Bryan Wright is a captivating storyteller with lifelong experience as a production, staging, audio engineer, recording artist, and prolific creator, serving clients of all sizes, including behemoths like eBay and PayPal. His work has been published by media giants like Forbes, Business Insider, and TechCrunch.
We had so much fun chatting with the incredibly creative Bryan Wright of Gravity Images and are in love with the powerful simplicity of his website!
Tune in to hear more about Bryan, including:
- His liquid smart 😉
- How Bryan fell into a new career within his old one within a huge major corporation, (a great example of “luck” happening to the prepared).
- What it takes to create the most effective content
- How he accidentally made a 40 minute video that was featured on the biggest mountaineering site on the internet.
- How Bryan worked through fears of doing/trying a new career and how his own boss at PayPal encouraged him to seek new opportunities.
- Bryan’s valuable advice on how to get a large corporate client, whether you’re on the inside as an employee or on the outside, seeking access.
- Opportunities entrepreneurs have that big corporations don’t.
- Opportunities for freelancers to get clients.
- Best social network for corporate clients and how to use it.
- Things freelance writers—and any kind of freelancer—can do to get clients.
- How Bryan was able to save the company millions of dollars.
- The things Bryan struggled/struggles with:
- When taking the leap to new things in corporate and then from corporate.
- In being an entrepreneur/solopreneur
- Following your passion versus stepping out of your comfort zone.
- The essentials of good branding and good writing.
Inspiring Quotes from Bryan:
I call this [coffee] liquid smart!
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
If you can’t put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you’re not going to be able to have the most effective content.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
You have to do what you love. As an artist… you’re going to be the best at the things that you love. But you also have to do things that scare you. The things that scare you are the things that are going to push you [to grow].
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
If you keep creating, somebody’s going to pay attention to it. Keep creating, keep doing the right things. Follow your passion.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
Artists, if left to their own devices, will never finish a project.
Sylvia Massy, world class music producer
Bryan’s former drummer partner’s advice on “just shipping” your work. Getting it out there, and getting it done!
How about we just get it done because getting it out, we can actually sell it, and we can figure out other stuff.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
[Creatives]…we get lost in our heads. So I’ve learned that it’s really important to focus on what’s important.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
Fear is important. The things that push you hard and make you go, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this.’ Don’t default to comfort.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
There is tremendous power in simplicity.
~Bryan Wright, Gravity Images
Bryan is a delight! Enjoy!
Links:
Bryan’s AWESOME website: GravityImages.us; it’s an elegant example of the power and beauty of simplicity.
Screw the Nine to Five with Josh and Jill Stanton
Kate Erickson, EOFire. Bryan said, “I was just blown away by some of the techniques that she’s used.”
The Mastery Journal, by John Lee Dumas
Bryan’s interview with world famous music producer, Sylvia Massy, that was used to teach corporate creatives how to think out of the box
Full Episode Transcription:
Devani Alderson: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the I Create Daily Podcast. I Create Daily is a movement for creators serious about their art. I’m Devani.
LeAura Alderson: I’m LeAura, and our guest today is Bryan Wright, founder of Gravity Images, which is a video photography and audio production company. Bryan has lifelong experience as a production, staging, and audio engineer, recording artist, and prolific creator, serving clients of all sizes, including behemoths like eBay and PayPal, but that’s not all. His company, Gravity Images, photography and video work has been published by media giants like Forbes, Business Insider, and Tech Crunch.
Welcome, Bryan.
Bryan Wright: Thank you very much. What an intro! You guys are awesome.
LeAura Alderson: So are you.
Devani Alderson: Definitely. It’s awesome to have you, and as we were just saying before we started recording, this is your first video podcast interview, so now we get to turn the camera on you. So, what is your story? How did you get started in your creative work? How did it become your life work?
Bryan Wright: First of all, before I get into any of that, I felt like it was almost disingenuous to you guys to show up on a podcast with coffee-obsessed people without some coffee of my own.
LeAura Alderson: Absolutely.
Devani Alderson: Amazing.
LeAura Alderson: Absolutely.
Bryan Wright: So, I got some really, really good coffee. It’s like my safety blanket for this.
LeAura Alderson: Nice. Well, you’re in California, right?
Bryan Wright: Yes. San Francisco Bay area.
LeAura Alderson: San Francisco, and we’re in North Carolina, so we’re on eastern time. Three coffees ahead of you.
Bryan Wright: [00:01:33] I call this liquid smart.
How did I get started? Wow. It’s been a really incredible journey because I’ve spent most of my life … There are a bunch of things that I do, and most of my life and work has been spent as a writer. I’ve been writing professionally for a really long time for, again, some of those same big corporations all over the world. I’ve been in Silicon Valley since ’99, so been doing it here for awhile. I like to say I’ve been laid off from some of the best companies in the world.
But doing that was kind of what my life was all about, and it’s about creating. It’s about finding the right message for customers. It’s about putting yourself in customers’ shoes, and if you can’t … For me, my philosophy was always if you can’t put yourself in your customers’ shoes, you’re not going to be able to have the most effective content that you can.
So, I did that for a lot of years, and in the last … Boy, I started working for eBay/PayPal in 2007, and I was there for about ten years. I started there as a writer, and about halfway through that, one of my mentors came to me. She was a VP, and she had some familiarity with the fact that I had just started getting into video and photography and some other things as a result of some other hobbies that I have. She came to me one day, she pulled me aside, and she goes, “We’ve got a whole bunch of footage that these executives shot at a Home Depot release that we’re having for this product that we’re going to put out. I wonder if you know anybody who could cut this together for me for Global All Hands in four days,” wink, wink.
I was like, “Okay. What do you need?” She sent me the footage. I took a look at it. It was completely unusable. She trusted me enough to actually go out and do this on my own, so what I told her was, “Hey, we’ve got to go get every single one of these executives.” These were just guys shooting cameras, nothing of themselves. Nothing of them talking. Nothing of them talking about strategy or anything, so it was basically just a bunch of garbage-y B-roll by people who don’t know how to shoot a camera.
I said, “We have to re-shoot this whole thing. This is too much.” And getting executives from big corporations in one place all at the same time is very nearly impossible, especially with a four-day window. So, we got lucky, actually. We got really lucky. There was an All Hands [mtg] that was happening with all the executives. It was like an executive retreat at a local hotel just down the street from us, and I said, “Let’s go over there, and let’s just write up five questions. I’m going to set up a set with my own camera gear.” It was just me and my camera stuff. And I said, “I’ll just do some interviews with these guys, and they can just tap the next person on the shoulder and send them out and go back to their meeting, and it should be really easy.”
So we did that. I hastily cut a hilarious cut of this thing together within that four days. It aired to the entire global organization, and the second that it did, I got dog-piled on by everybody in the corporation worldwide. They were like, “How do I do this for my group? What is this video? How can I do this? This costs so much to do. Who did this?”
So, while continuing on my writer journey, and I was actually a very senior person within the writing organization at PayPal. It’s part of the user experience and user interface and design team, which is under product. I was doing that while all these requests were coming in, and I just talked to my management and I said, “Do you want me to do this stuff?” They’re like, “Yes, go. Just do the thing. If you can hold it down, just go.” “Okay.”
So, I started doing it, and about 15 productions all over the world later on my own equipment with no support from anybody except travel budget and stuff, it was clearly obvious that this was a real need inside the corporation, so what I did was … At that time, there was a different VP over my organization, and I went to that VP and I said, “Listen, obviously there’s a huge need for this worldwide. How about we just give me some money and a space and we’ll make this my job for real.” He goes, “Here’s a quarter million bucks. Go build me a studio.”
LeAura Alderson: Wow!
Devani Alderson: Wow! That’s like every creator’s dream, right?
LeAura Alderson: Yeah.
Devani Alderson: Especially inside of a job. If you’re not on your own doing your own thing. It’s like if you’re inside a company and you have this creative outlet, or this opportunity for an amazing creative outlet, which is a really interesting segue to how if you are working with a company, how can you expand your role and bring up, like, “Hey, I have this creative potential that we could be utilizing,” and also just sort of as a way to also have that secured day job, which a lot of people are worried about. How does the money work? So that’s interesting.
Bryan Wright: That’s a good point that you make because, honestly, as a creator, it can be … I don’t know. Creators have a type, shall we say. I’m one of those particular types. I’m really good at creating stuff, but I’m really bad at marketing stuff, or caring about the data behind it. Or if it involves numbers, I run screaming.
Devani Alderson: I can relate. I can relate for sure.
Bryan Wright: Yeah.
I like to call this … Anyway, just to finish that out, before I move on to answer your question, I just ended up doing that. I built a studio for PayPal. It was just me for two years. It was run and gun. I was me with a camera all over the place, and I was the audio guy, and the lighting guy, and the electrician, and the gaffer, and the grip, and the director, and the producer, and the editor. I was everything, doing all of it.
Eventually, I got some people, and we built it up. It ultimately became a pretty big space. About 2,000 square feet of world class production space inside the company. So, we had a space, and it was beautiful. But that whole journey, to your point, Devani, is this whole idea … The thing that helped spark me and push me in this direction to get to Gravity Images, to get to Crash Force Camera, to get to whatever I’ve got going right now is this idea of being able to hone your entrepreneurial chops while having the support of a big corporation. It’s like you said. It’s kind of like entrepreneurship with training wheels because that budget. You’ve got people who believe in you. You’ve got your support, your network, and you’ve got all the resources behind you to make this happen that you don’t have to put out there yourself.
I call it intra-preneurship. I don’t even know if that’s a word.
LeAura Alderson: It is.
Devani Alderson: It is, yeah.
[NOTE: A newer term is corpreneurs and intrapreneur/intrapreneurship].
Bryan Wright: But basically that’s what I was doing, and that’s how I honed my craft. I was so terrified. Terrified! My lifelong occupation of a writer, to go, “Oh, I’m going to go do this now.” Left turn. What’s going to happen? No clue. Complete blackness out in front of me. I had no idea.
And it can be really, really scary, but it’s because of that fear … But I had belief in myself, too. I’ve got a lot of the skills from lifelong audio engineering, long before I ever got to photography and video, that sort of translate well. Software workflows translate well. I know a lot about it.
“I accidentally made a 40 minute video that was featured on the biggest mountaineering site on the internet.”
LeAura Alderson: Accidentally.
Devani Alderson: Just in your free time.
Bryan Wright: It was literally my first film I ever made, and it turned out to be this 40 minute thing, and they picked it up as the Trip Report of the Month.
LeAura Alderson: Wow.
Devani Alderson: That’s amazing.
Bryan Wright [00:09:36] I got a lot of traffic off of that, but I only made it because I was out in the wild with some stupid camera, just shooting dumb video clips. I was uploading dumb single 25 second video clips to my YouTube channel and just being ridiculous. And I got back from this one particular expedition in 2011, and I went, “You know, rather than doing this clips thing, I could probably just make a movie out of this.”
So, I made that, and then you go, and then you go, and then you go. And so in order to sustain that creativity, just to answer your question, it’s having some fear, I think, is important. Having something that you’re very passionate about. The things that you care about are the things that you’re most going to be successful at. You need to be able to believe in yourself enough and your own skills enough that even if you don’t know the answer right now, you know that you can figure it out.
I think that’s a really important aspect of being successful in this way. So, once I left PayPal, I had had all this experience. By this time, I had been managing people. I had been managing hardcore IT infrastructure. I had been doing all these really serious things that I could’ve gone to another company, like a Google or a Facebook or a whomever and said, “Hey, I want to do this for you guys,” but I just was like, “I can do this. It’s going to be basically taking a few steps back.” I chose to be poor, if you will, and that’s sort of a joke, but it is. You’ve got to roll it back. I don’t have the people. I don’t have the giant financial resources. I don’t have all this stuff anymore, but I can do this, and I can make it go.
Through the amazing help of some really key people that I met at the time, Josh and Jill Stanton of Screw the Nine to Five, and some other folks that have been really influential in helping push me toward being creative every single day and being able to make creativity my job, you just kind of go toward it. Hopefully that answers the question, but that repetitive belief in you. That having the drive to actually go out and do it. That being scared of not knowing what’s out there.
My mentor that asked me to create that very first video for PayPal, she was on the back end of me trying to make this transition, and I was kind of sitting in her office going, “Hey, is this a terrible idea? I feel like I’m just terrified. This feels like the worst thing ever. I’m stable in my writing career.” And she said, “What’s the worst thing that can happen? You’re not going to get fired for wanting to take on more responsibility, so just go ask. I happen to know.” So she was like, “Go! Get going.”
LeAura Alderson: That’s fantastic.
Bryan Wright: So you just have to do it.
LeAura Alderson: You were so fortunate to have that supportive, open-minded, visionary person to help guide you in that direction. One of the things … I mean, there’s so many different aspects we could talk about of the story that you just shared, one of which is some of our audience are writers and would like to know … Well, most of them want to know is can I make a living at my art? Some of them, as writers … Like, you were working for, on payroll, full time for PayPal, eBay, as a writer. So, yes you can.
This is the thing that most people don’t realize. A huge company didn’t yet have its own video production team, and part of the reason is because all this movement into video and accessibility of video, and proliferation of video and audio is still fairly new, especially for larger corporations that are big ships that move slowly. And so what many creatives have as an opportunity either if they’re already working full time, as you were, or if they’re freelance, looking for some bigger clients is that there are corporations that are definitely hiring freelancers on temporary basis or even an ongoing basis to fill some of those needs. So that’s one opportunity. Same thing with writers.
If someone was on the outside of a company like that, looking to try and get a contract, do you have any advice of how they might approach them?
Bryan Wright: This is something that, looking back on my corporate career and looking at the way that my video role at eBay/PayPal sort of unfolded, I feel like one of the best things that somebody could do on the outside of an organization like that is … It’s the same thing that I did. I just happened to have access to the internals, but basically do the thing that you want to do for them. Prove that there is a need. If you just write emails and say, “Hey, I’m a really great writer. I can really do these things. Blah, blah, blah,” that’s great, but everybody says that.
What people want to see is action. Corporations are especially blind. Big companies are especially blind. They don’t know what they even need, and the big value proposition… I’ll give a good example that can apply to writing, it can apply to video, or any other creative discipline within a big corporate structure. They were addicted to spending a ton of money on agencies to create video, and that’s all fine. A lot of big companies do this. However, if you look at that situation, there’s a marketing team or a brand team that has to interface with that creative organization. They’re often hiring more than one agency to create more than one video, and sometimes the marketing team or the brand team is not using the same agency as the product team, or this team, or this micro team, or this micro team. Hundreds of these little cells inside the corporation that, because of the nature of the organization, don’t really get talked about amongst one another, or consolidated in a way that makes sense.
So, what’s going on is, and this is true of writers and other disciplines, but they are spending a lot of money, and by extension, time. The brand team and the marketing team have to explain the product, what the product does, who the audience is, what the point of it is, in order for the creatives at the agency to even be able to begin to go, “Okay, well, hmm. Maybe let’s go away for a week and think about what this video, written piece, marketing piece, micro site, whatever needs to be.” And then they come back four or five times in a row having meetings and more meetings and more meetings getting up to speed on this thing.
If you know that company and you’re inside that company already … I had the advantage of being on the inside to know that I already knew these products. As a writer, I covered every one of the products across the company, so I kind of knew how these things are working, who they’re targeted at, all the other things. And I could just go straight to the team and go, “Hey, how about you don’t spend $150,000 and I make this for you for $15,000 or $20,000 instead?” They’re like, “Holy crap.” “And also, I’m just downstairs. You can come down and knock on my door any time, and we only have to have one meeting to explain all these other things.”
Through that, I was able to save the company millions of dollars. Literally in my first year of operation with just me, I think I calculated out something like $3.4 million I saved. The number of productions I created, if you had taken that number to an agency versus what I cost to do it, it’s a big dollar figure.
I guess what I’m saying is for other creatives on the outside looking to try and figure this out, how to crack into that either on contract or something else, do the thing that you can see the opportunity for for that company. These companies don’t talk internally. They don’t know what they need internally often.
And what I mean by “do the thing” is, for me, that sometimes means just making a contact, developing a relationship, and then doing a project for free. Honestly, if your heart is in it and your passion is there, it’s going to come through. It seems like free work, but the only way that I was able to make this happen inside a company that… Like, if I had gone to my mentor and said, “Hey, you know what? We need a video studio.” They’re like, “No, we don’t. We’ve got agencies. Bye. Catch you later.” That would’ve been the end of that conversation. But because they saw something that came out the other side, they went, “Wow. Holy …” That was the tipping point that made them go, “Huh. Maybe we need something like this.” That was me working for free, because I already had a job as a writer and I was holding down my writing job at the same time running around the world doing these 15 or so productions that ultimately netted me the thing.
Devani Alderson: And that’s important. The offering value. It’s almost like instead of just showing up with your resume and being like, “This is all the stuff I can do,” which the 15, 20, 30, 100 other people are doing as well. It’s like showing up and like, “Let me show you my resume. Let me show you what I can provide to you, and the back end value to your company that it’ll have.” I know a lot of people are starting to speak up about the value of doing free work, the value of just showing up and adding the value of the content that you’re creating first. Because a lot of times, people promise so many things, and so now we’re almost wary to, “Oh, you’re promising all this stuff. Are you actually going to deliver, or are we just wasting our time?”
Their side is … You know and you have the confidence that you can pull it off, but the company, no matter how big or small they are, they’re looking at it like, “Well, I have no idea if you can actually pull this off. You say you can.”
LeAura Alderson: And you’re just one voice in a sea of people.
Bryan Wright: Right, exactly.
So, for writers specifically, I will say that some of my clients are some big names in entrepreneurship out there right now, and as a video creator, I have to work with the writers and the web developers in order to make cohesive web spaces for these people. In doing that, I used to be on the other side of that where I was the writer working with the video guy and the web people to make that thing happen. But having heard a number of these folks going through struggles with content people, with writers, and when they finally find the writer that they didn’t know could do the job but they discovered through their work that they are just killing it, it transformed their business, honestly.
That’s what I’m saying. These folks that are the writers that were discovered by my clients, they were definitely looking for work. I’m not exactly sure of the nature of the way that those relationships developed, but, honestly, if you can show somebody …
Like, take a company’s webpage. Just rewrite the whole thing. Cut it down from three scrollable pages to a couple of paragraphs. One of the things that I used to do all the time, to the dismay of the legal team at eBay, was to take terms and conditions, which are awful … Awful reading! Awful. Nobody has ever read one of those in the history of the world. But my job in certain projects was to take terms, like an agreements thing, and cut it down. Take all the legal speak out. Completely rewrite it without changing the intent or the meaning or the legal voracity of the content itself. And the legal people were like, “Ah! Don’t touch it!” But in working with them, you actually could read the thing. It’s like a normal language that people understood. It did not change what the legality of the content meant.
So, that’s, of course, one of a billion opportunities, but for writers specifically, that’s something that I would look at. That’s really boring writing, but you can take any webpage on any website. So many of these big corporations have the worst websites.
One of the biggest pain points for PayPal was their Help site. Nobody wants to touch it. It’s awful, boring content, and blah, blah, blah. So, there’s this backwater in the company, and every company that size has one that’s a backwater where everybody’s like, “Ew.”
Devani Alderson: It’s like the elephant in the room that we all just … “Eeeh.”
Bryan Wright: Yeah, and because they’re that way, they also don’t get funding. They don’t get buy-in from the executives. They don’t get a sponsorship. All these things from internal that an organization needs to succeed.
People, creators of all kinds … Whether that’s UX, UI, writers, video, audio, artists, crafts people, whatever … You can find those areas where … It’s not that hard. Everything is out on the internet these days, and if we’re talking about web-based workflows and entrepreneurship online.
I work from my house here in San Jose, but I’m traveling all over the world making films for people. So, this is not something you have to do right here. You can go out and find those opportunities really easy. It does take some work, and you might need to make a few phone calls, and do some social engineering. This and that, and oops, randomly dial a random number inside a corporation and go, “Hey, is Bob there?” And they’re like, “Bob who?” Work your way through the company until you find somebody that’s the right person, because all of the normal pathways into these organizations are sort of … They have gatekeepers that are designed to eject people that don’t seem to have the right message coming in. So you can get around all that stuff pretty easily, but you do have to find that opportunity, and you do have to be able to do something with it and show the right person the right kind of thing that’s going to make them go, “Wow, I need this.”
LeAura Alderson: So that’s the tricky part. So, a couple things come to mind as you’re talking. One is for people looking for freelance work and landing big contracts, instead of spending time as an Upwork person to establish themselves for a ridiculously low rate, they could potentially scan a company that they love, scan their site, and create something of value. Whether it’s video or writing or product idea, whatever it may be, and then present that to the company in about the same amount of time it would be for them to try to peddle themselves for a little just to get good reviews. They could actually be using that same time to land bigger, very lucrative contracts.
The biggest barrier being, as you indicated, the gatekeepers. So you have landed some big contracts with corporations since leaving PayPal on your own, right?
Bryan Wright: Yeah. I’ve done a little bit of work for some big companies here and there. Companies like VMware, the company that provides PCOS operating systems on your Mac. They’re just up the road here, so I’ve done a bunch of that kind of work. But when I was at eBay, it was like the entire eBay family of companies, which was like 30 or something. I was like Red Laser and Milo and Stub Hub, and all these companies I was doing work for, and it was all different and all felt that way.
I will say that … Crap. I lost my train of thought on this one. I’ll come back to it.
LeAura Alderson: Okay. Go ahead. You got it?
Bryan Wright: Almost there.
LeAura Alderson: We were talking about access. Like if you didn’t already have an inside to these large corporations, how do you get beyond the gatekeepers? How do you ever get them to look at the work that you created for them as an example for free?
Bryan Wright: That’s a good question. That is a good question. Before I get into that one, because I do have a couple of thoughts on that one, I also want to point out that what I’m talking about here is not exactly … I mentioned earlier that creatives have a type. Doing this kind of sleuthing and communicating is often not in the wheelhouse of the stereotypical creative. Again, that’s painting it with a broad brush, but it is true that a lot of creative folks don’t like getting out there, putting themselves out there, having really intense conversations with people, socially interacting and some of those other things. There are barriers that we place on ourselves to that, too. I happen to be a loudmouth. I like to talk.
Devani Alderson: Extrovert.
Bryan Wright: Yeah. But what I think a lot of creatives in general do love, and especially this is UX people, UI people, even writers … I’ve done this so much. I love solving hard problems. I love putting pieces of things together that make something awesome. And that’s really all this process of getting around these gatekeepers is. It’s observing the places on websites or public information where you might be able to have an opportunity. Being able to work your way through a system on the phone sometimes, and I would say the phone is a great way to go. Sometimes email. Sometimes that’s LinkedIn, sometimes that’s Recruiter, sometimes that’s other people.
But working your way through that system in a way that allows you to put together all the pieces of this puzzle that forms a more complete picture, that they go, “Hmm, this actually is an opportunity here.” I’ll say that.
So, to answer your question, one of the best ways you can get into some of these people is on LinkedIn. Every single big corporation has an HR department. Inside every HR department are recruiters for that company, and those recruiters are out there. Their names are out there. Who they recruit for and who they work for are out there. Yeah, you could go to a temp agency, like a Vitamin T, or an Aquent. There’s a million, million, million … Like Beyond.com. There’s a million job sites you could go to. Go to LinkedIn. Find the internal recruiters for the company that you want to work for.
Have a dialogue. That person’s job is all about making the company better with the right personnel, so what you’re doing is you’re lobbing something right into their wheelhouse. They’re like, “Wow, I got this really great person. Where can we find a place for this person?” You do have to do relationship building. You’re going to have to have a conversation. Sorry, creative people. But it’s about developing relationships. That might be an online relationship.
Recruiters of all kinds absolutely love taking people to lunch, or going to lunch with people to understand what they do, why they do it, what drives them, what makes them good at what they do. I’ve done this a thousand times, having been laid off from some of the best companies in the world. I’ve had a lot of lunches with the next company, or their recruiters, or some temp agency. That’s a really easy one for people to start getting.
That’s a great “skirt the switchboard.” “Press one for this person. Press two for this person.” Skip all that. It’s the attendant on the phone who’s trying to, even if it’s a small company, it’s going to be only one person who is often the gatekeeper, and you can get around that.
But this is for bigger corporations. They’re always going to have those people. And those people are always looking to be successful themselves, and for them to be successful, they have to find the right people that fit the right thing. If you’re the right person and you have that ability to develop that relationship, they’re going to find you and they’re going to put you in there.
Devani Alderson: And you’ve made their job so much easier, too, because you’ve literally dumped an opportunity in their lap, and that’s your work. That’s a good point.
Bryan Wright: That’s right. It’s all your stuff.
Devani Alderson: Linking back with the next question, you were talking earlier about how you do the thing that you want to do so you can continue doing the thing you want to do. Whether it’s for yourself, whether it’s for a company, whatever your creative passion lies. What do you do on a daily basis to keep doing your thing? Do you have habits? Do you do rituals? Do you just show up and you’re like, “Here I am. I’m going to make one video today?” What do you do? What are your routines around creativity?
Bryan Wright: That is a good question. In a corporate environment where you have a lot of structure, that’s a lot easier to do. It almost happens by default because if you’re not on board and part of the machine, you’re the one that’s screwing up, and therefore you’re not going to be on that team for long. So you spin yourself up to speed, and you find the dynamic of the team.
When you’re sitting, working from home by yourself, every entrepreneur knows this. It’s really easy to go, “I think I’m going to have a glass of wine. I’m going to [inaudible [00:31:35].” Thinking about the things you need to do is not doing the things that you need to do, although sometimes it feels like if I think about it enough, maybe I’ll actually do something. I swear I’m going to do this thing, but I just need a snack right now. Right after that snack, I’m going to get to this thing.
This is a constant battle for me. Finding the ritual has been pretty easy for me up until the last, I’d say, three or four months actually. In the last three or four months, I’ve started running into these barriers where I’m just feeling resistance in myself to actually doing certain kinds of things. And in examining that feeling, I look at it and have gone, “What are the reasons that I’m starting to feel that decline?” One of those big reasons is the lack of that structure. I’m pretty self-motivated. I’m pretty able to get stuff done when I know what I’m supposed to do, but at corporate, it requires lists. And it still requires lists, but I stopped getting away from list because I get too confident in myself. I’m like, “Pah! I could just totally knock this thing out tomorrow. It’s no big deal.” Go to sleep, wake up the next day and go, “Wow, I’m hungry.” And you don’t even remember that you had this thing to do.
So, keeping track of stuff is really important. It sounds so dumb, I know, but for me, if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or I don’t plan what I’m supposed to be doing tomorrow, it often doesn’t get done. Not because I don’t want to do it or not because I’m resisting sometimes, but sometimes I just don’t remember.
Devani Alderson: You have to set yourself up. Like any habit, creativity is a habit and a muscle, and if you’re not setting yourself up to do that, then it’s not going to happen. If you don’t set yourself up to go to the gym every day or to work out every day, it’s not going to happen. If you don’t set yourself up to go to work every day, it’s not going to happen. It’s the same thing with your own endeavors. It’s not going to happen if you don’t say, “Hey, this is the timeframe to write the article, to contact the HR department, or whatever.”
LeAura Alderson: Yeah, and your honesty on that is really appreciated because you struggle along with many other people on that same thing. That’s a very normal thing. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why some people don’t choose entrepreneurship or don’t think they could, or maybe even aren’t suited for it.
I would think that, on the one hand, you would be perfectly … So what you know is the kind of structure you had in corporate, and how that was required. It was not optional. So then it’s just a matter of inculcating that system, that design, designing your day, to be the same unequivocal thing for yourself. Do the favor for yourself that you had to do in corporate, because we know what happens when we have the most productive days. We are the most happy. At the end, we end up with more free time, in a way, typically, and more comfort at engaging in the things that might have had us meandering otherwise.
Bryan Wright: That’s right. That’s right.
One of the best things I’ve seen recently that I heard at the exact time that I needed to hear it was just a few weeks ago in Austin. I was there to shoot an event called Screw You Live. If you’re familiar with Screw the Nine to Five. That’s the [inaudible [00:35:02] product. Screw You Live is an elite membership thing. They have a great crowd there, but as a byproduct of me going to shoot the thing, I also get to hear all the things. In hearing all the things, there were two very powerful people there. Some of the earliest people I ever met as a result of my relationship with Josh and Jill, and it was John Lee Dumas and his [significant other], Kate.
There are lots of things that make this couple a great couple, but she is the systems person to his other skills. So what she’s brought to his business and their business is this idea of systematizing things in a way that helps even the smallest people run like a multi-billion dollar corporation.
There was a presentation on this idea, and her name is Kate Erickson.
LeAura Alderson: We interviewed her. Her interview will show up before yours.
Bryan Wright: Very cool. She’s amazing. I was just blown away by some of the techniques that she’s used. Her story goes all the way back to being a corporate admin for some of the same kinds of corporations that I work for, and not being valued, and not feeling like there’s a future, and wondering what she’s going to do with life. And then realizing, “Hey, I’m really good at X, Y, and Z. Why don’t we just do that?” Having the courage to do that is really amazing.
I heard her message. Josh and Jill actually presented right after, and they had a whole bunch of stuff on this topic, too. But what I knew walking into that was that I was going to order this thing, and it’s sitting right here by my desk. It’s the Mastery Journal from John Lee Dumas. It’s about being productive. It’s about systematizing. It’s about building methods and practices that help you get things done. The methods that JLD uses are things are really powerful stuff. Some things that people don’t think about like batching and other things like that.
That’s one thing. And then there was a second thing there that I have started doing. It’s kind of this idea of beginning to plan out your next day the day before. That used to be automatic, but as you fall out of those routines that are forced upon you by a corporate organization, that stuff sort of falls away, and you get into your own patterns as a human. Your memory of the need for that begins to fade, and you don’t even realize it’s happening. So, when you start feeling these weird feelings of, “Wow, I’m not being productive. What’s going on?” It’s important to take a look back at yourself and go, “Why am I not doing that? What’s going on here that I can fix and adjust?”
Rituals-wise … Mandatory. [Bryan holds up coffee cup].
LeAura Alderson: Yes.
Devani Alderson: Coffee, for those listening and not viewing. Just audio.
Bryan Wright: The next thing that I do that I make a point of that helps me be more productive is … You notice I didn’t get dressed up for you guys. This is how I get dressed every day like I’m going to work. [If I don’t get dressed] my bathrobe helps me not do stuff.
LeAura Alderson: Yeah, absolutely. We do the same.
Bryan Wright: Yeah. I love making music. I make a lot of music here, and doing that in your bathrobe is great, but that’s not what’s making me my current … I’m not making a living off of making music right now. So I get dressed, get some coffee, and not in that order. Actually, the reverse order. Get coffee, get dressed, shower, put myself together. Have my day plan ready to go, and I am just now starting to get that machine going back up again. Winding up the routine again through the Mastery Journal and some other stuff.
It’s really important. For me, it is. It was shocking to me how much I struggled with this in the last few months. I was like, “What is going on?” I’m a self-starter, I’m a do-er, I’m a this, I’m a that, and I’m just not doing it right now. What is the barrier?
Devani Alderson: That’s such a good point because my mom has always been really good …
Bryan Wright:
Devani Alderson: Oh, sorry. Can we hear? Can we hear now? Uh oh.
Devani Alderson: All right. And we’re back guys.
LeAura Alderson: Looks like we got our sound back, and for the viewer and listener, it wouldn’t have been that long of a pause, because we paused the recording. But we’re back with Bryan. We were talking about rituals and routines. It was a good place to actually pick up on the next thing, and I appreciate your sharing about that. You are using the Mastery Journal.
One of the things that we’re doing … In fact, that’s one of the reasons we created this whole movement, I Create Daily Movement, is that knowing, bottom line, if we just keep working on our passion and doing our art every day, something toward it every day, then results will come about. It’s creating the discipline and structure around that that works for us.
Devani Alderson: And accountability, too, because that’s the thing you have at a job. Whether you love your job or don’t love your job, either way, you have the accountability because if you don’t show up and if you don’t do the work, or you don’t provide the results, somebody’s going to come knocking at your door and say, “Hey. You’ve got to do this.”
Bryan Wright: That’s right.
Devani Alderson: So, as personal creators in our own spaces, if we’re trying to be a creator inside somebody else’s company and we want to get that ball rolling, you have to create systems yourself to do that.
LeAura Alderson: Do you have about ten more minutes?
Bryan Wright: I’ve got as much time as you need more for.
LeAura Alderson: Okay, awesome. Now that we’ve been talking about productivity, we don’t want to step on your schedule for the day.
Bryan Wright: I’m yours for as long as you want me.
LeAura Alderson: Awesome.
Bryan Wright: If you don’t mind, I would love to talk about something about creatives because I think one of the biggest moments as a creative that I had as a realization of the way that tend to operate is we ge