Hey, you're listening to the Creative Peptalk podcast, whether you're building a creative career or you just need to approach career in a creative way, we are here to help you chart your own path. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. You can stay up to date with all things Creative Peptalk by following me on Instagram @ Andy J. Pizza. Let's get into today's episode. For me, a home-cooked meal is very hard to beat. Fresh food, real ingredients, nothing is better than that. Hello, Fresh makes home-cooking easy, delicious, and fun night after night. Look, my family has freaking loved our Hello, Fresh meals. It was amazing for my 17-year-old because it's been this easy entry point to cooking real recipes, which is just so cool to see before she starts going off to college. We are a family that loves food, but the portions have been great and we've had leftovers after every meal. It's inspired us to try things we've never made. And my youngest daughter can't stop talking about the coconut rice that we had with the rainbow trout. You can pick from lots of high-protein meals, feel great about the wholesome ingredients, like sustainably sour seafood and 100% antibiotic and hormone-free chicken, and even get seasonal produce that keeps things fresh and interesting. Go to hellofresh.com/peptalk10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling Knife, a $144.99 value on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. Free meals apply to discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varys by plan. There's no one that's had a bigger impact on my productivity than writer Cal Newport, but he has a lot of books. So where should you start? I now have an answer for this question because he has a new class, rebuild your focus, and reclaim your time on masterclass. This class is an accessible way into his philosophy and gives you a breakdown of his approach to time blocking which changed my schedule forever. My wife often teases me about these big chunks of my time that are just labeled deep work. That's Cal Newport. Another class I'm super interested in exploring next is dopamine, take your brain back by Dr. Annelimke. Being ADHD, I have been looking for the right resource about dopamine to dive into in this class. Looks like just the ticket with plans starting at $10 a month, build annually. You get unlimited access to 200 plus classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. Maybe my favorite thing about masterclass is audio mode. Turn your commute or workout into a classroom with audio mode. You can listen to masterclass lessons anytime anywhere. There's no risk. Every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. Right now our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership of
[email protected]/peptalk. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/peptalk. A lot of people feel like this show is about finding motivation. Creative peptalk is probably my fault for naming it creative peptalk. That was just a catchier title than what was maybe more accurate, which I'll get to in a second. But yeah, people think this show is a motivational show, but I actually think that that is not true. I don't think most people's problem is that they don't have motivation. If you find yourself in a place where you just can't take a step forward because every step you take just feels more painful than the last, you don't need more motivation. You need to listen to that pain. You need to stop what you're doing and solve the real problem, which is what we're going to talk about today. Now there's a bunch of times on this show that I have talked to you about the time when I was living in England and I impulsively decided to run to a tower that was 11 miles away, but I didn't know how far it was away. And I got super, super lost. I got lost for like six to eight hours. And my parents were freaking out. They called the police. Nobody knew where I was. I'm not going to tell all the details of that story. I've told it a billion times, but I want to just stop and say, I think I know why that story is one that I tell over and over on this show because I think it gets to the heart of what the real problem is when you can't seem to be motivated to take any steps forward because motivation is not a problem. It's a symptom of a deeper problem. Now think back to a time when you were lost, not like lost, you know, in terms of your creative career path, but actually lost. Maybe you're not like me because I get lost every once in a while, like once a year or so, I go out and I didn't charge my phone and get really lost. And it's a terrible humiliating feeling. And maybe you haven't gotten lost in a long time. Maybe you have to think back when you were a kid at the drug store and you got separated from your mom. For a second, you're like, okay, wait, she was just here. I hold on. I'm not lost. I just got to go to the next I just pray in the next aisle and you go to the next aisle and you get a little bit more freaked out. And you're like, okay, she's not in the next aisle. All right, I go this way. I'll, nope, she's not that way. And you start stepping the other way and you start every single step you take is more painful than the last. Not because you're not motivated. You want to be found. It's not a problem of motivation. The problem is and the reason why you want to give up is because you don't know if every step you're taking is getting closer to where you want to be or further away. You don't know if every step that you take is another step to being found or is it another step towards being lost forever beyond return. And I think that what happens in creative paths is that the reason we lose motivation isn't a motivation problem. It's a clarity problem. We don't know where we're trying to go and we don't know where we are in relationship to where we're trying to go. And so when we get up and we make that thing, there's a voice in the back of our head that's saying, you don't know if this is getting you closer to where you want to be or if it's wasting your time and if you're spending too many days wasting your time, whether at some point you are going to be so lost that it's going to be too late to recover and you're never going to get where you want to go. And so motivation isn't the problem. It's the symptom of a deeper problem and the deeper problem is a lack of clarity of what am I trying to find? Where am I on the journey? And what do I need to be doing to actually get closer to finding it? Now, not so long ago, I got lost again. I went on a jog in my parents' new neighborhood that I'd never been to and it's this huge giant community with thousands of houses, I think. I'm bad with numbers, but I'm pretty sure that they said there's like thousands of houses in this community. And I go out, I just got my Apple watch. I think I'll be fine, but I don't realize how fast it drains when I'm using it for music. And so I don't have any devices. I get into that. I'm just like the kid in the drug store where I'm like, oh, I think I'm starting to get lost. I just need to retrace my step one road back and then you get to that road and you're like, wait, I can't remember if I went that way or this way. And you just get overwhelmed, not just by the feeling of, I don't know what to do next, but the humiliation of how did I get here? Why was I so dumb to even think that I could do this in the first place? And it's a shameful experience every time that I get lost. I just feel so stupid, which adds to the insult. It adds to the fact that I won't do what everybody knows you need to do when you're lost. You have to stop what you're doing. The first thing you've got to do when you're lost is to stop and admit that you're lost. But the fact of the matter is, I've been lost so many times that I know I've learned this lesson. I didn't repeat the mistakes of when I was in college and got lost for eight hours and couldn't find the humility to knock on somebody's door and tell them, hey, can you help me? I just instantly thought, you know what? I'm genuinely lost. I'm going to start stopping people, asking for, you know, telling them where this address is, getting them to put it in their phone and just get a general idea where I am in relationship to where I want to go. And if you're feeling unwell,
motivated. If every step feels more painful than the last because you don't know whether you're getting closer or further away, don't look for motivation. Don't look for more. Don't try to grit your teeth and bear it. Listen to that pain. Find the humility to stop and say, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing." And do the hard work of finding clarity because it will change everything about your motivation. It will make you feel not disintegrated where you have all these random pieces firing in all these different directions, but you will be able to when you stop and find where you are in relationship to where you want to be and all the steps in between, you will find a clarity. And I feel like there's a voice that says, "Clarity's an illusion." I thought I had clarity once. Yeah, you did think you had clarity once. It's true. You can't look out over the next 50 years and know exactly where you want to be. Sometimes the thing that you're on this planet to be creating is in a medium that hasn't even been invented yet. Yes, that's true. So you can't have perfect clarity. You are limited by the vantage point you have right now, but you can stop what you're doing. You can say, "I think just like I did in my parents' community, I could stop and say, here's where I am. I know that their address is in that general direction. And as I start heading that way, once I start feeling a lack of clarity again, I can stop and ask for directions again. And if I need to pivot and just kind of recalibrate, I can do that. But it doesn't mean that you don't stop and find clarity now. Because clarity does exist. You know it exists. You've had it before, but you might be in a time where it's time to recalibrate. And that's what this episode is all about. So I'm announcing that we're changing the name of the show. It's now called, it's not Creative Pepp talk anymore. It's going to be called Creative Clarity Talk. That sounds good. I'm just kidding. We're not changing the name of the show. I like the name. But you know, if you're in a place where you don't have motivation, you're unmotivated, listen to that. There's a reason for that. Don't just try to find more motivation. Stop and admit, I don't have clarity. Something went wrong. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where I've been. And every single piece of work that I'm making just feels excruciating. Because I don't know if it's getting me closer or further away from where I want to go. Because I don't know where I want to go. And so the first thing you have to do is stop what you're doing. We're going to go through four things to do when you're feeling unmotivated to find that clarity again to help you get that tank full. Can you smell it? It's a huge vat of bubbling motivation. At the end of this exercise. So the first thing you're going to do, stop, admit it. Sometimes you got to stop and admit, hey, I took a turn. I took a wrong turn somewhere. If you're a leader, that means that you led some people the wrong way. And you got to own it. Sometimes you got to make things right. Sometimes you got to actually spend some money to fix the problem. There are times and places where you got to stop what you're doing and say, look, I am no psychic. I couldn't predict the future. Nobody could see what was on the horizon over the past couple of years. And so if you're lost, welcome to the club. We're all lost right now. Okay. We all have to recalibrate and get our bearings again and chart our courses afresh to find motivation. And so there's no shame. There's no humiliation. None of us are side kicks. We need to stop and recalibrate. So stop, admit that you're lost. The second thing that you need to do is you need to ask yourself, where am I? If you have a map and you know the destination, you can clearly see it. It will do you no good if you don't know where you are in relationship to that. It doesn't matter if you can see it on the map. You got to know where you are and where you're going. And I think we skip this part. We get really into goals. We get really into where we want to be and completely ignore where we are right now to our own detriment. And in fact, I want to even change that question a little bit. I don't want you to ask where am I? I want you to ask where are we? You know, it's so easy on this creative path when you're charting your own territory and you're lost. It's so easy to go inward to get isolated, to get self absorbed. But I really think that the most interesting, powerful things get unlocked, unbelievable things get unlocked when we sink up with others. Now recently, I wasn't on, you know, the weird web. I was on national geographic and I ran into this article about a study from Princeton. Okay. These are legit peer reviewed things are not some random offshoot of the internet. And I ran into this article that had the most mind blowing topic. And I think it really illustrates what happens. What what's possible when it's not just, you know, me, but it's we. I've heard this a few times. My friend Kyle Shealey, he's seeing this in his work. I have a friend Jason Sturgell. He talks a lot about me versus we. I heard Tim Ferris say that, you know, when he what he admires about the Japanese, is there a wee culture, not a me culture? There's something in the water, man. I'm feeling this and especially as creatives were so prone to be, you know, self absorbed and disconnected and outsider. And yet I think if we will see that, you know, we didn't get here where we are now isn't just a product of our life. It's all of the giants that we're standing on from the past. And if we get that context, interesting things will happen back to this national geographic article. So I don't know how it works by the way. The people at Princeton don't know how it works. So don't ask me that. But they did this study and it's a study of human consciousness and ultimately the interconnectivity, the field of consciousness between me and you and everybody else on the planet. And so what they did, they put these random number generators, computers, I guess in all these major cities all over the world. And what they found, you know, these computers generate these random numbers. And they're like to the trillionth degree random. And what they found was that when a global event occurred, usually a tragedy and all the people in the globe were kind of thinking about in conscious of the same thing that we were in sync with each other, that these random number generators would be affected just by what we're thinking, that those random number generators would start to become more predictable, that when our brains are in sync, chaos turns into some kind of order. And you're asking me how Andy, I don't know, if they don't know, nobody knows. But what we do know is that when we are in sync, unimaginable, unexplainable things happen and that's not even the kicker. So when things like 9/11 happens and everybody on the globe is focused on the same thing, not only does it affect those random number generators, not only is there some kind of interconnectivity that we can't quite explain. But those random number generators actually get affected hours in advance to a event like that. That when we get in sync, there's some kind of cosmic and the mystic pre-cognition that happens, like we somehow can see it coming between us, not individually, but globally. And I believe that if you will get in sync with the story of humanity, you won't just, you know, figure out where you are. You might even tap into some pre-cognition into where you're going next. It's just like the kid with the dot to dot page. If you just get your nose focused on the next dot, the dot where you are, you're going to miss the bigger picture. But if you will look back and see it, all the dots that have already been connected, you might even see exactly where we're going next. And so what I want to encourage you to do is look for the torchbearers of the past. Who are the people that were
doing your work before you got here. Who were the people carrying that torch before you got here? For me, it's probably Jim Henson. Okay, I have a lot of heroes, Jaime Azaki, Tova Yansen, Jim Carey, Jack Black, all these people. They're a huge fans of them. You know, they all matter to me, but I think Jim Henson more than any, you know, this balance of performer and concept artist, this person who really embodied stories that said different is not a bug, but a feature. You know, the muppets and the frangals, I feel like so much about it is just the celebration of our different personalities and our different neurochemistry and just how we're different and it's and why that's so essential. You know, just think about it in terms of evolution. I get sidetracked. I get excited about when we start talking about different as I feature because, you know, the reason we have evolved to what we are is the mutation. That thing that is weird about you. That's what pushes us forward. That's what makes it us capable of accomplishing so much is that we're not all equipped in the same way. So, you know, as someone with ADHD, I'm very passionate about that. And so when I start not just thinking about where I am, but where are we? Where have we been? Where did that torch get left off? I get really excited. I get inspired. I get some insight of where we might be going next. You know, have a buddy, Brad Monague, creator of a kid president. And I really think of this guy as like the modern day Mr. Rogers. Like I think he, the work he wants to do with kids and how clear his vision is for how important children are. And his spirit is just so gentle and sweet and funny. It just reminds you of Mr. Rogers. I think about the recently watched Richard Pryor's special on Netflix. And I was just really, you know, I was just taken aback by the similarities between him and Dave Chappelle. You know, Richard Pryor has this white guy voice that I feel like Chappelle kind of picked up that torch and put it forward. And I think about how both of those people in culture really were like this bridge between black culture and white people. I feel like, you know, I can't speak from experience, but it seems to me that that Richard Pryor was able to articulate the black experience in such a way that a bunch of white people were listening to it. You know, he had a very diverse audience and the same goes for Chappelle. And I just think that there's this amazing thing that happens when you pick up the torch, when you figure out not just where you are, but where you are in relationship to where we are. And some mystical, magical, crazy things can happen. Number one, stop what you're doing. Admit that you're lost. Take a minute. Quit just making, making, making, if those pieces are excruciating, stop making them and don't look for fabricated positivity and motivation. Look for clarity. The second thing you want to do is figure out where are you by connecting to where are we? The third thing that you need to do is say, where are we going? Where do I want, where am I trying to head next? What is that domino? For my vantage point right now, you're not going to be able to see the last domino that you're trying to knock over in your life. But you'll be able to see, you know, 25 dominoes down the line. It might be a little bit fuzzy, but you can get a vague sense of where you are in relationship to where you want to go. And that kind of clarity will unlock motivation because it will show you what you need to be doing right now. We're going to get to that number four. But number three is where are we going? And, you know, just real quick, the reason I wanted to bring up the whole Jim Henson thing and talk about picking up the torch, something about like seeing, really tapping into what kind of work were they doing on a regular basis? Like, what were they spending their time with? What did they care about? You know, one of the things I really relate to what Jim Henson is, he was a visual artist, but it wasn't just, it was more about the concept. It was more about showing people what was in his head than it was like drawing per se. And I just so related to that and I related to the fact that somebody came before me that felt torn between visual art and that kind of expression and performance. It's, it just gives me comfort and it gives me clarity to see how people have done that in the past and how they spent their time. And so when we talk about how, where we're going, I want us to think about first, not job title. Job title is so, it can really throw you off your path. Job title, you know, being a stand up comedian or being an actor or being a director, all those words, I feel like they're so tied up. Those labels are tied up with this egoic identity of who we want to be in the world and how we want to be seen. And I feel like if you lead with title, you're leading with ego. But if you lead with job description, you're leading with meaning and joy and how you actually want to spend your life. And that really really matters. And so the shortcut into figuring out where you want to go, I think is not by thinking some hypothetical future where what kind of title do I want to have. But how you want to spend your week in five years, what kind of stuff you want to be doing Monday to Friday, it's probably going to be pretty similar to what you wish your week was this week. And so the shortcut I want to take as what would a perfect Monday to Friday look like for you? How would you be spending it? How many hours are you working? What kind of hours are you putting in? Is half of your day writing in the other half as performing as what, how does that break down? Then we'll link that to a job title. A few things you can think about here. For me, the perfect week would be the balance of doing stuff that feels meaningful and being in the flow state, like having the joy and the fun of really just enjoying the state of flow. For meaning, for me, it's like it's kind of the balance of, you know, this is, I'm uniquely qualified to serve in this way. When I get an illustration job, and I can think of 50 other people that should have got that job above me, it totally takes the meaning out of it. But when somebody comes to me for the kind of thing that I feel like only I can do, that really feels meaningful. That's how I like to spend my time. So figuring out how am I uniquely equipped to serve? Because it's not just about, oh, this is, I'm special. I get to be the talented person. I'm the only one in the world that can do this. Yeah, but you're the only one, I'm, maybe I'm the only one in the world that can bend my arm backwards really, really far, but that's not meaningful. And if you ever see me, I'll show you that trick. It's disgusting. Okay, it's super unique. I haven't seen a lot of people that can, that are double-joined to that extreme, but it doesn't help anybody. So that's not meaningful. You got to get that unique service mixed with fun joy. Mehi Chick sent me hi, the researcher who made the book flow talks about flow state is that balance of challenge and mastery. You don't want to be so good at it that you just crush it. You know, I love what Neil Gaiman says about writing books. He says, you never learn how to write books. You only learn how to write the book that you're writing. That's what's so inspiring about story to me. It's just like working with people. You never figure out people. Every single story is a unique challenge. And yeah, you got to have all the skills. You got to have the utility bell. All of your story chops to come at it, but every single one is fresh and new. And that mastery and challenge mix really makes it an enjoyable practice. So the first thing I do when you talk about where are we wanting to go is start with the job description, not the job title. Now, once you have an idea of like, I'd like to spend half my day doing this or a third of my week doing this and third of my week doing that third of this. I think three thirds is kind of a whole. And once you have some idea of that, then you can go look to let's look at the present day pioneers. Because if you're talking about where you want to go, that's maybe two, three, five years out in the future. It's going to be building on people that are pioneering things in that space with that job description right now. Who's spending time like that for me? It's kind of a, it's kind of, there's kind of a, I kind of think of it like a mashup. Like I feel like I'm a, I'm not a replica of any of these things. I'm a link in the
chain between two groups of people that are doing work. And hopefully in three to five years, you can look back at this and be like, he knew it, he had tapped into the pre-cognition of we, not me. I don't know if that's true, but let's see. Okay. One side of it is like the one person show that's like humorous storytelling. People like, you've heard me talk about him, Mike Breglia, James A. Castor, Derek Delgado, I just watched Derek Delgado's show in and of itself on Hulu directed by Frank Oz, I know, in Produced by Stephen Colbert. That thing I wept, I freaking wept. And I can't tell you anything else about it, but go watch it is incredible. And part of that is, part of this one person show thing that I relate to so much is I heard Nikki Glazer on Mike Breglia's podcast talking about how she develops material. And I was listening to it and I was thinking, oh man, that's how I do material. I don't just sit in a dark room for weeks and weeks and weeks and just writing and crafting and making it perfect. I have to write on stage, I have to put it in practice. It's part of my motivation, it's part of me keeping going. Like I have to make a little piece, put it out. Make a little piece, put it out, make a little piece, put it out and then edit it down to the best stuff. And she was talking about that's how she develops her material that she's a stand up comic and she doesn't do a lot of writing. She doesn't even do a lot of post editing. She just kind of builds it over time and it snowballs into a special and then funny enough. And I'm listening to her describe her process and I'm thinking that is my process. That's how I want to spend my time. And then she talks about how she just got diagnosed with ADHD. So I'm like, okay, that is a bread crumb. That is there's something about the way that you spend your time, that's how I want to spend my time. And then the other side of the link of that chain is people like Oliver Jeffers and Mo Willems. Both have a very different sensibility. Neither of them are doing really what I want to do in the world, but they do a lot of like, you know, TED Talks and and and specials and all that, but they also make kids books and it all comes from that point of view. And I feel like in between there picking up that Jim Henson torch and trying to find that space between a one person show and and and kids media creators, there's something in that zone that's where I want to go. And it starts informing every decision that I'm making and it tells me what do I need to do next so that I know when I take that next step, I know that it's at least in the general direction of where I'm trying to go. And that's what we're going to talk about in step four. (upbeat music) You don't need a million killer outfits to look good. 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That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to qunce.com/peptalk. All one word for free shipping in 365 day returns. Quince.com/peptalk. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's easy to sell it when you love something this much. I'm a big fan. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform designed to help you succeed online. Here's what I love about Squarespace. They're intuitive and super versatile dragon drop tools. I mean, you can make a custom website without knowledge of code that makes people say, "Whoa, who made that for you?" Looks like you built that from scratch. People have really said stuff like that to me about my site and I built it myself quite easily with Squarespace. You can check it out at antijapyza.com if you wanna check that out, what I did with it. It doesn't look templity and it screams my creative brand. I also love that I have all of my domains through Squarespace now, which makes it seamless and easy to manage. I know the first thing as creative folks do when we get an idea is to grab that URL. Now you can keep track of all your websites, inner domains in one place that's super intuitive and easy to manage. Head to squarespace.com/peptalk for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code Peptalk, all one word, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. (upbeat music) Okay, number four is what is standing in my way? When you have figured out, when you've stopped, and you figured out your lost, you found where you are and you found where you wanna go. Now you can see all of the things, all the obstacles, all the dominoes in between where you are now and where you wanna go next to those dominoes are the things that you need to create. They're the things that you need to make to get through the obstacles that are keeping you where you are and not where you wanna be. You know, this idea of the one thing, there's something about that book, Gary Keller, Jay Poppasson, the idea is, what's the next one thing you need to do? What's the domino that you need to knock over next that by doing it, everything you wanna accomplish will be finished or be easier to accomplish. This has been so essential to my life because what it does, when I'm feeling unmotivated, usually it's because, yes, I lack clarity, part of that clarity is this disintegrated feeling where all of the pieces of my journey just feel like random floating things. It's like 18 dominoes, all in different spaces, none of them connected, none of them working together. When in fact, even all the different disparate parts I'm doing, they always can work together to a whole. You know, I talked about on a recent episode how I wanted to get into the kids books, but my podcast was taking off. So I went with my podcast begrudgingly, feeling like, man, I'm gonna miss all of it on kids books. Only to find out that my podcast audience was essential to getting my first bigger podcast, or bigger kids book deals. And so those dominoes seemed like disparate, they seemed disintegrated, but actually, if I had had the perspective of every single piece fits together and the next piece I need to do, can I, if I focus on the one that can accomplish a few different goals, then I'm in a really good place. And recently I've been doing that, and it's been unlocking so much motivation 'cause I've realized now that I'm about to promote some picture books that I'm super pumped about, it's easy to be like, well, what about the podcast? What about public speaking? What about this? But I can see if I knock over this domino, if I really focus on making the best effort in the thing that's happening right now, that it actually has a domino effect of everything, oh, I wanna do, if I get really established in the picture book world, it will open up speaking gigs that I could never get. I can see that with people like Moe Willems and people like Oliver Jeffers, right? So that feeling of integration with all of the little creative I know has so many moving parts. They have so many desires, they have so much ability, their voice can be manifest in a diverse range of outputs. It's medium agnostic, most of the time, when you get into that essence of what you really wanna be and talk about and exist on in this planet, it rarely just falls in this neat, tiny, little compact compartment, right? And so if you feel like disintegrated, this is what you need to do, you need to ask yourself, not what's the one thing that I'm gonna do forever and screw everything else, we all know that's not right. But instead, what's the one thing I'm gonna do next that everything else I wanna do will be easier to accomplish if I focus my energy here. And so here's what I want you to do, I want you to go through, here's some ideas of some things that might be stopping you but from accomplishing, from getting to where you wanna go to be spending the weeks as you wanna be spending them. The first one is credentials. So you might, maybe you just don't have the credentials. You don't have the authority. You don't have any body existing that says, hey, this person knows what they're doing. I don't know if I've ever told the story on the podcast, but I went to college in England, I was there for five years. The catalyst that brought us home was this over?
well-man feeling that I got, that I was starting my illustration career and I'd had a few good projects that worked with companies like Sony and I'd had, you know, backs, beer and a bunch of other stuff, a bunch of other pieces and I was making more and more money. And I just, I had this deep compassion for my creative friends at home and I wanted to share all the things I'd learned about breaking into illustration and breaking into the creative career that I wanted and I had this overwhelming feeling to move home and start some kind of entity that would help others build creative careers. Okay? And then when I, that was the reason we moved back to America. That was, I mean, there was a bunch of reasons, but that was the catalyst. And we moved back home in the recession hit and, you know, a lot of the hype around the book that I published had diminished and all of my jobs dried up and I didn't have any credentials. I didn't have any right to be telling anybody else how to build a thriving creative practice because I hadn't and I, I spent, you know, I couldn't help anybody get their crap together. I had to get my crap together and I spent a good, you know, four to six years focused on building my own thriving practice, not by chance, not by accident, not by luck, but through strategy and practice and I built up that portfolio and I built up my salary and I built up my practice and by the time I launched this podcast in 2014, by the time I had gotten to this place where I wanted to tell people how I had built my practice and the things that I was learning alongside other people in their journey, by the time I done that, I had more or less forgotten that we had moved to America to start something like this podcast. That's how much of a distant memory it was and that's what it's like sometimes. Sometimes we have this vision or this dream and it propels us forward and and actually we might forget along the way why we're even going through the practice, right? There's other reasons for building a thriving creative practice for myself, but that was true. Sometimes you got to get the credentials. Sometimes you got to get the skills. I've told on this show before I had an opportunity to get my illustrations animated on Nickelodeon and the first opportunity I had with that right out of college, I massively failed. I sent them over all my final stuff and they said, "Rough drafts look okay?" Looking to see how they shape up in the finals and these were my finals, right? The problem was between where I wanted to be and where I was was I just didn't have the skills. I just didn't have the chops and I spent several years learning to draw digitally and learning to develop my style and learning to hit home on a brief and solve a problem. I spent several years and then luck would have it that I got another opportunity to make illustration to be animated on Nickelodeon, but this time I had the skills. It might be credentials. It might be skills. It might be social proof. Maybe you've got all the goods, but you just need something that says that you've got the goods. When I wanted to get into kids books, maybe some of my ideas were good. Some of them were bad, but ultimately I was untested and there was just no metric to say we should risk it on this person. Building up my Instagram, building up my podcast was helpful for social proof of there's something to this work. Maybe it's social proof. Maybe it's accessibility. I worked with an animator a few years back that he was making these gorgeous animations, but they were hosted on a random website on the internet. You could see the timestamp. They were five, ten minutes long or something. That's a lot to ask of somebody who's never heard of your stuff. You ever tried to get someone to listen to even a band that's already popular. If you ever try to get them to listen to a three minute song, they're like, I know you're going to like this. Would you please listen to this song? It's really, really hard because that accessibility is really tough and we talked with him about how can you break down these animations into bite-sized chunks that take seconds to consume that are easy to share. He was able to take his Instagram from a very small thing to 150 plus thousand and then work with the New York Times all just not by changing skills, not by getting credentials just by making it more accessible. Maybe you need to work on the messaging around how you're telling people who you are. Maybe you need to package it different. Maybe you need to find a better fit in a medium. Before I ever did this podcast, I was writing a blog about creative practice, but writing is a really weird medium for me. Audio is so much more conducive to the way that I like to create. And so maybe it's a medium fit. But what are the dominoes between you and where you want to go? What's the next right one? That if you knock that over, almost all the other ones are going to be obsolete. If you get the right credential, the right skill, the right social proof, if you make it more accessible, what thing is going to help you get there? A little bit of homework. Just to wrap all this up and give you something actionable to do, I want you to make a gateway drug to your work. I need I want to I need you. I need you to do this. Do this for me. I want I'm suggesting. That's all. I don't need you to do it. I'm suggesting you make a gateway drug and your work, make your work accessible and easy to tap into. Is there a piece of work that you've made that you can point to that really exhibits the best of what you know your capable of and summarize it in a way that really makes sense. This is something I'm working through right now. We tell these analogies on the show. I do this illustration. I have all these different parts. They're all kind of separate. Right now I'm figuring out how can I make a little small thing that gives you a dose of the heart and the story and the aesthetic of this stuff. What can I make something that's a minute, two minutes long that just really gives you a dose of the best stuff. I think about it like I have this, you know, two of my favorite bands, Alex G is one of them, which is a little bit more indie art kind of underground, experimental stuff. And then 1975, which is obviously, I feel like they're on opposite ends of the spectrum, but they're both like 1975 has some big hits that I think make people judge them wrong. Alex G has some accessibility problems where some of it's so experimental that if you turn on the wrong song, you're like, whoa, man, this noise is breaking my ears. But I think if you find the right way end to both of these bands, you can see how freaking awesome they are. And so I've made gateway drug playlists for both of them of like start here, you know, that little place in the maze. Your creative practice is a giant maze that other people can get lost in. And they're like, I don't even know where to start. You need to create a gateway drug piece that is a big chunky arrow that says start here. This is the way in to my brain and my creative practice. I've been working on that and I encourage you to create that gateway drug. And, you know, if you put it on internet, put it on Instagram, do hashtag CPT gateway drug and I'll check it out. Alright, sometimes, you know, get pushback either from myself or from others when I'm encouraging them to stop and find some clarity. And I think it's just this feeling of you're afraid to dig because you don't know if there's gold in there. You're afraid to go into that cave because you don't know it's clarity even in there. Am I just wasting more time? I'm telling you, if you will stop and do some of these practices, you're going to feel more grounded. You're going to feel like you have a clear direction in what you're doing in the next thing you make. If it's in line with the next right thing, that next right domino, you're going to find a well of motivation that you have a had in a long time. And these are all things that as you can tell I'm passionate about. But also, they're all things that have helped me really recently that I've come back to. So I hope it really helps. Thanks to Yoni Wolf in the band Why for our theme music. Thanks to Alex Sugg for our soundtrack. Thanks to Sophie Pizza for content assistance. Thanks to Apple. Boy. All right.
I'm Paul Tan of my co-founded podcast network, the co-do podcast network for content assistance and sponsorship assistance thanks to Jordan Heron for editing this show so beautifully. I can't get over it. I'm calling that. Thanks to all of you for showing up and listening. Hope this brought a bunch of pep to your step and until we speak again, stay pepmed up. [Music] Not all darkness is dangerous. Sometimes it's the doorway to becoming whole. On the brand new podcast, The Shadow Sessions hosted by me, Hibabal Fakeh, a psychologist and trauma expert, we should light on the hidden corners of the human experience. Through raw, unfiltered conversations from the edge of healing, The Shadow Sessions invites you to do the deeper work that leads to real change. Follow The Shadow Sessions wherever you're listening now. Sometimes it feels like red and blue states are just as divergent as post-World War II East and West Germany. So what can the US learn from German political history in order to create a more perfect union? Find out on the new season of the future of our former democracy, the Signal Award winning podcast from more equitable democracy and large media. Hosted by me, Colin Cole and Heather Vilen-Oueva. It's time to rethink democracy. So follow the future of our former democracy wherever you get your podcasts.
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