← Creative Pep Talk
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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. How to Embrace Creative Discipline if forming habits feels impossible, that's what we're talking about today. And I'm going to tell you the massive gear shift that completely changed how I think about habits. As someone who hates doing the same thing the same way more than anybody, I barely even use words more than once. My family will tell you that I don't call anything by its actual name. I. I barely speak in coherent sentences in my everyday because I'm constantly renaming things cause it's just too painful to do the same thing the same way. However, I'm also someone who's done 500 episodes of this show and made a bunch of books and been an illustrator for 15 years. And so I've learned something about creative discipline. And I want to tell you about this gear shift. And if you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you something you can do today. It's called creating a road trip Brief. And it is a way to get creative discipline in your life in a way that's not painful, but focuses on the fun and why that's so essential. I'll get to that at the end, so stick around for that. But for now, let's talk about why habits might not work for you the way that they work for other people. And the advice you've heard so far might be doing more harm than good when it comes to developing creative discipline. 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 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 Design is everywhere in our lives. Perhaps most importantly, in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. Host Roman Mars asks questions like, why do we use the bleep sound to cover up inappropriate words on radio and tv? What's with mall culture? And how did the mall become a ubiquitous part of American life? And why are houseplants having a moment right now? 99% invisible will answer all of that and more every Tuesday. Follow and listen to 99% invisible wherever you get your podcasts. One of the questions that I get most is how do you cultivate creative discipline? Now, this is a tricky one for me because I'm adhd. I'm a creative person who is a novelty seeking machine. And so when I get asked this, sometimes I feel like, why are you asking me? Why don't you ask some master at this? But I think the reason I get asked is because, not because I'm the master at this, but because I'm naturally bad at it, like a lot of creative folks. But I've somehow managed to finish a few things, you know, 10 plus books, 500 episodes of this podcast, et cetera. And so on. And so I think that that's probably why I get asked this. But the interesting thing about creative discipline I think gets at the heart of, of what makes it so difficult, because it is an oxymoron. Creative discipline, creative meaning doing something new, discipline meaning doing the same thing. And so striking the balance between those two things is incredibly difficult to do. And it's difficult for me. Every day I have anxiety around, you know, getting the stuff done that I need to get done. It is a challenge to get myself to perform habits. And this is a major problem because anything significant requires a significant investment in a particular direction. So if you want to be a picture book maker, if you want to make an album, if you want to market yourself as a creative person, if you want to build a newsletter, whatever it is you're trying to do, if it's significant in any way, it's going to require a significant investment of time, energy, resources. And that means, you know, chaining enough of little things together to be significant requires you to have habits. And I know that sounds, I mean, on the other side of that, I'm feeling, if I'm listening to this, I'm thinking, I don't like that, because habits, that idea, that word discipline even makes my skin crawl a little bit. And yet it has been super essential to me. And I've had to learn that creative discipline, being this kind of oxymoron, works in a very different kind of backwards sort of way. And it wasn't until I realized that that I could unlock it more intentionally. And so here's the problem, okay? Most of the conventional wisdom around habits are not about creative habits or creative discipline. And they're not really geared towards creative people or neurodivergent people. They are geared towards neurotypical people. And when they tell you how to develop a habit, they're aiming for this behavior to become automatic so that you don't have to think about it. Now, that alone is kind of a problem, because creativity requires thinking. It requires being switched on, right? It's not about automatic. You're not just a machine coming into the drawing studio and just churning out exactly the same thing. So there's already a problem there that gives us a hint that something isn't right about that advice for people like us. But they're telling you, okay, what you need for a habit is for it to become automatic behavior, for it to become autopilot for you to do this thing, and to do that, you need to. The most efficient route to that is doing the same thing the same way. And if you do the thing the same thing the same way long enough, that is going to be the most efficient route to developing a habit. But here, right here, this is the huge problem for me. Because right when they say, this is around the time, you know, three or four weeks in, or two weeks in, whatever, you know, month in, right when they're like, this is when it'll start becoming easy and automatic. That's the moment where I stall and break down and scrap the whole thing. Because it is in that moment that it becomes extremely boring, and I can't bring myself to do it anymore. And so here's what I realized. I don't have the automatic gear, and so these instructions are detrimental to me. It's literally like if you told someone how to drive a car, but you didn't realize they weren't driving an automatic. They're driving a manual transmission, and they don't have the automatic gear. And so everything that you're telling them is going to not lead them to the most efficient route to getting where they want to go. It's going to lead them to stall and break down and probably scrap the whole thing. Just thinking, this thing is broken. It doesn't work. It cannot take me where I need to go. And for a long time in my life, I felt that way I felt like I am just someone who cannot have habits, let alone creative habits. I just have to be chaotic and do whatever I want and just hope that somehow it works out. But it didn't. You know, living that way, if I just live however I want, I mostly just eat Doritos and play video games. That's it. Like, I love Doritos. I love the spicy ones. I like the cool ranch ones. I like the cheesy ones. I like the Thai ones are really good. I love Doritos, and I also love video games. But I have to keep them in check with my. I have to do them in a little bit of a disciplined way. Okay? I have to do my work first before I do any of that stuff. And I have to not keep Doritos in the house, basically. Anyway, this isn't about Doritos. It's about creative habits and this transition of realizing, like, I don't have an automatic gear, I just don't have that gear. I'm more like a manual transmission. This realization initially kind of is a bummer because you're like, okay, does that just mean everything has to be hard for me? But I don't think that's the case. I think it just means you can't be boring, and that's kind of cool. I remember growing up in the 90s, pretty much every person I knew, every grownup I knew, was driving an automatic car. And that made sense to me. It seemed pretty straightforward and easy. But my mom drove a manual transmission, and I always thought, like, why do you make it hard on yourself? Like, this is an option to just get rid of all of this nonsense, all these gears and all this, you know, paying attention to which gear is going up and down, you know, making the adjustments as you go. Every second, I was like, why are you doing this? No one else does this. And she would say, it's fun. It keeps it interesting. And that makes sense to my brain because if I don't keep my hands busy, if I don't keep it interesting, I'm going to fall asleep at the wheel, literally and metaphorically. Like, when I'm driving, I got to have sunflower seeds, I got to have music. I got to have stuff going on to keep the focus. And so that made sense to me. And it's true. Not just in driving, it's true in your creativity. When I start thinking about driving home, a habit, I have to remember that for me, it works in a similar way to driving home from work works for me, it works in a way that it doesn't work for most people. So most people, I have to imagine, their question is, what. What is the most efficient route from point A to point B? What is the most efficient point from work to home? And they're going to find that route and they're going to do the same thing the same way, but that doesn't work for me. It's too fricking boring. Sometimes I got to take the scenic route. Sometimes I got to take the. I got to try some experiments and see if. Can I shave off a couple minutes if I go this way, I got to have the sunflower seeds. I got to have the podcast. I got to have the music. I got to enjoy the windows down. I got to make a little pit stop and get a Gatorade. This episode is sponsored by Doritos and Gatorade. Apparently not. Not really. But, hey, if you're listening, you're not. But for me, I have to realize that habits work in the same way, whereas most people are going to drive to the same thing the same way, and that's how their habits work. My habits work a little bit differently where I have to do the same thing. I can do the same thing, but I have to do it a different way. And so for me, it's not the most efficient route that works for habits. It's the most interesting, it's the most fun, it's the most engaging, it's the most novel. How do I do the same thing a different way? And this applies not just driving, driving home from work. It applies to my running habit. I've been running about three miles every other day for six or seven years. There have been blips where I've kind of gotten off course and, you know, skipped start. I never skipped a long period of time. Okay, don't get mad, but I've skipped, you know, four days or I've missed. I've lost my habit here and there. But mostly I. I've stayed pretty consistent. And the way I've done that isn't by doing the same thing, the run the same way. It's by taking the running as seriously, taking that same thing as seriously as I take doing it differently. Meaning switching up the routes, making sure that playlist is fire, baby. That it's making me feel, that running all of a sudden feels like dancing when I'm listening to the right stuff, that I'm making sure the shoes are good, that I'm just. Every element of it is fun, interesting, novel. I listen to. Okay, here's the constraints. I Gotta run every other day, I gotta do it three miles. But everything else is a variable. And the main thing is, how do I keep it interesting? This is true for coffee. I have coffee every day. And my wife Sophie jokes about, like, how many different processes I've used. We've had aeropress, we've had an espresso machine, we've had drip coffee, we've had instant coffee. I've done it all, man. And the reason is, is I can do the same thing. I can have a habit, but I have to do it a different way. And that doesn't just apply to driving home. It applies to driving to the studio and doing the creative work. It applies to sitting down at the page. It applies to making this podcast for 500 episodes. I had to make a weekly podcast. That was the constraint. I had to do the same thing was about creativity, is about creative careers. But within that same thing, there are an infinite amount of ways that I could approach this. And this little shift, realizing that you might not have, maybe you do have automatic behaviors. Maybe you are someone who has that I can't even brush my teeth the same way. Okay, but maybe you do have automatic behaviors. But when it comes to creativity, you can't do it automatically. And it's one of the reasons why it is tricky to hold this oxymoron, these contrasting views, and master both worlds of creativity and discipline. And the way to do it is you got to realize there is no automatic. It doesn't apply to this sort of habit. And you've got to embrace and find out, how do I do the same thing, but I always do it in a different way.
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All right. I thought I could just tell you about three. Three things. Three things habit science has taught me. Now, all of these three things are in almost all of the habit sciencey things you can read, pieces of literature that you can read about habits. But these three are included in James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. That's a pretty big old chunky book, and it's a good book. I do really like it. But sometimes when I'm reading these things, one of the things that keeps me going is I feel like I'm reading them for you. I'm reading them because I know a lot. A lot of you know, there are a lot of creative people that are readers, but there are a lot of creative people that find reading difficult, especially if it's not just for fun, if it's not just fiction. And so that's one of the things that keeps me going in my reading habit is I'm reading it thinking I got to tell these people about it that might not read it. And maybe you have read it. It's a very popular book. But they're not all of the stuff. And it works for me. Like I said, making things automatic, which is a huge part of the book, doesn't really work for me. I don't really have that gear. But there are three things that I've taken from that book and other habit sciencey articles and things that I've collected and read over the years that really have helped. I'll say three things. One is I really like this thing that James Clear talks about, which is you need to find groups where your desired behavior, the thing that you want to be doing is the norm for this group of people. It's just how they act. And I felt this firsthand when I moved to England out of the suburbs of the Midwest. And the people around me were much were, you know, look, I'm not trying to judge the Midwest. Yes, I was fed a steady diet of Doritos and Gatorade girl growing up. But I know there are people in the Midwest and subcultures within the United States that eat super healthy. But I didn't grow up in that place or around those people. When I moved to the uk, everybody I was around just ate differently. You know, even the Doritos there are healthier because they have regulations around certain Ingredients, they're not healthy. They're still ultra processed food. But just being around people that naturally made the decisions to eat healthier helped change my habits for good. And so James Clear talks about, if you want to have a running habit, if you want to have a creative habit, whatever it is, you need to go be around. You need to immerse yourself in a group where that desired behavior is just the normal behavior. And it's because we're just such social animals that we assimilate just naturally. There's an effortless quality to that if you really soak long enough in groups like that. And so I highly recommend getting into groups where the desired behavior is the normal behavior. Now, this is a little sales pitch, but we do have a meetup. The creative pep rally. I didn't plan to talk about it, but I just realized we have a monthly zoom with the backers of this podcast from Patreon and Substack. We meet once a month and the desired behavior is making creative stuff. And it's normal with this group of people. These are a bunch of creative people. So if that's you, hey, that's one option. But you can also join local groups. You can join a class, a pottery class, a comics class, whatever it is, but get around people where they are showing up in a disciplined way to be creative. It will make it so much more effortless. The second thing is make it your identity. This is a huge one. You will hear this, yes, in Atomic habits, but in every single fricking habit thing you ever come across. And it's easier to make it your identity, to shift your identity than it is to just develop a habit. And my favorite explanation of this ever comes from a comedian from the UK that is really hilarious. And his name's Simon Amstel. Me and Sophie used to watch him on Nevermind the Buzzcocks. For you UK listeners out there that know this. Big fan, very funny, devastatingly honest, sometimes brutal, but really hilarious. And he said that he would get into this habit where he was like, eating a chocolate cake every night and he couldn't stop it. He found it difficult to change that habit. He found it more easy to become a vegan, to change his identity, then change his habit. And that's, that's what I mean by that. What is the label? What is the identity that you want to embrace? How could you make that shift? You have to think of yourself as a different person. You have to think of yourself as, I'm someone who eats this way. Does this sort of habit? Does this creativity, you have to. And this is why I think it's so important that we don't get hung up on, oh, I'm an illustrator because I get paid to make illustration, or I'm a standup comic because that's my full time job. Because the only way you're going to do that behavior is if it's your identity and only thing it has. The only thing you need to make it your identity is to do the behavior. So you first have to be like, look, I'm a standup comic, stand up comics, go do open mics and get on stage, so I better book that. And they're just this, it's just this like back and forth feedback loop in your brain that says, because I'm this, this is what I do. But you have to start with owning the identity before you do it. And so I think it's one of the reasons why you don't want to be too precious about, can I call myself an artist? Can I call myself? If you don't call yourself that, you won't ever be that because that's what it requires to get started and do it. So whatever label it is, own it, because it's a huge part of making it a habit. All right, the third bit is process over goal. Now, James Clear goes pretty hard in that book about railing against goals. I think a big part of that is just because goal centric self help has been such a big part of the past couple decades of self help. And I think he's just trying to, you know, come in with a wrecking ball in that way of thinking. But for me, and I don't think he's completely anti goal, I think he's just more about process. He's more about saying that goals don't make great people, behaviors do, habits do, and so get really obsessed with the kind of behaviors that you want to have. But for me, that, again, I have to alter this because as a creative person, as an ADHD person, a huge part of my motivation is situated in my brain through this thing I'm told is dopamine. Now, I'm not gonna go on a huge rant on this. Andrew Huberman has a huge episode about dopamine. You can just go, I think you can just go search all the different dopamine podcasts if you wanna go deep on this. Go listen to the science around this. But here's what I about myself is that dopamine, a lot of people assume this is about the pleasure or like, you know, enjoyment having fun but it's dopamine, I'm told, is not so much about getting the thing you want, it's about chasing the thing you want. And this is so freaking true for me. That's why video games are good for me. Okay, listen here, you habit science people. I like video games and I think they're good for me because I do delayed gratification. So I want to play this new Elden Ring Night rain game that I've just become obsessed with. But I can't do it until I do my creative discipline, until I do my work, until I do my emails. And so that whole day I'm chasing that thing. I'm chasing the Gatorade, Doritos and Elden ring that I'm going to have. I'm not going to eat Doritos today, okay? But, but I need that chase, okay? So I need that goal. However, if that goal, that long term goal, the reason why I need to have these creative habits stack up so I can do something significant, do it long enough if that's the only thing I have, if that's my main objective, I am not going to show up every day because I'm a wimp. I'm the kind of guy that needs something. I need some. For that delayed gratification to work, I need some instant gratification baked into the whole damn thing, okay? And I actually think there's, there's a way to do this. And it's what I call road trip goals. I've mentioned them a few times on this show. I need the soft focus of this big goal that I'm chasing. But I need to set it up like it's a road trip, not like it's, oh, I gotta fly on a plane 13 hours to get to the other side of the world. To get to this place I want to go. I got to endure all of this journey that I really hate and don't want to do. I have to have dopamine along the way. I have to plan the goal, the road trip goal, the destination, based on the kind of drive that I want to have, based on the kind of process that I want to take to get there. This is what I do like about what James Clear is saying. I like this focus on process because I need to select the types of exercises that have a instant gratification to them, some level of that. And so for me, the objective might have this soft focus road trip goal of this big thing of like getting healthy. But I have to have, I have my real objective, the one that's in my mind today has to be much more instant gratification. It has to be about enjoying the process. It has to be selecting what road trip destinations that have the kind of drives that I want to drive. And so for me, it looks like running is great for me because it's not just about the big destination of getting healthier. It's about the fact that it makes me happy today. It makes my brain happy. It makes my emotional state better. It makes me quicker. I like the feel. I run really slow, so it's not even. I'm not even pushing myself to the edge unless the music kicks in in a certain way and I want to do a little sprint. And that's how I get in those hit exercises, those little sprints and then soft jog like that. That's how I do it. So it's all about managing. How do I keep this fun? How do I keep this process oriented where it's about doing the thing I want to do? And of course, that applies even more so to. To the creative stuff, is that when I wanted to develop my creative sensibility and get a better sense, a more unique sense of my style, I knew that was the big soft focus road trip goal of a daily drawing project I was gonna do. But I made my primary objective having fun, knowing that I like to draw characters so I could draw a character every day. I feel happier when I've drawn something that and even better if I've drawn something that I am really proud of. And so my focus was on the instant gratification of the process, of enjoying the process. And the soft focus was the road trip goal of I want to develop my style. And so those are three things that habit science has helped me figure out. And I've had to kind of interpret them here on this podcast and to myself to make them work for a creative weirdo like myself. Now let's talk about how to build a road trip goal that will help you develop the kind of creative discipline that you're after, that you can start doing something today that will help you start moving where you want to go in the future. Okay, so every episode, we like to leave you with not just some inspiration, not just pep, not just freaking pepped out of your mind. No. We want to give you something you could do that could really start this thing working in your favor. And so maybe you're not ready to start a new creative discipline or do a whole tune up of your creative discipline just to stay on the car theme, but these are some things you can start conceptualizing with a road trip brief. Okay. One of the things that's really helped me is to not think about it like a habit, but to think about it more like a brief. Because a brief for a long term, ongoing creative project, it requires you to have habits, but because it's creativity, it requires you to do them in a different way. It requires variables, it requires keeping it interesting, keeping it fun. That is a given for a creative brief. And so maybe let's just put habits aside. Let's talk about driving home. Creative discipline through having a road trip brief. Okay? This is your creative call to adventure, your CTA for this episode. And your brief has to have three things. It has to have an objective, it has to have deliverables, and it has to have variables. And the objective we already talked about don't make your objective. You know, you can just, you know, pull one over on yourself here you can have an objective that's a big goal out there into the future. That's your soft focus road trip goal. Like, we know we're going to end up there. We know that's. That's part of why we're making this thing happen. But give your objective a more instant gratification sort of process objective. And so if I was doing this for running, I'm saying I want to. My objective is to have happy brain most days of the week. And I know running every other day really helps me do that, or exercising most days really helps me do that. It's something that is going to give me good stuff right now. If it was this character drawing thing, it was, I want to feel happier because I made something I liked every day. If I was making this podcast, it'd be similar. Okay, so make a. Make an objective that has a soft focus road trip goal in the back of your mind, but at the forefront has something about what you want to do now. Because if I've learned one thing about being someone like me, it's that I have a really hard time consistently maintaining discipline, doing something I hate to do. So I've got to focus on what about this do I love? And if I can't find anything, I need to find a different exercise, be it actual physical exercise or a drawing exercise or a creative exercise. I've got to lean into what I love. I've got to lean into having fun. I have to lean into keeping it interesting because I've got a manual brain, baby. Okay, that's the first one objective. Second thing is deliverable. That's where you're gonna get into the constraints of the brief. If this was a creative brief, it would say it has to be these dimensions. It has to be, you know, this, the file size. It has to have these words in it, whatever. But whatever creative discipline you're trying to create, whatever habit you're trying to develop, you need to say these are the rules. And I would recommend, again, this is. Goes along with what they say in habit science, that you don't overdo this. Remember that every constraint that you put in here is a new habit. So when I was starting to run six, seven, however many years ago it was, it wasn't do three miles every day, it was just run every other day. Could be for any amount of time, could be any speed, could be any distance, because I was just trying to get that first habit developed. Then once I'd done that for, you know, three to six months or something, then I could add that other constraint. When I was doing the drawing project, it looked like, okay, these are four by six characters. I have four different colorways that I'm going to use that I'm going to cycle through to keep it a little bit interesting, keep my hands busy, keep my mind busy, and I'm going to. But I can use any process I want to make. It has to end up being flat because we're going to maybe screen print these. But I can do it digitally, I can do it analog. I can. I have a bunch of. The third thing, which are the variables, and these variables, this is so essential for creative disciplines, is that you have to figure out, how am I going to do this in a different way? And so if it's exercise, I'm thinking of this through, I can do it with a podcast, I can do it with a playlist. And if I want to have a playlist, I got to keep it interesting. How do I keep it interesting? What are the things that I can do to make sure that I'm filtering in new music into my everyday systems, that I could be up updating this playlist all the time. If it was the drawing project, I could have a different description for each post. I could have a different name. I can use all these, like I said, analog, digital, all these different things. Make sure that you have an idea of what are all the different ways that I can do this drive, so that I can drive it home. And so that's your challenge. Whatever creative discipline that you're after that you're trying to make, whether it's a writing habit, whether it's a drawing habit, whether it's a painting thing, songwriting, whatever it is, that's your objective. Make sure it's about fun. Then have your constraints, have your deliverables, like, these are the things that it has to be. And then have your variables, too. Don't forget that that's one part that you have to do differently. If you have a manual brain or you're trying to do the manual sort of task of creativity. For the longest time when I was making this podcast, I thought, this is about bringing you new stuff every single week. Just fire hose of new information about how to make it as a creative person. And for a long time, for years, that's kind of how I was making the show. These days, I have started to shift it a little bit differently. I've shifted it to something a little less aggressive, a little less overwhelming. Hopefully it's not so much I want to keep it fresh. I want to bring you some good stuff, maybe some stuff you never heard of, some ways of thinking you haven't tried on. A lot of times I want to show up with, like, what's white hot exciting for me this week. That's helping me. Yes, all that's true. However, more importantly for me has become not all that new stuff, but doing the same thing. Meaning the most important element of this podcast for me is the fact that we've done it for 500 weeks. The most important part of this show is that it's a creative companion, not a creative fire hose. Yes, I want to keep it interesting. Want to keep it. I have to keep it interesting. I got to keep my hands busy. I got to keep engaged or I fall asleep at the wheel. Right? But more importantly, most importantly, is that I show up every single week. And the idea is that if I show up every week on this podcast and in your inbox through the newsletter, reminding you of the new episode, it can be your little nudge to have this body double, this person that's saying, hey, I'm doing it. I did it this week. You can, too. And I know that the people that have listened to this show for weeks, months, years, it's been able to have that effect of being this companion on the creative journey, on this journey, to have creative discipline. And so if you really want to do significant things in your creativity, it does require significant investment. And I know how hard that is for a creative person. And it's been really, honestly, like, I love doing the show, but anybody that knows me personally knows that it hasn't always been easy to continue to show up. But one of the things among many that encourage me and keep me going is just this idea that if I show up this week, you might too. And so if you want to build a creative discipline and do these significant creative things, I would encourage you to go check out the newsletter. Andyjpizza.substack.com Sign up to the email newsletter and you will get an email reminder that we released the episode with a link to the show, the audio show, and the show on YouTube. And it'll just mean that it'll give you that nudge even if you don't listen every week. It'll give you that nudge that, hey, Andy's showing up even though it's hard for him and maybe it'll help you start feeling like you can do that too. And so we have a great we have over 18,000 subscribers over there and I would love for you to be one of them. We give you reminders of when episodes come out and we also have the ability to go paid as a subscriber or be a Patreon backer. And then you can show up to these creative pep rallies that we do every month virtually on Zoom and normalize, doing creative stuff and having creative wins. We share creative wins. We talk through the episodes. It's been just fricking awesome to be able to talk to somebody about this stuff instead of just sitting in this room alone talking about it. And also we just started releasing the episodes. We have the whole back catalog and new episodes ad free for Patreon backers and Substack supporters. And when you subscribe you'll get information about how to access that free stream and put it on Apple Podcasts, etc. So go check it out. Andyjpizza.substack.com Hope that I see you there. And I hope that I can continue to show up every single week and encourage you to do the same. By the way, I'm Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times best selling author and illustrator of picture books and whatnot. I do a lot of client work for, you know, different brands like Xbox and Apple, illustration stuff. I also do a lot of public speaking. So if your company conference etc is looking for a public speaker, check it out. Andyjpizza.com, got my reel on there and the stuff that I talk about. Really appreciate you hanging out with me today. And I also appreciate Sophie Miller, my wife who is a producer and editor on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation, all kind. I mean this guy's just a I just like you. Hey Connor, I know you're listening. Working on it. Thanks Connor for all your help. Thanks to Yoni Wolf and the Band Watch for our theme music and soundtrack and thanks to all of you 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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Hi, this is Zibby Owens, host of Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly Moms don't have Time to Read Books in my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to stay in the know. Get insider insights and connect with guests like Grammy Award winning singer Alicia Keys, critically acclaimed author Judy Blume, and Academy Award winning screenwriter John Irving every single day. With Totally Booked, you aren't just listening, you're part of the story. So don't miss out. Follow Totally Booked with Zibby on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you're listening now.