Real Answers for Creatives w/ Chris Do | Ep 459

0:13Chris Do: This question comes in from Greg Gamino. He asks, why is everyone in the creative industry pivoting to teaching and coaching instead of doing the work? Am I falling behind by staying a practitioner? Very good question, Greg. Let's try and break this thing down in a couple different ways. Is everyone trying to become a teacher and coach? Well, I'm not sure about that, but it might appear that way because it feels like they're noisier and they're making their presence known online. So you could be over indexing on who is actually doing this. But here's the thing that I find. If you're in your career and you are making a lot of progress and you have this experience and you have a body of work that represents high quality work for great clients, there's an evolution to this.

0:57Chris Do: Just like how you start out as a designer, become an art director, and ultimately become a creative director or owner of a company, we tend to evolve. And so when we've been doing something for so long and we feel like we could do it in our sleep, there tends to be this question where people naturally come up to you and say, how do you do what you do? Which a business model then emerges, which is, what if I were paid to teach other people how to do what I do because it has come easy to me and I've become quite successful at it? So there's nothing wrong with that. that just seems to be the natural progression of things.

1:29Chris Do: And if you are one of those people and you feel called to serve, called to teach, I think that's a pretty cool thing to do. Speaking for myself, it's one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in my life. I found who I was, I found my voice, my identity, and my confidence when I was able to teach what I know to other people. It's a good test if you've really mastered something. And if you're not doing this, I would say don't worry about this. There's nothing wrong with doing the work and becoming really good at craft. Actually, in this age of AI, people do really respect and admire people who are good at their craft.

2:03Chris Do: So there's no need for you to feel like you're falling behind. And there's nothing wrong with being a quote-unquote practitioner of creative services. In fact, it's really admirable. There are some popular opinions around there that talk about why tradespeople are AI-proof. Because AI tends not to be focused on those kinds of things, like plumbing, being an electrician, or doing finished carpentry or cabinet making. Those things seem to be pretty safe. We still want someone, I think, to mow our lawn and to take care of our garden, to walk our dogs, at least for now. And I don't think certain crafts are going to be in jeopardy based on those same reasons and observations.

2:42Chris Do: I hope that answers your question, Greg. Thanks for submitting. Okay, the next question comes from Pooja Marwa. How do I go about having a brand for my passion project? Do I fold it into the professional brand I already have? And so for context, Pooja has written a book for Indian teenagers and the difference between how the world is versus how teens growing up in India are. She has a goal of being on Oprah's book club. Those are very high goals to have. And so she talks about what the obstacle is for her. She genuinely doesn't know how to market the book. Neither do I, to be honest. despite having an A-list publisher and she's not getting a ton of help from them.

3:24Chris Do: And number two, she says, I'm not a brand as an author yet. So my positioning is on my core work, but I believe that I don't need to box my passion and profession separately. I believe this is totally true. So really what you're asking here, as far as I can ascertain, is you have a book and you want to be able to market the book. So welcome to the club. We all have things we want to talk about. This is going to be helped by how you've been showing up prior to asking the world for help. So if you've served people, if you've given people a value and you build some kind of relationship, a community around the kinds of things that you normally talk about as your professional brand, then asking them for some help to support you in this book that you're writing and publishing should not be so hard.

4:07What I would do is as soon as possible,

4:09Chris Do: sit down and kind of figure out what a strategy for a book launch is. Luckily for you, there are many examples of successful book launches. I don't pretend to be an expert at this. But what I would do in your case right now is I would probably go on to an AI platform and said, based on how books reach the New York Times bestsellers list, what are the things I need to know? What benchmarks do I need to hit? And help me design a custom plan that is four, five, six months long, helping to sell pre-orders of the book itself. I think this is really important. And then tell it what your constraints are from budget, from time and resources, and then let it devise a plan for you.

4:49Chris Do: A lot of people overlook at how good AI is at knowing certain things. And if we just learn to ask the machine a very specific question, given its constraints and our goals and some of our obstacles, it should be able to come up with a really good solution for you. But if it were me and I was launching a book, what I would be doing is very much be building in public, talking about what it is I'm doing and when it's going to be launched so I can build up as much anticipation and hype for it as possible. The other thing I would do is make sure in every post, I would be leaving a link for people to go and pre-order the book.

5:21So what I want to do is I want to share my passion, my insights, my opinions with people so that they get a sense of who I am and the kinds of things I'm super passionate about. So I'm trying to build interest. If you look at the way movies are marketed, they drop little teasers. And as we closer and closer to the launch date, more and more of the film is actually revealed. Plot points, but of course, no spoilers. So what I would do if I were you, if it were 20 chapters long, I would try to pull snippets from each chapter and be consistently talking about it, giving value to people, building anticipation.

5:55And don't be afraid that you're giving away the best stuff. You need to give away the best stuff because in that, they're going to be receiving the information saying to themselves, these are excellent ideas. You've got me thinking about things in a way I've not thought about before, which is a good thing. I can't wait for your book to come out

6:10Chris Do: because I want to read the rest of it. Now we're worried that we're giving away the entire book, But I promise you, no one's reading every single post, watching every single video, such that once it reached and they're going to say to themselves, well, now that you gave everything away, I don't want to read the book anymore. In fact, oftentimes when I hear something important, something profound, something that's moved me, an insight, a framework from someone, I just go and automatically order the book with no intention of reading it because I want to support the author. They gave me something valuable and the least that I can do is go buy their book.

6:41Chris Do: And if I love the book, I'll go and recommend it to other people. There's also something that you can do about bulk buying in terms of activating your audience, saying, I would love for you not just to buy one, but for you to buy 30 for a classroom, for your team, for parents or groups or communities. And if you are a public speaker, sometimes you can also ask the event organizer to pay you your fee. And if they can't pay the full fee, ask them to buy some percentage of books and pre-orders. This will help you and it'll help to get the word out there. The other thing I would do is send advanced reader copies to people that are influential and ask them to review the book if they feel so inclined.

7:17Chris Do: Every once in a while, you're going to get somebody who reads the book and has a moment with it, and they're going to share it organically. You're not paying them, and they can say whatever they want. And maybe one of them hits and creates all this demand for your book itself. The last thing I would do is try to get on as many podcasts or media platforms as possible, having people interview you and talk about the book. These are pretty standard approaches on how you build hype and interest in your book itself. I hope this is helpful. Once again, I'm not an expert at book launches because I've only had one book self-published and I'll let you know when I know more.

7:51Chris Do: Hope that helps. Okay, this next question comes from Anonymous Submission. And the question is, how do longtime business partners realign their goals when their personal lives are pulling them in opposite directions? So this is two people who have been working together for 20 plus years, and they both have different commitments and personal obligations. One person has a teenage daughter who's going away to college, so they want to spend as much time with them. And the other person has recently become the primary caretaker of an elderly parent whose health is declining. And so what are they supposed to do?

8:27Now, when you've been working together with someone for this long, you know you've gotten through a lot of stuff in the past and you need to be confident in the strength of your friendship and your partnership that you can get through some of these difficult conversations. I think the best thing to do is come together and have a really open and honest conversation. I would probably start with we both have personal obligations and commitments that we want to honor and we want to be good people in our personal lives, not just in our business lives. And so So because that's the case, what do we want to agree to do?

9:00Chris Do: And how do we become recommitted to the work that we need to do so that our priorities are aligned and no one feels resentful of the other person doing too much or too little? I think this is a really important conversation to have. So you can have some ground rules to say, we need to put X number of hours of work or be always available during this period of time, while respecting that there might be some flexibility for moments when someone has to take care of someone, either their daughter or their elderly parent. I think that's the most human thing to do. I'm not quite sure where the friction comes in because you've found a way to work together for so long, 28 plus years.

9:39Chris Do: why this one feels so special and different. I mean, all our lives evolve. People get older. People are leaving the home or people are going to be in a state of decline in terms of their health. And so we want to spend time with those people because at the end of the day, you don't want to have a successful business and an unsuccessful personal life. It can't come at the cost of your family. And I think that's really important for you to be able to define clear boundaries and create flexibility where you are allowed to do what you need to do. And there's different systems I'm sure you can invent in terms of having certain cards where one of you needs to be 100 % at work while someone else is dealing with something very personal.

10:19Chris Do: I think Brene Brown has a story about how her and her husband have to always be 100 % in their marriage. And so sometimes when they're having a bad day or they're struggling a lot, they're going to tell their partner, I'm 30 % today and I need you to bring in the other 70%. So they're very clear in their communication. I think this is a wonderful thing to let everybody know where are you at energetically? And so the other person doesn't have to guess and they can fill in the gaps. So the other person can say, I can hold down the fort. I can run the business. I can do the client meeting or I can lead the team while you're having a moment where you need to deal with something.

10:58I think that's the best way to handle this. Hope that helps.