504 - Reduce Overwhelm and Unlock More Creative Work with This

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 pepsock.

0:20Okay, so I'm guessing you're like me and you feel like there's just too much to freaking do. You've got to do stuff for a book. You got to do stuff for Instagram or social media. You got to start up on that new platform. You got to finish that project. You got to do your emails, your blah, blah, blah, blah. Even as I'm saying it, it's stressing me out to think about all the different things that I need to do this week. And so I'm not going to list anymore, but I'm sure that you feel that way. For me, often I will look at the five days a week that I have and I think I've got 10 days worth of stuff that I could fill this five days with.

1:02Like it is an over-constrained problem. them. It's like you've got five pie tens and enough filling for 10 or 20, and it's really overwhelming. And I feel like that all the time. And you might be in a situation hearing that and thinking, dude, Andy, if I had, if I was a full-time creative person and I had five days to do all of this creative stuff, I wouldn't be complaining. And you're probably right about that. However, I can think back to when I had 30 minutes a day when I could do any creative stuff at the beginning, when I still had other jobs and commitments and stuff of that nature. And I felt exactly like I do now a lot of the time where I, no matter how many more pie tens I get, I still feel like it's an over-constrained problem.

1:53And I still feel like no matter what I do, it's going to get messy. It's going to be a disaster. And so sure, there are times where I am really overcommitted. But if I feel like this, no matter how much time I have or how much I have to do, that means there might be something else going on. My dad told me recently that he felt like this when he was in college. And it was this really busy time. He had a girlfriend. He had a job. He was playing sports and he had school. He was going to college. And he got into this place where he was really freaking out. He felt like something's got to go. It can't be sports.

2:39It can't be the girlfriend. It's got to be, it can't be the job because I had to pay these bills. It's going to have to be college. I'm going to have to drop out of college. and instead of dropping out of college, he realized that another option would be just not getting great grades, not getting the best possible grades that he was capable of getting in the ideal scenario, that he could just graduate. He wouldn't have to graduate with flying colors or live up to his potential, that there was an option to do things imperfectly, to do things with mistakes. And I think this idea is revolutionary for me because guess what?

3:33If you're making pies and they're creative pies, you don't want to worry about getting your hands dirty because creative pies are mud pies by design. Like the dirt is what makes them what they are. When you're doing creative work, you and you're in, you're constructing, you should remember that the type of creative work that really shines is stuff that encounters a little bit of demolition, that it's the brokenness, it's the mistakes, it's the humanity, it's the blood, sweat, and tears that make those mud pies so tasty. Sounds kind of disgusting, but it's true. Creative work is, it's not as much like just making ceramics smooth, clean, perfect every time.

4:30There's a mosaic brokenness to them and that the mistakes are part of the process. And there's this really great quote from John Cleese and he said, nothing will stop you from being creative like the fear of making a mistake. And I want to add another bit to that. I'm going to add my own spin on it, that you have to be less afraid of making a mistake than you are afraid of not making anything. Not just because mistakes are just something you have to live with, but they are the dirt that makes the pie, that the mistakes are essential to making the creative work. And the sooner that you can embrace this, the sooner you will feel less constrained.

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7:11And so I've realized that a lot of times it's not that I have five pie tens and 10 pies worth of filling, but it's rather that I'm afraid of getting my hands dirty, making mistakes, doing things imperfectly, and that it's holding me back from doing the work. It's holding me back from doing all the things that I wanna do. Now, there is, like I said, there is such thing as an over-constrained problem. There is over-committing. We'll cover that on another episode. It's important to say no. It's important to time block. All that's true. But I just want to float this idea over to you that what if a part of your stress isn't that you don't have time, is that you don't have time to do it perfectly.

8:06And that is a great thing. So one question I get a lot when I do Q &As after a talk is, how do you do all that stuff that you do? Because at least from the outside, I could see how it looks like I'm just publishing kids' books, making a podcast every week, doing client work, doing talks, doing social media, doing a newsletter, da-da-da-da-da. I'm doing it again. I'm listing it out. I'm stressing myself out, thinking about the stuff I have to do after this. But I do, I have a lot of different arms to what I do and I am often pretty busy and I am often stressed about that. But it helps me to remember how I answer that question when it comes up.

8:49When people say, how do you do all these different things? My answer is always the same, which is I do it imperfectly. That's how I do it. Now, there's a level of care and detail that I want to bring to the part of the creative process that really matters and really matters to me. And I will spend more time than is necessary to get it just right. But all of the other stuff around it, it's okay if I'm not number one emailer. It's okay if I make a typo on social media. It's okay if I forget the odd call and have to reschedule. And the fact of the matter is being a creative person, being a neurodivergent person means even when I'm hypervigilant about all those things, I still make all those mistakes.

9:40But on top of that, not just in the admin, the fact that I'm prone to making mistakes when I'm busy and most of the time isn't a bug. It's a feature when it comes to creative work. Like I said, the pies, these creative pies, they're mud pies. Getting dirty is essential. It's part of it. And I'm not just saying that hypothetically. I'm saying that from personal experience. One example of this is one of the, one really kind of dumb, but very essential part of my creative journey was changing my artist name to Annie J Pizza. So anybody that asks, I'll tell them, no, it's not my real name. My real name's Annie J.

10:31Miller, but I go by Annie J. Pizza. It's on my published books. It's what I call myself. It's how people introduce me on stage. And another question I get all the time in these Q &As is, is Annie J. Pizza your real name? And I'll say no. Now, if I'm doing a school visit, I'll say, actually, it is my real name because I loved pizza so much that I married it and I took its name. And kids like being like, no, that's not true. You're not married to pizza. And I'm like, yes, I am. But if I'm talking to adults, I'll tell them the story of how that happened. And like I said, the packaging of a thing, even if we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we do.

11:15And the packaging of a thing matters. And when I did end up changing my artist name, it did seem to have a pretty big impact. Yes, it meant all my social media handles can be the same because I can find them because nobody else is Andy J Pizza. But also it just, it worked in terms of my niche and my vibe as well as just being more memorable than my name. And the thing about that though is that that was the product of a mistake that I didn't actually intend to be Andy J Pizza. It was an accident. And so what happened in case you don't know and you're interested in it. I used to have the website andy-j-miller.com and it was just a really annoying domain name to share.

12:00And it was, and you know, no one's going to remember that. And so at some point, probably around 2014, they came out with new suffixes that you could get, like novelty ones that weren't.com, but you know, things like.pizza. And I've always loved pizza too much, unnatural obsession with pizza. And I just thought, I'll make my website name, Andy J dot pizza. And I'll be able to say that at any point. And it'll just be, you know, memorable. And that I really only intended it to be my website. And then a bunch of people just thought that was my name. And so I just thought, whatever, I'll go with it.

12:37I'm not super attached to Miller and it's fun and it fits and I'll roll with it. But that was a mistake. That wasn't something that I intended. And then even better than that, I had done that way before I was doing school visits, before I was making picture books. And so now it's even better because when I go to schools, all the kids are like, Mr. Pizza. Like they love that. It's even more fitting than I ever could have intended. Now, on top of that, that's just one little example of a mistake working out. But on top of that, if you listen to this show, you know, a big project of mine that has been really important to my creative practice and creative journey is the book Invisible Things.

13:20And Invisible Things, one of the reasons that came to be was that I had gotten fed up having this idea, pitched it in a bunch of different ways to publishers and tried to get it out there to different people and all these different kind of avenues and wasn't getting anywhere with it. And so I decided I'm going to create a post on social media that kind of explains what it is. And that's what became the cover of the book. It's what that's generally what became this poster. But it used, it started as this post on Twitter. And I just thought, I'm just going to put it out there, put it out there into the world.

13:59And, you know, it really took off on Twitter and gained more momentum than almost anything I'd ever posted, maybe probably more than anything I've ever posted. And I think potentially one of the reasons it worked is because it was absolutely riddled with typos. Like I spelled thought T-H-O-U-G-H, no T at the end. And there was a bunch of weird, I put I and E in the wrong position. I can't even, I think it's W-I-E-R-D. And there was a bunch of those. And I don't know if that added to it in terms of charm. Maybe it just seemed like it was made by a child. I don't know. Or maybe also, I don't know if this actually worked out this way, but I know that there's even YouTube people or YouTube people, the people of YouTube and Instagrammers and people like that will put really obvious mistakes in their videos on purpose because it gets engagement.

15:05Now, I wasn't engagement farming, as they say, but I have to imagine that people noticing these weird spellings contributed. And some people might have even commented like, hey, you spelled that wrong or whatever. I don't remember. But just another example of mistakes being a feature and not a bug, that the dirt is what makes the pie, that the brokenness is what makes the mosaic, and that being hypervigilant so that you never make a mistake and you never look dumb and you never look human means that your art won't feel human. And in the age of AI art, that is going to be a major problem. That will be the bug.

15:47If your stuff looks too slick, if it looks too perfect, it won't feel human. And so for me, embracing the imperfect, embracing doing all these different things imperfectly has been a huge shift and a weight off my shoulders to be like, it's okay if I make mistakes. I'm going to try my best. I'm going to use all my scheduling skills that I've learned over the years and hacks on doing all that. But ultimately, it's okay that I'm going to make mistakes. In fact, it's an essential part of making these creative mud pies.

16:43All right. It's your CTA, your creative call to adventure. we don't like to leave you with these episodes with, you know, nothing you can do, just feeling inspired, but not being able to put it into practice. So every time we try to end with a CTA, something, a call to adventure where you can go do something with this. So this week's is Next, The Great and The Finished Project. That's a play on the Nate the Great books. in second grade. I wrote my own Nate the Great book. It was called Nate the Great and the Missing Monkey. And it was a mystery. And I don't think I still have a copy of it, but I got real into writing that.

17:29And so, yeah, what does it mean? That's the question. So next, the great and the finished project, that's a way to get it hopefully stuck in your head because you need it while you're making projects. And it comes from something I think I've touched on here and there throughout the 500 episodes, but is worth revisiting because I need this injected into my veins and just plastered to my forehead because I need it so frequently. And the idea comes from an author who I'm a fan of, past guest of the show, Cal Newport. And he says that when he's in the middle of writing a book, he gets to this point in the project where he wants to start over from scratch, where he realizes that he's made some mistakes.

18:17And in order for the thing he's working on to really truly be great, he needs to wipe the slate clean and start all over. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't times where this is true. You know, it comes to mind, things like Pixar, you know, they really get far into the process and sometimes start over a few times. Yes, that there are times where that happens. Sure. However, I would say if I let that be the rule and not the exception, I would have done nothing. I would be, I would not be a published author. I would not be a podcaster with 500 episodes. I would not be someone with client work and all this stuff or a website even, or any images that I've made because I feel that way every single time I make a piece of work.

19:07I get to a point where I'm like, you know what? This is okay, but it'd be great if I did that. And in order to do that, I got to just delete this and start from scratch. And so when Cal Newport feels that way, he says to himself, okay, you know what? I'm going to take that note, inner critic, and I'm going to use it in the next book. in the next book, I'll use that and the next one will be great. And the one I'm working on now, this will be the finished one. This will be the finished book or this will be the book that was good enough. And I use that every single time I make an episode. Every time I make a picture book, I use that idea.

19:49We just got to the finish line on a new picture book. We're just like finishing the final touches, very thrilled about this book. But even that book, I'm going through all the final illustrations and I'm thinking, you know what? If I was doing that from scratch, I'd maybe do this differently or if I was doing it. And I almost did it where I started to open that back up. But I heard that voice, Cal Newport voice that said, the next one, I'll do that great thing. This one is going to be the finished thing. And so that's my encouragement to you. What I want you to do with that information is to think about all the stuff on your plate, all the stuff that you could do if you're just waiting for the perfect time, you're waiting for it all to come together where you're going to finally be good enough to start that project or finish that project or have enough, the perfect amount of time and space to really focus on that thing.

20:46Take an inventory of all the stuff that you're doing, all the unfinished projects, all the unstarted projects and figure out which of these can be better off, full of mistakes, not being the great next one, but being the finished one now. Which of these do you just need to finish? Because for me, there's a lie in my mind that says if I restarted, it'd be great, be perfect. Or if I just wait until I have the perfect time and space to perfectly accomplish this, then, then it's time to do it. But the fact of the matter is there'll never be perfect time. You'll never be a perfect version of yourself.

21:29The project will never be perfect. And that is a feature, not a bug.

21:54All right, that's it for another episode. I just want to give you a heads up. If you want to stay up to date with things and be the first person to hear about it, hear about the stuff that I'm up to, the best place to follow along is on Substack at andyjpizza.substack.com and sign up to the newsletter. Every week we'll send you just a reminder that an episode has dropped. But also in there, I will let you know if there's an event coming up that might be near you. I will let you know when there's a sale on books or stuff in the shop. I will let you know if we open up any like one-on-one session, creative direction slash coaching call or portfolio review stuff.

22:43Right now, we've opened those up really infrequently, like once every other year, something like that, but we might do it more frequently. Also, if you sign up to be a supporter on Substack or on Patreon, be a Patreon backer, you will have access to our monthly call with other people that are trying to build a creative practice. We do this creative pep rally thing at the end of every month on a Monday. We change the times. Sometimes it's 9 a.m. Eastern. Sometimes it's 12 p.m. Sometimes it's 2 p.m. We might even explore and experiment outside of that. But they've been really fantastic. We share some wins.

23:25We mostly talk about the episodes from the past month, things like the CTAs, questions, comments, additions from listeners. And it's just really satisfying to me to talk to you back and forth and have a discussion around these things that we're publishing and to hear your wins. And also we talk about the obstacles that you're facing and how they can filter into future episodes. So that's been really great. It's an hour and a half long. It's on Zoom. You can sign up. If you support the show on Substack or Patreon, you will get links with those weekly updates to register for those calls. And they've just been really fun.

24:05Thanks to everybody that supports the show. It means the world and it makes it so that we can do this. Huge thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor, the editor on the show, the co-producer. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio and video editing and sound design and animations. We're on YouTube if you like to, you know, casually watch and listen at the same time. We're Creative Pep Talk over there. And thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for the theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up.

25:09biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our Creative Career Path hand booklet.

26:10And the whole process is in there. And you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up. But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y 'all.