Education Entrepreneur Bradley Morris Shares His Creator Journey

In this LMScast episode, Education Entrepreneur Bradley Morris shares his creative journey, beginning with a low time when he operated a t-shirt business and dropped out of college, which helped him learn the importance of thankfulness.

His artistic career started in 2007 with the release of his viral “Gratitude Dance” video. Bradley became interested in meditation throughout the years, leading seminars and retreats before turning to recording meditations for an audio library that brought in passive revenue.

He strongly emphasizes the value of collaboration and relationships, utilizing the abilities and skills of others to further his goals. These stories were the basis for a children’s book publishing business and an entertaining audio storytelling app that aims to foster creativity, instill morals, and ignite the imagination in young listeners.

If Bradley Morris’s journey inspired you, don’t miss out on his Signature Workshop training, where he dives deeper into building a fulfilling and creative life. Click here to learn more and sign up.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and friend. He’s back on the show. His name is Bradley Morris. You can find him at magic media dot com. That’s m a j I k media dot com. He’s a prolific creator, everything from dance videos to meditation training to all kinds of different things with kids, the magic kids.

We’re going to talk about that. But first Bradley, Take us on a tour of how this all started. I know it started with the gratitude dance video that went viral. Tell us how your creator journey sparked.

I would say my creator journey sparked with rock bottom. I dropped out of College after my second year to start my first business, which was a t shirt business.

and we sold really offensive t shirts on the internet, my buddy and I, and within a year, my life became what was written on my shirts. And, and that set me off on the path of trying Get my act together and make some positive changes and the process I discovered the power of gratitude and my buddy and I, two buddies and I won out and created a video called the gratitude dance.

This was back in 2007, right at the early days of YouTube. And so this was the first video. I ever posted on YouTube and it went viral. and my buddy and I went on a speaking tour around North America for the next couple of years, teaching workshops and speaking on stages. and in that time, I got really into meditation.

after my tour, I went back to Victoria, British Columbia, where I was living. And I started teaching meditation classes based on the request of a friend. And that led me to, teach 500 workshops over the next three years. It was crazy. I was teaching all the time. I started doing retreats in Peru and Mexico and Hawaii.

and by the end of those three years, I was tired of teaching meditation, to be honest. And that was when I wanted to go all in on, on creating on the internet. I wanted to basically clone myself so that the teachings I was sharing with people that had changed my life could reach people. Millions of people.

And that’s what I did. I produced a world class audio library of meditations. we started with 48 tracks, each with custom composed music, and I started licensed those to a whole bunch of different apps and I ended up going. Up through the ranks of Mindvalley’s Omvana app and I was number one on there for six years straight and through that a whole bunch of other apps started approaching me and as a result, over the next coming years and still now my work just keeps spreading, but I’ve reached millions of people.

It’s generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of purely passive income. I’ve never had to build a meditation audience. The apps do it for me. and then I could, I retired from teaching meditation. I went on to teaching creators how to bring their life’s work to the internet, how to create courses, memberships, and communities, how to do proper launches, how to use where, which is where you and I met, how to use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform and how to use gamification to get people to actually get the results that they’re trying to get in their programs.

So that has led me on this whole other journey for the last decade plus. And, Just three years ago, my son Soren’s eight, we’re unschooling him. So we’re supporting his educational path by following his interests and pulling in mentors around him and what he wants to do. And as a result, we launched a kids publishing and story company three years ago called Magic Kids.

Him and I have, co written 17 stories, a graphic novel. We’re working on our first audio movie together. he has been a part of our comedy writing team, our advertising and marketing team, and, we just launched our magic kids app in March. And we’re working on producing the best audio stories on the planet.

We have a team of producers that score all the music and sound effects. We’ve worked with over a hundred voice actors, most of which are from my Island on salt spring Island, where I live. we’ve licensed over 700 kids songs from musicians around the world. We have kids meditations and we create curriculum with every story so kids can have a whole bunch of fun integrating the lessons and themes from our stories.

And then, I just launched my, new enterprise with a buddy of mine, just This morning called play cheap all. com, which is a new sport. We’re bringing to the world. So I have been, as you said, I’m on the forever path. Some people play the long game. I’m playing the forever game like you. and so it’s part of my philosophy just always be creating.

and I’ve tried to build a career around following my passions and interests and to keep my artist self and my entrepreneur self happily married.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That’s amazing. You’ve done a lot of great work. And one of the things I hear in your journey is that you’re not doing it alone. And tell us a little bit how you think about that.

So for example, you are not trying to build, you didn’t try to build a meditation audience. people were like, wanted you to come lead workshops and stuff, but you went to the platforms that do guided meditation to distribute for you. You didn’t have to figure out that piece or spend a bunch of time focusing on that.

How do you think about team around projects and community and people?

Love that question. you hit the nail on my exact business philosophy. so I left social media 8 years ago. I have a master class called thriving in business without social media where I teach the 19 relationships based marketing strategies that I’ve figured out or an implement magic media, magic kids, and all the things that I do, but you hit the nail.

it’s relationships. our tagline at magic media is leverage your life’s work. And so many people struggle and suffer in their business because they’re trying to do it all themselves. They think they have to do everything that themselves, and they think they have to keep reinventing the wheel.

And so what I look for, what are the leverage points? How can we leverage what we’ve already created? And how can we leverage our skills? How can we leverage the relationships that we have surrounding us? And so I’ve built everything through partnerships. I’ve always had collaborators to support me because I’m not the best designer.

I’m not the best video editor, I’m definitely not an illustrator. I’m definitely not a web designer or a techie. But I have the clear vision of what I want to be doing. I have the enthusiasm to enroll talented people and that’s what I try and do. And then it’s to figure out the win when you and I met, we were launching the Grady course adventure, which was essentially like Indiana Jones meets Saturday night live and a business development course, which is still available in our magic mind community.

It’s still just as epic as when we made it. And back then when the idea struck, I didn’t have a couple hundred thousand dollars to invest in hiring my buddies who were very talented designers and producers. So I enrolled them in a business partnership. Same goes when I produced my, my, meditation library.

I didn’t have money to hire my buddy for a year to produce and compose all these beautiful tracks. So I made them a business partner on it and paid them a share of the revenue that we made. I’ve always been one who looks for the opportunities to collaborate with other people. And I feel like that’s where alchemy happens is like when you and somebody else combine your magic, that’s when like super magic happens.

That’s when, you share the responsibility, you share the workload, you share. The revenue that happens, you share the marketing like it, when we can share that weight, it’s no longer all just on us. And I do that really well with what we’re doing for magic kids. We have several hundred artists who are contributing to everything that we’re doing inside of the magic kids realm.

And it’s just trying to find. What are the fair ways that we can all be compensated for our talent and time?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s really cool One more thing

on that just so I feel like this is another important one. So five six years six years ago I think it was now. I got really burnt out from magic media doing these big client partnerships and so instead of taking clients money of 50, 000, 100, 000 to do a project with them.

We started doing partnerships where they would pay us a retainer for 12 months, and then we would get a revenue share for two to three years. We would do these like longer term projects with them that would have this bigger ramp up. And, it’s been amazing and life changing, it’s just been so much better and more fulfilling for me to go on these long arc projects with people.

My entrepreneurial spirit feels more satisfied than like typical client work where it’s we do the project we’re done. It’s okay, goodbye. We’re done with the thing we said we would do. and so that’s been another way that I shifted my business model to just. Lean into partnerships and relationships.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love the incentive structure there and how that, how you’re just sharing responsibility and revenue. you also are clearly a visionary. this is a funny question, but what’s your process for vision or does it just strike you? Like where did magic kids come from?

It usually is just it strikes me.

it’s a conversation. it’s, something that repetitively shows up in my life. So with magic kids, for that 1, my son and I were always just making up stories and he’s been growing up with very limited screen time. He gets 1 show a week. He’s eight now. He just doesn’t complain about that. That’s just the reality he knows.

And he’s cool with it, but he gets audio stories. So he’s grown up with audio stories and I found a lot of the audio stories that we were finding were basically junk food entertainment. They were funny, but they weren’t like. helping him to learn values or life skills or lessons or think about the world differently.

The ones that were more holistic in nature were just boring and lame. And so I wanted to combine what we’ve learned at Magic Media about, like, how do you use entertainment as a vehicle to teach and transform? In my opinion, audio is one of the most transformational mediums we have because you can get inside of people’s minds and you can take them on a journey.

You can activate imaginations. And that’s what we’re trying to do at Magic Kids is like, you take kids from the screen time where they’re being fed Through this like strobe light effect, whatever it is that the screen wants to tell them or show them versus an audio story where it’s activating their imagination and they can feel and they can each kid is going to have their own experience of a story that we’re trying to share with them.

they’re going to imagine it in a different way. They’re going to see a character in their mind differently. If you get. 30 kids to all draw the main character of a story. They’re all going to draw it differently. And what was the question again? I was about where vision comes from. Oh yeah. so yeah, that with magic kids, it just, we were making up stories.

And then, so I’ve had this men’s group I started years ago called man ventures and every Tuesday we get together and whatever guys show up, choose what the adventure is the following week and we’ve done. Amazing things. You’re not allowed to do the same adventure two weeks in a row. So on one dark and stormy October night, we had 12 men in my office and we all wrote children’s stories.

Then we read our stories to each other. I wrote a story called the master’s Apprentice about a wizard who looks for his apprentice. And then the apprentice shows up and it’s all rhyming. And, really, I thought it was really cool story that kind of ingrained the, philosophy that to go from good to great practice every day and that when we’re starting out at something, it’s very frustrating.

But if we just keep practicing, we become a master. And that story the next day after I wrote that, I was like, I want to publish this. I don’t want to go the traditional route. I’ve gone traditional publishing routes before. It can take two to three years to get a book on a shelf. I’m going to get 6 percent of the revenue that’s made.

They’re going to pay me in advance, which is a debt to the company. I don’t want any of those things. So we’re going to start a publishing company and it’s going to be called magic kids. And it’s going to be a fair pay publishing company where we pay 50 percent of the revenue back to the artists because I’m an artist and I want to be paid well for my work.

And so that was the beginning. We did three or four months of research. I hired two different friends to who had publishing experience to just get me all the facts and all the information. Everybody told me not to do it. I raised a little bit of investment capital to get the first, 12 books paid for with the audio stories.

I thought the audio stories would be, or the books would be the thing that made money. And I was dead wrong. We lost a lot of money on books, but that led us to build the app. My son Soren actually had the idea to build the app. Vision struck him one day. We had a marketing meeting, six of us in my office, and he’s at his little desk whiteboard wall.

And we’re mapping out all the ways that we can get more books sold. And he walks over with his little whiteboard with

Chris Badgett: A rectangle and a circle in the middle of the rectangle. And he said, listen up everybody. This come from a six year old. What we need is a button and he holds up his little whiteboard over his head.

Button buddy. And he’s we need a button. Kids just push a button and a story pops up and starts playing. Oh, like an app. He’s yeah, we need an app. We’re all just like jaw dropped and it was one of those moments where the universe spoke to us and we’re like, okay. We erased everything on the whiteboard and we said, what’s the magic kids app?

And that was when we started working on it and that was two years ago. and then he walked back, Mike dropped moment. He didn’t say another word. He walked back to his desk and kept drawing and we’re just, what was that?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And that’s M a J I K kids, magic kids. That’s right. And for anybody out there listening, who’s a parent, or knows a kid that might enjoy this, like what’s the.

Target age for Magic Kids

4 to 10 is what we’re going for, but we have friends and customers that like the whole family gather around to listen to stories. We release new stories every Saturday morning to help replace cartoons. Our stories can be 15 minutes. They can be 25. We have 490 minute audio stories that we’re working on that are like audio movies.

yeah. We’ve got several that are around 45 minutes. So there’s like something for everyone. And the way that we’re trying to do the stories is kids are geniuses. So treat them like geniuses. So a four year old can fall in love with the story because the characters and the sounds and the humor that’s in there, the occasional fart joke, and then the parents and older kids fall in love with them because there’s these, Deep life lessons that are being taught through the character’s journeys in the stories.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I want to dig into something you mentioned about quitting social media eight years ago. I think it was, tell us more because I think that. That can almost sound impossible to an entrepreneur, particularly a digital entrepreneur. but you’ve pulled it off. just give us the story there.

Okay. It’s a good story. I wanted to leave three years before leaving, so I created a evacuate Facebook group. I could feel the toxicity back then of what it was becoming of just this, like there was these mixed signals that I was getting. In the space that just weren’t congruent. The idea of, instead of friends, we’re getting followers, the anxiety, people were feeling the loneliness, the screen addiction that was happening for me, my work days were on average 12 hours a day because I was spending three of those hours wasted on social media every day.

there was a lot of things, but I had one, one particular moment. We just had our kids soaring. So he was a baby. We were just launching the Grady course adventure. And I was up on a mountain watching the sunset by myself. It was a beautiful moment. Just reflecting on, I was feeling really lit up in my life at that time.

I was like, first part of my career where my artist and my entrepreneur self were perfectly married through the delivery of the Grady Course Adventure. I was stoked. And so as I’m watching the sun go down, I suddenly started to notice my mind pre writing what I was going to post on social media. In that moment, I realized my brain had been hacked.

My thoughts weren’t my thoughts. My experience was no longer my experience and Mark Zuckerberg essentially owns that experience now, and it felt so out of alignment with the life I want to create for myself and for my son and the freedom that I seek in all of my experiences. That I went home and I told my wife what happened and I said, I’m leaving.

I’m pulling the cord on social media. I’m deleting my account tomorrow. So I messaged all my friends that matter to me most and I deleted and what happened next was the reason why I think so many people don’t leave and I’m grateful for the experience, but it was hard as hell. It was crickets. It literally felt like I got erased.

I erased myself from the Matrix, I no longer existed. And I wasn’t having friends text me. I wasn’t having people call me. Nobody reached out and said, Hey, dude, what’s going on? Is everything okay? Why’d you leave? I saw your account’s gone. I saw your goodbye poster. Nothing. No party invites. No potluck invites.

Nothing. I just spent 10 years developing a following on the internet and it was all a lie. None of it mattered. So that was when I realized I needed to focus on real-world relationships. And so my whole philosophy on life and business changed as a result of being erased because everything that I thought was real, all these followers, it was all not real.

That was when I started my men’s group. My wife, I felt super lonely. So I started this adventure club. my wife started a group on our Island for a handful of moms who all had kids the same age that grew into a group. There’s over 1200 moms in it now from our Island. Our population is only 10, 000 people.

Like it’s the grandmothers of the Island, the mothers of the Island, and they, it’s become this incredible hub for collaborative support on our Island. and so that led me to 19 relationships based marketing strategies and how do we come back to the old fashioned way of valuing relationships and my philosophy when I left was like, I wanna have wealth in my life.

I want to do well. And I was convinced that in order for me to do really well with my work, I don’t need 10, 000 followers. I don’t need 10, 000 people on an email list. All I need is 10.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Go to Lifter LMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.