Want to make a living from your craft? Start thinking like a businessperson.

I’ve probably lost some of you already.

If you’re like I was, you probably think business means being pushy, manipulative, corporate. Selling out. Gross.

But what if the best businesses aren’t like that at all?

I used to think business meant ‘selling stuff.’ Until I read this quote by Donald Miller that completely changed my perspective: “The day we stop losing sleep over the success of our business and start losing sleep over the success of our customers is the day our business will start growing again.”

Not that I even had a business that needed growing at that point, but it helped to grasp that businesses don’t exist to “sell stuff,” they exist to solve problems. To provide something so valuable that people will gladly part with their money to have it.

Marketing feels sleazy only when done poorly. Like a referees in a football game: when they’re doing their job well, you don’t even notice them. But when they’re blowing the huge call and fucking with your team, well now you hate all referees everywhere.

What will be important to remember as we proceed is that businesses first borrowed their marketing tools from actual, genuine human connection and relationship building.

Like some corporate sociopath had a eureka moment of “What if we behaved as humans and treated people like people??” then proceeded to try and paint a human-like veneer over the outside of their business and call it a “brand”.

Well.

Start with your humanity. Let that reveal your brand. Be so unapologetically YOU that your fans can’t help but be drawn in—like a cartoon mouse to cheese.