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

A South West Side Story

I live in Arizona, in the South West, U.S.  I was drawing a married couple at an event and we got on the subject of music.  I told them how much I loved it!  How music was initially my college major and how I pursued being a “pop star”.  She got excited!

She started suggesting ways I could still follow my dream.    She brought up The Voice, American Idol, and America’s Got Talent.  She mentioned ways I could go viral.  It was adorable!  Keep in mind when I was in college the Internet was barely a thing and singers weren’t uploading videos to YouTube and TikTok every five minutes.  

I told her thank you and that I appreciated the support.   But I figured I should stop her because I was a bit of a lost cause.  In the few years I pursued music I learned what I already knew about being an artist.  I told her, “I learned what it took to be a great musician and I wasn’t willing to pay the price.”  

That’s why I was cool with shifting gears and changing majors.  Happy about it, really.  To me it was like going to a bench press at the gym and loading it up with 400 pounds of plates.  I’d LOVE to be able to bench press 400 pounds but if I tried it today I’d become VERY familiar with the inside of an E.R. at a hospital.  

That’s why I sometimes laugh when people preach about monetizing doing what you love.   I LOVE music.  As much as I love art but I never studied it until college.  I think I wrote good lyrics but I was mediocre with the music part.  On the other hand I love art AND I was already good at it because I drew since birth.  Really.  My mom told I came out the womb and snatched the nurses #2 pencil and I started scribbling.

Ok, maybe that’s not true.  

But my point is this.  

All success has a price.  When it came to art I knew the price I had to pay to be good at it and I chose to focus on art instead instead of music.  By the time I was 18 I had thousands of hours clocked in as an artist.  By the end of my first college music theory class, do you wanna know how many hours of music I had?  One.

Find out the price you need to pay and do the work.  And you’ll find a way to love it.

https://www.adamstreet.net/

Adam    

Life lessons and buttox chewing

Back towards the beginning of my  time at Marvel, I turned in a page that my art director was NOT happy with.  

I was the color artist.  Meaning that a penciler drew it, an inker inked it, and my job was to color the black and white page.  I don’t remember what exactly my art director didn’t like but I kept totally trying to throw the the inker and the penciler under the bus.  After all, I don’t change what they do for the most part, I accentuate it.  

So if it looks crappy it’s not my fault.  Maybe “they” should fix it.   And not. Me.

My art director told me something that melted down my paradigm like butter in a furnace.  He said in his message that making the page look better was my job, not an excuse.  That one stung a little.  But on the flip side he gave me permission to make changes.  

I think I was sensitive to do this because when you work as a team on a page, consensus is, we HATE when our work gets changed without our permission.  My first gig in comics was working for a small publisher as a color artist.  Sometimes I would see the comic once it was printed and some pages would look totally different. 

I manned-up and got over it.

On the surface it looked like my art director just gave me a good old-fashioned buttox chewing.  And let’s face it, he did.  But what he really did was he empowered me to take responsibility for the ENTIRE page.  Owning it and making it better.  And not making excuses for why something doesn’t work.  That doesn’t do any of us a bit of good.

Oh look…  Embeded in that experience is a life lesson that could be applied anywhere.  If something doesn’t work in your life or your business, change it.

Actually, there’s two lessons tied in there…  

This is why you always want to work with great people or ‘A Players’.  They push you to make you better.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

P.S. The page above is not the page that initiated the ass chewing.

The Trade Show Offensive

I’m good at email marketing. I’m not Neo from the Matrix good but I’ve gotten really skilled at pressing the right buttons over the years.

Several years ago I wanted to sign-on as a vendor at a few trade shows and I needed thousands of dollars for all the upfront fees.  I debated on how I should pay for the shows (credit, cash, etc.).  Suddenly my  inner Dan Kennedy kicked in.   I thought, why not create a few sales emails and raise the money from scratch.  

That’s what all my direct response marketing gurus would do.    Cause after all… “the money is in the list”.  “There’s no problem a good sales letter can’t fix”.  “If you haven’t offended someone by 9 am you’re not doing your job”.  These are in quotes because this is the soundtrack that was playing in my mind.  

I wrote a three email series to create my cash surge.  The plan was to send them over the course of about four days to a cold list of brides to be.  I was so excited.  My open rates were off the charts.  The open rate of the first email was in the mid 40% range and the second email had nearly a 70% open rate.

Did I mention I was good at email?  

Well, it turns out that I’m not as good at email as I thought I was.   In my first two emails I got every bridal fear that I could get my grubby little hands on and exploited it.  I wasn’t being a good marketer I was being an asshole.  And my list let me hear about it…

Surely my wife would back me up and everyone is overreacting.  I printed email #2 and showed it to her.  After she finished reading it she handed it back to me holding it with two fingers passively with her nose scrunched up.  She looked as though she just smelled something foul or accidentally stepped in chewing gum.  All while saying, “yeah…”

I thought I was so cool, so creative, so cunning.  But all I really was was a bully who only thought about himself.  Afterwards I felt like I was on an episode of Dirty Jobs.

In Darren Hardy’s book The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster he has a section on ‘not killing your customers’.  When he was starting out in real estate he went to a mentor to learn how to sell more.  He showed him his ambitious “Hit List” of prospects.  The mentor wasn’t impressed.

He said, “no one wants to be your next hit, Darren.  They don’t want to be your next victim.”  I’m glad Hardy included this experience in his book.  He was right.  You shouldn’t maim or kill your customers and you shouldn’t insult them either.   

The weekend of that email campaign I grew up.  I learned that I make a better Adam than a bad version of Dan Kennedy or any other marketer that I adore.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

Word Power

Years ago I was listening to a Wayne Dyer program and he spoke about his talk with Nelson Mandela.  He said Mandela told him he needs to do everything he can to get rid of Apartheid (shows you how long ago this was).  This isn’t verbatim but Mandela said South Africa was the only place left where it was written down on paper that segregation and racism was acceptable.

I never thought of it like that before.

Segregation and discrimination happen all over the place but where it’s written down and practiced as the status quo, it’s most deadly.  

That taught me a valuable lesson early on about the power of the written word.  

When my son, who we call the Peanut, turned one we noticed some development delays.  We had a feeling something was wrong because our daughter had a speech delay too.  No big deal.  We had him examined and he was diagnosed with autism.

The big fat letter said so.  The doctor did too.  I didn’t panic.  

Here’s how I have always looked at the Peanut and anyone else with a mental health label.  The diagnosis just tells me HOW his brain works.  My job is learning how to work with the way he learns.  

What’s that cliché?  The best direction to ride horse is the direction it’s already going.  Yeah…it’s like that.

Over the years I’ve seen parents freak out over an autism diagnosis.  The stress.  Divorce.  Or they act like their child is combustable like Jack Jack from the Incredibles movies. 

Words have power but you also don’t have to give them ALL your power.

https://www.adamstreet.net

Adam

When I was an accomplice

About five or six years ago a groom wanted to hire me to draw caricatures at his wedding.  One problem though.  The bride was kinda against it.  I’m sure she thought what many people think.  

It’s low rent.  

Caricatures are for kids.

It’s stupid.

Ok, I’ll give her stupid.  I draw cartoons, I’m no stranger to stupid.  But still…

I emailed the groom a few times and we spoke on the phone.  It’s always kinda strange for me when I speak to a Millennial on the phone.  So many of them are into texting, instant messages, and written communication.

Not that I can blame them.  The more I write the more I prefer to communicate with the written word too.  Anyhoow… 

Back to my groom.  With our e-mails and even our phone conversation he kept talking about meeting up in person.  It was odd because 98% of my events I book via email or over the phone.  

I made an appointment and met them at a park.  I finally got to meet the fiancé and she was very pretty.  They made a beautiful couple.  But to quote one of my favorite lines from the movie Evolution, she was a bit of an “Ice Queen”.

She was not warm to me at all.  Time to do like Flynn Rider from Tangled and bring on the smolder…

I tried charm…

She shot it down like trying to shoot a layup over Shaq.

I told her my story and my background in comics…

She was about interested in that as a college lecture on Dung beetles.

I even went the social proof route but she wasn’t seemingly impressed.

I was using every ounce of my creativity.  I felt like I was doing a crossword puzzle but none of the words I kept using seemed to fit.  I slowly learned why the groom wanted to meet me in person.  He wanted an accomplice to help convince the fiancé to include me in their reception.

Eventually the groom had his way and they did book me.  It taught me a lesson though.  In my success in not scratching and clawing for every gig I could get I got lazy.  Why should I have to do things like talk to people or meet them in person?  Ain’t I Mr. Special…?

I grew to really enjoy talking to my perspective clients in person.  You get the good stuff.  You learn about them, how they met, what their goals are.  It’s the kind of thing that you just can’t get from sending emails (usually) or looking at their Instagram page.

To quote a John C. Maxwell book title, “everyone communicates, few connect.  Connect with your prospects, clients, and tribe.  The connection will go way beyond words.

https://www.adamstreet.net/

Adam