525 - The Prerequisite to Connecting with Potential Fans

0:20What do you do if your work is white noise? It just is background. It's not enough to stop the scroll, not the scroll, but the scroll. Like when you're scrolling, you can't, nobody stops to take any notice. What do you do when you just can't seem to connect with an audience? I understand this problem on a deep level because back in 2011, when I was doing my first daily project, it was a daily drawing project, there were lots of days where I hit this incredible milestone that you might never have experienced, which was many posts that got zero likes. Zero likes. It was back on Tumblr where that happened.

1:15I don't even know if Meta will let you experience that death the way that I did, but I'm doing this year-long project. Lots of posts were getting zero likes. It was discouraging in some ways, but also really important in other ways. And some of those same characters from that project are now tattooed on people's bodies. And so I know a little bit about this journey of figuring out how to connect with people in a way that doesn't just end up becoming background white noise. In this episode, I want to give you what I think is the key to making deep connections. And there's a twist because I don't think it starts with connecting with potential fans.

2:04By the end of this episode, I'm going to share an exercise that we are calling, and by we, I mean me, Yellow Door Questing. which I think is an exercise that is going to help you recognize the seeds of connection in your own life so that you can start building those into your creative practice in a deeper way. But first, we have to talk about the connection that you need to make before you ever start thinking about connecting with an audience. Let's go.

2:50The cold is here. I used to hate the cold weather until I started to embrace it, dress for it, build a wardrobe of layers that were made for the season. And that is where Quince comes in. They've got down jackets, wool coats, leather and suede outerwear that holds up to daily wear and still looks good. Quince uses premium materials and trusted factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. But because they cut out the middlemen, they can deliver the quality of luxury brands for a fraction of the price and bring you classic styles that you'll love and will hold up year after year.

3:29Still loving my Quince button-down shirt. I feel very legitimate when I wear it. I have been eyeing their affordable cashmere collection for Sophie's birthday that's coming up. Don't tell her that. And we got Quince's European linen sheet set. And let me tell you, nearly every night when we go to bed, Sophie says, I love these sheets. It's like our new nighttime ritual. They're soft, cozy, and the material just feels real and whole and homey. Very cozy for winter nights. Refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to Quince.com slash pep talk for free shipping on your order in 365 day returns.

4:08Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash P-E-P-T-A-L-K. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash pep talk.

4:26If you're not careful, making art, a creative practice, can easily devolve into a desperate attempt to get fans or followers. a depraved pursuit of fame even it can turn into that and we've been doing this few episodes in this theme of shifting away from a negative self-psychology to a positive self-psychology so shifting away from seeing yourself as something to overcome to seeing yourself as something to cultivate. And that's really essential if you want to be someone who regularly expresses themselves. Because if you think everything in there is not so great, why would you make the effort to get it out of yourself and into the world?

5:21For me, there has been an incredible amount of energy in shifting to assuming that my base impulses, even if they're misdirected, even if they have caused more trouble than good sometimes, that I have a more productive outcome if I can start with assuming that it's coming from something good, that it's some part of me that's trying to survive or adapt or even thrive and maybe just not always getting it right. So if we look at that de-evolution of creativity that can happen when you start making stuff and putting it out in the world and it can turn into this desperate attempt for connection or even fame, If we look at that and instead of just assuming that's wrong, squash that, that's the problem, just make for yourself.

6:26Instead of jumping to the conclusion that this is something bad, this impulse is kind of in your way. What if we started with, well, okay, maybe attempting fame is getting in the way or just working to get followers or likes is a distraction. But what is that base impulse if we were assuming that it's trying to do something good? And when I pull back the curtain on that, to me, it looks like it's an attempt for connection and an attempt for wholeness. And that desire doesn't seem to be rooted in anything negative. In fact, it seems like a very base human need. And if you lack connection, part of that artistic impulse might be a attempt for human connection.

7:29And so if we look at it through that lens, maybe we can see that art actually can help you make that kind of connection that you're after. if you go about it in a way where you're trying to connect. You're not trying to get praise and worship. So there's a trope in artist circles, stand-up comic circles. You hear this a lot. This idea that this impulse to connect through creativity is a sign of your brokenness. Like, what was wrong with you? What was wrong with your home that meant that you needed extra attention from people in order to feel okay? And I think, you know, it makes sense, but a more positive spin on that, a more positive psychology lens would be maybe art for you as like a supplement, like your internal or interior self needed a little bit more.

8:35attention or needed a little bit more affection or connection than average because your inside self doesn't produce enough of that. Or maybe you did grow up in an environment where there was a lack or a deficiency in the connection that you needed and art has become a supplement for you, a way to get that nutrition that you need that you lack. and longtime listeners of this show know that I fall into that camp and probably some degree of that comes from the fact that I grew up without my mom around most of the time. Now, longtime listeners know this because I have spoke and wrote and podcasted and whined all over the freaking internet about it for years.

9:30But the main reason I have done so is because it's so central to my creative journey. This is the quick nutshell version of my story and how my creativity connects to my relationship with my mother. And if you are a longtime listener and you've heard this a couple different ways. Just bear with me for just a couple minutes because I think this story holds one of the most important keys to learning how to make the kind of connections that you're looking for through your art. And this is a true story, but I think it's important to note that it's also one that I've worked for years to learn how to tell in such a way where it captured the essence of what I think it's all about.

10:27So here is that basic version.

10:48Growing up, I felt like a super creative weirdo, a Nick Nickelodeon kid in a sea of Disney kids. And I really loved being creatively weird. And I was told all the time that I got this creative weirdness from my mom. My aunts and uncles would constantly tell me that I was just like her. And I really liked that. But as I got older, moving out of elementary school, I felt more and more conflicted about this weirdness because although being creative really helps you in like kindergarten and that kind of thing, as you get to middle school in high school, none of the ways that you draw or the faces you make really make much of a difference in terms of grades or making friends.

11:37And so I started to feel more complicated about this. I also noticed that those same people that said that I was just like her didn't have the highest opinion of her. So they would complain about her being late, not showing up, not being able to commit to things. And I started to feel a little bit weird about being just like her. And then when I was like something like 17, my mom went into the hospital and I found out that she had a brain tumor and was struggling with a bad addiction and had a really bad boyfriend. And all of this just was devastating to hear. But on top of just hearing that my mom, this person I loved, was in such a bad place, was this weight of feeling like I was just like her.

12:31And so that went from feeling like a blessing to feeling like a curse. And at that moment, I started to try to be the opposite of her. I wanted to become everything she wasn't. And I was determined to overcome this weirdness that she had given me. And at the same time, I was becoming an adult, going to school for illustration and design. and I was trying to get my illustration career off the ground and find myself creatively. And I wasn't really having any luck. So I kind of just adopted the trendy styles from the time. And for a minute, those things really worked. It got me some jobs early on, even to the point where I got an email from someone who worked on a show on Nickelodeon.

13:25And they asked me to make some illustrations to be animated on one of their shows. I tried my best, gave it my all, sent over these final illustrations. And their reply was, rough drafts look okay. Looking forward to seeing how they shape up in the finals. I was devastated. I didn't know how to make them any better. That did not go how I planned. and all of those trends kind of passed and the economy was weird and I really hit a massive wall in my creative journey and I decided like I need to do some soul searching I need to go deeper I need to figure out how do I make work that is really really me that could be a little bit more timeless than the current trends that are influencing what I'm doing.

14:19And so what I did was I just kind of, there wasn't podcasts like this one. So I was just obsessively learning about the journeys of my creative heroes. So I watched tons of creative mornings talks, like artist talks and TED talks and stuff like that. I read a bunch of interviews through things like The Great Discontent, which at the time was just this series of online interviews with artists, a lot of whom I was a huge fan of. And I was just kind of obsessively consuming that stuff, looking for patterns and trying to figure out how do you connect with yourself on a deep enough level to put it on the page.

15:04and a lot of these things had a big impact on me but one had a bigger impact than all the others the talk was from this origami artist named joseph woo and it was all about how he had just recently become diagnosed with adhd and he's taught telling the story of it being like Like, just feeling like a bit of a mess, you know, being late to things, not being able to stick to things, that sort of thing. and it just hit me like a ton of bricks, especially because he said that the reason he figured out that he was ADHD at this point in his adult life was because he had a son that they had just got diagnosed and found out that it often runs in the family.

16:01and so yeah I was pretty sure that I didn't get my ADHD from my corporate accountant father and so I just went on this deep dive and at first it just devastated me because I felt like this thing this weirdness that I had been running from my entire adult life was not something that I could escape because it was a diagnosable fact. And so that was a lot to handle. But the more that I read and the more that I found out about all of this, the more I heard this other side of the story, which was this neurodivergent lens that said this, yes, in the world that we live in, being this way does come with a ton of challenges and some of which are going to be challenges no matter what world you find yourself in but you can also think of this as just a different type of brain and these things that we say are part of a disorder being late not being able to stick to things, there are other ways to channel them.

17:24They can be time optimization. They can be, that's what I call it when I'm late for my doctor's appointment. I'm just optimizing time. But that not being able to stick to anything can mean you're always up for something new. It can mean, yeah, traditional work can be a real challenge for you, but also it might be useful for being an entrepreneur. And so as I read with this different lens, I started to wonder if my mom's problems weren't so much who she was, but that she was trying to be something she wasn't. She was constantly trying to overcome herself and be normal and not embrace this weirdness.

18:12And I started to get really curious about what would happen if I quit trying to be the opposite of my mom and I started to try to be more like her than she ever let herself be. So this was the birth of my shift from a negative self-psychology, thinking of myself as a bad thing to overcome, into a more positive self-psychology, seeing myself as something to cultivate. and I've been talking about this for a couple episodes because it was so foundational to probably my biggest creative breakthrough, which is this idea that art is self-expression. If you wanna make art that you love, you've gotta learn to love yourself because you're never gonna love that expression if you hate the thing that it's an expression of, which is you.

19:07and that maybe sounds like an Instagram quote or something but it has really powerful implications because once I started to think of myself more as a good thing it gave me the courage to excavate myself it gave me the ability to not be afraid of who I was but to be interested in it and to look inside and ask those questions and look at the parts that I was running from, which I think is just the essential groundwork of putting yourself onto the page. And I have spent the past few years working on this story, figuring out how to tell it, sharing it in a bunch of different mediums and ways because it was such a profound shift for me.

20:02And the reason I wanted to share it was because I have had so many encounters with people that are struggling with the same things. I have had friends that I lost to drug addiction that were probably neurodivergent. I have friends that are still struggling with those things. I know so many brilliant creative people that are just riddled with struggles by being different and it's not going to solve all their problems to embrace who they are but i do think it really does help and there would be people just in my everyday life we had someone come out and work on our ac and he we just kind of talked a little bit and i realized like this guy was a veteran who really struggled in the military.

20:57And eventually he talks about the fact that he's ADHD and you can just sense in him the self-loathing and the weight of the embarrassment of the missed opportunities and appointments and just being treated like an idiot. You could just, it was just palpable in everything that he said. And I just so deeply relate to that and it just breaks my heart. So there's so many, there's so many personal experiences that have caused me to want to share this story wherever I need to listen. So that's where the motivation came from. The motivation to learn how to tell this story in a way that it worked came from really wanting to connect to those people and share this shift that had had such an impact on my life.

21:57oh and by the way i should mention that that same soul searching led to a bunch of creative work that broke open my creative sensibility some of which were the characters that ended up being tattooed on some people's bodies and made into this book invisible things and put me in a place where a couple years later when someone from a company called nickelodeon reached back out to make some new animations. This time around, they were so pumped about the results that we ended up working together something like 14 different times. And the client that nearly broke me ended up making my freelance illustration career possible.

22:46But the reason that I bring it up in this episode is to explore something that I've never really spoke about on the podcast. And it's the unintended consequence of learning to tell my story. See, when I started to try to learn the craft of storytelling, I was doing it because I wanted to connect with other people. But what I didn't realize was that it would super help me connect with myself and do so in a way that was really, truly healing for me. Last year, we told this story through a six-part narrative nonfiction podcast series on this podcast, starting with episode 449.

23:42And if you're watching this on YouTube, this was before we were doing YouTube, so you can only listen to it. If you go to creativepeptalk.com slash 449, you can check it out and listen through. It's kind of This American Life style podcasting. And we tell the story through me talking about it, sharing a lot of other details and anecdotes, doing some interviews with my wife, Sophie, and my brother, Josh. And we talked to a therapist and Angus Fletcher is also part of that, who was a recent guest on the show. And it ends the last episode or the second to last episode is a chat that I recorded with my mom.

24:24Why did you have such a hard time? Growing up? Yes. I don't know. It was all a lot of things. And it was right after I had shared this story, this way of thinking about this story with her. and it's me chatting with her about how she felt about it. And it was really special because I hadn't seen her in a few years up until this point and I had never really been able to explain my experience to her until I learned how to tell the story. And after all this was said and done, like it was a great experience in so many ways And I got so many messages from neurodivergent people and creative people and people that had had these complicated relationships with being like their parents and, you know, dealing with all of the stuff that gets passed down through your DNA.

25:26And we won two Signal Awards, podcasting awards, this thing right here, this guy. And it was just really, really special. but after it was all said and done I was left with this other feeling which was this feeling of healing and I really don't want to oversell this because you know let's fast forward five ten years and who knows how I will feel then or what it'll be like but I can tell you that learning to tell my story, not even to my mom, not to all of you, but just learning to see the meaning in it, see the arc, it had a profound impact on me. And it really softened, enlightened this burden that I have carried my entire life.

26:31My entire life, I have felt this weight of my mom being missing and the impact that it had on me as a kid and then what it meant for me in terms of the person that I had become as an adult. And any time that notion would pop up, you know, Mother's Day or just reminders from a movie or hearing someone talk about how, oh, you know, thanking their mom for always being there and being their biggest fan and all that. anytime it would pop up, it was this weight that I was just so familiar with. And as I learned to tell the story and to see the story in it, that weight has at the very least really, really changed.

27:22And I am tempted to say that it's mostly gone. that whatever that weight was became the raw material of this storytelling. And I did something with it instead of just letting it sit on me. And I feel like the process changed me and definitely changed how I carry it. And so after all of putting this series out had kind of passed and we had a little time, I got thinking about how I wanted to share what I'd learned about storytelling that had helped me make some sense of this because of the impact that it had on me.

28:30So this was such a real experience for me that I got really curious about it. I've kind of been digging into this. One thing that I came across that was really powerful was this study. It's called Senior Life Story as a Hero's Journey Increases Meaning in Life. And it's actually a collection of, I think, eight different studies all on this topic of learning to see your life through the lens of story. And they talk about how developing this re-storying intervention leads people to see the events of their life as a hero's journey. And that this intervention causally increases meaning in life, meaning it's not just correlated.

29:16it actually has been found to cause an increase in meaning. And by prompting people to reflect on important elements of their lives and connecting them into a coherent and compelling narrative, this hero's journey re-storying intervention also increases the extent to which people perceive meaning in an ambiguous grammar task and increases the resilience to life's challenges. Now, I don't understand all of that. But what I do here is that learning to see through the lens of story has a profound impact on the meaning of your life and your connection to it. And I truly believe that if you're going to have a deep connection with anyone else through your work, it's going to start with having a deep connection to the meaning within your own life.

30:13And I think that the key to doing that is learning to tell stories, is to learn to see your life through the lens of story. Now, this has limitations. And I think there are ways in which we have to break free from the stories that we tell ourselves. And that's why I think they call it re-storying even. But here's the freaking kicker. And if you don't get anything else from this episode, I hope you just listen to this for a second, if meaning in your life is tied to your ability to see the narrative, to spot the story, to craft the meaning within it through this lens, that is going to require you to know how to tell a story.

31:04And what if the reason why we are lacking that meaning and lacking that connection to self is because we have lost our ability to tell stories. And so after all of this experience, the thing that I wanted to do was to share what I'd learned about telling stories because it it helped me so much in this very particular way.

31:55I don't really feel like a podcast is the right format to share everything that I've learned about storytelling in the 10 years of making this show and making a handful of picture books and reading a bunch of books on storytelling. But you know that we want to give you something you can do, not just pep you up in every episode. And so every episode we end with a CTA, a call to creative adventure. Here's this week's CTA. It's called Yellow Door Questing. and this is about how to find the seeds of stories in your life so you can write from life experience even if you don't want to tell them in a narrative non-fiction podcast series and you want to translate them into fiction whether you're doing non-fiction or fiction doesn't really matter you want to write from your own experience you want to write what you know what you've lived.

32:58And the way to recognize those things, I think, starts with having an idea of what a story is. And so over the years, I've kind of cobbled together and collaged my own definition of story that has helped me recognize the stories that I've lived. And so my favorite definition is, my favorite definition of a story is a series of events that ends in a surprise. and the surprise is really about this shift in the hero, the main character's perspective and it's this surprising but inevitable because it's something that you already knew was true but you didn't see it coming because it's a surprising idea.

33:47Okay, so a surprise, that's the thing you're looking for. When in your life have you been surprised by life? Now, Yellow Door Questing, where this comes from, is a book called The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller, Dr. Lisa Miller, which I've spoke about a couple times on this show. And she has this exercise where you close your eyes and you think about this thing that you desperately wanted, but you didn't get. And so she calls that thing you desperately wanted a red door. And so think about that red door. And was there ever a red door, a thing that you really wanted, that you worked for, that you did everything right for, that you didn't get to walk into, and that it slammed in your face, but then life surprised you with what Dr.

34:43Lisa Miller calls a yellow door, a door that you hadn't planned for, an opportunity that you didn't see coming, that ended up being better than what you thought that you wanted. This exercise can help you connect to some of the stories that you've lived because they connect you to the ways that life has surprised you. for me in my story the thing that was surprising was realizing i didn't have to be the opposite of my mom but i had to be more like her than she was that was a surprise that i didn't see coming that hit me in my mid-20s when i started this journey to get diagnosed with adhd and so do this exercise write down a handful of times where life surprised you in a positive way and And one of the reasons why I love this exercise is, yes, it can help you find some seeds to stories.