This story in The Age today is a terrific example of what making your own success looks like.
Out-of-work actor turns to art… with 300,000 TikTok followers
They say when one door closes, another opens and Melbourne actor Nathan McCarron is living proof.When his acting dreams fizzled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and he even lost his day job booking jobs for tradies, McCarron, 28, turned for solace to his other passion: drawing.
It began just as a hobby, but an experiment filming his sketches of celebrities such as Taylor Swift, and uploading them to video-sharing app TikTok, “blew up”.
He was swamped with requests to draw the likes of pop superstars Billie Eilish and Ariana Grande and six months later he has turned the lemon of lockdown into lemonade.
McCarron’s TikTok page, Nathan’s Art, now has 300,000 global followers.
His little videos of between 15 seconds and one minute long, mostly portraying the sketching process, are attracting an average 1.6 million views.
This relates to newsagents in that is reflects someone who could no longer make a living from their core activities so they pivoted. While they are not making a living yet, they are headed in the right direction.
In the situation of our channel, the decline of core foundational categories has been slower than Cortona has been for many this year. However, for many newsagents, the pivot has been slower, too.