Photo by Click and Boo on Unsplash Two years ago, I was feeling stuck.   If you’ve never felt this way, it’s really hard to describe.  It’s the feeling of everything being okay but not great.  Of mediocre satisfaction.  I felt like life wasn’t bad, it was pretty good, but there could also be a lot more.   I had the sense that I was playing a small game.  In my twenties, I had pushed up against the edges of my boundaries, defied a lot of conventional norms, and felt like I was constantly pushing towards bigger things. But as many older people will tell yo ..read more

If you’re not familiar with the puffy, pink Pokemon, Jigglypuff is a Pokemon that is characterized as loving to sing. However, part of its ability is that when it sings, people fall asleep. Poor Jiggly is cursed. Think about it: all Jigglypuff wants is to have people listen to its singing, but by its very nature, no one will ever be able to listen to the entire song. In a way, this is very much like the struggles of a creative. We desperately want to share our work with the world. We crave the validation from the praise of others. Most of the time, we’d love to be paid for that work as well ..read more

I’m sorry, I have no idea why I wrote that out like I was a talking cow. Anyway, I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be migrating the blog over to Substack. Why? Because there not only can you converse with one another and find more folks like yourself, but I’m also working on a new book project around creativity, and I felt like it’s one that I’d like to build in public. Also, I’m taking on a greater role over at Brainstorm Road, where we’re building a community around helping folks bring their dream projects to life in real life, and we’re getting all connected and stuff on Substack, so ..read more

I’m giving a workshop next week, and I’m already scared. There’s so much that could go wrong. I’m not running registration – what if no one has signed up so far? What if a hundred people have signed up and I’m not ready to run a workshop of that size? What if people show up completely unwilling to engage? After all, I’m running a workshop – audience participation is what makes it impactful. You need to show up and put in the effort if you want to see the intended outcome. What if people think that I’m a fraud? Or not experienced enough. Or not qualified enough. Or, because it’s meant for creat ..read more

Illustration: Rick Kitagawa“What does the fear look like?” I would suspect that your answer to what fears looks like would be more like failure than Frankenstein’s monster. Perhaps its closer to being laughed at than being slowly chopped to pieces as part of a demonic pact. Our fears have evolved, mostly away from certain death towards modern anxieties like being shamed on the internet, or having a scammer steal our bank info.  They are also often also misplaced- the fear of flying is much more prevalent than the fear of driving, even though you’re much more likely to die in a car than in ..read more

Photo by Sarah Gualtieri on Unsplash We are no longer cavepeople. Comparisons are a healthy, very human way for us to process the information we take in from the world around us. It’s a natural instinct that we honed in our very primitive days, comparing rampaging animals to that time when a saber-tooth tiger mauled and killed Uncle Urg.   However, we are no longer cavepeople.  Our comparison radars are too finely tuned for the nuance, diversity, and relative safety our modern world offers.  When we’re unfairly comparing ourselves to others, like apples to oranges or fish ..read more