488 - Frozen During Slow Times? How to Activate Self Starter Energy

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 pimp song.

0:20Do you struggle to make things when nobody is asking you to? When no one's hiring you, when no one's telling you what to make, when no one's commissioning you? Do you struggle to find the motivation to make stuff? It's tough. How do you know what to make work about? Do you struggle with getting started because you feel like you gotta have a huge idea before you start working? If that's you, this episode is for you because I have designed this episode to transform you into the type of creator that can instantaneously, effortlessly generate stuff, substance, creative work. In fact, this episode isn't gonna transform you at all.

1:04It's just going to show you that you already have everything you need within you to effortlessly generate substance and plot and characters and metaphor. Stick until the very end for a technique we're calling Visit the Sandman that will help you effortlessly, instantaneously generate creative work that you have self-authored today. But first, let's talk about how the real problem isn't that you don't know what to make, but that you're sitting around waiting for a day that's never going to come if all you're doing is sitting around waiting and not creating. Let's go.

1:55The cold is here. I used to hate the cold weather until I started to embrace it, dress for it, build a wardrobe of layers that were made for the season. And that is where Quince comes in. They've got down jackets, wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that holds up to daily wear and still looks good. Quince uses premium materials and trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. but because they cut out the middlemen, they can deliver the quality of luxury brands for a fraction of the price and bring you classic styles that you'll love and will hold up year after year.

2:34Still loving my Quince button-down shirt. I feel very legitimate when I wear it. I have been eyeing their affordable cashmere collection for Sophie's birthday that's coming up. Don't tell her that. And we got Quince's European linen sheet set. And let me tell you, nearly every night when we go to bed, Sophie says, I love these sheets. It's like our new nighttime ritual. They're soft, cozy, and the material just feels real and whole and homey. Very cozy for winter nights. Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash pep talk for free shipping on your order in 365 day returns.

3:13Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash P-E-P-T-A-L-K. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash pep talk.

3:33I used to think that the reason why it was so hard to get myself to create something on my own accord without anybody asking me to, without any commission, was because I just didn't know what to make. Like I just didn't know, I couldn't come up with compelling ideas. But over time, I have realized that the biggest obstacle that stops me from making something just for myself, just because I believe that I have something to say, the thing that stops me isn't that I don't have an idea or a compelling idea, but rather that I just don't believe in me, that I just don't know if I have characters and plots and metaphors and meaning in me.

4:34And it makes it so that it's a lot easier to just create when someone else sees those things in me and brings me a commission or brings me a job or asks me to create something for a client. And for a long time, that was true. I needed that external validation to get up and go and start making stuff. You have to have some level of validation. And if you don't have that external one, you've got to be your own validation. You've got to be the one that says, look, I think you should spend some time putting some of this stuff onto the page. I think you've got some of these characters and plots and metaphors and meaning that you need to get out and put onto a page.

5:24You should spend time doing that. You should do that. I'm validating that. And you have to do that for yourself. And that's pretty difficult. And so it wasn't that I didn't have ideas. It wasn't that I just couldn't think of what to draw. It was that I didn't believe in myself enough to give myself the validation, to give myself the time to try to put that stuff onto paper. And when I was first starting out, or even now, if I get stuck, really stuck while I'm trying to be creative, sometimes I'll just stop and go take a nap. And I have a lot of dreams. Supposedly, we all do, whether we remember them or not.

6:07And one reoccurring nightmare that I've had often in my creative practice, as I've had a creative practice, is this dream where I'm like on vacation and I know that we have a flight coming up and I feel like we're going to miss it. And all the people in my party, my wife and my kids and my in-laws and then these other people that don't really exist, they're all like not taking this seriously. Like we got to go. We're like, oh my gosh, we're going to miss the flight. And I usually have those dreams when I'm under a tight deadline that I'm worried about missing. So I think it's kind of just a metaphor for that.

6:50But that's one of the most reoccurring – this missing the flight dream is one of the most reoccurring dreams I'll have. And I'm fascinated by dreams. I was recently in a situation where I had to pause and reflect on why do I like dreams so much. I'd always just been fascinated with them and never really stopped to think about why. It's held my attention for most of my life. And I realized, I think that dreams are such undeniable validation in your ability to be creative. Even with that stupid flight dream that I have, there it is instantaneously, effortlessly, characters, a plot, a metaphor, a meaning, all there.

7:45and I'm capable of doing that in my sleep. Sometimes when I think about taking on a creative project, I think, well, maybe even if I do have it in me, I don't know if I can put the time and effort and the slog that it would take to get that stuff out of me. And yet here dreams are proving that you can do this instantaneously. You can create worlds instantaneously. You can effortlessly create characters and stories and plots and metaphors. It's so natural for you to create and generate like this. You can literally do it in your sleep.

8:42So the point of this episode is to say that the problem that you're facing in your creative practice truly isn't that you don't have anything good to make or you can't think of what to make or that you're not good enough. but that you don't believe in your goodness enough to validate yourself by spending the time with your butt in the chair making the work. Because if you believed that you had something to contribute, if you had enough of that faith and belief, you would put in the time to get it out there into the world. And this is so essential to this podcast. I've been thinking recently, you know, we hit 10 years of the show.

9:36We're almost to 500 episodes of Creative Pep Talk. And so I've just been kind of reflective, indulging a little bit in a little reflection about what is this show about? You know, I had intentions of what it was going to be about. what did it end up being about over time? What was the purpose that emerged as I made all these episodes? And I think ultimately, it all comes back to the same most deeply held value that I have, which I mentioned in a recent episode, which is you are a good thing. You're a uniquely good thing that deserves to be cultivated and the world would be better off if you took the time to cultivate that thing that's inside of you and get it outside of you and put it out into the world.

10:26That's what creativity is to me. That's the point of it. That's what we're doing when we're making creative stuff at its best. And back last year in the spring, we did a whole series called Right Side Out, starting on episode 479. I think you meant episode 449. And I was telling my story and how I came to earn this perspective, this value that I'm not a bad thing that needs to be overcome, but I've learned to embrace this positive psychology that says I am a good thing. I've got some rough edges. I've got some things to work out. I've got some things I got to work on, but that work isn't overcoming or repressing.

11:09That work is a cultivation of me, of the basic goodness of who I am. and who you are. And that's at the center of this. And that goodness is a uniqueness too. And so whatever flavor of neurodivergence you have, because there is no average brain, we're all different in varying degrees, whatever flavor that is, that's actually a good thing. And the work to be done is to cultivate it, not to overcome it. And this becomes essential as a foundation to your creative practice because the conclusion of that story, that Right Side Out series, that project, was essentially if you want to love the creative work that you make, it starts with loving yourself because creative work is self-expression and you're never going to love that expression if you hate the thing that it's an expression of, which is yourself.

12:11and so that's where it starts for me if you're going to be an artist i think you've got to you've got to have some even if it's really deep in there even if it's really hidden under tons of self-loathing and self-deprecating uh underneath all of that has to be something that says there's something in here that i want to put out there for a reason and that's at the core of getting yourself to do the work. That's at the core of not waiting for someone else to validate you and to validate yourself long enough to get yourself the space and time to put yourself onto a page or into a song or into a movie.

13:01Now, I don't know this author. Back when I was on TikTok, this just popped up in my feed. And she's a, I think she's a, she seems like a very successful self-published author. I think she's done some traditionally published stuff as well. I believe her name is Fagan Chelsea or maybe Chelsea Fagan. Maybe that was just the username. But I'll put a link to this video in the show notes. And she did, I don't, I think she coined this term, this idea of institutional validation. And she was making an argument for why you should seriously consider validating yourself, putting out your own albums, even if you have the option to do it traditionally.

13:43So I've put out some things self-published. I've put out some things traditionally. I still will do both for different reasons. Some of the stuff I've put out traditionally has been a huge win and blessing in all kinds of ways. Some of the things I've done self-published has been the same, and I do so for different reasons. But the thing I would want to tell my past self is there is a huge benefit that you're not going to get to a place where you have those options if you don't believe in yourself and validate you before any other institution or any other person or any other gatekeeper validates you.

14:22That that is essential to you getting to a place where you have those options. And even after you have those options, my message to myself in the mirror today is you can choose to do this yourself whenever necessary. And it's good to remember that. It's good to remember that you don't need someone else to say, hey, that's a good idea you've got in there. You can actually do that for yourself.

15:05I am a huge fan of craft. I am a huge believer in the notion that the best work that you ever do will have a pendulum swing between really working on it, really wrestling with it, gut churn, working with it like it's a puzzle to solve, and then completely letting go. Or starting out letting go and just like stumbling into it and then putting in the time and the work. I actually think some of the most fun aspects of making creative work is learning to see some of the struggle as like you're a wrestler. The fun in the job is the wrestling, is the struggle, is the working with it and messing with it and really putting the energy into it.

15:57It doesn't need to be effortless to be fun. Like any sport I've ever played, the most fun was when we were working the hardest. And I actually think great creative practice is a pendulum that swings between these two things. I give that as a disclaimer because I want to, for a second, talk about the effortless side and why that side is so essential. And it's what I love about dreams is that you can do this in your sleep. You can generate and create characters and plots and meaning and metaphor. That's the thing I like about dream work the most. I'd love to believe. I'd love. And sometimes I can get myself to believe that these dreams that we have are sometimes coming from a mystical place that are giving you secret instructions from the universe about your purpose here on the planet.

16:46I love that. I could do, baby, I love it. I'll take it. Man, please. When I feel that, I'm loving it. But I'm not always so sure about that. And I don't know if all of them are that, even if some of them are. But what I am sure of is the more I've worked with my dreams and learned ways of doing that, the more I've seen like these metaphors are there. I think what it is, and this is based on research and theories on what dreams are. We still don't really know. There are a lot of ideas and theories around it. But we think that part of it is like a deeper self, meaning an older self that evolved prelingual before we could talk, before we had language.

17:33and it's really just a symbolic manifestation of what's going on inside of you, including how you're feeling subconsciously. And so I love tapping into it because it gets me past my ego of what I think is happening or would like to think was happening with me and to the root of what's going on. But even more than that, as a creative person, what I've loved is the more I've worked with it, the more I've learned how to parse out some of the metaphor of it is that it has proven to me that I am able to instantaneously, effortlessly create metaphor. And I like this idea that dreams really are your unconscious self writing poems about how you're truly feeling to your ego, to your conscious self.

18:23It's beautiful. I love it. It's one of my favorite things about being alive. But it's proof and it's validation that even if you don't remember your dreams, you almost certainly are having them. And they are validation of your effortless ability to generate. And I bring that up because I think this effortless component of creativity is such an essential part of creating substance in your work, just effortlessly putting yourself in your work. I watched this little interview with Taika Waititi, a filmmaker who made Thor, Ragnarok, and one of my all-time faves, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. I like his sense of humor and the drama and the heart that's in it.

19:10He balances those two things so well in some of those films. But he talks about how when he's coaching actors as a director, he's trying to get them to just be themselves. Say this line, even if it's a funny line, even if it's a comedy moment, say it like you believe it, like commit to it. Like this is not you being funny. This is you being serious. And that's the funniest you could be. And it reminds me of in my life, the funniest I can be in my day to day is to just let myself externalize what's going on on the inside. That I remember one random time I'm at the eye doctor and I'm thinking about this.

19:53and I just thought, I'm going to just vocalize most of my thoughts as dumb as they are. And she moved this big eye doctor machinery and it made this sound. And I said, and I just instantly was like, sounds like Chewbacca. Not a super, it's not super funny, but I got to laugh, okay? Then I wasn't trying to have a laugh. I was literally just trying to be me, just trying to externalize the thing that was going on inside. And I have been really working on valuing my own experience enough to train my brain to notice when I'm having a reaction or a thought and put that down and just trust that the thing that is interesting about the work is just my unique perspective.

20:42not only how I can work it into something, how I can wrestle it into art, but really just the perspective. And when I had Catherine May on recently, she said something that really brought this up for me, which was, it's not often the clever stuff and the really overworked stuff that really hits home with people. It's the stuff where she was just able to say her experience exactly like it was. Her thought, her feeling, her take on what had happened or where she was as just plainly and as vulnerably as possible. And it really reminded me, it put this kind of macho, clever, overworked side of my creative practice in check.

21:29And it also reminded me of, I think I brought it up in this interview, Mike Birbiglia on his Working It Out podcast talked about a similar thing of one of the most essential parts of being a comedian is just having and spending time with comedy friends because they noticed what is funny about you. They will notice which of your thoughts are just like askew and weird and novel and funny. And that stuff is the water that you swim in as a fish. You are not going to notice the most unique idiosyncratic elements of what makes your perspective funny or interesting or deep or unusual. And that unusual quality, that's the creativity.

22:12That's the good stuff. And so that's that effortless stuff that we're looking for. And so in this episode, I'm encouraging you, if you don't get anything else, get this. I'm encouraging you to trust that that is enough to at least get started. You can work later, but if you will just effortlessly generate, that is enough to get moving. You don't need an institution to validate you. You don't need me to validate you. You just need your dreams, your thoughts, your feelings. All of that stuff is generated without effort. And if you will capture some of that stuff, it will be the basis for the book or the album or the film.

23:00It'll be everything you need to get started today.

23:21We're going to get to the call to adventure in just a second, but I just wanted to say one more thing about that. essentially what I'm saying in this episode is you are enough you in your work putting it into the art that's enough for it to be interesting because you are interesting you are unique in all of the universe and there literally will never be another one like you I know you've heard that before but that's not just a platitude. That's a fact. I looked it up because I was like, is it true? How unique are we? Just the way that I think how it works is that DNA code is so complex. And if you map that over human evolution, how long it would take for that to be repeated, it could never be repeated because by that time we will have evolved into something different that wouldn't have that type of code.

24:24And I feel like it's maybe a bit redundant to even just, it feels a bit pedantic to even go there. But for me, that's something juicy. Like just being you, just effortlessly being you is enough to make your work unique and interesting. And all you've got to do is believe it long enough to sit in that chair and do it. All right, the creative call to adventure. Let's do something with this, man. You know, every episode we try to end with something where you don't just feel great about, like, I'm excited about doing something, but actually getting you to do something, a small win that helps get the ball rolling, right?

25:08So in this one, we're gonna do what's called Visit the Sandman. And I'm excited about this one. I'm not gonna lie. visit the Sandman. I don't mean Adam Sandler. Don't go try to, you know, Hollywood stars map him and figure out where he lives. I'm not suggesting it. I'm not even talking about Adam Sandler. I'm saying the Sandman, you know, the guy they say comes into your room and gets you to go to sleep. I don't, it's weird. Why would we tell anybody this? Hopefully we don't tell kids that anymore. It's strange, but the Sandman, he comes in and Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream. that's the idea so here's what I recommend I would recommend you put the sand in the sandbox you put that effortless ability to generate into a sandbox that is a piece of art or is a song or whatever it is you make and you do it effortlessly you just start the dumbest idea the first idea doesn't matter what it is just put it down and see where it goes Now, this is a riff on something that Judd Apatow, the filmmaker, talks about.

26:20He talks about how the first draft is really you're just putting sand into the sandbox. After the first draft, you can construct something. You can build a sandcastle with it. And I saw something recently. I don't know where this quote comes from, but it's this idea of the first thing is to do it. The second thing is to like wrestle with it, craft it. And the third thing you do with the third draft is to make it good. And I saw also Tamey Coker, who is a past guest on this show, posted something that was similar to that on Substack. That it was a post-it note that said, just make it exist first.

27:01You can make it good later. Now, I'm not saying that that's the only way to make stuff. I'm actually a huge believer in plotting and not just pantsing of strategic creativity, coming up with something that you really want to say and then building out an outline and then doing the first draft. That's a great way to create something. What I'm saying is if you feel stuck and you don't know what to make or you don't know what your work is about or what the next thing you make, like the point or the meaning of it is that you can just barf out a first draft and just let it be what it's going to be. I just did a comic that I posted on Substack that started with just the feeling of it being rough to go back to work after taking some time off.

27:49And with no idea of what the punchline would be, what the point of it would be, I just did two panels of a character getting up and then putting their socks on and trying to go back to work. And I won't give it away. You can go annijpizza.substack.com. It's on my Instagram too. I don't know if it'll be worth the payoff. It's a dumb joke. But that was an example of just putting sand in the sandbox and being like, okay, well, what's funny about this or what could be what could be next. And I really liked it. But the same was true for my Invisible Things project. When I started that, I was literally just putting characters on a page for a year.

28:33And I didn't know what it was. I didn't know it was Invisible Things. I didn't know what the point of it was. I had a vague sense and I had just work. I just did work. And then later it got shaped into a castle. And then later we shaped it into a book. It was never an actual castle, a sandcastle. And so that's what I'm recommending you do. Just make something, just start drawing, just let, do the John Mayer Ouija board creativity, let the paintbrush go where it wants to go. You can make it into something later. That's my recommendation. And the only way you're going to do that is to believe that you're enough, that you are interesting enough, you are generative enough.

29:17Your perspective is worth sharing. And I deeply believe those things and encourage you to do the same even if nobody else does. Because if you do that, one day those institutions and gatekeepers may start to believe in you and validate you. And if you have done that for yourself long enough, you will be in the position that you should be in, which is walkaway power, because you already know this. You don't need them to tell you this. What you need them to do is their part of the bargain, which is why ever agree to work with them in the first place? Maybe it's distribution, maybe it's collaboration.

30:04There's a lot of reasons to work with people outside of yourself. But one of them doesn't need to be just being validated. You don't need someone to say, let's put this on the fridge. No, you put it on your own damn fridge.