Sean McCabe: Hand-letterer Turned Business Visionary
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 July 2015
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From the time he was a kid, Sean McCabe was obsessed, strike that, possessed, with letters.
The shape. The form. The curves and nuances. Not just the fonts you see on computers, but the ones drawn painstakingly by hand, what's come to be known as hand-lettering, consumed him.
A few years back, Sean began posting his work online. Nothing happened for the better part of two years. Then, lighting began to strike. In part, riding along with and, in part, helping to fuel a massive resurgence in both the practice and demand for hand-lettering, Sean's posting began to catch fire.
People wanted to not only buy his work and hire him, though, they also relentlessly asked "how" he did what he did. Both as an artist, and as a professional who'd built a career hand-lettering.
That demand kicked off a journey Sean never saw coming. One that's now led him into what he terms the next "season" of his life, moving away from the practice of hand-lettering and into his role as a leader and teacher in the business-side of art. He's built a tremendous educational resource with his Learn Lettering course, a broadcast-quality podcast and video series with a global audience and an emerging career as a keynote speaker. And, there's lots more in the works.
In this week's episode, we dive into the exact steps along his journey. We explore how he developed his skills as a hand-letterer, then shifted his focus to cultivate the same depth of expertise in business and media. Sean is incredibly transparent and generous and he also shares a mountain of strategies for building not just a business, but a life. In fact, this conversation was recorded during one of his "7-week sabbaticals," a one-week window that he takes work-free every seven weeks. We talk about how that began and, also, how sacred and important it has become.
Oh, and P.S. - An all-new Learn Lettering 2.0 classes will launch on July 27th, 2015. I was a student of the first one and I was blown away by both the depth of the content and the production values.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you start seeing headlines like a hand letter or makes six figures in three days, |
| 0:09.1 | you start to peak the interest of people a little bit outside of that realm, more business-minded, |
| 0:15.0 | and once again I'm realizing there's people wanting to learn to do what I do. |
| 0:22.8 | So a couple of years ago, hand letter or sound-acabed started posting his work online. |
| 0:27.7 | The response was pretty stunning. Everybody wanted to know not just what he was doing, |
| 0:34.0 | but how he was doing it. People started calling him more and more and more people emailing |
| 0:39.2 | everywhere they could reach him. They wanted to know how to do what he did. |
| 0:43.7 | So in order to sort of save himself a little bit, he wrote this incredible tutorial and |
| 0:48.8 | put it up on his website. That page exploded, drawing hundreds of thousands of people to the page |
| 0:55.5 | where he then turned around and realized that the thing that had obsessed him, the thing that |
| 1:00.8 | had drawn him, his deep fascination almost obsession with drawing letters, was something that the |
| 1:08.3 | world was becoming increasingly fascinated by. And that led to not only a pretty huge explosion in |
| 1:15.2 | his career as a letter, but it launched his life as an educator, as a teacher, as somebody who |
| 1:21.3 | turned around and taught people how to do what he did and also how to build a career around the |
| 1:27.6 | thing that he loved so much. In this week's conversation, we go down that rabbit hole with Sean |
| 1:33.8 | McCabe and how he really came to lettering and then how he turned around and turned this into |
| 1:40.7 | something much bigger and really extraordinary. He's incredibly generous with his time and his |
| 1:46.8 | wisdom. I'm so happy to share this conversation with you this week. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is |
| 1:52.8 | Good Life Project. |
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