495 - 3 Steps To Get Un-Lost As A Creative

0:02on the creative journey it's easy to get lost but don't worry you'll lift off sometimes you just needs a creative pizza.

0:20What's up y 'all? It's me, Andy J. Pizza coming at you with a new episode. Today on the show, I'm going to talk about when you feel lost on your creative journey. Okay. This is a feeling that when I first started this podcast, I didn't know if other people felt this way, but it's a topic we've explored on the show a handful of times. And it seems like, from what I can tell on this side of the screen, that I'm not the only one. And this feeling of being lost is very disconcerting. It is panic-inducing because you don't want to do anything. You don't want to move because when you're lost, if you're actually lost, like in the woods or somewhere.

1:09Every step you take is filling you with anxiety because you don't know if you're getting further away from where you want to be or closer to where you want to be. That's the feeling of being lost. It makes you paralyzed in analysis and it's a terrible place to be. Now, when I think about being creatively lost in my own creative path, it has a very particular feeling. And the only way I can really think about it is comparing it to the opposite feeling, which is the place that I love to be, which is just feeling like I am right on the freaking creative trail, man. I am like locked in to what I feel I should be doing.

1:56Like things are coming together. There's synchronicities, there's breakthroughs. I'm making stuff I'm proud of. Like it seems to be connecting with people and I feel like I'm on the pulse of what I'm supposed to be all about. And that is an incredible feeling. And if you've ever felt it, then you know when you lose the pulse, when you get far off the trail, when all of a sudden you're like, dude, we're jamming, we're going, and then all of a sudden the flow starts to slow and you don't feel like you've got it anymore. And it's a scary place. And you can scramble and you can backpedal and you can, there's all kinds of things that, you know, you can get into this survival mode, the fight, flight, freeze, fawn, beg the universe, like, please help me, I need to get back.

2:51But I have found that there's three things that really do help me when I find myself in that spot spot that I hate being in, which is feeling lost creatively. And I thought this episode, we're going to go through those three and I'll give you some ideas on how to think about it. And at the end, I'm going to come back with a CTA called Phone a Friend. And we're going to talk about something you can do absolutely the second after you quit listening to this episode. I hope that you take that phone and pick it up and call somebody. And I'll tell you how I would approach that.

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5:13so the first one is the first thing that helps me get unlost is admitting it now this you know the worst thing you can do when you're lost is to just pretend like you're not one of the things that inspires me the most as a creator is the way that Pixar goes about making their creative endeavors. One of the things that's just like, I don't even know if Pixar has ever had a movie that isn't certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Like that is a serious track record. I could be wrong about that. They might have the odd one that is, but I don't know. I can't think of one off the top of my head that wasn't at least good.

6:05And then they have a ton of greats in there too. And from the outside, it's easy to look at creators like Pixar and think they never miss, man. Like they are flying from one hit to the next to the next. But if you are a bit of a fanboy and you take a look below the surface a bit, you're going to see that that's not flying from hit to hit. That's not flying at all. It is as Buzz Lightyear would say himself, it's falling with style. And the reason it is is because they don't just bang out stellar screenplays one after the next. They actually fail over and over and over again. they have so many stories of writing a full movie like storyboarding it doing these screenings and then going back to the drawing board being like this is a stinker man in fact toy story 2 was i think originally going to be uh made for tv movie um that kind of thing and when it got really close to being done they were like we can't even put our name to this we hate it they started from scratch And they became, in my point of view, one of the first great sequels.

7:23Now, yes, we had Star Wars, the second movie, hailed as like one of the greatest ones in that whole franchise, but it's really rare. And then Pixar went on to do that a bunch of times. And it kind of changed how I felt about sequels, how the society maybe embraced sequels, maybe to the detriment of society now that we're sequel, prequel, threequel, drowning. But either way, they did something that felt like it couldn't be done. And they didn't do it by flying hit after hit. They did it by failing with style, falling with style, admitting like, hey, oh, this isn't working. Back to square one. This isn't working.

8:04Back to square one. And so the first thing I think you have to do is admit it. When you feel lost, don't just keep swimming in the words of Dory from another Pixar film. Don't keep swimming. Pause. Admit it. Be like, okay, this doesn't feel right anymore. This doesn't feel good. That's the first thing that really I think is really essential in getting unlost. the second thing that i think is an absolute uh must in staying unlost as much as possible in your creative journey is embracing the lost okay it is part of the process one of the worst things you can do when you're lost is to think oh no i did something wrong i'll never get back like oh i'm doing it wrong oh why does this happen to me there's something broken about the way that i'm engaging my creativity.

9:01Like why? For me, a much more productive attitude and relationship with lost is knowing that this is part of the journey. In fact, that being lost is essential to doing anything creative. The whole idea is that you are charting a path. you're not supposed to stay on the trail. And I think about how, you know, if you are just a casual consumer of creativity, that's like you're going on a trail in the woods and you want to see those little painted marks on the trees that say you are on the trail. But if you're a trail blazer, those marks say that you are playing it too safe and they actually should make you feel uncomfortable.

9:57And so the whole idea that doing creative work right would mean never getting lost is antithetical to the whole idea of what it means to be creative. It's to risk, it's to try things. Back in the day, a friend of a friend reached out. His name is Andy Mineo. He is a rapper who talks about faith and he's really funny and he's got a bunch of great songs. I didn't know him at the time. And a friend of a friend kind of connected us. He ended up being on the show years ago and we've kind of just stayed in touch. I think he's a really creative dude and has some great songs and also is just a funny guy who I love having chats with.

10:47but he has at the start of one of his songs he has this little ep called lost and at the start of one of his songs i think it's uh the song clarity he says this he's like you have to realize that being lost is just part of the journey like that is an essential part and so if you can embrace it you can actually you don't you don't have if you don't embrace it you're going to get into the fight or flight. And all of that survival energy, survival reaction is the opposite of your creative brain state. And not only that, I'm also really fascinated by this idea of good stress versus bad stress. I recommend you look this up.

11:35Bad stress being stress, good stress being you stress EU stress and they're completely different your body metabolizes these things completely differently we actually you know when they first started doing research around stress they kind of felt like all right stress is bad it's killing people it's destroying people's hearts and brains and it's leading to chronic illness like we've got to get less stressed man Everyone just chill out, slow it down. And that's kind of good advice, I think, to our country in general. However, it's not as simple as that because the further they looked into it, they realized like actually there's a type of stress that is really, really essential to well-being.

12:25And it's this eustress. And then the kicker, the absolute mind boggler for me is that the difference between bad stress and good stress isn't like what you're doing or the circumstance that you're in necessarily, but a huge part of what's the difference between these two things is not the what, but how you engage with it. if you resist the stress, if you resist the challenge, it will become bad stress in your body. But if you can reframe it and have a different mindset, if you can figure out a way to embrace the challenge that you are in, that stress can turn into eustress. That is the difference between good stress and bad stress.

13:20And so when you get lost, when you're starting to feel like I've lost the plot, I've lost the trail, I don't know what I'm doing, I used to feel like I was right in the sweet spot making stuff that I was proud of, making stuff that connected, I was growing on this platform, I was making sales, whatever it was, the worst thing you could do is to stress about it in a way that is resisting the spot that you're in. And if instead you can see like, oh, being out in the wilderness is like the name of the game, like being lost, getting lost, getting confused, letting yourself wonder. That is not, yes, it's uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean that you aren't being creative.

14:12It doesn't mean that you've lost the creative thread. It actually is just part of the pendulum swing, the ebb and flow of being a creative. If you're not getting lost, you're not doing it right. One thing we like to say on this show is this idea of our island. What do you expect? This is the thing I say to myself. And it comes from an episode we did a long time ago. And it's about how at the time I was watching this History Channel show called Oak Island, where they're looking for treasure in, I think, Nova Scotia. I don't know. It's been a minute since I've watched the show. And it's the Lagina brothers.

14:56And they're putting all their life's fortune into trying to find this missing treasure off the coast of Canada on this island called Oak Island, where supposedly the Templars or the Romans or the Vikings or the Spanish buried some treasure. Who knows? It's interesting. And it's also pretty funny. But one of the things that just absolutely blew my mind and it completely changed how I saw challenges like feeling lost in the creative journey was that when they would be digging or looking for treasure, if they ran into a massive problem, if they ran into what seemed like a booby trap, like something that was trying to stop them, they didn't get upset.

15:50They didn't shrink. They didn't pull away and resist. they saw it as a sign that they were on the right track. Because if there are booby traps, there's got to be treasure. You don't set up booby traps unless you're trying to keep someone out. And so it's helped me develop this idea of no booby traps, no treasure. And when I hit challenge, when I feel lost, I have trained my brain to be like, boom exactly means i'm trying new things it means i'm i'm exploring new territory it means i'm not doing the easy route the the route that's paved i'm trying something different and it's led me to a place where i have got myself lost and i and i've trained myself to say what they say which is when they hit a buoy trap or a some kind of roadblock they would say oak island like what do you expect?

16:53Like this thing is littered with booby traps. Like that's the name of the game. Oak Island, what do you expect? And so I say to myself, Art Island, what do you expect? You expect it to be easy? You expect it to be a paint by numbers? Like that's not what this thing is. And so I, when I find myself lost, I try to, I try to remember that that is the name of the game and embrace it. The third, the third thing is get moving, get moving. This is a huge and I could explore this for a long time. We'll probably come back to it, but

17:33when you're lost as a kid, what do they tell you to do? You know, I got lost at Walgreens once when I was a kid and it was so scary, man. I was probably like five years old, took a wrong turn down the wrong aisle. I couldn't, you know, I was probably in that scenario where my dad and I are both looking for each other, but we're just missing each other, like going throughout the whole store. And I was freaking out. And I remembered what they tell you to do when you're a kid and you get lost. What do they tell you to do? They say, stay put because it makes it easier for people to find you. Because when you're moving and they're moving, you're missing each other over and over again.

18:14And you might end up leaving the store or thinking, oh, what if they're gone? You end up just making the radius of the search wider and wider and wider. And it makes it more and more impossible to find you. And so what do they say? They say, stay put and wait for someone to come find you. And that is great advice. If you're a kid and your parent is looking for you at Walgreens, that is not good advice. If you are a creator or a creative person, because no one is coming to find you. They don't even know you exist. And I don't even mean as a person. I mean, if you are on your path as a creator, if you are trying to unlock a type of creativity that only you can deliver, people don't know to look for it because it's never existed before.

19:14And not only that, I think we have this idea of this, I have this fantasy of the fairy art mother, this idea that someone's just going to come and discover my natural talent that's latent, the diamond in the rough, just like something I didn't even know I could do. And someone's going to just see it in me while I'm pumping gas or whatever. Like I have always wanted that moment of Hagrid showing up and being like, you're a creative wizard. Like I, it's just a, I don't know what it is. And I don't think I'm alone in this. we want to be scouted for our talent. But the fact of the matter is, not only has that always been mostly a fantasy because it's like winning the lottery that your paths cross with somebody who could recognize some latent talent that you're not even developing or putting out there in the world.

20:08Not only was that always kind of a fantasy, it's even more of a fantasy now in the age where publishers and record labels wait for you to prove that you've got something worthwhile before they give you a deal. Wait for you to drum up and build connections with an audience before they even swoop in and support you. And so it's never been more of a fantasy. But it's a very attractive, tempting way to play it. But the fact of the matter is, you can't stay put. No one's coming to find you. Now, just a little side road to kind of illustrate this a little bit. Some story time. Story time. Okay. When I was in middle school, I lived in Western New York and I lived there for three years and a series of things happen to where I ended up being one of the popular kids and I had all these friends and I had never been happier.

21:19I had these close friends who I just loved and it just felt amazing. And so when we ended up moving back to Indiana but into a totally different zone and school system far away from anyone that I knew. We moved back when I was a couple months already into high school. And so when I got there, the people that hadn't already made their friends and clicks in middle school had also quickly paired off at the beginning of high school just to find the strength in numbers. And I was coming in in like October and just nobody was looking for, no one was recruiting new friends. And I had to eat lunch by myself.

22:05And I did that for several days, just like sat at this, in this island alone, just miserable, embarrassed. It was just brutal. and then one day one of the popular girls who was kind of cut from a different cloth i think she ended up in the peace corps just a really like generous sweet person came over and invited me to the popular table and i don't know if her friends were down with this or not but uh i was like yes i will please like this is it like everything's coming back i'm gonna be popular again and i'm embarrassed of this story by the way this is a vulnerable story it's embarrassing to admit at any age that you wish you were popular.

22:50But there's a point. So I went and sat with the popular kids and it was awkward and weird. But from that moment, I thought, okay, I've got to be one of these popular kids. I've got because I'm depressed and I'm struggling and this worked before, I need to do it again. And so I spent the next two years, freshman and sophomore year, really trying to become the kind of person that was popular. This was, this meant, you know, changing the music I listened to. I grew up listening to R &B and rap and all the popular kids listened to Dave Matthews and John Mayer and OAR and all this stuff, Jack Johnson.

23:30And I really hated it, but I listened to it because I thought that's what I got to do. And I dressed differently and I went and watched sports, which I hated to do. And I just completely changed who I was. And eventually I was kind of, you know, part of the popular group. I still think it was kind of like being the water boy or the towel boy for the basketball team. Like, I don't think I was on the team, but I was in the team. I was there. And the only problem was I was absolutely miserable. I hated being part of this crew. not because they were bad people, because they just weren't my people.

24:11I wasn't anything like these people. And then I look back at the middle school years and I realized like, I wasn't happy because I was popular. I was happy because I had friends that I clicked with, that I liked. They were my people. Now, when I was in middle school, the way that I got into the popular group was a complete prank and fluke. In sixth grade, when I moved there, one of the most popular girl's friends asked me out for her, asked me if I wanted to be her friend's boyfriend. And I said, yes. I was like, cool. Yeah. That's great. I don't think I even had a sense of like what that means at that age.

25:01And we did end up going out, which meant like I borrowed a pencil from her in math a couple times. And I think we spoke on the phone once and it was awkward and terrible. But that was the extent of being boyfriend, girlfriend in sixth grade. Come to find out way after this happened and I became a popular kid overnight because of this. Come to find out later that that was a prank. That was kind of a mean girl prank that this friend asked me out for her, even though she didn't want to go out with me. And it was just to tease the new kid. But the girl that I dated, quote unquote, dated, never wanted to go out with me, but was just too nice of a person to break my heart when I said yes.

25:52And so it was all a lie. It was all a sham, my popularity in middle school. But when I look back at those two occurrences, I'm glad that I not only said yes to the first girl that ended up in me being popular, but also to the second girl who invited me to the lunch table, even though it meant wasting a couple years of my life. in a way. I mean, who doesn't waste their freshman and sophomore year in some way or another. But I'm glad that I said yes to that adventure, yes to the action, yes to the story, because guess what? I learned something really valuable about being at the popular table is that it doesn't matter if these are not the people that you want to sit with, if these are not the people that you want to talk with.

26:48And you might think like, Andy, I don't know if you know this, but high school was 20 years ago now for you. Like, did you really need to learn that lesson? Well, yeah, because I don't know if you know this, but illustration conferences, design conferences, clicks online, There are still popular tables no matter where you go. And the temptation to fall into that hierarchy climbing is just such a pull. And look, I'm the first to admit it, but I know that you feel it from time to time. And you probably learned one way or another that it's a waste of time if you don't actually want to be at that table.

27:39And so I'm glad that I learned it. and I learned it by saying yes. I learned it by taking action. I learned it by going through it. And this is, for me, what I realized, the worst thing I can do if I'm lost is to stay put and do nothing. The worst thing I can do is just sit and wait. The worst thing I could do is not do the wrong thing, but to do nothing. and there's this whole idea in psychoanalysis that I've ran into. It's called the Puerh Eternis or the Puella Eternis and it's this idea of the forever child and the Peter Pan syndrome, if you will, the kid that doesn't want to grow up and the kid that stays at that lunch table alone because he's not sure if it's right to say yes to go sit at the popular table, that kid that stays alone doing nothing in their own island, that is the Peter Pan.

28:49And it's tempting. It's more tempting than it might seem. And it's this idea that when you look out into the possibilities of your future and you get paralyzed in your analysis of all the possibilities, it can feel like a better plan than to collapse all those possibilities into one reality if that reality is wrong. But here's the thing. If you choose a path, if you take action, Yes, for a period of time, if you do a project, if you commit to going to school, if you take a job, whatever it is, if you commit to one path for a period of time, yes, the possibilities for that freshman, sophomore year, yes, the possibilities for that six months or year, whatever commitment length it is, yes, the possibilities are going to collapse from infinity into that one reality.

29:54But if you don't say yes, those infinite possibilities are going to collapse into no reality, into nothing. Because doing nothing is also a decision. And for me, I have found that when I'm lost, what I need to do is I need to come up with a hypothesis. emphasis, I need to create a project, you know, big or small, the right length of how sure am I that this is the right way? You know, am I sure enough to make one piece of work in this direction? Or am I sure enough to commit to a six-week project where I make a piece every week? Or am I sure enough to where I'm going to do 50 in this direction?

30:43I'm going to do a whole gallery show. I'm going to do a whole podcast, like whatever it is. You know, don't bite off more than you can chew, but I try to make a small bet, a small commitment in that direction and not learn by overthinking, but learn by taking action because even the wrong path is a more powerful set of data than doing nothing. And so that's the third bet. Get moving, get doing, take action. That's where you're going to find the answers.

31:33This is your creative call to adventure. Every episode, we try to leave you with one thing that you can actively go out there and do, not just like think, oh, that was cool, good, back to being lost in the creative wilderness. No, do something right now. After you stop listening to this show, here's what I want you to do. Phone a friend. Phone a friend. I don't care if it's your mom, your dad, your brother, your friend from high school, whoever it is, phone a friend. Maybe it's your spouse. Maybe it's your kid. Sometimes I talk to my 16-year-old about stuff I'm working through. Just kind of give her a slice of like what I'm going through, you know, if it's a problem that feels not too heavy.

32:16if it's a creative problem, phone a friend. At the very least, phone yourself. Get on the voice memo app and just take a walk and just dump it out. But I highly recommend that you do this. And the thinking here is, you know, I'm this ADHD person who forgets to charge their phone, forgets to check where they're going, gets lost on tangents. I've been lost as an adult more than most people ever were lost as a child, okay? I can get really easily lost. I've told stories of being lost on this podcast many times. You've heard them if you're a longtime listener. I'm not going to tell them again. But what I will tell you is this.