The Myth of the Starving Artist

Hi there, friend. Welcome back to the Artworks for Teachers podcast. I’m your host, Susan Riley, and today I’m really excited to introduce you to somebody you may not have heard of. His name is Jeff Goins. Now Jeff is a bestselling author and he’s also a creative genius in his own right. He has. Songs, he’s written books and he is also the founder of the a creative agency, which helps, um, anyone who has a good idea turn it into a big idea that others wanna hear about.

And he does that through the medium of books. His agency helps to edit and publish and even ghost write, uh, books for others. So if, if you’ve got a book inside of you, you might want to check out Jeff’s work now today, um, in my interview with Jeff, we talk all about the idea of, uh, creativity, why it’s important now more than ever, um, and busting the myth of the starving artist.

So Jeff has some really interesting examples. From hundreds of years ago as to why the myth of the starving artist just isn’t true. And how we can choose something, a, a different story to tell ourselves, which is super important in the upcoming, uh, creative economy that we’re starting to see evolve right around us.

So it’s, it was an amazing conversation. I cannot wait for you to hear it. So let’s dig in. Here is Jeff. Go. Hi, Jeff. Welcome, Welcome. I’m glad you’re here. Hi Susan. I’m eating a piece of chocolate. Cause you said this was informal. It’s all good. And you know what, it is informal. So I’m glad you’re eating a piece of chocolate.

Chocolate makes everything better. . Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . So can you do us a favor and just introduce yourself, um, what’s your working on and, um, what your work’s been based in. Because our audience is a bunch of educators and they may or may not know your work. I know you work from a, a different field. Uh, so I’m, I’m excited for them to get to know you a little bit.

Um, Sure, yeah. I’m a writer, um, and I usually call myself an author because I live in Nashville, Tennessee, and if I call myself a writer here, everybody assumes I write songs. Sure. Which I did many years ago. But you don’t say that in Nashville cuz a person, you know, serving you a drink at a bar is, is, you know, incredibly talented and, you know, you would be, you would be embarrassed to say, you know, I, I I play guitar or something.

Um, yeah. So I, um, I write books, and I’ve done that for the past 10 or so years. Uh, I, blog, podcast, do all of those things. Um, and I run a, a creative agency that writes and edits books for thought leaders. So I, I basically write books for myself and I help other people write books. Yeah. Um, and your writing is what I’m, I am excited for people to hear about today because every time I read what you write, it’s the way that you craft words together.

Um, It speaks to me in a way that often when I’m just reading a regular novel, or even if I’m reading, you know, a professional development or personal development book, it doesn’t, it stale. But the way that you write is beautiful, the way that you craft things together. So, um, I’m excited for that today. So, um, and I’m, I’m excited that you’re in Nashville.

Have you lived in Nashville very long? 16 years maybe. Wow. Okay. Okay. Um, I have several friends who, I’m a musician by trade, so Nashville’s like the Mecca, right? And so every time I go friends who live there, you’re right. You go to any restaurant and it’s like, you know, it’s drop in the bucket. It’s very humbling experience if you are a musician to be there.

Nashville’s the only city where when you go to play, where you go to sing karaoke, you don’t have a bunch of drunk idiots singing off key. You have like a concert. Yeah, absolutely. It’s like, and if you, if you go there as like the one drunk idiot  who’s just trying to be silly, you get laughed out of the dive bar.

I’m not kidding. I have literal, I have literally been told, You will never sing in this, this town again. It’s like, I know. I wasn’t trying to, I thought we were having fun. That’s how I’m here, right? Yeah. I. Um, so, um, I want, I wanna talk about creativity, but I first wanna swing back to this idea of your creative agency because, um, I find this to be fascinating as part of your creative agency.

Tell me a little bit more about what that is. What does that entail? Yeah. Um, it’s called Fresh Complaint, Fresh complaint.com. And, um, we, um, We help authors pick a fight, brush complaint, you know? Um, okay. I believe that a book should stand for something. You shouldn’t just talk about something. You should, um, argue a point.

You should have something to say. Um, so, you know, we have a, a team of writers, editors, project managers, designers, and. We help anybody with a, a vision who wants to say something worth saying, we help them say it better. So, um, we are a book production agency. All of the things that are required to produce a book, a book plan, um, ghost writing or writing, uh, book coaching, uh, editing, design publication, um, you know, we, we help authors do that.

And I would say our, our strongest suit is focusing on, on the big idea. Great book needs to begin with a big idea. Most people try to write a good book, uh, and, and they, they succeed in doing that. The, but the problem is good books are boring and what it takes to resonate with an audience is not a great book.

The opposite of good is not great. It’s interesting and, and we help authors do that. So, um, I think as I was researching for this interview on your, on that section of your site about the creative agency, there’s a line that says that, that you help leaders turn good ideas into great ideas. Mm-hmm. . So what does that look like?

I’m curious about that process. Right. So Great is some synonymous with interesting for us and, um, And you don’t make a good idea better by just trying to like amplify more of what it is. You’ve got to pick a fight. You’ve gotta do something different. Um, different is better than better. And interesting, as I define it, is anytime you challenge your audience’s assumptions in a way that they want to believe.

Um, so anytime I. Most people think X is true, but what’s actually true is Y. And I tell it to you in a way that is artful and palatable to you. That’s an interesting idea, right? So every book Malcolm Gladwell has ever written follows that formula. Everybody thinks that small things or big, small things lead to small change, and big things lead to big change.

But the truth is small things can lead to. Change and that’s the tipping point. Or, uh, everybody thinks that, you know, strength is how you defeat an enemy, but sometimes strength is weakness, and weakness is strength. That’s his book, David and Goliath, and on and on it goes. Um, most successful business books are, um, Sort of follow this formula, but, but most great stories do as well.

Mo you know, some of your most favorite novels and memoirs, uh, follow the same sort of challenging the audience’s assumptions. You have to do that. You have to say something new. You’ve gotta take something old and make it new in a way that is interesting to the audience. And, um, people don’t buy. Because they’re good.

They buy them because they’re interesting because somebody told them something about a book or they heard something that stimulated them. I mean, more books, uh, 10 times as many books are being published now as there were 10 years ago. Mm-hmm. . So it is just a very, very, Cluttered, crowded space. If you have something to say as an author, and in order to break through all that noise, you have to bake the marketing into the book itself, which means you begin with what I call an interesting idea.

Hmm. That’s, that’s fascinating because now, first of all, I know. There’s a, there’s a trend in marketing right now just cause I study that for what I do. Um, and I think it’s Brandon Luce who talks about this idea of, in order to capture engagement from an audience, is to take an idea that they perceive as true and flip it on its head and as though it were false.

Um, that what they believe is actually not true and that draws them in and helps you with your marketing to then convey the message that it is that you’re conveying. And I also find it interesting from the aspect of education because as you know, most of the people are listening to this are teachers.

And one of the frustrations that we’ve heard in the last two years, specifically from the pandemic, was when kids came back that you can’t keep them engaged. You can’t, you can’t compete with a video game that they played that levels up every couple of seconds, you know what I mean? And challenges them with something new.

And so this idea of how do you present information? Cuz I think this transcends just writing. Um, how you present information in whole could be, um, presenting it in a, just in a different way, packaging it a little differently. Yeah. I mean, speaking frankly, um, I, I have the utmost empathy for educators, um, and the pandemic has forced you to do your jobs.

Yeah, I totally agree. You have to like , you, you have to, the, you know, near Al writes about this in his book in Distractible, and I would recommend it for any, um, uh, teacher. Mm-hmm. . Um, and, and he talks about, you know, the kind of, the modern problem of distraction. And if you don’t know who near Al is, near Aile, N I R E Y A L, um, key, um, Uh, was, uh, he, his first book he wrote about how, um, Facebook, Twitter, Uh, uh, now Instagram, most of the social media platforms and now apps, um, were intentionally designed to, um, uh, addict you to, to sort of lure you in and, and be these ex experiences that you wanted to keep going back to.

So he wrote a book basically about how to create sort of addictive experiential products and, and experiences. Mm-hmm. . And then his follow up to that book. So that book was called Hooked. His follow up to that book was intractable how we as individuals, um, focus and, and how we, we don’t get lured into kind of the, the quick hits of, uh, of dopamine, um, that are, you know, um, that are full, you know, through, what is the word I’m looking for?

Rife in our culture. Yeah, that’s not the right word. You know, like we, we cannot escape them. They’re inescapable. Yeah. And. Argument in that book is the opposite of, um, distraction is not focus, it’s traction. And, and he says kids play video games because their lives are boring. Mm-hmm.  not so, so a parent going stop playing video games and, you know, read a book or, or do this.

Um, none of those like, look, you know, my kid loves Fortnite and would literally play it for 12 hours a day. Um, And so I get it, you know, as a parent, and I, and I can empathize with teachers trying to get kids to, you know, dig into more meaningful subjects than, you know, Spider-Man twerking or, or something, you know,

So I get it and. , Um, you know, he basically says that the way that you get a child out of some, you know, a distracted kind of activity is to give them a more interesting activity. Yes. You don’t force yourself or someone else to focus. You give them something more interesting. It’s even hard for our, you know, old.

Kind of like curmudgeon 40, you know something plus brains. To comprehend this, I’m saying by myself, , your kid is not gonna go to a factory. They’re not gonna have a job, They’re not gonna have a boss. They are going to be the factory. This is happening. The pandemic accelerated this. I do wanna touch base on this idea.

Of, um, the creative economy and it swings into your book. Um, the real artists don’t starve. So, um, the idea, and again, you swing this on its head, this idea of the starving artist and that that’s not true anymore. Was it ever really true? That’s the story of Michael Angel. Can you share that from the book?

Like, I think that’s fascinating. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, the basic idea is that you don’t have to starve and that most, uh, modern creative professionals are, are believing a set of principles and obligations that, um, are no longer true and in many cases were never true. Um, and it’s the same thing that, that we see in education.

And in parenting, parents and teachers are preparing children for the, the world that they know, the world, that the parents and teachers know, and that world one doesn’t exist right now and certainly will not exist 10 to 15 years from now. You know, the gig economy will be the. Uh, employment market, meaning you will have multiple employers and clients and jobs and things that you do.

Um, it, it will be the, the main way that we experience employment in, in the near future. Um, so in that same vein, I saw, you know, a as, as a, as a musician, as an artist, as a writer, as a creative entrepreneur, I, I’ve worn a lot of different hats in the past couple of decades of being an adult and, um, You know, I’ve seen that this is the, the best time to be a creative professional, to make money with your artistic, uh, talents and sensibilities.

Um, the playing field is almost completely leveled out. My grandfather was an incredibly talented, uh, artist. He was a, he was a fine artist. He was an incredible jazz pianist. He was a professional journalist and, and a hell of a writer, and he could. He died when I was 15, 16 years old, and he could not get published for the life of me.

He was incredibly well decorated, brilliant, creative person. And because the way things worked back then, I mean, this is the, you know, eighties and basically early nineties when he, you know, towards the end of his life and he was trying to do this. You know, unless you were Stephen King or Michael Criton or whatever, you weren’t, you weren’t making it, you know?

Right. And, um, there were still a lot of gatekeepers he would’ve marveled at the world that we live in now. You know, the first book that I ever published, I wrote in 30 days. I got. Somebody that I met on Twitter to design it for me, somebody else that I met, uh, via email to edit it for me. I traded favors with them.

Yep. Uh, and I published the book for free and I made, I made $50,000 and sold over 10,000 copies of it in the first six months. Uh, you know, and, and I did this without a book contract, without an agent, without anything. I just self-published it. Um, the world we live in now is incredible and. Most creative people I know are going, Well, I’ll never make it.

I could never make it. And they’re waiting to be picked. They’re waiting for the record company or the publisher or whatever to come alongside them, and they’re missing the greatest revolution. That, you know, the arts have ever seen because they’re believing in old story. So that was the frustration that I felt when I wrote this book.

I was like, you could make a a good living doing this if you stopped believing what I understood to be the myth of the starving artist while I was kind of setting out to write this book a friend. Enlightened me, uh, to the story of Michelangelo. Michelangelo, um, was obviously, um, one of the most well known artists of all time, and he was extremely wealthy.

I did not know this. Most people don’t know this. Um, but we, we do now know this. We just don’t believe it. Um, thanks to the work of a, an art historian named Ra Hatfield, who lives in, uh, Florence, Italy. To this day, he’s still alive. I emailed him, you know, a few weeks ago. And he’s probably in his eighties now.

And, um, uh, long story short, in the uh, nineties, uh, Rab Hatfield discovered a bunch. Previously unknown bank accounts belonging to the artist, Michelangelo. And in those bank accounts were hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars, which was an exorbitant amount of money for an artist at that time to just have sitting in a bank.

And he had lots of them. And, and, and what, uh, Rab Hatfield discovered was that by the time Michelangelo died, he had a net worth. Almost 50 million. And he was the artist. He was the richest artist of the Renaissance. But not only that, he was the richest artist at that time who had ever lived. And I always thought that obviously there were artists who made money, you know, the Thomas Kincaid of the world or whatever, and the James Pattersons, the people who kind of like found a.

To sort of like mass produce their art, but it wasn’t like great, you know, So you could either sell out or you could starve, you know, and retain the integrity of your work. You could be like a van go. Um, and here we have a counterexample to that belief, right? That Michelangelo in arguably one of the greatest artists of all time, of multiple mediums, uh, painting, sculpture, even architecture, and he.

In arguably, uh, a creative genius and he was the richest MFR in his, you know,  in, in his space at the time. And, um, you know, so I just started like digging around and finding out how many other artists of renowned, um, were not what we think they were. Even Van Go was not. Broke. Right. He, he was bankrolled by his brother Theo.

He, uh, made the equivalent of, um, you know, like, um, I don’t know, like a postal worker’s salary. He, he was, he was a blue collar artist. He wasn’t poor, right? He made plenty of money. Um, and he made enough money to paint over a thousand paintings in his lifetime. Uh, plo Pica. Pablo Picasso said, I would like to live as a popper, but with plenty of money, and he did just that he was worth over half a billion dollars when he died.

Wow. Yeah. So all that to say. Um, the examples, the historic examples of people who have, um, created good end during work, um, and been compensated in their lifetimes for it. Those are not diametrically opposed that there is a lot of overlap there. And, um, And so there are lots of thriving artists throughout history.

Um, I would say to thrive as an artist is the rule, not the exception. Um, but the whole idea of a starving artist was a story that was born in the late 19th century and propagated through most of the 20th century through Bohemian culture. And it’s just a story. And like any story, if you really, really believe it, it becomes true in your life.

You see it play out in your life everywhere. Uh, but if you don’t believe it, if you believe something, That alternative can become true as well. And so the book is just, Let’s draw a line in the sand. There are two myths in creative work. One is the myth of the starving artist. If you believe it, it’ll come true for you.

The other is the myth of the thriving artist. Myths are stories that we tell ourselves to help us make sense of our reality. If you believe that one, it can become true for you as well. And there has never been a better time in history to thrive because of all of the resources that you now have access.

Yeah, it’s, You’re absolutely right. It’s incredible. I will say, um, when I, when I went to college, I went to, I went to a music conservatory, very small. It was, I mean, like you were doing music, that was it. There was no alternative. If you went and you wanted to do something else, well then you needed to choose a different college.

There was no other choice. Totally. Um, and I remember having a conversation with my dad about it, and he flat out said, he was like, I’m not gonna pay for you to go. You’ll, you won’t be able to survive. You’ll come out. Do you know how many musicians there are in the world? You’ll star, right. I’m not gonna pay for it.

Gotcha. Um. We ended up that, uh, I, I took out a huge amount of loans to go to college. He and I didn’t speak for years. Mm. Um, just because we had this very different understanding and it was, you know, it was kind of like my stubborn streak of, Well, I’m gonna make this work one way or the other. I think that’s something that’s really important for most creatives.

I think most creatives are not only creative in their work, but creative in getting themselves paid Right.  to getting themselves what I have to. Yeah. They have to, they absolutely have to be, they have to be industrious. Right. Um, and I would never have imagined however, many years ago though, was 25 at this point.

The, the world that I sit in now, which, you know, I, I get to create my own job essentially. I get to create my own life and whatever that looks like, I can create my schedule. It. It’s completely different than anything I would’ve ever imagined. So you, I, I totally agree. That now is a great time. I still think though, that there’s, you know, especially in education, when we’re looking at where do we, how do we prepare our kids?

The arts are the things that get cut. The, um, the things that we’re actually gonna prepare them for the world are what get down, you know, drowned out. So it’s wonderful to hear a message that, that’s not true and that we can, you know, artists can thrive in this economy. Um, I, I also wanna touch base about your other book, The in Between.

And I wanna touch base about this one because the, uh, the idea of the embracing tension between the now and the next big thing, because so many educators in the last two years have decided they’re moving on. They’re gonna try something different, and it’s really, really scary for them. Um, so I feel like in your book, the in between, there’s this underlying premise.

That the power is in the pause, that there’s in the waiting, this, this space in between the then and the next big thing. Um, so I’m curious how this tension that, um, that waiting, that pause kind of has, has evolved in your life and what you’ve learned from that. Well, all of life is waiting. That was essentially the argument of that book, Annie Dier says, How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

And I’ve always loved that quote. And it occurred. I wrote that book when I was, um, um, you know, my, my first child had just been born and I had in many. Ways achieved everything that I had sort of set out to achieve. I’d become a full-time author at this point. I’d quit my job. I’d started a family. I had a kid, uh, I, you know, was self-employed.

I was making more money than I knew what to do with, and, and I still felt like I was like waiting for something. You know, There, there’s something. Else to come, you know? And so I increased my goals and, you know, and, and, and set my sites higher and just went for more. And I, and I just felt this like low grade anxiety and frustration and this feeling of like not doneness.

And I realized that, um, uh, so I wrote the book sort of based on all of these kind of major milestones. Waiting to, you know, graduate college. My first time overseas, uh, waiting to get married, um, waiting to have a child, waiting for my grandfather to die. Like, waiting, waiting, waiting. You’re always waiting for something.

And how we use the waiting is, is really what we’re doing with our lives. You’re like, we’re all waiting for, you’re waiting for the data and you’re waiting for lunch. You’re waiting for your turn to speak. And if and every moment that you’re waiting for the next. To happen. Every moment that you’re waiting, you’re actually wasting, you’re wasting this right here.

There is no, there is no next big thing. There is only now there is only this, this thing happening right here. And you may love it and you may hate it, but it’s all you have to work with right now. And, um, you know, uh, that, that was sort of a central. Message, uh, and lesson of the pandemic, whether we chose to embrace it or not, which is like, look, you’re not in control.

They, things didn’t work out the way that you thought. The thing that you thought was gonna last two weeks took two years . And eventually we, we had to realize, okay, we’ve got to sort of get on with our lives and this is sort of the new normal. And that looked different for everybody, of course. Um, and that was a wonderful lesson because.

Um, you know, we talk about slowing down, but you don’t actually have to slow down. You just have to notice the speed of life. And if you’re moving so fast, what’s the Ferris Buer line? Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, it just might miss it. And, and it’s like that, like you just have to notice what’s going on.

And, um, if you don’t ever notice things, you’re gonna miss it all right. I recently had a, a friend, a client, a ghost writing client. I wrote a book with, with a, a friend of mine. And, um, and we collaborate on it. You know, we, we both did a lot of work on it together, but I was the writer and he was the author, he was the person who knew the stuff, and I was the one who brought the pretty words and.

He launched this book the other week at the same spot where I launched that book that you’re talking about in 2013, that book came out. Wow. And I remember I saw him up there and I, and I saw parts of myself, or at least I projected parts of myself onto him. And I remember being this like anxious slightly younger man.

Um, you know, that was nine years ago, you know, jittery. I couldn’t enjoy where I was because all I could see, uh, was what was ahead of me, and I was, I was missing where I was at and. One of the things that I observe about elders, older people, which don’t really have a, a place of respect in, in our society for the most part, you know, we put these people in homes instead of put putting them at the head of our dinner tables.

Yeah. Um, but you, you watch an older person, you know, somebody who’s 70, 80, 90 years old, they move more slowly through the. You know, and, and, and there are multiple reasons for that. One is that their, that maybe all their bodies can do. Two. I’ve noticed that sometimes you have a lot of experience, you know, and you know what can break a person a lot more than a six year old who jumps off a, you know, Diving board or something with no, you know, reckless abandon, you have a sense of consequences, right?

So you’re like, let take my time here, . And you know, the third reason I think is, um, you just don’t have anywhere else to be or anything else to do. But this right here, right now, a walk can just be a walk. You’re not walking to get exercise. You’re not walking to go somewhere. You’re walking just to enjoy the walk.

And the more I. Learn to accept and embrace what we call the in between. You know what some people call liminal space, the space in between major things. Mm-hmm. , uh, the richer and deeper and more beautiful life gets even in the absolute mundane. Yeah. And, and you know, I wrote this before, you know, everybody was talking about things like mindfulness and, you know, it was out there, but I, I, I wasn’t aware of it.

Meditation, just presence and, and everything gets better. Almost everything gets better the slower it gets. You know, you chew your food a little bit more softly. You, you hold your child for just an extra moment. You know, you, you take a deep breath and, and breathe and you know, the air around you, whatever it is, like just learning to be with whatever’s going on right now.

There’s a lot of good out there and we miss it when we’re just going, going, going. Life is not about really big things. I’ve had really big things happen to me, and those things are fine, but if you’re going a hundred miles an hour, even the big things blur by, um, life is about slowing down for the small things and seeing how deep and how wide and how big those things actually are.

Oh, that’s beautiful. And it’s true. So thank you so much for sharing that. Um, to wrap up, I, I don’t wanna take up anymore time. I did wanna kind of close though with just asking you if there was one takeaway that people could, um, remember about the creative process, about creativity in general, What, what would you say that would.

That the arts are really the last vestige of creative thinking. Meaning when my kids, when my kid goes to theater class, that’s like the one goofy, weird, fun. There are no rules here, kind of, you know, teacher. Mm-hmm. . Um, and then everybody else is trying to go, This is the way, the problem with life is that everybody who ever told me this is the way was wrong,

Not in the sense that like that was an a way and that there, there wasn’t good data to support that way being useful and effective. But when they told me it was the way, the only way. They were wrong. And the only thing I really wanna teach my kids, um, is that there’s more than one way to get to where you want to go.

And the arts usually when you, when you’ve got a good teacher, not even a good artist, a good teacher, uh, leading the way for that sort of discovery process. The arts are where that happens. Where we. Cool. Let’s find out what happens. There aren’t rules here except to like maybe figure out a form, figure out some ways that people have done this before.

And then mess with it. And then break it and have some fun and do something interesting. I wish that math were taught that way. Yeah. Because math has changed since we learned one plus one equals two. You know ? Yeah. You know that. Sure. So, so everything is a bit more malleable than we were led to believe.

Science is not a subject, it’s a process. You can’t study science. You use science to understand the world and the universe and yourself, right? So I wish everybody knew that everything you learn and do is creative. And, and, and it is being recreated and redefined and recontextualized and re understood.

And if you were a teacher or an educator, um, remember that you’re also an artist and that there was a time when you didn’t know all these rules, when you were discovering these things for the first time. And you were excited about that. Hopefully. Yeah. Because it was new, right? And, and what we need. We don’t need novelty.

It’s there. We just need to be able to recognize it, to go, There’s another way to get there. There’s a, This is not the only way, and to your point, it is an artistry just of itself. So, and it’s a hard job and it’s thank job and I wanna acknowledge that it is incredibly generous job that is not, you know, nearly well compensated.

You know? And, and, and, yeah, I mean, sorry, I could interrupt you, but Yeah, if I, My closing comment is thank you and, and. You know, what is the Picasso saying? You know, um, you know, the artist is just the child who never grew up, you know, And, um, and the teacher can be the same, you know, the teacher, um, is, is not the child who never grew up, but they’re, the artist who remembers what it was like to be a child.

Hmm. Oh, I love that. Thank you Jeff. See, the, the, your way with words is amazing. So thank you so much for being with us today. I really appreciate it. It’s my pleasure. Thank you. Susan. Where can people find more information about you? Um, have follow you, all of that good stuff. My name is Jeff Goins. Goins, like coins or groins as they told me in middle school.

Um, and my website is just my last name, Goins, g o i n s, writer goinswriter.com. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks.