513 - Why Creatives Have to Build Habits Differently and How to Do It

0:02On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off, sometimes you'll just need a creative pep talk.

0:20how to embrace creative discipline if forming habits feels impossible that's what we're talking about today and i'm gonna tell you the massive gear shift that completely changed how i think about habits as someone who hates doing the same thing the same way more than anybody i barely even use words more than once. My family will tell you that I don't call anything by its actual name. I barely speak in coherent sentences in my everyday because I'm constantly renaming things because it's just too painful to do the same thing the same way. However, I'm also someone who's done 500 episodes of this show and made a bunch of books and been an illustrator for 15 years.

1:12And so I've learned something about creative discipline. And I want to tell you about this gear shift. And if you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you something you can do today. It's called creating a road trip brief. And it is a way to get creative discipline in your life in a way that's not painful, but focuses on the fun and why that's so essential. I'll get to that at the end, so stick around for that. But for now, let's talk about why habits might not work for you the way that they work for other people. And the advice you've heard so far might be doing more harm than good when it comes to developing creative discipline.

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3:39One of the questions that I get most is how do you cultivate creative discipline? Now, this is a tricky one for me because I'm ADHD. I'm a creative person who is a novelty-seeking machine. And so when I get asked this, sometimes I feel like, why are you asking me? Why don't you ask some master at this? But I think the reason I get asked is because, not because I'm the master at this, but because I'm naturally bad at it, like a lot of creative folks, but I've somehow managed to finish a few things, you know, 10 plus books, 500 episodes of this podcast, et cetera, and so on. And so I think that that's probably why I get asked this, but the interesting thing about creative discipline, I think gets at the heart of what makes it so difficult because it is an oxymoron.

4:44Creative discipline. Creative meaning doing something new. Discipline meaning doing the same thing. And so striking the balance between those two things is incredibly difficult to do. And it's difficult for me every day. I have anxiety around, you know, getting the stuff done that I need to get done. It is a challenge to get myself to perform habits. And this is a major problem because anything significant requires a significant investment in a particular direction. So if you want to be a picture book maker, if you want to make an album, if you want to market yourself as a creative person, if you want to build a newsletter, whatever it is you're trying to do, if it's significant in any way, it's going to require a significant investment of time, energy, resources.

5:37And that means, you know, chaining enough of little things together to be significant requires you to have habits. And I know that sounds, I mean, on the other side of that, I'm feeling, if I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, I don't like that. Because habits, that idea, that word, discipline even makes my skin crawl a little bit. And yet, it has been super essential to me. And I've had to learn that creative discipline, being this kind of oxymoron, works in a very different kind of backwards sort of way. And it wasn't until I realized that that I could unlock it more intentionally. And so, here's the problem, okay?

6:26Most of the conventional wisdom around habits are not about creative habits or creative discipline. And they're not really geared towards creative people or neurodivergent people. They are geared towards neurotypical people. And when they tell you how to develop a habit, they're aiming for this behavior to become automatic so that you don't have to think about it. Now, that alone is kind of a problem because creativity requires thinking. It requires being switched on, right? It's not about automatic. You're not just a machine coming into the drawing studio and just churning out exactly the same thing.

7:08So there's already a problem there that gives us a hint that something isn't right about that advice for people like us. But they're telling you, okay, what you need for a habit is for it to become automatic behavior, for it to become autopilot, for you to do this thing. And to do that, the most efficient route to that is doing the same thing the same way. And if you do the same thing the same way long enough, that is going to be the most efficient route to developing a habit. but here, right here, this is the huge problem for me because right when they say this is around the time, you know, three or four weeks in or two weeks in, whatever, you know, month in, right when they're like, this is when it'll start becoming easy and automatic, that's the moment where I stall and break down and scrap the whole thing because it is in that moment that it becomes extremely boring.

8:19and I can't bring myself to do it anymore. And so here's what I realized. I don't have the automatic gear. And so these instructions are detrimental to me. It's literally like if you told someone how to drive a car, but you didn't realize they weren't driving an automatic, they're driving a manual transmission. and they don't have the automatic gear. And so everything that you're telling them is going to not lead them to the most efficient route to getting where they wanna go. It's going to lead them to stall and break down and probably scrap the whole thing just thinking this thing is broken.

9:06It doesn't work. It cannot take me where I need to go. And for a long time in my life, I felt that way. I felt like I am just someone who cannot have habits, let alone creative habits. I just have to be chaotic and do whatever I want and just hope that somehow it works out. But it didn't. You know, living that way, if I just live however I want, I mostly just eat Doritos and play video games. That's it. Like, I love Doritos. I love the spicy ones. I like the cool ranch ones. I like the cheesy ones. I like the Thai ones are really good. I love Doritos and I also love video games, but I have to keep them in check.

9:50I have to do them in a little bit of a disciplined way. I have to do my work first before I do any of that stuff. And I have to not keep Doritos in the house, basically. Anyway, this isn't about Doritos. It's about creative habits. And this transition of realizing I don't have an automatic gear. I just don't have that gear. I'm more like a manual transmission. This realization initially kind of is a bummer because you're like, okay, does that just mean everything has to be hard for me? But I don't think that's the case. I think it just means you can't be boring. And that's kind of cool. I remember growing up in the 90s, pretty much every person I knew, every grownup I knew was driving an automatic car.

10:40and that made sense to me. It seemed pretty straightforward and easy, but my mom drove a manual transmission and I always thought like, why do you make it hard on yourself? Like this is an option to just get rid of all of this nonsense, all these gears and all this, you know, paying attention to which gear is going up and down, how, you know, making the adjustments as you go every second. I was like, why are you doing this? No one else does this. And she would say, it's fun. It keeps it interesting. And that makes sense to my brain. Because if I don't keep my hands busy, if I don't keep it interesting, I'm going to fall asleep at the wheel, literally and metaphorically.

11:28Like when I'm driving, I got to have sunflower seeds. I got to have music. I got to have stuff going on to keep the focus. And so that made sense to me. And it's true not just in driving, it's true in your creativity. When I start thinking about driving home a habit, I have to remember that for me, it works in a similar way to driving home from work. Works for me. It works in a way that it doesn't work for most people. So most people, I have to imagine, their question is, what is the most efficient route from point A to point B? What is the most efficient point from work to home? And they're going to find that route, and they're going to do the same thing the same way.

12:23But that doesn't work for me. It's too freaking boring. Sometimes I got to take the scenic route. Sometimes I got to try some experiments and see, can I shave off a couple minutes if I go this way? I got to have the sunflower seeds. I got to have the podcast. I got to have the music. I got to enjoy the windows down. I got to make a little pit stop and get a Gatorade. This episode is sponsored by Doritos and Gatorade, apparently. Not really. But hey, if you're listening, you're not. But for me, I have to realize that habits work in the same way. Whereas most people are going to drive to the same thing the same way, and that's how their habits work.

13:08My habits work a little bit differently where I have to do the same thing. I can do the same thing, but I have to do it a different way. And so for me, it's not the most efficient route that works for habits. It's the most interesting. It's the most fun. It's the most engaging. It's the most novel. How do I do the same thing a different way? And this applies not just driving home from work. It applies to my running habit. I've been running about three miles every other day for six or seven years. There have been blips where I've kind of gotten off course and, you know, skipped. I never skipped a long period of time, okay?

13:56Don't get mad. But I've skipped, you know, four days or I've missed, I've lost my habit here and there. But mostly, I've stayed pretty consistent. And the way I've done that isn't by doing the same thing, the run, the same way. It's by taking the running as seriously, taking that same thing as seriously as I take doing it differently. Meaning switching up the routes, making sure that playlist is fire, baby, that it's making me feel that running all of a sudden feels like dancing when I'm listening to the right stuff. that I'm making sure the shoes are good, that I'm just, every element of it is fun, interesting, novel.

14:43I listen to, okay, here's the constraints. I got to run every other day. I got to do it three miles. But everything else is a variable. And the main thing is how do I keep it interesting? And this is true for coffee. I have coffee every day. And my wife, Sophie, jokes about like how many different processes I've used. We've had AeroPress. We've had an espresso machine. We've had drip coffee. We've had instant coffee. I've done it all, man. And the reason is, is I can do the same thing. I can have a habit, but I have to do it a different way. And that doesn't just apply to driving home. It applies to driving to the studio and doing the creative work.

15:29It applies to sitting down at the page. It applies to making this podcast for 500 episodes. I had to make a weekly podcast. That was the constraint. I had to do the same thing. It was about creativity. It was about creative careers. But within that same thing, there are an infinite amount of ways that I could approach this. And this little shift, realizing that you might not have, maybe you do have automatic behaviors. Maybe you are someone who has that. I can't even brush my teeth the same way, okay? But maybe you do have automatic behaviors, but when it comes to creativity, you can't do it automatically.

16:07And it's one of the reasons why it is tricky to hold this oxymoron, these contrasting views and master both worlds of creativity and discipline. And the way to do it is you gotta realize there is no automatic. It doesn't apply to this sort of habit and you've gotta embrace and find out how do I do the same thing, but I always do it in a different way.

16:53All right. I thought I could just tell you about three things. Three things habit science has taught me. Now, all of these three things are in almost all of the habit science-y things you can read, pieces of literature that you can read about habits. But these three are included in James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. That's a pretty big old chunky book and it's a good book. I do really like it. But sometimes when I'm reading these things, one of the things that keeps me going is I feel like I'm reading them for you. I'm reading them because I know a lot of, you know, there are a lot of creative people that are readers, but there are a lot of creative people that find reading difficult, especially if it's not just for fun, if it's not just fiction.

17:54and so that's one of the things that keeps me going in my reading habit is I'm reading it thinking I got to tell these people about it that might not read it and maybe you have read it it's a very popular book but they're not all of the stuff and it works for me like I said making things automatic which is a huge part of the book doesn't really work for me I don't really have that gear. But there are three things that I've taken from that book and other habit science-y articles and things that I've collected and read over the years that really have helped. I'll say three things. One is, I really like this thing that James Clear talks about, which is you need to find groups where your desired behavior, the thing that you want to be doing, is the norm for this group of people.

18:49It's just how they act. And I felt this firsthand when I moved to England out of the suburbs of the Midwest. And the people around me were much, were, you know, look, I'm not trying to judge the Midwest. Yes, I was fed a steady diet of Doritos and Gatorade growing up. But I know there are people in the Midwest subcultures within the United States that eat super healthy. But I didn't grow up in that place or around those people. When I moved to the UK, everybody I was around just ate differently. You know, even the Doritos there are healthier because they have regulations around certain ingredients.

19:32They're not healthy. They're still ultra processed food. But just being around people that naturally made the decisions to eat healthier helped change my habits for good. And so James Clear talks about if you wanna have a running habit, if you wanna have a creative habit, whatever it is, you need to go be around, you need to immerse yourself in a group where that desired behavior is just the normal behavior. And it's because we're just such social animals that we assimilate just naturally. And there's an effortless quality to that. if you really soak long enough in groups like that. And so I highly recommend getting into groups where the desired behavior is the normal behavior.

20:17Now, this is a little sales pitch, but we do have a meetup, the Creative Pep Rally. I didn't plan to talk about it, but I just realized we have a monthly Zoom with the backers of this podcast from Patreon and Substack. We meet once a month, and the desired behavior is making creative stuff. And it's normal with this group of people. These are a bunch of creative people. So if that's you, hey, that's one option. But you can also join local groups. You can join a class, a pottery class, a comics class, whatever it is, but get around people where they are showing up in a disciplined way to be creative.

20:56It will make it so much more effortless. The second thing is make it your identity. This is a huge one. You will hear this, yes, in Atomic Habits, but in every single freaking habit thing you ever come across. And it's easier to make it your identity, to shift your identity, than it is to just develop a habit. And my favorite explanation of this ever comes from a comedian from the UK that is really hilarious. His name's Simon Amstel. Me and Sophie used to watch him on nevermind the buzzcocks for you UK listeners out there that know this. Big fan, very funny, devastatingly honest, sometimes brutal, but really hilarious.

21:42And he said that he would get into this habit where he was like eating a chocolate cake every night and he couldn't stop it. He found it difficult to change that habit. He found it more easy to become a vegan, to change his identity than change his habit. And that's what I mean by that. What is the label? What is the identity that you want to embrace? How could you make that shift? You have to think of yourself as a different person. You have to think of yourself as I'm someone who eats this way, does this sort of habit, does this creativity. And this is why I think it's so important that we don't get hung up on, oh, I'm an illustrator because I get paid to make illustration.

22:32Or I'm a stand-up comic because that's my full-time job. Because the only way you're going to do that behavior is if it's your identity. And the only thing you need to make it your identity is to do the behavior. So you first have to be like, look, I'm a stand-up comic. Stand-up comics go do open mics and get on stage. So I better book that. And they're just this, it's just this like back and forth feedback loop in your brain that says, because I'm this, this is what I do. But you have to start with owning the identity before you do it. And so I think it's one of the reasons why you don't wanna be too precious about, can I call myself an artist?

23:15Can I call myself? If you don't call yourself that, you won't ever be that because that's what it requires to get started and do it. So whatever label it is, own it because it's a huge part of making it a habit. All right, the third bit is process over goal. Now, James Clear goes pretty hard in that book about railing against goals. I think a big part of that is just because goal-centric self-help has been such a big part of the past couple decades of self-help. And I think he's just trying to, you know, come in with a wrecking ball in that way of thinking. But for me, and I don't think he's completely anti-goal.

24:00I think he's just more about process. He's more about saying that goals don't make great people. Behaviors do. Habits do. And so get really obsessed with the kind of behaviors that you want to have. But for me, that again, I have to alter this because as a creative person, as an ADHD person, a huge part of my motivation is situated in my brain through this thing I'm told is dopamine. Now, I'm not going to go on a huge rant on this. Andrew Huberman has a huge episode about dopamine. you can just go search all the different dopamine podcasts if you want to go deep on this, go listen to the science around this.

24:47But here's what I realized about myself is that dopamine, a lot of people assume this is about the pleasure or like, you know, enjoyment, having fun, but it's dopamine, I'm told is not so much about getting the thing you want. It's about chasing the thing you want. And this is so freaking true for me. That's why video games are good for me. Okay, listen here, you habit science people. I like video games and I think they're good for me because I do delayed gratification. So I want to play this new Elden Ring, Night Reign game that I've just become obsessed with, but I can't do it until I do my creative discipline, until I do my work, until I do my emails.

25:34And so that whole day, I'm chasing that thing. I'm chasing the Gatorade, Doritos, and Elden Ring that I'm going to have. I'm not going to eat Doritos today. Okay. But I need that chase. Okay. So I need that goal. However, if that goal, that long-term goal, the reason why I need to have these creative habits stack up so I can do something significant, do it long enough, if that's the only thing I have, if that's my main objective, I am not going to show up every day because I'm a wimp. I'm the kind of guy that needs something. I need some, for that delayed gratification to work, I need some instant gratification baked into the whole damn thing, okay?

26:18And I actually think there's a way to do this. And it's what I call road trip goals. And I've mentioned them a few times on this show. I need the soft focus of this big goal that I'm chasing, but I need to set it up like it's a road trip. Not like it's, oh, I got to fly on a plane 13 hours to get to the other side of the world to get to this place I want to go. I got to endure all of this journey that I really hate and don't want to do. I have to have dopamine along the way. I have to plan the goal, the road trip goal, the destination based on the kind of drive that I want to have. based on the kind of process that I want to take to get there.

27:02This is what I do like about what James Clear is saying. I like this focus on process because I need to select the types of exercises that have a instant gratification to them, some level of that. And so for me, the objective might have this soft focus road trip goal, this big thing of like getting healthy. but I have to have, I have my real objective. The one that's in my mind today has to be much more instant gratification. It has to be about enjoying the process. It has to be selecting road trip destinations that have the kind of drives that I want to drive. And so for me, it looks like running's great for me because it's not just about the big destination of getting healthier.

27:53It's about the fact that it makes me happy today. It makes my brain happy. It makes my emotional state better. It makes me quicker. I run really slow, so I'm not even pushing myself to the edge unless the music kicks in in a certain way and I want to do a little sprint. That's how I get in those HIIT exercises, those little sprints and then soft jog. like that. That's how I do it. So it's all about managing. How do I keep this fun? How do I keep this process oriented where it's about doing the thing I want to do? And of course that applies even more so to the creative stuff is that when I wanted to develop my creative sensibility and get a better sense, a more unique sense of my style, I knew that was the big soft focus road trip goal of a daily drawing project I was going to do.

28:51But I made my primary objective having fun, knowing that I like to draw characters so I could draw a character every day. I feel happier when I've drawn something that day and even better if I've drawn something that I am really proud of. And so my focus was on the instant gratification of the process, of enjoying the process. And the soft focus was the road trip goal of I wanna develop my style. And so those are three things that habit science has helped me figure out. And I've had to kind of interpret them here on this podcast and to myself to make them work for a creative weirdo like myself.

29:39Now, let's talk about how to build a road trip goal that will help you develop the kind of creative discipline that you're after, that you can start doing something today that will help you start moving where you wanna go in the future.

30:11Okay, so every episode we like to leave you with not just some inspiration, not just pep, not just freaking pepped out of your mind. No, we want to give you something you could do that could really start this thing working in your favor. And so maybe you're not ready to start a new creative discipline or do a whole tune-up of your creative discipline just to stay on the car theme. But these are some things you can start conceptualizing with a road trip brief, okay? One of the things that's really helped me is to not think about it like a habit, but to think about it more like a brief. Because a brief for a long-term, ongoing creative project, it requires you to have habits.