An Audience of One

Reclaiming Creativity for Its Own Sake

De: Srinivas Rao, Robin Dellabough

Narrado por: Srinivas Rao

The creator of the Unmistakable Creative podcast makes a counterintuitive argument: By focusing your creative work on pleasing yourself, you can increase your productivity, happiness, and (eventually, paradoxically) the size of your audience.

Creating for your own pleasure - whether you're writing a novel, composing songs, or painting a landscape - can seem pointless. It's tempting to focus on pursuing money and fame rather than the process itself. But as Srini Rao warns, creating then turns into a chore that can harm your self-esteem and suck the pleasure out of life rather than being a source of joy.

Rao, host of the podcast The Unmistakable Creative, argues that we should counter this thinking by intentionally creating art for ourselves alone - an audience of one. In this book he shares the fascinating true stories of creatives who took this path, along with actionable tips and the research of creativity experts. You'll learn, for example:

• How Oprah's intentional focus on her own work rather than the opinions of everyone else catapulted her into one of the most popular talk shows of all time.
• How being process-driven not only can help you produce more work but can make you happier outside of your creative time.
• How to put together a creative "team of rivals" whose feedback can help you hone your craft and filter out useless feedback.

By playing to an audience of one, we can find more happiness, increased productivity, and a greater sense of community.

©2018 Srinivas Rao (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Great inspiration

Lots of great ideas and put together well for Artists to enjoy. will listen to over and over

Excellent Encouragement for Creatives!

This book is SO full of awesome advice for many areas in the life of a creative. If you are a visual artist, writer, musician or performer, this book could become a favorite as it has for me. I am SURE I will listen to it again. And most likely, I am going to also buy the Kindle version now so I can highlight it like crazy!

Srinivas Rao's voice a pleasure to listen to, though, so I di recommend this audible version as well.

If you need a boost of confidence, some encouragement or just great advice on how to maintain a thriving creative life, this is a book you may find helpful.

One Pebble

I find myself constantly chewing on the apples in this book! I believe passion fuels passion and it is clear that these authors have a zeal that’s contagious. I found the gems on productivity to be especially insightful. I didn’t realize how much of a distraction my social reflection was and how much I was conforming my creativity to the sake of others.

One pebble can change the current of things and ripple it throughout the masses, and I can finally see how much greener my own grass is. The moment I took off those social glasses, I started truly seeing that we shouldn’t be so caught up in what everyone else is thinking.
I think this book will inspire its readers to become that one pebble.

Outstanding Book for Creatives

As a creative I found this book most definitely valuable. It accurately identified some issues that I was personally going through as a creative. It also gave me outstanding advice as to how to self correct these issues. I enjoyed the book so much that I'm recommending it to all of my other creative friends.

Thank you. A great way to start my year.

I appreciated this and needed this in ways I cannot verbally express. You spoke from the heart. This will help many who are genuinely seeking self confidence, affirmation & freedom from the innumerable constraints. Thank you.

A bit of everything worth knowing about creativity

Most books that are written by bloggers and podcasters have a similar trend, they contain a lot of small parts and massive gratitudes of subjects more or less about one theme, an "Audience of One" uncovers some of one of the simple secrets that you may not know about how some massively successful creative writers and artists have kept hidden in the open.

It's always about you... What you like to listen to, what you like to read, what you like to see... You are your #1 Fan.

I Enjoyed the book!

good premise, but he loses focus on it

I liked the idea of the premise/thesis, and the book started off well enough in helping explain why the idea should be pursued during their creative endeavors and a few tips on how to accomplish it. however, it didn't take long before he started regurgitating ideas from research and books I've already read it have seen referenced many times over on topics like habits, focus, etc. thankfully, unlike other similar books, he kept it pretty short.

I was doing my art for the wrong reasons.

Over the last 10 years I started several projects. I was expecting to receive immediate feedback and when it didn't happen I got discouraged and eventually stop working on the project.

The truth is I'm not looking for props or praise . My reputation and Legacy with in my industry is already - reading this book has allowed me to gain clarity - I've since we started an important project that I've had on.

Srinivas this work is on the level of Seth Godin.

Helped me put down the social media and pick up my pen

Helped me put down the social media and pick up my pen in this post lockdown world where that’s all we did for a while

More About Productivity Hacks Than Art

There were some helps tips for daily habits but I was disappointed that there wasn’t a deep exploration of art. I’ve already heard many of these productivity hacks from the books written by some of the authors he references. I’d say this could be helpful for someone new to art or an entrepreneur who wants to be creative.

It seems that more and more authors are making books that seem scrapped together from blog posts. Where are the days where authors went deep into topics and brought their own unique points of views?

I fear that America and west coat non-fiction literature is being taken hostage by group think where every author just references every other author as a way of cross promoting and forming some kind of back links.

The irony is that many of these 21st century books that try to help us be more efficient and work faster with hacks are being written with the same hacks. Don’t write a book from scratch, just like together all of your blogs, vlogs, and podcasts.

Then these books get used as a way of promoting ones blogs, vlogs, and pod casts even more. It’s like every online entrepreneur’s intention for publishing a book is bc they’ll be taken more seriously or bc they need something to make money from in addition to advertising. It all becomes a viscous cycle leading to today’s increasingly mediocre non-fiction literature that lacks depth, richness and originality.