532 - THIS is Your Creative Secret Weapon that You’re Ignoring

0:00To get great opportunities, you have to have a great unique selling point. You have to stand out in a considerable meaningful meaningful way. but that is easier said than done when we live in a time where it feels like everything's been done how can you do anything unique how can you have a unique selling point it is very anxiety inducing it's difficult to ask yourself what do i have to offer that's different to what anyone else is doing i've been thinking about this recently because this year i've had a handful of jobs that have just felt so tailored to what I do and who I am as an artist. And I've been thinking about like, what did it take to create these opportunities?

0:52I was recently outside of Boston visiting a school that I did a bunch of illustration for and it just the whole opportunity just felt so tailored to me. And it got me thinking about what did I do to put myself in a position for this to happen? and it came down to a few things, but the most important was having a sense of what the twist I put on illustration is or put on being an artist or a creator is. What is my creative twist? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about your unique selling point, your creative twist, how to find it and why finding it is maybe easier and more fun and less overwhelming than you think.

1:35And if you stick around to the end, I'm going to be back with a creative call to adventure. It's called the Universal FYP. Something we've talked about a little bit on this show before, but I've got a new twist on it based on this whole episode that I think is going to be really helpful to you. Seeing that you already have a unique selling point in the works, you just have to recognize how to cultivate it. So stick around for that. But for now, let's talk about what is the key to unlocking a unique selling point for your creative work. Let's go. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off.

2:16Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

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4:01Everyone in the creative biz wants better opportunities. And like any business, that means having a unique selling point. You have to have something different than what's already out there. And in the business-y world, they call it USP. So I might abbreviate that from time to time, unique selling point USP. It might sound a little bit overly business-y. However, I would say it's more true that you need a unique selling point if you are in a creative business than in any other industry. Because it really, really matters when you're doing creative stuff that you're putting your own twist on it. You have got to put a satisfying twist on what you do.

4:48And if you are on this creative journey and you're moving towards success, you've got to have a twist like that in your future. Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Andy, dude, thank you. So easy. I didn't know I was supposed to do something original with my creative thing. Now that you've told me put the twist on it done easy right no not right i i understand that it uh is easier said than done like i said especially in an era where everything feels done and redone and rebooted and sequeled and prequeled and reposted and copied and returned out like we live in that era it can feel nearly impossible to do anything truly unique.

5:39But in my creative practice and in my experience, there is some really good news. And it's that your creative twist and you showing up in a different way, it's not about some massive unicorn of an invention or innovation. It's about finding your point of view that comes natural to you, that is authentic to you and tapping into that. That's what it's all about. It's not about coming up with the eighth wonder of the world. It's about figuring out what your sixth sense is. Like, for example, maybe your sixth sense is guessing the end of a movie. That's one of my sixth senses. Actually, when the movie Sixth Sense came out in the theater, I guessed the big twist before it happened.

6:28Now, I know you're all just really impressed, but I had a lot of help. I can't fully take the credit because when we sat down in that movie theater, my cousins were with me. They'd already seen it. He leans over and he whispers, there's a big twist coming. There's a big twist coming. And of course, that's a huge part of being able to guess the twist, guess that knowing that this movie contains a big twist, that there's a big twist coming because when you know that, you're gonna look a little bit more intently. You're gonna be more aware. You're gonna be looking for any clues, any hints. And so it's not super impressive that I guessed the end of Sixth Sense because I had that heads up.

7:17But I want to, in this episode of the show, be your cousin for a minute and just lean over and whisper to you, if you're on the creative path, I'll give you the hint that gives you everything you need to guess it, to guess the twist is coming. And it's this, there's a huge twist coming. There's a huge twist on the horizon if you are making creative work because every creative thing that you do is a type of twist. And now that you know that's coming, You can do what I did in that theater. You can heighten your awareness. You can be looking for the clues. You can be looking for the juicy things that are standing out to you because you are preparing for that twist.

8:12You have to be aware of what am I noticing, noticing what I'm noticing. The key to finding your creative twist is figuring out what your unique point of view is. And you do that by noticing what you're noticing. You look around and as you move through life, if something perks up your spirit and your soul and your creativity, if something unusual seems out of place in the narrative, that's your cue to dial in because you know a twist is coming. You know it needs to be coming. You know you need that unique selling point one day. And the place that it arrives from are those little juicy clues and nuggets that you find along your creative path.

9:04And so it doesn't become that difficult to put a twist on something, to guess the twist when you have been dialed in, when you have been tuned in to all of the little clues along the way. And what this looks like practically is looking at what I, like I told you at the start, I just got back from a place outside of Boston. It's a school called Landmark, the Landmark School. And it's a school for kids with dyslexia or language-based or reading-based learning difficulties and challenges. And I was there because I did something like 11 or 13 illustrations that were in my exact style, the kind of concepts I come up with all the time for this podcast and other things that I make for myself.

10:00I made these for their school and they have all these illustrations blown up on the wall. It was so fun. And as I was there talking to these kids that are neurodivergent and learn differently. I am talking to them and I'm feeling like this is the perfect opportunity for me. And I've had a few of those this year as an illustrator for clients. And I felt like, man, how did I get so lucky? And in some ways, yes, there's luck involved. And I'm not denying that. But ultimately, I think the thing that makes the difference and put me in those scenarios to get those sorts of jobs were pulling at those little clues, trusting that there were twists on my horizon if I was willing to pull the threads that were uniquely me.

10:54And the thing about looking back on my creative journey and noticing what are the things that made the difference, a lot of those clues, a lot of those threads, a lot of those nuggets were things that at the time didn't seem to be to do with anything about my creative career or creative journey. You know, I think about the work that I made for this project and a lot of that was made possible because I got super into Carl Jung and into symbolism and I was studying dreams and I was reading a man and his symbols, that book, and I was listening to this podcast and, and I was going super deep on this Jungian psychology, not because I thought it, I honestly did not think at all that it had anything to do with my creativity.

11:42I thought it was about personal development. I thought it was just something I was hyper fixated on and curious about. And then after reading the book, A Man and His Symbols, I realized like a huge percent of this, a percentage of this is about art. I mean, symbols, it's about symbols. It's about illustration. A lot of it's even interpreting and wrestling with art and like dream images and all of it has to do with illustration. I don't know if I'm just not that quick or something. I didn't, I just missed it. But this helped me fall in love with writing with pictures in a deeper way than I ever imagined.

12:22And it helped really increase my engagement with it and how I came up with ideas and what I thought of as visual metaphors and all of that work filtered into my personal work. That's the stuff that they referenced when giving me this client job. They're like, do this kind of thing. And I wouldn't have done that had I not pulled at that thread. But the thing that I'd learned is same thing happened to me with writing picture books and telling stories on stage and on the show from getting super into Joseph Campbell and that leading into being obsessed with storytelling. All of that came, I didn't know any of that had to do with my creative future.

12:59I stumbled upon it, kind of begrudgingly followed my curiosity because I couldn't help myself thinking this is a total aside. It's not really helping me in any considerable way. I'm just curious about this. And then come to find out later, it became completely essential to telling the kind of stories that I tell now for a living. And so I learned that a few different ways. And now I've realized that there is a huge twist coming on the horizon of my creative path because that's what being a creative is. And if that's true, if I know it's coming, if I know it's on the horizon, I can increase my awareness.

13:40I can give myself permission to take notice of what I notice. and especially true if the people around me don't seem to be as interested in that stuff because that's telling me something about my point of view and I can have the faith and the trust in my creativity and in my journey to say, even if I don't know how this is related to anything that I'm gonna do in the future, I can trust that I need to let my curiosity lead the way. And so if you want to get better opportunities, if you want to make work that is more unique to your point of view. The key is to allow yourself to be aware and invest in those weird little things that you're obsessive about, that you're curious about, even especially when you can't see how this has to do with anything that could make money, anything that could make your creative work better, because those are the places that have not been explored.

14:39If it's not obvious to you what the value of them is, you have to trust that intuition. And so the great thing you have now is you've got a cousin like this guy that leaned over and said, hey, that twist is coming. Heighten your awareness. Look for the things that are out of the normal. Lean into those atypical things that just seem unusually juicy and don't count them off because you can't see how they're going to pay off in the future.

15:24so like i said when i was in massachusetts feeling very grateful i was walking to dinner the night before I was going to visit these schools. And I was just feeling so privileged and lucky. And I thought, this isn't a thing that I would have never dreamt of doing. It's not like a thing that as a kid, I even knew was possible. I wanna do school visits outside of Boston about my riding with pictures. I was just feeling really privileged and lucky and thinking about what could I pass on to anybody else. that might help them get into these kind of circumstances that feel custom made for you as a creative person.

16:12And the more I thought about it, the more I was thinking, oh, it's something about leaning into your curiosity, pulling those threads, knowing, learning. You know, I learned it the first time on accident, but then after I did it on accident, learning like, if I will trust that, That stuff will bleed into my creative work in such a way where my work will be different to everybody else's because I'm pulling those threads that aren't interesting to anyone else. And so that's kind of what I was mulling over when I got back home. I started pulling that thread because this is what I do for the show is now I'm interested in that.

16:49And I start thinking, is there any extra work? And this is kind of an example of what you can do when you have an encounter like that and you're having an emotional experience and like that moment of gratitude and you're thinking about what are the pieces there? I'm getting curious about this. Then I start doing searches and research around, is there anything to this? Have other people experienced this? What are the ways I could describe it? And some of the stuff that I ended up searching turned up this paper, this scientific paper called an atypical salience account of creativity. and it proposes this theory that is exactly what we're talking about which is creative outcomes come from people that have atypical attention they and so they didn't say adhd but i think that's probably part of it but they gave a couple different examples of how you can uh develop or how this different type of attention manifests but essentially what it is is the ability to notice and pay attention to things that everyone else is ignoring and that that ends up becoming the key to creative outcomes.

18:03And I want, if you don't get anything else from this episode, I would zero in on this word that I've actually heard Jungians talk about before. It's salience. And salience is, I think a synonym for it would be importance, but it's essentially what you notice, what you focus on, what you think is important. And so we have a salience network in our brain. And I want to kind of coin this idea of creative salience, that term, which gets at what's going on in this paper, but it's getting at what we're talking about in this episode. Creative salience is a totally different thing than what you're doing on an everyday basis or what typical people are doing or people that aren't focused on creative output are doing, which they're only focused on the things that are gonna make ends meet or make them happy or they know where this thread is leading and it's leading to something they know they want, an incentive or a reward.

19:05That's how a typical salience network fires. It's looking for things like, oh, we know that the end of that thread is something we want. but creative salience is a curiosity that says, I don't know where this is going. And that's, what's interesting about that fodder. When I got into Jungian stuff, when I got into Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey and stuff, I didn't know. I, the reason it was interesting wasn't because what I knew what was at the end of that thread. It's because I didn't know. And I actually wanted to know. I had an intuition that that was going to be interesting or important or juicy for me.

19:48And so the key is to develop that creative salience. You already have it. You already have these little moments of things that catch your interest in a deeper way than anyone else around you. The shift that I would encourage you to make in this episode is to give it space, give it investment, especially when you don't know where it's leading. If something fires you up and makes you lean in and you don't even know what you could possibly gain from it, that's telling you this is raw fodder for a creative twist. Something is at the end of that rope that I don't see coming. And that's exactly the kind of stuff that's going to elevate my work.

20:35So lean into the creative salience. That salience, look for things that have levels of salience that are unexplainable, that you have a gut response to, that you're more attracted to than anyone else around you. And then double down on those things. And what that might look like, and that's what we're going to talk about next, is going, not just looking out from now on, but looking back on the things that had salience that you discredited because you thought, oh, they're a waste of time. I don't see the reward. I don't see the incentive. No one else around me cares that I'm into this stuff. So I'm just going to drop it.

21:14And going back to those things and saying, no, this has potential for a creative twist if I will pull that thread.

21:38okay it's time for our creative call to adventure i don't like to leave you with just an idea i want to encourage you to put it to work in a real way in your creative practice today so That's what this is. This one is called the universal FYP. Now, if you don't know, FYP means for you page. It's on TikTok and it's the videos that it's just delivering to you because they think it might be of interest. we're going to take that and we're going to put a couple twists on it the first twist is imagine that everything that you're encountering in your everyday life is the fyp page that is being delivered to you from the algorithm of the universe that it is feeding you things that it thinks might be of interest that it thinks you might need to dig into that it thinks you might need to give some time attending to.

22:33So what if your everyday life, this sounds like I'm really trying to like sell being present to like Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids of like, dude, life is like a for you page. Okay, man, everything that you're encountering in the real world is served to you by a mega algorithm. Okay, I'm not exactly saying that. But I am saying that the things that you find interesting? Like as you're moving throughout your every day, what if you paid attention to them like you do the For You page, assuming something is delivering this to you and it is giving, and if you find interest into it, that you would pull that thread.

23:19Now, the other twist that I want to put on the FYP, the For You page, is FYP, finish your plate. We've talked about this a couple of times on the show because it's a central practice of mine. When I'm feeling like, oh, I don't know what my work is about. I don't know what I want it to be about next. I don't know what the twist is. I want to put on the stuff that I'm making in the next book or the next episode or whatever. I will pause and I will think I need to do the FYP, finish your plate. Like the universe is giving me these, this serving me this stuff and I'm ignoring it. That there are things, there are threads that seemed so salient to me in the moment.

24:01And then guess what? Out of sight, out of mind, completely slipped it. And then I didn't do anything with it. I didn't follow that curiosity. I didn't pull that thread. This has happened to me so many times where I get stuck, I'm in a dead end and I think, hold on, I can't remember what, I can't think of any podcast to listen to. I can't think of any book to read. I can't think, you know, nothing feels exactly right. And I don't know what to do in my work next. I don't know what to say. And I'll think, when was the last time I felt that level of salience? When was the last time that I encountered something and it felt like kismet with the universe?

24:39I was like, oh my gosh, like, yes, that's so interesting. That's speaking to me. And then I didn't finish that plate. I didn't eat the veggies. I didn't do the extra work to dig into it and see its relevance and understand it. That's what I recommend you do because the likelihood that you don't have anything unique in your journey, the likelihood of that being true is so small. You are already probably in the midst of a journey to develop your own unique selling point within your creative work if you will go back and pick up that thread and that juicy thing that you encountered on your universal FYP moving through life.

25:26And so you've already got the first fruits of something that could make your work completely different. If you will pause and be like, what's the last thing that I noticed that just lit me up in an unexplainable way and I wanted to go on a journey, not where I had the end in mind, where I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know where it would take me. And I don't even, especially if I don't know what is the relevance to the economy with this? What is the utility of it? No, we're talking about the stuff that moves your soul and your spirit, whether you can see any way to make money from it, no way to monetize this bad baby.

26:03That's the stuff that makes your stuff so interesting and unique. And if you will trust that there will be ways in which this creates a human that I become where my work will have a unique point of view. If you will trust that, you will be able to pull that thread. And so finish your plate. Check out the universal FYP. Check out what are the things that I've let fall by the wayside because of the pressures of everyday life. And how can I check out a book on that? How can I listen to a podcast on that? How can I go do a little research and see if there's any papers on that? It might not look like that for you.

26:41Like for me, that often comes into this like a pseudo academic pursuit of trying to figure something out or wrestle with a theory for you. It might be an encounter with a bird that you had, man. And you didn't, you just completely blew it off that encounter with a bird. Nothing's more important than that. I'm telling you, I'm feeling it right now outside my windows, a blue Jay on, there was a Blue Jay right on the gutters. And yes, it's begging me to pay attention to it instead of record this podcast and I'm loving it. And I'm, look, I see you. I'm going to get to you in just a minute. We're about to finish up.

27:16Think about those things, the Blue Jays, the Youngians, whatever it is, where are those veggies that you need to finish your play on? Because if you will, it will turn into a unique human. You are what you eat, right? Eat those veggies, eat those things that nobody else is interested in clear that plate it's going to make a difference

27:53all right if you've made it this far in the podcast i feel pretty comfortable sharing a secret with you. We just had a book go on pre-order. I'm very excited about this. I'm actually almost getting emotional because we haven't been able to talk about it. It's a follow-up to our book, Invisible Things. It's called Mysterious Things. It is coming out in 2026, and it just went on pre-order. If you want to get a pre-order book, if you want to put a pre-order and go to invisiblethings.co and there's a bunch of links to bookshops that you can go order from. We so appreciate it. It's one of the ways that you guys have supported me being able to do this podcast and do my creative practice and keep going on this journey.

28:43So I so appreciate it. And I cannot wait for you to see this book. We, Sophie and I wrote it together and I illustrated it and it's about this thing that we're talking about in this episode, cultivating curiosity. Yes. And you, if you adult listening to this, yes, I think that the book can encourage your curiosity, but even more so your kids and kids, you know, this book is about how freaking cool and mysterious our universe is. And at the heart of it is the knowledge paradox that says somehow we keep learning new things all the time. It feels like mystery should be dwindling. We should be getting closer and closer to figuring it all out.