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 talk.

Hey, you're listening to Creative Pep Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative

journey. I'm your host, A.J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator.

And whether I'm illustrating for clients like Apple and Xbox or creatively pep talking

teams at places like Warby Parker and Sesame Street, I aim to make stories that make people

want to say yes to life. And I'm also ADHD, which means it takes a lot of creativity to do

anything, let alone build a thriving creative practice. And this podcast is just me sharing

all the things that are helping me do just that in hopes that it helps you build a more creative

life as well. Let's go.

We all have creative dreams, don't we? We all have things that we'd love to achieve,

things that seem impossible to achieve, things that we can't imagine ourselves achieving,

but we have this inner aspiration to do that thing. It's very annoying. And when you start

listening to people that have achieved these things, I think that you get one of two answers,

you get, well, just out of my hands, just lucky, I guess. And I think that is a respectable

answer. I think it often comes from a place of understanding and recognizing your personal privileges

and ways that your success was out of your hands. And I think that those things are really important,

but it can also be a kind of gatekeeping because even if only 10% of what you achieved is your own

making, if you're not willing to share that 10%, you're not helping anybody else achieve their

creative dreams. And so that can be a pitfall, but a worst pitfall is telling people

to just do the work as if people are just extremely lazy and the only thing that's stopping

them from living their creative best life is that they're just lazy. And they watch too

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