My Affair With Drayton Bird
It started innocently enough. He was just another Internet Marketer sending me emails on a regular basis. Most of the time I didn't even open them and when I did, I skimmed over them quickly, and they seemed somehow quite different from most of the frenzied Internet hype I was getting. He had an old fashioned common sense approach to marketing that made me feel like I was back in high school economics class. I had hated school; I never did any homework and it was a miracle I even graduated. I may be quite brilliant but no one would suspect it and I'll never know because I used my brain to avoid doing things I didn't want to do. I didn't like college either. The teachers didn't seem to care about what they were doing or else they conducted themselves as if they were teaching grade school. So I confess, I am a college drop out.
Why I didn't unsubscribe from his newsletters:
Advertising and direct marketing, for me, are not exactly exciting fields of study; especially when I was looking for information on how to get rich on the Internet like everybody else. I am inclined to think that anyone who would spend their entire life in advertising (like Drayton Bird) would be painfully boring. I would much rather be doing something artsy and creative like painting a picture, or playing around on the computer. However, I was well aware of the fact that an artist must make a living too, or else go back to work punching a clock, or as my mother would say, "Get a real job." At some point I realized that the one thing I had neglected to learn to do was how to sell my art and make a living as an artist.
But the real reason I decided to keep getting his stuff (and I have not read it all yet) was common sense. Besides, I like what he has to say.
He was teaching the basics! From years of learning to paint in oils and from teaching art classes, one thing I did learn was that you must have a good handle on the basics or you will forever be floundering around making a mess. Yes, the basics are rather boring and everyone one of my art students wanted to jump right into painting their first masterpiece the very first day of class before learning how to mix a secondary color like green.
So I decided that now is as good a time as ever to begin learning the basics of marketing one step at a time, in the hope that one day I might successfully learn to learn how best to market my artwork and perhaps get paid for it, or even make a living at it.
This is how "my affair" with Drayton Bird got started. There is a lot more to it than this of course, so you might want to come back and look for links to follow up articles. I intend to reveal all the juicy details as they unfold, meanwhile I am going to pick his brain, steal his stuff and stalk him whenever I can. As you might notice, I copied the look of his website and even the title from him.
I am finding that I don't want to face the day before I listen to one of his videos. I particularly like the one where he talks about "getting on with it." In striving for perfection we can over work it and waste a lot of time. This was true with making this blog/website and it is true with doing a painting. When I feel I am procrastinating, I listen to that one, then I proceed to "get on with it."
I was just thinking that I hope he keeps making videos to watch and listen to. Everytime he coughs or sneezes he claims he is old and feeble, so the time to pick his brain is now before its too late.
"Don't be a team, be an Individual" 
"Knowing what to do is useless if you don’t DO it!"