Because guess what? When you get to that dream scenario and you have the loft you want and you're wearing the stuff that you designed, you're going to feel amazing about yourself. You're going to be like, this is the life that I wanted and I went and got. In this video, we're going to talk about developing aura and building your creative dream life. When you're in real creative fields, you're designing, you're in marketing, you're in branding, you end up putting a good chunk of your life into bringing other people's visions into the world.
And that's not a bad thing because you have to hone your skills somewhere and you learn. a lot more around other creative people than you do like purely in your own world. But you only progress in that journey when you make these jumps. You know, you move to a new place, you shift careers, you add something to your skill set, you launch a brand, whether it works or it doesn't. And there's no playbook for them.
And I think in our lives, it's going to keep going. I think you're just as likely if you're new to your career and you're in your 20s you're gonna have a bunch of these shifts as you are if you're in your 30s or your 40s because you'll notice that even when you achieve a certain level of wealth and success you're still gonna want to keep creating and you're still gonna want to keep going and the only way to progress is every few years you have to take some kind of big jump. So this video is a playbook for that. It's a playbook for developing ARA and what that really means and I use ARA and I view it as an important term because you'll notice that certain creative entrepreneurial people are magnetic and they're magnetic in real life or online or in the best cases is both. People are drawn to their story, their energy, the things they put out there, and it's by design.
This is something that is creative. I have a little guideline for how I think anyone can think about bringing that into their life, because I do think you have to be intentional about, do I want to be that kind of person? What does it take?
And how do I go about it? And be mindful of it. Then we're going to talk a little about creative life planning, because there's no guidebook.
Because if you're not a creative person and you're just chasing money, there's significant ways you can go and do that. And it's a kind of a completely different playbook than if you want an interesting, fulfilling life. I'll talk a little bit about the mind.
mindsets it takes to actually achieve that. And I'm going to talk a little bit about like the core skill sets and things that are worth knowing and having in your arena. If you want to say, hey, I want to build into this perfect creative life. How do I get there?
This is going to be an interesting video and probably unlike anything you've seen on YouTube. I've made this Venn diagram. So I've mapped this out and there's four quadrants here.
The first is taste. And taste is an interesting one. It's so unquantifiable.
But at some point you have to start deciding what do you think is good and bad? Not what the elite online tell you is good or bad. Not what capitalism tells you is good or bad or your design school does. What do you personally think is interesting and not and why?
And then what does your target customer base think is interesting or not and why? And where is that alignment, right? And I think this is a really interesting conversation and one I'm pretty deep in because I grew up in a place with like essentially no taste.
I grew up in Hawaii, surf culture, super Asian culture. In that era with less internet, I just didn't have access to much. Like everything I learned about things, I learned through magazines.
I was obsessed with design, learned everything I could through magazines from that and acquired a bunch of my understanding. anyway, everything through reading and through school and then moving to New York and working inside and working inside fashion, working inside like a, like an agency with like major clients and stuff. You begin to understand like discerning what is good or bad.
But then I also learned that you create really tasteful things. Like some of the projects I worked on where people would create these things that you would think because they are the perfect item or whatever would succeed. They don't necessarily, right?
Like taste is not an indicator of success. But people will often criticize or critique you if you don't make tasteful things if you're in this design and creative community. And then there's your barometer, what you like and don't. And that actually might be different than what is tasteful and what consumers like and don't.
And you have to kind of basically find alignment between what do consumers like, what do I like, what is good and tasteful and right, and decide where you want to live. And now. Now it gets a whole nother complicated factor of what gets attention on the internet because there's so much of that playing into this too.
Or people can make really like, there's an epidemic right now of really nice tasteful menswear brands. There are so many of them that make so much good stuff and they simply don't get a lot of attention because they don't make the kind of products that can get attention, which means fiscally they don't get the success level they should for the things that are as tasteful and good looking as they are. And a lot of those businesses are going to fail.
Whereas I can get people arguing for hundreds of thousands of views about whether my t-shirts should be distressed or not. I sell a group of them along the way and then know that that is Part of the design process is understanding the conversation that's going to come from it. And is that necessarily the most tasteful thing?
No. Is it something that appeals to me? Yes.
Is it something that works inside the bubble that I'm shooting for? Yes. And I say all that to say that you need to understand what your role is there, understand what you like and don't, and have that perspective. But until you start deciding that I'm only going to put out things of a certain caliber, or I'm only going to appreciate things that are a certain way or in a certain niche, or I'm only going to up-level my ability to discern what is good or bad. It's hard to develop that level of aura.
You'll see very few people with aura that don't have any understanding of like how things go together, how things work, and culture. And that ties directly to experience, right? Because the easiest way to get that is experience in life. Moving to new places, travel, spending that time in New York, Paris, Italy, Milan, wherever it is, Tokyo. Those places are inherently full of taste.
They're full of people and generations of people that take design and take success seriously. And you get the trappings and the fallout of that. is basically spread through everyone around it.
So you begin to understand far more. So the more experience you have in the world, the more it learns into like how you can. reflect on things, make decisions, take into account different cultures, and adds to this kind of ability to have aura.
And because you'll find very few people that don't have a bunch of worldly experience or aren't currently having that worldly experience who are able to have that magnetism. And then in this bottom quadrant, we're going to have positivity. This is a super, super key one because you rarely see people that have that magnetic energy who are negative more than a little bit of the time.
They have the ability to be critical and to critique and to have high expectations, but you'll see they are always looking at What is that best result? How do I excite other people? When I'm around them, is it fun?
As a huge precursor to whether someone's going to be successful with their creative vision is if people enjoy being around them. And I learned this like the hard way in agency work. So the past, I think almost seven years now, we've had this contract engineering agency in Austin. And when we started it, I always thought people would want the best solution who can provide them the best engineering team at the best price to solve all the problems their business has. But as you begin to work and deal with clients more and more, you start to realize that actually there's another diagram there.
That is... Do you enjoy working with these people and are my problems being solved? And people will basically almost always choose enjoying working with people over problems being solved. And the perfect Venn diagram is problems being solved and enjoying working with the people.
But rarely it takes a certain type of company or person to say, I'm not going to enjoy it but they're going to solve my problem. And they're more often than not forced into that scenario. And it's a human nature thing and it's interesting but also should really impact how you think about providing your services. and your personality because you basically get a lot more people that are stoked to be around your energy than you do people that are like okay they're solving my problem i really don't like the fact that every time i walk into this meeting with them it's just like straight pedal to the metal here's what we're doing wrong have to fix it like right away even if that leads to success faster i say all that to say that that positive energy that always being excited about everyone else's projects stoking like egging them on to do better and like do the right things being the person in the group chat gassing stuff up connecting people constantly being fun to be out and about with Even the little things like tipping big and smiling at dogs or whatever it looks like actually adds up to being the type of person that other people want to follow and be around. And this is the thing I personally struggle the most because I'm inherently critical by nature.
I think most things are whack. I have the ability to self-reflect on that and note that things that I am doing are whack or not and why and then choose to do it accordingly, which is a useful skill set. But I have to basically always pull myself back from I don't want to be critical about this.
I want to make sure I have a positive nature about it because I notice the effect it has on people when I am overly critical and it does not make them want to. be a part of what I'm putting together. And up at the top we have giving.
This is one that I've been really interested in because I've always figured out the intangible, right? Like, okay, if you have taste, you have this worldly experience, you're a positive person, people want to be around you, there's something more there. Especially when it comes to the internet. You know, what separates these people that are really, like, interested in that next phase? Like...
I'll give like Daniel Dayland's a great example of like you have all that positivity you have like this you know this experience like his kind of global nature that I think really draws people to him and uh he's like relentlessly positive but then he's giving he's showing you how how he does this stuff he's like really saying hey like this is a recipe for a young person that wants to succeed and i give back i think is a big part of why people are attracted to his content i also think the huge part about why i built the following i have is i'm constantly giving value all my youtube videos my instagrams like my goal every time i sit down to write one of those is am i making people am i entertaining people are they are they laughing and finding it funny in a niche way like some jokes about marketing or pans or whatever or are they getting just a ton of value from it is it helping them shift their career or work better at their job and are they gonna be able to act on that like today not like some big intangible thing but when you continue to relentlessly give value to people all the time when you meet them in person when you see it online That is like the X factor that really propels people to always want to be around you. And I never met Virgil Abloh. but lots of my friends have or had relationships with him and they all would remark on the fact that he messaged back and messaged people like all the time he had all these group chats and whatsapps and stuff like that and was super positive with everybody and would like introduce people and it was like one of the things that they mentioned all the time was that like combination of like positivity and giving that was just inherent to what made him so special so now we're going to talk about the life plan and building your creative like i mentioned before i got to a point um a while ago where i realized i had hit some of the financial goals i had for myself as a business person right because i did focus for about seven or eight years not on Not on creative fulfillment, but on accumulating as much money and getting as high up in my career as I could.
It led to me being the president of a decently large company, having all of these businesses, my hands in all these things, but not being fulfilled. And so I did this exercise, it was inspired by my friend Zach Kravitz, who has this video he put out about it that went pretty viral. Where it's like, design your creative dream. And basically go and list out what your perfect life looks like, and all the things that it costs.
Like actually go and map out, I really want to have a G-Wagon. Here's what that costs me every month, if that actually matters to you. I want to have this house, I want to be able to live in this place, I want to be able to go on this many vacations.
I want to be able to spend this much on, X or Y, and really go down and then ask yourself that critical question of, do I really want this? Would this actually make me happy? And it's funny because you'll find interesting things about what makes you happy or not.
Some of the things that make me happy are things I didn't expect. I lived under my means for a really long time. I drove like exceedingly normal like Toyotas and stuff even when I was making like mid six figures because I really wanted to accumulate money and it mattered more to me, I thought, than experience day to day. Now I drive, I have a bunch of... Really nice cars because I really enjoy those 20 minutes every day like really make a difference to me and make me feel good of like Whipping around in my intro I've also realized I really enjoy wearing stuff that I designed.
It makes a big difference to me. I'd rather spend money on something I designed, have outfits that I was involved with all the time because you get to walk around and be like, yeah, I'm in my shit. It's actually really funny.
Those two things matter to me far more than me buying anything designer. And also, me driving those cars matter more to me than having some of that money in the bank. And that's very particular to me. That's not everybody. But when you start asking yourself these questions, they make a big difference.
So I would ask yourself, in order, where do I want to live? And that's both a location and that's a type of place that you want, which is actually a really interesting one when you get in. Because some people would say, hey, I actually want to be able to do all these other things, execute my creative vision, have some big loft, do whatever.
But I actually don't care where I am or something would be like, you know what? No matter what, I don't care what my space is like. I need to be in New York.
And it's good to kind of walk through that and walk through that with your spouse, your partner, if you have one and say, what do I want out of my living? And it's like, what vehicles do I want to drive? Do I even need a vehicle?
Right. Am I am I actually happy using? using my funds on other things and taking the bus because it doesn't matter to me at all because a lot of people will have some like mid-tame range cards because they feel like they should actually has really no bearing on their life and they're like yeah i don't know why i have a bmw you know like the entry level one just cuz and actually i could just have that four hundred dollars a month or eight hundred dollars a month back in my bank account down to like basically down to every level one of those costs. What most people find out is their life actually costs less than they think. And what matters to them is significantly different.
And to give you a couple anecdotes about where that ended for me personally, when I did that exercise, is we realized that we actually don't need a really expensive home. We live on this street right now that has a no-through traffic, has a bunch of other families. I have an eight-year-old son. He has a bunch of friends on the street. They're all kids of similar ages.
Open the garages on the weekend. They all go out and play together. And that actually, and we're basically 10 minutes from the beach. That matters more to me than having a multi-million dollar home.
million dollar like like five ten million dollar mansion or living in like the middle of LA and I actually the perfect life for me is having enough space to be able to have my studio to be able to have my office to have a house that my family enjoys and then to be able to live there like in this like more neighborhood-y thing matters way more to me than having the nicest thing once I realized that I was like oh that's actually a fixed cost it's significantly less than what I can afford and that means that that money can go into other things that are more interesting to me and it would never have gone there without having that conversation and once you map that life out you say it's gonna cost X amount a month and maybe it's more than you thought, maybe it's less than you thought. This comes into the second phase of this, which I think is really interesting for creative and entrepreneurial people, because you have all these options to make money. We're gonna walk through that, because once you have your cost list out, you go, okay, how do I actually fulfill this life?
So bucket one that everyone has is, okay, I have my job. You make some amount of money, with whatever you do day to day for most people. And then really there's this question of what do you do after that?
And it is extremely American to have a side hustle, right? Like I live in Orange County. Almost everyone I meet has like something. Either they're entrepreneurial themselves or it's like, yeah, we have a bar cart. We rent out on the weekends.
We have these two. rental properties or you know we own this piece of this pool company or yeah like i have an amazon business like almost everyone has something else and it's extremely common like especially in wealthy areas for people to kind of be engaging in and i think we have this culture of people like oh i don't want to do more after work or whatever but like you rarely achieve your dreams without that and if you're creative you actually get to build a massive you get to build the ability to then have your life where you work completely for yourself chunk by chunk in all these little entrepreneurial areas those areas are freelance doing your skill set for other people for money content there's a couple buckets of content right One is content you are creating via affiliate for TikTok shop. Like if you are creating and you are selling stuff, there is a lot of people I know making a little to a lot of money, but like some significant amount by basically making videos for TikTok shop products. So that's content bucket one.
Content bucket two is making that content for other people. Very similar to freelance. Like, hey, I actually make 20 social media videos a month for whoever.
Bucket three is getting money off of content. Like you're getting money from the creator funds on YouTube and TikTok and bonuses on Instagram, which isn't a huge amount of money, but... actually adds up a lot especially for younger folks and you're like oh i made 700 this month or 1400 this month it starts to be something legit and then there's like becoming an actual influencer and having brand deals and stuff like that so that's category two freelance category creation social media category category three is info product we are taught inherently that courses and info products are bad when in reality a lot of really successful people like spend a lot of money on them i learned tiktok by buying jimmy farley's course i just bought this um designer jamie who i like online who i use one of her like this thing she did for this brand portal or ritual i use as a reference all the time like when i'm showing people like uh working in a niche and i was and she put out like a template about proposals i was like oh you know i just want to support it i've used this stuff as a reference a lot i want to support whatever she puts out i bought some templates she had around like proposals and then i looked at it i was actually this is a better proposal template than i use i'm just going to use it and she's not like some massive social media following the template was like 65 bucks but i bet she sells a decent amount of them even if she sells 10 a month whatever it's like 650 bucks i would not be afraid to sell info products like obviously i have a couple things i do i have the cut 30 program i have these 200 report things i put together with with clayton we saw on hyper they're not a huge money generators, but it adds up, it provides value, I put work in. And if you are a creative, you have a workflow or a template or something you're proud of, or a significant look and feel, even if you don't have huge social media, but you have like an offering of a thing is a way to generate income and something to think about doing.
So you start getting into those three, those those three buckets, freelance content info. And then the last one is brand, right? I sell things on the internet or on retail or whatever it is, and I make money off them. For a lot of people brand is hard because brand is a money pit. But for most folks, I really encourage like starting a brand by being like a first order profitable.
very straightforward business. I sell hats. The guy who sells the creative department hats is a great example. He has one SKU is one visually good looking SKU.
It's an idea that seems really familiar to see a lot of these other brands that say also say creative department and have similar colors and whatnot. But he has a little spin on it. He sells one thing and is a great business. He can probably do all he's doing 17 other things.
And that's an entry level all the way to like having a full brand or having an Amazon project or doing some stuff on TikTok shop or whatever. But that is definitely the hardest, most time consuming of those four things I mentioned. But that is your toolkit and you have to pick some of them. If you want to live that creative dream life, you don't achieve it just by having your job.
You may achieve it by having one of these other things on there. And sometimes it's going to be two, but you have to pick them and you have to actually calendar and work on. So back to anecdotes on my life.
I freelanced for basically my entire executive career. I had a. Overseas developer, I had a friend who is a designer locally, and we would do websites.
We did a lot of 10 to 15k websites, relentless, basically one a month for years. And we had that sweet spot of, hey, we can do this on nights and weekends, three of us working on this. We don't need to have some big agency or anything like that.
We don't even need a separate LLC. I ran everything through mine. It's not going to overlap into our work because it's only like one project a month.
But we are all taking home a couple thousand dollars every month by doing a really specific thing and doing it well. And I was the funnel because I'm a... very social person i network very heavily i know a lot of people a lot of people would see the work i did at companies and want to work with me on something and knew that's the thing that i did and we had a whole little side freelance thing and honestly that feeling is like paid for my g-wagon you know the uh there's like i would always reserve that money for things that i wanted um and it adds up over time and you can look at me maybe we'll make it a whole business or not but like that was just one freelancing that we did over the course of several years and i have two friends who have design templates and plugins stuff on my creative market and stuff who do very well just by having like very hip stuff on there that's kind of current with the times But it's about deciding which of those you're going to do and then going after. One of the biggest things I've learned in the last few months is that for the previous decade, I just had meetings all day. I had six to eight hours of blocked out meetings every single day on my calendar.
And now I've realized when I started to not have that, that I needed that same time breakdown to be able to get things done. Half hour on this, hour to get this thing written, hour for this consulting project, two hours to put this email plan together, this recurring thing every week. I feel like most creatives need that too.
If you are saying, hey, I'm going to pursue making content, I'm going to pursue freelancing, I'm going to whatever, you need to calendar out that time. It's like, yeah, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thursdays, I've got three hour blocks at night where this is what I do. And you stick to it and you address it.
Same thing with weekends, whatever it is. And you've got to realize that your time is not really safe. And you also have to realize if you're like, oh man, I can't figure out how do I step in LLC.
If you can't figure that shit out, you need to. You need to make the jump and be able to do that. If you can't say $150 to register this entity is more important than eating out this weekend, you're also, you're not going to get it.
This is like everyone who has gone through this jump. has made those decisions at that point to be like this stuff is more important to me than whatever it is i was doing prior and you need to lock in and do that once you have your dream life outlined and you have your outline of what are the things i can do to add money into my life to be able to do it you can begin to actually align that and say i think i can make this much or my goal is to make this much off this and then begin to start to piece together how you align to those things and you'll start to realize that if you're willing to look at it like it doesn't need to be done tomorrow that i want to be able to achieve this in three years or four years or i'm going to kind of piece by piece put these goals together for myself that it all becomes really attainable. But if you never put that framework down of what do I actually want and then what am I going to do to achieve it and then here's my calendar time to do it, it probably won't happen.
And so literally, if you don't watch anything else I've ever do or talk about, just go do that. Plan out that life. Plan out where you're going to get the money to do it.
Put the time on your calendar and then say this is a three-year thing. This is a four-year thing because if you say, oh, that's too long or I need to figure out something else. That always needs to be easier than this.
It's not. The answer is always going to be there at the end of the rainbow once you do the work. So just go suffer through it. through it.
Because guess what? When you get to that dream scenario and you have the loft you want and you're wearing the stuff that you designed and you bring in X amount of money from freelance, you're going to feel amazing about yourself. You're going to be like, this is the life that I wanted and I went and got.
And there's honestly no better feeling than that. And then once you realize all these things are achievable, you're just going to keep doing that for the rest of your life. You're going to start being like, why wouldn't I start this business? Why wouldn't I attempt to do X or Y? Because I know I have the framework to act on it.
So from there, quick note on mind states that are really important. important. I'm not like some, I've never seen me doing like mental model videos or shit like that, but I am going to talk to you about things I think are critical to make sure they're like, are stamped in your mind for all time and tattooed on your body. If you're one of those kinds of people, the first is the classic.
Like if you want to be poor forever, start tomorrow. If you watch this video and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna get to that next week. This is part of the problem, right?
The answer is like, after this video, like start writing this shit down, do that shit tonight. If you just act tonight, you act right now. You just knock the stuff off the list. It is going to happen.
You're the person that makes it happen. Once you turn into that person, everything changes. And the second is live in the present, visualize the future. I do a lot of things now so I can enjoy what I do daily. Before I was recording this video, I was surfing.
I'm a kid at the beach. Loved every second of it. Like I mentioned, I love driving around the cars I am.
I love making content. I love talking to people. I love designing things.
Every single thing in my life stokes me up. I am stoked for the present. And even when I was working at a company, like I liked the job I had prior. Worked on content, worked with retail, worked on product development. We were doing cool collaborations.
I was trying and I was, I liked the success. I liked seeing the numbers go up. Like, enjoy the present. but also visualize the future. That planning part is important, especially if you have a spouse too.
It's a plan of what matters to y'all. Like what's important? What do you think is achievable? And to like visualize that and put that on the board. Because if you go put the mansion on the board, like I used to have the mansion on the dream board.
And then when I actually considered it enough, I was like, actually, that's not what I want. Take it off the board. But if you don't, you visualize, like what you visualize ends up being often like what you get, whether you actually want it or not. And so I'm always visualizing what does that amazing scenario look like? Like I'm about to do ComplexCon here in a couple weeks.
I'm debuting it for... or do the booth for valuable and i'm visualizing that being an amazing experience and what not going well i'm not agonizing about what if it all goes wrong and the third is like every day has massive incredible value right you can get so much closer to your dreams every single day than you think you can if you just act on that day if like that night hey guess what instead of netflix we do x and y with him or say it's a hundred times like if you just do that action like you get there and you'll see these people like i'm now surrounded in my life by people that are all like that where we're all texting each other at midnight or whatever being like well i just finished or like oh man we're shopping this thing Because you just realize that like it just gives you so much energy and value and aura, for lack of a better term, because those people attract other people like that. Guess what other people like that are like? They're successful. They do things together.
And it all starts by being a person that other people start to know like, yeah, that person grinds. they get after. And then third is Pomodoro tasks. So if you're up for the Pomodoro, because you're setting a timer, like 15 minutes to be able to, you know, concentrate exactly 30 minutes, concentrate exactly on one thing, don't do anything else, no distractions or anything until that timer is done. I'm a huge fan of this, like as a theory, because I think a lot of people get caught into hairy tasks.
If you're like, I want to start a freelance business, you're like, God, it's overwhelming. I can't think about it. But if you break it down into what I call Pomodoro tasks, things you can complete in a 15 to 30 minute period, all of a sudden, everything becomes easier. So let's take that start a business example where you start to go like, Hey, I need to search for names for my business. I need to figure out how to register an LLC inside my state.
I need to find a template for articles of organization. I need to get a domain. I need to decide where I want to host my domain. I need to set up a Squarespace account. I need to set up an email account on ConvertKit.
You know, like, you begin breaking it down to those tasks, like even email setup, where it's like, all right, I need to get the account. I need to outline what I want to do for automation. I need to connect my domain.
That is way more achievable to say, here's this list of seven things, each one of which takes 15 to 30 minutes. Then to just do, here's this one big hairy thing. And then once you get those 15 to 30, you go back to that calendar and you go, what days can I actually do that? Or what times do I have to do it?
And you put it in the calendar and you get it done when you say you're going to get it done. And all of a sudden, your life seems to like snap into focus and you're doing everything you've ever wanted to do. That's the end of my motivational speech. The last thing we're going to talk about is a toolkit you need to basically make anything happen. I feel like we're exiting the era of...
Pure specialists, like I'm just a designer, I'm just a videographer, whatever. Entering the era where you have like a core specialty, but you have a bunch of other things around it that enable you to be dangerous. So first things out of the way, the most boring things everyone should be able to get the basic idea to understand is one is like accounting 101. P&L, the balance. balance sheet, how to make a business that makes profit, what are the costs of goods sold, how do I have a basic idea of taxes.
This is far easier than most people think it is, but basically people don't know it unless they have to have a reason to know it, and I would just get slightly dangerous on that. Second in a similar vein is Meta Ads Manager. understanding how to set up ads, how to set up instant form.
What's an ASC campaign? How to load in new creative? What is ROAS? What's the cost of customer acquisition? How do I format creative in different styles?
You have to be amazing at understanding the basics of how it works, gives you the ability to go like test things and expand things that once you have it. And I would highly recommend putting yourself in whatever scenario you are at work or with your own side project. You'll spend a little bit of money to figure out and be somewhat dangerous at that.
I probably mentioned before, but I'm in like a group for this called Meta Ads at Scale. Because I am, having run ads for years on my own projects and managed teams that run millions of dollars in ads, I still want to be just as on it as possible because it's such a crucial skill. The third is use of CapCut and understanding how to quickly edit and make videos and have them look good and have good-looking captions and stuff, which is something you can learn completely off of YouTube. Then we have design and basic design and understanding a little bit about layouts and grids and typography and being able to make anything you do look a little bit better and just basically get an MVP together, whether it's a landing page or an email blast or a promotional flyer or whatever it is. We'll actually end up...
saving you a ton of time versus whatever whack stuff you do prior and it's easier than ever with like the default templates in Canva or anywhere else but then we have like the interesting things that are happening right now where a lot is happening in technology where basically code is being commodified through through AI so if you look at like v0 cursor replet Claude and you understand like how to prompt a bit of how each of those work you've experimented with some of those idea if you Want to get really deep into any of those or just trying to find a way to nerd out now, like those are good places to be because there are people who are really into that right now. Like all the smart people I know who haven't like hit a win yet are spending a lot of time with those tools, which is a sign for me. that everyone's saying, hey, this is where the ball is going. I want to be really good at it.
And I would be recommending doing the same exact things if I were. And all that to say that like that constant expansion mindset of like, I'm going to get better at this. I'm going to be dangerous enough at this thing. All contributes back to that like initial aura and experience concept, right?
The more of these things you have, the more people are like, man, like, oh, that guy has a complete understanding of like how shell companies work. Or, oh, they're able to do like an app, no code. And you're able to kind of show that off or tell that story.
The more universal you are at those things, the more respect you get from other people, the more confidence you have in yourself, the easier it is for you to bring your ideas into reality, which is a lot of what having a fulfilling, creative life is about. Because you start as a little baby with all these ideas. You don't know how to bring them out. And then you'll start to bring them out. They'll be bad.
You start to get better at it. Then you start to get good enough that you can actually do the creative part of your ideas. Now you're like, oh, I actually need to do the business part of the ideas.
And then it's like, hey, I need to be able to do the business part of my ideas and to be able to do the distribution part of the ideas. And, you know, it's the content side of it. And then once you understand how all those work, now you can manage.
Now you can be like, I'm going to get a person I know they're competent to do X and Y because I know how it works. And you begin to scale out underneath that. And that, in my opinion, is the creative way.
And it allows us, when you have all those different skill sets, to look at all these phases of your career and be like, you know what? I want to work for the next six years in Portugal. And the only really way I can do that is if I have something I can freelance remotely at.
But guess what? I'm excellent at, you know, I learned how to do cap cut edits. And I'm starting to work for a travel firm that really needs extra Y. Like, there are...
Like so many of those skill sets, once you get some applicability of, can allow you to move one way or the other. That can allow you to freelance through this way or that way. Or be able to navigate through the MVP of a product or a creative idea that is like extremely quick. I know I do a lot of like super tactical content.
Like how to develop a brand strategy. I do this exercise. It's a little bit more intangible, but I think it's really important just because there is no roadmap. I'll say this again and again in my videos.
There's no roadmap for creative success. There's no roadmap for creative careers. Those are changing in front of our eyes. I happen to be at this midpoint where I've had a bunch of career experience, but still want to have other. other arcs that come out of that.
And also where like, I enjoy making content and talking about it where I'm trying to share as much of about that as possible, that hopefully like it has, has some benefit that's there. So if you have any questions about this, please let me know. I am doing a new Tik TOK series where I do like extended yaps.
Basically I'm doing like a captain's log where I talk about what's happening in my day, different kind of challenges, really specifics about like creative work that I'm doing three or four times a week on Tik TOK. So feel free to ask questions there and I will, I will hit those kind of in that like more candid format. So. Thanks again, and I'll be back.