487 - Apathetic About Goals? Uncover A Different Source of "Infinite" Motivation

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

0:20What do you do when things dramatically change and there's not enough work to go around or you hit a slow patch or a rough patch and the scene is different and things just are not working on the outside? Things are slowing. There's no opportunities. There doesn't feel like there's enough jobs to go around, what do you do? In this episode, I'm going to share a game-changing shift that allows you to take control of your creativity and keep going even when others have taken the ball and gone home. It's a way to rise up above external forces and keep your creative discipline strong. At the end of this episode, I'm going to share an exercise called Rules of the Game that helped me find a well of creative joy that I can access whether anybody else is giving me permission to create or not.

1:27This is episode two in the grounding series on this podcast, Creative Pep Talk. If you like what you hear, you can go back and listen to episode 486. and listen to the first episode of the series, but they are all designed to work as standalone as well. So you're welcome to just tune into this one. For now, let's talk about the game-changing shift that changed my creative perspective forever.

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3:42My first really legit client illustration job that I did as a freelancer came right outside of college and it was for this handheld gaming console called the Sony PSP, which I owned. I had one of these things, so that was even more exciting. And between the hands of what was supposedly this person holding the Sony PSP, we were supposed to illustrate this really loud, vibrant illustration that looked super fun. And that was very my work, still is my work. and I was just so pumped about this. And they were gonna pay me a thousand pounds because I was living in the UK at the time. And they might as well have been paying me a million pounds because that was just so much money to me back then.

4:38And I was just thrilled and I worked and I strived and I tried to push what I was even capable of and gave them a couple options. And they passed for somebody else. I was absolutely gutted as they say in the UK this job had kind of floated my way and it came into my orbit didn't even fully understand how it had happened like I had an online portfolio and I was trying to do stuff but I couldn't I didn't know exactly why they chose me for this. And I kind of felt like it's this thing floating my way. If I knock it out of the park, if I just smash this thing, this is going to be the game changer that just solidifies my creative future and changes everything overnight.

5:31So when I lost the job, I felt like I'd lost everything. My wife and I were really young parents. We had our first kid right out of college and I was at the hospital the day after she was born when I got a call and they said, they actually changed their minds and they were going to use one of my illustrations. I made the work, got it approved and got the date of when I could put this on my website and in my mind, start my career. I felt like I had won the game, like this was it. I was going to update my Dreamweaver website and the jobs would flood in and I would be an illustrator for the rest of my days.

6:21Did I really think that? I think on some level, yes, I did. This was the game winner. The day came and went, not a ton changed. I think maybe a couple of blogs covered it that I sent it to and that was it. Maybe a few jobs floated my way after that in the coming weeks or months. Directly related to that or not, I don't really know. But what I can tell you is it wasn't the game-winning smash that I thought it was going to be. Over the next few years, a few different jobs came over, floated my way. And I every single time thought if I play my cards right, if I just freaking smash this and spike it down, that this thing could be the game changing game winner illustration job that kind of sets me up to have this career locked in for a lifetime.

7:21Of course, none of those illustration client jobs ever really were that. And even as I diversified my practice with other opportunities like talks and podcasts and having a few guests that felt like game-winning game changers or book deals that felt like this could be the thing that changed everything or talks that I thought like this is going to be the winner. This is going to be the smash. I just have to knock it out of the park. This is going to be the big one. I thought this so many times, but none of them ever really were. Sure, some of them felt like a bit of a slam dunk in the moment. Some of them had a bigger impact than others.

8:07Some of them floated my way into my orbit and floated away before I could really do anything about it. All kinds of different outcomes, but nothing ever dramatically changed things. Nothing ever really won the game, so to speak. Treating your creative opportunities like every single one is make or break, do or die, all or nothing, game-changing, game-winners is not great for your nerves, let alone your creative flourishing. Eventually, approaching my practice like this just left me burnout, and I was forced to take a different approach. Eventually, I treated those big, scary jobs like everything else, like the other jobs I was doing or the stuff that I was making for myself for the podcast.

9:02I ultimately shifted my perspective to try to make the job fun. Now, I'm not always successful at this, but this shift has been the real game changer. For years, I had smashed these jobs like balloons that had floated into my orbit, and I'm playing some kind of creative balloon volleyball and just smashing it back every single time, just trying to crush each and every opponent and win the creative game. But as I was forced to take a different approach, I realized that things actually worked better when I didn't treat them this way. And in fact, I started feeling like Maybe this isn't some balloon volleyball, but more like a game of keepy-uppy.

10:02If you're a parent with little kids, you probably know about the Australian cartoon Bluey. I think it's still the biggest streaming show, I don't know, of all time or at least right now. It's a great show. I'm a huge fan. And one game they play on the show is called Keepy-uppy. and it's with a balloon, even just the name says it all. You know the point. The point of the game isn't to win the game. The point of the game is to continue playing. It's to keep the ball up in the air, keep the balloon afloat without touching the ground. On several occasions and interviews and maybe even in his book, I've heard Judd Apatow, the famous comedy filmmaker, say that he's not really interested in making groundbreaking cinema.

11:00He was never trying to change the game, so to speak. But what he was trying to do was make movies that he loved that were successful enough to keep being able to make movies. At some point, he also realized that the name of the game when it comes to creativity isn't winning, but continuing play. And that's a completely different way to approach creativity.

11:54So there's actually a name for these two different types of games. They are called finite games and infinite games. So finite games, the purpose is to win the game, to beat the game, to complete the game. Whereas an infinite game, the purpose is to play. The purpose is to keep playing, to keep it going. And in this episode, I'm making an argument to say that creativity is primarily an infinite game and approaching it that way may lead to better results. It definitely has with me because when I play creativity as a game to win, I often defer my joy and enjoyment until I've got the reward. I see the point of making as getting to a future destination rather than the point of making is to enjoy making.

12:56And in fact, before I ever wanted to make this a career, the reason I wanted to make it a career was because I like to make stuff. And as soon as I got on this treadmill of making stuff for clients and trying to reach this pinnacle of success where I had won or I had achieved what I needed to achieve to be part of the club, I quit enjoying the process. For the longest time in my creative journey, my motivation, my dopamine that I got from the journey of making creative things came from chasing a goal, chasing something to achieve out there on the horizon. But eventually, this became problematic because I wouldn't enjoy the road trip to getting into any of those places.

13:50Or I was just struggling to really see any really juicy, exciting goals that seemed worthwhile. And I realized that I could get that hit, that excitement from not the chase of a goal, but the chase of trying to do something interesting in the creative work itself. and that the intrinsic motivation of trying to achieve creative things in the work was something I could do whether anybody else gave me permission or an opportunity to do so at all. I was actually not bound to wait around for those things to flow into my orbit. I could just play the game all by myself and be pretty much totally satisfied.

14:41I was telling this to my buddy Colin Rigsby, who is a musician, and he said that it reminded him of the philosopher Albert Camus, who talks about rethinking the story of Sisyphus from ancient times. You know, who was cursed by the gods to perpetually forever roll the boulder up the hill. And then it would roll back down and do it all over again until the end of time. And Albert Camus was famous for saying, what if Sisyphus loved this? What if he was happy? What if he was having a blast? What if he loved doing this? That would be a game changer. And this can be true for your creative practice. In fact, before you ever thought about doing this work for anybody else, the reason you wanted to was almost certainly because you loved doing it for its own sake.

15:40And so if you've got to a place where you feel like your game has been ended because there's nothing floating your way, maybe you need to get back in touch with the fact that you have everything you need inside of you, in your own hands to play this game by yourself. And side note, when I made this shift in my own practice, I started to create my own opportunities. I started to create an independent practice that was not as dependent on other people bringing me jobs. things like my online shop or this podcast. And not only that, the work that I was doing for the love of the work was so much better that the opportunities got better too.

16:35That was the true game changer.

16:52This is episode two in the grounding series that we're doing. Episode one, which is episode 486 of this podcast. It was called How to Turn Your Frustrations into Fertilizer in 2025. And we explored in that episode, what do you do when perhaps creatives are being forced underground? and how sometimes it's necessary to continue your work underground. And I'm not saying that if you have lots of work and things are going great for you and you have opportunities and clients and jobs that you should turn away from all those. I'm just saying that when they're not flowing your way, that some of the most interesting, vibrant, creative things come from you continuing the play and making stuff underground and cultivating that creativity and that community, whether any outside external validation comes or not.

18:00And I feel like right now we're in one of those times where some of the most interesting things that are being made are happening independently. We're seeing journalists and cartoonists move away from publications and places like Substack and getting their own support and doing and saying what they feel convicted to say, whether or not the institutions want to support them in doing so. In fact, in some cases, even if the establishment is actively against them doing so. Also, since recording the last episode, I found out that my probably favorite record from 2024, Claro's third album, Charm, which is just amazing.

18:48It's got such a live feeling. It was just produced really well. Just so much really interesting things to say about it. Just love that record. That it was self-released. and I believe it was up for a Grammy and hit the Billboard, I think, top 10. Like, that is an incredible thing. That is incredible news for creative people that the stigma of self-releasing or self-publishing is more or less dead. And that puts more power in creative people's hands today than we've seen in a long time. The point and purpose of this second episode is to continue on that by saying, perhaps if the lack of jobs or opportunities or vibrancy of your scene has got you down, that perhaps you need to make a shift from a finite game perspective where you're constantly trying to win that next thing and achieve that next goal and shift it to a intrinsically motivated, infinite game that you can play whether anybody else says you can or not.

20:05And so what do you do when things get slow or your scene or market or genre has hit a rough patch and things aren't floating your way? You start a solitary game of keepy-uppy. You figure out what game am I playing? What is the game within the game? And you define it and outline it and you get playing on your own and finding the joy within that as the motivating factor in your creative practice. You do what Percival Wilde was getting at when he said that every great art conceals an even greater art. And so maybe you're an illustrator, maybe you're a designer, maybe you're a filmmaker, maybe you're a musician, whatever kind of creative work you do, there is a game within the game.

21:09There is a game beyond the industry. There's a game beyond even writing a song. There is something to go after and to achieve and a balloon to keep up in the air to see if you can continually keep that thing going. And that's what we're going to talk about next. Let's talk about figuring out the rules of your game.

21:53now it's time for your creative call to adventure we try to end every episode of this show with something you can do with these ideas it's not enough for me to just share some ideas i i don't like when you get really jazzed about a new thought but you don't know you're like okay now what? Like I love having something to actively apply ideas that I'm excited about with to somehow. And so we try to leave you with something every episode. The creative call to adventure, the CTA for this week is rules of the game. And I'm going to extend it to rules of the game within the game. What is the game within the game?

22:38Now, the idea of infinite games and finite games. I believe this comes from a bloke named James P. Kars, I believe it is. Yeah, he has a book called Finite and Infinite Games. Simon Sinek went on to write a book called The Infinite Game, which applied these ideas to business and leadership. But they also appear in people's work like Austin Kleon and Steven Pressfield, not by name, but by theory. In one of Austin Kleon's books, I believe it is the book Keep Going. He talks about how from his point of view, creativity isn't a journey, which we talk about the creative journey on this show a lot. But from his point of view, it's not a journey.

23:29It's more like Groundhog's Day. It's like you get up and you more or less do the same thing. You write a song, you write an article, you write a poem, and then you go to sleep and you wake up and you do it again. It's this infinite game is what he's getting at. It's this thing where you want to spend your days doing this craft. And I like to pair this idea with Steven Pressfield. He's the guy who wrote the book, The War of Art. He also has a book called, I think it's called The Artist's Journey. And in that, if I understand the proposal correctly, he's saying that there's essentially two big parts to becoming an artist.

24:15That the first is more or less like a hero's journey where you're really trying to find out what is your art. And that really is a journey. You're trying to find out what is the game that I'm playing. And And then I would propose saying, what is the game within the game? What is the art within the art? And we'll get to what that means in just a second. But Steven Pressfield says, that's the first thing you're doing. Then you're getting to this thing that's the artist journey. And that sounds more like what Austin Kleon is getting at with the Groundhog's Day metaphor. This idea that once you know your game, once you know your craft, then it's not so much about going to some far off destination.

24:55It's more like you're just on a perpetual road trip and you're just consistently enjoying and taking in all the different sites day after day after day as you do this thing. So that's kind of how I think about those frameworks integrating alongside this idea of the infinite game versus the finite game. So I bring all that up because one of the reasons why I couldn't initially embrace this notion of the infinite game approaching creativity as just enjoying making the illustration for the sake of illustration or making the metaphor of the story or the picture book or the podcast for the sake of making it was because I didn't know what my game was.

25:44I didn't know what the game within the game was. I didn't know. I hadn't gone on that hero's journey that Steven Pressfield talks about to find what is my craft, what is the game that I'm playing. I was still searching and experimenting and trying things. And so at the first part of my journey, it made sense to be playing that finite game, to be trying to find those benchmarks, those destinations where I could push myself forward and learn more about what it is I did. Now, I didn't understand that that's what I was doing. But eventually what happened was I started realizing what the game within the game was.

26:29So as I started getting more versed in illustration, I started to understand that illustration was different. It was a different game than what you saw on the surface. On the surface, illustration is just a drawing. It's just a picture. It's making a picture. But the further I went along, the more I realized that illustration was so much more than that. My favorite definition of illustration comes from Yuri Shulovitz, who wrote the book, Writing with Pictures, how to write and illustrate children's books. And that's my favorite definition. Illustration isn't drawing for me. It's writing with pictures.

27:12It's actually telling a story with symbolism, with a punchline, with a purpose, with a point. Illustration does what Paul Clay talks about, where he said art's purpose isn't to reproduce the visible, that would be just a drawing, but to make the invisible scene. The purpose of an illustration is to show you something you couldn't see any other way. Once I started to understand a little bit more of what the definition was, what the game within the game of illustration was, I started to play with symbolism in a totally different way. I started to have an understanding of what I was trying to achieve, not with my illustration career, but within the illustration itself.

27:59I started to have a sense of what was more like a successful illustration and what was more like just a drawing. And the same was true for story. The further I had an understanding of how I defined story, the more the game came to life because I realized like the purpose of the game, what it meant to keep the balloon in the air in the game of story was something very specific. And my definition is kind of a hybrid of Brian McDonald's and Ira Glasses. And I would say that a story for me is a series of events that ends in a surprise. And then I started to, that's the definition. Then I started to outline how do you get there?

28:46What are the pieces that make that up? And so that's what I'm going to challenge you to do today. If you're a songwriter, if you're an illustrator, if you're a designer, whatever you are, Don't stop with that. Don't stop with the title. Don't stop with knowing the game. Understand the game within the game. And that looks like having a definition of what is this game and then having an outline of how do you achieve that thing. If you're a comedian, the game is punchlines. The game is tags. The game is bits. And then maybe part of the game is concealing the game. You know, nowadays, you don't want to show the seams of your joke.

29:26You don't want the audience to know that this is something that you practice and practice and practice and you know exactly what the punchline is. You want them to feel like they're just experiencing something funny. And if you listen to comedians talk, they're aware of the game within the game. Once you start having this clear of a target, once you understand the game that you're playing, You can play that game, whether anybody is watching, whether anybody is desiring you to do this for them. You can do this in your notebook at home. You can write these jokes. You can write these stories. You can write these songs.

30:07I'm moved by people like Sufjan Stevens who has spent a lifetime making music saying like his desire is just to like write the perfect song and he hasn't done it yet. Like that, that's the juicy stuff, man. Like that's what I wanna be doing. And when I shifted the joy, the dopamine chase away from these external markers and these opportunities coming my way and more to what I want to do and achieve and play with in my own creative practice, the better off I was in terms of enjoyment, but also the better the work got. And so my challenge to you is to understand what are the rules of the game within the game?

30:56Define the game, not just with a title, but with a full definition, and then outline what does it look like to succeed in this game? What are the rules of this game? And then get playing on your own. And good things are bound to happen, even if they're just tapping back into your own creative joy.

31:31I hope this episode really lit you on fire for your creative work, even if things are cold on the outside in the market. it. It definitely lights a fire for me. I get so excited talking about this stuff. It's funny, like looking back and I'm thinking about when I was more in a finite game perspective, like it was hard sometimes for me to get myself to do the work, to write the story, to make the pitch, to make the illustrations, whatever. And now the challenge is much more like seeing it through after I've made it. The writing of the story is so satisfying that it almost feels done before I even pitch it or put it out.