148 - Streams of income

Hello and welcome to the The Spark & The Art creativity podcast. Thank you for subscribing to our weekly podcast, where we alternate between interviews with creative folks from all different career levels and insight and inspiration episodes. All with the intention you’ll get what you need to get your creative projects started and, more importantly, finished.

I’m your host Tucker and this week is just me again and I’ve got my last update about my job search. 

I really was expecting this search to take about 3 months. But things aligned the right way and I’m in on Monday. These episodes come out on Friday so that’s only the weekend away. It’s just about as perfect a job as I could hope to walk into so let’s hope my expectations and reality jive as well as I’m hoping they will. It’s still a UX role but it will have a bit more responsibility than my last job and is on a single product rather than a large collection of projects like my last role. 

In my last just Tucker episode I talked about putting together a consulting product that would allow me to create my own job in case my job search wasn’t fruitful. I mentioned that I would eventually need to replace the salary I was losing at my last job and asked if I should offer video courses or in-person training or some other things. 

The fact is I’d have to do all of that my question was more or less "what should I do first?”

I got to thinking about this because my wife hosted an essential oils party. It’s like a Tupperware party except the subject is essential oils and their benefits as part of a natural health regiment. They smell lovely (well, most of them some were a little on the less-pleasant side of the olfactory experience) but they all had properties that would help support sleep and headaches and warts and other things that humans get wrong with them. 

What made the presentation interesting was the presenter, Linda, she is a nurse at the Children’s hospital here in Calgary. A lot of what she talked about was supported by her medical training and said that while she believed strongly in the healing powers of the oils she said they are not a replacement for modern medicine, only a support for it. 

I feel like I should be putting an affiliate link to an essential oils site or something but really I’m not selling the oils I’m just setting up my next point. 

What made Linda interesting was the fact that while she was incredibly knowledgeable about the oils and sold them as a business this wasn’t her only stream of income. When I asked about it she said that she and her husband had 7 streams of income. 

She said this was important because if any one of the streams dried for any reason then there are the other ones she could focus on. 

Now, I’ve only ever had a single income. I’ve never worked for more than one company at a time but it seems to me that 7 is a lot to keep track of. But that’s between the two of them and they include nurse at the children’s hospital and essential oil resale she was also a yoga instructor and licensed massage therapist. Here husband was an author and speaker and corporate trainer. 

So while they have multiple streams of income they were tied around a central theme for each of them. For Linda it was heath and wellbeing and for her husband it was … I can’t remember the topic … sales or management if I remember correctly. 

I on the other hand worked at one place and when they asked me to leave that was it. I had no more income. If I had been focused on my creative work as a songwriter or children’s author/entertainer there was the possibility I could have ramped that up into a something. But I’ve been treating it like projects and hobbies so I couldn’t. I’d have to start from scratch and build from the ground up. That’s why I chose my day job skills with which to build a job I could own.

I have been pen-palling with Mark Osborne the director of Kung-fu Panda and The Little Prince. (I’ve asked him a couple times to be on the show and it’s never quite worked out. So who know’s maybe one day.) Once The Little Prince was on Netflix I asked him what he was up to and he said he was writing and starting to develop art and stuff. Recently I saw an article announcing him as working on a trilogy for an adaptation of the comic Bone and I emailed to ask if that was the project he was talking about. He said it was one of them but he had 3 on the go a the moment. Three?! Is that because you like to work too much or incase one doesn’t pan out? 

His response? “I have learned the very valuable lesson to never have all my eggs in one basket!”

So, if you are thinking of leaving a job to start a job for yourself or expect that soon you may be asked to leave the job you currently have. Or if you are seeing a slow down in the entrepreneurial project you are in right now. It is very important of you have either already built or are currently building other streams of income into your plan. 

As an entrepreneurial family friend once told my mom “Don’t try to find one way to make a million dollars. Find a million ways to make one dollar.” 

 - out - 

If you know someone who is hoping to start their own venture I’d hope you’d share this episode with them. They may just get a nugget of info that helps them in the future. The easiest way to share is to send the short url. TheSparkAndTheArt.com/148 the hardest way is to write the url on a $20 bill and hope that your friend one day gets that bill when they visit an ATM on their way to your house to pay you what you earned from that bet about how many grapes you could fit into your mouth at one time. (You and your friend are weird by the way)

Get me on twitter @sparkartpodcast or leave fun voice mail at 1-877-966-4886 like Melissa did. Even though she doesn’t know that I got it yet because as I write this I haven’t responded yet because I’m a terrible garbage person who lost their manners apparently. I’ll get to you soon I promise Melissa please don’t be mad. 

Thanks for listening and remember: you won’t get the art without the work and you won’t do the work without the spark. 

- Links for this episode -

Mark Osborne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Osborne_(filmmaker)

Kung Fu Panda - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0441773/

The Little Prince - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1754656

Bone - Comic Movie - http://variety.com/2016/film/news/mark-osborne-bone-warner-bros-kung-fu-panda-1201920047/