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

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

Star Wars, freakin out, and the important of training

I was watching Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Anakin Skywalker’s padawan Ahsoka was taken by some bad guys.   Did they abduct her because they wanted to have tea and crumpets with her?  

Hardly.

They wanted a padawan for their own creepy little version of the Hunger Games.  

After Anakin realized Ahsoka was gone he got worried.   Crazy worried.  He was freakin’ out until finally Plo, another Jedi master, dropped some wisdom on him.

He said if you trained her properly, she’ll find her way back home.

This was a hard pill for Anakin to swallow… 

He knew Plo was right though.  Instead of trying to scour the universe for her he knew he had to let go and trust she’d be ok.  

And Ahsoka made it home.

What made this good fiction is the fact that this is so true and so applicable to real life.  

When the pandemic hit I thought I could out maneuver it like flying a X-Wing around enemy fire.  I thought I was going to pivot and my business would be safe.  Instead I got swallowed like that creepy toothy mouth thing in the Return of The Jedi.  

I had the marketing training but what I didn’t have was the mindset and belief in my skills to match it.  That’s why in my upcoming boot camp we’re going to go over the practical business skills creative entrepreneurs need, but the mindset as well.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

I was wrong

For about a year I used to get annoyed at events when people commented on my drawing skills.  

They would give me compliments and I said thank you but inside I was annoyed.  I used to say a monkey could do my job.  You know, if the monkey drew three hours a day for 20 years.

He and most people could do it…

I was wrong.  I admitted I have natural gifts and desires that make me suited to draw cartoons.  The fact that I drew everyday to get good enough to turn pro was just the icing on the cake.

Let’s see… What else was I wrong about?

I was wrong about Google.  I called them a one-trick pony.  When the stock closed at over $100 after the initial public offering I thought the people who bought it were crazy.  

I was also wrong about marketing my business with traditional Business Paradigm tactics.  I wrote about that here:  https://adamstreetblog.com/the-artist-paradigm-letter/

I thought I had to do what the gurus said.  I took ME out of my marketing and replaced me with a USP, fear, scarcity, and looking at metrics.   Focusing on SEO and fine-tuning my elevator pitch made for some really good Sundays…  Not. 

Those things are ok.  They’re useful even.  The problem was I realized they were the opposite of what I needed to do.  As I focused less on what “they” told me to do I  started enjoying marketing and promoting my work again.  And, it got easier.

This is why I’ll be introducing my new boot camp soon.  I’ll be  sharing with you what worked for me and shiz-nit that you need to get rid of and avoid like the plague.  

More info to come.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

Is your work dry or wet s**t?

Stan Lee called The Scarlet Pimpernel the first superhero.  If Stan Lee says it it’s gotta be true, right?  

It’s like taking acting advice from Meryl Streep or learning how to stroke a 3-pointer  from Stephen Curry.

The Scarlet Pimpernel was a novel published in 1905 by Baroness Orczy.  Orczy’s ‘superhero’ would save the day and leave a card behind bearing a scarlet pimpernel flower.  

How pimp is that?  

Today that would be the equivalent of foiling a crime, putting it on YouTube, and sending it to the bad guy.  

What I love about leaving the card is (and I’ve never read the novel in case you’re curious…), it leaves a piece of you behind.  It puts a face on the work or transformation.  And here’s the million dollar question…

Do you do this with your tribe?

Matthew McConaughey interviewed a musician he loved in West Africa.  He asked him why he didn’t come to America and other countries.  The musician said…

“Because there I would be dried shit, neither me nor my scent would stick with you.  Here, I am wet shit, both me and my scent stick with you.

Do you stick with your audience?  What part of YOU do you leave behind in your work?  

In your marketing? 

In your  promotions?

We’ll talk about this in my new boot came for creative entrepreneurs. You can be unapologetically you and attract the right clients and earn a great living doing what you love. 

More into to come!  But until then, keep puttin’ your funk out into the world.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

PS McConaughey’s quote was taken from his book, Greenlights.  It’s a keeper and worth checking out.