486 - How to Transform Your Frustrations into Fertilizer in 2025

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. Is it time for creatives to go underground? That's what we're going to explore. Welcome to Creative Pep Talk. I hope that you have multiple drinks with you for multiple functions. I have my coffee and my hydration apple cider vinegar mixture, and I'm feeling pretty good. It's the new year. I'm ready. it's time to get into the setting intentions and the goals and the action action action well not really that's not how we do things in this show because this is a creative show and by definition creative people do things differently we don't need to roll into the new year with everything sorted and knowing exactly what we're doing and just stressing and clawing our way to achievement.

1:11I am trying to take January to do something different. I want to use January to tap into something deeper. This is the start of a new series on Creative Pep Talk, where instead of starting January, reaching for the sky, we're going to do the exact opposite, because this is the grounding series. We are going to dig in. We're going to tap in. We're going to try to get to something deeper. Let's dig into it.

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3:51So since the beginning of Creative Pep Talk, we have explored this idea of career, creative, creative, career, creativity, and business. And that is a dangerous thing to do. Like, it's tricky. It makes sense because business is basically people paying you to do what you do. And creativity is trying to do something that you've never done. They are, in a way, exact opposites. But I'm not sure that makes creative business a total oxymoron that is incompatible. Yes, business requires you to repeat yourself. Like, you're going to have a really hard time making a thriving business, opening a restaurant, and today you're serving cheeseburgers.

4:40Tomorrow you're making pizza. The next day you're selling Slinkies. Like, that's going to be a difficult sell for most people. And this can feel antithetical to your creative nature that wants to do new stuff. But these two opposing forces don't have to be negating one another. Because although it might feel like it goes against your creative nature, opposing forces are the ground of nature. They are how nature works. We breathe in oxygen and we breathe out carbon dioxide. And trees do the exact opposite thing, but that doesn't mean that we're at odds with the trees. Sometimes we act like we are, but we know that it's exactly the opposite of that.

5:32These two opposites aren't at odds. They are in balance. They need each other. They thrive off each other. It is a pull and a push and a give and a take. The fact that they're opposite is exactly why they're so essential to each other. I think humans can fall into this kind of computer-ish, binary kind of thinking really easily, but the universe doesn't work where it's either this or that. The universe works in a way where it's this, then that, then this, then that, then this, then that. It's a cycle. It's breathe out, breathe in. The new becomes old and the old becomes new back and forth and back and forth.

6:21Creativity takes old stuff and makes it new. But where does that old stuff come from? If you're feeling sick from the recycled air of the triple reboots and the prequels to the sequels and the same old faces over and over and over again, That stuff that's getting old isn't against you. It's the exact opposing force that is calling you to be creative.

7:07now i'd like to be clear and just say this is not a capitalist creative manifesto of how these two things work hand in hand. I'm not saying that, okay? I make picture books and podcasts for a living, man. I am not an economist or a politician. I have not constructed the perfect economic plan to get us out of this place or the way that society should structure itself so things are even and fair and creatives are honored and everybody else in between. That's not what I'm doing here. That's not what I'm suggesting. In fact, I'm pretty suspect of folks on the internet without much credentials saying it's so simple and so easy.

7:51All we got to do is this, aka my plan or my perspective or the team that I root for. However, I will say that it seems like the state of things, this late stage capitalism space that we find ourselves in does seem to be choking out creativity in a way that I've never quite witnessed in my adult life. So how do we restructure society in order to fix this? I honestly don't really know. I really don't. That's way beyond my pay grade and I will just keep learning, keep voting, keep having conversations and trying my best to be part of shifting things to a healthier place. But I do know what I desperately hope creative people do, which they probably will because they always do in the meantime before change like that happens on the surface.

8:53And it's what they always do. It's the creative life cycle. When conditions get brutal and hostile and nothing can live, let alone grow, creatives do what all living things in scenarios like that do. They go underground. We recently bought this book for my brother-in-law for his birthday. It's an illustrated version of the book, The Hidden Life of Trees, which is by Peter Volabin. And it's beautifully illustrated by Benjamin Fleow. I'm not sure if I'm saying either of those names exactly right. But like good book nerds, my wife and I couldn't help but flip a couple pages before we sent it along.

9:42And I just found it really inspiring. I'm excited to get a copy for myself and really dig into the whole thing because it was super fascinating. But even in those first pages, I read this thing that has really stuck with me. And it's the idea that for most of time, the earth's surface was not hospitable. It was inhabitable. It was mostly rock and that it took years and years and years, millions and millions of years for it to become the rich soil that we have now. And he even says that if you scoop up just one handful of soil, that it has more living organisms in that soil than there are humans on this freaking planet, man.

10:31That is so much life underground. That's where all life comes from is this richness that we find in the ground. And I think the same is true in culture. If on the surface, if in the cinema listings and the bookshop shelves and your local gallery's upcoming schedule, you look at it and it doesn't feel alive and fresh and living and thriving, then it's time to go to the source. It's time to go underground. when everything is a sequel, a reboot, a rehash of the old thing, we aren't rotating crops properly. We have sucked all the goodness out of the underground and it's up to the creative people to say, no, we are going to self-sustain.

11:25We are going to find ourselves and our creativity. We're going to go back to the source. You know, it's easy to look at the movie theater and just see superhero movie after superhero movie after superhero movie, super superhero movies. There are so many superhero movies and just be like, oh gosh, the mainstream is just totally lame and dead. But the truth is, that too is just part of a late stage cycle because superhero stories didn't start out as this gigantic structure on the surface. Even it has its roots in something much smaller in the underground. If you look at Comic Cons these days, some of the big ones get up to like 130 ,000 per or attendees, whereas the first Comic-Con had something like 100 people back in the 60s.

12:27Like this thing started, like all creative things, underground. There's a lot of critical attack on things like Marvel and DC and the rehashings and retellings and rebooting and all that kind of thing. and I don't really have a take whether it's the right approach. I'm not gonna critique any of the critiques. I actually feel like we need to go beyond that because I don't think this is the problem. I think this is the symptom of the problem, that it's actually much deeper than that. Having been around a couple minutes, I've seen some of these patterns before, even if we are in unprecedented times.

13:30So like most illustrators, I grew up liking to draw. Family members and teachers and people around me would often suggest or question whether I was interested in being an artist or going into animation. And honestly, throughout my childhood, I never really took it seriously. It was just a fun thing that I like to do that helped me pass the time and not be bored. It wasn't until the early 2000s when I was in high school and I discovered indie music that I really started to take this creative career path seriously. I fell in love and I just desperately wanted to participate in the rich subculture of band posters and band merch and just all of this incredible design and illustration that surrounded this music that I became obsessed with.

14:25Looking back now, I can see that by the time this Pacific Northwest flavor of indie music that I loved hit me in my little suburb in the Midwest. It was probably already past its creative peak. But to a kid that had never heard anything that wasn't on MTV's TRL or Rick D's in the weekly top 40. Modest Mouse 2004 album, good news for people who love Bad News sounded initially like just experimental noise rock that made absolutely no sense, but deeply intrigued me. And looking back, that seems just really silly because it's a pop rock record, but I'd never heard anything like it. Now, I often joke that we all know these morons that are like, this band changed my life, man.

15:25and if you want to know anything about me, that's exactly the type of moron that I am because Modest Mouse freaking changed my life, man. It really did. Indie music changed the trajectory of my life because I discovered that music and I got into this culture and I watched these people making these band posters and merch and all this ephemera and cool stuff and I was like, that looks almost, that's the closest to a career that I've ever seen myself doing. I want to do that. And I really, I don't know if I would have gone to the school I went to or moved to the UK like I did. So many things would have been different if it hadn't been for diving into this emerging underground culture.

16:15By the time I got out of college and published my first book with Chronicle Books, the Indie Rock Coloring book, Indie had pretty much gone completely mainstream. In fact, I vaguely remember reading an article from back then titled something about, is Indie dead? That kind of article. And it cited as one of the signs, stuff like tribute coloring books as a sign that it was probably on its way out. So yeah, that hurt. But honestly, I don't really take it personally. I am just happy and grateful to have participated in any way to this thing that I just love so much, even if it was just a bouquet for the funeral.

17:08Jokes aside, I still love indie music. It's mainly what I listen to. I think what I listen to is mostly classified as indie music still. So long live indie rock. But I bring it up because I think it's an example of one of the creative life cycles that I have experienced. And is indie music dead? I don't think so. I just think maybe it's on its way back underground. Having been in the creative game for 15 plus years, I have seen a few different cycles like this. I think that artists are a bit like cicadas. they churn and tunnel and build underground in every 5, 10, 15 years come to the surface and the people, the land dwellers, the animals, the forest, they celebrate and they gather around and they devour them and eat them and tear them apart until the only thing that's left is the husk of what they once were.

18:15Nothing's left but the eighth spinoff of their hit TV show. Just a shell of something that was once pulsing, living, generative, and alive. But that's when the new cycle begins.

18:37in 2024 Modest Mouse released the 20th anniversary of Good News that album that took me on this path so what does that mean it means I'm getting old first of all but it also means that like I said, I've seen a couple cycles or two, and I'm seeing some patterns right now that are actually encouraging me, even though there's a lot to be discouraged about creatively. Now, if you are a visual artist, a painter, a photographer, someone who makes still images, you're probably still reeling from the realification of Instagram, Instagram going all short form video. And it makes sense. I sympathize with you.

19:25It is scary. It is sad in some ways. Like Instagram being the top cultural artifact for, you know, five, six, seven years meant that still image makers were at the center of the mainstream in a way that maybe has never been true throughout history, definitely not in modern history. There were friends of mine, illustrators that were household names, people that had nothing to do with the culture, knew about and were fans of. Like my neighbor, who's not really in the creative industry, was a fan of several of my friends just because they made art and put it on Instagram. And so, yeah, there's a grief in the mainstream kind of turning its back on visual artists.

20:19I get it. It's a bit scary. But when I see the fear and anguish that shows up in the comment sections of every new Instagram update and I see all of these artists saying, we got to go back to the old chronological way, go back to the still images, all this stuff. When I see artists saying, let's go back, I know something is wrong because I have trained my brain to notice when I see artists saying, let's go backwards to hear the voice of Jack from Lost begging Kate to go back to the island, to go back to this place of pain. When I hear artists saying, let's go back to the way it was, I know that a new cycle has to begin because it's not the artist's way to go backwards.

21:18It's not the artist's way to go back to the old. It's the artist's way to show us a new path to something that's never been. And it's already happening. So yes, the cinema is full of sequels and prequels and superhero movies pretty much exclusively. However, there are interesting things happening in that space. For example, Megapolis. I don't even, I'm not sure if that's how it's said. Something like that. I didn't see the movie, okay? But it is an interesting sign to me. This filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola, makes this movie that nobody wants, nobody likes, apparently, but guess what? He wanted to make it.

22:07So what did he do? He self-financed it. He didn't look to the powers that be, the structures that already exist for that. Maybe he did, but he did it anyway. And I think there's almost no better sign for the future of creativity when artists of that magnitude decide to do something whether anybody else is interested or not. We had midway through 2024, we had Julian Glander on the podcast, who was an animator illustrator who just got into filmmaking with his movie, Boys Go to Jupiter. I love this animated film. He animated it. He made it happen independently. He got this whole thing together. And then it just went to so many festivals and was really celebrated and won some awards.

22:58Like this is a great sign for creativity and a new cycle beginning. We also had Yoni Wolf on the podcast this year. If you don't know, Yoni Wolf and the band Y is all the music that you hear on this show. I'm a mega fan. And in 2024, they self-released their album, The Well That I Fell Into. And Yoni started his own substack where he releases a demo of a new song every single month. And if you like this music, it's well worth supporting and checking out. Highly recommend it. In fact, the second half of the year, I noticed this trend that I started calling out in almost every one of our interview episodes, this idea of the indie spirit where so many of the artists that I was interviewing were self-publishing, self-financing their own creative projects because they had got so frustrated with the mainstream and its lack of support of new creative endeavors.

24:06So while I grieve the fact that the indie creative movements have been worked out of the mainstream and crowded out and pushed out and creativity has really struggled to flourish in the mainstream over the past few years, it doesn't mean it's over. Quite the contrary. Yes. The status quo becoming more and more samey is the opposite of creative flourishing, but it doesn't mean that it's at odds with our creative flourishing. When you look at the movies on the TV and the stuff on your phone and the stuff that's in the bookshop and you see the same old, same old, and you start feeling that deep-seated frustration, that frustration is not at odds with your creativity.

25:10It is your creativity. That frustration is the creative impulse and that status quo, same old, same old. That is the fodder that pushes us into a new season of creativity. It isn't the end of our creativity. It is the impulse to create. That is the cycle.

25:49Okay, it's time for your creative call to adventure. Every episode of this show, we try to leave you with something that you can do with these ideas so you don't just feel like jazz and excited and pepped, but you can actually take that pep and put it to work in your creative practice right here, right now. And your creative call to adventure this week is called Dig Your Pinky Toe Into the Underground. Now, I'm not telling you that you need to throw off all your technology and go live out in the woods and paint on trees. I'm not saying that. Look, if you want to do that, that's cool. It sounds fun.

26:25I personally have three kids and two dogs and a whole pile of other responsibilities and can't do that. And I don't know if I would want to. I'd probably miss pizza, first of all, but also other things like my wife. although I think she would actually dig that. I'm not telling you to not do any client work, don't do any sponsorships or partnerships or opportunities that are coming your way but what I am saying is that if you're frustrated with the opportunities that are in front of you, that maybe the time isn't to go back when those opportunities were plentiful but to trudge forward in a totally new way and stay open and excited about what could be possible in these next coming seasons.

27:14If we ground ourselves in our own creative impulses, in that intrinsic motivation to create, what could these next chapters look like? Because we get to decide. That's what the creative people do. Like the reason that Instagram was ever interesting was because of us. So I'm not calling you to do some extreme, huge, ridiculous, wild thing. I'm just asking you to think about how you could go a little bit beyond touching grass and dig your toes into the underground, dig your toes into the soil. Just dip your pinky toe into letting go of the way things used to be. I will tell you what this looked like for me.

28:02So at the beginning of December, I deleted the Instagram app and the Twitter app and the TikTok app from my phone. And I don't know if it's forever. It's kind of just a fast thing. I probably won't put Twitter or TikTok back on my phone because I just really haven't missed it at all. I might put Instagram back on just for the ease of use within my work. But all of those things are things I use for work at best. And so I just do them from the desktop now when I'm at work. So not a huge shift, but it kind of has blown me away by what that has made possible and how just those little decisions have opened up so much space and room for dreaming up what could be.

28:50And for me, what that's looked like is, yes, I've deleted those apps, but I didn't delete apps like Substack or YouTube, two areas where I can go deep on stuff with creatives, two areas where I've wanted to dig in and invest and explore, and both of which I feel much more attuned to and excited by. I've read so many Substack posts and articles since that deletion, and they are so much richer and more edifying and creatively inspiring than the short form video that I was just downloading into my veins every second of the day. And so here's what I'm calling you to on your creative adventure. Your call to a creative adventure is to just ask yourself in this new year, what are some small changes like deleting an app that could have big outcomes, that could have big implications for you?

29:52Where do you want to go? What do you want the future to feel like? Instead of being crowded out and trying to keep up on the creative path, realize your job is to create the path. And so, yes, it's gotten crowded and it's gotten overrun and it's gotten less and less and less creative, but that's your job to tune into and realize that it means that it's time to start something new. So if you're feeling anything like I'm feeling, you're seeing the patterns, you're feeling the feelings, then I hope that you join us for this series. We're going to do solo episodes like this where we explore how to ground ourselves back in that creative space and find that part of us that wants to make, even if it doesn't get the social or institutional validation.

30:44How do we validate ourselves? How do we validate our creative friends? How do we do our projects without the funding, without the opportunities, without the support of the mainstream? How do we see the hostile environment of the marketplace and create our own marketplaces and our own zine fairs and pop-up shops and trades and communities? How do we get out of the algorithm and back into the rhythm of our own creativity and its own life cycle? How can we see that it's not either be a huge success as a creative out there in the mainstream or give up completely, but realize that this is not a binary, but part of an ongoing cycle?

31:35We're gonna be doing these solo episodes, exploring these topics. We're also going to be inviting creative people onto the show for interviews on these topics and hearing from people that are doing this well or feeling the same things and figure out what they're finding on their own path as they create it. So I hope that you will join us. We're gonna be exploring this for January, maybe even for a little bit longer than that because I don't know about you, but I need to ground myself again. I need to find reasons to get out of bed and make stuff that isn't about making money, that isn't about social validation, that isn't about likes and comments and shares and virality and success.

32:19While some folks on the internet spend more and more time thinking about how they can reach the highest heights, I hope you'll join me in figuring out how we can get lower and lower, how we can ground ourselves, how we can dig in and find something even more valuable and exciting than anything you can find on a phone. I hope you will come join me on Substack, annijpizza.substack.com. You can sign up to the newsletter there. The creative community there is cut from a different cloth, honestly. There is just a lot of grounding. There is a lot of getting back to long form, getting back to deeper inspiration.

33:13and if you sign up and become a supporter on Substack or on Patreon, you can join us for our monthly creative pep rallies where we talk about everything that I'm talking about on the show and we apply it to your creative practice. So if you ever have trouble applying these ideas to your own creativity, this meetup is for you. We meet up on Zoom the last Monday of every month. We are going to be meeting January 26th at 9 a.m. Eastern 2025, and we're going to be talking about the Grounding Series and the creative ways that we can chart our own paths. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator, and Creative Pep Talk is just a place to put everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice.