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Creative Pep Talk
541 - Are You Afraid of The Art? How to Get Past the Fear and Have Fun Again
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Are you afraid of making art? Are you? And maybe you don't even realize it, but do you have anxiety around it? Do you get analysis paralysis imposter syndrome? You sit down. The prospect of sitting down and making something spikes your stress on your watch. Like, do you have all of this fear around your art and is it stopping you from showing up authentically showing up in an excited, fun way where you can participate? If that's you, this episode is for you. I want you to feel like I'm not afraid anymore. I said I'm not afraid anymore. I am excited about making stuff. That's what this episode is hopefully going to give you is a new lens where you're feeling like you did before about making stuff. For me, this lens changed everything. Where now when I'm looking at the prints of my latest book that I hand painted, I'm excited about the mistakes. I'm excited about the way that the paint looks messy in different places. I'm excited about the ways that it's not perfect. And so that's what I'm hoping to pass on to you and to me and to embrace in a deeper way. If you're into that. This episode is for you. Here's the plan. We're going to talk about the lens that will help you do that. We're going to talk about why it's so important. And then we're going to go to the call to adventure, something you can do with these ideas today. It's called Right side up and it is a reflection that is going to help you put on a new pair of glasses that will help you see art in full color and the full spectrum like you did when you first were excited about making stuff. If that sounds fun, stay tuned and let's get into it. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative Pepsi. Nothing hits like home cooking and hellofresh makes it easy to do more of it this year with recipes that feel good and taste delicious night after night. 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Go to hellofresh.com Pep Talk 10 FM to get 10 free meals a free Zwilling knife, a $144.99 value knife on your third box offer valid while supplies last free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's easy to sell it when you love something this much. I'm a big fan. Squarespace is an all in one website platform designed to help you succeed online. Here's what I love about Squarespace. They're intuitive and super versatile. Drag and drop tools mean you can make a custom website without knowledge of code. That makes people say, whoa, who made that for you? Looks like you built that from scratch. People have really said stuff like that to me about my site and I built it myself quite easily with Squarespace. You can check it out@andijpizza.com if you want to check that out. What I did with it, it doesn't look templatey and it screams my creative brand. I also love that I have all of my domains through Squarespace now, which makes it seamless and easy to manage. I know the first thing as creative folks do when we get an idea is to grab that URL and now you can keep track of all your websites and your domains in one place. That's super intuitive and easy to manage. Head to squarespace.com pep talk for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use promo code PEP Talk all one word to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. My hope for this episode is that it would just feel like a voice memo from one creative friend to another because I really want to ask you to not let fear determine all of your creative values. You know how you go about making stuff, how you set up what you think is good and what's bad, and how that determines how much of yourself or how much of your taste you allow in your work. I don't feel like we talk enough about how scary making things is and how much scarier it gets the further you go on your creative journey And I'm making this episode primarily for myself, first and foremost, because I can get very afraid of making stuff. And maybe you're not tapped into that feeling right now. And it's easy to forget what it feels like to be overthinking and worrying about what are the comments going to be? What if people think this is unoriginal? What if the, you know, now I'm making picture books, I'm getting reviews. It's easy to think, like, what are people going to feel about this? Are people going to think this is bad? Or worse, think that I'm a hack, or think that, you know, whatever it is, the further you go, the more that you know about what's, quote, unquote, good or bad about art, the harder it can be to show up and let your curiosity drive instead of your fear of being a phony or an imposter or a loser or a poser or whatever it is. So making it, first and foremost, myself. A voice memo from me to me, but also to friends of mine who I have watched as I've gone along 15 plus years on my creative journey and watched creative people either give up or kind of give up by default. Like, yeah, maybe they're still making stuff, but they're not taking risks. And when I say taking risks, I don't mean like doing some, like, avant garde thing. I mean risks of participating in the creative movements that they're passionate and interested in. Risks like putting dumb jokes in their work. Risks like trying really hard to make something good. And I've just had experiences and I've seen friends fall by the wayside in the creative path and give in to the critics and the reviews and the comments, or even more so, just the potential judgment of others. And they go along and collect all these rules about what's good and what's bad, and it causes them to paint themselves into a corner where there's just no room for error, there's no room for trying. And it makes me so sad because creativity is supposed to be loose and fun and it's supposed to be like, you know, spilling your guts. And you see it with almost every artist you like. As they get older, they tighten up. They want to be more on point. They don't want to. They want to protect any vulnerability when the whole idea of making art is being vulnerable. And so I want this episode to be permission to fan art, boy, girl, person, out about whatever it is that you're into and participate in it and realize that it's not going to be for everybody. And yes, you. Your work will be. Will have valid critiques on it. Like, there will be valid critiques about what you choose to do, because there always will be. And so that's what this is about. And when I started to wrestle with this idea, the thing that surprised me the most was that the thing that is scaring you, the thing that is holding you back from showing up in your own creative practice, might not start with you sitting down at the table and being afraid, and might not start in how you're approaching your creative work. It might start with how you approach and see and engage with the creative work as a whole, art as a whole. It might start in the way that you consume and view the work of other people. It's kind of like, you know, the people that are the most socially worried about judgment are often the most judgmental people because they're going around town looking at this. You think you can get away with that? Oh, my gosh. Look at this guy. He's got to be joking. Oh, my gosh. If that's how you're looking at everybody else, you can only assume that that's how they're looking at you. And if you could start to be more generous, curious, open in the way that you view others, that same lens is how you're going to approach the person in the mirror or the art that you put onto the canvas. And that might sound loose or abstract, but today we're gonna talk about specifically what that looks like, how to practice it, how to exercise that muscle. And honestly, it's not some, like, just be nicer to people. It's. For me, this meditation on this idea has opened up not just how I think about my creative work, but it's made me love and engage with creative work as a whole in such a more vibrant way that's really fun and exciting. And I think the shift is something that's happened to me over the past 10 years, and then I've been really excited about it recently. And so I want to get into that. Let's start by talking about what it looks like to do the opposite and why this lens ends up taking over, why this lens of judgment and harshness and critique ends up defining how you think about art and then how to get out of it. We'll get to that in just a second. So I'm asking you, please dance like nobody's watching. Create like nobody's watching. Please. Come on. Can we go back to that? Will you go back to that? I want to see that stuff. I want to see that kind of. That energy of you pouring yourself out, getting pumped, excited to participate and make stuff without all of the fear of, is this going to be bad? Is someone going to think this is bad? Is someone going to think this is derivative, unoriginal, uninteresting, boring, plebeian, pedestrian, whatever you want to say. Instead of letting those voices determine how you feel about the art that you make, instead of letting those voices make the prospect of sitting down and creating seem cumbersome, dull, overwhelming, and scary, what if the prospect of sitting down to create could feel exciting again? When I was really little, we had a computer, our first computer. And I barely remember that thing, but my dad had it, and it was for his work as an accountant. And I don't know if I barely ever touched the thing. To me, it was so uninteresting. It was black and white. Letters and numbers might as well have been binary. And the prospect of sitting down with that computer, with that black and white screen just seemed so uninteresting, so dull, so cumbersome, so overwhelming, even a little bit scary. Like, if I do the wrong thing here, this thing might explode. Like, it just felt like, you know how code. Like if you get in code and you start tinkering, tweaking the code, you can break the whole thing. And if you don't know code, you don't want to fricking touch it. You know what I mean? Your whole website can go down. The whole app could quit functioning if you don't know what you're doing and you mess with the code and you put some bad code in. And that's what that computer felt like. And when you approach art in that black and white way, that binary way that is this good or is this bad, is this pass or is this fail? Will this be celebrated or will this be destroyed by the comments or critics or reviewers? When you have that screen, that interface in the way that you think about not just your art, but art in general, it is no surprise that it's scary and it's overwhelming and it's cumbersome. But what if you could interface with art in a way that feels like that next computer we got that was full color that I remember that AOL sound logging onto the Internet and just feeling like this sounds. I would go on there and I would search for little way. This is. If you don't. If you weren't there for this, it's not gonna make any sense. But I would look up like wave files of Jim Carrey quotes and just play them and Be like smoking. Somebody stop me from the mask, you know, like that. The sounds, the smells. There weren't smells. We didn't have that technology yet. We still don't. The possibilities, the full spectrum experience felt like the possibilities were endless. And my hope is that if you can develop a full spectrum way, engaging, not thinking about art, but feeling it through an experience with all the shades and all the colors, that you can start sitting down at your desk and just hearing, conditioning yourself to hear that AOL login sound. And feeling like, I'm about to explore, I'm about to have fun. I'm about to do something that's never been done by me. And that shift can make all the difference for me. It looks like. Quit thinking about art through the lens of is this good or bad? Do I like it or do I not like it? And it's not that I think there's anything inherently wrong with critique. And actually having a sense of what you like and you don't like is part of taste. It's not all bad. But if that's the only way that you think about and engage with art, you are going to engage with it in a way that is so binary that it will be, what if you push in the wrong one or the wrong zero? What if that brushstroke is slightly wrong? What if, you know, like, every decision has to be on point or the whole thing crumbles? That's not how art works when you're working with the full spectrum interface of feeling it and experiencing it and reflecting on it instead of just critiquing it. And so this episode is about dropping the binary way of approaching and engaging with art. In my mind, what this looks like, it's like a reverse the Matrix. I'm going to never stop talking about that movie because I was like, 13 in 1999, and it just turned my whole world upside down in the most ridiculous way. It's just how I think about life in so many ways. And I want you to have a reverse Neo moment. There's a moment in the movie where the one Keanu Reeves sees the world as it really is, which our world is in that movie. A simulation. Ones and zeros, essentially binary. Instead of looking outside and seeing birds and trees and power lines, it's just lines of code. Black and white, green and black, actually code. And when you are moving through the world through the lens of the left hemisphere, through the lens of numbers, you're not seeing it as it is in full color. You're not seeing the meal for all of the stuff, all of the beautiful colors and things that the person did to put it on the plate, you're seeing $29. When you're looking at the car outside, you're thinking that, oh, my Gosh, that's like $100,000 car. You're not looking at the person across from you and thinking about, look at the experiences. Look at the full color. Look at the spectrum of emotions and experiences and qualities you're seeing. This guy probably makes $200,000 a year. You're seeing facts, figures, binary code. And that way of seeing that, is this good? Is this bad, Is this right, is this wrong? That lens is ruining not just your experience of other people's art, but your own view of your own art. And when everything is make or break and there's nothing in between, you do have to scrutinize every little thing that you do. It's like if you looked at an image on a computer and it was a picture of Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or whatever, you're seeing it in all of its color. It can barely compare to the real experience, but you're getting a good sense of it, right? That also could be translated into binary, where each pixel is. Is determined. The color of each little pixel is determined by a series of ones and zeros. And that's how flat your experience of life and art and your own making becomes. And when your experience is that flat, each pixel, you better get every one and zero right. And if you're overthinking every single move, and it has. Your practice has become this thing that is cumbersome and dull. It's because your canvas has become that black and white screen of my accountant father's computer from 1990. And what we want to do is turn that bad baby up. We want to flip it upside down. Which brings me to my question. If you want to know how do you test whether you have fallen into the trap of the binary lens? Here's my question for you. If you've seen Stranger Things, all the episodes, and I ask you. I'm not gonna give any spoilers away, okay? Just don't worry about that. We just finished it. We're a little behind everybody else, and I'm not gonna tell you anything, but I am gonna ask you this question. If you've seen it, if you haven't seen it, replace this show with whatever show you've seen all the episodes of. Maybe it's Breaking Bad. Maybe it's Game of Thrones. Maybe it's Lost. If you've just been out of the TV game for a while. But if you've seen all of Stranger Things, here's my question for you. What did you think? And I'll just give you a little space to feel that. What's the first thing that came to your mind? What did you think? What'd you think of Stranger Things? If your first response to that was you liked it or you didn't like it or you thought it was good or you thought it was bad, you have the binary lens and we want to turn that upside down. We want to bring that into full color. It's not like I said, it's not a real problem to have a critique. I think there's a place for critics, there's a place for that. You need to have a sense of what you like and what you don't like. I think that's all true, but there's so much more in the way of how to engage and experience and love and celebrate art and creativity and life in your own work. That's what we're going to try to unlock here right now. 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Go to quentz.com peptalk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Pep Talk free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com Pep Talk we heard you. Nine years of bring back the Snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you if you really want. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Real quick, little ADHD sidebar for a second. Look, okay, here's the thing. You know, I just want to do a little. A tiny. A tiny little tangent. And this is. It's related, but it's not. Look, can we just nerd out for a minute? Cause this is cool, and it does relate, I promise. Gonna circle back to what we're talking about. One of the things that started this for me, what I started thinking about with this episode, was we were watching Stranger Things, and one of the things I noticed about. One of the things I noticed that was strange about Stranger Things was that. Or that was interesting, was that it reminded me of some of the stuff that Angus Fletcher talks about in his book Primal Intelligence. And we had Angus on the show. You could go back and listen to that. One of my favorite interview episodes. But in that episode. Here's the thing. Not in the episode, in the book, here's the thing, he talks about how he believes that one of the reasons that Shakespeare was so revolutionary and so popular and what made people really kind of obsessed with his work was that not just that he was working with archetypes of characters that people were familiar with and liked. Like, there's a general consensus in creative work or in storytelling that you need to work within these archetypes and whatever, the hero, the mage, the sage, the rebel, whatever, all these different things, you do see, these show up a lot. But one of the things that really interesting, successful ones do differently is that they put a huge twist on that thing. And Angus Fletcher says that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare was so popular, is that he would introduce these archetypes that we thought we knew, but then he would flip them on his head. On their head. That is one of the things that Stranger Things does very, very well. Whatever you think about it, whatever you like about it, whatever you don't like about it, whatever your binary is about this thing, whether it's good or bad, whatever, I think you would have to agree. And it might be one of the core elements of what the show's about, even is taking these people that you think you would know, people like Steven Harrington and be like, oh, you'd think this is the jock who just doesn't give a crap about anybody. This guy is a total sweetheart. He loves kids. He's a great babysitter. This is totally not what you take Nancy. Popular girl, prissy, whatever, at the beginning. And by the end, she's Rambo. She's literally Rambo. Okay, this is relevant, okay, for some reason to this episode. And here's why. Here's why I think it's relevant. It's because if you are afraid of putting yourself in the work, if you see every creative thing as a binary, what you're gonna see it as is, this is e part of the Cool Kids club or not. It's either sanctioned, like these decisions, these line weights, these shapes, these colors, these whatever. They're either part of the Cool Kids club. In the genre that you're a part of, the movement you're in, they're either accepted or they're not. It's in or out. And if that's true, all you're able to do is fit in. All you're able to do is be part of something. You're never able to contribute something unique. You're never able to put your own twist on it. Therefore, you're never able to break out from the art archetype and be truly interesting to anybody. You have to, at some point accept that art isn't binary. It's like that Niels Bohr quote which I originally heard. I just. I want to shout out to the person that I heard it from, which was Frank Camaro, who is a designer, who, when I was starting out, was doing just these super interesting meditations on what design is. And, you know, it's. It even went far beyond that. And I was a big fan. And he introduced me to this quote from this physicist who's a famous physicist, Niels, who said, the opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth. And that's true in quantum physics, and that's also freaking true in art. That art doesn't work like numbers. It doesn't work like accounting. It doesn't work like my dad's black and white computer. It works like this full spectrum. And it means the opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth. And it means that this thing that is un cool to some people might be super cool to other people. It might hit on a deeper level. There is no this is right. This is wrong. This is. Even when I hear people talk about, like, talk crap about a band from five years ago and not have the foresight to be like, there's a lot to do with just the context of your experience and the time that we're living in, and in five years more time, this might actually sound good again. You know, for me, nothing sounds better right now than Alanis Morissette and tlc. There's something about. I Mean, guys, take a frickin minute and just consume a little bit of that. The first track on Jagged Little Pill, is it called All I really Want. That thing is a masterpiece to me. Oh my gosh. And TLC, I've been listening to that with my 10 year old. And that first album, the red one, crazy, sexy, cool. The production on that, the vibe is unbeatable. Like it's so literally effortless in the vibe. I just can't get enough. And then when they came out with the next one, which had Scrubs and Unpretty and all that, I'm just gonna nerd out on TLC because they're just so, so freaking good. And their voice, like T Boz's voice, is so cool. And I'm doing this on purpose because I know some of you are like, what the heck? TLC is not cool. No, Scrubs isn't cool. It's the context, it's the time. The opposite of a profound truth might be another profound truth, baby. Okay? That's the relative nature of the spectrum, the full spectrum of art and Unpretty, by the way, just one more nerding out thing. I told you. This is the ADHD sidebar. Unpretty, if you don't know. One thing I noticed about this song. First of all, I love that the first album's very like traditional in terms of a lot of it's about romantic relationships. But this album is almost all about, like supporting women. Not the whole album, but the singles. And I think that's really cool. First of all, the second thing I think is cool is and again, that's a little twist on the R B genre, which was the R and B genre traditionally was so all romance. This is a good little twist, a Stephen Harrington twist. But I just wanted to say, this is so dumb. I just want to say go listen to Unpretty if you're a music producer. Here's what I want. Put this in a new song because I just think it's so underrated. The basis of that beat is like a super distorted guitar that's like really noisy, but it's super quiet in the mix. So it doesn't come across as like loud and aggressive, like metal or something. You don't even really notice that it's a guitar. But it's like so low in the mix and so not abrasive that this distorted guitar sounds so melodic. I'm into it. I love it. You can tell I'm into it. I love finding stuff that people think is uncool and Finding really great stuff. And I just think it is so much of what it means to embrace the full spectrum approach to creativity. And so that. That's my little sidebar. But I think it illustrates why it's not just paramount to not being afraid to create stuff, but also to creating stuff that really connects and breaks through the noise. All right, so this is our CTA Right side Up, our creative call to adventure every week. You know, we don't like to just talk about stuff. We don't want to just feel excited. We want to do something that actually has potential to have an impact, a real world impact on our creative practice. This week, we are going to do that through the lens of this right side up reflection. And here's what I want you to do. Because your fear of making might not be anything about you making art. It actually might go deeper than that. It might be how you're seeing art, how you're consuming it, how you're engaging with it in this binary. Do I like it? Do I not like it as the end all be all of a reflection or engagement with art? This is what. Honestly, let me just be honest with you real quick. The reason I made this episode is because I kept getting annoyed with people's hot takes online about art or music or stories or TV or Stranger Things, whatever. Like, I hate that. I was talking to Sophie about this, my wife, and she said something that I think hit the nail on the head. She said that when people are like, oh, I don't like that thing, that. That is a. She said, it's a way of putting yourself above it. It's a way. It's an ego thing of being like, I'm not saying you can't like stuff or that's not part of an engagement. It's just one part of a much wider spectrum. And when you just say, I think this was crap, it's a way of being like, I know better than the people that have spent their entire lives doing something that almost nobody on this planet has ever done, which is make a TV show or make a movie or write a book. That alone should cause us to put ourselves in a seat of gratitude. But also just reflection of, like, why did this person take the time, rather than critique, rather than rush to critique, to critique, why don't we reflect more on things? And for me, this shift has happened over the past probably five, six years, coming through, reading a lot about story and art and symbolism and all that kind of thing. And it's made me realize that I can even enjoy reflecting Consuming bad art stuff that I don't love. If I engage through it through a reflective lens. If I start thinking about like, what's the. If this was a one person psyche, this story, what would the shadow be? What would it look like to integrate it? You know, if we're thinking about how a character changes in a story, where's the change? How do I like that kind of thing? All of a sudden I'm enjoying so much stuff and I'm having so much more interesting conversation about art than I liked it, I didn't like it. And that lens also makes me less harsh on my own stuff, less scared to make my own stuff because it's not passer fit. And so that's, that's. Here's what I suggest you do. This is the right side up activity. If you've seen Stranger Things, you know, any, any episode, you know, there's this thing called the Upside Down. The Upside down is very black and white, very dull, very scary. That's the view of the binary screen. That's what we're trying to get out of trying to get to the right side up, up on land where everything's in full color. And here's how we're going to do it. We're going to do it through a reflection on take. I think this will work best for like a story. Take a story, a movie that you watch recently, a TV series you finished, a book that you've read, something like that. And instead of saying how many stars, black or white, good or bad, instead of starting there, let's go through these series of questions that might give you more of a full spectrum experience and how you're engaging with the work. So first one is what feelings did I have that came up during this story? So that's first we're just gonna say like, what are, what are the feelings that I had? Maybe you had frustration, maybe you had fear, maybe you had excitement, maybe you were moved to tears. Just, just list them all out. No judgment, no, nothing more than that. You're already going from like or didn't like to 10 feelings that you probably had during this. That's already a fuller spectrum of reactions in response. Second question is which feelings were a reaction to the art itself in which were a reaction to the artist that made it. So for me, the ideal when I'm engaging with a movie or a book or something is that I lose my sense of self into the thing. And I'm mostly having feelings about what's happening in the story. Sometimes if something goes weird it throws me out of it and I start thinking about the artist that made it. I started think, I started thinking about why did they do that? Why didn't they do this? What are they trying to say? What am I trying to feel? What's their perspective? When I start thinking about the artist, it's not even, I'm not even saying it's bad because that can be really interesting. Sometimes. Art is designed to be like that where you start having to ask yourself what is the intention of the creator, but then start thinking about which feelings belong in which category. That's an interesting thing. Like, oh, I was just swept up in the moment and I was so afraid. Or I was actually really confused and uncomfortable. And it had me because I was feeling like, why did this person make this? So that's another way to think about it. And also I like that, you know, reacting to art is not super thinky, it's subconscious. Hopefully a lot of the time it's more feelings based on. So third one, what character made the biggest, healthiest change or adapted in the most inspiring way? So a lot of story expert kind of people think that the person that changed the most for the better is the main character of the story, even if they're not getting the most airtime. One movie that came to mind randomly was the recent animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. To me the biggest change came from Master Splinter. And so I think he's the main character of that movie. I can't remember the change he made, but I just remember thinking that. So just think about who's the main character of the story? Who made the biggest positive change? What was that change that they made? Number four, which character was the least healthy, least adaptive? This could be a villain in a more traditional story or it could just be the main character in a more true to life story. A tragedy where the main character doesn't change. What change could they have made that would have led to a better outcome or been more adaptive? See how I mean there is an infinite amount of ways to think, engage with story and even bad stuff teaches you changes you. Like I didn't, I wasn't crazy about Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, but afterwards I started thinking about it through these lenses and I started noticing, oh man, this alien character is like the shadow character. It's like the thing that all these characters are, the quality that they're all repressing and it comes out of nowhere. It's this really interesting shadow character. And all of a sudden I have all these interesting feelings and experiences. And it's working on me, this creative work, instead of just being like, eh, fail. Didn't like that. Whatever. Number five, last one. What ways do you relate to both the hero, the most adaptive from question three, versus the villain, the least adaptive in question four. This is where it gets even more interesting. Because now art has this power to be almost like a spiritual practice. Now you're starting to think about what is this speaking to in my life? In what ways am I, have I. Can I celebrate that I have changed and adapted? What ways am I like the villain and that I refuse to evolve and grow? What are the way? What. What is it? And you could even say in this question, what does this say to my life? How does this relate to what I'm going through for good and for bad and for in between and everything, all, you know, all these different colors. So that's the reflection, that's the right side up reflection. If you start to engage with art this way, it will change the way you make stuff. Instead of thinking, oh, this is, you know, Stranger Things pulls in a very literal way, in a very unhidden way, pulls from so many fun influences. Instead of just writing that off as derivative, unoriginal, start saying, like, what was it about Spielberg? What was it about Eternal Sunshine? What was it about these monster movies that spoke to them? What is it? How does it support or help the message or the what it's about or the themes of this show? Okay, now you're getting in more interesting territory. What could they have pulled differently? What could have they have. What could have they have taken tropes and then flipped them on their head in a way that they didn't? Okay, the, the. This is more fun. This is better engagement. And when you start switching this, you're going to go to that full screen color lens and it's going to change the way you feel about your art. I really do hope that this episode helps you to have more fun in your work. Be less afraid. Get back to the good stuff, man. Get back to when you were having a blast trying to participate instead of trying to impress. I really want to see that for you and see that in myself and see that in my friends that are making art. And I think if we could start to embrace this full spectrum lens, that might be possible. Two little notes, super small little notes we have. If you support the show on substack@annajpizza substack.com or on patreon patreon.com creativepeptalk you have access to our monthly Creative pep rally meetings, which is we talk about creativity wins, all that kind of thing. It's really fun. We had 50 people there last time, all kinds of different creators. Very, very fun. We're also doing once a month a creative Pro talk. So if you're a creative professional and you want to talk about all things career related, we have that. And one of the main things I want to tell you about is that if you hate ads, you hate ads on all podcasts and on this show you can get ad free version an ad free version of this show by either supporting on Substack or Patreon. Both have a perks page that will show you how to access that and actually connect with it in the app of your choice. You can actually get that feed that ad free feed. If you. If every time you're just sick of skipping and you hear these ads and whatever, that's how you have access to that. Other thing is I have a new book that I made with Sophie, my wife Sophie Miller called Mysterious Things coming out in the summer. We need your support and pre orders for that and not only we just need it. I want you to see this. This is some of my favorite work to date. I just saw the first images of the interiors and I am so fricking pumped about just the humanness, the mistakes. It's just I hand painted it and it just has that quality that I love in print. So if you like my work and you want to support this podcast and my work and all this stuff, one of the ways you can do it is go to InvisibleThings Co and pre order the book Mysterious Things. We so, so, so appreciate it if you order it from Birdie Books, my local bookstore. I'm gonna go and sign all those pre orders before they go out. So if you wanna sign book, that's a way to get it. Thank you to Sophie Miller for being a producer and editor on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, sound design and animation. Thanks to Yoni Wolf of the band Y for our theme song and our soundtrack. I made a little playlist of all the songs we pulled from for this show. If you like the music and you've like. What is this? I want to listen to this. The full songs are in this playlist. I'm going to put it in the show notes. Just a warning, it is often explicit so just know that. But probably my favorite band and we love and support all the stuff that Yoni does, all the music that he makes. So thank you Yoni, and thanks to you for listening. Until we speak again, stay Pep Top. 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. What is healthy spirituality and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of with for hosted by me, Dr. Pam King. Within for Bridges psychology and spiritual wisdom to help you thrive, featuring conversations with experts like Self Compassion pioneer Kristen Neff and author activist Parker Palmer. So go ahead, follow within four, hosted by Dr. Pam King. Wherever you get your podcasts.