In a world obsessed with productivity and profit, creativity can feel “optional.” For reinventors, it’s the opposite: creativity is a core business skill, and a survival skill for the future of work.
In this episode, Todd and Chris break down why ReInvention is inherently creative (you’re literally designing your next chapter), and how to make creativity practical – even if you’re coming from a structured corporate life.
We cover:
- Why creativity will matter more as AI transforms jobs and industries
- The biggest trap reinventors fall into: hiding in busywork instead of creating
- How to block “creative time” like it’s a real pillar of your work (and why the to-do list never ends)
- The truth about imposter syndrome: why it’s normal, and what to do anyway
- A simple rule for creative output: let it be messy first, edit later
If you’re building a business, launching a portfolio career, writing, posting, creating offers, or trying to figure out your next move…this is your reminder: your uniqueness is the asset. Time to get weird, and make it real!
If this conversation resonates with you, visit ReInvention.biz to explore our guided workbook and join a community of people just like you – people designing what’s next.
**Subscribe to the ReInvention Podcast to stay plugged into fresh ideas, frameworks, and real-world tools for navigating the future of your work and life.
Episode Transcript
Todd: You need to make creativity a consistent thing that you’re integrating.
It may be weird, it may feel awkward, we’re flexing a muscle. The first time you start going back to the gym, it feels really weird.
You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s the same thing here, we are flexing new muscles, and so you wanna just do it. You wanna spend those three hours and you wanna do even one or two things.
All right, all right, Chris, what is going on today? What’s on the docket for reinvention?
Chris: Todd, today we’re talking about a topic that is so critical, but I don’t think it’s necessarily obvious for most reinventors to proactively think about. Because we live in a capitalist world so entrepreneurs and career reinventors need to be focused on making money commerce. But we’re talking about today is art, or more specifically creativity.
Creativity is a critical business skill that you need to tap into in a reinvented career. Think about it. You have to create an elevator pitch or a tagline for your business. You have to create the copy for your new website, and even if you’re just at the very beginning of getting clarity about your future career, that is the definition of creativity.
You are literally creating the vision of your future. But when you’re a reinventor, and especially if you’re coming out of a more structured setting, and now you’re starting a new business, it might be new for you to have to think about allocating time specifically to creative endeavors.
And it’s a challenge. One, how much time do you spend on those creative endeavors? Like what’s the right proportion among your creative work and your more tactical operational work? Two, creative output is so subjective. How will you know when good enough is good enough? And three, creativity suffers from this difficulty of, well, you might not always get a satisfactory output every time you sit down to do the work.
So we’re gonna talk today about tactics and techniques that you can use to ensure that you’re using your time efficiently while still honoring that sometimes you need to rely on some inspiration or the muse to strike. The creative parts of your reinvented career in business can be a lot of fun, but you need to allocate time and space and take it really seriously as a process because it’s critical to successful reinvention. And Todd, I know you’ve got a lot of thoughts on this topic, so what’s bubbling up for you my man?
Todd: Yeah, I do man. And thanks for that really great intro because I think this is a topic that’s really important for people that are reinventing. ’cause when we think about creativity, okay, a lot of people will first go to, oh, that’s playing my guitar. You know, that’s doing my art. Getting out a big pad and pen and throwing some paint on there, which obviously are creative endeavors, and we’re all artists in a sense. And so that’s a wonderful thing. But I love how you shared how reinvention itself is a creative endeavor. When I heard that, I thought about the six tenets that we talk about on this podcast again and again. And of course you know, our number one is clarity, getting clarity, creating a life vision. Trying to understand what would be worth fighting for for the next steps in your career. Okay? And so in our community, we have this clarity course, right? Where we give people a two day process of getting deep clarity around their vision, what they really wanna have happen. And in that two days, we give this exercise of writing one’s own eulogy.
And I know it sounds really morbid, okay? And I’m not gonna talk about the process in detail here, but that’s a creative endeavor, right? Thinking about your life in terms of being finite, okay, that we’re just a blip in this matrix. And starting to envision what could happen that would be really great.
Like what could happen that would make it all worth fighting for, right? You know, in terms of your money making, your projects, your abundance, where you live, your lifestyle, like all of it. And this is really what makes reinvention different, Chris, than just doing a career pivot, right? We have a lot of people that find us and they’re like, oh, well I just need to change jobs. I need to, get that security back. Just make enough money, you know, in these next projects that kind of satisfy my needs and my trajectory and all that. And that’s fine. I’m not taking that off the table. But reinvention, connotes something additional, Chris, it connotes creative endeavor, a creative mindset of like, what could happen to my life.
It’s freedom. And I go back to when I first got this idea to work with you in reinvention, I had interviewed this guy named Bill Burnett, and I think we talked about it on this podcast. He’s a really big guy at Stanford University. He runs the Designing Your Life Institute there. And, he said something interesting when I asked him about AI disrupting everything and taking over industries. And he said, look. AI’s gonna come in and take over all the mundane jobs, a lot of the mathematical engineering jobs. And I’m not saying those things aren’t creative by the way, but this is just what he said and that it’s gonna be a real unleashing of human creativity.
There’s gonna be a lot more focus and energy on the creative endeavors. Writing, music, and I know it sounds odd because how our economy is and how are we gonna support ourselves financially in that way? But he was really clear that creativity is gonna be a real asset in the future for how you make money and how you live your life.
So I just love this conversation because it can go a little bit all over the place ’cause it is creative, right. But those are some of the things that come up for me when we talk about it.
Chris: Yeah. I love you pulled in the AI and the future of work. I think that’s really important and we’re talking about that topic more and more because as we help people in our community and our listeners on the podcast think about reinventing their careers, you obviously want to think about where the world is going and think about what careers are gonna be around and how you can adapt to that. Adaptability is a very big feature of reinvention and creativity and adaptability go hand in hand. There’s a lot of people right now who are in the creative fields who are bemoaning that AI is gonna take all these jobs and take them away.
And we’ve given some examples on this podcast. I know you’ve worked with some people where it actually is more of a evolution. I mean, I have a very good friend who does a lot of design and art graphic type work, and a couple years ago was like, oh, my career’s gone. And then a couple months after that, he’s like, oh, I’ve learned how to wield AI in this totally cool way that actually has accelerated my business.
And now I have all these like cool designs and shirts that I’m making that like I never would’ve done before by hand and stuff like that. So I think that that’s a metaphor for all the areas we’re talking about for career reinventors where, it’s such a great opportunity to like bring your human creativity, mix it with the new technology and I really think it’s gonna free people who were formerly just technologists and give them the opportunity to be more creative and it’s gonna free people who were formerly thinking of themselves as non-technical and give them the opportunity to buddy with a technical partner through the AI and the technology. I think it’s just gonna open up possibilities for people if we really lean into it and get smart about it.
Todd: I mean, I actually agree with you. I think that, the point of this episode is to have you, our listeners think about your creative endeavors in a more serious, tactical way. Okay. Because what I found, especially from a lot of the people that come out of a corporate environment where it’s very structured and then they come into kind of this reinvention, it’s like, okay, I’m gonna start building a portfolio career. I’m gonna start exploring new ideas. I am gonna write that children’s book, not necessarily to make money, but just to see what can happen out there. I am gonna take some of the things that I do, and create some fractional work. I’m gonna start doing these things. It’s a mindset shift more than anything to start thinking about how to live this way and how to explore this way. And additionally, like, who do you need to connect with? This is all very, very creative, right? There’s a lot of creativity and everything to do with reinvention, and that’s why I believe in it so fervently right now because. Staying stuck in the old way, in the old life, as much as we bemoan change. Change is upon us my friends, it is happening. Okay? I’m sitting right now in LA and there are just, you know, a million Waymos driving around with no drivers. I mean, this is very real, okay? Like the world is changing, okay? And we don’t know where it’s going. No one knows where it’s going, and that’s why we’re going to interview a lot of people out here, right?
We want to talk to people that are more visionary, you know, in business and technology. Maybe they can give us some insights that will help us be smart around the choices we make. But creativity is something that you’ve gotta own my friends. you’ve gotta look yourself in the mirror and say, all right, I’m gonna take this reinvention thing on.
Like, I love our workbook, the seven day workbook that we did, Chris, because that seven day process is very creative. We walk people through, right? what are the careers that are possible for you? What are my financial implications in all of this? What are the things that I would love to do? Who is my network?
All the things that are in that seven day workbook are work related, right? That help you make decisions. But ultimately having you think about things differently. Okay? And that’s what the call is. You need to think about the future of your career differently right now. You need to open yourself up to new possibilities and really embody a open-minded way of going about things and an exploratory way, right?
Like setting these smart experiments that you like to talk about and going out there. This is all creative. What happens, Chris is that people hear this and they say, yeah, I get it, but I don’t know how to do that. Or I’m scared to do that and I don’t really know what to do. I understand energetically what you’re saying, but how do I start living this way and how do I do it?
Well, welcome to the conversation. You know, it starts here. It starts with. Awareness and it starts with a commitment to, yeah, I wanna be one of those people that learns how to be flexible and learns how to be creative and starts exploring in new ways. I wanna be one of those people that gets out of my own way and my old trajectory and my old identity and starts to like live a new and better life.
’cause that’s the hope here, this is all an opportunity, my friends. This is all an opportunity and yes, it can be hard to change, but this podcast I think is something that can help you be a linchpin for that change.
Chris: Yeah, I think the thing is, and is a big picture concept, creativity, especially if you go through our seven day reinvention workbook, you’re gonna be thinking about literally the rest of your life as part of that activity. Really big picture stuff. But also there’s some tactical elements of this. One of the first things that you have to do if you wanna embrace this idea of creating the career and the life that you want and reinventing, and even doing the creative work within your reinvented career, you have to block time for it.
You have to make time and space for it, and you have to treat it just like any other. It’s like a tower of your business. You block time to do your financial books. You block time to do your sales and marketing. You block time for creativity. I mean, that is, you treat it in that way and I think that’s a mindset shift for people right off the bat because I think most people walk around, I know I did for a lot of my life walking around thinking of creativity as this thing that strikes like we’ve heard this, from so many musicians and artists and whatever. We’ve heard this I’m just a channel. I’m a vessel for the universe, and the inspiration flows through me onto the page.
And it’s like, yeah, okay. Yes, but also you were holding a pen. Like you were at the desk with a pad and a pen and you were like putting yourself in the place for God to channel through your body. It didn’t just happen. I mean, yeah, people get a spark of an idea, but then you have to go do the work. I think I heard a story about uh, Lin Manuel Miranda who wrote Hamilton, right? And he’s telling a story about how like he was pissing his friends off ’cause he kept being on the way to the party and he got an idea and he would turn right around and go home and write a song for Hamilton Okay. Spark of an idea. But the reason the spark of an idea came to him is because he’s been thinking about it, putting so much time into it and working. And then when the idea came, he went and did some damn work at the desk. It wasn’t like it came fully formed magically into his head and all he had to do was like spit it into the microphone. He had to go work it and work it out. So the commitment to creativity as a real arm of your business, as a real feature of what you’re doing, as something you’re going to put real time towards, I think is table stakes for this whole conversation.
Todd: Yeah, I could not agree with you more. Okay. And I think what happens for a lot of people is that we get bogged down in the old mundane ways we used to do things, and for a lot of people who have not given themselves buckets of time or space to be a creator, this is a very hard skill to learn. And I know so many Reinventors they come at it they make their spreadsheets, they do their financial plan and they make all the plans. And then when it is time to go out there and try to explore something different, they freeze. They get stuck, right? They don’t wanna have that conversation. They don’t wanna send that dm, they don’t wanna do the thing that is uncomfortable. That is more, in some ways creative because you’re used to just kind of staying in a little bit of a shell and protected and now like being creative is this thing of like, oh, I’m going out there.
Right? So there’s a lot of ways to look at creativity and so when you mention creating buckets of time for creativity, this is so very important. What I recommend, for every Reinventor Is to spend at least three hours a week. Okay? And this could be an afternoon. I do this on Wednesday afternoons.
I never have any calls on Wednesday afternoons. Okay? And what I do in those three hours is that I literally spend time thinking about the most creative big picture ideas. The big book that I’m gonna write, the TED talk, that I wanna do the big picture ideas for our business, right? And I’m not talking about this is when I go out for a walk on the beach and I meditate and pray to God. I do that as well. Okay. And that’s also very creative. I’m talking about three hours of focused time where you’re working, but your work is focused on the big picture, creative endeavors. I think that’s a big bucket of time that most people don’t know how to do. Okay. And so when people talk about this, it’s like, oh, you gotta take care of everything and do all these things. Okay? The mundane, right? And then you gotta like go out there and you gotta go on retreats and you gotta go, you know, meditate and do all these things that we talk about here, right? Allow and reflect is a big thing for us.
Creating the space for the inspiration to come in, as you talked about with the Hamilton creator, is a very important thing. But then there’s like this middle piece of like, I need to bucket some time to explore these creative endeavors. You talked about him then go ahead and writing out the inspiration.
That’s what he’s doing in those three hours, probably for him more. And this is a muscle that we all need to begin to flex, right? Because when we’re working, we get caught in our old patterns. And what we’re saying here is, let’s work. But let’s shift it up and start to integrate different buckets of time by which we’re doing different things that are all very valuable. And I’m curious what comes up for you? ’cause I’m building a business with you, right? And I know you pretty well at this point. We’re in this part right now of like, how do we start to get out of the building and the this and the that, we built this podcast and we’re doing all these things, but now we need to do things differently, right? And we need to build that into our routine. What’s coming up for you on that one?
Chris: Well, yeah. You know, it’s a little inside, information, right. You know, I’m having trouble with this, right? Like, for me, I’m a creative person, by the way. Write music, write, all that stuff. But in terms of in my working world, the idea that I would block out half a day for just creative endeavors is not something I was doing.
It’s not something I was ever doing in my career in the past. I would always be doing the mundane administrative execution type tasks first with the idea of once I get those all done, then I’ll have some mind space and time to create. Todd, do those ever all get done or they’re just an infinite flow of them popping up?
Right. So. It has dawned on me lately as we’re working in this business and we’re shifting into a more creative mode where we’re reaching out into the world. We’re doing this podcast, we’re leaning into social media and, putting things out into the world. Creativity is a major, major feature of what we’re gonna be doing in this business and committing, to me, it’s really important that I and the people who are listening, you have to commit to this to say, I’m committing to this time and I’m protecting this time. The same way you might protect gym time or family time or something like that. ’cause the truth is those mundane, administrative execution tasks that you’re doing, I think we do them sometimes because we wanna feel virtuous, like we’re doing the right thing and we’re supposed to be doing them.
I’m calling us on that. That is a cop out. It’s because the creative stuff is actually like amorphous. It’s a little scary. It’s a little weird. We don’t know what we’re gonna get from it. We might sit there for three hours and not get the dopamine hit, but if we sit here with the to-do checklist, we know we’re gonna be like, check the box dopamine. Check the box dopamine. So the nature of creativity I think is daunting to us, so we sort of can go hide in that administrative place.
Todd: It’s so well said, man, and before I respond to that directly, there are people that live in the creative space and it’s really hard for them to build out systems and checklists and all that stuff. You know, I think for some people that may be listening, that’s also a thing. I think there are really two skills here when we’re talking about reinventing.
There’s this game planning and like administration stuff that you need to do, which some people are very strong and in most corporate people are very strong in that. And then there’s this creative space, right? So I just wanna honor those of you who like live in this creative space and you’re like, wait a minute, hold a second. That’s easy for me, man. I, I can’t get anything done. That’s a different episode. Okay. That’s actually a different episode. And we talk a lot about that here on this podcast. Okay. But it reminds me of a conversation we had in our community this past week where we have somebody in our community, who is really coming in there wanting to get some results for his reinvention.
Okay? And he’s actually somebody who’s been a pretty successful entrepreneur for a long time, but he’s stuck in the mundane, okay? And he has other ideas of things that he wants to do, and he has everything going for him. He has a foundational business that financially does well. He has ideas, he has creativity he’s at the point in his life where he has time to do it, and his stuckness is that every week he goes through the checklist and then they get done right, and he’s done like, you know, in 10 hours a week. And he hasn’t built this muscle to now like go do these things so he doesn’t even just need an afternoon.
He has a lot of time and space to actually do some more creative endeavors and he can’t, he’s having trouble crossing that bridge. And so the recommendation we gave to him was , just spend three hours a week, like we mentioned here, doing some of these creative things like building the talks that you wanna do.
He wants to speak okay on the topics that he is really knowledgeable about. I’m like, spend some time like developing those talks. Find other people like you who are doing those types of talks and conversations and reach out to them, right? And start having conversations. Just spend three hours in action.
And he was really, he said, he is like, oh, you’re almost like a palm reader. That’s what he said on the call because he just needs to start doing that. And here’s the thing where I wanna let people off the hook. ’cause I think people get really stressed around this ’cause like, well, okay, I’m gonna spend the three hours in creative endeavors, but what am I gonna do? Okay, and I’m gonna tell you right now that if this is an issue for you and you’re really vibing with what you’re saying here, you may not know what to do the first few times you set aside time to be creative. Okay? It may be weird, it may feel like awkward, and that’s okay. We’re flexing a muscle. The first time you start going back to the gym, it feels really weird.
You feel awful. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re like, oh my God, I used to lift weight and now I can barely lift like five pounds. What’s going on? Right? It’s the same thing here, okay? We are flexing new muscles, and so you wanna just do it. You wanna spend those three hours and you wanna do even one or two things, then you know, the next week or the next day, whatever works for you in terms of creating these buckets, you do it again. And then it starts to build some momentum, just like going to the gym. Just like anything, when you’re talking about changing your patterns and your behaviors, you need to do it consistently. You need to make creativity a consistent thing that you’re integrating. Okay? And if this is the medicine, you need to hear we’re here to motivate you.
Because Chris and I are at that point where we’re at that different phase in our business where we now can spend more time being more creative. And I think we’ve had a little bit of this hesitation. It’s been a big thing for both of us personally, for our own reasons. You know, like I think that me personally, Chris, I’ve gotten caught for the last couple years in that checklist and like building stuff, but I am at the point now, I have a great business partner.
I have a great podcast. Well, I believe it’s great. You and I are like the biggest believers in our podcast
Chris: It’s empirically and observably great.
Todd: Empirically and observably this is like really good. But we like doing it, and now there’s a lot of reasons why we have a community. We have a workbook, we have a bunch of things in place that are just working.
And now it’s time for us to go out there and be the creators. And we’ve gone through it too, of like, all right, are we doing this? How are we gonna do that? So we know, okay, we know that it’s stressful and we know that it’s challenging, but. this is the time to make it tactical. Make it tactical, like find a way to integrate this in your life.
Our recommendation is three hours on a Wednesday afternoon. Okay, that’s very specific, but you make it your own, but you do it and you do it consistently, and you wanna see where that lands.
Chris: This is inspiring me actually to really double down on this because we talk about, in our business, we’re shifting to this mode where we’re creating more content and putting more messaging out into the world. You and I have talked about this, I have these perfectionist tendencies where it’s like, I want this thing to be beautiful and perfect before it goes out into the world. I don’t wanna release it. And there’s a lot of identity, I think, tied up in creativity. This is not just for me, for everyone, right? We feel like if you do the mundane things, how much of your soul is really in balancing QuickBooks for last month, right?
But then if you’re gonna go put some post on LinkedIn or something like that, it’s like you’re putting your words out there with your face and your picture next to it, and you know it’s kind of exposing yourself to the world. I think I wanna remind myself and the people that are listening, the stakes can be as low as you want them to be here.
Let’s not hold ourselves to some perfect ideal of what’s gonna be put out there, because I think when you hear about things like writer’s block, people can’t write anything. I don’t think there’s a such thing as writer’s block. I think there’s a such thing as having the editor and the perfectionist at the party way too early in the process.
Stephen Pressfield’s the War of Art, I think we’ve talked about a little bit on this podcast. Great book. I mean, I read it over and over again. It’s like a sacred text of Reinventors is what I would call it. And a lot of what he talks about in there is do the work, commit to the time, sit at the desk.
Do the work, and doing the work means you’re gonna output something. The problem is the quality meter is bringing this quality meter to like, if you haven’t opened a pen and sat down and written in a creative way in 10 years, the first thing you write is gonna suck. I’m not saying it might suck. I’m saying it’s gonna suck. Embrace the suck and be good about that. Be happy about that. That’s part of the process. just make, produce the stuff and bring the editor later. You don’t have to take the thing that sucks and put it right out into the world, but. A lot of the times people sit there and they’re like, self-editing.
Write a word, scratch it out. Whatever the creative endeavor they’re doing is start to think about their future reinvented career and like, ah, I couldn’t do that because ah, you know, reasons or whatever it is. It’s like, no, the beginning is a time to let it all out. Like we say in the reinvention workbook, get weird.
Todd: Yeah
Chris: Put it all out there. You can sort through it later, these three hours on a Wednesday or whenever you do it, I want you to just open the floodgates and if you can’t think of what to write or what to create, then write about the fact that you can’t think of what to write or create and let it flow.
The editor’s not invited. Not yet.
Todd: I love the get weird message ’cause I think we’re so scared to be ourselves. We’re so scared to be authentic and we’re so scared to be just vulnerably who we really are as people. And I don’t know, like I’ve coached so many people over the years that. You know, I can see it when I get on the phone with somebody they’re just wanting to bust loose. Even people listening to this podcast, like there’s something that you’re hoping for that you can shift the way that you are internally, because there’s some feeling of being in an internal prison on yourself that we all have in some way, and we’re just trying to find the pathway out so we can just be ourselves and we can be authentic and, yes. I can make money, you know, and we can have an abundant life and you know, we don’t have to go live on the street to be able to do that or to really suffer, right? And so I think that’s what we’re trying for here, is to just be authentically ourselves. And I think one of the big things that comes up with what you just shared is this fear of what other people think is what stops us back.
So I think there’s an internal mechanism of who am I to be doing these things? Who am I to be creative? Who am I, to do whatever it is. So there’s the imposter syndrome, which holds us back, which is an internal thing that we can talk about, and we do talk about a lot here, but there’s also this fear of being seen by other people. This fear of being cringe, you know, and like looking bad and like all that. And you know, my message on this is always gonna be very clear that the truth is, is that yes, there may be people who say things about you. There are people who say things about me, okay? And it’s just gonna happen. But at the end of the day, no one really cares. Okay? Everyone is in their own little world trying to figure it out. And they’re probably judging you because they’re watching you. If you’re somebody that’s on that path now, explore yourself. They’re watching you break free, you know? And they’re scared of that because they want everyone else to stay in the prison ’cause they’re in the prison
Chris: They might be jealous.
Todd: They’re jealous, but you’re actually, what I found in this is that you’re actually an inspiration for them. Because they also want to be creative. They also want to get out of their own way. And so what we’re talking about here is really deep stuff. It’s actually just being yourself. It’s being authentic, it’s being vulnerable, it’s being truthful with who you really are. Because again, what I said in the beginning is that this life is a fricking blip in the matrix. Okay? It’s a blip in the matrix. We are all gonna be here and gone, and we’re all getting older day by day, and a lot of us especially midlife professionals are feeling it like, oh my God, how did I get here to this point in my life? Like, why am I all of a sudden having to reinvent? Why am I listening to this podcast and trying to stir my creativity? There’s so much that comes up in this, but it’s okay. It’s permission reinvention equals permission to be yourself.
Right? And it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden you have to go out there with your, you know, new children’s book, and tout it to the world. I mean, it may be that you do that. But it’s okay to be weird. It’s okay to be a little bit different. Like this is what makes the world go round.
And by the way, the most successful people, the ones that are the most successful that you look up to. That’s how they live.
They all live that way. They all live with feeling the fear and doing it anyway. They all say the same thing. And so we give you permission here to start being weird, get bizarre, use this creativity as a real thing. it doesn’t mean that you need to go out there and tell everybody that you’re doing something totally different, but just start the process, build it into your routine, start to shake up your inside because that’s what’s wanting to break free. There’s something in you that’s wanting to break free. And become the best version of you, and it’s there it’s being stopped by all these forces that are vapor. Let’s see them as vapor, so that way you can be free.
Chris: Hey, man. I love that so much, Todd. I mean, I love the feeling of letting it break free, right? For me, that really sings true. Before you and I started working together and before I even really leaned into my reinvention, I think that was the unnamed pain I was feeling was just this me inside that was trapped and couldn’t express myself openly, or I thought I couldn’t, and I was holding that in.
And to anyone who is listening to us, it’s like, you have this thing inside you that you wanna bring out into the world, this is the starkest way I can put it. You’re either gonna bring it out into the world or you’re gonna die not having done it. Those are your two choices. If you are gonna be held back from expressing that into the world because you’re worried about what, some internet rando thinks about you, that’s a crazy to me I’m like. Again, I lived in that way for a while, but I came around to the fact that like, I’m not gonna let that stop me every time I put something on social media, Todd, there is at least one person who willfully misinterprets it or just says something like wrong. That’s my favorite comment by the way when I put a post on like Instagram wrong, I’m like, oh, thank you so much. That’s so helpful. Like it’s one of those things where, I don’t die from those comments. I could post something today and I could get a thousand comments where they’re all telling me I’m wrong, or they’re all telling me I’m stupid, or whatever it is. And my response to that is, oh, that video didn’t do very well with those people.
Make another one. I’m having trouble thinking of how the stakes can be so high around these things, especially in the beginning when we’re starting to launch these new ideas into the world that we can hold ourselves back from even giving ourselves a chance to express what’s in our soul.
I mean, I feel that in my chest right now as I say it, Todd, you know what I mean?
Todd: Well, I do. I mean, I think we’re living in a world where there’s so much judgment, there’s a lot of anger out there. There’s a lot of really bad stuff in the field that, you know, you and I are not naive to that. We’re very optimistic and we like to talk about opportunity, but there’s a whole world out there that is really, it feels to me like crumbling in on itself.
And I also believe that there are a lot of people like me and you, you know, and a lot of others that are looking at this life and this time as we don’t know what the future’s gonna hold, but we’re gonna make the best of it. And we’re gonna go out there and we’re gonna do what we can. And we’re gonna start to learn to put our fear of being judged aside. We’re gonna start to just be a little bit more exploratory with our creativity, with our ideas. We’re gonna start to have different types of conversations, and we’re gonna start to get excited about our future again. Ooh. Wow. Excited about your future again, like even when I say that to people, they sometimes just look at me like it’s like so foreign into them to be like, your future could be awesome.
You could live your dream life. You could create a life of your dreams, like in every possible way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I believe that fueling people to do that is how we really change the world. ’cause there’s a lot of really good people out there that wanna serve like you, Chris, you know, that wanna help a lot of people. And my job is to help them be inspired and empowered to go ahead and do that. And I think that’s how we really change the world. So I put aside all the judgment, all the anger and criticism out there that does exist, that touches me as well. When I post stuff like it’s there. I’m like, okay, that exists, but I’m turning my gaze over here.
I’m turning my gaze towards what’s possible because I know at the end of the day that. I am gonna die at some point and I wanna look back on my life and say, you know, I went for it. I went for being myself. I live without regret. I went for it. Whatever that means for me.
Okay. And I’m not gonna let all that BS stop. And you know what? When I was 25 years old, and I’ve shared this on this podcast, and I think you know this, I got an opportunity to work in hospice for six months these are people who all have six months or less to live, and most of them were older, and even then at 25, I couldn’t help myself but asking them, you know, like questions you know about life, about what they thought, it took a while for some of them to open up to me, but this is what it was. They just all looked at me like, don’t sweat the small stuff. Do not let, all this BS bog you down. Heal your relationships. Get rid of all your anger and like, just live your best life to the best of your ability. Cause a lot of these people didn’t do that and they were lying there. I mean, I remember this Chris, I remember one guy in particular. I’m not gonna get into the story here, but there was a lot of regret.
There was a lot of regret, and reinvention for me is for people who are in the middle of their lives that have been on a trajectory and need this, that need some redirect and need some fuel that need to feel that inspiration and that optimism, that hope. Because it is there And it is possible. And together we can literally create our best lives. And I think that’s the best way we change the world. I don’t really see another thing. I’m not gonna go in there and change all the negativity out there. I can’t do that. I can just continue to inspire those that are seeing their lives in this moment as an opportunity.
Chris: Yeah. You know, we’ve gone down the road here of talking about creativity that’s really sort of pointed outward into the world and putting things out there, right? Which is a big part of it. We’re not saying it’s not scary. We’re saying face to fear and do it anyway.
And we’re saying that whatever you want to call it, pain or discomfort of the fear of putting yourself out there will pale in comparison to the pain of regret if you don’t do it. and I’ll tell you this, for every idiot out there who comments “Wrong!” on someone’s Instagram post, there’s a thousand people or more who are delighted that you are adding your uniqueness into the world.
We want your uniqueness in the world. We don’t need another boring gray man just holding his briefcase, going through the world, doing his same ole. we Have a huge surplus of those, the jerk store called and they’re not outta you. That’s my Seinfeld reference for this episode.
And we don’t need that. We want you, we want what’s interesting about you, we want what’s unique about you. So, get some courage and put it out there in the world. I think you’re gonna be very pleasantly surprised with what you find when you do that. And to me it’s like that is life. That is the stuff of life. I want to meet as many unique individuals and connect with them as possible.
And cookie cutter’s just not interesting. So if you wanna never get a negative comment, then just be cookie cutter because no one can attack cookie cutter. and if that makes you happy, knock yourself out. I wager it doesn’t though.
Todd: Yeah, I agree man. And I just love this conversation. We map out our episodes a little bit, but then we go off on these tangents.
Chris: We got creative with this one.
Todd: We got creative with this one, which is fun, you know, that we can just kind of jam on it. You know, as we close this one out, the one last thing that I wanna talk about as the imposter syndrome, ’cause I didn’t mention it, we all have it. Everybody has it. Everyone has it. Everyone feels like, who am I to do this thing? Because when you’re starting something new, it just feels weird. It just feels weird. Be okay with the weird, right? just keep going with it. It’s gonna feel cringe. It’s gonna feel awkward and weird, and that’s okay. Right. It’s totally okay. if it didn’t, that wouldn’t be normal. Imposter syndrome is like totally just normal. Like, fine I feel weird by doing a podcast, meeting this guy on TikTok that I never met and we met on a DM and now I’m pitching him to do a business with me and now, yeah, it all felt weird. But here I am doing it right and we’re having fun and it’s been interesting and it’s been really fun in a lot of different ways. Right? And so that’s the model, you know, to go towards is that, yes, we all have imposter syndrome. Allow yours to be, you don’t need to transcend it. There’s gonna be that voice that tells you like, who am I to do this? Fine. Let it be, keep moving forward, take action, keep moving forward. Take action.
Chris: Absolutely. I love that man. I think that’s really important because you said it right, everyone experiences that imposter syndrome. Go Google every creative person you can think of, and they’re gonna tell you that they thought they were finished when they were about to write their 14th album.
They were like, I don’t know if I have any more songs left in me. It’s gone. It’s never gonna visit me. They all say that. They’re all questioning themselves. And I actually just put something on social media the other day where I said, it’s like you have three choices.
You either have imposter syndrome. You’re totally stagnant or you’re a sociopath because if you don’t feel some fear, then God bless you, but you’re probably not human or you’re just stagnant. Because if you’re changing and you’re creating something new and you’re doing something different, you don’t know what you’re doing.
That’s part of the package. So just lean into that. Be courageous, not necessarily fearless, feel the fear, and do it anyway. And that’s what we’re taking a stand for here in ReInvention.
Todd: Amen, Amen, everybody. Thank you, Chris, man, always just so awesome to be with you today. If you guys are inspired by what we’re sharing here, definitely follow along our podcast. We’re gonna continue to do this, you know, as long as we both feel inspired, which we’re really feeling inspired by it. So follow us along. We’re gonna do all different kinds of episodes. If you’re loving this reinvention concept, come over to our website, reinvention.biz and download the workbook. That’s a really good start. If you’re somebody that is like, not really sure, like our workbook is amazing, it’s a seven day process, we walk you through it.
And then of course we have our community. We always mention it. We have this amazing community of people who are doing this together, who are giving each other the permission to reinvent and think this way. It’s always there for you. and just grateful that you’re here listening to us and that we look forward to seeing you next time.
