497 - Find Your Creative Zone Today: Which of These 7 Types of Ideas Come to You Naturally? **REPLAY**

0:02Hey y 'all, it's Andy and I'm just jumping on here to let you know this episode is a replay of an episode from a few years ago. And I've been thinking about the content of this episode around how creativity is much more about timelessness than timeliness in some ways that I think are easy to forget. I think it's easy to get caught up in being relevant and part of the zeitgeist and all that kind of thing and lose our sense of tapping into flow and timelessness and making something that transcends the current moment. and this whole episode will help you tune into the natural way that you get ideas, tune into your right brain and your flow state.

0:58And listening back through this episode, I was definitely recording this at a time where I was super hyped. So you can enjoy that. But I really love all the ideas from this episode and I think that they're as relevant now as they ever were. Hopefully this is a timeless episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I'll be right back at the end to share a couple updates and whatnot. But here it is. Hey, you're listening to the Creative Pep Talk podcast. It is so easy to get lost on the creative journey, and that's why this show is here, to help you get back on the creative path, back to unlocking your latent creative potential.

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3:08now 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. You ever heard anybody say creativity is all about timing? You know, you ever heard someone say that? You ever heard them, you know, you got to hit that cultural zeitgeist, man. You got to keep up with the times. You got to stay relevant. You got to make the perfect thing at the perfect time and post it to Instagram at the very perfect second if you want to make it in this creative game. But I tell you what, I never feel less creative when I'm concerning myself with time.

3:56In fact, I kind of feel like obsessing with time is kind of the antithesis, the opposite of creativity. You know, I grew up in the Midwest and that meant my childhood was all about one thing. Chuck E. Cheese, man. I was living for Chuck E. Cheese. If you don't have, maybe it was a regional thing. I don't know. Did you have Chuck E. Cheese? The memes would say Chuck E. Cheese was basically a kid's casino. You know, they even had like poker chips, the little tokens. you exchange your money for tokens to help you kind of lose sense of how much money you're spending and you get hundreds of tokens for these you know 85 tickets and then trade that in for a little water pistol that cost three dollars and fifty cents that breaks in the parking lot that moo-wee that was a good smoothie that was the good stuff that was a good time when your mom would be like we're going to chucky's you're like yeah it was the best time ever except for the times when it wasn't because sometimes you find yourself locked in to one of those super mega jackpot machines you know one of these things with the little it's like a big circle machine got the blinking light going around at rapid pace and you got to hit your buzzer right at the right second to win the super mega jackpot i just need another token mom come on jesse's cousin ricky's brother once hit the big jackpot and he got millions of tickets you know he only spent a third of those tickets on an enormous vault so that he could just swim through the rest of his tickets like some kind of scrooge mcduck but he's a rat like chucky cheese do you i don't think he turned into a rat anyway you had that notion either you got unlucky enough to hit the jackpot one time and so you just got obsessed with mastering that you had to stay at the machine or you heard somebody who had won the jackpot at some point but man nothing would ruin chucky cheese experience like trying to get that perfect timing you know chuck e cheese is supposed to be about pounding pizza in 43 seconds and hanging out with kids that you've known for 87 seconds but feel like you've grown old together running around warp speed through those tunnels and sweating your face off in that nasty ball pit like that's what chuck e cheese is all about Chuck E.

6:42Cheese is all about those times when you turn two hours into what feels like two minutes and an eternity at the same time. Chuck E. Cheese isn't about perfect timing. It's about losing your sense of time. It's about getting into the flow state. It's about losing yourself in the process. that's what Chuck E. Cheese is about. And if you don't remember that, if you try to be some superhero with the power of time manipulation with the chronokinesis, I said chronokinesis like seven times on this podcast, no one knows why. I like the word. But if you try to do that, you're gonna miss what this thing is all about.

7:40And if you try to do the same in your creative practice, you're going to forget you didn't get into this because you had perfect timing. It's because you had the perfect time losing your sense of time, space, self, lost in the practice of your creative process. if you get obsessed with the time element you're going to lose what this thing's all about you're not going to have a creative practice you're going to have a creative casino that instagram's not going to turn into a way to connect with your audience it's going to turn into a little slot machine you know you're pulling the lever down with your thumb as you're seeing the slot machine flip through, zero followers, zero mentions, zero comments, zero likes.

8:39If that's what your creative practice has been reduced to, I would wager to bet that you have forgotten why you went on this journey in the first place. You have forgotten what it's like to use creativity to transcend time and in this episode I want to help you find that person inside you that version of you that used to want to make this thing more than a hobby because you loved the experience of it because you love the way it made you feel and now you've been put into this place where you feel awful trying to stay relevant. So let's go on a journey. Let's find how to transcend time again in our creative process.

9:44All right, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a little missing person ad for the part of you that used to love to get lost in creativity because the only part of you that's left is this person who is just you know obsessed with controlling it obsessed with hitting the big time hitting the jackpot you know where did the person go that used to lose track of time lost in their creative practice where did they go let's find them okay here's we got a few steps to work through three steps to finding your time transcending person inside of you all over again how do we do it how are we going to find that the first thing you got to do is we're going to name that part of you if you know there's someone who's wanted america's most wanted creative pep talks most wanted first thing you got to know is what's this person's name.

10:42Okay. So how do we reconnect into what creativity is all about? Losing ourselves, losing the sense of time. How do we rediscover that? First thing we got to do is understand kind of the science behind why time is such a bad ingredient to try to put into your creative crockpot of your mind. Now to do this, we're going to reference the work of Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor. She wrote a book called Whole Brained Living. And in that book, she talks about how she had a stroke and lost access to the left side of her brain for a period of time. That left side of your brain that is analytical, that left side of your brain that is obsessed with time, that left side of your brain that's all about numbers and facts and figures, that left side of her brain disappeared.

11:36and what Jill Bolte-Taylor experienced was oneness with the universe. She lost her sense of self. She lost her sense of time. And so much of the stuff, so much of the richness that comes from creative work comes from that right side of the brain. And when you are stuck in the left side, obsessed with trying to hit things right at the right time, you're drowning out and you're destroying your access to the part where all the creativity really comes from. I like to think of it kind of like a sideways mullet, you know, business on the left, party on the right. That's what we're trying to get access to.

12:22Now in the book, Whole Brain Living, by the way, let me just take a little second to say, I actually believe that creativity is an integrated process that has, you know, the left brain really starting that analytical side, really starting with the constraints, with the brief, with the targets, with the strategy, like what are we trying to do? And then in the middle, we go all right brain, baby, we're playing, we're having fun, we're losing ourselves in the process. And then at the end, I think the left brain comes back in and it starts to say, well, what can we pick from this? What can we edit out of this?

13:00You know, I think about my creative heroes, the people that really are able to take their practice to the next level. I kind of feel like they are the master explorers of the inside of themselves. They are the people that have this consciousness in which they can ebb and flow and grab in different seasons, the parts that they need. You know, the people that are able to master their inner space. You know, and that is the whole brain living. That's the whole, and I would even go further than that and say, it's also the limbic brain, the brain that's in your guts. There's a consciousness. There are neurons in your guts, man.

13:49Okay. They don't have words, but I think artists that really transcend are the ones that can access all of those things with precision. I think about athletes as like, you know, the masters of their body. And I feel like the artists are the masters of their inner world. And I think it's all about knowing how, but I also think just to interrupt myself, wait, hold on there a second. You're getting carried away, there's another part of me that wants to speak up. And it's, and I want to say that, you know, I think that the reason why it's so important for us to regain and reconnect access to the right side isn't because that's where all the creativity is.

14:36The reason is, is because we absolutely live in a left brain obsessed work. That's why you have STEM and not STEAM, you know, the science and math and analytics and numbers and figures. That is what our world is obsessed with and values. And if you don't make yourself fall in line with that, you don't eat. And so remembering that other side of us is actually going to take some effort. I'm doing this not to divorce yourself from the left brain. I actually think a lot of creatives need to work that muscle too. too but i'm guessing that if you're an adult and you have been for any amount of time that your right brain has been quieted that time is waking down on you and you got to figure out how do i access that again the first thing we got to do is we got to know what's their name okay in whole brain living i believe we talked about this in another episode jill bolte taylor breaks down the left and the right into two other quadrants the up and the down it's the amygdala and something or other.

15:38I don't remember, but it's too complicated for our usage. So what we're going to do is we're going to just break that down to the left brain and the right brain, and we're going to name those people, okay? So that you can recognize them when they show up, just so we can categorize them. Sometimes you just need to put things in buckets to kind of see it clearly. So for me, I'm going to name my left brain Andrew because it's proper and serious and timely, and I'm going to name the other side, Andy. Okay. That's who we're trying to find. Now let's talk about how do we pinpoint what that person, what does Andy look like when he shows up?

16:26Okay. So the first thing you got to do is name it. So you can identify it. So you have a bucket to put this thing, this part of you that we're looking for. Second thing you got to do is you got to kind of recognize what do they look like we need one of those you know police drawings of this thing a rough look at what we're trying to find here and really what we're talking about here is what do ideas look like when they show up for you because your ideas don't look like other people's ideas you might not know that and actually that can get you into a little bit of trouble which is what we're going to go into right now now of course you could just say when do i lose sense of time yes that's a good question but you know it's the obvious one you can think about that on your own i'm sure you have some ideas of what kind of creative activities you lose yourself in but let's get hyper micro and really identify the the particulars of what that looks like so that you can start accessing it more frequently and to do that i want to i want to pose this okay When you are losing your sense of time and you're in that right brain, another thing happens, according to Jill Bolte-Taylor and according to Dr.

17:43Pizza, a.k.a. me, you lose your sense of self. You feel one with the universe. You lose the ego. You're not even aware of your own being. You just are. Okay? And when do you feel like that? Stay with me because we're going to get to some stuff that I think you recognize. If you don't, if it's not obvious the times when you've lost your sense of self and the creative process, let me give you some different kind of language to it so that you can start to kind of see this because at the same time that you're that selfless you, your timeless you is there too. And so that's a way to hack yourself into getting into that state more frequently.

18:29Okay. So what is the sense of selflessness all about? It's really what a lot of artists I think talk about when they talk about the idea of channeling ideas, like, you know, saying the song wrote itself. I just heard Chris Martin, the front man of Coldplay on Pete Holmes' podcast, and it was a good time. I was enjoying it. It's a great episode. Highly recommend it. But one of the things Chris Martin said kind of threw me for a loop into my imposter syndrome until I started to work it out through this process that I'm going to give you. What Chris said was, for him, writing songs starts with a melody just showing up.

19:20It's like he's not even writing it. He's just channeling it. It's coming from somewhere else, someone else, but it's not him. And I have this strong feeling that, and by the way, you've probably heard artists say this a bunch of times. Like when I really find my groove, it's not even me. I'm just dictating something from somewhere else. And my theory on that is that that's because you finally accessed that part of your brain, that right side of your brain where you lose your sense of self. So of course it doesn't feel like it's coming from you. And so one way that's a very poetic way, it doesn't have to be a literal way for all of you materialists out there that are like i don't like this idea of channeling or you you know maybe super religious people be like that sounds sketchy is all heck to me because you wouldn't say f word because you're super religious so i had to you know anyway that's what i think they're talking about when they're talking about channeling now when i heard chris say this my first feeling was like, oh man, why don't melodies ever come to me?

20:33I must not be a real artist. Nothing ever just shows up to me. But then I got to thinking about it and I thought, wait a second. I think I just have a different receptor. I think ideas show up for me in a totally different way. And in part two, finding what do they look like? What does this being look like? What do ideas look like when they show up for you in your brain. I want to talk about what kind of idea receptor your brain is so that you can start to notice them more frequently and take more advantage of those ideas as they're channeling through you. To do that, just humor me for a second because I want to talk about a concept that I love rolling around the old tonsils.

21:26It's just a fun thing to talk about. And it comes from a book called The Flip by Jeffrey Kripple. And it's this idea of consciousness. So physicists, nobody knows for sure. Nobody's been able to prove how are we conscious. This feeling, this sense of you being you observing the universe. What is that, man? Nobody knows. And one theory is that your brain is more like a radio than it is something that contains consciousness. And so it's this idea that if you took apart a radio, you couldn't find the voices in it because they're not in it. They're channeling it from somewhere else. And this theory is saying consciousness is coming from some other, you know, universe or dimension or some other place.

22:19And our brain is just kind of a receiver for that particular frequency that we call us. And it's just got super trippy on the podcast. And by the way, not interested in saying, is that true? No, I don't know if it's true. I have a, you know, if I had to guess, I'd say Probably not, at least not exactly. But for the use that we're trying to roll with here, let's pretend like your brain is a particular kind of receiver. And let's go through seven different types of idea reception that you might have. This isn't an exhaustive list. I just want to give you a few different ideas of how that timeless you shows up through the door with ideas.

23:12Now, the first one, we'll call it a radio because it channels sounds. That's what Chris Martin has. It's melodies. It's lyrics. It's musical, okay? You might have a radio kind of brain channeling those sound waves. Now, that's not me. For me, one of my kind of receptors in my noggin is more like a telephone because I channel words. You know, I love, you know, one of the things that makes me most angry, and sometimes your love is deeply connected to your anger. You know, you don't get real angry about anything you don't care much about, right? One of the things where I just like get stopped in my tracks is when I know somewhere in my brain there is the perfect word for what I'm trying to describe.

24:01And I just can't put my fingers on it. And I just have to stop the whole conversation down until we can find it. Because words are what it's all about to me. You know, if you're a poet or a writer, you might have a telephone kind of receptor that's channeling the perfect words. And I loved this. I ran into this quote on brain pickings the other day from poet Dylan Thomas. He said, I learned to turn my creativity over to the only God I could ever believe in, the God of creativity. I learned to get out of my way and let that creative force work through me. That's that right brain, losing your sense of self.

24:44It's coming from somewhere else. Maybe it's coming from you, but you can't feel it because you lost your sense of self. Back to the quote. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping. And can you just feel the burden of creativity drop when you hear that? Can you feel your jaw unclench? Can you breathe again? The tension of your neck is gone. your shoulders just loosen up because you don't have to make up the words you just have to listen if you can find that place in you you don't have to reinvent the wheel and hit the zeitgeist man you just have to be quiet enough to hear it

25:45okay maybe that's not you maybe you're more like a tv receptor that you're getting images you know i'm an illustrator this isn't really my thing and we're gonna get to that in a little bit because there is no wrong way to create there's no wrong way to approach any of this and we're gonna i'm going to go deep into that in a second but let's go back to the tv if you get images you might have that tv receptor i'm getting an image you know my wife sophie she gets images all the time just things she's like boom color composition light she needs to recreate it she needs to capture it in some textile art you know my friend danielle chrisa of the jealous curator she gets the same thing, an image pops in her brain and she has to get it down.

26:29If you get images, if you channel that kind of thing, you might have that TV receptor kind of brain. Number four, maybe it's like a prism and it just refracts like the most colorful feelings. If you get just the most crazy array of nuanced, rich, 256 color feelings, that might be yours. You might have that prism brain. Here's what I'm talking about. You know, we all have feelings, but some people have the ability, just that kind of palette that can really get into the particulars of, you know, Olivia Rodrigo. I got a 13 year old daughter, so we're listening to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo right now.

27:14And actually, when it comes to radio music. It's one of my favorites because a little bit more chaotic, a little less polished. I think she's got a lot of talent, but it's kind of like that. Like everybody knows a breakup is hard or bad and it's upsetting, but that's like saying a breakup is the color red, but the color to Olivia Rodrigo, man, it shoots through that prism and you're getting magentas and fuchsias and vermilion. You know, she's getting the nuance. It's not just bad. It's like, it's like, do you ever wonder if your new partner gets deja vu? Do they do things that remind them of your relationship?

27:49Are they ever getting into these periods of time where you feel like, man, I helped them grow. And then they use that better version to be with somebody else. Well, good for you, right? That sort of thing. We all go to driver's license. But you get this array, this just giant, vast spectrum of feelings that you have to channel. If feelings show up that way for you, maybe you got the prism brain. Number five, maybe you got an x-ray kind of machine, okay? That's something that sees below the surface. You're channeling truth. You're seeing not the thing. You're seeing what's underneath the thing.

28:31and in that way I like to call it not x-rays but y-rays because it's you're always asking why why you know you're looking below to the pattern relating it to the other things you know you're getting analogies and metaphors and concepts and philosophy and a lot of comedians have this kind of x-ray device where they're just a you know they are a conduit for the truth getting down to the least common denominator. And I really relate to that. There's something about my brain that just wants to go, why, why, why, why? Until I get to the bottom and I can make some sense of it. That's just what my brain does.

29:11It channels that thing. Number six, maybe you got a solar panel. By the way, I noticed we have a, we have numbers within numbers right now. Okay. I hope I'm not losing anybody in the left brain. I'm trying to have a fun time with it at the same time. So I Hope you're enjoying yourself. Stick with me. We're in part two. We're in part six of part two. I could have done letters in there too. That would have made some sense. Anyway, number six, solar panel. Okay, if you're a solar panel, you are attracting the sunshine of hope. Okay, for me, I have a deep sensitivity to things that give me hope, to things that make me say yes to life.

29:55You've heard me say it 8 ,000 times on the podcast, but it's true. And I think it's actually something about my nature is to kind of be in a state of laying face down on the living room floor in a nope posture of life. And so I've got this deep sensitivity to those rays of sunshine, soaking them up like a solar panel, storing them up, and then dumping them all over you every single week with this podcast. if you soak up hope if you channel that thing you have the solar panel brain and the last one seven we'll call it a cat scan had a little fun with this one okay cat scans use gamma radiation and you know who's a product of gamma radiation the hulk and so if you have the cat scan device of a brain it means that you are a conduit for anger and man we don't have a place for anger in this culture and it's a major problem you know some people know I do pep talks I'm a conduit I'm the solar panel sunshine hope artist and sometimes I get the feeling if I'm talking to a cat scan anger hulking out artist that they're kind of like you know be like look I'm not trying to you know, step on your toes, but there's some things to get angry about.

31:19And you're damn right. There are so many injustices in this world. And if you have that kind of gamma radiation, that anger, just it comes to you and you create from it, that's what you're channeling. You know, Rian Johnson, the creator of the movie Knives Out and one of those Star Wars movies you probably heard about and a whole bunch of other great movies. He says every single movie that he makes starts with some anger, something he's angry about, about himself. And I think anger is a rich emotion. There's always so much in there. And maybe that's how ideas show up for you. There's nothing wrong with that.

32:11And so what is the stuff? What does it look like when it shows up on your door? Here's a bunch of different ways that an idea might look for you.

32:32Okay, number three is, okay, you got their name on the most wanted list. You know, you got a good drawing of this is kind of what the ideas look like when they show up. This is what that timelessness me looks like. The third thing you got to do is say, where does this person frequent? Where do they hang out? Where can you find them? You know, you got to say, what are the conditions in which this person comes out of the woodwork? You know, every creator that's worth their salt figures out some kind of routine that helps that person, that version of them come out on a regular basis. You know, Thomas Edison, he would sleep with these weights in his hand in a chair.

33:21And then when he'd fall asleep, he'd drop the weights and boom, he'd get that right as you're falling asleep kind of mind state where ideas are fresh and your brain's doing weird stuff. You know, Beethoven was famous for taking these enormous afternoon walks that would sometimes go all the way into the evening. Kafka started writing at 1030 at night. You can find actually a whole bunch of daily rituals that were collected by Mason Curry, you know, stuff about coffee and naps and all kinds of other cool, weird stuff. But you'll find if you study your heroes, they have practices. They know where the timelessness version of themselves is hanging out.

34:05And basically in this point, there's just one thing that I want to tell you, and it's to let yourself be weird. now I'm gonna admit to you okay that five days a week I wake up and I have a hour and a half long bath and then I go on a 30 minute run and then I take a shower now listen I'm saving up for a hot tub to conserve water because I don't I don't that's what I don't like about that weirdness and I'm working on it. Okay. But for me, that's where my guy hangs out. He's hanging out in the bathtub. I do almost all of my writing in that time in those days. And I do a lot of my thinking while I'm running.

34:54And I know after I run, that guy tends to hang out a lot more. I also know that it'll happen if I take a nap. I know that it'll happen when I'm at a coffee shop. I know he always is out there traveling. And so even when travel's tricky, go to a different park, draw in a different room in your house. I found that if I allow myself to draw without any plans with some music without vocals, oftentimes he will show up, but he might not show up for you that way. And what I want to give you is just a permission slip to do a, to live life in the weird way that allows that person to thrive. Your right brain self is a total weirdo and you need permission to let him live the way he wants to live.