the bossbabe podcast - 45. Entrepreneurship Realness: Balancing Art and Business, Monetizing Your Passion & Behind The Scenes Struggles with Rapper and Spoken Word Artist Humble The Poet

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

In this powerful episode, co-founder Natalie Ellis is interviewing Canadian-born rapper, spoken word artist and internationally best-selling author, Humble The Poet.  Together, they have an open conversation around self-discovery, creativity, empowerment and how to live as your most authentic self. Humble shares incredible insights and wisdom that challenge conventional thinking and will help you to better understand yourself. Natalie and Humble dive deep into the importance of sharing your happiness with the world as well as finding a balance between art and business. They discuss what the journey of an entrepreneur really looks like and how your business can bloom when you align with your purpose. Get a copy of Humble’s book, Things No One Can Teach Us at: https://rebrand.ly/BOSSBABES Discover how to grow your audience on Instagram by 10,000 ideal clients in 30 days: https://bossbabe.com/growthatinsta 

I'm better off feeling the best about myself when I'm doing my most authentic stuff. I realize that, you know, my problems, even when they're not my fault, are still my responsibility. When we chase the fun, we enjoy what we do and great things start to happen to us. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I'm Natalie Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Boss Babe and your host for this week's episode. In this episode, I am so excited to interview someone else whose Instagram quotes and posts you've definitely shared before, Humble the Poet. So Humble the Poet is a Canadian-born rapper, spoken word artist, poet, internationally best-selling

author, and former elementary school teacher with a wildly popular blog with over 100,000 monthly readers. He's traditionally shared his message of self-discovery, creativity, and empowerment with fans through music and written word. That message has now been extended to his book Unlearn 101 Truths for a Better Life which offers insights and wisdom that challenge conventional thinking and help you tap into your best most authentic self and in his new book Humble flips the conventional script for happiness and success showing us how our most painful experiences can be one of our greatest teachers in his new book Things No One Else Can Teach Us. So his book Unlearn I think is a must-have for anyone's

morning routine. It's so great to pull out you can start at any chapter they're very short by its size you don't need to go cover to cover and I love books like that so I'm so excited to be doing this Humble has performed at concerts and festivals including Lollapalooza and has been featured in major media including BuzzFeed and Huffington Post so I'm really excited to have them on the Boss Bay podcast and as usual we really want to see you share this episode and tag us so just take a screenshot tag me at IamNatalie at BossWave.inc and Humble at at HumbleThePoet with your favorite takeaway. And we're going to randomly select some of you and send out a limited edition Boss Wave sticky quotes. A Boss Wave is unapologetically ambitious

and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself, confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. So with that, welcome Humble A Poet to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. We are really, really excited. And I just want to dive straight in and ask, how did you go from being an elementary school teacher to be an international best-selling author? I enjoyed teaching and I probably the

first time that I was no longer in school so I didn't have any homework and pretty much after work I needed something to do and then I started going out you know nightlife trying to meet girls and and do what people do and I stumbled upon a spoken word performance at a concert. And then I kind of fell in love with the art. And from that, I started performing at open mics. I started performing at coffee shops. And that transitioned into music. And it slowly just continued taking a life of its own. I never took it serious. That's kind of something I did after work, did for fun on the weekends, something to kind of scratch a creative itch. And then the next thing I know, kids at my school are recognizing me from videos I posted on YouTube.

I was getting shows and gigs around North America at that time. And then eventually, I started meeting people in the music game, and they promised me a record deal. And before investigating the record deal, I immediately quit my job and dove headfirst into it. And after about a year, I realized the record deal wasn't going to come through. And I pretty much got rid of my safe and secure job, had no income, accrued a lot of debt. I was about $80,000 of debt. I had a mortgage to pay. I had no way of making any money. And that was the point where I had to kind of wake up and get responsible and take ownership for my decisions. Before that, I spent about two weeks in bed, avoiding the world, blaming the world.

And then I think after a little bit of rest and recovery, I hopped out of bed. I took ownership. I realized that, you know, my problems, even when they're not my fault, are still my responsibility. And I went ahead and started working away. The first thing I realized was making just music because it was a very slow process. It required a lot of collaborating. And this was at the same time I met my friend Lilly Singh, and she encouraged me to figure something out that I could do all by myself. She showed me how she was making videos all by herself. And she's like, figure out something that you can do that you don't have to wait on anybody else for. And for me, that became writing. So I just started writing my

thoughts and my feelings, taking random pictures, writing what they made me feel and sharing it on Facebook at the time. And people really connected with what I had to write. In the beginning, the top comment was, it sounds like you're living in my head. I'm going through the exact same things. And eventually the top comment turned into, you should write a book. And I didn't know how to write a book. So I just put my writing together, researched how to publish online, reached out to a friend who taught me how to format books using Adobe InDesign. Then I crowdfunded to raise some money so I could publish the book. And then my first book on Learn was independently published in 2014. I literally just had no intentions of writing any more books

or even being considered an author. I figured it'd be a good thing to sell at my shows instead of a t-shirt. I feel people get more value from a book than a t-shirt. A few years later, it got picked up by a publisher in Canada and it became a bestseller. And then after that, it got picked up by a publisher in the United States and it released this past year with HarperCollins. So it all kind of happened organically and slowly over time. You know, nothing happened overnight. The book's been around for five years, but just hit the mainstream this past year. That's incredible. And it obviously sounds a lot easier than I bet it was. How was it in the beginning getting traction on this content that you're putting out there? And probably in the

beginning, you had to stay consistent when no one was really watching. So how was that starting out? And what did it look like to get traction to get actual people resonating with the content you're putting out there? Looking back now, what I realized was, every time I tried to get people's attention, that didn't work. Obviously, all of us are competing in this attention economy to build our audiences so we can run a business or sell a product and make sure people are aware that we even exist. And I tried to play the game to get people's attention, whether it was writing trends, whether it was clickbait and all the other stuff that people do, but none of it felt good to me.

And really none of it actually worked. And I think what I realized looking back, what actually helped me grow my community was writing when I had things to say, things worth saying. Instead of focusing on a schedule, instead of focusing simply on being part of a process, I focused on, do I have something worth sharing with the world that's going to add value to people's lives? And as I did that, and as I did that consistently, things grew very slowly. None of my work went viral. It was just baby steps. Baby steps add up over the years. And I've been doing this for 10 years now.

And I'm grateful that I have a wonderful community that engages with my work. That's incredible. Was it hard in the beginning to continue doing it when you saw things that were growing really slowly? In the earlier stages, it was probably the easiest because I didn't even have the expectations of having an audience. So to me, you know, having 5000 people follow me was more than 5000 more people than I ever expected would care about me. So it was fantastic. But obviously, as I got deeper into it and started to see the business side of it, then you begin to compare yourself to

other people. And then obviously, you're like, wow, these people have much larger audiences than me. And that's the challenge though. When you compare yourself to other people, you're always going to come up short. So it took me a lot of, I had to let go of that idea to compare myself to other people and realizing that, hey, when we chase the fun, we enjoy what we do and great things start to happen to us especially if we're doing stuff that adds value to other people again and even now sometimes I catch myself you know focusing too much on the business side of things or focusing too much on the attention side of things but I think the story of my life now as 10 years has played out has shown me that the only thing I

really should focus on is better understanding myself and using my tools and my talents to share that with the world so they can better understand themselves. And what does it look like for you to better understand yourself? You have daily practice? Yeah, I have to write every single day. I have to ask myself uncomfortable questions. I have to really be honest with myself. I really try to frame stories that happen to me in terms of what's in my control. So for example, if I were supposed to meet up with you and then you canceled on me last minute, the old version of me would take that very personal and question why you canceled on me. The version of me now would focus on my side of the

story, what my expectations of you were, how it feels to be canceled on, why I feel a certain way. And then I explore that in my writing. In the old days, I used to write about stuff I figured out. Now I write stuff to figure it out. It always starts with a question. I think when we enter things with questions, it's the best way to learn about ourselves. And the more we understand ourselves, the more we'll have a better relationship with the world around us. I'm in full agreement with that. And one of your quotes that I love that you posted is those who anger you conquer you. I think that's so incredibly important. Was there anything that you experienced that made you realize this? Yeah, completely. And I actually talked about that experience in the new book.

It was the last time I was offended. I saw somebody from my heritage kind of acting a fool on TV and it really bothered me a lot. I thought they had an opportunity to be on the main stage and get a lot of mainstream exposure and they were really kind of embarrassing themselves. And I realized it really upset me. And I had spoken to a friend I make music with and he kind of put things in perspective for me. And he's like, hey, why are you letting this bother you? His life, his decisions, his choices have nothing to do with you. Your job is to make the best work you can make and not worry about other people who are doing any different. And he really made me realize that I allowed someone to conquer me who didn't even know I existed. And after that, I kind of realized that anytime people take offense is when they allow somebody in and those offend us to conquer us.

I haven't been offended since. And I've had a very long life dealing with racism, dealing with other different challenges. And I realized it's not what happens to us, it's how we deal with it. And when we develop new tools and stop taking things so personally and stop making things just about us, we can gain and learn so much from those situations. Yeah, I think you're so right. And so do you feel like you learn this through writing? Like you're saying that's your practice? Or have you done any kind of retreats or meditation?

They're like anything that's really helped this ground for you or does it really just come through in your writing and you get to look at it from a different perspective I think definitely there's more than one way to kind of come to realizations you know meditating I think it's extremely important sitting quiet and just listening and seeing what's there is an opportunity to have a healthy conversation with yourself. I think for me, and I encourage most people too, is to get into writing because sometimes we don't realize how little we've thought things out. You know, if I have an idea that, oh, Natalie canceled on me because she hates me. And then I build a whole world around this idea that Natalie must not care about me or

respect me because she canceled the dinner on me. You know, that happens because we don't take the time to actually stretch the thought out and see what's behind it. Now, when we write about it, we're going to actually encourage ourselves to explore that idea deeper. And then we'll start to realize like, whoa, wait a minute, this is a little ridiculous. I'm filling in a lot of gaps. You know, Natalie could have canceled on me because she had car trouble. She could have canceled on me because she got the flu. There's a billion different reasons why it could have happened and why am i only picking the negative one and then be like oh maybe this reminds me

of my childhood and it starts to take all the tangled thoughts we have and it starts to help organize them better it's the same and i also encourage people to do the same with therapy therapy isn't there to fix our problems therapy is there if you get the right therapist to help you organize your ideas and help you make better sense of them. And sometimes that therapist is just going to take the spotlight that you're shining on an idea and adjust it to a different angle. And you're going to start seeing things in a whole new light. And I think that's really the goal. The real goal for writing, meditating, going on these retreats, being a therapist, is to better understand ourselves. So I really encourage people to chase self-awareness, however they want to do it. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new

favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know?

Get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible i definitely recommend kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering boss babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash boss babe. Yeah, I love that. And I think sometimes it's just a case of getting quiet. I think there's so much going on. We're constantly being stimulated left, right,

and center, and we don't even sit with our thoughts to understand what is up there and how we can actually organize it. So I love the way that you frame that. Another thing you talk about is trying to make everyone happy is a real ingredient of failure. How did you come to realize that? I've been putting out work for a long time, not just, you know, books. I've also made a lot of music. I've written a lot of poetry. You know, I've written a lot of just, you know, articles and thoughts. And you start to realize the bigger your audience gets, you know, even if 0.01% of people disagree with you or read between the lines and misunderstand what you say, you know, they're going to make their opinions vocal. And I think in the beginning, I really tried my best to explain myself to everybody. If somebody left me a mean comment or somebody accused me of something that I didn't intend to do and try to defend myself.

But then I realized that when people criticize us and people attack us or people don't like us, that's really a reflection of them and what they're going through. I may not like a movie that I just saw because I was already having a bad day. That context matters. And I had to learn that when I put my work out into the world, I only own 50% of it. And the other 50% is the person and what they're going through in their lives in their own context. And that's what makes them love it. And that's what makes them hate it. And me trying to connect with every single person who comes across my work and ensure that they all love it, it's impossible. It's a waste of time. It defeats the purpose of putting the work out there. My job is to build a community of people who connect with me.

My job isn't to make everybody happy. If I wanted to make everybody happy, I'd make chocolate ice cream. And even then, somebody wouldn't like it. So I think just doing this long enough and seeing how people can misinterpret your words and kind of giving them space to do so and being like, all right, cool. I've done the same thing too. You know, I've seen people's stuff and thought they meant a certain thing from it. And then a couple of years go by, I grow up and I realized, oh no, there's more ways to look at life.

So what I realized is my goal is to put it out there. It's not necessarily my business to worry about how people feel about it. Yeah, I love that. And I think that's so true. The more that you open yourself up to having a bigger impact, I think that's so true. The more that you open yourself up to having a bigger impact, I think there's always going to be someone that doesn't like what you're doing and can find something wrong within it, because it's wrong within themselves. And I also kind of learned, especially in the YouTube space, and I learned this from Lily, she's like, if people aren't giving you negative feedback, or you're not getting any thumbs down, then you're not reaching a new audience. You know, she would measure her reach by how much negative comments she got. Because

she's like, you build an audience, your community loves you no matter what. And they're all just praising you, then you're never leaving that bubble. She was the one way you know, you leave your bubble is when you start to get a little bit of critical comments, you start getting thumbs down, because these people are new to your work, and they're going to give you a different perspective. So it's find value in that as well.'s so true and i think it's one of those things that's definitely easier said than done unless you're focusing on doing the inner work and you can be okay yep i mean everything in life is easier said than done yeah this is true and so speaking of that i mean a part of your story is going from being eighty thousand dollars in debt to being

a full-time artist and entrepreneur which is a very difficult thing i know a lot of your story is going from being $80,000 in debt to being a full-time artist and entrepreneur, which is a very difficult thing. I know a lot of artists online can find it really difficult to monetize and to understand how to make this their career. And so how has that looked for you? Well, in the beginning, I was in the same boat. I had $80,000 debt. I had more bills due. My debt just wasn't to my credit cards and the bank. It was also to friends and people I really cared about. And I was like, how do artists make money? I thought you get discovered by Puff Daddy and he just throws a bag of money your way and it's happily ever after. And after that didn't happen, I had no idea what to do. So I had to start

exploring. And it wasn't simply how to make money. It was also how to spend less money. I had to sell the place I was living. I couldn't afford to make the mortgage payments anymore. And it wasn't simply how to make money. It was also how to spend less money. I had to sell the place I was living. I couldn't afford to make the mortgage payments anymore. And I was getting more desperate every month to scrape together the money to do so. So I had the honest conversation with myself and I said, you have to start over. You have to hit the reset button. This property, when I purchased it, I was a teacher so I could afford it. This property was your rainy day fund. And now you're having a rainy day. So I had to sell that. And I moved back in with my parents. And I was 30 at the time. I had to move back in with my parents. And they welcomed me back, but they gave me a lot of, I told you so. And I had to deal with that. I had to own it. It wasn't

anybody else's fault that I was in that situation. That gave me a little bit of cushion. And some of the money I made selling the property, I was able to pay back my personal loans first. I didn't want to be that guy who owed anybody money who was avoiding them. I took that money, I paid back my personal loan. And then I just started picking every artist's brain that I could find. Anytime I met an artist and they're willing to talk to me, I was like, how do you make money? What do you do? And I learned that some music artists, they hit the stage, they give the performance of their life, and then they sell t-shirts after or they sell different merchandise or they sell, you know, one guy told me that even the tablecloth he uses to display his merchandise, he'll sign that at the end and sell that. And he used his live show as the advertisement for his products. So I learned about products and selling products, selling t-shirts. I have a t-shirt line now. And then I also incorporated my books into that. I'm from Canada. They had a couple of arts grants. So I started looking into the different arts grants and doing all that unsexy paperwork to fill out a grant and get a little bit of money there. So I found some success there.

I started writing for other artists and doing it for free and then charging a little bit. I really minimized my life. So my bills became very nominal at that point. They weren't super high. So I no longer felt like I was drowning. I pretty much became a minimalist. And it took me about four to five years to get out of debt. The beauty of it was when I went from negative 80 to zero, that taught me how to keep making money. And I didn't change my lifestyle when my bank account hit zero. I started earning regular money from all the different seeds I had planted. Even back then, when my book was independent, I was selling like two to three copies a day, but that was getting me 20 bucks a day and that was adding up. And then I sell a couple of t-shirts and then I started

getting live shows and I started making a little bit of money off of that. It took about five years, but by then I had figured it out. Then I got invited to be on a tour. While I was on the tour, I got also paid by the production companies to do some filming for them. I started producing my own music videos. So everything slowly started to add up. And then once I got out of debt, I used the same principles, lived simply as well.

The money started going into the green until I got to a very comfortable situation. But even to today, things are very good for me financially, but I live a very simple life. I don't even own a car. Wow, that's awesome. And in the beginning, how was it to be selling books and selling out show? Were you doing it through YouTube and your audience on Facebook? Yeah, so what I was doing was I had crowdfunded the book. So I pretty much used Indiegogo, which is very similar to Kickstarter. And I pretty much put it out to my audience. I'm like, hey, I'm going to drop a book. I don't know how to drop a book. I don't have any money to drop a book. But if you give me 30 bucks, I'll send you a signed book. If y'all give me 100 bucks, I'll give you a signed book and a t-shirt. If y'all give me 250 bucks, I'll

give you this limited edition hardcover. If y'all give me a thousand bucks, I'll fly to your house and perform for your family. I made all these different levels and I ended up raising about $26,000. And the biggest contributor I received was from a Harvard business professor who I had never met. And I guess he was a fan of my work back then. And he was very happy that I was taking the business into my own hands. And I ended up flying out to Cambridge, Massachusetts and performing for him and a bunch of Harvard colleagues. And he showed me in his office a poster by Andy Warhol that said, business is the most interesting type of art. And that really solidified for me that I could not just simply be

an artist and think someone else is going to handle the business side of this. I had to treat the business like an art and use all the creativity I had to find different ways to generate revenue. And sometimes it hurt me. Sometimes I spent so much time organizing my own shows and selling tickets and negotiating with venues that when it was time to go on stage, I was horrible. I spent no time working on my craft and working on my live performance. So I had to take a step back from that as well. So sometimes no time working on my craft and working on my live performance. So I had to take a step back from that as well. So sometimes I overly dove into the business and it hurt my art. And sometimes I overly dove into the art and it hurt the business. And

every single day is about finding that balance, which is like, what's more important, doing some writing or replying to emails? And I feel like everybody listening right now in the entrepreneurial space is dealing with that same struggle. It doesn't go away. We all have to try our best with the tools we have. And do you have any kind of ways you do it? Do you have creative days and admin days or anything like that? Do you balance in a certain way? Currently, I try to time it out. So I try to set a certain time for my health, you know, waking up, going to the gym, attending a class, going for a long walk. Then I try to make some time and get through emails. I mean, depending where I am in the world, I understand that the irony of it is we didn't want nine to five jobs, but you have to conduct

your business between nine to five if everybody else is working in those hours. So I try to get through some emails and then I try to ensure I have some energy to do something creative, whether it's, you know, writing captions, writing chapters for the book, or writing music. And sometimes that happens for me wonderfully late at night. But I want to get to a situation, and I'm working towards it, where I can start my day with the creativity and then spend my afternoon focusing on the business. Yeah, I try and do that. But I normally find I can't mix two things at the same time.

It just doesn't work. I can't switch on creativity. I haven't found the key to that yet. Yeah, I have a friend actually, and he has a successful podcast. And what he did was he taped podcasts for five months and he taped a year and a half worth of episodes. And then he stopped

and then he started focusing on the next thing. And he just does this like tunnel vision focus of what he needs to do. And he banks all his work. And then he works on the next thing. And I guess right now, as an author, I wrote this book that just came out, Things That No One Else Can Teach Us. I finished writing it in February 2019.

And then after that, the publishers had to go through their process of bringing the book to life in terms of binding and marketing and all that good stuff. And that allowed me to focus on the next thing. I'm trying to look at life in terms of seasons as well, where I'm trying to have a creative season for music, and then a creative season for the book and then creative season for some of the fashion work that I do at the same time, both focusing on the business side and partnering and hiring people who can work on this business stuff better than me. I love that. And I just want to jump back when you flew to perform for the Harvard

professor and you started to change your beliefs around being an artist and being able to earn money through doing it. And I think a lot of people listening can relate to that, whether they're artists or not. I've really, okay, I have this passion. Is it wrong of me to monetize? Am I selling out if I do that? And it really is about changing your belief system around that, which is one of my favorite chapters in your book, in your previous book on learn about you not being your beliefs and you needing to reevaluate them every now and then. It's something I've definitely known to be true. And I've had sometimes some really strong beliefs from childhood that I've had to really reevaluate because they just weren't serving me. So what does that look like for

you? And what do you believe about that? Yeah, I think you hit it on the head right there. It really goes back to beliefs that were kind of programmed into us. And a common belief for most people is around making money. My dad is a cab driver, and I grew up in a family of immigrants. And I was raised with the belief that anybody with a lot of money is most likely greedy. They probably cut corners to make their money because we didn't know anybody with money. We lived in a modest neighborhood and everybody was in the same struggle. And when you become an artist, you're told that any artist that makes a lot of money is a sellout. Again, all these ideas, they programmed in your head and then they become the barriers. They're the only reason why you don't move forward.

For me, I realized that it has to happen with the baby steps. The first thing I would encourage every entrepreneur to do is to fund their own endeavor. I think we're all artists in one way or another. You're solving a problem with your creativity. That's what a business owner is. They find a problem that they care about, and they address it in one way or the other. Your product is a reflection of that. And in the beginning, work your day job and pay for it. Pay for the marketing, pay for the design, pay for it to be out there. And as you start selling or as people see that you're bringing them value, they're going to give you resources to continue. And I think that's the best way to look at it.

You're doing a service. We're all in the service industry. We're all here to help other people. We're all here to add value to other people. And when you do add value to other people, they're going to give you what you need to continue adding value to other people. So definitely, if you're creating because you want to buy that Lamborghini, you have to do a little bit more soul searching as to what that Lamborghini means to you. I have a friend who started a business, a waterless car wash, and he became very successful because large companies and UPS and FedEx, they wanted to save water when they washed all their trucks. And his product definitely helped them save money. But he didn't come from a position of making money. He came from a position of caring for the environment.

And he actually does care about the environment. He's actually given some equity in his company to charity for clean drinking water. And because his purpose was real and pure, his business has bloomed and has grown exponentially because he really cares about the problems he's trying to solve. And some of us sometimes just want to be rich because we want to make up for something that happened in our childhood. We want to feel significant. We want to feel like we matter. We want to be noticed. We got to do the work to figure that stuff out. As you've done the work as well, realizing things that were programmed into you from childhood, the more we can let go of those things and the more we realize that, hey,

my beliefs aren't tattooed onto my identity. I can be whoever I want and I'm better off feeling the best about myself when I'm doing my most authentic stuff. That's what we should really be pursuing. So for me, I had the same challenges. I still deal with the same challenges sometimes when people present to me options that would maximize profits, but I don't feel good about it. So I just don't do it. I think how we feel matters more than anything else in the world. I fully agree with you. And we chatted about on a previous podcast, if someone's saying,

I want to be a multimillionaire, so I'm going to start my own business. I feel like that alone is not going to be the thing that carries them through because generally people are looking for lots of different things. And often it's freedom and probably choosing the entrepreneurial lifestyle isn't always going to bring you that freedom, especially in the beginning. And so getting so clear on that's really important. Another thing I want to chat about is a lot of work you put out there. You really talk about time being limited and being really selective about the people you surround yourself with, which is something that I really try and do. But it can be really hard sometimes when you don't turn up to events or you don't do certain things. You can almost feel like you're missing out or you're being a bad friend because you turned down that

invitation. How do you go about things like that? That's a great question. I think it's important for us to realize how we are a source of all things that we chase. We chase love. We chase attention. We chase feeling significant. These are things that all of us as human beings, we all want it. We all need it. There's nothing wrong with that. How we go about getting it, some ways are more sustainable than others. And I think love and our relationship with other people is a really good thing to explore because sometimes we feel like we'll always have FOMO. We're always going to feel like we're missing out something if we're not there, especially with the social media generation, because everybody's posting where they are and everybody's acting like everything is the greatest thing ever. The thing is, just like we have to eat healthy, we also have to, you know, be mindful of the people that we're around.

And sometimes, you know, just like junk food, it's the most delicious, but it's the most unhealthy. Certain people are like junk food, you know, they could be so much fun to be around, but they could also be the most toxic for us for what our real purpose and our real goals are. And anybody in our lives that feels like an obligation that we have to keep up with, I'm not going to say it's wrong. I'm just going to say it's not sustainable. You can only try to keep people happy for so long before you let them down and they don't appreciate it. So I think the best thing to do is when you put yourself first, then your cup will be full of love. And then you have love that you can share

with people. When you put yourself first, then your cup will be full of happiness and you can share that happiness with people. So I always encourage people, instead of trying to make other people happy, share your happiness with other people. And if you are still around people who only know guilt and shame as ways to communicate, these people, they're not ready to be in healthy friendships and relationships. And I recommend you move away from them. And I definitely understand that when we have a lot of history with people, it gets hard to move away from them. But having a lot of history with somebody doesn't mean you have to have a future with them. I have friends who've never left our neighborhood and I've known them since we were four years old. And because they never left their little bubble, you know, their mindsets are not healthy to be around.

And I care for them and I love them, but I have to protect myself and not be around them at all times. I fully agree with you. And what about your family? How do they feel about what you do now? Are they really supportive or do they not understand it? I think it's a combination of not understanding it when they support it and not understanding it when they don't. Obviously, when I left my job as a teacher, my mother was very concerned. She's like, you have a salary and this is a stable, secure job. Why are you throwing it all away? And my father was kind of like, you know, I see documentaries about artists. They always go crazy. I don't want you to go crazy. You know, in the beginning, I wasted a lot of time trying to prove things to them. And I want to use the word wasted time because

they're set in their ways. You know, my parents grew up in villages in India. They never knew artists. You know, they never knew entrepreneurs. I'm one of the first entrepreneurs in my entire family. They don't have that scope. And I shouldn't have tried as much as I did to try to make them understand that with my words and our arguments. Instead, all you can do is show them with your actions. And in the beginning, even when good things would happen to me during my struggling years, my mother would be like, oh, that's nice. Did you make any money? Because sometimes, and you know this, entrepreneurs, you have to spend to make sometimes. And you got to spend money in the short term for good things to happen in the long term. I used to get invited to perform

on amazing stages. I got to perform at Lollapalooza. But they said to me, you got to fly yourself out here. You got to pay for your own hotel. You got to cover all the costs, but we'll give you a spot on the stage. I invested in myself by doing that. That's something I couldn't explain to my mother. Every so often, she would say, well, that's really good news. But did you get paid? Did you get paid? Do you think it's time to go back to your job? And then until eventually good things started happening to me, and I could start showing her the paychecks. But then almost instantly, her story changed to, you know, money isn't everything. We need you to get married and have grandkids now. So they have their own priorities. And I really encourage people to be mindful of how much pleasing our parents is a big chip that

we all carry on our shoulders, but it's only weighing us down. You know, at the end of the day, live your most authentic life. The resources will come from a consequence of that. It's not going to happen on your own timeline, but it will come. And slowly the people around you who either overtly doubted you or even passively aggressively doubted you, they kind of plant little seeds of fear into your brain. They'll come around. And if they don't come around, you have to move away from them. You have to love yourself enough to know who you need to be around. And I have compassion towards my parents because I know they didn't understand what was going on. Sometimes they still don't.

But even now that I'm doing well, my mother is afraid that the money is going to go to my head. She feels like it's going to make me egotistical. She thinks I'm going to forget about God. You know, as an immigrant, she grew up with a very strong scarcity mindset. And there's not much I can do about that. So now I always tell people that I don't think about how my work impacts my parents. I think about how my work impacts my nieces and my nephews.

They matter and my contributions enhance their life much more than it will ever do anything for my parents. I love that so much. Yeah, you've hit the nail on the head. And it's really powerful, I think, to take the focus away from the older generation and actually and think about how you can impact the newer generation. I think that's really, really incredible. And so your books are amazing. And they really do feel like you're in my head, everything that you touch on. I'm like, Oh, yeah, I get yet. But so I'm interested. Do you still get triggered? And I'm sure the answer is yes. But I kind of just want you to admit it because I'm like, surely you can't have done all the work. And so do you still get triggered? Does it kind of go away faster because you have ways of dealing with it? What does that look like?

No, no, I get triggered every single day. I think the big lesson that I'm learning is different levels, different devils. So most entrepreneurs listening, and you can probably agree with this, the real rewards that you gain as an entrepreneur are more opportunities to work. Your stage will get bigger, your clients will get bigger. Your clients will get bigger. Your orders will get bigger. Whatever you're doing, things scale bigger. And that's the real reward. The reward isn't the money that's coming in or the attention that you get. It's the opportunity to do more because you have to continually be growing. And as you grow, you encounter different challenges. So for me, it's a bunch of challenges I never saw.

I remember the first time I had to pay tax. I was broke for five years. I didn't have to pay any tax. And the first time I paid tax, I was happy. But this most recent time when my accountant showed me my tax bill, it was like, wow, I never thought in a million years I'd make enough money to pay that much in taxes. And that became a challenge. You know, this book, for example, the new book is being published in the United States and in Canada and in the UK Commonwealth, all at the same time, but with three different publishers. So each of them have very big demands for my time. They have demands for what they want me to do, what they want me to post on my social

media. So dealing with a lot of their pressure definitely isn't something I'm used to. You know, and you're in a professional setting, you have to find the right language to communicate with them. And I grew up in a challenging neighborhood. Nobody ever taught me professional courtesy and etiquette. So I'm kind of learning that as I go. Recently, I just did another podcast earlier today with somebody who was just saying a bunch of very strong ideas that were really getting my juices flowing in terms of me learning. And I was kind of getting overwhelmed with these new lessons and I wanted to take notes. Sometimes I think this is all a waste. And sometimes I look at my friends who live very simple nine to five jobs, and

they don't have to think about work after 5pm. And they can come home and just watch Netflix and just veg out. And they can look forward to the weekend and they can plan their vacation six months ahead of time. And they have simplicity and happiness to their life. Whereas for entrepreneurs, you gave up a nine to five so you can work 24 seven. And you never stop thinking about your baby. You never stop thinking about your business. You can't. You can't turn it off if you want to. And it doesn't matter how much money you have. It doesn't matter how many opportunities you have. New challenges arise that fit that. So now I'm trying to make peace with that. I realized I'm entering new leagues. And every time you enter a new league or a new level, you have to start at the bottom and you have to work your way up. But that's healthy. I think that's the best way to look at

it. But I've definitely encountered some new challenges that I never thought in a million years would come my way. And even with friends of mine who had gone even farther with some of their work and people attacking them with the legal system, accusing them of plagiarism, accusing them of stealing their ideas, accusing them of saying things they never meant. And now we're getting to a level where it's like you're partnering with businesses and they want you to have a clean cut reputation, but you're a human being and people can go out there and just make up stories about you. And that's enough for you to lose a deal. And learning all of this and navigating it, you know, sometimes it's a fun video game. Other times I miss the

simpler days when I was 17 years old in front of my computer, just doing this for fun. Oh my God, I can relate to pretty much everything you said there. It's so funny. Well, funny or not, but yeah, something like that happened to me a couple of months ago where someone went online and just made up something completely wrong about me. It was not true. And like you've probably seen online, lots of other people jumped in and started making up their own things too. And I took it really hard that day. And that was a big learning for me. And I went for a walk with my husband and we walked past a tech company

that he used to work for. And he was just telling me all about like the things that he loved about working there. And he'd quit to start his own company. And on that day where I was having one of those entrepreneurial lows, I was like, why did you give that up? I can't see why you give that up.

Because for me, I felt like it wasn't a choice. I was like born an entrepreneur. And so it's just nice to just to put that out and to show that it's not always ups and ups. There's lots of ups and downs. And it's not always the best option for everyone. It looks really cool and amazing on the outside. But some of us, it's what we were born to do.

And we're doing it. And it's great. But it's not the easiest thing either. I think you hit it right on the head there. This is something that we were born to do. And I think this is a big thing that I want to clarify for the listeners. It's become this millennial idea that we deserve to get paid for our passion. Any entrepreneur that you've ever met who has found some level of success, they're not passionate. They're upset. They don't have a choice to do the thing that they're doing. They have to do it. They have to solve that problem.

They're consumed with it. We don't sit here and think to ourselves, oh, it would be nice to be my own boss. And I want to be, we sit there and think I have to do this because I can't do anything else. And I just want to remind anybody entrepreneur, we all go through this level of BS. It doesn't go away. The more you grow, the bigger these challenges are going to be. And I've actually asked movie stars, I've asked TV stars, I've asked people who everybody thinks hasn't made. And I'm like, do you deal with BS? And they're like, I definitely deal with BS. it's okay to get tired. It's okay to get frustrated. Just remember, the better choice is to rest. Don't quit. Take a break. Don't quit. Take a rest.

Don't quit. And learn to rest. It's okay to rest. You have to recharge your batteries. Let's stop glorifying this notion that you have to sleep four hours a day to make this happen. No, no. Get your eight hours of sleep. hours a day to make this happen. No, no. Get your eight hours

of sleep. Eat some non-processed food. Spend time with people you actually like. Go outside. See nature. Breathe some fresh air. Movement is medicine. Get some exercise. Not just going to the gym. Maybe join a class. Be mindful of all of that because you are the vehicle for this and you're on a mission. And sometimes that mission, you're going to hit massive roadblocks that are going to feel like they're insurmountable you have to take a step back you don't have to change your goal but you may have to adjust your strategy every so often and that's completely okay that's completely fine i think the best thing to do is definitely listen to great podcasts like boss babe because other people sharing their stories and letting you know that it's not all glamorous. Continue reading about your favorite entrepreneurs because they'll tell you like

everybody's story has that, those pitfalls. They have that moment where they were going to give up on everything just like I did, just like I'm assuming you did as well, Natalie. And then you realize like, what else am I going to do? And for me, it was, I made the promise to myself when I was $80,000 in debt, I had lost 15 pounds and I was grossly underweight. I was hiding from my family. I didn't want them to know I was dealing with this. And then I made one decision, which was I'd rather do this for three more months and die than do anything else for 30 years. And then after I made that decision, that never went away. And I've been working accordingly. And every time I'm frustrated now, I'll just close the laptop, turn off phone, give myself a couple of hours to just eat some junk food, go for a walk to

be selfish and focus on me, recharge my batteries, and then jump right back into it. I love all of that. It's so incredibly true. And I've heard someone also say entrepreneurs are like athletes. Like you were saying, it's not always a nine I I've heard someone also say entrepreneurs are like athletes like you were saying it's not always a nine-to-five job we are thinking 24-7 about our businesses our teams how we can do this better our purpose and athletes are not just doing this constantly they have seasons where they're on and they're you know at full capacity and they have seasons where they have more downtime and they take time off and I think everything you just said really sums that up. And whether your season is you have one week off and one week on or you find time in the middle of the week, it's so incredibly important because no one's

got this figured out. No one has this endless energy where everything's going smoothly, even if you're doing something you're so incredibly passionate about. Completely. And that's actually a quote in the new book that says nobody's got it figured out and that's okay. And a whole chapter in the book is called focus on the rainbow, not the pot of gold, because that's what it really is. Entrepreneurs, we have to enjoy the rainbow and not worry if there's a pot of gold at the end. We have to, you know, the rainbow is the pot of gold. The journey is the reward and the ups and downs are what make our story interesting. If you were to watch the story of your life, if everything worked out perfectly, it'd be a very boring movie.

Challenges are what make us strong. And I always say, easy day at the gym was a day wasted. And it's the same thing on our journey. We have to deal with challenges. We have to deal with BS. That doesn't go away for anybody. Everybody is dealing with BS. Some of us will just be fortunate enough that we have a strong enough purpose that makes us motivated to face that BS head on. So true. I feel like everyone listening to this is just like, oh my God, they are in my head. I'm so glad they're speaking about this. So where can everyone find you? And more importantly, where can everyone buy your book? Because for everyone listening listening I really want you to pull out your phones or go on to Amazon where wherever you want to buy the book and buy it and support because it can be really

really hard to support your passion as an artist and when you're putting out books I mean I feel like people don't write books to become multi-millionaires they write books because they have a purpose that they want to get out to the masses. And the smallest thing that we can do is go and support. So where can everyone find you? And where can everyone support your book too? Yeah, so my book's available everywhere books are sold. I mean, definitely Amazon. The first book is called Unlearn. It's got a nice yellow cover that says Unlearn on it by Humble the Poet. And then the new book that's dropping is called Things No One Else Can Teach Us. I think actually Amazon has them sold together as a bundle as an option as well if you want to get both. And it definitely starts you on that journey.

Unlearn was my first attempt to connect with people and using my skills and talents as an elementary school teacher and a rapper to take what we all go through because we're all in the same boat. We're all dealing with the exact same things. And my contribution was helping us put that into words to help us make more sense of our thoughts. And with things no one else can teach us, I started sharing my own personal stories and showing people how I made adjustments to my attitude, my outlook, and my expectations to either find or create the silver lining in all of that. And as you said, nobody writes a book to get rich. We write because that's what we're supposed to do. We share our stories because as human beings, that's what we've been doing since day one. The people who used to draw in caves, they were drawing stories on caves to warn and educate future generations. They weren't doing it to make some money or get some followers or get some fame. They were doing it because this is how we evolve as a people. We're all in this together. We're all in the exact same boat. And, you know, we feel lonely because we think our

problems are unique to us. You know, whenever our hearts are broken, we think we're the first person to ever get our heart broken. But that's not true. There's a million heartbreak songs out there. We think we're alone in the entrepreneurial space. It can feel very isolating, but it's not true. There's thousands and possibly millions of entrepreneurs out there. And when we unify and we share our stories with each other, you know, and read the stories of other people, and we build our community that way, it's going to feel a lot less isolating. And it'll also help us understand ourselves better. I think hearing the stories of other people has helped me understand my story. And sharing story has helped me understand myself better and has also provided a framework for other

people to get their stuff. So again, back to the book, you can find me at Humble the Poet on all social media. I post a lot on Instagram and Twitter and then my website is humblethepoet.com and the books are at Amazon. And I do believe you guys have a link for the comments and stuff like that as well that links you directly to the book on Amazon. And yes, please definitely check it out. And there are samples. You guys can see what's going on. And I post a lot of pages from the book as well

on my social media. And the goals of these books were to help people better understand themselves. I love it. Yeah, we put all the links below in the show notes. And just because I love to get specific, I really recommend everyone listening, incorporate this book into your morning or evening routine

because yes, it gives you tons of advice, but it really makes you think. It really makes you reflect on things differently or it brings up something that you might not have dealt with. It's been a really, really good addition to mine. I have a solid routine that I don't like to move away from and this is something I added in. And I also just want to say, which is totally irrelevant,

but your book looks like a hardcover. I guess it is a hardcover. It looks amazing on a bookshelf, but it's really, really light. Was that done on purpose? Because it's so easy to throw in your bag, to put in a suitcase. Did you do that on purpose? It's incredible. I'm learning myself.

And it was a conversation with the publishers because when old school hardcover books were very bulky, and they had that jacket on them that would always get messed up. And they had shown me they said, you know, this is a new style of hardcover that we're exploring, especially understanding people now or you know, everybody's moving all time. And the last thing we want to do is make it a burden. So yeah, we wanted it to be very light at the same time, very aesthetic. You know, I have a lot of friends when they're reading the book, people stop them and like, what book is that? That seems really cool. And, you know, shout outs to the cover designers for doing that. I mean, when I first published it, I made a whole different cover myself.

Unlearn is on a third cover. And now Things No One Else Can Teach Us, because it's being released in so many different countries, it already has four different covers as well. And I'm super excited and proud for that. And for people who don't like reading, because I mean, the people listening to the podcast, I've also recorded both on Audible, and they're both there. And specifically the second book, there were some chapters that were so heavy that I'm literally crying while I read them just because we were going to keep it as authentic as possible. We didn't want it to be kind of vanilla. So we just left the experience a little bit more authentic in the audio book. And I had a blast reading it. But it was a I shared a lot. And it definitely was heavy revisiting some of that stuff. I really love that. I love that you left it in. And I also

I'm Yeah, I'm glad that was intentional, because I'm the kind of person that I have a Kindle, but I love to travel with actual books and they are so heavy. And I remember getting this and I was like, holy shit, this is so different to anything I've had before. So thanks for doing that. So like we said, everyone link below in the show notes would love you to grab a copy and also take a screenshot of this podcast and share your biggest takeaway, share something that you might've learned or a quote that you're going to maybe sit with for the next week and tag us. But thank you so so so much for being on the podcast this has been an amazing conversation and I think people are gonna love it thank you so much for having me I really appreciate it

if you loved this episode please subscribe and be sure to leave us a review I want to hear what you enjoyed what your main takeaways were and also I really want to know who you want to see appear on the show we'll be reading all of the reviews so we will be implementing your feedback and speaking of reviews we've got a little something up our sleeves so we've just created a brand new document it's called the boss babe 25 so the boss babe 25 is the 25 essential resources you need for personal and professional growth seriously it's like a little Boss Babe holy grail. It's incredible and you're going to love it. It covers everything from must-have products, our favorite books, rituals that we do daily, and some amazing hacks to help you grow. So if you want a copy, it's really simple. Just leave us a review, screenshot your review,

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