540 - Why the Creative Path Has to Be Twisty and Turny with Nishant Jain

29:01So strategy, which is having an end in mind and then working backwards. I think that's an interesting type of creativity that can do some good things. And then curiosity is exact opposite is you're starting, you've no idea where it's going to go. So I wondered, curiosity is a huge theme in the book. Could you talk a little bit about what you feel like the relationship is between drawing and curiosity? Yeah, so absolutely. So curiosity is the thing that is unspoken inside you. You can't always put words to it. And we are a very text heavy society. Like from the moment we wake up, whether it's a tweet or messages or emails or headlines, everything is words all around us.

29:43And so, you know, very quickly, this becomes a way of understanding the world or the way of expressing the world, the way of sharing thoughts and emotions. And if you can't put it in words, maybe it's not even a real thing. So for me, what it's done is as a person who loved words, their whole life. Drawing showed me how much of the world exists outside of language. The process of drawing was a way of fulfilling curiosity because I see something and that thing that I see, I know it. But the more you see it, the more you translate it, the more you get into the business of only seeing the lines and the shapes and the colors and the shadows.

30:22And then I do this job of translating it on the page. And the more you do it, the more you get into the zone of it, you can do this entire cycle without words getting in the way. I didn't put it into words. I just saw it and then I translated it with my pen, with my brush. And it's here now and this is what it is. And if you ask me to describe it, why would I do that? This is what it is. We keep trying to put things into words. And what drawing has shown me is that there is so much curiosity we have for the world that does not exist in words. It is not meant to be put into words. It cannot be expressed that way.

31:01It's so much greater than language. And the more you draw, the more you allow that side of you, that massive, big amount of curiosity well inside you to express itself. And it's stopped by the need for words, by the need to put it into a text message, the need to put it into a fancy post somewhere on some platform or the other which is a reduction into words so drawing and curiosity are you know curiosity is what shows you something drawing is what shows you a way to translate it and this this these two things combined sight senses absorption filtering curiosity is a filter so you see so much of the world but what do you care about what do you focus on?

31:47What do you blur out? That's your curiosity. So it's this filter that takes away a lot of noise, a lot of data, a lot of information, and then it leaves out certain things that you really care about. And then based on what you're using, whether it's a pen or a brush or colors or just ink, you translate it and you reduce it further. So you filter it more and more and more. And then the final filter is your skill level at depicting it and the style that you choose to draw with. and then you have all these filters that are your body and your mind and then it's on the page and no words entered this whole process.

32:22Yeah, I really like what you were saying about words versus images. There seems to be a philosophical thing here too of words are really useful for taking things apart and separating things and disconnecting them. Like that's the tree, that's the ground, that's the sky. They're all these different things when we name them. Whereas when you're looking at them, or you're drawing them, it's really a composition. It's a whole. And so I like... Yeah. Where does the mountain stop being the mountain? Right. Exactly. Where does the mountain stop being, you know, a discrete unit is the mountain, but it's always part of a mountain range.

32:59So at what point is it not the rest of the range? These are all distinctions we make to make communication convenient. But by putting things into boxes we reduce them and we need to understand that these are reductions and the more we just accept the world the way it is and the way it's presented which is in words because of all the platforms we're on now right from childhood people are experiencing the world in these words that are filtered for virality words that are filtered for what is optimal attention uh baiting clickbaity words. And then that becomes the filter through which you understand and express the world.

33:41And that reduces your whole worldview so much. So this is an essential way to counter a lot of that programming that all of us go through now. I like that. And there's a really cool way where that aligns to what you're getting at before, where before you're thinking about this political satire and how it maybe further separates us. And I thought about you talking about words in this way of clickbait and SEO and categorization. If the words you use get you filtered into different parts of the internet versus an image is not going to do that. I wondered if you could talk to us about a curiosity spiral, because I felt like that really gets at how drawing, what I liked about this whole thing is how it gets you in touch with your curiosity.

34:34And I felt like that because that's a really difficult thing to do. And I felt like this exercise really illustrates what that is. Yeah. So I'll go backwards on that answer because you touched on a lot of beautiful things and remind me in case I slip and I forget something. Yeah, that's fine. Firstly, this is something you see so often people don't value their own curiosity. The process of growing up is understanding that there are things I'm good at things I'm not good at. And often the things we let go as children, everybody used to draw as children, use colors as children, and then you grow up and everybody around the world, regardless, regardless of nationality, ethnicity has the same story.

35:15Someone told me I'm not good enough, or I thought it's not practical. I looked at somebody else's work and got jealous and thought I'm useless. And so I stopped. And this is such a tragic thing. So one of the most important things for me to express is that we are all curious as human beings and we all have unique curiosity. But the way we think about art is that it's not my curiosity that matters. What matters is that there is a sense of what is great curiosity. The value I bring is by, again, externalizing my work and meeting XYZ standards. Like tapping into what are people curious about? What do other people want?

35:54Always what do other people want? And we devalue our own curiosity. So this exercise that I've got in the book is about how to tap into your curiosity. And you can't do that. You know, again, too many words will not work. I don't want to give you a treatise on it. So the exercise is to now tap into the thing without letting words get in the way. No hesitations, no second thoughts. Screw all of these thoughts. Just get into the drawing of it and start getting into that nonverbal image-based curiosity inside you. So how it goes is people are afraid of the blank page. And I am an impatient person and I am very curious about certain things and I don't care about other things.

36:36And that's how my art has evolved. So this lesson comes from all of those factors of me expressing themselves honestly. You start with anything that makes you curious. You look in front of you and whatever it is that catches your eye, don't overthink it. Don't ask yourself why. Don't ask if it's profound. Don't let words get in the way. Just pick the damn thing and draw the first thing that catches your eye. It looks like something and it stopped you for some moments, so you drew that first. And since that is now the start of your curiosity, you spiral out. And this advice is particularly useful because people don't always have a lot of time to draw and they feel like if I can't give it two hours, should I even start?

37:20And this is me giving them permission to not think like that. You spiral out and then the curiosity spiral constructs itself. What it does, what it says to you is that as you move away from that element of first curiosity, by default, you are less curious. As you spiral away, you spiral away. And you allow yourself to be less curious. Allow yourself to be not interested. Allow yourself to not care. As you move away from your point of curiosity, you give less attention to the things there. You give fewer lines to them. You give fewer details. You give them less time. And the thing that made you curious and the things around it are the things that get all of your attention because it made you curious.

38:06What this does is it immediately gives you a way to start. You get over, like for me, the longest time, you know, that blank page was, is always fearful. But the moment you put pen to page, that fear decreases. And the moment you get into it more and more and more, it's gone. As soon as the process begins, those outside thoughts are gone. So the fastest way that you can close that gap is good for you. so I would get into it and then immediately I would allow myself to tap into my impatience if I'm impatient if I don't care if I think that thing doesn't matter I am allowed to go with that feeling and what that means is that without really really consciously thinking of it I am expressing my curiosity both for the things I care about and the things I don't care about so I'm navigating this beautiful scene in front of me in this interesting way that is directly related to my personality.

39:00I like what people are doing. I am always curious about those people at the bus stop. So that's where my drawing starts. But drawing windows is super tedious. I don't want to draw windows. So the building behind them just gets very quick lines and I don't want to draw the windows. This drawing, therefore, for most of like pretty much all of the drawing stays with within the zone of my joy. These are the things I enjoy. So I'm spending time with them. And then when it's done and you look at it, it tells you what I was curious about and it tells you what I didn't care for. So this, you know, whether my lines are good, whether my skill is great, this drawing is my drawing.

39:37It can never be anybody else's because this is an authentic representation of what I care for and what I don't care for. Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I love that you get artistically, you get a focal point naturally, you get a thing where we're having a soft focus on everything else because you're detailing the thing that you're really energized and drawn to. And then I love it's an exercise of reacquainting yourself and affirming what I like and I'm interested in. that's something I need to take seriously and listen to. And then the things that are not as interesting, I can let them go. And it's a way to tune into your point of view.

40:22And that's so difficult to do, honestly. Like you said, going through school and everything, we turn that off. I learned a lot of stuff around urban sketches and people who do this. They sit in public and they draw. And I would meet so many people who felt like they want to draw a thing, but they are intimidated by all the other stuff around it. And they feel obligated to draw everything with an equal amount of detail. So one of the things I tell people is this, that your taste is not just the stuff you love. You have to allow yourself to hate certain things. Yes. Like hate sounds like, oh, such a terrible word, but it's so useful.

40:59So you have to know what you don't care for. And you have to move away from those things too, as much as you move towards what you love. and this coming out on the page makes it yours. And then, you know, all of it is joy and you have a reason to get into it again the next day because you didn't spend two hours getting the perspective on those windows right that you don't care for, but you felt obligated to do. I completely agree. And one of the ways that I practice this and try to encourage artists to think about, think about, you've probably spent a lot of time thinking about what you love about your hero's work.

41:39Spend just as much time looking for what you don't like, what you don't, try to find things that your heroes do that you're like, I hate when they do that. I hate when they add that song to the album that I'm like, don't skip that thing, whatever it is, because that's telling you something about your taste and point of view. It's telling you of how you want to do it differently. And I think it's a great insight that you've added there.

42:35We'll see you next time. You can count on their great customer service to help when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. One thing I wanted to ask you about was this idea of leaving some room for magic. You talk about that in the book. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit. I think it fits nicely with this exploration on curiosity. Yeah, sure. I think I have the drawing that gave me this idea too.

43:14Oh, cool. Maybe you can tell that story of what that's all about. This is the drawing. And what happened on this page is that I drew this because I wanted to draw this bridge. This is in Seattle. And I wanted to draw this fun bridge. And I started drawing it. And I drew the background. And I drew the sky. and then I came down this way for the foreground. And just as I was here, that's when this father and son walked into the page. They walked into the page and they had this little exchange where the son asks the father, what is with that thing, that drawbridge? And the father explains how it works and it goes up and down and the child is fascinated.

43:50And they occupied the spot that was empty on my page in that moment and I put them in. And now if you look at this drawing, it seems like as if the whole drawing is constructed around them. So when you draw on location, and this is part of my argument for why more people should draw on location and not always only out of photographs. When you draw on location, you spend a half hour or an hour at that spot. So what you do is you're giving this space, this scene, your time and your attention. And it's a constantly shifting tableau. This is not a still image people come in and out things change ships come in whatever stuff happens and sometimes stuff happens that irritates you like this car comes and blocks your view yeah but sometimes something magical will just come into that space in the last five minutes of your time there and completely own the scene now and you needed them to do that and they're right here so the idea is at a very general philosophical level that if you leave room for magic in your page, sometimes that magic appears.

45:01But you have to be in the business of leaving some room for it, which means giving time, waiting faithfully, which means watching and observing, which means going out there day after day after day, looking in your regular ordinary world, in ordinary places for magical stuff to happen. And if we start doing this, this also happens in the way you draw, this happens in the process by which you draw, oh, this happens in the process by which you see. The more you do this, it gets us to appreciate how beautiful our everyday world is. Like you don't have to be in remarkable Instagram worthy places, big cities of the world.

45:42There is incredible beauty everywhere and it's waiting for us to see it. And some of it is that magical thing that happens when you give from your end the gift of time and attention. And I like how you also add that this is true in your everyday life. Like I thought about it through the lens of your calendar. Do you have any space where you don't know what's going to happen? And it gets back to that curiosity versus strategy. Like strategy is all about, one of the reasons I talk about strategy on the show so much is because I think creative people find that direction. Some creative people find that really difficult to have a goal in mind and work backwards.

46:24I think it's a type of thinking and being creative. That's really powerful if you can harness it, but the world mostly over indexes on strategy of like, okay, here's the next month. Here's what we need to fit in. There is no room. There's no room for, I didn't know that was going to happen. Right. Yeah. And part of the reason why is what you're getting at. Like some, a lot of times if you leave room, you don't, you're not in control of what shows up. That car does obscure the view or whatever. But there, yeah, there's a comfort to making that strange. We are so addicted to control. And I want to just add that there are a lot of people who are, who've appointed themselves in the business of telling you how to do things.

47:08And it's so important that you never listen to such people and they'll give you all the tips for success and they'll tell you how to optimize your life. And you should never listen to such people because they are not in the habit of doing things. A lot of people are very successful at selling people newsletters on how to be successful. And that is a weird, vicious loop. Like, I don't know what you're successful at because your success is at telling people you're successful. So the strategy has its place, but when we over-index on strategy, we over-index on outcome. And the more we over-index on results and outcome, the narrower we make our worldview and our experience.

47:51So this is something that's very important to me because the process of art for me was the process of becoming a child again. Children draw because they take joy in putting that crayon on the page and making big marks. Look at the color coming out on the page. If I add green to it, look at what happens. They're taking joy in that process. Once they're done, and I have a near two-year-old at this point, once he's done he literally tears it apart he's done with it he doesn't care we want to save it i keep begging him to not tear it so i can frame it and he just he doesn't care he'll tear it because that's fun now and then he'll draw again the more we grow up we forget to take joy from process we only care if it's good enough quote unquote good enough the return on investment is worth it if so and so people are impressed i'll only do it if the result is worth it so from process-oriented people we become results-oriented people and how this manifests a lot especially in men is our world shrinks because we'll only do the things we're good at doing because the process the result is good enough and of course every year that field shrinks so you get older and older and older and eventually you reach that age i'm not there yet luckily where your world is basically just news and sports and that's it that's all you talk about that's all you know and nothing outside it.

49:11It's the opposite, as I see, at least in my experience with women, the older women get, the more they're eager to explore their world and do things and just enjoy things and be curious and do things for the fun of it. And I feel like for me, it's been understanding that. And as a person who loves to plan things, I have three, I have four notebooks and I have notion that is full of all my plans. Google Calendar also. I digitally analog every way I plan in 100 million ways. And I have tried and rejected dozens of tools before this as well. I think what I'm really taking from it is that when you fixate on destinations, you're postponing joy until you reach that destination.

50:01That's one part. So 90 % of the journey, which is 90 % of life, you are sacrificing joy so that at the end hopefully you will be happy secondly it presupposes that you are fit to decide the destination you know what the best destination would be and so you go through this life on an optimized path not going left or right and i asked what you're on this planet to do were you here just to get to that destination or were you here to explore this mad beautiful world we live in. You're supposed to take every detour. You're supposed to stop at every scenic vista. You're supposed to get lost. These things have come to me from trying to be an artist.

50:44These things have not made me an artist, but these things are gifts that my art practice has given me because I trusted my curiosity, which showed me there is so much more to be happy about. You said something wonderful. You said leaving room for magic in your calendar, which is such a rich thing to do like the biggest thing that I've gotten this year has come from saying no to a bunch of things last year I let go of the kind of commissions I was doing I let go of a lot of things that were making me money but I didn't want to be doing that and I left room in my calendar basically and things would drop in and I have space for them and now things that happened two years ago that I did just because I had space and nothing to do are circling back and becoming bigger things that I really want to do.

51:34Not knowing destination, just following curiosity makes for such a rich, wonderful life in which you, like who cares where you end up? Like destinations, straight lines, all of these things. Like they're part of$300 courses with marketers and growth gurus. And like, those are words that work for them because they don't care. They don't care about the everyday. But if you want to be happy today, I don't think strategy is the way to do it. Yeah, I love that. I think, I love what you said about, it touches on the last question I have for you. This idea of like, whenever I started this podcast, even after it started taking off, which was, I started almost 10 years ago.

52:19One of the things that was a commitment for me was I never want to lose my, if this is my lab, I want to be in the field. I want to be making illustration for clients. I want to be working on picture books. I want to be deeply invested in my creativity. And then I can speak to that. I never want to lose that connection. I feel like very interested in that, just kind of these two different lanes, right? Yeah. And I never wanted to become someone who's just talking about being creative. Just a talking head. You know? Yeah. But I like, you know, I actually feel, I always try to give credit to, I heard someone talk about how some, there are these incredible coaches that never were excellent at the game and they ended up being, you know, so we do have, and I have teachers in art school that were incredible teachers and didn't end up pursuing it.

53:16So I'm not saying you can't do that, but for me personally, that's been true. Like I want to, I want to be in the field and then I want to be in the lab and I want there to be a relationship between those two things. And getting to that, I wanted to ask you if this following your curiosity, this onsite drawing and kind of like the way that you observe yourself doing it and noticing what you're noticing and all that, it has a very scientific quality. Have you ever thought about how it relates to your relationship to neuroscience and biomechanics and all that kind of stuff? Because there is kind of a relationship there.

54:03That's a good observation. So this is something my mother says to me. She'll say, why did you waste all that time studying if this is what you wanted to do? And I tell her that nothing is wasted. Everything adds up. There are ideas I have from my life as an engineer that play a big role in my art today, in my writing today. Ideas cross, like ideas are not stopped at the boundary of genre or field of study. They bleed into everything around us. One of the best things I learned as a control engineer in my master's program was the idea of accuracy versus precision. This is a lesson I share in the book as well.

54:50So this applies to designing very small systems that move very little, little micrometers or millimeters and have to do exactly that every time. So, you know, CD players and chips that have little moving parts, all of that precision control devices. but it applies to being an artist also. And it came to me when I was trying to be an artist. Accuracy is when you always hit the bullseye. So you're always correct. If you never hit the bullseye, you're not accurate. If you always miss the bullseye, but you always hit the ring just outside it, you're not accurate, but you're precise. Precision is not how correct you are.

55:28Precision is how consistent you are. A lot of devices when designed for precision control don't have to be accurate. They do have to be precise. They have to do the same thing every time, even if they're offset a little bit from the right point. That's okay, as long as it's precise and consistent. As an artist, we don't have to be accurate. This is the most common misconception people have. The idea that there is an accurate, perfect solution that you have to reach. Engineers think like this very often. There is an optimized solution we have to get to. A lot of people coding for AI, therefore think this way also.

56:03There is a perfect art that we will optimize towards. Yeah. The point of this is to not be accurate. The point is to be what brings style, what brings you out is your consistency. Are you always you? Are you always honest? Are you never faking it? If you do this consistently, if your perspective is always off, just a little bit, always like that. If your heads are always just a little larger than the rest of the body, that becomes your style. just do it consistently just stay with those things that are part of you stay with the quote unquote mistakes that are part of you that are your personality all of those things add up to become your style all of those things add up to become your honest representation and that is what we want to get to that brings us that joy there's this quote I always share by my favorite musician Miles Davis.

56:54Miles Davis said, once is a mistake, twice is an idea, three times is style. Love it. No better. That's so good. Style comes from staying with the things you think of as your mistakes. Staying with those things until they give you some kind of bright idea, some kind of thing that maybe, maybe this will work. Maybe this will work out for me. And then staying with that and keeping at it, keeping at it until people look at it and they don't see the mistake. so I'll give you a visual example yeah please do I started drawing people out of curiosity and I wanted to draw these people who were passing by so early in Chicago I started drawing people at corners corner cafes I'd look out at people at the traffic light and try to draw them before they're gone so like 15 seconds 20 seconds sometimes if you're lucky and you never know how much time you have so quick instinct uh put myself in this situation where hesitations can't enter the picture just do it do it do it do it do it and i realized as i was getting kind of better at it so this is a recent page from like three years ago as i was getting kind of better at it i realized you know i am getting decent at this but i really suck at drawing shoes so bright idea what if i don't draw feet yeah that's very you my tiny people don't have feet and this is a mistake Like people have feet, Nishant.

58:19But you do it and you do it. And once it is style, that's not a mistake. That's just his style. That's a great example for people that are listening and not watching. It's a full two-page spread of all of his people drawings. And they're very recognizable. And they're littered throughout the book. And I think it really drives the point home. I do also want to say before I forget. Like I want to tell you how much I appreciate your podcast because you, you, you give me company a lot of the times when I'm driving and I love it because I can see that your ideas come from a place of creation. Like your ideas are not you typing them into an idea generator and deciding let's talk 30 minutes about this thing.

59:03It's, it's not SEO driven. It feels like it is curiosity driven. And I really appreciate that. I take a lot of lessons from it. I have a podcast in which I primarily have conversations with other sketches, but I've been slowly giving myself the space to just talk about my practice and my journey and my creativity. And listening to others such as yourself gives me that space that I'm also allowed to do this. So I take a lot of permission from you. That's great, man. And you're very profound. And where do you tell people the name of the show so they can go find it? Yeah, sure. So it's the Sneaky Art Podcast.

59:43And like I said, I'm a contrarian, so I didn't follow any of the rules. It's a podcast about art that has no visuals. It's purely audio. People said you should do a half hour show. Nobody wants to listen for longer. So I have three hour long episodes. You're good at trusting yourself, man. I love it. What a joy it is to talk to somebody for the first time in your life and convince them through conversation that they should tell you everything. and let's do this. Let's keep going for three hours. It's true. I totally, it's very tempting. And every episode of my show is me talking to somebody often for the first time in my life and staying at it until they start telling me stories.

1:00:25And once that point is reached, I know that I can just shut up and back out. And now this will just run. So it's a discovery in learning how to listen, learning how to, learning where inspiration comes from. people who learn from all these different places and depict their world in all these different ways for different reasons art is not always art is not about making pretty drawings art is not about the result what does it give us why do we do it it was my question because this is my journey why am I making art like I was writing stories I was writing jokes why am I suddenly drawing things the first time I sold art Andy somebody said they wanted to buy it I posted on Reddit somebody said they wanted to buy it.

1:01:06And I thought this is the craziest thing in the world. I didn't even put a funny caption. You just want the raw drawing. Why would you give me money for this? But again, America, you know, it just only in America, this can happen. So I was like, yeah, sure. I'll take the money. I went to Lincoln. I met them at Lincoln Park Zoo. It was a drawing of Chicago skyline from the Lincoln Park Zoo. And I gave it to them there. And that's the first time I sold art. And it gave me the confidence that so much can be said, so much can be shared, and so much can resonate with people through just some lines and shapes.

1:01:39I agree with that. One last thing, maybe you could just end it with telling us the two different definitions of sneaky art. Okay. Yeah. So these definitions evolved. One, when I started doing this, this was me being sneaky. I was tremendously self-conscious. I was anxious about being in public and doing this silly, ridiculous thing a grown adult trying to learn to draw yeah so I started drawing with the fountain pen so I wouldn't erase and I would draw quickly and I would draw in a little sketchbook so I could get out of there quickly and nobody would see me sit in the corner seat in cafes nobody behind you draw very quickly get out of there before anybody asks what are you doing and I have to show my terrible pages so I was being sneaky in the pursuit of art the more I did this the more I understood and as I started to accept my role as this and you know push out the shame this unnecessary shame I started to see and especially after moving to Wisconsin you know you'd think I'm in a small place what is artistic what is beautiful what am I going to draw but I kept finding things the more I just walked out with the sketchbook just look and I realized art is everywhere beautiful things are everywhere and what they need from us is time and attention And if we give that, then they reveal themselves.

1:03:02I realized that the world is full of sneaky art, waiting, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be seen. I was trying to be sneaky to begin. And I realized that the art is sneaky too. It's right there, but you can't see it until you're willing to give it time and attention. There's two things I want to bring up. We were talking about embracing chaos, embracing the not straight path, going on these different, letting things kind of derail you. And you brought up this example from scuba diving that I thought was really great. And then I want to go to something else too. Sure. So the first lesson in scuba diving that I took, I quit my PhD program.

1:03:46I had three months paid leave to take. Yeah. And I started backpacking across Europe before moving to the US to live with my girlfriend. And I was in Montenegro and I was taking a scuba diving lesson. And I was flailing in the water, five feet underwater, trying to keep myself in looking in one direction, facing one direction, completely straight and still, but you can't do that in water. And I didn't accept it. My scuba instructor was two feet in front of me, two feet above me, floating above me with the light shining on his face in this Zen meditative pose. folded his legs, put his arms to his sides.

1:04:23And he showed me in that moment that in order to have control, in order to be at peace, you have to relinquish the idea of control. You cannot live in a chaotic world trying to control every variable and then find peace. This is something I've had to accept. This is something I've had to appreciate again and again and again because a creative life is full of chaos and variables that you just can't know. You cannot know it and you have to find peace in the not knowing. Very true. I think I love what you said about accepting, kind of embracing the chaos in a chaotic environment. It reminds me of how I noticed in my own creative journey that I started out as a kid making videos, doing a fake radio show, drawing pictures, just doing all of these different things.

1:05:21Right. And then the world says, no, you need to get it together. You need to get the order, get the straight line. What is it going to be? And I was like, all right, I'll be an illustrator. That's what I'm going to do. That's my path. And then I did that, pursued that. And then a decade later, all of a sudden they're telling me, yeah, well, if you're going to want going to be an illustrator. You're going to need a fake radio show called a podcast. You're going to have to have some videos. You're going to, and I'm like, what the hell? Like, no, I'm trying, I want to draw. Okay. And I think that it reminds me of that.

1:05:52I'm like, oh yeah. The reason I chose a creative path is because I wanted it to be creative. I wanted it to be chaotic, unexpected, trying new things, doing new things. Um, and there is this kind of letting go that you have to, you've got to kind of roll with it. Yeah. And that's, I feel like this is the best part of it for me. It's also the worst part of it for me. Not like, so when I quit my life in academia, I also quit a structured nine to five situation, like knowing what my deliverables are, knowing who I'm accountable to. If I was in a big project, knowing when we are 20 % through 50 % through.

1:06:30so one of the things I let go of was all these numbers that help to structure your life in a creative life I tried to force fit numbers how many pages did I write today how many things did I draw today how many hours did I work today as a way to somehow signal productivity or feel allow myself to feel happy about my day yeah which doesn't have a realistic output at this moment until like months down the line. Learning to embrace this situation was so important and learning to not quantify it, to not struggle to put productivity measures into it. It took so much learning and unlearning, like these old ideas of my old life that aren't applicable anymore because you can't tell when the project is done.

1:07:17You can't tell what the returns will be. Things will multiply and things will become other things and things will manifest in ways that you can't imagine. And that is the great joy. Like we are so lucky. Like here's something I get. I just finished my book tour. I went to like seven cities or eight. And one of the most common questions you get from people is this, especially with all this AI stuff around us and the news we get about it. It is so hard now. News, we'll just say. It's PR is what it is. Go on, sorry. Yeah. it is so hard now how do you decide to be an artist in today's world it is so hard to make money it is a terrible time to try to be a creative full-time and my counter is that this is the best time in human history to be an artist objectively it has never ever been easier you can go next door to an art supply store and buy a 64 thing of colors any medium you want any sketchbook you want, any surface you want, any pen you want.

1:08:22You can, on your phone, go on the podcast app, find the Creative Pep Talk podcast, listen to all these ideas about how to be a creative. Leonardo da Vinci would kill to be in your place. You can make an audience and sell them art directly. You don't have to beg your local gallerist curator to give you permission to frame something on the walls and make friends with, you know, schmooze with all the famous artists in order to become known. You get to do it however you want. We are alive in the best time to be an artist. We have the freedom to learn. We have the freedom to pick up skills and to make an audience and to sell to that audience.

1:09:01With it comes the responsibility now to make that work. How will you sell? What will you sell? What will they buy? Why will they buy it? A little bit of the strategy is in this part. So this is that flip side that you were talking about, you know curiosity versus curiosity is what makes you an artist strategy is what keeps you as an artist maybe yeah i think so i think at least in terms of thinking as a professional artist like anybody can draw and find joy and you're an artist i agree but the idea of a professional artist is somebody who also makes money from it and to do that you need some element of thinking outside of yourself yeah and that's where all these things that are business like things planning things strategy things, they start to play a role and it becomes, I feel like it is incumbent upon me to sustain that curious child inside me that I pick up the strategy slack and I learn how to, how to make it sustainable.

1:09:58How do I make, how do I keep this freedom to do whatever I want? I completely agree. And a big theme for me throughout the show is realizing that you need both the strategic creativity and the curiosity-based creativity. And I think there's two watchouts for it. One is you have to – the first hurdle is going from being a purely curious creative person to learning the strategy side, which is intimidating in all kinds of different ways. It's kind of like writing a joke. Like, okay, how do I get to that punchline? It's not comedy acting. It's not just like, oh, being silly in the moment. It's I need to construct this.

1:10:43That hurdle is difficult because it's intimidating. Then the second hurdle, I think, is after you learn that that strategic way of thinking is very intoxicating. Once you have some control of it, it's just like what you were saying. Like once you can put a funny comment under the drawing and now you've added value to it, it's very hard not to want to do that always. it's very hard to then let the curiosity back in and let the chaos back in and let the lack of control back in that then that's the second hurdle but then so but they don't have to be at odds you have the thing you have to do is figure out how do i reach to the one that i need it when i need it yeah it's tough it's really freaking tough it's i think it's one of the biggest battles of being a creative person absolutely and i think the challenge of being a creative person is to be enthusiastic about this great difficult battle which is a lifelong battle it's never going to end and you're never done with it it's like so one little idea again enjoying the wrestling you know that's what it is like so just like you say go on yeah so there's this little idea i share in the book it's called knowing the difference between finite and infinite games i was going to ask you about this because i think it's a great a great point yeah so finite games are games where they end.

1:12:02So they're finite. There is a way to keep score. There are rules. There's a winner. There's a loser. So most sports tend to be finite games. Infinite games are games that don't have rules, even though we try to impose them, that don't have score, even though we try to keep score. They're not supposed to end. They're supposed to be fun to play. You play them because you want to keep playing them. And life, your life is an infinite game. And the practice of art is also an infinite game. You don't keep score. You just have to find a way to keep doing it and to keep doing it and to keep doing it because the doing it is the joy of it.

1:12:41Yeah, I love that. I think there's a Venn diagram here for a creative professional where for the longest time, I really thought like, oh, so much is about taste and really about taste is really a result because when you can taste the, this piece that I'm making makes me feel like this, I can trust people out there there, they exist that will feel the same way that, okay. That's like a result thing. Then, um, Kendall Hillegas told me, she was like, she's an illustrator. She was like, I think it's about process. And now I am right in the middle of this Fenn diagram where I think it's something about taste and tolerance.

1:13:28Tolerance being like, I have this, I'm a machine that does this and I like doing it. It's always, it's fun. And so then the metaphor I came up with is, it's kind of like if you're Coca-Cola and you've got all the machine to make these fizzy drinks, like part of it is, okay, getting in tune with how doing that really well, knowing the process, knowing what, what kind of thing do you create? Then it's about tapping it, then having a, some insight into the market to say, okay, they don't want sugary ones anymore, but my machine makes these things. Well, I can make soda water or I can make, you know, probiotic water or whatever.

1:14:11And I think it's having some kind of knowledge of what do I produce naturally? And I enjoy it, just like you were saying, just drawing for the sake of it. And then and only then, because I think the other thing is we do the opposite way. We start with, what does the world want? They want sugary drinks. Okay, I've got to be a machine that creates those. You know what I mean? Does that make sense? Yeah. And then at some point, I'll add, you need to have a marketing department. Right. So here's how I, I told you about the two week conversation with my parents. So one of the arguments sometime during these two weeks, one of my approaches to tackle this argument was that think of me as an entrepreneur, I'm making a product and it happens to be art or it happens at that time, it was a novel artist wasn't in the picture.

1:15:01I'm going to write and I'm going to make comics and my job is to sell them. So I'm making a product and I'm selling, I'm just a businessman, except I am on both ends of the supply demand curve. I make the supply, but it is also my job to create the demand for it. You have the freedom to do whatever kind of art you want, but it is also part of your job to create the market for it. Why should people care about my art? That's my job. There is so much art in the world and I can't be the best artist in the world. There's no point trying to be that because anybody can go on Instagram and now on your phone, you can access all the art in the history of humanity instantly.

1:15:44So trying to be the best is not the point. Why should somebody care about me doing this? This is a question I have to answer. This is a question I had to answer myself. Why am I doing this with my life? Who cares? Why me? And that why and how that works is my job to figure out. And it's my job to make that thing desirable. and you've done a great job with it you're in the way that you've packaged what you do the way you've named it the way you talk about it the way you present it lots of lots of people can do observational drawing or go out and do these on-site drawing and you've taken your own point of view that is informed by what you found valuable and interesting about it right like the the sneaky art side in both different ways and then all all of these other things that you've taken from it one of the things you said that i wanted to get down before we head out is uh you were talking about if you go to a city and you're you're not leaving that space for the magic and you just go to what what did you say do you remember this bit like you're talking about going to a restaurant no i don't remember you're talking about you're talking about like looking up on google and you're like oh that one has a 4.8 oh yeah oh right yes so you know uh we before i step into a restaurant now this is the default i go on maps and i'm not going to step inside a restaurant that has less than 4.6 out of five right firstly who the heck am i that i deserve only better than that i mean i'm the same i do the same thing yeah how much are we how much are we curating our human experience so that we only trust these these arbitrary numbers who leaves reviews i don't know if you're the kind of person who leaves reviews for stuff on google maps but i think i think it's you have to be insane to be the person who leaves reviews for every place so you're listening to the most crazy people who eat at restaurants and they're telling you you should go here and enough of them love it so you go there and you don't look left or right you just go from point A to point B, following the path Google Maps told you, listening to your thing because you're outside.

1:17:54So you're listening to your music. We're all walking in these bubbles of audio visual control, insensitive to our world. We're passing through our world like robots and not seeing it, not allowing ourselves to look up, remember the route, remember the street markers you walk by. Nobody can trace their path back because only Google took them there. So this is such a new thing in our world, but it has completely, we have delegated the business of being in the world just so we can be in the content loop. I can Instagram a little longer. I can listen to another podcast. I can listen to the same pop music that Spotify throws at me again and again, a little longer instead of actually looking at the world around me.

1:18:37And what a reduction of the human experience. Yeah. There's going to be, there's going to be a backlash against this. I feel like people are so frustrated with being less than human. I feel like this is something I want. I try to encourage myself to see and encourage my kids and encourage artists around me. Like have a little faith in humanity. Like when we constantly, when we do things for a couple of decades that are killing us, we pretty much always think, okay, let everyone, let's just demonize this because this is like not so good no matter how good it feels like we we have more resilience than people give us credit for i love this we usually end the show with a cta it's a call to adventure it's a thing you can do i'm gonna call this one no no point b and it's an idea where you go go pick a point a don't have a point b let and the reason i think it's important is because, like I said, your whole life in this era, in this economy, everything you're doing is encouraging you to be in your strategic brain, to get the right outcome, to get joy at the end, to get money at the end, to know you're all about B.

1:19:48Well, that's all we're thinking about. I'm always trying to collect ways to how do you tap back into the other one? How do you get there? And so let's do one. You go pick a point A, go drive there, nothing else. Everything else is, And I love that you said that because we went to Italy in the summer. And the funniest thing is, like, all of my kids' favorite meal was one that happened on accident. While we were waiting for somebody else, we saw this hole in the wall place. And they were the loveliest people ever. It was super cheap. They were just, like, so friendly. There was no menus. All the people were local.

1:20:27And it was just like, yeah, this was not – we had a huge itinerary. itinerary so many places we had to hit a lot of them were lovely right but this is the one they talk about and it's the there's a point b we didn't plan yeah that's that's amazing i think it's lovely that you know you allowed for that again you left possibility for that magical thing to come into your your trip and that's what made it happen like because you're there and it's possible that's how it can happen and if you only went by reservation or you planned and scoped everything that there wouldn't be room for that to come into your life.

1:21:01And that's so true. Like the more room we leave for discovery, maybe you discover something. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. And thanks for giving me extra time. I just wanted to get some of that stuff down. Uh, everyone go check out Nishant's sub stack podcast, all the things we'll put them in the notes by the book, by the book, by the freaking book. That's going to be at the top of the show notes. go check it out there it's it's really great like you say it's not super heavy on the how-to it's really about how to give yourself permission and find the beauty in how you do it and i i think you uh made something really great man thank you so much andy this was such a joy

1:21:57Okay, this is kind of becoming a theme on this show, talking about curiosity. It must be because it's on my mind. I told you a couple episodes ago about my new book that I did with Sophie, my wife, called Mysterious Things, coming out in the summer. And one of the core new characters, new invisible things that we introduce is curiosity. So I think it's going to be a theme for a while. And I think it's really essential to you as an artist, but even more so you as a human. I think that curiosity is super key. So we're going to keep hammering that. I think it's important. It's hard to stay curious in a world like the one we find ourselves in, the pressures and demands and the chaos and what have you.

1:22:40Thanks, Nishant, for giving me so much time. It was a blast chatting with you. Thanks to Sophie Miller for being a producer and editor on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones for the sound design, the animation, the video, the video editing, the, the, I missed one, but you know, I say them every week. Sound design, animation, audio edits, video edits. There you go. It's all those. We love them. So, so helpful. Thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until I speak to you again, stay pepped up, y 'all.

1:23:35Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers, and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them, like our recent episodes on Dante and Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts. okay the podcast is over so i don't know why you're still listening uh but i am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end i have one more thing for you if you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next go sign up to our newsletter at andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our creative career path hand booklet and the whole process is in there and you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up.

1:24:51But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y 'all.