Start Before You’re Ready with Humans of New York Brandon Stanton
The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show
Chase Jarvis
4.8 • 641 Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2018
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you don’t know Brandon, you definitely know his work. Brandon is the creator of Humans of New York which has accumulated over 20 million followers worldwide and turned into two NYT-bestselling books (Humans of New York and Humans of New York: Stories). It has also spawned an entire genre of similar blogs. Hundreds of aspiring documentarians have followed in HONY’s footsteps, telling the stories of countries, cities, and communities across the world.
During a PhotoWeek session we had at CreativeLive, Brandon shared his story from getting fired at a job he hated to selling everything to move to New York to try to be a photographer. Brandon shares what he has learned along the journey of interviewing thousands of people and how they have shaped his storytelling.
If you love this episode, you might also want to check out the video version of this talk to see some of the photos he shares during his talk. You can do that by logging onto creativelive.com and searching “Brandon Stanton”.
In today's episode:
- There’s a subtle but crucial mind shift that needs to happen if you want mental freedom. You need to consciously decide what you’re going to spend your brain power on and consciously decide what you’re not. Focus on the things that make you feel the way you want to feel and do the things you want to be doing.
- You can plan all you want, but you won’t know if your plan works until you start executing it. The original Humans of New York plan looks nothing like what the project has turned into today.
- Choosing the work that you do is a better goal than not working at all. Following your dreams is hard work, but success is getting to spend every day doing what you want to be doing. Worth it.
Enjoy!
Today's episode is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world's largest hub for online creative education in photo/video, art/design, music/audio, craft/maker and the ability to make a living in any of those disciplines. They are high quality, highly curated classes taught by the world’s top experts -- Pulitzer, Oscar, Grammy Award winners, New York Times best selling authors and the best entrepreneurs of our times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and good day to everybody out there in my Creative Tribe. This is your friend Chase |
| 0:09.0 | Jarvis. Welcome to another episode of the Chase Jarvis live show here on Creative Live. You guys |
| 0:13.6 | know this show. So I sit down with awesome humans. And today, no exception, but we're going to |
| 0:18.7 | change it up just a little bit. My guest is a guest who has |
| 0:21.5 | been on the show before, but not in this, in this current sort of format, which I love. I love, |
| 0:27.9 | you know, keeping it moving, and that's what we're doing today. My guest is Brandon Stanton, |
| 0:32.8 | the creator of wildly famous. I think it's the highest engagement. It's the social site with the highest |
| 0:40.2 | engagement in the world. The humans of New York, something like 25 or 20 something million fans |
| 0:45.5 | on Facebook, maybe 10 million or so on Insta or a million, I don't know, just huge, huge |
| 0:50.6 | audience. Brandon, because of the success of Humans of New York, |
| 0:54.3 | the multiple number one New York Times bestseller. Every time he puts a book out, |
| 0:58.0 | it goes straight to number one. His story is incredible. He's been on the podcast before, |
| 1:03.4 | but let me tell you how, in the past, it's me asking him a bunch of questions, of course, |
| 1:08.1 | around his books and around his sort of style, but never before have we heard Brandon's complete story out of his own mouth, in his own words. |
| 1:18.8 | And to me, that's what makes this show what we're about to hear super exciting. |
| 1:23.8 | I want, if you've ever wondered if you could chase a dream, you have to listen to this |
| 1:28.3 | episode because Brandon talks in great detail about leaving his job, actually scratch that |
| 1:35.0 | being fired from his job as a bond trader in Chicago and thinking to himself, what is it that |
| 1:42.3 | if I could do anything in the world, |
| 1:47.9 | and regardless of sort of risk of financial, what would I do? |
| 1:49.4 | And it would be to take photographs. |
| 1:55.6 | And so he chronicles his own journey from Chicago to New York, where he basically put a mattress on the floor in something that was not too, you know, not much larger than a closet |
... |
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