THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Maria Brito:
I think that when the ultimate and only focus is getting money, then you put a lot of stress on due stress on the process and leave a lot of the enjoyment, the human aspect and the relationship building outside of the table. That is the problem because people have energies that can be filled way before you show up in the room. The whole thing is about just the money. Then you’re going to taint that process and people are going be able to see it.
Speaker 2:
It’s The Inspiration Place podcast with artist, Miriam Schulman. Welcome to The Inspiration Place podcast, an art world inside a podcast, full artist by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. Now, your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hello, passion maker. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration. You’re listening to episode number 202 of The Inspiration Place podcast. I am so grateful that you’re here. Today’s guest is an award-winning New York-based contemporary art advisor, author and curator. She’s the author of, How Creativity Rules The World. A Harvard law school graduate. Originally, from Venezuela. She’s been selected by complex magazine as one of the 20 power players in the art world. She was also named by ARTnews as one of the visionaries who gets to shape the art world. She’s written for publications such as Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Elle, Forbes, Artnet, Cultured Magazine, Departures and the Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from the University of Houston, Texas.
For several years, our guests taught her creativity course in companies. In 2019, she launched Jumpstart, an online program on creativity for entrepreneurs based on years of research and observation in both the areas of business and art. She’s curated exhibitions on three continents and in 2019, created and hosted the C Files, a TV and streaming series for PBS’s news station, All Arts. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place, Maria Brito. Well, hello, Maria and welcome to the show.
Maria Brito:
Hello, Miriam. Thank you so much for having me. This is exciting, because I think we’re going to have a fun talk and a great time. I am excited to roll with you.
Miriam Schulman:
100%. One of the reasons I was particularly interested in having you on is, I’m actually publishing a book with the same team that you just finished working with. Did you know that?
Maria Brito:
Awesome. I did not know. How serendipitous is that?
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, except, I think you did it a lot faster than I did. I was reading your bio. I was like, “Oh, she’s a lawyer. I bet she has better negotiation skills. How did she get this accomplished so fast?” Did you sign your contract last year? Is that right?
Maria Brito:
I signed my contract with them in, I don’t remember. The truth is, yes, it was last year, but I had written the book. It was more like, “Here’s the book.” My agent went and said like, “The book is done, so you want it or not?”
Miriam Schulman:
Okay.
Maria Brito:
Truth and the honest answer is that I am a person who works really fast, because that’s the nature of how I feel. You just moved to New York City and you’ll see, if you don’t move fast, the city’s going to leave you behind. You don’t want that.
Miriam Schulman:
100%. I signed my contract in June. I had not written the book. They originally wanted to give me an April of this year deadline for finishing the manuscript. I told my agent, “I do not work well with long deadlines. You’ve got to move this up.” Initially, we did have an October release date. Now, it’s not until February, which it feels like a long time from now, but the truth is, I think I actually needed that time. This is my first book.
Maria Brito:
Well, you’ll see. Well, it works out in the end for whatever reason. I’m not sure. The publishing industry is very old school, still, right? They have all this type of deadlines and structures and specific ways of doing things. I don’t know. They want to modernize themselves, but they haven’t done that. Authors who want to work with, traditionally, published that they want to work with big publishing houses. They always are at a little bit of the mercy of these very long leads and long deadlines and whatever.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. Yeah.
Maria Brito:
It is a process.
Miriam Schulman:
It is.
Maria Brito:
If you don’t really have a lot of patience, it can be extremely frustrating.
Miriam Schulman:
Did you have the cover picked out ahead of time too?
Maria Brito:
No, because I chose to work with a contemporary artist that I… It’s a friend that she is mentioned in the book and I worship her. I said, “I want my friend artist to design the cover.” They had to agree on that and they did. This artist is a 32-year-old artist who also works extremely fast. She worked at a very, very fast speed. It was putting together the title and how it would fit in her work, right? That was a little bit of a collaborative standpoint between the designer that they used and the artist, but that was also fast. There were not these things that, instead of moving the ball and keep rolling with things, sometimes you find this moments in processes like this, where you’re like, “I don’t know why I’m stuck in this limbo for this long,” but it didn’t happen.
In my case, I never failed. I’m stuck or like I’m not moving forward, I always had the sense of continuity and that we were doing things in a place and in a pace that I feel comfortable with my speed. I think that a lot of people seek perfection. A lot of people seek for these things that they wanted to keep going on until they have this perceived notion that it has reached this level of perfection. The truth is, it’s never perfect. I have a friend who’s writing a book, too, in London. He hired a couple of different editors at this point and it’s been like, “But I want it to be perfect.” That’s never going to be. I think, maybe, you are in a space where you don’t really want to go and do the work of getting an agent and selling the damn thing, because that could be also a protection mechanism, right?
Miriam Schulman:
Right.
Maria Brito:
You don’t want to go and do the real work, which is, sell the damn book because we’re not going to be able to know what’s in the book unless you sell it. If you’ve been working on it for four years, I don’t know. Are you trying to beat Liz Gilbert? What are you trying to do with that manuscript, right? I think a lot of people get lost in the minutia rather than taking action, which is what, at the end of the day, brings results.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. You bring up Liz Gilbert. One of the things she talks about… I think she talks about this in big magic, but I’ve also heard her speak about this as a talking point in interviews is that when she decided she was going to be an author, that was her promise. That she was going to be an author, but when she struggles with writing, she reminds herself, “Well, I never promised myself I’d be good. I just promised I would do it.”
Maria Brito:
I think that’s brilliant.
Miriam Schulman:
Right?
Maria Brito:
Well-
Miriam Schulman:
She may not have put it exactly that way, but that’s the gist. I’ve heard Julia Cameron say very similar things is that, “I will take care of the quantity and God will take care of the quality.” It’s just, put it out there.
Maria Brito:
Yeah. I know that Liz worked on Eat, Pray, Love a lot because she said that she worked and worked and worked on that manuscript. She may have moved on right now from that, because once you reach the level of success that she’s reached, it’s easier, right? You don’t really have to spend three years with a manuscript in your hands or whatever, but at the beginning, she did spend an enormous amount of time working on that book. I think that it’s always this willingness that human beings have. It has to be self-directed, right, to navigate between those things. How good do I want this to be? How soon do I want this to come to the surface? Because look, you never really know what’s going to happen. You really know how the reader is going to or the collector or the venture capitalist, you never know what they’re thinking, right? You know what you’re doing and you know how good you could be.
If I were to venture tomorrow to, let’s say, write a novel, which I would love to, but I don’t have the skills, I don’t really think I could write a dialogue. I would have to go to a very profound and deep training with coaches or teachers or whatever to get to a point where I can write a novel. It’ll take me two or three years at least, but non-fiction, which I do every day. I write every day. I’ve been writing for years. It’s a much more straightforward path. The thing is, also, projects like this, books like this, and truth, they are never finished. Because every day, if you’re really passionate about your subject, every day you’re going to find something new.
Miriam Schulman:
I don’t know if you had this happen because it sounds like you went really fast. Did you have to go through a developmental edit where they completely wanted to have you rewrite things-
Maria Brito:
No.
Miriam Schulman:
… because that happened to me?
Maria Brito:
No, no, no, no, because I was pretty sure about what I wanted the book to look like. I had put together a proposal that my agent praised the proposal said, “I don’t even have to change it.” It’s like, “I did everything.” I was like, “This is the book.” You know what I mean? It’s like-
Miriam Schulman:
When they came back with the edits, you were like, “No, thank you” or-
Maria Brito:
The edits were not developmental. They were like, you know, “Oh”-
Miriam Schulman:
Copy edits.
Maria Brito:
It was copy edits, expansions. We would like to hear more about this or we don’t need this. They were not like, “Let’s just restructure the book.” No. It was just like, “Yeah.” There were questions like, “I don’t understand this,” right? “Oh, that makes sense. I understand that you don’t understand because maybe I didn’t explain it right.”
Miriam Schulman:
Right.
Maria Brito:
“Or maybe, I thought you were like at a place in time that you could have gotten knowledge about this, but you didn’t.” As an author, right, you have to have sufficient perspective and be humble enough to say, “Well, I just really didn’t explain my point clearly,” right?
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. Well, I found my message evolving because of that process. I felt very grateful as I didn’t write a book so that I could perfect my message. I never thought that was going to… but this is what’s happened. Like, “Oh, yeah, I don’t know why I think that. Let me see if there’s research that backs it up or maybe there isn’t research that backs up what I’m thinking and I need to take this thought out or this belief out.” Maria, let’s get back to your book. Why did you write Creativity Rules the World?
Maria Brito:
I was a corporate attorney like you introduced me. I spent many years of my life going to law school and practicing law and law firms in New York. This was not what I wanted to do. It was something that I convinced myself because my parents thought that I needed to have a dependable career and something that I could fall back on. God forbid, I was going to end up being a starving singer, which is what I wanted to be or a hooker. Because my mom thought that all those types of professions, if involved being on a stage, it was just for prostitutes, right? That’s what my mom thought. I ended up doing something that was by default. I was not very good at math. I didn’t like blood, so I was not going to be a doctor.
I said, “Well, I’m very good at writing, reading.” I think this is a profession that is very well regarded, so let me just go and be an attorney. I was, but again, as I grew older in the profession, it was miserable. When I decided to quit, which was very difficult as you can imagine, after nine years, it’s a very, very solid career, excellent salary, all sorts of perks, no life, but some people like to sell their soul to devil. The reason why I was doing that was not for the money. It was because this was what my parents thought it was the best for me and I thought it was the best for me. When I quit, I had already the thought that I was going to open an art advisory because I love contemporary art. Since I moved to New York, I was collecting. I was meeting people in the art world and gallery owners, artists, collectors. I thought it was, the whole thing, fascinating and that was 13.
I started collecting 20 years ago, but me mingling more in the art world, maybe it was 15, 14 years ago, give or take. I thought it was fascinating, the whole dynamic, the whole idea of all of these artists, getting all this incredible records at auction and also, how it worked behind the scene, the world of ideas, the world of materializing thoughts in a way that you put it on a canvas. I saw a couple of people who were working as art advisors and I thought to myself, “They suck. They suck.” I didn’t believe that they are so bad because it was so transactional the way they treated their clients. They were like, “Okay, here it is. Bye. Let me just get my commission.” I was like, “There is such a lack of soul and to what those people are doing when there is so much opportunity for expansion and growth and to cultivate different relationships and to have a different business model.”
I saw that was my end and also, writing and utilizing social media, which at the time, absolutely, none of those people. I can guarantee you, I was the first one to work with artists. I would go to the studios, photograph them, write about them. I started doing videos when nobody was doing videos. I had a Facebook account before any of those people even had any. I was like, “Okay, I’m the outsider, but I’m going to make sure that people know who I am.” I started promoting those blog posts like crazy and the imagery that I was taking with a real camera, because I was like, I can’t… The iPhone camera was shitty at that time. I had to go with a real camera and work on the picture.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s still better to use a real lens, I have to say.
Maria Brito:
Well-
Miriam Schulman:
When I photograph my artwork with a real camera versus my phone-
Maria Brito:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
… I’m like, “Huh.” Now, I wanted to cut in, Maria, because I’m not sure that everyone in our audience knows what a contemporary art advisor does. Could you define that?
Maria Brito:
Yes. My job is to be the eyes and ears of the art collectors. They hire me so I can tell them what art buy, where to find the best opportunities in the market, whether it is, for the most part, primary market, but also secondary market, which is something that has changed hands. It was owned by someone and someone wants to sell it, so that’s secondary market. Primary market always comes straight from the gallery. My clients entrust me with showing them things. My job is to be everywhere, right? I go to auctions. I go to galleries. I go to museum shows. I go to artist studios. I do that, pretty much, around the world. Now, it’s like, since the pandemic, I haven’t traveled as much. I still do, but not as in like crazy. It was like, every month, I was somewhere outside the U.S. Not even outside Europe, but outside the U.S., but it’s different now because everything happens online.
In that job, what I found that was the most fascinating part though is that, since working for the clients but also developing relationships with artists, and not… yes, directly with them, but it was always with the gallery in the middle. I started becoming very curious about this artist. I started documenting their processes, and asking them questions, and writing them down, and writing through them in magazines, and in my own blog and building this huge archive, if you will, of direct observation. When I saw, also, the way I run my business and the way my clients who are business owners and entrepreneurs run their businesses and came up with their ideas, I saw the parallels between the creative process, right? Because a lot of people stay and I go back to the question why I wrote the book. A lot of people think creative process is when you are in front of a canvas or you are cutting a film or whatever, but creative process is nothing more than your unique ability to come up with ideas of value that are relevant and that you can execute.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a dentist, and you need to figure out your next marketing move or how you’re going to promote your services, what makes that unique. I think I wholeheartedly believe, actually, that is the most important skill than any human being in a business and in a setting where you need to make money for yourself can have because it’s not taught in schools. Occasionally, when you get to great business schools or design schools like Stanford design school or Harvard business school, they do have certain courses on creativity and entrepreneurship, creativity and design, but this is not something that is taught in art schools. This is not something that is taught in high school but is so needed because at the speed that we are changing as a society and as humans, we need to be able to come up with these ideas all the time or else, we become irrelevant and it becomes harder and harder to show the world who you are and what you do. It requires constant adaptation.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. What you’re saying, I find to be so true. I had a friend recently asked me, “Oh, you do so much, Miriam. How do you have time for your art?” By that, I think she meant, my painting. My retort to her, I was like, “Well, it’s all my art. The business is my art.” The podcast is definitely an art form. I find everything that I do and that I touch is highly creative.
Maria Brito:
Yes. That’s actually the best way to live, in my opinion, because one thing informs the other, right? The way you do one thing informs another thing. It also expands outside of your business and career because you do things in your family life or in your daily life that require thinking differently, right? That is the core of what I want to give the world to this book and what I want to show people, right, that they can access and that they can live with. It’s a very, very important thing that we finally break with all the past that says creativity is just for artists or creativity is a God given talent or creativity is a genetic thing because none of that is true. It is, again, what I consider to be the number one skill as an amalgamation of skills because it’s not just one thing, but the number one amalgamation of different skills that people will always be able to rely on to get them where they want to be.
Miriam Schulman:
One of, though, the takeaways I got from your book, and this may be your next book, Maria, is how connected you are. A lot of times, in your storytelling, you would talk about how you would get quiet with yourself and you would get very quiet and tap into yourself and then you would have a vision that would remind you of somebody you know that was able to help you. That’s why I was like, “Well, damn girl. She’s like working like, I don’t know, the Harvard alumni network” or I don’t know. This is definitely a sign of somebody who’s very well connected. Would you agree that your ability to network has also helped you?
Maria Brito:
You know what, it’s a great question. It’s so funny you say that somebody who wrote a review for my book said, “Well, but she never tells us how she finds all those rich people or whatever,” right? I find that fascinating and hilarious because here’s what, right? When I came to the states, I didn’t know anybody because I had never lived here and my parents were from and still are from Venezuela and still live there, and I had, really, no connections, right? Then I go through this Harvard world, which is fantastic. It’s a great networking place, but also, as a foreigner, I had to work twice as hard because man, that was hard. Law school was difficult. It was really hard. Also, not only the language, but the system. Okay. It’s not that I was the most networker of the whole thing, right?
I moved to New York City. I have many friends from Harvard who are in New York City too. They invite me out or whatever, and we go out and we network with more lawyers. It was the very self-contained world. My husband was introduced to me by a Harvard friend. It ended up being small, but when I left that law firm, my number one or number two concern in my list of things that I had to do was to meet people. I felt such freedom when I left that law firm because I was tied to their schedules, whatever the partners wanted me to do, Mike Lyons, I had to work 24/7. Since I didn’t have that anymore, my job was to go and shake hands with people and to insert myself in all these circles that were completely unknown to me, which was the blessing. Because when you get into those places, you don’t have any preconceived notions of who they are, how they misbehave or behave. It was like, everybody’s great. Let me just shake hands, right?
I was not shy at all. I was just like, I came in and I was like, “Hello. I’m Maria Brito. I’m here to demystify the art world. I’m blogging and I’m an art advisor.” Everybody was like, “Oh, this girl is so cute with her aunt.” I was like, “I just tried to be genuinely interested,” which I was, but also, again, my biggest blessing was that I had nothing to stop me. If somebody would’ve said, “Well, don’t go to that person because that guy is a jerk,” right? Or like, “Don’t go to that woman because she will never do business with you,” right? I didn’t have anybody telling me that. If they did, I was like, “Okay, but I want to see now. I want to see for myself.” That whole thing turned one thing into an another, right? That’s how I started opening up my own doors.
Occasionally, you get to someone who falls in love with your vision, because again, remember, this was pre Instagram. This was pre everything online available for everybody. This was pre artsy, all those things. The information was really hard to find. I had, what, 16 waking hours. I had the stamina of a lawyer to do all these things, to find the information and package it in different ways, and talk to people about it. I think that resonated really well with people who thought they were shunned from the art world because it’s intimidating at the beginning or whatever with people who had already been a part of the art world, but they needed a fresh perspective on things. The pure truth, how did I become so connected is because I have been doing it already for 13 years. I am willing. I’m open.
Right now, I think I’m so busy sometimes that it’s not the same amount of my networking that I do because I’m so busy with business and things that are happening, but I consider that that was an incredibly important thing, obviously, for me that you’ve noticed it. How, you being in the right place at the right time, you do it yourself. You know what I mean?
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Maria Brito:
It’s like, how do you get to those rooms with all of these power people? How do you get all these amazing clients? First, by not being afraid of saying what you do and how you do it. Second, by… because you get tired to hear yourself, but they don’t know. That’s the thing, right? If you repeat your elevator pitch, if you will, to yourself a million times, you’re going to throw up and say, “Who cares?” but they don’t know. They don’t know. That’s the thing. You’re getting to meet these people for the first time. What Jay-Z said once to Warren Buffet in an interview is like this genius thing that I did is like, I never gave up. That was the genius thing that I did.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. There’s one thing you said earlier that I want to cycle back to. This is something that I teach my artists. My artists are primarily self-representing artists. Some of them have gallery relationships, but you as an art broker, you’re basically… an art consultant, you’re basically brokering the art sale. Would you say that’s a correct characterization?
Maria Brito:
I go through the gallery, for the most part. I never work directly with artists.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay.
Maria Brito:
In very rare occasions, it has happened that I have bought directly from an artist, but for me, not for my clients.
Miriam Schulman:
Got it.
Maria Brito:
Here’s why, because I want everything for my clients to be kosher perfect. If they have a problem, they can go back to the gallery. I’m just a middle man who provides an incredible amount of access because the market is way too hot, and the inventory is not as big and everybody wants the same thing. I give access and I also give recommendations of young artists who are starting and they are in young galleries and not so easy to find sometimes. That’s pretty much where I am. Occasionally, as I said, I work directly with artists, but again, it’s just for me, not for my clients.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. Here’s the question though. Earlier, you were talking about how other art consultants are more transactional. The thing that I talk to my artists is how they should be focusing when they’re selling the art. They should be focusing on the experience, not the transaction. It sounds like you have a similar philosophy. Can you share, Maria, how you do that?
Maria Brito:
Look, this question actually came up recently with someone else that I know. This is the complicated times that we live in a capitalist society, in a capitalist country, right? It’s like, you have to think about the money because it’s very important. I don’t think creativity and business and money should be disassociated or enough. Money is not dirty. I love rich people come, thank you. They’re my clients. Fantastic, but I think that when the ultimate and only focus is getting money, then you put a lot of stress on due stress on the process and leave a lot of the enjoyment, the human aspect and the relationship building outside of the table. That is the problem because people have energies that can be filled way before you show up in the room. If the whole thing is about just the money, then you’re going to taint that process. People are going to be able to see it, especially rich people. They have a very good radar for these things, right?
How do you separate those things or how do you make the whole process more enjoyable is by, first of all, I think gratitude is very important. I think being able to express yourself through art and sell it and make a living out of that is a privilege. It’s a really big privilege. Not because I am… I’m not the kind of person, at all, and you know this from my book that subscribe to the whole myth of the starving artist and like, no, actually, I think the opposite. If artists are good and they are smart, just a minimum amount of creativity with marketing, they can be really wealthy really quick, but I think that if you have the gratitude to understand that putting your ideas in a frame, in a canvas, in sculpting, something, whatever it is, you do video art, I don’t know, and having someone pay for that is an incredible achievement if you think about it.
Putting your gratitude in the whole process of it, knowing that you have somebody who wants to back you up that celebrates what you did that says, “I can live with this, I can recognize it, I can put it on my Instagram, I can hang it on my living room,” is a big thing. We start with the idea of being grateful for that and enjoying what’s happening along the way, having the conviction that our work has worth and that someone is going to pay what we think the labels and the prices that we are adding to that. I think that it’s important for artists who are selling for themselves to have that attitude. I don’t know if they are selling online. I’m not sure what type of channels they are using. I guess if they don’t have a gallery, then for the most part, for people to be able to find them, they are selling online and things like that. There’s nothing wrong with that.
A lot of people want to follow a very traditional path and have gallery and split 50/50. A lot of people have all sorts of different ways. People want to do NFTs. Please go ahead. It’s all a very, very big spectrum that artists have to play with right now, but if you have that right attitude of the human, which at the end of the day is the representation of what it means to be an artist, right? Artists are always attuned to the here and now and expressing that human aspect through their work.
Miriam Schulman:
Very nice. Okay. I have one last question before we wrap up. There are a lot of beautiful stories about different artists and also people who are in the business industry like Estee Lauder. I’m trying to think which one I most want to ask you about. I think the one I wanted to ask you about the most was your emotional reaction to the artist, Mickalene Thomas. Can you share with our listeners who she is and why you had such a strong reaction when you visited her studio? I think they would enjoy hearing about that.
Maria Brito:
Mickalene Thomas is a black artist. She is in her late 40s. She was born and raised in New Jersey. Mickalene grew up in the ’70s with disco music. It was a time, also, where black people became exuberant. It was the post civil rights era where it was about celebration of the hair and the clothes and the music and also, hip-hop was being in the mix, in the Bronx happening. Also, all these things were so interesting for culture. Mickalene, she wanted to be an artist. She graduated from her master’s at her MFA at Yale. She went to have a very and she still has an incredible career. Part of her practice, her main medium is painting mixed media. She’s done everything. She’s done sculpture. She’s done photography. She’s done video. A really big part of her practice is the installations.
She created an installation many years ago that she has replicated in several settings. She had a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and it was there. She had a solo show at the Toronto Art Museum. It was there. It was this African pattern fabric that covered the furniture. She wanted to replicate the living room of her childhood, where she lived in New Jersey with her mom. There were all these vinyl records from black artists and disco and hip-hop. Well, it’s a kaleidoscope of forms and shapes. It’s beautiful. The aesthetic is incredible. She invited me to her studio in Brooklyn and I went. I sat down in that chair in one of the installations that I had already seen in the Brooklyn Museum and I started to cry. Because I felt so much energy that represented both the toughness of having to grow up in a low-income neighborhood as a black girl who also is queer. Things were not easy, right? Her mom was a drug addict. It was a complicated thing, right?
On the other hand, it’s the incredible success that she has. She’s incredibly successful and wealthy and well regarded and ambitious. It’s this empathy that I felt, right? It was so palpable. It was the transmission of everything that had happened in that living room in the ’70s, which is, in a way, one of the most incredible things that any artist can do. If an artist can take you to a place like that, that artist has done everything already, at least, in my opinion. I think that what these artists that I have met in my 13 years in this business have taught me not only is creativity, but also, how to embrace this different points of view and how to be empathetic. When you see the world one way, they see the world another way, but you want to be able to take on those points of view because they are definitely important for anybody who wants to succeed in business and in life.
When you just see things one way and one way only, it’s not only stressful for you because you try to find silos where you can be like, “I’m going to go with my people who think just like me,” right? That’s a problem. It’s a problem because if you think about how politicized things are, both sides of this equation in the U.S., right now, think that they are right. They want to convince you, right? They want to convince you they are right, but is there an opportunity to think that they each have an argument that is valid and we can actually take from it from each piece a little bit and see how to reconcile the extreme paradoxes, right, all these things for a better life.
I think, at the end of the day, that’s a whole lot more fruitful for society and for us as humans and then trying to live our lives with the extreme positions that we have been forced, honestly, to live with because I didn’t choose extreme positions. I don’t want to be brainwashed in either way. I just want to make sure that I continue to serve my clients happily and I continue to learn. Because if you’re not learning, you’re not growing. It’s like, you might as well die. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing. That’s for sure.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. Well, this is a great place to wrap up. Thank you, Maria, for joining us here today. Everyone, Maria Brito, how creativity rules the world. We’ll make sure we link to the book in the show notes. It’s also available independent bookstores. If your bookstore doesn’t have it, just ask them to order it if you want to support your local bookstore. I’m sure they’d be happy to do that. Maria, do you have any last words for our listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Maria Brito:
Yeah. I want everybody who’s listening to know that everything that you have inside of you is perfect and whole to succeed in this world of art and business. You should definitely embrace them both. You will save a lot of heartache if you start by believing that you have for those skills that you can be an artist who runs the business that you are entrepreneur entrepreneurial, and that you can continue doing what you love and have a nice living. Really, that’s important.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. Well, thank you so much for being with me here today.
Maria Brito:
Thank you.
Miriam Schulman:
All right, everyone. Thanks so much. Also for being with us today, I will see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Speaker 2:
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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