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The most common problem there is you don't have enough work. No matter what kind of creative you are, whether it's opportunities or sales or clients, whatever it is, the most common problem that we have is that we're just not getting enough of those as much as we want or need. And I think that there is a secret to getting regular work. The key, the secret key to regular work is not what you think it is. And so we're going of get into what I think it is. I think we have two guesses. I think both of them are often wrong. And there's a third one that we mostly don't know exists. And I can tell you that because even over the past couple years that have been not the best for illustration client work. I. Yeah, it's not the most I've ever worked in client stuff. I've done more books than I have the client focus. But I've got some of the best projects I've ever got in the past few years, even as it's been a little bit quieter. And so I think I have a sense of why that might be. And we're going to get into that and then we're going to end with the show and Tell. That is our creative call to adventure. It's either show and Tell or a modified version called Explore and Tell. If you're not quite ready for show and Tell, and this will help you do the thing that I think is essential to getting more regular opportunities coming your way, go 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. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's a 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. 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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. Okay, so I'm pretty jazzed right now, so I'm going to try to rein it in just a tad. I know you came here for the pep, but I don't want to scare you. I'm feeling very, very charged because I just got off a call with a group that a group of Patreon backers and substack supporters of this show. We do two calls a month with the group. One is Creative Pep Rally where it's everybody and we're mainly talking about creativity and creative wins in our creative practice. Then there's also Creative Pro Talk where we talk more with creative professionals and we're talking about career wins and we're talking about solving career problems. And we've started doing a thing where we have one creative in the hot seat and they tell us about what they're working on and where they're stuck. And then people in the group and myself included, give feedback and possible solutions and encouragements about that project. So I just got off of one of those creative pro talk calls, so I'm very jazzed. It was very fun, very exciting. But the reason I'm doing this episode is because I think there was something from this call that might be relevant to you. And it's about how, as creatives, we often have the same problem, which is we don't have enough work, we don't have enough opportunity, they're not letting us do as much of the thing that we want to do. That's the most common problem. And I think that most of us jump to two possible solutions that are both often not really going to help you. And so I want to talk about those two and then suggest what a real solution might be to this problem of not getting enough work, not getting enough opportunities, and then talk about how you can implement it. So when we don't have enough work, we often think. I think the first thing we think is the problem is that people don't know about us. We are not being discovered enough. We are not on enough people's radar. We need to go viral, we need to take off on social media. We need to get on a new social platform where we can get ahead of everybody else and really pick up some steam so that enough people know about us. That is the solution of discoverability. We need more people to discover us. That's the first one. We think that's a problem, rarely the problem. That is a problem, but it's only a problem if you have solved these other two parts. The other thing we jump to is people don't know about us or people don't like us. People don't like our product, people don't like the thing we're trying to sell. It's not good enough. And again, maybe slightly better problem to focus on than being discovered. Some people just focus on discovery. They think if I could go viral on TikTok, then I can think about what product to sell, because now the world's my oyster. I got all these people looking at me now I can just sell them whatever I want. I'll figure that out later once I crack the big thing, which is discoverability. Not true. There are lots of people that have thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers that don't know how to turn it into a business because they didn't think about the product. But those aren't the only two parts of this equation. And they're the least of your worries. It's often not that you just need more people to hear about it, or you just need to get the right product, get the right work, tweak things, tweak things, make it that much better. It's not that it's more often than not a middle piece in the audience. True fan journey. And it gets at. What is the difference between someone who knows about you and someone that's a fan? Think about it like music. Someone said to you, do you know this musician? Now, you could either say, no, I don't know, or yes, I do know, or I'm a fan of that person. What's the difference between one that you know about, you've discovered them, and one that you would say you are a fan of? To me, part of that equation is consistency. So if you know about them, you've heard that song, you might even like one of their songs. But that's not going to make you a fan. That's not going to turn you into what a true fan is, someone who would spend a considerable. A considerable amount of money on that work. Right. So what's the difference? The difference is it's not just a single that put them on your radar, it's an album. It's a body of work that has transformed you into someone who's passively knowledgeable, into someone who is engaged and trusts that musician to produce good stuff. If you're a fan, you're looking forward to the rest of the cuts on the album and the next album, because you think this person has the goods. They know what they're doing. They know how to produce this kind of thing that I'm after. Even if you're not even sure what that thing is, they're sure about it. They know what they're trying to produce in you, and they've made an effort to produce that multiple times. And so the key piece isn't discovery, it isn't sales. It's in between the thing that goes from knowing about an artist to being a fan of them. And it's trust. It's building trust that they can produce the goods. Now, what are the goods? We're going to talk about that next. But I think this is so essential because I feel like we all don't even realize that this is part of the equation. And then once you do, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed because how do you know that you do have the goods? And then how do you figure out what are the goods? How do I produce them? How do I get them out there. How do I show people and tell people that I've got them? You do exactly that. You do show and tell. Let's talk about that next. Okay, so show and tell. We're going to get to that in just a second. That's going to be our creative call to adventure. First, I got to explain this a little bit more. This is a concept that we've talked about on this show a lot, but it's one that I think is pretty abstract. And it seems abstract when it's really very practical, very real, very tangible in your own experience. And that concept is the concept of value. Now, I'm a little bit uncomfortable with that concept or that word because it sounds too businessy, marketing y, that kind of thing. Not very creative, but it's just the best word to use. And the truth is, you've probably even heard that businesses solve a problem. If you want to have a creative practice that has a relationship to an audience, I think you do have to be good at solving a problem. The thing about that is that's not how we mentally think about what we turn to creative work for. So when you go to turn on a movie or you go to turn on an album, you're usually trying to solve a problem. Whether it's like, I want to have fun. I want to enjoy this. I want to be moved. I want to be moved in a very particular way. When you go put on a record on your vinyl player, you're thinking, I want this vibe. You're eating that album for an outcome. And you might not be aware of it, but you have trusted. If you bought the album, you knew you didn't have this thing where you heard a song on a Spotify playlist, you clicked it, listen to the rest of the album, and none of it sounded like that. None of that. Nothing else on that album gave you anything in the realm of the feeling that the single gave you. That's why you know of that artist. You like one of their songs, but you're not a fan. And the difference is they are able to produce maybe one feeling, maybe one specific feeling, maybe. Maybe some connected feelings. Maybe they're an artist that knows like a. Like a Radiohead is someone or Kendrick Lamar is a good example of. These are people that know how to produce a handful of feelings reliably, maybe even more. They know the craft of doing that. Most bands are more like a Drake kind of thing where he said he's trying to make you have an album of what it feels like when you're cruising in a car at night. Like the perfect album to companion that, the soundtrack to that. That's the value that that person's trying to provide. Now, I'm not a major Drake fan, but if you are, that's kind of. That's kind of the vibe I personally, as I was trying to explore and figure out what is the vibe that I want people to get from the picture book. And each picture book might have a slightly different one. It might have a couple related ones that are complimentary. Sometimes, if you're like a proper artist, you might give them two types of value that are in conflict with each other because you're gonna disturb them a little bit. That's totally valid. But you have an intention, you have an idea not of just what you want to give them, but also the craft of how you produce that in somebody. Now, real quick, I just have to get. I got to get close here. Listen, if you are an artist and you are overwhelmed by the idea that you would understand the thing you're trying to deliver and also know how to produce that feeling in somebody, you are in good company. I mean, if I do say so myself, I was there. I am there from time to time, but especially early on when I have this idea of like, oh, I want to make a story. And there's this kind of an idea of what a story is supposed to produce in somebody. It's kind of like going to an open mic, and you're a comedian, comedy open mic, and you're like, I know that I'm trying to make them laugh. That's an overwhelming equation. That takes a lot of confidence. That's a lot of pressure. But let me just say, first of all, you can learn how to do these things. You can figure out the craft of how to produce the thing you want to do. It just takes not even brains. It just takes heart. It just takes caring enough to unraveling this. The guy that wrote the picture book, a pizza with everything on it that I illustrated, he brought up a really good point around this. He said that Penn and Teller talk about magic. Magic tricks are usually just. You would never guess how much effort the magician took to pull this off. And that's why it seems like magic, because you would never imagine that someone would go to those lengths to guess your card. And the same is true for art. You don't have to be a genius. You don't have to have all the brains in the world to produce a laugh, to create a punchline, to do a story that makes you Cry. To make a podcast that makes you pepped, you don't have to be a genius, you just have to care. You just have to care enough to learn it, to obsess over it, to study it. And then you will figure out these are the pieces. This is what it goes into to create an analogy that makes you feel pepped. This is what it takes to tell a story to kids that make you feel excited or moved or whatever it is engaged to get attention. And so I got a little bit off course because I was doing a little pep talk within a pep talk, saying my little tangent about, hey, I get that this can sound scary and overwhelming. I get like, it's much easier to be like, I'm like the alt comic that doesn't. That does comedy, but not for laughs. Now I like all comedy, don't get me wrong. I like weird stuff that challenges things and all that. I do like all that. But I get the impulse to want to be so avant garde that you're saying, I don't even know what I'm trying to produce in somebody. Because as soon as you say I'm trying to produce that, now you've made yourself vulnerable, not just to other people, but to yourself because you're like, can I do that? Do I know how to do that? Am I good enough to do that? You are. You just have to care. You just have to care enough. Back to the main point. Just. Just to highlight how this has played out in my own creative journey. When I was making Invisible Things early on, even before I knew it was Invisible Things, the kids book that I made with my wife Sophie, I knew that one thing I want them to feel is the feeling of I get when I was watching stop frame animations of plants growing when I was a kid. Like, I don't know, this was in a lot of different things. I don't know exactly where I thought of this from, but when I would see like a stop frame animation of a plant, like a flower blossoming, it would make me feel like, life is precious. Life is amazing. Life is the universe is good. It's like giving, I don't know, it's generative. It's this very difficult to pin down thing. But I wanted to pin it down and I wanted to understand how do you produce that? It was a feeling of mystery and awe and I don't know, I'll say awe. And I got really obsessed with how do I produce that. I have other versions of this thing too. Like values. As you go to choose a value, I Would say, try to choose something that is a noun, not an adjective. Now awe is a noun. It's something you can have. Hope is a noun. Go look it up if you doubt me. Presence is a noun. Go look it up. Sometimes it's hard to know, is this a noun? Is this a person, place or thing? This isn't a grammar class, but something that you can hold, something that you can have, you're trying to hold it and hand it to somebody else with your work. And so I was trying to produce this feeling that I got watching this stop frame animation of a flower. And this is something I put in mood boards and mood videos that we made for Invisible Things when we were pitching it, those little scenes like that. And the craziest thing that affirmed this, but blew my mind, was Jenny Slate, the comedian, said the exact same thing on Mike Birbiglia's podcast, that she wanted to produce this feeling of watching a stop frame animation of a plant growing and blossoming. And my brain exploded because I'd been talking about that and thinking about that for years. And I thought, this is like, I'm totally. I've lost it. Like, what is this? So somebody got it right and they had the same, a similar kind of intention. So this is something that artists do. They have an impulse, they have an intention. They learn the craft of producing this feeling in somebody else. They learn the chemical reaction, what does it take? What's the equation that produces this in somebody? And it's difficult to do. And it's fun. It's fun to keep trying to do it. This is why I keep making this podcast, because I know I want to pep you up. And I have some theories about what produces pep. And I don't want you to just think it, I want you to feel it. So I know, like analogies, metaphors, stories, I know there are ways to, like, produce this thing in somebody else. And I'm gonna keep coming back and trying it, first of all, because it's fun to do that, to exercise your skills and your craft. And that's what's so fun about creative work, is that it's got a little bit of a casino vibe because it's got this intermittent reward. You can't do it every time. That's what's so fun about storytelling or joke telling or illustration, you know, creating concepts is that you don't get it every time. And so it's kind of addictive in a very productive way. So I love that about art. I'm really letting the ADHD fly here. Today because I'm pumped. I'm just letting you know. I know that I'm getting out of control, very excited. But that's because I think one of the ways to pass on pep is just to capture when I'm pepped and then you can put this on and hopefully it's a little bit contagious. I wanted to add one little thing. So part of the reason I think it's important to create projects where you're doing this on a regular basis. It's one of them is just so that you're just doing the thing that you were born to do that you want to do without anybody's permission. So I would recommend having a project where you are producing this value for people so that it's fun, so that people know that you can do it. You're building trust because they're watching you do this over and over. And then the third reason is so that you're game ready. So that when someone shows up to get you to do a talk or get you to do a show or get you to do a set or get you to do some client work, you are. Your muscles have an atrophied because you're not waiting to get called up to the plate. You're doing it regularly. That's why it's a creative practice. And so those are some of the reasons why I think it's important to have an idea of what this value is, what it looks like. It took me years of pursuing illustration to even have an idea of what this looked like. Like what. What was the value and what was the craft of producing that value. But it's such a worthy pursuit and now that I'm on this side of it of like, oh, I love this. I have an idea about this. I keep wanting to do this over and over. I'm just so desperate to tell past me starting out that was overwhelmed by the notion of even trying to go to the open mic and be funny and say that I was trying to be funny. You can do it. You just have to care. You just have to be really into it. You just have to be dedicated and you just have to keep trying and you will get it and it will be what makes creative practice so satisfying. Now let's get to the last thing, which is our creative call to adventure. It's called show and tell or explore and tell. And this is how you can start doing this in your own creative practice. A well built wardrobe is about pieces that work together and hold up over time. That's what quint does best premium materials, thoughtful design, and everyday staples that feel easy to wear and easy to rely on even as the weather shifts. And boy is it shifting. For the longest time I was really frustrated with the fashion situation because I was aware of the ethical issues. I was aware of a lot of the stuff I bought fell to pieces in seconds. And I am an artist for a living with three kids and I just couldn't afford the really, really quality stuff. But that's before I knew about Quint's. 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