What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast, an author of Pivot, the only move that matters is your next one. For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com.com.
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I'm really excited to have one of my earliest blogosphere friends here on the show today. Shreeni Rao. He is the host of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast and founder of Unmistakable Media. Since starting the shows and podcast for bloggers at the beginning of 2010, Shreeni has interviewed over 600 people from all walks of life, including entrepreneurs, authors, artists, performance psychologists and even bank robbers among many other fascinating people.
Shreeni's latest book, which is the topic of today's show, is Unmistakable. Why only is better than best? And it hits stands this week. When he's not using the internet to make things, he's out chasing waves and an avid surfer.
Shreeni, welcome to the show. Thanks. I hope I can live up to that introduction. Of course.
It's so wild to think that you first interviewed me for you were doing video stuff at the time. I think it was 2009, maybe 2010. And it's amazing to see how interviewing has been such a common thread throughout everything you've done these last seven or eight years. Yeah.
I mean, like you said, I mean, we started in 2009, really as the podcast for bloggers where, you know, more than anything, it was an accident, very accidental sort of started. It wasn't like I had this plan when I set out, you know, because I started out with a blog like most people and the byproduct of that blog was this weekly interview series called Interviews Without Becoming Bloggers. And I'm pretty sure you were probably in the first 100 interviews that I ever did, because I know I've known you for a very, very long time. And, you know, it really, you know, I was in this course and one of the lessons was to, you know, every week there was a lesson and each lesson was the kind of thing you could do in one week very easily.
And I, you know, since I didn't have a job, you know, just graduated from business school, I was like, okay, well, you know, let me dedicate myself to this thing. How hard can it be? I have all this time. And so one of the lessons was interview somebody as a way to get traffic to your blog.
And so I did one interview and then that led to a second one and the third one and so on until here we are, you know, maybe seven years later, six hundred interviews and unmistakable, creative is far. Like, it's needless to say the ship sale, of course. What have you learned doing six hundred interviews? Either about people or about podcasting?
Okay. So I think personally, I think what I've learned about podcasting is far less interesting than what I've learned about people because, I mean, what I've learned about podcasting, you can go and read and every, you know, marketers guide to podcasting or whatever, you know, podcasting for dummies. I mean, what I've learned about people, God, I mean, it's, it has been, you know, it's so funny because in some ways, you know, like the original blog was called The School of Life. And I guess you could say, you know, creating on a single creative gave me my own school of life in a lot of ways.
I mean, you know, the thing is that you, you see so many different ways in which people somehow arrive at where they're at, you know, like I've always had straight in our past or not, what usually lead to interesting destinations. And I mean, no matter who it is from, you know, like you said, a bank robber to a drug dealer to a performance psychologist, to an entrepreneur to a venture capitalist. I mean, every one of them has had an appearance on the show. And when you look back at how they've arrived where they're at, the path is almost never linear.
It's not this sort of plotted out trajectory and life plan, you know, everybody's life somehow doesn't go according to plan. And I remember, I think I, one of the very first post you ever commented on that I wrote at The School of Life was this piece titled When Life Doesn't Go According to Plan, which I've, no idea if you can even find it anymore. But, you know, it doesn't. And so what I think one of the big things I've learned, I mean, like I said, I mean, to comprise lessons I've learned about people in psychology, you know, from 600 interviews would take an entire book bigger than the one that I wrote.
But, you know, the thing is when our lives don't go according to plan, we can fight and we can resist whatever has happened or we can see that as an opportunity. You know, I mean, if I look back at my life and this is fresh on my mind because I was writing about this morning in the morning from something bad, there has always been something good. And of course, it doesn't seem like it at the time because, you know, when something bad happens, you're consumed by that thing that's bad. And it seems like the worst thing in the world because it's happening to you.
It's all consuming. It's all you can think about. You know, anybody who's ever had a breakup knows this, you're basically like consumed with grief and shit and tears. And, you know, you think that it's the end of the world.
But, you know, like I look back at, okay, I graduated from business school and I didn't have a job, which, you know, at the time was the worst imaginable thing. You know, graduation was more like a funeral. Like I don't really look at my graduation for Pepperdine from any of my programs, one of the highlights of my life. In fact, I look at it as one of the low points of my life because, you know, I was melting and a cap and gown, no job, you know, on, you know, waiting for me on graduation.
And, you know, I remember very distinctly my parents were like, hey, we'll go celebrate tomorrow. I'm like, there's nothing to celebrate. This is my funeral. And, but the funny thing is from that came two things that I could dedicate my life to, which were surfing and writing during that seven or eight month period.
And both those things fundamentally altered the course of my life in a way that they never would have. I mean, you know, like how different would things have been right now if I'd had a job waiting up on graduation? You know, like 2014, you read the book was probably the worst year of my life. And from the worst year of my life, I got one of the best friends of my life, Brian, my business partner.
And, you know, Derek was also on our team. Like, you know, those are good things that came out of something really bad. And then at the beginning of 2015, you know, to add insult to injury, right? When you thought things couldn't get anymore devastating, this thing that I had built with my own two hands, this conference and event that had been wildly successful the year before.
After already going through a horrible 2014, right at the beginning of 2015, we had to pull the plug because we didn't sell enough tickets. You know, in that same week, my business partner got into a car accident and which he almost died. It was, I mean, like, he got really lucky because the person hit him hit his back door, if it had been the front door, like, you know, just a thing. And I remember telling him, I said, hey, by the way, I'm like, you should know, at the beginning of 2010, I was having, you know, I got in a car accident in a week.
Somebody stole my towel from the beach when I was surfing along with my car keys and that ended up being one of the best years of my life. So, you know, I think maybe that one of the bigger lessons is something good always seems to come from, you know, something that in the moment seems really bad. And then, you know, the other thing is that everybody has their challenges, right? There's no way that you're going to go through this entire experience, especially when you attempt to do things of great significance.
It's just inevitable that you're going to end up having situations that are challenging or push you to your limits. And so I think, you know, in a lot of ways, what I've learned about people is managing psychology through dark times. I mean, it's something that I've found as a common thread. It seems like every single person that I interview has this sort of crucible, but that thing becomes a very defining moment in their life.
And then, you know, probably the big one, you know, which, you know, will wrap this sort of monologue with this and it's something that a mentor told me and I try to remember this almost to the point where I think I should probably get a tattoo on one of my arms. It says, you know, your temporary circumstances don't have to become your permanent identity. And in so many cases, they do for so many people. So...
I love how you say in the book that our scars become shells that later protect us in some way. If we let them, if we're open to that darkness, like you said. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I mean, the thing is that, you know, often the kind of strength you gain, you know, the resiliency developed is only developed by going through tough things. Like you can't get it any other way, you know? It was having a conversation with one of our listeners, a guy named Jeff Sanquist. And I said, you know, like, there's a real difference between reading about something and experiencing it.
So like, I've never lost a parent. And, you know, I can read every book imaginable about grief and loss of parents. And, you know, I can, you know, think about it and talk about it and actually understand it. But somebody who's actually gone through that experience is going to have a level of understanding about it that I never will.
And the only way they can gain that kind of strength is by experience. One of the things that completely jumped off the page is your definition of unmistakable. So I would love for you to share what your definition of unmistakable art is. Sure.
And then the second part is I'm curious how these darkness, you know, it's always darkest before the dawn, these blessings and disguise. How do you think that relates to creating unmistakable art? Two part question for you. Yeah.
So two part question. So let's talk about how I define unmistakable art. So I think for the purposes of answering that question, we need to find both art and unmistakable, right? Because typically, I think when we think of art, like the, you know, Seth God knows, all we says, art is not necessarily the industrial act of putting paint on a canvas, right?
Because what you do as a writer, what you do as a podcaster, what you do as a coach is art. What I do as a storyteller, as a podcaster, as a producer of animated shorts, you name it, that's art. When Nancy Duarte designs a slide presentation, it's art because it's beautiful. I mean, if you've ever seen something she's done, she's taken something as mind-numbing and mundane seeming as PowerPoint.
So when my Achilles feel that? And she's turned it into a work of art. Like, I mean, how many people can say that by the way, Al Gore came to us to have a presentation design that drove significant amounts of environmental change and was the basis for the film and it could be in truth? I mean, not many people can point to a PowerPoint presentation that they design.
That's the seed for a film that is done by a former vice president. That's, you know, so that's art. In terms of unmistakable, I mean, the way I define unmistakable is that it's something so distinctive that nobody could have done but you and it's immediately recognized as something that only you could have done or something that you did. And the example, I think, that comes up over and over again for me in many conversations as my friend, Mars Dorian, because if you, you know, or anybody listening to this knows Mars Dorian, you can take one look at something he's done and you're like, the only person who could have done that is Mars.
That's a perfect example. It is. I mean, Mars is a stuffed Rolls through your Facebook feed and you're like, yeah, Mars did that. I can take, you know, he wouldn't even have put a signature on it.
I know that. Like, I can take one look at any book cover that Mars has done. And so really, I mean, the funny thing is the sort of core idea of unmistakable came from him and a conversation that I had with him. So it was, you know, very fitting that he ended up doing all the chapter illustrations in the book.
So yeah, I mean, and, you know, the other place that this came from, I think, was, you know, you asked what did I learn from hundreds of interviews? Like, you know, I started to notice certain patterns when I was looking, especially people who were starting things and, you know, kind of comparing them to the people who had built presences or who had managed to get to a certain point of success in reaching an audience or, you know, however you define success. You know, we, what happens is that you often see this thing that happens where people who are starting something are building something, they will look to some sort of authority figure and they buy into this very sort of debilitating narrative that if you do exactly as some authority figure says, you will get exactly the result that they have promised. And, you know, if you notice, people like Seth Godin, who's worked influences a lot of people, Seth Godin doesn't offer you any tactical advice.
It's very, very, you'll kind of wave with a set from reading a Seth Godin book with 10 insights on, or 10 actionable insights on how to do XYZ. What's funny is you'll come away with a hundred that you would have never come up with if he had given you the XYZ. And the thing is that in that process of constantly looking to an authority figure to validate everything that we do or following supposedly step by step, this blueprint or plan that is in their course or in their coaching program, what we end up doing is we play it safe. And so at best, what you end up with is a pale limitation of one of your predecessors or somebody who is your mentor.
And at worst, something that gets completely ignored because in that process of following the instructions, the letter and saying, okay, I'm going to do exactly as this authority figure or this course or this program tells me to do instinct and intuition and all the things that you would have never thought of on your own, or you would have thought of on your own, get denied. So like, you know, you look at it on a stakeable crate, if you land on a website, you know, it doesn't follow any of the rules of so-called, you know, website best practices and, you know, are about pages of cartoon, which is probably not good for SEO and stuff like that. It was so powerful too, just want to say, on the subject of validation, at one point in the book, you say your need for your parent's validation was a bottomless pit, and that validation is like a drug, but then where we depend on it, the higher dosage we need for it to work. And that's so interesting how you couple that need for validation with a hindrance to unmistakable art.
And then what I love about unmistakable is it raises the bar. There's so much help there about be creative or what's your purpose? You know, these really broad sweeping cliches. And when I read your book, I was so inspired to think, that's the next level, is what is unmistakable?
What is yours without even a need for a signature? And that's not necessarily easy to do. I'm wondering if you have- So that's a thing, right? If it was easy, then, you know, everybody would do it.
And the thing is, it's not supposed to be easy to do. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to take years of work. We don't want to admit this.
The whole 10-year overnight success is a cliche. That's a cliche for good reason, because there's enough evidence to support that. You know when I work since 2009, I didn't follow the womb this way. And it's very easy to think that, I think, when we don't know what has actually gone into somebody's work.
And then the other thing is, I've gotten a world-class education from people who are just phenomenal at what they do. What do you think the ingredients are? If you had to pull out, either what you've learned from people you've interviewed or for yourself. I think longevity is one.
Like, longevity is certainly not enough. Yeah, longevity and commitment. And I've said this on a handful of interviews, but I think it bears repeating. I think our perception of longevity has really warped in the world that we live in, because what happens is we have access to what I call instant applause, like we have never had before.
And that's only really happened in the last 10 years or so, because our ability to create things and share our stories and share ideas has been completely democratized. So if you want instant applause, all you have to do is take a picture of yourself with a baby and put it on Facebook. I know, because every time I meet a friend or a cousin or somebody goes, I'm a single guy. So I take a picture with one of their kids and put it on Facebook.
And so I get to see all these comments from girls and I'm like, okay, that's just proof of what I'm talking about. But the thing is that that's not lasting. You can't create a career off of something like that. So all joking aside, the thing is that your priority has to be sort of a long lasting connection that occurs between a creator and audience.
And that is something that is built over time. So we don't think of longevity in terms of most people's like, oh, a year, that's a really long time. No, it's not. I mean, you said that in the book.
Yeah, it's really not. I mean, a year is a really miniscule amount of time if you're serious about what you're trying to do. So obviously, time is one of those critical ingredients. I think what you're exposed to is also a critical ingredient because I think the probably the big advantage I've had is the sheer volume of such intelligent, thoughtful, and creative, and insanely interesting people that I have been exposed to.
My sort of sample that I draw from is not just sort of bloggers and online marketers, but it's like you said, artists and bank robbers and people who've done amazing work that have created social movements. They've written things that are really honestly meant to be turned into movies. Because I guess for me, I never looked at, okay, will interviewing this person make the show grower is going to be some popular person. It's almost never the wildly popular, well-known people that become our most liked interviews.
It's the people that nobody has ever heard of. And that's one of the comments I'll even get is where you find these people. And so I think, to really extract an ingredient from that is curiosity. Almost all my decisions about what I work on, what I do, and what I want to try is based on curiosity.
So I'll give you an example from something that I'm working on in a moment. So I'm giving an keynote on Friday at this event. I'm the opening keynote for it. And I've been watching my friend Eric Wall, who's a graffiti artist and keynote speaker.
He makes his live music and painting and all this stuff into this amazing keynote. And I'm like, well, I can't paint. So I'm not going to try that. That would be a disaster.
But the music part really appealed to me. Music has always played a big role in my life. I was in band in high school. And if you see animated shorts, you can see the role that music played.
And music does something very special to dialogue. It changes dialogue and makes it much more emotionally compelling. All you have to do is watch a TV show like Friday Night Lights or watch the movie Joe Black, Me Joe Black, and just isolate a monologue and listen to how music brings about emotion. And so I thought a lot about that.
I was like, wow, why couldn't I take that into the keynote speaking room? And so when I'm closing the talk, I figured out a way to actually incorporate instrumental music into the closing of the talk in such a way that it takes the entire last 30 to 45 seconds of the talk and amplifies the emotion by using music. So that's why am I doing that? Because I'm curious.
I want to see whether this theory of mine will work. And there's nothing to lose really. And so that sort of curiosity, innate curiosity. And then the funny thing is that I borrowed that from somebody else, but I'm incorporating it into my work in a way that is my own.
The artwork is unmistakable created. That's not a coincidence. I spent 30 days teaching myself how to draw, only to discover that I couldn't draw. But I figured out that I could collaborate with people like Marsorian to really bring all my ideas to life visually.
So you got sort of, I guess, if we're looking at ingredients, longevity, curiosity, collaboration, and yeah, one deputy curiosity. Intuition. And then let's come full circle. The idea about adversity.
I actually think that those really challenging times as you use the surfing metaphor, the impact zone, that that's got to fuel unmistakability, that every time we get knocked down and we learn how to pull ourselves back up, it's got to be the art somehow. I'm curious. This latest round for you, you said 2014 was really excruciatingly difficult. And you write about it very pointedly in the book.
How do you think that has further shaped your views on unmistakability? Well, the thing is, I think difficult things teach you a lot about resilience and persistence, which takes us back the longevity. So it's kind of like, okay, you make it through that. You're like, wait a minute, I've made it through that.
It's funny. One of my mentors also says, your problems don't go away. What changes is your capacity to handle them. So you end up being able to take on bigger things.
You know, you and I were chatting just a few days ago and then I was telling you the kinds of things that I'm binging about. I'm like, okay, this is ridiculous. None of these are like, you listen to the quality of the problem. You're like, okay, Ryan, it's like, these are champagne problems, dude.
I'm like, yeah, no fair enough. I don't think adversity reaffirms commitment. That every time you get knocked down for while trying to pursue your art, whatever that is, it reaffirms. It asks you to recommit and re-up and get better at it.
And that those experiences, that's part of it too, at least for me. It's like, I'm not letting go of this. You know, and you even talk about like, kind of, to invest into quit, the age of. Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing, right? So the other thing is, I think, maybe another thing worth mentioning about the impact zone is there's this idea that you're going to avoid being wrong, you're going to avoid screwing up or you're going to avoid things blowing up in your face. Because we have this deep-seated fear of being wrong that I think, in my mind, goes all the way back when we're kids, because you remember those moments in class where you raise your hand when you have the right answer, keep quiet when you don't know you have the right answer, and God forbid you raise your hand when you think you have the right answer, only to find out you have the wrong answer. Well, that's humiliating.
And the stakes keep getting higher as you get older, so you stop taking risks and your capacity for risk goes down. But you look at the impact zone, I always say, there's no way that you can avoid being in the impact zone is not to surf, because inevitably at some point or another, you're going to end up in the impact zone if you're in the water. It's just part of surfing and I think it's part of life as well. As far as how it fuels unmistakability, we're talking about resistance and resilience and persistence.
But I think the other thing is, somebody asked me the other day on Twitter, they're like, how do you deal with creative blocks and the circumstances of your life? Or probably you, I said, you view your circumstances as colors to paint with, and they will allow you to paint in a way you couldn't paint before and allow you to see what you could never see in any other way. And I think it's a real test of commitment and faith, but I think it also, it's revealing. It's revealing in terms of what it reveals about you as a person, what it reveals about the people around you, and many, many other things.
And I talked about the fact that in the book, I said, I think God knows how long I mean, 38 now for 36 years. The idea of seeing a therapist made me cringe. I was like, therapy is crazy people, not for people like me until I found myself in a therapist's office and wondered why I hadn't gotten there sooner. I thought, wow, I should have actually come and done this way early on.
It would have been a good move. Not that I had any major issues to solve, but it would have waited a lot of problems. So yeah, I think that there's really more than anything I would say is viewing those things as colors to paint within. You have to ask yourself what you learned from it.
I mean, for us as a business, what we realized was our foundation was shaky. We had existed really as a hodgepodge of projects, many of which made a lot of money. But over the long haul, our core of the brand, unmistakable and the podcast suffered because we poured all this energy into this event. And when it was done, it was like this just deflation.
So I learned probably the biggest thing from that experience was momentum and how important momentum is. People ask, what are you going to do on Tuesday after your book comes out? I'm going to tell them start the second book. Probably I will be writing on Tuesday morning because that's what I do every day.
It's just another day as far as I'm concerned. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly grateful. It's exciting.
But I think there's a great line in Stephen Pressfield's book, Do the Work, where I think it's the very end of it. And he tells the story of how he goes to Paul Rinks House as a mentor. And he says, I told him when I did that I finished something and he said, great, now start the next one. And the thing is there's a reason for that because creative momentum is incredibly powerful.
You lose it. It's also incredibly detrimental. It's very hard to get it back. And it takes a long time to build up to that.
So I think those are some of the big lessons that come from bigger challenges that I'm going to deal with. Speaking of the book coming out, one of the sections I really loved in the book is called The Drop. You describe it as the liminal moment between paddling and standing is known as The Drop. Even though The Drop is brief, it determines what the entire ride will be like.
I'm really, as you know, really interested in studying change and so much of change is being liminal space. And now here you are. Your book comes out this week. You're in The Drop.
So talk to me about that like both for you personally. And why do you say that The Drop determines what the entire ride will be like? Because I'm not a surfer, but I'm curious how that forms the rest of the ride. It might help to do, you know, so just for the sake of clarity for anybody listening, I will try to explain it as best I can.
I would recommend that you actually like just do a search for a surfing video on YouTube also because it will make it that clear. We're going to serve for something. Yeah, which would be even better. Not that I want more people in the water, but you know.
So the thing is that, you know, there's a lot of elements of surfing where, you know, like it requires a tremendous amount of presence and, you know, a decent amount of athletic skill. But The Drop really is what here's what happens basically is your paddling paddling. So you see a wave coming. You start paddling so you can catch that wave.
And if you've ever seen waves, what you, you may not know if you're not a surfer is like watch surfing videos. Surfers don't ride straight. They ride parallel to the wave. So you're actually parallel, you know, and the wave is parallel.
So The Drop is the moment between when you push yourself up on the board and when you're actually standing. And if you screw the drop up or if you hesitate on the drop or if you are choppy on the drop, like there's a couple of things that happen. If you hesitate, it's actually worse than committing completely and falling because sometimes if you hesitate, you're going to get tossed anyways by the wave. And then you end up in situations that are hairy and messy.
And because you hesitated, you have a chance that your board will hit you in the face and all sorts of stuff can go wrong. Whereas if you fully commit, you'll fall. But the thing is that you were fully committed to the fall is easier. Like your board was basically the way you approached it was set up in such a way that the fall was going to be something you could handle.
And you know, the thing is in that moment, if the drop is smooth, it determines literally what the entire ride will bike like. So if your drop is, moments when I'm hesitated on the drop and I've made a wave, but throughout the entire wave, I'm just struggling to stay on the board without falling and adjusting my balance and doing all this stuff because I wasn't committed in my mind. Like I hesitated, I wasn't fully just all the way in. And it's funny because you're not the first person to mention that that same phrase has come up maybe a dozen times.
My friend Erica Leermark said me a text about it yesterday. Every person in their life who was in a career transition or a change of some sort has mentioned this to me. Yes, Erica Leermark was a former stir-fry and now turned business coach who you recently interviewed and I've been following her work for years. Talk about it a bit.
I mean, and so pivot is exactly. I mean, you're really, I know why I resonate with you because I mean, the core of your upcoming book is about this is making changes. So the thing I think the drop really is about and this is about change. If we're talking about change is often, our attempt to change is a very half estimate and it's like one foot in one foot out.
And so the result is that we're flailing. We don't go all the way in and I'll kind of give you an example from my own life about this. Talking about the book coming out is probably not the best example. But in 2013, Greg Hardell, who's in the intro of mine, he basically said, you know, do you want to be doing any of these things in five years?
Like, you know, all the things I'd done in the time that we'd built what had been school life and block FEM. Like I had been a book marketing strategist for an author. I had updated social media for a pro surfer, which was the worst gig ever. I was a freelance writer at a website called Search in Journal where I had to write about marketing.
And I looked at all these things. Like, do you want to do any of these things in five years? And I was like, not really. And so we basically said, okay, we're not going to do any more of those things.
We're going to focus entirely on the podcast. And that's going to be the core, which is scary because you're saying, okay, you know, these all these things are sources of revenue. I'm willing to walk away from it. And then in the book, I also give the example of Pixar.
You know, like, for those of you who weren't familiar with the history of Pixar, I mean, they didn't start out making these amazing movies. I mean, it was about 20 years before they started making these incredible movies. You know, it was like John Lasseter and Steve Jobs and I think Lucas sold a division of Lucas Film to these guys, which ended up being spun out as Pixar. But they were actually making this graphical image computer, which is what all these films ended up being made on eventually.
And somewhere, I think they realized that, okay, we, you know, they were in the red really deep because they were spending so much money on these computers. And Ed Catamels said, you know, the only way to say Pixar at that point was to do what they had been yearning to do from the outset, which was to, you know, do computer animation. And so what ends up happening, of course, is a string of hits and nothing. I mean, I don't know the Pixar's made any bad movies.
But I mean, that was 20 years in the making before. You get to that point, which means, you know, like the bigger the wave, the crazier, the more ambitious the idea, the more committed you have to be to seeing it through from the outset. So it's really, you know, I think the drop is a metaphor for commitment. And you know, the more committed you are, the more likely the change is to happen.
Whereas if your commitment is, you know, on the fence, and this isn't, you know, I mean, I think we have to be careful about, you know, making this seem like an narrative about quit your job and, you know, just go and change the world and don't worry about security, which is nonsense because, you know, people have real responsibility. So I want to make sure that I'm, you know, mindful of that in saying this. So that's not what the lesson here is. But even in the process of those things, you know, are you really committed?
Is that, you know, are you going to show up every day and work on this thing that you say you want in your life that will allow you to make this transition that you want to make? Like, whereas, you know, like you look at a lot of people when they attempt to change, where they attempt to do something, you know, and this is another thing I said in the book about, you know, you look at certain people have these like very sudden bursts of inspiration that, you know, for a Saturday afternoon, they're like, okay, I'm going to try to change the world this afternoon. And I'm going to make my dent on the internet. And so the internet is basically littered with the digital graveyards of people who have attempted stuff like this.
And I know because, you know, a good amount of my earlier projects are like this, where I was going, okay, you know, I'm going to try to do this in afternoon. And you kind of realize once you start to tease apart a lot of these stories that wow, okay, wait a minute, these are many, many years in the making. So I don't know, I know I kind of went on a bunch of different channels. Well, I love the way I love the way you define the drop in that it's about commitment and clarify.
Thank you for clarifying. It's not about being reckless. In fact, when I hear you talk about it, you have a great memento mori type question in the book about reflecting on death and those of ourselves and the ones around us and you say, have I created the most audacious and ambitious pieces of art and started the most daring projects that I want to see exist in the world. And that to me, that's the commitment.
It's to the most audacious and ambitious pieces of art that each of us can and wants to create and wants to see. And to me, that's what I love about the concept of unmistakable. It's again, it raises the bar. It's not just saying, are you out there, Sir Fiend?
No, it's like, are you committing to the drop? Are you committing to taking risks to truly put yourself out there? And as you said, it's not, it's not always easy to understand what our unique stamp or blueprint or thumbprint is that we leave on the world, but that the process is part of the fun. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I think the part of it is that you have to be willing to be misunderstood, criticized, and all these things, you know, and your choices, you know, potentially will be frowned upon in the short run. You know, like, I think there was a certain point at which my parents really began to question this. And at the beginning of 2015, I was at a point where I was beginning to question it. And so I said, listen, I'm like, you know, my business partner, Brian, gave me some of the best piece of best piece of advice ever.
He said, look, they just want to see that you're not going to chase some pipe green forever that's going nowhere. He said, here's how you appease them. He said, tell them that you'll look for a job by the end of the year if it hasn't worked out. And so I did.
And then, you know, the book happened and they kind of were like, okay, wait a minute, this isn't a joke anymore. You're serious. So often our friends and family, they just want to make sure we're fed and have a roof over our head. And so that's the plan.
Yeah. Yeah, friends and family are, you know, they all mean well, and that's what we have to be very understanding of is that they mean well, but they don't necessarily want what's best for you. They want what's good for you. And there's a difference.
One of the things I also really love is you suggest a 30 day project that has nothing to do with your work as a way to get the creative juices flowing. I love that. I want to do that. I'm going to do that for everybody listening.
That is so powerful. I can't, you ask me what is one of the elements of my mistake. I mean, that honestly is one of the things I attribute to how I see the world now, you know, that drawing project led to the idea of animated shorts, it led all the album covers that you see, it led to working with Mars. I mean, you know, like when you open this book, you can tell like there's a lot of thought behind visuals, you know, like every chapter at illustrations, it's not just a chapter, you know, heading, you know, even the book cover, the amount of back and forth that went into design and, you know, making sure that when you opened it, like we're very adamant that like this cannot look like a business book.
In fact, you know, I was like, we were trying to find this blend between comics and art and, you know, hopefully we've accomplished that. But again, you know, I can trace almost all of it back to a 30 day project right taught myself how to draw you know, I said, you know, that project was the impetus for us going from being a website to being a brand. Unmistakable, why only is better than best out this week, which is so exciting. Where can people find you if they want to keep in touch?
Yeah, so Unmistakable Creative dot com is where you can find our work. The podcast you can subscribe through to iTunes. And then if you go to unmistakable creative dot com slash book, you'll find info there and of course it's in bookstores and Audible and Amazon. Awesome.
Trainee, you're amazing. It's been so fun to watch your Epic progress over the years. And I'm just really glad to be walking these paths together. Yeah, thanks for having me.
This has been really fun. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm peeking out on. Sign up at pivotmethod.com slash pivot list, get show notes from this episode at pivotmethod.com slash podcast and connect with me on Twitter at Jenny underscore play.
Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Haven't it, Ollie?