468 - How to Save Your Creativity from Toxic "Business Mind" Quicksand

0:02On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off, sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

0:21Hey, you're listening to creative pep talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. And this show is everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice.

0:44I don't know about you, but for me, it's really easy to fall into obsessing over the career aspect of my creativity. The numbers, the views, the clicks, the money, etc. It's extremely easy to become obsessed with that once you let it enter the idea of having a creative practice. Once your creativity is not just for you, just as a hobby, it's really hard to continue to strike that balance and remember why you like to make creative stuff in the first place. It's super easy to get distracted by what other people are doing, what seems to be working, what seems to be making the most money or taking off or getting the most views.

1:35It's really hard to, once you let that voice in, to quiet it enough to tap back into your own inner voice and your own inner perspective and why you chose to make creative work or what you care about or what your personal taste is or what you're most passionate about right now. It's really, really hard to strike that balance and it can become a very all or nothing thing. If you find yourself swearing off ever thinking about money or ever selling your work or ever letting that infiltrate your creativity ever again, and then going back and forth and back and forth, this episode is for you. And if you stick to the very end, I'm going to come back with a method, a tool called the right token that is a thing that you can carry with you throughout the rest of your creative journey that can help you course correct and very quickly tap back into that creativity, even if you choose to venture out into those dicey waters of career.

2:40So stick to the end for that. But first, let's get into why career is such a risky place for your creativity in the first place.

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4:39Okay, so we are doing a series on the show about creative journey. And the reason we're doing this series is because we talked about in the first episode of this series, how having a journey mindset is one of the keys to balancing the, what Dr. Lisa Miller calls the awakened side of your brain, or you could think the creative side of your brain with the career or achievement or action, logic, outer focused side of your brain. That having a questing or journey mentality, seeing your life as part of a grander narrative can be a really effective way to ground yourself when you have lost that balance of creativity and career.

5:33And so we're doing a series about creative journey. This is the second episode of that series. And we're going to talk about, first of all, why it's so difficult to strike the balance between these two things. Now, there are cliches around creative people selling out for a reason. That is a trope because it's a thing that happens quite often. Like those of us who have made our living or have attempted to make a living from our creativity and make it the primary focus of our working life, we have realized over and over and over again that doing so is tricky as hell. It's really difficult to walk that tightrope between money and creativity.

6:31And not only that, we have seen countless examples of creators who we loved, whose work meant the world to us, who seem to have somewhere along the way lost themselves in the success, who have, for whatever reason, become swallowed by the economic side, lost their heart, lost sight of why they started to make work in the first place. And that can become both our own experiences with losing our way and forgetting why we do this and money and the pressures of that, ruin the fun that we have with creativity, both our own experiences and the experiences of watching others lose their way can cause us to, at times, completely divorce ourselves from the idea of ever selling, having any economic element to what we do.

7:27And it can be really quite scary. Now, on the other hand, most likely, the art that had the biggest impact on you, the creative work that had the biggest impact on you was work made from a person that was doing their damnedest to strike this balance. You know, when I think about my own creative heroes, one that comes to mind is Jim Henson. If you've listened to more than one episode of this podcast, you've almost certainly heard me mention him. Fraggle Rock, The Muppets, these are huge influences on me. They're a huge influence for the picture books that I make. I love the spirit of it. I love the world.

8:13I love the humor. It meant so much to me as a kid, and now my kids are super into it. It just is really, really important to me as a kind of true north in my own creative practice and the kind of stories that I want to tell. One of the things that is kind of legendary about Jim Henson is that he took this balance incredibly seriously. Now, he is also someone who's known for keeping the creativity in focus, but not losing sight of the fact at the same time that they had to get the finances right if they were going to be able to do the kind of creative work that they wanted to do. All the way to the point where they jokingly had a shrine on the set of the Muppets to a dollar bill to be like, don't forget that this thing has to work for all of this other stuff to work.

9:12And for me, I've kind of envisioned it like we have this inner awakened brain side of us. We have this inner part of us that is that higher thinking, that more human evolved side of us, that is that artist, that is that poet, the person that is connected to the higher thinking and the abstraction and the deep well of passion and humanity. And we have that part of us, but it's almost like that part of us is this blind sage that can't see the real world. It's like this prelingual deep part of us, the part of us that perhaps dreams at night. That's the part of us that has all of these creative callings, has all these creative impulses and has all this deep wisdom, but can't actually see the world in which this human that it's within is set into.

10:10And that the other side of us is the part of us that is the clay, that is the thing that is in the dust, in the dirt, putting our hands to the till creatively or the iPad pencil. It's not as poetic. Sounds way goofier. But that, you know, us actually putting our marks onto the page that also has to see reality. And we have to, just like a nighttime dream doesn't make sense, a daydream doesn't make sense until you have interpreted it into the world that you find yourself in. Like what if you dreamt of being an astronaut when you were a kid and the truth of the matter is you're a person who suffers from asthma or different ailments that mean that you just can't ever go into space.

11:10Then maybe perhaps you take that dream, that daydream, and you translate it in the same way that you would a nighttime dream. You take that dream and you say, okay, well, maybe this was something about reaching for the stars. Maybe this was something about escaping my atmosphere because I grew up in a toxic atmosphere. I'm not saying I did. I'm just saying maybe you did. And that's why you wanted to get the hell off the planet. But these daydreams, these two parts of us, the part of us that feels timeless and the part of us that is stuck in the timeliness of now, in the blood, flesh, and dirt of now, they have to make friends.

11:53And in that first episode, we talked about how a journey mindset or a questing mindset is super key to marrying and mastering both of these worlds in such a way where you can realize that inner potential into an outer reality. And so it's very lofty. It's very hopefully in the realm of poetic abstraction so that it kind of rustles up that part of you and you can kind of feel like that reason why you make stuff or why you are passionate about creativity in the first place. And stirring up that side of you, reconnecting to that side of you on a regular basis is essential because it is incredibly easy to get obsessed with the money, the numbers, the facts, the figures, and lose the point of what you're doing all this for in the first place.

12:54And so all the way through this whole process of making this show, we've been making it for almost 10 years, all the way through, one of the things that set it apart from other podcasts about creativity or other educational resources or what have you, one of the things that set it apart isn't just the journey mindset. It is the fact that, yes, it is both. It's not just a creative podcast. It's not just a career podcast. It's not just a creative career podcast. It's a creativity first creative career podcast or creative practice podcast. And the reason why is because if you're not careful, if you got into this, if you're passionate about creativity and that's why you want to do it, like you want to earn the money like Jim Henson so that you can do the next creative project.

13:47If you're like someone like Judd Apatow, who's like, all my movies have to do. The only success that I need is that they're successful enough that they let me make another movie. If that's you, this show is for you and it's important to retouch base with this creative side of you because on a very real level, the career side is like a siren that can draw you in and devour your creativity for good. Not only have you seen this happen to other creators that you once loved, whose earlier work just blew you away and whose later work felt stale or less human, but also we actually have interesting research around this that I think kind of explains what might be happening here and why it's so important to have tools of grounding yourself back in the creativity, back in the passion.

14:50So judging by this person having one of the biggest TED Talks of all time, you've probably heard of Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor. You might have heard of her whether you realized it or not. She wrote a book called Whole Brain Living. She is a Harvard-educated, published neuroscientist, and she had this terrible, incredible experience of going through a stroke in her shower, losing her left side of the brain activity, and getting completely immersed in the right side of the brain. Now, and that was temporarily, and she kind of over time was luckily able to recapture her full faculties. Now, whether you believe it or not, we have psychologists and scientists that listen to this show from time to time.

15:52So if you're one of those people, I'm not going to oversimplify the idea of the left and the right brain. I'm not even going to legitimately go into any kind of lay neuroscience legitimately. But because I know the left brain and the right brain tropes are overplayed, misunderstood, massively oversimplified. Essentially, you've probably heard you're a left brain person or a right brain person. And left brain is kind of the logic side and right brain is the creative side. And most neuroscientists, when you hear them talk about this, get pretty frustrated about how inaccurate that really is and how the whole brain is involved in all parts of everything that we do, whether it's logic or creative, even down to something like when we take in something funny, that there's a part of us that's understanding it with the logical side, the part of us that is getting the break of logic on the right side and how these things interact are really where the juice is.

16:58But that's really the point of what we're talking about today is that meeting point between these two parts, getting these two parts of you to act in unison and play ball and play nicely with each other, both the logic career side and the abstract poetic creative side. And so what Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, what she talks about in the book is the incredible, expansive, transcendent experience that was, and frightening experience that was losing her left brain function, going into the right brain, watching her body literally dissolve into energy, losing her sense of language and just this very deep state of joy and oneness with the universe.

17:52It's really fascinating book. Highly recommend it. But one of the things that she talks about that has really, really stuck with me and I think gets to the heart of why it's so easy to fall into being a sellout or a wannabe sellout as a creator or a creative person. is because when they start studying the people that lean right brain or lean left brain or lean towards the artsy side or creative side or lean towards the factual detail logic side, when they start studying these ways of being, one of the ways that they do this kind of thing is people who had their corpus callosum, I think, disconnected or removed or something.

18:39Again, not a brain scientist, but they disconnected the connections between the left and right brain. They could test things just with the right brain with the person and then test the same person with just the left brain and get these really interesting results. So they've done tons of tests around this, these sorts of experiments. And one of the things that they realized that you're the right side of the brain, that artsy creative side, if you're that leaning, if that's kind of where you spend your time, you are able from that side of your brain, you're able to respect and value the other side.

19:25that if you're in that creative side, you're able to see that there are reasons why we need the logic, we need the detail, we need the facts, we need the figures. Like we get it. But the scary thing is that the other side isn't able to return the favor quite as easily. And when you're in that left side, or if you spend more of your life in that left side or maybe the left side's even more natural for you, that when you're in that state, you don't find it easy to value the other side. And I can see this play out in my own experience. If I get into a phase of launching a book or launching a project or trying to get a client or trying to set up a new stream of income and I have to go into a season of my creative practice where almost all of my energy is dedicated to making that thing into a reality and I'm setting KPIs, whatever those are, and goals and trying to figure out how do I move the marker and move the needle and I get really, really into that practical mindset where I'm focused on those extrinsic goals, I can get so well worn within that path, within that groove that it becomes a rut.

20:58And I can go months without remembering why I chose to do this in a creative way at all. I can go months without remembering what it's like to have a movie or a story or a book or a song make me well up with tears. And then when something breaks through, it's like I'm captured by the sirens. And I remember, holy crap, like I've got a ship to sail. Or it's like that, you know, the character in the movie that's been taken over by a virus, like, or by a zombie outbreak or, you know, some kind of takeover from an overlord. And just for a split second, they remember who they are and they quit persecuting the hero or whatever.

21:57You know, you remember that. It's like that. It's like, oh my gosh, I was so dangerously close of forgetting the point of all of this. And that's the crazy thing is that you can go super hard into your creativity and never forget the fact that you've got to pay your bills and never forget the fact that you've got to make it all add up somehow, or never forget the fact that you have to value those efforts as well. And so I feel like this study really gets at why it's a dangerous game to mix creativity and career at all in the first place. And yet, people like Jim Henson that did it well make me want to give it my best shot.

22:51And you read things about even the most staunch, anti-capitalist sellout type folks, people like Kurt Cobain took the career element of the band that much more seriously. Didn't say, I'm not even going to think about that because when you don't even think about it, you can fall into it on accident and then lose yourself without any awareness. But if you realize like this is a thing that I have to respect, this is a very worthy opponent. I need to understand it. I need to learn it. I need to be tied to my ship in such a way where that siren song can't take me completely and utterly off course. And I got to have people around me even that I say, I don't care how much I beg, do not untie me and let me spend all of my days making reels for Instagram because I got to get those views to go up.

23:52like the algorithm siren song is so strong for so many people and everybody has different versions of that where you can become completely swept away with those extrinsic markers of success and lose the most important marker which is your own inner subjective taste and passion for the creative work that you make

24:39Okay, so I want to talk about our call to adventure, a way to take this idea and put it into practice in your own creative practice today. not just feel excited and encouraged by the idea, but a way to put it to practice right now. And it's called Find Your Right Token. And I'll explain what that means in just a second. But to set it up, I got to talk about something I mentioned in the previous episode in this series where we talked about how questing a journey mindset was the key to holding both of these creative and career sides in tension with each other, this inner and outer conflict together.

25:26And Joseph Campbell, the guy who popularized the idea of the hero's journey in his book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces, he talks about this. The language he uses is the master of both worlds. And what he means by that is that the hero is somebody who can leave home and enter into the fantastical world, the extraordinary world where everything's is different, where everything is as they had never seen it before, where it breaks all of the rules of the previous world, that they can enter into that world, but then come full circle all the way back home and not lose the elixir that they got in the extraordinary world.

26:14That the whole point of the journey isn't to leave home and never come back and home being your nature, being who you are, what your comfort zone is, leaving that not to set up camp and be always stretched to your limits, always out of your comfort zone, always on the edge of your nature, but to go out there, try something new, find something new, and then bring it back to your strengths, bring it back to your home, bring it back to your comfort zone, and integrate that into a new way of being. And Joseph Campbell calls this the master of both worlds. Carl Jung calls it the tension of opposites.

27:02How can you hold, how can you stay in this place? And that's what that questing thing is about, is how can you stay in that spot that holds the inner creativity and calling and holds it in tension with that outer calling, that outer siren song of the career in the outer world? And so that space, what that looks like in story, you've seen it a billion times. Like the most satisfying part of the book, Harry Potter, in some ways, is not when they are at the height of the journey where he is fighting Voldemort and crushing it at Hogwarts. Some of the most interesting and exciting and satisfying moments are when he goes back home to the Dursley's house and he has found this level of confidence in his own inner magic that he can go back and show his cousin a thing or two and he's not going to take no crap from nobody.

28:06That ability to bring back the magic, that's where it gets juicy. If he can't bring it back to the real world, it's like a dream that you wake up from. It's those movies where you're like, well, it was just a dream and none of this was of any consequence. But we even see when it is a dream, things like Wizard of Oz, when she goes back to the real world, she has taken something from the dream realm, taken something from the inner world, from the abstract unconscious place. And she's made it conscious and she's made it part of her reality. And she sees the parallels between the characters that she met in the dream and the characters of her real life.

28:46And the same goes for Neo and the Matrix. Like just learning to bend the spoon in the Matrix isn't gonna do the trick. He's gonna have to learn how to access that higher level of thinking in the real world in Zion for it to matter whatsoever. And the same is true, I think, for you as a creator. As a creator, it's not enough to master creativity. It's not enough to lean into your creative nature and your interests and your comfort zone. It only works fully if you can go out of that comfort zone, out of the right brain, enter the land of the sirens, enter the land where you might get swept away and learn something there, take something there, and then bring it back to your creative practice.

29:36And so how do you do that without risking losing yourself completely if we know that that's really easy to do? Well, it reminds me of another story, Inception by Christopher Nolan, this idea that they're going into a dream and within the dream, another dream and a dream within a dream and a dream within a dream. And the further you go down, the harder it is to realize that you're stuck in a dream, that realize that what you're in is a fabrication and remember that you need to get out of that dream. And there are characters that get stuck in their dreams for thousands of years. And, um, you know, there's this, all this drama and, um, tragedy that happens within that.

30:29And so in the movie, because you can easily lose yourself in the dream, they have to have a method for remembering that this whole world is just a construction and they have to bring with them a kind of token from the real world that reminds them like, hey, you're in a dream and helps them regain lucidity within this fabrication. And it kind of reminds me of The Matrix too. The Matrix being based on the book Simulacra, this idea that we are living in a simulation. This is before that was taken so literally. Are we living in a simulation? Who knows? What's the difference between real and software?

31:13I freaking don't know. The more you think about it, the weirder it is. But the idea of simulacra, as I understand it, my limited knowledge of philosophy, is just that everything we're living in today, that people are like, well, that's just the way it is. Anytime you hear that phrase of, it's just the way it is, you have to question like, is it? Or is it the way that people before me, that were born before me, decided it would be? Or that we had compounded over time in our culture for it to be? or that technology has determined for it to be. And that essentially everything we do is kind of a type of Disney World because these are fabricated worlds that were created by humans.

31:57You know, the ecosystem of a city even is a fabricated world. It's not just the way things are. They're the way things are now, but a lot of that was determined by people. and that seeing through that is kind of a superpower. And it's also, you know, something that creative people are really great at doing. So the same goes for that dream that you get stuck in. That's the economy. That's the world. That's the outer life in a way. There is an illusion to the way that societies set themselves up. There's an illusion to the value of the dollar, right? These are all constructions and they're constructions that are so, especially the online world is an even more extreme version of this.

32:50I'm not going to go deep into some weird conspiracy way of thinking, but if you think about it just for a second, you're like, damn, the things that we value right now as creative people are such abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions. or dreams within the dreams of the dreams, like a like, a view, a follower. Like these are not real things. They represent real things, but it's important to remember. It's important to have tokens that remind us like this is but a dream and that we need to get back to why did we do this in the first place? What does this represent? What's the meaningful thing under the thing, under the thing, under the thing so that we cannot lose ourselves in that side of the brain.