Subtle Maneuvers and Big Outcomes

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Everyone loves a good origin story, that dramatic moment of breakthrough, the artist who finally gets discovered, the addict who hits rock bottom and turns it all around in a single flash of clarity. And those moments, I mean, they can matter, don't get me wrong. But here's what I've been thinking about lately. What if those moments only matter because of the thousands of small, unsexy off camera choices that come after them or even before them? What if the real creative life. What if real leadership, what if real meaning is not built in the spotlight but in the margins, in the cracks and crevices of an ordinary Tuesday Today I have two conversations and they both come at this idea I used to describe from a very different angle, but they land in a remarkably similar place. First, we're going to talk with Mason Curry, who is the author of Making Art and Making a Living. Some of you may know him from his Daily Rituals series. Going to talk about how some of history's most celebrated creators navigated the tension between making art and making a living.

Todd Henry [00:01:08]:

Spoiler. Almost none of them had ideal conditions. They had day jobs, they had noisy apartments, they had empty bank accounts, and they had to make it work anyway. Then I talked with Eric Zimmer, who is the host of the One you Feet podcast and the author of How a Little Becomes a Lot about why real change is not about the big epiphany, but about the accumulation of tiny daily choices. Both of these conversations challenge me to rethink what it actually looks like to build a meaningful and creative life of everyday leadership. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:01:49]:

Welcome to the show.

Mason Currey [00:01:57]:

I think that was always the question that hovered over those stories in my first books.

Todd Henry [00:02:01]:

That's Mason Curry, author of the book D Rituals, which he's describing here, and the brand new book Making Art and Making a Living.

Mason Currey [00:02:10]:

Especially when you had these people who had these sort of dream artist lifestyles with set periods for work and then lunch and then a nap and then, you know, a cocktail hour or whatever and it was like, boy, that sounds great. But like, how did anybody ever afford to live like that? And it's of course some of those figures had inherited income. Some of them were like wildly successful at a young age. But I still just always wanted more about the financial side and particularly for those of us who don't have a magical source of income, what are we supposed to do? What are the trade offs? How did people think about that how did they make their way forward? So that was the idea.

Todd Henry [00:02:46]:

So the book spans centuries. You really went pretty far back in examining artists and their lives and their incomes and how they made ends meet. I'd be curious. Was there a story that surprised you the most or that fundamentally changed how you thought about the tension between art and livelihood?

Mason Currey [00:03:05]:

I think actually it was more that I was, like, comforted to find that this has indeed always been a fundamental dilemma of an artistic or creative life, and that more often than not, people really struggled with it, butted their heads up against it. And I think I was maybe surprised to find how hard it has always been. Like, you think, oh, maybe it was easier in earlier times when there were patrons or when there were different kind of economic conditions. But I just kept finding, oh, wow, this person went through the same kind of thing that I've been through or that people are still going through today.

Todd Henry [00:03:39]:

Was there a particular person that you profiled who you felt some empathy toward or you felt like, oh, my gosh, that's very reflective of either my experience or someone I know's experience?

Mason Currey [00:03:50]:

Yeah, one of the. I think the earliest figure in the book is the Italian poet Petrarch, who I was surprised to find, like, he had a patron. And I thought, okay, great, you have a patron, you're set. But in fact, like, went out of his way to be constantly maneuvering to find income sources and even basically convinced his patron to help him revive the idea of the poet laureate and to be literally crowned with a crown of laurels and receive this, like, honor that he revived from ancient Rome and Greece. And so that wasn't something that was bestowed upon him. It was something he hustled really hard behind the scenes to set up. And then when he gave his big speech at this moment, basically snuck in a mention of don't forget to pay poets. Like, poets need to eat.

Mason Currey [00:04:35]:

It's very great, this honor. And don't forget that we should all be, like, giving poets money. And I thought, man, it's like he could be a contemporary figure. This sort of cobbling together multiple income streams, hustling things, arguing for the relevance of what he's doing. And that's in the 1400s.

Todd Henry [00:04:51]:

I think that there's this kind of hope or this understanding sometimes among artists that by virtue of the fact I make something that I deem is valuable, that I should be able to make a living from the thing that I made that I deem as valuable. And what really strikes me in all these stories is that there are so Many people for whom, and I'm talking about people whose art we know today or writers whose work we know today for whom that art or that work was very much a. I don't want to call it a hobby, but it was like a sideline to their necessity to make a living. Can you share a story of someone who we would think of today is. Oh, obviously that person is a world famous artist. Clearly they were able to make a. But really the work that they were creating was done in the cracks and crevices of their busy life.

Mason Currey [00:05:36]:

Yeah, I have a whole section of the book about people who had whole parallel careers in sort of like middle class, professional lines of work. William Carlos Williams, who's a famous poet, like, I think everyone learns a few of his poems in high school, was a family physician in New Jersey and delivered, I think something like 3,000 babies over the course of his career. And he would make house calls, see patients in his office, and then he would like scribble poet notes for poems on his prescription pad or like whip out his typewriter or type a few lines. And he said that his work as a physician actually helped his creative work. That he would see the real lives of his patients and hear the way they spoke and then that would influence the sort of poems that popped in his head. And a lot of his work was like dealing with the everyday experience of common people. So that's one example. I don't know if he's someone that people think of as being so famous.

Mason Currey [00:06:29]:

He made a lot of money. But for me, growing up and being an English major and seeing these people's work and like, anthologies of poetry, I never really thought about the fact that he made basically zero income from his writing. Like, he was always paying for his life as a doctor.

Todd Henry [00:06:45]:

It's always interesting to me the number of, like when you hear how many people actually maybe even died thinking that their work was irrelevant and only later was their work discovered and became famous. Or even when you hear stories of like Albert Einstein, who largely developed lots of sort of his thinking about relativity while he was working other jobs, using his expertise in other ways. And it's just, it's always interesting me because I do think we're in the unique, almost golden age of being able to make a living as a creator or as somebody who makes things for other people because it's so much easier to distribute that work now. And at the same time, because I work with creative professionals inside of organizations, often the complaints I hear are I spend all day making things I really don't care about in order to make a living so that I can have that one project that I can work on that really matters to me.

Mason Currey [00:07:36]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:07:36]:

Or the thing that I can really make that I love. And this feels like a unique situation, but as your book shows, like this has been the situation throughout all of human history.

Mason Currey [00:07:46]:

Yeah, yeah, primarily it's true. People have had to find some way to do it. And I'm always fascinated by what decisions they made. Like, some people go the route of sort of a crummy day job working as a waiter or at a cafe or on a construction site. Some people try to secure a more comfortable middle class life, some more professional line of work. Some people really hustle other kinds of funding, government funding, private patronage. Some people had some really crazy schemes, like shoplifting. John Cage, the composer, went on a television game show and won a bunch of money.

Mason Currey [00:08:18]:

So for me, those are maybe the most fun to read and write about. But yeah, I want people to know that it's a universal condition in a funny way. And I hope people know that, like the pressure that's put on your creative work by the fact that you can't do it full time. You have to squeeze it in or carve out that time. And you have to be really deliberate about how you use your time and energy because you just have this little slice, I think can actually be really good for making something. I think there's a funny sort of energy that gets imbued in these projects by the fact that they have to be done in this sort of circumstances that aren't ideal, but like, you want to do it so bad that you make it happen. And I feel like in some fundamental way that gets into the work and is good for it.

Todd Henry [00:09:03]:

It is interesting that people often say, if you want to make great art, go live an interesting life, go do things. And there is something. You talk about how the material circumstances shape the actual creative output of artists, right. And it's almost, you almost wonder, would. Would their art be the same if they didn't have these difficult circumstances where they had to figure out how to make a living? If they just sat around all day making their art, maybe their art would not have been as profound, it wouldn't have been as interesting as it was because of the life that they lived.

Mason Currey [00:09:32]:

Yeah, I think the worst possible thing for an artist is to have as much time as you need to do whatever you want. Because it's so easy to just get lost in all the possibilities or to never actually finish something. I think this book is full of stories of people who did something with the resources they had. And sometimes those resources were quite generous and sometimes they were quite restricted. And you just see them still figuring out some way to get something out there and to keep going forward. And I think that's always a good lesson for us all.

Todd Henry [00:10:04]:

You say that this book is about offering inspiration and consolation rather than prescriptions. Why did you choose to write it that way versus turning it into a how to book about making money, making your art or whatever?

Mason Currey [00:10:17]:

Yeah, I think for me, like, I don't really like advice in books. I like a feeling like I want to feel like I'm seeing myself in the stories in a book. I don't really want someone to tell me what to do. I want to see, in this case, a sort of universal problem and see how people actually confronted it, how they thought about it, how the way they thought about it influenced the work that they made. It makes me feel like I'm in a lineage of people who have struggled with this and come through the other side. I don't really think there is any one size fits all advice about how to make art and make a living. Everyone's economic circumstances are different and everyone's energy levels and temperament and opportunities and the kind of work they're doing. You just can't say you should do X, Y or Z.

Mason Currey [00:11:04]:

But I think you can say, here's what famous, brilliant people did, and hopefully some of these stories are going to resonate with you. For me, compiling these stories, there were people where I thought, oh, yes, I've felt exactly like that. And I feel so seen. And there are people I thought, oh, my gosh, I could never be like that. But I am entertained and interested to read about the sort of variety of ways you could deal with this.

Todd Henry [00:11:27]:

Okay, so I have to ask, what was a story that made you feel like, oh, I feel seen right now. Oh, okay, I totally understand that. And what was an example of a story where you thought, I could never. There is no chance I would give up my career before I would try to do that, to make a living, to support. Like, what were the examples of each of those?

Mason Currey [00:11:44]:

Yeah. Okay, here's two people who could not be more opposite. One is Franz Kafka, the famous writer who works at an insurance office and did his writing on the side. And he hated his day job. And there's all these stories and all these entries in his diaries and his letters complaining about it. And as someone who has had a day job, I disliked and tried to write on the side, I always find these. He's like the much more extreme version of what I went through. So there's something very validating and comforting and funny about reading the most over the top complaints about how impossible it is.

Mason Currey [00:12:17]:

This is the worst thing ever. It's torture. It's unending torment. I can't possibly do it. But knowing that he was. He did do it. He was doing it. And I just love that kind of stuff.

Mason Currey [00:12:26]:

It feels true to something to me. On the other hand, I read about Jeff Koons, the famous contemporary artist who in his early career had a job at the Museum of Modern Art at their membership desk. He was selling memberships, and he was, like, such a natural salesperson and so, like, charming that people kept offering him a job. They were like, you should come work for me. Like, you're so good at this. And he finally did take one of these jobs selling mutual funds on Wall Street. And like, for the 1970s downtown New York world, like, that was so not cool. What are you doing working on Wall Street? And he was like, hey, like, the art I want to make is expensive to produce, and I can't make enough money to do it working at the museum.

Mason Currey [00:13:06]:

So I'm going to work on Wall street and make some real money. And that's so the opposite of me. I'm not that kind of like, super charming hustler, like, salesperson. But I feel like if you are, that's an amazing way to do it. And I really admire that. He could fund his work through mutual funds trading on Wall Street.

Todd Henry [00:13:25]:

Yeah, it reminds me of the Walt Disney quote. We don't make movies to make money. We make money to make movies. And that was like, early in Disney's career and the company's history. That was. They were like. His brother Rory was like, what are you doing? You're putting everything back into. We're going to lose everything.

Todd Henry [00:13:43]:

And he's like, that's why we're here. We're here to. And that those kinds of stories make me think again, we don't have. The art that we make doesn't have to be the core revenue generator for our life. Our life is a portfolio. But our other areas of our life can generate space and freedom for us to be able to make the art and maybe even might even improve the art because we're more focused on what it needs to be rather than, will this be commercially received?

Mason Currey [00:14:10]:

Yeah, that's a big tension in the book is if you're trying to make money from the art itself, are you somehow overburdening it with all these other expectations, like letting in voices that shouldn't be in the room at that stage when you're actually making it. I think that's true to some extent. And I do think most serious artists really feel like they just want to make enough money to keep doing their thing. It's not about making a ton of money for the sake of making a ton of money. It's about just having the security and the resources to do this work that you feel called to do.

Todd Henry [00:14:45]:

Making art and making a living is available now wherever books are sold. I love that conversation with Mason because it just strips away the fantasy. Nobody had it figured out. Not Kafka, not William Carlos Williams, not even petrarch in the 1400s. They were all improvising. They were cobbling it together, making subtle maneuvers to keep the work alive. And I think that's actually freeing. You don't need perfect conditions.

Todd Henry [00:15:10]:

You need resourcefulness. You need a willingness to keep showing up. And that idea of showing up, of the daily, unglamorous act of doing the next small thing, that's exactly where my next guest lives. Eric Zimmer has spent over a decade and more than 800 conversations exploring what makes a meaningful life. And what he's found is that it's rarely the big dramatic turning point that changes everything. It's the thousand little choices that follow it. His book is called How a little becomes a lot. And our conversation picks up right where Mason left off, moving from the question of how do I sustain a creative life to the deeper question of how do I.

Todd Henry [00:15:47]:

How do I sustain myself in the process? We'll be back with our conversation with Eric Zimmer right after this. Stick around.

Eric Zimmer [00:16:06]:

If you were going to film the movie of my life, you would go back 30 years in about this time of year to a tuberculosis hospital in Columbus, Ohio, that had been repurposed as a treatment center.

Todd Henry [00:16:22]:

That's Eric Zimmer, host of the one you feed podcast and author of the new book How a little becomes a lot.

Eric Zimmer [00:16:29]:

And you would see me going in there, and I was 25 years old. I was homeless, I was a heroin addict. I weighed 100 pounds. I was jaundiced. I had just been charged with six grand felonies. And I got there and they did a little assessment of me and they said, we think you need to go to long term treatment. And I said, man, no thank you. And I went back to my room and I had what we call a moment of clarity.

Eric Zimmer [00:16:58]:

I remember it was looking out the window. It's, the trees are bare, it's still winter in Ohio. And I just saw I'm going to die or go to jail if I leave this place. So I went back out and said, okay, I'll go to treatment. So that would be the moment you would film. That would be the key moment, that you'd have a strings in the background, the triumphant moment. And it's an important moment, but it's only an important moment because of the thousands of little things that I've done since then. All of those off camera moments where I chose to move towards recovery instead of addiction, where I chose to call a sponsor instead of a dealer, where I chose to exercise versus not exercise.

Eric Zimmer [00:17:41]:

And we all have so many of these moments. And so that's really why little by little means so much to me is that in a culture that prioritizes epiphanies and quick fixes, that's not how real change works.

Todd Henry [00:17:57]:

And this sort of plays into the philosophy of your podcast, which is the parable of the two wolves. Could you share that parable and talk about how the. That plays into this philosophy of little decisions that we make?

Eric Zimmer [00:18:09]:

Yeah, it's. Many people will be familiar with it, but it's an old parable of unknown origin. And it says there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

Eric Zimmer [00:18:40]:

So that parable is what I've kicked off every show since 2014 with. And I think the reason that parable matters to me is that we are motivationally complex creatures. We want lots of different things, we value different things. We all know this feeling of being being pulled in two different directions. Hopefully not as extreme as I was as a heroin addict, but we all know it. We all see ourselves making the choice we wish we didn't make. And so that's the reason I love that parable, because it, and it does bring it right back to the idea that we are making choices and those choices matter.

Todd Henry [00:19:27]:

And I think that this is a challenge for a lot of creative pros, right? Because I think a lot of people who are making things, they wrestle with their external talents, their abilities, their objectives, their ambitions, and maybe how they, how they see themselves on the inside there. Sometimes it especially when you're doing creative work, people like to be reductive. And they'll say things like, oh, you are not your work. Separate yourself from your work. You're not your work. And that's fine, but that's like pop psychology advice. Yeah, that sounds good in the moment, but the reality is your work is an expression of your identity, of your values, of who you are, of your talents, of your abilities. It's expression of what you want to see in the world.

Todd Henry [00:20:10]:

And so it's a little bit reductive to say, you are not your work. And I always bristle when I hear somebody say that because it's. You're not giving the creator enough credit when you say that because you know this. And one of the techniques that you talk about in the book to help people deal with that inner critic is to name that inner narrator, right? And you've named yours Eeyore. Why is the act of naming that internal critic that makes it hard for us to connect with our work, that always criticizes us? Why is it, why is that valuable to. First of all, how do you do that? And then why is it important to do that?

Eric Zimmer [00:20:44]:

I love that you're not reductive, because I think if I had a brand, it would be nuanced. And of course, our work is a reflection of who we are ideally. And of course, we care deeply about it. And so it's really important, when I think about internal thought patterns, to be asking myself the question around any way of thinking or feeling, is it useful? Because there's lots of ways of thinking and feeling that might be quote, unquote negative that are actually very positive, beneficial and useful to us. The challenge with an inner critic gone awry is that it tends to raise the emotional bar in a non helpful way. Because I think art change, all of these things are about learning and unlocking something. And the more we get locked into an emotional place, the less we're often able to do that. And that inner critic often does.

Eric Zimmer [00:21:48]:

It paralyzes us. So the reason that we name them, the reason that's a useful skill is because what we're trying to do is create some degree of distance between us and the thought pattern. So taking a step back, naming it gives us that ability. So mine is Eeyore, because I. My inner critic's not so strong anymore in a negative way. He's just more of a gloomy donkey who wanders around occasionally. And so when I have a thought in my head that I recognize as that voice, when I say to myself, in my head it's not much of a tail, but I'm not much of a donkey, right? It makes me laugh, it makes me laugh and I suddenly have a little bit of distance and I'm able to see the important thing, which is thoughts

Todd Henry [00:22:30]:

are not always true, they feel true to us. Right? There's a sense of urgency that comes with our thoughts, our critiques, our. The anxiety that often results from the worst case scenario. This is something that I learned in researching my latest book, the Brave Habit, which is that the two things that tend to lead to brave behavior are optimistic vision of the future versus pessimism. So I have a belief that there's a better possible future out there and a belief in a sense of agency that I have perceived agency to help bring that about versus perceived powerlessness. What our negative thoughts want to make us think is everything is going to be terrible and even if there was something better, what are you going to do about it? That's basically it wants to keep us in a place of resignation, but it's all illusory. The reality is we can always envision a better future. We can always do exercise some agency, but we turn our thoughts into these little prisons that keep us where we are.

Eric Zimmer [00:23:30]:

I couldn't agree more. And one of the things that that Eeyore voice tells me is that I've always felt this way and I always will. It's just baked into the feeling and it is so untrue. But that belief is what you're saying, it's that pessimistic belief. Oh, what's the point? You always feel this way. And then as to agency, one of my biggest core beliefs is that we all can take some positive step towards our well being or whatever it is that we want. There is always some positive step. Now it may be that not be the step we want.

Eric Zimmer [00:24:07]:

We may be constrained in ways we wish we weren't constrained. Some people have more choice than other people. But there is some step, there is some move that leads to a better place.

Todd Henry [00:24:22]:

I want to talk about leadership for a minute because I think a lot of people listening are responsible for not just their own work, but they're responsible for leading other people in doing their work. And I like this idea of a little becomes a lot over time. What are some small leadership decisions? In all of your research and all of your experiences, what are some small leadership decisions that you think that leaders should be making today to reap big returns tomorrow? What, what would be a couple that they should be focused on?

Eric Zimmer [00:24:54]:

The first is Taking the time to be clear enough about what is expected, what I want, what we're aiming at. It's very easy to ask somebody on my team and be like, you know what we're doing, right? And I go, yeah, we know what we're doing. And off they go. But we're not, they don't, we don't. And different employees need different things. But with certain people, I find that it's really valuable to keep coming back to just a little bit of planning together, of talking through what's important, of providing a little bit of structure. It's not always what I want to do, but as a leader I've recognized it's a really valuable thing to do. And it's a very small decision.

Eric Zimmer [00:25:35]:

It's 10 minutes on Monday. The other is having difficult conversations. That's the other one. It's being willing to say, hey, I didn't like that, that email that you sent, here's what I would have done differently. Here's maybe how you could improve that. Because it's often easier just to be like, eh, it's okay, it's good enough, they did their best, let's move on. And I'm not saying that every single time you're like nitpicking everything, but I do find that useful. Consistent feedback, which is sometimes difficult to give, is really a kindness to people.

Eric Zimmer [00:26:13]:

Early in my career. I didn't do that back when I worked in the software business. Early on I avoided that. I didn't say those things because I thought I was being kind by not saying them. And the reality was I was not. I was doing those people a great disservice. So that's another little thing like feedback as I go. Instead of letting it all build up for three months and then dropping a mountain of here's what I don't like about everything that you do.

Eric Zimmer [00:26:38]:

So those are a couple that come to mind and are ones that I need to continue to take the small action that leads to the bigger result.

Todd Henry [00:26:51]:

How a little becomes a lot is available now wherever books are sold. Here's what stays with me from both of these conversations. Mason shared that line from Kafka that if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers. I love that phrase. And Eric described the thousands of off camera moments where he chose recovery over relapse, chose to take the next small step. Those are the same impulse. They're both saying that the path forward is not a grand gesture. It's a posture of daily faithfulness to the work and to yourself.

Todd Henry [00:27:24]:

And I think this is especially important for those of us who make things for a living or who lead people who do. It's tempting to wait for the breakthrough, to wait for the big client, the viral moment, the flash of inspiration. But the people who actually build lives of meaning and impact, they just keep wriggling forward. They feed the right wolf. They give themselves to the work instead of demanding something from it. So here's my challenge for you this week. What is one small, subtle maneuver you can make today? Not next month, not when things settle down, but today? What's one choice you can make that feeds the right wolf and moves you a little closer to the work that matters most to you? Because little by little, a little becomes a lot? Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you would like all of our interviews in full, you can get them@dailycreativeplus.com it's absolutely free.

Todd Henry [00:28:17]:

Just go there, enter your name and email address. We'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of our podcast interviews in their entirety. My name is Todd Henry. If you want information about my books, my speaking events and more, you can find it@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.