Getting Work To Work

I think a lot about the creative life and how to stand out in an unlimited landscape of hobbyists and professionals. For the longest time, I thought that it was just time spent developing technical abilities, but as I have gotten older and more experienced, I realized that there was more at play. In this episode of Getting Work To Work,I’m going to dive into an unseen component of our creative life that fuels both our creative work and our life.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Cole Brown for the past 15 years as he has grown into his roles as a writer, speaker, pastor, and stand-up comedian. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, we dive right into talking about our mutual love for 80s wrestling, Cole’s decision to learn another language by immersing himself and his family in a new culture, why he started doing stand-up comedy in Spanish, and the importance of honoring the strength of the youth and the wisdom of the old.

The creative journey can be a struggle. You know you need to produce something, but instead you just stare at your canvas, your document, your sketchbook, your code, your scene, and you’re paralyzed by the limitless possibilities or the absence of ideas. You allow yourself to be overrun by distractions, hoping that the hit of adrenaline and the rush of the noise will prompt something, anything, to fill the page before you. You flood your mind with the anecdotes of professionals who tell you all that you need to know about creativity. You seek inspiration of people a little further ahead of you in hopes that something will get triggered in your mind, but instead imposter syndrome sets in and you do everything you can without doing anything at all. This to me is what the blank page symbolizes and in this episode of Getting Work To Work, I want to talk about the blank page, and the distractions, anecdotes, and inspiration that keep me from filling that page.

Adam Croft is an audio professional working on technical audio implementation and programming for games. He is also a serial entrepreneur publishing books and online courses. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, we talk about Adam’s transformation from being a serial starter who never finished anything to becoming obsessed with completing projects, the value of consistency, his definition of a professional, the two types of goals and why most people should set bigger goals, and the importance of starting where you are.

What reaction does your work give you? Do you get excited as the vision in your mind becomes a reality? Perhaps you push aside your personal satisfaction in exchange for feedback and client approval? In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I am going to share a quote that I heard recently in the documentary Score: A Film Music Documentary that has me thinking twice about how I respond to the work I do not only for myself, but for clients.

A returning guest on Getting Work To Work, Jack Kent is back to share about his new Kickstarter project for the upcoming Flawker Rawker album as well as self-made scavenger hunts, the importance of journals, and his love for practical effects, metal, and This Is Spinal Tap. This was a fun conversation and I hope you even spend some time doing the homework assignment Jack wraps up the episode with.

At the end of every interview, I ask my guest about a book or resource that has impacted them. One book that seems to come up a lot is The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life by Twyla Tharp. I just started reading it and my mind is blown with how good it is. It is extremely relevant to what we as creative professionals go through on a daily basis. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to share a quote from the book about how important it is to be ready to do your creative work when inspiration strikes.

In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I talk with Aaron Edelheit, the author of The Hard Break: The Case for a 24/6 Lifestyle, about combining the old world concept of the Sabbath with the modern business world, what he learned through researching and writing his book about the need for disconnection so our brains can function, and why working every day is bad for you.

This week I was working on a project that was too complicated for what it needed to be. I kept asking myself, “Why? Why do I need this?” This wasn’t a response to the job, but to the common tendency in creative work to over complicate what is sold to clients. In this episode of Getting Work To Work, I’m going to share six times throughout the life of a project that you can ask that question to tighten up your work and get back to the fundamentals.

Christopher Butler is a great person to know and learn from. He is a thinker, designer, writer, podcaster, and the Chief Design Officer at Newfangled. If his name sounds familiar, he was on the show last year and he has returned to talk about a variety of topics including the power of limitations in finding creative solutions, how we need to embrace forgiveness of ourselves and others, the changing nature of stories in our lives, and how treating life as a series of small experiments can lead to greater satisfaction.