506 - The Career Defining Breakthrough I Found in Scary Slow Times

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 pep talk.

0:20What do you do with your creativity and your creative impulse when the world is stuck in a place that means that you cannot move forward? That no matter what you do, what strategy you apply, you can't seem to get past the stage and the phase that you're in. That's what we're going to talk about today. and if you stick to the end, I'm gonna come back with a call to adventure, the CTA that's called Retrace Your Stage and it's what you can do when you can't move forward. There is still something you can do that's super powerful, that's super essential, even more essential than forward momentum and I will be back to talk about how to do that thing at the end, so stick around for that but for now, let's talk about what happens when you really can't control your progress?

1:15And do you just do nothing? I don't think so. I think that's one of the most important times in your creative journey. In just a second, let's dive into that.

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3:11So what do you do in those times where you are truly stuck? It's not just an inner obstacle where you have to figure something out, but actually the external world that you're in will not move, will not change, and it's not in your control. Maybe it's the economy. Maybe it's the platform. maybe it's the industry that you're in is going through changes or is stuck itself. And no matter what you do, you can't get more jobs through the door. You can't get the analytics to move forward. You are stuck and it's not anything in your control. What do you do when you can't make forward momentum? What do you do when you can't make progress?

3:53You see, there are times where your stuckness just needs a little bit of strategy, a little strategic, strategery, some creativity where you need to solve a problem. For me, when I think about creativity, I think about it in these two different categories. There is strategic creativity, which is starting with the end in mind. Like that's an end result that I want. I want that puzzle finished and I got to go work backwards and start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Like problem solving is a creative activity. But then creativity, I think more as how we think about it in culture, usually falls more into this exploratory creativity, which isn't starting with the end in mind.

4:41It's the exact opposite. It's starting and not knowing where you're going. I like to think of that through that lens that I've heard John Mayer talk about. It's the Ouija board creativity where the guitar is playing itself. The paintbrush has a mind of its own. Like that's the kind of creativity we're talking about when it comes to exploratory creativity. And so sometimes when you're in a stuck place, especially if it's an internal block or if it's just a little obstacle where you're seeing other people, it's working for them, but it's not working for you, you just need to apply some strategic creativity, some problem solving, and it can do wonders at the right time.

5:25And a lot of the podcast, this podcast, Creative Pep Talk, is about strategic creativity because I like helping people solve problems and strategic creativity initially seemed foreign to me in my own creative journey. But then once I got the hang of it, I was kind of mesmerized by how powerful it was to approach a problem with this kind of design thinking and starting with the problem and defining it and then working backwards from the goal. Like some incredible things have happened in my own creative practice through this sort of strategic thinking. And so lots of the episodes are about that.

6:10If you don't have jobs, here's how to get jobs. If you can't get followers, here's how to get followers. If you can't overcome this creative block, here's how you get through it. And a lot of the show is about how to break through blocks. And I'm proud of that. I'm excited about that. I still believe in that. However, there is a degree in which I have over-indexed on the strategic creativity because it's so practical. and that's a problem because it's imbalanced from the other just as important, maybe more essential creativity, which is the exploratory creativity. And the fact of the matter is as much as the magic has really been a result of strategic creativity in a lot of instances in my creative work, some of the most essential moments in my own practice have come from the opposite, have come from this willingness to explore whether or not I knew I was going to reach any interesting end or not.

7:23And so in this episode, I want to celebrate and embrace and encourage you to embrace exploratory creativity, taking a risk to make stuff even when you don't know where it's going to lead you. Even if you don't know, it's going to help you break through the block that you're currently facing because sometimes it's like a video game where you're not stuck on a final boss. It's not that you just haven't figured out how to beat them. You haven't figured out the right strategy. It's more like you're stuck in an area where there's a doorway. You can see it, but the computer has a guard in front of it and it won't let you in.

8:12Like the computer programming is just saying you will not pass through this door. You shall not pass. And when that happens, you don't need a strategy. When you're at a place in your journey in a video game where you can't move on any further, no matter what you try, you can't go around the guard. You can't try a different dialogue option to get through it. You can't strategery your way through this block. What do you do? You explore where you already are. In a moment like that, you realize that you don't need forward momentum. You need to go backward. You're missing what's already here. You're missing some secret items that you haven't found yet that are necessary for moving into the next area.

9:08And so when you get to a block where it's a huge external block, it's the industry, it's the economy, it's the platforms, it's stuff beyond your control and strategy will not work. That's the time where you need to quit thinking about making progress. You need to quit trying to make forward momentum. You need to start making art.

9:54So in just a second, I want to talk about how to embrace this other type of creativity. This other type of creativity being exploratory creativity. This is something that in hobby level creativity gets overrepresented. It's I think hobbyists or amateurs and I'm not using those in derogatory ways. I'm just saying when you're doing – I'm a hobbyist and an amateur in elements of things that I do and I think that's something to aspire to is to do creativity for itself. I think that's a really great thing. So I'm not demeaning anybody here. But I think sometimes when it comes to that kind of creativity, we overemphasize the importance of exploration rather than having a goal and constraints and an end result in mind.

10:50This idea of exploratory creativity, this gets underemphasized when as soon as you inject into the equation any level of commerce or money or doing it for a living. And once you introduce these ideas to your creativity, it becomes really difficult to spend time and make space for the kind of creative work that you don't know is going to lead to anything worthwhile. That's a very difficult thing to do, but it's so essential. And I think there are ways to systematize that even within the constraints of the economy and the capitalistic society that we live in today. And so we'll get to that in just a second.

11:35But just for a minute, just allow me a little side road, a tiny little tangent that I think is relevant to this conversation and is really going to make this a lot juicier because it does for me at least. and it's this idea called the quest mindset. The quest mindset is a central theme to this podcast. It's the reason why there is a hand holding a pencil sword up in the air on the cover of this podcast, the podcast artwork for this show because the hero's journey has been a big part of it and I didn't always understand what that was all about. Now, I've come to realize that is partially about the growth mindset that your creativity isn't this thing that's a fixed thing that you either have or you don't.

12:26You either have the X factor and the talent or you don't, but instead it's a journey, it's a process, it's something that you can grow and develop in. So I think that's a big part of it. But another part of it I didn't understand until I read this book by Dr. Lisa Miller, who I believe she is a professor in the psychology department at Columbia. I'm almost positive that's true. It's something similar to that, if not. And she has a book called, I think it's called The Awakened Brain. And that book is about how our brains are wired for spirituality. Now, one of my core values of this show that I've spoke about quite often is that I don't want to mix spirituality and creativity here.

13:14And it's not because I don't have a spiritual practice or leaning. And it's not because I don't think creativity isn't inherently spiritual because I do think it is. I just feel like in other formats, other creative self-help resources, it's overemphasized the spiritual or magical quality of creativity. And I kind of believe that anything that maybe has that transcendent quality actually also shows up in practical, physical ways. And so all the things we think of as channeling, I kind of feel like there's probably precedent in neuroscience that could show us what it is that's happening there. And I think, anyway, I'm kind of getting off topic.

14:11But I've made a habit not to make this podcast spiritual. And I think there is a way in which when we talk about creativity, there's going to be the experience of spirituality or that the encounter of it will have a spiritual quality, even if that's not explicitly intended or named. And so I kind of trust that if there is anything otherworldly about this show, that it'll happen on its own without me needing to name it or pre-frame it that way. However, one little aside, in this book, one of the things that Dr. Lisa Miller lays out so beautifully is this idea of the quest mindset. And it's the exact thing that I encountered as I got enamored with the hero's journey.

15:12And the idea is pretty simple, but it's really profound for me. And it's this idea that spirituality is a kind of journey quest mindset that says the external circumstances that I'm encountering are deeply connected to who I am, what I'm going through, what my purpose is, and ultimately my interior life. And she says that when you start to see parallels or connective tissue between what you're experiencing on the outside and what you're experiencing on the inside, when the growth that you need on the inside is being set up on the outside for you, when you start seeing things that are happening as not happening to you but happening for you, That is the quest mindset.

16:13And the research around it says that moving through reality this way can guard you against aspects of depression, can actually do wonders for your mental health. And one of the reasons why I wanted to make this episode was because I know so many of us are experiencing blockages in our creative flow, in our creative path. Whether it's the platforms changing or the technology or the economy or politics, the outside world is coming to a standstill that is scary. And for me, it's been really powerful to encounter those moments through the lens of the quest mindset to not resist when things get blocked or strained on the outside, but to see that as deeply connected to what needs to happen to me on the inside.

17:16and that sounds maybe really fluffy and abstract, but it's very practical and pragmatic and it happens to me in such a way where I can really see it when I look back through my life. So one example of this, the times we're living in now, there are a lot of it's unprecedented and you know that because that word has never been used more frequently. Sophie and I joke about this all the time. Like when you watch the news, It's just, you know, don't do a drinking game. That is take a shot every time they say unprecedented because it happened. Unprecedented things are happening every second. But in some ways with the way that people are experiencing slowness in their work, this was similar to what happened back in 2008, 2009.

18:02Right when I graduated, I got a bunch of positive momentum, a lot of illustration jobs, and then just overnight, boom, nothing for a long time, like six months to a year, like no jobs. Almost no emails, no opportunities. It was so disheartening and scary. And yes, for a long while, I just was stuck in bemoaning that and resisting that external reality. But at some point, I realized that I wanted to make creative work regardless of whether anybody else wanted me to or not. And I decided I was going to use this time. I was going to see this time as a sign that I needed to dig deeper. that I needed to explore my internal space.

18:48And so that's when I started this daily character drawing project. And I was doing this knowing I didn't want to be a character designer. In fact, I even got a couple opportunities to do character design because of this project. And I was so bad at it. I got to see what other people were making on the project. And this was just not for me. And so while I was doing the project, I knew this is not leading anywhere directly that I want to go. I don't even know why I'm doing it. It just feels like what I should be doing right now. It just feels like what I should be exploring. And it wasn't until I got all of that stuff out of my system that I saw like, oh, this is where it should go.

19:30It should go into picture books. It should go into kids' media. And then I could actually start doing something more strategic with it and start doing those sorts of projects. But I had to do that work for myself. and I joke sometimes about how like six or seven days into the project, I hit this massive social media milestone that you probably have never hit. I feel safe to brag about this. You've probably never been to this place where I posted, and guess what? I got zero likes on that post, and I'm joking, but I'm not because that was a milestone, or at least the next day was, because when the next day came around and I posted again, that was a personal milestone that said, I am doing this not for the likes.

20:18I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing this because I need to explore this space that I find myself in. And it was so freaking essential to my creative becoming and development. And it's why I wanted to do an episode. I might even do a few episodes. This might turn into a series because we haven't spoke a ton about this side, the exploratory side. And it's probably even more essential than the strategic one because until you get that stuff out, you don't know what to do with it. And I had this image of, there's this reality TV show that Sophie and I used to watch back in the day called Storage Wars.

20:57And it's where these people go to these auctions where they auction off storage containers of people's stuff for people that haven't paid for it. They haven't paid their bill in so much time. And so they're just going to sell off everything that's in the storage unit. But you're not allowed to go in it and explore it. You have to just stand on the outside and try to guess what's in it based on your first impression. And then you bid and the highest bidder gets it and gets to go in there and explore it and figure out what this thing is worth and what to do with it. And that image just felt so much like me before I was willing to do these exploratory projects where I was trying to figure out what market should I be in?

21:47What industry should I be in? How should I position this? How should I sell it? What strategies should I take to market this work before I've ever got it outside of myself? And so it's so much easier to go and take everything out. and then figure out how do I do something strategic with this? And so it's so essential. And I think in this moment, we find ourselves in a time where the circumstances are out of our control on a massive level. And yes, I think do your part politically, do your part creatively, be part of the change you wanna see in the world. But you find yourself in this place where it's gonna be a long game and you're stuck here.

22:31And the guard is at the entrance and it won't let you through until you explore where you already are, until you find what you already have inside that you need to get out. And so for me, there's just a tremendous amount of power in reframing this circumstance and embracing the circumstance that you find yourself out in, embracing the quest mindset that says this external reality is somehow maybe naturally or supernaturally linked to who I am supposed to become. And I think you don't even have to get woo-woo about it because whatever circumstance you find yourself in is what you're going to have to adapt to even if there isn't a higher power pushing you in any direction.

23:20Like that's just the reality you find yourself in. And the sooner you embrace it and rise to the occasion, the better. And it also relates to a theme on this show that we've talked about a lot, which is the difference between stress and eustress, which is bad stress that hurts your heart and your body and good stress that actually makes you function properly and keeps you alive and vital. And the difference between stress and eustress, there's really interesting research around this, is whether you embrace the obstacle or not. that when you resist the circumstance, it shows up differently in your body.

24:01When you resist the place that you're in, it acts as stress in your body that hurts you. But if you can find a mindset that says this circumstance isn't happening to me, but for me, you can actually transmutate that stress from bad stress to good stress. And that's the power of the quest mindset. So I don't care if you see it as supernatural or just practical, but I think embracing this moment we're in and forgetting about making progress and start being mindful about making art that is exploratory in nature can be extremely profound.

25:05Okay. You know that every episode, I don't want to leave you with nothing. I don't want you to just feel inspired by the stuff that we're talking about. I want you to be able to do something with it. So every episode we end with a creative call to adventure, our CTA. our CTA this week is retrace your stage. If you are in a stage that you can't seem to escape, it might mean that you need to go back and explore it more thoroughly. I don't know about you, but when I play a video game, often if I'm just kind of mindlessly moving through it, I can get into this mode of just trying to get to the next part, just trying to get to the next boss, just trying to get to the next phase or world.

25:55And I can end up not doing the dialogue, not talking to people along the way, not exploring the stage that I'm in. And I get to those moments where all of a sudden the game won't let me go any further. And when that happens, I know I got to go back to those areas where I had a sense that maybe something else was going on and I just blew straight through it. I didn't open any of the boxes. I didn't trust that gut feeling. And I just tried to move on through. And the same is true in my creative journey. And so in moments where you can't move forward, it might be time to just continue making money how you already make money, continue in this phase that you're already in, but also retrace your steps, retrace the stage that you're in and move back through and ask yourself, when was the last time that you moved through something where you got a sense that maybe you should have explored it?

26:56Maybe there's something more there, but you just blew right past it. When was the last time you felt on fire for something where you felt eerily at the right place at the right time, but you didn't capitalize on it? You didn't dive deeper into it. When was the last time you felt life was speaking to you, but you ignored it? When was the last time you were in a conversation where you were on fire talking about something that you never went back to? For me, this has happened a bunch of different times. Early in my career, it was like when I did this project that I told you about where I was doing a new character every day for a year.

27:36That required me to go back throughout my whole life all the way to childhood and think about what was the art that stopped me in my tracks? What was the art that lit me up on this transcendent level that I haven't really explored thoroughly. And that's what that project became. But it also has happened where I feel stuck and I can't move forward. And I have to think about when was the last time that I had a conversation where I just fell on fire? And there was a particular moment where I got interviewed on a podcast and the person told me, hey, based on all this stuff that you're interested in, you should go check out this Jungian life and Carl Jung more.

28:18You should dive deeper into that. And it wasn't until a year later where I was in one of these stuck places that I paused and I said, you know, when was the last time where I really felt like the psychically charged moment? And it was that conversation. I thought, all right, maybe I should go explore some of those things. And I did. And it unlocked all this new territory to explore. And it happened to where I was like, when was the last time where things seemed to be clicking? When was the last time where it didn't feel like I was the only force pushing the thing up the hill, but things had some momentum?

28:51Did I leave something back there that I need to explore again? I like to think of this also like the universe telling you to finish your plate before you get seconds. Where are the vegetables? Where's the deeper dive that I need to go on? Go back and more thoroughly explore it, not just by looking into it, but creating, responding. Making a project where you are responding and participating with that thing. And so when you cannot move forward whatsoever, it's time to retrace your steps and see what you missed. And so I want you to, if this is you and you're in this place, maybe quit thinking about moving forward and start thinking about moving backward and find those last, one of the recent moments where you blew right past something that had, you know, a numinous quality, a quality of it kind of not being like the others.

29:51And how can you dive deeper into that experience by making something?

30:13Okay. I hope this did something for you. I hope it got you getting those creative juices moving again. I want to tell you real quick that we are exploring. This is kind of, you know, where it's an exploratory movement for us in our creative practice and our, in this show, we are trying something out. It's kind of in the beta mode. So I don't know if we'll be able to do it forever, but I wanted to let you know that we are now offering an ad-free version of this show to Patreon backers and Substack subscribers that are paid that support this show. One of the benefits of that is going to be an ad-free version of the show where you can get an RSS feed and you submit it to the podcast app you use.