Creative Pep Talk
088 - You Have Insane Power
(upbeat music) Hey y'all, just a quick heads up. The episode you're about to listen to is eight to 10 years old. Now, these episodes were intended to be evergreen, and I still believe there's a lot of good information in these early episodes, but I do wanna let you know that some of my ideas have evolved over time. Times have changed since we made these episodes, and ultimately, I'd like to think I've grown a lot as an artist and a human, and that these don't necessarily represent my best work, or the best of the podcast. If you're new around here, I suggest starting with the most recent episode, or at least go back to around 300, and move forward from there. Enjoy the episode. Before we get started, I just wanna start with a giant shout-out to Nate Yutash. He's a buddy of mine, graphic designer and illustrator. He lets us use the music of his band Metavari on the podcast, and it has totally changed our whole game and the whole production and the whole vibe. I love it, it's perfect for creative pep talk. It would mean so much to me if you would go check out their SoundCloud. It's SoundCloud.com/Metavari-M-E-T-A-V-A-R-I. That music will, I kid you not, it's so groovy. I put it on all the time. When I'm working, it's nearly instrumental. It gets you into that proper workflow. Love it, you will probably love it too. Go check it out. (upbeat music) Hey everybody, you're listening to the Creative Pep Talk podcast. This show is about commercial art, making a good living and making great art. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. Dr. Pizza is in the house today. Our proud syndicate is Illustration Age. You can find this show at illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. You can also find the show wherever you find podcasts. We're on Stitcher now. We're on iTunes, we're on SoundCloud. We're probably on Spotify, even. They have podcasts now. Podcasts are all over the place, man. Just, just, just real quick. Just real quick. I wanna say thank you so much to all of you. You guys have been sending me emails and reaching out and sharing the show and all that. Some of you guys have pretty big followings on the old social media. And so, honestly, there is no greater compliment than you guys being willing to tell your friends about the show. And so many of you have been really, really generous about doing that. And that's why the show is kind of growing at a rapid pace. So I just wanted to take a moment out and say, thank you so much for sharing the show. Nothing is a bigger compliment. And it means so much to me. And yeah, so I owe all of the growth to you guys. Thank you guys so much. You know, really, the show has grown 99% by just sheer organic grassroots growth by people remarking on it, telling other people about it. And so really, I have so much to thank you guys for. So, thanks guys. (upbeat music) I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. And I have applied this to my creative practice too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro. And that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's fluid engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So go check it out squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out for yourself. And when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code PEPTALK, all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meetup every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met. And we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture bookmakers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well. And we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're gonna chat through our new Journey of the True Fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice so that you can leave 2024 stronger than you came in with more visibility, connection with your audience and sales. Sign up to whichever suits you best at either patreon.com/creativepeptalk or antijpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. (upbeat music) I am so fired up about today's episode because I believe that it might be the most important episode that I've done. And it's kind of an abstract concept. And so I've put in a lot of time and energy to try to figure out the best way to articulate it because I believe it has crazy potential. And so here's what the story is or here's what the episode is about. The stories we tell ourselves will become our story. Your beliefs will become your reality. And I think this idea is so esoteric that we ignore it, we want to downplay it. I think it's been co-opted by some strange people in the past, but it's also something that the most brilliant minds in history have spoken over and over and over and over again. And it's this, that your potential is only limited by how much potential you believe that you have. I often think about it like this. I often wish that I was like Neo or Harry Potter or something like that because they had people all around them all the time telling them that they were the one. They were like, you have extreme potential. You have amazing gifts. You are the one. You're going to save everyone. And at some point I realized that it wouldn't matter if that was me because their power is still limited by their ability to believe in themselves. And if you listen to the show, you know that I have a crazy heart for creative people that I am just obsessed with helping creative people communicate their value to a world that undervalues them. I believe that creative people are some of the most powerful and important people on the planet that society desperately needs. And for whatever reason, whatever forces, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's people in the world who understand creative people's value but have money to be made by keeping them down. I don't know what it is, but for whatever reason, I feel like we're currently in this place where creative people are massively undervalued and taken advantage of. And I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks is that we don't believe that we have value. We don't believe in our own potential. And I want to talk about today how you can find those limitations that you're putting on yourselves, find those places where you're living less than what you're capable of and owning those things, abandoning them and not returning to them. I think it starts back in our school system. And if you follow Seth Goden, you've probably heard him talk about this, the idea that our school system is built on the Industrial Revolution. That's the model in which it was based. The people that determined what school would look like in the Western world were industry leaders and what did they create it to be? They created it to be. With good intention, I'm sure. They created it to create great factory workers. People that could sit in the same place for six to eight hours and do what they're told. And those people will do fantastic in the factory industry world. So if you got amazing grades, you might be that type of person. And I'm not dismissing those people that are typically brilliant. But what I am saying is that there are a lot of people that don't fit that mold, that were given medication and labels and stereotypes that have tremendous value to society, but were measured with the wrong metrics. They were measured in ways that don't determine whether they're valuable to society. It determines whether they're good at working in a factory. And I was like that. And I think that the reason I did this episode was because the further I dove into the business world, the more I was shocked to find out that the people that were most successful in business were more like me than the dude in high school who killed it in calculus. I had this wrong belief that limited me, that said that right-brained people are bad at math and bad at numbers. And therefore, bad at business, that all the money and all the cash and success is on the left-brain side. Now, let's start by dismantling the fact that there is no such thing as right-brain and left-brain people. If you go do the research, go just Google it. You'll figure it out really quickly, that that whole premise was a misinterpretation of a scientific study. That there is no right-brain person, there is no left-brain person. There are different types of personalities, but those do not come into play. And beyond that, what I've realized, what I've gone on to realize is that it takes a lot of different types of people to make business work. If you look into the EMIF, they talk about it takes entrepreneurs, it takes managers, and it takes technicians. Now, I personally fall about 70% into the entrepreneur side and about 30% into the technician side, both of which are really, really valuable in business. And so today's episode is all about saying, if you think that by being a creative person, that you are inherently not that valuable, and you're lucky if you get to doodle on some paper and get paid for it so you can eat some beans and rice, I'm telling you right now that that fundamental belief is limiting your potential, it's limiting your future. And I'm calling you out, I'm saying listen, I guarantee you that you have amazing power, but it's only limitation is your ability and willingness to believe that. It's so easy to take some of these ideas and lump them in with platitudes and cliches and write them off. And I think they can easily sound like knowledge is power, that kind of thing. But the fact is this is straight up science. There was this really interesting study that I heard and I'm gonna do my best not to butcher it, that I heard about on Radiolab. I'm gonna link to it in the show notes, the episode is called The Voices Inside You. And it's about the power of the voices in your brain, what you tell yourself. It has tremendous power in the outcomes and how you perform on a regular basis day and day out. There was a man named Claude Steele and they did this research because what they saw, they saw the data said that when an African-American and a white dude go to college, if they have the same credentials, the same IQ, that the African-Americans do worse on tests and get worse grades. And they wanted to figure out why, why is this? So they did a test where they got a group of whites and African-Americans and they gave them this test. And they basically said this is an IQ test. And the people were essentially the same on paper, same IQ, same credentials. But when they told them that the test was measuring their intelligence, that the African-Americans scored significantly lower. There was a big gap in the test scores. Now, they tried it all over again. But this time instead, they said, this test is not about measuring your intelligence, it has nothing to do with that. It's simply a study of how people problem solve. And when they took that pressure off and they didn't play to the stereotypes, the stereotype being that there's this big history of stereotypes that say that African-Americans are not as intelligent as whites. That's been a stereotype throughout history. And I'm actually so far removed from these types of stereotypes that I didn't actually know that was a thing. And it is incredibly disgusting and sad to me. But when they didn't play up the stereotypes and they didn't put the pressure on, on those stereotypes to disprove them, the gap disappeared. They did the same thing with women and men. Now, there's a stereotype that says that men are better at math. And in the test scores of tough math tests, the gap is present that men score better than women with the same IQ. So they gave the test out and they said, this is going to measure your intelligence in this field. And it was a tough math score, math test and the women scored way worse than the men. Then they did the test all over again on it with same controls, different situation. But instead they said, you may have heard that women score worse on these tougher math tests. However, with this particular test, we have found that there is no gap between test scores of men and test scores of women. And when they broke apart that stereotype, they broke apart those belief systems, the gap in the test scores disappeared again. The men and the women scored the same. And to me, this speaks volumes to the power of our words and our heads, our beliefs and how dramatically it changes our outcomes. It's holiday shopping time, y'all. It's time to freak out. Not because uncommon goods is here to make it easy. Listen, all I did was click the for her section on this site and I instantly saw five things that I could get, Sophie, don't tell her, but I'm thinking either the National Park sweaters, the tea advent calendar. There's also just below that little bubble tea kit for my oldest. And then I saw one of these, you know, the retro little viewfinder orange real viewer things, but you can make it your own photos. Okay, it might not make sense. Just, you have to go check it out yourself. Here's the thing. I have seriously never seen so many good options for gifts online in one place, and unlike lots of other convenient options, shopping uncommon goods actually supports small businesses. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/peptalk. That's uncommongoods.com/peptalk for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) So the first thing that I suggest you do is play some capture of the flag. The idea is this. If you feel like you've been relegated to the right side of the brain, thrown to the margins of society that say, "Go ahead, doodle over there. "We might throw you a few pennies from time to time." If that feels like it's you, here's what I want you to do. I want you to imagine that you are a dog in the invisible fence of the right side of the brain. And you know those little yellow flags that they put around? We're gonna take each flag down. We're gonna take each place where we have this false narrative playing out in our minds, and we're gonna dismantle it. First, I think you gotta accept that your world is kind of like that M-Nite Shalaman. Shalaman, I'm not gonna say his name. The guy that made the sixth sense. He made a movie called The Village. We're not gonna talk about the merits of the film. We're just gonna talk about how often life is a lot like that film, where the people in power are gonna be perpetuating ideas that hold us back and keep us from our greater potential, from exploring the world. So in that film, this is a spoiler alert. If you are really desperate to watch that first hand afresh, then maybe you should go back in time and watch it when it was relevant, but the time has passed, and I'm gonna give it away. The idea in the movie is that the elders keep everybody under this idea that there are monsters in the woods and no one can leave the little village that they're a part of. The village is very primitive. It's very old school. And you find out later that it's actually this remote village in modern day. But the elders have been keeping it a secret and perpetuating it from generation to generation. And I think often that in life, there are a lot of people out there that want to perpetuate these ideas that creativity's not valuable, that there are only certain types of people that are successful because it gives them power. That's how they make a profit. And I think there are a lot of businesses that want to come along and they understand that what you do, what you do is super powerful and they can pay you 0.001% of the profit and go take what you created and make a killing. And I think you see people, we talked about this before, you see people like Draplin or my friend Tyler Deeb, people that have taken their creativity instead of lending it to other people, whether there's no problem in that, but they managed to create a business of their own. They managed to take that creativity and use the power on their own. Draplin took a stack of paper, folded it in half, stapled it, gave it a super nice brand, great branding, great graphics and created a giant business called Field Notes. And he didn't wait for some other business savvy person to come along and say, hey, I'll throw you a few pennies if you come, if you brand this pocket notebook, he figured out how to create that value all on his own. So what I want to encourage you to do is I want you to look back into your life and look at the places where you have those pain points, those shock points where you've felt that invisible fence shock you, and I want you to dismantle it. I believe there were places, maybe, that there were people that demeaned the type of work that you wanted to do, that told you that it was less than, that told you it was not as cerebral or intelligent or worthwhile, and so it caused you to go on a tangent, it caused you to go down a road that maybe you shouldn't have gone down. So go back and look back at those things. Maybe there were places where people said, oh, that idea has been done, or you're not original, or, you know, oh, that reminds me of this, or blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things that caused you to create something that was inauthentic, caused you to go down a path of obscurity, caused you to hide behind something. For me, it was so helpful to look back through my past and connect to those places where there's that pain where someone tried to hurt me, tried to put me down. You know, I had a person that told me that they would hire me when they didn't want any white space on the page, when they wanted to fill the whole thing up. And it caused me to rethink everything that I did, 'cause it was, they meant it as a diss. And the truth is I like really busy things. My work isn't all about white space. Some people still is about that. It doesn't mean that it's better. And so I think you really have to go back and find those places where those insecurities started and take them down. So, the second thing that I think you need to do is test the limits. Go ahead and go feel the shock and keep going anyway. You've heard it before, right? That bravery isn't the idea that you don't feel fear. It's that you feel fear and you do it anyway. So you've identified these areas that you have been shocked and you're afraid and you're hiding and you're not doing the work that you're meant to be doing. And my challenge, step two, is to take those areas and do something actively in those areas, feel the shock and keep going anyway. There's a writer, the writer of Eat Pray Love. She wrote a book called Big Magic. Her name is Elizabeth Gilbert. And she has a lot of really good ideas about creativity. One of the things that she talks about is this idea of fear. And you say, okay, like everybody that's made things for a living or has made a big effort to spend their life creating things knows that there's a lot of fear involved in making things. I don't know why it is. We could pontificate for hours about evolution and how we were afraid of saber tooth tigers. And now there are no saber tooth tigers. So we act like a bad comment online could kill us. I don't know, it might be that, might not be. But if you're out there trying to express the stuff that's in you, trying to put your ideas into the world, it's a very vulnerable position. And I understand it. I felt the fear. It's scary sometimes for me to do the podcast, but I do it anyway. And so my challenge to you is to feel the fear and do it anyway. Liz Gilbert, back to her, she says, fear's never gonna go away. That's something you can be sure of. You'll be more afraid sometimes, less afraid other times, but no matter what, it's coming along. And so what she suggests is you say to fear, look, I get it. You keep me from dying and that's fantastic and I love you for it. But get in the backseat, I'm gonna drive. You can come along. I know you're gonna stay. You're gonna be along for the ride, but we are going. We're not gonna stop because we're afraid. And so here's my challenge to you. If you're thinking about doing a new project, if you're thinking about, man, I'd really love to do this kind of work, but I have all these fears attached. I have all these vulnerabilities that I'm worried about. My challenge is to you. Identify those areas and then do it anyway. It's nothing brilliant. It's not gonna blow your mind. I'm just encouraging you to do the work that you know you're supposed to do even when you feel the fear. (upbeat music) (cheering) One thing, the last thing I wanna tell you to do is refuse to replay. Refuse to continue to give into these fears. So you've identified them, you went into the battle. Don't be surprised when you broke through the first time, but it comes back another time. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to see it not as a neutral thing that says you can do it or you don't have to do it and you're the only one that's gonna feel the pain for that. I want you to see it as a holy temptation or an evil temptation that is taking you from doing the work that you need to be doing. I desperately believe that you need to be telling your story, not for yourself, but for the other people like you so that they know that they're not alone. People like you need representation out in the world. It gives me so, it almost brings me to tears when I find someone with great success that has ADHD, like Walt Disney or Tom Hanks or even Dave Ramsey. It means something to me. It means something to me that they've done the work and they're out there doing awesome things and it makes me think, you know what? No matter what I've got going on, no matter all the stumbling blocks that I have, I can go out there and do awesome stuff. So when this thing comes along and it tries to stop you, these ideas, these false narratives that are playing your mind that tell you why you're not important, tell you why you're not valuable, tell you why you don't have anything to give, you have to say no to them, not for yourself, but for other people. I think self-awareness is fantastic. I think you need to have a really good understanding of who you are, understanding of why people might get value from what you do, but I think the problem is sometimes when you get really self-aware and you really understand your market and who's gonna respond to your work, that you also become self-conscious because you realize who's gonna hate your work. That's a big problem for me on the podcast. Like I know for a fact that this stuff that I'm doing, that there are people out there that staunchly, fundamentally disagree with people encouraging other people or trying to inspire other people. I know that for a fact, I know there are people out there talking smack about Andy J. Pizza. I got it, I get it. And sometimes it makes me afraid. But on the flip side, I know that I get emails of people who have been brought to tears from the podcast, who have kept their job, who have quit their job and got a new job, people that have stayed in school, people that have had breakthroughs in their career, people who have published books on the back of this stuff. And so I can't give into the temptation that says, just because people are gonna hate it, just because there are people that are gonna judge you and hate you for it. I can't give into that. I gotta keep making this thing any way. I got to keep going. Brene Brown, she's a, I think she has a PhD. I could be wrong about that. But she's a writer and a researcher. And she always talks about this Theodore Roosevelt quote, and I'm just gonna read it. And it's about getting in the ring and doing the work. And here it goes, it says, it is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose faces marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, that great devotions, who spins himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. You will fail, people will hate what you do. You'll have bad motive sometimes, you'll do it wrong, you'll make mistakes. And the leaders out there that are perpetuating this idea that you won't have something to gain by throwing you off course. And, you know what, I guess, I gotta tell you, this episode was hard to record, but I believe in it so strongly, and I want to encourage you to not allow these negative ideas, these negative forces, these fears to stop you from living to your full potential. I think nowadays with the whole internet shame game where people get thrown into the pit and people tear them apart, that more than ever we have these fears that are stopping us from making the work. And I just want to be a voice, as painful as it is, honestly it is painful for me to be here, sitting here, recording myself, telling you to keep going. It's hard, it's hard to even make myself vulnerable in that way, but I believe it too strongly and I'm too dedicated to not get in the arena and fight. The worst case scenario is that you do fall, that you do get thrown into the pit, but I'll tell you what, look at these folks, there's plenty of people that have gone through that and come out the other side. The internet will move on in two days, you'll be back as good as new and you'll have learned something. So don't let it stop you, feel the pain, but keep going anyway. So I want to end on a personal note. You know, growing up, my whole childhood, I was told that I was just like my mom because I was creative, because I had a big personality, I drew pictures, all these things that on the surface made me look exactly like my mom. And as I grew up, I watched her life really unfold into a tragedy. And if you can imagine kind of feeling like you're looking into your own future and seeing destruction and thinking, man, I am totally doomed. This was a battle of my mind from an early age that said that I am the type of person, I have the DNA that says that I am going to fail. And I remember this one time I was in a track race and I'd given it everything I got and I pushed and I think I won the race. And afterwards, I ran over to see my dad and my dad was in tears. And my mom and dad had split up and I think he all along the way had seen people say how much I was like my mom and not really bought it, not really saw it and actually saw a lot of himself. And he's actually a really successful dude. I love my dad, he's a super, super, super good dad. And anyway, I run over to my dad and he's crying, he's in the stands, not being able to pull it together. And I remember thinking, like, why are you crying because I just won a little track meet. And he tried to articulate it then but I didn't really get it. And later we had a conversation about it and he said that in that moment he knew that I had his determination, that I had his strength and ability to push through the pain and push myself to my limits and really work for something. And he had seen all this work pay off in my track race. And the truth is that I have a lot of my dad in me. And the side of me that's like my mom is, I'm really proud of and I've actually dedicated to using that side to the best of its ability. And actually I even would love the chance to make up for some of the things that my mom didn't get to do with her creativity. And so I just want to encourage you, just like me who was growing up afraid of his own DNA, afraid of his own potential and skills and strengths, afraid that the world said that they don't matter, they're not worth anything. I just wanna speak into this, I wanna speak into this creative world and say that I believe that you have amazing potential. If you're a human, first of all, I really, really do believe that you have amazing potential in its only limitations or your ability to believe it. And that may sound like a cliche or a platitude, but it is maybe the most important truth that has had the biggest impact in my life. My ability to bet on myself in big ways has paid off in just amazing ways. And recently I was actually getting out of the car after coming back from an event that it actually went really, really well. And I looked back over the past five years and I could see the places where I really questioned my potential and I played it safe. And I saw some of this strength and this power and this potential play out at that event and thought, man, imagine if I was willing to have made bigger bets, what kinds of things I'd be getting my hands into right now. And so this is my encouragement to you. My encouragement is believe that you have tremendous value, that you have amazing potential to deliver value into the world, into the business world and into the world at large to affect other people, that the stuff that you do, the work inside of you can actually dramatically help and change and grow other people. And if you don't believe it, somebody else will and they'll come along and pay a small percentage of the value that they get out of it. And that is something that I can't stand by. I can't stand it. It's something that constantly just gets me so fired up and angry. And it's actually the reason I've abandoned this term freelancer. I don't like it. Freelancer to me, you know, you can call yourself freelancer and that's fine, but to me in my own life, I feel like it was a name given to me that says, I'm available to be taken advantage of. And so I switched from that mindset to a small business mindset that said, look, I'm a business person. I'm creating value all on my own. I can also create some value for you if you're willing to really value, sorry for saying value so many times, but value what I do. And so I want to encourage you in that. I hope this episode is a call for you to make giant bets on yourself and go out there and be vulnerable. Feel the shock and keep doing it anyway. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Thank you guys so much for listening to Creative Peptalk, for sharing it, writing reviews on iTunes, backing the Patreon, being Peptalkers, supporting peoples. I don't know what, I need a name for you. You guys tweet to me at Andy J. Pizza. Would you give me some ideas of what the fan base or the audience or the Peptalk friends could be called? But thank you guys so much for that. Thank you to Yoni Wolf for our theme music from his band Y, thank you to illustrationage.com. They are our syndicate. You can find this show at illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. Thank you to Nate Yutesh and his band Metavari for all the other tunes. You need to go check out their SoundCloud page. SoundCloud.com/metavari, M-E-T-A-V-A-R-I. Go check it out, listen to it while you're making stuff. It will totally get you in the groove. Really, really good, like nearly instrumental stuff. I love that. Thank you Nate for letting us use your music. Guys, I hope this peped you up. Do whatever it takes to stay Peptalk. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - I did consider Barney a friend. And he's still a friend to this day. - The idea of Barney is something that I want to live up to. You know, I love you, you love me. I call it the purple mantra. Barney taught me how to be a man. - Generation Barney, a podcast about the media we loved as kids and how it shapes us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. 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