Season 2 · Episode 1
Sparking Your Intentions, and Creating Messy Action
ZADAN with Jenna Monaco
· 2:31:16
The conversation
Jenna Monaco, the Bay Area creator behind the Spark Intentions podcast and the Messy Bun, Messy Action brand, sits down with ZADAN in Los Angeles. The first half is a long talk about purpose: why people should focus on their core message rather than the vehicle that carries it, how one piece of content can become a video, podcast and blog, why community should live somewhere you own, and why ZADAN gives away tools that others sell, with Peter McKinnon's presets as the running example.
The second half turns personal. Jenna explains spending eleven years in school and retail before hiring a success coach and starting her show. ZADAN shares his water drop theory of God and his habit of living for the person who wakes up tomorrow. Then both describe anxiety that surfaced only once life became stable: Jenna's 3am panic attacks after losing her father, and ZADAN's office job spiral. They close on why parents should not make their children their therapists.
Topics, with timestamps
Pick a time to start listening right there.
- Jenna's Bay Area trip and a VidSummit connection
- Starting Spark Intentions with a success coach
- Fear versus faith and the plumber's core message
- Busking for rent made ZADAN hate music
- Turning one message into video, podcast and blog
- Taking your community off rented platforms
- Paywalled presets and reverse engineering Peter McKinnon's pack
- Failure as feedback and the ten-year overnight success
- Flipping free Craigslist finds for profit
- Eleven years of waiting before Messy Bun, Messy Action
- ZADAN's water drop theory of God
- Automating posts with Sendible and IFTTT
- Panic attacks, trauma, and anxiety without medication
- Why parents should not share their problems with kids
Worth hearing
- ZADAN argues that a person's core message stays constant while the vehicle for it can change, citing Gary Vaynerchuk's shifts from wine to business to mindset.
- He suggests repurposing a single recording: pull the audio from a YouTube video for a podcast and turn a typed transcript into a blog post.
- Both urge creators to collect email addresses and build community off social platforms, since any one network could fade the way MySpace did.
- ZADAN says he learned color grading by applying Peter McKinnon's preset to many photos and watching which settings changed, and argues tools should be teachable or donation based rather than locked behind a paywall.
- Jenna says she spent about eleven years in school and retail, including managing a Journeys store, before a success coach helped her launch her podcast.
- Jenna describes waking at 3am with panic attacks after her father's death and says they eased once she recognized them for what they were while reading a novel.
- ZADAN tells how he picked up a free 4K TV from a Craigslist post in Laguna Beach, as proof that flipping free items can bring in real money.
ZADAN's original episode notes
On this week’s episode, with the guest appearance of Jenna Monaco. Jenna Monaco is a holistic mental health management brand creating content on her podcast, Spark Intentions which I was actually featured on an episode of and highly recommend you check out after this episode, as well as her career as an author and mentor to help her community break out of the chains that their mindset has set so you can stop feeling stuck, harness the power within yourself, and amplify your life on every level utilizing her "Messy Bun, Messy Action" take on the creation process.
In this episode Jenna and I talk a lot about depression in your work, dealing and pushing through anxiety, finding efficiencies to make your life easier, family trauma and how it effects all aspects of your craft, and so many other things that I can't wait for you to hear about - so without further ado, I give you; Jenna Monaco.