The quiet moments

In 2020:

Do not believe anyone that tells you that you have to work all the time, or hustle always, or do things you aren’t comfortable with in order to get ahead.

The magic, I have found, usually happens in the quiet moments when your brain is resting, and rest is essential for clarity. Clarity, meanwhile, is essential for vision. And vision is essential for success.

More importantly, knowing where you are going is essential to not feeling completely lost. Having a guiding light lets you decide what to chase and what to let go.

Sometimes, it’s worth it to do something for free, or even pay for something, if it services your overall vision.

Sometimes, it isn’t worth it to take a high paying job that takes you away from your goal.

Yes, plans change and visions need to always be adjusted, but without aiming for a point on the horizon you will get lost.

And when you are lost and adrift, it’s easy to get pulled in many different directions, to take on things that don’t service you, and not be able to jump on the right opportunities when they present themselves.

Life, I have found, is more about being silent and listening to the right opportunities, and then being able to say yes to them when they come, much more than struggling against the current all the time, trying to be everything to everyone.

I won’t lie and say that you won’t have to do that in the beginning. You have to swim, struggle, and build up your muscles. No matter how many times somebody tries to help you it’s almost impossible to avoid some pitfalls until you experience them.

However, you only have so many years on this Earth, and so many chances you can take. I have talked to too many people who squandered their good opportunities because they were too busy mired in mediocre ones.

Yes, you do need to do a lot of work to get good and do a lot of things to get noticed, but the quiet moments, steeped in reflection and meditation, often yield the biggest results.

I take December off every single year, just allowing myself the freedom to play and do whatever it is my mind feels like doing, and usually it comes up with some really awesome stuff because I give it time to think and synthesize everything about the previous year.

Some people call it a luxury, but I think it’s a necessity. It’s hard in the moment to shut off my brain and watch my hard won money fly out without getting much back, but in the end it’s totally worth it because the absolute best ideas of my entire life. Literally, the reason I have been able to scale so high so fast, have not come from the constant shows and the other stuff.

Those ideas came from the 2-3 things I figured out in the quiet moments that allowed me to explode forward.

Some examples:

2015 – 1) I came up with the idea for Melissa the Wannabe, my mascot, which solidified my brand and our target customer for the rest of my career plus 2) my podcast, The Business of Art (now The Complete Creative), which put me in contact with more high level creative than anything I’ve ever done plus 3) my show schedule and speaking schedule, which contributed to my break out year in 2017, plus 4) the beginning of the idea to launch the Monsters and Other Scary Shit anthology AND Pixie Dust, leading to easily over $100,000 in sales and were my break out hits two years later.

2016 – 1) I decided to run mailing list builders which account for a HUGE percentage of my business (over $50,000 in 2019 alone), plus 2) I decided to write my first non-fiction book, which was the nascent idea behind this website plus 3) I decided to release Monsters and Other Scary Shit BEFORE Pixie Dust instead of the other way around, allowing me to build a huge list of people who loved monsters and comics plus 4) I had the idea of the Monsters and Other Scary Shit cover after struggling for months with an idea, and that became my #1 most commented piece cover ever.

2017 – I 1) completely redesigned The Business of Art into The Complete Creative, along with launching Build a Rabid Fanbase, my signature course which has yielded over $20,000 in sales, and planned my other courses, plus 2) I decided to write 20 total books in 20 months, which taught me how to write really well, and I was able to launch a writing course earlier in 2019.

2018 – This was all about cutting things that didn’t serve me. I cut a lot of small shows, and marketing that wasn’t working and for the first time since I started I was revenue positive for the first 11 months of the year, and didn’t need 1-2 big Kickstarters to save my year. I decided only to bring in that which made me stronger.

ALL of that came from taking December off, and those are the BEST decisions I have ever made for my company. They all came from stillness, and reflection, and allowing my mind to wander.

I still end up doing a lot of work in December every year, but it’s work designed to let my mind wander, and it involves a lot of down time to ruminate, think, and plan.

NONE of those are historically extroverted qualities. They are qualities most often associated with introverts. People often SEE the extraverted side of me, but the thing that HAS all the good ideas in the quiet, reflective, introverted side.

Every time.

Yes, that extraverted guy is the workhorse who gets things done, but the introverted one is the visionary.