541 - Are You Afraid of The Art? How to Get Past the Fear and Have Fun Again

0:00Are you afraid of making art? Are you, and maybe you don't even realize it, but do you have anxiety around it? Do you get analysis paralysis, imposter syndrome? You sit down, the prospect of sitting down and making something spikes your stress on your watch. Like, do you have all of this fear around your art? And is it stopping you from showing up authentically, showing up in an excited, fun way where you can participate? If that's you, this episode is for you. I want you to feel like I'm not afraid anymore. I said I'm not afraid anymore. I am excited about making stuff. That's what this episode is hopefully going to give you, is a new lens where you're feeling like you did before about making stuff.

0:49For me, this lens changed everything, where now when I'm looking at the prints of my latest book that I hand-painted, I'm excited about the mistakes. I'm excited about the way that the paint looks messy in different places. I'm excited about the ways that it's not perfect. And so that's what I'm hoping to pass on to you and to me and to embrace in a deeper way. If you're into that, this episode is for you. Here's the plan. We're going to talk about the lens that will help you do that. We're going to talk about why it's so important. And then we're going to go to the call to adventure, something you can do with these ideas today.

1:30It's called Right Side Up, and it is a reflection that is going to help you put on a new pair of glasses that will help you see art in full color and the full spectrum like you did when you first were excited about making stuff. If that sounds fun, stay tuned, and 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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4:19Built to wear for a long time and still look good. Plus, they partner with factories that meet rigorous standards for craftsmanship and ethical production. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash peptalk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com slash peptalk. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash pep talk. My hope for this episode is that it would just feel like a voice memo from one creative friend to another because I really want to ask you to not let fear determine all of your creative values. you know, how you go about making stuff, how you set up what you think is good and what's bad and how that determines how much of yourself or how much of your taste you allow in your work.

5:29I don't feel like we talk enough about how scary making things is and how much scarier it gets the further you go on your creative journey. And I'm making this episode primarily for myself, first and foremost, because I can get very afraid of making stuff. And maybe you're not tapped into that feeling right now and it's easy to forget what it feels like to be overthinking and worrying about what are the comments gonna be? What if people think this is unoriginal? What if, you know, now I'm making picture books, I'm getting reviews. It's easy to think like, what are people going to feel about this?

6:13Are people going to think this is bad or worse? Think that I'm a hack or think that, you know, whatever it is, the further you go, the more that you know about what's quote unquote good or bad about art, the harder it can be to show up and let your curiosity drive instead of your fear of being a phony or an imposter or a loser or a poser or whatever it is. So making it first and foremost to myself, a voice memo from me to me, but also to friends of mine who I have watched as I've gone along 15 plus years on my creative journey and watched creative people either give up or kind of give up by default.

7:00Like, yeah, maybe they're still making stuff, but they're not taking risks. And when I say taking risks, I don't mean like doing some like avant-garde thing. I mean risks of participating in the creative movements that they're passionate and interested in. Risks like putting dumb jokes in their work. Risks like trying really hard to make something good. And I've just had experiences and I've seen friends fall by the wayside in the creative path and give in to the critics and the reviews and the comments and even more so just the potential judgment of others. and they go along and collect all these rules about what's good and what's bad.

7:48And it causes them to paint themselves into a corner where there's just no room for error. There's no room for trying. And it makes me so sad because creativity is supposed to be loose and fun. and it's supposed to be like spilling your guts. And you see it with almost every artist you like. As they get older, they tighten up. They wanna be more on point. They wanna protect any vulnerability when the whole idea of making art is being vulnerable. And so I want this episode to be permission to fan boy, girl, person out about whatever it is that you're into and participate in it and realize that it's not gonna be for everybody.

8:43And yes, your work will have valid critiques on it. Like there will be valid critiques about what you choose to do because there always will be. And so that's what this is about. And when I started to wrestle with this idea, the thing that surprised me the most was that the thing that is scaring you, the thing that is holding you back from showing up in your own creative practice might not start with you sitting down at the table and being afraid and might not start in how you're approaching your creative work. It might start with how you approach and see and engage with the creative work as a whole, art as a whole.

9:26It might start in the way that you consume and view the work of other people. It's kind of like, you know, the people that are the most socially worried about judgment are often the most judgmental people because they're going around town looking at this. You think you can get away with that? Oh my gosh, look at this guy. He's got to be joking. Oh my gosh. If that's how you're looking at everybody else, you can only assume that that's how they're looking at you. And if you could start to be more generous, curious, open in the way that you view others, that same lens is how you're going to approach the person in the mirror or the art that you put onto the canvas.

10:15And that might sound loose or abstract, but today we're going to talk about specifically what that looks like, how to practice it, how to exercise that muscle. And honestly, it's not some like, just be nicer to people. For me, this meditation on this idea has opened up not just how I think about my creative work, but it's made me love and engage with creative work as a whole in such a more vibrant way. That's really fun and exciting. And I think this shift is something that's happened to me over the past 10 years. And then I've been really excited about it recently. And so I want to get into that.

10:58Let's start by talking about what it looks like to do the opposite and why this lens ends up taking over. Why this lens of judgment and harshness and critique ends up defining how you think about art and then how to get out of it. We'll get to that in just a second.

11:34so i'm asking you please dance like nobody's watching create like nobody's watching please come on can we go back to that will you go back to that i want to see that stuff i want to see that kind of that energy of you pouring yourself out getting pumped excited to participate and make stuff without all of the fear of, is this going to be bad? Is someone going to think this is bad? Is someone going to think this is derivative, unoriginal, uninteresting, boring, plebeian, pedestrian, whatever you want to say. Instead of letting those voices determine how you feel about the art that you make, instead of letting those voices make the prospect of sitting down and creating seem cumbersome, dull, overwhelming, and scary?

12:32What if the prospect of sitting down to create could feel exciting again? When I was really little, we had a computer, our first computer, and I barely remember that thing, but my dad had it and it was for his work as an accountant and I don't know if I barely ever touched the thing. To me, it was so uninteresting. It was black and white letters and numbers might as well have been binary. And the prospect of sitting down with that computer, with that black and white screen just seemed so uninteresting, so dull, so cumbersome, so overwhelming, even a little bit scary. Like if I do the wrong thing, here, this thing might explode.

13:22Like I just felt like, you know how code, like if you get in code and you start tinkering, tweaking the code, you can break the whole thing. And if you don't know code, you don't want to fricking touch it. You know what I mean? You can, your whole website can go down. The whole app could quit functioning if you don't know what you're doing and you mess with the code and you put some bad code in. And that's what that computer felt like. And when When you approach art in that black and white way, that binary way, that is this good or is this bad? Is this pass or is this fail? Will this be celebrated or will this be destroyed by the comments or critics or reviewers?

14:06When you have that screen, that interface in the way that you think about not just your art, but art in general, it is no surprise that it's scary. And it's overwhelming and it's cumbersome. But what if you could interface with art in a way that feels like that next computer we got that was full color? I remember that AOL sound logging onto the internet and just feeling like the sounds. I would go on there and I would search for a little wave. If you weren't there for this, it's not going to make any sense. But I would look up like wave files of Jim Carrey quotes and just play them and be like smoking.

14:54Somebody stop me from the mask. You know, like that. The sounds, the smells. There weren't smells. We didn't have that technology yet. We still don't. The possibilities, the full spectrum experience felt like the possibilities were endless. And my hope is that if you can develop a full spectrum way of engaging, not thinking about art, but feeling it through an experience with all the shades and all the colors that you can start sitting down at your desk and just hearing, conditioning yourself to hear that AOL login sound and feeling like I'm about to explore. I'm about to have fun. I'm about to do something that's never been done by me.

15:42And that shift can make all the difference. For me, it looks like quit thinking about art through the lens of, is this good or bad? Do I like it or do I not like it? And it's not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with critique. There's not, and actually having a sense of what you like and you don't like is part of taste. It's not all bad. But if that's the only way that you think about and engage with art, you are going to engage with it in a way that is so binary that it will be scary. What if you push in the wrong one or the wrong zero? What if that brushstroke is slightly wrong?

16:18What if, you know, like every decision has to be on point or the whole thing crumbles? That's not how art works when you're working with the full spectrum interface of feeling it and experiencing it and reflecting on it instead of just critiquing it. And so this episode is about dropping the binary way of approaching and engaging with art. In my mind, what this looks like, it's like a reverse, the matrix. I'm going to never stop talking about that movie because I was like 13 in 1999 and it just turned my whole world upside down in the most ridiculous way. It just it's just how I think about life in so many ways.

17:06And I want you to have a reverse Neo moment. There's a moment in the movie where the one, Keanu Reeves, sees the world as it really is, which our world is in that movie a simulation. Ones and zeros, essentially. Binary. Instead of looking outside and seeing birds and trees and power lines, it's just lines of code. Black and white, green and black, actually, code. and when you are moving through the world through the lens of the left hemisphere through the lens of numbers you're not seeing it as it is in full color you're not seeing the meal for all of the stuff all of the beautiful colors and things that the person did to put it on the plate you're seeing $29 when you're looking at the car outside you're thinking that oh my gosh that's like a hundred thousand dollar car you're not looking at the person across from you and thinking about look at the experiences look at the full color look at the spectrum of emotions and experiences and and qualities you're seeing this probably this guy probably makes two hundred thousand dollars a year you're seeing facts figures binary code and that way of seeing that is this good is this bad is this right is this wrong that lens is ruining not just your experience of other people's art but your own view of your own art.

18:31And when everything is make or break and there's nothing in between, you do have to scrutinize every little thing that you do. It's like if you looked at an image on a computer and it was a picture of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or whatever, you're seeing it in all of its color. It can barely compare to the real experience, but you're getting a good sense of it, right? That also could be translated into binary where each pixel is determined. The color of each little pixel is determined by a series of ones and zeros. And that's how flat your experience of life and art and your own making becomes.

19:11And when your experience is that flat, each pixel, you better get every one and zero right. And if you're overthinking every single move and it has, your practice has become this thing that is cumbersome and dull, It's because your canvas has become that black and white screen of my accountant father's computer from 1990. And what we want to do is turn that bad baby up. We want to flip it upside down, which brings me to my question. If you want to know how do you test whether you have fallen into the trap of the binary lens, here's my question for you. if you've seen Stranger Things, all the episodes, and I ask you, I'm not going to give any spoilers away, okay?

20:01Just don't worry about that. We just finished it. We're a little behind everybody else and I'm not going to tell you anything, but I am going to ask you this question if you've seen it. If you haven't seen it, replace this show with whatever show you've seen all the episodes of. Maybe it's Breaking Bad. Maybe it's Game of Thrones. Maybe it's Lost if you've just been out of the TV game for a while. But if you've seen all of Stranger Things, here's my question for you. What did you think? And I'll just give you a little space to feel that. What's the first thing that came to your mind? What did you think?

20:35What did you think of Stranger Things? If your first response to that was you liked it or you didn't like it or you thought it was good or you thought it was bad, you have the binary lens and we want to turn that upside down we want to bring that into full color it's not like i said it's not a real problem to have a critique i think there's a place for critics there's a place for that you need to have a sense of what you like and what you don't like i think that's all true but there's so much more in the way of how to engage and experience and love and celebrate art and creativity and life in your own work.

21:21That's what we're going to try to unlock here right now.

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22:58Real quick, little ADHD sidebar for a second. Look, okay, here's the thing. You know, I just want to do a little, a tiny, a tiny little tangent. And this is, it's related, but it's not, look. Can we just nerd out for a minute? Because this is cool. And it does relate. I promise. I'm going to circle back to what we're talking about. One of the things that started this for me, what I started thinking about with this episode was we were watching Stranger Things. And one of the things I noticed about, one of the things I noticed that was strange about Stranger Things was that, or that was interesting, was that it reminded me of some of the stuff that Angus Fletcher talks about in his book, Primal Intelligence.

23:42and we had Angus on the show. You could go back and listen to that, one of my favorite interview episodes. But in that episode, here's the thing, not in the episode, in the book, here's the thing. He talks about how he believes that one of the reasons that Shakespeare was so revolutionary and so popular and what made people really kind of obsessed with his work was that not just that he was working with archetypes of characters that people were familiar with and liked. Like there's a general consensus in creative work or in storytelling that you need to work within these archetypes and whatever.

24:21The hero, the mage, the sage, the rebel, whatever. All these different things. You do see these show up a lot. But one of the things that really interesting, successful ones do differently is that they put a huge twist on that thing. and Angus Fletcher says like that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare was so popular is that he would introduce these archetypes that we thought we knew but then he would flip them on his head on their head that is one of the things that Stranger Things does very very well whatever you think about it whatever you like about it whatever you don't like about it whatever your binary is about this thing whether it's good or bad whatever I think you would have to agree and It might be one of the core elements of what the show is about even is taking these people that you think you would know.

25:10People like Stephen Harrington and be like, oh, you think this is the jock who just doesn't give a crap about anybody? This guy is a total sweetheart. He loves kids. He's a great babysitter. Like this is totally not what you expect. Take Nancy, popular girl, prissy, whatever at the beginning. And by the end, she's Rambo. She's literally Rambo. Okay. this is relevant okay for some reason to this episode and here's why here's why I think it's relevant it's because if you are afraid of putting yourself in the work if you see every creative thing as a binary what you're going to see it as is this is either part of the cool kids club or not.

25:55It's either sanctioned, like these decisions, these line weights, these shapes, these colors, these whatever, they're either part of the cool kids club in the genre that you're a part of, the movement you're in, they're either accepted or they're not, it's in or out. And if that's true, all you're able to do is fit in. All you're able to do is be part of something. You're never able to contribute something unique. You're never able to put your own twist on it. therefore you're never able to break out from the archetype and be truly interesting to anybody you have to at some point accept that art isn't binary it's like that neil's boar quote which i originally heard i just i want to shout out to the person that i heard it from which was frank camaro who is a designer who um when i was starting out was doing just these super interesting meditations on what design is.

26:47And, and, you know, it's, it even went far beyond that. And I, I, I was a big fan and he introduced me to this quote from this physicist. He was a famous physicist, Niels Bohr, who said the opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth. And that's true in quantum physics. And that's also freaking true in art, that art doesn't work like numbers. It doesn't work like accounting. It doesn't work like my dad's black and white computer. It works like this full spectrum. And it means the opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth. And it means that this thing that is uncool to some people might be super cool to other people.

27:27It might hit on a deeper level. There is no, this is right, this is wrong. This is even when I hear people talk about like, talk crap about a band from five years ago and not have the foresight to be like, there's a lot to do with just the context of your experience and the time that we're living in. And in five years, more time, this might actually sound good again. You know, for me, nothing sounds better right now than Alanis Morissette and TLC. There's something about, I mean, guys, take a fricking minute and just consume a little bit of that. The first track on Jagged Little Pill, is it called All I Really Want?

28:06That thing is a masterpiece to me. Oh my gosh. And TLC, I've been listening to that with my 10 year old and that first album, the red one, crazy, sexy, cool. The production on that, the vibe is unbeatable. Like it's so literally effortless in the vibe. I just can't get enough. And then when they came out with the next one, which had Scrubs and Unpretty and all that, I'm just going to nerd out on TLC because they're just so, so freaking good. And their voice, like T-Boz's voice is so cool. And I'm doing this on purpose because I know some of you are like, what the heck? TLC is not cool. No, Scrubs isn't cool.

28:50It's the context. It's the time. The opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth, baby. Okay. That's the relative nature of the spectrum, the full spectrum of art. and unpretty by the way let's just one more nerding out thing i told you this is the adhd sidebar um unpretty if you don't know one thing i noticed about this song first of all i love that the first album's very like traditional in terms of a lot of it's about romantic relationships but this album is almost all about like supporting women not the whole album but the singles and i think that's really cool first of all the second thing i think is cool is uh and again that's a little twist on the R &B genre, which was the R &B genre traditionally was so all romance.

29:38This is a good little twist, a Stephen Harrington twist.