is the starter Right now we're saying Starter all. He starts a lots of things and doesn't finish anything. But you know what? What's this strength of the starter? Uh, they start. They take action, they paint the painting, they bake the cake. So that's good. But if you know that you're a starter. You also know when I'm inclined to stop something. I'm gonna push just a little bit further to see if there's something there. I'm not going to get distracted by the shiny idea. Sometimes inspiration is horrible and mean and gets us off track. Shiny thing that maybe you're a starter and I do find is that you might be more more than one thing. I'll tell you what I am to be at the end of this stuff. So there's a starter. What do you think this one is? Anybody here? Just keep on noodling the same thing and not ever calling it done. The new dealer, the strengths of the new Lear's. You get started easily, right? You're good at tinkering. Begin. That's you heard the idea of it iteration in technology and put a particle out there An M v p. And then you make it better. Make it better. Make it better. Make it better. Great. But if you never ship it What are you doing? You're not putting something out there in the world and you need to hit Publish. You need to ship. You need to do perfectionism. Really troubles these folks. Anybody feel like they've got to do stuff that's perfect. Yep. The prioritise er again, I'm not bringing these up to put anybody down because we're all in some of these categories. I believe that knowing something about who you are, what you do matters. And it takes sometimes a little flashlight showing that thing you like got me the prioritise er very productive. The prioritise er always does not want to prioritise creativity. These bills are not gonna pay themselves right. Got to make sure the kids were at school on time. Got it? Taskmasters the strength of the prioritise er is there productive? And if we can channel that weakness into a strength, you are very well off because you're gonna get a lot of stuff done. If you could take into heart some of the things we're talking about here. If you are a prioritise, er you're gonna be well on your way. Anyone in this room? Stubborn Or maybe a little too pragmatic. Little to rational. Don't put your hands up. It's fair. It's OK. There were a couple of people. I was very pleased to see that identified as creative, curious, like I'm not sure about this whole creativity thing, I do find that they will coincide with being hyper rational, like I'm not so sure. This idea that Chase says about creativity is and every person is all that valuable because I haven't identified as a creator, and here I am, And things were going pretty good. I make $90,000. I'm very healthy and happy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Totally fine. I'm saying, if you that words matter. If you identify as a creator, you're going to realize that not just that you can create something here, but that you can create the life of your dreams. It's just creativity in a different scale, strength of a resistor. You understand that I'm good at this thing and you could block everything else out like I don't even I don't need to be created because I'm good at spreadsheets. I run the office, and that's but that that's decisive. That's aware. Now you can imagine if you put a little bit of creativity and you can like legal. I'm talking to you back there who identified as a You could, sir, in that in that blue sweater. I don't know if this is you or not the where a resistor struggles is unused. Creativity is toxic. Most of these people I there's a, uh, part of their. There's a thread in their existence where they feel disconnected. They feel alone. You can actually channel those feelings into great work. Many of you may be a resistor. I personally Emma's driver, never enough. This book launch was good but not perfect. This picture could have been better if I had just done fill in the blank. And it sounds like I actually resisted naming at this driver because it actually sounds kind of positive, but that it's actually one of the most toxic of these person of these personas. Because what's the self talk of this driver? It's really negative. It's The voices in her head are really, really loud. I called the compare and despair trap. My friend Marie for Leo calls it. Compare Schlager if you've ever had uh, gosh, what is that? Goldschlager. It's literally the worst alcohol in the world. His little gold flecks in it. Talk about a gimmick like you drink it and you feel horrible. Compare Slager's bad, so comparing despair is the vice of the striver were never enough. Now I'm guessing that a couple people are more than one thing. I would like to see it volunteer deconstruct themselves who is willing to tell us what they are. I just want one person to be brave enough. You've been like you said, the smile on your face the whole time here. I can't wait to hear from you. I'm gonna watch this. This is my favorite slide here. You're in the hot seat. Tell us who you are. Hi, I'm Grady. Hey. And I'm a noodle starter. Oh, a noodle starter. Those are two great qualities. What? What have you learned from being a noodle starter? What are you going to do differently? I very often struggle with perfectionism. Uh, but I have so many ideas that I just want to jump on each one of them and get them off the ground. What do you do differently tomorrow? Who focus on one? Yeah, we're gonna focus on one thing. This is literally an assignment. Okay? I don't care if you take five minutes, five hours or five days. I would like it to be done in a day, so don't ignore the last one. I want you to start and finish something tomorrow and share it with anyone. What's your instagram handle? This is get this is getting uncomfortable. That's a grade e o G r A. That we're still your name in front of a lot of people. It's cool. There's only like 3300 people watching online. OK, G r a d dot io g r a d dot io is gonna publish something on Instagram that he finished tomorrow. Are you? Yes. Round of applause for Brady. Awesome.