Author: Dan Blank

So my team and I have been trying to figure out how to use Facebook ads effectively, and this past week, we gave up. But perhaps not for the reason you think.

YES, we did find it difficult to identify a campaign that met our goals. I have been studying others doing a similar thing, including Bryan Harris’ public Facebook ad strategy. Bryan is really smart, and has been working at this again and again to solve it. And he is frustrated with it. Now, I know he will keep at it, and in doing so, work through the challenge to reach his goal. But looking at the scale of his effort and how many challenges he is working through is not motivating me to try harder!

But the other big reason we are giving up on Facebook ads? It’s just not my voice. I have been studying Facebook ads, and I tend to find that they over-promise easy success, six-figure sales, and loads of free resources. The voice in which most of these ads are communicated is vastly different from the voice I try to craft with my audience.

I don’t want to show you specific examples (I have loads of screenshots), because it is not my goal to “call people out,” on sales tactics that don’t resonate with me. Those tactics work for those people, which makes me happy for them. But it’s not the tone I want to set for WeGrowMedia.

In this process, my team of Diane and Leah and I have lots of conversations around not just WHAT we want, but HOW we want to achieve it.

What is the voice of WeGrowMedia? Who do I love working with? How do I like working with them? What kinds of breakthroughs do they have when we work together? Why? These sorts of questions.

I was reminded of this while listening to a review of the movie Mad Max: Fury Road. The point that was made is how simple and linear the movie is. The “what” of it is: drive on this road. Drive back. That is the entire movie. Did I spoil it for you? NO! Because it is the experience of the movie — the HOW of the storytelling — that makes the movie as incredible as it is. By the way, the movie is incredible. (This is the review, but with a warning: it contains lots of curses and movie spoilers.)

So as you seek out ways to develop your body of work — to grow your audience — you have choices not just around WHAT you do, but HOW you do it.

Your voice directs the actions that you take.

News Flash: Creative Work is Difficult

This week I saw some photos shared by my friend, novelist Miranda Beverly-Whittemore. She is working on revisions on her next novel, and posted this status update:

When Miranda shared a photos of her revision process, fellow novelist and friend Tammy Greenwood chimed in:

It reminded me of something I have been thinking a lot about, which is success is difficult. Especially in creative fields.

Now, you may be saying, “Duh, Dan. Of course it is.” But recently, I have been surveying loads of course offerings and webinars that people are selling. The core messages I keep seeing again and again are:

1. It’s easier than you think.
2. I have the secret.
3. Sign up here.

People are literally saying this, including people I respect. They promise big success, huge sales, huge earnings, a big audience, and present it as “easy.”

I can tell you, it’s not. Success as a creative professional is difficult. Perhaps more so than you think.

Let’s go back to Miranda from above. She has spent more than a year writing and editing this novel, and is still now saying, “This is difficult. Revision is difficult.” Miranda, more so than many other authors, is living the dream:

• She is a New York Times Bestselling author, with 3 previously published books.
• She has been a professional author for more than 10 years.
• She writes full time, and has an incredibly supportive family who not only work hard to give her time and space to write, but are wonderful sounding boards for her works in progress. Like, her family is amazing on so many levels. (Hi, Miranda’s family.)
• Her new book is being published by the same house (Crown) who published her last one, and they were incredibly supportive of her.
• Her editor is, well, the woman who edited Gone Girl. Yes, that Gone Girl. Millions and millions of copies sold Gone Girl.
• Miranda is confident, she has a system by which she writes, and is disciplined about it.

And yet, it’s difficult. I wrote about Miranda’s journey with her latest novel back in May. Why am I providing yet another update? Because this is the stuff we gloss over. Next year, when her novel June is released, you may have a vague memory of her last book having done well, and hopefully, you will be hearing about how June is doing well. But in between those two milestones was an incredible amount of hard work, frustration, confusion, and grit.

The “Easy” Sell

I share Miranda’s story because it illustrates why I bristle when I see people offering sales pitches for courses that say things such as, “Find success twice as quickly, with very little effort, and have huge sales!”

I mean, can you imagine walking up to a successful musician, artist, author, or designer, and asking them about their road to success, and them saying, “Actually Dan, it was way easier than I thought it would be. It happened really fast, even as I spent less and less time working on it.”

As someone who offers courses to creative professionals, I have found myself tempted to make it all sound so easy because that is what people want to hear.

But it isn’t. It’s difficult. It takes discipline. It forces you to confront so many aspects of your identity, your boundaries, your goals. You have to negotiate with everyone in your life, catch a bunch of lucky breaks, and even then, 1,000 things can still get in the way.

Does that mean there aren’t strategies and tactics by which to follow? Of course not. That IS what is in my courses. In a course I’m running right now, students are reporting incredible milestones that they are reaching.

So often, success seems to elude us. As we observe others and gain experience, we begin to discover what works.

And all through this process, we have to make decisions about HOW we want to achieve success. That our voice and the voice of those we want to reach is the core connecting factor.

What has your experience been in finding success with your creative work?
Thanks.
-Dan

How do you get more creative work done? This is a topic I obsess about — helping creative professionals find a way to do more of the work they love. Today, I want to share three examples of what this looks like, and how it is often counterintuitive.

FOCUS ON YOUR SUPPORT SYSTEM, NOT HACKS, TRICKS, AND APPS

A recent episode of This American Life profiled how to make better cars by giving us a history lesson in quality control in an auto factory. The story focused on a single factory and how other companies tried to get ahead by copying the efficient design of a specific factory, and why doing so didn’t work:

“When he realized how much of the factory system happened off of the factory floor, he asked why Toyota had been so open in showing their operations? They recognized we were asking all of the wrong questions. They were all focused on the assembly line. The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that take place in the organization.”

When you just copy the factory floor, but miss out on the rest of the support system, your cars still suck. You fill them with low-quality parts, and your workforce outside of the factory floor — designers, leadership, etc. — are not equipped to attend to quality in other ways.

Too often, I see creative professionals thinking that the best way to get more done and be happier is to add one more productivity app to their life. As if adding this additional function to a broken system will somehow fix it.

It won’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of tools — I use loads of them in my daily workflow. But they are only added on top of one where I focus on core resources first. Let me describe two of them below…

SLEEP MATTERS, BUT WE NEVER TALK ABOUT IT

Get more sleep. Seriously.

Sleep is critical for your physical and mental health. Do you feel stretched to the seams, like your life will burst at any moment? Get. More. Sleep.

Some people consider busyness to be their badge of honor. They show off because their identity is rewarded for being perceived as “busy,” which somehow translates to “essential,” or even “productive”.

That’s a lie.

Yet, consider these two statements:

• Person A: “I’m so swamped. I’ve been working off of 5 hours of sleep for weeks now.”
• Person B: “I’m feeling sluggish today. I only got 8 hours of sleep last night, usually I average 9.”

That first person seems really important, right?

I’m midway through teaching my course, Fearless Work, and had an incredible conversation with one of the students this week. She’s a writer, and was telling the group about her struggle to get her writing done. There was lots of context, and somewhere in the middle, she mentioned she gets 4 hours of sleep per night because she has restless legs syndrome.

This floored me. I went back to it: “Only 4 hours per night?!”

To me, nothing else in the context mattered. If she is only getting 4 hours of sleep per night, that means that her core support system is fractured. No app can magically solve for this.

So we talked about sleep, about how she can proactively address this issue. That if her only takeaway from the course was to go from 4 hours of sleep to 5, that means the course gave her 25% more rest, which is critical for her physical and mental health, to her energy levels, to feeling sane. And all of this filters back down to her creative work.

Too often, we focus on time and money as core resources, but energy and rest matter much more.

SOMETIMES SUPPORT MEANS TRADING DIFFERENT KINDS OF RESOURCES

This year, I added a second member to my team. I am excited to publicly welcome Leah Shoemaker to team WeGrowMedia. She joined in early summer when we were in the middle of three back-to-back course launches at the time, and she jumped right in.

I’ll say this: Leah is incredible. She has been focused on graphic design, and I have been blown away by her skills, her ideas, and what an incredible pleasure she is to work with.

She is based in Canada, which rounds out the team geographically; I’m based in New Jersey, and Diane Krause (who has been with me for more than a year) is in Texas. None of us have ever met in person, yet we interact every day.

Now since this post is about resources, it’s worth noting that the decision to hire Diane and Leah comes at an expense. It takes resources to pay them, to work with them. But what I have found is that this is an exchange of resources. The money and time I invest comes back to me multi-fold in a wonderful team energy, plus the practical work that they do way better than I ever could!

Too often, we covet all of our resources. We spend days, weeks, months, and even years, calculating any financial investment, never taking action.

When I began hiring in 2014, I knew I needed to invest in skills: my own ability to work with and develop a team, and invest in others. Like all small businesses, I have very finite resources, and a thousand things I can spend money on each month. But paying them feels incredible, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do so. Having them in my life makes everything better.

They are my support system in many ways. And it feels wonderful to do anything I can to support them in how they want to grow — to provide resources to them.

Many creative professionals I speak with juggle 1,000 things a day. Their job, their family, their physical and mental health, their creative work, and so much else. In doing so, it is easy to let their support systems diminish. To “steal” time by robbing themselves of sleep. To “save” money by not hiring a team. To focus on adding one new “tool” to their life, not rethinking core processes.

But these deeper things are critical. How do you focus on your support system (however you define it), despite juggling 1,000 things each day?
-Dan

We live in a pretty crowded world, right? You feel constantly inundated with messages, ideas, information, and opportunities.

If you are a writer, or artist, or musician, or other creative professional, you are probably aware that your ideal audience is inundated as well. Browsing Amazon.com for books, or Etsy.com for art, can make you feel as though your work will be lost among the crowd.

Which is why I focus so much on clarity of your vision, and clarity of your message when trying to reach your audience. Today, I want to share one small example of why this is important, and how to address it for yourself.

While paying for groceries at my local Whole Foods, I noticed this on the wall:

I was taken aback by how many “core values” they listed. It seemed like a kitchen-sink approach, meant to offend no one. Every worthwhile cause was listed here.

The issue with that: when you say everything, you say nothing. Core values are meant to provide direction to staff and partners. They should lead to clarity, which defines actions on a daily basis.

Whole Foods listed 8 core values, and I would argue 13 main concepts are being communicated here:

1. Advance environmental stewardship
2. Promote health of our stakeholders
3. Educate people how to eat healthy
4. Create win-win partnerships with suppliers
5. Support team member happiness
6. Support team member excellence
7. Create wealth through profits
8. Create wealth through financial growth
9. Support local communities
10. Support global communities
11. Delight our customers
12. Nourish our customers
13. Sell high quality natural and organic products

All I could think was how this list provides ZERO direction, ZERO focus.

I wrote about this several years back in a post titled Intention vs Action: How Businesses Connect With Customers.

After I visited Whole Foods, I stopped at my local Wells Fargo bank. I was greeted by every employee who came within 15 feet of me, a common occurrence there. While making my transaction, I noticed large letters on the wall behind the counter, which read:

“We have one very powerful business rule. It is concentrated in one word: courtesy.”
— Henry Wells, 1864

While I’m not an advocate for large banks, I have to say that my personal experience walking into that branch over the course of years has always been exactly this. Does that mean I’m a Wells Fargo fanboy? Nope. Because a simple Google search on this quote will illustrate to you that folks find standard banking practices (including those at Wells Fargo) to be frustrating.

But that isn’t my point. Do I like it that my bank has some kind of overdraft fee above $20? Nope, I don’t like that. Do I like that when I walk into the bank, everyone I see nearly falls over themselves to help me? YES. That I like.

Why? Because it’s rare. I simply don’t experience that in many places I walk into. It was neat to see how the quote on the wall was directly demonstrated through the actions of their employees.

And that IS my point. Honing your vision should be about communicating clarity and trust. It should have a focused audience, and should drive ACTION.

Whole Foods posted a bunch of nice words on the wall. But how does an employee balance these competing needs in a situation where a customer has a problem:

1. Be happy
2. Create profit
3. Delight
4. Promote health
5. Create a win-win partnership
6. Be local (but also global)

How does a Wells Fargo employee know what to do? Simple: “Be courteous.”

Does that mean they can break company rules, even ones I find annoying? Nope. But it means they can be courteous while addressing my annoyance and explaining their policies.

Let me give you an example. During my visit to Wells Fargo, when I saw the quote on the wall, I asked if I could take a photo of it. The person behind the counter said she was sorry, but it’s bank policy that customers can’t take photos. The manager came over and politely explained this policy, and how it came into being. I was made to understood it via a friendly face and nice conversation. Their policy wasn’t merely stated to me. It was communicated to me.

I then asked if the manager could take the photo for me, and he again explained the rule whereby he can’t take photos either, and how that policy came to be.

What struck me was that even when saying no, they lived up to their core value.

That is the power of clarity. Their value isn’t “make me happy,” it is be courteous. Through that value, they’re directed in how to handle any situation.

For busy creative professionals trying to have their voice heard in a crowded marketplace, I often hear the advice “say NO” in order to focus your time and message.

What I have been considering this week is how one’s vision for their work — how it extends to their audience — helps identify not just what you do, but how you do it. And that all of this starts with focus and clarity.

Of having a clear goal, a clear vision, and a clear intention on who you hope to reach.

And then, how you will communicate and create experiences around that vision.

In the Wells Fargo example above, the simple focus on “courtesy” provides intention for their thousands of employees. Let’s face it, each individual employee has a TINY amount of power when compared to the enormity of the bank’s size, rules and practices. That simple word, “courtesy,” allows them to have the power in the way they take actions.

This week, I also listened to an episode of This American Life where they shared the story of a manager of the games at a small theme park. During the episode, the point was made that this is a pretty crappy job. The guy who manages games is running the least profitable section of the park, the least popular section of the park, and one where you have to manage 100 teenagers who actually run the games.

But this guy — the manager of the games at this theme park — loves his job. The entire This American Life profile of him focused on the outlandish ways he tries to make the job fun for himself, and fun for his employees. He is incredibly goofy, and the result is, the people he manages love their jobs.

Much like the singular mission statement from above, this manager focuses on fun. Because that is the one thing he has the power to control. Not the ticket prices, the water fountains, the cost of games, their placement, etc. All he can control on a given day is the spirit and focus with which he does his job and manages his team.

Do you have a singular vision for how you help others experience your creative work? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!
-Dan

I understand how difficult it is to make your creative work a priority. You want your voice heard, but it gets drowned out in the process of attending to everyday responsibilities.

The result? Your art, your craft, your creative work is left undone. Ignored. Abandoned.

I hear this from so many people. Which is why I have decided to be more honest than ever in sharing specific strategies and tactics that will ultimately be the most effective ways to make your creative work a priority.

To ensure your voice is heard.

To that end, I am so excited to release my newest course, Fearless Work. This course offers you everything I know about:

1. Prioritizing what matters
2. Working smarter
3. Making creative habits stick
4. Managing your physical and mental health in the process

This course is the culmination of my own work — working one-on-one with hundreds of creative professionals, running my own successful business for the past five years, and a lifetime of creative projects.

This course is filled with:

• Detailed lessons (more than 100 pages!)
• Video walk-throughs (dozens of them!)
• Worksheets that get you started (more than 20!)

Here is a peek at the online classroom:

And here is a sample of some of the (very fun) worksheets:

Fearless Work was born from real work with real creative professionals — in the trenches — and addresses the reality of what it takes to do the work that matters most to you. This is the behind-the-scenes stuff that you rarely get to see.

My team and I have been working hard on Fearless Work for months, and I couldn’t be more proud of the results. It’s our hope that this new course will help you gain momentum in building the creative life you want.

You can find out full details here, but please note that registration ends on Monday, July 27th:

http://FearlessWork.com

Thank you!
-Dan

My team and I have been working on something I am incredibly excited about. I won’t be announcing it just yet, but I wanted to share a bit of the “why” behind it, and give you a teaser.

Every single day I talk to people who are trying to find more time to do their creative work. I have to say, I have spent most of my life in these conversations.

When I was a kid, I went to art school, and growing up, I did illustration, photography, poetry, sculpture, pop-up books, music, writing, a newspaper cartoon, trained to be a radio DJ, published a zine, did design work, and eventually I became an entrepreneur working with writers and creative professionals.

I have been lucky to have my life filled with wonderful creative people doing deeply meaningful work.

But there is another side to their experience. The struggle of finding the time and energy for it, especially as we grow older and life’s demands become more complex.

I created a video that shares what I have heard in talking to creatives about their challenges.

I want to be honest about the struggle that so many people go through in trying to make their work. I don’t want to ever diminish how profound it is, nor make the solutions seem like they are magic tricks — a simple pill that makes everything easier. This is deep stuff, but critically important to address.

Here is a video introduction:

I would also like to invite you to be the first to know when my new project launches. To sign up, click here.

Thank you.
-Dan