 Hi, I'm George Cao. So how do we do what we love and make enough money? In this video, I want to actually share with you an article from one of my business heroes, Derek Sivers. He just wrote this recently and I thought it was so good that I wanted to share it with share the article with you in its entirety and Along the way, I will intersperse some of my own opinions. So let's get started. Derek writes, The problem is that people with a well-paying job ask my advice because they want to quit and become full-time artists. But full-time artists, on the other hand, ask my advice because they're finding it impossible to make enough money and Derek defines art as anything that you do for expression. So it could be blogging, making videos, could be serving people in a particular way that you really enjoy. And so Derek, Sivers, continues, The solution for both of them. I prescribe the lifestyle of the happiest people I know. Have a well-paying job, number one. Number two, seriously pursue your art for love, not money. And then Derek continues to say that the ingredients are the following. Number one, there's balance. You've heard about balancing the heart and the mind, the right brain and the left brain or whatever you want to call it. We all have a need for stability and for adventure, for certainty and uncertainty, for money and for expression. Too much stability and you get bored, right? But not enough stability and you feel devastated. So keep the balance. Do something for love and do something for money. Don't try to make one thing satisfy your entire life. Now, I want to intersperse with my own comments. And I think that eventually with thoughtful strategies, you can make enough money doing your art. And I'll talk about that later in this video. But let me complete, let me continue with Derek's article. He says, in practice, each half of your life, half money, half job, half art, becomes a remedy for the other. You get paid and get stability for part of your day, but then you need creative time for expression. So you push yourself creatively, expose your vulnerable darlings to the public, feel the frustration of rejection and apathy. And then you long for some stability again. Each half is a remedy for the other. And before I go on with Derek's article, I want to say that you can do what he's saying here, which is to have a day job with that pager bills and then do your art with passion in the evenings and the weekends, for example. Or you could work, focus on work, focus on having a job for a few years, build up some savings and then take a few years to explore your art. And then you might say, OK, now I'm feeling rested enough to go back to some day job and work that for a while. And then, you know, so you can do this, not just all at the same time, but you can do this a few years and a few years there. OK, now Derek continues and writes. Now, part of the ingredients of this life, happy life is, you know, he mentioned balance. Second ingredient is having a job. Be smart, he says, and choose something that pays well with a solid future. Look for statistics in your area about what pays the best when factoring in the training that's required. You probably need to study for a few years to build up the rare skills that are well rewarded. And then he recommends the book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, written by the author Cal Newport. And he says, in terms of a job, this is a head choice, not a heart choice. So you're not trying to make your job your entire life. Now, he does include some links in this article, and I will be including those links in the notes of this video as well. Now, before we go on, I want to say a bit about this job that he's talking about. How do you find a job that pays well? Now, there's a couple of categories here. One category is the simplest way is to go and get a job that can pay the bills. And when I'm recording this right now, the economy seems to be picking up and there seems to be more available job opportunities in the past. So go out and look. You know, there are websites out there like Indeed.com, I-N-D-E-D.com, whereas lots and lots of job options are available to go check out. Of course, go on LinkedIn and update your profile. There are websites like Glassdoor.com, GL, like Glass, like a Glassdoor, Glassdoor.com, which gives you ratings of companies that are that employees feel happy to work with. Now, if you once you get a job or if you're in a job, I think part of your work is to make your job less miserable, to make your job more tolerable. And so I highly recommend that you get either a therapist or a coach to help you make your job less miserable, make your relationships with your coworkers better, make your attitude and your job more positive and make the work that you do more fun. So take some of your job money and get a coach or therapist to help you do that. And I'm biased, but I want to recommend the services of my wife. She actually does this for a living and she loves doing it. She's good at it. She has been my coach many times. Her website is kimsu.com, K-I-M-T-S-U-I.com. She works with employees from Google and Apple and some of the other top companies in the Bay Area here, but she also works with people virtually as well. So you can and she's right now her rate is quite reasonable, so you might want to go and check out what she has to offer there. Now, however, for those of you who are, there are other options beside the job. You might have savings that you've built up over years of working that will allow you to not work for a while, right? And that's a wonderful option instead of just having a job is to take a few years to do your art, to focus on your art. Now, or you may be lucky enough to have a partner, a spouse or partner or maybe a family member who is able to support you for a while so that you can explore your art and gives you the permission and he or she is happy to, if she or she is happy to give you that permission, that time to explore your art, that is wonderful. Now, whether you have a save, you're working on the savings or working with their savings or having a partner, something you might want to consider is to stretch out your savings, stretch out the money by moving somewhere cheaper, okay? You don't have to live where you are, you really don't. There are so many options in your country but also in other countries you can go to that you might find yourself happier and you might, your living expenses might be half or a third of what you're paying now, really, really considerate because don't, don't let yourself be in this prison of having to stay where you are. Open your mind. You might meet the most amazing people elsewhere, okay? I have two clients of mine who moved to Mexico and they love, they love it more than they thought they would. It's wonderful there. They feel so much more relaxed. Their, their expenses are like half of what they used to be, maybe even less than half and it's great. There's also Thailand. Thailand has some, a place, Chiang Mai is very famous for a lot of expatriates, expats, people who live, who used to live in North America or Europe or somewhere else moving there and they live like royalty for less than half or maybe even a third of the expenses that they used to have. So really considerate. I actually hire a couple of freelancers to research for me, places in Mexico that I, my wife and I might want to move to and I'll include the link to my research in the notes of this video. So check it, check it out. Consider that. I, my wife, we decided not to move because the work that my wife does, she loves working with these Bay Area company employees and so we decided to stay here for now. So the other, the other important, important thing about stretching out your, your money is please do not spend money, building, don't, do not spend money on expensive training programs to build your marketing or business skills. Anything that costs more than a couple hundred bucks, please I recommend you don't spend money on it. I have coached, I've coached hundreds of clients over the past eight years and I have spoken to many, many more hundreds of people who have tried to build their business by buying these expensive programs and honestly I used to sell some of those expensive programs in the first couple of years of my business. If you followed my journey, you know that I've had to change a heart a couple of years ago and stop selling those expensive programs, but please those expensive programs will sell you on, oh you just buy our program, we're going to support you in the building a six-figure income, a seven-figure income, whatever it may be, it may be and it, 99% of the time it doesn't work out because these expensive programs use a lot of hype and unfortunately deception to sell you on something and if you have a budget, if you want to spend some money to build your business, again I'm biased in this but I've been around the block so much and I've coached so many people that I encourage you to talk with me about hiring me even for one session. I don't have a session minimum anymore, I used to but now I'm lucky enough where I get to be, get to give people a lot of flexibility in working with me, so I don't have a session minimum, hire me for a session and I will help you or a couple of sessions in me depending on how fast we can work and I can help you to hire a team of very, very affordable freelancers to do the things to build your business and doing the activities that you don't want to do or you don't know how to do or I can of course through our sessions train you in the very essential tasks for how you can build your art to that so you can monetize it. So when Derek Siver says that it may take a few years of training to build up the rare skills, well it may take working with a business coach like me, affordable and well experienced business coach like me to build up your, either your affordable freelancer team or build up your own essential skills to be able to monetize your art. So let me continue on with this article, let me complete this article here for you. So Derek goes on to say and the third ingredient, the first ingredient was having that balance, second ingredient was having the job or as I mentioned savings or if you're lucky to have a partner or a family member to help you. The third ingredient is to have the art to do your art and he says pursue it seriously, take lessons, make weekly progress, keep improving even if you've been doing it for decades. If you don't progress and challenge yourself creatively, it's not going to satisfy this balance. So release and sell your work like a pro, find some fans, let them pay you, make a band if you're a musician and do some gigs for fun. But the attitude is different than someone who needs the money. You don't need to worry in this balance that we're talking about. You don't need to worry if it doesn't sell, you don't need to please the marketplace, you don't need to compromise your art or value it based on other people's opinions. You're doing this for you, you're doing art for its own sake and you're releasing it because that's one of the most rewarding parts of doing art. It's important for your self-identity as an artist. It gives you good feedback on how you might improve ways that you hadn't thought about. The fourth ingredient Derek writes in his article is self-control. Your main obstacle to this amazing life will be self-control. Mind management to leave your job at the office and not bring it home with you. Time management to stop addictions like social media and video watching and make your art your main relaxing activity. So again, I'm going to give you my commentary as George Cowell here. That happens to be what he just said. Mind management and time management happens to be two of the topics that I love coaching on the most. So again, if you do have a budget and you want to learn how to do your art seriously and to be able to eventually monetize it, hire me as your coach. I would love to work with you on your mind management, on your time management, to do your art with a joyful, joyful discipline, with mindfulness and with a sense of fulfillment and to be able to carve enough time and energy for that. Derek's final thought says how nice it is to not expect your job to fulfill all your emotional needs. How nice it also is to not taint something you love, your art, with the need to make money from it, at least in the short term I would say. Most full-time artists I know only spend an hour or two a day actually doing their art. These are full-time artists Derek writes. The rest of that time is spent doing mundane crap that comes with trying to make it a full-time career. So skip the art career and just do the art and now I would say as George Cowell that you can hire affordable freelancers to do that mundane crap so you can do spend more of your time and energy doing your art. Let me finish Derek's article here. He says I'm fully expecting you to disagree with this advice. Derek likes to be a contrarian and likes to kind of have conversation going but Derek says I've met about a hundred people a week for the last 18 years and now I can believe this because Derek is incredibly generous about replying to emails that are sent to him individually so you might want to email him if you have any questions as well. You can go on his website sievers.org to find his email address or to comment on this article. He already has several hundred comments on this article. S-I-V-E-R-S.org. This article, the URL for this article is called sievers.org slash balance. S-I-V-E-R-S.org slash balance. Okay so he says the happiest people he knows having met thousands of people are the ones that have this balance that he's writing about so he says there's my blunt advice given only because people keep asking don't try to make your job your whole life and don't try to make your art your only income let each be what it is and put in the extra effort to balance the two for a rewarding life so I hope that this is helpful um again I uh encourage you to try to strike this balance either in you know I I'm reading this article to you because I believe a lot about this article but as you as you can see I also have my opinions about it I think that you can make your art income if you're smart about it if you first strike the balance of having a having some income source like a job or savings or having a partner who could support you and and building up your art without having the pressure but having smart strategies to eventually allow the income from your art authentic art to be able to become your full-time income so I hope this is helpful always open to your questions and until the next video I wish you that balance and the joy of doing your art authentically be well