Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Rainmaker.FM

The Digital Commerce and Content Marketing Podcast Network

  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Member Area
  • Log In
Menu
  • Log In
  • Free Training
7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
Hack the Entrepreneur
Members Only
Rainmaker.FM Elsewhere
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/rfm-pink-0462.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes
Previous Episode:Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness More Episodes Next Episode:The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

August 11, 2015

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

July 28, 2015

How Long Will It Take for My Business to Start Making Money? And Other Impossible Questions

July 21, 2015

5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

What does it mean to live an amazing life? Why put the time in to get great at something? And how can we keep having fun for the long haul?

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Last week David Bowie died, leaving a lot of us shocked and saddened — and leaving all kinds of “What David Bowie can Teach Us” posts and podcasts.

This isn’t that. But it is a set of musings that Bowie’s death (and life) sparked me to think about.

In this 15-minute episode, I talk about:

  • How to prepare for your “overnight success”
  • My pink permission slip for making yourself great
  • The role that weird, deep projects can play in an amazing life
  • Finding the balance between working deeply and playing deeply
  • Train wrecks, publicity, and legacy
  • My favorite virtue (some consider it a vice)

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David BowieSonia Simone
  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/rfm-pink-0462.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

  • David Bowie’s final photographs
  • Victoria Labalme’s speaking workshop in late February, if you want to join me there …
  • Why Getting Attention Won’t Make You Rich
  • Josh Kaufman’s Personal MBA

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Hello, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me yet, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

So, I record these a little under a week before we publish, and the big thing that happened this week is that David Bowie died. It shocked and saddened a lot of us on social media, it was pretty much the only thing anyone talked about on Monday in my feeds.

There will be a lot of “What David Bowie can Teach Us” posts, I think because he tried so many different things that he had many, many opportunities to influence and become beloved by so many people. So there’s a lesson there, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

I’m not going to do a “What Bowie can Teach Us” podcast today, but his life did spark some thoughts for me, so instead of walking through all the ways he did it, I’m going off on my own and talking about something that didn’t get covered ten million times — which is the value of continuing to show up, to stay engaged and creative for the long haul.

The multi-year overnight success

Many of you are well familiar with the phenomenon that what looks like “overnight success” virtually always has roots in many years of preparation.

You may be in the middle of that preparation time, which is an incredibly tough time on the psyche. You’re working hard, your family or significant other might be wondering why you are spending all of this time on this “pipe dream” thing, whether it’s a podcast or a website or a business or a book, or whatever it might be.

One of the most valuable things you can do is to surround yourself with support and encouragement during this time. It’s nice to have a supportive family, but it isn’t fair to ask them to do all the heavy lifting here.

Find other people who do what you do — write or record or make music or make a business, whatever it is. Create those supportive friendships, and keep working on them and creating new relationships. You’re going to need it, you really will.

No one can give you a guarantee. I can’t give you some kind of warranty that guarantees you’ll get the results you intend to from this time of your life, this time of preparation and getting really good at what you do, and putting the work in.

But I can give you one of my pink permission slips to continue to make yourself better — because something awesome is going to come out of it. I don’t know what it is, and you don’t either.

The value of doing “non-commercial” deep work

My lovely, smart friend Victoria Labalme studied with Marcel Marceau. She worked incredibly hard. Does she make a living now as a mime? No, I guess somewhat ironically, she makes a great living as an elite speaking coach.

But the visual expression she can put into a talk, the way she can communicate beyond what she’s doing with her voice, is incredible.

She didn’t know where that work was going to go, but she knew it had value — and it has been part of what’s added up to become this amazing life.

Plus, as my friend and Personal MBA writer Josh Kaufman says about writing books, “It’s valuable because it’s hard.”

By the way, both of those people are folks you should know more about — I’ll see if I can entice Josh here to talk about the Personal MBA, because it was vastly influential on me. And Victoria is doing a speaking workshop in Los Angeles in late February that I’m going to — if you give talks and want to work on doing that at a much higher level, I think she might have room. Plus you and I can hang out. 🙂

RockTheRoomLive.com is where to go to see if there are any spots left in that workshop.

Finding the balance

What this is all about is finding that balance — on the one hand, putting the work in because it’s hard and because you want to get tremendously good and because it matters, and just because it’s satisfying to really master something instead of staying on the surface the way most people do.

And on the other hand, staying open and sensitive to the potential for doing Your Thing in a new way, a different way, experimentation, exploration, reinvention. Play.

Obviously, going back to Bowie, what he was known for was reinvention. But paired with reinvention is working your ass off toward mastery, so that when you reinvent yourself, it’s not just some kind of train wreck attraction stunt, which is where a lot of celebrities these days settle.

Train wrecks, publicity, and legacy

What is Kim Kardashian masterful at? I have no idea.

If she’s paying her dues, if she’s working to master something at a truly exceptional level, an elite level, other than self-promotion, she hides that. This may or may not be fair, but from what she puts out there, she’s today’s poster child for being famous for being famous.

As opposed to her husband, who’s kind of a tool a lot of the time, at least in his public persona, but Kanye West is a masterful musician and he’s put the work in to really create transformative work. His level of craft and inventiveness are genuinely at an elite level. You might like his work or not like it, but you can’t dismiss it.

By the way, I happen to suspect they’re probably both very smart. Who knows, I don’t know these people. This isn’t praising or putting them down, it’s just an observation from the outside on what legacies I think they’re likely to leave. Since they happen to be very famous and married, it invites that comparison between the two.

It’s not about being nice, or likable. I happen to think being nice is underrated, and I recommend it. Emotional intelligence is a useful thing to develop. It comes in handy plus it makes you a better person.

But this isn’t about that. It’s about being both deeply dedicated and deeply playful. It’s about being a pro and being an artist. They’re not mutually exclusive, at all — quite the opposite — but sometimes our culture makes it feel that way.

The virtue of stubbornness

Going back to Bowie, although there are a lot of things I admire about him, it might be the stubbornness that I respect the most.

He kept showing up. He kept reinventing himself. He kept working on that knife-edge of balance between mastery and play. He kept things uncomfortable.

If he’d stopped at Ziggy Stardust, he’d have enduring fans, but it would be a somewhat shallow success. It would be a moment in time, a sliver of rock and roll history.

Some of his creative experiments weren’t terribly successful, commercially or with critics. That didn’t really seem to matter. He just kept working.

Many of you have seen some lovely photos taken of him just a few days before his death, by his photographer Jimmy King. They don’t look like a man who’s given up. They don’t look like a man who can count the hours before his death. He looks like he’s having fun.

That’s what I would wish for you, and for myself. Keep showing up, keep working on something that challenges you, and keep having fun right up until the final moments. That’s a life well lived. It’s certainly my aspiration, and I hope that both you and I can live up to it.

Never Miss New Shows and Episodes on Rainmaker.FM

Get the best of the Rainmaker.FM network in a single weekly email, along with two weeks
of free training that will change the way you think about online marketing ...

Free Registration

You might also like...

Youpreneur with Chris Ducker

Changing Lives, Making Money and Inspiring Others, with Steve Chou

Listen to episode
Rough Draft

030 The Great Paragraph Hoax

Listen to episode
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

Listen to episode
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker

Why Every Entrepreneur Should Become an Author, with Jim Kukral

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

How #1 Hit Podcast ‘Welcome to Night Vale’ Co-Creator Jeffrey Cranor Writes: Part One

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

How Advice Columnist and Author Heather Havrilesky Writes: Part One

Listen to episode

Comments

  1. David Villalva says

    January 26, 2016 at 11:03 PM

    Sonia, thank you. I just survived an exhausting conference for my Corp America job I want to escape and listened to this episode during a quick one hour flight home. Your words reinforced all the work I’m putting into my side hustle.

    I’m grinding every day. I’m challenged every day. But I’m still showing up everyday.

    This episode gave me two blog post ideas, too.

    THANK YOU for supporting this Creative and making sure I’m focused on the long-term deal. 😉

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Copyright © 2023 Rainmaker Digital, LLC. Powered by the Rainmaker Platform.

Privacy Policy  Â·  Refund Policy  Â·  Cookie Policy  Â·  Terms of Service  Â·  Contact