537 - Reignite Creative Drive with This Energizing New Year's Exercise

0:00Don't listen to this episode if you are already pepped out of your mind. If you're going into the new year like, I know exactly what I'm going to do. I got the five-year plan. I got the 10-year plan. I got the one-year plan. I got the 12-week plan. I'm ready to go. I don't want you to listen to this episode if that's you because I don't want you to overdose on pep because this thing is going to help you find your drive, your creative drive today. And also, jokes aside, this episode is not for you if you are already inspired for 2026. If you are already like, oh my gosh, I'm hitting the ground running.

0:34The possibilities are endless. I didn't feel like that going into the new year because we're living in a very weird time. And it reminds me, it's not the same, but it reminds me of goal setting back in 2009. We're in the middle of a global recession. I was trying to get my illustration career back on track. And I just could not find any energy to dream about five years from now because I couldn't even imagine where things would be. I didn't even know if there would be an illustration industry at that time. And I had to tap into the creative drive that I had right here and right now. And so if that's you, if you're struggling to get excited about this new year, this episode is for you to help you find the drive here and now to create and to get excited about what you're doing now and what you can control and what you can make today.

1:34And so stick around for the end. I'm going to come back for a creative call to adventure. It's called the driver's test. It's going to be something that will, it's a little quiz to help you figure out where your drive is hiding today so you don't have to dream about or understand or predict the future five years from now to get started and to create and get excited about what you're doing that's what we're going

1:59Andy J. Pizza:to do let's get into it on the creative journey it's easy to get lost but don't worry you'll lift off sometimes you just need a creative pep talk

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4:36Go to hellofresh.com slash peptalk10fm to get 10 free meals, a free Zwilling knife, a$144.99 value knife on your third box. Offer valid while supplies last. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. So if you look at my sketchbooks now, Now you're going to see they are messy. I go through a lot of them. A lot of the stuff in there is just totally garbage. It's full of garbage, but also some cool stuff. And it gets used. And I go through a lot of them. But early on in my creative journey, I would have said that I wasn't a quote unquote sketchbook guy. I just didn't keep a sketchbook.

5:32I was overwhelmed by the sketchbook and you don't need to be a sketchbook person, no matter who you are, whether you're an illustrator, a musician, filmmaker, whatever it is, you don't have to be a sketchbook person. I'm not telling you that you have to do that, but there is a problem in your creative work if you are treating it like this pristine sketchbook that you cannot mess up, that you have to make this thing perfect. It has to feel like an extension of your highest potential. If you are treating all of your creative output like that, it's going to be a problem. Now, this is because for artists, we have to create.

6:21It's a way of life. It's how we move through our life. It's like therapist and creative coach Beth Pickens says. She says, everyone's creative, but artists have to create. That's the distinction. If you're listening to this podcast, you're safe in assuming that you're one of those people that has to create. It is our one vehicle for moving through life emotionally, relationally, mentally. We need to be creating. not because we want this perfect dream scenario five years from now but because we need it in our everyday life to work through stuff and if you treat your sketchbook like that it's like treating your one vehicle like it's your project car like it's this thing in your garage that you're going to passively preciously tinker on and maybe in five to ten years you'll have this dream vehicle but that's a huge problem if you've only got one vehicle if you've only got one vehicle you can't treat it like that what you need is a freaking clunker that runs like a champ and maybe yeah like my sketchbooks it's full of garbage filet of fish boxes from mcdonald's maybe it's lined with those i don't know but you have to be able to use it because it's how you're going to get from where you are now to where you want to go today, tomorrow, and a month and a year from now.

7:56And so you have to have that kind of relationship with it. You have to see it not as this prize possession on this lift, looking at it like, oh, my ego is going to be so proud of this one day when it's all perfect. No, this is the crappy thing in your driveway that runs, baby. This is the thing that moves you. This is the thing that drives you. This is where you work stuff out. And I really resonate when I hear actors talk about like every single role that they get. It somehow is giving them something to work on and chew on in their real life, that they see this correlation, that there's a relationship because their creativity is a vehicle.

8:43It's not just a thing to look at. It's not just a thing to passively tinker on. And so for me, in this new year season, I have been feeling, honestly, moving like December winding down, I was feeling a lot of dread going into the new year because I could feel like I don't feel like I'm in a safe place to dream right now. I don't know what it's like in your neck of the woods, but I'm guessing if you've got at least dial up internet, you have a feeling that the world feels at least uncertain, if not unstable. ball you're looking at that you you're not going to start this year with like unless you're just fully drunk off of cognitive dissonance you're not going to be you're not going to be thinking like let's dream up what oh i know exactly what i'm going to do and where i'm going to be five years five ten years from now like that was just not inspiring me and if that's you more power to you baby i mean you've got more faith and hope than i do now i have not completely lost my hope i haven't at all i i am scared of some of the things going on in the world for sure and it has made it difficult to go into the new year with the kind of energy that i was going into the new year with in 2015 right but i wanted to share with you this little shift of don't you don't need to think about the only way to get excited about this vehicle is if it could be this head turner five years from now that's going to stop people in their tracks like the cars in Greece.

10:29It doesn't have to be like that. That's not the only thing that's going to get you out of bed and get you moving and get you engaged in your creative work that you can find. You can tap into a more grounded thing. Get those wheels on the ground. You can talk about what could I do right now? where are where's my creative drive in the here and now and we're going to talk about like there are if you can find your curiosity if you can find how you want to clarify and communicate if you can find how you want to connect with other people right here right now in 2026 in this month of january or february whenever you're watching this if you can find if you can tap into those drives that are about what you're doing in your real life right now, then you will find that energy you need, even if you can't predict where you're going to be in two to three, five years.

11:23That's what we're going to talk about. That's what we're going to look into. How do we get into that today? So let's talk about those, uh, these three creative drives. They are curiosity, clarifying and connection and how to find those energies and see which of those really resonate for you right now so that you can reignite your creative fire today, right today, not tomorrow. I mean, tomorrow too. Hopefully this will work tomorrow too. Anyway, let's do it.

12:10all right let's talk about the three creative drives this is instead of getting your energy from i think they're look i'm not a brain scientist i don't know if you've ever noticed that But I have done a decent amount of reading around certain elements of the brain, especially motivation, because as you might know if you've heard more than 35 seconds of this show, I'm ADHD. And it's been really, really useful for me to get to know what kind of brain I have because so much of the conventional wisdom doesn't work for me. It almost works against me if I try to be neurotypical. And so I've had to learn a lot about things like dopamine because we have this dopamine deficiency.

13:01And a lot of people think that dopamine is like the pleasure chemical in your brain, but it's not that. It's this thing that has a lot to do with motivation and chasing things that you're after. And all of that is really important to understanding how I move through the world. And you might not be ADHD. You might not consider yourself ADHD. but no matter who you are and where you are, I think you have to have some sense of how does motivation work for me. Now, for the longest time, my motivation in my creative practice was wrapped up in dopamine. It was in this thing of, I desperately want to get this type of job.

13:44I want to get advertising illustration jobs. I want to do public speaking. I want to have this many downloads on my podcast, whatever it was. It was, I'm here and I want to go over there and I want to chase it. And that chase and that motivation, that's the dopamine thing. However, as I've gotten older and as I have achieved a lot of those things, luckily, you know, I'm very grateful to have done that. But as I've done that, it's been much harder to run on that kind of energy, on the future energy. And I've had to start to learn how do I get motivated, not by where I might be in five years from now, but where I am today.

14:26And what is that kind of motivation? And one of the things that's helped me is shifting how I think about motivation and pleasure away from only things that I'm like working towards this goal oriented thing, but more also enjoying where I'm going. And the funny thing is, that's always been true for me. The reason I wanted to do illustration jobs and have public speaking opportunities and have a podcast and all that was because I enjoy doing this stuff. This is the stuff I want to be doing. But somewhere along the way of having to work towards getting those opportunities, I shifted how my motivation worked or how I thought about motivation.

15:07and I forgot that like the reason I want to get there in a couple years is because that's where I want to be not because I want to keep going and I thought about it like this I might make this into like a picture book or something someday where it's a character and he's got a map and it's got clues and then he finds this trail and there's like breadcrumbs and then there's and that's clues and then there's a x that marks a spot and that's clues and he's chasing and chasing and chase and he digs and digs and finds this treasure chest and he opens it up and he sees all these coins and he picks it up and he's like, okay, what does this mean?

15:43Like, what's this clue for? And he doesn't realize like, no, you found the treasure. Like you don't have to keep looking for clues. And that's the story of my creative life is that at some point I realized like, oh, it's not that I don't have goals or I don't have things to work for. I still need some of that energy, but I also had to tap deeper into enjoying the things that I was doing, the drive that I had here today of just because I want to do it. One of the things that has helped me conceptualize that came from this book, 4 ,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, and I highly recommend it. It's kind of an anti-productivity book, and there's a lot of great things in there, including some interesting things about parenting and children and all kinds of things.

16:25But the reason I bring it up, what it has to do with what we're talking about is in that he introduces this concept that he got from somewhere else, but it's telec versus a telec experience. And it's really just like, it's a fun new way to think about this new words, but really it means goal oriented versus like enjoying the moment oriented. A telec is a play or it's like a development of the word telos which is goal i don't know if it's greek or latin or whatever um but but uh it's it it means like goal oriented you're doing this thing not because you want to do this thing but because you want what doing this thing affords you you're you don't want to run but you want to be fit right um whereas he argues like a telec meaning not telec not goal oriented is like you do a hike not because you need to get somewhere because usually hikes are a circle.

17:29You get back right where you were. It's because you want to go on the hike. You want to do it for the sake of doing it. And an art practice, I think, needs both of these things. I don't think one is better than the other. I think they work in tandem. They are ideal if you can find those activities in which you love to do them for the sake of doing them and you like what it affords you. That's where the kind of career comes into it. And if you can marry those two things, it's really great. But if you are in a scenario where there's pressure or it's difficult to do what you're doing and to achieve what you're gonna achieve, it's going to be easy to forget to enjoy the hike.

18:14That you're not just trying to get somewhere, you're trying to be here while you're making. That's why you want to do this because supposedly you like this process. Okay, so let's talk about the three creative drives. Now, these drives are things that you probably have access to at any time. If you're not aware of them, you're not necessarily going to invest in them and get the fuel that they have, that you will miss the creative engine that is available to you right now if you don't realize that these drives are a huge part of having a creative process, that it's not just about the drive to look cool because you got sweet clients and awards and whatnot.

18:57That's the ego drive and that, yeah, maybe there's space for that, but there are some really pure fuel, pure drives that can get you moving today, even if you don't know where it's gonna take you tomorrow. So let's talk about those. And actually, we're going to talk about these three pieces. They are things that you probably have in different areas of your creative practice right now or have access to lean into these different places. But also, they are kind of how a project progresses. So one, two, three, these three drives. Each project has different stages that correlate with these different drives.

19:37And so I thought, let's take a recent project of mine, Mysterious Things, a new book that Sophie Miller, my wife and I have coming out in July that we are so freaking excited about. And I thought I will use this project to kind of show you how this process naturally evolves. And so the first creative drive is the curious drive. Okay, so we did a book in this world called Invisible Things that came out in 2023. It was a product of, it started with the daily drawing project I did in 2011. And then we worked on it and talked about it and tried things for a long time. It took us over a decade to get that into its first published form in the book Invisible Things.

20:26But when we put that out, even before we put it out, we knew there is so much more we want to do with there. this book. There are so many stories there. There's so much stuff that we already have made that we want to put out into the world. And so as we thought about what do we want to do as a follow-up, as a companion book, we had to get curious about what is the next thing that we are dying to say? What is the next question that we want to ask? And so we looked at the first book and we said, we love that this is an introduction to the fact that our universe has, 95 % of it is invisible, is unseen.

21:07It was an introduction to the social, emotional component of that in a big way. It touched on the sensory stuff, but it didn't get at one of the core elements of this project that I was initially curious about, which was how mysterious and weird and rich our universe is. Just in that core idea of like 95 % of our universe is invisible, it barely touched on the weirdness of that, the mystery of that. And I wanted to pull on this thread that started when I was 17 and I started reading this pop quantum physics stuff, this trippy stuff that was also real. And it got me so switched on to real life.

21:57And I thought, can we put that, that thread, can we switch that on in kids much earlier than 17? How can we show them that our universe is just absolutely chocked full of weird mystery and intrigue and that there's so much to engage with? And so that's what we got curious about. We started making lists of all of the things that, you know, and Sophie and I have different things that make us curious. For me, it's trippier stuff. It's stuff like, does time exist? Are there other universes? That sort of thing. And she gets really intrigued by like buried treasure and what's over a garden wall, that kind of stuff.

22:43and we wanted every single page of this book to give you that feeling of mystery, like, oh man, I really wanna see what's on the other side. I really wanna go deeper, I wanna engage. And so we got curious about how do you create that in a kid? How do you create that in a person? And we got really obsessed with compiling the ways that our heroes had done that. People, books like The Little Prince has these drawings that don't show you the inside of stuff. It's got a sheep within a box. And you're like, that's the perfect sheep in there. And there's a cobra that ate an elephant and he has to show you a cross section of that drawing.

23:26And there's just like all of this way that you can create that intrigue through devices and illustration and through storytelling. And so we got really curious. We were researching, we were compiling, we were creating, we were writing and rewriting. and that's the curiosity drive. And so what are you curious about? What are the things that make you switch on? It might not be buried treasure. It might not be other dimensions, but what are the things, not just in art, not just in your hero's art, but in the world? Because this is a vehicle for moving through life. That's what creativity is. It's not just for engaging in creative work.

24:06It's not the snake eating its tail thing. It's not just art for art and for artists for artists. It's, you know, it's not just, you don't just have a car for car people to take it into the lot once a year at the car show. You have to use this thing. And so what are you curious about and how can you create and research in that area with your sketchbook, with your art? Okay. The second one is the clarify drive. Now this could be called the craft drive as well. It's like crafting the thing. In the curious stage, you found stuff that's interesting. You know it's juicy. You know it's good stuff, but it's rough.

24:43And you have to go through the work of engaging with this. And you have maybe early, really crappy drafts that don't really have what it's all about. You haven't really nailed the thing on its head. And you have to create to clarify what it is you have. And so we knew with Mysterious Things that we wanted to engage kids in the mystery of the universe, in the richness of the universe, but we couldn't quite figure out what it was we were trying to say. And we did have a lot of conversation around it. We did have a lot of thinking and note-taking around it. But more importantly, we had draft after draft after draft of this thing.

25:25And we kept going back to the drawing board and trying to figure out, like, what is this about? I was just listening to this episode of Script Notes, which is a podcast about writing scripts. And they were saying that they were saying the same thing, that often a script starts with something that you're excited about, something that you're questioning, just a premise that you're like, oh, there's something here that's cool. And that gets you moving. That's that it's fine to have that curiosity and then go. That's what you want to do. You don't need to know what the thing is about, but eventually you do.

25:59eventually you have to have a sense of like, oh, what is engaging about this? Why do I want to write about this? What is the character learning? Why am I drawn to this based on my own experiences? And at some point in that creative process, you will start to clarify what is this thing about? And for us, we realized that what we wanted to do, there was a couple things, but they're all pointing back to the same thing, which was mystery is out there. that we live in maybe the most mysterious time to be alive. And it came down to this idea of the knowledge paradox, which I know, don't switch off. It's not complicated.

26:40It's not hard to understand. I believe it comes from Einstein. And he just said that, you know, we're learning all of this stuff. A hundred years ago, you had physicists say things like, we probably only have like 1 % left to figure out. We figured out a lot of stuff. And then we discovered things like quantum physics. And we're like, oh no. We barely know 1%. And it can feel like if you're going through school and you're reading all of this stuff that's been done and all this amazing discovery and all these textbooks, I remember feeling like we figured it all out. Like there is barely any mystery left.

27:14In this book, we wanted to tease like, is mystery extinct? We actually have a page in the book where there's like an endangered wanted poster of the character mystery. And it's like, are we about to lose mystery? because we've had thousands and thousands of years of people just so curious that we've just answered all these questions. And that's such a scary thing for people like me that are so driven by curiosity. And so we wanted to introduce on the very next page this knowledge paradox, which like I said, I believe comes from Einstein. It's this notion that the more that we know, the more we realize we don't know.

28:00That the more we have learned, the weirder things are. And as we get to the ends of the universe, we might think, we might start to figure out that this might be only the first universe. There might be infinite universes. There might be, it's trippy, buddy. It's crazy. And I wanted to show that knowledge wasn't so that we would get rid of all the mystery, but so that we could engage in the mystery. and that really like that only came from draft after draft and drawing and drawing and painting and creating and so the second thing you got to do is ask yourself uh okay maybe if you're not in the curious phase maybe you know like oh this is kind of the area that i want to explore now you can use that sketchbook now you can use that artwork now you can use that creativity to clarify Can I get to the heart of what this thing is and what this thing is about?

28:55So if you're already past the curious place, maybe you have the clarification drive where you know you've got something good and you would hate to see it go to waste. You'd hate for it not to be communicated with others, that you would not be able to transfer what you know is so cool about this into somebody else. And that requires the crafting and the making and the remaking.

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