Transcript
Andy J. Pizza (0:03)
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. Are you overwhelmed in your creative practice? Because if you're not, can you tell us your secret? Why are you doing this in this day and age? If you're not a bit overwhelmed? Honestly, I would be very surprised because we are just going through rapid changes both in the online space and how things are organized and what just the world is going through a lot of chaos. Technology is just disrupting things dramatically for lots of people and most creative people I know. If you're not feeling some level of overwhelm, what is your secret? I am feeling overwhelmed, of course. But I want to share a tool that really helps me find some clarity and a little bit of relief from that deep overwhelm. And at the end of this episode, if you stay all the way to the end, I'm going to give you this thing. It's a grid that will help you have this really clear overview of your creative practice, and it will help you know what part of it desperately needs attention today. And so stay to the end, I'll give you that. But the first thing we have to do is organize the parts of this mess. I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. And I have applied this to my creative practice too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro. And that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's Fluid engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So go check it out. Squarespace.com peptalk to test it out for yourself. And when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code peptalk all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world.
Bumble (2:52)
We're so done with New Year, new you this year it's More youe on Bumble. More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what, we love that for you. So someone else will too be more you this year and find them on Bumble.
Andy J. Pizza (3:20)
You know, when we think about our creative practice and things get really, really messy, that's when we feel the overwhelm. That's when we feel like we need to change something, we need to do something. Ah, that is because of that mess. Now, at home, I am adhd, we have a pretty neurodivergent household. We don't do, like, type A sort of people. And so sometimes, often our house will get a bit chaotic. It'll get a bit of a mess. And on the weekend, we're gonna have to take some extra time to get it back to square one. And so when that happens, it used to be when I was a younger father of three, I would just be like, guys, come on, we gotta. What are we doing? Good God, look at this room. Like, just panic. Just panic. Move through the room, think through the house, thinking that that's going to help something. And it didn't. And what I eventually realized was If I took 10 minutes just to organize the chaos, just to take go, I just go through the main levels of our house, main level of our house, and find this is this kid's stuff. This is this kid stuff. That's that kid stuff. And just put them on in little piles on the kitchen table. And I call it table Ch. And you're free. Free to steal it. You know me, I'm not a master organizer. I'm an ADHD chaos gremlin. So I don't really think I need to be giving anybody advice on this. But in case you're also one of those types of goblin gremlin people, parents, maybe this will help you too. But here's what I do. I just take 15 minutes. Takes me almost no time. And I just go through the level and I just separate into three piles, one for each kid. And then I say, all right, it's table chore. Go down to the table, get your pile, and put everything where it needs to go. And the difference in overwhelm, when I have organized these things out, when you can see it really clearly, like this is what all the parts are, means that each kid can go in and knows exactly where they need to apply that focus. And the same can be true for your creative practice. If you will organize it in parts, you will be able to see, like, what. What part is lacking, what part needs fine tuning, what part needs to be let go of. That's super important now, even though it took me forever to figure out how to organize this chaos in my house, your creative practice is even harder because it doesn't Fit into nice little boxes in an obvious way. And over the past 15 years of having a creative, creative practice. I'm just going to keep saying 15 years. I think it's more than that. But I don't want to do any more math. Look, I've been doing this over 15 years. I'll just say that. But the more I did it, the more I realized like, oh, these are the categories and it's really this spectrum or this kind of two part tightrope act that is being a creative person. For me. It's passion and mastery. Okay, There are the. I know what I'm like deeply passionate about, excited about, on fire, about right in this moment. And I'm aware of like what, where my skills and mastery lie, like what I actually know. I'm already good at everything in my creative practice in terms of where I'm going to in vest my creative energy fits somewhere on this spectrum. Some of it is a really good sweet spot of both. Some of them are I'm just passionate about, but I haven't actually developed any mastery in some of it. I'm really masterful at, you know, if I do say so myself. But I'm maybe I've lost a little of the passion in some things that I do don't really have either. But I still have them in my practice for some reason. Okay, so imagine these four. There are four categories of these different ways that these two things can be at play. And imagine those are your four kids. And we're going to put the pieces of your creative practice into these four piles on the table. Okay. And then at the end, I'm going to give you a little grid that kind of really clearly breaks down how these two, the two, the four options with these two pieces of passion and mastery. Okay. But I'm going to go through them first. So the first one is we're going to call it flow. All right? Flow is where you have tons of passion and tons of mastery. This is the holy grail. This is the very difficult thing to attain. And only, only certain moments in my creative practice have I really had something that I was doing that was perfectly in flow. I feel like right now my creative practice children's books are probably. They're close to being in that flow zone where I am perf. I'm passionate and I'm masterful in it. Feel like it's. There's a few tweaks here and there that have to kind of change for that to be totally true. But it's pretty close to that Zone. Now, for each of these four categories, I'm going to give you what the opportunity for something in this category is and what the risk is. And then I'm going to give you an example and a bottom line. But each one of these categories has an opportunity and a risk. So for Flow, the opportunity is, I don't know, pure bliss, the highest experience of happiness that you can possibly encounter here in this little life. And I say that as kind of a joke, but also completely true. You're probably familiar with the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was this modern day psychologist. He's passed Rest in peace, but he was a psychologist moving within, flowing within the positive psychology movement, which if you don't know, you should get to know it because it's, it's a huge part of the, it's probably the main energy behind this podcast. And it's not. It isn't. It needs a rebrand really, because it's not positive psychology. That's not what it is or it's not. It is positive. It's not positive thinking is what I meant to say. It's not. It's not like just think positive. No, Positive psychology, which I've mentioned here on the show a bunch of times, is a really respected thing, as far as I can tell, very respected thing within the field of psychology. And it was a paradigm shift that happened in the 90s with a guy named Martin Seligman, a psychologist who really questioned the current. What was current at the time, which was this idea that the bible of psychology was the dsm. It was this book of disorders is our bible. And essentially he was saying, look, that's an incredibly negative way to think about what it means to be a human with a psyche, with a mind, is that we're going to define you by your flaws rather than we actually have the opportunity to say, let's define you by your strengths, let's define you by what's working. Let's even, you know, acknowledge these are the downsides of the kind of psyche that you have. But, and this doesn't maybe always apply. There's. There are times where there's mental illness and there are times where there's real challenges that need diagnose. But, but for the most part, it seems even that a lot of the psychologies that use positive psychology, that use this lens have an incredibly high efficacy rate. Like they work things like ifs. I have to imagine. Cbt. Yeah, cbt. Cbt. I'm trying to think is that is that one of the things that's in weed. What is that? Is it. No. Cognitive behavioral therapy. It's cbd. What is the. Anyway, you know, the. Whatever the other one is. Is it the same thing? I don't know. Anyway, I got to move on. So. No, that's cbd, all right? That's what I was. My brain would let me move on. Cbt. Positive psychology. So flow. The flow state and the research around that, that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did was based in this positive psychology movement. It was. It's based in leaning into our strengths, leaning into what makes it amazing to be a human. And one of the what. What he would argue was the highest form of being alive would be the flow state. And he would say that the flow state is this balance of being challenged and being ma. So challenge and mastery. But I'm going to just edit that slightly because I hate challenge, first of all. And actually, when I first heard this idea that you're going to get into the flow state when you balance challenge and mastery really well, I started embracing challenge too much because I missed the part where he says it's actually about 30% challenge, 70% mastery. That's where you're going to find that sweet spot. And I just heard 50. 50, okay. But I'm going to change it from challenge, because the only way I know I'm going to embrace a challenge is if it's coming through the lens of passion, even if it's something I don't want to do, it means I'm embracing this challenge. Because on the other side of it, learning this skill, you know, cold emailing, whatever it is that I really don't want to do on the other side of it is something I'm so passionate about that I'm going to engage in this challenge. So instead of thinking about it through challenge, I'm going to just say passion. Because without the passion, what are we even doing here now? Like, no, that's not. I'm not going to get into a flow state purely just seeking challenge. And so passion and mastery are these two pieces. They're influenced by this book on flow. And when I say that when you find things that you're both super passionate about and really masterful in that Venn diagram means you are in one of the highest states. So the opportunity is bliss if you can find. If you can move through your creative practice in such a way where you give the. Give the odds a chance to be in your favor, to find these sorts of seasons in your creative journey, that's opportunity. The risk is, in my opinion is that we want this one to be our job. But there's a problem with this because by the time you have become so masterful in something that people are willing to trust you to pay for it, by the time you get there, your passion is mo almost certainly going to diminish somewhat. Your passion is not going to be at its highest when you have explored this skill or this direction so thoroughly that other people can see that it's obvious that they should pay you for it. And so this is a just, you know, you don't have to adopt this, but this is how I move through the world. I have to realize that the thing I am most passionate about, most masterful in, may not be the thing that I get paid the most to do. Right. So in my creative practice over the past 15 years, I have a bunch of different arms of my business. Client work was a really big one for a while. There was a time before that was kind of my job where I was in that flow where I was like I really want to do this kind of work. I'm really passionate about it and I'm getting masterful at it. That sweet spot wasn't the most I ever made money on doing that. And so I feel like kids books are kind of in flow right now and they can eventually turn into an even bigger part of my job, but now they're just one part of it. And so the risk here is to feel entitled to the idea that the thing that puts you in flow state the thing where you are happiest in your creativity should be your job. And it's good for me to just realize that that's unrealistic because by the time people know they can pay me and trust me in this area, usually my passion isn't at its highest because it means I've really thoroughly explored it. That doesn't mean I don't have any passion with it. We'll get to that later. But that, that is, that's something to keep in mind. I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Hey, find a keto friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a.