June 16, 2020

How to Find Soulful Success and The Dance Between Creativity and Business | Rolf Potts on Conscious Creators with Sachit Gupta

Check out the Conscious Creators Show Episode Page & Show Notes

Focus on maximizing your satisfaction, not your audience reach
- Often times you can sacrifice your creativity to reach a larger audience, but it will cost you some satisfaction
“It doesn’t really matter how big your audience is if you don’t really have anything to say. Having something to say is way more important than having a giant audience.” – Rolf Potts
“Different is better than better” – Sachit Gupta
- “I’m not trying to create a better interview, I’m trying to create a different experience both for the guest and the audience”
Once your brand gets to a certain size, you can cut out the middleman (book publishers, traditional media, etc.)
- Your reputation used to be your college degree or connection to a middleman, but today it’s the size of your followers
  - “More and more, creative people are going to be expected to manage their own business, their own marketing, their own promotion. And I think just as equally, business people are going to find that their world is enhanced by being creative.” – Rolf Potts
There’s a difference between having 5 years of experience and having 1 year of experience that you’ve repeated 5 times

Sachit read Rolf’s book Vagabonding before visiting Asia
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
- People who want to become the best at something usually understand what they do and how things around them work
  - “If you’re an actor, if you can understand how the cameraman works and moves the camera, that will make you a better actor” – Sachit Gupta

Focus on maximizing your satisfaction, not your audience size
- There are a lot of successful podcasters tired of talking about the same topic for three years straight
  - Often times you can sacrifice your creativity to reach a larger audience, but it will cost you some satisfaction
    - “Success in a way can become its own prison” – Sachit Gupta
Once you’ve gotten successful at something, you often want to branch out and expand, not just continue the same routine
- Rolf enjoys talking about traveling, but he also wants to expand into different topics
“It doesn’t really matter how big your audience is if you don’t really have anything to say. Having something to say is way more important than having a giant audience.” – Rolf Potts

Too many people listen to self-help podcasts to soothe themselves instead of taking what they learned and putting it into action
Sachit questions for podcasting:
- Who am I interested to talk to?
- Then he asks his guests what topics they usually talk about and tries to find different topics that guests haven’t spoken about before
- He asks his guests, what are things you want to talk about but don’t get asked about?
“Different is better than better” – Sachit Gupta
- “I’m not trying to create a better interview, I’m trying to create a different experience both for the guest and the audience”
  - The podcast space is starting to get saturated so it’s important to be different and stand out
    - The entire idea of Rolf’s podcast is to talk to experts about something other than their expertise
Most of the best podcasts are personality-driven instead of topic-driven

Rolf has sold a ton of books without a huge social media following but things are changing now
- Your reputation used to be your college degree or connection to a middleman (like a book publisher), but now your reputation is the size of your social media audience
Once your brand gets to a certain size, you can cut out the middleman (book publishers, traditional media, etc.)
- Authors can publish their own books on Amazon
- Filmmakers can publish their own movies on Youtube
- Radio hosts can publish their own shows on Apple
Creatives aren’t just creators anymore, they are now the brand and business manager
- “More and more, creative people are going to be expected to manage their own business, their own marketing, their own promotion. And I think just as equally, business people are going to find that their world is enhanced by being creative.” – Rolf Potts

Sachit read Rolf’s book Vagabonding before visiting Asia
Rolf actually started traveling late in life, as he didn’t have a passport until he was 25
Rolf’s book is a somewhat philosophical book because he built his own travel philosophy out of a desire to travel rather than a travel experience that was handed to him in his upbringing
- “Travel can be a metaphor for so many other things in life” – Rolf Potts
“In some ways, Vagabonding was a letter to my 17-year-old self saying you don’t have to play by those rules, you can be a little bit different” – Rolf Potts
- In those days, travel was seen as an irresponsible, hippy activity

There’s a difference between having 5 years of experience and having 1 year of experience that you’ve repeated 5 times
There’s a difference between success that’s just an endless pursuit and success that actually enhances your life and that you allow yourself to appreciate and enjoy
- There’s a balance between achievement and appreciation
Our brains love brief excitements and dopamine hits that come from clickbait culture, but that is not in any way connected to soulfulness
Authenticity and being true to your vision is what makes you successful
People are liking TikTok more than Instagram because TikTok content is more authentic
- The people on TikTok are also nicer than other platforms like Twitter
The response to COVID-19 goes against all American sensibilities
- Because we can’t see the virus, we can’t see the “attack” and people behave as if there’s nothing to react to
  - “Something is attacking our country, yet we’re having the same old conversations. We’re trying to stick a dagger in somebody else’s argument when both of us should be listening to what’s happening.” – Rolf Potts