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Creativity on Demand Pt 2

eventually. What happens is we hit the wall eventually. If we're not aware of these dynamics, and we don't build practices to countermand that we hit the wall and the reason that we eventually hit the wall is because of what I call the assassins of the creative process. Okay, so the assassins air stealthy. They're like ninjas. They sneak into our lives, they sneak into our organizations, and they erode both of them from the inside out. Um, and again, we have to be aware of them. If we know when assassin is coming, then we can suit up in our own ninja gear and we can grab our nunchucks, and we can, Yeah, we convey. That was pretty good. By the way, we can jump in. We can prepare. We can be prepared for them. But a lot of people aren't aware of of what these assassins are and how they affect our process. So I want to die of entities. But before I do, are there any questions based on possibilities versus pragmatics? Or can you articulate a time when maybe you've experienced that in your o...

wn work? Any of them happens all the time in my industry. Yeah. And how does it play out in your industry? Shot? Well, when we develop a game or we develop a vision or art direction for a certain product, Um, we do set up processes the checks and balances along the way. But there's always people that come in towards the end together. 10 cents and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Air just wasted because a pivot a change of an opinion? Yeah, it's kind of wasteful, but it's at the same time. It's It's a disenfranchise into law that the creatives on the team all right, probably courses process. You have spent a lot of times what equity on that thing and that somebody condemned The last minute says now, not that. How about this instead? Yeah, yeah. And how does it make you feel creative? I've been I've been doing a long enough to where it doesn't bother me so much, but I do sympathize for the younger team members. They get disenfranchise real fast. Yeah, I think as a pro again. As a creative pro, you're not being paid to get a thrill out of your work. That's not why you're being you're being paid to do a job to deliver value, right? So the more you adopt that professional mindset and you say, Look, this job cannot contain the sum total of my creative energy. It can't and never will. Never should. I think one of the reasons we feel a lot of tension, but we're not living up to our potential. All these things is because we're looking to our job to contain the sum total of our creative energy. Can't do it if we try to make it force fit. Then we will always be frustrated, disenfranchised because we're being paid to do a job as creative pros. And that means that somebody else is typically paying the bills and calling the shots. And at the same time, if I work inside of an organization, there are things I can do to make that dynamic. Less palpable, less destructive, right? And so there are things like for example, um, you know, we could we kind of have to think about creative projects and organisations like a giant hallway. Okay. And the problem is, we often don't have people involved in the process at the right time, like you mentioned. So people are involved in conversations until later down the road. So what happens is we have a, like, a kick off call of some sort, and we've got, like, stage one. We were defining the problem we're gonna do, you know, all of that. And then we move into stage two and we've been the stage three moving the stage four. But the problem is, these air like, what is that, like paper? These. Like paper curtains. Right that we pulled down between these stages. So at some point, you know, Mr Boss Man comes and this boss woman comes in at this stage and says, I'm now going to go bust through that paper curtain and we're gonna go back and revisit this conversation again. Terribly frustrating. Maddening for creative pros are sitting around having these conversations there. Thank you, Vanessa. And they're having all these conversations about you. What's best. What we think is best when somebody comes in at the last minute says no, not that. Let's do this other thing instead. Well, you're devaluing the whole process. Very, very mad and very frustrating. So my friend Ben, his creative director at at a video production company, he always says we have to think of it like a hallway. Okay, so you define the work, you define what you want to do the beginning, and then you have to tell the powers that be. You have to say, Hey, in about three days, a four foot thick steel hermetically sealed door is going to drop between this part of the process and the next part of the process, we're going to start asking entirely new questions. So, Mr Miss Boss Person, we need you involved there and understand that once we make this call, we're going to move beyond that and this door is going to drop. And there were not going back and having these conversations again because we have to move forward So it is done. And then next stage, same thing. Giant vault door drops. Now we're over here, and we're having entirely new conversations. Now, if you wanna have a conversation about this, you have an opinion. Feel free to offer it because we want this to be pleasing to you. But understand that once we move beyond that, we can get back there. But we're gonna have to hire a Walder. It's a jackhammer. Whatever it's going to be expensive. It's gonna take time, and we're not going to deliver this on time, Okay? So if you want this process to be healthy, the product versus process thing to be healthy so that we're not making snap judgment calls at the end we need you involved in each stage. Whether that's a client, orbit your manager, whoever we need you involved each stage that we can have the appropriate conversations. And then we're not constantly drilling back through walls in order to start all over again. Have those conversations right? But that takes time. Take structure. It takes intentional effort. So but that's the best way that I thought off. And I've found toe work in organizations is to be intentional about this conversations and even describe it that way so costly to do that if we have to revisit it. But it's maddening because process versus product. It's very why, because it's maddening. It is good. So any of the thoughts, questions I think we're being, quite everyone that makes those decisions is listening. Teoh, Just like it's interesting for us. I mean to be somewhat transparent about it. It's not so much the um, exactly to sea levels that get on us. That's the instructor brings a lot to the game, too. So, um, it's this It's this interesting dynamic cause I come from a creative world to where, um, you know, whether being an editor and production and somebody comes in who hasn't been involved in, makes those changes in its matting for everybody, but in our case, sometimes and, you know, in the structures and get here like you experienced until day before kind of goes, Oh, well, I want to change this stuff. It's like, Have we got some going to juggle, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So But it's the same thing. Yeah, but again, getting the instructor involved in your case earlier in the process and saying, Listen, at a certain point, there is a drop dead date where you cannot make changes, your presentation or whatever it is right, and it's it's difficult. It's challenging. But I think the honor, the process of everyone involved, right, you can't have special case scenarios, and every organization has those kind of rock star untouchable people who well, you know, there there are a special case, you know, we don't make them abide by the rules of everyone else. And you can't have that. I mean, you do have people. They're gonna be more talented. It's just gonna be the case, right? That's the way it is. If you hired right, that's gonna exist. But you can have special rules for a special for certain people. You have to find a way of helping everybody abide by the process If we're interdependent. Okay, awesome. So next time if I come back, help me. Listen a week out, buddy, you gotta have your presentation. All right? So the assassins of the creative process Assassins air stealthy again. They're like ninjas. They sneak in, they assassinate a process from the inside out. And this is where we feel those tensions. The first assassin is this month's so dissonance is a term. It's using a lot of contexts. It's when two things don't seem to go together. They're not constant. They're not congruent, they don't build fit together. And the creative process is the resolution of dissonance. I've got a problem. I've got an environment. I can't seem to bridge the gap between those two. I got something I want to do something that I'm dealing with here. How do I bridge the gap? That's what the creative process is, the resolution of dissonance. But there's also a kind of sinister dissonance that can creep into our life, this institution music the term for a chord that doesn't really resolve as you get done. Done. Ah, and your mind craves resolution. Your mind is craving the resolution of that pattern. That's what creativity is to resolution patterns, right? But your mind is craving that resolution, and it doesn't come and it creates a kind of next. And pop songwriters use this to great effect by the way they use it because they know that if they create that kind of dissonance and then they resolve that your brain releases chemicals to say, all is right with the world. So listen to Adele for like a minute and 1/2 and you hear, like, who were gonna break open? Terrible. Everything's OK again. This is resolved so terrible again. Okay, everything's fine, right? Only Lefteris with someone else. So you know, it's like that dissidents were, and there's a science to that to pop song writing dissidents resolution Filmmakers use this to great effect, so you might be looking at the scene of a woman walking through a house. It's a perfectly beautiful, sunny, innocuous day. The birds are chirping. It's great. But you just know that this serial killer is hiding in the bathroom, right? How do you know? Why do you have this sense that something is wrong? Typically, it's because there's a bed of music. Playing just beneath the surface of the film on that bed of music is creating kind of angst in you, because the dissonance that's involved in it causes you to feel like I want this to result. There's a kind of dissonance that plays a bed of musical place just beneath the surface of a lot of creative lives and the organization's lives. Organizational life. And it creates this kind of baked in but sometimes undefinable tension in the organization, and it zaps cycles that could be used for a creative process. So I want to talk about the source of a couple of those places of dissonance in our life. So these are my three Children when they were a little younger. They're not your greatest source of distance there. Sometimes mine, not yours. They're about to have a race. So this is my daughter Eva here. She's the youngest, and that's my oldest Ethan, and they're about to have a race. And even who's the total rule fall or a typical first child, right? He's gonna take off running Avis Gonna take off running total free spirit. There she goes, and at some point she's gonna throw her hands up and say, I win, I win the race. I am the champion, Re I win the race. And Ethan, Who's the rule followers? What do you mean, you with what you talking about you and where was the beginning? Where was the end? What were the rules of the game we hadn't defined the edges of the race is starting line the finish line. So how do we know who won? Right? Many of us go through that similar kind of dynamic and creative work. We don't define the edges of our work effectively. Where we starting from? What's the problem we're trying to solve? And how do we know when we're finished? How do we know when we've contributed the value that were being charged with contributing their about to assault one another? So I'm gonna move on before I get in trouble here. But how do I know when I've contributed enough value? When is the project that when we celebrate, when do we celebrate? Right? It's a tremendously challenging thing for creative. Sometimes creative work is a process of constant iteration. Right up until the end. We run out of time and it's done instead of No, we know when we're done. Sometimes it's gonna be three days in advance. Sometimes we might go over, but we know we've defined that. We know when we're going to celebrate. We can't just keep working up to the deadline every time with life teams do, right, Frustrating. So defining the edges. Lack of definition of edges. That's the first source of distance. The second source is what I call unnecessary complexity. Okay, so this is Ah, sign this formula hung on my office door A to the last organization that I work for, where I was leading a creative team because I love complexity. I do Complexity feels like progress to me. If you give me a project and you say, here, turn this into something valuable, I will make it really, really complex. because, to me it looks like I'm doing a lot of work, right. But complexity is not necessarily progress. Sometimes complexity issues, complexity. I'm a complexity junkie. I love things were complex because I love to wrestle with ideas and concepts and all that, but that could be destructive to the creative process. So this formula you'll know this balances. At least I hope so. I'm not a mathematician, but balances. Hopefully, I can do this. One balances on both sides, but it's a lot easier to say one plus one than it is to see all this ever gobbledygook. But many of us live our lives in an unnecessarily complex way. Our systems are more complex and they need to be our processes. The way we define problems is more complex. It needs to be. Our organizations are set up in a more complex way than they need to be, and the unfortunate result is that we spend a lot of our time navigating hurdles just to get to our work instead of spending our energy on the work itself, and it could be frustrating and maddening. So we have to go through our lives and organizations and ask Is there any place where I am being unnecessarily complex and how I'm approaching my working home, defining the problems I'm trying to salt And again, a lot of times that sourced in these kind of we could call these kind of baked in assumptions that we have about the way that great work gets done back to the fireworks and buzzy feet thing from the beginning, right? We have these baked in assumptions and, you know, uh, or an organization starts off and everybody's on the same page. We're all doing the same thing, But then over time, what happens to an organization as it grows right, you've got you've got an organization that starts off in a very entrepreneurial way. And, you know, basically everybody is doing the same thing. Hey, we're gonna We're gonna take this hill, We're gonna do this. We're resources were doing whatever when you do to make it happen. But over time you need new systems. So then now you've got the main group of people. But then you've got these other people who are sort of guarding these other towers, right? And then over time it becomes more complex. And now you've got more towers that are being guarded here. And then you've got more. Towers are being guarded. And pretty soon, everyone in the organization every division has its own understanding of what success means. In this case, success means keeping my job and guarding the silo that I've been given charge off. Forget about the main thing I'm trying to dio, right. It creates this kind of sometimes unnecessary complexity. And so these systems become fossilized. These processes become fossilized. The way we do our work that we set up our organization all becomes fossilised. But for individual creatives, it can look like Am I doing things in my life that I've always done a certain way just because I've always done them a certain way? Um, our family, Up until very recently, we lived in the house that backed up to a nature preserve. And one of the unfortunate parts of living in the home that backs up to a nature preserve is you get a lot of things in your house, spiders and bugs, and things will find their way into your house because we live right on the edge of his nature preserve. Right? So one morning I went down and I was going into my home office in the morning, and, uh, I was generated down the college, my cup of coffee and my book in my hand. And this wolf spider pops up between the cushions. And I hate spiders more than just about anything in the world, right? So I ushered the spider into Spider after life, and after I did that, um, you know, I went back and I checked the cushions to make sure there wasn't anything else there. But here's the interesting part. For the next year, every morning when I went down with my cup of coffee in my book and I set them on my desk, what do you think? The first thing I did Waas. I checked the cushions for spiders. Now, I had never seen a spider in my entire life in those cushions since we've been living in that house, right? We saw him in the basement. Everyone's well, whatever, right when they sort of creeped in an older house, right, so you can creep in the stuff. But I had never seen one there, but I had that one experience and every day for the next year. The first thing I would do is pull the cushions off. I'm looking a bit like a vacuum out in case I need to do, you know, whatever crazy Based on one experience. It was an unnecessarily complex way to start my day. It was not necessary. But I did it because of that one time experience. Same thing in our organization, something So is our your systems too complex? Is there a way you can simplify so you can focus your creative energy on solving the problem, not on the system itself. Make sense. The third source of dissonance. So you've got lack of edges. Unnecessary complexity. Third sources what I call the opacity phenomenon. And this is what happens when all of the why based decisions for an organization for a project are made in some kind of black box. And at some point, somebody comes out and says, You do this, You do this, you do this, you do this and then they go back into the black box and everybody's left saying, Why are we doing this? I don't get it. I don't understand. Why are we even doing this to begin with? I know what I'm supposed to do. I have no idea why I'm doing it. And if you hired well, organizationally, you want the people on your team to understand not just what you expect of them, but why it's important to the overall mission of the organization when there's a gap between the wine, the what dissonance emerges, there's a break, and you're not gonna get the best workout of people on the team. First of all, you're not gonna do your best work if you don't understand that bridge between what you're doing and why you're doing as creatives. You live in that why you live in that? Here's what we're trying to accomplish, and I will work my fingers to the bone. I will work night and day to make this happen, but I need to understand why I'm sacrificing you. Understand why I'm pouring myself fully into this? Why is it important when there's that gap? It creates a kind of dissonance. So that's distance. The second assassin is fear, and we talked about fear earlier. Um, fear is when the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success. Fear is when we're afraid to act because of some perceived consequence that lives in our mind. And a lot of times it's completely illusory blood times. It's not really, and yet that's what fear does. It paralyzes us and prevent us from taking action. But action? Oftentimes again, we talked about earlier parts, the fog participating in stagnant waters because once we step, we realized, Oh, there's ground there. After all, it was a guy named Neil. If you are a who's brilliant writer, read a book called The Now Habit About Procrastination, and I know none of you probably struggled with, but now have it. In this book, he talks about an exercise he does often times with his clients, where he'll take a 10 foot, I think, 10 foot long wood plank, six inches wide and lay it on the floor. And he'll say, Could you walk the length of that plank? And they look at it like it's a trick question. What do you mean? Of course I could wood plank on the floor. Yeah, I have to be drunk, not able to do that. What you mean and it's okay. Great. That's great. Now imagine that I take that wood plank and I suspended 100 feet in the air between two buildings. Now, could you walk going through that point and they look like What do you mean? I have to be drunk to try to do that. No way. I'm not gonna walk across the wood blank 100 feet in the air. There's no way I'm doing that. Well, what has changed about the technical skill required to do that? Absolutely nothing. If you can do it on the ground, you could do it in the air. What's changed are the perceived consequences of failure, which in this case, is plummeting to your death. So I kind of get it right. But I would submit to you that many of us go through our lives artificially escalating planks. We artificially escalate the perceived consequences of failure. And so we tell ourselves these stories about Well, if the idea isn't good enough, I might get fired. If the idea isn't good enough that I might lose that client, the idea isn't good enough. Then everybody's gonna laugh at the idea, Isn't it the idea, you know, And we tell ourselves these stories in our head and there are very real consequences. But most of the time, the consequences we fill our mind with are not are far greater than the actual consequences that we would experience if we fail. So that's fear of failure. And it's it's endemic. And we talked about this really is one of the things that came up. Most often, we talk about what's standing in the way of creativity. It's fear to that gap. It's the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success. It's not worth it. Fear. Failure is destructive. Fear of success can be justice destructive. Your success. What do you mean? For your success? I mean, of course, we're all trying to succeed right when you mean fear of success. Well, am I really sure? I want to knock this one out of the park, and I really sure that I want to over deliver on client expectations by really sure. I want to be recognized for my work because what if I can't sustain What? What What? What if I'm a fraud? You know what? If I am the great Oz behind the curtain, you know? And all people see is this figure up here on the screen, But I'm actually the person behind the curtain, and at some point some of those they come. They're gonna pull the screen back and they're going to be revealed for who I am. What's really isn't as great as everybody thinks, and I think we all experienced My wife said something to me several years ago when I was launching my business for the first time. She said, You know, cause I was I was kind of complaining about well, you know, But But what if, you know, I get in the room, this board room with all these people of this Fortune 100 company, and we're talking about this stuff? And what if someone starts poking at it? And what if they? What if they start poking at to the point where I really can't come back with an answer? And she said, Listen, everybody's taking it to some extent, everybody, to some extent is afraid they're gonna be found out. Everybody from the highest level CEO to the lowest level junior person in their first rolling with everybody, to some extent, is faking right now. That doesn't mean everybody's like Google puffing up what it means is that I think everybody has that sense in their head that, you know, we're kind of making this up as we go, and at some point I might be found out. And that's what fear success does to us. For your success prevents us from acting because we're free. We're gonna be found out. But the reality is that we only truth comes from action. Understanding comes from action. We have to act in order to dispel fear. Okay. And when you start acting and organization, what you start talking about fear, which we'll talk about a little bit there talking about fear, it tends to go away because you're dealing with actual consequences versus perceived consequences. So I was still organizations. Hey, when you're kicking off a project and you're about to do something that seems a little bit risky, it's a little bit outside the confines of what we would normally deal with. Um, let's talk about what we're afraid might happen. This is a great thing for as an individual create if you're a photographer again, a designer right or whatever it is you dio ask yourself. If I do this, what am I afraid might happen Because then at least you're having that dialogue in your head. You're not just sort of charging into it and hoping, Well, I hope I don't get paralyzed by fear in the process. Instead, you're saying, what am I really afraid might happen if I go this course? Okay, so fear is dispelled when we talk about it. That's one of the great things about fears you can countermand it now. Doesn't mean you're never gonna be afraid. But you want to be dealing with reality, not figments of your imagination. Make sense, Get the third assassin is expectation escalation, which rhymes so expectation. Escalation is when you compromise your process because you're comparing your in process work with the absolute best thing that has ever, ever, ever been done in your industry. In the history of humanity, the greatest pinnacle of achievement in your industry. Secure designer You're looking at the designer who's one of your heroes and saying, Well, this could never be that. And you compromise your own process. If you're designing games, right, you're looking at, you know, the absolute peak of your industry. Like, what's that? What's the best thing that's out there, right now in your industry or the thing that you admire the most. Okay, so you're looking at JK five, right? And you're looking at it. You're saying, Well, this thing that's in front of me resting, I'm working on like it's not that. So maybe I need to do something else. Or maybe I need to find some other way. You know, you're failing to realize that at some point this thing looked very much like the thing that's in front of you, right? It was in process. It was being developed, but somebody decided I'm not going to allow comparison to paralyze my process. Instead, I'm gonna continue playing and tweaking and experimenting. And eventually, I'm gonna work my way up the rugged mountain until I get to the peak. Right? Expectation escalation can come from a couple of sources that come from our heroes. So we compare our in process work with the work of our heroes. You a lot of creative services firms that come into they've got industry trade magazines plastered all over the walls. So you've got, like, the peak of everything being done in their industry. And so I can just imagine this junior designers sitting in a cube crammed together with a bunch of other designers, and they look up. And when they look up from their monitor, they see this pinnacle of something that's being done in the industry right now, and it's supposed to be inspirational. But sometimes it could be paralyzing because they're looking at the thing on their monitor and they're looking up there saying it doesn't look like that right? It creates kind of paralysis, not good, not good at all. So we can't allow are the work of our peers or our heroes. Also our managers. Sometimes we talked earlier about expectation, escalation. You know how you do something great, and that's your new baseline that can be paralyzing. Sometimes it's our past work are our own past work. We look at something we say, Well, this isn't as good as this other thing I did, But again, we neglect to recognize that that was the result of a process. Okay, Steven, knock Manevitz. You wrote a book called Free Play. He said. It's great to sit on the shoulders of giants, but you don't want them to sit on your shoulders because there are no late no, there's no room for their legs to dangle. Sometimes we allow the giants to sit on our shoulders and crush our effort because of expectation escalation. So eventually, as I mentioned, these assassins will cause us to hit the wall. We have to be aware of them, and we have to build practices that help us to counter man. And that's really the more important thing. You have to build practices to help us countermand them in our life so they don't infiltrate and erode our process from the inside out. Eso A couple years ago I was watching a news, uh, new show and somebody said something I thought that is so profoundly brilliant. And it was somebody that we probably all think of when we think of creative services. We think of creativity, all these things, of course. And it was former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but he said something that was so profoundly brilliant and the press didn't know what to do with it. But he said this. There are known knowns, thes air, the things that we know that we know there are known unknowns, that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know. We don't know. OK, everybody together. Three times I thought This is so brilliant. Actually plotted it on a graph because I thought, This is great. You got the known, the unknown, the known, the unknown that, of course, in the upper left you got the known knowns, the unknown knowns, the known unknowns, The unknown unknowns. Four of the greatest indie band names ever. By the way, um, the known knowns up inequities, air expectations. Look, if you give me something to do, I will knock it out of the park. I'll make it happen. It's gonna happen. Challenge me. Go ahead. Challenge me. Problem is, we continue ratcheting up our effort and we're not machines. We're not able to sustain that's expectation. Escalation for constantly ratcheting up the pressure to deliver more, More, more, more value. Right. But we're not machines. Well, we have a building infrastructure to support that. Okay, we're gonna talk about a bit dissonance. The unknown knowns. These are the things that we know deep in our gut. We know that something's not right, but we can't quite put our finger on what it is. There's a kind of dissonance that's the bed of music playing just beneath the surface of our life rate. By the way, Donald Rumsfeld was talking about fighting terrorist cells. I was actually a little bit dismayed to discover how similar fighting terrorist cells is to the creative process inside of organizations. But that's an entirely different topic. OK, the left side is the unknown, and fear thrives in the unknown. It thrives in the places where we're not talking about consequences. We're not talking about the work. That's where fear lives. And that's where fear drives when we don't talk about actual consequences. Fear takes root in those dark places. The way we dispel fear is by moving directly in moving directly in the place where fear lives. Ah, Steve Press Field with a book called The War of Art. He talks about this concept called resistance. Resistance is his personification of the fear of action. It's the thing that comes against you when you feel like you should be doing something Resistance stands in the way and says, uh, you shall not pass rate in full Gandalf form. You're not going to go this way and he says that he has encountered in his life that resistance typically is in the very place we need to be going. If we're moving in the place, it's most comfortable to us. Resistance doesn't really play with us all that much. It's fine. No big deal. Go. Yeah, go do all that little piddly stuff. That's fine. But if you go try to do the really important work that you're wired to, Dio all of a sudden resistance stands in your way. It is. Ah, you're not gonna go over here. The only way that you get to that valuable workers by confronting it head on and what stands on the other side of resistance is uncertainty to the unknown. That is why resistance and fear is so paralyzing as creatives. We traffic in uncertainty. We traffic in the unknown, right? That's what we dio were constantly turning uncertainty into value. So we have to define the edges of that uncertainty. We have to be willing to move directly in the place of fear and step into it and say, once I act, I trusted on the other side, there's gonna be ground okay? And not allow fear paralyzes so expectations, dissonance and fear the three assassins that rob us and eventually cause us to hit the wall eventually. If we're not careful, we will find that we were in a place where we're not engaging fully as creatives. Now there are ways to deal with this mess we're gonna talk about in the next section after we take a break here in a bit. But we have to be purposeful of in paying attention to these dynamics so that they don't just become the norm for us. You know, they infiltrate organisations when we've become the ethos right, So we have to be careful to identify them. If you're a leader of people, you have to be careful to stamp them out at every turn. As a creative, you need to be careful to be aware of them so that they're not robbing you of your creative energy. So a couple of questions for us before we close off this session I love that some discussion about this because I have been talking at you now for quite a while and I am like that. By the way, I like a chatty Cathy doll just wind. Maybe like it going. So, um, the assassin I'm most experience in my work is dissonance, fear, expectation, escalation. Okay, what is the assassin that you think you experience the most in your work? Your creative work? No expectation of escalation, I think for sure. Okay. And how does that play out for you? Um, I think I I overreach in my expectations for sure. Like upon starting project. And if I feel like I'm not on that path, Teoh, like the height of my potential, I definitely start doubting myself and, you know, try and solve a problem. It may not even be there. OK, And that's the real challenge, right? I mean, think that's it's easy to confuse expectation, escalation with having a lot of ambition or wanting to do great work and those air different things. Um, ambition is good. Not in the sort of Gordon Gordon Gekko. Is that right, Gordon Gekko? Greed is good. Not in that kind of way. Not. Uh oh, you're kind of creepy. And I don't like your hair kind of way, but in a, um, like expectation, escalation is paralyzing. Ambition is Dr that causes. You want to continue climbing mountain. That's a good thing. It's good to set high expectations for yourself. But when you start comparing and contrasting with your past work and it paralyzes your process and you say maybe I need to do something else, that's that that's the frustrating part is we have to be careful not to allow that to eat away, but very common response, by the way. Expectations collision. Yeah, that's mine as well. Yeah. Yep. And how is that taken form in your work? Um, I don't know. An artist in the world are in my professional thinks they're the best. Every artist compares the work to the next artists, and we all admire each other's tendencies or abilities. And we wish we had, you know, um, the same time, It also ties a little bit into the fear. Yeah. You know, you You know, you second guess your abilities, your work quality when you see other people's work. Yeah. Yeah. You get fearful like maybe I'm not back. You know, titled are good, are experienced. Sure. No. So, yeah, it's the wizard behind the curtain thing again right now. The odds behind the curtain. Yeah, absolutely. I full disclosure. I feel like that right now The way I think we all do. To some extent, it's yeah, absolutely have to act on this. Hundreds and thousands of times ready, But well, thousands, hundreds of times I say is dissonance and fear. I'm thinking about in two parts my work here creativelive in my work outside to Yeah, yeah, um, dissonances every day And I can totally relate to the fear I don't think I've ever seen And I get creative whether it's photography video, something in post production. I think every single time I've put something out to show a client or just to show anything that's even a personal work. I've always thought they're gonna Nobody's gonna like it. Nobody's gonna like this. This is terrible. And then, um, eso Sometimes I don't even show people stuff. Yeah, I'm like, this is people see it like this is great. Yeah, that's great. But you kind of know to like inside, sometimes together people think some things are great. And you yourself are like, Yeah, no way. I'm not sure that I'm really happy with that. Exactly. Yeah, it could be. That could be stressful for sure. Um so I tend to experience it most. Wen and I think you kind of answered it a little bit. You answer it a bit to Do you have any thoughts when you when do you tend to experience expectation, Escalation of most and your work? Oh my goodness, when the deadlines tight time eyes. Yeah, and I don't have enough data to go off kind of media. Good one. Yeah, I think it's again. It's creating on demands, creating under pressure, right? It's And so we have these pragmatics that we experience in the course of it, And that's when it's most tempting to start comparing what you're doing to what has happened in the past. We start feeling I'm not gonna have enough time to make this what it needs to be, but it could become paralyzing for sure. All right, so quick answer with regarding prolific, brilliant and healthy. I'm Are you firing on all cylinders at which of these you feel like you're struggling with the most right now and it's OK to say I am awesome. That's till we find to do that as well. Brilliance. You're struggling with feeling like you're doing a great work Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm always second guessing the work. Can't I always? You never think it's perfect. You feel like you're pace is good. Generally, Um, I I go back and forth between those three there. It's just one big mess, So Sure, Yeah. I mean, recycles the rhythms, ebbs and flows, right? Yeah. We're gonna talk about that. The next section, the practices we can build to help us with that, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I would say the same. I've always I feel like I always have to any two of those at one time locked pretty great. But then there's always one that's kind of poking out. Yeah. Yeah. So not maybe the brilliant part. Well, and again, I sure that number 70% right? I think a lot of people, that's kind of where they feel. The problem is, if you don't get all three of these, you know, as a pro, right? If you're not able to produce a lot of work to produce great work and to do it sustainably, eventually you're gonna help wall. And again there's assassins or what causes to hit the wall. But we can build practices to countermand it. And that's what we're gonna go in the next section. We're gonna talk about the elements of rhythm, the practices that you can build into your life, very specific and concrete. So this first section is very, very theoretical, very sort of almost like identifying the symptoms, the issues that are involved. But you have to do that before you condemn the countermand them. So in the next section, we get very tactical and talk about how do we as individual creatives, both practices to prepare us to be brilliant at a moments notice? If you wanna be brilliant moments news, you have to be in far upstream from the moment you build a brilliant idea. And that's what we're gonna talk about in the next section. Well, we got some great answers to the assassins from our audience. I thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with the questions that top posted a big, very beginning of the course. W lotuses, saying self doubt stands in their way. That's there because Assassin 3 18 Media is a regular with creative life. Welcome. 3 18 The assassin I experience most in my work is time, but in a different way. It's the time to be creative. Yes. And then D s n D v A said, having to take more time to educate clients or to gather all the bits and pieces of info and images instead of using that time to brainstorm and play with ideas. Yes. Yeah. We're gonna bring address all of those in the next section. That's gonna be a core part of what we talk about.