The Power of Creativity in Art and Business
Publish. Promote. Profit. with Rob Kosberg – Episode 100: Maria Brito
A Harvard graduate, originally from Venezuela, her first monograph “Out There” published by Pointed Leaf Press in 2013, was the recipient of the Best Book Awards in both the Art and Design Categories. In 2015 Maria Brito was selected by Complex Magazine as one of the 20 Power Players in the Art World and in 2020 she was named by ARTNEWS as one of the visionaries who gets to shape the art world. She has written for publications such as Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Elle, Forbes, Artnet, Cultured Magazine, Departures, and the Gulf Coast Journal of Literature and Fine Arts from the University of Houston, Texas. For several years, Maria has taught her creativity course in companies and, in 2019, she launched “Jumpstart”, an online program on creativity for entrepreneurs based on years of research and observation in both the areas of business and art.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Maria Brito about inspiring creativity in others.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How people can create magic with themselves and their lives if they so desire.
- Why following your dreams can sometimes be the most realistic choice for yourself.
- How it’s important for people to follow their passion and be on the lookout for signs.
- Why you need to realize that everything you’ve worked for can be taken in an instant.
- How people need to be utilizing both the left and right side of their brain.
Connect with Maria:
Links Mentioned:
Guest Contact Info:
Twitter: @MariaBrito_NY
Instagram: @mariabrito_ny
Facebook: facebook.com/MariaBritoNY
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mariabrito-ny
Connect with Rob:
Website: bestsellerpublishing.org
Twitter: @bspbooks
Instagram: @bspbooks
Facebook: facebook.com/bestsellerpub
YouTube: youtube.com/c/BestSellerPublishingOfficial
Rob Kosberg:
All right, hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast, really excited to bring a great guest to you. Maria Brito is an award winning New York-based contemporary art advisor, obviously a bestselling author and curator. She’s a Harvard graduate originally from Venezuela. Her first monograph out there published by Pointed Leaf Press in 2013 was the recipient of Best Book Awards, and she has a new book coming out called How Creativity Rules the World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas into Gold. That’s going to come out early 2022. Maria’s been in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Huff Post, W Magazine, L Magazine, Time Magazine, and now the Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast. So Maria, great to have you here today.
Maria Brito:
Thank you, Rob. What an intro and all those things don’t matter if we don’t have friends and are full of soul and desire to share our lives with others, so it sounds very pompous, but I am very down to earth.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it.
Maria Brito:
Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here with you today.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you, great to have you. I’m really interested in our discussion from a couple of different perspectives. I even shared, as we were talking before, about some things I’d like to talk about, but I didn’t say this about you in that you are a recovering corporate attorney. So, it certainly seems like a good place to begin. How do you go from Harvard graduate corporate attorney, which seems like it’s on one end of the spectrum to what at least seems to me like the other end of the spectrum, which is art and creativity or am I missing something?
Maria Brito:
You’re not missing anything and that is an excellent question and a good one to start, and it’s also one of the reasons why I wrote How Creativity Rules the World because I wanted to be able to tell people that they can do magic with their lives if they so desire. And, the truth is I sold out on my dreams because I grew up in Venezuela in a very conservative house, Catholic parents, Catholic school, and to them middle class, they thought that the thing for me to do was to go to law school or become a doctor or do something that was truly dependable. And so, it was one of those things where I really was indoctrinated, if you will, not because my parents wanted to hurt me, but because they thought they could help me survive and thrive with choices that they predetermined for me.
And, that was not what I wanted to do the truth is, but I did it because it was safe. It allowed me to leave Venezuela, which nowadays is a country ravaged by war and communist governments and whatever, but what I did is that I practiced in New York city for nine years and that was a long time. I graduated very young. So, I practiced and I hated it with all my might and I had my first child in 2008 and I came back from maternity. I gave birth and everything and I was looking at the baby, looking at my life and I’m like, “How am I going to do this?” And a series of events, it’s like I think that the universe sometimes works with you even if you don’t necessarily know it at the time.
So in a series of events, when I went back to the law firm, after the 12 weeks of the maternity leave, it was literally September 2008 and two days after the collapse. Bernie Madoff is in jail, or not in jail, but his whole empire collapsed. Bear Stearns declares bankruptcy, it’s not bailed out, Lehman, the whole thing. So, those were the clients that the law firm that I had had, and it was a lot of work, but at the same time, I was like, “What am I doing here, seriously?” I have no desire. It was an ethical job, of course it was, but at the same time I don’t really care one bit about any of this and I had the baby at home and I said to myself, “I’m going to give myself a few months to figure out exactly what I’m going to do because it’s the end of the year. Let these people pay me their bonus, whatever, and by 2009 I’m out.”
And so, I was praying and trying to figure out what to do and writing things down and really making an inventory of my strengths, and for many years I had been going to art fairs and galleries and recommending to my friends pieces to buy and artists to follow and this was pre-Facebook, pre-Instagram. Now, everybody supposedly finds everything so easily, but at that time you really had to hit the ground and do things. And so, I had been very successful at recommending artists that gained value over time, and my friends used to tell me that I had such a great eye and that I was so good and intuitive with my [inaudible 00:05:39] that I should think about how to do that. For them, it was mostly like a side gig. How do you do this as a side gig or would you invest yourself or whatever?
I did a lot of crazy things at the time, crazy things. I was literally calling fashion houses, asking for a job. I need to get out of that law firm and I don’t know how, or I don’t know what I’m going to do. So, after I did like a bunch of these crazy things that I’m telling you, I was already an attorney making a lot of money, having a 401(k), that was amazing and I was literally calling fashion houses in New York and saying, “Don’t you need someone to help you out with these little things?” Because I was so sad in that job, it was so miserable.
And so, after realizing that I was not going to work for any fashion house, and that I was too senior and too smart to really be anybody’s receptionist honestly or whatever, assistant, I don’t know, I said the hell with this, I’m going to open my own business and I’m going to follow what my friends have been telling me that I do have an eye for art and I know how to place it and I know how to recognize this artist and that I have an enormous upside in doing that. And so, I told my husband that I was ready to quit and he was like, “What?” And I was like, “I’m ready to quit this job and I’m going to open a business.” And he’s like, “And how?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to hire a web designer and I’m going to hire a PR person, messaging everything. I’m going to do everything from home obviously, because I need to be in people’s houses, they don’t need to be in my house. They don’t need to be in my office. I need to be with them, I need to take them to galleries.”
He was like, “You’re absolutely nuts, woman.” I said, “Well, I am, but I’m going to do it.” And so look, I did and it was an act of faith. It was an act of intuition and it has paid off more than I could have ever imagined as much as I dreamed about the future and I was so positive, and I had dreams and visions, and I wrote about what it is to really build a vision as an entrepreneur. I really got so many incredible confirmations that I was on the right path from the very beginning and it doesn’t mean it was easy. It means that I had never doubted that this is my calling and that teaching others how to do the same has become also a very important part of my mission and that’s why I want to share how to be creative, how to learn, how to recognize the symptoms when you’re not doing what you love because there’s nothing more traumatic than spending your life doing something that you don’t want to do and that you don’t feel that burning passion and desire.
So, I think that it is particularly in the times that we are after two years in a pandemic where so many people have walked away from their jobs or in the era of the great resignation, I think it’s very important to encourage people to follow the signals, their passions, the things that they want to do, and tell them that it is possible and that we do have a lot of the right conditions to start new things and to see them come through and to make them successful and to make money with it, obviously, which is crucial for any entrepreneurial venture at least.
Rob Kosberg:
Right, well I love that. Boy, there’s a lot to unpack there. Let me go to the first thing that I think of as you share that, you took a really, really big bet on yourself. I love that. Obviously in my business, and in your business, in all businesses, we talk to people that are going to invest in a piece of artwork or in my case that I’m helping to do a book or market, or do PR media, things that my company does, and oftentimes they want to partner… Not often, but sometimes they want to partner or there’s this fear of betting on themselves, investing in themselves. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit because you took a really, really big bet. Some people might say, “Well, you had your 401(k) behind you, but when you have more to lose, it’s harder to bet on yourself, right?
Maria Brito:
Yes, absolutely. I think that the decision was the pain of staying in that job was much bigger than anything else. This is actually true for anything, every time that you start something where there is a lot of uncertainty, and everything is surrounded by uncertainty because you can have everything buttoned up and the next day you get hit with a pandemic and none of us knew. I didn’t know. I don’t handle the information that the government has, I don’t know, so you can have absolutely everything.
Rob Kosberg:
Sure.
Maria Brito:
And, the next day something is going to pull that rug from under you and what do you do? But, it does take a very specific type of personality, and it doesn’t mean that you are born with it or not, it means that you have to cultivate certain traits and certain abilities.
And one is, I think that I can get this done and part of it is a lot of people do not know how to listen to their intuition and the topic of intuition and business, it’s becoming more and more popular, even if it sounds woo-woo for certain people, intuition is a crucial part of any entrepreneurial venture, of any big move, side gig, whatever. Why? Because our intuition is always right. What’s wrong is our own interpretation of those signals. And so, I wrote an entire chapter about intuition in my book because I think that it’s an often overlooked aspect, and there are tons of great books out in the world that are all about intuition, but I wanted to have a chapter on it to illustrate how important it is for people because when I… See, it’s almost like that had no option and here’s why.
If I failed, what was I going to… I had already tried doing things, and I had already tried to get a job in a completely different thing. I just did not want to go to, let’s say I was going to leave the law firm and I was going to go to a consulting firm. It was going to be just the same. I just hated everything, I hated the people, the offices, everything. So, I was like, no, no, no, I just cannot do this to myself and I have to succeed. There’s no option. I have a baby, I have a mortgage, I have to make… So, when you have that much… First it’s the pain that you feel when you are in a place of so much darkness because for me, really, even right now when I close my eyes and I think about that time, I recoil in horror.
Rob Kosberg:
Wow.
Maria Brito:
It’s like I have PTSD, but nobody did anything wrong to me. This is me, how I actually felt thinking about that time, and being a prisoner of this law firms and partners and the clients calling you at 3:00 in the morning and what a horror. So, once you have such a thing, your desire of making things work out for you is so strong that you invest in everything, and I mean even the investment is not the monetary one, it’s the emotional one, it’s the psychological one. If you have to repeat affirmations, even if they don’t work that much, whatever it is, if you have to put Post-its everywhere, you have to kind of support yourself else in your dreams because if you don’t believe, and if you do not support your vision with your own actions, and concrete actions too, nobody’s going to do it.
And so, I also think that taking that bet, again, it’s something that I owed to myself and I said, “I have already given so many years of my life to law school and taking the bar exam and go to these different law firms and whatnot, always trying to see if the next law firm was going to be better, and man, it never was.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, I appreciate your honesty. I love your spirit. Some people might hear this and they might think, “Well, of course, Maria was going to be successful at whatever she does because you’re smart, you’re so incredibly driven.” But, I’m sure there are a lot of ups and downs. Number one, you were on the wrong path for a long time.
Maria Brito:
Yes.
Rob Kosberg:
Because of maybe not listening to your intuition and then I’m sure there were lots of ups and downs from 2008 and the financial crisis that [crosstalk 00:15:05].
Maria Brito:
Absolutely.
Rob Kosberg:
Talk to me about… And like you said, I know this is within your book, I know that that’s part of the drive to even write this was to help people to take their dreams and make them a reality, talk to me about some of what you’ve put within your book, the steps, the plan, the pieces of how people can use creativity in their business to really get to the gold.
Maria Brito:
I think creativity is foundational to everything that we do because without it we don’t have any sort of progress. And so, take away creativity and innovation and actually one of the things that I want to do with this book is to allow people to reclaim those concepts for themselves. You don’t have to be Elon Musk building Tesla, you don’t have to be sending people to outer space, you don’t have to be building an iPhone. You could, and I’m telling you that all the people I’ve mentioned are pretty special, but they’re also pretty human and they are pretty much like you and I, they just work with their guts, all of them actually, they believe in the signals from within, and they are extraordinarily passionate about things and most of the things they’re passionate about is business.
It’s not rockets, it’s not electrical cars, it’s a passion about doing deals, doing businesses, doing things, and creating new things. These guys get high on the idea… It’s not money for them anymore. They’re so wealthy. It’s a game, but it’s fun, and so it’s crucial that we understand that without ideas we are going nowhere. And so, what I wanted to do was to create something that is so timeless, that this book, you pick it up again in 40 years, and you’re going to still find value. The book is divided into four different parts. The first part I wanted to give people a lot of context and background because when people read about creativity, they confuse it with artists, they confuse it with… And so, I wanted to go and go back 2,000 years and see what are the origins of creativity and what it really means.
So, I give people context, so they don’t get into the meat of the book without really knowing why all this confusion. I also have a whole chapter on debunking the myths. People are always confused about, is this something that I inherited? No, there’s nothing in your DNA actually that says that you are or not creative. Is this right brain? Do you know that there’s no such a thing as left and right brain?
Rob Kosberg:
I didn’t know that.
Maria Brito:
Yes. No, we do have two hemispheres, but what I mean to say is that the left and the right need each other to be creative. So, if you are somebody who is a genius at math, you’re extraordinarily creative and you engage both parts of your brain all the time to find solutions for the things that you want to get done.
And the same thing, if somebody is an artist, you need a lot of the left brain to actually send you logical signals to the other side, and so we have two hemispheres for sure, but it doesn’t mean that if you have a skill and a talent in an area that you were told is left or right brain, it doesn’t mean that you don’t utilize the other. So, a lot of people is like, “I’m so right brained.” Right brained or so left brained, it’s already crippling your abilities. We have both hemispheres and they need to work constantly. It’s one of the most complex organs, not only of your body, but in our world, our brains work better than any computer and we don’t even utilize 10% of them. Anyway, so-
Rob Kosberg:
[crosstalk 00:18:52].Maria Brito:
And so, the second part of the book is all about skills and habits and it’s a lot about how you go… Because people trip up a lot about what he said that it is to be creative. Is it a God given thing? Like I was saying before, is it God given, is it genetics? And, the truth is creativity is and amalgamation of different skills. It’s not just one thing. It’s your ability to be a risk taker, a visionary, somebody who believes, like we were talking about in your autonomy and your authenticity, someone who can actually trust that what you’re thinking and pursuing is real. And so, I made each one of the chapters super digestible, super actionable. There is an exercise at the end of a chapter, and I back everything up with history and with data and I don’t like… Data for the sake of data is not something that I do.
So, I turn everything into storytelling and I quote all the studies in a very kind of dynamic way, so that the reader is excited about what is in front of them and is actually wanting more, and like most human beings, learn through storytelling. And, that’s also one of the reasons why I wanted to incorporate history so much because if it worked for Leonard da Vinci and Steve Jobs did the same, it’s probably going to work 200 years from now, and that has to do… This is not a book where you’re going to go and find out how to use TikTok. It’s not about that. I wanted it to withstand the passage of time. I want this to be a book where people… In the future, I may keep adding to other additions or whatever, but what I’m saying is there’s nothing in the marketplace because I read every book on creativity that has gotten to this level of depth, while at the same time being manageable.
It has 250 pages, even my publisher didn’t want it to be longer than that. So, I think it’s important that people understand that what you have in your hands is something that’s going to really last forever, hopefully, because it’s all about habits, skill sets, and also the third part of the book is all about action. One thing is that also caught my attention in creativity books is that they don’t tell you how to execute the ideas. It’s like, “Oh, okay, well, so this, and coming up with ideas and brainstorming, whatever.” That’s not how my book is, so then you get to a point where you say, “Well, and what do I do with this?”
So, then the third part of the book is all filled with specific ways that you can combine everything that you have learned in the previous chapters, and the end of the book is about seeing the future and I think about that often because if you are not able to anticipate what people want and where trends are going, then it’s hard to actually beat the market and make money with it. So, I wrote a whole chapter on seeing the future because I think that’s going to be one of the most valuable takeaways of this book is how people will learn, hopefully, to utilize everything and put it together to create things that are part of the future.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I’ll make a statement, you correct me if I’m wrong, but when someone first looks at the book and it’s a beautiful cover, by the way, you did a great job with it, How Creativity Rules the World, they might get the impression that this is for creatives or what someone might think of as a creative, but this is really for a business owner that is creating something within their business, that’s really all that we’re doing is we’re seeing a problem and we’re solving that problem using creativity. So, there’s obviously an audience for every book, but I think your audience is probably a lot broader than maybe somebody would initially think if they’re just thinking creative. Is that accurate?
Maria Brito:
That is very accurate and you just said it right, and I think that it’s important to highlight that half of the examples in the book point out at entrepreneurs, and that’s when I go back to history too, and start finding examples, so that the reader does not get the impression that it’s all about how artists did things because I also highlight a ton of different artists, who are not starving by the way, and have never been because that’s the other myth that we have to clear up. I think artists are really the greatest entrepreneurs because, especially throughout history, they were either a solo operation or they had a studio with assistants, but when Picasso died, he had a fortune of 500 million bucks and that’s almost 3 billion today and Picasso didn’t have an assistant.
And, if you think about, it’s actually humbling to imagine that this guy who had no Instagram, no internet, he was a one man show thing and had that amount of money and he’s not the only one and I think that it’s important when you want to create something new and you want to disrupt the status of quo, and even if you don’t want to disrupt the status quo, but you just want a solution to problem, you just got to look in different places and that’s why I have this dream. I’m going to be able to help the business owner and I’m also going to be able to help these people who are already in creative fields, whether it is an artist or a designer or a freelancer and whatever, the gig economy, I don’t know what because the idea is if you keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them, I’m not sure how far you’re going to get.
And, this is actually 100% a reality of the times that we’re living. I myself have had to pivot and adjust my business almost annually because I think it’s part of the way that… The world we inherited is pushing us to adjust and adapt, and the most important thing for anybody right now is to be adaptable and that is actually the greatest survival skill anybody can have besides being creative is be adaptable and Darwin used to say that it’s survival of the fittest, it’s about adaptability. And so, I think it’s important for that business owner who is thinking, what do I do?
And, is this book for me? It is absolutely for you because it is a way to find interesting stories of entrepreneurs who have changed the world, but also starting seeing things through the eyes of how artists have created empires with very nimble operations, and that is actually fascinating, and we can all learn from them and I think I’ve been learning from artists for the past 13 years since I opened my business and I think a lot of what I learned from them has been incorporated in my business with great success, and it’s almost like you learn things by being surrounded with people like that, and artists will never say, this is my manifest of how I do things, they would never do that.
But, I was there to actually capture this information and write it down and make this available for people, and by the same token, I’ve worked with incredible entrepreneurs. I’ve worked with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, those are my clients, and I’ve also seen that the most successful ones repeat the habits that the artist possess. So, I think that it’s kind of like a match, if you will, and that’s why I’m telling you that there are universal truths in this book that are applicable to people who are in business or who want to open a business or who want to change careers or who want to start something new.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Well, we’ve given people a lot of reasons to get the book and I can’t wait for it to come out, but you wrote the book and even if you had a complete attitude of generosity and giving, which I believe you do, you still have your own goals and things that you want to see happen with the book. Plus, you’ve written in the past and have done some great things. Talk to me and our authors that are listening today, how have you used your book to grow your business, get PR, attract clients? What creative things have you done and will do with your newest book to grow your empire?
Maria Brito:
Books are an incredible marketing tool and I think one of the strongest, and this is not a new thing, it’s throughout history, especially in the United States of America. Books have been pivotal because we are the fabric of a country that has built itself out of ideas. And so, if we don’t have those ideas in books, a lot of this amazing thing that is this country would be crippled by not having the access that we have to the most brilliant and prolific minds, and we also have the publishing houses that support that and we have the consumers who buy the books. So, we do have a perfect ecosystem, we do, and the thing is when I wrote my monograph and that was 10 years ago, whatever it was, it was a very different world and it was I would say slightly easier at that time because the competition was not as massive.
And, you wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle of so many things. Remember that we also have now a very different political scenario that has hijacked our minds unfortunately because we are paying attention to so many things. For so many years, we were not constantly on the phone, checking the tweets, checking the news feeds, and whatnot.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s true.
Maria Brito:
You are competing with everything when you’re an author. When you’re anything, the truth is whether you are Beyonce or Maria Brito or Rob, we’re all actually very much in the business of trying to get a little of attention from anybody, and when I launched my first book, it really became an incredible marketing tool for me. I got an enormous amount of press.
Rob Kosberg:
Nice.
Maria Brito:
And, at that time I didn’t even hire a publicist. Everything happen organically. I had a friend who told a friend, then a friend told a friend. It was something like the work led the way without me having to be hustling at that time for that, and then I sort of kept promoting it. It was the very, very early days of Instagram, so it was a good platform to be on super early because it wasn’t as populated as it is today. And so, I was able to make friends with people, get the book out, it was very visual, people loved it. Podcast did not exist. Radio shows did, but podcasts the way they exist right now, it was not a thing. And so, I think that if any of the people listening are thinking about whether it’s worth it to write a book or what to do with it, I think that right now we do have so many options that depend on us.
The onus is on all the authors. It’s like, “Okay, are you consistently tweeting? Are you consistently posting on Instagram or Facebook?” Whatever it is your platform, I think that consistency is something that people underestimate like, “Oh, I didn’t do it today, I don’t have anything to do tomorrow with this, I don’t really have ideas.” Well, the problem is people have to try to prioritize those things because they are super, super valuable and super strong as means of communication, and even if you have 25 people who follow you, those are 25 eyes who actually have 25 more friends, who actually have 25 more friends. It’s like the tribes that Seth Godin and talks about. It’s like we have so many and the messages multiply. So, I think that the most important thing for authors, really, and this is something that I’ve heard so much in the past two years is write a good book first and foremost because writing a bad book is very easy, but it won’t really do what you need. Writing a good-
Rob Kosberg:
It’ll do the opposite if people read it.
Maria Brito:
It’ll do the opposite. If you write a good book, however, and you don’t have to be Hemingway because none of us are, and you don’t have to be Brene Brown, you just have to write a good book and then the book will have wings, and I can say this, because again, we do have the right ecosystem that supports us, and it also supports self-published authors, Amazon is incredible in giving support.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s powerful.
Maria Brito:
It’s powerful, but yes, you have to invest. If you’re listening to this and say, “Well, I have absolutely no desire in paying a cent in Amazon ads,” then I don’t know. That’s the thing, a book is a business by and in itself and it requires whatever level of care and funding you can give to it depending on how you actually feel about it.
If you have the confidence that you’re going to get your money back, or some people are not even doing it for the money, they are doing it for the recognition to get it out. It’s like stepping stones to things, like you said before, speaking engagements, without a thought leadership book are very rarely happening. So, if you want to get into the business of being a professional and paid speaker, then you need a really good book that leads the way for you to get there, and there are so many different ways of doing that right now and not everybody can do them all. As I was saying before, now there are so many people looking at TikTok for books and it’s crazy if you think about it. I have kids who are on TikTok and I don’t think they will buy my book, my kids, or their friends, but what I’m saying is that this is also a very important example of how books are important for us.
If you have kids on TikTok, and not so young people also on TikTok trying to connect with authors or trying to find recommendations for books, it could be someone who’s filtering through the whole amazing amount of books that get published every year, that tells you that books are as alive as they have ever been and that is hopeful, it’s encouraging, it’s exciting, and again, there are millions of ways. I used my first book to give me a lot of platform, and it led the way for a long, long time, and now it’s a different story. Now I’m a grownup, if you will, and so I’ve been working for so long that I thought it was the right time to put all this information out.
And, I had the time to write the book because last year was so strange, but I had the time to sit down and put my thoughts down into paper, and so here we are, and I’m excited about what it is that’s coming out of this book. I am doing podcasts because now podcasts exist. I am doing press appearances on TV and things like that. It’s too early because we have a few more months to go, and obviously again, it all depends mostly on me, and so I am driving all this traffic to my website by showing people, giving them excerpts, and giving them whole chapters and sort of explaining… There is no such thing as sharing too much, and I think at the beginning I was a little bit like, “Am I going to give this much away?”
And, I had this fear like a week ago, and you know what, if they don’t like it, they’re not my people and the book is not for them, and that’s also very important and very valid. You cannot write for everybody, that’s impossible, and that’s why non-fiction has pockets and audiences that are specific for certain things and I think that it’s not that you’re going to give the whole thing away, but I think that if you have the opportunity to really highlight important passages of the book, the things that you like, ask friends. That’s also something I’ve been doing is giving friends the book in a gallery and say, “Would you please go over this if you have a chance? And, let me know what resonates with you the most.” Because as authors, we’re too close to the work to say which are the parts that you think are the best.
I think I do know, but I want others to tell me because I always get surprised by the things they say, and sometimes the parts that I am like, “Wow, this is my biggest statement here,” it gets overlooked. It didn’t resonate with them, and I think that’s absolutely seriously important is to be able to have those focus groups with people you like and care and to share a lot. Running a pre-order campaign is nerve-wracking because you don’t have the whole thing out in the world, so that what I was saying before is write a good book, people don’t know what’s in the book, so they are kind of trusting you.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s already a number one new release though. I’m looking at it right now, so congratulations.
Maria Brito:
Thank you.
Rob Kosberg:
We can’t wait.
Maria Brito:
I’m very excited
Rob Kosberg:
They’re all ordering it.
Maria Brito:
I’m very excited for everybody to have it and I think that as I’m telling you, I’m ambitious about it. I want it to become a classic, and again, the value of a book is very relative because you’re going to spend 28 bucks on a hard cover, $15 on an e-book, and what if you build a $1 million part of a business with it?
Rob Kosberg:
That’s a great ROI.
Maria Brito:
You know what, I have so many books that have changed my mind and my business and the way that I do things, and they have inspired me to be better, and I could have never gotten that watching a movie. It’s, and so I think that we sometimes underestimate what we get out of these amazing treasures that are inside of those pages.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Well, that’s a good way to give them a link. Where can people go to get a copy of the book to… Obviously, they can go to Amazon and pre-order it, this will be coming out prior to the book being released, but I think you also have bonuses and things like that? So, where would you like to send us?
Maria Brito:
I have a ton of bonuses.
Rob Kosberg:
Yes.
Maria Brito:
So, let’s go to mariabrito.com/book.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome.
Maria Brito:
But, if you want to go just mariabrito.com, B-R-I-T-O.com, you’re going to find the links are permanently highlighted there. So, you can go find the bonus page. I feel also that I’m generous about that. I want people able to have a lot more than what they are thinking that they are getting. And so, I will be adding more bonuses along the way. I’m excited about this, and I think that at the end of the day, really what motivates me the most is the ability to make a mind shift in people who actually been stuck for a while and to give them the encouragement that things can happen for them no matter where they are, and I know you said it before, they say, “Well, but you can do it because you had this and you had that.” Believe me, not all the time I had everything.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s the point.
Maria Brito:
Nobody gave me anything either. I built everything on my own and I’m extraordinarily thankful to the opportunity of being an American citizen after having come… I came here from Venezuela and I could have, again… My heart is so full of gratitude because that girl who came here 23 years ago, whatever, could have never imagined where I was going to be today and I think that if I can even make people 10% better than where they are right now and help them succeed in whatever capacity, my job is done.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Thank you, Maria. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Maria Brito:
Thank you.
Rob Kosberg:
Again, mariabrito.com/book, or you could just go to the dot com and pick up the bonuses, click the link and you’ll be directed to pre-order the book and I can’t wait to have it out. Maybe when it comes out we can have you back on the podcast and talk about [crosstalk 00:41:04]-
Maria Brito:
I will be thrilled.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome, thank you so much.
Maria Brito:
Thank you, Rob. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. I appreciate the time, thanks.
Rob Kosberg:
Thanks.
