Creative Slash
Have you ever wondered what secrets drive the most profound, successful, famous, and unique creatives?
Then the Creative Slash podcast is for you. We dig deep to discover the high-leverage concepts, philosophies, tools, weird obsessions, and quiet daily routines that fuel their success—the stuff that rarely gets talked about publicly.
You'll get an inside look at what really drives the world's greatest graphic designers, illustrators, and artists through in-depth interviews with creatives who've achieved both creative and financial success.
Hosted by Brad Woodard (bravethewoods.com) and Dustin Lee (retrosupply.co), each episode feels like you're hanging out with us after hours, having the kind of conversations that happen when the work day is done.
You'll walk away with fresh inspiration, new ideas, and practical advice you can actually use in both your creative work and personal life.
Creative Slash
Ep. 039 – Lenny Terenzi – The War I Didn’t Know I Was Fighting
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
For years, Lenny Terenzi built the kind of creative life designers dream about.
He ran a beloved studio and screen printing shop, taught workshops to hundreds of creatives, spoke at conferences around the country, helped build creative communities, and created work that genuinely impacted people’s careers and lives.
And yet underneath all of it, he secretly felt like he was failing.
In this episode, Lenny opens up about discovering later in life that he had been living with ADHD his entire adult life and didn't know it.
Plus, how that realization completely reframed the way he viewed his career, relationships, burnout, creativity, and self-worth.
“I was fighting a war that I never knew was declared on myself.”
This sentence hit Brad and I hard (and I suspect it does a lot of our listeners as well).
We talk about the hidden ways ADHD can show up in creative lives: unfinished ideas, difficulty crossing the finish line, tying your identity to your work, burnout disguised as laziness, and the exhausting cycle of feeling capable of more while never understanding why certain things feel so impossibly hard.
But this conversation is also about an important reframe of how we define success.
Lenny reflects on shutting down Hey Monkey (the studio and workshop space he spent years building) and why he no longer sees it as a failure simply because it didn’t become a forever business.
Over the years, the studio taught hundreds of people how to screen print, launched careers, created friendships, inspired other studios, and gave people a place to belong creatively.
And maybe that counts for something too.
This episode is for anyone who has:
- Struggled with burnout or creative exhaustion
- Wondered if they’re “lazy” or broken
- Tied too much of their identity to their work
- Felt ashamed of a business, project, or career pivot
- Almost without knowing it, gauge success purely by revenue and profit
It’s an honest conversation about creativity, ego, reinvention, mental health, and learning that the value of the things we build can’t always be measured on a spreadsheet.
Sometimes a project changes your life even if it is not an indestructible empire.
About Lenny Terenzi
Lenny Terenzi is a designer, illustrator, creative director, educator, musician, and longtime creative community builder based in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Known for his bold visual style and irreverent approach to creativity, Lenny has spent decades helping brands and creatives embrace personality, craft, and experimentation.
Join the Creative Slash Newsletter and Get the 5-Part “Off the Record” email series FREE
Click here to get the five-part “Off the Record” email series
Note: If you're looking for hard-earned advice, resources from top creatives, and the products they can't live without, you're going to love this.
Brad Woodard
Brad is an illustrator and designer behind Brave the Woods, a full-service studio working with clients like PBS Kids, Ford, Target, and USPS. His bold, playful style and heart-led storytelling shine through everything from brand campaigns to children’s books.
Dustin Lee
Dustin is the founder of RetroSupply, a shop for retro-inspired brushes, textures, and digital tools used by tens of thousands of creatives from indie artists to major studios. He shares what it’s really like to run a creative business while keeping it small, weird, and intentional.
Credits
Audio/video editing: Clara Wright
Cover art: Brad Woodard
Intro animation: Seth Austin
Intro music: “Snakes and Fire” (Instrumental) by Pär Hagström