Episode 6: Permission to Make Art with Yanik Silver

At the top of his career, seven or eight companies in, seven figures, an Aston Martin with “Secret Agent Yanik Silver” stamped on the door sill, Yanik Silver asked his journal a plain question. Am I happy, and would I be happy doing this in ten years? The honest answer was no.

Yanik is the founder of Maverick1000, a global collective of entrepreneurs, and the author of Evolved Enterprise and the Cosmic Journal. We get into what came next: selling the Aston Martin (but keeping his ticket to space), driving a beat-up family SUV until he felt real gratitude for it, and sinking four hundred thousand dollars into a new venture before it became anything. The 108 straight days of making art at two in the morning that became a book he never planned to publish. And why, after all of it, he still hesitates to call himself an artist.

It’s an episode about the inner voice Yanik calls the cosmic alarm clock, the one you can keep hitting snooze on, and what happens when you finally answer it.

Yanik runs Maverick1000 (maverick1000.com) and created the Cosmic Journal (cosmicjournal.com).