Getting Work To Work

The longer your creative career lasts, the less written about your specific struggles. Writing and producing work for young professionals is enticing because there will always be an eager audience, hungry to succeed. They will 10x absolutely everything in order to keep up with the algorithm and crush the content calendar. The message never changes even though the audience does. But for the rest of...

What’s your gift to the world? What makes you uniquely different than everybody else? Why should I choose you? Three powerful questions from today’s conversation with John Ravaris, consultant, speaker, and author of Define Value, Drive Growth: Build a Business Clients Choose and Competitors Envy . In our conversation, John unpacks these questions and more, focusing on how uniqueness cr...

Years ago, I was having coffee with a friend and he asked me if I wanted his old 3D printer. It had been awhile since I modeled anything in 3D and I couldn’t visualize the process, so I declined with a simple statement, “I need to learn to see first.” I’m shaking my head at my ignorance. Have I learned to see yet? Nope, I haven’t. I haven’t even tried. What I di...

Of all the questions today’s guest asks in our conversation, the biggest of them all is this: “What does it mean to be alive?” Making his sixth appearance on the show, Christopher Butler is a designer, communicator, and deep thinker not afraid to ask tough questions and explore obscure topics. Our conversation begins with nature journaling, the joy of slowing down, observing, and...

What are the things you’ve studied, explored, or even built a body of work around, but ultimately moved away from? As creative professionals, we are wanderers and explorers, constantly searching and striving for new experiences and techniques. But what do we do when we feel the call to return to past areas of study? We are different than before, so why would we even think of doing this, let...

I want to prime you with a question asked by today’s guest during our conversation: “What does it mean for you to be fully expressed as a human being in whatever shape that takes?” So much of our life and work is spent in opposition to what we actually want, and yet the possibilities are truly endless. Sarah Bush is a mixed media artist who explores “the relationship betwee...

As a curious person, I am intrigued with what it takes to build skills and get good at a craft. Sure, there’s the initial impulse, the desire to pick up a guitar, make a leather bag, or design furniture, but at some point you need to start doing the work. You pluck and strum, sew and saw, cursing and crying as you suck beyond measure. But something in you tells you to keep going. Slowly, you...

What is the work you want to put out into the world so you can experience it? What’s keeping you from doing it? Today’s guest not only thinks you should do it, but he also genuinely believes in you. I know I needed to hear that. Ian Honeyman is a film composer, songwriter, and founder of Film Score Academy . In our conversation, we talk about his limitless curiosity and creativity for...

How would you describe your talent? I know, not a comfortable question to start with today, but I think a lot about what talent is and how we choose to celebrate it as a society. The simple view of talent is this: whatever you want to do, as soon you share your dream with the world, you’re immediately put into a category, a genre, an industry, and judged against the best and the brightest. T...

When I find myself getting in my own way or needing a creative pick-me-up, I tune into what Heather Crank is doing with art, AI, design, and technology. She was one of the first artists in my circle to adopt AI, and since we last talked on Getting Work To Work three years ago, she continues to forge her message of shaping the future of AI by using and understanding it. In our conversation, we dive...

As I examine my life, I find that I am in the middle of a massive pivot. I’m no longer who I once was, the young entrepreneur who wanted to work for anyone and everyone doing anything creative. I’m slowly becoming someone different, the thinker, writer, and artist who wants for more than just relying on formulas and routines to make ends meet. Yes, you could label this as a midlife cri...

How do you work through and process awful events that happen in your life? For today’s guest, author Liz Lazarus, she turns them into psychological suspense novels including her brand new book, Dawn Before Darkness . In our conversation, she shares her journey to becoming an author and the importance of educating while entertaining. She also talks about how she approaches multiple pursuits,...

The only prescription you need to get through today is one for laughter. Fortunately, dr. gough—fear not, it’s an honorary title—is in the house, pad in hand, to talk about his latest film, The Proposal , now available to download at beernutsproductions.com. We talk about stuff, lots of stuff, funny stuff, and even some serious stuff, all the while chuckling like two idiots who find everythi...

Today’s guests couldn’t have said a more profound statement during our conversation: “Art is our gift to the universe.” Ashley Wren Collins and Jordan Rockwell are the co-authors of She Wrote, He Wrote: A New York Love Story , here to talk about their shared love for art and romantic comedies. In our conversation, they talk about their creative partnership, cracking jokes o...

What got you interested in the work you do? Maybe you experienced a work of art that drove you to an easel or a grandparent put a camera in your hands and you couldn’t stop taking pictures. For today’s guest, it was watching a TV show about a doctor at a young age that led him to medicine. Dr. Kenneth Ro is a physician, creator of the RECLAIM Method, and author of PRIME: How to Win the...

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a friend about perfectionism. I asked, “What triggers perfectionism for you?” They shared some thoughts, generally around being a beginner, but when they asked the same question to me, I took it another direction. I responded, “When I’ve done things for a long time and feel like I need to prove myself.” It’s amazi...

What’s the first thought that enters your mind when you hear the word networking? Mine is some form of a sigh, usually ugh. But what if networking isn’t what we’ve made it out to be? What if it’s something you can do at your own pace, in your own way? Today’s guest is Monique Kelley, a professor, consultant, and author of Redefining Networking: How to Lead with Your U...

What does it mean when a book that is not self-help actually helps more than most books in the category? No shade to those authors, I’m sure their books are helping people, but they probably didn’t embark on a 10-year research project in search of the answer to the question, “What to make of a life?” When I picked up What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Kn...

How do you grapple with resistance when writing about personal stories from your past? As today’s guest learned, “When you get to the pain, slow down.” Darls Centola is a psychotherapist, educator, and author of Finding Truth with Michael: A Memoir of Friendship, Faith, and First Love .” In our conversation, Darls shares stories from her book including what it was like grow...

Have you ever wondered what a crime novelist can teach you about your own creativity? It turns out, a lot—and not just about weird crimes and sketchy people. Today’s guest is Tod Goldberg, the bestselling author of sixteen books, including the Gangsterland quartet and his latest, Only Way Out. Tod is also a professor of creative writing and the founder and director of the Low Residency MFA i...

Be honest: How bored are you right now? In all this push to get seen, to be consistent and on-brand, you’ve managed to become more machine than human. Your processes all have systems that talk to each other, dashboards measure what matters instantaneously letting you know whether you’re succeeding or failing, and social media keeps you jacked in and distracted to what’s really go...

I believe art finds us when we need it most. When I picked up the first issue of Art Bar Magazine and read the welcome letter from the editor, I felt like they were speaking directly to me and welcoming me home. I sent an email inviting the founders of the magazine, Sawa & Ira Ingram to the show, and they graciously accepted. In our conversation, we talk about how their roots in filmmaking, ph...

When was the last time you listened to your inner broadcast? You know the one. It’s your unique internal monologue full of beauty, curiosity, hope, imagination, wonder, and intrigue. It’s always broadcasting and we have the opportunity to tune in or drown it out with the noise of the world. I’ll be honest, it’s been hard to hear my inner broadcast lately. Focus is reserved...

For almost 50 years, today’s guest didn’t talk about what happened to her on September 6, 1970 when the plane she was on was hijacked. But in her new book, Hostage: A Memoir of Terrorism, Trauma, and Resilience , Mimi Nichter recounts her story of what happened before, during, and after her hostage experience. In our conversation, we talk about her work as a cultural anthropologist and...

What do you do when you get stuck? Maybe you’re like me and you let doubt and despair slow you down or even stop you. Today’s guest has a different answer: keep it moving. Bishop Kevin Foreman, “The People’s Bishop,” is a man of many pursuits—pastor, church planter, bishop, success coach, speaker, author, philanthropist, and entrepreneur—and in this conversation he sh...