Grief & Pizza

Marie: 00:04

You're listening to Grief and Pizza, a podcast exploring the highs and lows at the intersection of business and emotional well-being. In this episode, we're chatting with Jessica Abel, a graphic novelist, author, business coach for creatives, and the founder of Autonomous Creative. Together, we explore the evolution of running a creative business and the unique challenges of making a living as a creative in an ever changing technical landscape. So awesome to have you, Jessica. For anyone that doesn't know who you are, I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey, as a creative.

Marie: 00:37

I know you've started as a cartoonist. You've done illustration. You've done graphic novels. Today, I sort of think of you as a teacher for creatives to help creatives actually earn a living doing what they do. But I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey because I feel like you've had many lives as a creative and you've lived many places.

Marie: 00:53

You've gone through many iterations of your business. So maybe you could go and tell us a little bit about how you got your start.

Jessica: 00:59

Of course, yeah, happy to. So yeah, I started out as a cartoonist. I started out more specifically as a mini comics artist. I started self publishing, you know, I mean it goes back to college doing the anthologies and stuff with other students. And then post college, I started doing photocopied comics, trading through the mail, the whole kind of 90s male art comic scene.

Jessica: 01:21

Was very involved in that. And that led eventually to larger publishing contracts. So I've published first with FanaGraphics, which is sort of the premier underground comics publisher. Just had a new book come out with them actually, a new old book. They republished, they brought back into print my book Life Sucks just this year.

Jessica: 01:44

So that was fun to work with them again. And then I moved to Pantheon, did my book La Perdida. And I did a number of other books with big New York publishers, including a couple of textbooks about comics because I taught comics for ten or twelve years at SVA in New York, School of Visual Arts. And kind of parlayed that with my husband and writing partner for those kinds of projects. And the two of us worked together on a series of two textbooks, like big, very comprehensive kind of lay the groundwork textbooks about making comics.

Jessica: 02:20

And then after that, I got started. I did my book Out on the Wire, is a nonfiction comic about-

Marie: 02:29

Still got my copy?

Jessica: 02:30

Got it right there. Yeah. It's a nonfiction book in comics form about the storytelling techniques of radio and podcasting greats like Ira Glass and Jad Amarad and Stephanie Fu and you know, a bunch of other people. So that was a huge research project and then a huge writing project and then a huge drawing project and really changed a ton about how I understand stories, storytelling, story structure. And for a while that was kind of my main focus.

Jessica: 03:04

My last comic was I've been all over the map. Like my comics are all kinds of different things. If you buy out of the wire and you're like, Can I have more of this? No, you can't. That's the only one.

Jessica: 03:16

My last book was Trish Trash Roller Girl of Mars, which is you know about a roller girl on Mars. So you know, I am all over the map. Life Sucks that just came out, was just re released as a vampire romantic comedy.

Marie: 03:30

Oh my gosh, I love it.

Jessica: 03:32

Yeah, a lot of variety in what I do, which I don't think helped me very much in my writing career, know. Oh, interesting. Because people don't know, they want more stuff from me. And then like I say, Well, how about this? And they're like, That's absolutely nothing to do with what I like.

Jessica: 03:47

And so, you know, it's really hard to kind of build momentum that way. I did have a good bit of success as a mainstream author. But what happened basically is so on the personal side, I started out in Chicago. I was there until I was almost 30. Got together with my husband, Matt, who's also a cartoonist.

Jessica: 04:06

We met through the mail, through mail comics.

Marie: 04:09

That's amazing.

Jessica: 04:12

And got together. We moved to Mexico City together for a couple of years in the last two years of the last century and then came back to The US, moved to Brooklyn, lived there for about twelve years, moved from have two kids, had two kids in Brooklyn, Brought them with us, all of us to France for four years and lived in France in a small city called Angouleme where there's a very strong comics scene and they have a residency for cartoonists. And we were in this residency for four years. And then moved from there to Philadelphia where I was offered a job as the department chair of an illustration department at a small art school, which just closed their degree programs this year. So that's the personal arc that sort of, know, goes along with all this stuff.

Jessica: 04:57

So I'm in France doing Out on the Wire. I did the entire book while I was in France. I was getting towards, you know, incredible deadline pressure because it's had in the end, it took me about three years to create the book from one end to the other. But it's a 200 plus page comic book, which means an enormous amount of just labor, you know, just creating all those pages is just a lot. And I had studio assistants, you know, interns.

Jessica: 05:23

I had Matt helping me with backgrounds. Know, so I was not doing it all alone. But writing process was incredibly research was incredibly demanding, took a long time. Then I'm writing the script, you know, sort of getting and I write it visually like in panel layouts and stuff, getting feedback on that, updating all that stuff. And then, you know, we're eight or ten months out and I've got to draw the whole thing, right?

Jessica: 05:46

So that was very high pressure. And as I'm in the middle of that, this is in 2014, I guess, because it came out in 2015. I am essentially staring down the barrel of another book. I'm like, what am I going to do next? Like I need to support my family here.

Jessica: 06:07

And where we lived in France was not very expensive, but we knew if we went back to The US, it would be very expensive. Know, I mean, life is expensive. We have two kids. You know, I was just thinking how's this supposed to work? Because I had earned a decent advance for out on the wire, but it's supposed to last for three years.

Jessica: 06:22

Could pay my agent out. You know, it's minimum wage, if that. I had ideas for other stuff I could do, but I was just exhausted, just absolutely, you know, burnt to a crisp. Even though I, you know, loved doing the book, I'm super proud of it. You know, there's all these things.

Jessica: 06:40

But you know, I also had Trish Trash still going on, by the way. Like I was trying to get that to be finished during the same period and utterly failed. So you know that ended up being this sort of like tail end last two or three years of cartooning.

Marie: 06:53

Was that a self directed project that was happening in the background? Were there sort of No, no, contracts. Okay, wow.

Jessica: 06:59

Yeah, had contracts. And I mean I could have probably backed out of them because it was paid by the page, know, the advance was paid by the page. I could have just been like, you know what, you guys, let's just not. But I didn't and I probably should have. But there's a lot of scarcity that went into that, just feeling like, well, what else am I going to do?

Jessica: 07:17

You know, I didn't have any I didn't feel like I had any options. And I literally, as I'm going through this period in my notes, journal, whatever, as I'm trying to think about what I'm going to do next, I'm thinking like, I literally have I can't think of anything I can do that people will pay me real money for. I just can't think of anything. You know, I'm a cartoonist, I'm an illustrator. Like that's not No one pays money for that stuff.

Jessica: 07:43

Know, illustration field is cratering, you know, and it already was when I started twenty, thirty years ago, you know. It's so much worse now in terms of the competition, in terms of the rates. I mean, when I started doing illustration in the early 2000s, in the 90s really, the rates we were getting paid then were the same rates, same dollar numbers as people were getting paid in the 70s and 80s. And they're still the same dollar numbers or less

Marie: 08:09

So

Jessica: 08:12

you know, it used to be a very viable thing to do for a small number of people, obviously not for a huge number of people. But now it's just, you know, I was teaching illustration for the last eight years and it's just like I just tried to equip students with a lot of flexibility and a lot of you know, like, what are you going to do with this skill set? What are you going to, you know, invent? A lot of entrepreneurial skills and stuff. So anyway, that's what I was trying to do for myself while I'm grinding through all of these comics pages.

Jessica: 08:41

Because, when you're drawing, it was already written, right? So when you're drawing all these pages, you just spend all day focusing on images. I could listen to stuff. I could have sort of two channels going on. I can't do that anymore because I'm writing all day.

Jessica: 08:58

But at the time, was of course, I was really interested in podcasting and all that stuff. Was listening to all those things, also, you know, going down a rabbit hole with various kinds of business related things. And very early on through CreativeLive found Tara McMullen and was super attracted to her down to earth, straightforward, really honest way of talking about business that felt I could connect to it. Now she talked about all kinds of things that I just had no idea what these concepts really meant.

Marie: 09:34

Email lists and collecting people's emails.

Jessica: 09:36

Oh my god, I didn't even know what a sales page was. I didn't know what a launch was. I didn't know what anything was. And but I'm talking about stuff, know, was watching some of her creative live courses. Think the first thing I saw was build a standout business or something like that.

Jessica: 09:50

And she talks about, I think she talks about business models in there. And she talks about different parts of the business. She talks about the marketing, you know, sort of marketing stuff. And I'm just like, I don't actually really know what marketing is. You know, obviously I've been doing marketing for comics since I was 20.

Jessica: 10:06

But I would never have identified it as that. I didn't know what it was. So it was this really, really hard, painful process. And my identity was then way more than now, but you know, still holds on to a whole bunch of like punk rock and, you know, underground comics and countercultural whatever. And even the words like value proposition gave me shivers down my spine.

Jessica: 10:34

Was like, Oh, that's so horrible, you know? Had it's funny because I had this intern at the time who was actually from The US. He came he wanted to do internship at the Maison des Hauteurs where we were, and asked me if I would have him on. And I did. And he was great.

Jessica: 10:49

He was fantastic. His name is Ryan. And he was a student at I think University of Portland maybe in their publishing program. And he was doing, he was like, wanted to go into comics publishing. And so that's what but he knew a little bit about marketing.

Jessica: 11:06

He knew a little bit about business. And so I was getting him to like help me think things through. He would I remember he made like a social media plan for me and I'm like, That is ridiculous. Like there's no way I'm posting on Twitter basically ever. Certainly not three times a day or whatever it was.

Jessica: 11:22

Know, was like, here's your and it was like, was very logical. It was like, here's your topics, and here's where you should be posting and how many times and whatever. And it was like really nice of him to do this thing. But I was like, what? What am I posting?

Jessica: 11:34

Like what am I talking? I don't understand do

Marie: 11:35

I do with this? Yeah.

Jessica: 11:36

It was really painful. And then I joined Tara's business programme basically in 2015, as we were all as the book was coming out and also as we are planning to come back to The US in 2016. So there's this kind of like major transition there. And that's the beginning of where, you know, where I've gotten to now. The first thing I did then was I thought I was going be working much more on storytelling related stuff just because of Out the Wire and that's what I was focusing on at the time.

Jessica: 12:09

And I had for Out on the Wire I did a podcast. And with the podcast I had an online group that was like, it was sort of pedagogical, you know, it was like, here's this thing, this topic for the podcast. It's fully scripted, you know, music, the whole deal, trying to really go all out with my producer, Benjamin Fresh, who happened to be also at the Maison des Hauteurs and trained in doing this stuff. What are the chances, right? So Ben and I would create these really elaborate episodes.

Jessica: 12:39

And then at the end, there'd be a challenge like try this, use this principle. You know. And then we had an online group where people could post their answers. And then we would do in between the full episodes, would do critique episodes. So me and Matt and Ben would critique some work from the group.

Jessica: 12:58

So this group was like great, really engaged. It's the first time I'd run an online group like that. I had done some online teaching, but I hadn't done that before. And at the end of that process, when we were finished with the podcast, because it's a specific like maps the book, you know, it's a length. It's not like an ongoing thing.

Jessica: 13:16

I had learned from Tara to ask people questions. And so I asked the group, was like, What do you want from me? What should we do next? You know, what's the next product I should make? And really was thinking about storytelling related stuff that they would be saying stuff like, you know, something about scenes, character development, I don't know, you know, something like that.

Jessica: 13:37

But like, not every person, but like a huge number of people were like, I'm so stuck. I don't know how to get things done. I just sit down and I want to work, I can't figure out how. Procrastinating, all this stuff. And I was like, Oh, I actually know kind of a lot about that.

Jessica: 13:54

I can help with that. And so I developed this just email course, like a quick email course using Tara's sort of essentially her version of MVP. She called it living room strategy. It wasn't really that either, but it was like a little test product, which was a week long email course that went super well. And then I immediately turned that into the first version of the Creative Focus Workshop, which then became this course that I've been running for the last ten years.

Marie: 14:20

So the Autonomous Creative is sort of like that's your signature program, right? That's your coaching program. Is that cohort based or is it sort of open access?

Jessica: 14:29

So Autonomous Creative is the name of my company overall. That's like the umbrella of everything. I'm naming everything autonomous creative this, autonomous creative that. So it can be kind of confusing, I admit. But it is the concept I really love and so I'm fine with having that throughout.

Jessica: 14:46

So the Creative Focus workshop still exists and I still teach it. But the main thing I'm focusing on right now is business coaching for creatives. It took, and we can talk about this too if you want, but this took a long time to figure out how I could coach creatives in business with my ethics intact. Because I really think that a lot of what I was trying to do and what people want to do actually isn't super possible.

Marie: 15:14

Oh, can we lean into that? Yeah, tell me more.

Jessica: 15:16

Well, let me close this loop. So that's I do business coaching. My one on one business coaching is called Finish Line. And I have a program called the Autonomous Creative Incubator, which is a group program which I have not run for a couple of years, but I'm probably going to run it this year. I'm going to run it later this year.

Jessica: 15:33

So put that aside. So leaning into this, so getting back to my pivot in 2015, '20 '16, when I went from identifying primarily as an author to being a business owner in a more explicit way, because of course, authors technically are business owners, but no one would admit that. That pivot, you know, it really I did not understand then and did not understand for many years that while it is a little more straightforward to sell a product like the Creative Focus Workshop, or even in coaching sessions or whatever, there's still this very tight relationship between your price point and how you put your thing together and the size of your audience. And if you have a low price point, which I have had for the course for a long time, and still do relatively speaking, you have to have a much larger audience. If you have to have a much larger audience, that dictates a totally different business model.

Jessica: 16:37

And mostly a business model I don't want, and most of the people I work with don't want. You know, that requires a lot. I mean, you run a huge course with like, you need a ton of traffic. Like you need to be out there doing marketing in a way that most people I work with just don't want to do. It's amazing and awesome when people do it.

Jessica: 16:55

I love how you guys work. I mean, I love to watch it. I love to see all your stuff. But I don't want to have to do that.

Marie: 17:03

Yep. Us neither. Yeah. Yeah. That's our big struggle for sure.

Marie: 17:08

It's Yeah.

Ben: 17:09

I think, one of our other guests that we've had on the show who also does notion work, Thomas Frank, often talks about this thing where it's like, we have this desire to have something like Thomas has, like a large YouTube following, but then he says, here are the things that I do all day long every day. Do you wanna do that work? Because that's the work that is required to get to this point. And I think the reason that we shut down our platform was largely the same reason because we realized that the technology actually isn't the thing that people are struggling with. It's the actual, like, they would get they would sign up for the course platform going like, I'm gonna launch a course.

Ben: 17:46

And then it's like, darn it. Now I have to write a course. Like, the tech the technology doesn't help you with that side of the of the of the work. Right? And I think it's kind of what you're talking about.

Ben: 17:57

And I'm curious if you modified your educational stuff as a, like, professor. My experience as a going to art school was that we went through and learned how to make art, and there was not a single question about how do you sell your artwork? How do you make money from your artwork? We didn't even have a portfolio building class in art in traditional fine art school. So, like, I think a lot of these kids left with a hundred thousand dollars of debt and absolutely no idea how to make money.

Ben: 18:28

And so you go directly into the whatever job I can get, you know, to support, and then you basically end up not creating art anymore afterwards, which is my experience. I I found, like, through art school, oh, interesting. There seems to be some, like, really interesting stuff happening here with generative art and code. So I'll learn code and that that's the place that I went, but I ended up getting a job just writing code because that was where the money took me. Right?

Ben: 18:54

So I never I never found that I was never instructed or taught how to bridge those two gaps. Like, how do we stay in touch with our creative side while also finding a a place to, you know, eat and live, that kind of thing. So I'm curious how your how your experience, like, with that kind of what do you teach now to students differently that you might have like when you first started teaching?

Jessica: 19:19

So I'm no longer teaching undergrads as of this year or teaching in colleges, but I had been for twenty five years. And the last eight years when I was at PAFA, which is the school here that I taught at, when I came in, when they interviewed me, my question was, are you they were starting an illustration department. Like why are you starting an illustration department when illustration is in the state that it's in? Like, oh, these reasons, those reasons. They had all these reasons historically around why illustration was a good fit for their school.

Jessica: 19:52

And I'm like, okay, I can only do this if I'm able to teach business essentially. If I'm able to teach professional practice as a primary and like put professional practice throughout this program. Because ethically, just can't. I couldn't do it. You know, when I was teaching comics at SVA, I was I was an adjunct.

Jessica: 20:14

I was teaching certain things. Know, there was no role there's no place for that. And we did have a huge input and impact on SVA adding professional practice classes and capacity. And so I'm proud of that. But I didn't teach it.

Jessica: 20:32

But for the last eight years, gradually and then quickly, that's all I taught. I didn't teach illustration. I taught professional practice. I taught a class to every student who came through the programme that was oriented around entrepreneurship, essentially. Like how do you have a business?

Jessica: 20:52

How do you think about this? Now students who are in school I find are not ready for this. They are receiving all of their information about what it's like to be a cartoonist, I mean an illustrator or artist or whatever from the internet. It's all about, you know, have a platform, be an influencer, whatever. But I did show them the math.

Jessica: 21:09

I did do all the stuff so that at least they're exposed to that. And they do, I think, when it starts happening to them in the world, they're going to have someplace to go to with it. And I also, because I was the head of the department, I got all of my faculty to incorporate or ask them to incorporate elements of professional practice in all of the courses. Now, that could be something really small, like how do you turn this into a portfolio piece? You know, or it could be something much more significant than that.

Jessica: 21:36

I also did a class that was essentially project management. So how do you conceive of and then see through a project all the way from beginning to end in a semester?

Marie: 21:44

That would have been so valuable in design school.

Jessica: 21:46

Was really fun. I loved doing that class. No one ever finished their project in the semester, but they almost always would finish it afterwards. They always overestimated, bit off more than they could chew. But I told them on day one, completion.

Jessica: 22:01

I'm grading you on how you are going through this process and that you're engaging with it, that you're reorienting, that you are adjusting as you go, and that you're showing up for it. I was very proud of that. Those two classes together, those were like the main things that I did. And I also had critiques with students. So juniors, seniors mostly, fourth years, I would go to the studio and talk with them about their work.

Jessica: 22:27

And that very frequently, because they knew me and they knew who, like my orientation would turn into, how should I do this? How should I do that? You know, what do you think about going into this gallery situation? How about this contract? Whatever.

Jessica: 22:39

Like I'd have an opportunity to have individual conversations with students about the work. So that was my perspective as a teacher. But as I said, I think that students in general, they're just not quite ready for the full complexity of all this stuff. So all I could and especially since it was just there, just that one class, you know, I couldn't get them to launch a business. I mean, they didn't even know what they wanted to do, but I just wanted to give them some tools.

Jessica: 23:04

Generally speaking, I work with people who are like 40 to 55. That's my sweet spot in terms of clients, because they've been out there, they've been trying to do the thing, it is not working. And they're like, Okay, time is flying. I need to make this work. And one of the things you said at the beginning, Marie, when you were setting this up is that I'm teaching people how to make a living from their work.

Jessica: 23:30

And often I'm not. Often what I'm teaching them is that they should make their work and make a living. Starting a business is a way to create a very flexible container to support creative practice. And frequently the people I work with are really expert at all kinds of interesting things. And many of those things feed into their personal work.

Jessica: 23:53

Some of them don't. Some of those things just are things they do at jobs or they've done, they've had some checkered history. And, you know, I was talking to somebody recently, he was like, I really love house painting. And I'm like, Do that? Oh my God!

Jessica: 24:04

You know, like, know, all these different things people can do. And my perspective as a coach is there are times when the work that somebody does can be turned into client oriented service based work commissions mostly, right? But then many times they can leverage the skill set and build something that is designed around how they want to work, the amount of money they need to make, the amount of time they want to put into this, and create more breathing room for their personal creative practice, which may be professional. But the money making weight does not fall on it. And I think that's a huge shift for people.

Jessica: 24:49

So that's what I was saying in terms of like how my progress into becoming a business coach. Like as I was learning stuff, I wanted to share it with people. I wanted to be able to almost immediately pass on what I was learning to the people who I knew needed it. But I had this ethical resistance to teaching, to setting people up to believe that it was possible to make a full living as the kind of author I was. Yeah.

Jessica: 25:15

Or make a living as an author without magic, without unicorns, you know?

Ben: 25:18

We've had that same tension a lot where you see people that will say, here's how to make $10,000 a month as doing x. But it's like, no. That's you're you're describing your outcome, not how to actually do that. You're you're talking about what you were able to do, not that and so it feels like a a promise sometimes that you can't actually make that you would be able to you know, you can't produce the exact same results as this person because they have a different skill set than you. So it's it's more about teaching them how to figure out a process that works for them more than repeating the process that you're educating them.

Ben: 25:55

Is that like where you kind of have that ethical separation?

Jessica: 25:57

It's more like the people who you know, painters and artists and authors, they want to be supporting their practice with selling their work, ideally, right? Many people do, most people do. But as an author, if you are making a royalty of 1.5 a book or you're self publishing and you're making $6 a book, you got to sell enormous numbers of books to make that function for you and to support your family. And if you are somebody who's gone into this sort of like genre self publishing world and you're publishing a book a year or two books a year and you do series and you do all this stuff, maybe. But again, do you want to live that way?

Jessica: 26:45

Right? And so people come to me and they're like, I'm a writer, I want to make money as a writer. And I'm like, let's see if we can come up with something else.

Marie: 26:53

Because like,

Jessica: 26:54

let me show you the math. Just do you want to do this? Is this the way you want to live? And do you want to also like, like my history with books, like I wanted to do different kinds of books because I was interested in different kinds of books. It didn't make sense commercially, particularly for me to do that.

Jessica: 27:09

And I needed it to support my family. So that's a problem. And you know, many people who are in my world are incredible writers doing all kinds of cool things, cartoonists, whatever. And they just keep beating their head against the wall, you know, and taking super low paying adjunct gigs and whatever to try to close the gap, which means they have even less time for the work that they care about. You know, or Ben, like you, they take a job that probably takes up all of their time and more and cuts out any opportunity for you to do personal exploration of your creative work.

Jessica: 27:47

And for visual artists, often it's a thing where you can sell your work, but the market for your work is very low cost, know, it's very low priced. You can't, know, breaking into like the upper end of the art market is a whole deal. Like it's a whole thing, and it's not simple. And I can't tell people how to I can't help people with that. People come to me and they want help with that.

Jessica: 28:08

And I'm like, I cannot help you with that. I can help you understand why I can't help you with that, which I think is helpful on its own, but I can't do that. And so until I could come up with a way of thinking like, I can help people make good money with what they know how to do, but we're gonna have to be creative about it. It's not going to be get a better teaching job, you know, or sell more of your thing that you're trying to sell right now. It's got to be something else.

Jessica: 28:39

And so that's that's what I do. And that's, I love doing that. I love helping people think like, Okay, of the things that I know how to do, including art things and including other things, which are the things that I enjoy? And which are the things that are easiest to sell and people need? And then we build a service around that and work on messaging around it.

Jessica: 29:00

And you know, where do they find the people and all that kind of stuff. And so business foundations, like fundamentals that most people, most creatives, they get into business, they're freelancing, whatever, they don't have any of those fundamentals. They never learned them. Know, as you said, Ben, like you don't get it in school. And even when I did teach it in school, they don't remember it.

Jessica: 29:18

So you know, business fundamentals, but combined with this kind of my orientation is toward, yes, your creative work is super important. It's got to fit somewhere, but it may not fit on the money side.

Ben: 29:34

I think a lot of times too, you mentioned the sort of audience size problem that if you have a really low ticket item, you necessarily have to scale to do that. And I think a lot of the the really successful businesses tend to and I'm seeing this a lot. I just started learning how to make music, and I'm, like, doing my own production now and stuff like that in March of last year. And I've been following a lot of creators on YouTube, and I noticed that the the most successful ones have this really awesome way of sort of, like, synthesizing the work across multiple different audiences. So you'll have a artist who is teaching, and there's some, like, ad revenue there.

Ben: 30:12

They might have a they also might have a sample pack that they're selling. And when they when they do their educational stuff online, they're usually using their samples and being like, oh, yeah. This is a sample that I use, and you can grab this here. So it's like an educational side of things. So that's like the low ticket high audience side of things.

Ben: 30:29

And then they'll have something on their website that's like coaching, which is a little more one to one, and it's like kind of in the middle tier. And then they'll also have something like, I provide mastering services for you. So if you use MyBeats, like, I can master your song in, like, an hour, and it's this and this and then, you know but then they have the professional services on the back of that as well. And I think that's kinda what you're describing when you're, like, building a container for the creative work to sort of, like, send out all these different tendrils such that you're not over leveraged. Like, if you build a huge audience around a platform, for example, like, this is one of the things that we we sit in the tension with a lot is around having a platform that is based on somebody else's software.

Ben: 31:08

Right? We're really leveraged in that way because, like, if the software changes, then our business necessarily has to change. So we start to think about, like, how do we sort of deemphasize that importance, and maybe we have, like, multiple products across, you know, different things. And that's why we started to do the the Trojan horse thing where we're teaching workshops around capacity planning and change management and things like that such that, you know, the some of the stuff that we're starting to build isn't really, like, specific to how to how to Notion. So that you're kind of almost, like, designing exit points for yourself at any given time so so that you're not like stuck with one giant audience or all one on one clients.

Ben: 31:50

So that such that if people start stop buying services for some reason, which happens in a lot of industries. I mean, saw my consulting revenue dry up significantly as no code tools have come to the market. Right? Because most more people can build what they need without an expert technologist now. So, you know, you have to sort of deleverage every once in a while.

Ben: 32:10

And I think these things are cyclical, You know, as the market changes, we have to adapt and we can't keep trying to sell the same thing over and over and over again because the market just doesn't have the demand over time.

Jessica: 32:22

Yeah. And different styles of products and so on have waxed and waned. Process I teach is a very MVP based process where I ask my clients to come up with kind of a container that they want to try and then try to get a few clients, see how it goes and see if they like it. A lot of times it shifts a lot within the first few iterations. They end up some other opportunity opens up and they realize that's a fruitful way to go.

Jessica: 32:56

But it's really about having the sense of how do you take advantage of these things and how do you build a structure around it? How do you do something? How do you create something that's then going to be relevant for these clients that isn't going to kill you to build it because you may have to build something else? Have one client who I talked to recently, or former client who, they started out doing podcasting and then went into a service where they were interviewing people and then processing the interview into outputs. So a bio, a sort of project description or something like that.

Jessica: 33:35

They sort of create these things. And then they also got into a thing where they were capturing institutional knowledge. So they would do an interview with somebody who's retiring and all the stuff they know about the company that nobody else knows, capture that into SOPs and various kinds of documents and things like that. And then some other things, some other things, whatever. And at one point they were thinking about doing like vegan food delivery.

Jessica: 33:59

I don't know what, you know, like went all over the place. But I talked to them recently and they're really right back there. And also adding an AI to their process now too, so they can create custom AI pipelines for people where they can get their own voice sort of into the process and create outputs from interviews and things that are super on point. And so it's been a long and winding road, but they've ended up really kind of where they started with doing interviews and processing interviews into usable documents of various kinds and just relying on those podcast skills.

Ben: 34:35

Interesting. Seems like I think creatives usually have some unique process of their own that they will they can recycle in different formats. So it's a matter of, like, noticing the trends and trying testing that that experiment against the trend itself and see, like, you know, maybe ten years ago, this thing just, like, nobody was interested in. I always think of, like, Google Wave when that first came out, like like, right before Slack, and it was, like, really, really way too ahead of its time for people to understand it as, like, a software.

Marie: 35:07

They weren't ready. Yeah.

Ben: 35:08

Like, if that had come out, like, five years, ten years later, people would have been like, oh, this is amazing. But when it first came out, it was so it was so out of left field that, like, they weren't prepared for that. So, like, that continuously testing, you know, the market for an idea, like, until it finds some kind of traction and then flex into that can be really effective, I think.

Jessica: 35:26

Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. Have another client who is a poet, published poet, award winning poet, and she is a poetry coach. So she works with poets to help them create or to develop publication ready manuscripts.

Jessica: 35:42

So take a pile of poems, figure out how they fit together, create a through line, you know, all this other stuff. So she's using expertise that she's obviously developed for herself, but also as a teacher in this very specific niche for very specific people. And I don't think that's it's not trendy particularly. You know, it doesn't depend on trends at all, but it depends on her lifetime of experience. And she could not do this without being the person that she is and have the experience that she is.

Jessica: 36:12

And that's kind of I think that's more the thing for the people I work with than, you know, is this ahead or behind at the times or whatever it is. I I certainly think there's things that clients do that end up being superseded by something else. They have to come up with something new. But very frequently it's like they have some really niche skill set that they can turn into something really interesting.

Marie: 36:32

I'm curious what other examples there are maybe of people taking something that was seemingly disparate and transitioning it into something else or ways that you've seen people organize multiple skills that maybe seemingly don't go together, but they're able to make a living with a really diversified skill set?

Jessica: 36:50

Well, it's not that it's it's putting things together into a cohesive offer that has a real audience, that has a really specific audience. I have another client who is a grief coach. And she started off as a graphic designer, I believe, and a curator. And her methodology is, she calls it curating grief. And she developed this when her own mother died unexpectedly and young and created an exhibition of meaningful objects that belonged to her mother.

Jessica: 37:27

And so one of those things is like a bottle of soy sauce. Like it's not fancy stuff. It's not like art from her house. Things that have real meaning. And she uses those as a kind of lens for helping people process grief and think it through.

Jessica: 37:39

And so her clients may or may not actually create a literal exhibition, but it still becomes this way of thinking through, way of accessing different kinds of thoughts and feelings around grief and processing those things.

Marie: 37:49

That's a really beautiful example. I love that. I'm curious, you mentioned AI and things are changing pretty fast. But I'd love to know kind of what role AI is playing in your work today and maybe some of your feelings around it. I know Ben and I talk about AI every morning over coffee and we have lots of debates over where things are moving.

Marie: 38:08

I'm just curious as an artist and teacher, how are you seeing the changes that are happening and how is it helping or hindering your business?

Jessica: 38:18

Yeah, I use AI a lot. Do. Mean especially since I'm constantly well right now, Marie, as you well know because you are a speaker at the conference, I am getting ready to put on the Autonomous Creative Conference, again naming it after my company. And it is an unbelievable amount of work. It's so hard.

Jessica: 38:37

There's so many things to make and do and write, so much writing. And I have very high standards. So you know, it's very challenging. And if I did not have access to AI, this thing would not be happening. There's no way I would get through all of this stuff.

Jessica: 38:56

I fight with it a lot because it's dumb and makes dumb, you know, suggestions all the time and everything it dumbs everything down and you have to really fight for it to not dumb things down. But it's also made me better because it points out various things around structure and clarity that I didn't notice. Know, I don't take every bit of advice, obviously, but it's helpful to have a reader always. Know, I believe in editors and I think that there's a real role for that there too. Also, I mean, it's surprisingly good when you feed it a lot of stuff at creating a voice that sounds more or less like me, like 80 to 90%, you know.

Jessica: 39:41

And so that's pretty incredible and really valuable. You know, I've been using it too for various kinds of life things, know. Also we share a lot about gardening. So I'm much into my vegetable garden and you know, pollinator. I don't have permaculture system set up, but I try to head that direction.

Jessica: 40:01

And so I just had this long discussion the other day with AI about what I should do with this big planter I have where I want to use native pollinator plants and it's got a certain kind of light condition and so on. And I was trying to come up with interesting stuff. And I was thinking about willow. And I was like, I need something that will fit in a pot and not take over and it can't be too wide. And so whatever.

Jessica: 40:27

So we came up with this kind of willow that's like a Korean pink pussy willow or something. I don't know. It's going to

Marie: 40:34

be cool. That's awesome. I don't know if

Jessica: 40:36

I would be able to keep it alive because I don't know it'll stay wet enough in a container. It wasn't expensive. I bought some cuttings from Etsy and they're rooting in the kitchen as we speak.

Marie: 40:45

Oh fun.

Jessica: 40:46

That was really fun. So there's lots of things like that where I can just kind of brainstorm about stuff. And even if the ideas are kind of stupid, it's I am a very verbal processor. So having a way to do that is very valuable to me and not exhaust Matt.

Marie: 40:59

Think like a starting point. 100% relate to that.

Jessica: 41:03

In terms of the other thing about it though is I actually, and I think this is possibly unfair, but I make a big distinction between AI for writing and AI for visual art in my mind. And I have not thought this through super clearly. When I use AI to write, generally speaking, I think because I'm using my own writing as the source material and what AI brings is so generic. I'm like, if anybody wrote this, they deserve to be robbed. I don't think they did.

Jessica: 41:37

I don't think anybody did. Nobody deserves that. But you know what I'm saying. Like it's just so milk toast. And what I'm training it on over and over and over again, and I'm waiting for the day that AI doesn't need this over and over and over again, is my voice and my writing and my structure and my ideas.

Jessica: 41:55

And so I don't care. Like I don't have any ethical issues with that. But when it comes to creating visual art with AI, for the most part, there are exceptions to this where people are taking a bunch of different photos or something and they're making a new photo out of it. And it's not like a photographer's photo, it's like snapshots. I'm like, cool, do whatever you want.

Jessica: 42:16

But like all this, the Studio Ghibli stuff.

Marie: 42:19

Miyazaki, yeah.

Jessica: 42:20

All of the people turning their family photos into, you know, Studio Ghibli style drawings. I just look at that and I go, How is that okay? Like how is that it's like literally, literally grabbing somebody's style and using it as directly as possible and as faithfully as possible. How is that all right? Like how do we do that?

Jessica: 42:44

And I see that so often where you know, there's some very specific style people are trying to copy. And sometimes and often it's like a whole group of artists are the source material for it. It's not like one know, in this case it was like one artist, right? One studio. You know, frequently it's like a bunch of different people are working in the style, but they worked really hard to develop this style, you know.

Jessica: 43:11

And like I know the years and the sweat that go into that and the thought and like sort of reprocessing in, you know, our actual intelligence of bringing all these different styles together and coming up with something new. It's just an enormous labor and so underpaid anyway. It's just under it's like undercutting this field that's already just on its last legs in a lot of ways, commercially speaking. Anybody who's famous enough to escape from this because they're that famous and there's, you know, there's some a few magazines who still use illustration, they will always pay real people to do that illustration. Great.

Jessica: 43:47

But the whole like three quarters bottom tier stuff gone. Just gone. You know, and the same thing is going on, I think with a lot of writing, a lot of copywriting and especially content copywriting, where you know, the very top end, especially content again, not you know, sales and marketing copy as much as just like blog posts and you know, creating scripts for things and whatever. Where a copywriter had a job before and now may not. Yeah.

Jessica: 44:19

And I know personally a number of people who've lost massive amounts of income, massive amounts of clients because they're just like, You know what? It's 80%, seventy five % of what you can do and it's 0% of the amount. You know, it's like all the money. And they're just losing, you know, tons of business that way. So in my personal case, way I'm using it, I feel comfortable with that.

Jessica: 44:42

But I don't feel comfortable in general with what we're doing here. And the other thing about it, and the main thing about it in terms of writing especially is that, well, any kind of intellectual labor, and I'm not a doctor, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not in other fields where jobs are going to be taken also, right? But the biggest problem here that we are facing is the speed with which this is happening, where we go from month one to month two, and whole sectors of the white collar economy are just decimated. What are we going to do with people? What's the future for that?

Jessica: 45:20

And I don't The kind of disruption we saw over the last fifty years in blue collar industries through automation and computerization and efficiency, not to mention offshoring, but let's just put that aside, just the actual change in the manufacturing process. Look what's happened to those communities. You know, look at where those factories used to be, various kinds of mining, whatever kind of industrial work used to exist and now it doesn't. What kind of world do we want to live in here? That's what I really wonder about.

Marie: 45:53

Yeah. These are the kind of breakfast coffee conversations that we're always having. Like what's this going to mean for creatives? And what does it mean in terms of what we value as valuable skill sets? And it's sort

Jessica: 46:05

of I mean it gets back to the thing we were talking about in terms of the conflation of being a serious professional creative and needing to make a living from that. You know, wanting to make a living from that creativity. And one of the things I've always way pre AI always talked about is this idea that you do not have to make money as a creative to be a serious artist, to be a real artist. But that is very, very hard for humans, period, and especially in a capitalistic society to believe. That if you're not getting paid for it, it doesn't mean it's not good, right?

Jessica: 46:37

Doesn't mean it's not worth it. Doesn't mean you can't spend time on it. I spend so much time giving people permission to make their work no matter what is going on, no matter whether it's getting paid for by you know, your time is paid for or not. But you know, it continues to be an enormous struggle for almost everybody I work with. And so what happens when it's literally impossible to get paid for creative work because nobody's paying money for that anymore?

Jessica: 47:05

You know, we've all got to figure out a way that our creativity belongs to us and we get to make things without it being monetized. And somehow we got to pay for our lives.

Marie: 47:15

I'm not

Jessica: 47:15

sure what that looks like. But that's the part that You know, I'm not really concerned with people continuing to be creative. I'm concerned with them feeling like it's okay to do that when economic and financial part of your life may be very endangered, you know? That's always been the problem where, you know, it's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't have the bottom taken care of, you can't get to the top.

Marie: 47:42

Yeah. And how do you I mean, you teach about creative focus, but I imagine so many creatives are struggling not just with their focus, but even like your attention is just kind of divided and you're like, I'm trying these experiments over here and I'm trying to be creative over here and there's obviously the potential for burnout, there's just spreading yourself really thin. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing really frequently in this audience of people And how do you create focus at a time when things maybe feel really unstable or uncertain?

Jessica: 48:14

Let's pull back and reframe it a little bit because things, I think, as long as I've been alive have felt unstable and uncertain when it comes to creative work. There's never been a time when it's like, Oh, this is absolutely how we should be spending our time. Like that's just not a thing. Yes, things are more chaotic now than I can remember them ever being. But that's not new.

Jessica: 48:35

And again, one of the reasons I moved into business coaching is because the people I would see in the Creative Focus workshop frequently were sort of had this had financial problems in their lives. Know that they don't they're not making enough money, they're spending too many hours trying to make money. And they're like, I'm not getting my creative work done and I want to get my creative work down. How can I use this last 3% of my available attention to finish my novel? And because all the rest of it is used up on family and work and trying to find work and you know, all this other stuff.

Jessica: 49:11

And if you don't solve some of those problems and create capacity for the work, then you it's not solvable. Know, and I do tell people in that situation, it's like, well, you know, spend five minutes a day, spend ten minutes a day. And any of that is helpful. You know, any time that you're able to you know, I was working with somebody recently who, she did my capacity worksheet, and then was like, I have zero capacity. I got nothing.

Jessica: 49:38

I was like, Okay, well, now you know, like we can work on that. And from that day onwards, she's been doing a few minutes a day, every day of writing or drawing. You know, because like zero capacity doesn't mean you literally have zero minutes. It means you have zero kind of bandwidth. And so she's not doing very much, but she's doing a little bit every day.

Jessica: 49:59

And so that has really shifted her sense of agency over her creative work and her ability to take that for herself in the midst of all the other stuff that's going on in her life. Okay, that's one side. But the other side is, how do we actually fix the system so that there's more capacity in your life, so that you can focus it on whatever you want to focus it on, whether it's you know, making pots or gardening or your kids or you know, whatever, like whatever you want to do. And that's where my business coaching springs from really, that let's fix this system. Because if what you're doing is taking up every ounce of juice Something's not working.

Jessica: 50:44

We're

Marie: 50:45

not going

Jessica: 50:45

to be able to fix the big picture until we work on that. And so, you know, I work with a lot of people who are super burned out and just underpaid in various ways. They need to come up with something higher value to do and find clients for it. And again, most of the people I work with are not interested in doing this kind of mass marketing model. They need to be doing something that's higher ticket.

Jessica: 51:06

They need to be working with fewer people at a higher price point, narrowing down their offers, you know, all the stuff. But how to do that is always really tricky. So that's what I help guide people through.

Ben: 51:16

Yeah. I think this is kind of for me the difficulty that I have fully embracing AI. Because when I think about the difference between the technical challenges that people have, they they believe are technical challenges, but they tend to be adaptive ones. That's why we talk about the capacity planning thing. And my fear of AI is that it actually puts us in the mindset that we can actually do more.

Ben: 51:40

And so these are tools for progress rather than tools for betterment of our life. So, like, when people go to AI to just, like, just do this for me. I just need to get something done and blah blah blah, they get it done, then it, like, it does cognitively free up more space to do more work. And so they fill that space with more work. And, like, our natural inclination is, oh, I can do more now because AI is handling all of this for me.

Ben: 52:04

But now you're actually disconnected from the process of the creative work. So you actually don't actually learn anything from the process of working or doing the creative work. So it's like, I think a lot of times people would benefit more from trying to do less and create more space for the creative work rather than trying to have something else do the work for them. And then that, you know, that that somehow frees up time, but it actually doesn't really free up time. It creates it creates a sort of, like, black hole of of of, you know, of necessity to do more of the work that you are already doing that's causing the capacity problem in the first place.

Ben: 52:41

And the AI stuff's interesting to me. Like, there is it does feel like as a visual artist, as a musician, I definitely have these, like like oh, yeah. The the the text stuff feels okay to me. The language stuff feels okay. But the you know, on the art side, I'm a little less okay with the visual stuff, and I'm very, very not okay with the musical side of of it because that's, like, just so important to me to, like, play instruments and, like, the actual play is what's really important for me in art.

Ben: 53:10

So I have, like I definitely have that distinction, but technically speaking, there's no difference, really. Like, it's the same underlying language models that are determining what's being outputted. So we have this feeling like, oh, that feels like like, you know, Miyazaki's art style feels like uniquely his. And so when we create in that, it's like stealing directly from him, but it's still like, you're still you're still stealing directly from some writer. It's just a a, like, sort of generalized version of that writing.

Ben: 53:41

So, like, we all have to sit with this ethical quandary, I think, of, like, we are accepting the death of copyright and the death of of ownership. And so the the tricky thing is figuring out what does the new ownership model look like more than, what does creativity mean anymore? You know? Like, that's, I think, what people are struck by. So yeah.

Ben: 54:02

I don't know. Like, the fact that we just bar like, barreled into this without saying, like, okay. Maybe we should figure out how to, like, verify what's in what's been it's what it's been trained on, and, the people that are paying to generate images are sort of paying, you know, if it's micro fractions of pennies to the actual source material and stuff would be really helpful. That was very quickly barreled over and it doesn't seem like we're going to get much of a conversation around that. So I don't know.

Ben: 54:32

It's very tricky.

Jessica: 54:34

Yeah. No, I agree with all of that. I think that the idea of using AI directly in creative work in the sense meaning work that is there's a distinction for me in sort of there's like a functional writing that I do. And then there's writing where I'm really trying to express original ideas. And I think that I still see a line there for myself personally, which doesn't address any of the source material stuff you just talked about.

Jessica: 55:02

But just it doesn't mean that I won't cross it. Know, I don't know. But like that feels very different to me. In terms of the source material, yeah, obviously this is coming from thousands upon thousands of writers all at the same time. And I think if I were to say like, write me a story in the style of Cormac McCarthy, I wouldn't feel okay publishing that.

Jessica: 55:22

You know what I mean? There's, that's where I think. But there's no, as you say, there's no technical difference between those things. But there is, going back to historically speaking, how plagiarism, we see it, how we think of it, that when we're copying something and trying to evoke somebody else's work directly, that is actionable. Whereas being generally influenced by somebody is not.

Jessica: 55:55

And on a technical level, how do you draw that distinction? Is there a distinction there? For humans, there is a distinction. We've said there is, at least we've said that there's a distinction there. That when something is too directly based on some other piece of artwork that you're not allowed to do that.

Jessica: 56:15

So how does that translate into the world that we're in today? I don't know.

Marie: 56:18

Yeah. And it's unique because the onus is kind of on each individual user right now to decide where that line is, right? There's not necessarily What a surprise. The onus are individuals.

Jessica: 56:27

How could that possibly happen in our society?

Marie: 56:32

What creative projects are you working on right now? Because I know with the conference that you're putting on, there's a lot of writing and it's a lot of work, a lot of administrative stuff to come together. But what are some of the things that you're making space for creatively in your life right Literally, This week?

Jessica: 56:50

Not. In general, I've been very interested in pottery lately and ceramics. Started making sculpture and stuff. So that's been really fun. I haven't done three d stuff very much before.

Jessica: 57:02

So that's been really, really cool. And I'll get back to that when this push is over. And garden mostly, those two things. Know that it's spring and things are looking great and I wish I had more time to get outside and do stuff. But fortunately I did a lot the last few years and it's not insanely busy

Marie: 57:21

out

Jessica: 57:21

You

Marie: 57:22

built the foundations, yeah.

Jessica: 57:23

I built the foundation. There's lots to do, but it can wait a few weeks. So you know, I'm giving myself permission to just be a beast. Know I can be and get through this thing because it is really it's just a huge the task list is bananas. Normally I try not to let a project like this take over the way it is now.

Jessica: 57:47

It's just there's no other way to do it at the Like if I'd started six months out, six months more out, maybe. But even then, it's like you don't really know what you're in for until you're in it.

Marie: 57:58

Yeah.

Jessica: 58:00

So I'm sure I would have still been

Ben: 58:01

It would have just increased the scope of the project by starting in sooner, more than likely.

Jessica: 58:06

Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah, would have taken on all kinds of new things. There's all kinds of stuff I say I'm going to do and I'm like, I might have to edit that out.

Marie: 58:13

Yes. Story of my life. Yeah.

Jessica: 58:17

Written them all into the pages and I'm like,

Marie: 58:20

will I really? I

Jessica: 58:20

don't know.

Marie: 58:21

We'll see. Is that still important? Yeah.

Jessica: 58:24

Yeah, I'm doing a whole bunch of stuff in the sort of upgrade version for the conference where I'm going to be doing, in theory, I think, going to be doing a full workbook and a bunch of live sessions and a whole workshop and a bunch of stuff. So TikTok.

Marie: 58:43

I mean, I know a bit about the conference, but maybe it's a chance to share kind of, you know, your vision of the conference and kind of what it's all about for anybody listening.

Jessica: 58:50

Yeah, I mean, I'm super excited about it. There are going to be 18 speakers, including myself. And so I tried to keep it big but not overwhelmingly overstuffed. And the most important thing about it is that essentially what I designed this for is to do exactly what I do in my business coaching with new voices and new angles on it. You know, so that a lot of people who are coming in just do stuff I don't do.

Jessica: 59:16

The point is that the day one is focused on capacity, time, taking control and agency over your decision making. So there's a couple of things. I'm going to have a live interview with Oliver Berkman first. And well, not necessarily first, we can get in earlier and watch other stuff because it's pre recorded. You will be there, Marie, and some other people who are doing stuff that has to do more with sort of automations and getting more out of less ideas.

Jessica: 59:47

And all with a view to, you know, so many people who the target audience for this conference are people who are like we've been talking about their mid career, expert in a lot of stuff, probably do work that people love and think is awesome. And yet they're finding themselves working way too many hours, having a hard time saying no to stuff, deciding what's in and out. They're doing stuff perhaps that's like not at their peak, you know, abilities, like it's not that interesting anymore, but this is what they can get paid for easily. And, you know, all those kinds of things. So really like looking at those, that constellation of problems that comes in the middle of a creative career of one kind or another, not necessarily capital C Creative, you know, but somebody who's an entrepreneur and doing cool stuff, you can get stuck in a lot of patterns.

Jessica: 01:00:43

So trying to break all those things. So day one is around time and agency. And day two is around money and business models. So Tara is going to be speaking about business models. And Michelle Warner is going to be speaking about relationship marketing versus traffic marketing.

Jessica: 01:01:00

So this whole thing we're talking about, like, do you want a big audience or not? You know, is your work set up for that or not? Jacquette Timmins is coming in talking about aligning your pricing with your sort of personal needs and ethical compass and stuff like that. So that's about like the system, the underlying system of how you're trying to make money, trying to get that in line. And then day three is about leveraging your creativity in your business.

Jessica: 01:01:26

So Jay Acunso is going to come in talking about finding your voice and speaking. Matt, my husband, is going to be there and he's going be talking about using creative constraints to spur innovation. Awesome. And just a confirmation from Tarzan Kay, who's going to come in talking about using your voice and email and stuff. So they've got really cool people.

Jessica: 01:01:45

But basically, those are the three big pillars for me. It's time, money, creativity. Those three things have to be in a business that works for the kind of people we are. All of those things have to be present. And they can get really out of whack.

Jessica: 01:02:00

So we're trying to create, you know, a place and a structure for getting that all to work, you know? And so I think that the talks themselves, I've listened I did a bunch of interviews, I've listened to a bunch of them, and they're amazing. They're really great. Really excited about what we're going to be bringing and then also adding this extra layer with the implementation kit, which is this upgrade to be able to I'm doing integration sessions each day with this workbook, in theory, have to write the workbook, where people are going to be able to I'm going to try to prompt people with questions and decision making prompts to figure out, is this something you need to pay attention to right now or not? Is this the right thing for you to be doing?

Jessica: 01:02:44

Is there a question that you're trying to answer, you know, with this session? So it doesn't just become like one of those things where you just kind of everything's interesting, but then what do you do with any of it? Like that's the big problem I see with conferences.

Marie: 01:02:57

I love that. Yeah, I'm very impressed with all the onboarding, like as a speaker, the expectation setting and just how you've organized it. So I'm excited to be a part of it and excited to even just participate and see what comes out.

Ben: 01:03:10

Yeah, it's awesome. To see it. What it'll line up.

Jessica: 01:03:12

Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited.

Ben: 01:03:14

I wanna finish with just an observation because you started at the top by saying that you've really never done the same thing twice and that you it didn't help you a lot. But I listening to you describe the experience of this con conference kind of actually says to me how much that has actually helped you because of the the uniqueness of perspective and all these, like, throughputs that make a really well rounded holistic experience as a creative is, like what your special sauce seems to be to me. So I feel like that that has helped you a lot. In fact, might be the thing that makes you Jessica able.

Jessica: 01:03:52

Thank you. That's really, really lovely here. And and I wanna revise what I was saying earlier in that what I meant to say is that from a commercial point of view, as an author, it's not a super helpful thing to jump all over the map in terms of developing an audience and growing that audience. You know, I have like a bunch of different audiences that are Venn diagrams and overlap in different ways. So it was really hard to build something.

Jessica: 01:04:19

That said, I totally agree with you that my checkered past is why I can be who I am today. And this is actually something I talk to people about all the time. I used to have a course about marketing and we talked about this whole thing of the thing that you're most embarrassed by is probably the thing that you should be talking about the most. Know, this is like actually your special sauce. It's actually the it's what will bring the cool people who are the right people for you out of the woodwork is talking about these things.

Jessica: 01:04:50

I really believe that. And I definitely, as I pivoted from being a cartoonist to being a business owner, and like focusing on, you know, making my own books to helping other people do stuff, there was definitely grief that went into that. Know, there was definitely a moment of like, what does this all mean? I mean, has my whole career been pointless because I'm walking away from this right now? And what I came to is pretty much what you said, Ben, that like I couldn't be coach I am now.

Jessica: 01:05:16

I couldn't be the teacher I am that I've been all along. I couldn't have these kinds of ideas in this perspective without having gone through what I went through. And I'm grateful to all of those different parts of me and those sort of the me's that did those things in the past.

Marie: 01:05:33

Yeah, really cool trajectory. It was awesome to dig into it a little bit more. Yeah, maybe you can share what's the best place for people to kind of stay on top of what you're working on and find out more about your work?

Jessica: 01:05:44

Well, I am super terrible at social media. I'm hoping to hire my daughter, so maybe you'll get

Marie: 01:05:50

better at Very cool.

Jessica: 01:05:52

Yeah. So probably the best place to go is just to jessicaabell.com. And I hope that I will see a lot of your listeners at the Autonomous Creative Conference. Absolutely. Thanks so much

Ben: 01:06:02

for

Marie: 01:06:03

hanging out with us Thanks

Jessica: 01:06:05

for having me. It's so fun to talk about this stuff.