To kick off the day, we'll start with the opening keynote. And I'd like to introduce the moderator for the opening keynote, Karen Brennan.  As many of you know, Karen has a very special connection with the Scratch conference. She really led the organization of the first Scratch conference 10 years ago, and then for several others in the years following that. She's now a professor at Harvard Ed School, where she leads the Scratch Ed team. And her team led a couple of workshops yesterday, so I'm sure a lot of you got a chance to interact with them yesterday, and have interacted online in all sorts of different ways. So with that, I'd like to introduce and welcome Karen Brennan. Good morning, everybody. So let me tell you a little bit about how this session is going to be structured. Austin is going to give a 30-minute talk, and then he and I are going to have a conversation for the rest of the time. So some of you may not already be familiar with Austin, so I wanted to give you a little bit of sense of my connection, how I came to know about Austin-Clean's work. So as Mitch mentioned, I'm a professor at Harvard University, and at Harvard, I teach a course about creativity. Several years ago, I found myself in my office with one of my students, and we were having a conversation about her course project, and she was on her way out the door, and she sort of very casually says, oh, who helps you think about creativity? And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not an out-the-door question. I'm like, come back. Have a seat. Let's have a conversation about that. It's like, first of all, that's a gorgeous question. Who helps you think about creativity? Oh, my word. That's just fabulous. And three groups of people immediately came to mind, I thought, of kids. And they're just passion for imaginative play. They really helped me think about creativity. Teachers and their commitment to cultivating the cultures of creativity is my second bucket. And then the third large group is my academic inspirations, Mitch Resnick, being certainly in that first and foremost in that category, his mentor, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, Edith Ackerman, John Piaget. I started rattling off this list. And then naturally, I turned the tables and said to her, who helps you think about creativity? And she paused, and she said, I'll return with an answer in one week. I was like, I was intrigued. That felt like a big, dramatic reveal. So a week later, we found ourselves in my office. And I said, OK, it's time to let me know. And she slowly unzipped her backpack and handed me these two books, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Cleon and Show Your Work by Austin Cleon. She's like, do you know Austin Cleon? I was like, I'm not yet. But apparently, I'm going to. And these two books have been such a creative security blanket for me. Whenever I'm feeling uncertain or doubting myself or I'm feeling really stuck, I turn to these books and I just feel better. I feel reoriented. I feel grounded again in creative practice. So when Mitch asked me to organize a keynote session, I knew two things right away. One, I really wanted the focus to be about creativity, because that is one of the things that I think is so special about scratch in the world in this cultural moment is the commitment to creativity. And second, I wanted to connect you to Austin Cleon.  And I hope he helps you too. Thank you. Austin. Wow. Hey, y'all. So I grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio. And there's a point to that. And I've lived in Texas for 11 years now. So sometimes when I come to Boston, I'm like, why is everyone so angry at me? Right? But my trip has been the opposite of that this time. I feel so welcomed. And this is such a great room. And I can really feel the energy. When we were talking earlier, it's obvious that you found your people, right?  And I think as a creative person, that is someone who's interested in things.  And so I'm really happy to be spending this time with you. So thank you for having me. Thank you to Karen and Mitch. If you've never seen my work before, I want to just show you really a few pieces. And also, I'm one of the oldest millennials. And so if something happens and it's not online, it doesn't exist, right? So I'm Austin Cleon on all the things, if you want to follow me or tweet things out.  So let's see. And about, let's see, it'd be about 10 years ago, I first became known for doing these things. What I do is I take an article from the New York Times, and I start making boxes around words that pop out at me. And then I start arranging those words into funny phrases or sayings. And then when I'm done, I black out everything I don't need. And this is what it looks like when I'm done. Sort of looks like if the CIA did haiku. This is my ode to Texas. In Texas, there is nothing but Texas. This one's called overheard on the Titanic. I mean, yes, we're sinking, but the music is exceptional. How many people are married here? We have any married folks? All right, so I'm on my 12th year of marriage. This is my ode to marriage. What is marriage? Marriage is two people in love standing in the same bathroom. So this was actually my first book. This came out in 2010. It's called Newspaper Blackout. It is a book of poetry. And so I extended the tradition of all the poets who came before me, and I kept my day job after it came out. But after this book came out, it was interesting. What I've learned from this book and by putting my work out in the world sort of became the other books that Karen mentioned. And what these two books do together, I think, is they kind of, the two together, I think they have what I call my Robin Hood theory of creativity. First, you steal, then you share. So together, they sort of have a unified theory of creativity. But today, if I had to really summarize it, it's exactly the title of what this keynote is supposed to be, which is, creative is not a noun. When people use the word creative as a job title, I think it falsely divides the world into creatives and non-creatives. And I think it also implies that the work of a creative is being creative. But being creative is never an end. It's only a means to do something else. So creativity is really just a tool. And creativity can be used to organize your living room, paint a masterpiece, build a program and scratch, or design a weapon of mass destruction. So creativity is just a tool. It's something that you use to get to someplace else. Another way of putting this is the comedian John Cleese. He says, creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. And so what Cleese is talking about is that creativity is almost less of a noun, something that you have. And it's almost more like a verb. It's something that you do. And because it's a noun, it's something that you can get better at. And it's a tool that you can use in your work, regardless of your job title. So for the rest of this talk, I really want to talk about a certain kind of operating that I think can help you be more creative in your life and your work. And it's a list of 10 things, because I'm a 10 things guy, 10 commandments, and all that stuff. So I just want a little caveat. I'm probably going to use the word artist a lot today. Whenever you hear the word artist, you get to be creative. And think of it as a mad lib. Just put your job title in for artist. OK, let's go. Number one, you don't have to be a genius. When we talk about creativity, the kind of cartoon version of creativity is the great genius. Usually an old dead white man who is somehow superhumanly talented and gifted and lightning strikes and inspiration comes. And they just sort of push this stuff out into the world. And we're all just supposed to gawk and awe of it, right? And so that's the kind of genius theory that great work springs fully formed from a supremely gifted individual, usually working in isolation, like up in their Garrett or their little studio. And there's a great antidote to what I call the lone genius myth. And it comes to us from the musician Brian Eno. And Brian Eno refers to his kind of theory as genius. And what genius is, is it's the sort of collective form of genius. This is a model in which great art and great ideas are born in sort of like a rich scene of people, a rich group of people who are all sort of sharing and stealing and spreading ideas out together. And what I love about genius is that it really makes room in the story of creativity and creative work for all of us. Because being an essential part of a genius is not necessarily about being superhumanly talented, but it's more about what you contribute and the kinds of connections you make in the network. What is this room but a gigantic genius, right? What is the scratch community but a gigantic genius? And to put it another way, genius is an ecosystem. And genius is more like an ecosystem. So when it comes to genius, everything is in service of that great individual. And with genius, everything is in service of developing a rich and healthy community and environment in which everyone can do their best work. So the less you worry about your own genius and the more you worry about joining and building a rich genius around you, the better the quality of your work life and your personal life will be. And we'll talk a little bit more about genius in a little bit. Number two, steal like an artist. Every artist gets asked the question, where do you get your ideas? And I think the honest artist answers, I steal them. How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what's worth stealing, and then you move on to the next thing. That's about all there is to it, really. And when you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about necessarily what's good or bad. There's only stuff worth stealing and stuff that's not worth stealing. Everything is sort of up for grabs. And if you don't find something worth stealing now, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow or a month or a year from now. What an artist really understands is that nothing is completely original. All the creative work we do builds on what came before. And nothing comes from nowhere. And most ideas are just a remix or a mash-up of two or more previous ideas, or a previous idea transformed into something new. Now, let's talk for a minute about that word steal, OK?  They're like, man, Austin, why do you use the word steal? Man, can't you say be influenced like an artist or something like that? And I always say, well, I use the word steal because I'm not very original. Pablo Picasso, he said artist theft.  I'm going to tell you. I'll just admit that right now, OK? Pablo Picasso, artist theft. Someone once asked David Bowie if he was original. He said, no, no, no. And he said just in that accent, because I'm really good at it. No, no, no. I'm more like a tasteful thief. He said the only art he will study is the stuff that he can steal from. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying. He said, good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Kurt Vonnegut told his students, if you're going to steal, steal from the best.  He said, if you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. If you steal from 100 authors, it's called research.  Steal a lot and they make you a king. We'll leave that to sit there right now. OK, but nobody, in my opinion, has ever said it better than the poet T.S. Eliot. And this is where that phrase, bad artist copy, great artist steal comes from. This is what T.S. Eliot said. He said, immature poets imitate, mature poet steal. Bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. So the good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling, which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn. What I think T.S. Eliot was saying is that there actually is honor amongst thieves. There is a sort of code of creative thievery. And the imitation is, you hear that a lot, the imitation is flattery, right? No, it's not. It's really the transformation that's flattery. It's taking someone's idea and turning it into something new. And so here's my, here's a, I see the cameras out. That's great, I love it. So there is honor amongst thieves. And so what I would say to you is this is a post-it note that my brilliant friend, Wendy McNaughton, keeps above her desk and it says, I rip off everyone I meet. So you are in this room with these brilliant, you know, there's so many enthusiastic talented people in this room. So my advice to you for the rest of the conference is rip off everyone you meet, right? Everyone you meet has something to steal. But the way you honor that person is you take it back to your desk when you get home, you put it together with other things you've stolen, try to come up with something new, give it back to the community and so other people can steal from you. Number three, write the book you want to read. It's interesting, some people ask me like how I became a writer and everything I do as a writer is rooted in my love of reading. So everything I make as an artist or a writer, it really comes from my love as a fan. I often joke to people that I became a professional writer so I could become a professional reader.  I like read and read and read and when I can't find the book I'm looking for out in the world, well first I go to the library and ask for it. But if they don't have it then I sit around and think of whether I might be able to write it. And that's sort of where I, this is sort of how I operate. And I think this is sort of what we do with all of our great creative work. You sort of see a gap in the world somewhere and you see a space that you can fill with your own efforts and then you do that work.  You do the work that you want to see done. Number four, use your hands.  And I said, and we'll get to that in a minute. But one of my favorite artists, Linda Berry, she says, in the digital age, don't forget to use your digits. Especially in this room, your life is full of glowing rectangles, right? That's the real thing. Now, one thing I loved about Mitch's book, Lifelong Kindergarten, was Mitch really emphasized that not all screen time is create equal, right? That it's different building something versus consuming something. Time spent mindlessly scrolling Twitter is not the same as time coding and scratch. But so many of us use computers now for our creative work. But the problem is that never have our tools been able to interrupt our thinking like they do now, you know, all the notifications and the pings and stuff. So I think sometimes computers can alienate us from our sensory experiences because they sort of like put this pane of glass between us and the world. And I think it's very important to remember for creativity that the mind and the body, it's not a one way street that they talk to each other. And our bodies can tell our minds as much as our minds tell our bodies. And so I think that it's very important if you're feeling uncreative to always take an attempt once in a while to step away from the screen, to get your body in motion, to scribble in a notebook, to go for a long walk in your neighborhood, to strum a guitar for a little bit. Because I think it's very important to keep your senses active if you want to get better ideas. Everyone's had that moment, right, where you're really trying to get to solve this problem and then you walk away from the desk and you take a shower and all of a sudden that idea pops up, right? And that's the sort of thing we're talking about. Your body can tell your mind as much as your mind tells the body. It's for that reason that I actually, I keep two desks in my studio now. So I have a digital desk and then I have what's called an analog desk. So this goes to the guy's question about how did an analog guy like me end up in a digital place like this? So the digital desk is what you might expect. It's got my computer, it's got my scanner, it's got my little Wacom tablet, blah, blah, all that stuff. But then I have a separate area called my analog desk and nothing electronic except for a baby monitor. I see a baby monitor there. When the child was crying earlier, I felt like I was right at home. I was like, oh, well, here we go. So my analog desk is where I keep just pens and paper and analog tools. And what's interesting is that, he had me pegged as an analog guy, but I'm actually just as digital as anybody because what I spend most of my day doing is doing a sort of dance in between these desks. I really come up with a lot of my ideas for writing or drawing at the analog desk. And then I skip over to the digital desk and I actually execute the work. So I scan in the drawings, I arrange them in Photoshop, all that kind of stuff, or I blog and post it, that kind of thing. So if you're feeling a little uncreative, just in codermode, kind of like, I get that glaze when I used to code, I get that kind of glaze where you're just like, take a walk, scribble on paper, have some fun, use your body, bring your body back in. Number five, side projects and hobbies are important. The one thing I've learned in my career, it's really when you're messing around, that's when the good stuff happens, when you thought you were just goofing off.  What you do is, is you have at least two projects going at one time, and then when you get bored or sick of one project, you go over to the other project and you work on that for a while. And if you do that long enough, things get done. And one of the things I find interesting, you might have this experience too, when I work on another project, when I work on what I'm not supposed to be working on, then I get the ideas for the thing that I'm supposed to be working on. So productive procrastination, very important. Other very important thing, everybody needs a hobby. How many people have seen Mad Max Fury Road here? Okay, so this is the actor who played one of the war boys and he's knitting on set. Charlize Theron taught him how to knit. So everybody needs a hobby. A hobby is something that you do for fun that's just for you. A hobby can be a form of work, but it should also be an escape from work. We used to have hobbies, now we're supposed to have side hustles, right? Resist the side hustle. Because it's not enough anymore to just be an amateur, right? Like it's not enough to bake cupcakes because you love to bake cupcakes. Now you're supposed to run a cupcake trailer, right?  You have to keep the love in it. Get a hobby. If you turn your hobby into your job, then you just have to get another hobby. Things become very tricky when you turn a hobby into a job. You have to keep something in your life that's just for you. That is music for me. When I play the piano, like when I play Bach on the piano, I feel like someone peeled my skull back and scrubbed my brain with a brillo pad. That's my thing, playing the piano and music. Music's my hobby. Okay, number six, share your process. Okay, so when a painter talks about her work, she could be talking about two different things. First, there's the artwork, right? That's the finished piece, the painting framed and hung in the gallery wall. But there's also the artwork, the real work of art, and that's all the day-to-day stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the studio, right? That's like looking for inspiration, like drawing your sketchbook, getting the idea, applying the oil to the canvas, all that stuff. So there's painting, the noun, and then there's painting, the verb. As in all kinds of work, there is a distinction between the painter's process and the products of the process. Now, traditionally in the arts in particular, you're supposed to keep your process hidden. Like you only reveal your work when it's in its final finished state. And I think this really made sense when there were gatekeepers and certain avenues that you could share your work through. But now we're in this connected world, right? Where everyone's connected to each other and everyone can share whatever they wanna share, whenever they wanna share it. And so let's talk for a minute about what the creative process, what I think the creative process looks like. This might resonate with some of you. So this is usually how it goes for every project that I attempt. First, this is the best idea ever, right?  Let's do this, yeah. And then you work on it a little bit, all right? Okay, this is harder than I thought. Then you work a little bit more. This is gonna take some work, right? Work a little bit more.  Finally, you get to the midpoint. This is Dark Knight of the Soul, right? This is when you question everything. When you're like, I chose the wrong profession, I'm leading the wrong life, I should quit right now and just walk away from everything. This is a very crucial point. You have to make it through this point because eventually you get to the next point, which is it will be good to finish because I'll learn something for next time. And finally, you arrive at this spot. Not as bad as I thought.  So this is sort of the life of a project and actually this comes from my friend, Maureen McHugh, who's a wonderful writer. I'd like to make a plug for her books. Now, process is messy and again, traditionally you're supposed to keep your process hidden, but we live in a world now I think where we were all like sort of, my generation was raised on DVD extras and like behind the scenes stuff and I think that everybody wants to see behind the scenes. You hear like, oh, well you never want to show how the sausage is made, but I think like if the sausage, if the process is really good, like it makes the sausage even tastier in a sense. Now, let's all face it, we're not all artists. A lot of us go into our work and we feel like we have nothing to show for it at the end of the day, but I think that no matter the nature of your work, I think there is an art to what you do and there are people that would be interested in that art if you can present it to them in the right way. And so, you know, go through some time thinking about what's the residue of your process that you can kind of scoop up and save for later? Like how can you become a documentarian of what you do? Could you start a work journal? Could you write your thoughts down in a notebook or use an audio recorder, video or keep a scrapbook? You know, what are the kinds of ways that you can kind of collect your process and that you might use it later? And I think what's interesting is documenting your process, even if you don't decide to share it, there's amazing merit in that in that in documenting your process because you really do see how you work and you really can track your progress as you go. One of the most important things I do every morning is I keep a diary, a three page diary. I just write three pages in my diary and I can go back and kind of see where I've been and where I'm going. And then afterwards, take people behind the scenes. Think about how you can show other people your process and communicate what it is that you do. So let's talk for a few ways about ways that you can share your process. Number one I think is to tell good stories. This is particularly true for artists. Like sometimes you hang out with artists and they kind of like cross their arms and they say, my work speaks for itself, right? Anyone who was ever, have you ever tried this in a client meeting, right? My work speaks for itself. Doesn't really work, right? Work doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone needs to speak for the work. Someone needs to speak for the work. And the stories you tell about your work, they have a huge effect on how people think about the work and how they feel about the work and ultimately how they accept it. So how can you become a better storyteller? Well, again, steal, pay attention to stories and how they're structured and how they're told. I wanted to show you Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, he thought that you could graph every story on this chart. So if you look at the x-axis here, he's got the beginning, every story has a beginning and every story has an end. And then in the course of a story, the characters go through good fortune and bad fortune. So let's do a couple. Kurt Vonnegut said the most famous story is man in hole. And that is, someone gets into trouble, someone gets out of it again. That's pretty much the dramatic structure right there. You get into trouble, you get out of it again. That's the life of a project we talked about earlier, right? You head into the dark night of the soul and you get back out of it. Here's Cinderella. Cinderella's having a real bad time. She's in a low spot when she starts out, right? But then her fairy godmother comes, she gets some helpers, she gets a nice dress, she gets the carriage, she goes to the ball, she meets the prince, and then midnight strikes, right? Things are very bad for Cinderella. But oh, look, here comes the prince with the glass slipper and whoosh, things get really, really good forever and ever, right? This is Kafka's metamorphosis. But Vonnegut's point was when you pay attention to stories and you pay attention to how they're told it's really the structure of stories that is so important and if you pay attention to the structure of stories, you can steal those structures for your own work. And teach what you know. I think teaching is probably the most valuable form of sharing your work. When you teach, you figure out what it is that you actually know. So I've always been, as an artist, I've always been inspired by these people, especially Snoop Dogg. No, Bob Ross and Martha Stewart. So they have a very interesting model. So Bob Ross taught people how to paint on a free PBS show and then he sold them art supplies, which made him a millionaire, right? Martha Stewart does the same thing. She shows people how to make their lives better and how to cook and all that stuff and then she makes her fortune selling them the tools to do it with. But what I've always been interested in is that when you show and when you're generous about sharing what you know, it makes you very valuable to the people that want that knowledge too. And so one of the really great things that happened when newspaper blackout came out is that I immediately sensed that other people wanted to try the form. Other people wanted to grab a newspaper and a marker and go at it. And so I found myself teaching these workshops for college students and then also elementary students and high school students and all sorts of people. And I found myself teaching for the first time and I really loved it and I loved sharing my own process but I felt like there really needed to be a place in which people could share their own poems with each other. And so I made this website called newspaperblackout.com and at one point the site's kind of falling off because I'm lazy but at one point we had like 150,000 readers and there were poems published from all over the world and I almost thought it was almost sort of like marketing stunt on my behalf. I was sort of like, oh, it's user-generated content or whatever, right? But this fabulous thing happened which is people sent me the craziest stuff. I mean they sent me the wildest stuff. I wanna point out the baseball card whereas so they've drawn a lamp shade on this dude's head and blacked out his name into lamp. But the cool thing about all this is that I found as much to steal from the people who shared as I felt like they were stealing from me and so this really wonderful thing happened where I was inspired by all these people who shared their own blackout poems. And now blackout poetry is this huge tag on Instagram. Even old aging rock musicians are into blackout poetry now. That's Roger Waters' album cover, the Pink Floyd guy and this is a letter that you too sent some of their people, or sent their fans. It blackouts have made their way back into the New York Times which has been really interesting. But I think the most important thing is that you who are teachers in this room, you know this, right? Is that when you teach, you learn in return. And for those of you who aren't teachers, if teaching feels scary, pull back a minute, forget about teaching, forget about whatever your idea of teaching is and just think about sharing. Think about how you can share your work because as the late great Christopher Hitchens said, he said, when you put a book out into the world, when you put your work out into the world, you hear from all the people you should have talked to before you actually made the work. So having your work out in the world is like a free education that goes on for a lifetime. I'm going a little long, Karen. I'm just gonna keep going with it if that's okay. All right. Number seven, don't turn into a vampire or human spam. Okay, so when we talk about a seniors, like I said before, a seniors operates on a spectrum of stealing and sharing and where you land on the spectrum determines what your role is in the community. So let's talk about vampires first. Let's go back to Picasso, Mr. Artis Theft. Picasso was a notorious vampire. His granddaughter, Marina, claimed that he used to squeeze people out like a tube of one of his oil paints. So here's what would happen. Like basically you'd hang out with Picasso and you would spend all day with Picasso and at the end you'd just be like this nervous wreck. You'd go home and collapse in your room but not Picasso. Picasso would go back to a studio and he would paint using all the energy that he'd sucked out of the people he'd hung out with, right? So most people put up with this except for this dude, Konstantin Brancusi. I'm from Texas so I can mispronounce anything I want. Brancusi was really interesting because he grew up in Romania near the Carpathian Mountains and he knew a vampire when he saw one. So Brancusi was not about to have his life force sucked out by this guy and he banished Picasso from ever entering his studio. Now what I think Brancusi practiced is what I call the vampire test.  So if you find yourself spending time with something or someone and at the end you feel okay, you feel full of energy, that thing is probably not a vampire. It can be a person, place or thing. If you spend time with a person, place or thing and at the end you are depleted, you could be an introvert, that's a possibility, or that thing, place or person could be a vampire. I would like to point out this does not work with children.  So run through some of the things in your life, run it through the vampire test, see what happens. And if you find a vampire, do what Brancusi did, banish him from your life forever. Okay, so that's vampires. On the other side of the spectrum, on the sharing side, we have this other creature who you may know of, human spam, human spam, okay. So you know these people, they're on Facebook, they're tweeting out their every move, right? These are also the people in meetings they want to tell you all their great ideas, but then they don't want to hear your ideas, right? They're the musicians who go out and pace the whole world with flyers, but they never actually go to a gig themselves. Human spam, what do you do with human spam? If you find yourself becoming kind of spammy, I would suggest putting what you share through what I call the so what test. It's important when you share things to think about sharing as an act of generosity. That's really how sharing works. And so ask yourself the simple test. Is it useful or interesting to the people I'm sharing with?  That is the greatest antidote to talking too much about yourself. I found that on, you know, I talk about myself a lot in my job and the great joy and relief of it is actually getting to hear from other people after I talk, so I'm looking forward to the Q and A, which hopefully we'll get to soon. So anyways, there's a really great sweet spot in between vampires and human spam and that is simply a contributor. That's someone who takes and gives, right? That's someone who is involved in both ways that pushes and pulls and a really healthy synias is full of contributors. Number eight, the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary. So if any of you have ever had the pleasure of driving down 93 South in Boston, you might have driven past this. This is a gigantic gas tank painted with rainbow stripes. It was painted by one of my heroes who was a nun named Karita Kent. Now in the 60s, Karita was running an art school in Los Angeles and she went to one of Andy Warhol's first shows in Los Angeles and she became really interested in Warhol's work and also Ed Ruchet's work and so she started screen printing and what Karita did that was so interesting is she would take pictures of advertisements and signs all over Los Angeles. The stuff we usually think of as junk and she would take these common things out of their context and she would bring out these religious messages in advertising. So here Karita's taken a bag of Wonder Bread and she's divorced the dots from the package but then she's also brought out this idea of enriched bread, like bread breaking, right? And she also added the advertising. She said she wanted to be advertising in its own game. She wanted to manipulate advertising. Finding God in all things is sort of the task of a believer and Karita was able to find it in advertising. Amazingly. So Karita took this man-made landscape around her and she paid really close attention to it and that's what she taught her students too. They had this, she would teach her students to go around with these little pieces of paper that were cut out like a camera viewfinder and she would teach her students to crop the world and to really pay attention to things on their own terms. It's easy to assume that if our lives were more extraordinary we might make more extraordinary work, right? If we could only move to Paris or rent the right studio or fall in with a great gang of misfits, you know, right? Like we would be more creative. We think if we had extraordinary circumstances the extraordinary work would follow but I think this is really wishful thinking because I really think that everything you need to make extraordinary work is in your ordinary life. You just have to pay attention to it and if you really wanna change the quality of your life pay attention to what you pay attention to. Your attention is one of the most valuable things that you possess and that's why everyone wants to steal it from you, right? So first you must protect it and then you have to point it in the right direction. Finally, be boring. Hopefully I haven't been too boring so far but be boring, it's the only way to get work done. We'll keep this real short. People think a book is really hard to do and it is but if you write one page a day it doesn't seem like much but you write a page for 365 days a year you have enough to fill a novel. Very simple, little chunks of effort build into something big over time. So be boring, it's the way to get work done. And finally we're there, where, oops, wrong slide. Okay, we're here. Creativity is subtraction. Okay, in this age of information abundance and overload I think that the people who really get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. So I think a lot of times the way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. And my favorite story in this vein is Dr. Seuss. When Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat there was only 236 words in The Cat in the Hat and his editor bet him that he couldn't write a book with only 50 words. And so Dr. Seuss went around, turned around and wrote Green Eggs and Ham. And Green Eggs and Ham is one of the best selling children's books of all time. And there's something, it's actually my favorite Dr. Seuss book to read to my kids too. And so there's something about constraints. There's something about putting limitations on yourself that leads to some of the best creative work. I was talking to Paula early. I don't know how to embarrass her, but I was talking to her earlier and one of the ways that she said she designs is she starts with a list of what she won't do in the project. And I love that. You have to figure out what you're not gonna do sometimes in order to figure out what you're gonna do. And so creativity isn't just the things we put into our work. It's also the things that we choose to leave out. So I hope you will choose wisely and have fun and I will leave it there. Thank you. Well, that's amazing. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I'm so sorry, I went over. Yeah. And this is actually my favorite part. I'm not mad. So, okay, you're not mad at me. She's disappointed. Okay. No, I'm neither mad nor disappointed. No, it was beautiful. I certainly did not mind. So let me tell you about the Q&A process. So as you may have heard, we are sort of distributed across the lab, not everyone who's in the community is in the room. So I felt like a little stressed out about taking live questions in the moment from the room. It looks like all the people who can't be here. So I was like, how else could we do this? So two days ago, I posted a form online and said, hey, do you have a question that you wanna ask Austin in advance of having seen the talk? Right? Cool. Yesterday at around noon, there were like 16 questions. I'm like, okay, it was like a good selection of questions. After dinner yesterday, there were more than 100 questions. Oh. And I was like, cool. So what I did is I looked through all the questions, I sort of like grouped them thematically. This is my education researcher hat on, grouped them thematically and then tried to pick an exemplar from each category. So I have 10 questions and we're gonna play Q&A lotto. Are we gonna do lightning round? Oh, we're gonna do a lottery. Plus, plus speed round. Okay. Our first question is, okay, imagine you could give every person in this room one additional hour in each day. What would you have us all do each day that would cultivate creativity? I would, this is so easy. This is the easiest answer. Like unbelievably, I would give you an hour in the morning after you wake up. Don't look at your phone. Just do not look at your phone. Don't touch your phone. Don't go online. Give yourself an hour to wake up every morning without any kind of external stimulus from the world. Or take a walk, play with your kids, listen to Mozart, eat breakfast. If I could give everyone in this room, take an hour for yourself every morning before the day starts because. That is where, you know, many of the great creative thinkers, that's where these, you know, after that waking state, that's, there's so much good stuff that we lose because we're immediately interrupted from the world. So I would give you an hour in the morning. That's easy. I would take it. Where can I sign up? Okay, next. Next question. What are you reading right now and why? Oh, well, I am not reading much at all because I've been on vacation with my children and vacation with children is not a vacation. It's a trip. But I am, I'm dipping into an essay collection called They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. And I will, I will, I will bungle his name but it's a collection of essays about music and culture and it's an interesting collection right now. But before that, what's the last great book I read? I love reading oral histories of music. I'm like a big fan of like oral histories of music scenes. So I love this, if you're into punk rock and you haven't read Please Kill Me. That's an amazing book. And I'm, again, I'm the oldest millennial. So I went to college from 2001 to 2005. And so there's a book called Meet Me in the Bathroom which is about the New York music scene from 2001 to 2011. And that's, that's an amazing. I like, because those books are about scenes, they're really about seniorises and how scenes develop. So I love, that's why I was reading before I came and got my reading time decimated. Also, in your weekly newsletter, I really appreciate you guiding us towards me. So if you have not signed up, I encourage you. My weekly, so every week I put out a list of 10 things I think are worth sharing. And it's my favorite thing that I do. And I think we have like 60,000 readers now. So it's like a really fun thing. And so if you're looking for something to read on Friday morning, check out my newsletter and sales pitch. No. How can I give my students feedback on their creative work without crushing their dreams?  She says good. Like she has her, her kids read aloud and she just, I'm not, I don't know about feedback. I think, you know, feedback is for Jimi Hendrix. No, I don't. I think that the more you can divorce the work from it being personal, I think the more you can take the work on its own terms and not that it's somehow, and I think this is really true of people get this idea that creative work is all about personal expression and it can be that way. But one of the things I've noticed, for example, when people make a blackout poem, they don't feel the sense of ownership with it. They don't feel like it's necessarily something that came deep from their soul. Like I could never get a room full of people to write their own poems and come up and read them. But if I gave you all a paper right now on how do you make a blackout poem, there'd be a line of people to read them. You know, because it's more like a game. So I think the more that you can kind of get students to understand that your work is not you. The things that you make, again, these are products. They're not the, you are the process.  These things that you make are just spinoffs of that and they don't necessarily represent you as a, even though we judge students on what they create. And maybe that's the answer. Maybe it's, see I'm thinking out loud here, maybe it's judging students based on their process rather than the products of the process. When in the creative process is it better to ask for permission and when is it better to ask for forgiveness? Oh, that's a question for an attorney. I think beg forgiveness always. But I think you have to let the thing happen with creative work and then before you, it's very important, I do think, as much as I talk about sharing process, I do think it's important to separate the making of the work from the sharing. And because I think time is really the great editor of things. If you let something sit for even 24 hours, you can really see what it's made of. And so I do think that it's okay to make something that might be in murky water, but then you really have to look at it and say, okay, now what kinds of permissions do I have to get? Or if you walk around this lab, there's lots of things that are made and then you have to like, there's a kind of process of discovery happening, but then there are questions such as, what will this do in the world? How do I have to start thinking about the ethics of this or that kind of thing? So there are consequences to putting things out in the world. So I think separating the creating of work from the sharing and publication of work is a really important thing. And it's a really important thing to get students to understand because we live in the share everything culture and copying is really how we learn. We copy people, that's how we find our own styles. We basically copy a dozen people and we arrive at some other thing that is us. But that copying needs to be a private process. It needs to be a thing that's in a protected space. And so I think it's just important to help people understand that there's creating and there's sharing. And just as there's writing and there's publishing and there are different things. We're making great time. Great. Yeah. What types of environments and experiences best support kids' creativity? I think for my, I can only speak, I'm not a teacher or I'm not trained. I don't have a lot of experience. What I do have is a five and a three year old at home. And what I have found to be the most helpful philosophically is to not think of myself in the tradition, I'm not saying this is what teachers do, but our cartoon version of what a teacher is is that a teacher has a bunch of knowledge that they then impart to students. For me it's more interesting to think of myself as a librarian. I am a person that creates environments in which my kids discover and learn for themselves. And so quite simply that could be my kids have markers and papers available to them at all times.  But just creating an environment in which easy access to materials, everything on hand, and letting them go whenever they want, and having a lot of uninterrupted time. I think children are interrupted a lot. There's not enough time for children to really dive in and just be obsessed with things. I let my kid work on garage band well into dinner time sometimes, because he's really into it. And then eventually halfway through dinner he comes out and he's got a song to play us and we sit down and eat. It's a balance between having very rigid structure and then allowing free play. Can you talk a little bit more about the librarian metaphor? Oh right, so I actually have way more experience as a librarian than a teacher. So when we think about, librarians really misunderstood because you think of a librarian as someone sitting at a desk who just shows you books in the card catalogs, but if you visit a public library right now, a librarian is everything from a maker space creator to a social worker to, I mean librarians have all these things that they do. And one of the most important things that librarians do is they create an environment in which people can connect with the things that they need. And so if we think about, and again I'm talking about our culture's idea of a teacher, which is that it's a one way street and that it's about imparting very specific things to the students. If you can kind of break out of that idea and just create, I really think about it as I'm creating spaces in which my children can learn and I don't think about it as I'm actually imparting things because I think as far as imparting things, they get what I am is what they get from me. What I am and how I operate is how my children learn from me, that's how they learn how to be in the world. And so this idea that the do as I say not as I do that you can't do that, you have to do and then you kind of have to become the person that you want your children to be which is the terrifying prospect of parenting. Right? Yeah. Have a good, quick, do we have more time? We've got a little bit of time. Maybe this is an appropriate question to end on. Okay. How do you know when creative work is finished? It's never, Paul Valerie said it's never finished only abandoned. There's a point at which the work has become, I can only speak to books in particular. I will speak to books. Books are crystallizations of thoughts in a particular moment. So there is a point with a book where you're like, I could add to this forever, but this book works as an object right now and it will have some sort of resilience in the future as an object and people can respond to it. But for my own work personally, my blog and my website is this sort of never-ending work of art or, you know. And so my books I really think of as catalysts, like they're almost like, they're objects that get people to think and then everything that goes on around the books I document in my other work somehow. And so I just never feel like they're finished ever. They're constantly evolving and they evolve in the form of talks and they evolve in what people do with them. And so it's really when you know when the thing is whole, when that product really holds together, that's when it's finished. That's when it's ready at least to be released. But that commitment to constant evolution, I think, is such a lovely sentiment to carry with us throughout the day, so please. And it's true of children. Let's just go back to this real quick. I think the most important thing for me is I always remain a student. Questlove says that a lot. Always a student, never a teacher. If you can actually have a blackout somewhere that's like to be a teacher but remain a student. If we can get people to realize that this is really a lifelong thing, that you will learn forever, that learning is the verb of life, that is what we have to impart to people to keep their curiosity, to keep their sense of wanting to make things of the world. And that's how the road goes on forever until it doesn't. Please join me in thanking Questlove. Thank you.


Hey everybody, JR Fisher here. I want to welcome you to our training today. I've got a new microphone. I'm trying it out. So let me know it's this big bulky thing right here. So let me know how the sound is. I would really appreciate that if you put a comment in there. Let me know how the sound is. I've been told I got to be really close to it. It's kind of weird. It's like right in my face. But if the sound's better and you guys can hear me better, then I'm going to go with it of course. Don't forget today we're going to talk about what? Owning your own brand. How to own your brand. So very important guys.  So today we're going to talk about how to advertise for yourself which is kind of a good idea I think right. But make sure you say hi in there and let me know about this microphone. I do want to know and if you haven't watched one of my other videos listen to this one and then go back and watch another one. You know one of my lives because of all my lives I don't normally use this microphone. I use a different one. So I want to know. I want to know. Does it sound right? Is it good? Is it not good? I don't know. I know I've got a little bit of a delay here so I'll wait for your comments in there. If you haven't subscribed yet please do so. Make sure you hit that subscribe button down there. If it's red click it. Turn it gray. Red means it's a warning. You need to click it. Okay that's what I was trying to tell you. Don't forget. Ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time you go live. Now branding is an interesting thing. It's probably let's see here. Paul says the sound is good. Well that's good. No. Paul is on YouTube. We're live actually on YouTube and Facebook I think. Though Facebook I'm not getting much out of it. I'm just not. Anyhow let's get to our branding stuff here real quick. Let me pull up my notes I want to talk to you about. If you have a brand let's say it revolves around fitness, life coaching, financial you know planning whatever it is. It is so important that you actually use that branding. Around 49 percent of consumers rely on influencer recommendations. So if you're building a brand and I you know I get sponsored video requests all the time and I don't I don't pretty much don't do them because I'm not here to do commercials.  Though I may do some in the future so don't be offended. But it's really important that you build your brand okay because people are going to look at you on down the road and say do I want to associate with them. Owning the literal aspects of your brand is really important okay that's number one. That involves things that we mentioned you know before like you know maybe your logo your mission statement I just did a video on mission statement and vision statements and what that was and that will be going up probably next month.  You may not need a logo as a knowledge entrepreneur but you probably need the basics of branding on your website though I do think a logo is important and it can be like a comic version of one of your pictures something like that. The other physical part about owning your brand is where it's located.  I had somebody send me a message this morning and they were a power seller and that should tell you something on a site and they were making you know six figures a month but they didn't have their own website they didn't have email list and all that and they were just removed from that site and they have nothing now so they went from six figures a month to nothing zero zip. So if you don't own your own brand and you don't own stuff you know if you're on some of these other social platforms and you don't have a website you're going to be hurt on down the road or you could be hurt on down the road I can't guarantee you're going to be hurt. I know I've lost accounts on Facebook ad accounts my wife has lost ad accounts and they don't even tell you why I mean they won't even give you a reason for it at least if you advertise on something like Google you know you can talk to somebody and they can you know reassess it you can have a real person you can talk to but man Facebook is harsh. Next thing I would say is you need to own your content. Content is the key to owning your brand okay so as your knowledge as an entrepreneur builds you could build trust and expertise through your content that will translate over to your brand as a whole. So to stand out in the crowd it is important to hone in on your specialty as knowledge and as an intelligent entrepreneur so you can meet the needs of your audience.  I was looking this morning and I've got 1100 videos on my youtube channel 1100 and keep in mind they're all 10 to 12 minutes but some of them are a half hour to an hour that is a lot of content and I'm not getting rich off youtube but I know in the long run I'll make a lot of money on youtube I know that for a fact I mean that's just the way it is if you get enough content out there. Do you think using your name over a company name works better by the way I love the colors you use in branding thumbnails thank you so much that that is my assistant that does all that my social media guy you know it's really up to you I like I have JR Fisher training and in the branding for that is me teaching you how to make money online because I've made money online. Survival Cave Food I am really almost non-existent there you don't really see me anywhere but Survival Cave Food is a big brand it's very well known it's been around for over a decade and anything that Survival Cave Food comes out with people buy because we have a really big list so I think it has a lot to do with your audience and what you're trying to do either one can work but it's entirely up to you. There's been a lot of companies through the years that have used their name in the branding let's say Jimmy Johns but you know Papa Johns you know used kind of as his name but it was a pizza place and then he got into some trouble and he's out now so you know that's the other thing you got to think about if you do use your name and branding like JR Fisher training I can't sell that company it's impossible to sell that company because it is me and I can't sell me to somebody else however Survival Cave Food I can actually sell to somebody okay I can do that as you start to implement you know both these aspects to owning your brand you'll discover that there's more ways to monetize your knowledge than you would believe you won't have to solely rely on like partnerships or YouTube AdSense because people will come to your brand space and directly support you which is kind of cool so how do you start this branding and owning your brand first thing you got to do is get to know your audience while this may seem like a well-known marketing tactic it's even more imperative for knowledge entrepreneurs since you are the brand they will expect you to get to know them so that you can continue to curate relevant high quality content like you know the content that I'm doing right now in this video the stuff that people ask me for they want to know this stuff so I have to provide that because I'm their source as you get to know your audience your brand will also grow into a community that relies on you as well as each other I have a lot of people in my community that talk back and forth to each other they help each other out you also have to stay consistent this is a big thing this is hard for a lot of people you know today I had to record videos and I had to get up at 6 30 in the morning and come in here and start recording videos before I started my live because it has to get done I got to be consistent and the reason I had to record the videos is I have to have enough so that I have like two weeks of videos scheduled on YouTube which is Monday Wednesday Friday they come out Monday Wednesday Friday now at one point I was doing them five days a week and it was it was really it was hard because I would have to record 10 to 12 videos every two weeks that's very hard to do I'm not saying that a lot of people don't do it I know people that will post two or three videos in a day I know a guy that does five or six videos in a day Sean what is Sean's last name Sean Gunby Gunby Pub publishing so look up Gunby Publishing GUNBY and he I've seen days where he's done five or six videos a single day pretty amazing now he doesn't do real heavy edits or anything like that or music but goodness gracious you've got to stay consistent so that's the next thing I'll tell you you have to consistently come out with stuff you can't do a whole bunch of videos one month and then not do anything for two months and then come back again very rare for somebody to be successful doing that there's a few people that can do it you know if you're Kim Kardashian you can do it but she puts out a lot I mean she puts out Paris Hilton still puts out a lot they constantly put out content the next thing number three is you got to tell your brand story now it is infinitely easier to own your brand when your story is intertwined with your content personal branding is one of the easiest ways to hook your audience and establish trust I grew up in a very poor neighborhood a very dangerous neighborhood I got a lot of trouble as a kid and that is my brand and I went from that to where I'm at now where we've sold millions of dollars online for example maybe you know you're a fitness influencer an exercise help you with your mental health or it helped you lose 200 pounds or whatever it is telling this story will keep your brand and content authentic people will look at you and go that's what I want to do I'm I'm where he was I'm where she was and I want to get to where he is or she is so they they see that journey they see the things that you've done and they want to join that how many platforms do you think are optimal for building a brand what platforms do you find get the best bang for the buck by far youtube by far youtube now that having been said I don't use tiktok so I don't know maybe tiktok would be awesome for me but I'm pretty well vested in youtube right now I found that the reach on facebook has dropped dramatically but guys you got to look at these platforms and why they're good for you or why they're bad for you if I put a video on facebook they don't want to show it to anybody why would they want to show it to anybody because they make money by having videos or pictures on ads that go through your stream and if I clog it up with my videos then that just takes up real estate they don't want to show my videos on facebook however if I do a video that's helpful on youtube youtube actually makes their money by putting ads on my videos so if somebody's watching my videos and an ad comes up on there they're making money so they want to show my videos so you got to kind of align what you're doing like instagram instagram is another good example I don't do really much on instagram but instagram is set up to where pictures on there they want people to look at pictures and if you're generating pictures that are getting a lot of views and likes whatever it is you do on instagram then of course they're going to show them okay same thing with tiktok you know so it depends on what you're doing right it really depends on what you're doing and then number four speak your I hope that answers your question paul I think your story is a great part of your brand makes you relatable hey we all have a story very rarely very rarely was anybody born wealthy and people look up to them I mean I you just don't see it okay it's pretty rare thing I mean if you look at say Elon Musk's story and his his childhood and he's aspergers I think he has he was picked on as a kid and he was beat up and he was beat up so bad when he was I think eight years old that he went to the hospital kids picked on him all the time because he was so weird and unusual now he's weird and unusual genius life right we look at Elon and go my gosh you know he's amazing we just want to be around him we want to listen to him that's got to be a weird switch for his brain too to be because when what happened to us as a kid really sticks with you I know my two best friends from childhood are extremely wealthy probably worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars and both of them went to prison both of them went to prison one of them was for drug smuggling and another one was for gosh conspiracy and getting involved with hiring police officers he did he did all kinds of stuff money laundering and both of them went to prison for a number of years and I gotta gotta reach up here my computer screen has gone out there we go so it's really important to realize that your story you know whatever it is right now whatever your story is right now good better and different it can change okay you could be really wealthy and lose everything you could be very poor and get very wealthy you know your life is not sad your life is not what it is right now okay that's just temporary everything's temporary okay the next thing I would say is start your own language and speak your own language a huge part of owning your brand as a knowledge entrepreneur is the language you speak with your audience are there terms or acronyms that only your followers understand I think you got to be really careful with this because I think you can speak over the head of some people I kind of catch my wife doing that every now that she does dog training and she uses a lot of terms that the average person doesn't know and I'll catch her and I'll say hey they don't know what you're talking about you know they haven't read the books you've read they don't have the knowledge you have you got to you got to dumb it down a little bit so all of my training you know I don't I'm not very fancy anyhow but all my training is really for basic stuff for people it's not fancy it's not you know magical or any of that stuff it's just you know what it is the next thing you can do is start a podcast I think that is very helpful you can create a blog that you update weekly you can host a webinar I've done lots of webinars you can start a referral program for your audience you can write guest blogs on other sites gosh guys there's so much you can do you can create a members only or VIP group which I do have on my inner circle for select few in your audience as a knowledge entrepreneur which is what I am I'm a knowledge entrepreneur but I'm also a e-commerce on entrepreneur but as a knowledge entrepreneur you don't have to do it alone and you won't have a piecemeal of your brand in a variety of places which is difficult and that's another thing when Paul asked about you know where do you do some of this stuff I don't want to do it in too many places I just don't want to do that let's see here Paul says what would you say your main touch points are for your brand that you touch on a lot I think my main touch point is you don't have to be technically oriented okay you don't have to have a lot of technical knowledge you don't have to have experience anybody can do what I'm doing okay it's not it's not rocket science what I'm doing so I think I think the point is you can learn how to do anything the only thing I haven't learned how to do is type I'm still terrible at typing I got like two fingers of one hand three on the other but I've learned all of the technical stuff on my own okay that's what I did and I took some courses too I'm not gonna say I didn't do that paid for some courses on how to do stuff I I listed to Frank Kern a lot in the beginning I met him at the war room and I got to sit and talk to him for a while about different things I think he's an incredibly smart person I think he's a genius in marketing I think he's hot and cold and I would tell him that you know he'll get on a bandwagon of one thing and he really worked on it and then all of a sudden he'll disappear and then he'll start up something else and he's kind of bouncing all over the place all the time and I think that's you know he talks about having attention deficit I think that is exhibited in the way he does but he's a brilliant person now why is it really essential to own your own brand I think that's a question you need to ask yourself now what we've gone over is how to own your brand okay it is important to understand the why the why is always the important thing right why is something going on many external factors play a part in knowledge entrepreneurs businesses and sometimes they're out of our control as a content creator okay you can't always control what's going on I put up a new video on my cooking channel the other day and somebody did a a music claim on there so that I couldn't monetize it it was a fake music claim because all my music is paid for through a site and I get music through that site and I pay for it but don't put up these fake claims thinking people will just you know just collapse and let them claim all the income on their videos and I don't I always you know fight it and I they put it up on two of mine excuse me two spots in the video and they've already backed up on one of them because they're fake they're just fake okay so you've got to be able to handle that kind of stuff too social media is really going to be an integral part of most content creator strategy so understand the platform your own understand what Facebook wants understand what YouTube wants Facebook I think for organic traffic is almost dead unless they change some stuff there YouTube is very good I think Instagram is good I think TikTok is very good though I don't use some of those platforms it's much but it's an obvious external factor and it has an algorithm you know you've got to figure out what that algorithm is you know how many times have you seen an Instagram influencer say like this post so I can stay on your feed they know what's going on they know that if you don't like stuff if you don't you know integrate with them like when you watch some of my videos whether it's a live or an uploaded video you're going to see more of them because YouTube says hey this person's interested in this person or this subject you may see some more videos on that subject that's how it works they want to keep you on that particular platform algorithm updates are happening every single day and they can be unfavorable to your business if you're doing it wrong but they can be very favorable if you're doing it right so that's something that you've got to be aware of let me check here all these things like postings and podcastings require consistency Paul says most people give up after 50 post and even less for podcast developers yeah it's kind of funny I was looking through some of my content and I was looking at some of the comments on there from five six years ago and I looked at all these people who were commenting who were also working on their channels at the time because we had a little group going and I would say 99% of them are gone at this point you're gone one of them has about a half million subscribers which is amazing but he's in the gaming thing so you know you can build that pretty fast but people don't stay they just don't fall it's because it's frustrating you know it's frustrating because I'll do a video sometimes and I'll get 90 000 views and then I'll do another video and I get eight what is the rhyme or reason that I don't know I you know I try to analyze it I try to look at the subject I try to look and see what I said on there I try to look at the thumbnail the titles all these things but you're going to have more failures than you have successes people can't deal with that you know you know I I will break more things in the kitchen than my wife will by far you know I've broken more glasses more plates more anything that my wife ever has and you could say well she's a lot more careful in the kitchen and I would I would beg to differ with you because I think the difference is I'm in the kitchen every single day cooking dinner I'm in there cooking lunch I'm doing all these things so if you're touching all these items every day you have a high degree of chance of things going wrong okay I burn more meals than she has because I cook more meals than she has I've had more bad meals than she has because I cook more meals than she has so when you do things guys the more you do things the more failures or problems you're going to have so you got to understand that I think that's why most people go away they just can't handle those failures it is all part of it and I don't I don't I don't think of any of them as failures I think of them as stepping stones of things that need to get me to where I'm going so why is owning your brand so crucial right now many businesses who relied on let's say Facebook for their shops communications businesses suffered a loss of revenue when Facebook was out of commission for almost a whole business day so you got to be really careful of these platforms too that was in October of this past or this year October 2021 this was a harsh reminder that relying on other brands to host your content can really come back and bite you I think it's immensely important to have your own website I think that's super super important you've got to have a feasible long-term strategy plus people have to have a place to go to get more information about you if you're relying on these platforms these social media platforms and they don't show your stuff then people can't see it okay but if you've got your own website you've got your own podcast you got your own email newsletter you've got your own courses your book whatever people have a way of getting more information from you having a brand let me click here for a second having a brand really is not enough in the crowded creator world the influencer economy get this is expected to reach 13.8 billion in 2022 now to stay afloat knowledge entrepreneurs must own their own brand and every facet to see success looking for an easy way to start a building in you know doing your own brand I would suggest looking at youtube I have you know no affiliation with youtube whatsoever outside the fact that I have some videos there but I get a lot of people off youtube they watch my videos they opt in for my stuff they buy my courses I make money on ads you know youtube is a good platform for me for me for a long format video in long format you know I do 10 to 12 minutes something like that you know tiktok may be a great one for you if you want to do something under 60 seconds and I don't know maybe some of you guys know in the chat section you know what the optimal length of a tiktok video is or you know how long it's can be there and same thing with twitter you know people do tweets all the time Elon musk is a big twitter guy but you know they limit the number of characters they did increase it a few years ago but if you're doing little sayings and stuff like that you know how to use all the hashtags maybe twitter is going to be great for you I think facebook can be good it can be good if you're running ads and you're trying to build a list you're trying to build your group through running advertising but I will tell you you can lose your ad account on facebook like within a split second and they'll never tell you why it's happened to me it's happened to tons of friends I know they've created multiple accounts sometimes you can get it back sometimes you can't sometimes you're off forever so facebook is very touchy I like google better I like google better because they will work with you they tell you what you need to do and if you make a mistake they don't cut you off forever it never speaks to you again you know facebook will ghost you they will ghost you okay so it's important to understand guys owning your own brand and all the places that you need to build your brand okay it's really important that you do that uh and I'll take any questions you guys have here we're nearing our end of our training today but feel free to put them in there feel free to you know tell me what you think if you've got any ideas I want to hear about okay I love hearing ideas from you guys not because I can't think up any ideas I mean I've got tons of ideas of videos I've got you know hundreds and hundreds of them however I want to provide you with what you want this channel is your channel it's not my channel if it was my channel and I didn't have anybody else there would be no point the point is to get information to you guys so that's why it's so important and I'll tell you know what what is really interesting to me is when I look at the comments on my videos and I'm doing live facebook and I'm doing live youtube 99% of the comments come from youtube 99% it seems like the people on youtube want a long you know type video and they want to be able to converse with you which makes sense failure is the learning part of the thing called experience yes yes yes I've had so much failures so many failures and I talk to my friends both of which are probably worth in the hundreds of millions you can't ask people but you can look at their assets and you can tell what's going on they tell me about multiple failures and problems they had and things that went wrong in their life and things that went wrong in their business life personal life it's just part of it I think it's so important to collect emails in case you go to Facebook or get kicked off a platform 100% you've got to own your audience and the only way you're going to own your audience is to give them something of value to get them on your list okay now I have a list of buyers and I have a list of opt-ins sometimes opt-ins become buyers and buyers obviously are already opt-ins because they opted in for your course but you know when you have a list like that like I have a big list for it's not big it's big enough for my survival cake food company and we've been out of some meats for a while and I just got a ton yesterday we got four pallets ready yesterday actually and then I got another four comments as 12 pallets and I know I can send out an email and sell all that you know I can make in the six figures because I have a list and if you don't have a list you are screwed because when you do have something good you built a community you can't tell them about it you gotta have a list the best way to build a list is to use Cartra Cartra is amazing there is a video that you're going to see in the description after this video is up on YouTube now right now it's live which means it's not really up okay it's not a recorded video once it becomes a recorded video on YouTube then you'll see all the comments under the actual video you'll see the description and you'll see these links that I'm talking about I also have a free course there you can check out too do you keep separate lists for people 100% yeah I think I just mentioned that and I not only keep separate lists because I have my you know food you know buyers I have my people who want to make money online but I have different tags so if you bought a particular item and I'm said let's say let's say you bought a Ecom Road okay and I'm doing a big promotion for Ecom Road and you're in my list of people who are interested in making money online but you've already bought Ecom Road when I go to send out that email it will be an email about Ecom Road but I'll also add and don't send to people who have a tag that they were a purchaser of Ecom Road because they already bought it so why would they want to see it again why would you want to send it again and why would you want to spend the money to do it so once they get on my list I tag them with things they do or what they've done now some of my products let's say I'm let's say I did a promotion on canned chicken which I did the other day 14 and a half ounce canned chicken and I did a promotion on it and that promotion was for the 14 and a half ounce cans but what I did is I tagged them and since I was sending out emails for a week the tag that I put on them that they were the 14 and a half ounce chicken canned buyers would expire so I do expiring tags because maybe that week they weren't interested the 14 and a half ounce you know chicken or maybe they bought it and I didn't want them to get the next email so that way that tag expires and if I do another promotion six months from now even if they bought it and they were tagged for that the tag expires and they'll see the new promotion because in the new promotion maybe they want more maybe they ate what they got okay so it's also important to have expiring tags based on what you're doing I do that a lot um yeah I think I've hit most of the comments in there Paul's been very nice to give me a bunch of comments I get the majority of them afterwards now the reason I do is the obvious reason I do these things at 10 o'clock in the morning during the week you know not too many people can pull away from their job they're working and watch me at 10 o'clock in the morning however afterwards I get hundreds or even thousands of views on these videos because people want the information but it's not convenient for them and I know it's not convenient and you may say to yourself well why don't you do it when it's convenient for them well because they can always come back and watch and I have to have some convenience too and it is convenient for me to do one at 10 a.m so that's when I do it so um I hope that's helped you out I hope you understand the brand thing building your list thing having a website thing watching out for which platform you're on all these things are super important all these things I implement on a daily basis and also give me your input on the microphone give me your input on the microphone let me know what you think is it something and you gotta listen to one of my other videos is it something that um you want to hear more okay is that is that the case I want I want to know that so that's it guys I hope you enjoyed the video I hope you liked it I hope you got something out of it um I hope the microphone's good let me know let me know this is my wife's microphone this isn't mine that's pretty fancy let's get one of her hairs on right there okay let me get a sip real quick before we go away um what software do you recommend for doing a course sound is a lot better well that's good to know um 100 cardra I've tried kajabi I've tried a whole bunch of other words I won't list all the other ones I use but 100 cardra cardra is the only one out there and I don't think they've come up with one yet that lets you know how far people watch a video now you may say why is that so important well it could tell you that there's a bad part in the video if everybody's leaving at three minutes 30 seconds and it's a 10 minute video you may want to look at three minutes 30 seconds and see what you said there what happened there there could be a big reason for that and then you can correct it um cardra is the only one that allows you to upload your videos to their platforms that you can use that analytic plus the fact maybe somebody only watches two minutes of it but the average person watches eight minutes um you may want to send out an email to the people that left at two minutes and say hey I saw that you didn't get a chance to finish this video click here to go back and watch the video now that's pretty cool to get engagement um you can do that in cardra you can't do it in the other platforms not to mention that the courses in cardra are free because they come along with your email your page builders your sequence builders you're I mean just everything it's all in one place and you don't have to go to a bunch of different places um like you know kajabi has some marketing in there but you couldn't do all your marketing your sales pages and everything in kajabi you couldn't do it um that's why it's so super important to have something like cardra that teaches you all this and you have the access to all this uh let's see here so I think I'm good I gotta I gotta go back to recording videos for YouTube now guys I really appreciate you being here I appreciate your attendance I appreciate your comments if you're watching this and it's not live don't worry don't fear go down to the comment section put some comments in there questions in there whatever you got let me know what's going on okay let me know what you're working on let me know if you have any problems let me know any suggestions you have I want to hear that from you um thanks so much for listening to this video I hope you appreciate the information love each and every one of you uh don't forget to give me a thumbs up that means a lot guys um so please please do that right now just click that thumbs up button don't forget to subscribe hit that subscribe button down there uh it's a big red subscribe button okay it's scary if you haven't clicked it yet uh but do that uh don't forget to also ring the bell turn on all bell notifications so you're notified my bell is turned just notice that oh my guys that's so much better right it's a lot better I like that a whole lot better all right guys you have a great day and I will talk to you real soon if I find a hint button hang on I think I got it