Creative Pep Talk
080 - KILL FOMO BEFORE IT KILLS YOU
(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. Nothing is hurting your career, your creative endeavors. Right now, more than FOMO, AKA the fear of missing out. Hey everybody, you're listening to the Creative Peptalk Podcast. This show is about commercial art, finding the balance between thriving financially and being creatively fulfilled. It is a tough, tightrope to walk. I am your host, Andy J. Miller. Illustration Age is our proud syndicate. You can find this show at illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. You can find it on SoundCloud and iTunes. If you're an iTunes-er, if you use iTunes, I would super appreciate it if you would go there and give me a little review. That's how the show grows, and I couldn't appreciate it more. Today, we have a doozy for you. We're talking about a fear of missing out and how it destroys your career. Let's go. Miro is a collaborative virtual workspace that syncs in real time for you and your team so that you can innovate an idea into an outcome seamlessly. We talk a lot on this show about the idea of how creative research shows that playing with the problem is essential to innovation. Now, when I think of play, I don't think of documents and email. So if your team is often working remote, you need something more dynamic and collaborative. I think that Miro's mind maps and flow charts where team members can edit and play in real time has a lot more capacity for innovation and playing with the problem than traditional ways of collaborating over the internet. Whether you work in innovation, product design, engineering, UX, Agile, or IT, bring your teams to Miro's revolutionary innovation workspace and be faster from idea to outcome. Go to Miro.com to find out how that's M-I-R-O.com. 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. So there's this guy, and he's on a business trip to Las Vegas. He has to do an extended stint there, and every day he has a coin from the hotel that he's staying at. They leave a coin on his dresser, and every day he goes down and at this particular hotel, they have a giant room full of these coin pushers. Are you familiar with the coin pusher idea? It's basically this machine that has like thousands of coins in it and there's just this little moving mechanism that goes back and forth that pushes the coins, and sometimes they have prizes on the coins, and so every day he has this free coin, and he kind of had this idea that he wasn't gonna gamble at all the whole time. He was gonna be there for business, he was gonna make it lucrative, but he thought there's no pain in using this one coin every day. So he goes down to the room, and there are literally hundreds of these machines. So he walks around, and he tries to find a good balance of some kind of prize that he wants that also looks like he could win in the next 30 days that he's gonna be there with these coins. So he looks around for something that's kind of close to the edge, and he finally stumbles upon these little earbud headphones, and he thinks, that'll be good. I need a new pair of these. And these look like a decent pair. So he picks machine 32, he puts his coin in that day, and then he goes about his business. Now, the next day he does the same thing, and then the next day after that he does the same thing, and it looks like the headphones are maybe even getting closer, and so he's feeling pretty good about himself. Now, one day he goes down after the giant breakfast, he had some biscuits and gravy, and he's feeling like he's gonna die, but he's excited to put the coin in and make his little investment, and he goes into the room, and he sees somebody on machine 37 when an iPod shuffle, an iPod shuffle. Here he is trying to get these stupid off-brand earbuds, and a guy, a few machines down, you know, probably puts one coin in and gets an iPod shuffle, and he's feeling absolutely livid that he would make such a stupid mistake. And so then with this coin, instead of putting it into the machine that he was originally investing into, he takes another look around. He thinks, you know what? If it's that easy to win something so much better than what I'm trying to look at, I'm gonna go take another look around, so he looks around and he sees, there's an iPad on one of these things, and it doesn't look that far. I mean, it's far off, but if I continue the rest of the way, then maybe I can get this iPad. If I just spend the rest of the month, I've only made a few investments in machine 32. Now I'm gonna do machine 48. So he puts the coin in there, and the next day, he goes down, and he's going to put his coin in the machine, and he hears this crazy alarm going off. It's wild sensation down at machine 79. That person want a ticket. There was a ticket on the coins, and they want a brand new car. They want a brand new car. Here he is with the iPad, trying to think about getting that thing. This guy just want a car down the way, right? And so he's like, okay, I'm gonna reassess the situation. Now, before I go any further, you may have discovered the point. I have a guess. My guess is that nothing is hurting your career. Your creative endeavors right now, more than FOMO, AKA, the fear of missing out. I really honestly believe that if there's one thing that you need to fix in your creative career, it's that you're doing too many things, pushing in too many directions, and none of them are actually making any significant headway. There's a book called Essentialism by Greg McEwen. It's kind of all over the place right now. It's a business book, and the idea is eliminating everything that's not essential, everything that is not your highest contribution, the things that you do best, the things that you really, really, really want, eliminating everything else because there's so many things vying for your attention, and everybody's celebrating their wins online, and it's so easy to try to go in 10 directions at the same time and end up nowhere, end up going nowhere. In the book, he says, most of us, what we're doing is every day, we're making an inch of progress in 10 different directions, and actually, there's so much more power in making 10 inches of progress in one direction, and I think, just like the coin pusher analogy, you know, if you put a coin in a different machine every day, you're not gonna make a dent, and I think the fact of the matter is this, we have a limited amount of time and energy and resources every day. Just like that coin on the dresser, we literally are only given a day's worth of energy and time, and if you stack those days into one direction, the results are incredibly significant. You'd be blown away by what you can achieve if you just every day hammer in the same direction, and so that's what this episode is about today. It's about how do we get rid of all the junk, all the distractions, all the things we're doing for the wrong reasons, all the things that have been put on our plate, and we said, "Yes, just a people, please." And so today, I wanna talk about how do you eliminate all the junk, and how do you put all of your energy behind the one or two things that are really gonna move the needle forward in your business? So let's get moving. Actually, though, before we get started, I just wanted to say that this is a process that is live in my life right now. This is what I'm dealing with currently, and actually every step of progress that I've made to eliminate the things that I know in my heart are not the right things to be focusing on right now, have given me tremendous peace, a sense of power over what I'm doing and a sense of momentum. And so I just wanna encourage you, if you're in this space where you've got, you're chasing 10 different things at the same time, that I feel you. I'm not giant leaps and bounds ahead of you. This is something that's going on for me right now, and it's been such a powerful process, and it's been so awesome for me that I'm thrilled to walk you through the exact ways that I've kind of been able to eliminate things that are distracting me and focus on the things that really count. And so I'm super pumped about this episode. I hope that you get a ton from it. I'm trying to be very action-oriented in this episode. And so without further ado, let's get into the goods. (upbeat music) Number one is trust your gut, not the permission from your friends. I have a sneaking suspicion when it comes to you knowing what you need to be focusing on. Here's my guess. If you're anything like me, you know what you're supposed to be focusing on right now. Not the thing that you're worried you're supposed to be focusing on. The thing that deep down on a gut level, you know this is the thing that you're supposed to be giving yourself in or to this season. I think, I keep hearing this idea that we often know these answers that we're searching for. The ones that we're really aid up about. We're like, oh, we just can't figure it out. We know the answer deep down. There's a piece, there's something in you on a visceral level. You know what your life is supposed to be all about right now. But there's this thing where we seek outward affirmation from the people around us. You know, for the past year, I feel like really I need to be pouring into this podcast because it's the thing that feels right. And I need to be doing work that's aligning with the podcast. That everything kind of pointing more towards this in my personal projects and my personal work. And the whole way I'm focusing on 10 different other things. And I keep calling my friends. If you're one of my close friends, you've heard this before, it's annoying you because I can't shut up about it. I keep trying to go through this idea of, do I, should I keep these other plates spinning? What about this plate? What about that? And the truth of the matter is, all of these conversations, I'm just trying to give, I'm trying to get someone to tell me what to do. Someone to a firm and give me permission to do the thing that I already know is right. But the fact of the matter, this is the tough work because nobody else has that gut intuition that you have. Nobody else knows how you feel about it. Nobody else has that first hand information. And the only one that can decide to make the leap is you. And so you need to stop going around, looking for someone else to affirm and make the decision for you. And you need to do the inner work. If you need to stop and take an afternoon walk today and kind of work through some of these things and just get quiet, do that. If you need to go on vacation, sometimes these things are so big that you need to take a bigger step away. Go rent a cabin if you have the resources and spend a whole weekend on this. Get it all out, write down, spend time actually listening to your inner world. It sounds a little hokey, it's not hokey. It's actually, your subconscious is very, very honest. Your conscious mind is very dishonest. It's full of persona and ego and fear. But your subconscious just kind of is. It just is a certain way. And so when you're listening to your gut or your intuition or your spirit, whatever you wanna call it, you're looking for the things that are inspiration, the things that are love, the things that are pure, not the things that are driven by what they call the lizard brain. The lizard brain is the part of you that you have in common with a dog. It's the thing that is chasing safety instead of what's right. Your subconscious in the lizard brain area is only going to gravitate towards things that are familiar and easy because it's job is to keep you comfortable. But the thing that you're supposed to be giving yourself to in this moment is neither of those things. And so what you have to do is you have to stop and you say, what are the things in my life that I'm giving myself to to please people? What are the things that I'm giving myself to because I think the payoff or the reward is gonna validate me and say that I'm good enough? Those are the things that are driven by the lizard brain. The things that you're chasing after to validate you on some level where you need that thing to say, you're a decent artist. Those are the things you need to eliminate. The things you need to gravitate towards are the things that you love because of the process or the journey. Like you just love it, you love doing those things on a visceral level, not because of the payoff. Those are the things that are genuinely you and they're the things you need to be spending your time on. (upbeat music) Number two, see self-awareness as a live document. So I think one of the things that is really important in life is gaining a sense of self-awareness. And actually I think that it's really a lifelong pursuit. I think there is so much in your experience in your DNA. There's so much to unpack there. There's so much in your subconscious that you really need to spend the lifetime assessing who this person is, what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what do you love, what are you good at. And that process, the thing about it, you know, I'm a big fan of the Myers-Briggs. Now that you're probably, if you know what the Myers-Briggs is, you probably have a knee-jerk reaction either you love it or you hate it. And that probably has a lot to do with which Myers-Briggs type you actually are. Which if you don't subscribe to it, you probably hate that. But the Myers-Briggs is a personality test based on the findings of Carl Jung and then it was updated and the system was created by Myers-Briggs, two people. And it's a personality test and it's about your preferences. It's about what your strengths are. And if you take that test, you know, I think the thing I really don't like about it is that taking the test is so inaccurate in so many ways. Like, I think it assumes that we already have a level of self-awareness where we can answer these questions accurately. And I think that alone, knowing the answers to these questions is quite a journey. And so recently in my own life, I realized that there are some significant parts of my personality that I really, really misunderstood. And that there are all these ways that I viewed myself that were based more on my experience than my DNA. And they were kind of throwing me off in terms of my goals and how I was spending my time and the stories that I was telling myself about myself. And so one of the things that I think is really powerful to do is to kind of take a new stock, stop and take stock of who are you really? What's the new information that you have about yourself? Look over the past couple years, not your whole life, not the stories you've been telling yourself the whole life, but what are the new things that are surprising you? For me, as an example, I realize that I'm really more of a non-fiction person than a fiction person. And that's kind of like earth shattering for me because I've always seen myself as some kind of flu-py, loosey-goosey, weird guy that loves the stories and the, you know, a more fifth fantastical side of art. And really, I've found that over the past couple years, what I'm actually gravitating towards, what I actually spend my money on, what I actually spend my time on are the non-fiction pursuits and interests. And that really updated this live document of self-awareness in such a way that it made me realize that I was focusing my energy on a lot of things that weren't really true to me. So one thing that I think you should ask yourself is what are your superpowers? You know, I want you to think about it like this. Think of yourself as a machine and think of the things that you're doing or the pursuits as this input. What are the processes and projects and work that you're doing that when you put them in you, they come out the other side kind of just a little bit better. Say you put one thing in and two things come out, right? That idea of, you know, you're not having any supernatural effect on these things. They're basically like, if you put this input into any machine, you'd expect to get this out of it. Those are the things that you probably shouldn't be spending all your time and energy on. I think you need to gravitate towards the things where you put an input in and you get, instead of putting one in and getting two out, you put one in and you get 10 out, right? What are the things that you're doing that when you touch, people don't even understand how you add so much value there? One of the things that has been an ongoing theme in my life is that I just heard it on the Good Life project, his episode with John Acuff, it's a podcast, this idea that we rarely can see how awesome and powerful our own strengths and gifts are and that because we're so familiar with them, because it's second nature to us, they don't seem astounding and because they don't seem exciting and astounding, we minimize them or we don't play to them. I keep going back to this idea of Michael Jordan wanting to play baseball and not being super enthralled or impressed by his ability to play basketball. Here's someone who is so far ahead of any competition of all time, mind blowing, I don't like sports at all, I love watching Michael Jordan play basketball because it's just, it's like ballet, it's amazing to watch this person just run circles around his competitors like a God among men and here's someone who put all of that away, put all of that aside because he wanted to prove himself in baseball for some other reason, who knows why? And I think you see this all the time, so often our superpowers go undetected by us, we don't even understand how awesome they are because to us, they're just second nature and so what are the things that you do that blow other people away that maybe you're not interested in or you're bored with, you don't see as that special? You might need to get some feedback from other people to really get a full picture and update this live document of your self-awareness. 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 slash creativepeptalk or antijpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. 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. 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 support 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. Number three is consolidate or eliminate opportunities. So in the book of essentialism, he says that you should give a grade out of 10 on everything that you're investing your time in. So, and then anything that's not a nine or above to eliminate, now I just wanna pause and say, there are things that you have to do to pay the bills and I understand that and that's no small matter. And so there are certain things that maybe you can't eliminate right now, but if that thing's not a nine, then I think you should make a plan and be strategic about eliminating it in the future because here's the thing, right? The fact of the matter is that I believe that human life is a sacred thing and that it should be invested in the thing that you were made for, the thing that you were built for. And it's so sacred and so valuable that I really do believe that you should be pouring as much of that valuable precious commodity of your time that's dwindling every second into the thing that you were put on this earth to be doing and not wasting it on eights and sevens and sixes for all kinds of exterior ways. So what I think you need to do is list the major things that are sucking your time and energy and then give 'em a grade. You know, one out of 10, 10 being this thing is perfect. It's the exact thing that I should be spending my time on. Right now in my personal projects, 10, number 10, on the list, the thing that I give a 10 is the podcast. It's something that is very, very true to me. I love doing it. I love the process of coming up with the ideas. I love investing in other people. It's got positive momentum. It's definitely a 10. But there were a bunch of things on my list that were sevens, eights, fives, twos. And those are the things that have got to go. Now, one interesting thing that you can do, some of those sixes, sevens, eights, can actually turn into nines and tens if you pivot them. So I had a few things, a few plates that I was spinning that were going in a direction that were totally unrelated to my nines and tens, my podcasts and my best of the best client work that I'm working on. And I realized that there were opportunities that I could shift slightly to be about my podcast or to be about my client work that I really love doing. I could shift those opportunities away from these areas where I'm pushing in a new direction completely or a direction that's kind of a dead end or a direction where I'm kind of rolling a boulder up a hill rather than snowballing down a hill. And I could pivot them, change them just in a few different ways. And all of a sudden, they're contributing to my overall goals. So in some areas, some parts of that list, you might be able to do that. And those are really valuable things. Now, there are other things that are on your list that you need to walk away from. There are things that you started new, there's no commitment to anybody else that you just need to stop. You need to stop giving yourself over to that because it's probably driven by jealousy or fear or whatever, there's a billion different reasons you could be spreading yourself too thin. But you need to identify those things and just cross them off and say, "You know what, I'm not giving myself over to those things." Those things might be good things to pursue but they're not great things. They're not the things that my season of life is all about right now. So you put those off. Now, there are some things on that list that are commitments and I believe in integrity. I believe that you should do what you said you were gonna do. If there are some things on that list, here's what I'm gonna tell you to do, that you have to do, you have to finish but there are four or fives and twos, whatever. If you are in that situation, here's what I suggest you do. It's something that I've done recently and it was really effective and I got it from essentialism. I spent the first 90 minutes of my day working on those things until they were finished. And this thing that was on my list for a year that I could not get off my list, I crossed it off, nearly crossed it off in a week and a half of spending my first 90 minutes on it until it was done. And I look at it like this. I think the universe is a good parent and I think when you have this plate full of food and you ate the french fries but you left the carrots and you're like, can I have some more? It's like finish your plate first. I know you don't wanna eat that stuff, that stuff that you committed to that you probably shouldn't of, but I'm not giving you anymore and you can't do anymore until you finish that. And the power and the momentum that comes from crossing those things off will serve you in ways that you won't believe. And so what are the things that you've committed to that if you just spent the first 90 minutes of for a week, you could cross off and it would totally change your existence? That worked for me and it was mind blowing. One other thing I wanna say on this point is you might have to have some hard talks. You might have to make some bad phone calls. You know, there are some things that you're doing that you're involved in with other people or other people have skin in the game and you know that they're not right and you're doing them for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes you gotta pick up the phone and you say, look, I've done some inventory of what I'm doing and you might not understand this but I feel like I need to put this thing down. I don't feel like this is where I need to be spending my time and energy. Those phone calls, those talks, they're not fun but the weight that is lifted will be worth it. (gentle music) My last point is a poignant one for me. I hope it is for you. It's number four is let go of past seasons. So early on in your career, you're gonna have seasons that totally freaking suck and you're gonna be so desperate to let 'em go that you might let 'em go too quickly, right? If you are like me and you're ridiculously privileged and blessed in this season, you might be in a place where you're having three seasons stack up in your life that were pretty good or increasingly better and the weird thing about that is it's actually really hard to let go of a good season that's over and I found myself recently continually going back to seasons that have spent their time, they're done, they're over and maybe they'll replay in little ways but they're over and those relationships are maybe not as prevalent as they used to be. Maybe those opportunities aren't as prevalent as they used to be but just out of nostalgia or not wanting to let go of a good thing and not wanting to have that sense of loss, I keep returning to them and filling my schedule with them but it's like going back to this thing that is no longer alive, like it's not animated anymore and no matter how hard you push and prod, it's not going to be like it used to be and I think what you need to identify as where is the ball live right in this moment? You know, the game is still going, it's the third quarter, you can't be fantasizing about do you remember that play in the first quarter, oh my gosh, that was amazing, let's do that play again or like, let's celebrate that play, no, if you're still in the game, you need to focus on where's the ball in play right now and you need to let go of those things, the bad things and the good things, it's hard to let go of a good season, there were collaborations and seasons in my life where there were exciting things happening and it was fun and I would love to revisit those things but there comes a time when keeping them on your plate is distracting you from being in the game right now. (upbeat music) You know, this episode in this thought process has really been motivated recently by realizing that in the past that I wasn't getting the most out of the season I was in, you know, looking back on the Andy Rock coloring book, you know, I had opportunities to do a bunch more coloring books and kind of really take advantage of that, that was, you know, 2009, way, way, way before this ridiculous surge of adult coloring kind of exploded and I'm not claiming that that was my doing in any way but I am saying that that was an opportunity where I was so, I was so all over the place I was seeking too many things at the same time, I was so desperate to go into the next season that I didn't really get enough out of where I was at that time. Another thing that I see is I did a project called NOD where I did like a different creature/monster every day for a year and then recently I've seen that same kind of idea taken to higher levels and realizing that I didn't get the most of that, I moved on too quickly or I was too distracted and that's a fact, that's real and I think for me, I wanna make sure that this thing that's filling me with life, the thing that I know I'm supposed to be doing right now, I wanna make sure that I give it everything I've got so that I don't look back with regret. So there's an ancient Chinese proverb that I think illustrates this perfectly, I think I've said it on the podcast a few times and it's man or woman, I think it was a more sexist time when they were writing these but man who chases two rabbits catches none and I think the fear of missing out is begging you to run in 10 different directions at the same time, that worry that you're not gonna, oh I want that award or look at what they're doing, it's so awesome, I need to be doing that too and blah, blah, blah, blah, going all over the place with your head cut off, it's like a chicken with it's head cut off, I think is the frontest. Going all over the place like that, you're only making an inch of progress and think of it like this, let's say those 10 things that you're able to make an inch of progress day after day for years and in 10 years you're actually in a place where you're ready to harvest those 10 things, you're not possibly going to have the resources to maintain or to even to reap that kind of harvest, it's like planting 15 fields, maybe you end up planning them over 10 years but by the time they grow you're not gonna be able to harvest that many things and so the fact of the matter is that you don't have to do everything right now, it's not that I'm saying you have to do one thing for the rest of your life, I'm saying that if you focus your energy on the right small things now, you can get the most out of them and know, have the peace to know that in five years there are gonna be new things to be doing and maybe some of those things that are bugging you right now that are begging you to focus on them that you know aren't right for now, maybe those things will come into play in a few years but I've heard time after time these people that go into these significant places that they say I wish I would have, when I was 30, I wish I would have gone back and I would have said look, there's gonna be time for all these things, you don't need to run in 10 directions at the same time and just stack these achievements on top of each other, just go after one at a time, give it your all, give it your intensity and cross it off your list and then you can move on to the next thing but going all over the place at the same time achieves nothing but making you exhausted. You know, there's a book called "The One Thing" by Gary Keller and Jay Papassan and the idea with that is focusing on the domino, the first domino that's gonna knock over the most dominoes and last year for me, it was weight loss 'cause I thought, if I can lose some weight, it's gonna give me more energy, it's gonna make me more productive, it's gonna affect everything else I do, everything else I do is going to be better for having done this one thing and it was right, it was true, when I did that it affected my home life, it affected my work life, it affected everything really, really positively and so what is the thing that if you focused on it, you got that domino going, it would actually affect the rest of your career in a positive way. The cool thing about the domino effect that they bring up is that a small little domino, just in like five or six steps can knock down a door. If you just graduate the size of the domino, each step that actually the power of momentum means that just in like, I don't know, five to 10 steps, a little tiny domino falling over can knock over something a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger and just in like 10 steps, you can knock over a door and so you wanna ask yourself, what are your superpowers? What are the things that if you give yourself to them now are gonna have the most dramatic effect in all the areas of your life and so there's some projects where you learn something, right? Like, oh, I'm gonna do this personal project because I'm gonna develop this skill but there are other projects where you learn something, it's good marketing, it makes money, you know, it increases the value of your work, like, those are the things that you wanna be spending your time on, those are the dominoes that you need to think about knocking over. And so, I hope this episode was super helpful to you. I think there's a lot of actionable things that you can do from this. I just wanna give you one more word of encouragement. This is, I think this process is kind of standing at the edge of a cliff and honestly, it's been on my mind for ages, I've wanted to do this episode but I hadn't done any of the actual hard work in my own life. And recently, I've started to do these things, really put them into action and I was really nervous about eliminating things and focusing down and all that good stuff but I will tell you this, every single step that I've taken in this direction has unleashed an inner piece, a power and a momentum in my career, like nothing I've ever done. Like, trying to actively kill this FOMO, fear of missing out junk, has really dramatically affected my mental health, my career health. And so, I just encourage you, I know there's so much anxiety wrapped up in this but I encourage you to stop and do this hard, tough work and to focus down on the stuff that really counts where the ball is live today and really make some choices and really take some action on these things. So I have this weird obsession with helping creative people thrive. You know, I think if you're truly a creative person, you might not fit super well into the society that we live in. It's not usually built for people like us and so this show for me is my best effort to enable creative people to thrive in a world that's maybe kind of hostile to them. And so, you know, every time you guys share it or you send me an email or tweet to me or Instagram it, all that stuff, every time you do that, it really honestly gets to me, it really moves me and you know, I'm really happy that this podcast is doing all kinds of cool things for me. You know, it is, I'm not gonna lie, it's been really great for me in my career but honestly, ever since I can remember since starting this career, I've wanted to all along the way, kind of turn back and help other people do what I've done and anytime I've found any success, I've tried to figure out how can I pass this on and enable someone else to do this because it's hard and I always appreciate when others do that for me. And so, I hope this show is a gift to you guys. I hope that it really makes a difference and I hope that you keep enjoying it. So thank you guys so much for your time and energy and support. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope this episode helps you find clarity and strategy for your creative career. Thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music. Thanks to our proud syndicate, Illustration Age. You can find this show on illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. I wanna do a giant, a ginormous thank you to Nate Yutash, my buddy, one of my all-time favorite people, excellent designer. Just all around, fantastic dude. Love that guy, he's also the creator of Ferocious Quarterly. Go check that out. I make lovely publications. He let me use his band Metavari's music for this episode. That's all the new music in the show. It worked so well. I loved it. I love that band, really, really good work music. Go check it out on Spotify. Metavari, M-E-T-A-V-A-R-I, fantastic stuff. Thank you, Nate. I really, really appreciate it. Guys, I hope you do whatever it takes to stay peped up because it's super important to stay inspired and stay motivated so you can be disciplined every day, show up during your best career work. Thanks guys, stay peped up. (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. I love who 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 podcast. Get the Honda of your dreams during Happy Honda Day. Whether it's a rugged new passport, pilot with available all-wheel drive, or powerful Ridgeline, turn your dream Honda into reality during Happy Honda Days. For a limited time, well-qualified buyers can get a 1.9% APR in a 2025 Honda passport and a 2.9% APR in a 2025 pilot or Ridgeline. - See dealer for financing details.