Adam Street's Blog
The spiritual and practical path to freedom to do your art

Use or lose it

Imagine you drive an old beat up 1972 Ford F100 truck, but it usually starts everyday.

You really want to buy a shiny new Ford F-150.  You’re qualified for the loan but you just haven’t gotten around to pulling the trigger.  

For people like me like it makes sense to man up, find an F-150, and buy it. It’s new, it looks better, feels better, and it has the new car smell.  Ahhh!

But…

Everyday you drive the old F100.  It smokes, sometimes it breaks down on you, but you’ve driven it for years and you’re used to it.

This is what so many of us do with our marketing.  You get comfortable in your box and it becomes harder and harder to step out it even though something better is out there.

The fastest way to “better” isn’t necessarily in taking a course, reading a new book, or copying one of your competitors.  

It’s using your creativity and accessing it through your imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson  said, “the imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.”

Gratify here means to indulge or satisfy.  When you try to fix a life or marketing problem with the senses (looking around, reading, listening to videos and podcasts, etc.) it’s too easy to miss the boat because your imagination isn’t active, it’s passive.

On the other hand when you use your imagination you move from reacting to creating.  

Steve jobs said, “creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

The prime times to access your imagination is first thing in the morning, last thing at night, during meditation, or getting in the shower.

You can also access it driving, moving your body (dancing, hiking, exercising, etc), cooking, all sorts of other ways.

Find a way that works best for you.

And don’t forget Napoleon Hill’s words in Think and Grow Rich.  “The creative faculty becomes more alert, more receptive to vibrations from the sources mentioned, in proportion to its development through use.” 

So uh…use it!

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam 

Holy low expectations, Batman!  

April is Autism Awareness month.  

Every month is Autism Awareness in my house because my son, “The Peanut”, has autism.  We love every inch of that boy!

Then why am I so annoyed right  now?

I wanted the dates for Autism Awareness month so I went to autismspeaks.org.  I didn’t find what I was looking for but I saw this on their donation page:

“Your gift gets us one step closer to our vision of a world where the 1 in 44 children and 1 in 45 adults with autism can reach their full potential.”

WTF is this nonsense?    1 in 44?  Holy low expectations, Batman!  

I know they mean well but could you imagine if FedEx said we’ll get ‘most’ of the packages there on time.  

What if churches led with, ‘Jesus loves some people but not everyone’.

Like… What?

Ok, look.  I get that Autism Speaks means well and most human beings don’t live our full potential.  But that’s exclusive to ALL of us, not just kids on the spectrum.

That’s why I do what I do.  Wayne Dyer used to say, “don’t die with your music still in you.”  

That’s why I draw.

That’s why I teach.

That’s why I mentor.

And let me tell you one of the most important things you can learn from The Peanut and kids with autism.   

They don’t feel like they have anything to prove.  They believe and KNOW that they are worthy.  

Timothy Shriver said, “To the extent each of us learns that, we have the key, the first steps to feel fully alive and feeling that our souls are free.”  

That quote came from Shriver’s interview with Oprah:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viRWv4EygIQ .

To be, do, say, and act however you want is something that eludes most people.  The Peanut has a level of trust and honesty that I constantly work towards.  It ain’t easy!

Too often we treat Autism like this BIG thing we have to eradicate kids and adults from.  But in reality we can learn just as much from them as they can from us.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

Warding laundry and excuses

When my mother-in-law moved in with us she started doing all the laundry in the house.  

Older me is ok with it but back then it was weird.  She didn’t ask permission, she just did it.  I was ready to paint one of those wording spells from Supernatural on my bedroom door to keep her away.

My wife was ok with it though.  I later learned this was one of those little “boundary issues” that she grew up with.  This was her paradigm and she was used to it.   Apparently I just had to catch up…  

Paradigms in your business are the same way.  They establish and define boundaries so you know how to behave in order to be successful.

I mention Megan Macedo’s Artist and Business paradigms a lot because if you’re a Creative and if you try to grow your business with the traditional Business Paradigm you may not love ‘following your dream’ much.

This is why…

Because of what you have to DO to DO the work.  What do I mean by this?  Let’s say you’re a Financial Coach and you bought into building your business with YouTube or TikTok.  

Nuttin’ wrong with YouTube.

Ain’t nuttin’ wrong with TikTok.

Nuttin’ wrong with video.  

But if you don’t enjoy video or if you can’t stand editing, uploading, or posting everyday you will enjoy that process about as much as a flesh eating virus.  

Before you know it you aren’t “marketing”, your money slows, and you start telling people how you couldn’t make it as financial coach.  Or how it’s the economy…

Or Putin.

Or Millennials.

That’s why opened up enrollment for Attractor Factor BootCamp:  The Spiritual and Practical path to the Money for Creative Entrepreneurs.

It’s four lessons over four weeks and if it does not transform how you attract clients and money you don’t have to pay anything.  

Zilch.

Zero.

Nada.

If the experience worth it to you,  you can pay at the end and receive two coaching sessions with yours truly to help you implement and stay on course.

https://www.adamstreet.net/attractorfactor

Adam

Clean Out Your Junk Drawer

Clean Out Your Junk Drawer was an episode of the TV show Modern Family.

Gloria (Sofía Vergara) bought a discounted family therapy session with famed author Debra Radcliffe (Catherine O’Hara), who’s known for her self-help book ‘Clean Out Your Junk Drawer’.

Radcliffe comes over to help the whole family deal with their “junk” and no one takes her seriously.  For most of the episode the only thing that develops is pandemonium.

The whole episode is hilarious.   

And O’Hara’s performance is fabulous like her role on Schitt’s Creek. 

Like most sitcoms everyone gets it together in the end but that’s not always true in real life.  Sometimes our junk keeps hanging out and haunts us like an episode of Ghost Adventures.

It comes down to this…  

You need to get rid of what’s not working so you can make space for something better. 

With our business if we buy an ad and it falls flat, we generally get rid of it or change it.  

In our personal life we don’t always do this.  When we don’t release what’s not serving us, it’s like carrying around a bunch of Amazon boxes everywhere we go.  There’s no room to pick up anything else!

“Your ability to succeed or fail has far more to do with how clear your mind and emotions and beliefs are, than it has to do with your marketing or business education.”

Perry Marshall

Clarity is so important to us Creatives because we can have SO many ideas and our brain processes so fast, that’s how we end up with a junk drawer in the first place.

To help you get clear I opened up enrollment for Attractor Factor BootCamp:  The Spiritual and Practical path to the Money for Creative Entrepreneurs.

For Free… ish.

It’s four lessons over four weeks and if it does not transform how you attract clients and money (all while cleaning out your junk drawer) you don’t have to pay anything.  

But it if does you can pay at the end and receive two coaching sessions with yours truly to help you implement and stay on course.

https://www.adamstreet.net/attractorfactor

Adam

Who’s likely to stop you?  Dis B*tch!

When I first started coaching I began with artists.  

But once I expanded to just about any kind of business  I started feeling a little itchy.  Impostor syndrome started knocking at my door like Jehovah’s Witnesses and I felt like I wasn’t enough.  

Who am I to tell some plumber how to market his biz and get more clients?

I stumbled upon Oprah Winfrey’s interview with JK Rowling on YouTube.  Before Rowling wrote Harry Potter (you knew I couldn’t make it to the end without a Potter reference, right?) she was fighting depression.  She was in a bad relationship, just had a baby, and was living on welfare.  

She said the only thing she knew for sure was she could write a story.  And she did.

I thought to myself what is the ONE thing I know beyond a shadow of doubt?  And then it hit me…

I KNOW storytelling and how to be fun and entertaining.

So that’s where I started!  I built my business around that and showing people how to get their messages to stand out.

Then I moved into copywriting and doing other things.  And guess what?

Impostor syndrome and all sorts of other, as Kody Bateman would say, “stinkin’ thinkin’ showed up.  

That little voice that tells you that you aren’t enough never goes away.  You quiet it down so you can easily ignore it but it hangs out with you seemingly forever like relatives you wish would go home after Christmas.

On Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix show, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jimmy Fallon made a comment that blew me away.  He said before the curtains rise and his show starts a voice tell him he’s not enough.  

Or something is going to go bad.

Or isn’t right.

I thought, even as long as he’s been in show business, he STILL has to ignore that damn voice. 

Recently, you know what I’ve started to call that voice?  “Dis Bitch.”   When I have too much negative head chatter I think, “Dis Bitch is trippin.”  

Want a more polite way to say it?  Author Steven Pressfield calls this voice, “The Resistance”.  If you’d  like to tell your Resistance to GO TO HELL, I have something you may be interested in.

This week I’m opening enrollment for Attractor Factor BootCamp:  The Spiritual and Practical path to the Money for Creative Entrepreneurs.

For Free…

Well, sorta.  

It’s four lessons over four weeks and if it does not transform how you attract clients and money you don’t have to pay anything.  But it if does you can pay at the end and receive two coaching sessions with yours truly to help you implement and stay on course.

https://www.adamstreet.net/attractorfactor

Adam