We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Johnathan Pushkar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Johnathan below.

Johnathan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Has your work ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized?

I’ve experienced that a lot of people assume being a creator is an ideal life, given that I’m able to travel freely, work from anywhere, and do exciting things most days of the year.

Many people fail to see the thousands of hours I put into building my creative businesses to get them to the point where they sustain the life I have now. I spent countless college nights alone working on my laptop to build the businesses I have today. Instead of going out on a Friday night, I was going to networking events. Instead of partying or playing video games, I was taking meetings and trying to grow my network of professionals that have continued to be fruitful to this day. It’s not to say that one lifestyle is better than the other, but I made the choice to focus my time on building things that could be long-term investments instead of short-term fun experiences, which has now led to me having multiple streams of income that all lead me to fun places. Admittedly, I have a lot of fun these days, but it’s come by way of many days and nights spent alone working tirelessly at dreams that few others thought were possible.

While I am grateful for what I have and the dividends my choices continue to pay, I do sometimes wonder how life might be different if I hadn’t worked so hard and had been a little more laid back. Would I be further behind or further ahead? I suppose there’s no way of knowing, and it’s more of a curiosity than a reget. I am beyond satisfied with my life and the path that lies ahead, so I don’t have any regrets about the choices I made that led me to where I am today.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Depending on where you cross paths with me, I could be one of three people: a retro rock musician, a social media consultant, or a LEGO content creator.

First dates are always interesting for me, because it’s a never-ending challenge to adequately explain who I am and what I do in a short time. I’ve come up the “triangle concept,” where I point out that I am all three of these things, but one of them is always on top depending on what I am doing that given day. Sometimes I’m shooting LEGO videos, sometimes I am consulting social media clients, and other times I’ve got a guitar around my neck making music. No two days are the same, and I live for it.

I realized at a young age that I didn’t fit into a traditional box. Being the musically-driven son of two entrepreneurs, I knew I wanted to do something individualistic and creative, but I wasn’t sure what exactly that would be. Naturally, that led me to pursue music, where I played “Ringo” in a Beatles tribute band all throughout high school before moving to Nashville, TN for college where I pursued a career as a music artist. In 2019, a song I wrote called “The Girl Next Door” debuted on SirusXM’s Underground Garage where Marty Scott of JEM Records was listening in. We connected the following day, and within 48 hours he had signed me to his legendary record label and I’ve been in the JEM roster of artists ever since. I’ve released two albums to date, and will begin working on my third in the coming months.

In college, I started taking photos of the LEGO minifigures I’d taken to school with me. I was going through a difficult time in my life, and in an effort to better myself and learn a new skill, I made a challenge to myself to post one LEGO photo every day on Instagram. That began in March of 2015, and to this day the challenge remains unbroken. Under the name MiniSuperHeroesToday, I’ve since expanded to YouTube and TikTok, where my community has amassed a following of over 300,000 LEGO fans worldwide. This has been a dream come true to bring to fruition, and it’s allowed me to work with brands like Marvel, Disney, Pixar, Harper Collins, Mr. Beast, and even The LEGO Group themselves.

While growing those two careers, I realized I could help other creatives, small businesses, and entertainment personalities grow their social media, so I started consulting/managing social media for clients all across the US starting in my sophomore year of college. This has been a great way to use what I’ve learned to help others achieve their goals, and I love the challenge of reverse engineering new social media strategies for every client I work with, big or small.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I listen to a lot (and I mean a LOT) of business-minded coaches, teachers, and creators who have helped me form my ironclad view of the world as a content creator and businessman. No man is an island, and you can save yourself a lot of headaches by keeping an open mind and learning from those who have trailblazed their way to success before you.

On a personal level, the most influential people to my development were my entrepreneurial parents, Dennis and Jane Pushkar, my favorite college professor, Belmont University’s Dr. Kevin Trowbridge, and Nashville’s digital jack-of-all-trades Clark Buckner at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. Those four individuals instilled the values of hard work paying off, strategic thinking, and unwavering focus that helped me find success in the pursuits I’ve begun.

On a larger scale, YouTube channels like Patrick Bet-David’s Valuetainment and Sean Cannell’s Think Media have helped me shape the frame of my business to go from “amateur” to “pro.” Perhaps the single most influential individual on a large scale, though, has been Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia. His mindset and tips dispersed on social media around 2018 or so gave me the courage to go for entrepreneurship, and it’s been an honor to get to know the folks at VaynerMedia and work on projects with them over the years.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

In 2018, as I was getting ready to graduate, I was talking with some girls in one of my classes who were comparing the salaries of the jobs they were interviewing for post-graduation. They were making remarks like, “if I work here, I can make this much, but if I work there I can make that much.” It struck a chord with me as I realized that working for someone else meant there was a limit on how much you could make. Granted, that limit could be quite high, but nonetheless, there was still a glass ceiling. I began to weigh the pros and cons of working for someone else: you’d get job security, benefits, and all of the other attractive securities, but you could also end up doing something you hate while being reliant on the comfort that position provides for you. Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, had unmeasurable risks, but uncalculatable rewards if you found success.

I felt that I’d have the rest of my life to get a job somewhere else, but now was the time to strike if I wanted to pursue the risk of being an entrepreneur. The longer I waited, the more commitments I’d have, which would make entrepreneurship harder as I’d have more plates to juggle. The first few years after graduating were tight, but keeping my focus on the vision of being a music-writing, LEGO-building social media consultant helped keep me in my lane and not distracted with other things. It was right around the end of 2019 when I finally hit a stride, which was then thrown off by the events of 2020. The world shutting down was a setback that caused me to grow, and although I don’t miss those days, I am grateful for what they taught me and who they helped me become.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnathanpushkar/
• Youtube: https://amzn.to/3EdVTcZ
• Other: MiniSuperHeroesToday
  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MiniSuperHeroesTodayOfficial
  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/minisuperheroestoday/