On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift up.

Sometimes you just need a creative pep song.

Hey, you're listening to the Creative Pep Talk podcast.

I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. This episode, I want to talk to you about the feeling of the universal hamster wheel of death.

Does anybody just feel like we're just really living the same thing over and over and over again?

Look, on a global scale, I'm not sure I can really speak to that or help you, but on the creative journey scale,

if you feel like you are kind of in this perpetual state of repeating the same thing over and over,

you're making tons of effort every year.

Do you not really seeing any significant progress?

That was one of the most discouraging things in the world.

I hate when you get stuck in a kind of loop.

It really kills my enthusiasm when I feel like all of my efforts aren't really changing anything.

I've tried a different strategy of 18 times and I'm still not gaining any traction on Instagram or TikTok,

or I've changed what I've done a hundred times. I've done 10 different book proposals.

It's not working no matter what I'm doing, it's not working.

It feels like you're just on this hamster wheel where all the effort you're making is completely meaningless.

I've actually come to feel like it's not a hamster wheel, we're just going round and round and round again.

It's more like one of those claw games that pick up the candy, not the stuffed animal one, but the candy one.

The kind where you get to keep doing it until you've won a prize.

You ever have one of those? I can't let you keep playing until you've actually picked something up.

That's what it feels like. It's like a hamster wheel where the prize is going around over and over and over.

You get to stay on there until you actually grab it.

...