Andy J. Pizza (0:03)

Hey y'all, it's Andy, and I'm just jumping on here to let you know this episode is a replay of an episode from a few years ago. And I've been thinking about the content of this episode around how creativity is much more about timelessness than timeliness in some ways that I think are easy to forget. I think it's easy to get caught up in being relevant and part of the zeitgeist and all that kind of thing and lose our sense of tapping into flow and timelessness and making something that transcends the current moment. And this whole episode will help you tune into the natural way that you get ideas, tune into your right brain and your flow state. And listening back through this episode, I was definitely recording this at a time where I was super hyped. So. So you can enjoy that. But I really love all the ideas from this episode and I think that they're as relevant now as they ever were. Hopefully this is a timeless episode. Hope you enjoy it and I'll be right back at the end to share a couple updates and whatnot. But here it is. Hey, you're listening to the Creative Pep Talk podcast. It is so easy to get lost on the creative journey, and that's why this show is here, to help you get back on the creative path, back to unlocking your latent creative potential. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. Let's get into this episode. 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 Pep talk 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. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? Well, with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority skills. Wait, did I say job title yet. Get started today and see how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. You ever heard anybody say creativity is all about timing? You know, you ever heard someone say that? You ever heard them? You know, you gotta hit that cultural zeitgeist, man. You gotta keep up with the times. You gotta. You gotta stay relevant. You gotta make the perfect thing at the perfect time and post it to Instagram at the very perfect second if you want to make it in this creative game. But I tell you what, I never feel less creative when I'm concerning myself with time. In fact, I kind of feel like obsessing with time is kind of the antithesis, the opposite of creativity. You know, I grew up in the Midwest, and that meant my childhood was all about one thing. Chuck E. Cheese, man. I was living for Chuck E. Cheese. If you don't have. Maybe it was a regional thing. I don't know. Did you have Chuck E. Cheese? The memes would say, Chuck E. Cheese was basically a kid's casino. You know, they even had, like, poker chips. The little tokens. You exchange your money for tokens to help you kind of lose sense of how much money you're spending. And you get hundreds of tokens for these, you know, 85 tickets. Tickets. And then trade that in for a little water pistol that cost $3.50. That breaks in the parking lot. That moo wee. That was a good smoothie. The good stuff. That was a good time. When your mom would be like, we're going to Chucky's. You're like, yeah, the best time ever. Except for the times when it wasn't. Because sometimes you find yourself locked in to one of those Super Mega Jackpot machines. You know, one of these things with the little. It's like a big circle machine. Got the blinking light going around at rapid pace, and you got to hit your buzzer right at the right second to win the Super Mega Jackpot. I just need another token, Mom. Come on. Jesse's cousin Ricky's brother once hit the big jackpot, and he got millions of tickets. You know, he only spent a third of those tickets on an enormous vault so that he could just swim through the rest of his tickets like some kind of Scrooge McDuck. But he's a rat. Like Chuck E. Cheese. I don't think he turned into a rat. Anyway, you had that notion either you Got unlucky enough to hit the jackpot one time, and so you just got obsessed with mastering that. You had to stay at the machine or you heard somebody who had won the jackpot at some point. But, man, nothing would ruin Chuck E. Cheese experience like trying to get that perfect timing. You know, Chuck E. Cheese is supposed to be about pounding pizza in 43 seconds and hanging out with kids that you've known for 87 seconds, but feel like you've grown old together, running around warp speed through those tunnels and sweating your face off in that nasty ball pit. Like, that's what Chuck E. Cheese is all about. Chuck E. Cheese is all about those times when you turn two hours into what feels like two minutes and an eternity at the same time. Chuck E. Cheese isn't about perfect timing. It's about losing your sense of time. It's about getting. Getting into the flow state. It's about losing yourself in the process. That's what Chuck E. Cheese is about. And if you don't remember that, if you try to be some superhero with the power of time manipulation, with the chronokinesis. I said chronokinesis, like, seven times on this podcast. No one knows why I like the word. But if you try to do that, you're gonna miss what this thing is all about. And if you try to do the same in your creative practice, you're gonna forget you didn't get into this because you had perfect timing. It's because you had the perfect time. Losing your sense of time, space, self, lost in the practice of your creative process. If you get obsessed with the time element, you're going to lose what this thing's all about. You're not going to have a creative practice. You're going to have a creative casino that Instagram's not going to turn into a way to connect with your audience. It's going to turn into a little slot machine. You know, you're pulling the lever down with your thumb as you're seeing the slot machine flip through. 0 followers, 0 mentions, 0 comments, 0 likes if that's what your creative practice has been reduced to, I would wager to bet that you have forgotten why you went on this journey in the first place. You have forgotten what it's like to use creativity to transcend time. And in this episode, I want to help you find that person inside you, that version of you that used to want to make this thing more than a hobby because you loved the experience of it, because you love the way it made you feel. And now you've been put into this place where you feel awful trying to stay relevant. So let's go on a journey. Let's find how to transcend time again in our creative process. All right, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a little missing person ad for the part of you that used to love to get lost in creativity. Because the only part of you that's left is this person who is just, you know, obsessed with controlling it, obsessed with hitting the big time, hitting the jackpot. You know, where did the person go that used to lose track of time, lost in their creative practice? Where did they go? Let's find them. Okay, here's we got a few steps to work through. Three steps to finding your time, transcending person inside of you all over again. How do we do it? How are we gonna find that? The first thing you gotta do is we're gonna name that part of you. If there's someone who's wanted. America's most wanted, creative pep talk's most wanted. First thing you gotta know is, what's this person's name? Okay, so how do we reconnect into what creativity is all about? Losing ourselves, losing the sense of time. How? Rediscover that. First thing we gotta do is understand kind of the science behind why time is such a bad ingredient to try to put into your creative crock pot of your mind. Now to do this, we're gonna reference the work of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. She wrote a book called Whole Brained Living. And in that book she talks about how she had a stroke and lost access to the left side of her brain for a period of time. That side of your brain that is analytical, that left side of your brain that is obsessed with time, that left side of your brain that's all about numbers and facts and figures. That left side of her brain disappeared. And what Jill Bolte Taylor experienced was oneness with the universe. She lost her sense of self, she lost her sense of time. And so much of the stuff, so much of the richness that comes from creative work comes from that right side of the brain. And when you are stuck in the left side, obsessed with trying to hit things right at the right time, you're drowning out and you're destroying your access to the part where all the creativity really comes from. I like to think of it kind of like a sideways mullet, you know, business on the left, party on the right. That's what we're trying to get access to now in the book Whole brain living. By the way, let me just take a little second to say, I actually believe that creativity is an integrated process that has, you know, the left brain really starting that analytical side, really starting with the constraints, with the brief, with the targets, with the strategy, like, what are we trying to do? And then in the middle, we go, all right, brain, baby. We're playing, we're having fun. We're losing ourselves in the process. And then, then at the end, I think the left brain comes back in and it starts to say, well, what can we pick from this? What can we edit out of this? You know, I think about my creative heroes, the people that really are able to take their practice to the next level. I kind of feel like they are the master explorers of the inside of themselves. They are the people that have this consciousness in which they can ebb and flow and in different seasons, the parts that they need, you know, the people that are able to master their inner space, you know, and that is the whole brain living. That's the whole. And I would even go further than that and say it's also the limbic brain, the brain that's in your guts. There's a consciousness. There are neurons in your guts, man. Okay? They don't have words. But I think artists that really transcend are the ones that can access all of those things with precision. I think about athletes as, like, you know, the masters of their body. And I feel like the artists are the masters of their inner world. And I think it's all about knowing how. But I also think, just to interrupt myself. Wait a. Hold on there a second. You're getting carried away. There's another part of me that wants to speak up and it's. And I want to say that, you know, I think that the reason why it's so important for us to regain and reconnect access to the right side isn't because that's where all the creativity is. The reason is is because we absolutely live in a left brain obsessed work. That's why you have stem and not steam. You know, the science and math and analytics and numbers and figures. That is what our world is obsessed with and values. And if you don't make yourself fall in line with that, you don't eat. And so remembering that other side of us is actually gonna take some effort. I'm doing this not to divorce yourself from the left brain. I actually think a lot of creatives, you know, need to work that muscle too. But I'm guessing that if you're an adult and you have been for any amount of time that your right brain has been quieted. That time is weighing down on you and you gotta figure out how do I access that again, the first thing we gotta do is we gotta know what's their name. Okay? In Whole Brain Living, I believe we talked about this in another episode. Jill Bolte Taylor breaks down the left and the right into two other quadrants, the up and the down. It's the amygdala and something or other, I don't remember. But it's too complicated for our usage. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna break that down to the left brain and the right brain and we're gonna name those people, okay? So, so that you can recognize them when they show up, just so we can categorize them. Sometimes you just need to put things in buckets to kind of see it clearly. So for me I'm gonna name my left brain Andrew because it's proper and serious and timely. And I'm gonna name the other side Andy. Okay? That's who we're trying to find. Now let's talk about how do we pinpoint what that person, what does Andy look like when he shows up? Okay, so the first thing you gotta do is name it so you can identify it. So you have a bucket to put this thing, this part of you that we're looking for. Second thing you gotta do is you gotta kinda recognize what do they look like. We need one of those, you know, police drawings of this thing. A rough look at what we're trying to find here. And really what we're talking about here is what do ideas look like when they show up for you? Because your ideas don't look like other people's ideas. You might not know that. And actually that can get you into a little bit of trouble which is what we're going to go into right now. Now of course you could just say, when do I lose sense of time? Yes, that's a good question. But you know, it's the obvious one. You can think about that on your own. I'm sure you have some ideas of what kind of creative activities you lose yourself in. But let's get hyper micro and really identify the particulars of what that looks like so that you can start accessing it more frequently. And to do that I wanna pose this, okay? When you are losing your sense of time and you're in that right brain, another thing happens. According to Jill Bolte Taylor and according to Dr. Pizza, aka me, you lose your sense of self. You Feel one with the universe, you lose the ego. You're not even aware of your own being. You just are. Okay, and when do you feel like that? Stay with me. Cause we're gonna get to some stuff that I think you recognize if you don't, if it's not obvious, the times when you've lost your sense of self in the creative process. Let me give you some different kind of language to it so that you can start to kind of see this. Because at the same time that you're that selfless you, your timeless you is there too. And so that's a way to hack yourself into getting into that state more frequently. Okay, so what is the sense of selflessness all about? It's really what a lot of artists, I think, talk about when they talk about the idea of channeling ideas. Like, you know, saying the song wrote itself self. I just heard Chris Martin, the frontman of Coldplay, on Pete Holmes podcast, and it was a good time. I was enjoying. It's a great episode, Highly recommend it. But one of the things Chris Martin said kind of threw me for a loop into my imposter syndrome until I started to work it out through this process that I'm going to give you. Okay. What Chris said was, for him, writing songs starts with a melody just showing up. It's like he's not even writing it. He's just channeling it. It's coming from somewhere else, someone else, but it's not him. And I have this strong feeling that. And by the way, you've probably heard artists say this a bunch of times. Like, when I really find my groove, it's not even me. I'm just dictating something from somewhere else. And my theory on that is that that's because you finally accessed that part of your brain, that right side of your brain where you lose your sense of self. So of course it doesn't feel like it's coming from you. And so one way, that's a very poetic way. It doesn't have to be a literal way for all of you materialists out there that are like, I don't like this idea of channeling, or you, you know, maybe super religious people and be like, that sounds sketchy as all heck to me. Because you wouldn' the F word. Because you're super religious. So I had to, you know. Anyway, that's what I think they're talking about when they're talking about channeling. Now, when I heard Chris say this, my first feeling was like, oh, man, why don't melodies ever come to Me, I must not be a real artist. Nothing ever just shows up to me. But then I got to thinking about it, and I thought, wait a second. I think I just have a different receptor. I think ideas show up for me in a totally different way. And in part two, finding what do they look like? What does this being look like? What do ideas look like when they show up for you in your brain? I want to talk about what kind of idea receptor your brain is so that you can start to notice them more frequently and take more advantage of those ideas as they're channeling through you to do that. Just humor me for a second, because I want to talk about a concept that I love rolling around the old tonsils. It's just a fun thing to talk about. And it comes from a book called the Flip by Jeffrey Kripal. And it's this idea of consciousness. So. So, physicists, nobody knows for sure. Nobody's been able to prove. How are we conscious? This feeling, the sense of you being you, observing the universe, what is that, man? Nobody knows. And one theory is that your brain is more like a radio than it is something that contains consciousness. And so it's this idea that if you took apart a radio, you couldn't find the voices in it because they're not in it. They're channeling it from somewhere else. And this theory is saying consciousness is coming from some other universe or dimension or some other place, and our brain is just kind of a receiver for that particular frequency that we call us. And it's just got super trippy on the podcast, by the way. Not interested in saying, is that true? No, I don't know if it's true. I have a. You know, if I had to guess, I'd say probably not. At least not exactly. But for the use that we're trying to roll with here, let's pretend like your brain is a particular kind of receiver. And let's go through seven different types of idea reception that you might have. This isn't an exhaustive list. I just want to give you a few ideas of how that timeless you shows up through the door with ideas. Now, the first one, we'll call it a radio because it channels sounds. That's what Chris Martin has. It's melodies, it's lyrics, it's musical. Okay? You might have a radio kind of brain channeling those sound waves. Now, that's not me. For me, one of my kind of receptors in my noggin is more like a telephone because I channel words, you know, I love, you know, One of the things that makes me most angry and sometimes your love is deeply connected to your anger. You know, you don't get real angry about anything you don't care much about. Right? One of the things where I just like get stopped in my tracks is when I know somewhere in my brain there is the perfect word for what I'm trying to describe. And I just. I just can't put my fingers on it. And I just have to stop the whole conversation down until we can find it. Cause words are what it's all about to me. You know, if you're a poet or a writer, you might have a telephone kind of receptor that's channeling the perfect words. And I loved this. I ran into this quote on brain pickings the other day from poet Dylan Thomas. He said, I learned to turn my creativity over to the only God I could ever believe in, God of creativity. I learned to get out of my way and let that creative force work through me. That's that right. Brain losing your sense of self. It's coming from somewhere else. Maybe it's coming from you, but you can't feel it because you lost your sense of self. Back to the quote. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping. And can you just feel the burden of creativity drop when you hear that? Can you feel your jaw unclench? Can you breathe again? The tension of your neck is gone. Your shoulders just loosen up. Because you don't have to make up the words. You just have to listen. If you can find that place in you, you don't have to reinvent the wheel and hit the zeitgeist, man. You just have to be quiet enough to hear it. Switch to Verizon business and get more from your Internet without paying more for your Internet. Get LTE Business Internet starting at $39 a month when paired with a business unlimited smartphone plan. 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And we're gonna get to that in a little bit because there is no wrong way to create. There's no wrong way to approach any of this. And we're gonna. I'm gonna go deep into that in a second. But let's go back to the tv. If you get images, you might have that TV receptor. I'm getting an image. You know, my wife Sophie, she gets images all the time. Just things. She's like, boom. Color, composition, light. She needs to recreate it, she needs to capture it in some textile art. You know, my friend Danielle Crissa of the Jealous Curator, she gets the same thing, an image pops in her brain and she has to get it down. If you get images, if you channel that kind of thing, you might have that TV receptor kind of brain number four. Maybe it's like a prism and it just refracts like the most colorful feelings. If you get just the most crazy array of nuanced, rich 256 color feelings that might be yours, you might have that prison brain. Here's what I'm talking about. You know, we all have feelings, but some people have the ability, just that kind of palette that can really get into the particulars of, you know, Olivia Rodrigo. I got a 13 year old daughter. So we're listening to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo right now. And actually when it comes to radio music, it's one of my favorites because a little bit more chaotic, a little less polished. I think she's got a lot of talent, but it's kind of like that. Like everybody knows a breakup is hard or bad and it's upsetting. But that's like saying a breakup is the color red, but the color to Olivia Rodrigo, man, it shoots through that prism and you're getting magentas and fuchsias and vermilion. You know, she's getting the nuance. It's not just bad. It's like, do you ever wonder if your new partner gets deja vu? Do they do things that remind them of your relationship? Are they ever getting into these periods of time where you feel like, man, I. I help them grow and then they use that better version to be with somebody else. Well, good for you, right? That's her thing. We all go to driver's license, but you get this array, this just giant, vast spectrum of feelings that you have to channel. If feelings show up that way for you, maybe you got the prism brain, number five. Maybe you got an X ray kind of machine, okay? That's something that sees below the surface, channeling truth. You're seeing not the thing. You're seeing what's underneath the thing. And in that way, I like to call it not X rays, but Y rays. Because it's. You're always asking why? Why? You know, you're looking below to the pattern, relating it to the other things. You know, you're getting analogies and metaphors and concepts and philosophy. And a lot of comedians have this kind of X ray device where they're just a. You know, they are a conduit for the truth, getting down to the least common denominator. And I really relate to that. There's something about my brain that just wants to go, why? Why, why, why? Until I get to the bottom and I can make some sense of it. That's just what my brain does. It channels that thing. Number six, maybe you got a solar panel. By the way, I noticed we have numbers within numbers right now. Okay. I hope I'm not losing anybody in the left brain. I'm trying to have a fun time with it at the same time. So I hope you're enjoying yourself. Stick with me. We're in part two. We're in part six of part two. I could have done letters in there, too. That would have made some sense. Anyway, number six, solar panel, okay? If you're a solar panel, you are attracting the sunshine of hope. Okay? For me, I have a deep sensitivity to things that give me hope, to things that make me safe. Yes, to life. You've heard me say it 8,000 times on the podcast, but it's true. And I think it's actually something about my nature is to kind of be in a state of laying face down on the living room floor in a. Nope. Posture of life. And so I've got this deep sensitivity to those rays of sunshine, soaking them up like a solar panel, storing them up and then dumping them all over you every single week. With this podcast, if you soak up hope, if you channel that thing, you have the solar panel brain. And the last one, seven, we'll call it a CAT scan. Had a little fun with this one. Okay. CAT scans use gamma radiation. And you know who's a product of gamma radiation? The Hulk. And so if you have the CAT scan device of a brain. It means that you are a conduit for anger. And, man, we don't have a place for anger in this culture. And it's a major problem. You know, some people know I do pep talks. I'm a conduit. I'm the solar panel, Sunshine hope artist. And sometimes I get the feeling if I'm talking to a CAT scan, anger hulking out artist, that they're kind of like, you know, be like, look, I'm not trying to, you know, step on your toes, but there's some things to get angry about. And you're damn right are so many injustices in this world. And if you have that kind of gamma radiation, that anger just. It comes to you and you create from it. That's what you're channeling. You know, Rian Johnson, the creator of the movie Knives out and one of those Star wars movies you probably heard about and a whole bunch of other great movies, he says every single movie that he makes starts with some anger, something he's angry about, about himself. And I think anger is a rich emotion. There's always so much in there, and maybe that's how ideas show up for you. There's nothing wrong with that. And so what is the stuff? What does it look like when it shows up on your door? Here's a bunch of different ways that an idea might look for you. Okay, Number three is okay. You got their name on the most wanted list. You know, you got a good drawing of. This is kind of what the ideas look like when they show up. This is what that timelessness, me looks like. The third thing you got to do is say, where does this person frequent? Where do they hang out? Where can you find them? You know, you gotta say, what are the conditions in which this person comes out of the woodwork? You know, every creator that's worth their salt figures out some kind of routine that helps that person, that version of them come out on a regular basis. You know, Thomas Edison, he would sleep with these weights in his hand in a chair. And then when he'd fall asleep, he'd drop the weights and boom. He'd get that right as you're falling asleep. Kind of mind state, where ideas are fresh and your brain's doing weird stuff. You know, Beethoven was famous for taking these enormous afternoon walks that would sometimes go all the way into the evening. Kafka started writing at 10:30 at night. You can find actually a whole bunch of daily rituals that were collected by Mason Curry. You know, stuff about Coffee and naps and all kinds of other cool weird stuff. But you'll find if you study your heroes, they have practices, they know where the timelessness version of themselves is hanging out. And basically in this point, there's just one thing that I want to tell you, and it's to let. Let yourself be weird. Now I'm gonna admit to you, okay, that five days a week I wake up and I have a hour and a half long bath and then I go on a 30 minute run and then I take a shower. Now listen, I'm saving up for a hot tub to conserve water because I don't. That's what I don't like about that weirdness. And I'm working on it, okay? But for me, that's where my guy hangs out. He's hanging out in the bathtub. I do almost all of my writing in that time, in those days. And I do a lot of my thinking while I'm running. And I know after I run, that guy tends to hang out a lot more. I also know that it'll happen if I take a nap. I know that it'll happen when I'm at a coffee shop. I know he always is out there traveling. And so even when travel's tricky, go to a different park, draw in a different room in your house. I found that if I allow myself to draw without any plans, with some music, without vocals, oftentimes he will show up, but he might not show up for you that way. And what I want to give you is just a permission slip to do a. To live life in the weird way that allows that person to thrive. Your right brain self is a total weirdo and you need permission to let him live the way he wants to live. Okay, here's a little bit of homework to help you put some of this to action. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go back to some work, some processes that you used to do that you quit doing because you convinced yourself that they were out of date, that you were producing stuff that wasn't relevant when you were using those processes. Now, when it's all said and done, we'll invite Andrew Left Brain version of yourself back to the equation to edit it out to see if they can add some time to it. See if there's some ways you could update it, make it fresh. Like we don't have to kick him out of the entire process. But I want you to sink into your old comfy work processes that maybe you haven't done in a year. Maybe you haven't done them in 10 years. Just sink into them like I do that warm bath every single day. I want you to embrace like Chris Martin does from Coldplay. You know, in that episode, he talks about how Coldplay is never in or out. They've never been super cool, the biggest hits on the planet, and they've never been, you know, not even on the radio. I honestly, I'm trying to get you to embrace that. That middle way, that forgetting the opposite ends of the spectrum. You know, if you ever hit the zeitgeist at the perfect time, do you know how inevitable it is that you will go back to the bottom? I really am trying to get listeners of the show to embrace the long game. I want you to have some of your best work in your old age, when you're healthy and happy and it's flowing and you've lost your sense of time completely. I kind of think of it like that whole broken clock tells the right time twice a day. You know what I mean? My dad's mustache is cool every other decade. But guess what? It's consistently there because it's them. You know, for some people, emo never went out of style. But guess what? You don't have to be afraid, because even those emo bands that just kept chugging along their tastes evolve. They get tired of doing the same old thing over and over. You're not going to be able to find yourself slipping into that timelessness the way that you used to if you're just showing up and doing the same thing. But what would it look like to trust yourself, trust your timelessness, selfless self and its taste, instead of trying to run around catching lightning by chasing the thunder of what just occurred. And so I want you to be like Coldplay. Be like my dad's mustache. Be like a broken clock. Go back to the stuff that put you in that zone. What were the things you abandoned? How can you synthesize? If I'm completely honest, I actually think that there's an ebb and flow here. Okay? There is left brain seasons, there's right brain seasons, there's seasons for pushing yourself. But we live in a culture that is so obsessed with pushing, pushing, pushing, we forget that we started this creativity because it was natural, because it was our preferred state, because of it was who we were, not who we were trying to be or who we weren't. And so I just want to encourage you. What would it look like if you synthesized all that new stuff you've been doing all that stuff to try to stay relevant. All that stuff where you're pushing yourself, what if you take that, everything you learned from being out of the pocket, back into that sweet flow state? I actually think that's where some really cool stuff can happen, because that's the hero's journey, man. The hero's journey is sometimes you're at home and you're feeling comfortable and you're soaking it up. And sometimes you go out of your comfort zone. You try to go be some things that you're not, try some things that you don't have. But you gotta to let that pulse back and forth. And so your homework is let yourself make unrelevant stuff that's super comfy. Let yourself remember what it's like just to enjoy the process rather than trying to make it something that it's not. That is your homework. All right, I just have one more thing to say, and it's that art is, you know, a lot like Reese's peanut butter cups. There's no wrong way to art. You know, I really believe that. And I feel like if you can internalize that, it's one of the best things you ever will do. Because guess what? The ideas I mentioned on this show, they're not exhaustive. There are all kinds of different ideas that I don't even know about. Because guess what? Your brain is a thing that has never existed on this planet. I can't possibly tell you what it's like. And I think it was Jordan Peele that said, you know, how can anyone teach me to play an instrument that never existed until now? And he was talking about his brain. I can't. I can't tell you what it does. I can't tell you how it works. I could give you a bunch of different ideas and say, it's kind of like this, but you have to figure that out. That means that all the ways I said aren't the right way and the way you do it is the wrong way. And for a lot of other people, it's more like a combination of these things. You know, this thing is not prescriptive. You know, for me, a lot of the best creative work is more like a form of synesthesia. You know, I'm an illustrator, but I don't actually think that images just come to me. I think I take. You know, I'm more like the telephone with the words and the X ray with the truths and the whys. And then I take that thing and then I translate it into a picture. My favorite definition of illustration is writing with pictures. You know, I think maybe if I was a fine artist, it'd make more sense if I was that kind of person who just got images, you know, for a dancer, maybe. A dancer is someone who is super obsessed with music, but they get images, they don't receive sounds, and so they can be like, I'm obsessed with this music. Let me show you what it looks like, like to me. And so I want you to be convinced that, like a Reese's, there's no wrong way to make art. There's just interesting ways. Because guess what? The right way, the way that it has been done, every time there's a thing that is the right way to do it, all of a sudden that becomes the un creative way. And the wrong way is just the new way. So we need you to do it the wrong way. So if that voice comes in your head and you feel like an imposter, you just be like, yeah, I'm doing it in a totally backwards way. It's a way that's never been done. I couldn't do it more creatively than that. All right, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. This replay, I. There's a lot of stuff in here that I even forgot about, so it was kind of fun to go back through it. Hope you felt the same. On March 31st at 3pm Eastern, we are having our creative pep rally, which is a live online zoom meetup with the supporters for the show, the people that support the show, on Patreon and Substack, and once a month, the last Monday of the month month, we meet up to talk about your creative practice and apply ideas from recent episodes to what you're going through right now. And also discuss obstacles and help each other out and commiserate and celebrate each other's wins. It's been tons of fun. We've been doing it for over a year now, and I feel like we've really hit a great groove. So if you want to join, sign up to support the show on patreon@patreon.com creativepeppets talk or on substack@andyj pizza.substack.com hope to see you there. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for podcast assistance being the editor and co producer of the show. Huge thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio and video edits and animation and sound design. Huge thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band why? For our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up. Hi, I'm Rick Rubek and I'm Royce Yudkoff. Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur, owning your own business and being your own boss? Our new podcast from Harvard Business School, Think Big Buy Small, explores becoming an entrepreneur through the acquisition of an enduringly profitable small business. In this series, we guide listeners how to buy their own small business business, including determining if this path is right for them, evaluating prospects, raising the capital they'll need to purchase a small business, closing the deal, and more. Follow Think Big Buy Small wherever you get your podcasts. How are business leaders working to confront climate change? For that answer, listen to the award winning Climate Rising podcast produced by Harvard Business School and hosted by me, Mike Toffel, a professor at hb. 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