Conversation with Todd Henry, Creative, Podcaster, Author, Speaker

My guest today is Todd Henry , and I've been looking forward to this episode since I invited him , and I have to admit I'm a little bit nervous speaking with him . He started a podcast in 2005 . He's the author of several books and goes around the world speaking to people about productivity and work and creativity .

I'm just excited to learn a little bit more about him . We've never met in person . We have a mutual friend And we're going to take a virtual road trip today . So welcome to Dan the Roadtrip Guy , todd Henry .

So anybody who has to solve problems under pressure and within a certain timeframe , a certain budget , I help them understand some of the dynamics that can get in the way and how to move beyond that . Informally , I kind of cheekily like to call myself an arms dealer for the creative revolution . So that's my primary role is I write and I speak and I teach .

I grew up in the country and going to school meant driving 10 to 12 miles to get to her school , which was the junior high school , and then I'd have to turn around and drive all the way back to the high school , which was 10 miles from the junior high school . And so we did that day after day after day .

Well , i was a huge fan of Billy Joel growing up and I had Billy Joel's greatest hits , volume in two , the cassette tape , in my car , and I mean , i wore that thing out . We listen to over and over and over again constantly .

My sister , when they got really I heard of listening to the role , and so he decides he's going to reject the cassette tape and toss it out the window . And that's exactly what she did .

Okay , and we were probably about maybe four miles from the junior high school and I decided well , okay , that's fine , you can get out and walk the rest of the way to school . So I dropped my junior high age sister off about four miles from school and she walked the rest of the way to school .

So , for whatever reason , that is that , billy Joltate , this tied forever to my , my first car and my sister having to make that little John to get to To school . This forever tied with my memory of that first car as well , and she reminds me of it every time . I see her , by the way , and she did not tell my parents .

She knew she had done something wrong as well . She knew that like she would get in trouble for having done what she did . So we can just agree to keep it as a pact between us never , never , tell our parents what happened .

Okay , and we , you know , i don't know if you fit , i don't even know if they have these anymore because they're probably illegal now , but you know the kind of camper that you like put on a truck bed and you know , then you can sort of like strap it down and drive down the road with the camper in the bed of a pickup truck , except , you know , you're not

really supposed to be in the camper when you're driving down the road because they're not exactly secure . But we , our entire family , basically spent the entire trip in the camper , in the truck bed camper , on the way to Merle Beach , and that was probably I don't know a 10 hour , 11 hour drive .

And I have vivid memories , even as a child at that point they could maybe 10 or 11 years old I have vivid memories of thinking this is the last time I'm ever going to see my uncle because this is just a profoundly terrible idea , right , Right . But again , one of those memories is kind of fixed in my head .

So I think between the story of the car with my sister and the story of the truck bed camper , you have a pretty good idea of my environment growing up and some of the crazy ends we got into .

At the time Our family decided , you know what , if we all get in the car because the kids , the kids aren't in school , the kids said I think they'd just gotten out of school maybe .

Okay , we thought you know , nobody's going anywhere , we're not really supposed to be anywhere , but if we get in the car and just kind of stay among ourselves , we could basically drive straight to Florida and we could just kind of like you know social distance at his place with him . And so we did that .

We got in the car and drove , basically drove 16 hours straight . I think I stopped maybe twice to get gas on the way down , but it was .

The reason it's memorable is because , you know , we're sort of in the middle of this time where it felt like the world had stopped And just to have that time as a family in the car to do something that was meaningful and special and to go to a place and to be with him and to have those experiences with him was really pretty remarkable .

It felt a little bit like freedom during a time when it felt like you know , for good reasons , but it felt like so many of us were , you know , kind of just cocooning and didn't really have much you know much to experience at that point .

That was a very recent road trip , like in just a couple of years ago , but it was very , very meaningful to our family and really I think it resulted in a lot of bonding that we wouldn't have otherwise had .

Like it was just nice to be able to go to a restaurant and eat outside , you know , or just like to have that experience was kind of fun , because this was very very early at the beginning of the pandemic .

So I spent a number of years in Nashville , back and forth , doing Nashville and here , you know , in definitely having a job 35 years and Queensville as well , and basically trying to figure out how to make my living as an artist , as a musician . Okay , and had some a little bit of success doing that .

We had the ability to tour with and open for a number of people , a number of big acts and artists , get to play some pretty fun venues , but also , you know like happens plays some really small venues and some , for some , you know , less than adoring crowds while doing that . And it was really struggling to kind of make a living doing that .

And as many of these stories go , you know , i met a girl and she , you know , very rightly said , hey , maybe there's , there's something else here for us . So why don't we try to figure out ?

you know , give , give , give up some parameters around this and chase it for maybe another year and then we'll see what the momentum is like And at the end of that year , realized that , you know , things weren't really accelerating , things were kind of holding steady , and it was probably time for me to figure out something else to do .

And so I ended up as the creative director for a nonprofit for a handful of years and started as a very small team .

And then that team grew over time until I had a number of people who were reporting to me or people who had people reporting to reporting to those people In the middle of that , really just started doing some research into , okay , how do I keep these people engaged and fresh and producing great work , because we were producing a tremendous amount of work .

I had incredibly talented people on the team , most of whom had been in really high stress corporate environments , you know , at various times , and we're doing , you know , world literally work that the entire world had been experiencing , you know . So how do I lead these people ?

And I started reaching out to creative directors here in Cincinnati , where I'm based , and they would just say , well , i don't know , we just kind of burn through people and bring in a fresh crop right , like nobody really had any good strategies .

And so I thought , well , that doesn't seem like a good idea , and so I started doing some research and figured out some things that worked . It seemed to be working for the team And right around that time , this mid 2000s , this new thing called podcasting was starting to come on the scene And I thought , well , this is kind of cool .

You can just kind of talk into a microphone and people can listen to it whenever they want to . And so I started the podcast called the accidental creative and kind of forgot about it .

Honestly , i put about five episodes out and you know iTunes was a thing at the time , which was the place people went to get music , but they also had just started this podcasting directory , so I kind of forgot about it . I went back looking for podcasts to listen to And there was a podcast called the accidental creative .

That was one of the top podcasts on iTunes And I thought that I'd stolen someone else's name . I thought , oh no , i should have checked first . But it turns out it was my podcast .

It was one of the top podcasts on iTunes at the time And I suddenly had thousands of people listening to this show that I'd only started as a whim And I thought , boy , i think I've really hit a nerve here .

I think maybe there are other people who are also dealing with some of these things I'm struggling with , and so that podcast continued well , continues to this day , actually , 17 years later 18 years later , i guess .

That podcast then led to invitations to go and spend some time with companies and speak at conferences and other things and share some of these insights that I was sharing on the show , and led to a book deal with Penguin Random House shortly thereafter And I made the full time leap into doing my consulting work right around that time And really for the last I

guess the last 15 years now I've been traveling the world and working with teams leaders and helping them understand how to be prolific , brilliant and healthy all at the same time .

Because some of those early episodes were casualties to the technology at the time , they don't exactly sound up to snuff for today's podcasting world .

That was the first one in the catalog and it was very good because it was I think you were talking about your friend who started Breather And it was just about when to launch . Get out there and launch your idea and stop thinking about it and stop procrastinating , i guess .

And so I interviewed Steven for the show , and I've re-released that episode a couple of times over the years just for fun , but I'll never forget . At the very end of the interview , i said Steven , how was that interview for you ? And he said that it was great . He said can I ask you a question ? I said sure , and he said what's a podcast ?

And I thought , oh boy , i guess maybe I am on the early end of this , you know , because he had done radio interviews , but he didn't know what a podcast was . So I thought , well , i think I may have been his first ever podcast interview , which is kind of fun .

Is there a favorite book you've written , boy favorite one , or is that like Children ? You know it's like Children , they're all my favorite .

So I have people reaching out to me from around the world who have read Die Empty and have you know , because it's been translated into a number of languages And I , just matter of fact , have been talking to up some people from a country that I probably otherwise would never have influence in , who had read the book .

And there's , there are all these groups and masterminds happening in the country , in Africa and in one country in Asia , about I'm going to be visiting , where they want me to come speak about it . So you know , that's probably the one , i think , that has had the most global resonance and is really fun to see .

This is when you can read it multiple times and still feel like it's fresh every time .

So I'm proud of the work , the research and the work that went into that book and the writing that went into it , and I'm grateful for my amazing team of editors at Penguin Random House and the people who help pull that together , because I think I think we were able to craft something that will hopefully stand the test of time .

The fact that it's still in print , you know , a decade later , means it's hopefully still going to be in print for a while to come .

But before I die I want to blank , So I'll pose that question to you .

But what I would like to do , i think , is I would like to take a trip , actually do a trip of Italy with some friends . We've been talking about that for a while , so I think that would be a really fun thing to experience with our core group of friends . We have you know , in our neighborhood we have where we've planted ourselves .

We have really developed some amazing close friendships with people in our neighborhood , and many of them .

what's interesting is some of them I went to college with and we all sort of randomly ended up studdling in the same little neighborhood and we're raising our kids together , which is a pretty rare thing that you get to do That span of life with one group of people who have seen you in college and they've seen you as a young adult and they've seen you as a

young married adult , They've seen you as a parent and you know , we're sort of going through these stages of life together , which is really fun .

You've traveled a lot of places . Do you have a favorite place you've been ?

I really enjoyed Istanbul beautiful place and had a little bit of time while I was there to explore the markets and some of the mosques and whatnot . So it was really beautiful as well . So I'd say probably those two places are the most memorable .

questions about his experiences , i think would be really fascinating . So , probably , benjamin Franklin . Where would we go ? I think I probably would drive , probably drive to Washington DC , just because I think that would be an interesting culmination of our journey And probably interesting for him as well .

If he didn't , you know , have experience of modern day DC , what would we drive ? Probably going to drive an EV , right Yeah yeah , exactly , I mean , I have to drive some kind of electric vehicle , whatever that is , whether it's a Tesla or something else , because , you know , given you know , it's been Franklin right .

So look what , look what Val has to rot , you know , by doing your experiments . So , yeah , I think that'd be really fun .

I was wondering if you could share two or three pieces of advice that from our listeners that maybe they feel stuck or bored or not living up full potential . What would you tell them to do ? What would be those three pieces of advice you'd give them ?

They're ignoring important questions because they maybe they don't want the answer to those questions , because when you ask inconvenient questions , you sometimes get inconvenient answers that force you to act . The first device that we give to people is to ask themselves if they're falling for any ghost rules .

Ghost rules are invisible narratives or assumptions that are limiting their engagement . There are things we believe like well , that's just the way it is or that'll never work around here . I could never do something like that . It's a ghost rule , it's an invisible narrative , but sometimes people believe them . They allow them to shape and define their lives .

So that would be the first thing . The second thing is ask yourself what is your defining question right now ? In other words , what is the single question that , if I were to pursue it and answer it , might unlock untold value for me as a leader or as a professional ?

Again , i think we often ignore the questions that are simmering just beneath the surface because they're inconvenient questions . Ask those important questions . And then the third thing is make sure that you're filling your mind with valuable stimuli .

We live in a world where we're bombarded by bits of information , stimulus , things that are thrown at us , so we often don't take time to study , to digest , to analyze the patterns , to think . So many people don't even know what they think because we just kind of move through lack when we stop the process and synthesize and form patterns .

And so make sure that you're building time in your life to absorb valuable stimulus and to synthesize those patterns and to understand what it is you actually think about , what's going on around you . So those would be my three best pieces of advice for people who are busily bored .

By the way , for leaders who are listening , the most valuable thing you bring to any environment is your intuition , it's your ability to synthesize , and if you're not taking time to step back and the process and the think and understand the patterns that are going on around you , you are feeling a fundamental responsibility that you have as a leader , which used to

bring that perspective To the table every single day , and you can't do that if you're busy .

That's just great advice , and I think today You said this in your book and this is back in 2013 you walk into a Starbucks and everybody's on their phone and it seems like today we're just bombarded with you know when ? I think back to when I grew up , we had two channels .

We got the news for 30 minutes a day and that was it , and then the rest of the day you just kind of spent thinking about life and what you're gonna do right right absolutely way . This has been a pleasure for me I hope so for you just to virtually drive around Cincinnati here and and chat for a little bit before we leave .

Let people know how to find you , find your books and hopefully they'll check you out yeah , so I mean , henry dot com is my Website .

. You're listening to this . You're probably a podcast listener , so check out the accidental creative podcast or visit Henry dot com and you can get anything else I do , including my newsletter and my Books and everything else . My books are available wherever books are sold , so I just search for Henry and it will bring up all my all my things .

Until we meet up again , keep having conversations and keep driving .