← 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. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. Okay, so I'm guessing you're like me and you feel like there's just too much much to freaking do. You've got to do stuff for a book, you got to do stuff for Instagram or social media, you got to start up on that new platform, you got to finish that project, you got to do your emails, your blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm even as I'm saying it, it's stressing me out to think about all the different things that I need to do this week. And so I'm not going to list anymore, but I'm sure that you feel that way for me. Often I will look at the five days a week that I have and I think I've got 10 days worth of stuff that I could fill this five days with. Like it is an over constrained problem. It's like you've got five pie tens and enough filling for 10 or 20 and it's really overwhelming. And I feel like that all the time. And you might be in a situation hearing that and thinking, dude, Andy, if I had, if I was a full time creative person and I had five days to do all of this creative stuff, I wouldn't be complaining. And you're probably right about that. However, I can think back to when I had 30 minutes a day when I could do any creative stuff at the beginning, when I still had other jobs and commitments and stuff of that nature. And I felt exactly like I do now a lot of the time where I, no matter how many more pie tends I get, I still feel like it's an over constrained problem. And I still feel like no matter what I do, it's going to get messy, it's going to be a disaster. And so sure, there are times where I am really over committed, but if I feel like this, no matter how much time I have or how much I have to do, that means there might be something else going on. My dad told me recently that he felt like this when he was in college and it was this really busy time. He had a girlfriend, he had a job, he was playing sports and he had school, he was going to college and he got into this place where he was really freaking out. He felt like something's got to go. It can't be sports, it can't be the girlfriend, it's got to be. It can't be the job because I had to pay these bills it's going to have to be college. I'm going to have to drop out of college. And instead of dropping out of college, he realized that another option would be just not getting great grades, not getting the best possible grades that he was capable of getting. In the ideal scenario that he could just graduate. He wouldn't have to graduate with flying colors or live up to his potential. That there was an option to do things imperfectly, to do things with mistakes. And I think this idea is revolutionary for me because guess what? If you're making pies and they're creative pies, you don't want to worry about getting your hands dirty. Because creative pies are mud pies by design. Like, the dirt is what makes them what they are. When you're doing creative work, you and you're in, you're constructing, you should remember that the type of creative work that really shines is stuff that encounters a little bit of demolition. That it's the brokenness, it's the mistakes, it's the humanity, it's the blood, sweat and tears that make those mud pies so tasty. Sounds kind of disgusting, but it's true. Creative work is. It's not as much like just making ceramics smooth, clean, perfect every time there's a mosaic brokenness to them. And that the mistakes are part of the process. And there's this really great quote from John Cleese, and he said, nothing will stop you from being creative like the fear of making a mistake. And I want to add another bit to that. I'm going to add my own spin on it, that you have to be less afraid of making a mistake than you are afraid of not making anything. Not just because mistakes are just something you have to live with, but they are the dirt that makes the pie. That the mistakes are essential to making the creative work. And the sooner that you can embrace this, the sooner you will feel less constrained. 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 Internet 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 Spring savings are in the air.
- [06:40]
Kaley Cuoco
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- [06:57]
Andy J. Pizza
And so I've realized that a lot of times it's not that I have five pie tins and 10 pies worth of filling, but it's rather that I'm afraid of getting my hands dirty, making mistakes, doing things imperfectly, and that it's holding me back from doing the work. It's holding me back from doing all the things that I want to do. Now there is, like I said, there is such thing as an over constrained problem. There is over committing. We'll cover that on another episode. It's important to say no. It's important to time block all. That's true. But I just want to float this idea over to you that what if a part of your stress isn't that you don't have time is that you don't have time to do it perfectly? And that is a great thing. So one question I get a lot when I do Q&As after a talk is how do you do all that stuff that you do? Because at least from the outside, I could see how it looks like I'm just publishing kids books, making a podcast every week, doing client work, doing talks, doing social media, doing a newsletter. Da da da da. I'm doing it again. I'm listing it out. I'm stressing myself out, thinking about the stuff I have to do after this. But I do. I have a lot of different arms to what I do and I am often pretty busy and I am often stressed about that. But it helps me to remember how I answer that question when it comes up. When people say, how do you do all these different things? My answer is always the same, which is I do it imperfectly. That's how I do it. Now there's a level of care and detail that I want to bring to the part of the creative process that really matters and really matters to me. And I will spend more time than is necessary to get it just right. But all of the other stuff around it, it's okay if I'm not number one emailer, it's okay if I didn't. If I make a typo on social media, it's okay if I forget, you know, the odd call and have to reschedule. And the fact of the matter is, being a creative person, being a neurodivergent person means even when I'm hyper vigilant about all those things, I still make all those mistakes. But on top of that, not just in the admin, the fact that I'm prone to making mistakes when I'm busy and most of the time isn't a bug, it's a feature when it comes to creative work. Like I said, the pies, these creative pies, they're mud pies. Getting dirty is essential. It's part of it. And I'm not just saying that hypothetically. I'm saying that from personal experience. One example of this is one of the one really kind of dumb, but very essential. Part of my creative journey was changing my artist name to Annie J. Pizza. So, you know, anybody that asks, I'll tell them, no, it's not my real name. My real name is Annie J. Miller, but I go by Annie J. Pizza. It's on my published books, it's what I call myself. It's how people introduce me on stage. And another question I get all the time in These Q&As is, is, is Annie J. Pizza your real name? And I'll say, no. Now if I'm doing a school visit, I'll say, actually it is my real name because I loved pizza so much that I married it and I took its name and kids like, being like, no, that's not true. You're not married to pizza. And I'm like, yes, I am. But if I'm talking to adults, I'll tell them the story of how that happened. And like I said, the packaging of a thing, even if we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we do. And the packaging of a thing matters. And when I did end up changing my artist name, it did seem to have a pretty big impact. Yes, it meant all my social media handles could be the same because I could find them because nobody else is a J. Pizza. But also it just you. It worked in terms of my niche and my vibe as well as just being more memorable than my name. And the thing about that, though, is that that was the product of a mistake that I didn't actually intend to be Andy J. Pizza. It was an accident. And so what happened? In case you don't know and you're interested in it, I used to have the website andY-J-Miller.com and it was just a really annoying domain name to share. And it was. And, you know, no one's going to remember that. And so at some point, probably around 2014, they came out with new suffixes that you could get, like novelty ones that weren't dot com, but, you know, things like dot pizza. And I've always loved pizza too much unnatural obsession with pizza. And I just thought, I'll make my website name Andy J. Pizza and I'll be able to say that at any point and it'll just be, you know, memorable and that I really only intended it to be my website. And then a bunch of people just thought that was my name. And so I just thought, whatever, I'll go with it. I'm not super attached to Miller and it's fun and it fits and I'll roll with it. But that was a mistake. That wasn't something that I intended. And then even better than that, I had done that way before I was doing school visits, before I was making picture books. And so now it's even better because when I go to schools, all the kids are like, Mr. Pizza. Like, they love that. It's even more fitting than I ever could have intended. Now, on top of that, that's just one little example of mistake working out. But on top of that, if you listen to this show, you know, a big project of mine that has been really important to my creative practice and creative journey is the book Invisible Things and Invisible Things. One of the reasons that came to be was that I had gotten fed up having this idea, pitched it in a bunch of different ways to publishers and, and tried to get it out there, you know, to different people and all these different kind of avenues and wasn't getting anywhere with it. And so I decided I'm going to create a post on social media that kind of explains what it is. And that's what became the COVID of the book. It's what. It's generally what became this poster. But it used. It started as this post on Twitter and I just thought, I'm just going to put it out there, put it out there into the world. And, you know, it really took off on Twitter and gained more, more momentum than almost anything I'd ever posted, maybe probably more than anything I've ever posted. And I think potentially one of the reasons it worked is because it was absolutely riddled with typos. Like I spelled thought T H O U G H no T at the end. And there was a bunch of weird. I put I and E in the wrong position. I can't even. I think it's they did W, I, E, R, D and there was a bunch of those. And I don't know if it, if that added to it in terms of charm. Maybe it just seemed like it was made by a child, I don't know. Or maybe also I, I don't know if this actually worked out this way, but I know that there's even YouTube people or YouTube people, the people of YouTube and Instagrammers and people like that will put really obvious mistakes in their videos on purpose because it gets engagement. Now, I wasn't engagement farming, as they say, but I have to imagine that people noticing these weird spellings contributed and some people might have even commented like, hey, you spelled that wrong or whatever. I don't remember. But just another example of mistakes being a feature and not a bug. That the dirt is what makes the pie, that the brokenness is what makes the mosaic, and that being hypervigilant so that you never make a mistake and you never look dumb and you never look human means that your art won't feel human. And in the age of AI art, that is going to be a major problem. That will be the bug. If your stuff looks too slick, if it looks too perfect, it won't feel human. And so for me, embracing the imperfect, embracing doing all these different things imperfectly has been a huge shift and a weight off my shoulders to be like, it's okay if I make mistakes. I'm going to try my best. I'm going to use all my scheduling skills that I've learned over the years and hacks on doing all that. But ultimately it's okay that I'm going to make mistakes. In fact, it's an essential part of making these creative mud pies.
- [16:29]
Shirley Leung
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- [16:59]
Kaley Cuoco
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- [17:24]
Shirley Leung
Go to your happy price.
- [17:26]
Andy J. Pizza
Priceline. All right. It's your cta, your creative call to adventure. We don't like to leave you with these episodes with, you know, nothing you can do. Just feeling inspired but not being able to put it into practice. So every time we try to end with a CTA something, a call to adventure, where you can go do something with this. So this week's is next, the Great and the Finished project. That's a play on the Nate the Great books. In second grade, I wrote my own Nate the Great book. It was called Nate the Great and the Missing Monkey, and it was a mystery. And I. I don't think I still have a copy of it, but I was. I got real into writing that. And. And so, yeah, what does it mean? That's the question. So next, the Great and the Finished project. That's a way to get it hopefully stuck in your head because you need it while you're making projects. And it comes from something I think I've touched on here and there throughout the 500 episodes, but is worth revisiting because I need this injected into my veins and just plastered to my forehead because I need it so frequently. And the idea comes from an author who I'm a fan of, past guest of the show Cal Newport. And he says that when he's in the middle of writing a book, he gets to this point in the project where he wants to start over from scratch, where he realizes that he's made some mistakes. And in order for the thing he's working on to really, truly be great, he needs to wipe the slate clean and start all over. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't times where this is true. You know, it comes to mind, things like Pixar, you know, they really get far to the process and sometimes start over a few times. Yes. That there are times where that happens, sure. However, I would say if I let that be the rule and not the exception, I would have done nothing. I would be. I would not be a published author. I would not be a podcaster with 500 episodes. I would not be someone with client work. And all this Stuff or a website even, or any images that I've made. Because I feel that way every single time I make a piece of work. I get to a point where I'm like, you know what? This is okay? But it'd be great if I did that. And in order to do that, I got to just delete this and start from scratch. And so when Cal Newport feels that way, he said. He says to himself, okay, you know what? I'm going to. I'm going to take that note, inner critic, and I'm going to use it in the next book. In the next book, I'll use that. And the next one will be great. And the one I'm working on now, this will be the finished one. This will be the finished book, or this will be the book that was good enough. And I use that every single time I make an episode. Every time I make a picture book, I use that idea. We just got to the finish line on a new picture book. We're just, like, finishing the final touches. Very thrilled about this book. But even that book, I'm going through all the final illustrations, and I'm thinking, you know what? If I was doing that from scratch, I'd maybe do this differently. Or if I was doing. And I almost did it where I started to open that back up. But the truth. But I heard that voice, Cal Newport voice, that said, the next one, I'll do that great thing. This one is going to be the finished thing. And so that's my encouragement to you. What I want you to do with that information is to think about all the stuff on your plate, all the stuff that you could do. If you're just waiting for the perfect time, you're waiting for it all to come together, where you're gonna finally be good enough to start that project or finish that project or have enough, the perfect amount of time and space to really focus on that thing. Take inventory of all the stuff that you're doing, all the unfinished projects, all the unstarted projects, and figure out which of these can be better off full of mistakes, not being the great next one, but being the finished one. Now, which of these do you just need to finish? Because for me, there's a lie in my mind that says if I restarted it, be great, be perfect, or if I just wait until I have the perfect time and space to perfectly accomplish this, then. Then it's time to do it. But the fact of the matter is, they'll never be perfect time. You'll never be a perfect version of yourself. The project will never be perfect and that is a feature, not a bug. Foreign that's it for another episode. I just want to give you a heads up if you want to stay up to date with things and be the first person to hear about it. The hear about the stuff that I'm up to. The best place to follow along is on Substack at andy j.pizza.substack.com and sign up to the newsletter. Every week we'll send you just a reminder that an episode is dropped. But also in there I will let you know if there's an event coming up that might be near you. I will let you know when there's a sale on books or stuff in the shop. I will let you know if we open up any like one on one session creative direction slash coaching call or portfolio review stuff. Right now we've opened those up really infrequently like once every other year, something like that. But we might do it more frequently. Also, if you sign up to be a supporter on Substack or on Patreon, be a Patreon backer. You will have access to our monthly call with other people that are trying to build a creative practice. We do this creative pep rally thing at the end of every month. On a Monday we change the times. Sometimes it's 9am Eastern and sometimes it's 12pm Sometimes it's 2pm we might even explore an experiment outside of that, but they've been really fantastic. We share some wins. We mostly talk about the episodes from the past month. Things like the CTAs, questions, comments, additions from listeners and it's just really satisfying to me to talk to you back and forth and have a discussion around these things that we're publishing and to hear your wins. And also we talk about the obstacles that your facing and how they can filter into future episodes. So that's been really great. It's an hour and a half long. It's on Zoom. You can sign up if you if you support the show on Substack or Patreon. You will get links with those weekly updates to register for those calls and they've just been really fun. Thanks to everybody that supports the show. It means the world and it makes it so that we can do this. Huge thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor, the editor on the show, the co producer. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio and video editing and sound design and animations. We're on YouTube if you like to, you know, casually watch and listen at the same time. We're creative pep talk over there. And thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band. Why? For the theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until we speak again. Stay Pep Top.
- [25:46]
Shirley Leung
I'm Shirley Leung, columnist at the Boston Globe and host of say More where we go beyond the headlines with bold, intimate conversations about the biggest issues shaping our world. In a new special series, we're going to confront the C Word. That's right, cancer. It's a disease that touches us all, but it's hard to talk about. In a new five part series, I open up for the first time about my own battle with breast cancer and explore the science, history and deeply personal stories behind this disease. There is life beyond cancer. Join me for the C Word stories of cancer. Follow say More from the Boston Globe wherever you get your podcasts.
- [26:31]
Andy J. Pizza
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.