THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: The students who submitted more photographs all had a better portfolio than the one who only submitted their best photograph. So the best photographs came from the ones who tried the most. That’s the lesson there. The more things you try, the more action you take. Their better you’ll be.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world insider podcast for artists by an artist where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well, hey there. It’s Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 316. So, today’s episode is a little bit different. You’re gonna hear me walking in the woods on a hot day in July. I needed to go for a walk, and I was just really inspired to record the episode while I was walking. So you can pretend that you’re with me out in the country. I’m pretty sure you’re gonna be able to hear the birds in the background. You’re gonna hear me huffin’ and puffin’. And I’m just talking to you as if I’m talking to a friend and telling you what you may need to hear today.
This episode was inspired by many of the calls that I’ve been having lately, both with new Artist Incubator members and prospective Artist Incubator members. I’m also sharing with you successes from the Inner Circle members. The Inner Circle is a little more of a gated program. It’s part of the Artist Incubator, but it’s the mastermind level of it, and those artists work with me inside a cohort. Right now, there are seven artists in there, and the new cohort will begin in October. A couple of the artists who are in this cohort now are committed to being part of the next one as well. You’re gonna hear from some of them today during the little commercial breaks I throw in, so you’re gonna wanna listen to them because they’re really inspiring as well.
Every time I have an Inner Circle meeting, at the very end, I always ask the artists to share what their takeaways were. You’re gonna wanna tune in to this episode all the way to the very end because, at the end of this episode, I share the takeaways that the Inner Circle members shared, and it was perfect for this episode. They’re basically talking about how their success is based on committing to taking action. Not committed to the idea of what they need to do but committed to actually doing it. Alright, so we’re gonna get into my walk in just a moment. But first, these words l..
So I decided to record a podcast on my walk. I’m sure the audio quality is going to be bad, and if it is, I’ll just record it again when I get home. Maybe we’ll use this for the Coming Soon reel or something like that on Instagram. What I wanted to talk about is being committed to the action. I got the idea for this podcast when I was talking to one of my new Artist Incubator clients. Even the ones who don’t sign up for Inner Circle have an option to also get a one-on-one with me. This client signed up for a one-on-one with me, and we were talking about all the different areas that she has.
Her art is amazing. It’s beautiful, I love it. She should have no problem selling it. She expressed to me that she didn’t want to focus on social media because she thinks social media is negative, which is fine. You do not have to focus on social media at all. If you’ve followed any of my content, you know that I am a big believer in focusing on more traditional things like building your email list. Social media can play a part in all of this, but it does not have to. I said, okay, that’s fine. Are you selling in person? She said, yes. But what she meant by that was she was dropping pieces off at a show and picking them up the following Sunday.
And some of those shows can be amazing, by the way. I’ve participated in those shows as well. However, it’s very difficult to build a business if you’re not opening yourself up to feedback. So, I guess there are really two issues here. One is opening yourself up for feedback, and the second one is being committed to action. This is the hardest part about any kind of creative endeavor—you need to open yourself up for feedback, and that’s the part that is scary. People don’t want to, quote unquote, make a fool of themselves.
I was talking to my daughter about applying for this job, and she’s like, “Well, I don’t want to make a fool out of myself.” It’s like, well, who cares? I mean, that’s the way I think. But this is my 55-year-old brain talking, and I forget what it’s like to be 26. And at that age, it feels like the worst thing in the world. Whether it’s dating, looking for a job, putting your art out there and people saying no to it, writing a book and people saying no to it, or publishing a book and people saying, “No, I don’t like that.”
So, if you want to do anything worthwhile in the world, people are going to love it, people are going to hate it, and people are going to be indifferent to it.
But you have to be willing to open yourself up to all those things. And I think that’s the reason why actually—so, you know, I said there are two concepts here: being willing to commit to an idea and being willing to commit to action, and then being willing to open yourself up to feedback. Where this client was concerned, she said, “Well, I don’t really want to sell in person. I’m tired of that. It’s hard work for me.” And I said, “That’s fine. You don’t have to sell in person. You don’t have to sell on social media, but you have to figure out some way to sell. So how are you going to do it?”
The clients who come to me who don’t want to be on social media and don’t want to sell in person either, they’re in galleries or they use publicity. So those are options. But you’re still going to have to open yourself up for feedback and rejection because now you have to sell yourself to the gallery and you have to be willing to hear no, because not every gallery is going to want you. That’s just the way it is. In fact, you’ll probably have to hear “no” many times before you get the yes.
The clients who come to me who are the most successful, they’re not just committed to the idea. So let me explain what she had said to me.
And if you’re listening, we’re going to give this person a name. We’re going to call her Jill. If you’re listening, Jill, and you recognize yourself, or even if you’re not actually Jill and you recognize yourself, the only reason I’m talking about this on the podcast is because this applies to so many artists, artists I talk to and artists I don’t talk to. So I asked her, “Okay, well, do you have an email list?” And she said, “Not yet.” I said, “Well, are you starting to build one?” She said, “No, not yet.” But she said, “I’m committed to the idea.” I said, “That’s great, that’s great. But now you have to be committed to taking the action.” And this is the difference between the people who are successful and people who are not successful.
So now I am actually thinking about a different conversation I had with a new client. She talked to me and did end up enrolling, but this was the conversation she had with me before she enrolled. She was asking me, “You know what? I don’t think I have the right personality to do this. I don’t have the right personality to be successful. I’m just not really sure.” And I said, “Listen, you don’t have to have a certain personality. I have plenty of introverts who are successful in my program. I have plenty of people who are ADHD. I even have people on the autistic spectrum who are part of my program.
So there is no quote unquote ‘right’ personality that really needs to happen to do this. The people who are successful are the ones who do what I tell them to do. They take action and they’re willing to hear no. And the biggest difference is, are you merely interested in getting a result or are you committed? Are you committed to getting the result and willing to do whatever it takes?”
So part of that goes back to the belief triad. If you’ve heard me talk about the belief triad before, or if you haven’t, I’m just going to review it quickly. The belief triad is you believe in yourself, you believe in your art, and you believe in your buyer. But when you combine those three things together, it’s also believing—choosing to believe—that this result is possible for you. That’s what believing in yourself really looks like: you are believing in this result for you.
So if you believe in this result for you, you continue to take action. I like to give the example of J.K. Rowling because now, whenever I read the story about her, the numbers always change. But when she went to publish Harry Potter for the first time, she heard no a bunch of times. Different reports say it was maybe ten, maybe it was twenty. I’ve even heard stories that it was forty. But basically, we know it was a lot. It wasn’t Random House who published her, it wasn’t HarperCollins who published her.
It wasn’t Penguin Books who published her. She heard “no” a lot. It was Scholastic, which at the time nobody had heard about. What the heck is Scholastic? She’s the one who put Scholastic on the map because they said yes to her. Now, every time she got a no, she didn’t say, “Oh, this is a terrible idea. I knew I shouldn’t be a writer.” No, she kept applying. She was willing to hear no.
Another example that I heard recently from one of my coaches was this: if I were to tell you that there is $1 million in one of these envelopes, and there are 15 envelopes on the table, what do you do? Do you open four envelopes, and after you’ve opened the fourth one and found nothing in it, say, “Well, this opening envelopes thing doesn’t work”? No. If you believe that $1 million is in one of those envelopes, you will continue to open envelopes. And not only that, every time you open an envelope and there’s nothing in it, it’s not going to slow you down. Your desire to open an envelope will increase. You’ll keep opening envelopes faster because you’re like, “Okay, well, it’s not this one, it’s not this one, it must be one of the ones that are left.” That is the same energy you need to have with working on your business. Whatever your business is, whether you’re an artist, building a life coaching business, a psychic medium, or whatever you are doing, if you believe in it, you will keep trying to do things.
You will keep working no matter what. Every time somebody says no to you, it should give you energy to keep going. Another way I heard this expressed is from Noah Kagan. He has a new book called *Rejection Goals*. Of course, you want to get to a yes, but instead of making the goal the yes, you make the goal to hear 100 no’s because you know you need to hear that many no’s before you get a yes. So every time you hear a no, you can say, “Okay, well, I’m working on my rejection goals.” That’s going to get you the result.
One more way I heard this put: this is a story and I don’t know the specifics, but it was about a photography professor. He told his class, “Here is how you can submit your photographs. You can either take as many pictures as you want and submit as many as possible, or you can submit just one and submit your best possible one.” I’m not sure if the story is that he gave them the choice or maybe they split the class in two to force half of them to do it one way and the other half the other way.
It was probably a psychology experiment. I don’t really know. Anyway, this is a story, but I think it’s a true story. So I want to believe it’s a true story. The way it went is that the students who submitted more photographs all had a better portfolio than the ones who only submitted their best photograph. So the best photographs came from the ones who tried the most. That’s the lesson there. The more things you try, the more action you take, the better you’ll be.
Now let’s circle back to my original thought for what this podcast would be about, which is the idea of being committed to the action. This particular artist said, “Yes, I’m committed to the idea of building my email list. It makes sense.” I asked, “Well, have you started yet?” And she said, “No.” I said, “Okay, you have to be committed to the action—the action of doing it.” And she replied, “Well, then I do it and then I’m done.” I said, “No, because you always need to be building your list. You can get your initial amount of people and start emailing right away, but you need to be committed to always building your list. These are your prospects, your potential customers. This is how you’re going to make sales. That’s it.” And it’s not just building the list, it’s also using it.
So that’s the thing that I hear so much, and I talk about this inside my free masterclass How to Sell More Art. We’ll link that in the show notes, but it’s SchulmanArt.com/SellMoreArt. I’m gonna turn around here. You’re out with me in the country today. Okay, so what I talk about is… oh, shoot, I lost my train of thought. Oh, yeah, okay. This is three ways to know. Usually, people either don’t have an email list, they have an email list but they’re not using it, or they have an email list but there’s not many people on it because they are not committed to asking people to join their email list. And I promise you, the best way to add art collectors to your email list is to ask them to join.
None of this crazy “Five Ways to Decorate Your House.” They don’t want that from you. Just get on my list and I will send you exclusive peeks of the art, or you’ll get first dibs on this art. That is how you build a list of people who want to buy from you. People who want the “Five Ways to Decorate Your House”—first of all, we’re not really decorators anyway, so if we’re not putting out decorating content, they’re not really going to want to learn from us how to decorate their house or how to hang artwork. That’s not their problem. Their problem is they have a home, they want it to look amazing, and they want it to reflect their personality.
And why is that important to them? Because expressing themselves is important to them. That’s it. Now, there are many different nuances on that, like how they’re expressing themselves. And you’re going to show them how your art helps them feel a certain way. None of this “I love to do commissions. I just love painting commissions.” No, your customer does not care about that. Your customer cares about how that would make them feel. They want you to help them feel a certain way. That’s what art does. Art matters. It’s not about decorating the house; it’s about helping them feel a certain way. If your art does that and you show them how your art does that, you will have no problem selling. But you do have to be committed to taking the action.
All right, my friend, my thumb is getting tired from holding down the video thing because I don’t know how to do it in hands-free mode. I am a Generation X girl who is not so good with technology—only a little bit good with technology. So I’m going to end here. When I get back to the studio, I’ll see if this is good enough, and maybe I’ll add more to it. If not, I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
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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