Listen to this if you're feeling discouraged

Dream Life Club

In this heartfelt solo episode of Dream Life Club, Sumi shares her personal journey from a successful government consulting career to pursuing music in Los

Key takeaways

• Creativity is the fuel for solving non-artistic challenges in creative careers, such as marketing and promotion.
• Over-consuming advice from online gurus can drain inspiration and stifle authentic expression.

Main topics

• Creative discouragement in the digital age
• The role of authenticity vs. algorithmic success

Notable quotes

Success is never a straight line.

Keep going. Keep going.

Conclusion

Sumi concludes with a powerful call to action: despite the challenges, creatives must

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello friends, welcome back to a solo episode of the Dream Life Club podcast. This podcast is where we share insight and inspiration for creatives chasing a dream. So if that's you, let's lock in. My name is Sumi and my story is that I built and sold a 200 person government consulting company in DC and then built a whole new dream, which was to be a pop music artist. And I'm now doing that in LA. I want to talk to you guys today. I was thinking about what to share and I thought, you know, I really feel like a lot of people are going through a season of discouragement right now. And it's so crazy to break through on the internet, which is kind of what we're all told that we have to do in order to be successful as a creative. The algorithms are getting harder to place. The competition is... you know, just everywhere. Now AI artists are popping up out of nowhere and taking over Spotify. And it feels like, you know, we put all of this effort and attention and energy and creativity toward making content to try to stand out. And then like, you know, most of our audience that we've spent years building doesn't even see that piece of content. And it can feel and can get really discouraging and honestly depressing for many creatives who really, what do we want to do? We don't want to be doing any of that marketing shit to begin with, right? We just want to be. creating. Like I had this moment yesterday where I'm like sitting in my living room and I just fixed my record player, which was, thank God I did that. I don't know why I didn't do that earlier. And I put on one of my favorite records. You know, I used to be a trumpet player and I put on Miles Davis, Kind of Blue and That's just one of my favorite records. It just puts me in a mood, like a beautiful flow state almost where everything else goes quiet. And this, you know, gorgeous record from 1959 with all of the crackling and everything. I just, I was sitting there and I was sitting there on the floor. I don't know if this is like an ADHD thing or what, but I hate chair. Like I hate chair. Tell me if you relate to this at all, but I'm like sitting there. on the floor listening to this record and leaning up against the wall and I was looking out, you know, out my front door, out the windows at all the trees and I just had this moment where I'm like, I just want to like crawl up like under this table and just listen to beautiful music all day and like escape, you know, into a little happy place. and not have to deal with all of the buzz and the marketing and the advertising and the trying to break through and the administrative aspects of building a creative dream. And like the stuff that I feel like is probably even harder for those of us with creative hearts and creative souls. Like it's even harder to put on that left brain logical. hat and like have to take care of stuff that seems so frustrating because it doesn't take it it's like it for me that side of things feels like well anyone can do this like this is not you know like it's the creativity that's from the soul that's from me that only i can do like why do i want to spend my time working on marketing which like anyone could do you know but here's here is the point of this episode. It's not to complain. It's not to say, yeah, this sucks. It's not to tell ourselves that AI is going to take over the industry because none of those things are true. What's true is that we all have the capacity to use our creativity in so many different directions. And not only that, our creativity is actually the fuel that's going to allow us to get creative with... how we approach all of those aspects of our creative careers, right? Like we don't have to, you know what I hate the most is all of this advice coming at us on social media right now. Like every third post that I see on my feed is some guru or marketing expert or email marketing expert or music industry insider or coach for creatives telling us. Speaker 1 (4:32) how to do what we have to do to win, to succeed. And that irritates me like nothing else because the whole point of being creative is that we don't follow a freaking formula. Like I remember Tony Robbins put out this hilarious training like years ago. I remember seeing it. I couldn't stop thinking like, how stupid is this? It literally, the title of the training was Blueprint for