There is a lot of nuance and emotion that goes into creating and part of your success will be determined by how well you understand and control those emotions. Insecurity and frustration play a huge part in helping or hurting your creative process so its something you need to be able to control. In this episode, we will look at the stages of creative insecurity, how social media can affect it and some techniques to help you better control it.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-41-creativity-understanding-and-embracing-insecurity/
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
There is a lot of nuance and emotion that goes into creating and part of your success will be determined by how well you understand and control those emotions. Insecurity and frustration play a huge part in helping or hurting your creative process so its something you need to be able to control. In this episode, we will look at the stages of creative insecurity, how social media can affect it and some techniques to help you better control it.
SHOW NOTES:
http://thecrazy1.com/episode-41-creativity-understanding-and-embracing-insecurity/
FOLLOW THE CRAZY ONE:
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
It's time to light the lights and get things started on the 41st episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is the show where we talk about creativity, leadership design, and a whole host of other things that matter to creative people. So we are 40 episodes into this podcast, still a little bit crazy to me, but we're 40 episodes in. And I took a little bit of time to look back and kind of look at what are the episodes been that have been the most popular? What are the ones that kind of surprised me that they found the following that they did. And probably the most interesting one to me, and the second most popular show was Episode 27. And that was the episode where we talked about the importance of happiness and creativity. And I'll be honest, that I struggled for a while on if I should do that show or not. It's kind of a touchy feely subject, and it's something that not many people are willing to talk about. The problem is is that to be able to talk about something like that, you have to be honest. If you want to say you have feelings that other people have feelings and It's just simply part of the equation. And so I think that the fascinating thing, the thing that made me, quite frankly really happy was to see that reaction to it. Because it let me know that other people are thinking about this, and they're struggling with this. And I think it's for that very reason that we need to talk about these things. Because here's the problem. We're all trying to look so perfect and so interesting. And you know what, if we're all telling the truth, we'd probably all be better for it. The reality is that there's a lot of nuance and emotion that goes into creativity. A lot of us don't recognize it. A lot of us don't want to talk about it, and we don't really want to admit it. Well, in today's episode, I want to continue to talk about one of the other emotional parts about the creative process. And today, we're going to talk about insecurity. And I'll be honest here again, that this is something that I openly wrestle with, I think it's something that all good creatives, probably all just creatives in general wrestle with. And it's really one of those things where You know what, it can be a challenge. Because I think I get a large piece of my drive for my job to have a podcast or writing articles and speaking and a lot of more of those things. Well, it started because I'm insecure about my talent. I, if I'm being honest, I don't think I'm one of the most creative people out there, I see so many other people who are so much better at what they do. And I feel like I've only been successful because I'm willing to be crazier and work harder than they do. That's how I want to look at this. I want to have a discussion around this and really focus on four areas. Again, that's a number I tend to like and come back to a lot but four different areas that we want to look at. The first is just here again, to have a just a quick discussion about why is talking about insecurity, something that I think we need to do. I want to look at the role that social media is playing in affecting people's creativity. I want to look at the different stages that you're going to go through in your career, struggling with that creative insecurity. And then finally to take a look at what I'm saying Some of the things that we can do to understand and then control that insecurity. Why are we talking about this? Because the reality is that creativity is supposed to be fun. And I think that was where the last episode Episode 27 on happiness was so great because it really tried to celebrate the fun and the output and the good part of creativity. Creativity is a complex, highly personal process, and that a lot of your personal experiences and your emotions play into it. This is why if I give everybody who listens to this show, and assignment, I'm going to have all different solutions from every single person because everybody has ideas differently. Everybody creates differently. We've dedicated multiple episodes to talking about this. The thing is, is that what I think and the reason why I feel like we need to talk about these subjects is because how you understand and control those emotions, I think, has a lot to do with how successful you are. We talked about happiness because like I said, it's a question Part of being satisfied with your work. And it's something that changes over time, as you go from somebody who's mimicking somebody else's work to finding your own voice to finding leadership, and then you know, kind of going on and taking a larger role in an organization, your very basic definition of happiness is going to change. Well, the difference is, is that insecurity, I think, is something that you don't really have to go out and find quite the same way you do it happiness, it finds you. And I think it finds all of us probably a little bit too easily and a little bit too often. Historically, it's been challenging enough, right? It's been hard enough to go out and create something new. But modern creatives have to deal with social media, which I think is making it worse. And I think it's making it worse for a couple reasons. Social media is an interesting and funny thing. It's something that millions and 10s of billions of people engage with. And the funny part is, is that if you go out and you look at our profiles, Look at the profile that we have on behance or LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or dribble or Pinterest or any of these, right? If you're getting these profiles, we are all tall. We're all beautiful. We are all talented. We're all award winning. And we all know that none of that is necessarily the truth. Let's take a second and step back. And let's look at just social media from a bit of a distance. And ask ourselves the question, why the hell are we all acting like this? Why are we all trying to create these personas, and I've thought about this for a long time I've written about it. I've done studies and research around this. And for me, it really comes down to the fact that honestly, social media lets us see just how boring all of our lives are on a daily basis. Because that was the problem. If you think back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook when your friends would post the most every day and the name things. I don't care when you went to the dry cleaner or got a coffee or somebody at Starbucks. misspell Your name or whenever, you know, the world doesn't need another photo out an airplane window or your breakfast or on and on and on, right? Like these are all the everyday things that we get tired of we get social media fatigue around. Well, the reaction to that, I think has been that if you watch closely, you've seen that pretty much everybody, you know, probably even yourself, has turned yourself into a little brand. And what I mean by that is that we are all so concerned, consumed even with the same things that would travel a brand and things like what is our visual appeal, what's our visual language, and we care for that through photos and videos, and Snapchat and profile photos and all these different things that we post to try to make ourselves look more interesting, because nobody's profile photo is ever just simple and easy. It's always on the top of a mountain at sunset looking into the sun with Have an eagle on your shoulder some ridiculous thing like that. You've seen entire social media platforms reorient themselves. To take advantage of this, go back and look at what did the profile page on Twitter or Instagram or any of these platforms used to look like and look at them today. The one thing that you'll notice the one commonality that you will see is that those main profile photos that you can upload are significantly bigger, oftentimes giving you two of them. So you have an avatar photo and a large profile photo that sits behind it. We're all incredibly concerned with our tone of voice, the way that we speak to the world. Twitter is a huge, huge extension of this. I am lucky enough to know a lot of the people that I follow. And the funny part is that for most of them, they are smart, but they're not terribly deep. But interestingly enough, whenever suddenly they're on Twitter, they're acting like Yoda. He was writing fortune cookies around just how deep and profound and interesting everything has to be so that their brand sounds smart and profound and interesting. We're all concerned with creating content that's going to separate Read us from the crowd. This is again, this is the base of brand building his brand differentiation. But that's what all this is really leading to, is that we need to stand out from everybody else, we need to not highlight the day to day in the mundane, we need to highlight the interesting, the different, we want to separate ourselves out from this, we've created entire societal constructs around this. This is why we have Throwback Thursday and flashback Friday and man crush Monday and all this other crap because what we've done is we've said look on a day to day basis, my average Thursday or Friday might not be that interesting. But what we can do is that we can open up the entire archive of your life go back through everything that you have ever done. And pull from that. Pull the cute baby photo the time that you got the puppy the time that you graduated high school that you met some famous celebrity and everything else in between. That's all fair game now. And it's socially acceptable because we've created these constructs, like Throwback Thursday flashback Friday, where now I can post old content and it's fine This is again, the entire reason why you've seen the rampant outrageous Rise of the selfie. Because it's this base concept that nobody can capture the glory of me, but me, again, it's all brand control. It's all brand imaging. And we'd love social media. We love creating our brands. And the reason why we do that is because we are literally addicted to it. There is science that proves that with each interaction. Every time you get a like, every time you post something that gets a reaction, you get a physical chemical release in your brain of a chemical called dopamine. And that hit is something that you get addicted to it gives you a tiny little rush. Not a huge one, but just a little one. And then what happens is that over time, this is why whenever you go out to a restaurant and you're driving in your car, you're walking down the road, you can't put your phone down, because you miss that little hit. You think that you're missing out on something is starting to cause anxiety with everybody because they feel like there's something thing that they're missing out on, because they're not getting these little dopamine hits. This is why the average person unlocks their phone 125 times a day, it is absolutely insane. I thought it was absolutely insane until I actually counted one day and figured out that I was one of these people. The reason why I bring this up is because I think that social media and these little dopamine hits, they affect creatives differently, and probably a little bit more profoundly simply because of the fact that we are more insecure than the average person to start with. We're insecure because what we produce is always personal. You're giving us a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen and asking us to create something. So what comes from that is of course personal. There's a personal connection to this work, we want people to like it and we are insecure about how they're going to react. It is just a simple base human physiological response to this sort of a process. Now, the interesting thing is that I found just like Like happiness, insecurity changes as you go through your career. It's something that I struggle with. And I've struggled with my whole career. At times. I feel like if I'm being totally honest that this podcast has equal parts of me trying to help the creative community, and my own personal therapy session, I am riddled with insecurities about pretty much everything in my career. I'm frustrated about the state of my career, that I feel like I could be a better leader, I can be doing better work, I should be further along having better ideas and be giving more back to the creative community. And like I said, Before, I think even in my darker moments, I often don't really think that I'm that creative. I think that a lot of times I take pieces from different ideas or I take something in a different context and put them together in a new and slightly different way. And I'm not really creating anything that's that's new. And look, I know a lot of people argue that that actually is the definition of creativity. But for me, it makes me insecure again, it's my own personal hang up. But this is my current Set of insecurities. And they've changed as they've gone through my career. And I took a little bit of time to think about one of those changes, Ben. And here again, I seem to keep coming back to the number four. But I think that there are really four distinct stages of creative insecurity. And I just want to go through them because I think that it's good to understand them, I it doesn't mean that you're going to solve for them right now. But I think it's at least good to understand where you are, and how is it going to affect you. Now, the first stage is really that insecurity where you feel like you don't have enough experience. And this is because when you start out your career, you get like this basic form of insecurity, which is just simply not having enough experience. You're starting to learn. And by learning you do what everybody does, you start out by copying other people. That's the way most everybody learns. And you're searching for what is your creative voice, you know, you're copying, but you're not sure what else to do. You're trying to find that unique voice. You're trying To find that thing that will give you a little bit of separation, but it just makes you insecure, you're afraid that people are going to see that you aren't being original, and that you don't have that much experience. This is why every time you get a resume from a young designer, it is littered with every internship, every tough mudder medal, the fact that they were on drill team on the debate team, what high school they went to what house they walked by on their way to school. I mean, it's just like everything in the world. Because they're dealing with that insecurity. They're trying to deal with the fact that they feel like they don't have enough experience. And that's a natural one. Now, the next stage is then the next evolution of that, which is that you feel like you don't have enough specific experience. Because in stage two, this is where you start to find your creative voice. But you don't have a whole lot of experience with that voice. And you're starting to specialize in your career. Maybe it went from just being designed to maybe it's graphic design or digital designer video or any one of these different things, but you're starting to find a voice and you're starting to find a specialist. And because you've seen some amount of success, you felt some amount of passion to those things. But you're starting to really build more of that specialization voice for that area of expertise. So you're insecure about it, because you don't really have a lot of experience with it. And that's the thing is that now as you start to look at a more original voice, you're also starting to become incredibly aware of the fact that with originality, and with doing something different, can also really come the fact that people can now look at it, they can decide if they like it, they can judge you on it, they can react to it. And none of those are things that often made people feel terribly warm and wonderful, because all of a sudden you're having to deal with what people think about your work. Now with the next stage, what we do is we start to make that transition, we start to round the bend of coming out of just being an execute, and starting to think about starting to engage in leadership. And that's really the thing is for stage three, you start to move from being all about execution and stepping up to leadership. The thing that you quickly find, again, we've dedicated entire episodes to this is that this takes a totally different set of skills than what you've needed to just be an executed to just be a designer or a writer or something like that. And the thing is that because you now have to lead people, which takes sociology and psychology and a bunch of different things, and the thing here is that you're probably like most people, where you don't have much of any experience with these things. So you have to now be the most confident, uncertain person to step into that leadership position. And because of that lack of experience and expertise, it makes you insecure. You have to fake it like you know what you're doing. And here again, all of that makes you insecure. This is then compounded by the fact that you are now not just responsible for the emotions and output of you. You suddenly now have to have other people and their emotions and their feelings and the way that they do things. take that into account. And you start to realize just how challenging that can be. Now in the final stage, we start to really look at something a little bit different. And this is where now you've gone through and you've made that transition from being somebody who is just an execute or into a leader, you start to actually build some real leadership experience. But what you start to deal with what starts to drive that insecurity is relevance. Because you have a creative voice, you have experience, and this is what you've always wanted. But over the arc of your career, things have changed. The industry has changed, technology's changed, society's changed, tons of things have changed, because none of this stuff ever stays static. It never stays in one place. So now you have to find that you really need to work to evolve your creative voice and your leadership style to adapt to this new world. You're starting to think that Well, you know what, I'm starting to move out of that Prime age demographic that most companies need to target Am I still able to identify with millennials or different things like that? They see the world differently than when I did. And this means I have to work even harder to stay connected all these things, and you're insecure that your experience isn't as relevant as it used to be. Because younger and newer is always more appealing on the surface. But you know, that older and more experienced can get better results. And you worry about keeping that connection, which drives that sort of insecurity. How do I stay relevant? How do I stay connected to these sorts of things, and that that, again, drives a huge amount of insecurity. Now, there's actually probably a fifth stage we'll call it like a bonus level, that also drives insecurity across all of these different stages. And we touched on it once or twice. And it's really the bonus that comes with critics and trolls, because you can have a conversation on insecurity without mentioning these two. Because here again, a huge part of social media are critics and these trolls and it affects creatives because if you're going to put out your work, your opinions and my case a podcast, There are trolls that are going to come. These people are emboldened by the anonymity of the internet, they love the fact that they can sit behind a keyboard behind a screen and type whatever the hell it is they want with basically no consequences. They don't have to look in the face. They don't have to be threatened by physical harm or anything else. And they can say whatever they want. And I have been shocked and saddened at where these people come from. Some are the insecure little people who you just see all the time who sit around take potshots at everybody, but I've even seen it come from CEOs of massive corporations, all of which seem to be emboldened by the internet, all of which seem to be unburdened by the fact that they don't feel like they need to actually read or listen to anything that you actually produce to make sure that they understand it, just happy to take it at surface value, and to be able to fire away from there. And it's really, really hard to ignore them. Because the reality is, they don't add anything. They just want attention. And social media is their megaphone. It makes it so much easier for them. You can find followings by just being an asshole. We have an entire political system on both sides of the aisle that proves this. We have the reality TV craze and everything else in between, where we enjoy the conflict and then are suddenly mystified by how society then reflects this. The only advice that I can give you around this is to just block him and move on. Because the thing is, is that just like we discussed that episode about happiness, it's gonna change there's gonna be people that come in and try to affect these things. And what I've decided to do is just as simply focus on the people that matter, to focus on the interactions that helped me to focus on the people who feel like they're getting a benefit out of this and for the people who don't like it, who say, this isn't for them or don't get the metaphor, don't take the time to read, or just want to sit around and just kind of shit on everything, that's fine. And there are those people and I'm just, I'm not gonna waste my energy. I'm not going to waste some piece of my soul, justifying their stupidity because it's not worth it. rather spend the energy and give it back to the people that I feel like I can help. Like I said before, and we discussed about this in the episode on happiness that this is going to change. insecurity is going to change over the course of your career the same way that we talked about happiness and how you're have to constantly work to redefine that, as you go through your career. And this is going to happen, whether you like it or not. And it's really one of those things where I think it's better to be aware of it, and to try and figure out how do you control it so that it's something you can use your advantage and it doesn't become crippling. It doesn't become inhibiting because the thing that I've seen is I've seen too many great minds. I've seen too many great creatives who get owned by their insecurity. We've talked before about one of the biggest barriers to leadership are barriers to change are barriers to creativity is that idea is that people will take comfort over greatness, and that this is a huge driver in that because people would rather keep doing what they know. Because it's safe, it's easy, and it doesn't fire up any of their insecurities. Because that's the problem. Whenever I start doing something new, whenever I start doing new work, whenever I start putting my case, whenever you start a podcast, you do it a completely unknown of what's going to happen. are people gonna love it? Are they gonna hate it? Are people gonna make fun of me? Am I gonna ruin my career, my reputation by doing something like this. And then all you can do is you can take confidence in knowing that you can control those insecurities. You can use them to drive you, but you're not going to get owned by it, and you're not going to let it control you. Let's spend a couple minutes just talking about how do you understand insecurity? How do you really kind of take a look at this for you? I would say that in some ways, we need to understand and control it. But it's not something we're going to be able to completely hear. You're never going to cure it because you're human. So thinking that somehow you're bulletproof or you think that you see people go oh my god, they're so confident. Oh my god, they're so outgoing. Trust me, they are just as insecure as you are maybe even more, they've just found a better way to control it and package it. And I think that that idea that we need it, and then it's always going to be there. You know what, it may sound a little strange. I think for me, I've tried to find a way to harness it so that my insecurity drives me. I never stopped working or learning are pushing myself because of the fact that I have this raging insecurity in the background for all the other people out there who are doing better work, who are smarter, who are getting more recognition, or whatever it is that that's going to do that. But that being said, I think if I'm going to be truly honest about it, it's a delicate balance, because there's a balance between letting it drive you and letting it push you forward and letting it become something else letting it become poisonous or toxic. And I think that the biggest thing that I struggle with to this day is kind of insecurity sidekick, which is frustration. This is why I think insecurity can be more complicated and harder to deal with and something like that. Happiness because happiness you do that you get endorphin hit, it's great. insecurity often will lead to more complex emotions and more complex problems. And that's why I think it's just it's a little bit different than when we talked about happiness. Because I've worked for years to try to control my frustration. It can really affect me, it gets me down, it clouds, my judgment, and more than anything, it keeps me in a really bad headspace for long periods of time. And my problem is that I can rationalize it, because I'll feel like we're being frustrated. It's keeping me hungry. It's making me want to do better work and push things forward, that these people don't get it that, you know, there's all this other stuff of why I'm need to stay mad and mad keeps me going. And I'm not convinced that that's always the case, if I'm being honest. It's something that I'm working on. And then I'm working to try to work through and control so I think that part of it for me is to understand, are you somebody who really just is insecure? Are you concerned about judgement people laughing at you people judging you? Are you then having a byproduct of being frustrated by that or being angry or being anti social or things like that? Or is it just something where in general your attitudes fine, but you know what you could probably push yourself or your work a little bit more, if you just kind of looked at a few of those insecurities, because that's the problem with this stuff is it is a wide ranging spectrum. And like I said, over the years, this is something that I've really struggled with and a big part of it underlying it while I can spin it into making it sound, some great marketing story. It also is one of the big reasons why I got the here's the crazy one tattoo that started this whole damn thing was because I had been owned by my insecurities for too long that it took me going to someplace like Apple or Google or places like this to see how these people lived, how they weren't encumbered by their insecurities, but they could own them and let it drive them and they could focus in a different way. And I realized how much time in my career i'd wasted on this stuff. And the tattoo was a reminder to really never do it again. It's not a fanboy thing. It's not an apple fanboy tattoo. If you ask most people who know me an apple, they don't even know that I have it. Because I usually wear long sleeves whenever I go there. Because I don't I don't want to show it off. That's not why I did it. There are a few things that I found helpful. And I guess I wanted to share those as the last part of this episode was to look at what are the some of the things that you can do? What are some of the things that I've done, that can help you try to push through insecurity and push through frustration to try to find a better way to do this to be bigger and bolder in your approach to creativity and leadership? Now, the first one is pretty simple, but it's just a simply practice being objective. And what that means is, in a lot of cases I'll talk about if you want to be a great creative, you need to develop the ability to have almost willful short term Memory loss. Meaning that for me to be able to create a great app, a great website, a great piece of advertising, whenever we're working through it at regular intervals, I need to be able to step back, forget that I have been working on this and try to look at it with completely fresh eyes. And to be able to say, if I knew nothing about this experience, what would I think of it? Would it solve the problem that we're trying to do? And I think that with frustration, and being objective is basically the same thing. Because what you need to do is you need to step outside of yourself for a minute. And imagine you're a completely different person. Think about what would you tell this person that you're seeing in the situation that they're in? It's the similar thing of like, if I'd never been a part of this piece of creative and I looked at it, what would I think? Okay, well, if I'm not me, and if I took a step back, and I was just objective about the situation, I wasn't caught up in the emotion or the relationships are, what it was that I'm struggling with it work on this project. What's the advice that I would basically give myself, it can sound like I'm trying to give you advice on inducing low grade schizophrenia, but that's not really the case. But what it just simply is, is, try to find a little perspective, try to be able to try and figure out how can you help yourself and if you can't try to find people who can be objective that you can bounce these things off of, and don't hold on to it for so long. Now, the next one that I'm I do that I do find really helps is to write down what either the things that are frustrating you or the things that you're insecure about. And it's really writing them all down. It's just that simple. And but do it be and in a way that you have all the factors that make you feel like you can't get whatever it is done. And read them over and ask yourself, how many of them are really rational. And how many of them are just a product of insecurity or negative thinking and are aren't actual barriers to me doing something? Like this was one of the things whenever I was growing up, I And trust me, I did not get you dates. But I was really big into archery, I actually shot on the United States Junior Olympic archery team. But one of the things whenever you go and you start to train, especially a basically an Olympic level is that coaches will talk to you about how fear and insecurity are self imposed emotions, that no one it's because honestly, unless somebody is holding a gun to your head, getting on stage and speaking in front of a group of people trying a new idea, that is self imposed fear, there is no threat of physical harm from being able to do that. So in the way that you control your nerves, your insecurities, really is looking at this and saying, Is this an actual physical barrier? That I could hurt myself or do something like that? Or is this just simply a mental block that I need to overcome? And that's what this lets you do. And it was a technique that I found out of that time in my life was where you would just simply write this stuff down and then look at it and say, okay, is that an actual barrier? Or is this just something that is a product of the way I think, and I I can work to overcome that. The next one, and this is something that I am horrible at. And I think a lot of creatives are probably bad at this, to be honest, is to take some time to remember the success that you've had. Because whenever I talk about being frustrated, one of the things that I don't do is I don't look backwards, I don't look at how far my team has come, I don't look how far the work has come, I don't look how far I've come. I just simply look at the problems that are left in front of me, and that there are times and that I will force myself however fleeting they may be, to instead focus on the times where, you know, it was something that was done really well, that there was some success, and to just let myself acknowledge that there was good in this that it hasn't just been all of the struggle because that's really the challenge. Like whenever I look at my portfolio, all I see is the mistakes. I see the places where tech could have executed better, I could have thought something through better where the client should have let me Do one little thing that would have made all the difference that you tend to focus on the Yes. But that could have made things different. Just take a minute and give yourself a little bit credit and just own the success that you've had. Now, the next one, and this goes, it's probably a slightly different version that I've done over the years of sort of just writing down what are all the things that you're insecure, frustrated with? And it's really saying, Okay, look, I've got this problem, I have this idea, I have a change that I want to make on my team, that there's something that I want to do, but I'm worried about it. And what I'll honestly do is I'll try to stop myself and just say, look, what's the worst that can happen? Because if you're really honest with that answer, but if you have an idea that you think people don't like, and it's it's not likely that the world's gonna end we're not curing cancer here, people like you can go have another idea. You can change people's minds about you or your work. You can make things different. And often cases, like I said, we're not In physical Jeopardy, we're not you know, dealing in people's lives are these sort of high stakes thing, what we're doing is we're doing a process that allows us the insanely rare opportunity to be wrong, to try different things to go out and test it. And to see what works, we're given a massive amount of freedom. I mean, look, we're not quite to the state of like, you know, weatherman, who can just be wrong every day. And I think the only thing that they're gonna get right is like, the sun's gonna come up tomorrow. But maybe we're in a bit of a middle ground between the average person in that, but it gives us the ability to embrace that. But that's the challenge is that more of us need to take the time to embrace that as an opportunity. And to instead of saying, look, what's the worst that can happen? Also to take a minute and try to project what's the best that could happen? Because this is something that I find that insecure people are most creatives, which is often the same thing they don't do nearly enough is to take the time to think what is the best possible outcome? Because I think whenever you see a highly functioning Get creative teams. Whenever you see really successful companies really successful groups, you see that that's actually what they do. Go in and sit and talk with a team at Apple with a design team, a development team, product owners, anything like that. What you're going to hear are people who all believe that they're to change the world. They are constantly focused on the best outcome. That Yes, they're going to be consequences. Yes, there's hard work. Yes, there's a lot of barriers in the way of doing that. But ultimately, just the simple mental positioning that they have come to a company whose express purpose is to change the world makes such a massive difference, because that's the thing Apple doesn't have better people. They don't have smarter people than anybody else. They don't have some secret sauce. What they have are people that can rally around a way of doing things that can rally around a mental state, that they aren't caught up in those insecurities that they celebrate them and attack them with an almost brutal a brutal pursuit of the best idea. He has. And that's so incredibly rare. But that's what we all need to start doing is to understand that we are and it starts to sound like some Saturday Night Live card, you know, cartoon, but we are smart enough and good enough and dammit people like us. But that's part of it. Is that a lot of that Saturday Night Live skit, the Al Franken skit where he would sit in front of the mirror. And if you don't know what the hell it is, I'm talking about go Google it. But it's really it's positive self talk, I guess I don't know how to say it. Because the thing is, like, it's hard to notice whenever you have negative self talk, whenever you've been doing it for a long time, especially that if you're constantly telling yourself that you're failing, what you're doing isn't good enough that you can get anything right. Well, then, of course, you were bound to feel that way because attitude reflects leadership in teams and in people that if your brain as the leadership is constantly dwelling on negative emotions on negative outcomes, you tend to become a self fulfilling prophecy. That is the outcome that you start to find as you start to find more negative outcomes. And that's why I think you need to believe in yourself, probably more than anybody else. Because I think, especially as you start going into leadership, leadership, and especially if you want to bring change is hard, it is lonely, it is challenging, because you have to be the one that believes in things often, long before anybody else sees it long before they're willing to buy in and be a part of something. So if you can't do that, if you find that you're getting too hung up on your insecurities and your frustrations, Question two, why do you do that from yourself? And how do you say yes, more often? So instead of telling yourself all the reasons why you can't do something, try running through what happens if you actually said yes, then what could the possible positive outcome be? I think that's really the shift that I made is that in many cases, I'm coming in and trying to lead teams, I'm trying to change companies. I'm trying to affect creative work based purely on the belief that I can. And look, don't get me wrong. I'm at a point in my career where I feel like I've done it more than most. And I have actual tangible examples of doing these things. But every problem is different. And yesterday's homeruns aren't going to win tomorrow's games like it, there's no guarantee that I'm going to be able to do it again. And the only thing I have is my belief and trying to control my insecurities. And this is probably more than anything to let people know that whatever status you think I've had, whatever success you think I've had, it's come with a lot of work, a lot of problems, a lot of insecurities on my part that I've had to work through to try to figure out how do I overcome this stuff? How do I get stronger for it? How do I control it? And that's really what the challenge of all this is, is you've got to think about how these things affect your creativity. It is your instrument whenever you would talk to a singer They talk about caring for their voice or their body or these different things. And I don't think creatives think about their brain or their emotions or their process anywhere near the same way too often. And I've said this before, they just think of their processes happenstance that they don't take emotion into account of this, they don't think about how something like social media actually affects their creativity, how it's affecting them, physiologically and the actual impact that it has on their process. And so I think you've got to think about this stuff. You've got to think about things like that those different stages of insecurity so you can understand how to control it. And we've talked about this in the past. If you want to actually come up with great ideas. If you want to have breakthrough ideas, big ideas, if you want to do more than just the everyday in the mundane if you want to do more than just copy. Great creativity requires you to be fearless and take risks. It requires you to fail and to be okay with that because without the ability to be feared. without the ability to take a risk without the ability to fail, if you're not doing those, you quite bluntly will never find an original idea because of the fact that you aren't going to be willing to strike out and do something different to find new ground to, to be able to go where other people haven't. And that that's the big part of this. That's why whenever I talk about how as creatives one of our big charges is to come into our companies, and to bring them creativity, it's because everybody else is so owned by their insecurities around this stuff. They like the security of it, they don't want to be the first person that runs up the hill that does something different that maybe gets shot or judged or thought about as being different. But as creatives most of us are fine with being different, we know that we see the world differently. We know that we connect the dots differently than most people, but we have to embrace it. We have to understand that it is a gift and it is a tool that changes over our lives and over our careers. That's really the thing with all of this, how much of this affects you? How much you have the ability to be happy how much you can control, you're insecure. And your frustration ultimately controls your success with your ideas with your leadership, and like I said, I've had great years, but I've had ones where I faltered, I got too frustrated, or I got a little bit too insecure, because maybe I hit a bump a little bit harder than I wanted to. And so next time, I got a little bit gun shy. But so hopefully, this is some sort of a call to arms for you to think about this stuff. Don't obsess over it, don't dwell on it. But just be aware of it, and accept it that these are natural parts of the creative process, that being insecure, getting frustrated about it, not necessarily understanding how to even be happy. All these sort of emotional things that we've talked about, are just simply part of the human condition. We just simply as creatives elevate them differently than what most people do. Hopefully Once again, you found this informative or helpful. If it is, if you get anything out of this show, if you've taken notes over the course of this, I would ask you just take a couple seconds, go to your favorite podcast platform, iTunes being the biggest one as I know, whenever I look at my, the people who listen to the show, just take a couple seconds, click on the stars, or just leave a quick review. It makes a huge difference. It brings more people to the show, because I think we all want to see our industry continue to flourish. We all want to see us continue to take care of these opportunities. And I want to be able to help people to do that. And those reviews, interestingly enough, do make a big difference around that. If you want to find out more about the podcast if you want to get some related articles that I've got for this show, or even just feel like you want to get the notes for this because maybe you missed a few things or you just didn't feel like scribbling all this stuff down. You can always head over to podcast, Stephen Gates calm. It's Steven with a Ph. m. I've got all the show notes there. I tried to do a good job being really diligent about writing down everything that I talked About but it's always a great place in a rough place to be able to reference that. If you have any questions if there are things that you agree with disagree with want to find out more about, always you can go to the Facebook page, just go to Facebook type in The Crazy One podcast like that page. I'm always posting new articles, answering questions, giving updates and weekly inspirations and all sorts of different things like that. So just be sure to head over there to be able to do that. As always, the boys down illegal want me to remind you that all the views here my own, they don't represent any of my current or former employers. And finally, I say it every time because I mean and every time, but thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have. And I'm always incredibly humbled that you won't spend any of it with me. Hopefully this helps. Hopefully, you can knock back a few of those demons. I know I'm gonna continue to work on doing that. And until next time, we can all stay crazy