Creative Pep Talk
038 - Knowing the Unknown
Hey y'all, just a quick heads up. The episode you're about to listen to is 8 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 want to 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. Hello there, it's me again, Andy J. Miller, the creative pep talk, podcast, host and graphic illustrator known for my love of Fraggle Rock, Boys to Men and Slurping Coffee. Today I've got a iced coffee, as you know, the springtime is starting to spring into our lives and you're not going to hear any slurping today, I'm just going to be drinking through this nice straw. 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 going to 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. The Creative Peptalk Podcast is about me putting some of my ideas about how to be strategic in your creative career and just sharing the ups and downs of that, sharing the things that maybe I've learned in the past or the things that I'm experiencing right now and the kind of suspicions I have about what kind of thinking and approach leads to the success that I'm searching for in my own art career and maybe by sharing that I can benefit somebody else. So that's what this is about. Now, before further ado, let me just say you can listen to this podcast on my website, on iTunes, you can subscribe there so that they automatically download onto your phone or onto your desktop. Or you can listen to it at illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk. Feel free to listen any way you choose. And today, you know, I wanted to talk about this idea of knowing the unknown, knowing the unknown. If you know me, you know that I like these contradictory ideas, contradictory statements, that kind of mysterious faux wisdom kind of thing. And this is kind of one of those like knowing the unknown or getting familiar with the feeling of exploring the unknown. I was listening to a TED talk the other day by Diana Nayed, I believe it is. And she is the first person to swim from Florida to Cuba. I believe I'm saying that right. And it took her five different attempts. And you know, like many other people, these types of stories really move me. You know, hearing about a human pushing past our limits, pushing past what we're unsure about, you know, this is a story about pushing into the unknown. If nobody's ever done it, we don't know if it can be done. I was reminded of, I'm going to come back to that TED talk, but I was reminded of this quote by HP Lovecraft says the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown. I think there's something about adventuring into the unknown that it really inspires us when we hear other people doing it. But when we try to do it, if you're like me, it's in even in small ways. Like I'm not trying to swim from Florida to Cuba. I'm just trying to make an interesting looking picture or tell a good story. And you know, even in that pursuit, you know, even in this podcast, I don't feel like there's a lot of podcasts like this per se in the illustration world. And for whatever reason, because it's kind of unknown territory, it does feel scary a lot. It often feels scary, you know, I almost every week feel like, should I stop making this podcast? And then I'll get a message or someone will reach out and say that it really helped them and I've just and just try to get over myself and think, look, this might be uncomfortable to some degree or it might be, you know, scary to share your thoughts and feelings like this and have people and your peers listen to him. But if there's value being done out there, then that's a good motivation. And then also, I like to think of this fear as a signpost to forge ahead. You know, going back to this TED talk, Diane and I had she, she had many attempts and one of the attempts, she was out in the middle of the ocean and she got stung by one of these extremely intense jellyfish bites and it caused her to go into severe pain pain and paralysis and she had to get in the boat and she and she couldn't go. She couldn't make it. She couldn't go to the other side because of it. And she had several of these kind of big roadblocks in the way of her fulfilling this goal. She actually tried, I think, four times and on the fifth time, she'd come up with all kinds of security guards against these jellyfish, all kinds of different methods of overcoming all of the different roadblocks that have stopped her in the past. And her and her partner within this mission, someone who was going to be in the boat, which she wouldn't get in, but could coach her along the way, they said that the motto or the mantra of this fifth expedition was find a way, like we're going to find a way and we're not going to quit. And so they're off on the fifth mission and they're going along and the puking comes from swallowing the seawater and the jellyfish come, but she manages through her, all of her apparatus to get through that. And it's exhausting hour after hour after hour, tens of hours. And far along into the mission, her partner calls from the boat and she says, look out up there. And it was the middle of the night and she said, look up that out there. What do you see? And she looks out and she sees that there's some light on the horizon. And she says, Oh, it's almost morning. And the partner from the boat says, no, those are the lights from the shore. We're almost there and almost meaning like 15 hours away. But when she told that story, I just found myself kind of like tearing up at that moment. And I started to unpack, you know, whenever I have kind of an extreme emotion, I try to unpack it and to kind of utilize what I can learn about my own experience into my artwork. And I wanted to like, I was wondering why, why does that make me feel something? And I think a big part of it was just knowing the suffering that came through that or the discomfort or the struggle. And it got me thinking about this idea of joy being inversely proportionate to pain that the more painful a task is the more sweet it is to fulfill the task. The more challenging something is the more sweet the payoff is at the end. And I think it also reminds me of this modest mouse lyric, which is if life's not beautiful without the pain, well, I'd rather never see beauty again. And I think I've quoted that on the podcast before. And I think that line really resonates with me. There's part of me that wants the easy, comfortable life. I want the convenient, easy career that everything that I go out there and try to attain, I can have and I don't have to work for it. I don't have to work hard. And I think if you've ever got something and you didn't have to work for it, you know, something significant, you didn't have to work for it versus working extremely hard at something failing multiple times and then eventually getting it. You know that the victory is so much sweeter when you've had to work for it. And I think that's maybe one reason why I think it's important to find comfort or acceptance within the uncomfortable parts of your career, the parts that are difficult, that are hard. I think kind of accepting that if it wasn't challenging, then it would be really boring. Like I remember working in fast food as a younger man and just hating it so bad, the monotony, the boredom of doing the same function over and over like a robot, like stealing, killing my humanity. And that in comparison to the struggle to find something unique or new or beautiful within my work or something like trying to unearth new pieces of my style or process or a new story to tell, like the challenge and the discomfort of that, I found to some way of distancing myself from that discomfort. You know, if you listen to anybody who's talking about meditating, they talk about it's not so much about stopping your thoughts as it is distancing yourself from them. And so as your as thoughts pop into your mind, instead of thinking, oh, don't do that, don't think, try to empty your brain, empty your brain, instead to watch that thought come up with a level of detachment and just kind of watch it go by and be like, okay, there's that thought. And that's some form of mindfulness, you know, recently I was working on a gig poster and I was putting way more time into it than I could justify financially, but I think there was other justifications partially that it was just kind of like a dream job. And I'm pouring into my sketchbook, just going nuts on it and nothing is working and it's driving me absolutely bonkers. And my wife is watching this process too. And she is kind of like feeling the pain with me and she's feeling how difficult this process has been for me. And as I'm like pushing into this piece and I'm like racking my brain and I'm filling this sketchbook like like a third of the sketchbook filled with this project. There's comes a point where I stopped and I thought this is what like this is the sign that this poster is going to be good. Like this turmoil is the signifier of I'm doing this right. And it's actually this part of the process that makes this worth doing, you know if you're familiar with this idea of flow, there's a book called flow and it's about getting in the zone. And they say that part of flow and why it's such a euphoric state of mind is that it has to be challenging. If it's not challenging, then we can't derive any meaning from it. It doesn't feel purposeful. It's actually in the challenge, in the struggle that we find the joy of making things. And I think it was one of the first times ever as I was making this poster and I'm going through this stress of struggling through it and trying to come up with something different. It was actually in that process that I could detach myself and be like this is it. This is what, this is why I want to be an artist, like this feeling, like this aggravation, this struggling with the ideas, this is why this is enjoyable because it's a challenge. And when I get to the other side, I'm going to be better off for it. And I'm going to, and I'm going to be glad that I went through it and that the product is going to be better. You know, I'm, the holidays are here. You've got to find a unique gift for Uncle Derek and your sister, Katherine, and her kids, Jetson and Jeddah, and Jerfry, and Jacob, and another two Jay kids, so much thinking, so much searching. Plus there's the ethical thing, you got to shop small, it just, it's a lot, but it doesn't have to be. Uncommon Goods makes all of this simple and straightforward for real. The site is chock full of unique and interesting gifts that also support small businesses. My fam loves advent calendars. I think Sophie would like the Stitch of Day advent calendar and 12 days of hot sauce is definitely shouting my name. Sorry, that wasn't me. That was the 12 days of hot sauce calendar shouting. Seriously, we had tons of fun browsing the site for ourselves and kids and family. 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. When I go back to this video, it's a lecture by Jad Abemrod, who is the host of Radiohead co-host. He did a talk for 99u.com on the importance of gut churn. They talk about charting unknown territories in radio. With Radio Lab, they were given the freedom to just make something different. It caused severe gut churn. Severe gut problems with them of how fearfully hard it is to do something new, to do something that's not done, and how hard it is to come up with that. He just talked about how in evolution terms that this panic mode is actually a legitimate thing that says you're going into somewhere that's dangerous because it's unknown. He said that in order for their radio show to grow, the things that the biggest breakthroughs all come from that place of, "Oh no, are we going to survive this?" Like, "Oh no, we've got ourselves into some severe trouble. We don't know what's going to happen next." So many times, for me, when I'm in that zone of, "I have no idea what's going to happen next," or, "I don't know if this piece is going to work out," it's those times that actually the best results are found. He said that what they try to do is they try to push into the unknown and when they start feeling those feelings, instead of having those feelings of pain and struggle and causing them to turn around and causing those to be signs to turn back, they try to see them as arrows forward like you're on the right path. And I completely agree with that. So there's just two places that I just want to challenge you and challenge myself in the same way to allow myself to embrace the unknown. The first one is just making a piece of work. I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. And I said, "I was talking about a different poster that I was working on and it felt like a big success and I was trying to unpack why that one kind of worked." And I said, "I think that as a commercial artist, someone who is a pro, a professional, if you're trying to do commercial art, as a pro, you've got to learn craft. You've got to learn this ability to perform on the drop of a hat. You have to be able to be consistent. And in order to consistently make good artwork, it's a lot about craft. And craft is a lot about knowing tricks, like knowing how to perform even when inspiration doesn't come. Like, I can make something look visually good. And I can because I know 50 things that I've learned along the way that if I do those things, the end product is going to look good. Is it going to be brilliant? I don't know. I don't know if I can supply brilliance every time. But I do feel like I can make something that is more than possible every time. And I think being a pro is about that. Now, the dangerous side of this is that you rely on those tricks as a crutch. And this is my challenge. When you get that new job in your inbox or you're working on a new personal piece, I think that the challenge is to go into it with the unknown. Go into it without going to your tricks instantly. Don't think about the tricks. Don't think about the things that you know that work. Go into the process, especially the ideation process, not knowing how it's going to look. When I was in college, I really struggled with this. When they would give me a brief, I would instantly solve it in my mind. And then I would go execute it. I didn't allow myself to surprise myself. We talked about this last episode, I think, which is this idea of if you don't surprise yourself, you're probably not going to surprise anybody else. And if you're going to surprise yourself, you have to go into the ideation stage, the brainstorming, the sketching phase. You have to go into that, not knowing what's going to happen. And I think that not knowing is such an uncomfortable place. Jad Abramrod on this talk on 99U talks about this idea that you can't systematically plan on surprising yourself. You can't go into that process and say, "We're going to innovate. We're going to come up with something brand new and we're going to do this step and this step and this step and then we'll have something new." And the whole idea is, in order to surprise yourself, you have to know that you don't know how it works, how it's going to happen. And that can be really unnerving, that can be a part of the process that is uncomfortable. And it reminds me of this line that I heard from, I think his name is Ryan S. Maker, who's one of the co-founders of The Great Discontent website where they interview creative people. And he said that one of the best advice he ever got was that you have to find contentment within the discontentment of being an artist. Because being an artist is all about that discontented feeling of like the work isn't good enough, the sketch isn't good enough, the idea isn't good enough. I'm not good enough. I think that it's in that discontent, you have to find your contentness in it. You have to think, "I can see that this is a struggle. I can see that it's a mess and it's going to be hard, but I'm okay with that. I'm okay with it because I know that's what makes it good. I know that's what makes the work good. I know that's what makes this career path good." And so that's my first challenge is just go into making a piece of work not knowing how it's going to turn out when you start and working through the pain of the ugly drawings. Like I think if you're drawing, I think if you don't allow yourself to draw ugly drawings, if everything in your sketchbook has to look pristine, you're going to miss out on surprising yourself because it's so often the ugly drawing that surprises you in some way and then you can go mine that thing and make it more pretty or go through the process of beautifying that thing but taking that surprise and crafting it to a new degree and then the second place where I feel like I'm going to challenge myself and challenge you to feel okay with the unknown is in your career path as a whole. You know, there's a book out called "Do Over" by John Acuff and he talks about how we prepare so much to go to college and then to graduate and go into a career like everything is leading up to going into the career like your high school experience and we just get obsessed with it as parents, you know, trying to prep our kids for their future and we're prepping and prepping and prepping and working and growing and then we launch out into our career and he says the next thing we prepare for is retirement and death and I feel like we have to be okay with the fact that we're never going to arrive because I think if you arrive at a destination, if you launch your career and everything works out and in a few years you're at the very top of your game, you're in insanely high demand in the creative industry, that will only last so long, even best case scenario, it's only going to last a few years and I think we've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable like we have to, if you prepared yourself and all that preparation and work and you're in the hard struggling phase and then it pays off, like in that payoff, say you've managed to be the best in the editorial market, okay, now you're the best in the editorial market. So sustaining that for a lifetime is pretty much impossible and then on top of that probably not going to be fulfilling in the long term and I think it's getting okay with the struggling of okay, you made that goal, you're doing that thing, now what's the next stage, what's the next five years look like, what's, what kind of thing, I want to start that other journey even as I'm enjoying the fruits of getting to the end of this road and I feel like if you look at the people that have had really long term success, really great success over a whole career, you see them going through different phases and seasons of struggling and success and then charting new territory and then success and I think if you want to have a long term career that's fulfilling and full of breakthrough and excitement and great work, you have to be, you have to learn how do I enjoy the struggle, how do I get comfortable with the discomfort, how do I get familiar with, how do I know the unknown of learning a new skill, of going into a new industry, of pushing into new places in my style and so my second challenge is on the long term, have a good idea of where you want to go in the next couple years, even if that area you don't know how to go into even if it's unknown how to get there and then on a broader spectrum not knowing where you're going to end up in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years and being okay with that and being okay with the unknown because that's what makes good work, that's what makes good results, that's what pushing into direction that's unknown, that's where the excitement happens, that's where the great work and the fulfillment comes from. So that's pretty much it, this is going to be a little bit of a shorter one but I wanted to just put this out there and say that you know, pushing into some unknowns, pushing some of my style and work recently has really felt like it paid off, like just doing a sketch and really not knowing if it was going to work and trying some things that I didn't know were going to work and sometimes that payoff doesn't come, you know, sometimes you fail, when you go into the unknown you are likely to have some failure but I think unless you fail and unless you struggle the payoff isn't going to be that sweet anyway and so I just needed a pep talk to remember to continue to push into the unknown and be be okay with the discomfort and I thought it might be a good reminder for you. So I hope that this is challenging and encouraging and exciting, I think it's important to remember that if you set your mind to a target and you work towards it, that great things will happen. Not everybody can do everything, I'm not sure I believe this idea of, if you set your mind to it you can do it, I don't know, I'm not sure if everybody can just set their mind to any given thing and it works out, I think it's a combination of calling, a combination of skills, talents and a demand in the market, there's all kinds of different factors but I do believe that if you set your mind to something that you're not sure that you can do or you're not sure how it's going to happen, if you set your mind and you go through the struggle and you work through it, that there are going to be great things that happen through that even if you fail and so I would just encourage you to have hope towards these unknown areas in your career and to keep pushing and to keep trying and to then be able to step away and enjoy the struggle because that is what makes the career worth it, that's what makes it not boring, that's what makes it actually fun and so my biggest challenge is to find enjoyment within the struggle, find enjoyment within the fact that you're not where you want to be in that it's going to be hard but that is what will make it ultimately worth doing. Okay, that's pretty much it for today, thank you for listening, thanks for the great reviews that have been pouring in, that just means so much to me, thank you for all the encouragement via email and Twitter and all that, I really, really appreciate it. I hope that this is a help to you in your creative work this week, I've been really, really busy working on a few projects the past couple of weeks, I'm super grateful for them, I can't wait to share them with you guys and I'm glad I got to fit in a podcast somewhere and I hope that it's helpful for you and if you want to listen to this online you can go at illustrationage.com/creativepeptalk or you can listen to it on my website, Andy -j-millor.com/podcast or you can find it or podcast rather or you can find it at iTunes. Thank you for your time, thank you for listening and until we meet again, figure out ways to stay peped up and make great work, see you soon! Hey y'all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year, I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new fluid engine and I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately and if you want to check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com, if you want to test it out go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself and when you're ready to launch use promo code PEPTALK for 10% off your first purchase. Thank Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. 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 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. (upbeat music)