548 - 5 Creative / Neurodivergent Friendly Productivity Hacks to Become a Doer

0:00I can almost guarantee that you don't need to be more creative. Like you are someone who creates storylines and characters and plots and scenes and sets in your mind while you sleep. What you might struggle to do is take those dreams and then do them. Like you might be someone who is more of a dreamer than a doer. If that's you and you want to figure out how do you get this stuff out of your head and into the world, This is the episode for you because in this episode, I'm going to give you five no filler, all killer hacks to get stuff done. These are five things that have made a huge impact on my creative existence.

0:43And it really matters because I am kind of freaked out by how easily I could be an Andy pizza that doesn't have 10 plus published books and 500 episodes of this podcast and X amount of clients and whatever. Like the things that helped me become that person that can start things and finish things, they are just these little things. And so it freaks me out to be like, this is not a given. There are choices, there are moves that you need to make. And I still have to remind myself of these things. So this episode is really good reminder for me. I hope it helps you realize more potential, turn those dreams into done things.

1:26And at the end, we're going to go through all five. We're going to start with the ones that I've been using most recently and work all the way down to the ones that have been the biggest deal to me, the most effective kind of life changer stuff. And we're going to end with a CTA called Look Under the Hood. It's a little quiz to help figure out what kind of brain you've got and how to get the most of it in terms of productivity and making stuff happen. Let's do 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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4:29Go to HelloFresh.com slash PepTalk10FM to get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling knife, a$144.99 value on your third box. offer valid while supplies last free meals applied as discount on first box new subscribers only varies by plan number five in our all killer no filler creative neurodivergent hacks for getting stuff done is put in the revs not the reps the revs put in the revs what do i mean by that this is what i mean i personally have realized that we all have different engines in our skull okay we're not all running the same some people have what i would call a pit stop engine they have this thing where when they finish a task when they finish a race when they get back to the finish line it's like this little matchbox car on a track where when it gets the finish line there's a little motor there and it gives them a boost when they finish a task and they go boom they go back around boom and it just kind of self-perpetuates that's the pit stop engine they get back to the front they get the pit stop they get more fuel and boom they're out of there with more energy than they had before they started the race for people like that the key is to realize that the thing that's holding you back is starting if you just start you will get moving that's not me i start way too many freaking things that's a huge problem for me for me it's hard to finish and what has helped me is realizing that i have to put in the revs i am a rev up car and so So if you think about a toy car that revs up, you have to pull it back on the ground, pull it back on the table, whatever it is.

6:17I know this is a really instructional moment for you. Should I use a table? Should I use the floor? You can use whatever you want, baby. You can use the bathtub. You can rev it back. You pull the car on the ground. You just pull it back. Five revs, and then you let it go. And boom, it blasts off in a sprint. And then it slows down as it goes. All of the energy comes from the start. and that's what I'm like with the project. All of the energy is at the start and I gotta make sure I prepare at the start both in the beginning of my day and the beginning of committing to a new project that I have all of the resources to start strong in a way that's going to last me all the way to finish that project.

6:57So I have to know I'm gonna start this because I am super, super in. I'm all in, my whole self is in. Therefore, I'm gonna have enough energy to get to the end because every little obstacle, every time I get around the finish line, It's like a little brick wall that I go through every page that I finish in the picture book, every every task that I commit, every page that I write. That's it's not a pit stop. It's a it's a brick wall that's slowing me down. And I've got to make sure that I rev up. So what that looks like at the beginning of the day is I got to put in my revs. This also this often means that I have to get up before everybody else in the house.

7:33Even on vacation, the ideal is that I get up a half an hour, an hour before everybody else because I gotta put in my revs. I can't do a day at the amusement park if I haven't done some journaling, some morning pages, having my coffee, having some reflection, maybe a cold shower or a hot bath. I've gotta do all of these things that rev up my engine. It's really important I understand what those revs are. Sometimes it looks like even going for a run, not tiring myself up enough, out too much, but just getting myself switched on because I know all of my energy is gonna start there. And then I might crash in the afternoon and have to take a nap and do a whole other session of revs to get through.

8:13So that is just super, super essential for me. We talked about this a little bit in episode 545 with Jared K. Anderson, who is a neurodivergent author and poet. A lot of neurodivergent folks said that they got a ton from this. I think we have kind of some different qualities in our neurodivergence. And so it was really interesting to kind of compare notes here. So if you want to dive deeper on this idea, go to episode 545 with Jared K. Anderson. Number four on our countdown is second is the worst. Have you ever heard that dumb thing that kids say like, first is the worst, second is the best and so on and so forth.

8:52We don't need to go into the third one here. but I'm just distracted by it now. They say first, the worst, second, the best. Okay, ridiculous, first of all. Second of all, second is the worst. You know, in the Olympics, they say that the person that's the least happy is number two. Like third didn't even feel like they were in the running so they're just happy to be there on the podium but second really is like feeling like they totally lost. But what I mean by this is nothing to do with any of that. What it's about is do the second thing that you do in your day. Make it the worst thing that you have to do.

9:37And this is an ADHD adaptation of this idea of slay your dragon first thing in the morning. Or eat that frog, I think is the same kind of concept. but it's this idea that I've heard neurotypical people say, like, these are all kind of like adaptations for creative weirdos. But I've heard neurotypicals give the productivity advice of take the hardest thing you have to do that day and do that first so that the rest of the day is downhill. That's great in theory, but for people like me, here's the problem. That keeps me from sitting down. If I know when I sit down, I'm gonna do the worst thing I'm gonna do that day, I'm just not going to be able to get my frontal lobe to take action on that thing.

10:24My executive dysfunction will not allow me to get my butt into the seat. I have to trick myself. I have to give, I'm like a dog that's getting into their kennel. Like I need a treat, okay? I need to do the worst second and I need to do the first best. So what this looks like is I need a little bit of space at the start of my day. So if this is when I had, when this was when I had a job, it would look like I need a daily project that if I'm going to an office, I go in 20, 30 minutes before I have to be there and I can do whatever I want creatively in that space. and so sometimes it looked like something rigid like i'm going to do a new character every week day before work or it looks it can look like i'm just going to have 30 minutes to do whatever i want hopefully your commute in you kind of get thinking about how you want to use that space because you want to hit the ground running but you want to get your butt in the seat that's the the hardest part and so if you're not going to be able to do that if you're going to start with the worst if the first is the worst if you're trying to slay your dragons before breakfast if you're trying to eat that frog first thing, it's not gonna work for you because you're gonna figure out excuses and procrastination.

11:35But if you say, I'm going to let myself have a 20 to 30 minute freebie to do whatever creative thing that I wanna do. Now, it might not be something you wanna do more than play video games or sleep a little bit more. No, it's still gonna require a little bit of willpower and excitement. That's what the revs are for. We did the revs. Now we've got a little bit, we've got some juice. Let's spend that juice to get my butt in the seat and do something productive, even if it's not something that can make you money. It's something that gets you excited and in the seat and doing stuff. After you do that, you might actually have, it might act almost as a rev where you're going to get some energy to do that next thing.

12:17Now, making that transition is not easy, but hopefully if you've put in the revs, you're going to be in the best possible space to have the willpower you need to move forward. into what I would recommend is getting the hardest thing on the list second. The second is the worst thing you have to do that day. That for me is just a complete game changer. Number three is become speed. Don't do anything else with it. This isn't a pharmacological hack. This is about wearing the same thing every day. I highly recommend it. Now, when you look at these videos, you'd be like, hey, Andy, you look different.

12:53You haven't wore that Dennis Rodman camo shirt and a couple of videos. That's probably true. Although this is one of my favorite shirts. Uh, most of the time, almost every day that I'm not doing a video or not doing a talk, I'm not wearing my Dennis Rodman shirts. I'm not wearing my other cool whatevers. I'm usually wearing this shirt. It's the enjoy the arts shirt. It's a black shirt with a big white print on it. Uh, this is my cartoon t-shirt. I want to be like speed racer which I didn't realize that's his name speed I want to become speed racer I want to be a cartoon I pick speed racer because we're doing like an automotive theme throughout this episode however I probably my favorite cartoon wardrobe is Skeeter Valentine from the show Doug he's got this huge lightning bolt shirt wears it every day here's the thing I am a cartoon character, both in personality and in the fact that I need to have a super dialed in simple wardrobe that feels good every day that I don't have to make a decision on.

14:00Here's the thing. Your brain only has so much power to make decisions. You run out, especially if you're a rev up brain. It's double duty. Making a decision isn't just taking from your decision making. It's another thing that you're doing. It's taking away from your energy. Most people that aren't trying to be creative all the time and every day don't have to guard their decision-making tank, their wells of fuel for making decisions as much as you do. But the thing is, is that creativity is, if anything, choices. I love this quote from Robert De Niro, who he said, the talent is in the choices.

14:40and he's talking about the choices that you, what projects you choose to do, but also how you choose to show up in a scene. The talent is in the choices for all creatives. It is knowing, tasting the work you're making, rolling it around on your proverbial metaphorical tongue and then figuring out like, which way do I wanna go with that? Should I make it red? Should I make it green? Should I make it louder? Should I make it quieter? Should I make this instrument, that instrument? Should this beat, that beat? It's just this decision-making tree. the guy who does all the podcast music yoni wolf he he talked about this like little binary fragmenting branch like every song is just a series of decision making um choices and you need to guard that energy so for me i have to become a cartoon i have to become speed i have to become mosquito valentine i have to have my cartoon wardrobe so i've got like six or seven copies of that shirt that I know are comfy, that I know I like the design of.

15:39I have like four or five pairs of the same charcoal jeans. I have like 10 pairs of the same colored black socks. I've got two pairs of these Nike waffle, I think they're called, shoes. You can steal this. You go for it. I actually sell the shirt, etsy.com slash creative pep talk if you want to enjoy the arts every day with this cartoon shirt, but I don't care what shirt you wear. I highly recommend having an outfit because it just eliminates another thing you have to make a decision about. And the more that you can automate the stuff that doesn't matter, you have extra juice in the tank to make the decisions that really matter, that really change where you end up.

16:36There's no one that's had a bigger impact on my productivity than writer Cal Newport, but he has a lot of books. So where should you start? I now have an answer for this question because he has a new class, Rebuild Your Focus and Reclaim Your Time on Masterclass. This class is an accessible way into his philosophy and gives you a breakdown of his approach to time blocking, which changed my schedule forever. My wife often teases me about these big chunks of my time that are just labeled deep work. That's Cal Newport. Another class I'm super interested in exploring next is Dopamine, Take Your Brain Back by Dr.

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17:51That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash peptalk. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's easy to sell it when you love something this much. I'm a big fan. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform designed to help you succeed online. Here's what I love about Squarespace. They're intuitive and super versatile drag-and-drop tools. mean you can make a custom website without knowledge of code that makes people say, whoa, who made that for you? Looks like you built that from scratch. People have really said stuff like that to me about my site and I built it myself quite easily with Squarespace.

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19:11Number two is eat my sawdust. Here's what that means. This is getting at kind of a different take than just do your passion. If you do your passion, you'll never work another day in your life. I think that, especially for an ADHD person, passion matters. I think it's a big deal that you're excited, that you're interested, that you're engaged. I think for me, from an early age, I watched my mom, who I believe I get my ADHD from, just really struggle to do things long-term that she really wasn't engaged with, that she wasn't excited about and passionate about on some level. And so I do think paying attention to what you're passionate about is important.

19:56But the problem with making that your entire productivity tool, your only source is being motivated, being excited. The struggle with that is most of what you're really, really excited about is stuff that is new, that is novel, that is fun and fresh. By the time you engage with that thing and participate enough to get good at that thing, to be at a level where people will pay you for that thing, it's not going to be novel anymore. most of the time by the time i'm getting paid to do the thing my height of excitement has already passed that's actually okay i've learned to accept like that's the natural way of things it's i would love to be paid for my new hyper fixation today but that's just not the way it works by the time i get paid for it's going to be more like a skill more like a craft and i can find ways to kind of shoehorn my current hyper fixation into those things.

20:58Sometimes learning to draw, learning to make pictures. It's not the thing I'm most excited about, but maybe I'm excited about Jungian philosophy and psychology. How can I do a project about that? How can I make work for the psychology space? Like there's a way of using passion, but I don't think you should build your entire business or creative practice on passion as your main source of fuel. Instead, I think you should eat, you should be fueled by sawdust. Now, what that means is don't actually eat sawdust. What I'm saying is this is a concept from the business world. It's this idea that at some point the lumber industry realized that their byproduct sawdust ended up being their most valuable product, that they turned sawdust into all kinds of things.

21:47And they realized like, oh, just our regular everyday activities are creating something that's really valuable and useful. Something that is just us doing our thing, we're creating this extra surplus of value. So like when you make gasoline, I believe propane is a byproduct. What are your byproducts of just being on this planet, just your brain existing in this world? That's the kind of thing that I think you should build a practice around because it doesn't require effort. It's just you being you. This podcast is one of those things. The way I look at the world, the way I think about things, all of this stuff, it's just stuff that I was thinking about whether I put them into a podcast that had sponsors and supporters or not.

22:32And I just figured out a way to contain that stuff, to take that sawdust and figure out what kind of use is there in the world for this because I'm going to do it whether or not I put it anywhere or sell it in any way at all. This is also getting at what Jerry Seinfeld calls being a joke chuck. He's like, if you're a woodchuck, you chuck wood. It's just what you do. It's what your brain is just doing. Okay. Your brain is just creating sawdust. He says he's a joke chuck. His brain just works on jokes. It just thinks of jokes. It's just what it does. It's effortless. You don't need to be passionate about it.

23:06You don't need to be motivated. It's just what it does. Now, there's a few categories here for me. First is coping. Like, what do I do to just cope? One of the things I just have always done to cope is draw. So I'm going to draw whether people pay me to do it or not, because it's how I get through boring activities. If I have to be in some kind of lecture that, I mean, any lecture is not going to capture my attention enough to give it my full attention. I need to doodle while I'm doing it. And so doodling, making pictures, that's just something that I'm going to do, whether anybody pays me or not.

23:36I like to make a picture, put it on my phone and just look at it throughout the day. I just like it. It's just, it's just something I want to do. So coping, what, what do you just do to cope? Are there things that you just do to cope that could be part of your creative practice or you could build your creative practice from instead of just building it on passion? The second one is trash. So coping, trash, taking out the trash. I love this quote from Massimo Vignelli, who's this really legendary designer type designer. I don't know if he actually designed type, but he's a big Helvetica guy. He designed all kinds of really beautiful things.

24:07And he said, just like a doctor fights against disease for us, the visual disease is what we have around. And what we try to do is to cure it somehow with design. And so for me, this gets at like, I, for the longest time, I thought, I know that aesthetic aesthetics are a big thing for me. They're a big part of my illustration career. They're a big part of why I'm an artist, but I never thought, oh, I'm passionate about it. Like it's fashion, like it's decorative. Like I'm just really passionate about this. No, for me, I almost feel like it goes into ADHD where I'm just distracted by superfluous design.

24:46So I, you know, even as a kid, all of my favorite superheroes had the most simple, sleek, like curve, like outfits. I like Spider-Man, Black Panther, Deadpool, Moon Knight. Moon Knight got a little bit too much for me with the crazy cape and everything, but still pretty slick, like no facial, like no extra facial features, just the eyes. Um, I liked the really simple costumes and that means that aesthetics for me, it's not so much about like, Oh, I'm passionate about things that look awesome. I'm more like distracted by things that look like too much, which I say, if you're watching this, instead of just listening, you can see my chaotic background, but all of it is simple shapes, curves, like, I don't know, my aesthetic.

25:28And so for me, it's like taking out the trash. It's just like, oh, this is something that I just do. It's just something that is effortless. I want to simplify things. I don't like, it's not something I'm passionate about. It's something I don't like. It's something I'm fighting. And that's a huge part of what I build my practice on. Cause I'm going to do that whether you like it or not, I'm going to be trying to get rid of all the stuff that I don't like aesthetically. And then the third one here that is kind of an example of sawdust is surplus. So it's just stuff that your brain does. Your spouse doesn't want to hear any more about it.

26:02Your brother doesn't want to hear any more about it. Your friends don't want to hear any more about it. They don't want to hear about you talking about, Andy, the choices that Keanu Reeves is making with his creative career, how he's deciding to move through it. That's just something my brain does. I constantly am thinking about the journey of creatives. And I have been doing that since I was a kid. I would think about why are they choosing that movie? Why did they do that? Why did they make that next album? Why did they choose to go electric? Why did they choose to go traditional? I just think about it all the time.

26:30And I think about, well, what if they made this choice? How would it have positively affected the art? How would it have maybe affected the fans? How would it affect the career path? I have always thought about that. It's kind of a strategic way of looking at things. My brain just does that. And then creating this podcast, that's a container for that. Creating picture books, that's a container for that because I think in reverse. So I think about this is what I wanna say and then I work backwards into a story that kind of ends there. So the third one is just like noticing what your brain does.

27:03I think that's so, so essential. That's eating the sawdust.

27:23All right, that brings us to our final one. It's number one is look under the hood. This is the biggest one. This is the most life-changing one for me, life-making for me, but it's also the biggest one. And it's looking under the hood is about a self-awareness, but a brain awareness, a neurotype awareness. If there's any reason to get diagnosed with whatever kind of brain you have, I personally, at this moment in my life, am not medicated for ADHD. I don't have anything against medication for other people. It doesn't really work for me. I've decided that I'm going to go without it for now. But at the same time, the studies are very clear that for lots of people, medication is lifesaving.

28:09so um the data of p adhd people that are not supported the outcomes are so much worse than people that are supported in lots of ways including um medication so i'm not anti-medicine but it it just i i don't love the way that it interacts with me and i have tried to build my life and creative practice and work around my neurotype and what's under the hood what's in my skull. And I think it is the number one hack for being productive is going with who you are and understanding who you are. So when I think about getting a diagnosis, whatever it might be, I'm much more of a positive psychology person that says, you're not a problem.

28:55You're not broken. You're in a world that might not be conducive to the way that you are. But having that diagnosis, that's the best thing we've got to figure out what's going on in here because we haven't oriented our culture in such a way where we diagnose what's good about your brain we only kind of know what's bad and then so you learn that thing and then you can learn to work with it or not we kind of diagnose it like this is a problem not saying you have to get diagnosed although for me that was a big deal and that can be part of looking under the hood what i am saying is that i highly recommend that you do like business writer Jim Collins does, and he calls it Jim the bug.