Jeff Goins

Launch me, Luis. Let’s do it.

Jeff Goins

Sure, yeah. The new book Real Artists Don’t Starve is about me picking a fight with this idea that I have heard most of my life about how to be a successful artist.

As a creative like you Luis, I grew up fascinated with words, and I’ve always made things. When I was a little kid, I would draw Garfield cartoons. As a teenager, I would write songs, and as an adult, I always played around with writing.

Jeff Goins

For years, I was writing. I was just working on something, but I refused to call myself a writer because I thought this was something you were like born with or you just knew it, and I was never confident in my craft like that. It was always just a hobby.

The reason I was afraid to admit I was a writer is that I grew up with this story of a starving artist with people all around me saying, “Hey. You can’t make a living at that.”

We live in a world where we assumed creative work is not necessarily taken as seriously as other professions, and it’s hard to make a living off of it. I wanted to pick a fight with because I kept running into two groups of people.

Jeff Goins

I live in Nashville. We have a lot of creatives. I keep running into two groups of people, Starving Artists and what I call Thriving Artists who have learned how to be a successful artist.

There was no difference between these two groups of people in skill, which means you can be a good artist and also be a starving artist or, you could be a good artist and be a thriving one. You’re making a living off of your art, you’re not struggling to get by, and you don’t necessarily have to be famous.

And so, what I saw were some significant differences.

Jeff Goins

Yeah.

Jeff Goins

Right, yes.

Jeff Goins

One of the things that are interesting about Van Gogh is he didn’t starve as much as people think he did. He made more than the average manual laborer made. Did he sell a bunch of his art during his lifetime? Well, no. This idea that he never sold a painting is also not accurate. What Van Gogh had was a patron in the form of his brother who has taken care a lot of that stuff for him.

So even he did not starve as much as we would like to believe but you’re right. Picasso was smart about a lot of this stuff, and he’s an example in the book.

Jeff Goins

I wrote this book because we’re like, “Ugh. This person starved and struggled,” and it’s not true.

Now, is it true that artists have starved at times? Sure.

But what we find when we look at many of history’s most influential and successful artists like Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Picasso is they were not doing as bad as we thought.

One of the reasons for that is this whole story.

Picasso said, “I’d like to live like a pauper but with plenty of money.” and that’s what a lot of these guys and women did. They lived like paupers with plenty of money. Michelangelo was the richest artist of the Renaissance.

I pick a fight with 12 of these old ideas on how to be a successful artist that need to die. I call them the Rules of the New Renaissance.

Jeff Goins

Here’s the old thing we used to believe and the new thing on how to be a successful artist that is helping creative people live prosperous lives

The first idea is that you have to be born with it. You have to be born with this natural talent.

Starving artists tend to believe in talent and thriving artists embrace the importance of skill. Becoming an artist and a creative and choosing your vocation is a choice.

You don’t have to be born an artist. You have to choose to become one.

That is the first step.

Whatever our creative endeavors are, that’s the first step that we have to take. We have to take this bold important step in the direction of our life’s work.

Jeff Goins

The next one is the starving artist wants to be original.

Jeff Goins

They strive to do this whereas the thriving artist steals from his or her influences and this is something that rubs people the wrong way. They say, “Steal? I don’t want to steal. I want to be original.”

No creative genius ever did something completely original.

They never created something out of nothing. What they did is they built on the work of their predecessors.

I love the example of Jim Henson, who did incredibly innovative work with puppets. Those are the things the world had never seen before. Except when you dig down deep into his story, you find that what he’s doing is he’s borrowing from stand-up comedians, other puppeteers, and other comics from his era, and people that came before him. He was just building on it and combining things in different ways.

Somebody once said, “Nothing is new but arrangements.”

Jeff Goins

Rearranging them in new and interesting ways and that is something we can all do, and that means we can all be artists and learn how to be a successful artist.

Jeff Goins

We have to discard that idea, Luis, that there is such a thing as an original idea.

It’s never happened. We’re all building on the ideas that have come before us.

I live in Nashville. There are a lot of songwriters here. People ask me what I do, and I go, “I’m a writer.” and they go, “What songs have you written?” I go, “No. I’m an author. I write books.”

When musicians and songwriters get together to write songs, they’re almost always co-writing.

Jeff Goins

They’re getting together with each other, and somebody brings a lyric, and someone brings a melody. It’s a very collaborative art form, and it just turns out that this is the way the best creative work gets made and best way on how to be a successful artist.

Even when you think you have an original idea like a melody, you realized, “Oh, no! I had that subconsciously buried in my mind from a Bob Dylan song.”

If you borrow and copy an idea from one person, you’re a thief, but if you borrow from multiple sources, you’re an artist.

Jeff Goins

It’s not just about stealing. It’s about borrowing from the people who they influenced you and then combining those ideas and material in new and exciting ways. All of a sudden, the creativity and the art is how you’re arranging all this stuff because we all have the same stuff to work with.

The question of how we do our creative work becomes a matter of arrangement. How do I learn how to be a successful artist? How do I become well-read, an excellent researcher, and study the field I’m in so that I can, in an informed way, try to combine all this stuff in ways maybe nobody has ever done before.

As you mentioned Luis, I think Shakespeare did that well.

Jeff Goins

Right.

One of the rules on how to be a successful artist is not to work for free.

We’ve all done things for friends. We’ve all helped people out, and I think that’s fine but what I find with so many creative is they make a habit of working for free, and they give away their best work.

The problem with that Kamala is you’re setting a precedent that your last gig was free, so the next one is probably going to be free. And so, you create this reputation of never charging for your work.

Once you’ve done that, it is hard to switch to getting paid for your work. Most people are afraid to do this. They want to help people. I get that, but they’re also just afraid of the confrontation saying, “You got to pay me something.”

At the same time, there are all of these “opportunities” out there. And so, there can be this fear of missing out “If I don’t do this for free, I’m going to miss out on this opportunity, and somebody else is going to snatch that up.” Sometimes, that’s true.

Jeff Goins

What I encourage folks to do as a way on how to be a successful artist it is to always work for something. Always charge something.

I spoke with an exceptional artist when I was running this book interview. She’s one of the case studies in the book. Her name is Melissa Dinwiddie.

When Melissa started, she was doing a hand lettering calligraphy visual art. She was afraid to charge for her work but her supplies cost money. Not to mention rent, food, and all that other stuff but it costs money to make art.

It costs you time to coach somebody or to build a website for them. These things cost valuable resources. You have to value the time and effort you put into it and many times, you’re just afraid of it.

Melissa was terrified to do it but she wanted too. She wanted to make a living off of her art. I talked to many people who say, “I don’t have to make money. It’s not about money.”

Jeff Goins

But then, when you ask them, “Would you like to make a living off of your art if you didn’t have to sell out or compromise anything? Is it against your values to get paid to do this thing that you love?” Always, the answer is, “No. I’d love to do that. We’re afraid that’s going to cost us something.” And it does cost you something. It costs you this confrontation right here where you have to charge something, but at the same time, that’s not too big of a cost.

For Melissa, what she did was she told her friend, “I don’t want to charge anything,” and her friend made her. She said, “Look, this costs you something. You need to charge something.” and they both agreed on the sum of $20 for her first commission. She charged 20 bucks for it because they both agree, “Well, this probably what you could get to go if you want to target and bought a print for 20 bucks.”

Jeff Goins

When charging for your work, it doesn’t have to be exorbitant amounts of money. You just need to start somewhere.

I remember starting out as a speaker, I was terrified to charge anything. This is a field where you can make great amounts of money or no money at all because everybody’s trying to sell you an opportunity.

I knew I needed to charge something. I just started low and then gradually raise my prices. It was interesting. Events would ask me to come speak, and I would say, “I can’t come for free. Do you have a budget?” They’d say, “No.” And I was like, “Well, I need to get paid at least $500.” They would say, “No. We can’t do that.” I’ll say, “Okay. Well, I can’t come for anything less than 250.” And they say, “Okay.”

All of a sudden, this place that had a budget of zero dollars, somehow found $250 in the budget.

What that did for me was it did a couple of things.

Jeff Goins

It wasn’t like making bank off of $250 speaking gigs, but it brought a dignity to the work that I had never before felt.

Jeff Goins

When I’m getting paid to do something, I bring a certain level of seriousness and professionalism to work. Despite my best efforts, I typically don’t bring those to things that I’m doing for free. These are important factors on how to be a successful artist.

Jeff Goins

Once you set a baseline even if it’s very low like $20 and $250, it gives you a starting point, and you’re setting a precedent, “My work is valuable.” As you get better, as your reputation grows, and as your confidence increases, you can start to raise your prices. That’s exactly what happened with me. That’s exactly what happened with Melissa who’s now a full-time thriving artist and mastered how to be a successful artist.

I think we just don’t realize that weren’t trying to help people by giving our work away for free. In many cases, we’re hurting the work.

Jeff Goins

Just real quick on this, I came across the study not too long ago where they looked at paid internships and unpaid internships. This is a survey of 9,200 students. 63% of those, with paid internships received at least one job offer whereas 37% who were not paid received an offer.

If you get paid for your work, you are twice as likely to get more work, whereas, if you don’t get paid, you’re going to get less work.

The challenge here on knowing how to be a successful artist is to take your work seriously. If you want other people to do it, you have to do it first.

Jeff Goins

As you mentioned Luis, my definition of an artist is pretty broad. I think we all want to do more creative work. That’s a buzzword these days today, especially in the business world.

Jeff Goins

This book is just a challenge. We’ve heard the story of the starving artist that “Oh. You can’t chase that passion. You can’t pursue that dream. You’re going to starve. You can’t make it work. Don’t quit your day job.” We haven’t heard the other side of the story too much about the thriving artist and those who have learned how to be a successful artist.

It is possible to get paid to do interesting, fulfilling, and creative work, and to do it for a living without apology, without struggling, starving, or suffering for it.

Jeff Goins

I think the bottom line here is we have a responsibility to our art and the gift we want to give to the world to find a way to make a living off of it.

I love what Walt Disney said about this. He said, “We don’t make films to make money. We make money to make more movies.” Whether you’re doing food service or visual art or you’re an employee at a company trying to find ways to share your best creative gift with the world, and you felt stifled and resisted, you have a responsibility to do that. But the point of making money of thriving and learning how to be a successful artist is not just to become rich and hoard it.

The point of becoming a thriving artist and learning how to be a successful artist is you can create more art. You can share your gift with the world, and you, starving, doesn’t help you and the work you’re doing, and it doesn’t help the people that you’re trying to reach.