I have known Dustin Pead for more than a decade, and I have watched him do something most people only talk about. He walked away from twenty years of work he was good at, work that gave him a title and an identity, and he started over in the middle of his life with no map and no guarantee that any of it would hold.

What I did not fully understand until we sat down and talked was how close it came to falling apart, and how ordinary the thing was that saved him.

Twenty Years, Then Nothing

For twenty years Dustin was a creative arts pastor and worship leader. He orchestrated live production every six days, fifty two times a year, the kind of relentless schedule where Sunday never stops coming. He learned audio, video, lighting, design, communication, and how to make creative chaos land on time and on a stage. He did not know, while he was doing it, that he was building a skill set anyone would ever pay him for. Where he grew up in rural Virginia, the idea that creative work could be a business was not even on the table.

Then the work ended, and not on his terms.

He describes a grieving process that lasted about a week, and then the math showed up. A wife. Kids. A mortgage. He told me he applied to Home Depot and never even got a reply that they had received his application. That detail stuck with me, because this is a man with twenty years of high level creative leadership behind him, and the safety net he reached for would not even acknowledge that he existed.

Plant What?

Here is the part I want you to sit with, because it is the whole thing.

Dustin did not have a plan. What he had was a question. He says God pushed him out of the room and into a patch of grass and told him to plant. And his honest response was, plant what? The answer he landed on was almost embarrassingly simple. What are you good at? Making things happen in creative spaces. So plant that.

He opened his phone. He started at the top of his contacts and worked down, asking one thing about each name. Can I help this person create something? When he got to my name, he texted me to ask if I needed anything. That text is part of why we work together today.

Why He Still Works the List

I have thought about this a lot since we recorded, because it exposes something most of us get wrong about starting over. We treat it like a knowledge problem. We think we need the right plan, the right platform, the right credentials before we are allowed to move. Dustin had none of those. He had a list of people he already knew and the willingness to ask a question that made him feel slightly foolish. That was the catalyst. Not a strategy. A phone and the nerve to use it.

He still does it. Two or three times a year he runs his whole contact list looking for someone he can serve, or someone who knows someone he can serve. Every one of those reaches, he told me, is him planting something. It might produce nothing. It might produce everything. He plants anyway.

The Buffalo and the Storm

The fear never fully left, and I appreciated that he refused to pretend otherwise. His mentor told him early on not to treat fear as a threat and not to treat it as fuel, but to see it as part of the territory, like a wall in the office. You do not bang your head against it and you do not let it chase you. It is just there. The fear Dustin carries is not panic, it is respect. Respect for the fact that what he does, or fails to do, puts food on his family’s table.

The image I cannot shake is the buffalo. A friend of his preached once about how a buffalo, when it sees a storm coming, runs straight into it, because the fastest way out of a storm is through it. Most animals run away, and the storm catches them anyway. The buffalo, all that mass and muscle, lowers its head and goes. Dustin’s read on it was simple. Retreating is not best for me. Going around it is not best for me. So the only thing left is through, and there must be something better on the other side.

I told him about a season in my own life, walking through a divorce, the hardest stretch I have ever lived, when my brother said the only way through the valley is to keep walking. You cannot go around it. You just keep walking. That is the same truth Dustin found in the buffalo. There is a guaranteed outcome in quitting, and no other possibility inside it. Going through is the only path that leaves room for a different ending.

Two Kinds of Doubt

When I asked him what he does on the days he doubts himself, he made a distinction I have not stopped thinking about. He does not question the calling. He questions whether he has what it takes. Those are two different fears, and treating them as one is how a lot of good people talk themselves out of their work. The calling is settled. The capability is the thing you rebuild every morning. His tools for that are unglamorous and they work. He reminds himself of his purpose. He repeats a phrase that sits on his desk, work hard and trust God. And he leans on gratitude, which he calls the Swiss Army knife for any day you are down on yourself.

The Load Bearing Wall

The purpose statement matters here, because it is the load bearing wall. His is this. I am anointed to intentionally equip others through authenticity and excellence. He wrote it so it would apply to his marriage, his fatherhood, and his work, in that order, which means his sense of worth does not rise and fall with a contract. If he is living in that purpose, he told me, it does not matter what he does. That is why the move from ministry to business never felt like a downgrade to him. Different impact, not lesser impact. The people he reaches now would never walk into a church, and the work is still the work.

Dustin runs Chief Creative Partners today, where he helps creative business owners build the systems that let them deliver excellence without burning to the ground. His line for it is, you create, we operate. I can tell you from years of working alongside him that the systems are real, and so is the conviction underneath them.

Your Patch of Grass

If you are standing in your own patch of grass right now, not knowing what to plant, take the lesson from a man who has been exactly there. You do not need the whole plan. You need to name the one thing you are good at, find the one person you can help, and send the text. Then keep walking into the storm. The people who need you are already searching. So go create your art.

#createyourart

If this resonated, you can hear more conversations like this every week on the Create Your Art Podcast. Listen here or follow along at 1898creative.com.

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Full Transcript:

Dustin: I thought we were going to lose our house, and that we were going to have to start all over again in the middle of our lives. That was the scariest part for sure. I’m not a very brave person historically. God basically had to push me out of the room, into a patch of grass, and go, no, plant here. And I’m like, plant what? I just look at it and go, okay, there must be something better on the other side. I literally opened up my phone and started rolling down the Rolodex going, who can I help create things? And that’s how it got started. Unless you want me to tell the real story.

Darren: Hey, welcome back to another Create Your Art podcast episode. We’re glad that you’re here, and I want you to remember something even before we start, that you are an artist and you have something that you need to create and share with the world. And that doesn’t mean just art in the traditional sense. There’s something inside of you that is there, and I need you to do the work to bring it out and share it with us.

I’m excited about today’s conversation. We’re talking with somebody you might know if you’ve been around here for a little bit, but we’re going to take a little different angle today. Mr. Dustin Pead is with us, but in the, I’m going to interview him, seat today. Dustin, what’s up, man? How are you?

Dustin: I’m doing well. We talked before we started recording. It’s a full week, in a lot of ways. Emotionally, physically, mentally. It’s a week. But the part about creating your art is you have to show up, right? So that’s what we’re doing.

Darren: A hundred percent, even when you don’t feel like it. And let’s just say probably both of us feel that way, where it’s like, what are we doing today? But we’re going to have a good conversation. I’m excited about this one. This is kind of the newer format we’re doing, where it’s a little bit more interview based. You’ve been on the podcast and will continue to be on the podcast, but we wanted to put you in the “let me ask you a few questions” seat today.

Something about creating your art, or creating that thing that is inside of you, that happens often is you’re usually met with a few things. You’re met with fear. You’re met with a little bit of resistance along the way. You’re met with maybe a feeling of imposter syndrome. All of the things that happen when you begin to step into that thing you’re supposed to do. So I want to take us back a little bit. You spent 20 years in ministry, right? You were a creative arts pastor, a worship leader, the guy that made all of that stuff happen. For the people that don’t know that chapter, what did that work mean to you, and what was the moment when you first sensed you might need to do something different?

Dustin: Wow, okay. So what it meant to me was the pressure to be a jack of all trades and a master of none, to orchestrate creative chaos for a live production with pre-recorded elements in it every six days. No big deal. Not a problem. 52 times a year. So in that regard, I’ve never worked on SNL, but there were times where I felt like, I wonder if this is what SNL feels like, except they sleep later in the morning and work later in the evenings.

But yeah, man, 20 years of creative ministry over three churches. Definitely some burnout in there, because Sunday never stops coming. Some of the greatest relationships, including our friendship, were birthed out of my time in local churches. Pretty much almost all of my relationships are birthed out of that season.

Darren: What was it like, though, at the beginning? There was something you always wanted to do, right? There was a sense of excitement there.

Dustin: Well, I didn’t know it existed. Where I grew up in rural Southeast Virginia, I didn’t know that was a full-time job you could do. Every pastor I knew was bivocational, much less the music guy. I didn’t grow up in a church with a live band on Sunday mornings. For the most part it was a piano player and a hymn book. So I went to school to study music thinking that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up at Liberty University, and they said, there’s this worship and music degree where you can actually do this for a living. And that was way more fun to me than music education, than trying to teach a third grader how to play the flute.

Darren: Oh, bro. I didn’t want to do that. No way. That was a path presented to me too, and I was like, please, for the love of all things holy, no. I did it for one semester.

Dustin: I did it for one semester. About three weeks in, I knew, okay, we just have to get through this semester. And that’s exactly what we did. The very next semester we changed out of that major and into the worship major. So, like I said, not necessarily something I always wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do music since I was 13, and combining that with my faith was kind of the best of both worlds. My time at Liberty was spent on their campus praise band, now called the Liberty Worship Collective. We played six services a week on full-tuition scholarships. Some of the best musicians in the country were on that team. We were the house worship band for everything.

Darren: Walk me through it. You’re in ministry and you start to feel there’s something more out there. Maybe burnout was part of it. But what else was going on inside at that point?

Dustin: I had a few friends from Liberty, and other friends close to me through ministry, who were starting their own businesses. That was really foreign to me. I didn’t grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. My wife comes a little bit from that, her dad started his own thing, and now she does too, and her brother does. I just never had that, so I didn’t know what was possible. You and I were talking about this over a few beers in Nashville, that I didn’t know we could venture out on our own and people would actually pay us for our skills. In creative local church ministry you have to know enough about all of it, communication, production, music, lighting, video, photography, web, enough to be able to lead it. And I’ve always been what I call a type A creative. I love a good brainstorm, but I don’t love a brainstorm where, when it’s over, there’s nothing we do with the things we talked about. If I know going in this is just a dream for dream’s sake, I’m cool with that. But otherwise, all right, let’s set a clock for 90 minutes, and tomorrow we come back and decide what we’re actually going to do. So I sat on events and led all that for 20 years. My friends started their own things, and I thought, maybe I can do this. Through a series of maybe unfortunate events, I got shoved into a series of fortunate events. I ended up calling a bunch of people going, what can I do for you? And I stumbled into this business where now I get to help creative businesses.

Darren: So you spent 20 years collecting this set of skills. You had to learn how ProPresenter works on the computer. You had to be on stage. How do you orchestrate a photo shoot, a video shoot, a live production event? Graphic design, layout, communications, email campaigns, websites. You had to learn all of that. And then through a set of unfortunate circumstances you find yourself on the outside of an industry you spent 20 years in, going, oh crap, what do I do now? So when did you feel ready, and what did you do when you got out there? You’re saying you got pushed out of the boat a little bit and had to swim.

Dustin: Yeah. For probably four or five years leading up to that, I felt this discontentment. I’m not going to over-spiritualize it and say it was a holy discontentment. I really don’t know. I just felt a lot of personal conviction about the way things were going. I’m not a very brave person. So I figured, this is just going to be my life, I’m going to make the most of it. And God basically had to push me out of the room into a fresh patch of grass and go, plant here. And I’m like, plant what? And he’s like, just plant here. It was really literally like, what are you good at? And the answer was, I’m good at making things happen in creative spaces. Plant that. So that’s what I started doing. I literally opened up my phone and started rolling down the Rolodex going, who can I help create things? Unless you want me to tell the real story.

Darren: That’s up to you. So you’re finding yourself at this place where you had this thing inside of you stirring. Maybe you didn’t know what to do with it, but your imagination couldn’t go beyond where you were.

Dustin: No, I never knew anything different.

Darren: So you’re going, okay, I feel this, but I don’t have an imagination for it. And then through an unfortunate set of circumstances, you get pushed out of the proverbial boat.

Dustin: Yeah, man, it was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Darren: Talk to me about that. Let’s say it happens on a Friday, and Monday rolls around, and you’re going, the last 20 years I’ve done this, and now what?

Dustin: There’s a grieving process, for sure. That lasted about a week. And then the realization hits that I’ve got a wife and kids and a mortgage, and this has to get taken care of. So I was just like, God, I don’t know what to do. And he’s like, well, what are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? And I said, well, I’m good at helping creative things actually come to life and happen, and I really enjoy doing that. So I literally opened up my contacts and started going through them. After a while I got down to Darren Cooper, and I texted you and asked if you needed anything, if you needed any video editing, anything like that.

Darren: What I love that you pointed out there is something that’s easily overlooked. Sidebar, I was talking to one of our clients, Darren Ho, earlier today on his podcast, walking through learning your leadership voice, and it was one of those things that’s so simple it’s easily overlooked. What you said here, and what I’d encourage anybody listening who finds themselves in a similar circumstance, is to ask yourself, what am I good at, and who can I connect with or reach out to? That was the simple thing that became the catalyst that changed everything for you. Just going, what am I good at, and who can I help do that, and reaching out to them.

Dustin: Yeah. I’ve always believed that, maybe because I saw my dad was really good at it. My dad was very social. When we walked into a place there was always going to be at least one person who shouted his name across the room. He taught me how to introduce myself, shake a hand, look people in the eye, give a pump on the handshake. From an early age, connecting with people came natural to me. We were talking the other day about how I’d always make random friends on vacation as a kid. I think a lot of that has to do with that Rolodex I was able to go to. You were in my contact list for at least 10 years at that point. I think we met in the early 2010s.

Darren: Easily.

Dustin: So it was literally just those connections. Going back to my days at Liberty, I made a lot of connections there, and those connections paid off. When I stepped out on my own, one of my buddies I played with at Liberty, who’d never worked for anybody but himself since college, coached me for free my entire first year. He said, here are the things you need to be thinking about. Don’t get overwhelmed. Here’s where you lean into this fear. Here’s where you ignore this thought. That stuff really saved me through that season.

Darren: That’s a beautiful thing, and a challenging thing for me, going, who have I just not thought about connecting with? You get what you ask for, or you get what you don’t ask for. So you had this in-between thing, and you started talking to the people you’d connected with naturally over the years, and that became the new thing you were able to drum up.

Dustin: I still do that. I’m in the process right now of toying with starting a creatives meetup here in the West Georgia area where I live, between Atlanta and Alabama. I’ve gone through my Rolodex, my contacts list, 40-plus contacts. I only got about halfway through. All I was looking at was, are they in Georgia, and are they a creative? They don’t have to be a creative professional or business owner. Do they operate out of a space of creativity? Do they create something? And the reason I can do that is because I’m trying to get out there and meet people. Even for my business, I’ll go through my contacts list two or three times a year. Is there anyone I could pursue as a client, or who would know someone I can pursue as a client? My list is growing all the time. I may not have asked them before, or maybe I did, but it was two years ago.

Darren: That’s all right. I’m sitting here going, I’ve got 500 contacts on my phone, someone’s got to know somebody. Again, the thing we have to do is simple, but it’s not easy. That’s probably the way I’d word it.

Take me back real quick. You’re about to step into this. What was the scary part? What were you emotionally thinking?

Dustin: I thought we were going to lose our house. I thought we were going to have to move back to Virginia with my wife’s parents, and start all over again in the middle of our lives. That was the scariest part for sure. There was no way this was going to work. I couldn’t imagine it working, because I’d never imagined anything outside of ministry. I applied to Home Depot and places like that, thinking I’d get it. I never even got a, hey, we received your application.

Darren: Seriously.

Dustin: Seriously.

Darren: So you were even at a place where you were like, I’ve got to do something outside of my normal. I’ll just go get the side gig.

Dustin: Yeah, I thought I could get a quote unquote day job while I started this business. And luckily, thank God, a friend who had a nonprofit was looking for an executive director. I’m really good at building things. I build systems for a living, essentially, for creative businesses. He needed somebody to build infrastructure and processes around this nonprofit as they were getting off the ground. I took a pay cut, for sure, but it allowed me to pay the bills while I built this business. We did not lose the house. I had a friend whose wife saw us about a week after the separation from church work happened, and he said, don’t worry about the house. If you can’t make your mortgage payment, I’ve got you covered.

Darren: Which is awesome. Did you have to move in with your in-laws?

Dustin: Nope, sure didn’t. We’re still in the same house we were in when I made the transition. And I drive a nicer truck now.

Darren: Yeah, you do. Much nicer than my truck. It looks pretty and doesn’t have kids’ crackers in the back.

Dustin: Yeah, that’s because I’m a tyrant about who eats in my truck. I just don’t ever let my kids eat in it.

Darren: That’s really what I love. Quick pause here. If you are thinking about starting a podcast, or you’ve already started one and it’s not driving business results like you’d want, we would love to help. At 1898 Creative, we install a proven podcast system, a strategy that helps you leverage your message to attract premium clients without adding more to your plate. So if you’re ready to turn your podcast into an authority engine, book a call over at 1898creative.com and let’s build something awesome together. All right, now let’s get back to the conversation.

I have this fear too, especially often in the entrepreneurial journey.

Dustin: Oh, sure. I still do. And Will, my buddy who coached me that first year, said, don’t look at that fear as a bad thing, and don’t look at it as motivation either. Look at it as part of what you have chosen to step into. It comes with the territory. It’s just like part of this office is that wall over there. I’m not worried about that wall. I’m not going to bang my head against it. And I’m not driven by it. I don’t get up every day going, if I don’t, that wall’s coming after me. It’s just part of the office.

Darren: So many times fear takes the wheel. I saw a Tony Robbins clip yesterday about how fear has a grip. He had a guy on stage holding onto him, and he said, what you don’t want to do is try to get away from fear. You pull away, it’s a struggle, and you hurt yourself. And you don’t want to just let it take you wherever it wants. What you need to do is learn to dance with it. It was this whole piece only Tony Robbins can do. But it was this idea of dancing with the fear. It’s not going to go away, but you learn to dance with it. For entrepreneurs, for anybody leading anything, there’s going to be a time you learn how to dance with the fear. You step into it, you don’t let it control you or dictate to you, you don’t fight against it, you dance with it. That’s where you use that energy in some really cool ways. And it sounds like that’s a little bit of what you did.

Dustin: Yeah. And I’ll say, it’s not the crippling, I’m afraid kind of fear. It’s the kind we read about in scripture, where there’s a level of respect. I’m not walking around in fear. I don’t carry it with me. But there’s the thought that if I don’t do this, we don’t eat. I respect that my actions, or lack of actions, help produce food on our table. If we get primitive about it, back in the caveman days there was no farting around. You didn’t show up to the office and play Solitaire on your tablet. You had to go out and make it happen.

Darren: Right.

Dustin: And there’s a phrase on my desk, the number one thing that talked to me during that season, that I always come back to. Work hard and trust God. We work hard because the vision has been set before us. But the results are not ultimately up to us. It’s up to us to be faithful in showing up and putting in the work. It’s up to us to plant when we find ourselves in a new field and don’t know what to plant. We just plant. And we trust God that he’s going to grow whatever he has for us next out of that field. That’s how we operate as believers anyway.

Darren: Man, I love that analogy, because so often fear puts me in the fetal position. You want to bury yourself in the ground, dig a hole. But what’s the next right thing? Like you said, if you’re in a new field and don’t know what to plant, you plant something, you learn from it, and you move. It either grows or it doesn’t.

Dustin: Yeah. Every time I reach out to a contact in my phone, that’s me planting something. It may produce nothing. It may produce something.

Darren: I’m going to go off topic a little bit, but in my life, if you know any of my story, walking through a divorce, the hardest time of my life, everything getting flipped upside down. I remember sitting in my brother’s office one day, defeated, and he said something that haunts me in a good way to this day. He said, the only way to make it through the valley of the shadow of death is to just keep walking. You can’t go around it. There’s nothing you can do. You just keep walking. A little bit of what you’re saying is, you can’t lay down in the ditch and go, take me. We’ve got to get some work going. We’ve got to get a little uncomfortable. We’ve got to put ourselves out there in a way we maybe haven’t before. We’ve got to do the thing that scares us most. So, Dustin, you get past the initial shock and grief. You’re getting into it more. You have that moment where you think, I can do this. Was there a time where you made that decision and then went, I’ve made a terrible mistake?

Dustin: Oh man. I think it would be better for this podcast if I’d had that moment, but honestly, no, I never had that. For me, every day was further confirmation that I was doing the right thing. And just because it doesn’t fit the narrative some people think it needs to, doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

Darren: It’s basically what you said. You go, here are a couple things I know I need to do. I need to start planting. And as you planted more, the seedlings that popped up made you go, yes, I can do this.

Dustin: A good friend of mine gave a sermon a few years ago that a lot of people still talk about. He talked about going through the storms, and he talked about the buffalo. When a buffalo sees a storm, it runs towards the storm, not around it, not away from it. It runs toward it, because the quickest way out of the storm is through it. When I close my eyes and picture a buffalo, all I think about is this sheer mass of strength and muscle. One of the strongest creatures on earth is the one that goes through the storm, not around it or away from it. So I look at it and go, okay, there must be something better on the other side. Retreating is not best for me. Going around it is not best for me. So the only thing left that’s best for me is to go through it.

Darren: Oh man, that’ll preach. That was a great message. That visualization, the buffalo walking into the storm, is something I need to remind myself. I was telling you before the cameras turned on, this week is heavy, it’s hard. It’s one of those where you want to shrink back, or lay down in the ditch and put the dirt on top. Just call it.

Dustin: There’s a guaranteed outcome in that, though.

Darren: Yeah, you’re right. There’s a guaranteed outcome of quitting. There is no other possibility. Going through the storm, there’s the possibility of another outcome.

Dustin: Yeah. What’s on the other side of that?

Darren: Anybody who starts something, entrepreneurs, ministry leaders, anyone in charge of something, you have to go through the storm. Because the minute you shrink back, the minute you lay down, yes, there’s an outcome, but everything you were built for, the reason you feel that pull to start or create that thing, is because that’s how you were wired. It’s not there by mistake. That’s what I keep coming back to when I have to get through the storm. Leaning on somebody else, or not stepping into it fully, means I’m not being fully me. So at this point you go down swinging.

Dustin: Yeah, it’s not worth it to retreat. And this is going to sound bad to people who work for someone else, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s great wisdom and power in being the support. My whole business model is built on being the support system for other businesses, other people, other creatives. But for me, I’ve told everybody around me since starting this, I’ll never, and I say never knowing God has a sense of humor, but I have no desire to work for anybody else. That’s not right, wrong, or indifferent, it’s just the commitment. You asked earlier, do I ever wake up going, did I make a big mistake? And it’s the opposite. I wake up every day with further confirmation that what I’m doing is right. When you’re an entrepreneur or a visionary who has to start something new or create a category that doesn’t exist, you’re going to have a lot more nos than yeses. But it takes one yes out of 100 for me to go, I knew I was supposed to be doing this. Even when I get the nos, I don’t doubt I’m supposed to be doing this. My personality is to doubt my own abilities, not whether I’m supposed to be doing it. There’s a difference between, you have a calling and a purpose behind doing this, which I don’t question, and, do I have what it takes, which I do.

Darren: That’s a really good highlight, Dustin, because I’d second that, though I’ve never worded it that way. There are days you go, I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. I know I’m supposed to be doing this beyond a shadow of a doubt, but can I do it? What do you do when you find yourself there?

Dustin: A couple things. One, I remind myself of the calling. But usually, 99 out of 100 times, I remind myself again to work hard and trust God. And usually within 30 minutes of reminding myself, I’m back on to something.

Darren: What does that look like? You say it over and over? Write it down?

Dustin: I do. I’ll say it out loud. I’ll say it to my wife. I’ll say it to myself. I do the morning pages thing from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I haven’t been as disciplined with it lately, but in the seasons I need it most, I’ll do that. And the first thing I write down in my morning pages every day is my purpose statement, which I developed during that season of my life. My life’s purpose isn’t attached to a business or to what I do for a living. I wanted it that way. I wanted it to apply to my marriage, to my fatherhood, and to whatever I do for a career, whether for myself or someone else. That’s what I’m here for. So I remind myself of that purpose, I remind myself to work hard and trust God, and then gratitude plays a big role too. Gratitude is the Swiss Army knife to cure any of the down on yourself blues. We start thinking about everything wrong with us, and then we look back and go, wait, I get to live here and drive that truck and eat this food and have this wife and family because of this thing I do in my basement. That’s weird.

Darren: In your basement, just doing the thing.

Dustin: I call it my studio. It’s nice, it’s fancy, I have cool things around here that keep me stimulated. But at the end of the day, I’m just a guy in his basement making it happen.

Darren: That’s funny. So you’ve done this, we have a good picture now, and Chief Creative Partners is the thing you’re doing. We’ve worked together, so I know a lot of this story, but I’ll ask anyway. Chief Creative Partners has had different iterations as you’ve defined and refined it. Whose life is better off because Chief Creative Partners exists?

Dustin: Mine.

Darren: Boom. Dropping it.

Dustin: Selfishly, and I don’t just mean monetarily, though monetarily we’re doing good. It’s the piece of knowing I’m living smack dab in the middle of my purpose. And I’m not saying what I did for 20 years wasn’t part of that purpose. Every second of it was part of the journey, and not just to get me here. It’s part of the story. But you asked who’s benefiting. My clientele is creative business owners, people who create videos, design, communication, photos, websites. Someone once paid them for it because they were good at it, and that felt good, so they kept doing it, and it turned into a business. I don’t have a business degree, that’s not my forte. My forte is making creative vision come to life. They’ll say, my creative business is going to look like this and feel like this and operate like this, and I go, great, I hear you’ve thought about A, B, and C, but I’m going to think about the rest of the alphabet, and then we’re going to put infrastructure and systems around it so you can repeat it, and it doesn’t all crumble if you get the flu.

Darren: Yes, for sure.

Dustin: Or go on vacation, or take a day off, any of the things that happen.

Darren: Do you think you’d have the skill set with system building had it not been for the 20 years in full-time ministry?

Dustin: No, not even close. I could think back to a very young age where I was the kid who was very organized, but it was all in piles. It’s a mess, but I know where that mess is. It’s not tidy, but it’s not strewn about everywhere. I was always that organizer. I love to organize things and put structure into things, and a lot of that has to do with the chaotic environment I grew up in. My personality gravitated toward, okay, what can I control here? But to answer your question, no, not without those 20 years. We had to put on a live production, communicate about it, video capture it, design elements around it, script it, all of that. And that stuff doesn’t just happen. A lot of creatives think they can have the idea, stay up until 11, and the thing goes live at midnight, and they go, yeah, I can do it. You absolutely can do it. I’ve seen it done. But you can’t do it for the long haul. You can’t sustain it. And you can’t do it with excellence. Excellence is a big deal to me. If I’m going to be part of it, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but I want it to be excellent. When creatives consistently procrastinate and wait until the last minute, they burn themselves out and they don’t produce excellence consistently. They might hit it once out of 100 times. And when their livelihood depends on people paying them for that excellence, now we’ve got a problem. So we have to create that time margin, and we have to create the systems and processes so we can do it the same way each time. Not the same in a boring way, but the same result, the same level of excellence, every single time. We have systems all over 1898 Creative. No two videos are the same, but how we got to that video is pretty much the same way every time.

Darren: Yes. And I can attest, as the guy who stays up late trying to get the thing over the finish line for weeks and months in a row, that ends up going, I just can’t anymore. That takes you out. That gets you to lay down in the ditch and say, throw dirt on me. So it’s the system you put in place that lets you keep the thing going and keep burnout at bay. That’s the beauty of what you do, especially for creative agencies and creative-minded folks. And it’s the beauty of what you’ve helped me with all these years. So, some people might say, ministry is a higher calling than what you’re doing now. How are you making impact the way you were in those 20 years? What do you say to those who think ministry is a place of greater impact?

Dustin: I don’t think comparing impact is good for anybody. I’ll just say it’s a different impact. My impact in local church ministry was mostly, and I’m not saying this is the right way, you come to me and I’ll impact you. In the business marketplace, they don’t come to you, you have to go to them. There are people I can reach through my business who would never set foot in a church. And there are people who set foot in a church who would never want to do business with me. So we need it all. It’s not a greater level of impact because you’re in ministry, or because you own a business. It’s just different impact, and we need it all. But I think the heart of that question is attaching your value to what you do. That’s why I go back to my purpose statement all the time. Because if I’m living in that purpose, it doesn’t matter what I do.

Darren: You’ve said that twice now, so what is your purpose statement?

Dustin: Sure. I’m anointed to intentionally equip others through authenticity and excellence.

Darren: As a friend that’s close to you, I’d say yeah, I see how that’s a driving force in what you do. That’s beautiful. I love it. All right, man. I love this conversation and I love what you’re doing. For those going, Chief Creative Partners sounds interesting, where can they find you, buddy?

Dustin: Oh man, thanks to a good friend of ours and amazing creative, PJ Tao, shout out PJ, of 43 Creative. They can find me at chiefcreativepartners.com. There are simple next steps on there. Book a call, let me hear about your business, and we’ll take it from there. At the end of the day, we say you create and we operate. That’s what we do at Chief Creative Partners.

Darren: I love it. So simple and so easy to understand. You’ve thought about that for a bit.

Dustin: I surrounded myself with smarter people than me, like PJ.

Darren: I like that too. If you are an entrepreneur, especially in the creative field in any way, shape, or form, reach out to Dustin, especially on the systems side. The way he approaches it, the way he builds it, the way he helps you operate. You create, he’ll operate. Go check it out. The links will be in the description. Dustin, man, I appreciate not only your friendship over the years, but the work we get to do together. You’re very integrated with what we do here at 1898 Creative, and that’s super exciting for me. Couldn’t do any of this without you, and I want the world to know that.

Dustin: I appreciate it, man. Thank you so much for your kind words and the time on the podcast. It was a real pleasure to be here and share a little bit of that story, rather than just playing the Andy Richter role.

Darren: Yeah, no, it’s good. You’ll be back in the Andy Richter role, I’m sure, in some episodes to come.

Dustin: Of course.

Darren: But for now, we get to hear your story and learn from it. I love the lessons you brought out and the things you encouraged us to do. It’s going to be cool to hear the stories of those who took your challenges to heart and went out and did something with it. I appreciate you being a part of it. And thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Create Your Art Podcast. Before you go, I want you to remember this. One, you are an artist. Two, you need to do the hard work of bringing that art into the world. And three, you are loved more than you could ever imagine. So go out and create your art, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.