How To Blast Creative Barriers:

Be Remarkable

What Makes an Artist Remarkable?

We often think remarkable means rare genius: the beautiful prose, the breathtaking comic book art, the once-in-a-generation talent that people fall over themselves to praise.

And there is some truth to that.

But Seth Godin reminds us: remarkability isn’t just about being extraordinary.

It’s about being worth remarking on.

Sometimes, that just means showing up.

Drawing a page of finished comic art every two days, or even every day. Any way you can.

Writing 500 words daily, even after your day job drained you, even after your kids refused to go to bed.

Hitting “publish” like Seth has been doing on his blog post for 20 years, every single day, without skipping.

When it finally sunk through my head that it's nice to create, but people need to know that what know you create exists, I started looking at marketing content. (This is the beginnings of learning about the Gap. I'll explain further down the line.)

At first the search was random and desperate. Just watching content that had the word marketing on it, and not seeing that I was falling for clickbait titles. I was so green about selling and marketing that I didn't even know what a clickbait title was.

Eventually, after that initial phase of desperation passed, I admitted to myself that I need a structure, learning from a foundation. I looked more carefully, and this led to discovering Seth Godin.

He wasn't exactly doing marketing 101, but he wasn't gimmicky in his speeches or his writing. He was saying that it's going to take time for your message to sink in and to reach the people it is for, so do the work.

This was also my introduction to consistently showing up. Awareness made me notice that I wasn't happy with things taking time. So I resisted at first. I searched for shortcuts for a little bit longer before I admitted to myself I should have foundational understanding of the subject. (The Gap was wide in my head.)

The foundation of any subject is a sturdy construct of concrete and steel rebar mixed to specifications. It’s something you keep building on top of with time. Hacks and shortcuts are like a foundation built on sand, water, and a little bit of expired cement and a few pieces of steel rebar thrown in. When marketing trends change, your strategies will fall apart.

So I started consuming Seth's content religiously

And after deep study note taking and summing up, I saw that you could reduce his teachings to three principles:

• Be specific

• Be consistent

• Be remarkable

That last one gave me the most trouble understanding, and working through it presented me to what I now call The Gap.

The Gap is something I coined after observing my thought process for some time. The Gap is the distance, measured in time, between when you are introduced to a belief or idea that appeals to you, that you want to make a part of your mindset, and when that idea or belief is integrated into your way of being, so that it becomes a habit.

One frustrating aspect of studying Seth is that he never specified what remarkability is. He gave great examples. One that stands in my mind is about a tiny Italian restaurant in Manhattan that only offers choices of extra garlic, and extra-extra garlic in their dishes. The reason they do this is that when the person who attended the restaurant the night before talks about it at work the next day, people become curious about this place and will go check it out for themselves. The restaurant is not in any of the main review sites for Manhattan, but they are always busy.

A great example of remarkable. Uglies Chips. Made from upcycled potatoes. That is, potatoes with slight imperfections and blemishes. They are thickly cut and delicious.

The distance between when Seth introduced me to remarkability, and my present understanding of this concept was 2 years ago. Or my personal Gap in understanding remarkability was 2 years.

Remarkable is a characteristic that makes someone or something stand out.

It doesn't have to be glamorous.

It just has to be interesting to its intended audience. If they are exposed to this remarkability long enough and it speaks to them in a special way, they will want to be a part of it.

For me this meant letting go of the belief that remarkable is limited to superficial attractiveness only. And because my interest was to sell comics, I erroneously concluded that I needed to have beautifully drawn comics to be remarkable.

But remarkable can be the Creator gets his comic made and sold in spite of of the viciousness of trolls.

Remarkable can be the story of tenacity or dedication behind a final product that may not be as beautiful as the other things in the other tables at the comic con.

But it has a story that will be appealing to those have struggled to achieve something.

The ones who gave up will be encouraged to try yet one more time after listening to the story of of the remarkable Creator who would not give up.

The ones on the verge of giving up will be fired up to try one more time.

Remarkable is the story behind the thing.

What is your remarkability?

Something you're secretly proud of, but maybe you think no one else cares about?

Revise how you think about this particular thing, this skill.

This could be the beginning of remarkability.

Seth Godin: he makes marketing easy to digest and implement.

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