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I'm really excited to start doing that again.
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You know that's that I think.
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As silly as it sounds like, I'm really excited to like launch a blog and I'm going to be doing it over the next couple of weeks.
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I'm working on some posts right now, but that's not something where I'm saying to myself oh yeah, this is going to be your new career.
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It's something where I'm saying to myself you are happier when you do this, so you need to do it again hello and welcome to another edition of for the love of creatives.
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I am your connections and community guy host, dwight, and I'm joined by the Other Connections and Community Guy host, maddox, and today we are joined by our featured guest, david Powell.
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Hello, david, hi everyone, great to be here.
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We're so excited that you can join us on the podcast and I know that there are some people who might be quite familiar with all your work and what you do, but for a lot of people this may be the first time that they're hearing about you, so could you share just a little bit about who you are and what you're about?
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Yeah, so I am a creative digital project manager for a hospitality company in my full-time role.
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If you ever thought that you couldn't have a really cool job that was completely around bars and brewpubs, you were wrong.
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I'm living proof of that.
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And on the side I do a lot of freelance web design, product design and a little bit of digital marketing, so I've gotten to have my hand in a lot of really unique spaces, everything from classical violins to the diviest bars that you can name in Los Angeles.
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Yeah, so that's what I do for working creatively right now.
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How exciting, Tell me.
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It sounds like you have the potential to experience quite a bit of adventure with your work.
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Do you have any fun stories about things that you've gotten into because of the work you do?
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any fun stories about things that you've gotten into because of the work you do.
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You know, I think that part of the fun of working in the digital space for places like a physical location, like a bar or a group hub, is that the research is on the ground right.
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One of the fun things that we did last year one of the bars that I work with in downtown LA wanted to feature a guide on their website and also in like full printouts of downtown LA and their favorite spots in it.
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So to do the research for that, I actually got to go with some of the other members of this project team and we just went and had burgers and pizzas and beers across downtown LA and, you know, would be sitting and having a slice of pizza somewhere and then remember, oh yeah, there's this great coffee spot around the corner.
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It might be the best coffee in downtown LA.
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So you know, we got to go and like experience.
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All those places talk to the owners and then you know, I get to come back to my home office and do like a weird 3D design gopher head, because the bar is called the golden gopher.
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So you know, just um, that intersection of adventures in person with people is really what translates to better design and more fun design um in the digital space oh, I, you know it's.
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It's great that you should say that, because I'm reminded of some interesting research that I just learned about, where a lot of design experts them and worked with mechanical parts came up with more compelling and more creative designs.
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They were independently judged to be the better designs than those that just approached it with, you know, using what they knew about color form theory angles.
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With using what they knew about color form theory angles, there's something about just actually being in it and engaging all of your senses so that you can really inject a part of yourself, a part of your person, your essence, and I think we all appreciate that organic, living aspect of what we see.
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So tell me how it is that you found yourself in this really cool space where you get to do these cool things, because it's not one of those tracks that people look at in school and say, oh well, I want to go and do promotional work for bars and hospitality.
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Yeah, and I think that I'm in a pretty unique position.
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I work with a company that is over 20 locations strong in three different states and we are exclusively a bar company.
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We don't have restaurants, we don't have coffee shops, it's just bars.
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And trying to find people in that same vertical to even ask questions is nearly impossible.
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Not hard if you're looking for restaurants or hotel groups, but I'm not familiar with other places that are just bars, unless you count, like chilies, you know, and we're, we're all unique concepts.
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You know?
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Um, I tell myself in this position because I was a freelance life designer.
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I went to austin and I completed a ui design boot camp to kind of augment my self-taught skills and while I was in austin for that, I fell in love with the city.
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I, I moved there and while I was trying to freelance my way into a more sustainable career as a web designer, I started going to happy hours and saw people making cocktails and I was like this is the coolest thing ever and you get to do it and talk to people, and at that point I just didn't want to be behind my computer not hanging out with people.
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I was in my early 20s, so I had a moment where I was sitting at a bar and thinking, man, it'd be so cool if I could just like, do this, and at the same time the other thought that came to my head was like, well, you're like 22, 23.
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You can.
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So I was there a few years that I'm just going to be a cocktail bartender and open my own bars and it was so creatively fulfilling and I'm sure I can talk a little bit about that, because if you want a creative community like craft cocktail bartenders had that on lock, at least at the time I was doing it a few years ago.
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But eventually that nightlife is no longer as attractive as it was in your 20s or when you were single.
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I'm married now and I started to want to not be in that for the long term, but I still really love hospitality.
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So the company that I was working for as a bartender this over 20 bar group strong company needed somebody to just come in and do like systems admin work and I took the experience I had as a web designer and I said like, hey, I can come in and do this.
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I get technology, I get what you do, I understand the culture of the company and I have been in that role for gosh two and a half years now and it's grown from hey, we need somebody to create emails for us to you know.
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Hey, can you help us develop like internal tools, using like this mixture of AI, people you know and just sheer force and sweat, which has been a really cool job.
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It's hard to define.
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That's why we just say digital project manager, but it's a lot of different things and I have to be really creative in the role.
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Oh, and that is awesome.
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And, as you described how you're kind of in a unique space, you're on your own.
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That forces you to be creative in the classical sense, because you don't necessarily have a recipe that you can follow no, and thank god for the few people who will pick up the phone when I do call.
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Uh, you know they're not in exactly the same space, but it's wonderful when I can have that like that peer review.
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But yeah, it's a lot of just testing things and saying what works.
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I think it's cool that you, as a creative, are not just doing your creative work, but the people that you serve so much of, the people that you come in contact with, are creatives.
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That's got to make the whole process just more interesting and more enjoyable.
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I would think I know it would be for me to be serving well, I mean, we, we do.
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Everything we do has to do with creatives, and it's such a different animal than just dealing with everyday people that don't maybe consider themselves creative or, um, yeah, I think that's really cool.
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It's definitely a great community to be part of.
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And you're right, I mean the people who find themselves in any kind of service industry are often super creative people.
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You know they're people who maybe it's not what they want to do full-time or, if it is, they just turn all their creativity into that role.
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But you know, I work with people who have gone from bartenders to general managers for the company to now people who work in HR and they have graphic design degrees and on the side they have, like hair care products, e-commerce stores.
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You know.
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You know our VP of Ops uses AI to try to build apps all the time for fun.
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You know our our vp of off uses ai to try to build apps all the time for fun.
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You know, they're just people who like to put something out into the world and what a great place I'd like to dip back, oh no, you're good.
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There's a little bit of a delay.
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Go ahead, maddox.
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Oh, I was just going to say I would like to go back, maybe to an earlier time.
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How did you come to realize that you were creative, and how old were you, and what did that look like when it first manifested and you saw, you liked to make things?
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Tell us that origin story, please.
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Yeah, so for I mean, from as long as I can remember, I really loved to draw.
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I was really attracted to comic books and I loved cartoons when I was a kid.
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So I started out just drawing dragons and Batman or whatever.
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And as I got older I took some art lessons.
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I started getting really obsessed with sketching out plans for this camp that I thought I would make, or forts in the backyard.
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And as I got older and could use tools, sometimes I would build the forts.
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I remember making stilts in my parents' basement, like I just wanted to make stuff and it was really fulfilling for me and I think that I knew I was creative then.
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And as I got older, I kind of turned my mind towards oh well, like how can I make that make money?
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Or I don't actually need to be that creative, I just need to, like do something that makes money.
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And it's only been more recently that I've admitted like I'm never going to be fulfilled if I don't lean into this creativity.
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You know it's.
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It's the reason that when I work on a project and I don't think it's good, like I'm upset for days, like even, even if it doesn't matter, even if it gets the job done.
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If it's not something that I want to show to somebody else, it bothers me.
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And you got to do what you do in work and sometimes there are deadlines and sometimes there are budgets and constraints and sometimes you just get called away to other things.
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But I like making stuff that's good.
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Uh, I, I saw that when I was working in the cocktail scene.
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I saw that when I was in college and I was a barista, like I loved learning how to do latte art, like anything that I could create that was beautiful to me but also made somebody else happy, like gave me that point of connection with somebody else, was the best thing ever.
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Unfortunately, I, you know, couldn't remain a barista forever, but I, I get it completely.
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I I've started painting.
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I've painted on and off, but I'm painting again and I don't care whether my painting is ever hanging in a gallery.
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I don't care if I ever sell a painting, but the one thing that I really want is I want to create good art.
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So I get exactly what you're saying.
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If nobody ever sees it but me or maybe a few people that come into my home, I just want to create something that makes me feel good about it.
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Yeah, I mean it sounds narcissistic, but I go back and read my own poems.
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I don't share them with people usually, but it's not even that I'm like, oh, that's so good.
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Than with people usually, but like it's not even that, I'm like, oh, that was so good.
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It's more.
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I go back to need and I'm reminded of like hey, I did that, like I felt some way and I put it on paper.
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Whether it's good or not, like it's there.
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You know, I, I gave birth to that and that's just so fulfilling for me.
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Um, may I?
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I challenge you to uh to excavate some of that stuff, because I'm learning more and more that art doesn't become art until it's shared.
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That's so interesting, because that's the scary part.
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You asked about going backwards to when I knew I was creative.
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I knew I was creative for a long time, but I got more and more scared to show it.
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I actually remember when I was living in Austin.
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I was writing a lot of poetry at the time and I finally got the guts to go to an open mic night they had at this place called Spider House Ballroom and I got up on the stage and I read my poem and I got back off the stage and they score it there because it's technically a competition.
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And I got up on the stage and I read my poem and I got back off the stage and they score it there because it's technically a competition, and I don't even know what I scored.
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I stepped off the stage.
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After that I shook hands with some of the other people who had been in line and somebody else gets up to read their poem and I was like I think I need to go outside and just smoke a cigarette, because back then I thought that was cool too.
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And I go outside and I light a cigarette and I walk into the alley beside the ballroom and I just vomited everywhere in the alley and I stood back up and I was like, oh so, like I'm really scared to share this creative part of myself.
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I was like this is like probably a wake-up call for me and I decided to walk back into the ballroom and then I threw up again.
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I was like, okay, this night's over for me.
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But that was an experience where I realized, oh, the hard part for me is never going to be the creating, it's going to be having the guts to put it in front of people.
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This is a powerful callback to episode 33, patrick williams, where he talked about creative collapse.
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You're describing an experience that was your own creative collapse when it came to sharing your art yeah, I mean I remembering that moment, I still feel just like the same way your stomach, just like your heart dropping into your stomach or your just that emptying out.
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I guess it's fitting that I said it's like birthing something to write poetry, but yeah, that just burned into my mind.
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I ended up writing a story about it later.
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So it wasn't like at all a wasted experience.
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I learned from it.
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But it gave me this new respect for all the friends that I'd ever seen get up on stage in bands in high school or college or you know friends.
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I had a lot of friends who were in theater and I never respected enough the guts that it took for them to be up there.
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I had not felt that much fear and I didn't realize it was fear until after I got off the stage, like in the moment the adrenaline went and I did the thing.
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But afterwards I was like that was the most terrifying thing that I've ever done.
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You know, I suspect that if you stepped into your courage and put some of your creativity out there whether it's poetry or whatever it is, drawings, doesn't matter I think that you would.
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I really believe that you would find that you would be the worst critic.
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Does that make sense.
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Yeah, that's another thing too.
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Anytime that I have stayed with people and given them a chance to give feedback, they've never been rude or hateful.
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Sometimes the feedback is constructive, but it's never been that thing you're so afraid of Like, oh, you know you're actually a bad person because you wrote this poem, or you know you're in last stand because this picture that you drew is not up to my standards.
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You know, that's just not.
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Well, and we do get rude comments from time to time.
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You know, every once in a while we'll get a rude comment on something we put out there time.
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You know, every once in a while we'll get a rude comment on something we put out there, either a video that we have created, or, you know, somebody will say something that's just downright mean.
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And I've just kind of learned I mean hurt people, hurt people.
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When that comes across, or when I see it even happening to somebody else somebody's bashing somebody's something online I just think, oh, that poor soul, they must be hurting because it really isn't about the thing that they're being so rude and mean about.
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I've actually trained myself when I get something negative like that, I just laugh, I make it a point to burst into laughter and then just move on.
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I don't delete it, I don't respond, I just laugh hysterically and move on.
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It's kind of a I don't know coping mechanism maybe, but it's a conscious decision that I make.
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Yeah, I mean the idea of I mean maybe maybe you guys have done it, I'm not actually sure if I ever have but the idea of attacking a stranger on the internet there's something that they put out or attacking someone in person.
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Even worse, like I don't even think I've ever booed anyone at a show, at at a sports game Maybe it's part of the culture, but you know, to get yourself to that point would mean that you're pretty unhappy.
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And I found that when I'm more critical of people's creativity, it's not because it's so bad, it's because I'm envious.
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That you know.
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Oh, I think I could probably do better, but they actually had the guts to put it out there, to do it.
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You know, it's an envy thing for me.
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I think that is a profound awareness, david, and probably something that our listeners at least a percentage of them need to hear.
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You know, I find myself sometimes looking at art and going, ooh, that doesn't work for me at all.
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You know, I don't say that's not art, I don't do that.
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I don't say that's bad, I just say wow.
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That does not speak to me.
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But in the same breath, oftentimes I would say, and I don't think for a minute that I could do better.
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It's not about that, it's just I mean things call to us or they don't.
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Right, it's subjective.
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Yes.
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And it's okay to say something, doesn't call to you.
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But when you bash it, somehow I've gotten somebody in my Facebook feed.
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He's an artist and a seasoned artist, and all of his videos are about tearing people down and saying that's bullshit, that's just shit, that's not art.
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And I've tried to.
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I'm not following him, so I can't unfollow him.
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I've tried to.
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I'm not following him, so I can't unfollow him.
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I've tried everything I can to get him out of my feed and nothing has worked.
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I don't know why he's in my feed, but yeah, every video is where he is just ripping somebody to shreds about their art and I'm like thinking what's going on with him like, uh like kind of how gordon ramsey made his name, uh, in the kitchen, you know, um it and it's so funny because so many people could get better if they were allowed to be bad first, or if they allowed themselves to be bad first, you know.
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Being bad first is an integral part of you.
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We don't get to good without being bad first.
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I'm creating some ugly shit and I you know, and it's just part of the deal.
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Right, I mean, it's the part of the deal, joker.
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You know they just like are doing what they see on tick tock that's trending.
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So you know they're not really being original, they're not really doing comedy and like to some of their credit in the interviews.
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Um, I saw one comedian say you're gonna copy everybody else for probably the first two years that you do it before you find out what you have to say.
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Yeah, that's part of learning the craft.
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Yeah.
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When I was writing.
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Not only that, go ahead.
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I was just going to say when I was writing, you know, blog posts or poetry, I was just kind of parroting whoever I happened to be reading at the time my short stories from when I was in my early 20s.
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Like they're just me trying to be Hunter S Thompson, like my poetry from the same period, that was just me trying to be Bukowski, and like you know, you grow up and you realize that you have your own things to say and you know, maybe you don't idolize the same people that you did when you were younger and dumber, but it's part of the process of finding who you are and what you want to say.
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Well and, truthfully, there's not a lot out there that's original anymore.
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Yeah, you know, I will say I'm very intuitive and I get these like intuitive hits about ideas about our business or about all kinds of things, and I will come up with something that just literally comes into the top of my head in the form of an idea.
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I'm very connected to that unseen realm and I will go oh my God, I just had the most amazing idea.
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And then either Dwight will say, well, that already exists, or I'll go out and I'll Google and I'll find I've never seen it before, I've never heard it before.
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This was, for me, an original idea and there it is already completely out there and advanced.
00:24:21.986 --> 00:24:25.528
There's not a lot that's original anymore.
00:24:29.132 --> 00:24:30.452
I'm not sure if it's been referenced on this.
00:24:30.452 --> 00:24:33.865
No, I'm pretty sure it's been referenced on this podcast before.
00:24:33.865 --> 00:24:44.786
But in the creative act by Rick Rubin he mentions that if you have an idea and you don't act on it, don't be surprised to see someone else act on it at the same time.
00:24:44.786 --> 00:24:48.619
He basically is kind of talking about what you were talking about, maddox.
00:24:48.619 --> 00:25:00.405
There's the source of this creativity and this idea is trying to choose a vessel, more or less, and if you refuse to do that vessel, it's going to find one.
00:25:00.405 --> 00:25:05.426
So you know who's to say it can't find a few right?
00:25:05.426 --> 00:25:09.460
I interned at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center back when.
00:25:09.460 --> 00:25:19.404
Startups were crazy big in Nashville and one of the things that they would say when someone brought in an idea to them was who's already doing this?
00:25:19.404 --> 00:25:22.521
And the person responded no one's doing this.
00:25:22.521 --> 00:25:26.016
They would say well, if it could make money, somebody probably would.
00:25:26.016 --> 00:25:32.586
So you're going to have to really prove to us that this completely original idea is worth investing in.
00:25:32.586 --> 00:25:41.010
It's not a bad thing to be unoriginal.
00:25:43.040 --> 00:25:43.944
You can get original along the way.
00:25:43.944 --> 00:25:51.234
We had an experience here just recently where we were at a weekend conference in our show.
00:25:51.234 --> 00:25:58.346
It was called Art Boost and we were asked to facilitate a time on Saturday morning.
00:25:58.346 --> 00:26:08.501
That was kind of like a networking thing, because that's what we do we connect people and bring people together and we call it people magic and we've coined that phrase.
00:26:08.501 --> 00:26:10.643
We are all about creating people magic.
00:26:10.643 --> 00:26:15.739
So we went in and we had about 25 minutes, was all, and we created people magic.
00:26:15.739 --> 00:26:19.928
It was the loudest, most noisy part of the entire two-day conference.
00:26:19.928 --> 00:26:26.885
It was the most energetic and a lot of people told us that afterwards.
00:26:27.606 --> 00:26:49.898
And two weeks later there was somebody that actually told us that they were hosting something, they had loved what they saw and they had taken our idea and massaged a little bit to fit their use and we were actually going to something where they were doing this and it was just like it might have well been us.
00:26:49.898 --> 00:26:55.328
It was crazy and I had this mixed bag of feelings.
00:26:55.328 --> 00:26:58.894
There was this part of me that was going wow, that's really flattering, you know.
00:26:58.894 --> 00:27:06.127
It's like she thought what we were doing was so fabulous that she ripped off and duplicated R&D, as they say.
00:27:06.127 --> 00:27:15.469
And then there was this part of me that kind of felt like, wow, that's kind of nervy, kind of ballsy to do it right in front of our faces.
00:27:15.669 --> 00:27:18.624
You know and I don't have any she's a lovely person.
00:27:18.624 --> 00:27:21.423
I'm not bashing her in any way.
00:27:21.423 --> 00:27:27.528
She did a decent job of demonstrating that.
00:27:27.528 --> 00:27:30.183
But it was kind of this double-edged sword.
00:27:30.183 --> 00:27:42.739
I was kind of like, you know, but when you think about it, most of the things that we do, we've picked up little hints of it here and hints of it there and we learned something in this training.
00:27:42.739 --> 00:27:47.127
And then we saw something where we were being trained or I don't know.
00:27:47.268 --> 00:28:17.358
You know, everything's borrowed everything's borrowed, yeah, and I'm going to be careful how I say this because I don't want you guys to get hate and I don't want hate personally and I mean it's very murky ethically with generative AI right now, because it's pulling from copyrighted individual contributor kind of material in a little more of a direct way.
00:28:17.358 --> 00:28:40.285
The thing that I am thinking about with that, though, is how do we develop our own personal styles in whatever we do without going and kind of training ourselves on what other people have already done A little bit different in the sense of generative AI?
00:28:40.285 --> 00:28:48.939
But it made me when I saw a lot of people talking about how it's copyright infringement or it's, you know, a danger to creators.
00:28:48.939 --> 00:29:06.123
I understand that and I agree with that, but it made me think well, how can I say that anything I do is original if I also kind of feel like I'm going and training myself on, just like looking at things other people have already created?
00:29:06.123 --> 00:29:24.146
And I think probably it comes down to the intention and the effort and the fact that I personally have to put my own life experiences into it, my own pain, and it's not just an algorithm on an algorithm, but you know, it makes you question like how original can I be and what?
00:29:24.146 --> 00:29:27.694
What makes it different and unique to me?
00:29:27.694 --> 00:29:35.421
You know, and I think that that just comes down to what are my life experiences that I'm adding to this.
00:29:36.020 --> 00:29:47.869
Maddox, when you were talking about how that woman was kind of doing the same thing, with a little bit of a massaging on it, I thought about that Oscar Wilde quote.
00:29:47.869 --> 00:29:51.291
Often just the first half of the quote Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
00:29:51.291 --> 00:29:55.848
Well, the other half of that quote is that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
00:29:55.848 --> 00:30:01.406
And not to say that what she was doing was mediocre.
00:30:01.406 --> 00:30:16.663
But when you just go and completely imitate someone else, it's going to be mediocre compared to the lightning in a bottle that they had when they originally had the idea, until you really massage it and add your own personality and creativity to it.
00:30:17.656 --> 00:30:23.347
You are spot on when I think about how we have developed what we have developed.
00:30:23.347 --> 00:30:42.476
It has come at one little snippet at a time from so many places, and what we've pulled together is, yes, something that we learned over here and something that we saw over here, but we've put our own spin on it and we've taken this collection of things.
00:30:42.476 --> 00:30:47.048
I mean, I've not seen anything and we go to a lot of shit.
00:30:47.048 --> 00:30:56.278
We go to a lot of shit that has to do with artists and creatives and we don't ever see anything remotely like what we do.
00:30:56.278 --> 00:30:57.641
We don't ever.
00:30:57.641 --> 00:31:05.897
But we saw little snippets of all that from a gazillion things that we've done.
00:31:05.897 --> 00:31:35.916
We're always tweaking and altering just a little bit, so it's like we took Just a little bit.
00:31:35.916 --> 00:31:36.358
So it's like we took.
00:31:36.358 --> 00:31:38.047
You know, we found $101 bills as we scoured aroundight.
00:31:38.047 --> 00:31:39.192
Have we ever literally imitated something that?
00:31:39.212 --> 00:31:39.634
we saw somewhere else.
00:31:39.634 --> 00:31:53.883
No, because we can appreciate that there's, and in most cases it would not be appropriate, it would be tone deaf to what it is that we were trying to bring it to, if we just tried to replicate something that we saw.
00:31:56.936 --> 00:32:18.150
I mean, we've been at Creative Mornings for a year now, a little over, and we love Creative Mornings and we've been very, very specific in saying, not just to ourselves but to others you know, we serve the same community that they do, but we don't serve it in the way they do and we don't intend to serve it in the way they do.
