The election left a lot of my friends and family bummed. To say the least…
Yesterday, something came to me.
I found out Alien Romulus is going to be on Hulu later this month. Ok, so that came to me in an e-mail but that’s not technically what I’m talking about. What came to me is this.
Freedom is within.
A lack of freedom comes from the thoughts that you are thinking.
Freedom is found in the thoughts you’re thinking, your feelings, and your state of consciousness. When your mind and your conscious awareness find freedom, so will your body.
It’s ALL an inside job.
Happiness is found within.
Love starts within.
Even the bible says the Kingdom of God is within.
“My goal is not to “MAKE” America or anyone else do anything. Instead, I want to inspire the world to become whole from within, so that the light of our own growth and goodness spills outward, and America benefits from that overflow.”
-Garrain Jones
Do your art and be the highest expression of yourself.
When I started freelancing I read marketing books for fun.
No kidding.
Kinda sad but what can I say, I’m a nerd. And while people were reading Harry Potter and James Patterson books, I was reading books by Seth Godin. For fun, yes, but I knew it would translate into new ways to market my art.
My career still never really took off like I wanted so I switched to reading business books. Like sales, mindset, how to grow a business, and wealth books. Now we’re talking!
Now I’m happy with my career, right?
Nope.
To figure out what I was missing I went new age. How can I ‘attact this’ and ‘manifest’ that! Surely positive thinking will do the trick. And like Tom “Big Al” Schreiter said about his early career, all that positive thinking helped me feel better about still being broke.
Then I got it! I didn’t have faith like I thought I did. The bible says faith is, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It seemed I often lost faith in manifesting.
I mean, rent is due on the first people! God needs to speed this along.
My trust in source could be dicey and I worked on “fixing” my vibration but I never got it right. Why? Because the recipe was incomplete. It’d be like making sugar cookies with no sugar. Just so you know, people would call them biscuits.
Cute.
and…
Circular.
Biscuits.
I didn’t fully learn and understand the recipe until I came across Dee Williams’ work.
To be the manifesting dynamo you want to be, Dee says your success is based on these three things:
How I see myself.
How I see the world.
And how I see the world seeing me.
My friend, this is the difference between making sugar cookies that taste like sugar cookies. Or sugar cookies that taste like cardboard.
Cause what most people do is focus on how YOU see the world.
Even I love this Albert Einstein quote: “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe.”
And I do think that is the most important decision. I know people who are scared to live in a big city cause they think they’re dangerous. Or living in the country is the only way to ensure your kids don’t grow up with the moral code of Larry Flynt.
How you see your world is everything. If you’re fearful, you may not even leave your house.
But these next two, are the whoppers.
First, how I see myself.
As Dee says, “this is not only the first but the most crucial pillar because your foundation cannot support the manifestation process without it.”
Let me give you an example of me losing weight…
I’m fat.
Not only did I NOT lose a pound last week but I gained a pound.
Eating good is not working, may as well go to McDonalds….
I’m still fat, so what difference does it make? The difference is that’s not self love, that’s self acceptance.
Calling yourself fat and saying what you’re doing doesn’t work doesn’t make the needle move. I know that’s obvious but why did I do it.
Self love. Or a lack there of…
Do you think I would ever speak to my kids that way? No. They could all double in size and I still wouldn’t. Cause I love them unconditionally. That’s the goal anyway…
So I knew to manifest and get my life right, I had to see myself like Oprah saw herself, as god’s child. I am beauty, I am love, I am part of the divine.
Is it hard? Hell yeah.
It’s tough to go from I’m a fat pig who can’t fit my favorite jeans to loving yourself and STILL not fitting those jeans.
Ugh. Why do I have to love myself, FIRST? Cause that’s how it works, peeps. You just have to. Simple, but not easy. And you gotta do it, if you want to be happy.
Hell, you can chop off your leg and drop 30 pounds. There’s all sorts of ways to lose weight or get rich quickly (lottery, rob a bank) but it won’t make you happy in a fulfilled way.
And the last one is, how I see the world seeing me. This is a big one because you can love yourself but if you think the world doesn’t see you the same way, you’re not in congruence.
Let’s say you get a prospect who wants to hire you. If you think your style doesn’t fit the project, or if their budget can’t afford you. The juju you send out into the either is, this probably isn’t ‘going to work out.
You can love the hell out of yourself and think the world is amazing, but if you don’t think you’re gonna get the gig, you probably won’t.
Or let’s take me and weight loss. If I love myself and think the world is awesome, but if I think the world sees me as a fat pig, the cycle is broken and you lose your congruence again.
As you use your thoughts, feelings, and emotions to be the highest expression of yourself, make sure you live in alignment with:
There’s a Mexican food place near my house that I loved going to. Great food, but one thing kills it though.
They don’t want to give you salsa with your food. Asking me to eat a burrito without salsa is like eating a bowl of Cheerios without milk. You can do it but you don’t want to.
Actually, they‘ll give you salsa but they only give you one. They even have a sign that says 1 salsa per burrito. And then they treat you like a criminal if I ask for anymore. They just stand there judging me in all my salsa rebelliousness and burrito piety.
I kid, but it is annoying.
I asked the owner of the neighboring store about this because I knew he ate there too. I just had to get the scoop on what was up with the Salsa Nazi.
He told me he keeps the prices low so that all the landscapers in the neighborhood will keep eating there. And him being a freak about the “free” salsa was his way of controlling costs.
I asked him, “why doesn’t he just raise his prices” or charge for the damn salsa? He said, “I don’t know”. We both stared at each other cluelessly.
The Salsa Nazi has a money problem because he has a pricing problem. I looked and that restaurant opened in 2008. I could make fun and say he should have worked this out by now but I get it. I had my own pricing issues too.
When I first started drawing caricatures at parties, I priced myself low because I didn’t have any experience or clients. And I was still at Marvel so it didn’t matter a ton.
And that’s great in the beginning but after you get some experience under your belt, you should charge what you want. Irregardless of whatever the “market” is charging or what your colleagues think you should charge.
But most creatives don’t.
If you were to stop reading right now and get nothing else from this writing, read this first. And memorize it.
Or as Jim Rohn used to say, put it on your refrigerator so you can see it everyday.
PRICE.
IS.
ELASTIC.
Think about it.
You can buy a bag from Walmart for $30 or you can get the same size bag from Louis Vuitton for $2,000. Same size bag, huge difference in price.
Now, I know what you’re thinking… But Adam, those are products. I provide a service.
I’m a graphic artist.
I’m a photographer.
I’m a juggler.
Doesn’t matter. Want a service example? Fine. Let’s do it.
My barber charges me $30 for a haircut. I’m practically bald when I go in and I’m slightly more bald when I come. From far away someone may think I’m being hustled but I’m not. I happily pay it.
I met a barber that charged $200 for haircuts. And Steve Harvey said he paid hundreds of dollars more than that for each trim until he went bald like me.
So why don’t we raise our prices based on what we want instead of the market or what we think we can get?
For most of us, it’s fear.
Fear you won’t be liked.
Fear they won’t buy.
Fear you can’t pay your bills.
Let me tell you a secret. The limit to what you can earn and the power that is available to you is nestled between your ears.
“Wealth is an idea. A radio is an idea. Television is an idea. An automobile is an idea. Everything around you is an idea made manifest in the world.”
-Joseph Murphy
Wanna charge $500? That’s an idea.
Wanna charge $5000? That’s an idea.
But anyway you look at it, it is YOUR idea. And it ties into your paradigm of what you expect and what you believe you can charge.
It’s. All. You.
It’s not the market.
It’s not CNN.
And it’s not yo mama.
As Joe Dispenza says, you can’t think better than how you feel. And I got news for you, you can’t earn more than what you believe you can receive.
Keep becoming the highest expression of yourself and you will live more of the life that you want. In your personal life and with your art.
Wanna make more money doing your art? Sure you do!
I googled how us service industry folk can get er done! I found a nice article on the first page of Google. How convenient!
Here’s the first three things to do that the article mentioned.
We can…
1. Network to get referrals…
2. Reach back out to cold leads that had potential.
3. Respond faster with a more personable approach.
But wait, there’s more!
I’m being facetious but there’s nothing wrong with these suggestions. But if you’re not doing what I’ve written about in the last 4 parts of this series, doing those three things (and business tactics in general) is going to feel HARD.
You’ll probably end up in The Gap with nonsense thoughts like…
Why didn’t that company book?
Why didn’t that lead call me back?
Why am I not getting likes on these posts?
This happens because you over look the most important thing…
YOU are the most important factor in determining how much you can receive.
In the end, it’s all about being successful. But let me explain how I define success.
Success for me is about freedom.
The freedom to do your art, how you want to, for how much you want to, and for who you want to.
AND…
Being happy and healthy and enjoying your life.
When I was painting at Marvel, working 10-12 hour days was the norm. I loved what I did and wore my crazy hours and work days like a badge of honor.
Then, my body started to hurt.
And I started missing the important things.
My daughter had a school function that I decided to miss because I “had to work”. She’ll understand…
‘I’m busy.’
‘I’m doing this for her.’
‘This electricity doesn’t pay for itself ya know.’
And then she said, “daddy you never do things with us anymore”.
I was doing my art, and making the money, but my home life and health was floundering. Not matter what I told myself, I was NOT successful.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe money really can solve all of your problems.
The gurus always say to make more money you need to provide more value. But that doesn’t always work for artists the way we want because delivering value doesn’t encompass being more.
It’s about DOING more. Working on the doing without the being is a recipe for disaster.
What I eventually learned (and what most the gurus today don’t say) is value comes in two parts.
There’s physical value and spiritual value.
You know the physical value.
Get more clients.
Make more offers.
Provide more services.
But that’s the 20%! It’s tangible. Easy. That’s why everyone talks about it!
To provide more value on a higher spiritual level—that’s the 80%!
“Only spiritual things can be in more than one place at a time. Think about it, you can have money in your bank account, a checkbook for that account, and a debit card for that account, and they all represent the exact same money.”
“How can money be in three places at once? Because money is spiritual.”
-Myron Golden
Think about it, money is an idea.
A penny is 75% copper. Based on substance a penny is worth more than a dollar (that’s made out of cotton). But that’s not true, a dollar is 100 times more valuable.
What that means is, the value of money is between your ears. And how you attract it is based on who you are—how you act, think, and feel.
“Money” moves to and away from people and places for its own reasons, and for known (not mysterious), mostly visible reasons. By syncing your character, thoughts, behavior and business with these reasons, you attract prosperity; if in opposition to these reasons, money goes elsewhere.”
-Dan Kennedy, Wealth Attraction in the New Economy
To recap. How you earn (and receiving more) is based on:
80/20, it’s 20% tactics and 80% personality (how you think, act, and feel).
Growing and becoming a better version of yourself.
The Gain thinking.
Using Creative Vision.
And I loosely spoke about this, but, define was success means to you.
That’s important because…
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”
Years ago when I first heard Gary Vaynerchuk’s Do What You Love (no excuses!) talk on TED (and read his book Crush It), I proclaimed one thing…
Artists were gonna crush it online!
All that talk about passion, content creation, and doing what you love. Who does that better than artists?
Well, I was wrong. Sorta.
I struggled making money online. And I saw a butt load of other artists struggle too. Maybe I was missing something.
So I bought Gary’s second book Jab Jab Jab, Right Hook. Great book, but still, no fireworks.
Us creative folk are stuffed full of desire.
We generally have a vision for what we want for our art and we have imaginations that can rival any kindergartner.
So why are we not ‘crushin’ it’?
I didn’t get my answer until I read, How to Own Your Own Mind by Napoleon Hill. In the book Hill interviews Andrew Carnegie and he talks about the difference between imagination and Creative Vision.
And spoiler alert, they are NOT the same.
Carnegie said Creative Vision is an acquired ability of…
Recognizing favorable opportunities.
Embracing opputunities.
Moving with definiteness of purpose.
Removing limitations from your mind.
Using Applied Faith.
Going the extra mile.
And there are more…
Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” And he is right.
Imagination IS everything.
Until you try to SELL your art… Without the Creative Vision part, that’s where things fall apart.
That’s where most artists stall.
That’s where I stalled!
Check out this quote from Dr Joseph Murphy from the Miracle Power for Infinite Riches.
“When your desire and imagination are in conflict, your imagination always wins.”
That means no matter how bad you want to make money off of your art, if your creative visions isn’t dialed in, you can seemingly do almost everything right, and still struggle.
This is why Future Self thinking is so important. If you can use who you want to be as a measuring stick for how you act today, you active your Creative Vision. And your Creative Vision pushes you forward.
Instead of saying I can’t do that, or how can I do that? You look for WHO can help you do that. Then your imagination and creativity kick in and things fall into place.
On the other hand if you do NOT use your future self/creative visioning your imagination works against you. And as Murphy said no matter how bad you want it you’ll keep thinking of reasons why it won’t work.
Years ago before Amazon did same day Prime shipping, I read about it in Success magazine. When Bezos said he was working on getting products delivered the same day I thought he was…
Out.
Of.
His.
Friggin’ mind!
And then Amazon did it. Not everywhere. Not all the time. But they did it.
That was Creative Vision at it’s best.
Want to make more money while you sip on a Caramel Macchiato in Starbucks, warmly in your Supreme hoodie, while typing on your tricked out 16 inch MacBook Pro?
Master Creative Vision.
And reading chapter 1 of How to Own Your Own Mind wouldn’t hurt either…
