496 - How to Know What to Start, Continue, Double Down On or Quit

0:02on the creative journey it's easy to get lost but don't worry you lift off sometimes you just need

0:20Are you overwhelmed in your creative practice? Because if you're not, can you tell us your secret? Why are you doing this in this day and age? If you're not a bit overwhelmed, honestly, I would be very surprised because we are just going through rapid changes, both in the online space and how things are organized and what just the world is going through a lot of chaos. Technology is just disrupting things dramatically for lots of people and most creative people I know. If you're not feeling some level of overwhelm, what is your secret? I am feeling overwhelmed, of course. but I want to share a tool that really helps me find some clarity and a little bit of relief from that deep overwhelm and at the end of this episode if you stay all the way to the end I'm going to give you this thing it's a grid that will help you have this really clear overview of your creative practice and it will help you know what part of it desperately needs attention today.

1:34And so stay to the end. I'll give you that. But the first thing we have to do is organize the parts of this mess.

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3:27you know, when we think about our creative practice and things get really, really messy, that's when we feel the overwhelm. That's when we feel like we need to change something. We need to do something. Yeah. Uh, that is because of that mess. Now at home, uh, I am ADHD. We have a pretty neurodivergent household. Um, we don't do things, uh, like type a sort of people. And so So sometimes, often, our house will get a bit chaotic. It'll get a bit of a mess. And on the weekend, we're going to have to take some extra time to get it back to square one. And so when that happens, it used to be when I was a younger father of three, I would just be like, guys, come on.

4:14We got to, what are we doing? Good God, look at this room. like just panic, just panic, move through the room, thinking through the house, thinking that that's going to help something. And it didn't. And what I eventually realized was if I took 10 minutes just to organize the chaos, just to take, go, I just go through the main levels of our house, main level of our house and find this is this kid's stuff. This is this kid's stuff. That's that kid stuff. And just put them on in little piles on the kitchen table. And I call it table chore. And you're free to steal it. You know, me, I'm not a master organizer.

4:58I'm an ADHD chaos gremlin. So I don't really think I need to be giving anybody advice on this. But in case you're also one of those types of goblin, gremlin people, parents, maybe this will help you too. But here's what I do. I just take 15 minutes. It takes me almost no time. and I just go through the level and I just separate into three piles, one for each kid. And then I say, all right, it's table chore. Go down to the table, get your pile and put everything where it needs to go. And the difference in overwhelm, when I have organized these things out, when you can see it really clearly, like this is what all the parts are, means that each kid can go in and knows exactly where they need to apply that focus.

5:44And the same can be true for your creative practice. If you will organize it in parts, you will be able to see like what part is lacking, what part needs fine tuning, what part needs to be let go of. That's super important. Now, even though it took me forever to figure out how to organize this chaos in my house, your creative practice is even harder because it doesn't fit into nice little boxes in an obvious way. And over the past 15 years of having a creative practice, I'm just going to keep saying 15 years. I think it's more than that, but I don't want to do any more math. Look, I've been doing this over 15 years.

6:25I'll just say that. But the more I did it, the more I realized like, oh, these are the categories. And it's really this spectrum or this kind of two-part tightrope act that is being a creative person. For me, it's passion and mastery. Okay. There are the, I know what I'm like deeply passionate about, excited about, on fire about right in this moment. And I'm aware of like what, where my skills and mastery lie, like what I actually know I'm already good at. Everything in my creative practice in terms of where I'm going to invest my creative energy fits somewhere on this spectrum. Some of it is a really good sweet spot of both.

7:21Some of them I'm just passionate about, but I haven't actually developed any mastery in. Some of it I'm really masterful at, if I do say so myself, but maybe I've lost a little of the passion in some things that I do, uh, don't really have either, but I still have them in my practice for some reason. Okay. So imagine, uh, these four, there are four categories, um, of these different ways that these two things can be at play. And imagine those are your four kids. And we're going to put the pieces of your creative practice into these four piles on the table, okay? And then at the end, I'm gonna give you a little grid that kind of really clearly breaks down how these two, the four options with these two pieces of passion and mastery, okay?

8:15But I'm gonna go through them first. So the first one is, we're gonna call it flow, all right? flow is where you have tons of passion and tons of mastery. This is the holy grail. This is the very difficult thing to attain. And only certain moments in my creative practice have I really had something that I was doing that was perfectly in flow. I feel like right now in my creative practice, children's books are probably, they're close to being in that flow zone where I am perfect, I'm passionate and I'm masterful in it. I feel like it's, there's a few tweaks here and there that have to kind of change for that to be totally true, but it's pretty close to that zone.

9:07Now for each of these four categories, I'm going to give you what the opportunity for something in this category is and what the risk is. And then I'm going to give you an example in a bottom line. But each one of these categories has an opportunity and a risk. So for flow, the opportunity is, I don't know, pure bliss, the highest experience of happiness that you can possibly encounter here in this little life. And I'd say that as kind of a joke, but also completely true. You're probably familiar with the book flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was this modern day psychologist. He's passed, rest in peace.

9:50But he was a psychologist moving within, flowing within the positive psychology movement, which if you don't know, you should get to know it because it's a huge part of the, it's probably the main energy behind this podcast. And it's not, it isn't. it needs a rebrand really because it's not positive psychology. That's not what it is. Or it's not, it is positive psychology. It's not positive thinking is what I meant to say. It's not, it's not like just think positive. No, positive psychology, which I've mentioned here on the show a bunch of times, um, is a really respected thing. As far as I can tell, very respected thing within the field of psychology.

10:31And it was a paradigm shift that happened in the 90s with a guy named Martin Seligman, a psychologist who really questioned the current, what was current at the time, which was this idea that the Bible of psychology was the DSM. It was this book of disorders is our Bible. And essentially he was saying, look, that's an incredibly negative way to think about what it means to be a human with a psyche, with a mind, is that we're going to define you by your flaws rather than we actually have the opportunity to say, let's define you by your strengths. Let's define you by what's working. Let's even, you know, acknowledge these are the downsides of the kind of psyche that you have.

11:19But, and this doesn't maybe always apply. There's, there are times where there's mental illness and there are times where there's real challenges that need diagnosed. But, but for the most part it seems even that a lot of the psychologies that use positive psychology, that use this lens, have an incredibly high efficacy rate. Like they work. Things like IFS, I have to imagine CBT, CBT, CBT, I'm trying to think is that, is that one of the things that's in weed? What is that? Is it? No, cognitive behavioral therapy. It's CBT. What is the, anyway, you know, whatever the other one is. is it the same thing?

12:04I don't know. Anyway, I got to move on. So no, that's CBD. All right, that's what it was. My brain wouldn't let me move on. CBT, positive psychology. So flow, the flow state and the research around that, that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did, was based in this positive psychology movement. It's based in leaning into our strengths, leaning into what makes it amazing to be a human. And one of the, what he would argue was the highest form of being alive would be the flow state. And he would say that the flow state is this balance of being challenged and being masterful. So challenge and mastery. But I'm gonna just edit that slightly because I hate challenge, first of all.

12:53And actually, when I first heard this idea that you're gonna get into the flow state when you balance challenge and mastery really well, I started embracing challenge too much because I missed the part where he says, it's actually about 30 % challenge, 70 % mastery. That's where you're gonna find that sweet spot. And I just heard 50-50, okay? But I'm gonna change it from challenge because the only way I know I'm going to embrace a challenge is if it's coming through the lens of passion. Even if it's something I don't wanna do, It means I'm embracing this challenge because on the other side of it, learning this skill, you know, cold emailing, whatever it is that I really don't want to do on the other side of it is something I'm so passionate about that I'm going to engage in this challenge.

13:41So instead of thinking about it through challenge, I'm going to just say passion because without the passion, what are we even doing here now? Like, no, that's not, I'm not going to get into a flow state purely just seeking challenge. and so passion and mastery are these two pieces they're influenced by this book on flow and when i say that when you find things that you're both super passionate about and really masterful in that venn diagram means you are in one of the highest states so the opportunity is bliss if you can find if you can move through your creative practice in such a way where you give the give the odds a chance to be in your favor to find these sorts of seasons in your creative journey.

14:31That's opportunity. The risk is, in my opinion, is that we want this one to be our job. But there's a problem with this because by the time you have become so masterful in something that people are willing to trust you to pay for it, by the time you get there, your passion is almost certainly going to diminish somewhat. Your passion is not going to be at its highest when you have explored this skill or this direction so thoroughly that other people can see that it's obvious that they should pay you for it. And so this is a just, you know, you don't have to adopt this, but this is how I moved through the world.

15:21I have to realize that the thing I am most passionate about, most masterful in, may not be the thing that I get paid the most to do, right? So in my creative practice over the past 15 years, I have a bunch of different arms of my business. Client work was a really big one for a while. There was a time before that was kind of my job where I was in that flow, where I was like, I really wanna do this kind of work. I'm really passionate about it. and I'm getting masterful at it, that sweet spot wasn't the most I ever made money on doing that. And so I feel like kids' books are kind of in flow right now and they can eventually turn into an even bigger part of my job.

16:11But now they're just one part of it. And so the risk here is to feel entitled to the idea that the thing that puts you in flow state, the thing where you are happiest in your creativity should be your job. and it's good for me to just realize that that's unrealistic because by the time people know they can pay me and trust me in this area, usually my passion isn't at its highest because it means I've really thoroughly explored it. That doesn't mean I don't have any passion with it. We'll get to that later, but that's something to keep in mind.

17:12Okay, now we're going to move over to, I just want to say one more thing about the flow. The flow place is where you're going to have the most opportunity to build income streams. When you're really masterful, really passionate, that is the perfect place to capitalize and invest. If you have something really squarely in that spot, I think you definitely should make it part of your job if you are interested in doing creative stuff for money or for your living. I think that's where you need to invest. If you know something's right there, you need to invest in that thing. I just think it's good for me to remember that at the height of my passion is rarely when something is the most profitable.

17:55And that's okay. I think that just makes sense. The second one is curiosity. Okay. A curiosity is one that you have high passion in, low mastery in. And if you have something where you're like, okay, I am so obsessed with this, but I'm not really, I don't know if I'm great at it or I haven't spent enough time or I haven't been able to prove to myself or others that I have any mastery. That is a curiosity. Now, the opportunity for a curiosity, the perfect opportunity, the perfect way to invest in curiosity is doing a side project. It is creating the constraints and the deadlines and the specifics on this is how I'm going to invest in this thing that I'm deeply curious about, that I am super passionate about, but I don't have a lot of experience in.

18:50The side project is the best way to deal with one of those with the curiosity. The second piece of this, the risk, is that you don't translate or interpret this curiosity into something that makes any sense to anybody else. if you want to move this curiosity, the goal of a curiosity is to move it into the flow box. It's to become masterful in it. And if you don't figure out how do I translate this red hot passion into something I can actually do, and then even better, something that I can connect with others, if you're trying to think of this through the lens of making it a job or income, you have to interpret that daydream.

19:47And for me, what this looked like was over 10 years ago when I first did my first live storytelling, I thought, I wanna do this. Like, I am so curious about this. I'm obsessed with it. And I had the temptation to just be like, I'm gonna do live storytelling now. But guess what? I was a guy living in the Midwest who also was refusing to move. Like I knew for my kids and where I'm establishing them and what my values are as a person, I'm not moving to LA, I'm not moving to New York City, I'm not gonna try to do off-Broadway one-man show, I'm not doing that. So it doesn't matter, I'm not, it doesn't matter if I could do it, I'm not saying I could have, but I wasn't going to.

20:36And so I had to interpret that passion into something I could actively do realistically that I could see myself doing. And so if you wanna turn it into a side project, the risk that's facing you is you're not willing to compromise. You're not willing to translate it from a dream to reality. You have to interpret daydreams just like you do night dreams. So what I did was I knew I wanna do live storytelling. I knew I wanted to do talks. and I realized like I already have a career going in illustration. What if I combine these two things? And that's what became this podcast. That's what became that side project.

21:17And so the risk of having this curiosity is that you're not willing to compromise it to go from the perfect state that it is in your head onto paper, into reality by getting real with what's happening. Craft is the third one. Okay, the third one is craft. Craft is where your passion isn't super high, but your mastery is off the charts. Now, the opportunity for something like this is a job. It is by the time your passion has started to dwindle a little bit, it's probably ready to be work. Now, here's the thing. If I, when I was 20, if I would have heard this, I would have rejected it because a job without white hot, red hot, white hot passion sounded like torture.

22:14But the truth is, here's what I've learned, that if I have a skill that contributes to people in any meaningful way, even in a way where the client is happy, even if I just made something that I felt like, oh, I put in a good day's work there, that gives me a lot of joy. I can be some level of passionate about this contribution as long as I feel like I'm doing something that not everybody could do. It's a unique contribution. There's a joy in that that is really, really energizing. It's comparable. It's even similar to passion. And so the risk that I see in my own life with this is I can feel like, oh, there's no magic.

23:02the magic's gone the energy's gone the life force is gone i can get real the risk here is i can get overly kind of metaphysical when i'm thinking about like oh my my passion's not there i gotta just kill this thing but the truth is we live in both a space where you're a human that probably if you're creative runs on passion runs on excitement runs on curiosity that's you that's who you are, but you're in a world that trades in mastery. And there's a reality to finding that, how to navigate that. And one of the ways to navigate that is to realize by the time your passion has been converted into mastery, some of that passion isn't going to be as white hot.

23:51And I think it's, you know, not to be weird, but talking about white hot passion, but it's similar kind of in a relationship where, you know, we have these, we have all these examples in, in research around how people fall in love in this infatuation stage and all the brain chemicals that are going on, uh, and everything that's happening. And we know that is not, uh, sustainable. It's, and it, it's not even, um, it's not even something that we want because you're stupid when you're in love. You're risky when you're in love. Like if you stayed in that infatuation stage for your whole life, your life would be a total and utter mess.

24:34There's actually beautiful trade-offs when you move through, when you convert the passion to mastery, when you go from lovers to friends. It doesn't mean they have to sacrifice the love and the romance either, but okay, it's getting too weird. But it's true. Don't discredit your skill. That's the risk. Your skill, even if it no longer has the magic of the other world, of the ethereal realms, it's still valuable in our world and it can feel good to use it. And there are times when a skill that I had became kind of just, you know, less magical for me. And I would be quick to discredit it. When I was just at the right now, I'm kind of in a really serious

25:30rekindled passion for illustration. But when I first started this podcast, I'd been doing illustration for years up to that point. And this public speaking thing was just so new. And it just felt so exciting that for a couple years at the beginning of this show, I think I felt like, well, illustration, whatever. I'm just doing that for my job or whatever. But eventually I realized like, oh, illustration is a skill. It's not just a passion. And if I combine, if I do my talks and I really take my slides seriously and I actually tell stories and do metaphors and do interesting things on the screen, that actually really gives me a competitive edge in live storytelling.

26:16And it would be dumb to not use that skill. And so the risk is discrediting your own superpowers that you fought for, that you developed, that you put the thousands of hours into to become masterful at it, to just throw it in the trash because it doesn't have this particular type of fire. And I see this all the time, artists that just are incredible in this one area, but discredit it because the passion has translated into more mastery. And so the craft is the opportunity is the job. The risk is discrediting it because it's not as magic as it used to be. And the bottom line is this is where you make money.

27:00This is typically your most valuable asset. And I think it's important to realize like what you're doing for your job is rarely going to be that thing that you're most passionate about. But what you're most passionate about might be a big part of your job in a few years. But by the time it is, you might be less passionate about it. And that's just part of the cycle. For me, there's a level of acceptance that really does my body good, does my mental state good. It helps me translate some of that bad stress into good stress when I can accept that. this is all part of the process. And this is a good thing.

27:37All right. The fourth one is shoulds. Things that go in your should category. This is not passionate, not masterful, right? And you might think to yourself, who would do something that they're not passionate about and not masterful in? Why would you even consider that? And for that, I would say, why do you make Instagram reels, buster? Like, are you passionate about it? Are you masterful in it? Now, I will say that actually I like making reels. I don't like how much time it takes and how risky of a behavior it is in terms of just how unlikely that that time is gonna pay off in any way that's relevant.

28:30But I actually like making video. So I don't put myself in that category. But I know a lot of illustrators that didn't get into illustration to be on camera, right? And so if you're wondering, like, why would anybody even be confused around shoulds? It's very obvious when you put it through that lens. And so shoulds are the things that you're not passionate about. You're not masterful in. And it's really important to let go of shoulds. you know i'm fine with you experimenting if you feel like oh the industry's moving here and the market's moving there or whatever i gotta do learn some skills learn some things it's fine if you have to spend some time experimenting but if you've experimented with something that you felt compelled to explore and you find no passion the likelihood that that's going to translate to any mastery, that that's going to become a craft is so low, not just for everyone, but especially creative people, especially neurodivergent people, people that run on passion, your likelihood that you're going to go do a job, that you're going to get masterful at something that you hate is so low that these shoulds are the things that you should take off the list.

29:47You should take the shoulds off, I'm telling you, as quickly as possible. Now, like I said, I gave you a little disclaimer. There are times where you got to be a little open-minded. You got to test things out. Before, when short form video moved in, initially I was like, actually looking back, I'm like, initially I was interested because I know I like that kind of thing. I like being on camera. And sometimes you should push yourself out of your comfort zone just to try something. But once you have a little experience, you have a feeling of whether there's passion or potential for mastery there, right?

30:19And so if the things are in this category, the opportunity here is to free up your mental space and your creativity to pour them into these other categories all the other categories deserve some level of investment and attention this category only deserves the attention that it requires to take these things off your list to identify them and get rid of them and the risk here is uh that you're going to feel like dutiful that you're like, well, I just have to do this. I just have to make short form video. No, you don't. You don't have to do that. Like some of the people that are having the most thriving creative practices right now have an incredible sub stack and they are writing and they never show their face.