C (4:04)

Quints.com Pep Talk Fiscally responsible Financial Geniuses Monetary Magicians these are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.

A (4:42)

I have sort of a love hate relationship with the New year. I don't know how you feel about it. I don't know if you've ever had this. If you're like me and you have this urge to level up. If you're watching the YouTube, you can see I'm wearing my Dragon Ball Z T shirt. One of the things that I think has always appealed to me about Dragon Ball Z is they're leveling up. They go to the next stage, the next phase. They go from regular self to Super Saiyan self. And then you thought that was cool. What about Super Saiyan 2? What about 3? What about 4? What about Super Saiyan? God, what about Super Saiyan? I don't know. They keep adding them because there's always another level. And when I was a kid, even that just so appealed to me. I always wanted to evolve like a Pokemon. I wanted to be the next, you know, Andy J. Cals Zone. I want to go to the next level. And so in my 20s, that looked like getting so excited about the new year, just hitting the ground running, feeling like, all right, let's do this. But if you've lived on this planet for a handful of years, you realize that those aspirations and those promises to yourself, they are so easy to break. And you become kind of like a bad boyfriend to yourself. The guy that's like, it's gonna be different this time, I promise. And then one week later, you're like, no, actually, it's not. It's gonna be exactly like it was. And it can get you into this jaded place where you feel like, why even try? I'm not gonna get swept up and get my heart broken again by this guy that is me over and over again. And so I have that urge to grow and change and evolve. And yet so much evidence that I am not, that I can't trust myself to make those resolutions or make those goals. And I feel it, like, a little bit like those cards in Alice in Wonderland that see the change they want to make, they need to make the white roses red. And they're like, all right, let's go mad, frantic dash. Let's paint these bad babies and get it going. And when you're watching that movie from the outside, we're all like, dude, no, that's not gonna work. That's not how you get red roses. It's gonna drip. It's gonna. As soon as you put it on, it's gonna fall away. It's just surface level shift. And what they. What we really know is that if you want red roses, it starts at the seed level. You've got to find the right soil, and you've got to plant the right seed. And I think the same is true for change in your life. You know, recently, I've just felt like. I feel like 2024, 2025. I had some things thrown at me and just some struggles and felt like I got into a rut, and I couldn't make any positive progress. And I would be playing video games sometimes and think, man, it's so easy to level up in a video game. Like, I wish progress was that easy. And I feel this sense that this might be a human thing, it might just be a me thing. I need to see that the effort that I'm making is putting me forward in some way. And I just had hit this wall where I couldn't figure out how to, in my real life, outside of video games, push the needle forward in significant area. You know, I'm getting older, so there's ways where, you know, I'm almost 40. There's ways in which health becomes a much harder battle, and you're really, like, maintaining or Just trying to stay healthy rather than get faster times on your running and what have you. And the world is kind of in a weird place. The economy's in kind of a weird place. I just felt in this stagnant space and I was burnt out from efforting. And there were times where I would be running on the treadmill and really trying to push myself and feel this just wary tiredness that would well up in me as this emotion of like, dude, I just can't be pushing myself like that anymore. And there are lots of ways in where I've tried to be gentler on myself, and there are a lot of ways in which I had to shift that energy. But I tell you that because I want to. I just wanted to be vulnerable and share that. You know, when you get into this place where you just. You're trying so hard, but you're not seeing any results, it can be incredibly frustrating. And if you're in that place in this new year, I wanted to share with you something super small and gentle that has worked for me over and over again. When I got hitting this wall, I stopped to think, in the past, how did positive change really occur in my life? Was it obsessing about the result that I want? Plastering it all over my room and thinking, give it everything you've got. Just go mad, dash. Paint those roses, baby. Do the biggest run you can on January 1st. Think of 400 goals and go for it. Create the mega business plan. Is that how the real change worked? Or is that how I burn out now? There's good evidence even that you could shift that energy from outcome result type goals into process goals and get a much better return. Like, instead of thinking, I want to get this much money or that many jobs or this, this place in my health, this health marker, instead of shooting that way that you can find a lot of a lot better results if you will think rather than, this is the result that I want, the goal being this is the process that I'm gonna do. So instead of saying this health marker, say, I wanna run three times a week or I want to draw every day. If you will shift from result to process, you will see it's much easier to get a benefit. It's much easier to focus your energy there. But I wanted to take it one step further in this episode because as I was reviewing my own personal growth and the times where I really did shift into a life that felt more like me, it didn't even look like that. It was easier than that. It was a step before that, a step before process. And it was more about input. It was more about the seed that I planted in my own brain. And honestly, it looks like reading, it looks like listening to podcasts and audiobooks. It looks like reprogramming my mind before I start thinking about the actions that I'm going to take. And so my suggestion to you is to quit thinking about the output for a minute if you are getting discouraged by your ability to take those actions and see those results. And instead, just little by little, plant that seed, water that seed every single day in the direction that you want to change. If you want to change the output, you got to think about the input. And it can be like a Play DOH machine. If you think about a Play DOH machine and you're feeding white Play DOH through that thing and it's coming out white the other side or smushing it into that little spaghetti thing or all the, you know, there's several different options. What? There's one that's just like got a hole in the middle of a circle. I don't really know what that one's for. Maybe it's beads. I don't know. Does that. Can you make beads with Play doh? I don't think so. But, you know, the Play DOH Smasher, Play DOH factory, if you wanted the Play DOH to come out red, you wouldn't think, what kind of film, like, what kind of red dye could we put on the output that would like, you know, color this thing? No, you'd put red Play DOH in. You'd think about the input to change the output. And yet we. I, I'll speak for me. I want to change the output. I want to focus on the output. These are the results I want to have. But I don't think about, how am I tilling the field, how am I planting the seed, how am I watering it, how am I taking care of it, how am I putting the stuff in me that I want to grow rather than the COVID up the red roses? And so my suggestion and my. What I have been doing lately that's been really powerful is remembering that the change that I want to see. Don't start with the outcome. Don't even start with the actions. Start with the input. Start by every day reading a little bit. Sometimes I talk to people that listen to the show and they kind of give me the impression they think I'm a mega reader. I am absolutely not. So I talk about books a lot. They've had a massive impact on Me, but all the way until I was up to 18, I would have never dreamt that I would have been a reader. I maybe had read five books from front to back by the time I was 18. In school, I was constantly trying to figure out how to get around reading because I really didn't like it. I didn't think it was for me. It took me a long time to see the kind of books that I wanted to read and why I wanted to read. And even now I don't read a lot, but I do read every day. I don't read a large quantity, but what I do is figure out what am I trying to implant in my life, what am I trying to see grow in my life? And can I, little by little, plant that seed every single day? And so that's my encouragement to you. What is the thing that you could that would change everything for you if you made that shift in your creative journey this year? And how can you plant that seed? Let's talk about how to do that now.

D (15:26)

My name is Mackenzie and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a non verbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with.

A (16:13)

GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe. Okay, so here is your creative call to adventure today. It's called select the seed. Now here's the idea. What we're going to do is we're going to go through a process. We're going to use a Venn diagram because that's fun. I like doing that. I like visualizing having a framework for Externaliz my thoughts very necessary for the chaotic brain that is inside this head. I have found that in my life, the times where I was able to make a lasting change, or the times where I was reading something every day or listening to a podcast Most of my days and. Or an audiobook or something. Something where I am planting a seed in my brain that is growing the thing that I want to see in the actions and results in my life. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go through a process to select what that book or audiobook or podcast or seed is going to be that we're going to plant every single day and see this difference. For me, it has looked like, yeah, there were times where I was thinking about health and I needed to read a health book every day. There were times where I needed to open up my right hemisphere, my symbolic brain, my spiritual side. And I was reading something like that every day. And it could look like in the morning, it was always the same time, first thing in the day, get my coffee, read couple sentences, sometimes a paragraph. If I had other things, I gotta get to maybe a couple pages, sometimes a chapter, but just a little bit to frame my day and remind myself. And I honestly think one of the things that inspired me going back to this and rethinking about this was messing around with determinism. Now it's way above my pay grade to get into what that means. Do I fully understand it? No. I think it's something to do with people that believe that free will isn't real, that everything from the big bang to what you just said and what I just did is a domino system that is out of our control. This thing led to that thing, led to that thing, led to that thing, etc. You know, dominoes, You've seen them on Facebook, weird domino pictures. You ever seen those? Seen those? Has that ever happened to you? But you get how dominoes work. And I'm not a determinist, mainly because I just can't stomach. I'm not brave. I can't stomach it. I'm not brave enough to go down that path. But what I love about determinism is that even the most staunch determinists, lots of them, still believe that we're an open system. And I've talked about that on the podcast because it's a huge part of my worldview and values that you have to be curious. You have to be open. You are an open system. You're one of the only things we have is that we can download new software, we can rewrite the code. And that can only happen if you are, in even a tiny, disciplined way, continuing to take new information in. Sometimes that challenges your current beliefs, hopefully. Because if you want to change, if you want the output to be different. You want the Play DOH to come out the other side this year, a different color. You got to put in a different color Play doh. And that looks like consuming different things. Okay, so we're gonna select the seed. That's how we're going to do that. For me personally, I'll just say another little bit. This has looked like, yes, health things, finance things, spiritual things, all that, but it's also looked like art. When I wanted to be, when I wanted to work for the New York Times, when I wanted to do some illustrations for them, and that was my top goal, the best thing I could do, the thing that was make or break, was listening to Sam Weber's podcast, you, Dreams, My Nightmares that he used to do. And I listened to that over and over and over again until I started to change because I was listening to these people that work with the New York Times. And it reminds me of this thing that James Clear in Atomic Habits talks about all the time, which is you need to be in a place, you need to surround yourself with people where your desired change, your desired behavior is the normal behavior. That's what you need to do. And when you're around people that they're just doing the thing that you wish you did, it starts to change you through osmosis, without effort, without pushing yourself, forcing yourself. And so for me, that is a complete and utter game changer. Can you find what it is? What's the one thing that you could do that would have the biggest impact on your life? And how can you soak in that? How can you plant that mindset into the code of your brain and start getting that output change? That's what we're going to do. All right? It's called select the seed. And here's the coolest part about this. Got the Venn diagram going on in the middle. Kind of looks like a seed, right, Of a Venn diagram. Two circles. And on one side you' to put ease and on the other side, you're going to put impact. And we're going to go through all the possible changes you could make in your life and creative practice and try to select the one that ha that is the easiest to do and has the most impact. And I want to just speak to this real quick. So on the ease side, let's think about it in two different ways. One, when you're planting this seed, one of the things you want to think about is, is this native or is this invasive? I have spent, like I said at the beginning of this episode, I am definitely a bit of a self help junkie and in my 20s and probably up to early 30s, but really in my 20s, early 20s especially, I wasn't thinking a lot about is this seed that I'm trying to plant, is this change that I'm trying to make, is this idea that I'm trying to embrace, is it native to the soil of my brain or this invasive? This is a huge shift and it comes with learning about yourself, both from experience, but then also kind of learning your neurotype and getting an idea of how does this work, how do people like me achieve the things that I'm after? Is it even possible? And so the first thing you're thinking about on the ease side is the stuff that you're putting in there. It's native to you. It sounds like this works with my system. Now the other side of the ease that I'm kind of thinking about is taking from an idea called the Snowball Method. Now I believe this comes from Dave Ramsey. I've never done any Dave Ramsey courses or anything. I don't remember even where I heard about this. Cause I don't really consume his content, not really my flavor. It's a bit too scary to me. But. And among other things, however, I do think this is a really legitimate idea. This idea of the snowball effect. It's about trying to get rid of debt and instead of thinking what's the biggest debt that would have the biggest impact on my financial situation to get rid of? And starting there, start with the smallest debt and erase that. And when you erase that, you get that positive sense of momentum. How can you see a change that's happening in your everyday that will give you more willpower, that will let your brain unlock more resources to go after that thing when it sees that this is worth doing. So on the left side, on the ease side, that's what we're gonna be thinking about. We're gonna be thinking about how, what, what is the smallest thing I could start on that feels easy, that I could get some progress in and if I could do that, it would start, it would have a snowball effect. Okay, now let's think about the other side of this. Two circle Venn diagram. The impact. The impact. This one is essential to think about and it comes from one of my favorite books. It' one Thing. If you've listened to this podcast very long at all, you've probably heard me talk about this book, the One Thing. And it's because it's had a huge effect on my life. It's very good for my chaotic brain that is difficult to organize and gets overwhelmed easily. In that book, he talks about how instead of thinking about the 500 things you have to do, try to figure out what is the first domino that I need to knock over, that if I knock over this domino, everything else I want to do will either be done by default, like it'll just kind of happen, or it'll be easier to do if I accomplish this thing. When I was thinking about the options of what my next book should be or what should my next self initiated project should be, back in 2018, I started thinking about, okay, well what, what project could I do would make that would make all my other goals easier to achieve? And I decided, okay, I want to get better speaking gigs, I want to get on better podcasts, I want to publish kids books, I want to do all of that stuff. What would make all of those things easier? And I decided it would be easier if I pushed hard into picture books because I had some openings there, I had some people coming to me to make picture books. I thought if I push that way I might be able to get on the New York Times bestselling list. And that would open up doors and make it easier, that credentials would make it easier to get on better stages, that it would be easier to get on better podcasts, it'd be easier to get more picture book deals and other book deals if I did that. And I focused from 2018 all the way to 2023 on that goal. And thanks to a lot of you and also people throughout the world, therapists and teachers and librarians that helped champion the book Invisible Things, we hit that target. And all of those things came true. All those dominoes, domino's got knocked over a lot of. I got a lot of requests right after that happened. And then now when I cold call somebody and I have that credential, that domino is easier to knock over. So I'm now moving to the next domino. And here's the cool thing about the one thing. When you knock over a domino, one domino can knock over a domino one and a half times its size. And so you're trying to find what is the smallest, easiest to knock over that will have the biggest impact. That's set up to knock over something one and a half times its size. And the thing is, is that you can do that over and over and over. And it's something like in 10 dominoes, a regular sized domino can knock over a domino the size of a door. If each one is just one and a half times bigger. And it's something like 29 dominoes. And that little domino can have a. A domino effect. To knock over a domino the size of a skyscraper, that is the power of the domino effect. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to go through all the kind of categories. Health, family and friends, relationships, if you will. Finances, let's say work, rest. There might be more than that, but those will get you started. These are general categories. You could think of a goal in each one, a domino in each one of those categories, and place it in this Venn diagram. Either does it fit in, ease or impact, or both. Put it on both, and we're looking for the ones that are in the middle. Do you have a health goal, the best domino that you could hit over in that that is both easy and impactful? Do you have a health goal that if you got healthy in this area, you'd have more energy and it would have an effect on your family, friends, finances, work and rest? If you took care of. Do you really need to recover from burnout? And can you find easy ways that are highly impactful? Are you in a place where finances are weighing you down in every single way? It's really difficult to be creative if you have deep financial instability. Are there ways, Are there things that you could do? Do you know someone who said, hey, I could totally get you a job here if you just press the button, I'll make it happen? And if you had a few months of working that job, it would have a big impact on your wellbeing, on your work, on your friends, your family and friends, your health, all of those different areas. Okay. Once you figure out which one of the categories and the kind of general direction of what you need to be doing, instead of thinking, what's the result that I need? Or what are the actions I need to take? Those are all interesting and important things to think about. But instead of starting there, start with what is a resource that I could start implanting into my brain that would help change the code? How can I make the input different and match up to the change that I want to see in the output? How can I find a book on this topic that I can read a little bit each day, so it reprograms my brain? This is easy level of effort, but it has a massive impact for me. I don't know if there's anything that had a bigger impact on my life than becoming a reader, but you don't. You have to go with Your native self. You know, for me, I wouldn't have believed I could become a reader. But if you've tried a billion times, you couldn't make that habit stick. Go to podcasts, go to audiobooks, but find the change you want to make instead of leaping to the results. Start with what is the input? What is the seed? What is the book? What is the podcast? What is the audiobook that I could just plant every single day into my soil of my brain and start to become different from the inside out, the deep change. Instead of just trying to slap on a fresh coat of paint, how can I plant something different? That's your challenge for this week. All right, that's it for this episode. Just a couple other little notes. The first one is, we talked about in this episode, this idea that one of the easiest ways to make the change you want to make is to spend time in spaces where you're surrounded by people, where the desired behavior is the normal behavior. It's the norm in that community. And it's one of the reasons why a couple years ago, we started doing monthly virtual meetups with the paid Patreon backers and substack subscribers called a creative pep rally. And every month we get together and. And the first thing we do is share creative wins. And the reason why we do that is because I want to create a community where the normal behavior is taking action on your creative work and your creative potential and turning it into a reality. And when we share that, we normalize that. This is what happens. Breakthroughs in your style, breakthroughs in your career, breakthroughs in your ideas, breakthrough in your discipline, in your practice, and your every day of showing up, I want to spend time with those people. So I created this community to do that. And so if you want 2026 to be a year where you are taking action, this is a different way to plant that seed. And so go. You can sign up and back the podcast on Patreon patreon.com creativepeptalk or sign up as a paid subscriber to my substack@anniejpizza substack.com the other thing we're testing out, we've been doing the pep rally for once a month for two years now. We have a really vibrant community that started to show up there on a regular basis. And it's one of my favorite parts of the month. There's. I come outside of that chat every single time, just super jazzed. We talk about wins, then we go through the episodes from that month, and we talk about the CTAs. And we talk about the gaps and the holes and also how we've applied it or what we got from it. And then we talk about obstacles, things that we're trying to face next. And that filters into the episodes we do the following month. So you kind of become part of the show, which is really cool. And I like this becoming less of a parasocial relationship and more of a real thing. The other thing we're testing out is this thing called Creative Pro Talk. And so we're trying to also, every two weeks it's a creative Pro talk, and then two weeks later, it's the creative pep rally. The pro talk is similar, but this is for creative professionals. So this is for people that are making it their job. There's nothing. There's no hierarchy of better and worse. This is just if you're trying to make it your job, there's a unique conversation that you need to have around that. And if you want to normalize wins in that way, that's what we share there. These are career wins, specifically. And we're exploring, like doing a hot seat where one person asks a question and a thing they're going through, and they present kind of their particular scenario, and then we all chime in to try to help them figure that out. And, you know, this show, one of the things that I'm gonna be exploring this year is trying to figure out exactly what the heck this show is. And what I mean by that is I think I try to get really specific around what's the stuff that I've learned that I could share that could be helpful to other people. And then also who do I really want to encourage and help and see win, and what do I want to see them win in? And I think one of the pieces of that for me is this idea around neurotype centric world building. Okay. And this is a riff on something Cal Newport, the writer Cal Newport talks about. He's like a productivity kind of guy, and he talks about lifestyle centric planning. So planning goal setting around the kind of lifestyle that you want to have. And I feel like this show is maybe trying to take that in a slightly different direction. Where really my passion is around seeing people world build, terraform this world, their little world, into something that is hospitable for them. And that's a creative act. And that takes lots of creative energy to figure out, who am I, what are my needs? What are the opportunities in this world to show up and meet the needs of others? And that's Kind of at the heart of the show. And that doesn't always look like working for yourself, that doesn't always look like being a professional creatively. Now, I think it always requires creativity. And so I think there's creativity at the core of the show. But I want to throw that out there because it's just something I'm noodling on. It's something I'm thinking about and I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are. There's part of that that gets into neurodivergence, but also the neurodivergence of every person on the planet. How each person is very different, even if you're more neurotypical than others or not that your best bet at living a vibrant life where you. I feel honestly like we should be organizing our lives and our societies around meaningful experience and contribution. And so I really feel like that's the cornerstone of being a human and that we have so much work to be done, there's so much need that there's no reason why we can't orient ourselves to have meaningful existence that plays to our strengths, plays to our neurotypes, and that we could set ourselves up where we are able to be regulated and fulfilled. That's really the kind of creativity that I'm after. I don't know exactly how that fits into this podcast as a whole. I think it's kind of been at the heart of it the whole time. I do think creativity is at the center of that. But what I don't want, and the reason partially that I want to kind of figure that out a little bit on a deeper level, is because I don't want it to feel like either you're a full time creative or you're failing. Because I don't think that's true. And for a lot of people, the best thing they could possibly do is to at least have a part time job. I have like five jobs. Right. Like for me there's so much value in not putting all your pressure on your highest form of art or creativity. And so just been thinking a lot about like, what is this show trying to help you do? I think mostly it's trying to help you figure out who you are, figure out the contribution you can make and creatively go after that on your creative path. I don't know, that's a bunch of stuff. So anyway, I'm curious to hear back from you guys around that and I hope to see you at the next creative pep rally. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones for video edits, audio edits, animation and sound design. Thanks to Yoni Wolf of the Band Y for the theme music and the soundtrack. And thanks to all of you for listening until we speak again. I will see you next week, and until then, stay pepped up.

B (37:57)

Hello, this is Jack Wilson, the host of the History of Literature podcast. For the past 10 years, I've been talking to novelists, biographers and scholars about the greatest books in the history of the world and the men and women who wrote them. Like our recent episodes on Dante in Love, a starter pack of 10 Indian classics, the pop culture that influenced Sylvia Plath, and a talk with scientist and novelist Alan Lightman about the wonders of nature. Join us at the History of Literature podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

A (38:30)

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.