← 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. Every day seems to feel manageable for most everyday people, but not for this guy. For all the creative people that I know. Everyday life and trying to exist in this world can be a bit much. It can be difficult. You can feel like you hit a wall at some point where it starts to just feel like living well is just going to be impossible. And I've experienced that lots of times. However, you know, as I've built my life and creative practice, I feel like that less and less. I probably only feel like that once or twice a week, one or two days a week instead of every day, which is a massive improvement. And I want to share with you this unexpected thing that helped me unlock my creative brain in a huge way. And it was really essential to being able to publish 10 plus books and 500 episodes of this show and work with clients like Xbox and Apple. And I want to share that thing with you today. I'm going to share what that shift is, why I think it works, and then how I think it works. And then at the end, I'm going to share this exercise that I'm calling turn on co op mode. That's going to help you reawaken your creative soul today. Okay. Hopefully a little bit. At least get it rolling, baby. At least get, you know, reacquainted with it. Okay. Maybe reawaken is too big of a promise, but just feeling it again. Okay, let's do it. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I love Squarespace. I'm a long time 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's 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 Fall is coming. That means more fabrics are coming at you. Layers. It can be a good thing if the textures and sensations are right and the fit and the look feels good. Well, Quince has you covered on both. Now I have a European linen short sleeve shirt from Quince and when I put that thing on, I'm telling you, I feel so classic and sharp and somehow also everyday man that I feel like I'm someone who writes novels now. It's elevated my whole sense of self. Best part is the price is so much more affordable than comparable brands with similar quality and ethical standards. So I'm a huge fan of that. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from Quint's. Go to quints.com Pep Talk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com PepTalk free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Pep Talk with the rapidly changing environments that we find ourselves in, it can feel harder and harder to be a creative person. That wall that you feel like you have to scale feels steeper and steeper and steeper. And let's be honest, the environment was never that friendly to creative type folks to begin with. And so what do you do when you find yourself in this place where you just want to rage, quit and throw in the towel? I'll tell you what you do. The answer is video games. Okay? When life, real life is just too difficult and no fun anymore, turn to fake life. Video games, they're easier. They're a lot more fun. It really can help you disassociate from the horrors of modern life. I'm kind of, I'm kind of joking. And of course, in a video game you can also get stuck, which that really sucks. When you're stuck in life, you turn to video games and now you're stuck in the damn video game. It's happened to me so many times. I like those like open world games. Been a longtime fan of Zelda. I remember all the way back in like sixth grade when I got Ocarina of Time. I was playing that game was like this the best moment in my life. Fake life or real life? I was obsessed with that game. So good until I got to the frickin water temple. Okay? I was so stuck and I tried everything. I don't remember exactly like how you end up getting in there, whatever, but it's like there's just, just giant wall that you have to get on. And I'm thinking, I got to get this triple jump right. I got to use a. Maybe if I blow up a bomb, it'll kind of, like, blast me over the wall. And I'm trying to hit the buttons in the perfect order and, you know, be quick enough to get up there. And nothing I'm doing is working. And I end up just giving up and being like, I guess I'm just not good enough to play this game. And a little while later, a few months later, a friend who I was bonding over Zelda with checks in with me, and they're like, andy, how's it going? Did you beat the game? Like, the end is awesome, isn't it? I'm like, don't even go there, okay? I got stuck on the water Temple. I am just not good enough to beat this game. So I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I respect your distance and privacy, please. And they're like, oh, what? What do you mean? What happened? I was like, you know that part where I can't. You got to jump over that wall? Like, I just can't nail that kind of distance. And they're like, no, dude, you just gotta, like, shoot an arrow at that lantern, and the place fills with water, and you just, like, swim right in. And I was like, wait, what? And he's like, yeah, it's not that you're not good enough. It's not your fault.
- [07:41]
Brad Listy
It's not your fault.
- [07:42]
Andy J. Pizza
It's not you. It's not that you couldn't adapt to the environment, is that you need to adapt the environment to you. And it's true. In this world, too, in fake life and real life, sometimes the problem isn't you. It's that you are a magical, creative elf, and you have the powers to change the environment that the environment that you're in, this is the environment that the people before you created. Now, I've been teased about how much I bring up the movie the Matrix on this show. I don't know if it just. In 1999, must have been, like, 13 years old. Saw it in the movie theater. It just either changed me or traumatized me. I don't know. But I've thought a lot about it since and still think about it quite a bit. And I've heard that it's based on this book, Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, which is all about how we're living in a simulation, but not in the. We're in a computer game. We're in a video game kind of way per se. But more that when you're born into this world, you're told like, this is the world. Welcome to the world. This is the way it is. Except for that is not true that the way things are in human civilization aren't just the way that they are. Like, it's a fact of life. The civilization was created by the people that you were born into, that it was tailored to them. You know, one of the things that is incredible about being a human is we're not that well adapted to any particular environment. Like, you know, we constantly have to change and terraform our environment so that we can live all over the globe. Globe. So if this environment doesn't feel hospitable to you, it is your job to terraform it, reform it, change it. Yeah. I'm not saying that you don't need to have some better habits or that there aren't things that you have to work on on yourself. Yes, those are true. However, I want to do a little series on this podcast of a few episodes called the Creative World Building Series. And they get at a massive shift that took place in me when I was in my early 20s that really helped me see that the people that are creative, that find ways to thrive, they have to build their own little world that works for them because the one they were born into was not made for them. And so what was that unexpected shift, that thing that helped me unlock my creative brain? Yes, it was the world building thing, but it goes before that. If you are going to take it upon yourself to build your own little world, to change things in this world, you have to start with the idea that your weirdness, your difference isn't the problem. That the reason you feel uncomfortable at this party isn't because you primarily. And that you have to shift to feeling like on a fundamental level, your weirdness is a good thing. This isn't a bug in the simulation. It is a feature. It is why we are able to adapt and shift and grow with the environment and build scale those different obstacles that we find in our paths as humans. And it's been true since the beginning of our species. That's true about all the species on this planet. That these mutations, these differences, they are the thing that keep us dynamic and agile and interesting, for that matter. And so the big shift that changed for me, and it might seem like a little thing, but I want to get into a little bit why it is so gravitationally relevant to your thriving as a creative person is starting with you are a good thing. And you are worthy of manipulating the environment, changing the environment, building a little world where you can thrive because the things that you need are reasonable, they are worthwhile, they are good. All right, so let's talk about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying. So we'll start with what I am saying. I'm saying that the most important thing that you can do as a creative person to unlock your creative potential and your potential as a person is to start with a positive view of self, like believing that you are a good thing on a foundational level. But what I'm not saying is that everything you do and all your habits and everything you've ever done have all been good. And you're amazing. And yeah, there's no problems, nothing to work on, nothing to grow out of. I am a big believer that you do need to kind of face the shadow self, that you have to examine your life, that you need to address your behaviors and how they affect you and how they affect other people. I think all of that is key. But you're not going to. Going to be likely to face those demons, those dark parts of yourself if you don't think that underneath all of those is more or less basically a good human, a good foundation, at the very least. And that if you do believe that, you will be willing to slay those inner dragons and go into those caves that you fear to enter. And so I'm not saying that it's all good, man. I am saying that those behaviors or those actions or those choices, no matter how maladaptive they might be, that they were adaptive enough to get you here right now, listening to this. And so in terms of just survival, you have had an impulse that is good, that has brought you to this place, and that's pretty good, man. Now, do I think that you need to update some of those and get a software refresh and all that kind of stuff and alter your environment as well? Yes, I absolutely do. Now, I believe this because of my own experiences, but I don't expect you to take my word for it alone. So this isn't just an Andy J. Pizza thing of. I think it's better if you just think you're kind of a good thing. This was something that I experienced in my own life and kind of came to as a core worldview and belief. But as I started to explore it and research it and talk to people in the therapy and psychology world, I. I found out that this was a huge shift that happened in the therapy and Psychology space sometime in the 90s with this guy named Martin Seligman, who is seen as the kind of godfather, grandfather person who introduced a. This paradigm shift in the psychology world where he's like, hey, maybe our bible shouldn't be this book of disorders. Maybe we shouldn't start with what's wrong with you? What's broken with you? Like, maybe there might be some good if we start with like, what are your strengths? What. What can we work with? What's great about being a human or being the type of human that you are? And the incredible thing is this shift into a positive psychology, which is not, by the way, positive thinking. You know, I think the positive thinking movement, it's not that there isn't any worthwhile and whatnot over there. It's just not something that really speaks to me and. Or something I know much about. But I do know that this shift, this worldview shift from a negative self psychology to a more positive self psychology. Like, start with assuming that, you know, all of this bio hardware that we've ended up with has got us pretty far on this planet and must have something good for going for it. And let's try to work with that. That there is a lot of great evidence that this mindset is super effective in dealing with mental health stuff and dealing with personal growth and development. And so that shift was huge for me. But also, I encourage you to go check out more about this. One book that I could definitely recommend is, nope, There no Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz, who is the person who created internal family systems ifs. And I just think that book, even beyond the IFS stuff, introduces a totally different way of thinking about being a person. You know, starting with there are no bad parts of you. There are parts of you that maybe are not as well adjusted or are maladaptive to the environment you find yourself in that need some work. But they're all trying to keep you alive for the most part. And so I think that's a great place to start. Another place you could look that is also based on this principle. Is this book Good Inside and it's by Dr. Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky is known in the parenting world for gentle parenting. And starting with this same principle of like your. Your foundation is good. Let's start with there. Your kids foundation is there is good. And I. I don't think I finished that. Have finished that book yet. But the. What I have read is just really great, not just for parenting, but also parenting yourself and how you see yourself. And it is a fundamental shift that I think addresses most of the complaints or pushback that you might have on this worldview. And I highly recommend you check it out. And here is the number one reason why I think this shift is so paramount for you as a creative person. If you believe that you are just bad at this game, you are likely to throw in the towel, rage quit before you realize that you have the creative potential to adapt the environment to you and that you are actually good and worthy enough to build a world around you that suits you, that allowed you to thrive, that allows you to be in a place where you can contribute you to others, and that that is the place where you're going to find the most that you have to give. And so if you can make this shift this worldview to I'm not just bad at this game, but actually I need to change the game to work for me. That is how you unlock becoming a creative world builder. And we're going to talk about this over the next few weeks on a couple of different levels. Because if you stop and think about it and you think about your creative heroes and you think of the people that you admire most that are able to be full and show up in the world, I think you're going to notice that those are people that have found the license to have the idiosyncrasies that they need to be full and regulated and creative in this world. And I think it starts with assuming that you are good and you are good at this game and you can get even better as you tailor it to the very real needs that you have.
- [21:07]
Brad Listy
Hi there, I'm Brad Listy, longtime host of the Other People podcast and over the years I've interviewed hundreds of today's finest working writers. And now I've just launched a new company called Deep Dive. It's a learning platform and our debut audio course is called how to Write a Novel. It features more than 50 hours of never before heard insight and instruction from dozens of today's most celebrated contemporary authors, including people like Emily St. John Mandela, Stephen Graham Jones, Melissa Broder, Steve Almond, and many more. It's like getting an MFA level education at a fraction of the cost. You can stream the course online or through the Deep Dive app. And best of all, listeners of Creative Pep Talk can save 20% by using the offer code Pep Talk at checkout all one word. Go to DeepDive Audio to learn more. Again, that's www.deepdive.audio and use the code Pep Talk at checkout and start writing your novel today.
- [22:20]
Andy J. Pizza
So good, so good. So good.
- [22:22]
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- [22:30]
Andy J. Pizza
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- [22:33]
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- [22:52]
Andy J. Pizza
So you know, in every episode, we don't want to just leave you with some inspiration or some nice thoughts. This episode's not going to just stop with just love yourself. It's not that fluffy. Although I do think it's even just that is a pretty huge fundamental shift when you practice it. So every episode, we want to leave you with something more than that, something you can do. It's our call to adventure. Our creative call to adventure today is. Turn on co op mode. Now I will explain to you what this means. This comes from a random video that I saw on the Internet of this kid and their mom. I don't know anything about these people. Maybe you do. It's called Beth and Coop. And it's just comes to me out of context on my phone. And it's this little kid and they're in the backseat in the car seat working on this cross stitch and they're talking about the movie soul, the Pixar movie. And the mom says, you have a real old soul, don't you? And the kid is like, what's a soul? And they're like, it's something that lives inside you, like the movie soul from Pixar. And the kid says this thing that just shook me to my core, and I'll just play it real quick, but can you tell me what they need to live in there? In case you missed it, it's the kid asking, could you tell me what the soul needs to live in there? And I started thinking about, what does it look like to have to be a body that is hospitable to a soul, to a self, to your essence Now. Woo. Woo. Mystic stuff aside, it doesn't really matter. It's. It's a. It's a thought exercise, people. Okay. I don't know what the truth is about souls and all that kind of stuff. It's not what this podcast is. But as a thought exercise, it has been powerful to practice asking that question of. You know, recently I found myself just kind of not making the best healthy decisions and kind of fell into some Bad habits with my everyday routines. And I was getting frustrated with it and I kept trying to jumpstart different exercise things or new dietary things that could help me just kind of be a little bit healthier. And I just kept self sabotaging and resisting and I felt this energy that was very angry and negative about myself. And I just felt like, come on, man, what the hell? Like, dude, can you work with me? I need to do this. It's good for us to do this. And that video reminded me to start with, foundationally, I'm a good thing. Foundationally. These impulses and these urges, they're to survive, they're for my good. And instead it encouraged me to just temporarily take a different attitude towards myself. And instead of being like, come on, dude, get this crap together. I was like, hey, what? What's going on? And I just did some journaling and I started asking this self, like, what do you need to live in there? Better to be on my team, to go into co op mode with me, because I don't know about you, but for me, I get in my way all the time. And I've found that if I make this shift, I can actually accomplish more. It doesn't make everything fixed overnight, but it is powerful to be like, hey, what's going on? Why are you not having the resources, the energy to make these good decisions? And as I was journaling through that, I realized like, oh, it's because I haven't really fully cultivated that spark for life. I haven't found that thing in this season that makes me want to stick around for the long term, you know, wants me to be healthy enough to live to old age. I don't currently have that spark. And when I realized that, when I did that little prompt, I realized like, oh, okay, that means I need to do everything I need to do to get in touch with that. Now that part of that is like, yeah, my passion, my creativity, pulling those threads, making those, you know, connecting with people that are excited about what I'm excited about, making sure that I'm really going all in on that. Some of that is also being in touch with the world and doing my part to make the kind of world and build the kind of world that I want for myself and for my kids. So that goes beyond just the creative stuff. And when I start engaging with that and I start feeling like, hey, I'm going to fight to make the kind of world that I want to stick around in, I started feeling like I have a little bit more resource, a little bit more Energy. I feel myself working with me to make better decisions. And so that's my encouragement to you today. It's a creative prompt to do a little bit of journaling, do a little bit of visual journaling, make a little song about, hey, what do you need? Can you tell me what you need in there that would make you a little bit comfier, a little bit more, a little bit less hostile to me Soul? How can I get you to be on my team? How can we work on this together? So if you make anything out of that creatively, send it to me on social media or email, whatever. I'd love to see what you guys do with that prompt, but it's been really, really powerful for me in the recent weeks. All right, so I hope this helped you unlock your creative brain a little bit. This shift was huge for me and I detailed the process of that really explicitly and thoroughly and even shared a lot of personal private stuff, including a conversation with my mom, who I kind of guessed I get ADHD from. It's mostly a genetic thing. Probably not my corporate accountant father and I get in the details of that in this series I did, which was audio only, is before we started doing video videos. But it's episode 449 of this podcast creative pep talk. It's called Making Authentic Work youk Love starts with this. And it's the beginning of a six part series called Right side Out. If you want to dive deeper into where this shift came from of having this positive psychology, it starts there. And it was a really important, meaningful creative project and we released it last year and we won a couple awards on it. We had just an incredible, incredible. We had some incredible feedback and really powerful feedback that made me really proud to have made it. And ultimately it's based on this idea that if you want to make work you love, you want to make art that you love, it starts with loving yourself because art is self expression and you're not going to love that art and you're going to love that expression if you hate the thing that it is an expression of, which is you. And so that was a huge shift for me. It's one of my only beliefs actually is that you foundationally are a good thing. We need to cultivate it. There's some work to be done. But starting with that mindset is a huge shift. And it reminds me of this thing I heard singer Michael Gunger say on a podcast once where he was talking about it again through the lens of video games and he's like, if you start a video game and you believe that your character is there to do good. Like most video games, you're going to go around for the most part doing good stuff. But then there are other games. I don't know. Grand Theft Auto comes to mind. I never played it, but it seems like in that game you start off with the assumption that you're kind of bad. And so what are you going to do? You're going to go around doing bad stuff. So do I know if you're good or do I know if you're bad? I don't really know. But I do think that if you start with a foundation that you're on the on the bottom, most, deepest level good. I think you're it actually is going to serve you to the best possible outcomes and so hope you check that series out. It's whatever Audio podcasts are Little Heads up about the Newsletter we send a newsletter out every week with this podcast so you don't miss it. Links to the audio, links to the video. If you're trying to build a creative practice, a huge part of that is showing up regularly. That's why we show up regularly, making this show to show up with you as a companion. Be like, hey, I'm doing it. You should do it. And remind you that you want to be doing this. And we have a few perks, like our Creative Career Path ebook that helps you build a side project that is strategic and will help you meet some of your goals in a strategic way. And that E booklet is free when you sign up to the newsletter. But I just want to give you a heads up that in a few months we're going to take those perks off and start adding different kind of perks and update some of that so it won't be available for free for much longer. So go to andyjpiza.substack.com Sign up to the newsletter and yeah, you can get more info there. Thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on this show. Thank you to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation, sound design. Thank you to Yoni Wolf and the band why for our theme music and soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening till we speak again. Stay pepped up. I'm Nomi Frye. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
- [33:43]
Alex Schwartz
I'm Alex Schwartz and we are Critics at Large, A podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show?
- [33:49]
Andy J. Pizza
Every week we look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out that's right.
- [33:53]
Alex Schwartz
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.
- [34:03]
Andy J. Pizza
As kind of a pattern or a template.
- [34:05]
Alex Schwartz
Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [34:12]
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.