This episode is for you if:
- Your schedule is too full
- Your stress is too high
- You don't know how to change anything
- You've overwhelmed but don't know what to cut
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SHOW NOTES
Co-Writing / Editing: Sophie Miller sophiemiller.co
Audio Editing / Sound Design: Conner Jones pendingbeautiful.co
Soundtrack / Theme Song: Yoni Wolf / WHY? whywithaquestionmark.com
Mentioned:
Dave Ramsey and the 80/20 rule
Susan David's book 'Emotional Agility' https://www.susandavid.com/book/
Angus Fletcher's book 'Wonderworks' https://www.angusfletcher.co/
Adam Grant https://adamgrant.net/
Now I get to talk about a product I have used for years, Riverside makes it easy to get a studio quality recording of you and a guest from anywhere in the world. Most of the interviews on this show are done virtually but the quality doesn't suffer because of Riverside. Check out Riverside.fm and use promo code PEPTALK all caps and all one word to get 15% off and you can check out the link in the show notes for more info. Hey you're listening to creative PEPTALK a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host Danny J. Pizza. New York Times best-selling author and illustrator and this show is everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice. This episode is for you if your schedule is too full, your stress is too high but you just don't know how to change anything you don't know what to cut. This episode will help you trim the fat from your creative practice without losing any of that flavor. Stick to the end and I'm gonna share a tool for targeting where the hidden juice to be squeezed out of your practice is hiding and yeah that's it. Jason, we have a lot going on. We really do. Maybe too much but it doesn't feel that way thanks to Miro. Yeah Miro is the visual collaboration platform that helps your team work together from anywhere. Yeah and Miro has tools for project management, creating a digital whiteboard with your team where you can brainstorm, making retrospectives and a whole lot more. We have a lot of content here at MNN and we've been trying to figure out how to get our videos up on different platforms and Miro's flow chart tool really helped us get organized and figure out what we need to do to make that happen. And I really love Miro's mind mapping tool. It's a space where you can organize your thoughts in a way that translates to the rest of your team so that they can help you take action. Super helpful because I can't always reach your mind. You know it would be scary if you could. Whether you work in product design, engineering, UX, agile or marketing, bring your team together on Miro. Your first three Miro boards are free when you sign up today at Miro.com. That's three free boards at miro.com. Massive thanks to Squarespace. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform that makes making a website easy peasy. For a moment, creative websites were kind of looking all the same and I really wanted to break out of the templity look. Then I heard that Squarespace has this new fluid engine and boy am I glad I checked it out because this thing is what I always dreamed making a website could be like for me. Drag and drop stuff and then drag it all over the place, text, images, videos you can put it wherever you want. Layer it up, tear it up, everything I cooked up in my mind I could figure out how to do without any knowledge of coding. Got a lot of comments like hey who helped you build this and I was like Squarespace is fluid engine baby. You can see it at antijpz.com and head to squarespace.com for a free trial and build your own site and when you're ready to launch you can get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with promo code Pet Talk all one word all caps. Okay so the last time I did a solo episode I shared how I have been in a really stressful moment burnout whatever you want to call it. It has just been a lot and kind of built up over time and culminated in this scenario where I was like I just can't do this anymore and needed to take a different approach for a little while to kind of find my creative fire again. And so we've been doing this slow and steady summer series and in the spirit of that we're gonna do this episode which is three different ways to cut out things from your practice to simplify things to get stuff off your plate because for me I have a really difficult time knowing where my focus should be because everything sounds good. I'm always coming up with new ideas you know a lot of creative people I know don't have a hard time coming up with new ideas which is kind of the weird thing you know you see a lot of creative self-help type stuff that's like how do I have new ideas and I'm always like well if you're hyper creative that's probably not your problem like I need it this is kind of the episode of how to have less ideas like I need that because I could come up with new stuff to add to my practice every single day and unfortunately I kind of do do that. What I have a really difficult time doing is converging that stuff into a model that doesn't lead to burnout that does lead to satisfaction and so since I'm not very good at those things I've had to collect tools and I'm still collecting tools right now and to try to figure out what things can I get rid of how can I organize this stuff and so these are these three things are things that I have picked up over time some of them fall into that category some fall into the category of things that I'm trying right now as I'm trying to work through things that feel like they've given me some relief from the overwhelm and so I'm kind of sharing these in real time because I'm really excited about them and they have helped me in this moment that I've been in so let's get into it. Okay, so the first one is about cutting stress and it's the snowball de- stressing tactic and the idea here is that for me when I get into really stressful seasons of my creative practice I have a tendency to focus so much of my energy on the really big problem the really huge overwhelming problem that I ignore the little problems that are happening week to week and so what ends up happening is this really big problem that's going to take months or even years to fix is getting all of my energy meanwhile my daily problems are stacking up in its quadrupling my stress and what I realized was over the past couple years like I mentioned in the original overwhelm slow and steady summer episode I realized that over the past couple years the podcasting industry changed a lot and this is something you know this happened with client work and blogs when I was first starting out like getting work totally changed how you did that what that looked like it changed a bunch when social media came along then social media dramatically changed like this is something that's always going to happen they're going to be these big shifts that are completely out of your control and they're going to take a long time like months or years to readjust and when those things happen and your entire practice and world shakes and the sand that your castle was built on shifts and it's becoming quicksand it's really easy to be so overwhelmed and focus all of your energy on something that you can't change or the things that you have to do that are going to require an enormous amount of strategy and change and if you put all of your energy on those big things you're going to have almost none left for the things that are stressing you out in real time right now in your everyday and so as the podcast industry changed and we knew like everything about the model of how to keep this sustainable is different and more complex because dynamic ads came in and the ad market changed and the way that like there's so many things I'm not going to bore you with them but as all that change I realized like okay a year ago maybe a little bit longer than that I'm standing in front of a problem that realistically is going to take me eight months to 18 months like anywhere in between that and it's a huge problem and I can't even wrap my head around it and so my brain so much of my brain is clogged up with figuring out how do we get a podcast network how do we do the interviews how do we get in touch with those people how do we know who to talk to what do we value and you're going through this very complex process and then migrating the show and then learning the new tech and all the stuff huge process that can get so much of my focus and energy meanwhile I've spent the past 18 months not getting a comfortable runway of episodes in the bank ahead of time so that we don't have the daily stress of making sure that we have everything worked out so that we can release things on time in a consistent fashion and so I realize as I step back from the huge problem that if I just fixed our scheduling if I just gave myself more cushion then I would have 80% less stress right now because that huge problem yes is creating stress in the background but it's more like a drip drip drip kind of thing of you know this thing isn't working you know there's a pipe leaking you know like you know there's some like structural stuff and it is like this low level hum of if you don't fix this this is going to be a problem but the thing that was stressing me out the big stress in my everyday was that I was so focused on the macro that the micro was getting out of control or just creating extra unnecessary stress now I called this the snowball distressing tactic because it comes from a thing from Dave Ramsey now I've never done any programs that Dave Ramsey puts out there as far as I know he said a lot of things that I'm not a fan of I don't I'm not here to judge a person but I am gonna give credit where's where it's do and as far as I know he's the one who came up with this tool called the snowball approach to debt and the idea as I understand it is when you're in debt and let's say you've got 10 debts you've got I'm not gonna go but just for instance you've got your student loans and it's a hundred thousand dollars and you've got your mortgage and you've got your credit cards and you've got your Home Depot account and whatever it is it's easy it's supernatural to not supernatural it's not aliens levels of debt you got to pay for your spaceship no it's it's very natural to be consumed by and focus on the hundred thousand dollars because this is the huge thing that you've got to take care of it's the thing that's the low level anxiety that's with you every single day but the truth is that if you would focus on just paying the small debts first it could be a little snowball that rolls into something bigger and you can create momentum because you feel like you're making progress but when you feel like you're not even putting a dent in the thing it's really really difficult to get that positive momentum in your motivation to keep moving forward and so the snowball effect says you should focus on the littlest debts and move from there to the biggest ones and it's just a psychological shift that for me makes a world of difference and so what I realized was I'm so focused on this macro problem that's taken me ages and we've made great progress but it has taken 12 months to get anywhere and so I realized like oh but the real stress that's happening today is because I'm not giving the micro enough attention and it's becoming a daily problem and so this another way to think about this is the thing we've talked about in the show you probably heard it a billion times out there on the internet but it's the 80/20 idea now if you're not a nerd you might not have heard of the 80/20 idea the basic principle is that 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your products or 80% of your effectiveness comes from 20% of your efforts or 80% of your stress comes from 20% of your problems and it's not really there's no math there it's just a way of realizing that often the results are not directly proportional to the causes and that if you can use this tool you can help yourself focus down on the things that really work or the things that are really broken and focus all of your energy there and a lot of business people this is the way they approach business this is from the outside what I see with things like Apple where all these other companies are focused on hundreds of products whether they're super profitable or not and Apple has been pretty consistent about keeping their product line really optimized for the things that really work so they can spend 80% of their time on the 20% of products that work and bring-in profits and here's what I realized is that 80% of my stress was coming from 20% of my problem the micro problem the problem of we're just not the schedules chaotic because we're fighting fires on a big level if I get that if I sort that first they don't have extra bandwidth and time and mental capacity to deal with the bigger problem where is that big problem that 80% problem that huge problem was really only contributing 20% of the stress it was that low-level daily stress and it was something that was gonna just take a lot more energy and so that's the first thing I think that you can cut stress it's helped me cut stress to focus on what is the thing in my day-to-day that I could shift that would be not would be 20% effort for 80% less stress what are the things that I've let get out of hand it could be stuff with family life it could be stuff with cleaning the house it could be stuff with debt stuff it could be whatever it is but we all have these needs that we don't focus on that are keeping us at a low state mentally because we're focused on the huge problems but if we realize like oh one of the reasons why I feel awful all the time is because the way I'm eating or one of it or because I'm not taking daily walks or whatever it is but if you could find like are there things that are putting you really really out of whack that you could change today but you're not because you're like well there's bigger fish to fry like yeah you will be so much better at you'll be a fish frying master if you can't just get yourself into a less stressed state and you can fry those big I don't know why like is frying a huge fish really that much of it you have to like I just don't understand where that comes from but you will be so much better at frying those huge fish if you will just take care of the little ones first and it kind of goes off it kind of goes against our logic but it really really works okay number one was cutting out stress number two is about cutting out work load and this is the one utter focus and I will explain what that means but it's essentially about what can you cut from your workload what are the things in the process what are the products what are the income streams what are the you know what are things that are the old couch that you've become accustomed to that other people if they saw behind your scenes in your business they would instantly know like you gotta quit doing that now that's easy in theory but for me I need a little bit more of a systematic way of thinking about it to really figure out like what exactly is there that I can cut because all of it seems important all of it seems to contribute to the overall well-being of my creative practice and it becomes very difficult to be unbiased about the things in my practice so I need some tools so we're gonna use the 80/20 idea here too but we're gonna combine it with a thing that we've talked about in the past that we don't need to go super deep on but it will help us figure out what to cut and it is the BCG growth share matrix now if you're a creative person and I put myself in your shoes and this is the first time you've heard of the BCG growth matrix you might be like oh dear God please kill me now I do want to hear about whatever this thing is it sounds annoying and but I promise it's fun there's cows and dogs and stars it's a great time and I'm not gonna go super deep on it if you want to go super deep on this idea you can go back to episode 4 19 of this show we go way deeper but for now here's the only thing I want to say about this is that when you're making creative work and you're posting to Instagram or you're selling stuff at an art market it's really easy to put things in this binary category of it's either working or it's dying like either it's back in the heyday when Instagram was visual art and you're a photographer or you're an illustrator and you post something and you're just getting so much attention and traction and it's satisfying and you're pumped about it or it's what those same people are feeling on Instagram as it moves to short form video and you post it and it feels like crickets and you feel like I'm burning that to the ground done with Instagram it's really easy to put things into these two categories but the reason I bring up the BCG growth share matrix is because that actually breaks things down into four categories and we're not gonna go through all of them but a dog is the one where you're like this thing's done for as a part of your business and a star is the thing where it's working like gangbusters baby and so we tend to think in or I do tend to think in this binary way where everything I'm doing is either crushing it or I need to kill it I need to get rid of it and if you think about this in terms of like soda it's like I think either thing everything is like Coca-Cola like total market saturation in shares or clear Pepsi that was killed almost as soon as it was brought out in the 90s this thing that just needs to be completely destroyed and cut from the line but in business they don't see it like that it's much more nuance than that or at least a little bit more nuance because there's four categories so instead of it being a dog that you have to get rid of or a star that you need to go triple down on there's a thing in the middle of those things called a cow and a cow is something where there's not a ton of room of for growth in the future it's not you you can't really bank on that but it's also maybe your bread and butter it might be like where you actually earn a living what your job is today and if you're a creator one of the things you're probably good at is forecasting into the future seeing what's on the horizon and when you see the end of this thing is near be it six months to five years whatever it's easy to be like all right abandon chip and let's go straight on to the next thing whereas milk in that cow is how the business is going to last long enough to find the next star and so this has happened a few times in my own creative practice where I've had to make these transitions but I've had to do them slowly because the thing that was making me money today or is making me money today is going to help me get to the thing that's making money to tomorrow and I can't just make a clean break because I have bills to pay and because finding that star takes a lot of investigation and a lot of trial and error you know if you take it back to the soda world we can think about it like Coca-Cola is really probably more like a cow now because less people drink soda there's a lot of anti soda sentiment because of the health issues and so they know like getting the next generation hooked on soda is probably I mean they're probably still doing it but they have to know that the future is not infinite for them because there's just been too much awareness it's like they have to think differently and so they're not going to just cut Coca-Cola whether they should or not they're not going to cut it right from the product line they got to think about okay well what could be our star next and while they're doing that they have to think about they have to try different things and so they thought okay seltzer is having a star moment for brands like Lacroix how do we get in on that and so they have to keep making the stuff before to give them the runway to test out things because they tried to make their own seltzer and it didn't work and so then they had to try different practice which was buying Topo Chico and executing that direction to find where their next star was going to be so all of that is maybe a little bit too much strategic thinking it doesn't need to be that complicated there's two things that I wanted to introduce to you that helped me one was just realizing that there is a middle option there isn't a this things amazing or this things done for there is a cow level there is a place where this thing is a thing that I'm going to milk keep doing make sure that it keeps the lights on while I invest other things that's the first piece the second piece is identifying okay maybe Instagram doesn't work like it used to but you don't have to get off that platform all together overnight when a huge part of your business is reliant on those relationships or even just being there even if you're investing way less and so you identify it's not just Instagram that's just an example it could be a there's a whole bunch of things everything's always changing your product line is changing how would the sales are going change but find the thing that is maybe doesn't have tremendous amount of growth potential but is still paying your bills and then take the 80/20 approach to that thing and say okay this is still a cow but best he's getting old and the udders just ain't working like they used to and you got five udders on that cow and one udder might be producing 80% of the milk and so you spend 80% of your time on those four other udders that give you 20% of the milk and so instead of spending all of that time that you could be pouring into investing into stars and experimenting you're spending 80% of your time milking udders that barely provide anything and so the idea here is that you would just quit milking those four udders because that time is spent better other places and so back to the Instagram example you could say what is the thing that works the best is it reels is it stories is it carousels what is it what if this is something where and maybe Instagram is crushing it like if you're a short-form video person if you're a youtuber if you're a comedian like whatever if if reels or the thing that's working right now is right in your wheelhouse creatively Instagram might be your star right now so it's just an example but if it's a cash cow if it's a thing of this it's got limited time you can look at like what kind of posts tend to get me the most traction and where are the places that these legacy things that have been grandfathered into your process we're like okay I still end up spending a ton of time on the caption for this solo post but it's really not giving me any results like it used to what are the four udders that you can cut out and so that's the thing that you have to do in between the in between phase of something being a star and moving its way to being a dog how do you milk it efficiently you can free up so much of your time if you get rid of those things and you can pour that time into the next thing and so the big takeaway here for me is just the acknowledgement that it's not we would all like every you know I was talking to my dad who spent 40 years in business and he said the same thing where everybody wants to run away from things that don't have growth potential when the growth starts to die it's it's like a traumatic business thing of you're like oh this thing it used to be so good is no longer working like it used to and it you want to jump to the conclusion of get rid of that thing as soon as possible but that's the thing that keeps you a float while you invest in other stuff so just realizing that there's an in between phase can be super effective and and you can get more efficient when you realize that this thing doesn't work like it used to so if I look at this idea of the udders as well within the different arms of my business I realize like in kids books 80% of my time in the first couple books was spent in Photoshop making the pieces 20% better and I realize like if I just get a little bit better at painting I can cut out like the majority of that time and it'll make the whole process way more efficient way better now I don't think kids books are a cow for me they're kind of a question mark slash star for me they're kind of in between that question marks are like this is a has a lot of potential and so in podcasting about eight for a long time 80% of my time was spent re-recording because I would come in with something super loose and feel like I think something's here and then I'd record an episode and be like okay like 90% of that was not good I have to go back to the drawing board and start over and I realized like if I get really tight with my sketch metaphorically speaking for the podcast before I go in the room I can cut out four of those udders I can cut out the four episodes that I record that don't turn into anything before I even record them and then when it comes to speaking I realized 80% of my time is making slides new slides which accounts for very little of the effectiveness of a talk and so I can get really strategic of spending time making evergreen slides that I can use more than once even as I do different types of talks and so this effectively helps you cut out the places where there so much fat in the process or so much extra work being done that's not leading to anything effective without throwing the baby out with the bath water without just cutting off big parts of your practice that you really need to at least keep going until you get to the new part of your creative journey all right the last one is the most esoteric it's the most abstract but it is something I go back to over and over that helps a lot and the third one is about cutting judgment so we had number one was the cutting stress through the snowball number two was cutting out workload with the udders and number three is cutting out judgment with the farmer mindset now this is an ancient parable it's a Taoist kind of idea and you've probably heard some form of it but the idea is there's this farmer and he has a horse run away and all the townspeople are like what a shame and the farmers like well maybe and then the next day the horse comes back with seven wild horses and the whole town's like whoa this is so great now you have all these horses and the farmers like maybe the next day his son tries to tame one of the wild horses and falls off and breaks his leg and the whole town's like oh what a shame and the farmers like well maybe and then the next day there's a war and a draft and the Sun doesn't get drafted because his leg is broken and the whole town's like this is great news how lucky and the farmers like well maybe now I think it's there's maybe an extra level of complication here but essentially the idea is comparable to a stoic mindset about things that happen in your life that there are these things and it's really easy to jump to a conclusion of categorizing these things as good or bad and the stoic approach would be to remember that lots of people's lives were ruined by winning the lottery and lots of people's lives were made when they lost their job now this isn't about a type of toxic positivity this way of suppressing your emotions in fact I think that it would be good practice and I try to let my emotions be what they are when something happens and I have a reaction I try to acknowledge how it makes me feel at least on the inside but as Susan David would say who wrote the book emotional agility feelings are information they are not commands on what you must do they are things that you can feel that you can acknowledge you don't have to repress them but and they are helpful they are good information but they don't have to determine your reaction you can feel them and then make a informed decision based on the scenario you're actually in not just how you feel about it so I'm not saying if you win the lottery not to celebrate I'm not saying that if you lose your job that you should just pretend like well that door close to another window opens I'm not saying it's that simple but what I am saying is that there's a level of acceptance of what's in your path that you can have when you realize that even if something seems good even if something seems bad that you don't really know you don't really know and only time will tell and even as time tells you what the pros and the cons are you'll never know what could have been even if it seems better and so there's a level of humility that can accept what is now this is very esoteric but I'm getting I'm gonna apply it back to creativity and so for me the reason this is so essential is this idea of stress versus you stress so stress is the bad type of stress that can you know mess with your blood pressure and hurt your health and lead to all kinds of complications over time and then you stress is good stress it's the kind of stress you need to live a happy life it's the kind of stress that is part of doing stuff that feels meaningful and there's this incredible fact around the difference between stress and youth stress and it's this that the difference is whether you accept it whether you choose to say yes to it or not converts that stress in your body now I'm not a scientist I originally heard about this in Angus Fletcher's book Wonderworks and I was like okay I feel like he's a pretty trustworthy guy but I still want to know more about this when I hear where this comes from as far as I can tell the research is pretty good about this and whether you resist something or accept something can convert that stress from bad to good and so for me personally this is so essential and having this look I didn't get that job this thing fell through this part of my business changed this didn't go how I wanted it to go this client did this or this publisher did that or you know all these different things that people do or things that happen in my creative practice it's so easy for me to resist and reject all the things that seem bad but I've been making creative work long enough to know that some of the things that seemed like the biggest missed opportunities became the hugest things in my creative practice that I am grateful for and that are essential to where I'm at today and so the reason why I bring this up is I think that there is a huge amount of stress that could be eliminated instantly for me if I would be slower to judge if I would remember that the lottery could be the worst thing that ever happened to you that it could unpick everything and losing my job could be the best new beginning now I'm not going to jump to either of those conclusions but I'm going to accept the things that are happening as they're happening especially the ones that are completely out of my control and I saw recently Adam Grant shared on Instagram this post about evidence around how effective reframing things that are happening in your life that seem bad in your journal can be for your mental health like a huge benefit and it reminded me that I need to be actively taking those things that I'm upset about that I'm worried about that have thrown me off course that have pushed me to the limit and take a moment in my morning to write about them not to be Polly Anna Shabbat it not to say oh well everything's meant to happen no at the same time taking a moment to journal like here's what I know is bad about this here's the grief here's the loss here's the thing that I'm annoyed by and not or and here's the thing that this opened up here's the thing that this made possible and accept both of them. Okay so here is your CTIA if you don't know we have been doing a slow and steady summer series and usually on this show we in the episode with a CTA a call to an adventure in your creative practice something to go do with the ideas that we are sharing so they're not just making you feel excited but they're actually making a difference in your every day however in the slow and steady summer series we are doing a flip of that because we don't need to do more we need to do less and so we are doing a CTIA a call to inaction to do something less and so this week what I'd like you to do what I'd like you to consider is to think about these three topics think about stress think about workload and think about judgment judgment is kind of in the category of mindset how you're thinking about the place that you're in and just pick one of those areas and see if you can use some of the tools from this process either the stress snowball the workload utters or the judgment of the farmer just figure out which of those three resonate the most which of those are causing the most overwhelm and burnout and try to apply one of these tools to that area and see if you can really focus a half day a day and a couple of hours on really making progress in that place and if you do that hopefully it can snowball to the rest of creative pep talk is a weekly podcast designed to help you build a thriving creative practice but that's the thing it only works if it's an actual practice it has to become a habit we make this show every single week so that your creativity can go from being a thing that you do sometimes to a creative discipline to immerse you in a world of creatives that are doing the same where those kind of behaviors are normal one way we help you stick to this is by sending you the new episodes via email to your inbox every single week so that you never miss a week and we often add bonus content like pictures and links and extra related stuff to the episode that you're not gonna get just from the apps go to Andy J Pizza dot sub stack dot com to sign up to the free email newsletter and I'll have the accountability to stay on the creative path and keep this street going and hopefully it will inspire you to do the same and if you sign up right now you'll get immediate free access to our e-booklet the creative career path it's a step-by-step roadmap for creating a project that is designed to unlock your dream creative clients and opportunities sign up at Andy J Pizza dot sub stack dot com and let's keep this creative habit together creative pep talk is part of the pod glomerate network you can learn more about pod glomerate at www dot pod glomerate dot com this has been another episode of creative pep talk a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey hey it's dangerous to go along take this podcast with you weekend and week out by subscribing to the show to keep you company and keep the best creative practices top of mind so that little by little weekend and week out you can make progress in your own creative practice I'm your host AJ pizza I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator and I make this show not because I have it all figured out but because as a squishy creative artist type that's prone to big emotions it takes a whole lot of creativity to just get out of bed sometimes so every week I put out the ideas that are helping me stay disciplined and stay excited and have helped me stay on this creative path for the past 15 years plus in hopes that it might help someone else or at the very least help them feel less alone on their own creative journey massive thanks to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for theme music thanks to Connor Jones of pending beautiful for editing and sound design thanks to Sophie Miller for podcast assistance of all sorts and most importantly thanks to you for listening and until we speak again stay peped up (gentle music) (crickets chirping) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (bell dings) [BLANK_AUDIO]
