The School of Greatness - 668 Unlocking Creativity and Your Personal Genius

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

“It’s what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves” - Casey Neistat How many times do you try to look for success and fulfillment through logic? You might be looking too hard and in the wrong direction. Creativity is the key to unlocking your dreams and vision for the future. If you can unlock that creative mindset, you’ll be set for life. Machines and computers can do logical tasks and hard work, but they’ll never be able to be creative. That’s something only a person can do. Some people find their creative passions easily, while others feel a struggle. If you’re one who struggles, don’t worry -- finding your unique passions aren’t as hard as you might think. The key is to let go of your feeling of judgment. Let your mind relax and think about what made you weird or unusual as a child. Those fun oddities are what will make you something big today. To go more into unlocking your creativity, I wanted to bring you back past episodes from Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomorodi, and Liz Gilbert. Continuing my mashup series, I felt it was important to bring you the masters of creativity. These conversations have helped me unlock my passions to new levels and I know they will help you too. No matter where your creativity lies, if it’s in writing, creating content on YouTube, or still something you are trying to discover, this episode will bring you valuable insights. Don’t forget to take these lessons and practice them any chance you get. Knowledge is only useful when it’s applied to your life. So learn all about unlocking and mastering your creative side, on Episode 668. In This Episode You Will Learn: What makes you great (4:35) How insecurity helps success (6:26) The relationship between an audience and content (8:39) How to learn about new media and YouTube (10:05) The key to creating successful content on YouTube (12:22) The problems our world faces right now and how to fix them (15:11) How to be creative with an impossible schedule (16:24) The ways mother nature will heal your mind (18:24) Jackhammers and hummingbirds (21:28) Why you need to follow your curiosity (25:46) Plus much, much more

Episode number 668 on unlocking creativity and your personal genius. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Einstein said that creativity is intelligence having fun. I'm pumped about this one because

I've had so many conversations on the podcast about creativity and how to tap into your personal creative genius. So I wanted to bring on wisdom from four incredible minds today, artists, filmmakers, authors, and journalists who give some of the best tips on creative thinking that I've heard. So we've got some clips featured from the podcast with Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Featured from the podcast with Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomoradi, and Liz Gilbert. I'm excited about this one. We'll have links on the show notes to each episode as well, so you can go listen to each full episode if you want to dive into more on one of these.

But this is all about how to unlock creativity and your personal genius. Before we dive in, big shout out to the fan of the week. This is from Matt B, who said, Lewis just absolutely crushes it. This podcast has everything. It's motivating and informative. His guests have outstanding knowledge, and you get to listen to real stuff that you can use to change your life right now. So Matt B, thank you so much for being the fan of the week. Big shout out to you. We've got over 3,200 five-star right now. So Matt B, thank you so much for being the fan of the week. Big shout out to you. We've got over 3,200 five-star reviews now. If you want to leave a review, go head over to the podcast app and leave a review right now for your chance to be shouted out as a fan of the week. First of all, the things that made you weird as a kid, those perspectives that you were afraid of,

like that actually makes you great. Going there is part of the, that's the sauce that people can connect with. And you being bulletproof and perfect and all these other things that we try and be, and obviously there's no chance at that, but we posture, and those are all the things that sort of alienate and disenfranchise

and create a division between you and your fans or followers and people who might love your work. So what made you weird and quirky? Those are your biggest strengths as an artist. So you said there are artists for whom insecurities drive success. Those are the artists that are willing and able to capture that and go there. And then there are artists who have the insecurities and the folks that when they stand off from those things, they are unable to connect with their audience. And I don't mean to say that some artists haven't mastered and other artists are still on that journey. I mean to say even within one career, there are things where we are able to go there and tap into that weirdness that we have as a kid or that unique perspective.

And then there are other times in the same life or same arc or maybe even the same album for a musician where you weren't able to really go there and you can tell. It has this sort of veneer to it. So ultimately, those things are so core to creativity. There's a designer friend of mine named James Victoria who I often quote. He says, in the particular lies the universal. So what is it about your particular situation right now that is a story that you could tell through a piece of art, through creating something that seems super, super focused and finite and very you-centric? But ultimately, those are the things that there's millions of people who have experienced that in some way, shape, or form, and that allows the connection.

Wow. So would you say that if you've achieved your success as an artist, everything you touch turns into millions or impacts people, that in order to continue doing that and being successful as an artist and whatever success means to you, that you need to still be insecure? Or can you be completely secure in yourself? No. I know a lot of super, super famous people that are crazy insecure. I think there's the belief that you've achieved success, and

success is overnight. It's the classic 10-year overnight success. I really don't know an artist who's ever made it, in the classic sense, whatever it is, but I'll just go the cliche, made it, where there wasn't 10 years hard work underneath that. I've often used the artist, made it, where there wasn't 10 years hard work underneath that. I've often used the artist Macklemore.

He's a friend, a Seattle guy. He was living in his basement when he sort of got, sorry, living in his parents' basement early on in his career. He just got out of rehab, had been making music for 10 years before he was an overnight success. He and Ryan Lewis got together, made an album, the album through singles, and the album was a 15X Platinum album as their freshman album, the first album ever. And the belief is that, oh, wow, that just happened.

And there's always all kinds of hard work that's happening underneath the surface that people don't look. It's sort of like a swan, right? It looks calm on top, but underneath you're kicking like hell. And even that sort of level, again, keep pulling on this Macklemore thread, his next album is very much about exploring the insecurities that he had at the Grammys, winning four Grammys your first year. It's crazy.

Performing, you know, Artist of the Year, Album of the Year, Rap Album of the Year. Being friends with every big celebrity. Yeah, and still just like want to crawl out of your year, rap album of the year. Being friends with every big celebrity. Yeah, and still just want to crawl out of your skin when you're alone with yourself. So there's this dichotomy, and I don't think anyone's ever mastered it. And if they have, I don't know.

I haven't experienced it myself. It's more like waves. Waves come and go, and waves are a different size, and you catch some waves and you don't catch others. Yeah, sure. I'm really interested in this sort of arc of my life around exploring our shadow selves, which is that side of us that we don't really want to look at or pay attention to, because it's like in their lives, I think a lot of the answers to what we're dealing with right now.

It's not just the numbers. It's not just the numbers. It's the relationship that young people have with content that they see online that they choose to watch versus the content that they see on TV, which is fed to them. And that is sort of a profound idea that I didn't understand until my show on HBO. Uh-huh. Huh.

It was the kind of thing where it's like, how old are you? I'm 32. Okay, I'm 34. So when we were kids, we watched however much Nickelodeon or MTV as we possibly watched. TRL?

Yeah, before our parents yelled at us. But you have no control over that. You turn on the TV and you're at the behest of whatever the channel is putting in front of you. And if you liked it, you kept watching. If you hated it, you kept watching. If you hated it, you kept watching. And that was it.

That was your relationship. But when it comes to online content, like I look at the way my son consumes this stuff, and it's like, if he's not interested, he doesn't watch it. You go to the next video. There's a billion channels on YouTube. That's crazy.

And the inverse of that is if you do watch it, it's because you genuinely want to consume that stuff. So the relationship that the people who choose, who take their precious time to watch my stuff online versus the people that maybe passively consumed it on TV, that relationship is so different and so huge that it makes it very hard for someone like me to be attracted at all to something like TV. Man, that's fascinating. And I see you running around with all the big YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat influencers, and you guys are constantly doing cross-promotion,

and that's just building you even bigger than any TV show as well. When you get a group of you together shooting video, it's like no one can compete with that viewership. Yeah, and I also think it's like this is so new this space and it's so undefined still oh still not even you know five years ago people feel like they're not in unless they were in five years ago but you can still jump in today it's in its infancy it's more competitive it's much harder to get to to to get anywhere in the space now but it's so new that for me, what's most interesting about any overlap with other, other big YouTubers or big people in the space is that like, we just share our experiences and share our understanding because it's such an undefined

space that there's no other way to really learn about it. Um, then by being in it, there's no, it can't be taught. YouTube doesn't know they're building the best tools they can, but it's, they're just providing us the tools. It's up to us to build the house. So being around other YouTubers, like at VidCon, for example, where we first met, is just a tremendous opportunity for me to really share my own understanding and then to learn from other people. And that's what's most exciting about the collaborations I do with other YouTubers. Sure. How long was that video shoot with Nike where you went around the world? How long did it take? We did that shoot. We said 10 days. It was actually nine days. And then there was a huge battle on Reddit because nobody believed that I did that in 10 days. I don't

know the number, but it was absurd. You were flying everywhere. Yeah. And the reality of it was it was like much less... It was incredible, but it was much less romantic. You weren't sleeping. You were like, you know. We went the first five days without laying vertically. I'm sorry, without laying horizontally. So that meant we were sitting in like, you know. Trains and planes. Trains, planes, coach seats in the back, piled in the middle.

And these aren't coach seats on like British Airlines or something nice. This is like inter-African airlines that are just like really punishing. Day in and day out. And most of the locales we were in, we were in for an hour or two. Just shooting and then it's on the next. That's exactly right. Get the shot, go. That's exactly right.

Grab a bite to eat, see ya. There was no sitting on that beach. We literally got to the beach, ran through it, and then got jumped on a plane. Shut up. Yeah. Wow. What's the key to being successful on YouTube or creating content online right now? Is it having the nice fancy camera? Is it the production value? Is it personality? So I don't know what's right, but I can definitely tell you what it's not.

And what it's not is having the best gear, first of all. The vlog that I posted this morning, which I posted like five hours ago, and it's really... I'm looking at my cell phone right now to figure out, to tell you guys exactly how many views it's done in the last couple of hours. I don't know what I did. Is it on the ground? Is it on the ground? How do I lose a cell phone?

I'm sitting in one spot here. But what the key is not is the gear. And I think that's what's so... Limiting for people when they think I've got to have the right gear, the right mics. Yeah, that's wrong. Like my HBO show was shot on a point and shoot that we bought at Walmart. Really? But I mean, so much of my YouTube, one of my most watched videos on YouTube called Bike Lanes, which has over 15 million views.

That was shot on the crappiest of point-and-shoot cameras. Yeah. It's not. It's what you do with the tools, not what the tools are themselves. So I'm just looking at my stats right here. So my video that I posted this morning, so I posted it three hours and 58 minutes ago, and it has 140,000 views. On YouTube?

Yeah, in the last three hours um this video primarily was shot on my cell phone wow because iphone 6 because um mtv didn't allow any cameras at the vmas but they did like allow cell phones so i'm like standing there being like you guys realize that every cell phone is a video camera built in how ridiculously contrary all this means is that there's gonna be a million bad videos posted instead of a million videos but regardless like you know half that video was shot on my cell phone yeah and it's just not it's like if you can do great things with a terrible camera you can do great things with a great camera so i really like to drive home that point because my favorite aspect of creating online is how accessible,

democratic, egalitarian it is. Me selling a TV show for a couple million dollars to HBO, I believe that it was primarily the merits of what we made. But I also know that we had Christine Vachon as our producer, who's tremendously influential. She's a big time producer. She's the one who got us the meeting with Carolyn Strauss, the former head of programming at HBO. They had a relationship. There's nepotism involved. There are big Hollywood producers and agents

and facilitators involved. And your average kid sitting in Ohio right now in front of his computer doesn't have that kind of access. What he has is an internet connection and a crappy camera from Walmart. And that should be enough. And I think right now, because of technology, for the first time ever, that is enough. Our country right now is facing economic disparity, racial division, environmental problems.

These are not easy fixes. So updating your feeds constantly isn't going to solve the problem. It makes me say that like collectively, I think what we need to do is rethink how we are using technology right now, making sure that when we do pick it up, it's not because it's a physical reflex, but because it's improving our lives, turning them back into the tools that they are meant to be as opposed to the taskmasters that they have really become because, God, do we have some problems we need to solve? And boy, do we need some original thinking to solve it. There was a survey of 1,500 CEOs that IBM did, and they asked them, what is the number one leadership competency that you are looking for

in your executives and workers? And it was creativity. I mean, I think that that makes sense. The robots are going to be able to do all the other jobs, but they can't be creative. That is where- Critical thinking, yeah. Precisely. Wow. And so how is your daily practice now with this?

How do you do it with two kids on the road? Yeah. I mean, obviously it probably comes in phases where you're like, okay, now it's go time. I call it the playoffs where it's like, I'm in playoff mode right now. I'm like gearing up for the playoffs and the championship. So it's like, you're not going to have much time to relax. But how do you do this throughout the year?

Do you take breaks? I'm kinder to myself. I think I say to myself, like, it used to be that I was like, just push through. Keep going. You got this. And I'm like, no, you don't got this. If you need to say to your husband, like, dude, I need two hours off tomorrow and I'm going to lie on the bed and stare at the

wall. Seriously. That is what I want to do with my time now. I mean, it's, it's the dumbest little tweaks I think to your behavior that can make a difference. So for me, I used to think of my subway ride home as my chance to respond to all the emails that I didn't get to during the day. Like, perfect productive period. But then I realized, like, I would get home with my kids. And it was, like, transitioning from being working quick person thinking to being, like, thoughtful present mother was, like, not. So now I couldn't do it. I was kind of like, let's get homework done.

Come on, come on. Instead of, like, all right, mommy, take a deep breath and like, say hello. So now I think of the subway ride home for me as like spacing out kind of like, let's digest what happened during the day. Let's think about it. Let's like, let your brain work at it a little bit. And then let's have that moment of transition into another part of your life where you're not the same person at home as you are at work. I mean, I think Facebook wants you to be

all the same person in all the places and we're not. We have different roles that we play in all of these places. And so for me, it's about giving myself that transition period, like a warmup, I guess it would be in some ways. Or stretch, cool down.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. That's right. And I find that when I do give myself that time, there's less waking up in the middle of the night thinking about something. You know, that 4 a.m. where you just wake up thinking about a problem. And I think it's because for a lot of us, we don't give ourselves time during the day to actually process what has happened in our lives. So true. A lot of people who listen to my show are constantly asking, how do I find my vision? And how do I find my purpose? And how do I find these things? And I always tell people, you need to go in nature without your device and just be. Have a peaceful warrior moment. I don't know if you've read the book or watched the movie, but have a peaceful warrior moment. I don't know if you read the book or watched the movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peaceful warrior, yeah.

And so you just need to go and like the guy just sits on a car for like a day or whatever. Just like starts dreaming. Totally. I'm with you. Like you've got to go into nature. Allow your mind to relax. Don't just be like responsive like you said to everything. Have you heard about this new, like I don't think it's new, but like they call it a forest bathing in Japan, Japan. Sounds amazing. What is it? Literally? I think going

into the forest and letting it bathe you, which is sort of beautiful. When is the last time someone did this? Like when's the last time someone went camping? Right. You know, I'm, I love, you know, having a nice bed and things like that, but I will go to the ocean and just lay for like four or five hours and just let the sand heal my mind. You know what I mean? And just like swim in the waves for 30 minutes and just goof off. And for me, it feels so refreshing to just get away from something in Mother Nature and allow it to heal me.

And I think people are looking for proof and permission that they should be doing that. So you have the science, right? You have the data. Tell me more doing that. So you have the science, right? You have the data. Exactly. Tell me more about that. So this, the book is actually based on an experiment that I did with my listeners in 2015. So I had this sort of moment where I was like, oh crap, I think that actually my gadgets are the problem. They've helped me be a professional working mother, but I think they also might be like destroying like my potential essentially.

Your soul. Yeah, exactly. So I reached out to my audience and I was like, are you guys like feeling like maybe you want to rethink your habits here? Like, are you kind of feeling? And they were like, yes.

So within 48 hours, 20,000 people signed up to do a week of like little, every day we did a little behavior tweak. Kind of like the happiness project. Kind of like the happiness project, but on a community scale. Oh, cool. And so the idea was that every day for one week, they woke up to a mini podcast that

explained the science and some of the design behind the technology and why we feel like our attention is being hijacked from us. And then a little behavior tweak to try. And so I had these 20,000 people who then reported back with their data because we partnered with some apps that helped us measure how much time we were spending on our phones, how many times a day we were picking them up. And then I got all their stories back.

And so, first of all, it was incredibly effective. That is what we heard from people. We heard from people who finally finished their thesis or came up with a way to solve their startup problem idea that they were having or solve a conflict at work or even just like really small, minor things like how to help their kid make a friend or homework isn't working out.

How are you going to do this? I've always had the great good fortune of knowing what I love. And I love writing. And so my life has been really simple. That's all I do. That's kind of a definition of a passion. I know it makes your life really easy. You knew what you wanted. I knew what I wanted. I liked it. I didn't really like anything else. You worked in magazines, right? Yeah. Wrote short stories. Very clear.

It's like this is it. Movies. Here's the path. Yeah, yeah. Everything else can take a number, right? Like that's always been really obvious to me. And so it's also been very obvious to me to go around telling people, just do that. Like, you know, that thing that you love more than anything, just do that, right?

Right? Right? Like it just seemed like the easiest. It seems like good advice and even kind advice. Right. And so after Eat, Pray, Love came out, I started kind of professionally saying that going on stages and telling people, just find your passion, do your passion, passion, passion. And then one day I did an event in Australia. And when I got back, there was a long letter on my wall, on my Facebook wall from a young woman who said, you know, I came, I came to your event looking for inspiration for inspiration and I have to tell you I'm sitting alone in the dark in my room

and I've never felt worse about myself than I feel right now because all I've been doing is trying to figure out what that thing is that you're talking about and I'm telling you I don't have one. And the way that you define it as that thing that makes you feel like your hair is on fire, that you would sacrifice anything for, and it's not for lack of looking,

and it's not for lack of people. It's not for lack of people. And people like you are constantly saying to people like me that this is the answer. And I just feel like a loser and a failure. And I'm interested in a lot of things, but nothing that I would die for, nothing that I would give my whole life for. So I know you didn't mean to, but you just made me feel like the biggest failure and loser in the world and it was such a head-turning thing for me lewis because i was like how many

people have i done that to you know and i started thinking about all the people who i know and love and asking myself how many of them could truly say as i can that from the time they were like basically six they had no question about time they were like basically six, they had no question about what they were supposed to be doing with their lives. Not many people. Zero. Statistically zero. Maybe a couple, but very few. Yeah. And everybody else I know, including people who I admire and who I go to when I'm broken down and I want advice, everyone else's path has looked like a path through a carnival funhouse.

You know, like trick mirrors and trap doors and trying this and it not quite working and trying that and doing this. And so I was realizing we preach this passion thing in an almost fundamentalist way. And I'm a jackhammer when there's something that I care about and want to do. I'm fully focused. But what if everyone was? What a weird and boring world that would be. And so I've now sort of distinguished my mind between what I call jackhammers and what I call hummingbirds.

And the hummingbirds are people who cross-pollinate the world by just moving from field to field and pursuit and pursuit and taking ideas from one place and bringing them to another and mixing it up. And they don't get as much attention and credit as jackhammers because they're not as loud as us, Lewis. That's true. Nothing louder than a jackhammer. That's true. Like once we get going, we sort of don't shut up. Yeah.

And hummingbirds, they're beautiful. So it was just this idea there's other ways to be. Yeah. You don't have to be the way that I am. Fit in a box or fit in one. Yeah. Look, if you have a passion, of course, do it.

If you don't happen to have one, don't worry about it. And maybe there's a gentler answer, which is follow your curiosity, which is a smaller impulse and a lighter one and a less high stakes one than passion.

And you don't mortgage your whole house to go follow your curiosity. You just try it for a weekend. Maybe you like it. Maybe it's something. Maybe it's not. Maybe in the end, you kind of embroider a very complex, beautiful patchwork life for yourself.

And at the end of your life, maybe you're not at the top of the heap, but you're able to say, I did the most interesting thing a human being can do, which is to follow the slight pollen trail of my inquisitiveness for the entirety of my life. And through that, I cross-pollinated the world and created a beautiful work of art of my own existence. That's not so bad, you know, but it doesn't get a lot of credit in a really competitive passion, passion, fetishizing society.

If you have one, you'll know it, right? So you shouldn't, if you have one, you won't even be asking that because you're already doing it. If you don't have one, take the pressure of that word off your, it's such a pressure word and and just keep going back to the

word curiosity because you do have that yeah and the thing about curiosity that i think is interesting is how underestimated it is because i think a lot of the times people are missing their their invitations there are all these invitations for transformation and for creativity. They're missing them because their eyes are in the wrong place. Their eyes are in the sky looking for the clouds to part. They're looking for Moses to come down with tablets. They're looking for the voice of God. They're looking for the big sign because they think that that's how it comes.

because they think that that's how it comes. And in fact, your eyes have to be on the ground looking for the almost invisible trail of breadcrumbs. That's the path, right? And so the breadcrumbs are all around you and people aren't even, their focus isn't there. It's up in the heavens like, where's my sign? Where's my sign? And the other way that curiosity comes, I think,

is that tiny little almost, almost imperceptible tap on the shoulder my sign and the other way that curiosity comes i think is that tiny little almost almost imperceptible tap on the shoulder that asks you if you would please turn your head an eighth of an inch and look a little closer at this thing that you're barely interested in just have the most mild little touch of interest and i feel like people are getting those touches all the time and they're brushing off their shoulders like, where's my sign? Why are they brushing it? Because they don't think it's significant because it doesn't seem big or important enough. And as soon as that little tap comes, and if you even bother to turn your head an eighth of an inch and look at it more closely,

in that moment, you're like, this isn't a thing. This is nothing. This is like so small and so insignificant. But it is a thing. It's the first clue on the scavenger hunt. It's the first breadcrumb. And I think the foremost shape of my entire creative journey has been about being really trusting of that. I don't know why I'm interested in this. I don't even know I'm interested in this. I don't even know

what this means right now, but I'm going to trust that that's an invitation or the beginning of an invitation. And, and then I'm going to look for the next tiny little tap and the next, you know, breadcrumb. And so it's not, my life hasn't been a series of thunderous epiphanies. It's been a series of tiny whispered invitations. Every single one of them that I've heard, I've said, okay. Let me check this out a little more. All right, let's check it out. And sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes it's not a thing, but it's never wasted.

So I think there's a wonderful thing I've said recently. Don't ask for a sign and then ignore it when it comes. But I think people don't even know it is one because it doesn't look like the ones in the movies or the ones in the speeches that people give. Yeah, you know, it doesn't have voice of God, but voice of God is sometimes like, hey, buddy. Just two inches to your left. Yeah, just a little flutter in your heart or your stomach just a little bit. I trust that with my life. I've trusted my life with that feeling. There you have it, my friends. It's all about

unlocking that inner childlike creativity. How can we continue to manifest our creativity, to use it, to practice it so we can have a richer, more fulfilling, meaningful life, and allow it to play into our business, our careers, our family life, our personal life, our relationships. Creativity is really one of the cornerstones of fulfillment and feeling alive. That's why I love these clips from Chase Jarvis, Casey Neistat, Manoush Zomoradi, and Liz Gilbert. If you want to listen to more of those full episodes,

you can go to the show notes at lewishouse.com slash 668. We'll have those linked up over there, so you can just click on them and go listen to the full episode of one of those. If you enjoyed this, share it with your friends, take a screenshot, and tag me on your Instagram story. I try to reply to as many people as possible over on Instagram.

So just shoot me a tag, send that out to your story, tell people where they can go listen to this as well and get them in the School of Greatness community. We are creating a movement together. Millions of people around the world are listening and I want to continue to spread this far and wide so more people can unlock their inner greatness. I love you guys so very much.

If you haven't left a review yet, go to iTunes, Apple Podcasts, leave a review, share this with your friends, unlock your creativity and your personal genius. And as always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music