Customize Your Uniqueness (GWTW908)
You don’t really think about what makes an artist unique until you see the tools of their creation up close. Recently, I visited the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio and while looking at artifact after artifact I started to see a pattern: intense customization. Most artists memorialized in this shrine to music didn’t buy their greatness off the rack, they shaped it through their own hands and creative collaborations. There were wires sticking out of guitar bodies, unique shapes with multiple finishes, endless knobs and faders, and costumes adorned with everything from spikes and patches to mirrors and leather. While most of us will never be inducted into any hall of fame, we can learn from our heroes. Fast forward 30 years into your career, will you be remembered for the way you shaped your tools to bring your vision to life? Or will you be as forgettable as the prompts you used to generate acceptance in a world filled with conformists?
Patterns of Change (GWTW907)
How do you discover necessary patterns of change in your life? For me, I journal, writing down emotions, successes, and failures throughout moments in time. For decades, I lacked consistency, but in late 2023, inspired by a video on my friend Jack’s YouTube channel, I started a daily log of thoughts and ideas. Yesterday, I came across a notebook from 2019–2020, so I traveled back in time to see what was going on six years ago. What did I find? An entry that could have been written today. I honestly felt discouraged. What’s the point of keeping a journal if it doesn’t help you identify recurring patterns before they become problems? Yes, journals can help us find patterns, but you actually have to do something with them. You have to make the decision to change, then actually do it.
The Patient Reawakening (GWTW903)
The longer your creative career lasts, the less written about your specific struggles. Writing and producing work for young professionals is enticing because there will always be an eager audience, hungry to succeed. They will 10x absolutely everything in order to keep up with the algorithm and crush the content calendar. The message never changes even though the audience does. But for the rest of us, time tempers all things. While your creativity continues to soar, your willingness to settle for long hours and low wages does not. You grow tired of playing the game. The message grows stale in your mouth. You still dream impossible dreams, but the truth is that you don’t need anything fancy, you just need to work on your craft. The patient reawakening has nothing to do with being the next hot commodity, it’s returning to you, practicing, focusing, and refining. Every single day. It’s not chasing popularity or relevance, it’s doing the work that resonates.
Your Vision, Our Future (GWTW901)
Years ago, I was having coffee with a friend and he asked me if I wanted his old 3D printer. It had been awhile since I modeled anything in 3D and I couldn’t visualize the process, so I declined with a simple statement, “I need to learn to see first.” I’m shaking my head at my ignorance. Have I learned to see yet? Nope, I haven’t. I haven’t even tried. What I did was miss out on an opportunity to dive in and have fun learning something completely new. Vision doesn’t show up because we see something, it’s revealed through our experiences. It’s the combination of our senses and the understanding we earn as a result of our efforts. In today’s monologue, I’m going to dive deeper into how we can develop our creative vision by doing our work, sharing it with others, and refining it along the way.
The Creative Return (GWTW899)
What are the things you’ve studied, explored, or even built a body of work around, but ultimately moved away from? As creative professionals, we are wanderers and explorers, constantly searching and striving for new experiences and techniques. But what do we do when we feel the call to return to past areas of study? We are different than before, so why would we even think of doing this, let alone grapple with the feelings that we’re selling out or short-changing our evolution? The creative process is like the tide, it comes in, it goes out. We stay and go. Not everyone chooses to return, but if we do, we must honor the past with who we’ve become, and have a vision for something beyond what we could ever do before. It’s not about nostalgia or taking shortcuts, it’s about transformation. That’s the creative return.
Skills for a Skill-less Society (GWTW897)
As a curious person, I am intrigued with what it takes to build skills and get good at a craft. Sure, there’s the initial impulse, the desire to pick up a guitar, make a leather bag, or design furniture, but at some point you need to start doing the work. You pluck and strum, sew and saw, cursing and crying as you suck beyond measure. But something in you tells you to keep going. Slowly, you get better. It’s hard to say where you’ll end up, but that doesn’t stop you as you dream about new ideas and possibilities. Maybe you’ll make money, it might just be a hobby, but that doesn’t matter because you feel alive. This is the work we do in a skills-based society. But there’s an interesting conversation emerging in some corners of the internet centered around this question: How is AI de-skilling humanity and what impact will that have on society?
Talent of Unquenchable Interest (GWTW895)
How would you describe your talent? I know, not a comfortable question to start with today, but I think a lot about what talent is and how we choose to celebrate it as a society. The simple view of talent is this: whatever you want to do, as soon you share your dream with the world, you’re immediately put into a category, a genre, an industry, and judged against the best and the brightest. The result? You either have it, or in most cases, you don’t. We see this pattern play out in school, at work, in corporate America, and the entrepreneur’s garage. And let’s not forget the other side of talent: participation trophies. Don’t worry about talent, everyone’s equal and this trophy shows just how much we want you to believe that. I could go on and on, but I can’t stop wondering: What if we got talent all wrong?
Forging a Creative Life (GWTW893)
As I examine my life, I find that I am in the middle of a massive pivot. I’m no longer who I once was, the young entrepreneur who wanted to work for anyone and everyone doing anything creative. I’m slowly becoming someone different, the thinker, writer, and artist who wants for more than just relying on formulas and routines to make ends meet. Yes, you could label this as a midlife crisis, but frankly, it’s more than that, it’s a life-altering process of reinvention. It’s not easy, it hurts as I get forged by the hammer of reality, and I could easily bemoan my existence. I could blame the economy or AI or globalization or automation or about a million other things for inflicting this shift upon me. But the truth is that I’ve known what I needed to do for at least a decade, and I’ve been too scared to do it. Until now. In today’s episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to talk about how I’ve been forging a creative life of strength, exploration, and experimentation that’s been working behind the scenes preparing me for what’s next.
Curious Questions for Change (GWTW888)
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about perfectionism. I asked, “What triggers perfectionism for you?” They shared some thoughts, generally around being a beginner, but when they asked the same question to me, I took it another direction. I responded, “When I’ve done things for a long time and feel like I need to prove myself.” It’s amazing how experience can be both positive and negative. Without it, I would lack the confidence needed to do my job, but too much? Perfectionism. Fear of judgment. Constant comparison. It’s amazing how certain questions can unlock a state of reflection, but how can we actually do something with them? That’s what this episode is all about: Curious Questions for Change.
Through the Fog and Fire (GWTW886)
What does it mean when a book that is not self-help actually helps more than most books in the category? No shade to those authors, I’m sure their books are helping people, but they probably didn’t embark on a 10-year research project in search of the answer to the question, “What to make of a life?” When I picked up What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative by Jim Collins at my local library, I saw the title in capital letters, flipped through the pages, and thought I’d give it a shot. What surprised me the most was that I couldn’t put it down. It not only helped me to make sense of where I’m at in my life, but it also gave me tools to think about the future. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to dive into the seven most impactful quotes from Collins’s book, share a few stories from my life, and encourage you to search for your own answer to the question, “What to make of a life?”