🥸 Am I a Business Owner or an Artist? (or a Secret Third Thing)

Amelia [00:00:02]

[Music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Amelia [00:00:08]

I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds podcast studio. On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty.

Amelia [00:00:22]

Download your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig and join us as we do it all Off the Grid [music jams and fades out].

[1:17] Hello and welcome to Off The Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients, or as I like to think about it, a creative marketing podcast about sharing our work, making some money, and changing the world with energetic sovereignty and radical generosity.

I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio, the co-founder of the Lifestyle Business League. And today I am super excited to be here for our season two finale.

In this final episode of the season, we are going to dive deep into the exciting, challenging, maybe a little existential question of "am I a business owner or an artist or something else entirely?"

But before we take that journey together, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for being here, to reflect on everything that's happened in season two of the show, and to give you a little sneak peek, a heads up at what's coming for you, lovely Off the Grid listener, in 2024 and season three.

I've got some fun things up my sleeve and I want you to get excited about them.

So let's take a quick five to do all of that, and then we will dive into today's episode.

[2:43] First things first, I want to thank you for being here. And when I say thank you, I mean you, the singular, uniquely, wonderful, amazing person who is listening to this right now. I'm not using the collective you. I'm using the singular you.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to these episodes. Thank you for showing up for for yourself, for your work, for your business, for your practice. Thank you for continuing to believe that you can be successful without social media, or at least for continuing to ask the question to hold space for the possibility for yourself.

Thank you so much. I am humbled by how many people have heard these episodes from season two, And I want you to know that I am truly always thinking of you while I come up with episode ideas, while I'm recording, while I'm writing the show notes, while I'm making the emails. I really think of this as a dialogue. and I'm so grateful that it gets to be one because so many of you are reaching out, you're writing to me, you're joining the Interweb, you're telling me what's happening in your businesses and your lives so that I can better support you on the show.

And that means so much to me.

And I just, I can't say thank you enough. So thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you one more time.

[4:12] If this is your first episode, I wanna tell you all about what happened in season two. And if you've already heard every season two episode, let's recap together.

We kicked off the season with an episode on the five stages of leaving social media, where I looked back at my two years off of social and reflected on the stages of that journey.

It's interesting because something I said at the start of that episode is that before we even get to those stages, I think there's a grieving period that we have to go through. And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually did a whole episode on grieving social media.

So if you're finding yourself in a place where you're thinking about leaving social media, but you can't quite make the leap or you wanna know what's ahead of you in the process, I highly recommend those two episodes, the five stages of leaving social media and grieving social media, how to process your feelings about all the platforms.

[5:08] The second episode of this season was called 10 Things I Hate About Content Marketing.

This was one of the most popular episodes of the season. And in it, I talk about what content marketing is, why people love it, and then how it takes over our time and devalues our work in the process, maybe. If you're sick of making free things on the internet, and then just hoping that's going to bring you customers, that's a great episode to go to, to try to reconnect with if content marketing is right for you, or if you can abandon some of the things you've been doing that just aren't working for your business.

This season, we also did episodes on why I broke up with Pinterest, how this podcast makes money without a big audience, and the most popular of the season, To Substack or Not to Substack?, asking the question of whether or not Substack is a good platform for small business owners and small businesses.

[6:04] This season, we also had so many amazing conversations. I talked to Emily Gertenbach about SEO. I talked to Michelle Warner about relationship marketing. I talked to Kasia Manolas about blogging. I talked to Holly Wilkoszewski about email marketing. I had an amazing conversation my business coach Jessica Lackey about Cracks in Our Business Foundations. I also had some great conversations with small business owners and artists who were stepping back from social media in their business or who fully left the platforms. Those would be episodes with Melissa Word, with Natalie Ross of Earthspeak, with Lauren Ash of Black Girl and Om, with Mattia Mauree, and most recently with Nicole Antoinette. I especially loved that conversation around the question of how much is enough.

[6:58] There's just so much goodness in season two, and I really hope that while we're on break, you'll take the time to go back through the 30 episodes that we shared and explore the things that pique your interest, the things that feel either really exciting or maybe a little confronting. I often find that friction is where I'm really stepping towards something that might be a medicine that I need in my life.

And spend some time with those episodes, send them to a friend, chat about them together. I love to podcast club with my friends, let me tell you. In my Voxer chats with Grace and with Taylor, I am always being like, "okay, listen to this podcast episode and I need you to tell me what you think about it because I have so many thoughts, right?"

Like I love that and I truly hope that you might do that with one or more episodes of Off The Grid.

[7:46] Now that we've recapped season two, let me give you a little preview of what's coming up for the show in 2024.

So we're going to kick off 2024 with a free leaving social media challenge. I've created a five-day email course that will take you day by day through planning a social media hiatus or exit.

I want to invite all of us to step back from social media for a day, a week, a month, forever, whatever feels right for you, and do that together at the start of the year.

So that'll be coming up in January. There'll be an episode of the podcast to share when it's live, and then you will be able to join the challenge anytime that month.

It will be free for the month of January, and then it will be included inside the Interweb in an ongoing way.

So if you're listening to this episode and you're like, Amelia, it's February 2024, but I wanna do the challenge. That's beautiful. You can join the Interweb and you'll find the link in there to sign up and go through it on your own time.

[8:57] So once again, thank you for being here. Thank you for listening to season two of the show.

Thank you to all of my Interwebbers who have joined our membership. I can't wait to see you on the live calls next year. I'm so grateful for you and how you help me keep making this show. And I can't wait to support you in return. I've heard from so many of you about your beautiful radical businesses and we're just gonna have such a good time next year, growing and evolving and resting together.

All of that shared, are you guys ready to dive in to our final episode of season two? I mean, we already dove in, but, are you ready to dive into today's topic? I think it's time to talk about this question of, am I a business owner or an artist or a secret third thing? Let's dive in.

[splash sound]

[9:54] As we open this question, I want to give you a heads up about how this is going to go.

So I think that very often we feel like or we are told that we have to be a business owner or an artist. And it is set up as a dichotomy. And in today's episode, I'm going to start by doing that, I'm going to talk about the differences between being a business owner and being an artist. And I've identified what I think is like a clear core difference between the two endeavors. But I'm going to go ahead and tell you in advance that I think this is a false dichotomy. In our white supremacist patriarchal heteronormative capitalist society, I think that most dichotomies are kind of a lie and that we actually have a multiplicity of options and that most of the time when we're only given two, we can integrate and expand them. And so that's the gesture that this episode is going to make. We're going to start with the like this or that-ness of it, and then we're going to talk about like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that you have to be one or the other. Let's think about this differently. So this is not like a five-step quiz that's going to give you like one single identity that will sum you up in whole. I just don't believe in that.

[11:15] I love archetypes. I love playing with identity in those ways, but I'm not trying to tell you anything about yourself. Rather, I'm trying to invite you into exploration of the nuance of your own experience.

[11:28] So, let's take a deep breath and then I'm going to talk about the differences between business owners and artists.

Deep breath time, you ready? Let's inhale and exhale.

[breathes in & out]

[11:45] So here's what I think about business owners. I think at the core, business owners are engaged in commerce and that means that business owners have one goal, which is to make money.

I think that under capitalism, there are particular ways we make money and we might have a lot of feelings about that, but I think that even outside of capitalism -- yes, let's imagine it, a life outside of capitalism -- even outside of that system, businesses are about commerce and about money.

[12:22] Now, does that money have to be dollars and cents all of the time?

No, I believe in energetic exchange. I believe in trades. I believe in all of those things.

But let's just take money to be the shorthand for that transaction.

So again, business owners are engaged in commerce and their goal is to make money.

The way they do that is by creating something that other people need.

They see a need and they create something that serves and fulfills that need and they sell that thing.

So for me, business is more of an outside-in process. It starts with the needs of other people, and that informs what is created within the business, and then served up through commerce, and then sold in the realm of commerce. So again, I think of business as more of this outside-in gesture. It starts with other people's needs, and then comes in to our solutions for those needs, and then gets sold back out to them.

[13:28] You can't see the motions I'm making with my hands while I do this, but it is a circle.

I just think of the circle as starting outside of us and coming in and then going back out.

I emphasize that because I think the gesture of the artist works differently.

[13:51] Artists are engaged in creative practice. And they also have a goal. And I think the goal of the artist is to create the work, whether that be writing, painting, sculpting, quilting, dancing, hosting, podcasting.

I think that artists are expressing a creative impulse and bringing it from inside of them to out in the world.

So where the business owner started with that need that was out in the world, and then brought that in to come up with a solution and then sold it back to the world.

I think that artists are often starting with a inner creative impulse, and then their entire work is getting that out into the world. And then the response, the discussion, the discourse around the work is what comes back in and fuels them.

So again, we still have this reciprocal gesture, but for the artist, it's an inside-out process. And for a business owner, it's an outside-in process.

So I kind of think of it as a circle both ways, but like one is going clockwise and one is going counterclockwise.

[14:59] Now, you may be listening to this and being like, Amelia, that's not how my art practice works at all. Or Amelia, my business is not about other people. That's fine. I don't really need you to agree with me wholeheartedly. In fact, I invite your creative and business manifestos telling me all the reasons I'm wrong. All I'm really trying to get at is a way to simply describe the tension that we feel between being a business owner and being an artist. And I think a lot of that tension comes from this difference between outside-in and inside-out.

Because here's the trouble, here's why the tension exists. There's a tension because most of us want to make the work, we want to be the artist, and we want to make the money, we want to be the business owner. And so being a business owner and an artist is in tension when we want to make the work and make the money. When our artist self wants to create from the inside-out, and our human living under capitalism self needs to make money from the outside-in.

This is where we can get caught. It's like you can't go clockwise and counterclockwise on the circle at the same time, can you?

[16:13] Let's hold that question open for a moment. I'm not here to offer you a quick fix for this tension, but there are a lot of ways that I see people, myself included, handling it.

I see some folks work a day job and make their art on the side. I see other folks work a service job and make their art on the side. I see people work a job for a while and then leave that job and go to grad school for a period of focused art making. I see other people work jobs for a while and then leave those jobs and just have a period of solo retreat for their art-making, or work long enough to get a work sabbatical and use that for their art making. I see others who run a non-artist-self business that pays the bills and then they make their art alongside but separate from that.

[17:05] There are a lot of tactics for how to be an artist and a business owner side-by-side.

But what if side-by-side isn't enough, right? What if we want to integrate more deeply?

Because most of the people that I meet through this show want to be full-time creators, meaning they want to give their full focus to and make their full income from creating their work.

Whether that be their writing, their painting, their sculpting, their knitting, their quilting, their dancing, their hosting, their facilitating, their podcasting.

They want that to be the thing they do. They want it to be their art and their business. They want to be an artist and business owner in the same work at the same time.

And this is a beautiful dream. And it's one that I want to support us all in working toward, but I think that one piece of it then might be a mindset shift.

[18:10] And this is where I'm going to break down this dichotomy that I've established, right? Told you I was going to do it. Here we go. So rather than feeling like we can't go clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time, rather than feeling like we're stuck on these two side-by-side tracks that are just slowly draining us of all creative energy -- maybe I'm projecting about there, but okay. Rather than feeling that way, we can understand the relationship between business and art differently. One way I see people do this is to say something like, business is art, or my business is a work of art, or my business is my art practice.

[18:49] And I think that works. I love hearing people explain that. But I actually want to just like take us out of the language of business and art altogether and like relocate this conversation somewhere differently. That's just been so helpful for me.

[19:02] So I think at its core, business and art are actually about being of service. And this is a conversation I have been having with my collaborator, Grace, over the course of the year. And it's largely come through us reading this book that I want to highly recommend to you called Unreasonable Hospitality, the Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect by Will Guidara. Will is a former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, which is a much-lauded restaurant. He is also married to Christina Tosi, who you might recognize of Milk Bar and MasterChef fame. And in the book, he talks about his experience in the hospitality industry and learning how to exceed people's expectations and how to lean into excellence by focusing on both service and leadership.

And this book, Unreasonable Hospitality, also makes an appearance in a show that I really like called The Bear.

So let me tell you how it shows up there, and then I think that will make this connection I'm trying to draw between art, business, and service a little more clear.

[20:23] So The Bear is a show about a group of people running an Italian beef spot in Chicago. And the chef of that restaurant grew up working in the restaurant and then left and went to train in fine dining establishments all over the world. And then he's come back to take over the restaurant after the death of his brother. And so he's coming back to this Italian beef spot and everyone's grieving and no one's talking about it and they're all really struggling.

And in the second season of the show, the chef, Carm, gets one of the workers there, Richie, who was Carm's brother's best friend. He gets Richie an opportunity to stage in one of the best restaurants in Chicago. And that just means that Richie's gonna go work there for a week. And when Richie goes and works at this restaurant, there's this whole scene where he is drying forks. The forks have come from the dishwasher and he needs to dry them and make sure they are like polished for the diners. And Richie is chastised by the people that work there for not cleaning the forks, not making sure that they are properly polished. And he kind of comes back at them with this sort of like, who the fuck cares? And to that.

[21:48] The person that he's working with and for explains to him how important that work is to everyone in the restaurant. Because what they care about is providing service of the utmost quality, so that everyone has the best possible experience there.

And so through the course of the episode, Richie really evolves. Like Richie really grows to learn the beauty of being in service, the beauty of taking care of other people. And through that, he is then able to learn how to better take care of himself. And we see this like full evolution of Richie's psyche through the idea of giving more, of caring more.

And it's meant to be this sort of like paradoxical move, where it's like when you have nothing left to give, you want to like step back and back and back and back and give less. And through unreasonable hospitality, which Richie reads in the show too...

[22:58] Through unreasonable hospitality, we actually learn to take those moments where we have nothing left to give and to give more. And I think that that is a really beautiful gesture. That can inspire our business practice and our art practice.

[23:16] Because I think that this circle I've been drawing, the one I've been saying where we're going clockwise and counterclockwise, like service is the circle itself.

It's less about what direction we're going, but it's about being of service. It's about this reciprocal flow.

And I was actually on Grace's podcast over a year ago to talk about service. And in that conversation, something I said is that I never quite jived with the idea of like, you can't pour from an empty cup, because even though I am the first to like burn myself out, wear myself down, I don't think it's really about emptying my cup.

I actually think there is no limit to how much I can give to the things that I love and care about. I have no scarcity there. I am only abundance in that place, but it requires that I take really good care of myself, and that I practice really good energetic hygiene so that I can stay in this circle of service.

Because I think that I can definitely get knocked off track or there can be a sort of break in the circle where it's not in this reciprocal flow anymore. I'm not saying that we're all here to just like give, give, give, give, give, give, give, give and never receive. We need to receive to keep giving, but I still think that there is an abundance that we have to give.

[24:38] And that's what I learned through my business and through my art practice. I cannot create if I am not caring for myself. And if I am caring for myself, I cannot help but create. And in fact, none of that is even really about me. It is all about taking care of other people.

[24:58] So rather than think of myself as a business owner or an artist, after reading Unreasonable Hospitality, I was like, maybe I want to think of myself as a chef or a bartender or a server or a hospitality worker. Is that a better metaphor for what I'm actually trying to do in my business?

[25:14] Because what I've learned in these lessons of service and hospitality is that I want to be dedicated to my craft, and devoted to excellence, without forgetting for a second that it is all about taking care of other people.

[25:33] I'm not trying to be excellent simply for applause or for accolades. I'm trying to be excellent so I can take better care, and so that taking care becomes second nature to me.

That's what excellence is to me. It's when we practice so many times that we don't even have to think anymore about how to do this thing excellently, because we have practiced and practiced and practiced.

And when I remember this, then I can actually relinquish the identity of business owner or artist altogether, because it's not about the identity. It's about the work. It's about the care work. It's about the practice.

I think the answer to, am I a business owner or an artist, is that we are all practitioners.

It doesn't matter so much what we are practicing, just that we are practicing our way to excellence. And that our idea of excellence is inherently interconnected with taking care of other people, and how we take care of other people always informs how we take care of ourselves.

This is the circle of service. This is what underlies business and art.

[26:51] And within this circle, on our way to excellence, we will employ different tactics for making money.

So something I see people do a lot is kind of select an identity marker, and then force a set of criteria on themselves for how that identity makes money. For instance, I'm an artist, and therefore I have to make money by selling my art.

But I can't charge too much because then I I will be a sellout and artists shouldn't sell out. On the other hand, if you choose the identity of business owner, maybe you fall into the narratives I talked about in my online business growth escalator episode. And you're like, well, I'm a business owner now. So I'm not successful unless I'm making $10,000 a month selling things that come from my business.

We kind of use these identities to create these binds that really block our ability to make money. And instead, I wanna encourage us to embrace the flow of money and people in and through our practice and to nourish our ecosystems of excellence over time.

[28:03] And to always be in service. Because when I am in service, I find that I can always find money.

And maybe the money will come from my services themselves that I am selling, or my products that I am selling, or my art that I am selling. Or maybe the money comes from that relationship I made that actually got me a weekend job that is paying the bills right now, right?

I just think that these identities can often make us more rigid in how we think we can make money, which can make us unable to see the many ways that money can flow through our work.

[28:43] I'm a big believer that not everything has to be a business. I'm also a big believer that some of the best art is in-transactable and cannot be paid for. Not everything fits into commerce and not everything fits into creative practice and that's okay. The circle of service helps me see how art and business can be the same and also so different at the same time. And that helps me liberate myself from any way that I am, quote unquote, supposed to be doing things, such that I can actually go do things.

If that resonates, I really recommend going back and listening to the conversation I had with Natalie Miller about a spell for releasing all of our shoulds around social media and everything else. In that episode, I asked Natalie this question that's like, what do we do about best practices? How do we learn best practices and stay true to our path?

And she said something that has really stuck with me this whole season. She said, "Amelia, I don't believe in best practices. There's only your practice."

And that blew my mind, y'all. I was like, oh, that's right. There is only my practice. And my practice must put me in dialogue with other practices. But it's not about best practices.

[30:09] So as we come to the close of this episode, I want to add a few final layers of nuance here.

While I do believe that we have an abundance of energy to give to our path and that we can be almost endlessly of service when we are doing the work that is uniquely ours, I also know that there are life circumstances and oppressive systems that can keep us from our path, from our work, from the success we dream of for ourselves.

Nothing in this episode is meant to blame or shame you for feeling like you are not doing your work or you're not currently on your path. We have to do so much healing to even uncover what we might be here to do.

And so before you're able to really step in to the circle of service, before you're able to center service in your life, you may need to go on a healing journey. And that's beautiful, challenging work. It's work that I had to do before I could step onto this path of being a business owner, an artist, a practitioner.

[31:30] And even along my path, I find there are moments when I really don't wanna give more. There are moments when I want to pull back and just take. And that's when I know that something is off in my caretaking. And I need to recalibrate, re-center, give more so I can learn to receive again.

But normally, that starts with me just being kind of like pissed off and mad every time people ask me for something. It's not like I'm a serene, angelic person, right? No, I just get really resentful and then I'm like, oh, I'm off the path. I'm not centering service. This is not a hospitable environment. And I recalibrate.

So if you heard me talk about giving more and you bristled or you were like, "absolutely fucking not, Amelia." That's okay. There's probably some healing for you around giving and receiving. And I'm cheering you on in that journey.

Another touchpoint here that I had to do a lot of healing around was the idea of excellence.

For a long time, I felt the only way to be excellent was to be perfect.

[32:44] And I had to do a lot of work around perfectionism to let that go and to realize, that what makes something excellent is the humanity embedded within it.

It is the beautiful moments of imperfection that make something so excellent. That's why a piece of music can be performed so many ways and be excellent in so many different forms because so many different people performed it.

They brought their own humanity to it, embedding imperfections along the way. And I think that for a long time I thought that if something wasn't perfect, then it was a failure or I thought that the only way I could do things was like haphazard and horrible or perfect. And I've really had to unravel that and learn that my humanity can come with me along the journey to excellence. And that in fact, it has to be present in the excellent things that I create. It is what makes them excellent.

[33:50] So this episode, as the season finale of our second season of Off the Grid, is intended to inspire you to take care, to be of service, to be in service, to create your work, to, embrace commerce, and to remember that you have to do things your way.

Someone else's ten-step plan will only take you off your path. That's why I don't teach one. There is no ten-step plan here. I mean, I guess there is like a five step plan to leaving social media, but that's like a technique. It's not the path. And I don't really even intend for you to do it exactly how I teach it. I just intend for that to inspire how you do it.

So are you a business owner or an artist or a secret third thing?

[34:42] Well, you are certainly a secret third thing, my friend.

And I hope to learn more about your secret third thing in the upcoming year. I hope that you will join the Interweb so we can get to know each other so I can see your practice in practice. For now, I am going to go into a period of retreat so that I can dream up even more new and exciting ideas for next year and return with even more ways to be of service to you, the singular you, and to the communal you of all of our wonderful Off the Grid listeners.

[35:27] Thank you as always for being here. While we're on break, again, please explore all the episodes of season two.

Head to offthegrid.fun to find more resources. Please join the Interweb so you're all signed up when we kick off 2024. And until season three, my friends, I will see you off the grid and on the Interweb.

[music fades in]

Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes. And don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig.

This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, and our logo is by n'Atelier Studio.

If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you off the grid.