The 21st-Century Artist's Playbook

Undeniability, walk-away power, & the 5 pillars of infrastructure to make your career extremely cool.

Indie Artists, riddle me this.

If there was a realistic system that directed you towards a profitable, prolific career,

would you finally quit hanging your hopes on someday I’ll break in and be loved by the industry and take your life as an artist, RIGHT NOW AS IT IS, seriously¹?

You² keep waiting for The Industry to pour magical fairy dust on your career, but…

❌ The mysterious ✨ b I g * B R e A K ✨ you think gatekeepers could bestow unto you is an artifact of the last century. Not a reality in this one.

❌ The radical economic uncertainty in every industry (let alone the creative ones) is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.

❌ Getting viral attention on the internet is landing-on-Jupiter-level impossible. Even Kanye is pulling stunts for eyes.

❌ Social media flattens ideas and isolates people. Which makes real honest-to-goddess connections feel as easy as pushing a school bus up Lombard Street.

But but but!

This is the Perfect Moment for the Doc Brown Directive

And it vigorously applies to 21st-Century Artists™:

Roads Traditional Industry Strategies? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads Traditional Industry Strategies.

The Doc Brown Directive is a form of quantum leaping. It’s also something you might find cross-stitched on a decorative pillow… To get somewhere new, you have to do something new.

If the Old Directive was: wait for the industry to accept you to have an incredible career

Then the Doc Brown Directive is: You can take the *circumstances right in front of you* and build a high quality artistic life of your dreams.

Your career strategy doesn’t have to be crossing your toes you’ll hit the right viral moment and be one YouTube payout away from financial solvency.

It is 1000% possible to share your work with folks who are obsessed with it, get paid for that work, create year-after-year momentum, and wake up energized every day with purpose knowing you haven’t sold out your artistic vision to be a billionaire’s bot.

But before we get there…

Maybe it’s an Industry Plant, Maybe It’s Maybelline

It’s Monday and you have the best of intentions. Today, you’re going to share your ART! You’re going to make the most of your one wild and precious life. You think, maybe I’ll start publishing my poetry on Substack. Maybe I can grow a ~following~.

So you open the app to share a few bars of iambic pentameter with your 56 subscribers, but before you even get to your dashboard, BAM!, someone’s trend essay floats past your eyes and the thumbnail shows a photo of your Creative Writing-nemesis from undergrad. She’s holding a trophy. It’s gold.

…You hope it’s for soccer…

…(It’s not.)…

…It’s a Golden Globe…

…

An anxious energy shoots through you as you realize she wrote that show your friends have been obsessing over in the group chat.

Sweat forms on your upper lip. Spit forms in your mouth. Thoughts come fast and all at once: who’s her manager, how’d she get her “in”, does she still have a day job, is she an industry plant?!, should you get in touch with her?!, her stories sucked in Theory and Practice?!?!, how did she get a FULL SERIES?!?!?!?!, plus 87 other unanswerable questions that all add up to an inner primal scream.

You chuck your phone on the floor. Crawl back under the covers and decide you’ll live your one wild and precious life on Thursday.

But AS DOC BROWN TEACHES US, you’re a visionary — so you don’t have to “break into the industry” to have an incredible career.

When you build the infrastructure for doing your work, you complete more projects, join more collaborations, grow more of an audience, and make more money. And as you do this, your body of work, your reputation, and your integrity as an artist compound.

People lean in. They want to see what you’re going to do next. And this is when you reach the point of no return…

You become undeniable.

Allow me to underline this in linguistic Sharpie…

When you build the infrastructure of your 21st-Century Artist career, you start to realize:

You do not need to be invited to the party³. You’re AT the party. You’re the LIFE of the party. You are Sia, swinging from the chande-le-hier, at the party.

So what IS this magical infrastructure?

The 21st-Century Artist Infrastructure for a High Quality Career

There are five pillars:

1. Writing

2. Release

3. Revenue

4. Connection

5. Constraint

1. WRITING: Writing well is the master key that unlocks all doors.

When you know how to write well, you’ll get attention. Don’t listen to people who say “no one reads anymore”. Sure people do. They read their horoscopes. They read their texts. They read the lyrics to Pink Pony Club. In other words, they read what applies to them. So if you know how to make your emails, your marketing, your artwork, your social presence apply to your audience, they will pay you quite well in their attention. (I shared a very brief breakdown of how to write well HERE.)

2. RELEASE: Everything gets a release.

You do not post. You do not share. You do not throw it up on the internet. You release it. What is it? Everything. That’s not to say everything deserves an opening night party and a velvet rope. Releasing work simply means having an intention for it. You’re not dogmatic about doing “what works” for the algorithm — you’re dogmatic about knowing a) what the best outcome is for your content/art, and b) how you can hedge for that outcome.

3. REVENUE: A non-negotiable safety net.

There are a million ways to make revenue, and you employ at least 7 of them. In 2025, millionaires have at least 7 streams of income, and while that number may go up or down over time, the first principle is the same: diversification is life. I shared 52 ideas for indie artists to make revenue here. That list didn’t take me long, so if you sat down and dedicated one hour to thinking about this, you could 100% come up with your own unique list of 52 ideas. I also recorded a guided 5-part audio workshop for how to do this in more depth.

4. CONNECTION: Unexpected results come from community.

Lateral connection is high quality connection. Getting in touch with people in adjacent sectors with similar values is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s from these high quality connections that you will start producing better work, stumble into the coolest serendipities, and enter a new artistic era. But a lot of people don’t do it. Here’s a free guide for how to get started.

5. CONSTRAINT: Systems rev momentum and deepen the work.

Artistic constraint is so hot. Putting limits on your projects is magical. One time I wrote a 30-minute pilot in 24 hours because I told myself that’s all the time I had. I wrote a full-length feature in 3 days because I told myself it should be bad/finished, not good/unfinished. Constraints are wise. They are self-aware. They are little incantations to make your project 800x better.

Summoning Your Exclusive & Innate Walk-Away-Power

If you start working with these five pillars every day, I guarantee your artistic career will feel completely differently in even just two weeks from now. Doors will open. Roads will appear. Their people will be calling your people.

If you start doing this, even if you decide you want to play the industry game at the same time, you’ll be in a stronger position.

Why?

Because you’ll have what Chappell Roan calls “walk away power”.

The industry wants you to believe the power is in the prestige, but it’s not. The power is in your IP.

When you walk away from a laughable deal, a toxic collaboration, an impotent agent, or the crumbling industry at large, you’re taking your gorgeous, original IP with you.

And not only do you take that IP. You take all future IP that can ~only~ ~come~ ~from~ ~you~.

This is true power.

Once you see that bigger picture, you’re going to see you have a stacked hand. You just have to play it.

PS. I’m going to be teaching a free series of workshops on the five pillars above. Sign up for the wait list here.

PPS. Tell me which pillar (Writing, Release, Revenue, Connection, Constraint) you feel most/least comfortable with in the comments.👇

1. Whoa! She opened way harsh! So please know, I’m also speaking directly to myself.

2. I

3. Awards ceremony, prestigious industry function, hoity toity academic institution, very cool and coveted job, cool kids table, etc.