on the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you're liftoff. Sometimes you just need a creative pep sub. If you are overwhelmed by the state of your world, the world of the algorithm, Instagram, what it's like trying to sell music in a world that nobody values, where nobody values music, or maybe it's the government, or just the state of the economic system, or whether the economy's up or down, or all of that stuff, if you are overwhelmed by the place, the outer world that you find yourself in, and it has caused you to start and stop and continually give up and feel like just throwing out your creativity and your creative journey altogether. This episode is for you. I want to talk about the biggest shift that I had in my life that changed the way that I interact with the outer world in such a way that I could keep going and keep making even in dire circumstances. If you stick all the way to the end, I am going to leave you with a tool that is called story within the story. It's an exercise and it's going to help you get the kind of distance from your life and your creative practice that helps you see the problem areas, helps you see the opportunities. Often this kind of distance is only made possible when you're able to zoom out with a long vacation. We all can't just stop what we're doing when we get stuck or frustrated any time we want and this tool can help you do that in just a few minutes. If you want inspiration to make deeper, richer creative work, check out this podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's called Immaterial 5000 years of art one material at a time. Each episode examines a material of art like clay, stone and even trash and what they can reveal about history and humanity. One episode I suggest starting with is space part one giving form a feeling. If you know me, you know this notion of giving form a feeling is very much my jam and the story of the artist that cast these forms of negative spaces like in a wardrobe or underneath the table was particularly moving to me and I could feel it kind of opening up that essential emotional novelty side of my creative brain. Check out immaterial by searching immaterial 5000 years of art one material at a time in your podcast app that's immaterial 5000 years of art one material at a time. 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 antejpets.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 pep talk all one word all caps. Okay, we are done with our slow and steady summer series. I know I'm still tired. I'm not as burnout though and I am ready to make some progress. I hope that you're feeling in a similar place to me. I have been weighing up thinking a lot about like what do we do now that we're moving from the creative in action back to creative action. How do we enter this space in such a way where we don't run into all of the same problems and we address the fact that I and most of people I know are feeling still very overwhelmed by the circumstances that we find ourselves in whether that is with the internet and social media and the algorithm or the economy or the state of affairs of the planet and the world and politics and all of the stuff in this outer realm that is crushing down on so many of our optimistic points of view and ability to rally ourselves into going after goals or continuing to show up and make stuff like I don't know about you, but there is so much out there that can throw me off course and cause me to want to give up in my own creative practice on a daily and weekly basis. And so if that's you, I want you to know that we are entering a series called the creative journey series for that exact reason to deal with the fact that in many ways the circumstances that we find ourselves in are maybe less than ideal for our creative flourishing. And so if you're feeling like that, this is for you and we're going to talk about why the creative journey mindset is what I think is the solution to this very difficult scenario. Now, you might be having a great life, you might be having the best time of your whole creative practice. I really hope that you are and if that's you, I think a refresher or a doubling down on a creative journey mindset can be helpful to you as well and help you help others too who are not maybe in that circumstance. So the creative journey series, what's that all about? We talk about the creative journey quite frequently on this show and we have all the way back to the beginning of the show, which is almost 10 years in the past. The reason is, is because, well, it's evolved over time, but at first, the reason was because discovering a journey mindset, seeing my life and my path and my creativity and my growth through the lens of story was this before and after marker. It was this thing that when I discovered how powerful viewing your life as a journey and a story, having this story philosophy, how powerful that can be and how it reframes challenges and obstacles in your path and also reframes how far you have to go to get where you want to be in such a way that you can access resilience and strength and excitement and passion right here, right now. And so when I started the show, we were talking about creative journey. We're talking about, you know, the pencil sword from the stone and your creative destiny and potential and going on this creative heroes journey all the way back at the beginning because it was essential to my life and it changed my life and I was just trusting that conviction that this really helped me and it might help other people or it just might be interesting to other people too. But in my early twenties at the start of my creative journey, I stumbled upon this mindset, this philosophical framework of seeing your life in a narrative way and it completely changed my life and it led me to the work of Joseph Campbell and the heroes journey and then studying mythology and how story interacts with us and why it's essential to meaning making and understanding life and and have it in grounding you in such a way where you can put one foot in front of the other and that led me to Carl Jung's work and archetypes and symbols and how all of this stuff fits together to keep my mind cohesive and together and in such a state where I can move forward. And so at the start of this podcast, that was mostly just me trusting my gut, but here 10 years later, the reason I feel more passionate about this idea than I ever have and more certain that I want to ground this whole podcast in this concept is because in that process, I discovered that there's actually really good research that says this mindset shift is a powerful thing for your life and your mental health and I have a much clearer understanding of why that is and how to tap into it. And so we're going to do a series, a handful of episodes that helps us reframe the things that we're going through reframe the chaotic outside experiences and forces that are affecting us in such a way where we can collaborate with them. So what do I mean by creative journey or seeing your practice and life through the lens of a story philosophical framework? What I mean by that is seeing your life as a narrative where conflict, obstacle, those are the essential ways in which what you need is delivered to you that the things that you need to learn and become are not railing against the problems in your life, but the problems in your life are the methods in which you will become what you need to become. And so part of that is this kind of three act structure, 12 stage hero's journey kind of world view, but part of that is about the balance between career and creativity and the outer and the inner world. So I've mentioned Dr. Lisa Miller a few times on this show. She wrote a book that had a big impact on me recently, it's called The Awakened Brain. Lisa Miller is a Columbia professor who is tenured in the psychology department, the clinical psychology department, but her focus is quite unusual. It's like first of its kind really and it's all about spirituality and the brain. And she has dedicated her life to researching what spirituality does for people and in a lot of ways early on she was really laughed almost out of the department like science and spirituality for the longest time have at least in the mind of the scholars has been at odds with each other, right? If you start bringing a spiritual perspective into universities and colleges, that's going to be seen as kind of backwards. And yet Lisa, because of her own experiences in clinical scenarios, she felt like she couldn't ignore the fact that in her own experiences, spirituality had played this massive role. Now, I highly recommend the book. I think it's excellent, but I do want to just pause and say, just like always, this show will remain non spiritual. This isn't a spiritual show. If you choose because of your spiritual outlook to interact with the episodes of the show in a spiritual way, more power to you based on Lisa Miller's work, I would say that's probably not a bad idea. However, as a person that has this public facing perspective and podcast, I don't feel comfortable taking on a responsibility that comes with talking about stuff as abstract and powerful as spirituality. I will continue to show up through the lens of story, through the lens of my own convictions and trusting my gut and listening to that inner voice that is, you know, guiding how I do what I do, but I'm never going to full on mix those two worlds because it just doesn't sit right with me and I don't want to be a, I don't want to play in that space directly. However, in this book, The Awaken Brain, Lisa Miller talks about the research around what a journey or questing mindset can unlock for you. And it kind of blew me away in the way that it relates to this show that I've been doing for the past 10 years on creativity and career and trying to balance those two things. The thing that she found was that a questing mindset, a view that you are moving through a path and a journey and that there is purpose to the conflict and the obstacles that are in your path and remaining open to changing your mindset, to learning, to growing in your perspective on how you're going to move through the world. If you have that journey mindset, what it does is it helps marry these very two different values and ways of being in the world that creates a really powerful balance. The two mindsets that she discusses are The Awakened Mindset, which is kind of the focus of the book and the achievement mindset. Now, these two concepts, I think they correlate with left and right brain or right and left brain. So awakened brain, awakened mentality is what a lot of people associate with right brain or creative thinking or abstract thinking, maybe even a spiritual leaning. And the achievement mindset is akin to logical, rational, mathematical, goal-oriented, doing things out in the world sort of perspective. And in this chapter, she discusses how the quest mindset is the Venn diagram of those two things. You know, one of the things that I've struggled with as I've made this show throughout the life of it is how do you communicate that you have to be able to switch values, switch perspectives, shift your creative energy depending on the stage of the creative journey that you're in. You know, we're going to get into this in a future episode, but one of the things that's really powerful about having a journey perspective is that it allows you to own the stage and season of the creative journey that you're in right now and focus your energy and adopt mentalities and values that you need right now that might be completely oppositional and contradictory to the ones that you need to adopt in the next season. And so at the beginning of a new creative journey, you might need to adopt a severe level of openness that says you have no idea what's interesting, what's good, how it's going to work out, you're open to surprise, you're open to novelty, you're open to innovation, you're open to not knowing where this thing is going to go. That is an essential value in order to make anything interesting when you start a project. But that same value when you're in the middle of a project could cause you to never finish it, because once you move out of that stage, now you need an execution mindset. Now you need to be all about staying true to your vision and only creating little margins for that type of openness to direct the show or direct the project or direct the album. And so this kind of questing lens allows you to balance two very different, almost contradictory worldviews. And I think in the actual hero's journey, Joseph Campbell, he would call this master of both worlds, like the idea is that you would start at home, you would go into an extraordinary world, and then you would return back home having changed. You go back to the same home, but you're not the same. This is what you see with Moana and the Matrix and Harry Potter and then out through religions and mythologies throughout all time. Now I don't personally believe that Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey explains it all the way, I actually think that there are just a vast swath of archetypes and types of stories and different structures. And one of the reasons I find story so compelling is that it's just so malleable and versatile that it really can better than almost anything else adapt to the complexities of the universe that we find ourselves in, while still not being so fluid that it leaves us in the complexity to our own devices. And so in Lisa Miller's book, she's talking about this balance of the awakened mindset, this abstract, creative, spiritual mindset, and the balance of that with the achievement mindset. Or you can think of like career-minded, you know, this going out and achieving things, goal-setting, savings, retirement, all of that kind of stuff, making sure all the math, math's up, that kind of worldview, balances with that creative, spiritual, right-brained, awakened brain mindset, and that the way of striking that balance is the questing mindset. And the reason why is because it allows you to stay in that thin place between your inner world and what you believe to be true and what your gut is telling you and the outer world and the circumstances that you find yourself in. It allows you to tap into that inner awakened part of you, that creative part of you that says, "This is what matters. This is what my life's about. This is what the call is." And it helps you grapple with the fact that the outer world is not currently what it needs to be. And in fact, it might even be against or diminishing or making impossible the things that you're trying to realize into the world. That this questing mindset, this thing that says, "I'm on a journey and there are dragons in my path," is the exact mindset that says, "Okay, I have this call. I have this passion. I have this creative impulse, and yet my outer world is not reflecting my inner world, and I must engage with the obstacle, engage with the problem, and push through these challenges and hardships in order to collaborate with the universe." She goes on to talk about how in this study of this questing mindset. This perspective that some people adopt that says, "I am in a narrative. I am on a journey. I have a purpose and a mission in these obstacles and challenges mean something. They are worth taking on. The people that have that, parts of their brain are turned on, that aren't turned on in people's brains who suffer with depression, that their brain has interconnections and has different parts working together that people that are struggling, their brains don't. We can see that not just it feels good to have a story mentality or to tap into narrative to ground us in our lives as we face our day to day, that it's not just something that feels good, but it actually does make a difference. It makes so much sense. When I read that, I was just like smacking my head like, "Oh my gosh, this explains so much about why the creative journey was at the heart of this show from the beginning because we are attempting to do the extremely delicate balancing act of career and creativity. Creativity and career, creativity that part of us that has this abstract, awakened side in the career side that says, "Okay, but I have to actually take action. This actually has to exist out in the real world." Knowing that journey is the link, is the tightrope, is the way that you keep yourself balanced on that. Seeing that in the research and reading about that was just one of the most thrilling things that I've ever read. And as I go to do this creative journey series and quadruple down on this journey mindset to ground the show, I am reminded that there are probably two other through lines that have been a huge part of this show since the beginning that also perfectly align with this mentality. The first of which is this notion that we say, "No booby traps, no treasure." And one of the most popular episodes of this show is about treasure hunting. It's about this show on the history channel called Oak Island. And it's all about how these treasure hunters, these real life treasure hunters, when they're on this island and they're convinced that there's treasure, when they hit a setback, when they hit what seems like a booby trap, they don't get discouraged. They get encouraged because guess what? If there are booby traps, there's treasure. You only set up obstacles. There are only obstacles in the way of things that are meaningful to do. And it reminds me of how it feels to move through our own creativity. You know, by the time there are a million resources and courses and apps and tools and tricks and people set up on the side of the creative path to help you along to do a thing, the treasure is already gone. It's this notion that the people that made the most money in the gold rush were the people selling the pickaxes, not the people going for gold. And so when you feel resistance, of course, there are types of resistance and this is about discerning within yourself. There are types of resistance where you are trying to do something that is against your nature, that is against your best interests. There are types of stress that weigh down on you and negatively affect you in a way that's not good for you. That is part of the process as well is getting in tune with, is this the good kind of resistance or is this the bad kind of resistance? But for me personally, this adaptation of the hero's journey mindset, the number one shift that happened was how I interact with an obstacle. Because what I realized was if there's no booby traps, there's no treasure. And that when I hit an obstacle, when I hit something that's tough, figuring out a way around it is worth it because this same booby trap is what's keeping other people from moving into it and figuring it out. If this is something that is connected to what I want to do, embracing the obstacle and knowing that it's going to teach me what I need to know about reality in order to move around it or through it or over it is exactly the place that I need to be. And then the other piece that I'm reminded of as I start, you know, working my way through this rededication around creative journey is something that my dad said to me that I've said a couple of times throughout the life of this podcast that a lot of you have sent me emails about or told me in conversation made a massive difference to you and really glad to hear it. But again, it doesn't surprise me because it was a complete game changer in my own life. And so I personally am a very squishy, emotional artist type of person always have been, always been in touch with my feelings a little bit too much, so much that they're, I'm so in touch with them that they're squeezing half the life out of me, right? That's a bit too touchy with the feeling and it can really get me down sometimes. And so, you know, I can get really fed up, really discouraged. And one of the people in my life that has been kind of a mentor and a guide is my dad and my dad is not heartless. He can get in touch with his feelings better than most people I know, but he generally has a kind of natural, stoic attitude about life challenges. He takes things in his stride. That comes kind of second nature to him. And so sometimes when I'm feeling really out of whack, I'll give him a call. And I remember, I don't know, probably eight, nine years ago, I called him up and I said, you know, man, I'm struggling with this. This thing's not working. I'm frustrated. Da da da. Life is so hard. And you know, when I said that, I kind of expected him to push back. I kind of expected him to be like, well, you know, it's not bad hard. What you're dealing with is very minor in the scope and the grand scheme of human suffering, which is true, but like a good guide, he didn't invalidate my experience. What he did was say, yeah, life is really hard. And I was like, yeah, and it sucks. And then he said, no, life is hard, but it doesn't mean it's bad. Hard and bad are not the same thing. And that shift is exactly what the questing journey mindset unlocks. And that shift gets to another through line of this whole show, which is the the adoption of the growth mindset. Now I'm not going to go deep into that. We've done that so many different episodes, but it's the work of Dr. Carol Dewak, she has a whole book called mindset about the growth mindset. And it's about how we've learned in the research that the people that have the most successful results and the best results in their life are the ones that have the growth mindset instead of the fixed mindset and the growth mindset being when you hit a challenge. Do you shut down or do you light up? If you have the fixed mindset, you shut down because you believe that if you fail, you are a failure, not that you failed at that task and you learned something, but what you learned was you're no good, you are a failure. But if you have the growth mindset, every challenge is an opportunity to get better, to become something more. And for me, there's nothing more powerful than adopting a story outlook, because you probably heard this a million times that the key to a good story is conflict. And I think, uh, like many others have said before me, people like Donald Miller wrote a whole book about it a million miles in a thousand years. And it's about how the key to a good life is also conflict, that the lives, the Olympians, the heroes, the people that we look up to, those are the folks that learned how to dance with conflict and obstacle in such a way where it caused the best of them to be put through the fires. And for that best of their metal, the best of their inner gold was purified through them. And so as we're looking at the current circumstances that we're in today, which, you know, in some ways, if you go look at the data, there's a lot to be hopeful about. We've made a lot of strides on climate change, not as much as we need to, but we've, we've made a lot of good efforts. We've, we've done a lot of change. We're going to hit some of the big goals that we thought were impossible, but we're also suffering some severe storms, both literally and metaphorically, you know, there in terms of medicine and crime, there's a lot to be hopeful about. And then there's a lot to be depressed about. And in terms of the economy and how we move through it and what it looks like to be a creative person in a world where, you know, tech companies and technology are just increasingly coming for us, or at least it can feel like that. In that setting where the outer world is full of challenges and full of obstacles, I take so much from seeing these things as my teachers and seeing that, embracing them, listening to them, learning from them, are the way, is the way that I'm going to find where I need to go next. And so I want to leave you with a call to adventure, a creative call to adventure, a way to put some of this stuff into action today, not just hear it, hopefully feel excited, hopefully feel a renewed connection to that inner resilience and that inner hero. I hope that happens to, but I hope that I can leave you with something that you can actually do something with. And so here's an exercise. It's called the story within the story. And the idea here is that we can zoom out of our own story and see the story within the story. Another important story related book in my, in my life is this book called Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher mentioned it a bunch of times on the show. It goes through 25 different literary devices and inventions of how writers learned to have a chemical reaction on people's brains through their story devices. It's absolutely fascinating. Highly recommend it. Recommend the audio book, especially because it's almost like individual podcast episodes. If this is your kind of thing. But one of the ones he discusses is this story within a story idea. And it's this idea that when we have story within a story, that the further distance we get from the story, the more we can detach from our own bias and our own circumstance and let go of and suspend our disbelief that it helps us immerse ourselves more fully into a story, the more layers we go. You know, you've seen this a million times. Things like the princess bride where the grandpa is telling the story to the son at the beginning and then we go into the high fantasy comedy thing. That helps us make that transition of leaving our own circumstance and getting a real distance from them in order to immerse ourselves in something else and feel like it's real. And so the same is true. His example is Frankenstein where in Frankenstein, there are three layers. It is a brother writing his sister letters about a story that was told from hint from somebody else. And that person actually lived it. So we're getting multiple stories within stories and it's helping us to let go of our own reality. And so the same is true for you. When you are in your own reality, when you are crushed by the outer world and outer circumstances, it can be very difficult to tap into what Lisa Miller calls the awakened brain. It can be very difficult to tap into your creativity in order to find the types of innovations or eureka moments to get through these obstacles. Now, for me personally, sometimes one of the ways that I can find that level of distance that you might get with a story within a story is to live a different story for a while. Like go on vacation. You know, the times we've been lucky enough to have a couple weeks off and really, really put all of the work away and do that process of slowly letting go of caring about emails and really get to a state where you're living a different type of life. All of a sudden, all of your problems just seem obvious. You get back in touch with your more human values, that more right side abstract human brain values. And you start seeing ways over and through those obstacles that you couldn't see when you're right up against the wall. I liken it to painting a mural, you know, sometimes when you're painting a mural, you're right up against the wall, you're trying to get this part just perfectly. And you're just obsessing over and obsessing over it and just redoing the line, redoing the line, you're getting so aggravated. And then if you just will step back, you'll see that that little tiny thing that you're in right now is almost no consequence to the way that the full mural looks. And so the problem is, is that we get into these conflicts in seek, you know, sequentially over and over and over throughout all the weeks of our lives. And you can't just every time you hit one of the one of those, take a two week vacation and get some perspective. And so one of the things I like to do, one of the ways that I adopt a journey mindset is to find a story within my story. I try to look to what are the abstractions of what I'm going through. And when I get the particulars out of the way, it will remind me of a story that has had a big effect on me. And the reason why this matters is because sometimes we think that stories are so simple that, Oh, if only life was like a story, everything would be easy. But life's complex, Andy, you can't just think of it like a story. And there's a degree in which that's definitely true. But ultimately, yes, when you're watching a story about a dad is working long hours and not taking breaks and working the weekends and you're watching that and you're like, this guy, it's obvious, like, you know, they've massively simplified life. And clearly, the dad just needs to quit his job and spend all of his time with his kids. But in reality, it doesn't work like that, right? But the truth is that, yeah, there are stories like that about a parent that is a workaholic and needs to take a chill pill. There are stories like that, of course, cliches. But there are also stories like the movie The Pursuit of Happiness, where it's based on a true story of this guy, Charles Gardner, who is actually taking some large risks with him and his kid in order to give his kid a better life. He's working overtime. He's not sleeping. He ends up homeless. Like, there are huge risks. And yet the distance that we have from living that reality allows us to tap into that intuition and say, Oh, we know he's making the right choice here or always making the wrong choice here. Like it, that distance allows us to see from a higher perspective. And so here's what I want you to do. Here's your CTA. The story within the story is that you write out your circumstance and try to leave out all of the details. So maybe you're leaving a job or you're leaving a community or a book club or whatever it is, you're leaving a group because you have seen the light and you can't live this way anymore. And you look back at these people and you just feel like, how are they interacting with this like its reality? Like we've all been through a period of time where we were sold out to a group. And then later, we thought, what in the world were we thinking? And we can't imagine being a part of that any longer. That's a common experience. So common that there are tons and tons of stories written about it. For instance, the matrix, the matrix is a classic example of this simulation where people are because of kind of tribal mentality or, you know, group think acting in a certain way. Like this is the only reality. This is the way things quote unquote are when in reality, it's a way that they were agreed upon. And so the matrix is kind of an allegory of that. And so when you think about the matrix, what was the right thing for that person to do? That's the question. You find the movie and then you say, well, what would that person do? What does that character do? And maybe it can unlock something for you. Or maybe you're in a circumstance where the world is moving too fast. The apps are changing, the software is changing, the technologies changing, you know, the culture is changing, and it's all moving so fast and you're just afraid that you have been left behind. Okay, we've got movies like Encino Man, which I just recently found out was called California Man in Europe, you know, Brendan Fraser, Pauli Shore, the Weasel, classic 90s film. I don't remember the take away or moral of that story if it had one, but it's this kind of fish out of water thing. And this person that's been left behind and has to figure out a way to assimilate to the new times. Another one that comes to mind randomly is Goofy Movie Two, where Goofy has to go back to college at the same time as his son Max. And I think if you go back to that, if you get that distance, you realize like, yes, there are times where we have to adapt and learn, but that our wisdom and the things that we've learned by being in an older place are actually an asset and not something you want to lose in the process. And so those are the kind of ideas that you can only see through the lens of story. And so recently in my own life, I've done this practice, I've looked at what is going on with me. What are the things that are making this incredibly challenging, especially the ones that seem to make no coherent sense or have any purpose, or I can't see at all how they could be a teacher. And by finding those relatable stories, finding the ones that had moved me in the past with characters that were in similar scenarios that I was in, helped me to see silver linings, helped me to see new perspectives, helped me to get re in touch with some of my values. And it can be an incredibly powerful way to get distance even when your back is against the wall or your face is against the wall as you're working on that mural. And you just can't see a bigger perspective. Now, none of us will probably suffer to the degree, even even a fraction of the degree that someone like Dr. Victor Frankel did as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. And all of, even when you frame it in that light, all of the things that I face in my life, even the worst of the worst things just seem like absolute nothing. But instead of using that as a way to invalidate our experiences, I want to leave you with a quote from him that I think gets to the heart of how we can reframe where we find ourselves today in a very challenging place as people trying to create a thriving creative practice. And so, Victor Frankel is famous for saying forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess, accept one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. And I think that that quote perfectly encapsulates the power of the journey perspective, because it's about the outer world, the forces beyond your control, and ultimately how those come up against your inner world, and that that little sliver in between those two things are your reactions and your choices and your ways of interacting with them. And so, if you're in a place where you are really discouraged, that the things that used to work really well don't work anymore, you can't seem to find a way through the old way. I hope that the questing mindset opens you up to possibility and opens you up to seeing new ways of being and new ways of becoming today. Creative Peptalk 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 going to get just from the apps. Go to AndyJPizza.substack.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 AndyJPizza.substack.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.POD Glomerate.com. Hey, thanks for listening. I hope this episode brought you tons of PEP and encouragement and ideas for your creative practice. I'm your host AndyJPizza. I'm a New York Times best-selling author and illustrator. And you can check out my work at AndyJPizza.com or on Instagram @AndyJPizza. And until next week, stay peped up! [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
