(Kelly Rae Roberts print for purchase)
I’m a huge fan of today’s |Idea Addiction| focus. Kelly Rae Roberts is one of those people who you admire from afar, and then suddenly notice everywhere. (Except for the Mondo Beyondo session at 2011 World Domination Summit where she sat right in front of me on the lawn and I didn’t know it until later! Which was probably good, because I would have freaked on her in real life and embarrassed the both of us. Maybe I’ll meet her at 2012 World Domination. Now that would be very Mondo Beyondo!)
I was researching Art Fest and found Kelly Rae as someone who credits that incredible experience in Port Townsend as life-changing. I never actually made it to Art Fest (this past spring was their last year); bummer. And then I couldn’t stop reading Kelly Rae’s fascinating story about how she began her creative business as an artist. And then I started traveling and saw her stuff in shop after shop after shop and I would stand there, in a moment of self-doubt, look up to see a Kelly Rae signed print, and know that I was going to be just fine. And Kelly Rae has become my personal daily “Art Fest” if you will. I love her blog, I love her energy, I love her ideas and how she creates.
I have her iPhone cover on my phone because her message is priceless—“Dream big. (Permission granted.)”
In 2010, I was feeling kinda glum. I was bored, you might say. Ha! Me, bored? Yep. It was winter, I was lost in the swirling vortex of what I wanted and what I thought others wanted from me (which is one of the BIG learning curves in my life) and I needed something . . . something to fill my brain up. And I think that a book offers so much when in that mode, ya know? When I’m glum, I frequently find a book to make me dream and chase away the storm clouds. And Kelly Rae had just completed her ebook, Flying Lessons: Tips + Tricks To Help Your Creative Business Soar (The Whole Shebang) and it was there, waiting for me.
I bought it and devoured it.
But I don’t have a art business, not in the sense of paintings, Etsy, etc. But it helped me in a way that I am not sure Kelly Rae meant, but fortuitously happened anyway. I’m a literary artist, see, the writing, publishing, marketing, agenting side. But I needed to read FLYING LESSONS for my job, for my business, because I had become literary blind, sort of. Sure, FLYING LESSONS didn’t quite apply to me perfectly, but it began to make me think, it began to challenge my heart, distilled the process into doable actions, it made me see. First, do this. Second, do this. And don’t rush it. It won’t happen overnight. It’s a heart thing. (Which is so Kelly Rae!)
And so I mapped out what I wanted and went and got it. Er, well, I’m working on getting it. Kelly Rae is the person who first turned me toward creating the future I wanted by planning and going for it. I’m still on that journey (do we ever actually finish it?) and I still read her blog, and I think deeply about what she talks about. I’m a women, an entrepreneur, an artist. I received a lot of messages in my younger years about my self-worth being only wrapped up in what OTHERS wanted my life to be. With Kelly Rae, I feel as if I have a comrade-in-arms to go after what I want MY life to be.
And that is a very, very good idea.
Will I ever get an Etsy shop? Will I ever do more with my fancy camera? Will I ever learn to draw?
I don’t know. Will you?
