Getting Work To Work

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?

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.

In this thing called life, we undoubtedly face endless questions: How do I write a funny joke? Am I funny? Where is Chris? What is the meaning of life? Here to help us find some answers to those questions and to talk about his latest audio projects—Reflections – Where is Chris? and The Meaning of Life—is the funnyman himself, gough. We dive right into our typical podcasting shenanigans filled with laughter, inappropriate phrases, and the answer to yet another question: Who has the wettest mouth in Australia? We also talk about important things like oranges, human nature, two-line zingers, trusting your audio producer, how gough rehearses his actors to get great performances, and how he keeps his creativity fresh. If you've ever wondered where the line between drama and comedy is, gough even has an answer for that, too.

As listeners of this show know, I love asking my guests what they are endlessly curiosity about, but what I rarely take the time to consider is that we could overload our curiosity. What do we do when this happens? Today's guest provides several insights into forming our personal answer to that question. Micah Kassell is a graphic designer, drummer, and a deeply creative soul fascinated with curiosity, belief, and cult-like behavior. From corporate boardrooms to stages, he's learned to approach teamwork from the perspective of the drummer, as time keeper and vibe tender. In this conversation, we explore his obsession with aspirational and motivational speech that builds fans of brands and culture. We also talk about his journey into music and graphic design, how his dad's creativity influenced his life and career, why baseball is an imagination sport, learning to win and lose in life and business, why the trio is his favorite band and team configuration, patience, limitations, highlights and shadows, and learning to document his creativity with improvisation and communication.

Quotes:

"The longest of shadows are when the magic really happens."

"Focus on doing really, really good and important things instead of just more things."

The best conversations not only have interesting questions, but also the necessary time and space to think and respond when answers present themselves. From "What most often brings you joy?" and "What are you endlessly curious about?" to "What is the space you need to give yourself today?" and "Why does where you are matter?", today's guest and I dive deep into ourselves and share what we discover. Michael Hunter is the Founding Mentor of Uncommon Teams, a Coach, Podcaster, and Author of The Resilient Tech Leader: Harness the Power of Mind, Body, Spirit, and Heart to Lead with True Balance and Joy. Beyond the questions, we explore topics such as communication and science, why AI will never replace him, the solid foundations that allow him to have fun with change, what it means to be an uncommon hero, tiny experiments, resilience, and the simplest possible process.

Quote from the Episode:

"The most heroic thing I can do is to help you get in touch with your own inner hero, so that you can go on your own hero's journey." – Michael Hunter

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.

"We must train ourselves. Not to make spoons or jewelry or paintings or chairs but to be more competent, more forgiving, more patient. If we were simply training for production, there would be only engineering geared to cost-benefit analysis and not the value of Quality. But if you are truly interested in making changes in your work, if you are attempting to do work of Quality, then the work to be done is on you." – Gary Rogowski, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction

What's your gift to the world? What makes you uniquely different than everybody else? Why should I choose you? Three powerful questions from today's conversation with John Ravaris, consultant, speaker, and author of Define Value, Drive Growth: Build a Business Clients Choose and Competitors Envy. In our conversation, John unpacks these questions and more, focusing on how uniqueness creates client value. He talks about his curiosity with what people and businesses are really trying to accomplish, what sales is and is not, how his 4D Roadmap—Discover, Develop, Deploy, and Delight—reveals what makes a business unique, the difference between a customer and a client, his approach to niching and standing out, and building your reputation by saying no and not chasing the shiny object. If your business is stuck positioning itself just like its competition, then it's time to discover just how valuable uniqueness can be.

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.

Of all the questions today's guest asks in our conversation, the biggest of them all is this: "What does it mean to be alive?" Making his sixth appearance on the show, Christopher Butler is a designer, communicator, and deep thinker not afraid to ask tough questions and explore obscure topics. Our conversation begins with nature journaling, the joy of slowing down, observing, and modeling wonder for others. From there, we explore what it means to trust information, the role of modern propaganda and disinformation in our technical society, and the importance of having a consensus, shared reality. Ever deeper, we question purpose, meaning, and what we leave behind to the next generation. As Chris models throughout this conversation, open your mind as we go on this adventure together.

"What is it that I really do? What is the thing that is indispensable that I bring to the table?"

"It's not about what you're good at, it's about who you are."

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.

"Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: The man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were." - Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three by Clive Barker