← Creative Pep Talk
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- [00:03]
Andy J. Pizza
On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost. But don't worry, you'll lift off.
- [00:11]
Sophie Miller
Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. So this is a really special episode of the podcast because it is episode 500, man. And I thought, what better time than now to explore what does it take to stick to something, to stick to a creative project for a long time? How do you do longer term creative projects? Especially when you're somebody who doesn't struggle with having ideas, you struggle with ideas having you right where they want you, starting them constantly but never finishing them. Like, ideas love to be started, but you have to do other things than have ideas in order to realize them. You have to stick to it. You have to have some discipline and some habits. And so this episode is five steps from ADHD serial quitter, that's me, into a podcaster with 500 episodes. And we're going to explore all these different things that have helped me continue to show up for a long time in the same direction. And at the very end of this episode, I'm going to come back with a creative call to adventure. Something that you can do instantaneously that will increase the likelihood that you become somebody who can finish the kinds of things that you want to finish and achieve the kind of things you want to achieve. And it's called make something of Yourself. Now, it sounds really intense and kind of like a drill sergeant or something, but I promise you that is something that you can do right away that will help you become the kind of person you want to become and do the kind of things you want to do. And it's one of, if not the most essential lessons that I learned in my creative practice. And it's something I've done my entire creative journey that has been a game changer. So I'll come back at the end with that. And for now, let's get into these five steps. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I love Squarespace. I'm a longtime user. One of the things I love about Squarespace is I will use. It's so easy to use that I will use it to create pitches. If I'm pitching a book or I'm pitching something to a client, I will use a Squarespace page in my website and I'll build the whole thing there. Then you don't have these clunky, like, document PDFs clogging up people's inboxes. And it looks super slick. If you want to see one of those that I use all the time. I did one for my series right side out andyjpizza.com RSO and you can see how I create a little pitch summary of that project. Go to squarespace.com pep talk get building for free and trying it out and testing it. And then when you're ready to launch, use promo code pep talk all one word for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks Squarespace.
- [03:35]
Kaley Cuoco
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- [04:08]
Sophie Miller
So it's episode 500 and we're lucky enough that we still get lots of notes from people saying that they just started listening to the podcast. And so I thought just real quick, if the longtime listeners will just give me one minute. One. Not even two. One minute to explain why I think I am the person to do this episode about how to finish things. And the reason, the first reason is because I'm terrible at finishing things. I have both types of adhd. I have twice the memory deficit required to be considered adhd, and I have a graveyard of not just unfinished projects in my basement, but half started projects. Okay, I freaking get it, man. There are so many things that I've wanted to do that I've got hyped about doing. Like make this master huge plan of exactly what I'm going to do and how it's going to change my creative career and or life. And then I start with just so much energy and then just crash and burn quicker than I started. And so I just freaking did it. So I am that person. But I'm also the same person who has done 500 episodes of this show, who has published over 10 books, one of which hit the New York Times best selling list and have worked with clients like Xbox and Nickelodeon in my illustration practice that I've been doing for over 15 years. And so both of those people exist in this same body and mind. And it's chaotic and it's frustrating, but it's also possible too finish things and do things. And so I thought what better time than episode 500 to go over five super practical things that have helped me stick at something this long? When I am a serial quitter, when I am an ADHD person with Tons and tons of ideas and so many unfinished half started projects in my wake. But the biggest reason that I am the person to do this episode is because I just freaking care about creative people getting some of that untapped potential out into reality. So I have to do some travel with work because I do public speaking and workshops and stuff like that. And so I usually do about one trip a month. And earlier this year when there were all these accidents with airplanes in the news constantly, one of those trips, I was feeling pretty anxious. Even if it felt like, you know, the odds are still with me. I'm sure a lot of people were feeling that way at that time. And one of these trips I remember before I left, just kind of thinking about, like, what if this is it, man? Like, what if this is the last time you get onto a plane? And I was just letting myself spiral out, I guess. And I thought about it for a little bit and I thought, even though I feel really silly, I'm gonna go talk to my wife Sophie about it and just tell her how I'm feeling and, and the honest truth about how I was feeling. And this feels a little bit morbid, but it feels relevant to this episode, so I'll share. And I went and told Sophie, hey, just so you know, you know, if I never come back from this trip or just generally because all of our time is limited and none of us know when it's going to be our time to go, I just want you to know that I thought about it and I feel like if I go, I want you to know that I'm okay with it. Not that I want it, not that I don't have other things to do, but that when I look back and I look at some of these things that I've been able to do, yes, I have unfinished things. Yes, I have future plans. Yes, I have some big dreams that I still want to realize. But I've done some things that make me feel like, you know, what if that's all I did? I'm pretty proud of it. It's more than I thought I was able to accomplish. It's so much more than Andy at 18, 22, 25, 30 even thought. Not just that he was capable of in terms of creativity, but capable of in terms of discipline and follow through. And that this list of stuff, I feel like, okay, I've. I've done a decent chunk of what I wanted to do. And I don't say that to brag at all. I say that because that right there is the motivating factor behind why I made 500 episodes of this podcast. It's because I love weird, chaotic creative people. I love their ideas. And I want as many people like that to have that feeling of, you know what? I did some stuff. I didn't just think about it. I didn't just hope for it. I wasn't just excited on one day and then quit the next day. I figured out how to make some of this internal creative potential a reality out in the real world. And so this episode, I want to share five things that I think really helped me stick with this podcast and stick with other things that I've been able to go to the finish line with. And I hope that they help you cultivate more and more of a sense of I am doing the things that I feel like I'm here to do. So let's get into it. Okay? The first thing that helped this ADHD serial quitter make 500 episodes of the same podcast was that I learned to not assume that bad feelings are signs that you're going the wrong way. You know, when you're driving, you see those wrong way signs. Even if it's like on the other side of the road, it gives me anxiety because I'm like, wait, hold on, I can see doesn't like, if I see the wrong way sign, I panic. And I feel as a creative person, a deep feeler, someone who uses their feelings to guide them through creative processes. I feel the same about bad feelings as I do those wrong way signs. When I start feeling that bad feeling when I'm going to make something I my nature is to assume that that means I'm going the wrong way. And in fact, I got into creative work because I wanted to feel good. Like, I liked the fact that I would get into this flow state. And like they talk about in positive psychology, the flow state is one of the highest forms of human joy possible. That's why I wanted to make stuff. Not because I wanted to panic or have anxiety or have a breakdown or doubt my or hear the inner critic or have imposter syndrome. Like, all of those feelings are not the reason I got into this, man. And so when I'm going to make something in my project, in my creative practice, in my creative habits, and I get hit, I get slammed with some of those feelings. It feels like a wrong way sign. When I'm driving, it feels like I'm flowing in my car. I'm going, I'm in the road trip, man. I'm getting excited about what's to come. And Then, boom, right on the dashboard of the car. There it is. Some kind of little blinker starts blinking, and I'm like, oh, no. What does it mean? Oh, man. It means everything's going down the drain. Means I'm going the wrong way. But, like the dashboard of the car, you can't be too quick to assume, you know what a feeling means. You know, if you do that with the lights on your dashboard, when you first start getting. I mean, still, I don't know what half of those mean. There's one that comes up from time to time. Looks like a little fishbowl with an exclamation point in it. That doesn't mean you need more exclamation points in your fishbowl of your car. No. Supposedly it means you need to air up your tires. I don't know. I don't ever really do that. I do it sometimes. Okay. But I can every single time. Come on. Yeah, you. You can't assume that. What it looks like, what the impression it gives you is what it is. And it took me forever to learn this, because I'm looking for flow state. I'm looking for ease. I'm looking for that creative juice to just flow, man. But a lot of times, when you show up to the canvas, to the microphone, to the word doc, whatever it is, you are going to be met with, not flow, but at least initially, resistance. If you're a creative person, you've probably heard that term. You've probably. You might have even read the book the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He popularized and coined this term, resistance. And it's this idea, and it's. This is why it's such an essential book for so many creative people, is because it introduced the idea that making creative work may require you to feel bad feelings. That the resistance is this thing that comes up that tries to stop you from sitting down and making stuff right. You felt it. And that was. That's such a pivotal book for creative people because it introduced the idea that that is part of the process. And so for me personally, there were times going through my creative journey where those lights would flash, and I would feel like they were signs that I was doing the wrong project, I was going the wrong direction, that I was on the wrong creative path. And I would call my dad, and I'd be talking about why it's so hard and it's not working, and it feels really, really bad. And I'd be like, man, life is hard. And he would be like, yes, life is hard. And I'd be like, yeah, and it sucks. And it'd be like, no, life is hard, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Hard and bad are not the same thing. And that's an idea I've shared as a through line for this podcast. Because of this getting used to the fact that not all the feelings associated with the right direction of your creative path are going to be good feelings. And I like the way that Susan David said she has a book called Emotional Agility, and she says that feelings are data, not directions. And one way to think about that is every time you show up to make something within this project that you're trying to do this thing that you're trying to stick to, every time you go to try to make a spread in that picture book or an episode in this podcast, or a page or two in your book novel, every time you sit down to do that, if every single time you're feeling terrible, those are data points on a graph. And it will give you. If you. If you give it enough time to. To, like, actually experiment and try it and learn it and get comfortable with it, then eventually you can step back and look at the points and say, okay, generally this is not feeling good. And so you can take. You can collect those pieces as data instead of just seeing it as a direction, the direction being you're going the wrong way. And so the first thing that really, really was a shift in me as a person was to realize that bad feelings are not wrong way sign. Okay, so the first one was don't assume that bad feelings mean you're going the wrong way. The second one is embrace projects as experiments. Okay, you might have heard this idea before, this idea of the minimal viable product, but what about the minimal viable project, huh? You ever heard of that? Well, it's the same thing, but I want to speak to it because it is literally the thing that has helped me build a career. And it's not just projects. It's seeing projects as experiments. It's a certain way of approaching your entire path as a series of projects. And why project orientation is such a powerful way to approach your creative path. And it starts with this idea that projects are not statements. They're not solutions. They are questions. Not statements. They're questions you're asking yourself in the world, like, is this the right direction? Is this what I feel good doing? Is this what you want from me? So when I started this podcast, I had committed to about 100 episodes. I thought, I want to do 100 episodes. That's how much Data I need to collect in this direction to know if this is a good idea. And that's about two years of podcasting, if you're making one almost every week. But this commitment, which is rather large, that's a huge commitment, really creatively, especially without having ever done podcast before, that's really huge. But it wasn't my first experiment. Before I had made this podcast and started it in 2014, over 10 years ago, I had made a little tiny self published magazine with a few friends called Pump Magazine. I'd made multiple issues of this zine called the Wizard's Hat. I'd done the indie rock coloring book and the Indie Rock poster book and then a dream journal and a daily character drawing project where I did a new character every weekday for a year. I did a project called A Novel View where I did new book covers for books from the public domain. I had done a blog for weeks and weeks and weeks called Art Directions, so on and so forth. I could name a bunch of other ones that I had done in between all of those. And the point is that this was not my first rodeo. This wasn't the first bull that I tried to ride. Do they ride the bulls? I think they just ride the horses. But by the time I started this podcast, I had done so many experiments that I was ready to wage a bigger bet. You know, if you're a scientist, I have to assume I'm not a scientist, but I think in science you're not going to start with getting a huge grant, making years long plans of experiments, and putting all of your career on the line for this huge bet. You're going to try little experiments, test little hypotheses, try some things out, and if the early data looks like you might be onto something, then you stretch it, then you make a bigger data set, then you do a bigger commitment, and so on and so forth. But as you're starting out, you don't wage at all on the first bet. You don't put it all on the first project or the first test. If you're a comedian, you don't think, all right, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to create my first hour long special without ever having set foot on stage. You don't think I'm going to write a novel when you've never written a short story. This is one of the reasons why another through line throughout this whole show is this idea of writing on stage. This thing that comedians do where they test their material. They experiment with their material by going into clubs where they can't even be filmed, and they test out jokes. And the people that have made a whole career of this, people like Chris Rock, are people that do this and fail over and over and over again, even after becoming crowned Comedy king. And so you have to be willing to test it. And so every new special that you're moving towards is a new project, it's a new experiment. And you're going to take these little experiments and put them in the lab, see how they go. And you're not going to commit to any direction, any theme, any series, any special. You're not going to name the special before you've done some of those tests. And so this is. For me, this has been the most vital aspect of navigating my creative practice early on when I was struggling. And I'm still struggling in so many ways, different ways, new ways, but I'm always struggling. That's just part of being a creative person and a person with adhd. But early on, with those struggles of not really knowing how to get this thing off the ground or how I could find any level of success or achievement, and I would be consuming lots of things about how do you do things? How do you do that? I just needed to know. And one of the things that was really frustrating for me early on is you'd read whole books and TED talks and all this information about success is just about grit. It's just about stick to it. Iveness. It's just about never giving up. And you'd hear that over and over. And I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna do this project. I got an idea and I'll never give in. And I'm just do this direction. And then you'd also. Then I'm in the middle of never giving up. And what do you hear? Someone else shows up and they're like, okay, I know you've heard never give up, never let go, never surrender. But in my opinion, the secret to success is failing fast, quitting quick. Like, never stop quitting. And you're like, okay, so which one is it? Good God. Is it grit forever or is it never stop pivoting? And that right there is why I'm obsessed with projects, because they contain both. They are the balance of both things. That a project has the grit of a commitment. You know, when I did the book cover project, I said, I'm going to do four of these. That's how sure I am. It was an early experiment. I wasn't sure at all. I was like, I think this could be fun. I think there might be something to this, but I'm not really sure. I'm sure enough to place a small bet of four pieces. That's where I was at the time. Then there was a time where I was sure enough. I'd been making characters for years and kind of obsessed with it and had all these questions and all this interest and curiosity. And I said, I'm going to make 260 characters, one every weekday for a year. And the thing about a project is that it allows you to have that kind of grit through a commitment of these are the terms, these are the constraints, this is the timeline. And I'm not going to give up until I get to the other side of it. But it also allows for the pivot, because after you have done the experiment, you can stop, you can look at the hypothesis, you can check out the data, and you can analyze it and say, okay, well, the next project needs to be more of the same or a dramatic turn or a slight tweak. It is this project orientation, this experimental project orientation is the perfect, perfect synthesis of grit and pivot. And I think it makes total sense. It's the same thing as the scientific method where you're going to have a hypothesis, you're going to have control. Controls or constraints? I. Controls. That's constraints. That's constraints and controls. In one word, controls. And three, the third thing it's going to have is analysis. Afterwards, we're going to say, okay, this is how it went. But in order for that experiment to work, you're going to have to collect enough data to know whether there was anything to this. And to do that, you're going to have to stick at something for a long enough period of time to actually collect enough data to know if it's worthwhile to make a bigger bet, to make a bigger project. And so for me, the second thing that really helped was embrace projects as experiments. All right? The third thing that really has helped me show up enough times to make 500 episodes of this dang podcast is that I selected a premise that had space to explore. When it comes to podcasting, you've probably heard of these podcasts that have these super clever, really, really tight premises, these really tight concepts for what this podcast is going to be. This PODC is recorded while eating barbarian pretzels on one of those, you know, pedal your own beer carts with six other strangers in May. Look, here's the thing. If you can pull off one of those, if you're the type of person that Just has this ridiculous stick to it. Iveness just built in. You can pull that off and it's been done. Not that exact idea, but it's been done. These really clever podcasts have, have worked for some people. I get it. But if you're someone like me, what works a lot better is selecting something that has a lot of space to explore and improvise and grow and shift and change. You see this in TV too. Like they. Whenever you have these pilots, these one episodes of a show that are super clever, super tight, like completely compelling and amaz. Often those shows can never live up to the hype of the first episode. And so the ones that have the most longevity are shows like Curb youb Enthusiasm, where like, it's a guy who just can't accept reality as it is on its own terms. He has to question everything. He has to push the envelope. He has to mold reality and friendships and his neighborhood into what he thinks it should be or at least fight for it. Right? And you could do that forever. You can do that for 12 seasons. And not only that, in that show they do this thing where it's a balance of constraint plot, you know, having a plan and leaving space to improvise and try new things. Because they have a three act structure of a plot going into every episode, but they don't have a script. They improv their way through the episode and so they have a general sense of where it's going, but they make it up as they go along. And for me, if you're trying to do something long term, if you're trying to do something that's going to require a lot of time and a lot of days of showing up, it really, really helps to know that there are big, wide open spaces for you to experiment and explore and lead with your curiosity. In episode 474 of this show, I talked to a buddy of mine, Julian Glander, who had created an entire movie without permission and animated it himself and wrote it himself and directed it himself. And it ended up in all these different film festivals and just did all of these amazing things. Has an amazing cast. Really loved that episode. In that chat with Julian Glander and one of the things he said that I keep coming back to is that as he was writing the script, he would leave parts of it undone and just wrote beautiful thing here, knowing that that's a treat for him in the middle of the project when it's feeling stale, when he doesn't want to show up and just, you know, do the animation and do the hard work. He can put a music video, he can do something interesting. He can do something that's even going to surprise him and that keeps him going, keeps him invested. And the same is true for this podcast. So this podcast, it started through this idea of creative pep talk, creative practice. But creative practice means so many different things. Psychology, anthropology, business, my own personal experience, design, illustration, music. It can cover so many different things. Story, structure, philosophy, spirituality. It's just such a wide open bucket to talk about. Like, what does it mean to have a thriving creative practice? It's huge. And so I started with more of a focus on design illustration type stuff. But we have explored hero's journey, comparative myth, archetypes, Jungian stuff, kids, movies, video games, Zelda, all under the umbrella of creative practice. And it was a premise that I knew I can make this thing. I can make. I can show up and make an episode that's anywhere from 15, 20 minutes to an hour. And sometimes it's just me, and sometimes I'm interviewing somebody. And the people I'm interviewing, the types of people I interview change, the types of topics that I tackle change. But there's still a through line that makes this show what it is. And so that's the third thing is create a premise. Create a project that has lots of room for exploration. Foreign.
- [32:39]
Justine
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- [33:05]
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- [33:27]
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- [33:59]
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- [34:12]
Sophie Miller
Okay, number three was make sure you have a premise that leaves space for exploration. Number four is make creativity a habit. This is a tough one because there's a way in which habit formation in creativity and containing both the abilities to do these things in the same body is really tough because creativity is doing something totally new. Habits are doing the same thing, right? They are. In some ways, they at least feel like they're at odds habits for me as a creative person, and I love creativity because ADHD people are novelty seeking machines. I want new stuff all the time, and so I have to. And this, these kind of two go together because knowing that I have created a habit that has space to explore really, really helps. But I have been someone building creativity as a habit, building it as a muscle since at least 2011, probably before that even. But when you look at 500 episodes of a show, you can think that's a really big habit, but it's actually an emergence of a bunch of tiny atomic habits. Habits. It's a bunch of little habits. It's not just making a podcast every week. It's the habit of coming up with an idea and writing it out and planning the episode and recording it and editing it and scheduling it and making the artwork and posting it on five platforms. It's a bunch of different I don't know if it's five platforms. It's a few platforms. It's. It's a bunch of tiny habits that are strung together and emerge into this thing that is a podcast. And when I started my creative journey back in 2005, when I went to school, I could never have imagined that I could have a creative habit that I strung along for 500 weeks, let alone a habit that required this many moving parts, this many tiny habits, and the way That I built it up wasn't by just committing to this giant habit, it was making it a muscle. And so I started this habit driven creative practice all the way back in 2011, where I did a new character every weekday for a year. And it wasn't even a good character every weekday for a year. It was just a character. Because making a character and making it good would be two habits. I'm a fan of James Clear's book Atomic Habits because of this reason. And one of the things he's really serious about is making sure that you start incredibly small, hence atom, atomic habit, and then making them complex over time. And so if you're going to start running, don't say, I'm going to run every other day and I'm going to run this far and I'm going to run this fast and I'm going to lose this much weight or build this much muscle or whatever it is. Don't do that. That's a bunch of different habits. Just start one at a time. Just say, I'm going to run every other day. That might mean running for a minute. That might mean you feel like running really far that day. But until that's a habit, don't add another habit of how long it has to be or how fast it has to be or any other goal or any other habit. And the same goes for creativity. I had to learn how to post regularly, I had to learn how to make regularly as a practice before I could stack up a bunch of them and do something like a podcast. But by the time I launched the podcast, I had a lot of experience and creative muscle in order to make a more complex habit. And then over time, this podcast became more of a complex habit. Because when I started it, it started as I'm gonna go walk on my bike trail and record a 10 to 15 minute thing on my phone on a voice memo. And I'm going to throw some music behind it and post it and that's it. And so over time, it's become much more complex as I have gotten stronger in those habits and we're able to add other layers to it. Next week, we're going to go deep into this with an episode with comic artist Sophie, you know, who is an Eisner winner and has published two graphic novels. And we go deep into habits and there's a bunch of other tricks there too. But for now, here's what I'll say. If you don't have a creative habit, get one. This is the most essential part of this for me is to move from a mindset that says creativity is a thing that I do when the inspiration hits. Two, creativity is a muscle that I use day in, day out, week in, week out, and make your projects part of your creative habit formation. All right, the fifth and final one is aim to stay a not award winning artist. Now I've won a couple awards here and there, but it was not an aim of mine, especially starting out with this podcast. When I started this podcast, which was about creative practice, which is, you know, half about creativity, half about the self helpy stuff of habit formation and business and making it all work. Like, I thought this might get me ostracized from the community, not win me some awards. And I think that that not only has served this project well, I think it shows up in research around creativity. There is this really fascinating study that also just sounds like it was created by someone purely evil. It's called Undermining. Undermining children's intrinsic interest. That. How about that for a start? Like that's just ridiculous. Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic rewards. And the idea of this is that they would take kids that naturally liked to draw. They just intrinsically were motivated and interested in drawing and they took some of those kids and they said, you're going to get a reward, you're going to get an award for this drawing. You're going to get a gold sticker when you finish this drawing. And the kids that they did that to lost some of their intrinsic motivation. They liked drawing less because of the gold sticker. And if you are a creative person, you don't need a frickin scientific peer reviewed experiment to tell you that the likes in the comments and the shares and the shiny stickers have a negative effect on your intrinsic motivation, on that motivation internally. That is just making creative work for the creative work's sake. That when you start mixing the idea that you're going to get social celebration for being an artist with your motivation and inclination to make stuff, it gets messy. And I think one of the reasons why I was able to show up and do this thing for 500 episodes is because it wasn't driven by external motivation. In fact, I was afraid of what could happen if I made this show. There were so many reasons. There still are reasons why I show up and make this show. And I pour my fricking heart, mind and soul into this stupid microphone that make me so uncomfortable, that make me feel like, you know, people are just gonna think I'm the weirdest dude Ridiculous and laugh at me. They're all going to laugh at me. That's how I feel a lot of weeks coming into this room and recording. And I think that that might be one of the reasons why I've been able to do it, is because despite all of that, despite that, there aren't rewards and awards like external validation, which there are in some ways, but that they weren't ever the dream, they weren't the reason why. And in fact, I was afraid of the opposite. But despite that, I had an internal fire to do this project. And so the fifth piece to this is to allow yourself to do the kind of work that you're pretty sure isn't going to be celebrated by everybody, that you're pretty sure isn't likely to be award winning or celebrated by the community. You know, I think about these people that are the artists. Artists and the comedians. Comedians. And, you know, some of those folks, the musicians, the musician, like, some of those folks are some of my favorite artists. So I just want to say that first. But second of all, I wonder if that can become kind of a trap, like trying to make sure that you're making stuff that's. That's going to be celebrated by your heroes, like how that can hurt the intrinsic motivation by looking for that extrinsic validation and success. And there are so many ways in which pivotal things, and some of them are stupid, but pivotal moments in my creative journey were the times where you are Luke Skywalker disobeying Yoda. You are the one that's saying, I'm gonna call myself Pizza, even though I know that from what I can tell, my heroes are gonna think that's pretty dumb. But for me, there's just something about it that feels right. And the same was true starting this show. And so my advice to you is to forget about the gold stars. Don't make it for that. In fact, if you feel fired up about something and you're like, I want to do this, but nobody would do this in my industry, market and niche, that's even more reason to do it. Anytime I hear an artist be like, yeah, but nobody does that there. That's why you do it. That's the creative move. And if it's something that you think this is just never going to get the respect of my peers, that might be the thing that keeps that intrinsic motivation sacred and whole and not threatened and burning for a long, long time. All right, let's wrap it up. Let's summarize it. What were the five steps that took me from the ADHD serial quitter and turned me into somebody who could do 500 episodes of the same podcast. The first one was don't assume bad feelings mean you're going the wrong direction way. The second one is see new projects, see every project as an experiment. The third one was long term projects need a big enough premise for space to explore. The fourth is to stack up habits over time. And the fifth piece was forget about winning awards, Stay a not award winning artist for as long as you possibly can. It's really important to your intrinsic motivation. And every episode of this show we try to leave you with a call to adventure, something that you can do to put this stuff to practice right away. And this week's CTA is make something of yourself. And sounds like I'm like drill sergeant type self help guy. Make something of yourself. But what you didn't know because this is audio and you can't, I don't have any slides, is that something is sum thing. And this is playing off this idea that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. And even if you've heard that before, one additional note that I want to add is that you don't have to spend time with those people with their permission. And I'm not talking about being a stalker, sneaking up on people. I'm talking about podcasts, newsletters, blogs, books. This is essential. And so this is my call to adventure for you today is whatever it is that you're wanting to do, whatever thing you want to achieve. Maybe it is make 500 episodes of a podcast. Maybe it's, maybe it's being an illustrator for the New York Times. Maybe it's making a movie. Whatever it is, spend time with someone who's done that thing. Make sure that one out of five people that you spend the most time with is someone who is what you want to be. And that can look like right after this episode, subscribing to that podcast, following that person, buying that book, starting that audiobook. Make sure that one of those five people is what you hope to be. When I wanted to work for the New York Times, I listened to Sam Weber's podcast, your Dreams, My Nightmares every single week. I just consumed all the back catalog, all the time. I spent so much time with Sam Weber before I had worked with the New York Times. And then it became reality. When I wanted to get into public speaking, I listened to a public speaking podcast over and over and over. A bunch of them, actually. When I wanted to get. When I wanted to Focus on the project of the podcast. I listened to podcasts about podcasts and so whatever it is, figure it out. What do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? Is it publishing a picture book? Listen to a picture book maker like this guy and subscribe to this podcast. Don't just listen to it once, subscribe to it. Spend time with them over and over and over again. Find people that are like you, that have done things that you didn't know that you could do, and spend time with them. It will change who you are and what you're capable of. And so, yeah, I actually think that if you want to be someone that has a creative habit that that finishes things that shows up every single week, I actually do encourage you to go to andyjpizza substack.com Sign up to my newsletter and every single week I will show up with my creative habit of making this show and I will send it to you and that will be your accountability to continue showing up and doing your creative habit. And that is literally why I make this show, is to get you to show up over and over and over again long enough to achieve the kind of things that make you feel like, I could get on this flight and it'd be my last and I'll be okay with that. I don't actually fully feel like that I got more stuff to do. Universe, please. But I feel more and more like that with every project that I finish. Foreign Massive thanks to Sophie Miller, who is an editor and producer on this show. Huge thanks to Connor Jones for audio and video edits and sound design and animations for the YouTube. We're on YouTube. Thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our thank theme music and soundtrack and thank you all for listening. Until we speak again, stay pepped up. Okay, the podcast is over, so I don't know why you're still listening, but I am glad that you enjoyed it enough to stick to the end. I have one more thing for you. If you're in a place where you're feeling a lack of clarity and you want to figure out your industry market and niche and find the perfect strategic side project to do next, go sign up to our newsletter@andyjpizza.substack.com and you will get a confirmation email that will give you the download of our creative career path handbooklet. And the whole process is in there. And you might also get a few bonuses in there depending on when you sign up. But again, thanks for listening. Glad you enjoyed the episode and stay pepped up, y'all.
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That finale of the Bachelor was ridiculous. Lest we forget, this past season of Love is Blind. I know. At least there's always sex in the city to keep us warm and fuzzy at night. Always watching it back 25 years later has been the best. Why are we so obsessed with watching people fall in love on tv? Every week on our podcast, Two Black Girls, One Rose, we break down your favorite TV shows centering modern dating, love, and relationships. Come ready to unpack the mess and have a laugh with us. I'm Justine. And I'm Natasha. See you every week on all podcast platforms.