Emily McDowell: Irreverent Art With a Huge Heart.
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2016
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily McDowell is a writer, illustrator, and entrepreneur who specializes in chronicling the human condition.
In 2012, she left a successful career in advertising to launch her greeting card line, making cards for the relationships we actually have. Now a multimillion-dollar stationery and gift company, Emily McDowell Studio products are sold online and in nearly 2,000 stores worldwide.
In 2015, Emily’s Empathy Cards, designed to help people connect around serious illness and loss, struck a nerve around the world and gave people a way into conversations that seemed brutally hard to begin and deepen into.
Her first book, There Is No Good Card For This: What To Say and Do When Life Gets Scary, Awful, and Unfair To People You Love, will be released in January 2017.
In today's conversation, we take a step back in time, explore the experiences in her younger life that were defining moments, revealing who she really was and how Emily began to connect with an irreverent blend of art and humor that touches so many.
We explore what happened when she was diagnosed with cancer at a very young age and watched friends struggle to figure out how to be there for her. We dive into how she compartmentalized this experience, seeking to not let it define her, both as a person and, soon enough in art and business. We also track the launch and growth of her company and her recent move to rework the business in order to not just serve a "customer" need, but also give her what she needs, the ability to do the work that most lights her up.
Mentioned in this Episode:
- Dance Neurosis Resume by Emily
- Emily's famous quilt-making mom, Ruth McDowell
- Emily's talk at World Domination Summit 2016
- Emily's Awkward Dating Card
- Hand Letterer Mary Kate McDevitt
- Stupid Cancer :: The Voice of Young Adult Cancer
- Brené Brown - Researcher + Storyteller
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Jonathan. |
| 0:03.3 | One of the things that I've learned over the years is that the pretty significant part |
| 0:08.3 | of our community, or what I call conscious entrepreneurs, and what I mean by that is |
| 0:13.4 | it's folks who are founders, and that could be of a business and organization, foundation, |
| 0:18.2 | private practice, anything like that. |
| 0:20.7 | That have three things in common. |
| 0:22.7 | One is that you serve a genuine need. |
| 0:25.1 | You really solve a problem and you deliver that and get paid for it. |
| 0:28.4 | And so solving a problem and generating real profit is important to you. |
| 0:32.8 | The second is that what you create actually serves as a true vehicle for the expression |
| 0:38.7 | of your strengths, your values and beliefs, and your voice. |
| 0:42.8 | So it lets you step into your fullest potential. |
| 0:46.2 | And the third is that there's something bigger happening here. |
| 0:48.4 | You're part of something bigger and you're serving some bigger need. |
| 0:52.4 | And that's what I call conscious business. |
| 0:54.3 | And we've created all sorts of experiences, programs, courses over the years, designed |
| 0:59.2 | to serve conscious business founders in a variety of ways. |
| 1:03.4 | And amazing things have happened. |
| 1:06.5 | We put pretty much everything on hiatus this year because we wanted to really deconstruct |
| 1:10.9 | what we were doing and figure out how to bring more people together to serve them on a higher |
| 1:15.0 | level. |
| 1:16.3 | Because what we found is that not only do people need information and great advice and |
... |
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