THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hey there my passion maker. It’s Miriam Schulman and you’re listening to Episode 152 of the Inspiration Place podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here. Today, we’re talking all about doubts and doubters. In this episode, you’ll discover how to turn criticism into motivation, why curating the complete experience of your product is important to its ultimate success and why learning builds confidence.
Today’s guest is the founder and CEO of Hint, Inc., best known for its award winning Hint Water, the leading unsweetened, flavored water. Her first book, Undaunted: Overcoming Doubts and Doubters, was released October 2020 and is now a Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller. Please welcome to the Inspiration Place, Kara Goldin.
Kara Goldin:
Hello.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hey there. Welcome to the show.
Kara Goldin:
Thank you, excited to be here.
Miriam Schulman:
My daughter, who’s 23, she was super impressed because she knows all about Hint Water. That was something she knew. My husband wasn’t quite sure until I showed him the back of your book. And he’s like, “Jamie Dimon blurbed her. She must be a big deal.” I think so.
Kara Goldin:
That’s awesome, I love it. Well, it’s very nice to be here and by the way, you do not look like you have a 23 year old daughter, so I-
Miriam Schulman:
We’re about the same age. It’s the Zoom filter. Don’t you know about the Zoom filter?
Kara Goldin:
I do. I do know about the Zoom filter, but look, it amazes me that I have three in college right now. One in high school and three in college. It’s insane.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, yeah, well, congratulations. It was fun reading your book because we’re about the same age. I was like, “Yeah, I remember when we used to meet people in New York with just a slip of paper with something scratched on it. How did we do that with no cell? How did we get together? It was unbelievable.”
Kara Goldin:
I know, it’s insane. Right, now you can sit there and text people and say, “Hey, I’m here,” or, “I’ll be there in five minutes.” Before it was just you’d sit there and wait and wait.
Miriam Schulman:
Right and then God forbid your friend was 40 minutes late, which would happen to me. I would bring a book because you wouldn’t know were they going to show up, are you going to leave and then they show up? Where are you going to go anyway because you have no idea?
Kara Goldin:
Or restaurant reservations. I mean, I guess you could call them, but generally, you just went there and you waited.
Miriam Schulman:
We used pay phones, which my kids have no idea what that is. Kara, I did want to talk to you first about your mom, your late mother who was an art teacher and how that was for you growing up with an artist mother, since most of my audience are artists.
Kara Goldin:
It’s crazy. Her name was Kay, Kathleen, but she went by Kay. It’s interesting, I didn’t realize until much later, I think the benefits of writing a book too, realizing where she came from and what she did. I mean, she grew up in a little town just outside of Minneapolis and I mean, this is back in the ’40s. I mean, she’s a Midwestern girl who went to university. Most of her friends were not doing that and she was an art history major at a crazy time in our lifetime. She just loved art and she dreamed of art. She didn’t live in New York City or someplace where there was an incredible museum. But her father, and my grandfather, who I never had a chance to meet, was actually a printer. So she spent a lot of time probably watching him and printing.
But she was always doing something around art. Like I said, I mean, she graduated with an art history major and she was interested in the background of art, but also really interested in how she could take the story of artists and bring them to life where it was easy for people to recognize. One of the things I remember as a kid that she did, she took some time off from actually working while she was raising five children. We moved from Minneapolis to Phoenix/Scottsdale area when I was just a little kid. She used to substitute teach an art class in some of the public schools.
One day she came up with this idea to teach art in the schools. Now imagine you’re a kid hearing that your mom is starting this program in the public schools to actually teach art. I remember thinking, “Okay, wait. What are you doing? You’re going to my school? You’re going to come into my classroom?” Her response was, “Well, not necessarily. What I want to do is go into the schools and teach about the classics. I want people to be able to understand what a Picasso is. Why did he create the way that he created versus a Monet, versus a Renoir or whatever?” She did start that whole series in the Scottsdale school system and this is 1970s, she’s going from class to class. People let her do it, it ended up to be not just in the art classes, but she ended up reaching out to homeroom teachers and saying, “Hey, during the breaks can I come in? I’ll just take 15, 20 minutes.”
But she decided that she was going to have a hard time making money and it just became really challenging. In many ways, she was an entrepreneur. She was creating this idea and taking it into the schools. But the thing that really hit me hard was when she passed away and we were sitting at her funeral, people came to me and told me that story. That your mom actually taught me about art. How many art classes had they taken in elementary school? But the fact that they really equated art and what they knew about art with my mom’s program that she had started.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s amazing.
Kara Goldin:
Right? I wish I could get one of the books that she created. She would ask people to create these books and go and pull sheets out of different magazines to say, “Is somebody looking at this artist and taking clues from them in order to create the way that they create?” She had this idea in her head that was way ahead of what anybody was teaching.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, what is in throughout the school system, is how to create art. But what is missing and it’s wonderful your mother brought that program into the school district. We had something similar in my daughter’s school district, but it’s very dependent on there being somebody who wants to advocate that program. In our district as well, the person passed away and I think the program may have gone with them. But the idea is teaching people how to look at art and how to think about art and how aesthetics work. Which definitely came through in your story about how you created your product. Is how you look at a product aesthetically, not just the label, but an experience. Which I think is a great segue really to talk about the aesthetic of what you’ve created.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, I think for me, I’ve always believed that for me to spend time with anything, whether they’re people or they’re products or a sport, I have to enjoy it. It starts there. In order to have an experience with it you have to want to engage in some way. I always share this piece with entrepreneurs and also investors, is that if you were an entrepreneur in my industry, beverage, and you’re trying to sell a product, it’s not impossible to sell the first product, the first bottle. Maybe people want to have trial, they see it, maybe they see a friend drinking it or whatever. But to actually buy it again, you have to have other elements that allow the consumer to want to engage.
Whether that is a product, like I said, a sport, a service, a piece of art. There’s a tremendous amount of feeling that goes along with that. I think talking about my mom, I learned it without her preaching. It was just a thinking that went on in our house. Even just thinking about enjoying something or purchasing something or whatever it is. I really do believe that that’s where it gets sticky. That’s where consumers want to spend more time with it, is when they really appreciate the aesthetic part of it.
Miriam Schulman:
One thing I wanted to talk about too, it’s one thing to say, “I want to create a new soda,” and you actually were doing something that nobody else was doing. One thing that I feel was really powerful that would help a lot of artists, is that you received a lot of criticism. Not everyone thought it was such a good idea. Right now, we’re looking at oh, yes, of course, it’s a wonderful idea because we see the end result. But take us back to the beginning when you were up against a lot of doubters and how you kept believing in what you were doing to keep on going.
Kara Goldin:
I started my career actually in media and then I went into tech. I think I was probably in my career most known for what I was doing in tech. I was at a company called America Online and had started their eCommerce and shopping partnerships and many stories in there throughout the years. Of meeting Jeff Bezos, helping him build a bookshelf when he was just a book seller, not buying a $500 million dollar yacht. He was just a scrappy guy just trying to sell books and make a living.
It really stemmed from this need and desire to get healthy that caused me to really want to create, want to start my own beverage company. But also seeing that there was this white space that no one else was doing. When I gave up my diet soda, Diet Coke in particular, that’s when I tried to drink plain water. I’d heard for years, drink water, drink water. I grew up in Arizona, should have been drinking a lot more water, but just didn’t. What I realized was that my stickiness with water as a whole was not there because I didn’t love the taste. I think in a beverage, you have to love the taste. That’s why I didn’t drink it. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that I should drink it. I didn’t do it and I thought for a minute why I didn’t do it.
That’s when I did a little test, I sliced up some fruit, threw it in water and I said, “Aha, this got me to drink water. I don’t need to drink my diet soda anymore.” I was trying to move away from diet sweeteners, this is 16 years ago. I looked for a product on the shelf because of convenience. I thought, “I will actually go and buy a water with just fruit in it if it’s in a package where I can go and purchase it and it’s easy. Otherwise, I’m buying fruit, I have to cut it up.” It goes through this whole process, which was hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to engage with it, I didn’t want to use my time to do that.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s too much work.
Kara Goldin:
It’s too much work. That’s where I was and I went shopping and looking for this product and it wasn’t there. I think at that point I thought, “Well, while I’m not working…” This wasn’t a side hustle idea. People have asked me that. For me, I left tech, I was taking a couple years off to be a mom with my then three kids. That’s when I wanted to solve this problem for myself. I went to the grocery store, couldn’t find the product and thought, “I’ll just go make it.” It sounds great. Maybe on a Thursday you’re thinking, “I’m going to go and create it.” Then the doubts start to come in when people are saying, “Well, how are you going to do that? You’ve never been in the beverage industry. How do you know how to get a product on the shelf at your local grocery store? What are the margins?” All of these questions.
I understood the business side of it, I could go and dig and try and find this information. But then when the doubts start really piling in after you’ve made this commitment to it at this point, not just to yourself, but to a few friends. You’re thinking, “Well, I’m smart, I can go figure this out.” But then you get in your car and you go to the grocery store and you try and figure it out. Then people are like, “Oh, have you ever launched a beverage before?” Then the doubters come in and they pile on in your own thinking of thinking I can’t do it. In the art world you’ve got people you’re thinking, “Well, is it quite right?” Then people will say, “Ah, no. I don’t really like it.”
Then once you actually get it on the shelf, then you have a few customers who come in and say, “It’s exactly what I was looking for. I wanted an unsweetened flavored water too.” It’s those customers, it’s those people who appreciate your art. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t want what you have, have the doubts. Because you’ve got that relationship, you’ve got that stickiness with just a few of these customers. Now you’ve got to find where these people are. You’ve got to find your audience, you’ve got to find your people and grow them, in a way. That is the hardest part in any industry. Is to find those people and find those people that understand.
Maybe just another piece that would be very, very relatable, is that when you have an idea for something that you think is so unique and so different, for me, I thought about it as starting a new product and starting a new company. But I hadn’t really taken a step back to say, “I’m launching a new category,” which is exactly what I did. It’s probably the same thing in the art world, where you launch something that no one else is doing. You’re ahead of so many other people, they have to catch up to it. They have to figure out why isn’t anyone else doing it? Why haven’t I seen anything like this before? In the beverage industry, when that was happening to me, I had to not only convince the customer, but I had to convince grocery buyers who were my gatekeepers, to actually getting it on the shelf.
Maybe in the case of art, you’re trying to convince not only buyers, but also [crosstalk 00:16:13] gallerists to put it up. I mean, it’s the exact same thing. They don’t want to put it up because there’s nobody else doing it. From my perspective, I was like, “But that’s the point. I’m doing it. I’m it. I’ve created this thing and that’s why it’s going to be a home run.” Most of the grocery buyers would pass because they would say, “It’s not really big enough. That’s why not a lot of people are doing it.” They would not allow me to be the only one and give me space. Give me the environment that I needed to go and find those customers. So it was this challenge that I didn’t know how to solve. Nobody was really, 16 years ago, talking to me about categories and how hard it was and how difficult it was and all the roadblocks. A lot of what I even talk about in the book and the purpose for me writing the book because it really does happen in lots of different industries.
The challenge really for people who are living it and who are the creators is that you’ve got to wait for the customer to catch up to where, or the galler… Whoever it is that is your gatekeeper to catch up to where you’re at. That’s really the biggest challenge.
Miriam Schulman:
Last week, we had on Kindra Hall. Her book is Stories that Stick. She talks about the four stories that every business needs. At the end of the interview I said, “Well, you got to listen to Kara’s interview because she’s got the four stories.” The first one that we’re talking about right now, is that founder story. Your founder story about why you created this product, is so compelling and so strong. I mean, even when I’m reading the book, I’m telling my daughter, “Remember that Hint Water you were always drinking? It’s time to start drinking it again.”
Kara Goldin:
I love this.
Miriam Schulman:
And my son, it was hilarious because I was thanking Kara before we hit record for she sent me some nice product, which was gone in 24 hours. My 20 year old was like, “Oh, that was really smart,” because the next day we were at the store looking for it. He says, “And you know you’re going to be talking about it on the podcast.” Was like, “That was super smart, what she did.” I was like, “Yes, that’s what I’m paying the college bucks for you to observe and figure out.”
Kara Goldin:
I love it.
Miriam Schulman:
When was 9/11 in all of your decision to take time off from work? I was taking a break from Wall Street and when 9/11 happened, that was to me, I’m not going back to that.
Kara Goldin:
That’s a really good question. We live in the Bay Area and we used to live in New York. We had moved to San Francisco in 1994. I started my career in New York and went to the towers many times. I had a friend who actually left the American Express building, literally was in the path train. There’s many, many stories and I know people who perished, as you I’m sure did as well. I think watching it from San Francisco, I felt very helpless. My husband’s family still lives there and has a lot of family. His father just retired, but he’s a doctor. I think for him, he was at Ground Zero, all of those things.
Just coming out of that and I was on maternity leave. I kept thinking, “Am I really doing what I want to be doing? Not that there’s anything wrong with what I’m doing, but am I really, really passionate about it?” My answer was, “I don’t know. I’m good at what I do, but does that mean that I’m really passionate about it?” I don’t know that I would have had that stop and think about it moment unless there was 9/11. I think the pandemic, for a lot of people I’ve talked to, was a reset.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s the same thing. It lifted a veil on whatever wasn’t working in your life. What you described just now, Kara, was exactly how I felt. I was not exactly on maternity leave. I had left, but in my mind I was going back sometime. When 9/11 happened, that was like, “No, thank you. That’s my sign from the universe.”
Kara Goldin:
That was exactly the same thing for me. That I thought, “Here I have these really young kids and am I doing not only what I want to be doing, but if there’s no tomorrow, am I doing what my kids will say is powerful?” Maybe they don’t perish and I’m the one that perishes. Here I was going on a plane every single week. Thinking I was not on that United plane. I was going to DC from San Francisco. You have these moments where you really start thinking about it. There’s a lot of synergies between the two of them. They’re very different, but I think that there’s a lot of synergies and it’s something I’ve talked about on interviews for Hint specifically, is that I think Gen Z and maybe the lower end of the Millennials too, but I think Gen Zs. I was pregnant with my 19 year old.
While he obviously doesn’t remember 9/11, he knows all the stories. He knows that it was bad. He saw the 2008, 2009 financial crisis. He saw a lot of things that we didn’t really see in our lifetime that they saw. I think that part of what I see Gen Zer’s doing as they’re entering the workforce, they want to do what they’re interested in because there aren’t guarantees. Look at WeWork, you’ve got dude behaving badly and lots of things implode.
Miriam Schulman:
Because suddenly building your own company or being an artist or whatever it is you’re passionate about, suddenly it’s not as risky as staying in a job. The job, there’s no certainty, there’s no guarantee. Kara, what you’re saying is absolutely true because I forget where I saw this, so I can’t quote. Maybe it was on LinkedIn. People are right now quitting in record numbers. That’s something you can look up. It’s the quit rate is off the charts right now.
Kara Goldin:
Well, and I think it’s also they’re figuring out that they do have options. I mean, part of the reason why I think the quit rate is going on there too is that we’re writing checks. When that gig is up, which I think it has to come. I mean, I do not think that the Biden administration, I mean, I just don’t know that they can because that’s the only way to fuel the economy.
I have a girlfriend of mine who runs finance for a car dealership, one of my best friend’s from college in Las Vegas. She said that pretty much everybody who’s buying cars in Las Vegas is walking in, they have no job. They make more money. They will very soon, when they’re not getting those checks, the cars will be repoed. It will implode. I do not think, as much as I love the Biden administration being in there, I don’t think people know what to do. I think it’s going to be really, really frightening. When car sales in Vegas go from 100 a day down to repoing them and two a day, that’s bad.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s like the Big Short, part two.
Kara Goldin:
It is, it is and it’s coming. I don’t know, I think you got to rip the bandaid. You can’t find people to do jobs.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, no. I wanted to plan a we’re back in New York, let’s have lunch party for all my entrepreneur friends.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, forget it.
Miriam Schulman:
You can’t do anything because the restaurants are open, but they don’t have service people.
Kara Goldin:
I mean, my husband and I went out for margarita’s the other night. Woo hoo! Big deal. They close at 8:00 on a Friday night. I’m like, “Wait, what? How can you close at 8:00?” They don’t have staff.
Miriam Schulman:
No. This is crazy.
Kara Goldin:
There are people quitting because they know that they can get a check. I think when they realize after a while and they’re not getting the check, they’re going to be like, “Wait, what the heck am I doing here?”
Miriam Schulman:
We talked about how you had this very strong founder story, but what was very clear as well, is how much the customers did become a big part of building your experience with the brand and growing your business. Can you say a little more about that?
Kara Goldin:
The doubters, right. It’s real, it’s real for people. When I share the story with founders, creators, entrepreneurs, I get it. I think the challenge is that voice in your head, especially when you’ve got the gas being piled on by the doubters that are out there. But then when you get that relationship with the consumer, when you can have some kind of feedback with the consumer who is sharing what you’ve created in your life, in your kitchen, oftentimes they don’t even know what your why is yet. But they’ve just come in contact with it. But they want to understand why did this come to be?
For me, it also satisfied my own curiosity because what I started hearing was their story and that stickiness and that connection of for example, one of the first customers that I heard from shared his story about how he was looking for a drink like Hint for many, many years. That was fruit and water with no sweeteners in it because he had this disease called Type II Diabetes. It was the first time that I had ever heard of Type II Diabetes. I remember saying to him, “I’ve heard of Type I Diabetes, but I’ve never heard of Type II Diabetes.” He called the customer service line, we had an 800 number and an email on the bottle, which was very tech. It wasn’t typical of what people did. Don’t tell anyone, but I was the only customer service agent at the time, so I picked up the phone and was able to have this dialogue with this consumer.
But I guess what I realized is that although I didn’t have Type II Diabetes, I related to it and I felt like there was this purpose, there was this meaning. That I wanted an unsweetened flavored water because I felt like I didn’t want to have all those sweeteners and I had some health issues, not yet Type II Diabetes. But it all rolled up into the same thing where when you’re looking for a product together and you’re frustrated that you can’t find it, suddenly you have this thing that brings you together and you’re interested in it. It’s a very, very powerful thing. It was at that point when I started realizing that we actually had a nice size audience, sadly of people who were challenged with this disease.
If you remember 16 years ago, I mean it was 1.5% to 2% of the population. It was very tiny, had Type II Diabetes. Yet, I was hearing about it a lot. I thought, “If I can just find more of those people and help them solve their problem, then they will help my brand to grow.” Down the road, I mean, how we got over the challenge of getting into stores was I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. I call myself an accidental beverage executive because I did have moments where those doubts started to pile on. I had so many meetings with grocery buyers who were sharing with me that, “This isn’t going to go anywhere. If it was really a category, then the big soda companies would have come out with a product like that.” They wouldn’t accept the fact that I was bringing something new that people liked and enjoyed because it was still so small.
That’s when I actually was being recruited for a role in tech at Google. The company Google was still fairly small. I remember meeting with somebody who I knew from my tech days. Finally, describing to him what I’ve been doing and why I’m on the fence as to whether or not I should continue trying to build this beverage company or maybe I should really entertain this role at Google. We had a friendship even before this meeting, but he didn’t want somebody that wasn’t 100% committed.
He looked at me and he said, “I think it’s pretty cool what you’re doing. You’re doing it because you have a purpose. I think it’s awesome that you figured this out and you should actually speak to this guy Charlie, who runs this new thing that we’re starting called micro kitchens inside of Google. We’re going to be stocking food, but maybe we’ll stock drinks too.” He didn’t even know what he was doing at that point and again, I just followed up because he was a friend giving me an entrée into somebody and I just thought, “I don’t want to piss him off, so that’s what I’ll do.” It’s interesting because that’s how we ended up growing.
The most important reason why I share this story with you too is that sometimes it may not be the places, you have to find a new place where you’re going to find your audience. You’re going to find places that are not the traditional, that are not the obvious places to show up. Then people start to find it. We started finding people inside of Google when we started selling lots and lots. Google became our largest grocery store, even though they weren’t really a grocery store. We had employees who were going into stores for us and saying, “Why don’t you carry Hint?” I mean, it was just the opposite of what we had ever experienced. We didn’t do it intentionally, but what we saw was that by going where our customers ultimately were, it was the reverse.
Finding those zones where you can stand out. Another piece on the Google example is that they didn’t have any other beverages in there for the first two years.
Miriam Schulman:
Wow!
Kara Goldin:
I mean, it was the reverse of what happened inside of grocery stores, where we had mostly Coke and Pepsi and then maybe there was a bottle of Hint. This lonely little bottle that just got lost in the sea. It didn’t have any presence. The reverse at Google. They were like, “Do you guys own this company? Do you own a percentage? I mean, what?” No, it just helps our employees drink more water. That was it. I mean, it was kind of depressing, frankly, after two years that they started adding other beverages. But we got runway, that’s when people started to recognize our brand and that’s when we started to go into more and more stores. Finding those places where you show up a little differently I think is really the moral of the story on that.
Miriam Schulman:
I like to talk about when you’re selling art, and the art is your product, whether it’s your book, your artwork, your flavored water, you really need to have the belief triad. Which is you believe in yourself, which you so did. You were like steel not listening to the doubters. You believe in your product, which is your art, what you’re putting out there. Then the third piece, which is something a lot of people don’t talk about, is you believed in the customer.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah, and you believed what you could offer that customer.
Miriam Schulman:
Right, because what I hear from a lot of artists is that there’s the doubts about themselves, there’s the doubts about their art. But what I hear that stops them more than anything else, is doubting that that audience is there. Doubting that they will pay for art, doubting that they value art. Doubting that they will value what it is that they do. What really carried you through to this success is that belief in the customer being there.
Kara Goldin:
Yeah. It helps when you have a dialogue with the customer. I think that that is the thing that again, we did by accident. That I suggest to any creator out there is if you have a way for your customer to give you feedback, to have that connection. I think so often people rely on the gatekeepers, their feedback. Versus actually having that direct relationship in some way. What’s interesting, when I was running AOL’s eCommerce and shopping, thinking back in the ’90s around direct to consumer was that I mean, many retailers feared it. Because they thought, “I’ve already got all these stores. I’ve already got a catalog. Why would I need to have this online way for people to shop?” The answer really is the consumer and the direct relationship with the consumer. It’s the way that people are communicating. I mean, it’s the instant gratification. It doesn’t mean that you have to answer immediately, it means that they have to be able to get to you in some way to ask some kind of questions. Hear from you more.
Because they want to be a part of your story. That’s what it boils down to. Of course, you’ll always have the haters, you’ll always have the hecklers or whatever that will be there. But when you find those people that feel moved in some way by what you’re doing, that it’s much more powerful. It gives you this energy and it gives you this armor to go and take on whether it’s your own doubts or the doubters or the really, really difficult days that you have. To say, “No, wait a minute. I can’t throw the towel in. I can’t stop doing what I’m doing. The thing that I need to figure out…” Another question I share in the book is when you get stuck say, “What can I do? What can I do?” When you present that question, it is rare that you say, “I can’t do anything.” There’s usually something that you can do. That’s not to say that there aren’t situations where it’s beyond your control.
Because you’re always going to have those. I mean, during the pandemic galleries were closed. But that’s just another example of why you should have another avenue to be able to have the direct connection with the consumer. I think that if nothing else, what the pandemic has taught everybody, is having that relationship with that consumer is critical when things are beyond your control.
Miriam Schulman:
One hundred percent. Also want to encourage all those artists out there, especially now that we’re entering post, can we really say that now? Post pandemic. Now that we’re entering back into real life, that those in person shows that we haven’t done. Now, I’m all about online and sell a lot of things online, but the market research you get when you are actually in person with people is so invaluable that you just don’t get that same level online. People are not really bothering. They will like it, they will comment, but they won’t give you the same kind of detailed feedback you can get in those conversations. So the more you can get out there and talk to customers or prospects, and the more you learn, the faster you’re going to grow and really understand why people are responding to your art the way that they are.
Kara Goldin:
I totally agree. It will, it’s almost like a focus group without even sharing a focus group. That’s what’s occurring. I think if you can have that without asking the question specifically, but you’re going to hear from people. People have asked me why did you write the book? I said, “A lot of it was this Q&A that I would get over the years when I was out speaking about how and why I created Hint.” People would ask these questions and I would literally go back to my hotel room and I started journaling. I would take every comment that I could remember and I would start thinking about it and I would start journaling about them. I wouldn’t be defensive, I would start sharing stories about what were the answers, what were my opinions about these things. That was ultimately what became my book.
I think that that’s the thing that an artist can do as well. I think it’s important to listen to what people say, but then process it for a while and really understand. Is there some grain of truth in what this person who I immediately wanted to discount what they were saying? Maybe there’s something there. Really take it, don’t let them ruin your day. Think about what they’ve said and say, “Huh, that’s really interesting.” My favorite entrepreneur out there, Steve Jobs, used to say that the dots eventually connect. That there’s a little bit of grains of truth in what lots of people say.
Miriam Schulman:
Kara, you named your book Undaunted. Why is that the title of your book as the overarching message to the reader? What does that mean to you?
Kara Goldin:
I think being undaunted is a very purposeful statement. It’s a decision that you make. You don’t have to live undaunted. You can just continue to go on and do what you’re doing. You can create art, take it into galleries and go through that process and feel rejection and get hurt and maybe stop what you’re doing, whatever along the way. Or, what you can do is make that decision to live undaunted and understand that you’re going to have fears. You’re going to have people that don’t like what you do. You’re going to have challenges mostly inside of yourself initially of being daunted and having those doubts as well. But when you put a stake in the ground and say, “No, I’m going to go and try and I’m going to go and see what I’m going to learn and satisfy my curiosity,” that is a very, very powerful statement.
People have asked me for years, “Have you always been fearless? Have you always been relentless or resilient?” I think that the more times you lead undaunted, it doesn’t always turn out the way that you want. Maybe you go and start something. I mean, I’m still the CEO of Hint. I mean, I can name a million examples of this where you head down a road and you think, “Ah, things aren’t really working. Maybe we should go left,” you don’t continue to make the same mistake twice, but you learn. And you learn from those challenges and that’s okay. Because the next time that you go do something hard you know you can take it on. It really is part of a bigger journey.
In many ways, as my mom used to think about art, it’s a continuation. I mean, she would have tons of pieces of art around the house. Nothing was ever finished, it was a puzzle to her. But it was just constantly evolving over time. We didn’t know what she was doing or what she was thinking and then she’d come back to things. I think that that’s the same way about living undaunted. That you just keep trying and keep building on it.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Pick up a bottle of Hint, drinkhint.com.
Kara Goldin:
Yes, and on Amazon, in stores all over.
Miriam Schulman:
But I do have to say, my favorite goody that she sent me was the sunscreen. There is the sunscreen, it’s also called Hint. I read in the book there’s pineapple, but what I got was the pear. It was so good and it actually helped me understand the product. I’m going to sound like I’m getting paid to do this, which I can promise you I am not. It was just this hint of pear and I smell so good. I don’t feel sticky and it feels so nice. I was so happy when I put it on. It was so awesome.
We’ve included links to the book and her website in the show notes. It’s schulmanart.com/152 and don’t forget to check out my pricing workshop if you have doubts and drama around pricing your art. Well, this is the training that you need to gain confidence in marketing your art at the right prices. To learn more, go to schulmanart.com/workshop.
All righty Kara, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Kara Goldin:
More than anything, I think just believe in yourself and know that it’s up to you to go out and live undaunted and go out and try.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. Well, thank you so much for being with me here. All right, my friend, thank you for being with us today. We will see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram @schulmanart, and of course, on schulmanart.com.
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