Ja-Nae Duane is a good friend and a dynamic creative with many talents and pursuits. She is a professor, advisor, speaker, strategist, social scientist, artist, creative economist, professional opera singer and author – including the forthcoming book, The Startup Equation: A Visual Guidebook to Building Your Startup.

In episode 33 of The Mindful Creator, Ja-Nae and I discuss the connection between creativity and personal happiness, specifically what the pursuit of a higher calling to create something larger than just ourselves can teach us about what it takes to be truly happy.



Link Love

Ja-Nae’s amazon author page


Brain Pickings on Viktor Frankl


Our Revolution (soon to be Revolution Institute)


Guerilla Marketing – Jay Conrad Levinson


On Writing – Stephen King

In this Episode



* Ja-Nae shares her story, including the journey through a challenging childhood where parental substance abuse forced her to grow up rapidly and care for four younger siblings, her discovery of opera, and her experiences in college.

* Ja-Nae talks about the 2008 recession’s impact on her career as an opera singer and how that led her to pursuing other opportunities as an entrepreneur.

* Ja-Nae’s early experience as a social media city leader, and how that influenced her perspective on networking and led to the launch of her first company.

* Ja-Nae talks about opera as an art form and how that creative process leaked into other areas of her life (which led us to a deeper discussion on connection between creative and everyday life).

* Brett talks about the podcast and how all of the conversations around self awareness, creativity, and connection have impacted his perspective on the process of understanding the relationship between work and life.

* Pursuing art as a means to escape vs. pursuing art as means to survive.

* Stephen King, from his memoir: “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

* The role of alignment in shaping how we view ourselves, the outside world, and what we create as a result.

* Our fear of true vulnerability and how that holds us back from really connecting with our work and with others.

* Ja-Nae: “My first business was me.”

* The critical “missing piece” of shaping and curating what purpose and meaning looks like for each of us.

* Brett’s struggles with the tension between being creative and profitably creative.

* Brett: “All the experiences that we have are critical components of discovering purpose.”

* Brett and Ja-Nae talk about Viktor Frankl and his research on what the experience of suffering can teach us about meaning and purpose.

* Why the pursuit is the most fleeting and difficult aspect of chasing purpose to get a grasp on, and why it’s also the most fundamentally connected to finding fulfillment in our work.

* Ja-Nae: “It’s very hard to live life with meaning when I feel that life is a journey to explore what that meaning is.