Hey, Creator!

We are all living unfinished symphonies. Our lives and our work never actually end. We are always moving on to the next chapter, the next project, the next incompletion. And everything we put our hands to is yet another opportunity to discover who we are. And when we finally discover that, the real work begins. Until then, we'll just have to keep—

Developing your taste is a process of trusting yourself and your experience. It's about learning to live in the moment and knowing that sometimes it never gets better than the first sip. And really, what we're talking about here is the art of learning to live a little more fully alive.

An artist's taste is everything. But this takes time and effort to develop. And often, we won't know what we like until we experience what we don't like. Maybe taste, then, is more about paying attention than it is about preconceived preferences.    This is part one of a two-part conversation.

The first step to finishing is to begin. And the secret to getting unstuck is to begin again. We cannot bring anything to completion. That's not our job.

Join us as we get to the bottom of the future of money, cryptocurrency, and NFTs with our guest expert Ty Ward, founder of Book Coin and wearer of aggressively short shorts.

A little life is underrated. When all the glitz and glamor of "success" fade away, all that's left is the life you choose to live, the one that may be standing right in front of you. Maybe your greatest story is the one that's already happening.

What do tattoos, dreams, and bulls have in common? Maybe more than you think. Today, we explore this dream-like existence we call life and the creator's dilemma of making sense of the mystery. This Week's Sponsor: Aura GoinsWriter.com/Aura

After being able to buy a house he didn't know he could afford, Jeff muses about money and value and where it all comes from. If currency is merely a concept, then what does that mean for the artist? Maybe we can create the very resources we need to produce our work.

All art is a little scandalous. It takes that which you treat as precious and sacred and exposes it. A great artist knows how to play the trickster, that devious misfit who stirs things up in a way that changes things for the better.

What do you do when the familiar story you've been telling the world—about yourself—gets interrupted by reality? You do what no marketer or influencer wants to do. You tell the truth. Ray Edwards shares his story about getting Parkinson's, how he tried to get healed, and what happened to his identity when what he wanted to become didn't happen.

The problem with a (personal) brand is it's an idea, a distillation of a concept that is interesting and attractive to a certain group of people for a certain period of time. But then you change, and you have to keep selling the same thing to a world that wants you to be what you were. So what do you do then? Well, that's when life really begins.

Wherein we explore the art of making a perfect cup of coffee—and why it ultimately doesn't matter. Art is an asymptote: a striving towards an impossible standard of excellence that you never actually reach but always makes you better. 

After a cross-continent road trip, Jeff is still here and opens up about the story of his divorce, how he overcame writer's block, and the magic of making things. 

A sequel only works when it ignores what came before it. This is true with your life and work: to be truly innovative, you have to be willing to break the rules, even the ones you may have written. You can't just be another connoisseur; you've got to become a true creator, and that requires unmistakable audacity. You have to dare to be different if you want to continue creating work worth noticing.

We're back! But are we really? In this volume, we're gonna talk about sequels and second seasons and why they fundamentally don't work—unless you completely disregard what came before. And that's just what we intend to do (hopefully). See you soon.

In this final issue of our first season, Jeff shares more about his recent "retirement" announcement and hints at what's next. It turns out we are always retiring from something, outgrowing an old way of being and graduating to the next. This week, we explore how to end things well, what it looks like to create blank space for future work, and why endings are never really the end. We also hear some kind words from the audience, celebrating ten years worth of creative work together and bidding farewell to the old.

With our work, we are all trying to answer an important question. And how we choose to answer it affects everything. Art, however, may not be about answering the question as much as learning to live well within the unknowns of what we do. In this issue, we talk about death, art museums, writer's block, and more. Where we end up just may surprise you.

Someone once asked when I was preparing to give a talk if I could make it practical—and I had to wonder what that meant. Is Art practical? Does it need to be? This week, we explore how our life informs our art and how what we make influences everything else, complete with interruptions from my kids and a few stories from the lives of famous artists who struggled to reconcile their creative work with the demands of a normal life.

We all want to create things that matter, that actually make a difference. But how do we know when we've done our job? Do we need others to "get it" for our work to be meaningful? Is "art for art's sake" a real thing? What does it all mean? This week, we examine a critical tweet, tell three creator stories, and share some audience feedback. Hang in there. We get a little fired up (or at least Jeff does).

Yes, the money thing. The thing almost all of us struggle with. The thing that haunts and plagues us and tells us, "If we just had enough, then we'd be okay." This week, we are going to get super vulnerable, sharing stories, facts, and figures about having a lot of money and a little and how, maybe, your attitude is what matters most.