034: Secret Codes (2/3)
Have you even?
☕️ if you were paying attention, you’ll realise I missed a day posting this thing, but now I’m caught up. Thanks for reading and letting my notes be a part of your day, I really appreciate the opportunity :)
Today’s newsletter unpacks the the second of 3 short pieces of advice I got from the industry I was trying to get in. I’ll tell you what the advice meant to me, and how I used it to find my treasure.
2. Have you even listened to ANY of my podcasts?
I asked an illustrator and host of a podcast with over 300 episodes for specific advice. At the time, I may have had listened to 1 or 2 episodes and done a skillshare class by the illustrator.
What I got from this response was:
I was being lazy. This guy must have spent thousands of hours answering my question in 300 different ways in a podcast, and here I was asking the question.
So YES, there was a tone of annoyance in the reply of this person I admired. But, it helped me realise that the answers are out there, and that I needed to do the work of listening.
You can get a response from the people who’s work you admire. But do your homework and ask the right questions, or you might just be wasting that opportunity.
I have gone on to have a lot more exchanges and interactions with this creator, but it starts from interacting with the work that is already out there.
Narrow the Gap
Do your homework.
Ask better questions
You need to do number one to be able to do number two. One thing I noticed that the more successful illustrators have is clarity of thinking. You can see this from how they write their social media captions. Contrast that to the muddled questions of the people starting out.
And before you ask how to unmuddle your mind, let me ask you, have even you listened to 300 podcasts on the topic in which you are looking for clarity?