Todd Henry

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m

Thanks for joining us. Our guest today is Todd Henry, founder of Accidental Creative, a company that helps creative people and teams generate brilliant ideas. We have interviewed Todd once before, and he's back with a new book called Louder Than Words, Harness the power of your authentic voice. And now here's the interview with Todd. Henry. Hi, Todd, Welcome to the show. Thanks Eric, it's great to be here. Excited to get

you back on. You were one of our very early guests, which I was very appreciative, and your episode was one that we like so much, one of the very few that we've ever re aired. So this will be your third appearance all day to our technically the same interview,

So I'm happy to have you back. Well, it's an honor to have to tell you as a fan of the show, it's been so um amazing, wonderful, beautiful to watch how the show has grown and uh occasionally uh indi inducing because as you know, I also have a podcast, and I'll open up the home page of iTunes and I'll see the one you feed right there at the top of the main page on iTunes, of like, how is he doing that? It's amazing. So congratulations on the success.

Thank you. I appreciate that. So you've got a new book coming out called Louder than Words, Harness the power of your authentic Voice, and the book is really about how we find you know. What I got from the book was and I think it's a theme that comes up a lot. But then in order to be our best selves in life, whatever whatever arena you want to cast that into work or family or creativity, that we've got to really find. Um, we've got to find that

authentic part of ourselves. And you've got a lot of things in there that are about diving into how we do some of those and we'll cover some of those things here as we get into the interview. But let's start with the parable of the two wolves. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of is that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that

you do, particularly the work you're doing right now. This is a great question, and it'll be interesting. I can't remember how he answered this the first time, so it will be interesting to go back and compare my answer is the first time in the second time. I For me, I think that means right now, do not fear trepidation and step into the step fully, all in to the path that's in front of you. I think it's so easy, very often Eric too, to embrace life as if you're

pushing a wall forward, right. You have your arms spread and you're moving the wall forward a couple of inches at a time, UM, and you're trying to do everything, so you're making a little bit of ingremental progress in a whole bunch of areas, rather than stepping fully into the path that's in front of you, following where your intuition is leading you, and going all in and making

a decision. And so I think, for me, UM, when you feed the bad wolf, you're feeding trepidation, you're feeding fear, You're feeding um the narrative that says you're an impostor. You're feeding the narrative that says who are you? You're feeding the narrative that says you don't want to miss out on something else? So why don't you head your bets.

You know, we live in a culture right now that is afraid to commit to anything, anything, and I mean even social engagements because something better might come along, you know. And so I just I feel like, um, right now, one of the things that we have to as a culture, we have to stop feeding is in decision and we have to instead step boldly in the direction that our intuition is leading us. That's a great way to start off.

One of the things I love about your work is it's sort of a consistent clarion call, you know, against mediocrity, you know, against going through the motions, which is so easy to do in today's world. Well, and I think ever in time, I think it's a human thing. It's it's the default, you know, is to kind of do the easy thing. If we're if we if we're not motivated else else wise that's not a word motivated otherwise well it is it is easy to slip in the mediocrity.

And you know, as we as we discussed I think on the last time I was on the last episode, Um you, mediocrity comes from the two words medius and ochres middle and rugged mountain right and to be mediocres, to stop halfway up a rugged mountain. And I think it is our nature as humans to settle in, to seek comfort, to seek stability, to seek um, a sense of of UM wellness and UM safety, and and ultimately,

you know I mentioned comfort before. I think the love of comfort is often the enemy of greatness in our lives. And it's so easy to settle into that for days, weeks, months, years, and then to look back and realize that you've built

somebody else's body of work. You have lived according to the whims and wishes and objectives and priorities of everybody around you, or maybe you've just followed opportunity, but you've never stepped back to ask is this really where I should be going with my life and with my work. And so as a result, you end up very far from the place you initially wanted to go, simply because you didn't have a sense of who you are and of the through line that that should be guiding your work.

And so I think that's profoundly sad. And that you know, there are people who I believe have built really great bodies of work. Eric Um. Everybody points to and looks at them and says, Wow, look how amazing that is. And I think that they look at it and say that is that's not me, that's not who I am. That doesn't represent me. I built somebody else's body of work. And I think that's profoundly sad. And your book really gives gives some approaches to making sure that we're building

our own body of work. And you know, one of the things that you say early in the book that I really really like, and it it gets to that giving up halfway up the mountain, you say, you know that people believe that if they were truly on the

right path, everything would fall into place easily. Yeah. And this is a great myth of our age because we look at I call you know, I call them the unicorns, you know, the people who would just come out of the womb amazingly gifted, and um, we think, well, you know, I want to be a unicorn. But the reality is that of us are not unicorns. That's not who we are.

We have to work to build a substantive platform of expression if we want to have impact in the world, you know, we have to work to refine and develop our voice. Uh. And and the reality is too for a lot of people we point to and call them unicorns. They didn't just you know, success did and fall in their lap. It may appear that success fell in their lap, but they also had to work for years to cultivate

and develop that compelling voice. Um. You know, Jimi Hendricks did not come out of the womb able to rip off amazing guitar licks. You know, he had to develop that over time as well. Um. Now, he had a natural talent, you know, an opportunity met that talent, and that's great, but you know, we have to be careful not to fall prey to this narrative that says, well, if it's not easy, then it's not worth doing. If it's not easy, then it's not the place I should be.

And I think that that myth. Often times, Eric keeps us from exploring paths where we could have a substantive contribution and we might actually be able to develop a resonant voice. And the reason we don't do it is because it's hard. And the reason nobody else does it is because it's hard, you know. So maybe that's the very place where we could actually build something of substance if we have the persistence in the grid to do

it right. And you go on to talk about an interview that that you saw and I saw, which is one of the favorite things I've seen in a few years, and it's the Ira Glass interview um where he talks about you know that we we as as creative people, we we have good taste, We can see what's out there, like I love that thing, and when we start, we're

so far away from that. I think you call it the aspiration gap, right, Yeah, And I love the way he describe this because he put perfect language behind a concept that I've been seeing and noticing and talking about for a long time. But I love that he talked about that specifically is the gap, because there is a gap there between what you see your heroes doing and what you are capable of doing at that point in time.

And the reality is all of us, as people who want to express ourselves, who want to create things, whether it's business or we want to write, or we want to design something or make art or whatever it is, there's gonna be a gap between what we're capable of doing and what we wish we were capable of doing. The only way to close that gap is through intentional effort, and we have to go through specific phases of growth over the course of time. We have to embrace the process, right,

we have to step into the process. And there's a way that we can actually formalize that growth, which is great um in order to close that gap. But the funny thing about it, Eric, is that the gap is always going to exist because when you get to the place where other people are looking at you and saying, wow, how do you do that? That's amazing, you're thinking, that's not amazing. Look at what this person who is doing, and all of a sudden, now there's somebody even higher

up the curve than you. You know. But I think as you grow, as you get better at what you do, and you you grow in your capacity to express yourself, I think that you begin to recognize that's just a part of life. You know that life is going to be a constant climb up the mountain. It's gonna be a constant climb toward the peak. And the only way we lose is if we settle in, if we stop growing, because you don't stay static at that point. Actually, if

you stop growing, if you stop climbing, then you start dying. Uh. And so we have to embrace that continual climb if we want to continue to develop our voice and create impact. Yeah. I mean there's so many things in there that you just talked about. I think that I don't know why we get the idea we should start and be good

at something right away. We had Carol dweck On, who's got that concept of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, And that's that's exactly it, right, if we have a fixed mindset, um, And you know I had a fixed mindset in regards to playing guitar for years. You know, I started and I was just terrible, and I thought

I couldn't do it. And then I finally started again, and UM, still had sort of a fixed mindset around, well I can get a little bit better at this, and UM, it really took to a certain point where I went, oh, you know what, something like playing the guitar or so many things in life is such a

broad spectrum. There's so many ways to your point to have your own voice that it doesn't matter if I can play that solo exactly as fast as that guy, because I've got if I if I approach it in the right way and with the growth mindset, I bring something to it that's uniquely mine. Absolutely. And also I think one of the important questions we often don't ask is why do I want to learn how to play guitar? Right? Or why do I want to learn how to write? Or why don't you know I as a young musician.

I mean, I'm you know, I was a musician in my in my former life, actually was a professional musician and played music full time, you know, in my early twenties, as I now called him my misguided twenties, right, but uh, as I played music full time. Um. You know, I will fully confess I was never in love with music. It was never something that was just in my blood. I just, you know, I woke up thinking about music, thinking about how I could be better at what I did.

It just wasn't in my blood. Um. And you know, I look at I compare that to my son who's now twelve, and he's learning how to play guitar, and

he is obsessed. He's obsessed with the music of all of these great sixties rock bands, right, and who influenced too, and what kind of guitar they were playing, what kind of uh you know, and they were using, and the techniques they were using to record and all this stuff, and you know he's he's learning all of these amazing um riffs and licks on the guitar and emulating all these people. He's really deeply into it, and the love

of music just pulses through his his veins. It's a fundamentally different thing that's going on with him that went on with me. I think the reason I wanted to learn to play guitars because I like the attention, right. I like that I could get up on stage and play music. But that's not going to get you very far, you know. And I think that is why it's so important that we really drilled down on and figure out who am I, What do I really care about? What is my identity, what is my sense of the value

that I want to create in this world? And what is it that drives me? I think that's why it's so important, because that fuel is going to be necessary when things get hard, you know, when when you get halfway up the mountain and you want to quit, and the only reason you're doing is because you like the attention.

It's going to be easy to settle in, or it's gonna be easy to compromise and do the things that will get you the quick fix that you're looking for, but don't actually contribute to the body of work that you want to build. It's so easy to settle in when you don't have a sense of who you are and what it is that really fuels you. How do we do some of that deeper work to find out

who we are? Because I think a lot of the people that I hear from and work with that listen to the show say hey, I have a desire to do something that resonates deeply with me, that matters to me. But I look at my life and I don't see that passion standing right there. I don't I here follow my passion, but I don't know what that is and I don't feel it. So what are some things that people can do, even even in a real discovery way, to start to find out? Like, well, where? Where? Where

is my authentic voice? Who? Who am I? What are some exercises people can do there? Yeah? So there there are three kind of areas that I looked at in louder than words, um that that seemed to be markers of an especially resonant voice, right, and I called these the elements of the voice engine because they seem to drive compelling, resonant voices. And those three things are identity, which is who are you? What do you care about? Um? What is the substantive change that you want to make? Right?

Vision which is how you're shaping your work, and ultimately you want your work to go. And so the answer to you know, really what the question you need to answer there is where am I going with the work? And then the final element is mastery, and mastery is about developing a sense of ownership of the skills that you need to completely dominate in order to put that out into the world. You can have a sense of identity and a sense of vision, but you don't have

a sense of mastery. You're gonna be incompetent. People are going to pay attention to you, right, so you have to have mastery of skills as well. And so to to answer your question with regard to who are you UM, there are a couple of exercises that I've given the book. One that I use very often is what I call the fifty Notables, And this is really just a way of looking at your life and doing some excavation and figuring out what's already there. Where are the clues that

you've been ignoring in your life? You know, we all have little points, a little markers of resonance in our life that we glow us over because we simply don't pay attention to them. And so, you know, I encourage people to pay attention to those moments when you are especially resonant with others or when the outside world resonates with you in a deep way. So I'll give a couple of examples of ways that you can do that. The first is to ask yourself, when am I moved

with compassionate anger? Meaning when do I feel a need to step in. I'm not talking about road rage. I'm not talking about you know, somebody cut me off in traffic, or somebody stepped my shoe. That's what I'm talking about, talking about compassionate anger, meaning when in my life do I feel the need to step in to make something right? You know, a sense of justice overtakes me. Compassion means to suffer with right. So when do I feel a

need to step in and make something right? That's a great marker of something in you that wants to come out, that wants to add value to the world. I mean another one is when when are you moved emotionally? You know, when do you cry? I mean from me? Um, you know, I'm moving by the stories of underdogs, right. The stories of underdogs profoundly moved me, and so um, I spent

a lot of my time working with underdogs. It's really hard for me to say no to an underdog client who approaches me because I love the stories of underdogs. When I watch underdog movies, I am regularly, you know, moved to the point of tears or you know, I have things, I have something in my eye right like I've never admit them crying, you know, Um, you know I'm moved to the point of tears because these kind of So when in your life where you moved emotionally?

Go back and look at ten or fifteen or twenty examples of when you're moved emotionally in your life. What gives you irrational hope? Right? What is the what is the thing that you're obsessed with? The other people point to and say, why are you obsessed with that? That makes no sense whatsoever, But you just can't get it out of your mind. What are some examples of the kinds of problems you've been obsessed with in your life

that you can't get out of your mind. So once you collect a set of these examples, you can begin to look for a through line. You can begin to figure out, Okay, where in my life do I tend to be moved with compassionate anger? Where in my life do I tend to be moved emotionally? Where in my life do I tend to become obsessed with solving problems?

And you can begin to plot those and notice patterns and begin to see the places where you are naturally drawn, and the places where you're naturally drawn are the places you're most likely to be resonant in the marketplace. Because when we talk about authenticity, I'm not talking about just putting yourself out there, hey except me for who I am. Right, you should because I'm being authentic, um, you know, and doing whatever you feel like. Authenticity is about putting skin

in the game. Authenticity is about investing yourself in something to the point that other people recognize that you run and fall based on how your work is received or the quality of your work and whether it resonates, and people recognize that you're not just paying lip service to something, You're actually putting yourself into it fully. And once you have the set of of um of drivers of points of resonance in your life, you can use this fuel.

It makes it a lot easier to put yourself out there and to you confront the inevitable fear that's going to come when you are stepping into the unknown. One of the things that you say, uh, late in the book, and I really like this, you said that when because you've interviewed lots of amazing people, um, and you said, if you had to define those people, are described those people in two words. The two words you would use

were action and patients. Yeah, and and uh. You know, I think most people would say, you know, hustle, or they would say diligence, or they would say, you know, uh, forward thinking or innovative. That's not really been what I've I've noticed. What I've noticed is that they're actively patient, meaning they are moving in the direction they believe is right, but they're also patiently observing and redirecting based upon what

they see. I think when we are young, and we're inexperienced, and we're new in our career, we're new in whatever it is that we're doing, I think that we just want to charge up the mountain. Um. It's kind of like you you watch races sometimes and you see you young inexperienced runners will take off. They'll just go bolting out of the starting blocks and you think, wow, they're,

you know, thirty yards ahead of everybody else. And then after about half the race, you see they start to fall back in the ranks and then they finish in the back because they spent themselves completely early on. And a great runner in a race knows that you have to pace yourself and you can't be drawn off course by the people around you. You have to run your

own race and you have to do that. Yes, with with hustle, you have to to be active, you have to be moving, but you also have to be patient, and you have to spot opportunities, um when when they come, and be ready to take advantage of them. And if you're spending yourself completely, you're not going to be ready to take advantage of that opportunity when it presents itself. And one of the things I've noticed about very successful

people is that they're very active. They're moving in the direction they believe is the right direction, but they also have disciplines in their life where they step back and they look at patterns and they try to recognize opportunities when they present themselves so that they can take advantage of those opportunities. Are not just running headstrong in the

direction they believe right full out all the time. Um Instead, they're patient enough to recognize that all opportunities don't come at once, and you can't succeed by sheer force of will, that you also have to be able to step back and to build disciplines, to build white space into your life so that you can recognize those opportune moments to act meaningfully. One of the things I've always liked about your work is you talk about some of those practices

that we do. Some of them are related to how we tie everything together, messing things together. But you have a section in the book you say practice every day with the dailies. So what do you mean by that and what are your dailies? So in uh, you know, ancient times monks would have the set of practice, not even to today, they have the set of practice they call the dailies, which is a set of rituals and rhythms and things they engage in on a daily basis.

In order to keep them monastery going. And UM, you know, I'd do a very similar thing in my life. I know other people do this as well. I have a set of practices in my life that happened every day. You come, hell or high water, I'm engaging these practices. Now. I will say that there are different rhythms for different times of my life. So for example, if I'm on the road, my dailies might look a little different than when I'm in the office, but there are certain things

that happen every day regardless. UM. I have a little index card. Actually, my card for last month is right in front of me, UM, and I have a slot for every day of the month on that index card and then on the left hand side and the left column list of practices that um are what I consider my dailies. I have personal dailies and I have business dailies.

And uh, next to every one of those dailies, for each day that I engage in that daily, I mark it off in that little slot assigned to the day, and I just kind of go and so I can see at the end of the month, how many days did I engage in this practice and how many did I fail? UM. And so there's some things. For example, on the weekend, I do my business dailies. On the weekend, I don't don't do certain other dailies. But I keep

track of my reading. I keep tracking how much I'm writing, if I'm reviewing my projects, if I'm exercising, if I'm talking with my children. Is one of my dailies. Make sure I have a meaningful conversation every day with with my kids, UM and with my wife. Right, UM, did I meditate? UM? For for business? I keep track of

on the daily basis, did I create content today? Because, as you and I both know, if you don't create content, whether it's for a client, for public consumption or whatever, if you don't do that one day, it's not a big deal. If you don't do it for two days, not such a big deal. But then pretty soon two days becomes a week, becomes two weeks, becomes a month, and pretty soon you're just out of the habit. And so for me, you know, I have to create content every day and mark when I do. UM. Did I

do some kind of business development activity each day? I try to make sure I'm engaging in biz DEEV of some form or fashion UM. And I always keep track of what I'm reading, you know, the books I'm reading.

So I go back and I look through these cards, these little index cards of dailies, and I can see over time my patterns and how I've developed, and how I've you know, sort of grown in my capacity to do my work and to shape my voice as I've become better and more diligent about engaging in these dailies. It's it's pretty neat to see, actually, how it's just become a part of how I think of my day now.

It's almost mindless. I don't even have to think about it because I've I've just do these things habitually, um over the course of time. Yeah, I use I use coach dot me to do something very similar, um in keeping track of and I used to use a different program that would give you points for the things you

got done. And it was I always found it amazing that if I would go back and or I would hit a period where I'm like, I'm not feeling real good or whatever, I would look at, you know, I would look at my daily points and go, well, no, wonder, you know, like I can just see I can see it in the numbers. That I haven't been doing these things that I do on a regular basis that I've determined are really important in supporting me and keeping me

in a mentally and emotionally strong place right. And you know, people might say, well, what does this have to do with developing my voice? Well, does just have to do with the point of the book, And I say, it's everything, everything to do with it, because your voice isn't just what you care about. It's not just what you say. It's also about how people hear you, how they receive you,

how they interact with you. And if you're not staying in game shape, if you're not staying battle ready, and you can't take advantage of opportunities because you've not been doing these little things you have. You only right when somebody is paying you to write. If you only engage in certain kinds of behavior when you're at work, but you never do anything outside of that to develop your your relational skills, to develop your capacity to communicate, um,

eventually you're going to become decreasingly effective, you know. So it's it's about staying battle already, staying in game ship. I gave a talk about six months ago on Cornado Island just outside of San Diego. And as we were kind of driving this little slip of land that goes out to the resort where I was speaking, my driver UM said, well, that's the Navy Seal Training facility. There's where they do buds and you know, sort of all of some of the training stuff. And he said, you'll

see seals out there seven. They're out there running the beach, they're out there working out, they're out there staying battle ready. So my driver said that one of his friends was stationed there, um, and and that they have to be seven working out. They have to be in shape because they never know when they're going to be deployed. They never know when they're going to be sent into battle. And he said, they have to stay battle ready at all time. And I thought, wow, what a great metaphor.

I mean, obviously most of us don't you have those kinds of life or death um circumstances we deal with on the daily basis, But what a great metaphor for those of us who want to stay ready to engage meaningfully with our work. You know, we have to, in a similar way, have a set of disciplines, a set of practices in our life that help us stay sharp and to stay battle ready so that we can engage at a moment's notice when we're called to do so.

One of the things I took away from our first interview with you was you said of the biggest things people could do was if they were to change their ratio of of what they consume um as far as

information and how much they process it. So if they just spent a lot more time processing what they read versus just reading, what a what a big difference that would make absolutely One of the things you say in the book that I thought was a really interesting concept and you say it's deeply ingrained in the human condition to simultaneously crave recognition and camouflage. These two forces battle

within us and then paralyzed us. Yeah. Well, I think that we crave the safety and the comfort of community, but we also something inside of it also drives us to want to stand out, to want to be recognized for our work. And I think that, you know, you talk about the good wolf and the bad wolf, right, I think in many ways these forces fight within us. Um. You know, we want to be recognized for being substantially

different from everybody. Around us. But the moment that we step out and we become recognized, we also realize that that's maybe the most dangerous place for us to be culturally, because uh, you know, everybody loves to shoot arrows at the person who rises above the pack, you know, in many ways. And so you know, I think that we have to recognize that it is a struggle that we

each have to deal with in our own way. But we have to continue taking small steps on the daily basis in the direction of our fear, stepping out, you know, uh, into dark places and you know, step by step by step into our discomfort. That's how bodies of work are Bill, and that's how we find our voice. And nobody wakes up one day and says, oh, that's it. I've I've I've found my voice. Um. That's why I don't use

the phrase find your voice. In the book, I talk about developing your voice because it is a lifelong process. Developing your voice is something that is uh that happens over time through intentional effort, um diligence, discovery and like I said, Active Patients, one of your recent podcasts, you talked about something that I bring up a lot on

the show because I'm kind of fascinated by it. And you talk about comparison and competition, you know, I think that that ability to you know, that process where we compare ourselves to others can be one of the most poisonous I think things that we have in our life. I think the quote is, you know, comparison is the thief of joy. But you also talk about some really useful ways to use comparison. So can you talk a little bit about the ways in which we can use

comparison positively? Yeah, I think if you're pairing as a form of benchmarking, that can be very helpful to us. You know. So we talked before about the the aspiration gap and how we look at people that we admire and we want to be like them. We want to produce like them, we want to create like them. Um. And and that can be helpful as a form of motivation.

But if we allow the scales to tip and all of a sudden, it becomes de motivating because we don't think that we could ever possibly close that gap, that's when comparison can become destructive. UM. Go back to the to the the metaphor of running a race, your your eyes when they begin to veer to the side, will lead your body off course, so you tend to run

in the direction you're looking. That's why you don't see many runners running with their head over their shoulders or looking to the left or looking to the right for very long because if you do that, if you look thirty degrees off to the right and you're paying attention to the person three lanes over, then your body is going to start following wherever you're looking over the course of time. And that's what comparison and competition can do

to us. So comparison is a form of benchmarking. Is fine. What can I learn from this person? What are they doing that I admire? How can I apply that to my life? How can I emulate? Which is you know,

we talked about the phases of growth. We didn't really go into that before, but one of the phases that we go through as we develop our voices emulation, which means finding somebody else who's already doing what we do we want to do well and then emulating them, building disciplines in our life where we are trying to copy them, trying to be like them, emulate them. As as we

build our skill set right. And so that's one way that comparison can actually be helpful to us in our growth is if we use it as a form of benchmarking. But it can also be paralyzing if we use it in a way that um, if we if we begin to look at other people and we begin to allow our expectations escalate to the point that we become paralyzed, that we don't act because we don't see how we

could possibly close the skill gap. So we have to be careful right to use comparison, to use competition a healthy way, but not to let it cause us to veer off course or to fall prey to the cursive peripheral vision. Yep. And what you know, back to that idea of the fixed versus growth mindset, One of the things in the interview with Carol that really struck me was that she says that people who are in a fixed mindset are unable to draw inspiration and motivation from

people who could be mentors or role models. They've got this fixed mindset like this is the way I'm at, this is the way they are, and they're better than me. Whereas with the growth mindset, you do exactly what you just described, which is like, oh, look there's they do this, they do that. I could try this, you know, and we can change. And so it's seem to keep coming back to that that core theme there of UM, you know,

being willing to close that aspiration gap. Absolutely. Along a similar line, you talk about that every creative project has a U shape to it, UM, and you use the metaphor of of a canyon, and I think that applies to a lot of different things in life. Could you describe what that U shape is? Yeah, So this came out of a great conversation I have with Lisa Congdon,

who's a brilliant artist. UM. She said that one of her art school instructor has told her that every creative career and every creative project has a U shape meaning uh.

And I applied it to UM an example of walking through a canyon, Right, So imagine that you're gonna walk through a canyon to the other side, and so you can see the top of the canyon on the other side, the plateau, you can see your destination when you start and it's a beautiful day and the birds are chirping and the sun is just coming up over the horizon and you know, you're excited to venture into the canyon

and get your objective on the other side. But as you begin hiking down the canyon, the trail becomes less and less clear, and pretty soon you can't see your objective anymore because it's obscured by trees. And as you get to the bottom of the canyon, you start to question that I going the right way. It's just it's just the right path that I lose my my sense of direction. You can't see the sun because you're in the bottom of the canyon. You don't know which direction

you're really going. You're kind of operating by muscle memory, or you're just sort of doing the best you can do. And at that point, it's really easy to give up, right, it's really easy to lose hope, to lose perspective um, and to convince yourself that this is a really bad idea. But then you push through that those doubts. You begin climbing up the other side, and pretty soon you can

see your objective again, and you're really excited. And finally you crest on the other side just as the sun is going down on the other side, and I think that's what it feels like to do any kind of meaningful creative work. There's always going to be extreme hope at the beginning, and everything is so clear, you can see where you're going, see your objectives. But as you get in the midst of the work, it's nothing but frustration and depression and confusion and self doubt and all

of that and what happens to us unfortunately. Eric Also often as we think that we're alone in that, we think we're the own ones who ever went through that, And we look at our heroes, the work of our heroes, and we think, oh, well, they never experienced that. I mean, they just came out of the womb able to create

brilliant work. No, those brilliant pieces of work that we look at, we're the result of this same process of self doubt and comparison and all of these things that we do when we're in the bottom of the canyon. And the key is to continue pushing through. The key is to continue moving in the direction that you know, we set out on and not allow that to paralyze. Is Now, sometimes we realize that it was a bad idea to begin with. That's an entirely different conversation for

a different time. But what I'm talking about here are those narratives and the forms of fear that that crop up when we're in the bottom of the canyon, that makes us feel alone, that makes us feel like we're the only one, the only one who's ever been through

this before. And then those times it's important to remind ourselves of why it is we do what we do to begin with, the value that we want to create, the ultimate end that we're aiming for, and they continue pushing up the other side of the mountain until the end becomes clear again, Our objective becomes clear again, because everybody's going to go through that mud in the middle. But when you persist, if you continue pushing through, then

eventually your objective will come back in sight. Well, I think that is a wonderful place to wrap this conversation up. So thanks so much, Todd. It's been a pleasure to have you on. I'm always happy to see new work from you and uh and to have you on the show. Thanks Eric, and thanks for the great work that you do, and thanks for taking the time to inspire all of us other regular basis through your podcast and your other work. Thank you, Thank you. I really appreciate this all right

you too. Bye, have a great day. Bye. You can learn more about Todd, Henry and this podcast at one you Feed dot Net slash Todd too,