Art

Start Your Way

Start Your Way

Garth Beyer

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I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts lately. One in particular Debbie Millman’s. It seems every interviewee, every professional creative, every communicator began with one weird thing.

Think of a sculpture made from all the staples in wooden posts within a city. Imagine fake moss saran wrapped on a rock and sold. Consider a ridiculous feat. It can even be something that anyone can do, but no one is willing to commit to (basically half the art pieces in an art museum).

Once you become a success, people will want to hear your story. They will ask you how you started or where you started or when you knew exactly what you wanted to do with your career.

You have an opportunity when starting on the path to your own success to start in a remarkable, more specifically, weird, way.

If your serious about becoming successful, then you need to be the opposite about starting down that path. You never heard a successful person’s story start out “Well, I planned for four years figuring out everything I needed to do to get here and I worked my way very slowly here, pleasing everyone I could and trying to appeal to the masses and doing what everyone told me to blah blah blah.”

No.

You hear about people doing something crazy and weird and something worth talking about.

 

Stay Positive & The Most Important Part Of Any Story Is The Opening Paragraph

(What’s Yours?)

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Grow Instead Of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

Garth Beyer

What makes you feel a sense of self? Rather, what makes you not question what makes you feel a sense of self? What is it you do that you never regret taking the time to do? What are you okay with failing at?

Is it okay with you to prioritize some other activity over what you’ve just responded with?

We have to take our joy, our pleasure, our passion seriously. We can’t let perfection stand in the way of creating our muse. We can’t let critics steer us on a different path with only their voice. Most importantly, we can’t let ourselves be sold short… by ourselves.

If you’re concerned about time, you’re wrong about what you’re passionate about. The theory of relativity isn’t just something Einstein scientifically proclaimed, it’s something he felt while he worked. Time is relative for everyone, but nearly non-existent when we’re doing what we love.

It needs noting time can become irrelevant when you do many different things, not just one.

The important actions to take are the ones we feel we should, not the ones we think we want. It’s rare, but now and then I feel I should pull out a canvas and my paints to create an ugly piece of art. I do, I lose track of time, and I know nothing will come from my painting endeavors, but in that moment I did what I felt I should do, not sit back in the recliner and play video games, what I think I wanted.

Are you okay with blowing off what you feel you should do? Does it not bug you when you do? Are you ignoring it how you feel when you do, using what you think you should do as an escape from the feeling of what you feel you should do?

So many are. We need to stop.

 

Stay Positive & Sure, Seek Giants Out, But First Become One

 

What To Do About Your Idols

Garth Beyer

Mentors, idols, professors, heroes, whatever you call them, you have them. Someone you look up to, someone you admire, someone who can teach you their ways to success.

A common problem I’ve seen from people who have idols is they don’t know what to do about it. They can read up on their hero’s work, analyze their decisions that got them to where they are now, they can take sound advice from them, but it’s all study, little action.

Something I’ve written about before, but now I’m able to put my finger on it: what to do about your idols is impress them.

When you begin to doubt yourself, when you’re unsure of the next step (or if you’re currently on the right one)… if you don’t know what to do or if you’re doing something the right way, your way, ask yourself, will it impress your mentor?

If you impress your professor, you haven’t just done great work, you’ve done great art.

 

Stay Positive & Show Them What You’ve Really Got

Step Into Your Artist Pants

Garth Beyer

You’ve got to flip the switch on, you’ve got to bully yourself into it, you’ve got to step into your artist pants and walk with confidence. You can’t expect to do remarkable work if you don’t feel it, if you’re not in love with what you’re doing.

The most common thread in all the writers’ institute workshops this weekend is to do only what you will really love doing. If you don’t love the novel you’re writing, scrap it. If you don’t like a particular social media outlet, avoid it. If you don’t love what you need to sacrifice to go the route of traditional publishing, don’t try to traditionally publish.

Yes, you need to try each pair of pants on, but when you find the right ones, the artist pants, don’t exchange them for any other pair no matter who holds up a different pair and says “you need to wear these if you want success.”

 

Stay Positive & Stride With Passion

How Is There So Much Crap In The World

Garth Beyer

Crappy television series, crappy hyped up box office movies, crappy books, crappy food, crappy insurance plans, crappy businesses, crappy ordinances, crappy cars. There’s a lot of crap out in the world. How did it get there?

You can’t tell me you haven’t seen a movie that you wondered, “How the hell did this ever make it to the big screen? Who would buy this?” Let me tell you.

People know how to sell their crap. Producers, companies, publishers, they all buy crap from time to time. The thing is, they don’t know they are buying crap. What they think they are buying is a really great idea. And you know what, it’s not their fault. If someone has mad sales skills, mad storytelling skills, mad ethos-persuasion skills, then heck, they deserve to have their crap bought.

A well-known publisher in Madison just told me today she knows one author who has had a handful of books published, but never any of them really selling well. She said, “He will come into a meeting and say to the agents ‘Yea, that one didn’t do very well on the shelves, but here’s this other book idea.’ He would go onto pitching [selling] this new book and would end buying that one too.”

You can make it big in this world, but you have to know how to sell.

The same publisher also told me she had read hundreds of books that were exceptional, but the author just couldn’t sell them to the agents.

Only when everyone learns how to sell well, will the real content of any art be taken as serious as it deserves.

 

Stay Positive & This Is Why It Doesn’t Make Sense To Me When Someone Says Their Work Isn’t Good Enough, It Can Be If You Learn How To Sell It. Bittersweet Isn’t It?

First Get Good At Consistently Creating

Garth Beyer

So often you’ll not follow-through with a project or an idea because you know how much marketing you’re going to have to do when it’s complete.

To you, the world might not seem approving of someone writing a book and just throwing it on a digital bookshelf. No. You have to write the book, make sure it’s excellent, put it on the digital bookshelf, and then advertise it, get reviews on it, have bloggers cover it, give it out for free, set a Skype chat interview up for you to talk about it, make sure it’s translated to 20 different languages, beg the NYT reviewers to read it, and so much more.

It’s all a lie. It’s all a trick to stop you from creating. It’s fear speaking up. It’s an excuse and you and I both know it.

First get good at consistently creating. Write five books and throw them up on Amazon. Chat with friends about it, naturally, but don’t worry about heavily marketing it. Think about it in terms of time. If you create something, a book, an art piece, a business plan or a TED talk (and it takes you a month), then you spend the next seven months marketing it, getting people to see it, buy into it, subscribe to it, admire it, blog about it. You’ve just stopped yourself from creating seven more incredible works of art.

Obviously this post isn’t meant for the experts, the famous, the already envied. It’s for you, it’s for me, it’s for all the people out there who think things need to be perfect and need to have their total commitment for a year before they move on and create the next thing. It’s not necessary. The best marketing strategies come natural, the best art work doesn’t need to be pushed, the greatest connections often come from chatting about what you’ve done lately, not what you did six months ago.

And you know what? The act of consistently creating might be the greatest marketing strategy known to man.

 

Stay Positive & Interesting, Isn’t It?

 

Where You Start

Garth Beyer

What can you make from this chart?

Where you start

There are businesses, writers, artists that start when they still haven’t perfected their craft. They create crap art and develop sketchy business models. They write well but make countless grammatical and mechanical errors. But according to this chart, there’s no correlation of where you start in terms of a perfect craft to how successful you are down the line.

What about those who are perfect at their art when they start. What about those writers who practice in the shadows and refuse to come out until their novel is perfect? How about those businessmen and women who study model after model before they develop their “perfect” model. Is there any guarantee of success for them down the line? Nope.

Where you start doesn’t matter much down the line.* What matters is that you start.

 

Stay Positive & Go Start

*If you’re looking for a short-term investment or if you’re looking for a place to perfect your practice before you truly launch yourself, where you start matters very much.