Karen Wall Garrison Paints Live Events

I had about a 100 mile drive this morning and planned to spend it listening to one of the comedy channels on my satellite radio. As a writer and speaker, I really admire guys that have risen to the top of their profession and, besides, I’m at a place where laughter goes a long way. However today, the “host” of the comedy station I prefer (He’s sort of like a disc jockey for comedy, totally superfluous)  decided he would dedicate my travel time to discussing the death of Michael Jackson and the effects on comedy and pop culture. It was very bad radio and he got no calls from listeners. The truckers who listen to “Raw Dog” weren’t interested in a discussion of pop culture and neither was I.

There’s a lesson in here for artists, it’s what I’ve been talking about, finding your niche. Look, there were plenty of places I could have turned on the dial had I wanted to discuss the ramifications of Michael Jackson’s passing to Western Civilization, the comedy channel just wasn’t one of them. The show host screwed up big time, he forgot who his audience is and I’ll be surprised if he is back on the air again.

I was taping a Home Study Course of The Affluent Artist and came up with an example of a niche that makes me wish I was a painter. Because, if I was, I’d go to Daytona Beach at Bike Fest and I’d start painting rich Harley Guy’s portraits next to their motorcycles. Then I’d open an Etsey Gallery of these things, travel the country to various bike fests and Harley Dealers painting the portraits and tell about them on my blog. I’d have a life of fun travel and create a niche for myself with no competition, being a Starving Artist would NOT be an issue. “I’ll be in San Diego this weekend and bidding is open, I’ll only be doing two portraits this trip, bids start at $10,000.”  People who could not afford the portraits could buy limited addition prints of their model motorcycle.

Through Twitter, I met an artist who has that concept down pretty well. Karen Wall Garrison, born and raised in Long Beach, CA- is mostly a self-taught artist. Her “formal” art education began in the generously-funded public school system of the sixties and seventies, where she attended Newcomb Elementary, Marshall Jr. High and Millikan High School. She attended honors programs in the visual and performing arts, and studied ballet and violin. Her first art class was at the age of 5 at California State University Long Beach, by special invitation for young artist prodigies. Throughout K-12, Karen won awards and scholarships with her art, and began her commercial art career at age 17 with menu illustrations for the Hof’s Hut Restaurant chain. She attended LB City College, CSULB, San Antonio Community College, Golden West College and Coastline Community Colleges, never earning a degree- but focused her studies on visual art, graphic design, dance and career enhancement.

Karen does something REALLY unique, she does “Live” portraits at events like weddings and charity events. Anyone can have a photographer, but it’s something special to have an accomplished and well known artist commermorate your event forever.

She sets up her easel and paints a vibrant and colorful canvas, capturing the event as it happens! A great way to commemorate your special occasion-it’s a perfect addition to weddings, corporate parties, fund raisers, music festivals, or any other gathering.

Karen’s work also includes landscapes, murals, portraits and pets, and museum reproductions. As a professional artist, it is evident that she has mastered many of the principals we talk about here all the time, she has found a market, a niche and has reached a point where people recognize her work as her own.

You can see more of Karen Wall Garrison’s work by clicking here.

The guy on the radio missed the point, if I wanted to hear about Michael Jackson, I’d have put on some other station, I came to the comedy channel for comedy. If I’m the parent of a bride and want to give her something special, I’m going to consider having a famous painter who owns this niche paint my daughter’s wedding. Karen has done a remarkable job of finding a need out there and providing a wonderful creative product to fill this need. All hail this week’s Affluent Artist!

How Dying Network News= Your Opportunity

Do you remember a time when you didn’t buy plane tickets without a Travel Agent, you couldn’t buy stock without a Stockbroker and the big three television networks had a monopoly on television programming? I’ll tell you what, that day wasn’t that long ago!

Sure there are still travel agents, stockbrokers and television networks, only their jobs have gotten a whole lot harder. Being the only one that has certain information is a very valuable business asset, trying to play that role in the Web 2.0 age is pretty stupid. Knowing a little about the way business is changing is crucial to your survival as a creative in 2009, as I’ve been saying, if your job can be sent to India or done by a computer, you are toast.

When I was a rookie stockbroker in the eighties, all I had to do was get a prospective client into my office and show them my ADP terminal. It was a black and white screen that quoted stock prices in real time and scrolled the Dow Jones News Wire. Once I proved I had access to information they couldn’t get at home, these people couldn’t wait to become new clients. They left stock buying to their stock broker.

If I wanted to go to Vail to ski, I called a travel agent who found everything from a car to a flight to a ski resort, not to mention ski rentals and restaurants. She had a computer terminal with connections and a telephone, you left travel up to your travel agent.

There were only three television channels and they each hired very serious people to tell us what was going on in the world, they controlled the information America got and Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley told us what to worry about and who was famous. They did it at 6:30 every evening, you’d better tune in or you’d miss the information they were doling out. Local news was the same way; did your team win tonight? Better tune in at 11 to find out.

Old farts like me remember those days, my kids don’t. They use their mobile device to buy a stock, book a trip and find out who won the game; they do it NOW. In fact, just today, the network news reported new ALL TIME lows for CBS and ABC network news, the slide to irrelevancy is near completion.

Yes there will be successful stock brokers (I am one), good travel agents (just less of them) and network news; but our product will have to change to deal with smaller and more specialized markets. Stockbrokers offer financial planning now, travel agents specialize in cruises (or some other niche) and networks have the ability to tell stories in a way no one else does. Note, none of these things involves having a monopoly on disseminating information.

So, what’s The Affluent Artist message here? Actual, quite a bit of this is relevant to the creative.

* Information gets out and people who think they can control it suck. Turn in for news at 11? No thanks, I’ll look on my Blackberry right now. You don’t write for editors or publishers anymore, you don’t paint for gallery owners. You can get your work out to the masses with a You Tube channel, a $19 web cam and a Starbucks connection. You create for your end user, your customer. You use the web to find them.

* That smaller more specialized market thing? I believe you need a niche, you need to find your potential buyers and design stuff just for them. Think of your creative self as the local handcrafted furniture store, building stuff your customers want, you know your neighbors and what they need. It’s JUST like that, only your customers can be anywhere in the world.

* The world is begging for more content. Creative people are in big demand right now, if you can tell a story like no one else or design a product no one else can, you have a talent that people are willing to pay for, Web 2.0 allows you to get that work out there in a more efficient and targeted manner.

I’m pounding away at this business model thing because it is so relevant to the way people buy. Going to open a bicycle shoppe in London? Before you do, through social networking, every bike rider in town should already know who you are and you should know them. Then, selling them bicycles is like shooting fish in a barrel, you know what they want and you can just give it to them.

I’ve got a lot more to say about this, I’ll keep you posted.

Meatball Sundaes and Our Revolution

Not along ago, I blogged about the rise of right brainers and the book “A Whole New Brain” by Daniel Pink. I told you there is something important going on and I’d keep talking about it in this space because the Creative Class is taking over the world and I want to be your revered leader and President for life. (Ok, I’ll settle for selling you some books and getting paid to speak to you).

If you look to the right, you’ll see I offer links to my other places on the web, and I only (currently) link to one blog, Seth Godin’s. Seth understands marketing and what he has to say has quite a bit of bearing on how our revolution is working.

Meatball Sundae is about putting fancy toppings on something not designed to have fancy toppings. Specifically, he is talking about using the new internet, Web 2.0, to sell old established products, products designed to be sold through mass marketing. Meatballs are staples, existing products that no amount of sweet toppings will enhance. Companies who are successful using the new web, in other words, are not selling old products, they are asking a very important question,

“How can I create new product to capitalize on the web.”

Here’s why we should listen to Seth: As I’ve written here before, the way people buy things has changed forever. Advertising that “interrupts” us is going away. People who filter and parcel out information are going away. You can reach your market directly now, you can find them and you can have a group of buyers that is unique to YOU. My buyers are NOT yours and vice versa, the idea of advertising to everyone en masse is gone forever, you target your clients, target them with a laser.

Meatball Sundae, Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars and the rest of Seth’s work, including his blog, tell us (and big companies) that we live in an age After Advertising, that we can sell our work without trying to get some editor or gallery owner to buy it. Our work can stand on its own merritt and it is our responsibility to find the buyers. Our word, our opinion can get out there faster than the editor at the New York Times and so can our customer’s opinion. The world is about the democratization of information and NO ONE is more poised to benefit than creatives.

When I started in the financial planning business in the eighties, my branch manager said, “Interesting fact, 2% of the population is mentally ill.” Then he handed me a phone book and said, “Here, go find the 2% of the people who are crazy enough to do business with you,” and he went back into his office. Today, thanks to Web 2.0, you can find those people, the people who will become your fans and clients and you can:

Design Products They WIll Buy.

Find people you can create for. In a DVD package I’m releasing soon, I give an example of a fictitious painter who likes Harley’s. So, he decides to go to Bike Fest in Daytona Beach and set up a booth, he’ll offer to paint portraits of rich guys on their bikes. By selecting a niche with people who will be enthusiastic to give him money for his creation, our hero can use blogs, Facebook, Harley Davidson Dealers and grass roots marketing to get the word out that he is the guy. No gallery owners need apply.

People want to get to know you, they want to know other people are buying from you and that you are not going to screw them over. You don’t find your customers anymore. Nope. YOU DON’T FIND CUSTOMERS ANYMORE!

Your Customers Find You.

I’ve gone on enough for today; I’ll revisit some of Seth’s principals this week, it is imperative that Self Employed and Corporate Artists understand the entire ramification of his work. Like I’ve told you, the revolution is here, grab your pitchfork AND your I Phone!

Growing Older But Not Up

Ok, all work and no play makes the Affluent Artist a grumpy boy, so can I share my day with you? It was amazing!

Sometimes I see me as old manatee
Headin’ south as the waters grow colder
Tries to steer clear of the hum-drum so near
It cuts prop scars deep in his shoulder
But that’s how it goes (that’s how it goes), right to the end
Though his body’s quite flexible, that barnacle brain don’t bend…

Jimmy Buffett

A few years ago, with my fiftieth birthday approaching, I decided to buy a motorcycle. Not just any little starter Japanese bike, oh no; A big, honking Harley Davidson. I went as far as to visit several showrooms, look up the licensing classes and talk to bike riding friends. One of them said,

“Well, the classes are great, they teach you what to do when you go down”.

“You mean IF I go down”

“Oh no, you’ll go down.”

So, it was decided I would buy a boat.

Amie, my 24 foot Stingray cabin cruiser has literally changed my life. I keep it on Merritt Island here in Florida, right near the Kennedy Space Center, my Happy Place. My time on my boat is when I bliss out, I sleep on her often, slipping out alone in the morning while the mist is still rising from the canal, feeling like I’m one with the dolphins, heron, eagles, manatees and God herself. I never run out of new experiences, but today it was the manatees who gave me a memory I’ll always remember.

Manatees, as the video shows, are these big ole mammals, cousin to the elephant, that I’ve seen swimming around for a few years now. Mostly, you try not to hit them with your boat, they all have scars on their backs from boat propellers, we are their only natural enemy. They don’t move very fast and stay near the surface. They travel in groups, I’ve seen some alone but as many as 12 animals together at times. A couple times fishing, they’ve come up to the swim platform and looked up at me, wondering what I was up to I guess, but that’s the closest I’ve come to an encounter until last Saturday.

Last week, I was hanging off the back of Amie when a manatee decided to swim under my feet, I was suddenly standing on something in 25 feet of water. WEIRD! But, he swam on by, probably more surprised than I was and leaving me glad these big vegetarians don’t eat legs.

Today, my son was fishing off the bow and I jumped in off the back to cool off when my family said, “There’s a manatee coming your way”.

He sure was.

My new BFF, we’ll call him Marley (they are West Indian), came on over and spent some time visiting and brought the family! Marley swam under the boat and right up to me, circling me two or three times and then settling in right next to me for a while. He came up for air inches from my face and looked up at me with an eye that showed an intelligence I’d only seen before when I looked at an elephant in the zoo.

Marley hung around circling me now and then, staring at me and occasionally putting his big ole snout in spots only my neighbors dog does, we were having quality bonding. After a bit, two of  his friends showed up, we realized after a while, it was Momma and Baby Marley, just as curious and fearless, they looked at me with kindness in their eyes and I think I heard the baby:

“Can we keep him Momma?”

“Well, he’s big enough to be one of us, but he’s so damn ugly.”

The cool thing about this, at least to me, was how natural this was. I didn’t go to some fenced off part of a spring or a zoo. I was in these 800 pound animals’ habitat, dangling off the end of a boat, just trying to cool off when these curious giants took a detour to come and visit, to check me out.

The “large” family all examined me, each making eye contact before they determined I was of no importance, that I wasn’t going to join their clan, and they swam off, no doubt wondering what fell of the boat and couldn’t get back on… I was left with a visit I’ll never forget.

I love my boat, I love the baby dolphins that I’ve seen grow into young adults, the stingrays that swim by, the sunrises through the rear hatch, the time with my family, and I know I’ll always remember the encounter I had today, it was very special.

How Artists Negotiate

Afraid to ask for your price? Do you feel like you go hat in hand when it comes time to negotiate with a prospective client? Show them this video first!

“COW”

Annie Strack’s Passion

 

“I have always been an artist; I cannot remember the first time I picked up a brush or created my first work of art. I used to take it for granted, until a harrowing incident led me to change my life and my career. I had been working as a jeweler, until a gang of armed robbers convinced me that it was time for a career change. While I laid bound and gagged with a gun to my head, listening to the gunmen discuss my fate as if my life had no more meaning than a discarded gum wrapper, I had an epiphany; life is too short to waste even a moment on anything that we do not love, anything that does not bring joy and passion into our lives. I have been a full-time professional artist ever since.”

  That’s this week’s artist, Annie Strack, and she has turned her second chance at life into a successful creative career that any of us would envy, talk about understanding your purpose for being on the planet! I’d love to show you some of her work and give you some quotes from her bio, parenthetically, I’ll reinforce the career advice we can all use. 

For those of you just finding the Affluent Artist Blog, I only profile artists whose work moves me and I am careful about letting their work speak for itself; I’m not an art critic and I don’t want to sound like an amateur! Annie’s work touches me because I love the medium of watercolor and I am a seashore and boat person, I find God in my vessel, Amiee, amidst the dolphins and manatee here in Florida each weekend. Annie paints watercolors I’d  like to imagine resemble heaven.  

A classically trained artist with extensive experience in many mediums, Annie Strack has been published in numerous magazines, including Art Calendar, The Artists Magazine… (She understand the importance of publicity and making it easy for people to find you.)

She is the author of ‘The Artists Guide to Business and Marketing,’ and since 2005 she’s been a monthly columnist and feature writer for Art Calendar Magazine; the premier national business magazine for professional artists. (Obviously, Annie understand the importance of knowing where money and art intersect, she is a PROFESSIONAL)

She is an expert exhibit curator and art business consultant, and a highly admired art show juror and popular workshop instructor… (She understands the importance of being a mentor, of giving back, of coming from a place of abundance.)

 

Her art is in over 1,000 collections worldwide, including the US Coast Guard, US Navy, US Senate, US Pentagon, Fredonia Museum of Art, Zigler Museum of Art, Lake Pontchartrain Maritime Museum, Jefferson Parish Courthouse, St. Tammany Parish, New Orleans World Trade Center, Biloxi Sun-Herald, & many more. (She understands marketing and working with affiliates and getting sponsors).

I paint the places that I know, places that I love. I want you to step into my paintings and experience these places with me; to feel the sand between their toes as they walk on my sun-warmed beaches, to dive into my paintings and swim in my oceans, to cruise through my paintings on the decks of my boats. If home is where the heart is, then each of these paintings is my home. I want you to not just see a painting, but to feel the ocean’s wind in your hair, taste the salt spray on your lips, and hear the seagulls calling to you.” (We always talk about finding work that makes your soul happy, do you think Annie has a happy soul?)

Please click here and go see more of Annie Strack’s work and read more about this Affluent Artist, kiddies, you can do this! You can follow your heart and have a successful career doing so. You can create images from God, through God and have God’s abundance. Like I’ve said many times, God loves creative people, after all, that’s his line of work too! I believe you can be a creator and be successful in the process!

Just for fun:

Best explanation of taxes EVER:

Success is a Team Sport: Mastermind Groups

As an intuitive, “lone wolf” kind of guy, I don’t like to ask for help normally and tend to only trust my instincts. Hell, I don’t even like to use “Margaret” my GPS system in my car. I am, after all, a MAN. We really don’t like to ask for directions… or help. Learning to receive was not a natural thing for me, so I am very glad that I have learned this technique, it required quite a “stretch” on my part.. 

One of Jack Canfield’s Success Principles is that success is a team sport and many successful people I know are in a Mastermind Group It’s a way to find peers who offer support, expand your contacts and offer and receive  accountability. I have been in a very successful mm group for 2 years now and I can tell you that I have found it to be a crucial ingredient to having the ability to stretch and go for goals that I might not normally even try for. My group as been instrumental in my success by serving as a sounding board for my intuition and helping me when others have told me I was on the wrong track. My bi-weekly meetings with my group are events on my calendar that I do not miss and look forward to with great anticipation.

I’d like to share with you of what makes a good group work, what will kill one and why you might want to try to Mastermind your way to success.

* A good group sticks to a format, has a time schedule and allows people to negotiate if they need extra time. 

*The group meetings are a priority for the members, you work your schedule around them and missing too many meeting should mean you are asked to leave the group.

*It’s not a social meeting, you can do that stuff off line. The meetings are for professional discussions.

*It is important, no matter how enthusiastic some members are, that they respect the time of the person who has the floor. I was in a group that disintegrated because one woman dominated the entire call, no one wanted to be on with her.

*Play up. If you don’t want to share or stretch, don’t play. Groups need someone who can lead, but the entire group needs to be going for it. If everything is always “fine” and you are “on track” and don’t need any help, EVER, you aren’t playing full out and you might not be offering anything to the group.

*Everyone has to feel like they are getting something out of the group, a big reason for groups falling apart is that some members don’t feel like they benefit from the meetings. Try to find people who are MORE successful than you to be in your group.

*The group should have a mechanism for holding people accountable. It might be a monetary fine, a contribution to a political party you hate or a 3 AM “walk with God” and you should be accountable for being on time, being at the entire meeting and achieving your stretch for the next meeting.

Here’s the format my group has successfully used for a few years now:

1. Appoint a timekeeper for this week’s meeting and agree to stay within the group’s timeframe. (It’s usually a one hour meeting and you want between 5 and 8 members.) It is crucial that you stay on the clock or people will drop out. 

2. Open with an invocation. Usually an acknowledgement of gratitude to a higher power sets a good tone for the meeting.

3. Each member, in less than a minute, takes turns saying what is “new and good” since the last meeting and if they have accomplished their “Stretch” from the last meeting (No excuses, yes or no will do).

4. Negotiate for time. Normally each person gets between 5 and 7 minutes, but, if someone has an especially thorny issue, it is respectful to ask for more time and see if someone else can cede some of theirs. (A really big issue might warrant a separate call.)

5.Each member has time to discuss an issue with the group. It might be a new product idea, a need for a specific skill or feedback on something. It is important that the member gets to voice his entire concern before he gets “bombarded” with ideas.

6. Go around again with your stretch for the next meeting and your “consequence” if you don’t get your goal accomplished.

The meetings can be local “breakfast clubs” or, as mine is, done internationally over a conference call. The important thing is that you form a group whose members have something in common. Perhaps you are all artists, you are all entrepreneurs or you are all “Moms”, the important thing is that you understand the group is designed to help you be more successful, they are not “bitch” sessions. Some groups meet weekly, some meet every other week, some monthly.  

So, if you are feeling a little isolated, a little lost or in need of support, make a few phone calls, or forward someone this post, I think you’ll be amazed at how much playing on a team can help you!

Catch a Wave

Ok, I’ve seen the future and it is something we all need to know quite a bit about, because EMail is dead.

E mail, after all, is modeled after snail mail, but, the creative people at Google (the guys who created Google maps) have gotten together to create a communication tool that incorporates chat, wiki, social networking and the rest of Web 2.0 in a revolutionary product called Google Wave.

So, imagine this:

You and I are sending E Mails back and forth, talking about a project we are working on together. All of a sudden, our E Mail goes live like a chat. Only really live, no send button, no waiting for the other person to type, we are chatting in the middle of an E Mail, stuff showing up on your screen as soon as I type it on mine. We decide to invite a colleague on line and, like a conference call, another person catches our wave and jumps right into our ongoing conversation, seeing what we are talking about and how we got there. We can even send each other private replies, for side conversations. (It can even translate as you type, true GLOBAL meetings!)

The amazing thing is there is no separate software required, like Facebook or Yahoo, Wave works right in your browser. See ya Microsoft, was good to know you!

So, you want to show me a photo? Drag it from I Photo to your own Wave and it will show up on my wave too, works the same way for documents. We could create an on line, group photo album using our own computers, a pretty neat little trick, and then share it with all of our friends. Suppose we really like our wave and want to share all or part of it? We just simply imbed it on our web page, blog or Facebook page. In effect, the Wave can become your blog, other people can jump on your wave and comment, add to it or share it.

Groups of people will be able to collaborate on a document together without sending files or attachments. Sort of like a chalkboard people all over the world can write on together, adding content and discussing changes with each other right on line. Don’t worry, there’s widget to eliminate the conversation from your document!  Any number of people will be able to simultaneously edit the same document, all within a browser window. Colleagues on desktops, laptops and even mobile devices like I Phones will be able to work together; changes are instantaneous in each person’s window.

The product is open source, so folks will be developing applications like games to be played together. The imagination and creativity is amazing, the built in spell checker even takes the context of a word into account! They have a widget that detects hyperlinks and various “robots” let you do all kinds of amazing things like search and add the hyperlinks within the text while conversing in your wave.

Of course I’ll be able to play you at Madden from my office!

Twitter? You will be able to put waves on Twitter, called Twaves.

So, the Affluent Artist message is obvious here, right brain creative people rule and there is no way money and profit weren’t a part of this design team’s mission! We are soon going to have the ability to work with people all over the world from our browser window, the creative applications are going to be truly amazing, we have only scratched the surface of what we will all accomplish!

Cutting Each Other’s Hair

 

I heard a brilliant phrase from a small town mayor last week, his community’s largest factory was closed and he said, “We can’t just cut each other’s hair”. It’s a wonderful description that brings to mind an old cowboy town with barber shop next to barber shop, each barber walking next door to get a haircut from his neighbor every morning to keep the economy going. Since I ventured into the land of Tweets last week, this quote really hit me between the eyes: I swear, 9 out of 10 posts on Twitter are people sending each other messages on how to get rich from home on Twitter. They are all barbers! It’s like being dropped into the middle of an Amway convention. Please Mr, Wizard: Get me off this pyramid!

So, what makes the world go around, what makes us a viable nation? How do we avoid  being a “Service Economy” where we wait on each other’s tables, cut each other’s hair and deliver each other’s mail? What makes us America in the first place? It’s not credit cards, 6 packs and infomercials. It’s not low interest rates, the stock market or hostile takeovers. It sure isn’t Multi Level Marketing, Twittering for cash and internet porn sites. It ’s this:

Creation.

So, yea, creative people rule but before we feel all good about ourselves, let’s narrow that down a little bit.

Creative People Create. 

If you have tons of ideas, unfinished products and suggestions for everyone but you, ask yourself, what have you actually created?

According to Daniel H. Pink, in a book I mentioned last week, A Whole New Mind, corporations are realizing that more than MBA’s and financial guys, they need designers, artists and poets, they need people who see the world in new ways. Creatives who can use their right brains to figure out how to make and produce products with better design,find new customers through more imaginative ways and have enough business sense and discipline to play in the new corporate world are not only hard to find, they are in demand.

I read a LOT, and about once a year I stumble upon a book that is really, really important to me. A few years ago it was Jack Canfield’s Success Principles, last year it was Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. This year, A Whole New Mind is the next step in my personal development, Jack taught me to go at my goals with determination and action, Eckhart taught me to allow and stay present while doing so and Daniel Pink has just explained to me how this whole bridge between Wall Street and the creative community thing that I’ve been doing is supposed to work. The next part of my journey has been revealed and it all makes sense now. (Even the way I found this book will make a good story some day, I swear my Guardian Angel led me to it, I know, I know; that’s out there!) 

So here’s the thing, Left Brains have had their way with us long enough. The last vestiges of our industrial society, our educational system, is designed to feed our left brain, to keep us in line, to be good little soldiers who can recite, spit back facts and CONFORM. We’ve been taught to think in compartments, to believe in data and science, to believe the number 2 pencil and standardized testing actually predict or produce today’s leaders and success stories.

How’s that working for you?

Right brains, it turns out, are pretty important, being able to see problems from across disciplines, to be able to understand situations holistically, to understand that business is about creation is crucial in this: it’s the end of the information age and Pink gives us reasons, stories and tools to develop our right brain, to let our inner artist come out and play. Today, he tells us, it is harder to get into a good Fine Arts graduate program than it is to get into Harvard Business School. Today, if your job can be automated or sent to India, you are obsolete. Creative talents like Design, Story Telling, Humor and Empathy are more in demand than the ability to remember facts and figures, do math or look at an X Ray (all of which can be done cheaper and faster by computers or someone in Asia).

Medical Schools are now teaching new doctors something called “narrative medicine”, humor has been determined to be a better predictor of success than the SAT and the number of graphic designers has increased 10 fold in a decade. More Americans, Pink says, work today in arts, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors.

Our time has come.

My point is this, entrepreneurs are creatives too. They just use money as their medium. Getting a handle on the money stuff is no longer an option for a creative person, unless you are really into self sabotage. There is a new Renaissance upon us, grab a mitt baby, get in the game! We need you!