509 - Hack Motivation to Begin AND Finish Well + Unlock Creative Self with These Questions

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.

0:20Okay. We're going to talk about what do you do when you're just starting out? Because we got a lot of beginners that listen to this show too, and as well as the seasoned folks. And even if you're a seasoned folk, you got to start over all kinds of things, all kinds of times. So we're always in that beginner mindset. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what I think is really important if you're in one of those stages where you're starting something new. We're also gonna talk about how do you stay focused, not just long enough to start something, but to finish something. As an ADHD person who has finished a few things, I have a lot of thoughts on that that I hope will help you.

0:59These have been freshly helping me recently in a very important way. So I'm excited to get into some details around what really helps me stay motivated and start and finish things. And stick around to the end of this episode. We are going to do a CTA, our call to adventure, how to do something right now that's going to help you do this stuff. Not just be inspired, but do it. And it's called Date Yourself. Okay? Excited about that. Can't wait for you to get there. And yeah, let's get into it.

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3:25Dr. Pizza. Hi, Andy. I'm Snikta. I love your podcast. And this is me sending in a question for Dr. Pizza. I am kind of at the beginning of setting up my creative practice. I still have a full-time day job and I'm just trying to see what this could mean for me on the side. And Creative Pep Talk has been a big inspiration for me to do that. So thank you very much. I was wondering if you had any tips for when you're at the beginning, you don't have a specific style yet, you don't know what exactly your medium is and you just have all these different creative ideas of stuff you could make stuff you could do coming to you way faster than you can possibly pick one and execute it and bring it to life so when you're in that zone how do you get started how do you make sure you actually start the process and don't just let the ideas overwhelm you to the point of being frozen and not making anything at all.

4:24Yeah, I was just thinking about that and I would appreciate any thoughts, advice, anything that comes to your head. Thank you so much. Hey, Snigna, I am super excited to answer this question because I think it goes right alongside themes that we've been exploring in this show. We did an episode recently about how we talk a lot about the strategic side of creative career planning and creativity and kind of plotting and outlining and that kind of stuff. But we don't spend as much time on what we traditionally think of as creativity, which is the exploratory creativity. Strategic creativity being starting with an end in mind and kind of working backwards.

5:12And then exploratory creativity being starting without knowing where it's going. And when you are getting started, I think that this is the most essential time to be creating without a purpose, without knowing where this is going to go, what market is it in, how is this going to be profitable. I think you have to have a period of time early in your creative development where you are making not from a place of strategy, but from a place of exploration in terms of your taste. So when we think about the artist that we love, words that come to mind are creative voice or creative style or authorship.

6:00All these things are really important. But for me, I think that the first primary thing we should be focusing on in our creative journey is developing our creative sensibility. And I love this word sensibility. I think it's a through line throughout this whole podcast and it's really essential to how I think about what it means to make great creative work and kind of find your way. I think the way that you navigate the creative journey is through your ability of your sensitivity, a.k.a. your taste. And so taste is this word that I think means a lot of different things. I think when we think of taste, we think about good taste.

6:49We think about like refined palate. We think like, oh, this person likes good stuff and acquired tastes and not so much guilty pleasures or things that we think are maybe less than creatively. But for me, I've tried to evolve my definition of taste to be purely your creative palate, your sensitivity to creative work. Like what lights up your taste buds? If you're a cook, that might mean literally, but if you're an artist, it means more symbolically or metaphorically like your sensitivity on a heart level. What are the stories that make your heart sore? What are the songs that make you cry? What are the things that touch you deeply?

7:41that being touched that way is your sensitivity. And then when you create from that sensitivity, when you let that sensitivity guide you through the creative process, both inform the direction that you take as well as the decisions that you make through the process, that is the ability of that sensitivity. It is allowing you to taste the creation as you go and say, I need to go left. I need to go right. I need to add salt. I need to add a little paprika here. I need to do this or that to get closer to it lighting me up on the inside. And so to answer your question, that's just the preface, baby.

8:27To answer your question, I think you have to start with taste. You have to be trying to develop your sensibility, your ability of your sensitivity. And I think you do so by first collecting things that light you up in a visceral transcendent way. We'll put it out there because we're both creative people. We don't mind getting a little romantic about it, right? Collect those things that really like, it's almost like a spiritual experience and they fall into the categories of, yeah, the acquired tastes, you know, the bands and the artists and the books that you learn to love. Yeah, that's a good, that's useful in your journey.

9:15But maybe more useful is the guilty pleasures, the stuff that you feel like, I shouldn't even like this, but I can't help it. That tells you something really deeply true about your creative palette and your sensitivity. and so collect all this stuff, old stuff, new stuff, obscure stuff, all of it. Put it in a Pinterest board, create a collage of it, post it on your wall, cut it out of magazines, put it on your wall like you're a teenager, but get it all together in one place because the thing that you want to do is you don't want to separate all these like, oh, this is my music taste. These are my film taste.

9:58These are the new artists I like. These are the old artists like. You don't want them all separate. You want to get them together so that you can start seeing the commonalities. And when you look at that collage, I think what you're trying to see is it's like there's these diagrams online that kind of show you, it's like a picture of a drawing of a tongue and it shows you the different areas of taste. You have the salt and the sweet and the umami and something else and another thing. And these are all the little categories of the taste and this is your taste profile. Those collages, that's what I want you to think of as your taste profile.

10:38It's like a big picture of your creative tongue and you're trying to figure out what is overrepresented. Where am I really sensitive? Because you might have a sweet tooth or you might not care for sweets and you're all about savory. but you have this very specific thing that comes together, this chemical combustion that makes you feel something. And so that's where influences are so much more than like learning to make work that's inspired by them or kind of like them. The reason I think influences are so essential is because it tells you something about your sensitivity. and as you try to decode that, that's gonna give you an idea of the types of work to start exploring.

11:23And in fact, you might even start critiquing through critiquing these influences through the lens of, I love this artist, but I wish they had a little bit of that going on from this artist or that music or that film or that book or whatever. And you start to like pair all these ingredients together. And I have a friend, Lauren Hom, who is a chef and went to culinary school and also a great designer lettering artist. And she spoke about this through the lens of like, when you can say that a recipe is yours, like legally in the cookbook world, is something like you have to change three key ingredients of a recipe for it to be yours.

12:07And so, you know, real art, not that food and being culinary arts aren't a real art, but yes, they are arts. But art, fine art, illustration, whatever,

12:26that doesn't work as specifically in that way. It's not as easy as just change three ingredients, but it gives you an idea of what it means to develop your own work and doing so, not randomly picking things, not just randomly experimenting, which is just very haphazard, but trying to get closer and closer to that taste profile that doesn't exist except on your metaphorical creative tongue. And so what I would do is collect all that stuff, look for patterns. Those become constraints for a creative project that really is just you creating a creative habit, showing up, working in these ingredients for a period of time.

13:13For me, that looked like a daily drawing project where I did a new character every weekday for a year. That was me looking at these heroes, looking at the patterns, trying new combinations, trying to add other things, trying to critique, trying to experiment within that world. And then after I made that project, I had a much bigger sense of my sensitivity and what worked and what didn't. And I kind of was populating the world of my creative sensibility, like literally populating it with these characters, but also just populating it through items that the characters are holding and backgrounds and trying to get a sense of what does this creative palette as a true north, as a compass, where does it lead me on a page as I'm making these decisions informed by these influences?

14:08But then as I'm drawing and as I'm reflecting on the drawings, figuring out which of these really, really light me up. and as I go to make decisions, letting that internal sensitivity guide each decision. When I had Lulu Miller from Radiolab on this show, she spoke about it like moving the music on the podcast that she's working on and the radio show she's working on, moving the music here, moving it there, listening to it, closing her eyes. And she's talking about tasting, tasting that show with her soul and seeing which of them lights up that sensitivity and which of them maybe discuss that sensitivity and like letting that internal taste bud guide each decision.

15:00I think that is the intuitive way that we do something that goes beyond rational thought, goes beyond something you can explain or teach and it defines what will make your work unique to you. And so do that. And then, you know, when I did this Color Me show with my buddy, Andrew Nyer, who is a conceptual artist and product designer and illustrator, we did this in a way where we made this work, which was like a combination of our stuff. We did this mural. It was just like a doodle mashup. We stood back and we were like, what works and what doesn't work? And we made a bunch of rules and decisions about that based on our sensitivities.

15:44And this was our Venn diagram of our sensitivities. And then we said, okay, the next one we're going to do, it's going to be much more simple. We're just going to do objects kind of floating in space like a sticker sheet. And again, it was like us populating the world with this is what a shoe looks like in that world. This is what a pencil looks like in that world. This is what a head looks like in this world. until we developed our own creative sensibility together, almost like how a band will do. And so that's kind of what you're doing, but for just for yourself. And so collect that stuff, look for the patterns, make the work, reflect on it.

16:21And then once you have a sense of that sensibility, then you're going to have a much easier time knowing where that should go in the industry and the market and what makes your niche your niche. But don't, that's where the strategy starts coming in. I think it's, we did this episode recently. We're talking about, you got to get everything out. Like it's really hard to price how valuable a storage unit is if you can't get in there and like root around and see like what's actually in here. And they do that on that reality TV show Storage Wars, where they try to bid on a storage unit that's up for sale because the person didn't pay for it before they can actually get in there, just kind of judge it from the outside.

17:07And we try to do that with art, but we don't need to do that. We can get it out. We can put it on a page. We can step back from it. Then we can start thinking a little bit more creatively strategic in terms of career or what kind of projects we should do. And so that's what I would do. Create a creative habit, exploring your sensitivity, developing your sensibility, populating your world a little bit. And then you can kind of see like when I did that, the logical kind of next step would have been like to go into character design, but I didn't really want to do that. That didn't actually fit with the types of work that I was making.

17:38That might've, that might've been what I jumped to before I did that project when I was just looking at the patterns. But once I got it all out, I thought, oh, actually this makes more sense to like write stories with these characters. So like picture books and chapter books and that kind of stuff. And, but I can only know that until after I've got it all out. So that's what I would do. I think you need to do an exploratory project that develops that creative sensibility.

18:21Okay, our next question is, how do you stay focused? Now, this is a weird question because you're asking someone with attention deficit disorder how to stay focused. So I'm assuming that you aren't the type of neurotypical person who finds focus easy. And that's why you're going to someone disordered around focus and attention to ask this question. because although yes, I do have ADHD and focus is a serious problem for me, I have in some way hacked myself in such a way that I have been able to focus on some things long enough to finish them. You know, I've published over 10 different books, I think.

19:12Again, I don't focus enough to count them, but I've done a lot of books. I've done a lot of client work and I built a career doing all these things. I've made over 500 episodes of this podcast, which is just a hell of a lot of focus. So I have learned how to focus a little bit. And I'll tell you just one thing that I think has really helped me. And it's the reason why right now my iPhone wallpaper is quite bizarre. It's a headline of a substack written by a graphic memoirist named Kelsey Ervik. and she wrote a Substack recently and the title was something like, is the answer to all creative problems a deadline?

19:57And I screenshotted it and I made it my background because it's something that I have had to keep top of mind recently because I've realized so many of the projects that I want to do that I haven't done or haven't finished are because I don't have a deadline. And here's, I'll break down, I wanna say kind of two different things here. One is how I've learned to start and finish things, how I've found the motivation to start and finish things. And I found that motivation from two different places. It's essential for me getting anything done. And it's come from understanding myself. I'm gonna talk a little bit about that.

20:32The second thing I wanna talk about is, and I've lost focus just as I'm saying that I'm trying to remember what the second thing was. I'm giving you a little peek behind the curtain because usually I just cut this bit out while I'm trying to think of like, what was that second thing that I was going to bullet point? But I'm going to keep it for the sake of the question. Yeah. The second thing I'm going to talk about is, I don't know, but we'll probably get there in a second. The first thing I'll go back to that. This is the live version of my focus and attention. So when it comes, here's what I've learned about finishing projects and focusing long enough to achieve anything is that motivation doesn't just mean one thing.

21:11First of You're not either motivated or you're not motivated. Also, when I've learned about ADHD, I've learned that what motivates ADHD people is a very different thing than what motivates neurotypical. Now, you might think of yourself as ADHD. You might think, I might have ADHD, but I choose not to identify that way, or I find that as a limiting identity or fixed mindset, or you might be autistic or dyslexic or any other, you know, there's so many different types of brains. Is there even really a neurotypical? Some researchers think no. But back to the point, you may have similarities. So either you might be motivated in a similar way to me and to ADHD people, or the takeaway for you is to figure out what kind of motivation works for you and to systematize it.

22:02So my system is that I'm only going to start things that are triggered by interest because there's only a few things that motivate ADHD people. The two that I utilize most often are interest-based motivation. So a nervous system that is interest-based and motivated by interest and curiosity. That's one of the ways that I am motivated. And the second way that I'm very familiar with is urgency. So if it's not interesting or it's not urgent to do this, I'm going to have a really difficult time getting that thing done. And so how this manifests in my creative life is I start things out of interest knowing that at some point, especially depending on how large of a project this is, at some point this will, the interest is going to dissipate the second I commit to starting it.

23:07It's going to start to, it's like sand in an hourglass. It's going to start to dissipate almost instantaneously, drip by drip by drip, sometimes in huge ways, sometimes just in tiny ways over time. But I know this interest is not a sustainable fuel from the start of the project to the end of the project. because I've started so many things that I didn't finish. But the ones that I did finish were the ones that I was able to hack my brain with a sense of urgency. And usually that's done by a deadline. Sometimes I can get myself to commit to a deadline and the deadline to myself or to the accountability of the audience.

23:48Like I said, I was gonna do this podcast every Wednesday or I'm gonna post this picture every day. As long as I'm still pretty interested, and I can be accountable to that kind of a deadline. But the urgency really only kicks in for me if there is a more substantial obligation that I feel obliged to fulfill. Now, with work, the best case scenario is there's a lot of money attached to it and I gotta pay my bills and take care of my kids and all of that feels like real urgency because it is. Another one though, even when I haven't been able to do that, So sometimes the reason I've screenshotted that idea of is the answer to every creative problem a deadline, the reason I've screenshotted that recently is because I've realized there are a few different areas in my creative life where I've forgotten that the way that I finish ideas is having that urgency, having that deadline, hacking my brain that way.

24:48And I've tried to write books without a book deal. I've tried to create a course without a collaborative partner that's setting up the project and giving me deadlines and holding me to it. I forgot that this is such an essential part to not starting things but finishing things. And as I move forward, when I try to do a book about the stuff we talk about on this podcast, I realized, oh, I actually need to go get a book deal. I need to create the pitch, then I can get the book deal, and then that will hold me accountable to hack that second type of motivation that I need to finish something and follow through.

25:26But there are times when you don't have the option to get a book deal. There were lots of times in my creative journey, and maybe still, who knows if I'll get this book deal, but there were a lot of times where that wasn't even on the table. And even then, I would find ways to hack it. I'll tell you two versions of that. One was I wanted to make courses for podcast content for a long time. Couldn't get myself to do it. Then Skillshare came along and wanted to advertise on the show. And I made it part of the deal that I would only do it if they would help me make courses. And so I knew that they were going to give me that deadline, that urgency, that motivation to get this thing started or mostly finished.

26:05And so even though I was going to sacrifice a portion of the profit of that to this collaborator, I knew that sacrifice was worth it because there would be zero profit if I was trying to do it on my own because it wouldn't exist. And so that's a way in which I have traded money for staying motivated, for accountability, for getting that urgency motivation that's necessary for me to complete stuff. Now, even if you don't have someone that you could just literally pay to motivate you with this kind of thing, maybe you're not even there. It's looked like before this, it's looked like doing projects with collaborators that are stronger finishers than they are starters.

26:52And so all the way back into the beginning of my career, making zines with friends in college and creating these collaborative partnerships, so much of that was, yes, we are excited about the same thing and I'm pumped to start this, but they're pumped to follow through. They're the people that want to finish it. And so there's a collaborative give and take there. When I make stuff with Sophie, that's a huge part of our deal is that she is a strong finisher. If we start something strong, she's going to want to finish it strong. And that's part of the deal. So collaborators can be a part of getting that urgency motivation.

27:29So those two things, if I don't have both of those in tandem, I'm not able to both start and finish a project. And so that might not be you, you might not be ADHD, but what you are is a human with preferences and your nervous system and your motivation has a formula, it has a way to work with it. And so if those things don't ring true to you, I recommend going and checking out, I believe it's Gretchen Rubin's work on motivation where she goes through, this isn't going to give you everything you need, but it's going to give you a piece of it where she goes through, you're either a rebel or an obliger or this or that.

28:08There's four categories of things that keep you motivated. All those things are factors. This is actually just to go on a little bit of a tangent, since we are talking about ADHD, this is a little bit about why I go so hard on talking about ADHD, talking about neurodivergence. I think a lot of people assume that's because learning I was ADHD changed my life, which is true. That's true. That's why I talk about it all the time. But I think they assume that it changed my life because I got diagnosed and then I got on medicine and everything was fixed. I'm not on medicine, baby. I don't know if you can tell.