518 - The Hope I Found in This Rapidly Changing Creative Landscape

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.

0:20so i want to make an episode that addresses some of the fear that i've noticed not just creeping into my life and creative practice but consuming it from time to time and I've noticed this in myself, I've noticed this in other people. It is a scary time for a lot of creative folks because we are in some of the most

0:56transistory sort of seasons that I've ever witnessed, maybe that's ever happened. We are in some serious flux between tech, AI, platforms changing, the economy, politics. I mean, as I'm listing all of these out, I almost feel guilty because I don't know about you, but for me, those words even come with a form of fear, anxiety, and panic, maybe even. And so there's so much going on that it's hard to continue doing the work that I've always done. It's hard to block out those feelings long enough to put a pencil to the page, right? And so I want to address some of that because there have been some things in my life and psyche and practice that have really helped given the state of things and that have given me even hope.

2:07And maybe even a little bit more than that in the past year, after moving through and swimming in all of those very well acquainted waters of fear and anxiety, I've been swimming in some new waters that have come with serious growth and excitement in my creative practice. more so than I've experienced in the past five years. And so sticking to the very end for a creative call to adventure, our CTA, for what we're calling Cannonball Into New Waters to hear more about some of those things. But for now, I wanna talk a little bit about how I've shifted approaching these very scary, transistory, changing times in such a way that have helped me unlock some hope and excitement and growth, real growth.

3:07So let's get into that.

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4:56So one thing that helps me is doing this show because it requires me to kind of journal about my creative practice. It kind of makes me, it forces me to be introspective and reflect on what I'm going through, what's worked, what's not worked, what I'm frustrated about, what seems frustrating about the landscape that we're in as creative people. And it means that a lot of this stuff can't remain unconscious, and I kind of have to wrestle with it a bit. And one of the things that I've been wrestling with is this fear, this feeling scared of what's on the horizon. And as I go to think about, you know, what is my response to it?

5:44How am I going to think about this? How am I going to engage with this on this podcast? I have to start thinking about what is that fear? And that even helps a little bit just to make it transition from a visceral experience that's overwhelming to defining what is it that I'm afraid of. And I think more than anything, what comes up is this being afraid of a future where it's not possible to make what we love. That both for work, you know, my job, but also just for the pure love of illustration and the books that I make and what other people make. What we have to lose when a landscape changes dramatically as it is right now.

6:39There is a sense that we are going to lose something. And I think that that is a justified feeling, first of all. I'm just going to validate you, validate me. There's some stuff to be afraid of. There are some things to grieve for certain. I have experienced new landscapes before in my real life. When we moved, after high school, I moved from Indiana to West Yorkshire in the UK, in the north of England. And that was a dramatic landscape shift. And the truth is, no matter how hard we fought it, we lost a bunch of things. Like when we were like food people being from the Midwest, you know, we definitely didn't have, we weren't connoisseurs we just liked to eat uh and so when we moved to uh western west yorkshire and in the north of england we were grieving we were uh overwhelmed with the fact that we couldn't get any of the foods that we liked getting we couldn't create any of the dishes the way that we were used to making them.

7:50We really couldn't. No matter how hard we tried, we went there and we thought, oh, we'll go to, we did what we were used to doing in Indiana, which was like going to chain restaurants, you know, Applebee's, Chili's, but they didn't have those in the UK. So we tried to go to the kind of Americanized chain restaurants that they had. And honestly, I hate to say it, but they're terrible over there. They're absolutely awful. And we would try to make the things that the dishes that we like to create and we just couldn't recreate them the way that we did at home in the Midwest. And it was scary. It felt scary, uh, in a way it felt definitely discombobulating and, um, uh, it made you feel not at home.

8:33And for the first few years I was there, I just felt like the food in the UK fricking sucks, man. I hate it. And we would go home and we would just eat all of this, you know, stuff that I would consider now to be kind of junk, but we would just eat all of the stuff we were used to eating and feel very comforted before we would go back. Now, I feel comfortable saying that, that I used to think, I said used to think that the food in the UK was crap because I have updated my opinion. And actually now I dramatically, sincerely miss and grieve the food that we had access to there that we don't hear.

9:23Sausage rolls, the freaking pork pies and the Indian food that you can get there. Like Yorkshire puddings, there's so much. You know, if you go to a good pub where they're locally sourcing the meat and everything, it can just be such a satisfying experience with the gravy. I could just go on and on. Right. But we didn't know about those things when we first moved there, because when we moved into that new landscape, we did what a lot of folks do. Like, it's a natural thing to do. you just are trying to make the stuff that you're used to making, that you love to make. But when you find yourself in a new landscape, you have to let go of those things and see that that new landscape is making it possible to make totally new things, to encounter things that in some ways might even be better than the stuff that you used to make.

10:25now when you hear me say that you might be thinking that i'm saying ai man it's gonna make so much possible but that's not what i'm saying at all now some of you might feel inspired by this new tech and what it makes possible i'm not in that boat it doesn't do that for me we could go deep into the ethical issues we could go into the environmental issues we could go into And those things aside, they're real things, but those things aside, on a creative level, it just doesn't do anything to me. Everything I love is lo-fi. Everything I love is custom, human-made, broken, imperfect. That's the kind of stuff that lights me up.

11:06So AI doesn't inspire me. That's not what I'm talking about about this new landscape. What I'm talking about is when we move into that new landscape, as we're there, as we find ourselves there, we aren't going to be able to make the things that we used to make, that we used to love to make. But there will be new possibilities if we will embrace them and look for them. And one of the things I'm most excited about looking forward is the way that all of this generated stuff is going to put a premium on the handmade. Now, I don't know when that's going to happen, and I don't know what exactly that's going to look like.

11:49But if we look into the past, we can see how this happens over and over again. You know, when the computers came into design, there was a period of time where they took over everything and everything had gradients and everything was futuristic. And, uh, you know, it just completely upended the entire design industry for a period of time. And that was true. And I, and I imagine that was quite scary, but it was for my time. However, it also made possible going further into the past and getting obsessed with silk screen printing, getting obsessed with letterpress, handmade lettering and script and calligraphy and all this, it created this premium on those skills that people still had or developed despite the computer.

12:40And it's not isolated to that. When we look at this time that we live in where you can see a concert by any artist in the world, any musician in the world. And yet ticket prices for in-person events have skyrocketed. Like there has never been a more vibrant live music scene or stand-up comedy has exploded in comparison to streaming comedy or comedy in the theaters. And I think there's something about the live, the premium on live experience that has happened because of the easy access and the overwhelming access to the recorded stuff. And I think about people like Adele, who have one of the biggest recording artists of the past 10 years or so, 15 years, I don't know.

13:33Look, time, what is it? I don't experience it. But Adele is a great example of this person having two records that were in some of the top sales over the past few decades. And I think that is partially in response to auto-tune, to the fact that anybody can be a recording artist now if you have the right Pro Tools settings and plugins, right? That we are living in a time where we're moving into a time where I'm convinced that what's going to be made possible as a whole new audience for lo-fi, a whole new appreciation for the brokenness of human creativity. And so, yes, there are things to grieve.

14:21There are ways that we used to do things that we are going to lose. And I think that it is incredibly important to acknowledge that and accept that. And it's also important to embrace the fear of losing precious things and allowing that fear to charge you into a place of fighting and pushing back. I think all of that is also good. But I don't think that it's all doom and gloom. I'm very curious to see how this moves us into a place where we appreciate those who hold on to or even enhance their human capability or highlight their imperfections. And so I'm excited about that. I'm excited about seeing what's possible in this new landscape.

15:20Because when I allowed myself to do that a couple of years, it took me a few years living in England to start seeing all the new possibilities, all the ingredients that you can encounter that you can't get back home, all of the things that were made possible by this new landscape, that that was such a dramatic shift, which is necessary in a dramatically shifting landscape.

16:06okay so here is the cta for this week's episode the call to adventure i don't like to do a show where we talk about ideas. Maybe you temporarily feel something, hopefully, feel some hope, feel some excitement, and then you just keep scrolling on to the next thing without it actually impacting your everyday real life. And so we try to end the episode with a call to adventure, a call to action, something that you can do with this feeling that will maybe really make a positive difference in your creative practice. And so this week, it is cannonball into new waters. Let me explain what I mean by that.

16:48I want to propose that these new waters we're swimming in, these new times that we find ourselves in, that the times are an essential ingredient into the creative work that you're making. the times that you're creating in uh they are that context is inseparable from the work that you're making and the more that you embrace that the more new possibilities you're going to encounter in this landscape i think that the artists that recognized that they can't be bob dylan they can't be the beatles they can't be warhol they can't they can't be the thing that came before. They have to use the times that they were in as part of the ingredients, part of what makes what they're making unique.

17:46And so when I started thinking about the new waters, I was thinking about pizza. I mean, I'm usually thinking about pizza. We went to Italy for two weeks. I just got back about a week ago or a couple of days ago. Again, time, the times, I don't understand how time works, but we ate a ton of pizza there. We ate a ton of pasta. And one thing that was on my mind was how the pizza that you're eating in Italy is just going to be different. I'm not saying, I'm not trying to be like, look, you haven't had pizza until you've done it in Italy. I'm not saying that at all, but it is different. And part of what makes it different, part of what makes New York pizza different from Italy pizza, different from Detroit pizza is the water.

18:41The water that you make the dough with, depending on the minerals and where it comes from, whether it's hard or soft and all these other factors, changes the way that the dough develops and the way that it tastes. And I thank God that the people that moved out West and into the Midwest didn't think, how can we get aqueducts? I mean, I love New York pizza. Don't get me wrong. I really, really, I just have to tell you, I don't want to offend New York pizza if you're listening, because I just absolutely love you so much. And I make sure I get time and space for you when I come through. But I'm so glad that we didn't get pizza aqueducts to get the New York water into the Midwest because we wouldn't have Detroit pizza.

19:31We wouldn't have Ohio pizza. We wouldn't have all of this variety and all these different types and Chicago pizza if we did that, if we didn't let the different waters, the new waters impact the dough, impact the stuff that we were making. And so I want you to cannonball into the new waters and break down the aqueduct. Quit trying to bring the waters from the past into the new waters and see what this new water makes possible. And so here's what I say, cannonball in. Don't dip your toes in, go all in. And I'll give you an example of what this has looked like for me. So about a year ago, I was feeling incredibly discouraged on two fronts.

20:15I was really discouraged with Instagram and I was really discouraged with elements of podcasting. I still love doing the podcast, but the podcasting world dramatically changed. If you're not a podcaster, you might not be aware of this, but I'm going to save you the time and energy and boredom of going into all the details. But the ads changed. The ad market changed dramatically. how people were listening to new podcasts, what type of podcasts, how podcast growth worked, all that stuff changed, similar to all the other platforms, really. But those two were the areas for me. Like, no matter what I did, nothing was gonna move the needle on Instagram, especially doing things like I used to do them.

21:02And I also looked at the ways that people were growing their Instagram, and I realized I don't want to do that. It doesn't serve any of the goals that I have. so you know becoming a short form video person that develops a big following in that direction I honestly it just didn't serve my creative goals whatsoever and so I spent probably six months to a year grieving that and I think that it's not all bad that's a pretty good thing I think it was important for me to really fully accept that these two ways of doing things weren't going to work anymore. I think that's important. I'm not trying to, you know, paste toxic positivity of like, just see what's possible.

21:41No, I don't think that. I actually think accepting it, acknowledging it, feeling it, all that's good. We got to grieve Instagram, guys. That sounds so dumb, but it's true, I think. And I think there's a good reason for that. Just as a little tangent, there were a lot of great things about Instagram. For instance, I think Instagram put visual art photography into the center of culture temporarily for a good decade. And that's pretty cool. Like there were a lot of illustrators and artists and photographers that became almost household names because of Instagram being at the center of American culture in a way.

22:23Anyway, so that is something to grieve, right especially if you're an artist however I spent some time there being frustrated with that trying everything I could trying not to care none of that worked when I accepted that I did care and that I needed to do something about it I was able to cannonball into new waters and I've talked about this recently on the show and it took me some time I think to figure out what those new waters were because that the water I was in was stagnant and I would look out and I it wasn't easy to spot where there might be fresh new water worth cannonballing into and I tried a bunch of things but after dipping my toes into a few places I thought okay I can see that there's growth some of the ways that some of the things that I liked about Instagram were happening on sub stack that people were growing there through the lens of art and actual still images through the notes portion of that app.

23:26Now, if you're listening to this in 10 years, this is not relevant in the specific, but in the abstract, it still is, is that it might not be Substack, it won't be, but the principle stands that if you find yourself in these stagnant, festering waters, you have to find the new fresh waters where things can grow, where that ingredient can bring something new. And so instead of dipping your toes in to try some places worth cannonballing into is really important. But then I think you really do gotta go all in. You can't just test the water. Because what happened was I would dip into Substack here and there, ultimately be like, this isn't what I'm used to.

24:08And that first bite of something that you've never had before is gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit strange. and you're gonna be like, I just wanna go back to what I'm used to. That's normal. But once I noticed like, okay, actually I think this is worth doing a larger test with, doing a bigger dive into. Then, like I've mentioned a couple of times, I deleted Instagram off my phone for a couple of months or a month and a half, something like that. And I only could access that energy that I was looking for in Substack. And it forced me to do a bigger dive. and having done that learning about it test you know acclimating to those waters it allowed me to figure out what i would need to do to start growing and i've seen a bunch of growth there by posting on notes and being engaged in that community and it wasn't easy the key was diving deep doing the cannonball finding where to go and then going all in for a period of time as a test and it didn't happen right away.

25:08Same thing happened with YouTube. So YouTube, I avoided it for a long time, but I noticed like, obviously, a lot of podcasting have gone to video and there was a whole bunch of reasons I didn't want to do it. Most of them were just laziness. There were just things of, I don't want to do new things. I want to do the old thing. I want to do what I was used to making and have loved making. And eventually, you know, we tested a bunch of things over the years And then once I realized that there was, I had done enough dipping my toes to realize there is actual significant reasons to believe that this could be an area where I could find new growth.

25:53That's when I decided to do a cannonball. And what that looked like was saying, not I'm going to dip my toes in for a little bit and see if magic happens and it explodes because it doesn't work like that. I said we're going to do 25 episodes which maybe that doesn't seem like a lot but it's 25 weeks it's half a year we're going to be making videos the video version of this show and we're going to post them and I'm going to do that for 25 episodes and after that then I'll reevaluate whether I need to you know stay in these waters and make it a big part of what we do and make it a key ingredient or if I need to pivot again.

26:28And so over time, for a while, not a ton happened. It was just kind of slow growth. And it was kind of like, okay, this is something new to do. And I'm doing an experiment. And when I would feel like giving up, I'd say, hey, I committed to cannonballing into this for a little bit. And eventually, close to about 25 episodes in, we tweaked things in such a way where a couple of those episodes started to take off and do numbers that we haven't seen before. And we haven't seen with the podcast in a long time. And so the requirement there was, yes, testing out things, but then committing to a bigger dive, to a bigger splash, to a bigger cannonball.

27:14And so here's your call to adventure. I would say you've probably been testing things. You're probably aware of some things. Do a little assessment. If you need to dip your toes and do a couple other waters, go for it, but do so through the lens of I'm trying to find a place or a new place where I can cannonball. And it might not be AI. It might not be a new social media platform. It might be doing a live event. It might be getting off social media and the new waters of how do you grow a practice without that? I hope that you feel Inspired to think Outside of the boxes outside of the landscape that you were previously in and so for me Yes, it was sub stack and youtube but for you it might be putting on shows.

28:06It might be uh Investing in your community. It might be moving somewhere. It might be trying a new medium for me another example was in 2018, I realized that I was getting less and less, uh, I had less and less of a taste for digital art and that almost everything I was into at the time was hand painted. And so I, for a little while, I dipped my toes in there. And then eventually I said, I'm going to start making every piece of episode art painted for this amount of time. And I decided how I was going to cannonball into that until I got to the place where I could hand paint the majority of my picture books.

28:50And so, and I'm really glad I did. I'm glad I listened to that taste. I'm glad I tested those waters and committed to them because now that we live in this time of art generating robots, I feel so good about being able to hand produce stuff because it feels more special than ever. And so I'm glad that I didn't. The key of this episode, if you don't get anything else, is don't suppress that fear. Don't suppress that feeling scared about these new landscapes. They are new landscapes. The point is pretending like it's all the same and trying to make the same dishes that you used to make will not get you in anywhere interesting.

29:42But listening to that voice that's saying, hey, I know you've spent the past five years learning how to draw digitally, and there's all kinds of great things that have happened from that, but I feel like my curiosity, my excitement, my taste is going elsewhere. And give space for that.

30:19All right. I hope this episode pulled you out of a funk, inspired you to stay on the creative path. If you're new to the show and you don't know, that's why I make the show. I make the show because in my, I've been on a creative journey since 2008-ish, maybe even before that, if you include my college years, I'm studying illustration and design. And I'm just aware that in my every day, a couple times a week, I can get really into a negative funk. I'm a creative person of the creative persuasion, which goes with being highly sensitive as a person, which means I can just go up and down. I can have really high highs.