I picked up a physical copy of “The Business of Belonging” by David Spinks to gift to his Hybrids Dance Crew teammates as they build a freestyle dance community together. The book reframed how I thinks about combining art, business, and communities.. and the limiting belief that artists have to choose between making an impact OR making money.
Full Transcript
I’m so excited because I got a bunch of these books. This book is called “The Business of Belonging” by David Spinks. It’s one of my favorite all-time books that I’ve discovered on building communities.
One of the projects and businesses that I’m building with my friends is an online community, a safe space for freestyle dancers to get together and develop their movement practice. It’s kind of a new thing for me. I’m doing it with my friends in the Hybrids Dance Crew. All of us have a plethora of different dance experience. I’m dancing with a job walkies, which was America’s Best Dance Crew season 1 winners. Some of our members have danced with artists like Bad Bunny, High School Musical, and produce shows for corporate events like GameStop, Lush. And this year in 2025 we’re getting into the realm of creating dance education so that other people can experience the joys of freestyle dance and movement practice.
I wanted to get this book, “The Business of Belonging,” because it really changed my life and my whole approach, my whole understanding of what it means to build a community. The thing I like about David Spinks is that he was like a hardcore gamer when he was 14. He was the top player in Tony Hawk post skatr 4 and he built an online community of thousands of players, and he just had this natural proclivity to create really highly engaged communities. Later on he went to found CMX, which is a community convention. I haven’t been to it, but I really love the story. I love the gamer, nerdy background that he comes from, cuz I’m kind of like that too. And he has a lot of really great practical mental models and frameworks for things to think about when building a profitable and healthy engaged community that’s aligned with a particular goal.
I haven’t completely finished the book yet, but from what I’ve read of it so far, I started reading it online. Usually I’ll read a book online first, and if I really like it I’ll get a physical copy. He gives a lot of wisdom on the art of building communities, from a business context but also a holistic context, of like how do we actually make sure members are getting results, how do we actually make sure that we’re fulfilling the purpose, and not just making a fun space where people can get together and talk about stuff but not actually do anything. And so I wanted to get this book for my team members as a gift to start off 2025.
Out of everyone in my group I probably do the most amount of reading, cuz I just love reading. I love knowledge. I used to never be a gift giver, but I realized, actually from one of my ex-relationships, she taught me really the beauty of giving gifts. She’s an entrepreneur herself and she was a leader. She had a Bubba shop, and just the way that she led her team, the way that she showed up and gave to her team members, was really beautiful to me. So that has kind of imparted into me. And I realized that one of my love languages is actually giving knowledge. I love gifting knowledge to my friends and my loved ones because I want to see everyone around me grow and succeed. So yeah, I got this book, and hopefully it’ll plant some good seeds and align us all on the mission of creating this online dance space for people.
Movement is something that has really changed my life. I’ve talked on this channel before about getting deeper into classical philosophy and studying classical fiction to get to the root of decoding the subconscious processes that happen in my brain, that play out in unproductive or unhealthy ways in my life. Carl Young calls this the individuation process. But movement, before ever getting into consciously, intellectually studying thoughts and psychology, I feel like a lot of my spiritual and interpersonal realizations about my life and self-love, my artistry, how I really think about things, thinking for myself, a lot of those things developed not through studying intellectual knowledge from other people or books. I used to actually not read books at all. I used to hate reading. I more so loved learning through my own life experiences and [__] up in real life, getting what Nasim Taleb calls “skin in the game.”
And one of the ways that I really got deep skin in the game with my own psyche and my own consciousness is through the practice of movement. I call it “movement moves,” that are meant. It’s a tangible way of getting close and personal with the things that are happening in your mind. You’re able to take an emotion, or take a thought pattern, and then physically express that and process that through the practice.
I don’t really dance with the intent to go viral for a dance trend. I’ve always approached dance because… I grew up with a lot of health problems and skin diseases. I’ve tried killing myself when I was 17. Movement was always there to help me channel my inner hatred, my inner shadows, even my inner brightness and my inner light, through an artistic medium.
All this to say, I’m really passionate about movement. And I’m now going into 2025 to create and cultivate a community with my friends, and to also combine things that I’ve learned from my five years of my marketing background, my skills as a copywriter, these different entrepreneurial income skills, and combining that with my passion for artistry and movement and dance and parkour.
I realized in my life that one of the things that was always the hardest for me to balance is the balance of business and art. And there was a point in my life, for the past five years, where I felt like I had to separate the two. A lot of times artists have a struggling artist mindset. They don’t want to succeed. They don’t want to make money because money is evil. There’s a lot of negative, toxic, and unhealthy relationships to money. And that’s not their fault. That’s not your fault if you’re an artist. The struggling artist mentality is something that is taught. There’s not a lot of education, psychologically or spiritually, on how to combine those two things. And so, within myself, I felt like I had to separate the two worlds. And that’s why I felt so detached from myself creatively. And why I wanted to start this YouTube channel again.
One of my 12 favorite problems that I’ve talked about before in previous videos is: how do I balance business and art? And so this book, that I want to share with my friends and make this YouTube video about, holds a lot of keys. I’ve applied these principles to my clients and partners that I’ve worked with in the past, and we’ve built communities with hundreds of members. I generate thousands of dollars a month in an aligned way. And now I’m at that point where I want to apply it to industries that I’m also passionate about as well, like artistry and dance and movement.
One of my favorite ideas from this book is that a community does not have longevity if it is broke. True community leaders, true communities themselves, will find ways to monetize from the things that it generates, from the ideas that the community generates, so that can gather funds to make sure that the community can stay alive. A lot of the struggling artist mindset is, okay we’re just going to put together some cool things and then it’s just going to be all fine, and we don’t need money, money is evil, we don’t do it for the money. It’s such a limiting belief to have.
So yeah, “The Business of Belonging,” and exercising the beauty that is gift giving to my friends and my team. I’m excited to see what we can create together. But I think this will help us all align on some robust and anti-fragile mindsets when it comes to building a community that is self-sustaining, that is highly engaged, that is highly passionate, that is actually making an impact, but is also profitable and pays its members to continue doing what we love to do. So we can also survive. At the end of the day, that’s all I wanted to share. This part of my journey for, uh, memorabilia sake. Thanks for watching if you did. My reflection for my past, present, or future self. See you in the next one.