Episodes

202 - For When You Feel Like Giving Up Do you ever feel like you've lost your way? When you hit obstacles, setbacks and dead ends, do you sometimes feel as if you've fallen off your path? For me, the creative career path is a roller coaster. There are so many circumstantial and emotional ups and…

Finding your creative gift is the most important (and difficult) pursuit in your creative career, and in this episode, I will share all the clues that have helped me make progress on this journey. From podcast interviews to speaking at conferences, I am very fortunate to get to meet a lot of pheno…

Finding your creative gift is the most important (and difficult) pursuit in your creative career, and in this episode, I will share all the clues that have helped me make progress on this journey. From podcast interviews to speaking at conferences, I am very fortunate to get to meet a lot of pheno…

How is it the 200th episode!? How have I been doing this for almost 4 years??! Whether I believe it or not, this is 200 baby! So to CELEBRATE it's only natural that we have one of the most CELEBRATED creative professionals on the planet, designer Michael Bierut!!! In this episode we explore how t…

The first couple years of my creative career were about 99% CREATIVITY and 1% CAREER. Spoiler alert, that balance did not work! After crashing and burning, I was finally inspired to give the career / business side a serious effort. It was this season of my life that I stumbled upon a framework tha…

The relationship between art and money is a real tricky one. One of the the biggest challenges stems from the fact that involving money into the equation puts pressure on your creativity. This is a major issue because, neurologically speaking, your best creative work comes from a place of play... A…

EXTREMELY SPECIAL GUEST ALERT!!! Incredible Illustrator / Youtuber Fran Meneses (AKA Frannerd) joins us for a long chat about all things creative career! We talk about: How to make a deep connection with your audience and why it matters. Imposter Syndrome and why no matter how far you go, it sti…

As people who make THINGS, it's easy to be hyper focused on WHAT we make, but that should not be your only concern. WHERE you put what WHAT you make matters just as much. If you put the best restaurant in the worst location, it's going to fail, and the same goes for your art. Where you share your …

It's funny that with the internet we've never been more connected, and yet also never been more tempted to isolate ourselves! In my experience, you can not build a thriving creative career or a powerful creative side quest without OTHER PEOPLE! You've got to get other people embedded into your per…

It's hard to get into art when it's being shoved down your throat. So, how do you get your work in front of new fans, customers or clients without directly smashing it into people's faces? You engineer organic growth. You make work that people want to voluntarily share. In this episode I share ev…

It's noisy and no one wants to be sold anything anymore. No company is looking for new untapped talent, they just seem to sit back and wait for the "best" to rise to the top of the internet. In this climate, how is a creative person supposed to break into a new market or win a new dream opportunit…

GUYS!!! THIS MAY BE OUR BIGGEST EPISODE TO DATE!! I AM SO PUMPED TO SHARE THIS EPISODE WITH YOU! 1 - We launch a new series today called "Creative Side Quest" In this series, we will walk through how to take a normal creative side project and add 4 layers of strategy that will transform it into a…

In this episode I want to share with you the secret weapon I KNOW you have... that I'm SURE you're hiding :D This episode contains 3 lessons on creating a deep connection with your audience, and how that's THE number 1 secret to building a thriving creative career! P.S. Next week we will return t…

Today on the show, we have super special guest, Chicago based art director, designer and letterer Adé Hogue!!! Adé has worked with a very impressive range of clients, from Nike to PayPal, and his journey is incredibly inspiring. There are nuggets of wisdom and lots of vulnerability in this episode…

Does planning make perfect? Or is it best to shoot from the hip? Should you meticulously obsess over the details or should you just let those creative juices flow??? In this episode I want to share a principle that has helped me strike a balance and tap into my own personal peak creative performan…

Being a creative person is incredible... except when it's not. To be a pro creative you've got to work hard and be a professional, but playing that part can sometimes lead to ignoring your needs and emotions. There's a secret I know about most creative people. They can look all cool and collected…

Would the people that know you best, see 'you' in the art that you make? The self discovery and artistic development required to pull this off can seem like an impossible mountain to climb, so I asked artist Jon Burgerman, how has he done it? I don't know anyone who is as good as Jon at downloadin…

Do you have a sense that you've yet to realize your full potential? Do you often feel like you have much more to give but can't seem to figure out how to make it happen? These feelings have haunted me my entire life and over the past few years I feel like I'm finally unlocking some of my inner hi…

Every journey has it's ups and downs and your creative career journey is DEFINITELY going to have some serious downs... or you're not doing it right!! This episode is about failure and how you can not only get through it, but start to embrace it as the secret to success! I also offer a tactic I f…

What do you do when something's broken? You take it apart. I think we all have a deep sense that EVERYTHING is broken right now and because of that we are deconstructing EVERYTHING!! For this reason, this year's 99u conference theme of "Challenging Everything" felt VERY APPROPRIATE to me. In t…

Anyone can deal with the good times, but it's how we deal with the hard times that defines our creative careers. In this episode I want to share tools for getting back up when the chips are down and you're feeling crushed. I've been dealing with some burnout and struggle and I hope these ideas a…

Do you ever feel like you're hiding behind the subjectivity of art? Like the fact that creativity is subjective, means no one can tell you you're bad or good. Right? I would say: wrong! Take the very creative world of food for example. Like what's good food and bad food might be up for debate to a…

Chris Piascik has been doing a daily project for 10 years!! In fact, he's built an entire illustration career on the back of this project! In this episode, Chris shares the core insights he's learned about personal projects throughout this enormous journey!

Is it just me, or does it seem like people think creative work only matters if it's reaching insane amounts of people? Like if you've never made something that's gone viral, than you're not really in the REAL creative game? Like if you don't have a bonkers amount of followers on social media than y…