Latest / Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary) / Mastering the art of creative specialisation - Chris Do

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Mastering the art of creative specialisation - Chris Do · Daring Forever (Find your Extraordinary)

0:09
Chris Do: we can only do our best work for those that are aligned with what we believe and that are taste.
0:14
Chris Do: are similar.
0:15
Chris Do: Our ambition, our desire for innovative thinking and design and willingness to take some risk, not a lot of risk, but some risk at least.
0:23
Chris Do: So if we're aligned with those people, we have to say like, well, who are those people?
0:26
Chris Do: who do I want to represent?
0:28
Chris Do: And who am I a good representative for?
0:31
Chris Do: And I think that's the other challenge that we have to get over because it's, unfortunately, we're trapped under the scarcity mindset.
0:38
Chris Do: Like, Oh, I don't know when the next gig is going to come.
0:40
Chris Do: So I better just say yes.
0:42
Chris Do: And I don't want to pick a lane because picking a lane means other kinds of clients aren't right for me.
0:47
Chris Do: And it's actually, the opposite is true.
0:50
Chris Do: Where the more specialized we, we become, the more focused in what it is that we're able to do.
0:58
Radim Malinic: Hello and welcome to Creativity for Sale podcast, a show to help you start and grow your life changing creative career and business.
1:06
Radim Malinic: My name is Radim Malinich and creativity changed my life.
1:09
Radim Malinic: You see, I believe creativity can change your life too.
1:12
Radim Malinic: I even wrote a book about it and it inspired this podcast.
1:16
Radim Malinic: I've set out to interview the world's most brilliant creatives, designers, writers, musicians, makers, and marketeers about their life changing experiences with creativity.
1:25
Radim Malinic: If you ever wanted to know how people go from their humble beginnings to the pinnacle of their success, our conversations should provide you with an intimate look into triumphs, challenges, and untold stories behind their creative endeavours.
1:39
Radim Malinic: We also discuss the highs and lows of creative careers and creative life.
1:43
Radim Malinic: So, thank you for joining me on this exploration of passion, creativity, innovation, and the boundless potential within us all.
1:50
Radim Malinic: Let creativity change your life.
1:52
Radim Malinic: Are you ready?
1:55
Radim Malinic: Today's guest has spent the last decade rewriting the rule book for education in the 21st century.
2:00
Radim Malinic: He's an award winning designer on a mission to help other creatives build businesses and business leaders build better brands.
2:07
Radim Malinic: He's a loud introvert, recovering graphic designer, educator, and host of the future YouTube and future podcasts.
2:14
Radim Malinic: It's my pleasure to introduce Chris Do.
2:17
Radim Malinic: Hello, Chris, welcome to the show.
2:20
Chris Do: Thanks for having me.
2:21
Radim Malinic: how are you doing today?
2:22
Chris Do: Dude, excellent.
2:23
Chris Do: Thank you very much.
2:24
Radim Malinic: for those who may have never heard of you, which I think is very unlikely.
2:28
Radim Malinic: could you briefly introduce yourself for me, please?
2:30
Chris Do: Absolutely.
2:31
Chris Do: My name is Chris Doe.
2:32
Chris Do: I'm a loud introvert and I'm the founder of The Future, a company I started in 2014 after spending over two decades making commercials and music videos for a living.
2:42
Chris Do: And it's the richest, most rewarding, soulful, meaningful work I've ever done in my life.
2:47
Radim Malinic: I'm fascinated by the music videos and all that stuff, but I want to go somewhere to the beginning.
2:53
Radim Malinic: And my question is, do you know what you and Johnny Cupcakes have in common?
2:58
Radim Malinic: There's one thing that you and Johnny Cupcakes have in common
3:01
Chris Do: Aside from him being on our
3:03
Radim Malinic: and, and it's not making apparel.
3:05
Radim Malinic: It's not making your own
3:07
Chris Do: Ha ha No, I
3:08
Radim Malinic: Um, okay.
3:10
Radim Malinic: So I've, seen Johnny Cupcakes speak maybe 10 years ago and I believe just like him, just like yourself, he was selling sweets in a playground, on a schoolyard.
3:19
Radim Malinic: Is that right?
3:21
Radim Malinic: Have I got the information about you right?
3:23
Chris Do: yes, yeah.
3:24
Radim Malinic: yeah.
3:26
Radim Malinic: junior high.
3:27
Radim Malinic: So I believe Johnny Cupcakes, if I remember it right from that talk, that's what he did.
3:31
Radim Malinic: And I'm thinking, How'd you get supplies to be selling sweets?
3:36
Radim Malinic: And what's the margins?
3:37
Radim Malinic: Let's talk about margins too.
3:39
Chris Do: Yeah, so you have to remember this is like mid to late 80s here.
3:44
Chris Do: So Costco wasn't a thing just yet and, or maybe it was beginning.
3:48
Chris Do: but my uncle owned a liquor store and part of the liquor store is he has to stock on different kinds of chips and soda and candy.
3:54
Chris Do: And he had the best assortment of candy.
3:56
Chris Do: Every time we'd go in to see him, he's like, get whatever you want.
3:59
Chris Do: It's like pretty exotic stuff that you don't see in the normal supermarkets.
4:02
Chris Do: And my cousin would sometimes work at the liquor store, helping his dad out.
4:07
Chris Do: So one day I get this idea that I want to sell candy and I want to buy the cool stuff, not the stuff you can get in the cafeteria.
4:13
Chris Do: And so I said, Hey, put an order for me.
4:14
Chris Do: He gave me a list, like a checklist of things that he could get.
4:18
Chris Do: And I bought it from him wholesale and I just turned around and sold it.
4:21
Radim Malinic: Incredible.
4:22
Radim Malinic: good margins.
4:23
Radim Malinic: Did you make money?
4:24
Chris Do: Very good margins.
4:26
Chris Do: Yeah.
4:26
Chris Do: Relatively speaking.
4:27
Chris Do: Yeah.
4:28
Chris Do: It's like a 50 percent margins.
4:31
Radim Malinic: Wow.
4:31
Radim Malinic: So if you call yourself a An introvert, or you should consider yourself an introvert for most of your sort of adolescent life.
4:38
Radim Malinic: How'd you come out of your shelf just to do that?
4:40
Radim Malinic: Like, how'd you get that entrepreneurial spirit?
4:42
Radim Malinic: look, I'm going to, good candy is a good candy.
4:44
Radim Malinic: the sugar rush is there, but how do you break the barrier right from the start?
4:49
Chris Do: I think you have to be more motivated than your fear.
4:52
Chris Do: So my motivation is to have some money to buy a skateboard or something else.
4:56
Chris Do: Or maybe it was a Swatch watch or something.
4:58
Chris Do: We're middle class or maybe upper middle class, but my parents always made us feel like we were poor.
5:03
Chris Do: Like I'm like, we have no money.
5:04
Chris Do: I'm going to just go get things on my own.
5:06
Chris Do: I always felt really bad about asking my mom and dad for stuff.
5:09
Chris Do: So I'm like, I'm going to make some money.
5:11
Chris Do: So I thought, okay, I don't want to talk to people.
5:13
Chris Do: I really don't, this is very uncomfortable for me, but I like this idea of being able to be more autonomous and to generate my own income more than the fear of meeting and talking to people.
5:25
Radim Malinic: I think that pretty much summarizes what we do for a living now, right?
5:29
Radim Malinic: You don't necessarily want to talk to people, but you have to talk to people because you like the idea of the outcome.
5:34
Radim Malinic: I think that's what we do.
5:35
Radim Malinic: And I think that's why we get into this industry because sometimes, the fear shouldn't stand in the way.
5:41
Radim Malinic: So you and I have met, in Toronto at the IGD Design Thinkers, which I think is a fantastic conference.
5:47
Radim Malinic: And obviously I had the pleasure of talking to you on your podcast.
5:50
Radim Malinic: And this was my pleasure to have you back to turn the microphone the other way and ask you questions.
5:55
Radim Malinic: And.
5:56
Radim Malinic: Your talk, I've taken, I realize I'm looking at my slides.
5:59
Radim Malinic: I had quite a few pictures from your talk and it was the first talk of the day and you went big on, this is talk about sales and I'm thinking sometimes people want creative stuff.
6:12
Radim Malinic: They want to be told like, there's this sort of a federal sort of creativity that you can one day achieve.
6:16
Radim Malinic: And you're like, no, we're going to sell.
6:18
Radim Malinic: We're going to sell and look, we've made this much money.
6:20
Radim Malinic: We did this, we did that.
6:21
Radim Malinic: And.
6:23
Radim Malinic: I want to follow up on a conversation we had about creativity for sale, because is it sale of creativity?
6:31
Radim Malinic: What do we do these days?
6:33
Chris Do: You know what?
6:34
Chris Do: I think there are a lot of really talented designers and artists out there who are struggling to make ends meet to get the opportunities because they haven't learned the other aspect of it.
6:44
Chris Do: There's something that I heard, a very famous comic book artist, his name is Todd McFarlane.
6:49
Chris Do: He was being interviewed from Complex Magazine.
6:52
Chris Do: He said, the reason why I'm successful in doing what I'm doing is because I learned to speak two languages.
6:58
Chris Do: I learned to speak the language of art and design, and then I learned to speak the language of business, and it's very important for us to be bilingual, and I don't think it's a thing that is disputed, it's an undisputed thing that Todd McFarlane is the most successful, financially speaking, comic book artist of all time.
7:14
Chris Do: he owns toy companies, he owns lots of merchandising and licensing companies, and he also has one of the longest running, comic book series from Image Comics.
7:22
Chris Do: So there's something about this that we need to understand how to speak the language of business.
7:27
Chris Do: Those are the people who make the decisions to hire us, to give us not only their trust, but their money and to put their, the fate of whatever business enterprise they have in our hands.
7:35
Chris Do: And it's a big responsibility.
7:37
Chris Do: And sadly, I would say it's a very broad brushstroke statement that most of design education, formal design education focuses on the art and craft rightfully so, but neglects to speak about or teach.
7:48
Chris Do: Business principles from the people who are actually done it themselves.
7:52
Radim Malinic: that's a good analogy about speaking two languages because when you boil it down, we create commercial work.
8:00
Radim Malinic: We create something that aids, economy per se.
8:03
Radim Malinic: Like we obviously be helping people succeed, financially, business wise, the things that we create, obviously it's for that.
8:10
Radim Malinic: I'm sure, from experience through the future, that lots of people don't want to get involved with the business, don't feel like that, that they should, they are artists.
8:16
Radim Malinic: Whereas I'm sure when you, if you were to speak to Damien Hirst or whoever, Jeff Koons, they are shrewd businessmen.
8:22
Radim Malinic: They don't create the work themselves.
8:24
Radim Malinic: They got teams of people doing the stuff.
8:26
Radim Malinic: And I think they are not, not only bilingual, but trilingual, they know how to do production and do everything else.
8:31
Radim Malinic: And I think as we grow, would you agree that we accept these things more?
8:35
Radim Malinic: Because.
8:36
Radim Malinic: As novices, I feel like we want to change the world from our perspective, rather than having the world change around us, with us.
8:43
Radim Malinic: Would you agree?
8:44
Radim Malinic: Because we've got this naivety that we know everything.
9:32
Chris Do: think there is, and I think it's because this idea that's been put in our head from our instructors and professors.
9:38
Chris Do: Now, what we need to understand is, with exception, most art education is taught by lifelong academics, not practitioners in the field who are still active and relevant.
9:49
Chris Do: So they're teaching you this idealism, which is great, especially as you're a young 18, 19 year old, and you think I'm going to change the world in my image.
9:58
Chris Do: and it's going to be crafted around my perception of reality and the unique lens in which I look into the world.
10:05
Chris Do: And then you got into the real world, and it's a little bit different.
10:07
Chris Do: It's not so protected.
10:08
Chris Do: And it's it's okay to be saying these kinds of message within a very, like an ivory of like academia.
10:14
Chris Do: which they don't have to worry about because they're tenure.
10:17
Chris Do: They, uh, have grants sometimes and they work on soulful art projects that aren't commercially viable.
10:24
Chris Do: And so they're teaching these principles to artists and designers to go out into the and say like, you don't have to do that.
10:30
Chris Do: But I find that.
10:31
Chris Do: If people understand commerce and who makes our lifestyle possible, then we kind of have to meet them at least halfway.
10:40
Chris Do: I say meet them all the way, but at least halfway and it seems reasonable.
10:43
Chris Do: And so there's this unrealistic expectation that you can get out of design school and just be the sought after designer and make a good living doing it while not learning business or compromising at all.
10:56
Radim Malinic: I think, would you say, as 21st century creatives, we have to be different to 20th century creatives?
11:03
Radim Malinic: I happen to live just across the road.
11:06
Radim Malinic: from someone called John Pash, who designed the Rodding Stone's Lips logo.
11:12
Radim Malinic: postman told me once, he was like, I've only lived in this house for about six months.
11:17
Radim Malinic: And he's like, do you know the guy who lives over there?
11:18
Radim Malinic: And I started looking into his story because obviously we all know the lips.
11:21
Radim Malinic: We don't know the man.
11:23
Radim Malinic: And, so I've been looking at the story and, I've also met lots of creatives in London where there were sort of more old school, you know, older, creatives who didn't rely on, any internet.
11:34
Radim Malinic: There was no such thing, it was such a different way of making business.
11:38
Radim Malinic: And maybe their lives were slightly different because they didn't have the extra noise in their lives and extra comparison obviously flying around us all the time.
11:45
Radim Malinic: So I'm always fascinated like when, How much was it for them easier?
11:49
Radim Malinic: Was it not?
11:50
Radim Malinic: Because in our lifetime right now in the 21st century, like we have to do lots of different things.
11:55
Radim Malinic: And sometimes people say, you know, what DJ in the nineties was a DJ and that's all he did.
12:01
Radim Malinic: they had all the other people doing stuff.
12:02
Radim Malinic: Whereas now you're a DJ, you're a social media manager, you're a content creator.
12:07
Radim Malinic: And sometimes I think about it, like, Isn't that amazing that we can do this, because we can actually learn how the world operates, how we can actually, how we can appeal to people, because what people see as a hindrance or extra burden is actually, you know what, it's in your hands.
12:23
Radim Malinic: You can do this.
12:24
Chris Do: Yeah.
12:24
Chris Do: I think so, but it depends on how you look at it.
12:26
Chris Do: It's, are you glass, half full or half empty person?
12:29
Chris Do: I think in the eighties there was this golden or maybe seventies and eighties, there was this golden era where the highest, level of designer were flown in by helicopter to meet with CEOs and corporations design multi six figure projects.
12:44
Chris Do: And there was this love and respect for the art and craft of identity design as it's practiced on the highest level.
12:50
Chris Do: People like Saul Bass, people like Milton Glaser and Paul Rand, some of the European designers that came to America did some really amazing big things.
12:59
Chris Do: I don't know what happened along the way with proliferation of desktop.
13:02
Chris Do: design and publishing and the growing needs and challenges of what an identity standards looks like these days.
13:10
Chris Do: It seems like the market is flooded with creatives.
13:13
Chris Do: and kind of we do this to ourselves.
13:15
Chris Do: We say, I'll do that for cheaper than Johnny.
13:18
Chris Do: I'll do that.
13:19
Chris Do: And then what happens is it starts to erode the level of sophistication with entrepreneurs changes.
13:24
Chris Do: And so now we have this wide open marketplace that is both good and bad.
13:28
Chris Do: there's good and there's evil in it.
13:30
Chris Do: I'll say that.
13:30
Chris Do: I don't want to be solely like this optimistic, Pollyannic person and looking at it like that.
13:36
Chris Do: But I like to look at all these challenges as potential opportunity.
13:41
Chris Do: The opportunity is always hidden inside the package of obstacles.
13:45
Chris Do: And if you dig deep enough, you'll find something cool.
13:48
Chris Do: I think what's really interesting in these times is, as a multifaceted communication design person, you have direct access to the consumer, to a fan base, and it costs you nothing to do.
14:01
Chris Do: It costs you nothing.
14:02
Chris Do: Now, I remember as a motion design firm, the way that we would get visibility for our work is to sponsor or to pay for our work to be included in workbooks or on special DVD reels or advertorial things that were part of the trades.
14:16
Chris Do: And we would have to pay thousands of dollars to get access to this.
14:19
Chris Do: And I would do begrudgingly.
14:21
Chris Do: I say that because it wasn't trackable.
14:24
Chris Do: It was, kind of dubious as to whether or not it was going to produce any real result, but it felt like we had to do it to belong to a fraternity of designers who were taken seriously.
14:33
Chris Do: I'm sure you're of that age and era too, where there are black books filled with like photographers and illustrators and designers, and I still have some of those things.
14:42
Chris Do: And those things were printed in thousands and distributed to art directors, art buyers and designers who are in a position to hire us.
14:49
Chris Do: And we're hoping that in that 300 page book, they flip and find our one page and actually look at it and decide to remember it.
14:58
Chris Do: And even a longer shot is to call us for it.
15:01
Chris Do: That was bananas.
15:02
Chris Do: And so today we are somewhat spoiled that we have direct access.
15:06
Chris Do: That doesn't cost us anything.
15:08
Chris Do: what does require us now is to make stuff and to be much more intentional about how we want to be seen in the world.
15:15
Chris Do: What is our lens?
15:16
Chris Do: What is our voice?
15:17
Chris Do: And if we play the game, And we create value for people and we show up consistently enough, it will pay off.
15:23
Radim Malinic: I'm not in here profusely.
15:25
Radim Malinic: I'm not in here profusely knowing exactly what you're talking about.
15:27
Radim Malinic: And I like your analogy about, I hope they open a page where we are on that page because I used to be featured and I used to pay for a page, which was literally thousands of pounds and an illustration book.
15:39
Radim Malinic: Not that long ago, 10 years ago, maybe, and used to be shipped.
15:43
Radim Malinic: It was a surface shipped in a USA post bag, which was literally like a full sack.
15:48
Radim Malinic: The book weighed God knows how many kilos.
15:50
Radim Malinic: It was incredible, but it didn't make, hoping someone would find you and it was not trackable.
15:57
Radim Malinic: And when you think about it, that, that experience, it cost you maybe less, but you're still hoping that someone will flip the book open.
16:04
Radim Malinic: Let's call it internet now.
16:06
Radim Malinic: Let's, someone will flip the social media and find you somewhere.
16:09
Radim Malinic: And I think the ratio, it's cheaper, it's, easy to be online.
16:14
Radim Malinic: But you still have to do extraordinary work to actually stand out in that big noise, because if it was 300 pages you were fighting, now you're fighting, well, now we're in a, let's call it competition with three, four, five million people, and everyone, everyone's got the same shape of the social media, same shape of a website, which we've got the same screen to, project our work against it.
16:33
Radim Malinic: But I guess there's more people.
16:36
Radim Malinic: I think there's more, more chances to do more work because we've got more, founders, startups, more companies, more bigger budgets, bigger awareness, more multifaceted and fragmented marketing that we can be, we've got, frames and medias that we never had before.
16:50
Radim Malinic: But that, I think, does it, I don't know, when you think about it, does it shrink, the budget like will be had and that attention because, the place to go to, to find someone is other, we used to be in my lifetime, it was in 20, 2005, it was a website.
17:05
Radim Malinic: That website was the only place to be.
17:07
Radim Malinic: Whereas now, people want to listen to our podcasts.
17:10
Radim Malinic: Some want it on YouTube.
17:11
Radim Malinic: Some want it on Apple podcasts.
17:12
Radim Malinic: Some want it on Spotify.
17:14
Radim Malinic: Someone wants it somewhere else.
17:15
Radim Malinic: Someone wants it, you know, downloaded.
17:17
Radim Malinic: Someone wants to read a book as an audio book.
17:19
Radim Malinic: Someone wants to read it as a paperback.
17:20
Radim Malinic: Someone wants to sign.
17:21
Radim Malinic: And you're like, we're tailoring to all of these.
17:23
Radim Malinic: personal favorite preferences, but sometimes you're like, can we simplify this?
17:29
Radim Malinic: Wouldn't that be still possible?
17:31
Radim Malinic: Which it might not be.
17:33
Radim Malinic: so with the focus on sales these days, when you think about, How are we trying to be seen and do work with clients?
17:44
Radim Malinic: from your experience, do people have the right mindset about getting new clients?
17:47
Radim Malinic: Do they think, is it creativity first and money second, or is it, money first?
17:52
Radim Malinic: Because with the, arrival and advent of, social media and YouTube, we seem to have this figure of 10, 000.
17:59
Radim Malinic: Dollars, banded around as a sort of baseline.
18:01
Radim Malinic: Does it bamboozle people before they can actually, no, does it make them want to run before they can walk?
18:09
Chris Do: Oh, this is a question that opens up a lot more questions, I think.
18:13
Chris Do: So let me try and see if I can unpack some of the things that might be loaded within this question.
18:18
Chris Do: Deceptively simple question, a great question though.
18:21
Chris Do: First is this idea of mindset.
18:23
Chris Do: If I were to grab 100 designers off the streets of Los Angeles, just randomly pick, I'm just not sure how many of them think that marketing what they do is an important part of their work.
18:35
Chris Do: that I think the vast majority, I would say 80 percent of them, 80 out of 100 would say, I just do good work.
18:40
Chris Do: That's how I get work.
18:41
Chris Do: And they're relying mostly on word of mouth advertising, referrals, and passive ways of people finding out about them.
18:48
Chris Do: they do enough business to survive, but not necessarily thrive.
18:53
Chris Do: And they look at the burden.
18:54
Chris Do: I mean, marketing has a burden that they're like, Ugh, I can't be bothered by.
18:58
Chris Do: And what they do is they see people who have fairly decent traction, whether it's a podcast or Instagram account or LinkedIn account.
19:06
Chris Do: Those designers as being shills or somehow not real designers because they're playing the marketing game.
19:12
Chris Do: They don't understand the importance of it.
19:15
Chris Do: So let's put those people aside.
19:16
Chris Do: If we have 20 people left now, the ones who are actively participating in the, I guess the act of generating leads for their business and doing thought leadership, whether you write a book or podcast or something else, then those people, I think have the right mindset to begin with.
19:34
Chris Do: And now they're going to get frustrated.
19:35
Chris Do: Like I'm doing the work, but I'm not getting the results.
19:39
Chris Do: What am I doing wrong?
19:40
Chris Do: Am I shadow banned?
19:41
Chris Do: Cause that's the default.
19:43
Chris Do: I'm so important that I'm causing the stir that people are shadowbanning me.
19:47
Chris Do: No, I don't think so.
19:48
Chris Do: I think most of the times it's because you don't understand how to write content for people to consume on the platforms in which you hope that they will consume them on.
19:56
Chris Do: So now that would leave with us like of the 20, maybe two or three people who are embracing marketing, understand how to communicate, how to build thought leadership, how to connect with an audience.
20:07
Chris Do: Then I think now the next part is they need to figure out.
20:11
Chris Do: What is the point of doing all this stuff?
20:13
Chris Do: Is it to generate more leads?
20:15
Chris Do: to make more money?
20:15
Chris Do: Or to be, just to have more work than you could know what to do with?
20:19
Chris Do: And this is a fork in the road here, the proverbial fork.
20:22
Chris Do: And so you come to the fork, and the fork says, go to the left, do as much work as possible, strike while the iron's hot.
20:28
Chris Do: Well, the other person says, or the other road says, you know what?
20:32
Chris Do: Do high quality work for a select number of people at the highest price in which you can charge so that you can focus on those people.
20:40
Chris Do: So it's two totally different mindsets.
20:42
Chris Do: One is a volume.
20:43
Chris Do: Like I just want to grab as many clients as I can because if I'm prolific, that's the way to get to progress.
20:51
Chris Do: And the other person's I want to be super selective and I'm okay that there could be long periods of drought.
20:55
Chris Do: but when I feast, it's worthwhile.
20:57
Chris Do: And so we're kind of divided in those two camps.
21:00
Chris Do: I can't tell you of those three people that are left, which road did they pick.
21:03
Chris Do: I just have a feeling as to which road they pick.
21:06
Radim Malinic: Thank you.
21:07
Radim Malinic: That's a very, actually very accurate answer.
21:09
Radim Malinic: I think I read somewhere today that out of 260 million active users on LinkedIn, only 1 percent write content.
21:16
Radim Malinic: So that's 2.
21:16
Radim Malinic: 6 million people out of a billion.
21:19
Radim Malinic: So that's basically, that's the basic decimal number of the users.
21:24
Radim Malinic: But when you mentioned that, I think the word was like, get more clients.
21:29
Radim Malinic: And I think that just seems to be, that's something in your message.
21:32
Radim Malinic: Obviously you have one we'll talk about in about a future in a minute, but.
21:36
Radim Malinic: It seems to be like we need more, more, more, like get more clients because for example, the first group of people you mentioned, they just, they do word of mouth, they survive, but they don't thrive, but, Sometimes they would like more clients, but then they don't necessarily need them because, how many clients do you need?
21:52
Radim Malinic: do you need to grow your team?
21:54
Radim Malinic: Or are you happy to wake up at 10 o'clock at night and work for two hours?
21:57
Radim Malinic: You know, like I think that's just sometimes it's a personal preference, but the messaging, again, I think I'm going to process what's kind of out there is, More clients.
22:09
Radim Malinic: do we need more clients or do we think like Bezos of starting and growing someone small?
22:14
Radim Malinic: Like obviously, they've got a model of selling someone a book and having them as a customer, I'm as a customer and obviously selling them, a TV or whatever, of high value, or do we need to think like a construction engineer?
22:26
Radim Malinic: do you just build one house and you move on because that, that your work is done?
22:30
Radim Malinic: That builder doesn't need more clients.
22:32
Radim Malinic: Whereas Amazon, do you need more clients?
22:34
Radim Malinic: Like, how do you build it?
22:35
Radim Malinic: what is the right medium?
22:37
Radim Malinic: Does it, again, is it a question of mindset?
22:39
Radim Malinic: Is it a question of business?
22:40
Radim Malinic: How would you see it?
22:42
Chris Do: Well, if I were sitting in front of a small group of people who are creative and understand that they've mastered the fundamentals of design and they could apply it to web, to print, to some other format.
22:54
Chris Do: Okay, what should we do?
22:56
Chris Do: We should say like together that it's best for us to be extremely selective about who we work with.
23:02
Chris Do: Because we can only do our best work for those that are aligned with what we believe and that are taste.
23:07
Chris Do: are similar.
23:08
Chris Do: Our ambition, our desire for innovative thinking and design and willingness to take some risk, not a lot of risk, but some risk at least.
23:17
Chris Do: So if we're aligned with those people, we have to say like, well, who are those people?
23:20
Chris Do: who do I want to represent?
23:22
Chris Do: And who am I a good representative for?
23:24
Chris Do: And I think that's the other challenge that we have to get over because it's, unfortunately, we're trapped under the scarcity mindset.
23:32
Chris Do: Like, Oh, I don't know when the next gig is going to come.
23:34
Chris Do: So I better just say yes.
23:36
Chris Do: And I don't want to pick a lane because picking a lane means other kinds of clients aren't right for me.
23:41
Chris Do: And it's actually, the opposite is true.
23:44
Chris Do: Where the more specialized we, we become, the more focused in what it is that we're able to do.
23:50
Chris Do: First of all, the easier it is for us to do what we do because we've seen it many times before.
23:54
Chris Do: So we're going to develop a reputation for one who's an expert at solving a certain kind of problem.
24:01
Chris Do: So when you become that kind of person, you're able to transition away from being one of many to one of one.
24:07
Chris Do: And I think that's the status we all would like to be at.
24:10
Chris Do: Whether you're Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons or Joe Schmo at a design shop, you want to be seen and sought after as if you want X, whatever fill in the blank done, then you must go to this person.
24:23
Chris Do: Everyone else is going to be a compromise.
24:25
Chris Do: And that's a bold idea to embrace and say, yes, that's who I want to be.
24:29
Chris Do: And that's how I want to be perceived.
24:31
Chris Do: Great.
24:31
Chris Do: I'm going to plant my flag in the ground and say, this is what I stand for.
24:35
Chris Do: So any prospect that's interested in having this kind of conversation, I'd like to do this with you.
24:41
Chris Do: And then it takes the work of putting out consistent pieces of thought leadership, usually things that you write, observations you've had, frameworks you've designed, any kinds of data or things that people in your market would find valuable.
24:58
Chris Do: And if you could do that work, then you're going to attract the right kinds of customers.
25:02
Chris Do: And that's the thing I would have to tell people, let's specialize, let's claim an area of focus, let's be extremely selective with who we work with, and because we don't work with a lot of people, we then therefore have to charge a certain amount of money, but to give us the kind of time and the resources to hire people, to be able to do the right kinds of research and prototype and do testing.
25:25
Chris Do: And so we're not rushing through just to get the project done.
25:27
Chris Do: And unfortunately, I see the vast majority of creatives that are working, whether they're in the US, Europe or other markets, are always seemingly behind or under the gun to like, get the project delivered as fast as possible.
25:39
Chris Do: And I don't think that's, that's not the recipe for doing high quality work.
25:44
Radim Malinic: how long did it take you to actually get to that mindset?
25:46
Radim Malinic: How long did it take you to say, this is my flag in the ground?
25:48
Radim Malinic: Because it takes time to grow.
25:51
Radim Malinic: When I think about it, when you said, like, no, the fewer clients and we can charge more.
25:56
Radim Malinic: From experience, I've kind of decoded the other day.
25:58
Radim Malinic: It's like, you say yes to everything you can learn from.
26:02
Radim Malinic: And then once you've learned you say no, so you can grow.
26:04
Radim Malinic: So you actually, you get space to grow.
26:06
Radim Malinic: So I've had conversations with up and coming designers and they said, well, I haven't worked on anything I haven't liked yet.
26:12
Radim Malinic: Obviously now we've got the messages amplified through internet okay, you can work with anyone, you can be anything if if you double down on who you are.
26:20
Radim Malinic: But.
26:21
Radim Malinic: It always fascinates me that people say, I don't want to work with everyone.
26:24
Radim Malinic: I don't want to try everything because I think, with the niching and specializing, sometimes you never know when you might find yourself be actually interested.
26:32
Radim Malinic: So how long did it take you to find out?
26:35
Chris Do: It didn't take that long, but I'll tell you something that I think I have this combination of both ignorance and arrogance.
26:42
Chris Do: Ignorance, like I didn't know that was not a thing that you can do, and arrogance in the belief that I If I set my mind to something, of course it's going to happen, but we can get caught into two cycles and it's very important to point this out in case you identify that you're in one of two cycles.
26:57
Chris Do: I'll present the darker of the two.
26:59
Chris Do: It's the vicious cycle, which is, I don't know if I'm worth what it is I'm going to charge, so I don't charge enough.
27:05
Chris Do: And then therefore I keep having to chase every single opportunity.
27:08
Chris Do: So I'm saying yes to everything.
27:10
Chris Do: And the clients.
27:11
Chris Do: don't see a connection from project to project.
27:13
Chris Do: I'm seen as a broad generalist without a deep area of expertise.
27:17
Chris Do: And so I get all the bids.
27:19
Chris Do: I compete with everybody and I win very few, but the projects that I win don't bring in a lot of money.
27:25
Chris Do: So I don't have that runway in order for me to say like, you know, I need to be selective for a little bit.
27:30
Chris Do: I'm always worrying about one month or two months worth of rent because that's all I've got to my name.
27:35
Chris Do: I'm one financial disaster away from total ruin and bankruptcy.
27:41
Chris Do: Let's talk about the virtuous cycle, where for whatever reason, if you're able to just go out in the market and just believe that you do something that's good and it's real, and you can give it to someone who also sees it in you, then you make a little bit more money than you think you should.
27:54
Chris Do: And then you have a little breathing space.
27:56
Chris Do: So you're like, okay, I'm not so desperate and I feel pretty good.
27:59
Chris Do: Somebody paid me more than I thought I was supposed to get.
28:02
Chris Do: The next person comes and you're like, I wonder if I could just ask for a little bit more.
28:06
Chris Do: And you do that, and you keep doing that.
28:08
Chris Do: And so eventually your runway goes from one month, to three months, to six months, to twelve months.
28:12
Chris Do: And you're like, I can't believe I made more money on this gig than I would have had, an entire year of working for someone.
28:19
Chris Do: And so now that puts you in a whole different place and a perspective.
28:22
Chris Do: So you can sit back and say, What would be right for me now?
28:26
Chris Do: Now that I've removed this immediate burden or desire that I have to pay the rent and keep the lights on, what should I be doing?
28:33
Chris Do: for me, I was able to figure this out pretty quickly.
28:37
Chris Do: And the story I tell people is, when I was at ArtCenter, they would have like a bulletin board of job opportunities.
28:43
Chris Do: And I was looking for some side money, and of course they had the little things that you can tear off of the flyer that call this person.
28:51
Chris Do: So I remember one was like, freelance designer wanted 30 an hour.
28:55
Chris Do: I'm like, that's pretty good money for a kid who's broke, just living off credit cards.
28:59
Chris Do: So I'd tear it off and call and they'd look at my portfolio and say, okay, we'll give you some work.
29:03
Chris Do: And I was busy doing bank brochures.
29:06
Chris Do: tri fold, gate fold, bank brochures.
29:10
Chris Do: And I was like, did I really go to art school to go and work for banks?
29:15
Chris Do: It's the most conservative, boring thing.
29:17
Chris Do: I can't do anything that wouldn't feel inappropriate and self indulgent.
29:22
Chris Do: So quickly, I'm like, the money's okay, it's not great, but I don't want to do this.
29:25
Chris Do: I'd rather starve.
29:27
Chris Do: And it's that willingness to say, I'd rather starve and reduce all of my financial needs down to the bare minimum.
29:33
Chris Do: Just, mostly just rent.
29:35
Chris Do: And eat at fast food places.
29:37
Chris Do: Not great for your health, but that's what I would do.
29:40
Chris Do: And eventually another gig would come.
29:41
Chris Do: okay, now I'm going to charge them real money.
29:43
Chris Do: and you get to do this.
29:44
Chris Do: So I was starting to say no pretty quickly.
29:47
Chris Do: And then about a year into my business, I learned the next very important business lesson.
29:53
Chris Do: And I was working on a main title For Eraser starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
29:59
Chris Do: Like it's still a big deal, right?
30:00
Chris Do: We're talking about the mid nineties here.
30:03
Chris Do: Arnold's still like a star.
30:04
Chris Do: And the client who hired me to do this, sent one of their senior animators over because they didn't trust if I knew how to do this.
30:12
Chris Do: And thank God because I really didn't know how to do it.
30:14
Chris Do: I'm just a kid out of school.
30:16
Chris Do: And then I watched this person work and he's showing me like little shortcuts and ways to make the animation better.
30:22
Chris Do: And within a few hours, I'm like, gosh, that's what it's like to have some expertise, some knowledge about what you're doing.
30:28
Chris Do: And then we delivered the project.
30:30
Chris Do: And I turned to my girlfriend later on my wife.
30:31
Chris Do: I said, I think we got to stop doing websites.
30:35
Chris Do: logo design, entertainment flyers.
30:38
Chris Do: We need to focus on this motion thing because I'm excited about this.
30:41
Chris Do: I don't want to do anything else but this.
30:43
Chris Do: And I feel like it's something I can sink my teeth into for the next 10, 20 years and still be excited about it, learning something new every single day.
30:51
Chris Do: And then at that point we decided we're not doing any of this other work.
30:53
Chris Do: We took it all off our website and just left one or two pieces and just relied on that in order for it to drive more work.
31:00
Chris Do: It took a lot of faith.
31:02
Chris Do: And it took some financial runway to be able to make a bold decision like that.
31:06
Chris Do: But I, credit that with the thing that is a turning point for our service design company.
31:11
Radim Malinic: what you mentioned there is actually something I've been thinking about to ask you anyway, is that I feel that there's no shortcut to experience.
31:19
Radim Malinic: There's a shortcut to knowledge.
31:21
Radim Malinic: You can read all the books.
31:22
Radim Malinic: Now, as you say, like you can top up your knowledge that you're missing, or you can read the right books and you can do that, but there's no shortcut to experience.
31:29
Radim Malinic: And I think sometimes actually, I would say that we get paid because we are more experienced.
31:33
Radim Malinic: So you get your polar share saying, it took me 30 years to learn it and to draw it in 30 seconds.
31:39
Radim Malinic: And sometimes, like knowing all the shortcuts, what to click and what to press is what the experience is.
31:44
Radim Malinic: And I had an experience working as a retoucher.
31:47
Radim Malinic: I had very multifaceted career.
31:49
Radim Malinic: I mean, I have tried everything.
31:50
Radim Malinic: I think that's why I ended up where I am today.
31:53
Radim Malinic: But I remember working with retouches and he looked at my screen and he was like, yeah, you need to take up some yellow out of your blue channel.
32:00
Radim Malinic: And my mind was blown.
32:01
Radim Malinic: I was like, what do you mean?
32:03
Radim Malinic: And by the way, I want to know how does he, like, how does he even know that?
32:06
Radim Malinic: he's looking across the room.
32:08
Radim Malinic: He's looking at my, I was working for a telephone company called OT and they got predominantly blue, visuals, which are terribly hard to print properly in CMYK.
32:18
Radim Malinic: And he was like, yeah, you need to do this and that.
32:20
Radim Malinic: I was like, what?
32:21
Radim Malinic: That's incredible, like he can see that and it just blew my mind because I just wish that lots of people had that mindset of being curious, like how do I solve a problem with my, almost with your eyes closed?
32:32
Radim Malinic: what is the equation?
32:32
Radim Malinic: What is the problem?
32:34
Radim Malinic: And, I just feel like with the shortcut to experience, which doesn't exist, do you sometimes feel that in a world that wants you to succeed in a way like we've got more courses, books, and videos on how to do anything, but do you feel sometimes misleading for the people to actually think, you know what, that experience also needs to come.
32:55
Radim Malinic: It comes with time.
32:56
Radim Malinic: you can't just get it done straight away because you just watched a video on how to get more clients or how to do this.
33:02
Radim Malinic: Do you think sometimes it's misunderstood from experience?
33:05
Chris Do: Possibly, once said to me, You don't learn how to play basketball by reading a book.
33:10
Chris Do: You learn how to play basketball by stepping on the court and just playing and having someone guide you through the process and then doing the work that is often not talked about, but this unceremonious drills, just doing drill after drill.
33:23
Chris Do: I have a friend, his name is Lance.
33:25
Chris Do: He's got a boy and he's, Lance is a former, professional college, European circuit basketball player.
33:31
Chris Do: And of course he wants his children to learn to love basketball.
33:34
Chris Do: But one of the three boys wound up becoming very good at it.
33:37
Chris Do: And even though he's undersized, he's an incredible, you know, he can dribble, he can pass, he can shoot, he has all the moves and it's incredible to see this.
33:45
Chris Do: But what you don't see and what most people don't see is all the weekend spent doing drills with cones, just going back and forth, or just throwing a bunch of balls in the air and just, all these things that aren't fun to look at and do.
33:57
Chris Do: I believe, one year under hyper focused attention rigor can be more than 10 years of like haphazard poking around.
34:06
Chris Do: So it's not necessarily an indicator of time.
34:08
Chris Do: It's the depth of the experience that you have and under what conditions.
34:11
Chris Do: Give you an example.
34:13
Chris Do: So when I was starting my company in 1995, motion graphics was not a term that had been invented yet, so that's how early in I am.
34:22
Chris Do: And I remember working with a couple of the people in Hollywood, this is where I was based in Los Angeles, The rate of work and hours that they work a day are insane, totally unsustainable.
34:34
Chris Do: They're doing 12, 14 hour days every single day.
34:38
Chris Do: And the running joke was don't bother coming in on Sunday if you're not going to come in on Saturday.
34:43
Chris Do: And if you worked nine hours, the joke would be half day today, huh?
34:47
Chris Do: So there was a rigor there and a kind of, just a velocity that's just unmanageable.
34:52
Chris Do: I wasn't quite sure how these older guys who were running the companies were able to do this.
34:56
Chris Do: Later on, you find out some drugs were involved, but that's another story for another day.
35:00
Chris Do: And I'm just sitting there thinking, Oh my God.
35:03
Chris Do: So in a matter of three or four months, I think I had replaced my entire student portfolio, which had been built up for over four years.
35:10
Chris Do: I was embarrassed by it because this is now like on new levels of understanding design, and it really excited me.
35:16
Chris Do: And so if you work with someone who's working at a very high pace, working on the most creative briefs, You can learn so much in that period of time, being next to them by doing the work yourself and seeing how they think, if they're generous enough to explain to you, or you learn it through kind of observation, but you can do it.
35:35
Chris Do: Now, the second best thing is to take a course or to be in a class, either in person or virtually, but you're not going to get the same kind of friction.
35:44
Chris Do: And I think it's that kind of friction and that pressure that makes for beautiful things.
35:48
Radim Malinic: I fully agree.
35:49
Radim Malinic: I fully agree.
35:50
Radim Malinic: I think that sort of incubation period where.
35:54
Radim Malinic: And I will go back to education for a second, the incubation period, when you come out of university, where you've been taught to think, unless you go to a business degree, unless you go, that there is no such thing to teach you all of the stuff, because you have people come out of university and they're like, Oh, Okay.
36:09
Radim Malinic: They can't use Photoshop really well, or they can't think business really well.
36:13
Radim Malinic: They can't thinking, what was the point of going to university?
36:16
Radim Malinic: Why would you do this?
36:16
Radim Malinic: Whereas I think I'm a big fan of education.
36:20
Radim Malinic: my education was in business management.
36:23
Radim Malinic: It was not in anything creative.
36:25
Radim Malinic: Creativity came second because I was just fascinated, like how do things operate?
36:29
Radim Malinic: So to have the outcome, I think Sometimes being, being eager to jump the gun and go, look, I can launch my business.
36:36
Radim Malinic: I can do this because I can learn this from offline courses.
36:39
Radim Malinic: I think it's misleading because as you just said, you never learn better as we're working with other people because they've been pressing those keys, those buttons, moving things around the screen, let's say for 20 years, 30 years.
36:50
Radim Malinic: And this is, I think, the most magical part of, you almost have your, like a bootcamp, like you see footballers playing, for example, we call them footballers, you call them soccer players.
36:59
Radim Malinic: So let's go, let's take David Beckham, right?
37:01
Radim Malinic: he was kicking a free kick 10, 10, 000 times in his spare time.
37:05
Radim Malinic: He was kicking, kicking, kicking, kicking, kicking, you know, like no one knows that because you go as a young one, you go through academy, you go through, developing teams on, then you get to be on the pitch and we get to that top of the iceberg, okay, here's the footballer.
37:19
Radim Malinic: He's ready, whereas you don't see the years and decades of graft and blood and sweat and tears.
37:25
Radim Malinic: Whereas, I think we think that sometimes you can achieve that in university in three years, where you spend the first year drunk because you've found a left home.
37:34
Radim Malinic: So you speaking to experience of, UK students, no, you.
37:38
Radim Malinic: Don't particularly focus, then you do a little bit of work and then someone's doing better than you say for this heart and I think, this was worth, no, that was, this was not worth the time.
37:47
Radim Malinic: you and I know that any failures is beneficial for your growth because you will learn from it.
37:52
Radim Malinic: But, it's that sort of, that, that's almost like, how do we signpost it that it's not easy.
37:58
Radim Malinic: Just to arrive and be amazing because you need that time and need that opportunity to learn even just actually to absorb from other people, because that's how you learn, because, there is many different ways to use Photoshop and many different ways to use any software, but we overlap, we have the common ways of solving problems and yet.
38:18
Radim Malinic: We, I think we're losing that.
38:21
Chris Do: I think, it's kind of hard to say because there are so many great tutorials out there.
38:26
Chris Do: And I see people from using Illustrator and Photoshop and other programs where they show you, like a tool that you're not normally used to using, and they just show you like one way of doing it.
38:37
Chris Do: And I was, okay, so here's an example.
38:39
Chris Do: I grew up and got into design via Adobe Illustrator.
38:43
Chris Do: And you know, you draw part of it and then you would use the mirror tool and you'd flip it over.
38:48
Chris Do: And then I saw somebody showing this thing about how to set up your guide so that it automatically mirrors the other side for you.
38:55
Chris Do: So you just draw half of it and you can evaluate it without having to flip it over.
38:59
Chris Do: What a time saver that is.
39:00
Chris Do: And so those are little things that are like little tips and tricks in the buttons that I think can be learned this way.
39:06
Chris Do: I learned Photoshop on the job, self taught.
39:08
Chris Do: The guy sitting next to me in the studio, totally random.
39:11
Chris Do: I was watching him paint three dimensional letter forms, kind of like the way you would do it with an airbrush.
39:16
Chris Do: And I was like, wow, how are you doing this?
39:17
Chris Do: And he was so generous to say, oh, here.
39:20
Chris Do: And so he showed me something that might've taken me.
39:23
Chris Do: months, if not a year to figure out on my own.
39:25
Chris Do: He showed it to me in 30 minutes or less.
39:28
Chris Do: And I'm like, wow.
39:29
Chris Do: So now I'm like painting in Photoshop in ways that I used to with an airbrush and Frisket film.
39:34
Chris Do: And so to me, that was like, cool.
39:36
Chris Do: And now we get to do this and sit over in someone's shoulder virtually while they show us how to do something.
39:41
Chris Do: And There's some pretty cool tricks that people do that I'm like, Wow, never even knew you could do that.
39:47
Chris Do: And that's pretty cool.
39:48
Chris Do: So I think if you start with this place of genuine curiosity of I just want to be a geek about whatever it is I'm using and to like, know how every single button works so that when I want to communicate an idea, I know the most efficient, effective, and convincing way of doing it.
40:04
Chris Do: The old way was to literally read through the manual.
40:07
Chris Do: And I had a friend, who we sat down, kind of stayed straight out of college.
40:12
Chris Do: He's can I read the manual?
40:13
Chris Do: I'm like, huh?
40:14
Chris Do: Usually I put the manual back in the box.
40:16
Chris Do: I just try and poke around and figure it out.
40:18
Chris Do: He literally sat there for a week and read it from cover to cover like it was some Playboy magazine or something.
40:24
Chris Do: I was like, oh my god, what are you doing?
40:26
Chris Do: But when he was done, he was so good.
40:30
Chris Do: I'm like, how are you doing that?
40:32
Chris Do: So his sense of rhythm and design was backed by his technical prowess and he was able to do anything.
40:37
Chris Do: And for a long time, for years, I was like, I didn't want to animate next to you because you embarrass me.
40:43
Chris Do: I'd rather just hire you to do all this work.
40:45
Chris Do: Is that okay?
40:45
Chris Do: And he's yeah, I'm happy to do that.
40:48
Radim Malinic: I'm a big believer in the quote, but actually the book cover, a book title from Paul Arden's, it says, there's no, how could you, I was, how could you want to be?
40:57
Radim Malinic: So I was one of the geeks, reading, uh, Adobe Illustrator book back to back because I wanted to know what the shortcuts are like, because I was like, I was bored going up and going through the palettes and from the top up, not top up menu, because when I was coming through the ranks, it was the noise of the keyboard.
41:16
Radim Malinic: indicated how good designer you were, because, you can't sit with your hand in your pocket and poke around with your mouse or, a Wacom, because you've got all of these option keys, all of the things to press.
41:26
Radim Malinic: So you basically, you make a noise if you, I don't know how it really feels now, but if you make a racket, if you make a noise whilst you're working, that means, oh, he's doing something, unless you're pretending to work, you know, but, yeah, I think that's, that's the kind of, I feel like, I, Our software, our hardware is our instrument, if you don't have to think about what you're doing, what you're pressing, then you can actually think about it, So I always use John Mayer as an example, he doesn't look at his fretboard, or Jacob Collier, these guys, they feel it because they still learning, they still practicing, they're still trying to actually improve their crafts, even though I think you're at the very top of the tree.
42:00
Radim Malinic: In fact, if you've planted that tree and you're on top of your own tree and they're doing that.
42:05
Radim Malinic: So I just, I think throughout this conversation, I think what you mentioned quite a few times, which I will summarize is actually that probably broke down the baseline of the breakthrough so much from unattainable to very easy, because what you described, like what took a person to show you 30 minutes to do, which would have taken you, a lot longer.
42:24
Radim Malinic: Now that's a click of a button.
42:26
Radim Malinic: That's AI enhanced button.
42:27
Radim Malinic: that's something that, anyone can do, you know, we can do much more wonderful things and much more interesting things that you would need to be a real professional to do it before.
42:36
Radim Malinic: But, with the sort of the rise of AI, I'm going to quote, I think one of your favorite authors, which is Seth Godin, who said that if you average, You're going to be replaced by AI.
42:47
Radim Malinic: Basically, if you average, radiographer, if you're average designer, if you average whatever, like you're going to be replaced with AI.
42:54
Radim Malinic: And I went to a conference, for a business elite.
42:58
Radim Malinic: It was just in central London just last week.
43:00
Radim Malinic: And they had a guy called Piers Linney who did a wonderful talk on AI, which was a proper grown up conversation about AI.
43:08
Radim Malinic: It was like, It's here.
43:09
Radim Malinic: It's staying here.
43:11
Radim Malinic: In fact, it's not going anywhere and it will be everywhere, you know, and, it's only as the worst AI is, is today.
43:18
Radim Malinic: Tomorrow it's going to be better.
43:20
Radim Malinic: So I think we have to have a conversation about AI and creativity because as soon as generative AI came up, all of a sudden we have the creators are poked up their ears.
43:29
Radim Malinic: I'm like, AI is here.
43:30
Radim Malinic: It's going to replace us.
43:32
Radim Malinic: And sometimes you think, maybe it should, because if that's, if creativity at that level is so easy, then you've got opportunity to do something different with it.
43:40
Radim Malinic: what's your take on AI and how do you see it from where you are?
43:44
Chris Do: I love Seth Godin, but I actually don't agree with him on this, that if you're average, you'll be replaced by AI.
43:50
Chris Do: It's your unwillingness to adapt AI tools into your workflow that'll make you be somebody who's going to be replaced.
43:57
Chris Do: And there's that famous, text meme tweet that was going around.
44:00
Chris Do: It's you will not be replaced by AI.
44:02
Chris Do: You will be replaced by someone who's using AI.
44:05
Chris Do: I think that's really interesting because I know several people in my community who, for one reason or another, aren't great at doing whatever their chosen profession is.
44:15
Chris Do: And while using AI, they're able to supplement things.
44:18
Chris Do: And I'll give you an example.
44:19
Chris Do: There's two people I know in particular.
44:21
Chris Do: There's a woman, her name is Sherry, and she's an artist, classically trained.
44:24
Chris Do: But, you know, to make a painting, it's going to take a really long time.
44:27
Chris Do: But you know what she's really good at?
44:29
Chris Do: She's kind of like a wordsmith.
44:31
Chris Do: She's very good at writing and poetry.
44:33
Chris Do: And so she's using MidJourney as she calls an AI sorcerer or AI conjurer.
44:38
Chris Do: And she's able to write prompts that give images that I'm like, I don't even know how you did that.
44:44
Chris Do: What the heck did you just do?
44:45
Chris Do: Because I think I'm pretty good, but she smokes me.
44:48
Chris Do: So now, based on her art training and her propensity to use words and her ability to describe things very clearly, she's able to overcome other people who are pretty good at image making, or maybe even excellent.
45:01
Chris Do: And she's able to compete with them now.
45:03
Chris Do: It's kind of wild.
45:04
Chris Do: So that's really interesting.
45:06
Chris Do: I have another person who's partially blind.
45:08
Chris Do: and his name is, Matthew and he's partially blind.
45:11
Chris Do: He's a photographer and he's partially deaf in one ear.
45:14
Chris Do: So he's got some, and he's got like a learning disability too.
45:18
Chris Do: He's like ADHD or something.
45:19
Chris Do: I don't know what's going on, but he's able to use, Otter AI to listen to conversations as he's prompting in real time, because he's got this weird ability where he could listen to someone speak while managing AI in the background while participating in the conversation at the same time.
45:35
Chris Do: So a brain like that needs more things to do.
45:38
Chris Do: Otherwise, they're just bored out of their mind.
45:40
Chris Do: They can't focus.
45:41
Chris Do: But give him two or three things to do and he's doing them.
45:44
Chris Do: So I'm trying to host a room and Matthew's sending me his call summaries.
45:47
Chris Do: I'm like, what the person just said or what they meant to say.
45:50
Chris Do: And he's just helping me to save a lot of time.
45:52
Chris Do: So I'm like, this is pretty cool, So a person who has some physical, like partially blind, partially deaf, he's able to now use these tools to do things that he could not have done before.
46:04
Chris Do: And I think we haven't even tapped into this kind of neurodiverse Group of people who are going to be able to use tools then give them a competitive advantage not to be on par But to be ahead of so I'm excited for them So there's all these people who are worried and most of them haven't tried to even use AI Which is like wild to me
46:26
Radim Malinic: I think it's usually the, uninformed mass hysteria.
46:29
Radim Malinic: And I think you get it with all sorts of things.
46:31
Radim Malinic: And I mean, So many things have changed in our lives and changing into our lives of our ancestors and everything new seemed like a, like a sort of, a fear, like a challenge to our status quo, which we so much longing for, yet sometimes when it's here, we are surprised by it and threatened by it, which we don't need to be because we need to embrace it.
46:52
Radim Malinic: so Chris, You've gone from, doing all these wonderful pieces of work to become an educator.
46:58
Radim Malinic: I know that you were teaching at university for a while and now you've got your own, company.
47:02
Radim Malinic: And how did you build?
47:05
Radim Malinic: So it kind of sounds like it's been about 10 years of the future.
47:09
Radim Malinic: why did you decide to stop being creative per se, because you call yourself a recovering graphic designer.
47:17
Radim Malinic: how did your creative work run its own course?
47:20
Radim Malinic: Cause I feel like we don't have infinite supply of, enthusiasm.
47:23
Radim Malinic: I think like sometimes we just move on to the next thing and do that.
47:26
Radim Malinic: So how did you get on from, that to actually start an educational thing?
47:31
Chris Do: I think for a person like me, and I hope I don't come across the wrong way here is that I'm a deep diver.
47:37
Chris Do: I like go super hot on something.
47:39
Chris Do: And then when I'm done and I move on to something else.
47:42
Chris Do: So when I'm in school, I'm learning traditional graphic design, because I think I'm going to design album covers and concert posters and things of that nature.
47:49
Chris Do: and I pour myself into learning everything.
47:51
Chris Do: I interned with my professor.
47:53
Chris Do: I took every class that he was teaching and I would teach.
47:57
Chris Do: literally sleep at school, spent all my time in the computer lab until they closed and kicked you out.
48:02
Chris Do: And so I saw that I was advancing at a pretty, rapid pace and I was outclassing some of my, fellow students here.
48:08
Chris Do: So I was like, what am I going to do here?
48:09
Chris Do: Because they're busy learning fundamentals of design and I'm already building 3D models and doing animation.
48:15
Chris Do: And they're like, what are you doing?
48:16
Chris Do: I'm like, I'm bored.
48:17
Chris Do: Guys, catch up.
48:18
Chris Do: Let's go.
48:18
Chris Do: let's do something more interesting.
48:20
Chris Do: So the year out of school, There's this motion design thing, and now I'm like, oh my god, this is great, because I can learn about editorial, about directing, photography, cinematography, special effects, visual effects, writing, directing.
48:34
Chris Do: Cinematography, Color Correction, all these kinds of things I can learn.
48:37
Chris Do: I'm going to be busy for a long time.
48:40
Chris Do: And that ran its course too.
48:41
Chris Do: For about two decades, that's what I did.
48:43
Chris Do: I went from designing the most insignificant thing to a TV commercial, to directing the entire commercial with no graphics in it at all.
48:50
Chris Do: And so now I'm like, I'm bored.
48:52
Chris Do: What's the next challenge here?
48:53
Chris Do: I'm looking for my next thing to sink my teeth into.
48:56
Chris Do: Throughout this whole time, I've been teaching design and problem solving at different, local design universities, right?
49:05
Chris Do: So I'm like private art schools.
49:06
Chris Do: I'm like, great.
49:07
Chris Do: Let me do that.
49:08
Chris Do: And I was like, okay, that's running its course.
49:09
Chris Do: what is the next challenge?
49:11
Chris Do: I'm the kind of guy who needs a new challenge.
49:14
Chris Do: Because for me, if you ask me to design a poster, I'm sure there are people who can design it better than me, maybe a couple dozen people, but for the most part, I'm pretty confident I can design at least as well or better than the vast majority of people who call themselves a designer.
49:29
Chris Do: And so what is the reward there for me?
49:32
Chris Do: And if I free myself from the need to make money, which I was able to do because of the kind of industry that we worked in, being smart about how we charge and being smart about not spending money unnecessarily.
49:44
Chris Do: I'm already retired, like I've been retired for 10 years.
49:47
Chris Do: And so if I'm not challenged emotionally, conceptually, artistically, and I'm just going to listen to a client, tell me what to do.
49:56
Chris Do: What is the point of that life?
49:57
Chris Do: Now I get to explore something much more meaningful to me, which is how to become the best teacher that I can be.
50:03
Chris Do: Because I think before my identity of being a designer, I was a teacher first, but I didn't think that was a valid profession.
50:11
Chris Do: Being that I don't want to starve.
50:12
Chris Do: I don't want to suffer.
50:13
Chris Do: And so it took me a while to figure out this business model.
50:16
Chris Do: And yeah, we've been doing it now exactly 10 years, 10 years and a couple of months.
50:21
Radim Malinic: Congratulations.
50:22
Radim Malinic: one word I'm taking from this answer is challenge.
50:26
Radim Malinic: And I think this is how we are hardwired.
50:28
Radim Malinic: as we've got survival instinct, we need to be solving problems.
50:31
Radim Malinic: And, sometimes I feel like when, I read about intermittent fasting, we need to be hungry.
50:35
Radim Malinic: We need to actually, you know, when you bloated, when you overloaded, you're not going to be exactly looking for the next challenge.
50:41
Radim Malinic: So I think I'm looking for something new, looking for those sort of new bits of dopamine and challenges.
50:46
Radim Malinic: I think it always makes a wonderful experience.
50:50
Radim Malinic: when you're talking about the sort of the education and talking about your creative career, we haven't really talked about sales.
50:56
Radim Malinic: Was the sales the challenge?
50:58
Radim Malinic: Would you say that's what it was the next challenge?
51:01
Chris Do: I think it was Buddha who said this, like the avoidance of suffering is suffering itself.
51:05
Chris Do: And so if we just understand that our lives are going to be filled with problems, we just hope to have higher quality problems.
51:13
Chris Do: So the first problem you have is I want to start a business.
51:14
Chris Do: I don't know how to start business.
51:15
Chris Do: Then you get business and you think, why am I only getting 30, 000 gigs?
51:19
Chris Do: What do I need to do to get to the next level?
51:21
Chris Do: And you keep doing this and you keep doing this.
51:22
Chris Do: And now the new problem is how do I manage the team?
51:25
Chris Do: And now you have a team and it's like the culture of the company is really funky.
51:28
Chris Do: And I need to deal with that now because I didn't hire correctly.
51:32
Chris Do: And so you keep evolving the kinds of problems and the challenges that you have.
51:36
Chris Do: So you can't be in business if you don't know how to do sales for very long.
51:41
Chris Do: or at least do it well or profitably.
51:43
Chris Do: And so my biggest challenge at that time was like, how can we keep winning jobs that are under 200, 000, but over 200 grand, we just can't win those jobs.
51:54
Chris Do: And that's when my business coach really helped to unlock something.
51:57
Chris Do: And he taught me a very valuable lesson.
51:59
Chris Do: He says, you think you're playing in the major leagues, but you're a minor league player competing with the very best in the world.
52:05
Chris Do: Because once the budget goes past a certain threshold, they could literally call anyone in the world.
52:12
Chris Do: from Europe, from Asia, from America, from Canada, South America, wherever, they can call anyone and have them pitch on this and bid on this job.
52:20
Chris Do: So it's like the level competition get incrementally harder, got exponentially harder.
52:24
Chris Do: And so let's try to figure out what you're not doing that's hurting you.
52:29
Chris Do: And let's correct for some of those things.
52:30
Chris Do: And so once he laid it out to me, I'm like, Oh my God, that's what I was supposed to be doing.
52:35
Chris Do: I didn't know because I worked for myself mostly.
52:38
Chris Do: I didn't have someone to shadow and to learn from.
52:41
Chris Do: So yeah, there's all these challenges.
52:43
Radim Malinic: So when you put yourself in, obviously in a public facing sort of position for your business, I'm sure we can agree that sometimes people are not necessarily into what you do, some, you get the people who are with you and people who are against you.
52:59
Radim Malinic: And if it's okay, I just want to ask, how do you deal with the adversity sometimes?
53:03
Radim Malinic: Because they're There are millions of people who love what you do.
53:06
Radim Malinic: And sometimes, we all find a dickhead in our life who
53:09
Chris Do: Yeah, yeah.
53:10
Radim Malinic: we do.
53:10
Radim Malinic: How do you deal with that?
53:12
Chris Do: I think if you're going to put yourself out there, you need to do some inner work.
53:16
Chris Do: You need to learn to accept who you are, to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and to be totally comfortable in that.
53:24
Chris Do: I think that When people say bother, it's just because some part of that still feels true to us.
53:28
Chris Do: I would say this to somebody.
53:29
Chris Do: Here's the test, right?
53:30
Chris Do: Somebody's like, you don't know what you're doing about design, and you're like, really depressed and sad about it.
53:35
Chris Do: And I said, do you believe that to be true?
53:36
Chris Do: you don't really know what you're doing with design.
53:38
Chris Do: And they're like, no, no, of course I know what I'm doing.
53:40
Chris Do: I say, are you sure?
53:41
Chris Do: yeah.
53:42
Chris Do: So here's the test.
53:43
Chris Do: I'm going to call you a purple alien with 14 eyes.
53:46
Chris Do: Does that offend you?
53:47
Chris Do: no, not at all.
53:48
Chris Do: Like, not even a little bit.
53:49
Chris Do: Like, in terms of how it irritates you from zero to 100, what is it?
53:52
Chris Do: They're like, zero.
53:53
Chris Do: So why is it that this other comment bothers you?
53:56
Chris Do: Because some part of you actually thinks that you don't know what you're doing.
54:00
Chris Do: And so that's where this becomes a problem.
54:03
Chris Do: So what happens is for most people, they are still like children living in an adult suit, right?
54:07
Chris Do: This body, this flesh bag that we live in and have a lot of unresolved childhood trauma, and we all need a lot more love.
54:15
Chris Do: And we're super insecure about who we are, especially as creative.
54:18
Chris Do: We're so sensitive.
54:20
Chris Do: So we don't create things that have a point of view.
54:22
Chris Do: We don't say anything because we're so afraid of the blowback.
54:26
Chris Do: if you believe what you believe, then I would rather be around with fewer people who are comfortable accepting me, not necessarily agreeing with me.
54:34
Chris Do: And rather than trying to chase a whole bunch of people who don't care about anything about what I do, and are going to disagree with me whenever they feel like it.
54:42
Chris Do: It's like the kid who, sprinkles salt on slugs just to see them suffer.
54:46
Chris Do: It's like, there are people out there like that.
54:49
Chris Do: And if that's going to get under your skin, then I would say, let's do some inner work.
54:53
Chris Do: And to take small steps to expose a little bit more of yourself and through that exposure therapy, if you will, you'll become desensitized to it.
55:01
Chris Do: So for me, there are a lot of critics out there.
55:03
Chris Do: All you have to do is read any comment on our YouTube channel.
55:06
Chris Do: And you're like, God, they hate me, but I'm good with it.
55:11
Chris Do: it's par for the course.
55:12
Chris Do: You can't have a critical thought if you're not willing to risk alienating or offending someone.
55:18
Chris Do: I don't go out to try to be offensive, but sometimes people are, are like triggered by the strangest little things.
55:24
Chris Do: Even when I say you're worth it, you should charge more.
55:26
Chris Do: Oh, so you're out there peddling this self help crap, aren't you?
55:30
Chris Do: You fake guru.
55:31
Chris Do: You, I'm like, okay, well go kill yourself.
55:33
Chris Do: I don't know what to say.
55:35
Chris Do: if I'm saying something positive and they're still having a negative reaction to it, What can I do?
55:41
Radim Malinic: Chris, I think this is a fantastic way to park this conversation because.
55:46
Radim Malinic: As you know from our first part on your channel, the negative part is not about a person, it's about who says the comment, it's basically is about a person who says the stuff.
55:56
Radim Malinic: thank you very much for this because I think you summarized it really well because it's actually what's come up.
56:00
Radim Malinic: come from inside us, what's in the work, that, that helps us to actually grow and be somebody different.
56:05
Radim Malinic: So thank you for making the time.
56:08
Radim Malinic: It's good to see you again.
56:09
Radim Malinic: And, Thank you.
56:10
Chris Do: Yeah.
56:10
Chris Do: I really enjoyed the conversation.
56:11
Chris Do: I think there's so many threads I'm looking forward to continuing our conversation.
56:15
Chris Do: Thank you.
56:16
Radim Malinic: I can tell you I've got twice as many questions ready for you.
56:19
Radim Malinic: Thank you, Chris.
56:20
Radim Malinic: Thank you.
56:21
Chris Do: I love it.
56:22
Radim Malinic: Nice one.
56:27
Thank you for listening to this episode of Creativity for Sale podcast.
56:31
The show was produced and presented by me, Radim Malinic.
56:34
Editing and audio production was masterfully done by Mackay from Seven Million Bikes Podcasts.
56:39
Theme music was written and produced by Robert Summerfield.
56:43
If you enjoyed this episode and would like to support the podcast, please subscribe and leave a rating or review.
56:49
To get your own action plan on how to start and grow a life changing creative business.
56:53
You can get a copy of the Creativity for Sale book via the links in show notes.
56:58
burning, and until next time, I'm Radim Malinich, your guide through this exploration of passion, creativity, innovation, and the boundless potential within us all.