← Creative Pep Talk
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- [00:03]
A
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. So I want to make an episode that addresses some of the fear that I've noticed, not just creeping into my life and creative practice, but consuming it from time to time. And I've noticed this in myself, I've noticed this in other people. It is a scary time for a lot of creative folks because we are in some of the most transistory sort of seasons that I've ever witnessed, maybe that's ever happened. We are in some serious flux between tech, AI platforms, changing the economy, politics. I mean, as I'm listing all of these out, I almost feel guilty because I don't know about you, but for me, that those words even come with a form of fear, anxiety and panic, maybe even. And so there's so much going on that it's hard to continue doing the work that I've always done. It's hard to block out those feelings long enough to put a pencil to the page. Right. And so I want to address some of that because there have been some things in my life and psyche and practice that have really helped given the state of things, and that have given me even hope and maybe even a little bit more than that. In the past year, after moving through and being swimming in all of those very well acquainted waters of fear and anxiety, I've been swimming in some new waters that have come with serious growth and excitement in my creative practice. More so than I've experienced in the past five years. And so stick until the very end for a creative call to adventure. Our CTA for what we're calling Cannonball into new waters to hear more about some of those things. But for now, I wanna talk a little bit about how I've shifted approaching these very scary transistory changing times in such a way that have helped me unlock some hope and excitement and growth, real growth. So let's get into that. 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, or 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.
- [04:21]
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- [04:57]
A
So one thing that helps me is doing this show because I, it requires me to kind of journal about my creative practice. It kind of makes me, it forces me to be introspective and reflect on what I'm going through, what's worked, what's not worked, what I'm frustrated about, what seems frustrating about the landscape that we're in as creative people. And it means that a lot of this stuff can't remain unconscious. And I kind of have to wrestle with it a bit. And one of the things that I've been wrestling with is this fear, this. This feeling scared of what's on the horizon. And as I go to think about, you know, what is my response to it, how am I going to think about this, how am I going to engage with this on this podcast? I have to start thinking about what is that fear. And that even helps a little bit, just to make it transition from a visceral experience that's overwhelming to defining what is it that I'm afraid of. And I think more than anything what comes up is this. Being afraid of a future where it's not possible to make what we love. That both for work, you know, my job, but also just for the pure love of ill illustration and the books that I make and what other people make, you know, what we have to lose. When a landscape changes dramatically as it is right now, there is a sense that we are going to lose something. And I think that that is a justified feeling. First of all, I'm just going to validate you validate Me, there's some stuff to be afraid of. There are some things to grieve for, for certain. I have experienced new landscapes before in my real life. When we moved after high school, I moved from Indiana to West Yorkshire in the UK in the north of England. And that was a dramatic landscape shift. And the truth is, no matter how hard we fought it, we lost a bunch of things. Like when we were, like, food people, being from the Midwest, you know, we definitely didn't have. We weren't connoisseurs. We just like to eat. And so when we moved to western West Yorkshire in the north of England, we were grieving. We were overwhelmed with the fact that we couldn't get any of the foods that we liked getting. We couldn't create any of the dishes the way that we were used to making them. We really couldn't. No matter how hard we tried. We went there and we thought, oh, we'll go to. We did what we were used to doing in Indiana, which was like, go to chain restaurants, you know, Applebee's, Chili's, but they didn't have those in the uk. So we tried to go to the kind of Americanized chain restaurants that they had. And honestly, I hate to say it, but they're terrible over there. They're absolutely awful. And we would try to make the things that the dishes that we like to create, and we just couldn't recreate them the way that we did at home in the Midwest. And it was scary. It felt scary in a way. It felt definitely discombobulating, and it made you feel not at home. And for the first few years I was there, I just felt like the food in the U.K. fricking sucks, man. I hate it. And we would go home and we would just eat all of this, you know, stuff that I would consider now to be kind of junk, but we would just eat all of the stuff we were used to in eating and feel very comforted before we would go back. Now I feel comfortable saying that. That I used to think. I said used to think that the food in the UK was crap, because I have updated my opinion, and actually now I dramatically, sincerely miss and grieve the. The food that we had access to there that we don't hear sausage rolls, the freaking pork pies, and the Indian food that you can get there, like Yorkshire puddings. There's so much. You know, if you go to a good pub where they're locally sourcing the meat and everything, it can just be such a satisfying experience with the gravy. I could just go on and on, Right? But we didn't know about those things when we first moved there, because when we moved into that new landscape, we did what a lot of folks do. Like, it's a natural thing to do. You just are trying to make the stuff that you're used to making, that you love to make. But when you find yourself in a new landscape, you have to let go of those things and see that that new landscape is making it possible to make total new things, to encounter, things that in some ways might even be better than the stuff that you used to make. Now, when you hear me say that, you might be thinking that I'm saying, AI man, it's going to make so much possible, but that's not what I'm saying at all. Now, some of you might feel inspired by this new tech and what it makes possible. I'm not in that boat. It doesn't do that for me. We could go deep into the ethical issues, we could go into the environmental issues. We could go into. And those things aside, they're real things. But those things aside, on a creative level, it just doesn't do anything to me. Everything I love is lo fi. Everything I love is custom, human made, broken, imperfect. That's the kind of stuff that lights me up. So AI doesn't inspire me. That's not what I'm talking about about this new landscape. What I'm talking about is when we move into that new landscape, as we're there, as we find ourselves there, we aren't going to be able to make the things that we used to make, that we used to love to make. But there will be new possibilities if we will embrace them and look for them. And one of the things I'm most excited about looking forward, is the way that all of this generated stuff is going to put a premium on the handmade. Now, I don't know when that's gonna happen, and I don't know what exactly that's gonna look like. But if we look into the past, we can see how this happens over and over again. You know, when the computers came into design, there was a period of time where they took over everything, and everything had gradients and everything was futuristic. And, you know, it just completely upended the entire design industry for a period of time. And that was true. And I imagine that was qu. Scary, but it was for my time. However, it also made possible going further into the past and getting obsessed with silk screen printing, getting obsessed with letterpressed handmade lettering and script and calligraphy and all this, it created this premium on those skills that people still had or developed despite the computer. And it's not isolated to that. When we look at this time that we live in, where you can see a concert by any artist in the world, at any musician in the world, and yet ticket prices for in person events have skyrocketed. Like there has never been a more vibrant live music scene or stand up comedy has exploded in comparison to streaming comedy or comedy in the theaters. And I think there's something about the live, the premium on experience that has happened because of the easy access and the overwhelming access to the recorded stuff. And I think about people like Adele who have one of the biggest recording artists of the past 10 years or so, 15 years, 20, I don't know, look, time, what is it? I don't experience it, but. But Adele is a great example of this person having two records that were in some of the top sales over the past few decades. And I think that is partially in response to auto tune, to the fact that anybody can be a recording artist now if you have the right pro tools settings and plugins, right. That we are living in a time where we're moving into a time where I'm convinced that what's gonna be made possible as a whole new audience for lo fi, a whole new appreciation for the brokenness of human creativity. And so, yes, there are things to grieve, there are ways that we used to do things that we are going to lose. And I think that it is incredibly important to acknowledge that and accept that. And it's also important to embrace the fear of losing precious things and allowing that fear to charge you into a place of fighting and pushing back. I think all of that is also good, but I don't think that it's all doom and gloom. I'm very curious to see how this moves us into a place where we appreciate those who hold onto or even enhance their human capability or highlight their imperfections. And so I'm excited about that. I'm excited about seeing what's possible in this new landscape. Because when I allowed myself to do that a couple years, it took me a few years living in England to start seeing all the new possibilities, all the ingredients that you can encounter that you can't get back home. All of the things that were made possible by this new landscape, that that was such a dramatic shift, which is necessary in a dramatically shifting landscape.
- [16:07]
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- [16:37]
A
Okay, so here is the CTA for this week's episode, the Call to Adventure. I don't like to do a show where we talk about ideas. Maybe you temporarily feel something, hopefully feel some hope, feel some excitement, and then you just keep scrolling on to the next thing without it actually impacting your everyday real life. And so we try to end the episode with a call to adventure, a call to action, something that you can do with this feeling that will maybe really make a positive difference in your creative practice. And so this week, it is cannonball into new waters. Let me explain what mean by that. I want to propose that these new waters, we're swimming in these new times that we find ourselves in, that the times are an essential ingredient into the creative work that you're making. The times that you're creating in, they are. That context is inseparable from the work that you're making. And the more that you embrace that, the more new possibilities you're going to encounter in this landscape. I think that the artists that recognized that they can't be Bob Dylan, they can't be the Beatles, they can't be Warhol, they can't be the thing that came before, they have to use the times that they were in as part of the ingredients, part of what makes what they're making unique. And so when I started thinking about the new waters, I was thinking about pizza. I mean, I'm usually thinking about pizza. We went to Italy for two weeks. I just got back about a week ago or a couple days ago again. Time, the times. I don't understand how time works, but we ate a ton of pizza there, okay? We ate a ton of pasta. And one thing that was on my mind was how the pizza that you're eating in Italy is just going to be different. I'm not saying, I'm not trying to be like, look, you haven't had pizza until you've done it in Italy. I'm not saying that at all. But it is different. And part of what makes it different, part of what makes New York pizza different from Italy, pizza different from Detroit pizza, is the water, the water that you make the dough with, depending on the minerals and where it comes from, whether it's hard or soft, and all these other factors changes the way that the dough develops and the way that it tastes. And I thank God that the people that moved out west and into the Midwest didn't think, how can we get aqueducts? I mean, I love New York pizza, don't get me wrong. I really, really, I just have to tell you, I don't want, I don't want to offend New York pizza, if you're listening, because I just absolutely love you so much and I make sure I get time and space for you when I, when I come through. But I'm so glad that we didn't get pizza aqueducts to get the New York water into the Midwest, because we wouldn't have Detroit pizza, we wouldn't have Ohio pizza, we wouldn't have all of this variety and all these different types and Chicago pizza if we did that, if we didn't let the different waters, the new waters, impact the dough, impact the stuff that we were making. And so I want you to cannonball into the new waters and break down the aqueduct. Quit trying to bring the water from the past into the new waters and see what this new water makes possible. And so here's what I say. Cannonball in. Don't dip your toes in, go all in. And I'll give you an example of what this has looked like for me. So about a year ago, I was feeling incredibly discouraged on two fronts. I was really discouraged with Instagram and I was really discouraged with elements of podcasting. I still love doing the podcast, but the podcasting world dramatically changed. If you're not a podcaster, you might not be aware of this, but I'm gonna save you the time and energy and boredom of going into all the details. But the ads changed, the ad market changed dramatically. How people were listening to new podcasts, what type of podcast, how podcast growth worked, all that stuff changed. Similar to all the other platforms, really. But those two were the areas for me. Like, no matter what I did, nothing was gonna move the needle on Instagram, especially doing things like I used to do them. And I also looked at the ways that people were growing their Instagram and I realized I don't want to do that. It doesn't serve any of the goals that I have. So, you know, becoming a short form video person that develops a big following in that direction, I honestly, it just didn't serve my creative goals whatsoever. And so I spent probably six months to a year grieving that. And I think that it's not all bad. That's a pretty good thing. I think it was important for me to really fully accept that these two ways of doing things weren't going to work anymore. I think that's important. I'm not trying to, you know, paste toxic positivity of, like, just see what's possible. No, I don't think that's. I actually think accepting it, acknowledging it, feeling it, all that's good. We gotta grieve Instagram, guys. That sounds so dumb, but it's true. I think. I think there's a good reason for that. Just as a little tangent, there were a lot of great things about Instagram. For instance, I think Instagram put visual art photography into the center of culture temporarily for a good decade. And that's pretty cool. Like, there were a lot of illustrators and artists and photographers that became almost household names because of Instagram being at the center of American culture, in a way anyway. So that is something to grieve, right? Especially if you're an artist. However, I spent some time there being frustrated with that, trying everything I could, trying not to care. None of that worked. When I accepted that I did care and that I needed to do something about it, I was able to cannonball into new waters. And I've talked about this recently on the show, and it took me some time, I think, to figure out what those new waters were, because that the water I was in was stagnant. And I would look out and I. It wasn't easy to spot where there might be fresh new water worth cannonballing into. And I tried a bunch of things, but after dipping my toes into a few places, I thought, okay, I can see that there's growth. Some of the ways that some of the things that I liked about Instagram were happening on substack, that people were growing there through the lens of art and actual still images, through the notes portion of that app. Now, if you're listening to this in 10 years, this is not relevant in the specific, but in the abstract it still is, is that it might not be sub stack. It won't be, but it could. The principle stands that if you find yourself in these stagnant, festering waters, you have to find the new fresh waters where things can grow, where that ingredient can bring something new. And so instead of dipping your toe and just, yeah, dipping your toes in, to try some places worth cannonballing into is really important. But then I think you really do gotta go all in. You can't just test the water. Because what happened was I would you know, dip into substack here and there, ultimately be like, this isn't what I'm used to. And that first bite of something that you've never had before is gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit strange, and you're gonna be like, I just wanna go back to what I'm used to. That's normal. But once I noticed, like, okay, actually, I think this is worth doing a larger test with doing a bigger dive into. Then, like I've mentioned a couple times, I deleted Instagram off my phone for a couple months or a month and a half, something like that. And I only could access that energy that I was looking for in substack. And it forced me to do a bigger dive. And having done that learning about it test, you know, acclimating to those waters, it allowed me to figure out what I would need to do to start growing. And I've seen a bunch of growth there by posting on notes and being engaged in that community. And it wasn't easy. The key was diving deep, doing the cannonball, finding where to go, and then going all in for a period of time as a test. And it didn't happen right away. Same thing happened with YouTube. So YouTube, I avoided it for a long time. But I noticed, like, obviously a lot of podcasting have gone to video. And there was a whole bunch of reasons I didn't want to do it. Most of them were just laziness. They were just things of, I don't want to do new things. I want to do the old thing. I want to do what I was used to making and have loved making. And eventually we tested a bunch of things over the years, and then once I realized that I had done enough dipping my toes, realized there is actual significant reasons to believe that this could be an area where I could find new growth. That's when I decided to do a cannonball. And what that looked like was saying, not, I'm going to dip my toes in for a little bit and see if magic happens and it explodes because it doesn't work like that. I said, we're going to do 25 episodes. Which maybe that doesn't seem like a lot, but it's 25 weeks, it's half a year. We're going to be making videos, the video version of this show, and we're going to post them, and I'm going to do that for 25 episodes. And after that, then I'll reevaluate whether I need to, you know, stay in these waters and make it a big part of what we do and make it a key ingredient or if I need to pivot again. And so over time, for a while, not a ton happened. It was just kind of slow growth. And, you know, it was kind of like, okay, this is something new to do, and I'm doing an experiment. And when I would feel like giving up, I'd say, hey, I committed to cannonballing into this for a little bit. And eventually, close to about 25 episodes in, we tweaked things in such a way where a couple of those episodes started to take off and do numbers that we haven't seen before and we haven't seen with the podcast in a long time. And so the requirement there was, yes, testing out things, but then committing to a bigger dive, to a bigger splash, to a bigger cannonball. And so here's your call to adventure. I would say you've probably been testing things. You're probably aware of some things. Do a little assessment. If you need to dip your toes and do a couple other waters, go for it. But do so through the lens of I'm trying to find a place or a new place where I can cannonball. And it might not be AI, it might not be a new social media platform, it might be doing a live event, it might be getting off social media. And the new waters of how do you grow a practice without that? I hope that you feel inspired to think outside of the boxes, outside of the landscape that you were previously in. And so for me, yes, it was substack and YouTube, but for you, it might be putting on shows, it might be investing in your community, it might be moving somewhere, it might be trying a new medium. For me, another example was in 2018, I realized that I was getting less and less. I had less and less of a taste for digital art and that almost everything I was into at the time was hand painted. And so I, for a little while, I dipped my toes in there. And then eventually I said, I'm gonna start making every piece of episode art painted for this amount of time. And I decided how I was going to cannonball into that until I got to the place where I could hand paint the majority of my picture books. And so. And I'm really glad I did. I'm glad I listened to that taste. I'm glad. Glad I tested those waters and committed to them, because now that we live in this time of art generating robots, I feel so good about being able to hand produce stuff because it feels more special than ever. And so I'm glad that I didn't. The key of this episode, if you don't get anything else, is don't suppress that fear. Don't suppress that feeling scared about these new landscapes. They are new landscapes. The point is pretending like it's all the same and trying to make the same dishes that you used to make will not get you anywhere interesting. But listening to that voice that's saying, hey, I know you've spent the past five years learning how to draw digitally, and there's all kinds of great things that have happened from that, but I feel like my curiosity, my excitement, my taste is going elsewhere and give space for that. All right. I hope this episode pulled you out of a funk, inspired you to stay on the creative path. If you're new to the show and you don't know, that's why I make the show. I make the show because in my. I've been on a creative journey since 2008. Ish. Maybe even before that, if you include my college years studying illustration and design. And I'm just aware that in my everyday, a couple times a week, I can get really into a negative funk. I'm a creative person of the creative persuasion, which goes with being highly sensitive as a person, which means I can just go up and down. I can have really high highs. I can have really low lows. Things can throw me off really easily. I'm very sensitive to how things are going in the world and what's happening in my everyday or whether things feel like they're working or not, or so many things. I'm just very porous in my heart. My heart's very porous as a creative person. And so what happens is I can get thrown off for days and weeks and months in my creative practice because of this emotionality. It makes it so difficult to create a creative practice because it's a practice, it's a discipline. It requires some level of consistency, which is difficult for people. You know, that's why creative discipline and creative practice are kind of like an oxymoron, because creativity is doing new things and discipline is doing the same thing. And those two things are very difficult, difficult to put together, but they're completely required to make the kind of work that we want to make and have the body of work that we want to have. And if we want to make it into a career, doing it as a career requires that you figure out how to strike that elusive balance and walk that tightrope. And so I make this show because I know that I can easily slip into that dark space where I don't believe that it's worth showing up and that with a nice perspective shift that I can sometimes really jolt myself out of that and get myself into an emotional space where maybe I don't feel amazing, but I feel enough hope and excitement to get started and that forward momentum can kind of compound. And so that's why I do the show. I do it, and that's why I do it every week is because I need at least a weekly dose of pep. And I'm sure other people do too. And there's not a lot of stuff out there there where the purpose is literally to take you from a low emotional creative state to a higher state with new tools, ideas, strategies for approaching your practice this week. And so if you need that kind of thing, I hope that you subscribe if you're watching on YouTube or in the podcasting app that you're listening to and you stick with me on this creative journey. And we both kind of bring each other out of it on a weekly basis, if you don't know. My name is Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times best selling author and illustrator. I make picture books and I do a lot of client work with clients like Xbox and Apple and YouTube actually, and I've done that for that kind of client work for a long time. I do a lot of public speaking and that kind of thing. If you want to dive more into my stuff, you can go to andijpizza.com to look into that. Yeah, that's it. If you want to support the show, we could use your support. It's kind of an expensive endeavor in some ways and it takes a lot of time and energy. You can go, you can support on patreon or substack anniejpizza.substack.com or patreon.com creativepeptalk and we do monthly virtual meetups, talk about the episodes, which has been just phenomenal for me because it doesn't feel like such a one way conversation anymore and exciting to talk with you about applying these ideas directly to your creative practice. So hope to see you there. And massive thanks to Sophie Miller, my wife, for being an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones for audio edits, video edits, sound design, animation. Extraordinary. Extraordinary. And thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack. Until we speak again, stay pepped up. I'm Nomi Frye.
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I'm Vincent Cunningham.
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I'm Alex Schwartz and we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker guys, what do we do on the show every week?
- [35:46]
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We look into the startling maw of.
- [35:48]
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Our culture and try to figure something out.
- [35:49]
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That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend and we expand it across culture.
- [36:00]
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As kind of a pattern or a template.
- [36:02]
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Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [36:09]
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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.