Excerpt from Seth Godin’s podcast:
“My friend, Abbey Ryan wanted to paint the oil paintings she wanted to paint and she understood that people buy oil paintings for a couple of reasons.
- Because they are pretty – but a lot of people can make paintings that are pretty.
- Another reason, and the essential reason why people buy most forms of decorative act is because they are made by a famous artist.
When you buy a painting from a famous artist you get to tell your friends what you did.
…and telling your friends that and telling yourself that, is worth more than the painting it costs.
So, Abbey Ryan says how do I become famous?
What she started doing is painting an oil painting every day and auctioning it off on e-bay. Every day one painting a day, 200 paintings a year, day-after-day-after-day.
When she started her painting would go for 50 or 100 bucks and now they go for thousands of dollars.
She was then featured in Oprah magazine, I wrote about her in one of my books and now there is a waiting list to buy a painting by Abbey Ryan – because she is famous.
So the work was not to make her paintings better, her painting was already good enough – like lots of peoples paintings are good enough.
What was missing, was her story.
And she found her story. She made her story. She wrote her story”
– That’s a unique story. Abbey started just like anyone else would start. Doing what she loved, following her passion.
However, she deeply understood that to make a living out of her passion, she would have to do something out of the box. She had to write her own story.
Now, if you want to own your career or passion you cannot copy somebody else’s story. You can’t say “I will also paint a painting every day and auction it like Abbey did and I will be famous”. It doesn’t work like that, that would be silly!
Out there you have to write your own, true and unique story.