The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Creative’s Mind: How Exceptional Artists Think, Make, and Perform by Jim Afremow PhD, Phil White

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

The Creative's Mind: How Exceptional Artists Think, Make, and Perform by Jim Afremow PhD, Phil White https://www.amazon.com/Creatives-Mind-Exceptional-Artists-Perform/dp/1637746881 In every creator’s journey, there comes a stage where mental challenges are bigger than artistic ones—and it can be hard to know where to turn. This insightful book offers a rich source of mental strategies, resilience tips, and practical advice tailored specifically for creatives. No matter your medium, you know that you can’t wait for inspiration to strike when it comes to honing your skills. This is true not only for your craft, but a crucial and often-overlooked aspect of the creative process: your mindset. From Jim Afremow, author of The Champion’s Mind, and Phil White, co-author of The Leader’s Mind, this new guide takes you inside the mental game of some of the world’s top directors, photographers, writers, and musicians, and shows how their mindset has become their biggest competitive advantage. Learn from the mental game and creative process of these top artists: Destin Daniel Cretton, director of Spider-Man 4 and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Chris Burkard, award-winning photographer and filmmaker BT, Grammy-nominated musician, producer, and composer Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and The Demon of Unrest Dom Streater, fashion designer and winner of Project Runway and Project Runway All-Stars Tim Allen, animator for two Academy Award–winning films, Pinocchio and Peter and the Wolf Keegan Hall, artist and philanthropist Suzannah Bianco, Olympic gold medalist and Cirque du Soleil performer Stephen Wiltshire, architectural artist Graham Thompson, founder of Optimo Hats Ashley Stegon, visual artist for The Mandalorian David Greusel, architect and cofounder of Convergence Design Filled with motivating stories and hard-earned advice, The Creative’s Mind will equip you with powerful tools to maximize your potential, persevere through hard times, and leave a lasting legacy.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss here from the christmas show dot com ladies young and our latest things that makes official welcome to the big show as always the chris voss show's family loves you but doesn't it is harshly because you're here learning the business of life the stories of life the lessons of life all those great stories that come from our wonderful guests here but refer the show to your family friends and relatives share the love go to goodrease.com fortune's christmas LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss won the TikTokity, and all those crazy places in the end up.

Terry amazing young man on the show. Phil White joins us. He's returning guests on the show. His latest book is out June 17, 2025. It is called The Creatives Mind, How Exceptional Artists Think, Make, and Perform. We're going to get into some details about the book, some of the things he learned in researching it and designing it and all of that good stuff. welcome the show how are you there phil i am better than i deserve chris thank you so much for having me sounds good uh give us a 30 000 overview what's inside your new book along with the dot coms for people could look you up on the interwebs sure so this is my second collaboration with dr jim aframal and jim was the sports psychologist for arizona state university for 10 years and worked with athletes like a young beardless James Hardin.

The beard did not always have a beard, it appears. He did not come out of that way. So we got exposure across a wide variety of sports at the highest level of D-1 athletics and then was the peak performance coordinator for a little baseball team called the San Francisco Giants for three years. And the last few years, he's found that he's been contacted by a lot more Hollywood actors, directors, producers, musicians. and performance of other kinds.

And Jim always says performance is performance and the mental game is the mental game and mental health is mental health. And so with that in mind, we decided to apply some of his principles from sports psychology that we then applied to leadership in the leader's mind to 12 creative men and women

who are doing their particular thing, whether that be architecture, film directing, adventure, photography, music, etc. in the creative's mind. And so you guys took, would you call it, is it like a workbook sort of application you guys did to test? No, it isn't. It's between two and four and a half hours of Zoom calls with these individuals and heavily researching them and making sure we don't just ask dumb redundant questions.

And some of them we knew, some of them we didn't know. And really, Jim and I have creative teenagers. And so there's a selfish element to this, Chris, that everyone's always pushing. kids harder and harder. They have to have a 4.9 weighted GPA. They have to volunteer at 10 different things. They have to play two sports. And we know that college applications are increasingly competitive, particularly for Ivy League schools. And also, it continues to be this mistaken notion that anything less than a four-year degree in a growth industry like AI is that's going to lead to a good job and go to a great school, but anything else is invalid.

And I would say from the lessons of the likes of adventure photographer Chris Burkard from Grammy-nominated composer BT and others in the book, that is BS. Wow, there you go. So what are the real keys to being the creative's mind? And what are some of the aspects that you get into it? What are some examples of how exceptional thinking works? So in the case of Chris Burkhard, his father was very successful in business. And Chris likened that to, if he was going to go to a train station,

let's use Denver Union Station as an example or London Paddington. Like the Bear, there is actually a Paddington Bear. The rumors are true. At least the statue of the bear, it's not live. It would make things a little bit more fun, though, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would be very interesting. Yeah. So that first train leads to a predictable path and the stops are your high GPA and all the other things you need to do to get into a in quotes good school and a, you know, a growth program degree. And, you know, then you get a job and you start at the bottom of the corporate ladder and you like Montgomery Burns, Monty Burns and Simpsons, Patience Monty, climb the ladder. You know, you climb all the way up to an executive role and you retire with a big old child. And that's fine. He said my dad was really good at business. But for me, what interested me

and why he dropped out of college, and he was really smart. He had a 4.0 GPA. He had a good scholarship. He grew up in Pizmo Beach. And the thing he was into was photographing surfers on the beach and trying to sell their photos to them. He was a bit of an entrepreneur as Chris. And he realized, you know what magazine? I love more than anything. Surfer magazine. So what would happen? I wonder, if I dropped out of school, begged, stole and borrow until, lived out of my van, until, or out of my Toyota Tundra, first of all, until Surfer Magazine gave me an unpaid internship, I cut my teeth, I learned from the best surf photographers in the world, and I see what happens. And you liken that to another train that's eight platforms away, and you have to run for

it, and you're half-packed, you've got a few things hanging out of a rackly or backpack. You don't know what the destination is, let alone the stops along the way. But you know what? You're going to run like hell to try to make that train. And that's the decision he made, dropped out of college, did the necessary, and worked his way up to being ready to meet him and Jimmy Chin are at the absolute apex of adventure documentary, filmmaking, and photography. But it took him 25 years. And it took him going on a train ride that took him all around the world. He now lives in Iceland with his wife and kids. And that takes one of the scenes. And that takes one of the seas that we talk about in the book, which is courage. Yeah. Courage. How does the courage

applies? It courage to chase your dreams, courage to take risks. All of the above. And courage to not get on that train, that first train, where your ticket is punched and you got a nice cushy first-class cabin. Courage to scrounge change off the floor of you, and between the seat cushions of your Toyota so you can eat. The same courage that Alex Honnold had to show when he living in his van, eating 88-cent burritos at Walmart for many years. For years? Wow. Years.

You got to really like burritos. We didn't get to interview Jimmy Chin, but I have been lucky enough to work with two brands that have worked with Jimmy. And in his book, he talks about how outrage, he said, my mom was the typical stereotypical tiger mother. And she was very embarrassed to have to tell her friends when they said, so what's Jimmy doing? Well, my son is actually this homeless man that lives in a, in Yosemite National Park, and occasionally the police tap in his window to wonder why he's homeless and living in a Subaru. Shouldn't the Subaru be obvious enough as a message? I'm just teasing.

Hey, I'll pass at my pastor, Jim Bergen at Flat Irons Church Community Church here in Denver. He said one of the worst days of his life, he felt like every Subaru bad Subaru driver in the state of Colorado was coming at him. So, yeah, I think. you would agree with your uh your Subaru suspicions but jimmy's caution nonetheless despite being a dying-in-law Subaru owner yeah maybe you should be sponsored by Subaru Chris maybe we should I think we have to have more of a LGBTQ kind of show if I can pull that joke out for the Subaru drivers anyway uh they're kind of notorious for some brands of people uh anyway it's a internet I mean, you work with a lot of high performance in this book or interviewed them.

You know, some of the things you, people you have here is director of Spider-Man 4. Let's get into that if we can. Sure. Yeah, let's sue. So, Destin, Daniel Creighton grew up real poor in Hawaii, and his dad told him, man, you should get a really reliable job after you're done with college. Like, driving a trash truck would probably be good. I hear that's a pretty regular payday. He wasn't kidding.

He wasn't kidding. Maybe be a plumber, son. You know, well, there were 2.3 million boomers retiring from the trades and skilled manufacturing by 2030. So if you listen to Black and Decker and some of these companies that are trying to upskill kids and getting them into vocational programs, that would actually be a pretty good idea for a lot of people. But Destin wanted to make little home movies on his grandma's old Sony handycam. I think she maybe got on a thrift store in Hawaii. So he did.

And he went to Point Loma Nazarene University where my wife went. Nelson is a journalism professor that actually does journalism. He's written to the Boston Globe, the LA Times. He has the best book on interviewing. You should really have him on, Chris. I can hook you up. I'll gladly, yeah. Yeah, so Dean connected me with Destin, and Destin, in a few short years, went from making

free films with his college buddies on the weekend to making a little film about his experiences in a group care home for abused foster kids, and that short film was called Short Turn 12, and he entered that in a few film contests, and one of them was Sundance, and it won the audience award for Best Documentary Short. Oh, wow. And now suddenly he's directing future Oscar-winning actors Rami Malick and Brie Larson, as well as Lekeve Stanfield and Caitlin Divers, in one of the most, if you don't think that film is emotionally hard-hitting, if that film doesn't make you cry, I'm concerned for your soul.

So it's a powerful piece of filmmaking. then him and Brie Larson made another film, which was an adaptation of a Jeanette Wals memoir. And suddenly he finds, his agent comes to him and says, Marvel would like you to audition for the first Asian superhero movie, which is going to be called Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. And so he tried to do that.

And he called the Marvel executive, he was his contact and said, bro, I can't do this. The guy said, what do you mean? And he had been told by film professors, not at Point Loma Nazarene at a film school in L.A. You know what, bro, if you're going to do this, stick to making indie films with your buddies at the weekend and just keep working at the group care home. Because he said, I think, I'm from Hawaii. It was like, my people think slow, I move slow, and I talk slow.

And everyone assumes in Hollywood, you have to be a Taipei hard driving person like James Cameron and others are reported to be. so don't do it buddy so he let that get in his head and he was too nervous and the marveling sex said what if we give you two or three extra weeks and by the way stop trying to create what you think we want to see if we wanted what you think we would just have one of our existing directors we want something new so he comes in he hides behind his laptop and for a tortuous hour he presents something focused on his parents his grandparents in his Hawaiian heritage and he thinks he absolutely bonded. Now he gets a call

from his age and, hey man, guess what? They want you for Shang-Chi. And they say they'll do whatever you want to do after that. Nice. And so it's an example of square pegs and round holes or people that are called square pegs and told that the holes around and that they'll never fit. This is a book for the anxious,

for the sad, for the lonely, for the depressed, for the kid that's told, you'll never do that because AI is going to take over that industry. There won't be your thing. Yeah, it's a book about overcoming, about believing in yourself and about having someone, in his case, like a professor, Dean Nelson, shout out to Dean, a professor Tyler Blake in my case.

I know two writers who are mental, but John McPhee, if you're mentored by the greatest feature writer possibly in American history, that will probably help in storytelling. But if you haven't got a John McPhee, you find someone who can give you a bit of encouragement and then just believe in your God-given talent and don't let the naysayers hold you down or pull you back down. Don't let the scumbags pull you down. Yes, set Biscuitus to Tiriartum, as they would say in Latin.

Don't let the buggers grind you down. Griding you down. I'm glad somebody came up with a thing on that. So, how you guys interviewed a lot of different people, what were some of the other surprises maybe that you saw in, interviewing on the book that you were like, oh, wow, that's crazy. My buddy Keegan Hall grew up in one of the roughest trailer parks in the Seattle area and had a disabled sister and they all lived in a little trailer park,

which was very explosive because his parents did not get along and eventually split up. His uncle ended up killing himself in a drug-fueled event that dragged Keegan and his sister and their cousin into it and very scary experience. experiences. And like Chris Burkart, he was a little entrepreneur. He would do drawings of his friends' parents at the bowling alley and sell them to him for 50 cents or a buck. He would customize, like, stuffed animals and sell them to his friends and his friends' parents. And one year they were so broke that he got, all he got was a pack of paper from Walmart, like a pack of printer paper and a set of colored pencils. And to most kids, they'd be like, well, that

sucks because I want a Nintendo, right? Or I want a, in my case, I want an optimist prime, which I never got. Thanks, Mom and Dad. I'm not scar by that at all. You know, you want a Transformers thing or you want the Star Wars thing or whatever. So anyway, but he used that pad and paper to hone the craft of making up his own continuations of existing comic books and then starting to create his own. He eventually earned a scholarship at University of Washington Art School, which is really prestigious,

was the first, the youngest person to be accepted into their program in Italy. So he went to spend a semester. But then the voices came in. Oh, you're good, but you're not that good. You'll never make it. Nobody is going to put pencil on paper drawings of athletes and musicians in a gallery. And the gallery model is the only way to eat money in art. So just forget it, man.

Go into business. So he did. He worked for the Seattle Supersonics as a salesperson person, like selling tickets to dudes like you and I, then eventually got promoted to head of corporate sales. then they moved the team so he had to find something else and he went into tech startups

and he found all these skills to be useful for phase two his mother passed of cancer really soon after she was diagnosed and he thought back to every time a naysayer said you can't do anything with your art and his mom would say what Russell Westbrook's parents

said to him well why not you Westbrook was barely recruited he barely scraped into UCLA he goes on to be the only person since Oscar Robertson average a triple double and then by the way did it for three more years just to show he could russell wilson the quarterback the same so kegan did a drawing of a football player and he put it up on facebook and a friend said man that's incredible can you draw a picture of my favorite player

so he does and then the guy tagged this player which i'm real bad at american football it's a silly shape ball if you're going to have a ball that shape it should be a rugby ball but anyway this player then commissioned Keegan to do a picture of him and his teammates. This then snowballs to Richard Sherman, the wide receiver, I believe, but someone will be like, no, he's a defensive back. I don't know. One of the fast guys in American football, he has a charity for underprivileged kids, and Keegan saw it on Twitter, and he tagged him and said, hey, I've got an idea to raise money. I drew a couple of your teammates. Here are the drawings. Let me know if you're interested. The guy wrote him right back and said, sure. And he came up with what he

calls Keegan 200. So 200 prints signed by him and an athlete or musician. And he said, so the first thing I put on my website, I made $40,000 in one hour. And guess what? And guess what? The next day, I wrote a check for $40,000 and away it went. And then, so then he gets teamed up with Russell Wilson with Eddie Vedder, with all these amazing Kelly Slater, the surfer, Yannis, answered to compose. And he, and he, and he, he, he's, he teamed up. And he, he's, he's, he His second drawing during this comeback in art, and he was, by the way, still working full-time and drawing at night. He has a now teenage daughter who was a toddler at the time.

His wife's from Romanian is really awesome, a psychiatrist and counselor. And so they're doing their thing, and he's trying to hang out with them and take care of them and work. So he drew a picture of Michael Jordan. Google or go to YouTube and type in Keegan, K-E-E-G-A-N-H-A-L-L, Michael Jordan, free throw line and somehow he managed to even this drawing took him 200 hours plus and it's so detailed that even the camera shine from the flash bulbs off the wooden floor are shown in detail and this is pen pencil on paper monochrome wow eventually this makes it to mj and mj loves it so much he says can i

commission you to draw a picture of my family and i want you to come and hang it in my living room down in Florida. Wow. That's the talent this guy has. And again, he came from a violent background, a drug and alcohol addicted background. His thing was drawing comic books on paper with cheap pencils from Walmart while also volunteering at the Special Olympics with his mom for the sake of his sister and her friends. And this guy has the biggest heart of anyone you'll ever meet. And this is the kind of story of overcoming. So check out keganhall.com. support his charity projects. He's raised almost a million dollars for charity. Well, so what do you, what were your book help people? So if I'm a creative, you know,

being a CEO entrepreneur, I have to be pretty creative. How will your book help the average layman out there tap into their creative juices and resources? Well, I think somebody can connect to the stories I just said on some level. Another one is Stephen Wiltshire, the British autistic artist, who I believe is the world's greatest ever architectural artist. They call them the human camera and they fly him over London for 30 minutes and he draws a massive panorama and he remembers the number of windows say on St. Paul's Cathedral and they've tested this. They've looked at the Empire State Building. So there is a documentary on YouTube for free called Billions of Windows because of that.

And Stephen Wilkesha didn't say anything until he was seven or eight and his first words were pen and paper and his sister Annette and her husband run his gallery, run his travel arrangements, all the things he cannot do. And that to me shows that even if you have, say, a child with autism or a Down syndrome or something, God gave them a talent man. And it may not be Keegan Hall level. And it may not be Stephen Wilcher level, but it is something. He always gives all of us something.

Noah was a drunk, okay? David was a shepherd boy. They seem to have done pretty well when God calls them. So try to stoke that fire in them and stop letting people and maybe even yourself or maybe even themselves, put themselves in boxes, find their thing, and then encourage them to do it. Yeah. I'm looking at the Keegan Hall site. This is extraordinary.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, it is quite extraordinary. The amount of detail just saw on it. I mean, it looks like the heart. This guy has the biggest heart of anyone. The way he makes money is he sells prints of non-charity projects and then the people he partners with will kindly let him sell the original drawing. The heart is the Keegan 200 or in Janus's case, the Keegan 300, Eddie Betters, the Keegan 500.

And the fact that he gets to hang out with these people at their house and to call them friend is not name dropping. It's just a product of them seeing his heart and it's heart for the people that their charities benefit. And yeah, this guy just has a huge beating heart. So give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people where they can order the book, how they can maybe utilize any other services or stuff at your website. Sure. So I would just say if you like an indie bookshop, which I do, go to bookshop.org first. You can select your local bookstore. If you don't have one, order it on there. If you must go to Amazon, you can. It's an audible. It's on Kindle. It's on in paperback. Also, Barnes and Noble can get it in for you. And basically any other physical bookstore you might have. But yeah, consider supporting your local bookshop. Yeah, the first one I meant. mentioned. Like I said, we're Amazon people too. I think everyone is. We're Barnes and Noble premium members, so I would sure recommend that. It's 30 bucks twice a year. They do like 50% off hard

backs and other promotions. I love to go wander around the Barnes and Noble. And then we've got a lovely little bookshop called Half Fire Books here in Evergreen. You can go to Halffirebooks.com and order it directly from our little bookshop here. Check out Jim Afromo, Dr. Jim Afromo's website. he's way more active. We actually have a free newsletter is the only other thing I promote. Totally free, kind of weekly. By that, I mean, it's not. It's just when we can get to it.

But, you know, we take, say, the three sentences that Cristiano Ronaldo says to himself before he steps up to take a penalty or a free kick. And we break them down. And then we apply them to you. So that kind of thing. Just mindset tips, mental health tips. Mindsit tips and mental health tips. I need as much as I can get.

well it's been wonderful to have you returned the show phil thank you very much for coming on oh thank you and yeah other creators if you're a musician my friend bt brian trans out is a grammy nominated composer who's he basically invented electronic dance music as we know it in the mid 90s uh worked on the shawley's thereon film monster the one the oscar um has worked with disney and pixar and others works on video games um the best music to work to i listened to bt list for the last like 15 books we've done. Check out BT. Susanna Bianco, her and her sister won Synchronized Swimming Gold Medal for Team USA. Then she went to work for a little company called Cirque de Soleil for 18 years.

David Grusel is an architect, Ashley Stagone, who worked on the Mandalorian as a graphic artist, Tim Allen, not the comedian Tim Allen, the Great British Animator, was lead animator for Fantastic Mr. Fox, I Love Dogs, and Pinocchio. Check out Tim Allen. dot co. UK, trying to rattle through my list here, Chris. Graham Thompson makes the best hats in the world, are Optimo hats in Chicago. And yeah, just

go down the list, man. I think that's most of them, and forgive me for any I missed. Yeah, that's why people got to order the book so they can find out. Yes, sir. Ordered the book, folks, for fine books are sold, the creative's mind, how exceptional artists think, make, and

perform out June 17, 2025. Thanks to Phil for being on show. Thanks for us for tuning in. Go to goodreadies.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Voss, 1 on the TikTokney and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And I'll show us out.