Creative Pep Talk
001 - Hustlin
(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. The holidays are upon us, and finding the right gift for your kids, nieces, and nephews, and partner, and family members can be super difficult, but it doesn't have to be. Go check out Uncommon Goods. Sophie and I were checking it out the other day, looking for gifts for our kids. They have a make your own storybook kit, which we love. There's this cardboard tool kit, with a cardboard saw that's safe and connectors, so you can build cool stuff and forts and whatnot. They also got these building connectors where you can connect sticks and make them for it. Mainly, I just like forts, but there's tons of cool, creative gifts that will inspire your kids to go make stuff, but we could also easily have just bought stuff for each other, or even ourselves. This curated selection of goods means you don't have to scour the internet for something unique and exciting, and you're supporting artists and small businesses at the same time, which you know I love. 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. - Hello, this is Andy J. Miller, and you're listening to the Creative Peptalk podcast. This is the first episode, and I have been wanting to do a podcast for a long time, and I was waiting 'til everything was perfect. I had a bunch of different ideas, and they were also things that just weren't gonna happen. I don't have a lot of extra free time. I'm an illustrator, and I'm a pretty busy guy, and I still wanna get this information out there, and so I'm just gonna go for it. And so I feel a bit silly, starting a podcast that is virtually me monologuing at you, but I can feel that feels pretty, like it could be a pretty egotistical thing to do, but the truth is, I've been writing about my struggles about becoming a creative professional, and I've had so many people reach out to me and tell me that what I'm sharing actually has helped them keep going and actually helped them make breakthroughs in their own creative careers, and that's why I wanna do this podcast. That's why I just feel like this is a format that I can be direct, still be casual, and get a little bit more passion coming through than something written, and it's also just a different format that you can consume in a different way, on your way to work or whatever. You know, I'm gonna try to get these to be in the 10 to 15 minute mark, so good for like a little drive. And the idea here is creative pep talk is something that is kind of an ongoing theme for me. I kind of see myself as a creative motivational speaker as ridiculous as that sounds. So just see this podcast as kind of an early morning kicking the butt to keep going and to have to hopefully enable some kind of creative breakthroughs in your professional pursuits. So yeah. 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 to 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) - Today I wanted to talk about, I wanted to start on the topic of hustling. It's a topic that a lot of people have touched on, but I feel like I'm bringing some new ideas to the table here and maybe help reframe hustling for a new generation. I mean, that sounds pretty massive. But I don't mean it sounds so massive. I just, I think for me personally, this is something that I've kind of misunderstood. So my story kind of goes like this. When I graduated college, I wanted to be a freelance illustrator and I was my last year of college. I was hustling like crazy, promoting myself, connecting with people, doing lots of work. And two months after I graduated, I got a freelance illustration job for Sony through the ad agency or the design agency, Love Creative at a Manchester. And actually, I really felt like this was kind of my Cinderella moment. Like, you know, after this job, nothing's gonna be the same. And even though it did lead to a lot of different things, it just doesn't work like that anymore. And actually I feel like in the past, maybe, in these creative industries, things worked quite a bit differently than they do now. And maybe that's kind of confusing us. So I wanna reframe maybe my own thinking in regards to this. And then maybe you'll wanna do that too. So I wanna start with like an analogy because I feel like I am obsessed with analogies and I think that's probably common for illustrators as they kind of deal with visual analogies. You know, I love analogies because I think they, it's so much easier to find a profound truth. When instead of trying to use plain words by telling a story or a parable or analogy. And I think there's a really good one that John Acuff uses in his book, "Quitter", about Cinderella versus David from David and Goliath. And, you know, I think that with Cinderella, you have this idea that this good person, this is just kind of doing her thing in the corner and plotting along, doing the right things. And then one day something happens and everything has changed for her. You know, the fairy godmother comes and instantly her life is never the same. And I think in art, we can kind of trick ourselves into thinking that we can just sit alone in our studio and make amazing work and by pure merit, like just purely by the work being amazing that we're gonna get this crazy opportunity and then everything's gonna be different. And I just don't think that's the way it is. And so when I graduated and I got that Sony job, yeah, I kept getting more work slowly, but I hustled for another year. And by the time I was getting enough, the amount of work that I really wanted, I basically quit hustling. And I just kind of like let the work come in. And the truth is, is that when I did that, the work dried up because it doesn't work like that, because you can't stop hustling. And I think in the past, once you were discovered, then the hustle was different. You just got to make work. You didn't have to hustle it to everybody. And I just think it's not like that anymore. And I feel like the David and Goliath thing actually is a lot more relevant for us. Not everybody knows the full story. So David kills Goliath and God anoints him as king. As future king, actually. And a big portion of David's life is actually spent in the wilderness with a ragtag group of people that help protect him because the current king wants to kill David. And so David's life is spent scrambling and hustling before he's anointed as the actual king and then goes on to be probably arguably the most successful and renowned king of Israel in the Bible. And so that's a different picture than Cinderella, much different. It's a series of victories and it's a series of struggles. And I think that the thing is today is that we get these hot, new illustrators that graduate out of school and get instant fame and seem larger than life and seem like their success is never ending. And I would say, first of all, some of those people are completely brilliant and completely deserve it, but they're the exception to the rule. So I think that the majority needs to not model after them. The other thing to think about with them is that a lot of those people admit that they're still hustling. They're still having to hustle. And I think the bad news is that it's not like it used to be. So I think in the past, I don't know firsthand, but I think in the past, the art game was about, lots of people want to do it, only a few break in, but when you break in, you're wildly successful. But the truth is the model's changed now. It's not like that anymore. Now, lots of, this is actually brilliant news. Lots of people can make a living sustaining themselves with creative endeavors. But the bad news is that you've got to really work at it. You've got to really hustle, and once you make it, you might not be wildly successful financially. So I think if we reframe our thinking that actually we'll find a lot more satisfaction there. And I think a really good example, a kind of ridiculous one, but a good example, I think, is thinking Justin Bieber versus Weird Al. And I think that somewhere in us, we want to have that Cinderella, Justin Bieber thing where we hit the scene at a young age and we explode and people are wildly fanatical about our work. But the truth is, I mean, I don't want to take a stab at them, but if you look at those, especially the young stars in Hollywood and the music industry, how much of a toll that takes on them, it seems not to be a great model to follow even if you could achieve it. Then I think the flip side of that is someone like Weird Al, who I'd like to go on record as saying that I'm not really a Weird Al fan per se. I respect what he's done, but I'm not really into the music. And I just think he's such an encouraging tale because he's been doing this since before I was born and he's had victories along the way. He's gotten more and more successful over time and just this year he released an album at 52, I think he is, and that's his first number one album. That picture is actually so much more encouraging and I think so much more accurate to the day that we live in. I'll paint you another picture that I think is kind of true for a lot of young artists. You get a tumbler, you got this new thing, you're gonna pour into this new avenue. And so you're posting on tumbler for a few months, a few, once a week or something. And three months into it, tumbler features one of your images. Now, before that, you're getting like maybe five, 10, 15 notes on each image. Then this one that tumbler features, you get 10,000 notes. And it feels like that Cinderella moment. And if you're looking at it in that frame of reference, it's kind of bad what happens next. So the next day, you post a new image and you get 30 notes. And so although it's gone up a little bit, not in proportion to what felt like happened yesterday, right? And so you give up on it and you say, I don't want anything to do with it. It's all meaningless anyway. It doesn't lead to anything. But the truth is that every one of those little seemingly meaningless things that are your Cinderella moments are just investments. So if you don't look at them, if you don't have the expectation that there's this thing that you could achieve that's gonna change your world dramatically. If you don't have that expectation, you have the expectation that I'm gonna make some victories and every victory is gonna pile on top of each other. And over time, instead of thinking, I'm gonna hustle for a year or I'm gonna hustle for five years, think I'm gonna hustle for 20 years. And when I've done that, those victories are gonna pile up and they're gonna open all kinds of other doors. And actually, I think I was talking to my dad about this topic and he's in his 50s and he still feels like he's hustling. He's got an amazing job and an amazing career. It was in finance, not creativity, but he feels like his hustle's different. It's maybe more sustainable and he likes all the stuff he's doing more than he did when he was younger, but he still got tons of stress and he's still working hard. And actually, that's what makes it enjoyable. And so I think if we reframe our thinking a bit, we can actually feel more successful and really and enjoy what it is we're doing. You know, I listen to the podcast, Your Dreams, My Nightmares by Sam Weber. I'm actually a self-professed fan of the show. I know it's not cool to be a fan, but I love that show. I think it's so legit. And if you don't listen to it, you definitely should. An ongoing theme in that show is switching your mindset from the short game, which is kind of what you do when you get out of college, like, to the long game. It's really about the long game. And I think if you switch that mindset, you're gonna feel more successful. You're gonna feel more fulfilled. So I really, I think that this is a really important thing. And I think it definitely helps me approach this topic and end up a lot happier in my pursuit. So I just wanna close today with just kind of talking a little bit about, just a note about kind of why I do this. You know, I feel like, I feel like my, I feel like the purpose of the creative pep talk is to help other people find their thing in creativity. Kind of find where their awesome talent meets the demand in the market. And there's kind of like the synergy between those two things. Kind of the perfect combo. And I think that things kind of like falling in love, but I'd love to, I feel like it is magical like falling in love, but it's also practical. Like you actually have to go meet people and you actually have to do certain things to be in the right place at the right time. And so I want this podcast to be about that. I kind of see my purpose kind of as cheesy as that sounds. I see my purpose as to have a, to try to have a successful creative career and then leverage that to help other people do the same. And so that's kind of why I'm doing this. I hope it helps. I'm gonna try to, I need to figure out kind of a schedule of how I do this, but I need to do a few before I kind of understand how often I can do them. So keep checking back and subscribe on iTunes. Thanks, keep, keep hustling. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - 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 wanna check that out and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com. If you wanna 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. Thanks Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. Do you love hair raising allegedly true stories about the paranormal? Then some in the podcast scared to death. It's the popular horror series with more than 60 million downloads and is co-hosted by me, Dan Cummins. And me, Lindsey, co-hosts and also Dan's wife. Each week on "Scared to Death," we share bone-chilling tales from old books and creepy corners of the web and some submitted by our listeners, all designed to make you sleep with the lights on. Think you can handle the horror? Tune in to "Scared to Death" every Tuesday at the stroke of midnight to find out.