What if the thing keeping your idea stuck isn’t a lack of money, connections, or credibility?

What if it’s just that you’re aiming for the finished version before you’ve made the pilot?

Darnell Brown calls himself a multi-passionate creative polymath, and after 18 years in branding, design, and storytelling, he’s earned the title. He helps non-creatives find their voice through design, and runs Forge, a community for multi-passionate entrepreneurs who want to grow their impact without abandoning what makes them them.

In this conversation, Darnell traces his path from drawing superheroes as a kid, to cutting lawns with a mower he didn’t own, to the mindset shift that changes how he helps people get unstuck today.

Highlights

Art doesn’t need permission to matter.

Before there was a business model, before there was a plan, there was a kid with a pen who couldn’t put it down.

“I would just doodle and draw and just always have a have a pen or some chalk or a pencil or something in my hand and just like go into town with it.”

That instinct never asked for approval. It just needed an outlet. Maybe yours doesn’t need a five-year plan either. Maybe it just needs you to pick the pen back up.

Resourcefulness beats waiting for the right conditions, every time.

As a kid, Darnell wanted to mow lawns for money. He didn’t own a lawnmower. He went door to door anyway.

“I don’t got the lawnmower. But I got the grit and I got the will to actually do this and stuff for people.”

He kept knocking until he found someone who had the tools and needed the help. No plan survives when you think “I don’t have what I need yet.” The plan survives when you show up anyway.

Your idea doesn’t need $200 million. It needs a pilot.

Darnell’s favorite metaphor: you walk into a movie studio pitching a blockbuster with no track record. They say no. Most people stop there.

“The difference between me and them in that context is that if I would have went to you, yes, I would have did all of that, but if you said no to me, I wouldn’t continue to just go to the other studios. Like I would say, well, what’s a way that I could get this idea out without needing that much money to do it?”

The idea doesn’t die because the funding said no. It gets smaller, scrappier, and out the door anyway. That’s the version that gets noticed.

The smallest version of your idea is still the idea.

Robert Rodriguez made his first film for $5,000, playing every behind the scenes role himself. Darnell described the exact same principle without ever having read the book.

“Think about your pilot, man. Don’t think about the business model or anything yet. Get the idea out there.”

You’re not failing by starting small. You’re doing the one thing that actually moves you from thinking about it to having made it.

Community is the multiplier.

Through Forge, Darnell works with entrepreneurs who don’t call themselves creative, helping them see that their business itself is a creative act.

“We’re just there to basically align and integrate our entrepreneurial inclinations into our creative identity so that one isn’t at the expense of the other.”

Cross-pollination through networking is recognizing that someone else already has the piece you’re missing, and you probably have theirs.

Knowing your worth starts with knowing the right questions.

A free lead magnet called Breaking the Time Barrier changed how Darnell thinks about pricing entirely, moving him away from hourly rates toward pricing based on value delivered.

“How can I price things based on the value that I can provide if I’m working with you one-on-one... you have to be able to do that as well, I think, to be able to command a different price point.”

Charging more isn’t about confidence alone. It’s about learning what to ask so you actually know what you’re worth to the person in front of you.

The work you leave behind doesn’t need your name attached to matter.

Darnell doesn’t have children, but he thinks often about creating things that outlive him.

“I want to put out art that does outlive me, even though I don’t have children.”

You don’t need a legacy plan. You need one piece of work good enough to still be useful after you’ve moved on to the next thing.

Closing Reflection

Darnell’s story keeps circling back to the same idea in different costumes: the lawnmower he didn’t have, the studio pitch he didn’t get, the years he spent not drawing because life got in the way. None of it stopped the work. It just meant the work had to get resourceful.

What would your idea look like if you stopped waiting for the full budget, the perfect timing, or someone else’s permission, and just built the pilot instead?

But change is the one constant in life.

Things are always in a state of flux.

Growth is literally changing as well too.

It's literally transformation.

So I'd rather be working in sync with how things are always changing around me anyway.

And like leaning into that and being, like Bruce Lee said, being more like water.

Taking the shape of the environments that I'm in, soaking it all in, learning what I can, recognizing that there will always be a degree of equanimity.

There's a lot that I can't change.

I need to be content with that and then recognizing the things that I can influence and leaning all the way into those things and being so satisfied and so happy and so fulfilled.

Knowing that your work is always reverberating and there's a lot that you can't change anyway.

But that doesn't mean that what you are doing now, your body of work that you leave behind, won't live on after you are no longer here.

Welcome to the Standout Creatives where making money and creating meaningful work go hand in hand.

You're already passionate about what you create.

Now let's turn that passion into a standout business.

Marketing your work doesn't have to be overwhelming.

It can actually amplify your creativity.

I'm your guide, Kevin Chung, and this podcast is your roadmap to creative business success.

I'll show you how to turn your unique talents into a business that truly represents who you are.

Let's get started.

Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of Standout Creatives and I'm happy to have on Darnell Brown.

Darnell, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, the work that you do and all that stuff?

Yeah, happy to be with you Kevin.

Thanks for the invite and yeah, looking forward to having some fun.

So, so yes, I'm Darnell and Darnell Brown and I am multi passionate creative polymath and have worn many hats over the course of my life but I essentially help non creatives with their digital marketing, their branding, graphic design and storytelling.

And then I also serve my fellow multi passionate entrepreneurs through, through Forge, which is our ecosystem community that helps them grow their impact and earn their worth without abandoning their values and what makes them them.

And we do that through cross pollination and through this notion of actions over ideas.

So yeah, been in the game for about 18 years as of this recording and, and yeah, just, just always been a hyper, resourceful, hyper creative person for, for my entire life and I continue to use stories from my, my earlier life as, as a kid as, as metaphors and things and, and analogies towards the things that I'm aiming for these days.

Amazing.

Were you a natural storyteller as a kid or did that develop over time?

Natural as a, as a kid, but it was through visual art form.

So like just drawing superheroes and things.

More than, more than, for instance, talking about stuff.

It was just like drawing cool characters and in unique positions or even maybe things that were on my mind that didn't come across really in like in verbal or written form.

And so I would just, I would just doodle and draw and just always have a, have a pen or some chalk or a pencil or something in my hand and just like going to town with it.

Oh, that's.

That sounds very similar to my story of like just doodling.

I loved in the margins of any notebook that I had for school, there'd just be little like characters and, I don't know, shapes and just random stuff.

Just because I think people can tell you when you're a kid to stop doing that because it's not part of learning or whatever it might be.

But that's actually a separate way for different types of people to like ingrain stuff.

It's not always, oh, I need to listen and write notes specific to it.

Sometimes people need to do it in different ways.

Yeah, that's a, that's a really good point.

Not all, not all the ways that we learn is going to be through verbal or written or even through testing out things with our own hand.

It's just like, I don't know why I gravitated towards that.

It's almost.

You default to it.

You don't even realize that you're doing it.

I don't know if it's like a type a thing where you just, you're always in motion or when you have something in your hand, you can't help but to use it and draw.

It's a form of expression.

It's a form of just getting ideas out.

And to your point, like it's on things that maybe it didn't even belong on and you just kind of threw it away.

But it's like, yeah, long across all of the margins of the paper.

There only things that you would understand.

A nose here, a foot or something here is just like random, random things in random places.

But no, man, it helps to get the creativity out though, you know?

Have you seen this?

This?

There's like a note taking process, it's called sketch notes, where it's essentially like a combination of drawing plus notes.

And that's just a Different way of capturing notes in order to.

To really remember them better.

Because you have not only, like, the text of whatever is being said, but there's, like, drawings that relate to that to accompany it.

Oh, that was the first time I'm hearing about sketchnotes.

I'm gonna have to check out that for sure, because that's like.

Yeah, there's, like, a community of people who do this, and there's, like, conferences talking about how do you become more fluent in it.

It might be something that you can take into, like, community calls and stuff and see.

Oh, this actually does what I was doing when I was a kid.

Right.

It takes you back.

That is extremely special.

I had no idea that that existed or that other people even did that stuff.

Fascinating what you learn about your.

Your fellow creators and how similar y'.

All.

Y' all are.

Even from Worlds Apart, such as you and myself, man.

Yeah.

What kinds of characters and drawings did you gravitate towards?

Yeah, definitely.

It was going to be like, su.

Superheroes were a big one.

I remember having a stint where I was like, maybe I'll be a comic book artist.

So I remember coming up with, we're just different, like, protagonists, whether not.

Not having.

Not attaching any storylines to it.

Because when you're in your first brush with that world of superheroes, like, you're going off of the things that you see on tv.

So I remember growing up, for me, it was like, it was the X Men cartoon that was a big one.

And I really did like those Ninja Turtles.

The.

The Ninja Turtles.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may have been the first.

First.

My first brush with, like, characters, like, ever.

And seeing them when I was, like, five or six years old, just.

It's.

It's continued to imprint in my mind, maybe because it was the first thing that I saw, but it was like mashing up ninjas with turtles.

And they are bipedal, and.

And then, you know, you get to the live action movie, and when you're at that age, you think that all movies are just, like, recorded events, that someone walked around with a camera.

So imagine you at 4, 4 or 5 years old and sitting in front of a TV getting ready to draw some stuff.

And then Ninja Turtles comes on and it's in live action for him.

You don't understand that these are guys with suits on.

You're just like, how did these turtles look like this?

And they got on these pads, they got these cool names, and someone walked around with a camera and just recorded this story.

It's just, like, insane.

So you know, you.

You see that, and then you're just like, okay, I'm going to draw what I see.

I'm going to draw Wolverine and Raphael and all of them and put them in the same stor.

And then you.

Eventually, Kevin, started to create your own stories based off of your first brushes with you seeing examples of that because you didn't know that it even existed.

But then you see in this cartoon, again, you're not really putting the puzzle pieces together, that these are a bunch of clips, like, you know, 25 frame rate per second or something like that, and that these stories are going on.

You're just like drawing this little flat character, and it's just like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna write a name or something at the top.

And that was.

That was it.

But it was mostly, yeah, just like little, little side characters and doing things like, like doing superhero poses or walking down the street, like normal stuff like that.

And just really getting accustomed to even the type of media that you use.

Whether I liked pen the more the most, or watercolor or pencil even, and just, just free flowing with it.

And then as I got older, like, taking all of the art classes that, that I could through grade school to tighten the technique, I always had a natural propensity towards it anyway.

But to learn how, like, to draw perspective or still life or even vehicles, like using, using, like, lines or even like the face, I was like, oh, this is a fascinating way to draw some of the same things I was doing, but from a completely different technique.

But I definitely credit my teachers in those classes that I took with helping me to hone those skills.

One interesting thing about, like, art school that I learned for myself was that there's no way I was ever going to be the thing I wanted to be, which was originally, like a Disney animation person or something along those lines, just because of the amount of, like, work and effort and like, details that go into something like that.

So I think the more you dive into anything, the more you can either imagine yourself going more towards it or going more towards something else.

So when did you make the decision that you wanted to go from, like, doing that sort of artistic character type of drawing into different types of work?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think I made that decision, Kevin, around the time that, like, the college counselors were visiting the high schools.

So this would have been around 12th grade.

So I remember them coming in and them telling us about, like, graphic design.

And for some reason I was just like, oh, in case being a visual artist doesn't work out, I should go ahead and have a different trade in my back pocket.

And computers and things are.

They weren't blowing up.

Like, that predated that.

Even someone who had to do those, you know, the titles and the credits and the movie posters, all of that is like visual art.

But at that time, Kevin, that didn't register for me.

It was just like, oh, visual art.

In case I can't.

To your point, Kevin, like, I don't get a career being a painter or something and you're starting to hear rumors around, okay, well, maybe, maybe being a visual artist is kind of a long shot, like, to your point, even, like, it's just like, can.

Can that even be something that I'm doing?

But if.

In case it can't, I was listening to just.

Just different lessons from my pops around, like having different trades in your back pocket in case one thing didn't work out.

I think somewhere subconsciously that was rolling out in the back.

And when they said graphic design and they explained it of like taking what you do in this form but like in a computer form, I was like, oh, that could be fascinating.

This feels like the feeling future.

So from there, that kind of teetered me off of even going the visual art route because I ended up falling in love with the graphic design stuff.

However, you still end up dueling even here on the cusp of turning 42.

Like, if, if I'm.

If I'm on the phone with someone and I got paper near, like, I can't help it.

I don't even.

You don't even recognize what you're doing.

So it remains with you no matter what.

But you take those early lessons and you're just like blank canvas.

Nothing is on it.

Let me put something on here.

Or maybe, maybe you're actually removing the art that wants to be revealed underneath the blank canvas and all you're doing is erasing whatever it may be.

That same metaphor still applies even in the graphic design world, where you're using a completely different set of skills and stuff.

Like when I got introduced into Illustrator and Photoshop and I'm just like, oh, you draw things by connecting two lines in different.

Two dots and with lines.

And then you're.

You're dragging your cursor to like, make a curve and you're connecting this thing.

It was just like.

And again, I think that the Hunch was proven correctly because I feel like I had an easier time being a graphic designer than I ever would have had visual arts.

I feel like you to be a big name in the visual art games, like, you need a lot of things to go right.

I probably would equate that to almost being like a level under becoming a movie star or even being an actor in general in terms of like the amount of things that have to go right.

Especially in today's world.

Kevin, like you, you got to be in the right location.

You need, you need your name ringing bells in the right streets and galleries and, and exhibitions and obviously, you know, selling your art and all of that thing, all of that stuff.

But.

I do wonder if I would have went that route.

But I don't think it's too late to still dip a toe in that pine.

And I'm still interested.

I think that's one of my kind of bucket list items is to see if I could do something gallery related and get back into painting and things again.

But anyway, just to answer your question,.

Yeah, I think that no matter what point you are in life, you have the opportunity to change what you're doing.

You, even if it's slower than you would have liked or, you know, I am setting it off for a future date.

Obviously we do not know what the future holds for any of us.

Right.

We can only work with what we have in the current moment.

But we can plan to do something and see if it, if that plan turns out to work for us.

But there's no reason why, just because you haven't done it at this moment in time, that doesn't mean you're stuck never having done it.

Yeah, yeah, I appreciate you giving me that reminder.

And it's even more than just like, it's even more than just turning it into a business.

It's a form of expression.

It feels like something that you are compelled to do just as an exercise in and of itself to be like, I did that.

You already have insecurities around whether you're still even good at this in the first place of just like, have you, have you reached your prime?

Were you way better back then?

The time and bandwidth that would be required to really invest in that again.

But I'm taking my own advice and just saying, okay, well, maybe you make that idea smaller.

Rather than going their route of trying to set up an exhibition or even earning the right to even have that.

It just starts with, okay, just draw, man, draw in your off time.

And so that's what I have been doing, Kevin.

It's just like I get out my iPad, I play around on that, I draw on that.

Because I do like the convenience of being able to do that when I don't have paper and stuff near me.

And I don't want to make excuses anywhere, be like, oh, man, I don't got my sketch pad or something with me.

Like, there was no way that I can draw.

Now my whole metaphor in life is all about resourcefulness.

Use what you have around you to create, man.

Like, like, never, never use money as an impediment.

Never use your connections as an impediment.

Like you have to express.

Fortunately, you may realize this too, Kevin.

It's just like when you draw, it's so mesmerizing to people who don't draw no matter what.

If you and I set up a booth right now in front of a cafe and just started and just had a draw off or something, whatever it may be, you people are going to stop by and look.

So, so you're always going to do something that is attracting people or a crowd.

And now it's a matter of just being able to, to dance in the rain, as I say, or to throw, to throw paintballs at the walls and just have fun and stuff with it.

And then the whole business element, Kevin, like, that'll all work sort itself out.

What it ends up becoming, whether or not you got a.

A bucket or something outside that's collecting tips or something like that.

Like you, if you can, if you can pick up something and be brave enough even, even if you fear it, even if you worry that you're not good to just do your thing, man.

And if it's art, you're really lucky then because again, it's a mesmerizing thing.

Like, you just see it no matter where you go, it will never die out.

It will never not impress people to see people just drawing things.

Or especially if I'm sitting in front of you and I'm doing a caricature review or something and I'm sitting outside of a Libra, you're going to have people stop by and look at that.

They're going to take out their phones, they're going to take snaps and stuff of it.

So, like, that's your advantage.

That's just inherently baked in now.

It's just about the performance element, like just doing you.

So I look at it like that too, and I'm just like, oh, man, I could always do that.

To your point, Kevin, at any given time of just being like, you know, What?

I'm going to take a Saturday off and just like go out to the park up here in the city and just like draw all day.

You're not doing it to attract the crowd, but it will happen anyway, especially if you're doing it in a public setting.

And as you get more comfortable doing that as, as you start to just play around with it, it's a win win.

You get to creatively express yourself irrespective of any people coming around it or viewing it or paying you for it.

And then you get the, I think the free marketing component that, that just comes with doing something that is a mesmerizing act.

Yeah, I think there's like, there's two different gaps.

I think all that is relevant.

There's the people who are artistic but don't want to have business around it and then there's those are people who want a business but they, they're afraid to express themselves creatively.

So I think there's always a balance between these two things.

And there's obviously no right or wrong way to do anything.

It's just your options.

So what do you want to do and how, what's the best way to get where from where you are to where you want to be?

Balancing all those elements?

Yeah, yeah, 1,000% that's true.

That, that is a very real conundrum.

And the irony is that if you just integrated both of those things, like that's the holy grail of it all, you're doing what you love, what you would do for free anyway.

And you're paid handsomely for doing something that you would just do for free.

But it's always, and this is what I tell people in Forge as well, like the entrepreneurship or we call it marketing or being able to sell what it is that you do is the harder side of like your inherent skill set.

It's the thing that you actually gotta learn to do.

Like you don't really just learn that definitely in grade school of like how to create a business.

The school systems I design actually to turn you into a worker bee.

So if you're gonna make art, if you're going to make something out of creating value from the things that you can produce artistically and you are setting a price point or that or to your point, you may even have to be convinced to turn it into a business because you're so damn good at it, but you don't like the work that you do at your workplace and stuff like you just treating this as a hobby and it's just like, yo, if you could.

If you could do what you love doing and earn from it at the same time, why wouldn't you at least explore that?

Because from where I sit, that's the perfect place to be.

As Spike Lee said, you don't work a day in your life if you get paid for doing what you love anyway, because it is all something that you would just do for free.

But it's just like, oh, no.

I have visions of myself, Kevin.

I was just like, yo, if I could.

If I could, like, paint something, and those things sell at a hundred thousand dollars a pop, and, like, my bills are paid for, like, a couple years just off of one design.

It's just like, that's insane to be able to arrive at that precipice, though.

That's a lot of hard work, man.

And everybody ain't built for that.

Like, you got to be doing some.

And clearly, it's not even about the actual work at that point.

It's more, oh, I want a piece from Kevin Chung.

So the fact that he drew it is in enough of itself for me.

Like, your.

Your name, your brand is so powerful.

If you just threw something at the wall, like, literally, and it's just like, oh, because art is what it means to you.

And if it's abstract anyway, it's just like, man, you get to wake up, produce one thing, find someone who's into art, and sell it at an insane price point.

And you could do that a couple times.

Come on, man.

So, anyway, it's so interesting because the art is such a subjective thing.

Like, if somebody is willing to pay you for that thing, that's what it's worth, right?

You can't assign a value to something.

The.

The market essentially determines what the artwork is worth.

And that's why something like a banana.

Have you heard about that?

The banana that was taped to a wall in Art Basel, and somebody bought it for, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars or something insane like that.

There's just like.

There's so many things that you would not consider, and the only reason that thing was worth that is because somebody was willing to pay that much money for it.

Right, right.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

I. I feel like it's a.

It's a dance between what the market is willing to pay and how you're positioning yourself at the same time.

I think positioning is a big piece of it.

To your point about that.

That banana drawing, like, if I personally did that, like, no one would be willing to pay that price point for It.

Because of.

They haven't seen any work for me or they don't know who I am or the story behind that.

So unless.

Unless it's so unique that it has never been done before or it's.

It's so baffling and so stupid of just like, hey, the person, Darno.

Just, like, he, like, kissed the canvas, but it's still a blank canvas.

There's absolutely no art on it.

But, Kevin, I really want you to buy this for me.

And I'm gonna price it at 35,000.

Do I hear 40,000?

Do I hear 45?

Do I hear 50?

50.

Going for 50.

Okay, 65.

70.

Set it up at an auction even.

I don't know.

You get a. I meant life can be stranger than fiction sometimes.

But I, you know, I think.

I think you do gotta.

You know, you have to.

You gotta know.

You should know your worth.

But you're right.

The market does have a role, have the biggest role to play into what that ultimately becomes.

But you.

You have to come out there with a certain amount of confidence even as well, too.

And.

And if they do actually.

Well, how much does it cost?

You should have an answer that makes sense, you know.

Yeah.

Based on everything.

Yeah.

Because if I told you, you.

You like, darn it, I want to buy that from you.

How much?

Resell to before.

Okay.

So.

Because I was actually going to give you 50,000, but it's too late now, like, and we've shook on it and stuff.

And it's just like, oh, okay.

Well, see, I undersold myself, but I didn't know because I didn't know what the market demanded.

So it's a dance, I feel like, you know.

But anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everything is like, essentially the whole world in society that we're living in is just based on shared knowledge and shared, like, things that we say because, I mean, nothing is inherently illegal or illegal.

Right.

It's society decided this is how it's going to work.

No one decided, like, art should be worth this much.

This is as a side how much people are willing to exchange.

So I think knowing all of that is important because you essentially have the power to dictate what you sell things for or what you make things for.

And you don't have to abide by any, like, set rules.

You have the power to.

To really do whatever it is.

Everything is kind of just, like, set by the expectations of people.

Yeah.

That is true to your point.

It's all arbitrary until it becomes a Reality, like even us setting this date to talk, like, it's just, it's an arbitrary date.

It's just a date pulled out of thin air somewhat around whatever we have going on at the time.

But it's, it's all just, it's just something that you pull, that you pull out and two parties end up agreeing on that.

And I'm just like, man, if I could ever create something, whether it was a piece of art or even an ecosystem that was, that was worth it, that was worth that much to people.

And I was able to simplify my life and not have complex funnels, not have very complicated business models, and I could reduce my expenses as well.

Then Kevin, that gives you even more, I think, freedom just monetarily to not even have to depend on market forces all that much.

To be like, oh, okay, yeah, that, you know, that one, that, that one piece of art that sold for that amount, if I'm being smart around it can end up compounding for a while.

And you wouldn't necessarily be at the whims of having to continue to sell something like that very, very often.

You can just kind of just be good with chilling and, and putting you in, positioning yourself to where you would not have to continue to sell things beyond your point of expiration.

And you know, so anyway, yeah, I.

Think it's all just about like a lot of it is like setting your mind to something and trying your best to make that a reality.

Right?

So we all go from having had nothing to having something.

And there's a process to that.

So how do you go from point A to point B with the knowledge that you have, the connections that you have, like, and all the resources you have, and go from nothing to essentially having something.

Because that's how every single thing has come about that is not like part of, at least the human side of things.

Like everything that is a thing is because we actually created it from nothing.

Yep.

Yeah, that's the, that's.

I think about that often, man.

I think about that and I'm just like, this needs to be brought to the forefront more because everything that we take for granted was, was imagined by someone, probably designed by someone else and probably funded by someone else to, to become a thing in the, in the three dimensional space.

But we, you know, we, we, we do that and then we get crippled up on, okay, well, designing a business that supports my life and not the other way around, but you doing something as amazing as producing something that didn't exist, like you did a micro, microcosm of what you can probably do for your life.

And applying that same skill set in a different context could have great results for you.

But to your point, you got to, you got to be self aware enough to even recognize that that's an option for you.

You have to want that as an option and not just be a person that, that complains or stays stuck in a role or a job that you hate.

Because if you got, if you, if you are, if you are talented in that way, and if Picasso was right, which I do believe he was, Every child is an artist.

The problem is how to remain one in adulthood, is his famous quote.

That's a good metaphor for life too.

So if you and I both started out as artists and we were very experimental and we were putting Lego blocks in our mouths and trying to see what was edible and what wasn't, and getting our fingers stuck in cakes and like starting to scrub them all around the carpet and just do all of the things that you're not supposed to.

But you're still trying to understand the world around you.

And you take that same degree of creativity and you apply that into your adulthood.

What can't you create?

What can't you, especially if you believe you have no limits and no ceilings and, and you're never going to let you being financed be an impediment to what it is that you want to create.

If you can figure out a way to do that and to, and to, I don't know, to, to like immerse yourself in that specific dogma.

You, you can create anything.

You absolutely can.

But so few of us would subscribe to that belief system.

We probably don't create as much as we could.

We don't invent as much as we could.

And maybe that's just part of a world that's just kind of beating you down and stuff all of the time, or things that you don't want to learn about the world having an impression on you.

A deep and profound effect that is changing the way that you even see things.

But me, I don't have limits.

I don't have ceilings.

And I'm never going to let someone else say yes and no to my dreams.

So I always, Kevin used like the metaphor of.

Because I like, I like movies and stuff a lot.

I like filmmaking.

I like that as an art form.

Speaking of art forms, I really admire that art form and I like seeing how the sausage is made too.

So I watch a lot of like, special features and everything.

But when it comes to like the movies that we end up loving or the ones that wins Oscars or the ones that even get made.

There are so much behind the scenes stuff for that stuff to eventually just even reach theaters.

And so I love giving people this example, man, because I think this is pertinent to this conversation as well, Kevin.

And if people are watching us.

But if you, if you, Kevin Chung, were the head of Kevin Chung Studios and you produce all of these blockbuster hits and I walked into your office, your secretary set up a meeting with the both of us and she told you that I got this crazy idea and stuff and you just gotta hear it.

And we're meeting at a 2:30 on a Tuesday and I walk into your office and I got the perfect pitch for my story.

But the caveat is it's going to cost $200 million to produce this movie and stuff.

But I haven't directed any films before.

I have, I have no proven credibility whatsoever.

Like you're probably going to fire your secretary for setting you up with a meeting like that first off.

And B, well, B, or number two, you're going to, you likely are going to kick me out the office before I've even finished my pitch.

Because it doesn't make any sense for that happening.

Most people would take that and they would say, oh, okay.

Well, Kevin didn't say okay, but maybe this studio will, maybe Paramount will say yes, maybe Warner Brothers say yes.

And they go to all of these different studios and try to get this thing made by people who are in power, who can fund their ideas.

And when that doesn't work out, they stay waiting tables, they stay tending bars and dying a little bit each day because their dream of getting this $200 sci fi blockbuster won't ever get made.

The difference between me and them in that, in that context is that if I would have went to you, yes, I would have did all of that.

But if you said no to me, I wouldn't continue to just go to the other studios.

Like I would say, well, what's a way that I could get this idea out without needing that much money to do it?

Because the problem is money.

But I already promised myself that I can't let that be an impediment to getting out my dreams.

So what do you do?

Well, it's what I always say is around being resourceful.

What can I use?

Who do I already know?

What talents do I already have to get the same idea out?

I take $5,000, maybe that I saved up for my entire life.

Even through that point in time.

He said if I really believed in this much.

I got to get a concept or something together.

I gotta, I gotta get this on YouTube or something.

Obviously I can't, I can't create this two hour movie, but maybe I can create a five minute version of it using After Effects, using AI, using my friends and stuff in the neighborhood who are not actors.

It's probably gonna be terrible acting in here, but I have to get this idea out.

And then somehow a year later, you, you've, you've heard of this idea.

You heard about the person that you kicked out and like laughed off the stage.

And you seen that, you seen it, you've seen this concept that come out and you said, well, I'm still not, not going to greenlight $200 million, but I think I could pony up 20 million and see what he can do on that budget.

And you might be the one calling me at that point in time because you've seen what I was able to do after getting that no from you.

And that's how you start to get out your ideas and turn tables around, but also like lean into getting out these ideas regardless, even if there are smaller versions of the ideas because the expression must get out.

It shouldn't be contained, it shouldn't die.

In that way, it is me being creative on a meta level of like, how am I going to even get this idea out?

Forget the creativity of the story, how am I going to produce it enough to get an outcome that I'm seeking and have you being the one coming to me and me actually having more leverage than I had during our initial meeting.

And this is a way to do that.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

First of all, I love it because I just read Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew.

Have you, do you know about that?

I don't, I don't.

Tell me about, you know who Robert Rodriguez is?

I do, I do.

He's.

He's the director.

He's a famous director.

Yep.

He's done a lot of movies at this point, but his very first movie was done on a five thousand dollar budget and he essentially fulfilled almost every role within this.

He was the sound person, he was the director, he was the camera person, he was everything.

And he got, he found some actors in different places and whatnot and he did all the editing afterwards.

And then he talked about the process of having done all that and then having the process of finding somebody that wants to buy it and how all of that led to the opportunities that came up because of that.

So you essentially Just described his book without ever having read it, which is amazing.

That is insane, man.

That is crazy.

And to the $5,000 number, I had no idea.

But to your point, I do know Robert Rodriguez.

I've.

I haven't really seen any of his films, except.

Except I think, for Sin City.

But that is a.

That is an extremely fascinating story.

We see examples of this all at a time.

The most recent example is with that obsession film that.

That has kind of gone viral and stuff at this moment.

Like, he made his movie on a $750,000 budget.

Obviously it's mildly more than a $5,000 one, but the result and stuff is still the same.

You take what you've getting or whatever you got to borrow to do, or whether you got to put a second mortgage or something on your house, whatever it may be, taking actors who may be cool with being paid interns or whatever deal that you got to work out, filming the thing, Kevin, and then being able to hit up film festivals and try to get it acquired by a larger studio.

And when a larger studio acquires it and you've only spent 1 million producing it and the studio acquires it for $15 million, like, look how much you're already in the.

In the black.

Like regardless of what deal that you have sorted out because it's self finance and if it's not self financed, if it was credited or whatever, like, yeah, you're going to owe some money back on those things, but that's still $15 million or something that people see potential in that they're going to make way more money in.

But again, they.

The analogy is the same around finding.

Finding ways to create a smaller version of whatever outcome that you are seeking or whatever form of expression that you're trying to get out there, whether it is writing a book, whether it is shooting a movie, if you have that itch and that inclination to create something, you have to be resourceful.

You have to apply that creativity towards getting this idea out there.

And I think that's the switch that you have to make.

And you're just a DJ in a booth at this point.

You're taking various records and you're finding unique ways to spin them together and to make music out of these ingredients.

Who do I know?

What do I already know?

And what if I just twist these Rubik's Cubes a little bit to get a different outcome and change some things up?

So, yeah, I think it's a lot like if you imagine TV shows always have a pilot, right?

I would imagine what you're explaining is essentially the pilot of whatever project.

And that could be literally any creative thing that you want to do, whether that's a film, whether it's a book, whether it's like a painting.

There's always like a minimum viable product, which is what Silicon Valley calls it, to what you want to do.

And just because you can't ultimately reach your end outcome, like the ultimate vision that you have, that doesn't mean, like we were saying earlier, it doesn't mean you can't get there.

Right.

You.

There are steps that you can take along the way to make progress towards the thing.

Instead of saying, oh, I'll never be able to do this, what does it take to go from where I am to where I want to be?

Yeah.

And if, and if we are, we are, we step too far out of that experience, Kevin, and we look at the big picture to be like, oh, I'm going to have to create this complicated business model and have all of these problems.

We talk ourselves out of things before we even test the thing out.

To your point, let's just get the proof of concept out the door.

Just the pilot.

That's it.

Maybe, maybe that is all to focus on for right now of just of just getting the idea out there in some facet.

And what you'll find is that oftentimes a lot of that stuff sorts itself out and people will, people who need to be in your orbit will become in your orbit out of osmosis for you having to create the pilot version of the thing anyway.

So now you got a producer that comes in and be like, Kevin, that was a great proof of concept that you did.

Hey, I got this connecting stuff over here who might want to turn this into a series.

And I would love to represent you.

Like, and this is, this is what I would charge in this.

You don't owe me anything up front, but out of every deal that you make, my cut is 15%.

Like, what do you say to that?

Just as an example, you didn't need to shop around for a producer.

This person landed because someone put them up on your pilot just as an example.

Then your mind starts to get bigger, to be like, oh, I didn't ever thought to turn that into a series in the first place.

But this person that wants me to be my producer, they're pitching themselves to me like, I have leverage.

I've created value out of nothing.

And now this person wants to work with me, who I didn't even realize is a part of this game anyway, and they want to represent me.

Like they want to handle all the stuff that I don't want to do anyway.

Want to like go around and pitch at the studios and free me up to chill, free me up to do what I love doing anyway.

That's a great deal, man.

You know, and again that, that, that only happened, Kevin, because as a result of the work that you put out in the first place, it doesn't.

A lot of that stuff just, just from osmosis.

I feel like the law of attraction and stuff is real too.

Just like people will see stuff.

Sometimes it'll be nefarious and sometimes it'll be altruistic.

You'll have to turn on your own radars to be able to, to decipher who are really your friends who really want to help you out or who only see just, you know, monetization opportunities.

But at least you have leverage now and leverage is a powerful thing to have.

I wish more creative creators had it, but I think as you and I have kind of talked about this, it really does come with putting out your version of a proof of concept of your MVP of your pilot for whatever it is that you're doing and having that be step one at this point and letting it see what it does and what, what type of shelf life that that has before you take any other steps.

Because you will need help doing it.

And if you want to only focus on the art, on directing, on writing, on acting, on cooking, you're going to need to have other people in place to handle all of the stuff that you don't want to do anyway.

And usually they'll come at a price point, but at least with, at least it sounds like within certain components of even the film industry that is percentage basis, commission based.

So if you're not making money, they aren't the stuff either.

So it's, it's not real.

It's not really having to come out of your pockets, which can give you some comfort there.

Yeah, I think it's, it's all about putting it into the universe.

Yeah.

And then your universe will start to respond if you don't.

Yeah.

If you keep it in here.

Right.

It's never going to happen.

You have to begin.

It'll happen, but it'll happen through me.

Because you had the idea and you sat on it for 10 years and then you'd be looking at me be like, damn, that same idea 10 years ago.

Because the idea is going to be born anyway.

It'll just go through a different vessel at that point.

Yeah.

There's there's this idea of if you're not the one to do it, someone else is going to do it for you.

Because no idea is extremely original.

Like, everything is based on stuff that has come before.

Yep.

And stuff that's also just out in the universe.

Right.

Because we're all living at the same time period, stuff will likely pop into different people's heads in different times.

Yeah.

Just through osmosis, like you're saying.

So it's not like the universe works in such interesting and unique ways that we can never understand.

So if you have the idea in your hand, you can turn it into a reality in some FaceTime.

And it might not be that thing that you're thinking of, but it could be that first step, 1,000% along your way.

Perfectly put.

Yeah.

And that's the important part.

And I want.

I want the listeners and watchers, too, to take that away from this conversation.

It's just like, yo, think about your pilot, man.

Don't think about the business model or anything yet.

Get the idea out there.

And trust me, like, the version of it that is a pilot anyway is going to be such an interesting story of how that all came together.

An impossible story that is going to inspire other people in other industries anyway.

And it's a better story than everything working out anyway, because A, we can't relate to that, and B, it doesn't even happen that way.

If I walked into your office, Kevin, I asked for that $200 million, like, you're not going to give it to me.

And if it did happen that way, it's just like.

Oh.

Like it's not.

It's not a story that is.

That is I going to be met with anything but skepticism.

Because this is like how that's a, that's a unicorn.

Like, no one else is going to be able to do that.

So anyway, yeah, there are exceptions that I do want to bring up.

1.

I mean, I think the biggest one right now is Travis Knight, who is Phil Knight's son, the son of the Nike founder, and he.

He runs his own studio.

And it's amazing.

It's actually brilliant and amazing.

But you.

That's through connections.

Right.

So you're either gonna have a connection or you're gonna do it through the hard work.

Yeah.

Or.

Or the combination of both.

So just because you see one example doesn't mean that's the rule.

That's obviously like a huge exception that he's allowed to just play around with whatever because his dad found it night here or whatever.

Right, right.

Right, yeah, that's actually, that's interesting that you use that example because I think that's a fascinating.

That's in my opinion one of the better examples of, of like, of.

What.

We, what we think of just pessimistic, pessimistically as like nepotism even.

Like he didn't, he didn't extend the Nike brand or come out with an athletic brand like he went for, he went and created his own studio and produces works of art that are extremely endearing and different than other things that you see between his work in like in the, in the stop animation world and, and all of that.

It's just like, that's fascinating and it makes me think that if I, if I was the son of someone who was famous or I had a, I had a famous like dad who was into acting or a dad who was a famous actor, it's like now all of a sudden I'm in movies and stuff.

It's just like, come on, man.

It's an impossible shadow to escape if you do that.

But if I become a blacksmith, it's just like these two things aren't related.

I can create my own imprint and my own.

Yeah, I can dip the universe in my own way in a completely different field using the connections that I have.

But I'm escaping that shadow of nepotism in that way just by virtue of trying it in a different industry versus the one that they're in.

So yeah, that's a fascinating kind of gift and curse, isn't it, when it comes to offspring of people who are famous or celebrated at something else.

And it's even worse if you're, if that offspring wants to follow, it wants to be in that same industry just by virtue of like being, growing up around the same stuff.

Like hey, my dad was a famous musician, I grew up dancing and stuff all the time.

Like I want to create my own album or something.

Press is always going to compare you to that, to that more famous person and you fall for the comparison trap.

You can never get out of the shadow of what they did and stuff before.

It's just like some impossible thing.

But I feel like what Travis Knight did, and I actually did not even know that he was Phil Knight's son until you said that.

That is extremely fascinating.

I haven't heard of a story like that before of someone that went in a completely different field, you know.

Yeah, there's definitely examples of successful people who have followed in their parents footsteps.

A lot of actors or singers, there's athletes, those are probably the biggest three ones, there's Tom Hanks and Colin Hanks, both actors.

But when you do something like that, there's Jaden and Will Smith.

Yeah.

So when you do those sorts of things, you have to be your own version of the thing.

Right.

You cannot try to be your father or your mother or your uncle or whoever that famous person is.

You have to just find your path and your footing, and you have to realize that you're different and you need to go about the world differently, even if you're going to pursue the same sorts of, like, creative pursuits.

Yeah.

Denzel Washington and John David Washington.

Same thing.

And it's just like the more singular the original talent is, the harder it may be.

And that's why I said it's just like you.

It's really hard to escape that type of scrutiny, especially if you're drawn to making your own impact in the same field.

But if you can escape the shadow somehow, even though it's an impossible task, even though they will always say that you had connections that other people didn't even, no matter how good that you are, because, again, you can't untether the scrutiny that you'll face and stuff from doing that.

And the press loves to have stories like that anyway, that they can turn you into a punching bag.

So you're never going to be as good as the original.

A copy isn't a best thing.

As an original, I commend, not command.

But I just think it's fortunate in Travis's case that he was drawn to leaving impact in a complete different field, because that is not a story that I hear that often, but the example that you just gave.

We see a lot of them in music and in film, for sure, but I haven't seen.

I haven't really seen anyone escape the scrutiny of being in the shadow of the original talent.

And usually the child is not.

You can't measure up.

It's impossible.

Especially with Tom Hanks or Denzel Washington.

They're too singular.

They're too.

They're too distinct for.

For their offspring, in my opinion, to.

To ever be as celebrated as.

As they would be.

But if they're okay with that, then I am.

Yeah.

Can you talk about one of the ideas that you turned from, like, a dream and how.

How you turned that into a reality and whether or not you had different pit stops along the way in order to.

To make that come true?

Yeah.

I have many stories over the years, I think.

One that comes to mind or just picking one out of them.

I remember being Young in grade school, wasn't old enough to get a legal job somewhere.

And I remember wanting to make more money than I was during my first gig that I just came up out of nowhere, which was like selling pecans, which was taking pecans that had fallen on the ground and the fall and in the neighborhood and putting them in sandwich bags and then going door to door and selling them for like $2 a pop.

Some point, either that season, it passed and maybe like, spring or something came where I couldn't do that business or something anymore.

But I was just like, yo, I still need to get my own money because I'm not getting an allowance anyway.

And there are things that I want, you know, you're a young kid and all of those things.

So I remember landing upon the idea to, like, mow lawns and stuff.

And again, that did work very well with this, with the new season.

But the problem was we didn't have a lawnmower at home.

So how.

How are you going to sell the fact that you can mow lines if.

If you don't have the tools to actually do them, but the entire neighborhood is.

Is your oyster, basically, because everybody's got lines.

And so I. I just remember I didn't use that as an impediment.

I went door to door and, hey, hey, Kev, can I mow your lawn?

Like.

Like, I see you got a line that needs cut.

I would love to mow it on a weekly basis, like for the next few months.

Oh, that's good.

Do you have a lawnmower?

No, I don't.

I'm sorry.

I was hoping that you may have one.

And then if they didn't go on to the next door.

And I did that until someone did say yes, and they did have their own lawnmower.

And all I did was, was I went to re up on the gas and stuff for it.

Like, got me a little.

Little gas canister thing and filled it up with gas and.

And did that job.

But it's just like, you know, just the deeper metaphor and stuff in there of just like, not using that as an impediment of recognizing that.

Ah, I landed, finally, Kevin, at the right house where this older lady who lived by herself did have the right tools, but was too old to do her own line and had no one else doing it.

And I would have never landed at that house had I had.

I didn't keep going and saying, I don't got the lawnmower, but I got the grit and I got the will to actually do this and stuff for people.

And there are a lot of people, lawns and stuff around here or someone who is being overlooked or maybe can't afford the rate of the company that's doing it for $50 a pop.

And I remember, you know, she paid me $20 per cut.

And I think I went every once a week or twice a week until I moved out of that neighborhood.

But that was one, you know, that's one prime example of like, of having the will to do something, not having everything that you could to actually perform the task, but by continuing to keep trying until you landed at the house that had the right circumstances and was willing to give you that shot.

And then it's just, it's just around getting more practice with it, obviously at a price point that we both agreed at.

And it really helped her out and stuff too, because she, she liked having a nice looking yard and no one was taking care of her.

But I did it and, and I was, I was grateful for having that job.

And again, that was a very, very young age before I could get my first job working at a restaurant a few years later.

Yeah, I love that example because I think that was like the first seedlings that was going to show where you would ultimately end up as an adult, where you're creating your own realities through hard work, through what tools you have available, through the connections.

And it's not necessarily that things will always happen for you right away.

You have to figure out how do I do it with the constraints and the reality of this current moment versus, oh, Pecan's ran out.

I'm done, right?

I can't make any more money.

Yeah, exactly.

So, I mean, again, to your point, there are a lot of lessons in there.

And it's just like these were.

I don't know, it's just like I'm wired differently, Kev.

I'm just wired differently.

Like, it's like that just became obvious to me out of nowhere of just like either.

It was both two things converging.

A, I'm not making enough money selling pecans and B, now the season has changed and stuff anyway.

And I don't want to wait a whole year until I can do this and stuff again.

What can I do now with what I know who I have, okay.

And you know, what gets me out the house, what's legal and stuff, what's not gonna get me in trouble.

This was one of the routes of doing that.

Not everybody was into doing stuff like that but you.

But it's like I'm driving Home the point as well, around like what I knew at the time because now in my 40s, I recognize that there are a lot of different ways that I could have got around the lawnmower issue.

I could have like, I could have borrowed my friend's lawnmower.

I could have like put one on layaway until I was able to afford one.

Like save my money and like eventually bought my own one.

Maybe turned that into a lawn care business down the line.

Probably could have asked my parents to buy me one or something for a birthday.

It's like.

But at the time, the only thing that came to mind was I don't have one and I need to land at a house that does have a lawnmower and does want me to cut it.

Those were the only two things that had to make sense for me to get the job that I was seeking.

Just those two things.

All that other stuff that I now know in my 40s, I did not know at the time.

That was just, that was just all that it was.

It was just like lawnmowers, really expensive.

I have no experience even running a lawnmower anyway.

So this person has to really be taking a chance on me.

They need, I need to do good work so that they keep wanting me to come back.

I got to use their own material.

So don't break it, don't mess it up, don't owe on that.

And then, you know, gain qualities, Kevin, that will serve you better in adulthood.

Such as, like being prompt, such as being a person of integrity.

When you say you're going to do something, when you say you're going to show up at this time every other Friday at 5 o' clock PM before the sun go down, no matter what.

So you, you learn how to be communicative, you learn how to be prompt, you learn how to be responsive.

You learn how to go out there and seek the things that you're looking for, all at an early age.

And they serve you the older that you get.

Yeah.

And that I think it's one of those things where it shows you the opposite of what school teaches you, which is there's one way to solve.

Like if you're going to school, they teach you there's one way to solve a math problem.

Obviously there's, there's infinite number of ways to do everything.

And we're always taught, at least in the US school system, to, to seek the one right answer.

Right.

In life, if life teaches you anything, there's no one correct way to do anything.

There's always paths around where you want to go and how you can get there from point A to point B. I love that.

That's exactly right.

Like, no one has a monopoly on how you solve these problems.

Problems.

You just.

I am, I feel very fortunate into being wired differently, Kevin, in that way, because I was the only person that I knew who looked the way that I did that, that even had the idea to do that type of stuff, because I grew up from very humble beginnings and stuff.

And there weren't many examples of, like, things that I could do legally to go in and get this money at that age.

And for some reason it's just like, ah.

And it could be the drawing, it could be bringing this conversation full circle.

Like something as on the surface, seemingly unrelated as drawing superhero characters to like five or seven years later of being like, oh, man.

Though this has nothing to do with my drawing on the surface.

I need to get money.

And so I'm going to cut lines.

But then you realize, oh, cutting lines, you are designing, you're learning how to contour, you're learning how to straighten edges and to make things look nice and neat and to where that becomes a billboard for your work in and of itself.

Ah, Every time that person, that lady invited people over, they saw her, their lawn, hey, who did your lawn and stuff and could have got more business that way.

My life could have went a whole different path had I.

Had I stayed in that field even, and maybe I'd be one of the greatest lawn care people in the world.

But you, you pull from these different things.

And I think that's what makes.

That's why I claim to be a polymath in that way, is because I pull from different industries and you see patterns and you filter them through your own process and you make something wholly unique onto yourself, both in how you present yourself and in also the things that you choose to do.

And you could be very versatile.

And you can say, oh, that lesson, when it came to taking care of that person's lawn in that way that many years ago, so many decades, is still both a memorable anecdote.

And it shows you that there are no, there can be no excuses.

Because that's a prime example of, like, using nothing but your will and your will to, like, go door to door to get those no's, because that had to happen first too.

So it teaches you to.

It teaches you humility, it teaches you persistence as well.

And then it's saying, man, even as unlikely as it may be, someone is going to have the tools that I need to do the job that I need to do for them and I got no money to do it.

I can't even invest in my own business.

I can't afford anything.

I only have the will to cut this person's lawn.

No experience whatsoever.

May not even like it.

But let me try it, see what I think of it first.

Let me test it.

Let me get out of the theory phase or complaining or waiting until next season and going out here and getting my own future and stuff and not, not, not waiting for a handout.

Definitely not letting those seasons changing being to my impediment, using it to my advantage actually and say, oh, life is giving me these lemons.

I'm going to make this lemonade.

Life is giving me spring right now.

What can I do that still keeps me outdoors and, and hanging out and enjoying this weather, but also teaches me important skills that become industry agnostic.

So there you have it.

Yeah, amazing.

We could talk about that forever.

But I do want to talk a little bit about some of the work that you do for clients and for as a community.

Somebody that runs a community.

Yeah.

So for, so for people who are entrepreneurs or businesses or brands that they would not call themselves creatives, they always say that they're not creative in that way.

That's where I come in.

I help them to execute on the, on their ideas, vague as they may.

Be.

Under articulated as they may be to make them clear to those who need to hear and see the most, those who, who they are meant to serve.

And I do that through a combination of branding, of design and of storytelling through my unique lens, being able to understand where they are to your point point from point A to point B, helping to make them the shortest distance between those two points which is a straight line versus all of the windy stuff and to help them articulate what it is that they have to offer to those who need to see it.

So that's for my nine creatives.

Those, those are my.

That's how I do that on a one to one basis and deliverable wise sometimes what that looks like.

Our brand strategy guidelines, brand identity guidelines.

There could be some website work, there could be some profile optimization as well too depending on if they're on LinkedIn just as an example.

And then for my fellow multi passionate entrepreneurs, I designed this, this ecosystem community called Forge.

And essentially Kevin, we're just there to basically align and integrate our entrepreneurial inclinations into our creative identity so that one isn't at the expense of the other.

So when we talked about earlier around like you could be artistic in a host of ways.

I'm actually trying to change the paradigm on what is a creative or what is a creator.

And I think I use that term very broadly.

Not just visual artists, not just people who are into the arts.

But if you, if you author your own content, if you take things or you remix things, you're a dj.

Even is, is, is a creative of sorts.

Even though he's using, he or she is using pre existing materials and songs and beats and stuff from various artists and putting them into unique context.

And now you showing up with a light show and you got 50,000 people in the fan, in the stands.

That's dope, that's creative.

And so I don't need to convince people that they are creative.

The people who come and forge the component that we all need help with is with the entrepreneurial side because, you know, if you, if you live in North America or any capitalist society, you got to figure out how to, how to make profit off of what it is that you do if you want to continue to do it.

It's an important puzzle piece.

But if we apply that creativity to what we are already good at and in a business context, we recognize, Kevin, that we, that we get to disrupt this entire thing.

We get to demand our own worth.

We get to have a say in what, what it is that we get paid.

But also like we, we should have fun in doing those things.

We should be fulfilled as creators.

We should love what we do.

It should create the impact that we want it to have and we should be compensated whatever we demand that we are worth.

And whether you need to go for volume or go with just a couple of clients to meet, even just your household expenses, let's dissect that.

Let's get surgical with it and reverse engineer the steps that we need to and let's do that for everybody that's a part of this ecosystem as an individual.

And if we're co.

Equals, which we are, that rising tide lifts all boats.

Because if you see one person doing it and you get vulnerable in there saying, well, these are the problems with my business or how I'm doing things.

We're too close to it anyway to even diagnose those problems.

We need to be around people who are further along, further along than we are.

And behind that we are.

Because the different points on the timeline I feel like is a feature and not a bug.

Not just learning from people who got all the accolades and stuff.

Kevin, even from.

I could learn something if you had a kid, a five Year old or something.

Like they could say something to me that blows my mind on everything I thought creative entrepreneurship was.

But we got to be open to that idea in the first place to recognize that everyone that you meet knows something that you don't.

When we start to cross pollinate, when we start to collaborate in unique ways, it's just like, man, we get out that pilot movie concept like much faster and stuff.

Because now that I'm in the same space as Kevin, and I didn't know that he was trying to break into the film industry too, but he has connects that can help me out on this acting side of things.

Like, boom, now this gets your idea out faster.

We both end up because you're cross pollinating.

So we both end up winning.

We both end up benefiting from just the fact that we share that detail with one another.

And we do that when we're in safe spaces and we feel comfortable enough to even showcase that just as an example.

So that's what I'm doing through my work with Forge.

And it's something that I feel like everything, everything, Kevin, everything that I've ever done, all of my experiences, I get to put all in one place.

The design, the storytelling, the community, the being able to help orchestrate things and not just create things to compose and stuff a little bit and still have it all be one thing, something I'm super excited about.

And I'm just like, yeah, keep going with this.

Yeah.

I think it's so important, regardless of what creative work you do, to have some sort of community element in it.

Because I think society has tried to tell us that creative pursuits are like a solo creator's journey.

Right.

You should be a solitary creative that does everything themselves.

You don't need any help to figure things out, things out, which is like the complete opposite of the way that things have worked throughout time.

I don't know when this made its way into the zeitgeist, but it's, it's now like, oh, you should not need to rely on people in order to make.

But every single creative person that I've talked to, and I've talked to many, many creative people, they all bring up the fact that there is some sort of communal aspect to creation that has helped them make it further than where they are.

And I think we need to all lean into that.

Even if you're like somebody in a solo pursuit, like you're a painter or an author, those are considered like solitary things.

But like, you get feedback, you can like bounce ideas off of each other.

You can collaborate and create something bigger than yourself.

So there's so many ways to incorporate the idea of community into your spaces.

And I think Forge is definitely a great example of how you can do that.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

And you, you're 1,000% right.

And I love, I love that we seem to us as people who identify as creatives, we seem to inherently be collaborative just by our nature because you, I see so many examples of it.

It's not even just through Forge.

So for like instance, there's a meetup and stuff that's, that's like in the city of just like people who just go around just like drawing stuff.

And we, we meet at different locations and stuff in the city and just draw things around us.

Sometimes it's a talkative environment, but other times it's in a library where we can't talk anyway.

But you're communicating all the time through the work that you're doing.

And it's non verbal and you're in the energy of other people that are just like, oh yeah, we know what it's like to just sit there and just want to draw and be away from everything and just do that.

And so to your point, even when we, using the filmmaking metaphor, when we watching a Pixar film or something like that, like how many artists to get to that level of fidelity when it comes to a character design?

You got a sketcher, you got a pen, a panel, a pen person, you got a coloration person, you got the person that adds in 3D depth.

So you got artists who are skilled at certain elements of just the design component.

So you still need help just to finish up the artwork.

Even there, there's rarely a person that goes completely from concept all the way to finished product.

There's, there's not a single person that does all of that.

You have people set up, set up in different teams.

Hey, these people are really good at doing concept art.

These people are really good at putting on 3D effects and, and fidelity when it comes to the elements like water and hair and things.

So it, it just goes to show you that even through, through something like the visual arts, you would benefit from creating, from collaborating with others who are more skilled at, or have more patience for some of the elements of design than even you do.

And that's just like character design.

We ain't even getting getting into like selling the movie and pitching it and trying to get money and stuff for it.

You have hundreds and hundreds of people who work on things to make a piece of art that will Live on beyond them.

And that's why I will always like, filmmaking has such a soft spot.

It just teaches you just on the, just from like the outside looking in, not being involved in the industry.

A lot of things about just business and entrepreneurship and like collaboration and delegation even and getting across ideas, Kevin, that have to survive through me having this initial, initial idea to people seeing it in front of an audience and all the things that have to happen that have to go right for this to be a story that people buy when they, when they purchase their ticket.

And if you can, and if you can take that metaphor and then apply that to business and just being like, oh yeah, you can't do this and stuff alone, no matter, you're going to burn out.

You're going to plateau yourself in terms of what you can earn and what you can do and the impact that you create.

If you just got your head down and you're doing all of the things and playing all of the different roles in your business.

Accountant, bookkeeper, correspondent, pitch person, like designer, copywriter, like all of those things.

So you have to, you want to pick your battles, but recognize that you could get further through, through collaboration and definitely through cross pollination.

Yeah, just to your point of cross pollination, you can learn something from every single person.

Like you were saying before, you can learn from a 5 year old.

So I think we need to all as, especially as creative people, open ourselves up to the public possibility that we can learn from anybody.

Even if, even if you're a master, right.

I don't, I don't care who you are, there is something to be learned from every other person that you meet or can like learn from online or wherever it might be.

There's, there's always a lesson there that, that can be brought into your creativity.

Yeah, man.

And when you, when you come in with that, and even if you are, even if you are open enough, Kevin, to like, to like relearn things that you already know very well, like just because you've gotten older and like you're just at a different place mentally than where you were when you were learning that at the time.

So a simple example could be like when I was in my 20s learning illustrator versus like relearning the program from scratch, like completely going in with a beginner's mindset.

I guarantee you I'm going to learn like 90% more.

Because at that point when I was learning, I was doing it to get good grades and pass and graduate and all that stuff.

I had different reasons.

Now I would be Doing it as an experiment A and B, to get more out of the program that I'm paying every month for that I'm probably only using like 15% of.

But it's an extremely powerful tool.

Plus they've made a ton of updates since I was using it in my 20s.

If we are open to relearning what we think that we already know, some things are probably have been demystified anyway.

Now we might have obsolete learning and obsolete thinking.

So we can't be too rigid at it.

Because if you're too rigid, then you won't grow because you're already.

You're already fixated and happy with what you already know and that.

And it's impossible to grow from there.

But change is the one constant in life.

Things are always in a state of flux.

Growth is.

Is literally changing as well too.

It's literally transformation.

So I'd rather be working in sync with like the.

How things are always changing around me anyway.

And like leaning into that and being like Bruce Lee said, you know, being like being more like water, taking the shape of the environments that I'm in, soaking it all in, learning what I can, recognizing that there will always be a degree of equanimity.

There's a lot that I can't change.

I need to be content with that.

And then recognizing the things that I can influence and leaning all the way into those things and being so satisfied and so happy and so fulfilled, knowing that your work is always reverberating and there's a lot that you can't change anyway.

But that doesn't mean that what you are doing now, your body of work that you leave behind won't live on after you are no longer here.

And I'm kind of obsessed with that.

I want to put out art that does outlive me, even though I don't have children.

And I don't know.

I don't know why I would feel like that.

But it's just like, oh yeah, man, if you got the chance to create.

And we sit in chairs and work on workstations from people who design this that we will never meet, that we don't know.

And we take it for granted.

But at least it lived on.

And maybe those people who created those things at that time had a similar type of thinking.

They said, I want to create a piece of art.

And I may never meet the customers that buy this, but I'm thinking of something that is the perfect marriage of fashion and function, you know?

Yeah.

And I think another non, like artistic, a Product, even focus of that example is you're planting the seeds of the tree of a.

Of a fruit that you may never eat, right?

Like, it's like, how do we, how do we make the world like something that's lasting?

And there's like, many ways to do that.

Obviously it doesn't need to be a product.

It doesn't need to be.

To be a design or anything.

It could be, oh, I planted this tree and that's the impact that I made, right?

So how can we take what we do or what we want to leave behind and offer that to those who are yet to come?

Right?

That's.

That's the perfect analogy, man.

And it's so, it's so sound, Kevin, because of.

We see examples of it when we go to pick the apple off the tree or you pick up the apple off the ground.

If you don't.

If you, if you not have the idea of like taking from nature, wait till it hits the ground then.

And when you take that, when you take that apple and you finish it, the seed for the next tree is already within the same apple in and of itself.

That perhaps is probably the reason that we, we feel some subconscious inclination to, to create and to have to leave a legacy behind that will outlive us is because it's like it's within us and it wants to continue to spreading things in that way, and we can't help ourselves.

The worst thing is to see your artistic, your.

Your expressive self, like, be dormant for your entire life, man.

Like, the world isn't benefiting from that.

You're not benefiting of it, like working a job that you hate.

So it's just like, you gotta, you gotta get those, you gotta get those ideas out.

You gotta get that pilot out, man.

And you gotta be okay with realizing, not even okay with, but welcome the idea of, of involving others into your dreams who want to be a part of helping you realize it and empowering them to do what they love doing to help you get your.

Your thing out.

Because they're fans of it and they're happy with.

With like promoting the thing and broadcasting it even.

And they are not artistic in those ways, so they completely compliment you and being able to say, okay, I found my person.

Kevin hates designing.

Doesn't like designing and stuff that well, but he can, he can talk his tail off about something that he's inspired about in a way that I can't.

And he can get other people to believe it.

His energy is contagious and infectious.

And I'm the Opposite of you.

I don't like talking to people.

I don't like dealing with people.

I just want to draw my thing and stuff.

I just want to do my thing.

If Kevin could take my paintings out of my basement that I don't even want to share with the world and steal them from me and bring me back bags of cash or something and he gets what he needs to, we're both happy.

Just a random example of just congruency even and being open to the idea of, okay, well, you don't have to need to know to run the business.

You can still do what you love doing.

But if you want, if you want to keep doing that, like, you got to figure out a way to empower yourself so that you can do that and not do work that you don't like doing.

Yeah.

Amazing.

A couple more questions left.

Who are some other creatives that you know that stand out and what do they do?

Yeah.

Oh man.

So, so many that come to mind and I'm just like, hopefully they'll be okay with me talking about them here.

You know, man, people that just unique and creative.

So many.

And I'm just like kind of drawing a blank.

Rachel Lee is one of the people that comes to mind.

Me and me and you may both even be connected to her.

And I've met a lot of people in these past few years on LinkedIn but she has an amazing workstation just like in terms of how a workstation looks and just very expressive with who she is and her like the anime element and personal branding and all of those things.

And I haven't seen and infused with such a strong, a strong visual branding and just boundless energy and enthusiasm.

She's someone who's, who's hyper creative plays in some of the same sandboxes as me, but we have cross pollinated man.

And we continue to keep, keep in touch looped in because I don't do favorites and stuff, especially when it comes to forge.

Like I like for sure every, everyone that is a part of that ecosystem is extremely meaningful to me and is extremely creative.

And we've attracted like several brand strategists, several business coaches and stuff as well.

They are very multi passionate, they are very diverse, they're very vulnerable.

And so I can't, I don't have enough bandwidth to name all of the people and stuff in there.

But if they listen to this, they know that they mean a lot to me.

But I'm just giving you some of the traits and stuff of, of who the people are that affected Me in that way.

And I'm just trying to.

Yeah, those are the things.

Those are the ones that come to mind in terms of a quick answer.

But overall I think it's people who, who are sharing their stories uniquely and who have an interesting edge or have figured out a different way to present something that has been even commoditized, but do it through their own way.

There's transparency with what they do.

I feel like they're not hoarders and they're just.

They've been hyper resourceful.

They've created their own entities and brands versus just endlessly complaining about where they are, what they're stuck with doing.

They've found ways to.

To shift their own circumstances.

So.

Awesome.

Yeah, I had Rachel.

Rachel on earlier, so.

Really?

That's ironic.

That's ironic.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was, that was a great conversation.

For anyone who's listening and wants to check that episode out, it's.

Look in the archives.

What is one extraordinary book, podcast, documentary or something along those lines that had the biggest impact on your journey?

Yeah, that's a great question, Kevin.

I'm gonna have to go with there.

First off, there are several, but one that comes to mind is Breaking the Time barrier by Mike McDermott.

He's the, I think the CEO of FreshBooks.

I don't know how I landed upon this.

I think it was actually set up as like a lead magnet on their website.

But you're aware of Fresh Books, right?

Oh, okay.

Okay.

So anyway, the Breaking the Time Barrier book blew my mind because it's written kind of like a.

Kind of like a tall tale somewhat like I thought it would be a business book that was like, like much more like just insights and stuff like that.

But it's like written in story form and because I'm attracted to storytelling anyway, like the story of, of how this person had began to understand their worth and charge differently just like really blew my mind and stuff on it really blew my mind open and just got me out of kind of that.

That rat race of just like looking at your hourly rates is the only way that you could like charge for your worth.

It really got me thinking about value based pricing is kind of how I've like I've articulated in my mind around the value that you can create for someone and to price your services relative to that and be able to approve that rather than saying, okay, I'm gonna charge because I think it's gonna take me X amount of hours to do something Something that's a highly recommended book, super low key and it was free at that time.

And again it's written in like tall tale form so you gotta, you gotta be able to get the metaphor and just like all of the lessons that are within it.

But it's just like, oh man, this is everything to me.

And since then I haven't, I've never forgotten about that book, Kevin.

I often think about it, I quote it often and like still to this day I'm applying that with everything.

How can I, how can I price things based on the value that I can provide if I'm working with you one on one, if I'm pricing it for Forge and, and then how can I prove what that value is, is so that there is return on investment for those that I'm working with?

Because you, you, you have to be able to do that as well too, I think to be able to command a different price point not just for an arbitrary one, but to say that you the person, Kevin, if I knew the right questions to ask you, then that's going to help me determine my own pricing because I'm playing a completely different game at that point.

You're looking for a person to design you an e commerce site because you want to go from brick and mortar to online for your shoe store and you might have a $2,000 budget or something like that to do that with and we might not notice about each other.

But if I know what questions to ask and they are good questions that everyone needs to be thinking about when they do these types of projects and if I can prove something different and I can pitch that like that changes that I would never charge that rate because I'm playing a completely different game again.

But that book taught me a way into that of saying, oh, value based pricing.

How do you even arrive at that?

What is that as a concept?

And how do you go about being able to think in those terms and be able to re present your proposals and the way that you work with clients going forward.

Awesome.

I have not heard about that one, which is interesting because I hear about a lot of them.

But that sounds like such a great mind changing way to look about business and mindset and value.

We can all use that reminder that, that we're not just like the cogs.

We have the ability to really dictate the world around us to the best of our abilities.

And again like this, it blew my mind because when you're in freelance you automatically think I could just, I can charge whatever, $200 an hour, $300 an hour.

Like, that's really good if you can do that and command those prices even.

But that book just completely.

Oh, there's an entirely different game to play here.

And bringing that thing full circle, Kevin.

I think that's what they play in the filmmaking game too.

They say, I tell you, hey, Kevin, I need $200 million to create my movie.

But in exchange like this, this movie is going to be worth $500 million to your catalog because of what I'm going to produce.

And if I can sell that to you and prove it, you're going to be happy to give me that money because of the return on investment that you can do.

But we don't even as creators, as entrepreneurs don't even know to ask the questions, to even arrive at that conclusion, to be like, oh, well, if I'm, if I'm demanding this from this client, what can I prove to them that them investing in me is going to be worth to their business, whether it's that Same year or 10 years down the line even, and have that be a basis from which your pricing comes?

Great book, man.

Super.

Obviously you didn't know about it.

I'm just like, man, this book, this was one of the lowest key, lowest key books that I've ever like, came across like an actual lead magnet that I, that I really did read all the way through.

And I was just like, yo, this thing is insane.

Go share this with everybody.

Amazing.

What advice would you give to somebody who wants to stand out with their business,.

Man?

I think we, we have, we have given people so many, so many little anecdotes and things in here in terms of being able to stand out in their business.

But I, man, I mean, there's so many full circle moments in this, but I'm just gonna go with one that me, you and I kind of landed on together, just through our conversation, which was like, stop thinking about the 10 year business or even the business that you want to exit out of or the business that needs employees.

Just think lean, lean product.

Getting just the simplest version of the idea out, I think is what will help you stand out.

When you can show people that you have a proof of concept that actually exists, that you don't got to talk about it and stuff anymore, that the thing actually exists now and you can take it and consume it and to take from it what you will, that changes you.

You begin to stand out because a person sees what you were able to do when you had your back against the wall and with no money to do it in.

And so somehow you made something that was extremely impressive, that conveyed something important or something entertaining, and you've done it in a unique way.

You've remixed what was around you at this time in a way that they couldn't even imagine.

That's going to get people's ears perking up.

They are going to be the ones probably coming to knock on your doors because they know it's only a matter of time.

If you were able to do this with nothing, what happens when you do have a solid backing?

What happens when you do have better actors and things?

What could you create at that point?

So the advice is to be as resourceful as you possibly can.

Look at who you have access to already, what you already know and what skills that you are that you naturally have, and be a DJ in a booth and remix those three ingredients.

That always gets people to take notice.

What's a concrete step that somebody can take based on that advice that people can do to start that process?

I guess, yeah, I would say not everyone is going to be, is going to be able to take different examples.

So it's just like, I would say practically start a Rolodex of just people in your warm network of like, who do I already know in the game?

And if it's through your Instagram or your LinkedIn, like people that you actually admire are already engaging with to some meaningful degree.

Because the whole point is you don't need to do anything new that's like this is, this is like anti that idea even.

So you're looking at what you already have.

So who are you, who are you already connected to?

And if you have a limited amount of connections, well, who are those people connected to?

And I start to gain a Rolodex for those people.

Randomly draw like 10 of the people who seem to be adjacent to the industry or product or service that you actually want to put out and start to develop relationships with them.

But be genuine, don't offer value in an unsolicited manner.

Just be hyper curious.

I don't think that you can teach curiosity, Kevin, but I think that what you can do is put yourself in environments for curiosity to be randomly sparked just by virtue of being in a place that you do want to learn from.

So if your environment isn't conducive to that, then you have to get into some new environments.

That doesn't mean that you need to physically move, but you need to get into some new spaces where the people that you probably should be Connected with are already kind of hanging out and developing those relationships with.

And then to take the simplest version of the idea and begin there.

So instead of writing the book, you're starting with maybe a chapter or a page or something at a time and just seeing where the writing takes you.

Don't think about finishing the book.

Don't think about writing your memoir yet.

Just write kind of what comes to mind, because we're getting a proof of concept version out the door.

If you're trying to lose weight or get more healthy, like, don't sign up for the marathon yet.

Just get out of bed and put on your shoes.

And then the next day, you compound on that.

Put on your shoes, walk out the house the next day, put on your shoes, walk out the house, walk to the end of the block, and continue to compound on it.

The bigger the goal is, like, the harder it is to attack.

So you got to eat that elephant one, one bite at a time.

And you do that by compounding and getting really good at that.

So don't think at a marathon.

Think of out of the bed, even in terms of the metaphor there.

And so if you do those things, if you start off with that, like, you'll be making meaningful progress.

You'll learn things that you didn't expect to learn, and things will happen that you couldn't have predicted to happen just because you've remixed things and have been hyper resourceful in a unique way.

So those are some actionable steps that I would take there.

Well, that's incredible advice.

Thank you so much for all of that that I think everyone can learn from, like, just being curious.

Just pretend like you're a kid and, like, what would a kid ask if I were in their shoes?

Right.

Just, like, go from there.

So I love that specific perspective.

Just get to know people, be curious about them.

That's kind of why I started this podcast.

So just.

Just what is it that you actually want to know and how that will help you?

And how can you, like, help other people in the same manner, be the same sort of guide that other people were to you in that process and just, like, pass it forward?

Like we were saying with the legacy piece, how do.

How do I keep the ideas that I had going beyond myself to help future people who I will never know or have no concept of at this point?

Exactly.

Darnell, this has been incredible.

I feel like we could go on forever just chatting about creativity and all sorts of things.

But where can people keep up to date with you and all your work and the stuff that you're doing.

Yeah.

So y' all can catch [email protected] D A R N E L L brown, like the color.com is where you can find me and what I'm up to.

It's.

It's a very simple website, but you can also learn about foragearnellbrown.com forge and it's a little bit more detailed website, but that's.

It encompasses all that I'm up to and, and the things that are important to me.

But those are places where people can find me.

And from there there'll be little links to lead off.

I have a LinkedIn page as well, but those are about the three places that you can find me publicly.

And.

And then otherwise it's.

It's inside of Forge.

That's where we're making the magic happen.

That's where people have the most proximity and access to me and my insights and things.

So every day I'm in there sharing with, Sharing with people, learning from them as well too, because it's a two way thing and we are co.

Equals.

I'm no better, smarter or more talented than them.

I don't believe in that.

And they're always teaching me and stuff as well.

So I am, I'm just, I'm just improving with everything that I do because of that, that osmosis and continuing to give in that way.

Awesome.

Well, thanks again for coming on.

It's been such a pleasure.

Thank you, man.

It was a pleasure talking to you too.

And I hope people got value out of this conversation, man.

Bye, everyone.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Standout Creatives.

If you're feeling stuck, let's chat and see how we can help you start standing out instead of burning out.

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Thanks again for tuning in.

And as always, lean into your creativity and curiosity.

I'll see you again on the next episode.