245: Plot Twist: How to Align Your Passion and Turn It Into a Million-Dollar Viral Success with Spoken Word Artist, Adam Roa

In this bite-sized Plot Twist episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light Watkins revisits an inspiring conversation with spoken word poet and artist, Adam Roa. Adam shares a pivotal moment in his life when everything changed and he found his true path, leaving behind a comfortable career in advertising to pursue acting in Los Angeles. However, years of rejection and struggle in the acting world led him to hit rock bottom. This low point became the foundation of his spiritual awakening, ultimately setting him on a new journey as an artist and poet.

Adam describes how a chance encounter at a FRED Talks event in Santa Monica introduced him to spoken word poetry for the first time, sparking a powerful creative shift. Within days of seeing his first spoken word performance, Adam wrote his first poems, one of which would go viral and be viewed over 200 million times, launching his career in an entirely new direction.

Listeners will be inspired by Adam’s story of transformation and the powerful message that following your heart—even when it doesn’t make logical sense—can lead you to places you never imagined. Light and Adam also discuss the importance of taking leaps of faith, stepping away from fear, and embracing the unexpected plot twists that life throws your way.

This episode is perfect for anyone looking for inspiration to follow their passion, embrace change, or navigate through life’s challenges with purpose. Adam's journey is a reminder that sometimes the toughest moments are the ones that lead to the greatest breakthroughs.

And if you want to hear more about how discovering spoken word poetry led to his viral success and career shift, click here.

Transcript

AR: "The biggest leap of faith was saying goodbye to my friends, family, comfort, the full-time job offer, and all of it, and just saying, “I'm going to follow my heart and move to LA to pursue acting.” I had such close friends. I have none of them now. None of my friends that I had pre-spiritual awakening are in my life now. I felt that risk even then, like, “What happens if I move away from all of these people? What happens if I move away from my family? What about wasting time? Here I am, one of the most promising young employees in this ad agency and know that I would crush this. I have a bright career ahead of me here, If I want to move into advertising.” To say no to all of that, and going to live in my aunt and uncle's garage to pursue an acting career was the first time in my life that I made a decision that didn't make logical sense, but it was what my heart was calling me towards."

[INTRODUCTION]

Hey friend, welcome back to The Light Watkins Show. I’m Light Watkins, and I have conversations with ordinary folks, just like you and me, who’ve taken extraordinary leaps of faith in pursuit of their purpose or what they believe is their mission in life.

Today, we have a bite-sized Plot Twist episode. A Plot Twist is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares a pivotal moment in their life—one that changed everything and put them on a new path. The goal is to inspire you to embrace those plot twists when they happen in your own life, because they’re often detours that lead you exactly where you need to go.

Sometimes, that plot twist looks like losing a job, or making a difficult decision. In the case of today’s guest, spoken word poet and artist Adam Roa, it began with leaving behind a comfortable job in advertising to follow his heart and move to Los Angeles to pursue acting. But after years of rejection and struggle in the acting world, Adam hit rock bottom, which led him to a spiritual awakening.

It was during this time of transformation that Adam attended a FRED Talks event in Santa Monica, where he witnessed spoken word poetry for the first time. In that moment, something clicked. He went home that night, wrote his first poem, and within days, wrote another that would later go viral—reaching over 200 million views and launching his career as a poet and artist.

Let’s listen in...

[3:09] AR: I moved to Los Angeles and figured I would have to be a waiter and wanted – I still have that mindset of, “How do I do this and set myself up for success? How do I do this really well?”

I took that approach to acting. There's so much more than just talent that goes into acting in the acting world and building a career there. Ultimately, years in, I had been humbled so deeply, I had been beaten up so badly from that industry, that it led me to my spiritual awakening. Because they say, where the cracks are where the light gets in, I had had so much success at an early age in so many different things that I thought I had life figured out.

Acting was the great equalizer for me to go, “You might not have this thing figured out.” That led to just pure desperation of, “I will do anything. What do I need to do? How do I figure this out?” Ultimately, that would lead me to ayahuasca and a spiritual awakening and set me on the path I'm on now.

[5:13] LW: I used to be in the modeling industry in New York City. I worked at a restaurant. I made pretty decent money working at that restaurant. I ended up being fortunate enough to book an advertising campaign with The Gap. I remember one day I was waiting tables, and I saw my face on the side of a bus. I was like, “Oh, my God. This is actually happening.” That campaign didn't really pay a whole lot of money. I thought to myself, “This is it. This is my time. I have to take this leap of faith away from the safety of the restaurant job and into this unknown of, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm hoping for the best.” Did you have a moment where you pulled the plug, you hit the eject button on the comfort of your bartending and restaurants and all of that, and you took the leap of faith?

[6:06] AR: For me, the biggest leap of faith was saying goodbye to my friends, family, comfort, the full-time job offer, all of it, and just saying, “I'm going to follow my heart and move to LA to pursue acting.” I had such close friends. I have none of them now. None of my friends that I had pre-spiritual awakening are in my life now. I felt that risk even then, like, “What happens if I move away from all of these people? What happens if I move away from my family? What about wasting time? Here I am, one of the most promising young employees in this ad agency and know that I would crush this. I have a bright career ahead of me here, If I want to move into advertising.”

To say no to all of that, and going to live in my aunt and uncle's garage to pursue an acting career was the first time in my life that I made a decision that didn't make logical sense, but it was what my heart was calling me towards. That set in motion, really a foundational belief that that's more important than anything. From that moment forward, I've been following my heart. Sometimes it takes a little longer for me to figure out what my heart is calling for, but I think that was the real big moment of that. The next one for me was when I had the spiritual awakening. I said, “I’m unwilling to put my energy into anything that perpetuates fear on this planet. I can't do it.” I went and told my acting manager and agents, and I said, I am no longer willing to audition for CSI, or any horror films, or fast-food commercials with factory farmed stuff. I'm just not willing to do any of these things anymore, which is 90% of everything that goes out in Hollywood, especially in those early stages of building a career. It effectively ended my acting career.

[8:14] LW: What was your first exposure to poetry?

[8:17] AR: I was actually in Santa Monica at an event called FRED Talks. FRED Talks. At these events, there's a bunch of speakers, they all get five minutes, basically. The last person to go was a spoken word poet. I don't know how, but I had never heard spoken word poetry before. As soon as he started performing, there was this light that went off in my head, a lightning bolt. I just said, “I can do that. I can do that.” I went home that night, and I wrote my first spoken word piece.

I shared it with some friends the next day, and I said, “Hey, I just did this thing. I think it's pretty good.” I read it to them. They said, “That's really good. Cool.” Then my friend who was listening said, “Your next one should be called You Are Who You've Been Looking For.” I went, “Okay.” I went home. In 48 hours, I wrote my second ever piece, which is You Are Who You've Been Looking For, which is the poem that years later, would go on to be viewed more than 200 million times. It went so viral, and it launched my career in a lot of ways, publicly. It was the second piece I ever wrote. It was because my friend gave me the title.

[9:27] LW: At this point, you obviously memorized monologues and stuff in your acting career. That was just a part of the whole deal. When you started identifying as a spoken word poet, was that part of the process? You already had all that locked into place, like, “I write this thing and memorize it. I say it. I use the art of tonality and presence and emotion behind it.” Did you find that that was one of the reasons why you came off as more of a natural than maybe your average person who decides, “I'm going to be a spoken word poet”?

[10:04] AR: I'd like to think so. I'd like to think that that's part of the reason why people appreciate my delivery of any content, including this podcast, because we're in an era of anyone with a social media page can voice their opinions and talk into their phone and put out videos and regurgitate information that they read in a book about the Four Agreements, or whatever. I have such aversion to being put in that category.

I know a lot of people who've come to follow me over the years, and they may not be aware of this, but I take a lot of pride in the fact that I spent over a decade of my life professionally training as a performer and as a writer, and as an actor. I mean, I've written feature length films and web series and directed music videos. There's a whole background of storytelling and performance that was a huge part of my life. It was my first love.

I bring a lot of that into how I speak and how I perform definitely, and the process of spoken word poetry is very much storytelling to me. It's like, let me sit down and write a short film. Great, awesome. Or a scene. Writing poetry is the same way. Then you memorize it. Then as you're memorizing it, you notice where a certain emotion wants to rise up, where it is. Every time you deliver, it gets to be different. A lot of times, you get poets that say their poems the same way every single time. Well, my background is in theater. You got to do the same play 100 times, from rehearsals to actual performances. How do you keep that fresh? How do you keep that new? That's actually a skill that a lot of actors have to learn and struggle with. How do you keep something new when you're saying it for the 100th time?

All of that carried over into the spoken word poetry realm. I see spoken word poetry as bringing together my study of personal development and my life coaching, “coaching business,” whatever, and all of the things that I was teaching, but done in an artistic way, which I think brings in a whole other element that makes it more powerful, and actually, can shift people a lot more quickly and more deeply when they receive it as art, as opposed to feeling like they're listening to a logical lecture.

[12:32] LW: You also had that eight-month long vision quest where you went all around the world, and you sold off all your stuff. You went home free. That probably, I'm imagining it contributed to your openness and to the things that you wanted to express and maybe your development of your insight around these topics that really landed and hit home for –

[13:47] AR: You did your research, bro. Tim Ferriss over here.

[12:49] LW: Just walk us through that period in 2015. Why did you decide to give everything up? How did you end up at Kyle's Evolving Out Loud to perform your second poem ever?

[13:03] AR: You really got this research down. I love this. This is impressive. I was in a partnership at the time, and we had gone through a spiritual awakening. We were watching – I got to give credit to Tai Lopez, of all people. Pre-spiritual awakening, I was personal training and acting. I would come home from personal training day, I would smoke some weed, and me and my partner would eat and watch Grey's Anatomy, or Lost, or whatever. Just go Netflix binging for hours.

You don’t know how good Grey’s Anatomy is until you're high. Post-awakening, it was very similar. I went to personal training and acting and then I would come home, and I would smoke weed with my partner. We would eat and we would watch spiritual YouTube videos. We would watch personal development videos. Matt Khan, Teal Swan, all kinds of stuff, and spirit science and all of it.

Then we would pause things and we would talk about them. I had this partner that I was learning with. It's like, we were in school together. In one of the videos, Tai Lopez's Lamborghini garage ad comes up, and I think it’s 15 minutes long. We're just watching it, probably because we're just too stoned to change anything. We’re just, “Well, this is interesting.” Then, it was, “Click here to get the next webinar thing.”

We click there, and we're watching it. He says, “You're the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with.” He invited us to make a list of those five people. We realized, “Wow, we don't have anyone that we are looking to for guidance, or mentorship.” We just entered into this new chapter of spirituality. There were no guides for us. That was a huge aha moment. We ended up deciding to take action on that. This is what's important for everyone to understand is just because you become aware of something, if you don't take action on it, nothing's going to change.

We took the action to go to a retreat in Costa Rica. At this personal development retreat, we'd never been to anything like it. We'd never been to Costa Rica before. While we were there, we ran into two facilitators who are friends of yours and mine, Preston Smiles and Alexi Panos. They were facilitators at this retreat. They were really just starting their coaching careers and have gone on to make a massive impact and are epic humans. We just vibed. We just became really fast friends. We all lived in LA. Once we got back to LA, we just started hanging out and whatever. Fast forward to, I'm a groomsman in Preston's wedding. You and I get to meet in Tulum. That's where we got to meet. They invited my partner and I at the time to go on tour with him to Australia, where they were going to be facilitating some workshops. They said, “We'd love to have you come and facilitate with us and be support facilitators.” We just said, “Okay. Yeah, let's do that.”

That looked like giving away 75% to 80% of everything we owned, literally just posting on social media, “Come get free stuff.” We posted on Craigslist. We just put it out in the back. Come and take whatever you want. I'm talking a snowboard, just gave it all away, man. The only thing we kept was a couch and the TV and bigger furniture items. We went on the road. We went on the road. Everyone thought we were crazy, because we just launched our coaching businesses and we’d only ever lived in LA, that's who knows us. We have no social media following. How are you going to start a business halfway around the world? We just trusted and really, that leap of faith, from moving out to pursue acting, to that moment of saying, “You know what? Even though it doesn't make sense, and I have no idea how I'm going to pay my anything next month, I'm going to give up my personal training business. I'm going to give away my items, and I'm going on the road here.” The rest is history, man. Just sharing the journey. I just started sharing the journey along the way. That ultimately, would lead to all of the social media and podcasts and all of the things.

[END]

That was Adam Roa, and if you want to hear more about how discovering spoken word poetry led to his viral success and career shift, you can go to episode 123, and start at the 41-min mark. I also recommend following Adam on social media at @adam.roa.

And if Adam’s story resonated with you, you’ll also want to check out my interviews with IN-Q in episode 34 and 220, another incredible spoken word artist with a powerful journey. And you won’t want to miss episode 137 with Humble the Poet, who transitioned from being a teacher to becoming a spoken word/rap artist, and author.

As always, if you know someone who’s making the world a better place and has had an incredible plot twist in their life, email me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com.

My other request is that you take just a few seconds to leave a rating or review for the show. It really helps new listeners discover these stories, and it makes a huge difference in bringing guests onto the podcast. Just tap the show name on your device, scroll past the first few episodes, and hit the star all the way on the right to leave a 5-star rating. And if you’re feeling generous, a one-line review letting new listeners know where to start can go a long way!

You can also watch these Plot Twist episodes on my YouTube channel if you prefer to see what Adam looks like while sharing his story. Don’t forget to subscribe there as well.

I’ll see you soon with another conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to make the world a better place. Until then, keep trusting your intuition, following your heart, and leaning into the plot twists in your life. And remember, I believe in you.

Thanks for listening, and have a fantastic day!