Summer's in full swing, our routines are upside down, and creative disciplines are as vital as ever. In this special episode, we share Todd Henry's live talk from Scottsdale, Arizona, exploring the heart of creative work and what it really takes to thrive as a “create on demand” professional. Todd unpacks why producing brilliant work isn’t as simple as following steps 1-2-3, and why most of the real magic happens in the messy space in between.

He also discusses the hidden forces that sabotage our creativity—dissonance, fear, and expectation escalation—and introduces the five elements of creative rhythm that can help us stay prolific, brilliant, and healthy. You’ll learn why true creative success is about intentional daily practices, not bursts of last-minute inspiration, and how building disciplines now will help you build a body of work you can be proud of.

Five Key Learnings from This Episode:

1. Brilliance Requires Discipline: Great creative work doesn’t just “happen.” It comes from consistent, intentional practices that help us manage our focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, and hours.
2. Manage Dissonance, Fear, and Expectations: Unaddressed gaps between our “why” and “what,” fear of failure, and ever-escalating expectations are stealthy assassins to creative output—recognizing and addressing them is critical.
3. Creative Rhythm Is Key: Cultivating five elements—Focus, Relationships, Energy, Stimuli, and Hours (“FRESH”)—creates the foundation for sustainable, high-quality creative work.
4. Brilliance Emerges in Community: Collaboration, feedback, and support from others fuel our best ideas—creativity isn’t a solo pursuit.
5. Die Empty: Our goal shouldn’t just be doing more, but making sure we give our best effort. Leave nothing of value unshared, unattempted, or undiscovered—so we reach the finish line without regret.

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Well, hello everyone.

I hope that your summer is going well. We are just back from vacation, and I also just moved one of my sons across the country. So it's been a little bit of a crazy summer. And that means that I've had to be a little more intentional about my practices, about how I'm building disciplines into my life, just like I'm sure that you do when your schedule is not predictable, when it's not normal, it's not the way that you're used to going about your work.

That's when you need to be more.

Disciplined about building practices and being aware of some of the undercurrents that can creep into your life, into your work, your collaboration, your leadership, and your creating.

And so today I'm going to share.

With you a talk from a conference I spoke at in Scottsdale, Arizona, about my book, the Accidental Creative. In this talk, I share some of the principles from the book the Accidental Creative. We talk about why it's so difficult often to create on demand, and then five key areas where we can build practices to help us produce work that.

We'Ll be proud of.

So I hope you enjoy this talk. It's a little longer than many of my episodes, but I hope you enjoy this talk. If you would like me to come speak to your organization at your event, your conference, I speak about, obviously, the Accidental Creative, all of my seven books as well. I have talks about any one of them. So you can visit todhenry.com speaking to learn more. Without further delay, here is my talk from Scottsdale, Arizona. Enjoy.

Well, hello, my brilliant friends. One thing I know for certain on this planet is that southern heat will cause you to make some of the worst decisions of your life. And the particular situation I have in mind was a couple of years ago, my family and I went to Disney World in Orlando. Hello, it's hot in Orlando. And the particular terrible decision was choosing to go into a gift shop to get out of the heat. Now, I don't know about you, but I tend to avoid gift shops at all costs. I think they're designed solely for the purpose of grabbing me by the ankles and shaking me upside down to see if I have any money left in my pockets. But on this day, it's.

It was hot. So we went into the gift shop. My family strolled the aisles. I walked over, I found a little air conditioning duct, and I'm standing there in my personal igloo. And I look up and I happen to see what I have since come to refer to as the perfect T shirt. So I'm gonna show it to you, and I'm gonna explain to you why I believe this is the perfect T shirt. It's called how to Draw Darth Vader. All right, let's walk through it panel by panel.

Panel one, start with the head and body. How many of you think you could do this? Pretty easy, yeah. Panel two, add a cape. Again, so far, so good. Panel three, draw the face, gloves, and boots. Pretty easy, right? Pretty easy. And finally, panel four, add details and some shading. Finished.

I think I laughed so hard I snorted when I saw this. I really did. I think this is the perfect T shirt for a couple of reasons. First of all, come on, it's just funny. It's just funny. But second of all, I think this is often how we talk about things like creativity, isn't it? We talk about it as if it's all about the big principles. We just need to have a better strategy, a better brief. We just need to hire brilliant people and put them against important problems, and voila, brilliant work pops out the other side.

Who knew it was that easy to do brilliant, creative work? All we had to do was get panels 1, 2, and 3, right? But those of us in the trenches, friends, and I know you're in the trenches because I can see it in your eyes. It might be the open bar from last night, but I think it's that we're all in the trenches together. Those of us who are in the trenches, we know that the brilliant work happens between panels three and four. And it's really just the result of a lot of talented, dedicated, driven people doing whatever it takes to make it happen, which is great. We love spinning ourselves on behalf of work that we care about. We do. But with that comes a unique set of pressures, a unique set of dynamics. And if we're not aware of those dynamics that we encounter every single day as we go to work and as we try to do brilliant, productive, creative work every day, they will eventually take us out of the game.

You see, it's between panels three and four that we build our body of work, the delta that exists because we sucked air on this earth. And the question that we're all going to ask at some point is, did I build a body of work that I'm proud of? Did I really produce the work I was capable of producing? Or did I allow these forces that exist between panels three and four to cause me to settle for something less than I was capable of? And none of us want that. So I've spent the last 20 years of my life leading teams of creative people and studying the dynamics of creativity and innovation, but a very specific kind of creativity. Creativity among those who live in what I call the create on demand world. Creativity among those who have to go to work, who have to solve problems every day. How many of you solve problems every day as a function of your job? How many of you solve other people's problems every day? Okay, one final question. How many of you had a specific person in mind when I asked that last question? That's what we do. We solve problems as create on demand professionals.

But again with that, the on demand part is, hey, by the way, I need something. It has to be brilliant. I need you to write an email. I need you to develop a strategy. We have to develop this go to market strategy for this product. And by the way, it has to be there on Wednesday afternoon at 2:00', clock, on time, on budget, in order to keep your job. Thank you very much. How many of you have felt that create on demand pressure in your job? Yeah, it's palpable.

So when we try to be creative on demand, we're trying to control something that fundamentally doesn't want to be controlled. So, friends, you're going to spend the next day, day and a half talking about strategies, tactics, things you can do to help your company be more effective, to help you be a better marketer. I want to take this little bit of time we have this morning to talk about you. I want to take a couple of steps back and talk about you and how you bring yourself to your work every single day because you sit at the center of every single piece of value that you create. And if you want to produce a body of work you can be proud of, it's going to come down to how you manage your life. I believe the goal of every single creative professional should be to be prolific, to be brilliant and to be healthy all at the same time. Prolific, meaning we're doing a lot of work because we have to do that. Brilliant, meaning we're doing good work because we also need to do that and healthy, meaning that we're working in a sustainable way.

The problem is it's really easy to get two of these three right. It's hard to get all three right at the same time. For example, we could be prolific, meaning we're doing a lot of work, we can be brilliant, meaning we're doing good work. But we miss on the healthy piece, we miss on the sustainability piece. And there's a technical term I coined for these people, and it's fried. These are the walking zombies that haunt the hallways of our organizations because they haven't figured out how to produce good work, to produce brilliant work, to produce a lot of it, and to do it in a sustainable way. And over time, these people burn themselves out. You can only sustain on talent for so long.

Of course we can be healthy, meaning we're sustainable. We can be brilliant, meaning we're doing good work, but we're not prolific enough to keep up with everybody else. And we all know those people we don't really want on our project team because they can't quite keep pace with everyone else. And I'll call these people are unreliable. They can't be counted on to deliver when it matters most. And of course, just to close the loop, we could be prolific, meaning we're doing a lot of work, or we could be healthy, meaning we're working sustainably, but our work is terrible, it's awful. And there's a technical term for these people, and it's fired because you're not going to keep your job for very long if you're not producing consistently great work. So, friends, I ask you, how are you doing? If this were your definition of success right now as a creative professional, how would you be doing if this was your metric? I want to talk about why this is so difficult for us.

Because there are all kinds of hidden forces, hidden dynamics that cause us to hit the wall creatively and professionally. I call these the assassins. The assassins are stealthy. They're like ninjas. They sneak into our lives and they slowly assassinate our ability to bring our best work every single day. There are three of them we have to be aware of. The first one is what I call dissonance. So dissonance is a force that exists in a lot of contexts.

For example, in music, dissonance is used to describe. That word is used to describe two notes that are played together that don't quite belong together. So you have this, and it creates a kind of tension in you because your mind is wired to crave harmony, to crave resolution. Your creativity is forming patterns. It's resolving dissonance. And so when you experience dissonance, it creates a kind of tension in you that wants to be resolved. Filmmakers use this to great effect. Imagine you're watching a film.

It's a beautiful day. There's a woman, she's walking through an apartment. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining. But somehow you just know there's a serial killer hiding in the bathroom, right? How do you know this typically, it's because there's a bed of music, a dissonant bed of music playing just beneath the surface of the film. And it makes you feel uneasy, like something bad is about to happen. I would submit to you that many of us have a similar dissonant bed of music playing just beneath the surface of our lives and our organizations. It's a gap between what we're doing and why we say we're doing it. It's a gap between tactics, strategy, and purpose.

And when that gap exists, we feel it as creative professionals, we feel a gap. We feel a dissonance between what we say we're about and what we actually do. And that dissonance can zap our ability to bring our best creative effort. Let me give you a couple of examples of how this plays out. The first source of dissonance. These are my three children when they were slightly younger. They are not your greatest source of dissonance. Just want to be clear.

That's my youngest, Ava, who is a total free spirit. Don't fence me in, man. Don't fence me in. Don't tell me what to do. And my oldest, Ethan, in the striped shirt, who's a total firstborn rule follower. They're about to have a race, and at some point Ava's going to throw her arms up in the air and say, I win. I win the race. I am the champion.

It's some arbitrary point, right? And Ethan, who's the rule follower, is like, what do you mean you win? What are you talking about? Where was the starting line? Where was the finish line? What were the terms of engagement? Typical firstborn rule follower behavior. Right? Now, listen, it's kind of silly when kids do this, but we do this all the time in our work. We don't clearly define the edges of our work. We don't have a clear strategy. We haven't defined a problem we're trying to solve. We don't know when we're finished. How do we know when something is finished? Is it when we run out of time or we run out of money? If we haven't defined the edges of our work, it introduces dissonance. And we'll talk about how to remedy that in a minute.

Now, I'm going to move on because they're about to assault one another and I might get in trouble. Okay? The second source of dissonance is what I call unnecessary complexity. So this is a formula I put on my office wall after I tanked my first creative team. I tanked them because I love Complexity. I do. As a manager, I was leading a team of about 40 people. As a manager, complexity feels like progress to me. It does.

If you give me a problem, I'll hand you back some remarkably complex thing and say, look at how amazing this. Only I could have created this kind of complex value as a manager. Only I could have done this. Right? No, it's just complex. It doesn't help my team because it's not defining things as simply as they can possibly be defined. How many of you have customers who come back to you with a set of expectations where everybody on their side has had to have their say about what they're looking for and so they hand you some giant Frankenmonster problem that you're trying to solve. It's unnecessary complexity. It is.

So where in your life is there unnecessary complexity? Because it's an opportunity for dissonance to emerge and by the way, in process, in how you're defining problems and how you're approaching and structuring your life. The third source of dissonance is what I call the opacity phenomenon. This is when all of the why based decisions are made in some kind of a black box. And then somebody comes out and says, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. And they go back in the black box. Everybody's left saying, why are we doing this? Do you know why we're doing this? I don't know why we're doing this. It's a gap between what we're doing and why we're doing it. For smart, talented, create, on demand professionals.

If they don't understand why they're being asked to do something, they can't see the through line. If there's no story behind what they're doing, it's really difficult to gain traction. It introduces dissonance. If you manage teams of people, I encourage you to have regular why chats. We're going to do something and now let's talk about why we're doing this. Let's talk about why this is important. Let's talk about why it ties into our bigger vision as an organization. And if you're on a team, I encourage you to seek out that.

Why it's your responsibility to seek it out if you don't understand it. So this is dissonance. This is how dissonance can affect us. The second assassin is fear. Fear is when the perceived consequences of failure outweigh the perceived benefits of success. So we don't act, we don't take little strategic risks that are Necessary to produce disproportionate value. There's a guy named Neil Feary who does research into procrastination. And he'll often bring people into a room like this.

And he'll put a wood plank on the floor, 10ft long, 6 inches wide. And he'll ask people, could you walk the length of this plank if I ask you to? And they'll say, of course. It's a wood plank on the floor. Why wouldn't I be able to walk the plank? He'll say, great, great. Now imagine I take that wood plank and suspend it 100ft in the air between two buildings. Now, could you walk the length of that plank? And they'll look at him and say, no way. Are you kidding? I'd have to be drunk. No way am I walking a wood plank 100ft in the air.

Well, what's changed about the technical skill required to walk the plank? Absolutely nothing. If you could do it on the ground, you can do it in the air. What's changed are the perceived consequences of failure, which in this case is plummeting to your death. So I kind of get it. But listen, I would submit to you that many of us go through our days artificially escalating planks, artificially escalating the perceived consequences of failure to the point that we don't act. We. We don't take little strategic risks. If we want to produce brilliant creative work, we need to discipline ourselves to act in the face of fear.

My friend Brian says fear is often the smell of opportunity. And I think that's true. You see, fear turns something innocuous into something terrifying. That's what fear does. We have to discipline ourselves to act in the face of our fear, to produce, to engage in small acts of bravery creatively to countermand fear. Okay, so that's fear. That's the second assassin. The third assassin is something I call expectation escalation.

So this is what happens when somebody, let's say, for example, your manager comes to you and says, hey, sue, hey, great job last quarter. You know, you not only hit your numbers, that was amazing. You did 25% more than we did 125% of what we asked you. That's amazing. Great job, by the way. Way, 125% is your new baseline. Hey, Joe, you not only did 125, which is what we asked sue to do, I mean, Sue's only doing 125. You did 140%.

That's amazing, by the way. 140% is your new baseline. And once people realize we can do something, what do they want? They want it again. They want it again. We slowly ratchet up expectations. It doesn't matter what it took you to do that. It doesn't matter what it cost you to. You had to work nights and weekends for three weeks straight in order to deliver that.

It doesn't matter. All that matters is you delivered it. And when this happens, when this dynamic begins to emerge, when our expectations become escalated, it squeezes all of the white space out of our life. Where does creativity happen? Where does innovation happen? It happens in the white space. It happens in the gaps between. And so we start off doing something very simple. By the end of the day, it feels like this. So if I ended this talk right now, it would be the most depressing talk in the history of this conference.

But we're not going to end it now. We're going to talk about how to avoid hitting the wall. We're going to talk about the five elements of what I call creative rhythm. These are practices that you can build into your life to help you engage more fully and freely. And I just want to listen, I'm going to give you a little, a little heads up, a little warning here. I'm going to say some things you've probably heard before, but it's not what you know, it's what you do that matters. You know, I think we confuse awareness with understanding often in our culture. We think because we're aware of something, that we get it, but it's not that you're aware of it.

It's that you understand it and you implement it. That's where real change occurs. So we're going to talk about five areas where as Create on Demand professionals, you need to be building practices to prepare you for those moments when you have to be brilliant under pressure. The first area of rhythm is focus. Focus is about how we allocate our finite attention. It's about how we spend those very, very precious cognitive cycles that we have, where we put them and how we define problems. You know, we often think of focus as just defining really good targets. If we just define really good targets, then we have focus.

We're going to be effective. But that's not really the way that focus works, especially when we're talking about doing creative work, problem solving work. Let me illustrate this by uttering the most terrifying words ever uttered by a human being. Let me show you a magic trick I just learned. Okay, I'm going to put five cards on the screen. I want everyone to choose one card. Just focus on one card. I'm going to mind meld with you.

Everybody have your card? All right, good. I'm going to remove the cards. Now, I've done an extensive psychological profile of the average marketer in this room, and I think it was in the privacy policy. If you didn't read it, it was there. I think I can with great certainty predict the card that most of you chose. So I'm going to remove that card and put four. Four of the cards back up on the screen. How many people see your card? Nobody.

Two people, actually. These are four entirely different cards than the ones I put up the first time. Those of you who raise your hand, come see me after. I have people I can refer you to. It's no problem. It's fine. I'm happy to do it. Why does this trick work? It works because I gave you a problem to solve and you performed brilliantly.

With a few exceptions, you performed brilliantly. You did. But in so doing, you ignored the context. And see, friends, this is why focus can be so difficult for us as creative professionals. Because the more we home in on a specific problem, the more we begin to ignore the context that might allow us to see things that would help us create disproportionate value in solving that problem. We are in a highly distractible world. Bless you. See, right there.

See, we're in a highly distractible world. And one of the reasons this happened is something I call the ping. The ping is a perpetual pin prick in my gut that says, you should go check your email right now. See, some of you are doing it right now, aren't you? You should go check your Twitter feed, you should go check your Instagram feed, you should go check your phone, because maybe the President of the United States is calling you with a national security crisis. That's the level of urgency to ping the L. And the ping has a life philosophy for you. And for me, the life philosophy of the ping is something out there might be more important than what's in front of you. Something out there might be more important than what's in front of you.

It has us living in a state that researcher Linda Stone calls continuous partial attention. I'm always kind of here, but I'm also kind of somewhere else at the same time. Let me ask you, do you think we do our best work that way? No. No, we don't, but we try. So how do we begin to dispel this pain? Let me get. Let me actually. Let me just give you a couple of Numbers. Productivity writer Merlin Mann calculated if you glance at your email every five minutes.

Now, I'm not talking about, like, going into email, by the way. Substitute Instagram, substitute Twitter, substitute whatever you want every five minutes. If you do that every five minutes, some of you are thinking, like, every five minutes. Try every five minutes. Seconds. How many of you get that phantom buzzing thing in your pocket where you think your phone's ringing, but it's not even in your pocket? It's, like, across the room. Do you know what I'm talking about? We are telekinetically connected to our technology. This is a problem.

But he calculated if you do that every five minutes over the course of an average year, you will check your email 24,000 times. 24,000 times. What do we do other than breathe 24,000 times a year? So I took this a step further, and I calculated that, let's say it takes you 10 seconds every time you. You do this to regain your depth of focus. Now, most experts would say 30 seconds up to 20 minutes. To really regain your depth of focus, let's say it takes you 10 seconds over the course of an average year, you will spend 66.6 hours not going into your email, not even doing anything with it, just glancing to see if something out there is more important than what's in front of you. 66.6 hours. It's like half a work week for you people.

It was supposed to be a joke, but nobody laughed. I don't know. So we've done a couple of things here. First of all, 666, we've proven email is evil. There you go. But second of all, how many of you struggle to find the time, the focus that you need to be able to dedicate yourself to doing the work that you need to do? And yet we think nothing of slicing up our life 10 seconds at a time and giving it away to the pain. We think nothing of it, friends. We have to discipline ourselves.

Let me ask you, are you ever off the grid? Is there ever a time when, at a moment's notice, you might not be interrupted by somebody else's priority for your life? We are learning a fundamentally new way of being human. Focus is about diving deeply into the problem we're solving and then disciplining ourselves to break away consistently, to be off the grid, to be disconnected, to allow our mind to do what it does best, what it's evolved to do over the course of human history, which is solve problems, connect dots, form patterns. But if you're constantly distracted, it's impossible to do that. So I encourage you. I don't care if it's. I'm going to take a walk at lunch every day for an hour and turn all the technology off. I'm going to get up in the morning and not check my email till 8:30, God help me. Right? But I'm not going to do that.

I don't care what it is. But you have to have some time in your life when you're off the grid, when you're disciplining yourself to be present with your thoughts. Some of us don't want to be present with our thoughts because we're afraid of the accountability that might introduce. What if I have an idea? What am I going to do? I'm going to have to act on it. We have to discipline ourselves to be present with our thoughts. Brilliance, friends, emerges in the gaps. I engage, I focus, I break away. I have a regular routine discipline of breaking away, of just being present.

Another quick strategy related to focus is that you need to define your work by establishing challenges. Now, many of us talk about our work in terms of projects, but your mind doesn't do projects. Your mind solves problems. So for any project that you're working on, I encourage you to establish a set of problems, specific problems that you're trying to solve. You can solve problems, you can't solve projects. So do you clearly understand the problem you're solving with whatever projects you're working on? If not, sit down, list out your projects and write out the specific problems that you're trying to solve. And by the way, those problems are going to evolve as you work on the project. Okay? This is how we begin to define the edges of our work and prevent dissonance from emerging in the course of our work.

The second element is relationships. So we have focus relationships. We tend to think of creativity as a solo sport, but it's not. Brilliance emerges in community. We need other people in order to do our best work. The problem is that we often don't seek out people who challenge us. Instead, we find pockets of people who reinforce what we already think. If we want to produce brilliant work, we need to seek out people who will speak truth to us, people who will introduce ideas maybe we don't like, that we have to respond to, we have to react to.

So who in your life plays that role? Do you have people in your life who inspire you, who challenge you routinely as a matter of course, as a matter of discipline? So we have to come out of hiding. We have to put our guns on the Table. What I mean by this is if somebody comes up to you and introduces something that you don't like, is your first response. Do you shoot first and ask questions later? If so, how likely is it those people are going to come up to you and challenge you, come up to you and speak truth to you? Again, probably not. We have to be humble enough to say, I'm not going to agree with everything everybody says, but I'm going to receive it, I'm going to consider it, I'm going to mull it over, I'm going to be willing, if necessary, to change my mind. So how do we do this? How do we engage in this kind of relational connectivity? One practice I encourage you to implement is to start a circle. And by the way, all of these practices are in my book the Accidental Creative, which I'm going to be signing during the networking break. If anybody wants to stop by, I'd love to meet you and talk about that, but the book's going to be over there.

All these practices are expounded upon and actually many more in that book. Start a circle. Circle is a group of people, five people that gets together once a month. And you're going to talk about three things. Number one, what are you working on right now? So what problems are you trying to solve right now? What's important to you right now? Number two, what problem can we help you with? Is there any specific place where you're stuck? Is there anything we can do to help you quickly problem solve something that you're really stuck on? And number three, what's inspiring you right now? What are you seeing? Noticing, reading, what's fueling your engines? What's firing you up? Sharing that well, that deep well of stimulus can be incredibly helpful because then you're leveraging other people's experience. It's not just your own. Brilliance emerges in community. Okay, so maybe you're thinking, okay, I'm an introvert, by the way, I am a card carrying introvert.

And this just sounds absolutely miserable and terrifying to me. Getting together with other. Can we, can we just all do this from my own apartments? Like alone? You know, let's be alone together. That would be amazing. Okay, so I'm going to give you a lower bar practice. It's what I call a head to head. A head to head means you're going to meet with one other person once a month and you're going to get together and the idea is you're going to share something you've learned since the last time you were together. And they're going to share something with you and then you're going to talk about how it applies to your work.

Just a quick way to inspire one another to share ideas, stimulus books you're reading, videos you've seen, your talks you've seen. Share it with one another to help spur one another on to do brilliant work. Brilliance emerges in community. Which of these relational practices are you going to begin to build into your life? Brilliance emerges in community. The third element of rhythm is energy. So we have focus, relationships, energy. We are wonderful at managing time. We are.

We have more tools at our disposal for managing time than at any point in human history. We are terrible at managing energy. So we stack meeting after meeting after meeting after obligation after obligation. We get to the end of the day, it's 5, 15. We need a brilliant idea. We've got nothing left in the tank because we've not been managing energy effectively. You see, brilliance requires emotional labor. Not just physical labor, not just mental labor.

It requires emotional labor. This is a phrase from Lewis Hyde, who wrote a book called the Gift. He talked about this thing that happens when we're creating art, we're making something. It's emotional labor. We're putting part of ourself into the thing. I don't care if you're writing an email, I don't care if you're developing a strategy. It requires emotional labor if you want to get to the really good stuff. But emotional labor requires energy.

You have to dig deep. You have to be able to put something of yourself into what you're doing. It's not just about being present. So we have to manage our ability to bring emotional labor. Does that resonate, by the way? We have to manage our ability to bring emotional labor to what we do. So a couple of practices we can implement. The first is to practice pruning. So in a vineyard, one of the primary roles of the vine keeper is to routinely prune areas of growth off the vine.

Perfectly good fruit, by the way, why would you prune perfectly good fruit off of a growing vine? Isn't that the goal of the vine? Well, yeah, but. But a good vine keeper knows if you don't routinely prune some of that new fruit off of the vine, it will eventually steal resources from the older, more mature fruit bearing parts of the vine. And over time, the entire vine will succumb to systemic mediocrity because there aren't enough resources to bear that much good fruit. You can bear a lot of mediocre fruit or a select amount of good fruit. I would submit to you that we, as creative pros and as organizations, we don't struggle with new fruit on our vine, do we? New ideas, new projects, new initiatives, new things we want to try to tackle. What we're terrible at is saying, no. What we're terrible at is getting rid of things that have been around for a while that maybe served a purpose at one point, but now they need to be pruned so we can create space for something new. You see, if you want new growth to emerge, if you want good fruit, you have to recognize there are only so many resources to go around.

So I encourage you to look at your commitments on your calendar. Personally, I'm not talking. I know you can't. Many of you are saying, well, yeah, let me introduce you to my manager, right? Some of you. I mean, I know that there are things you can't say no to. You're being told to do things. Okay? So I'm just going to apply this to the personal level. Think about your life.

Think about recurring meetings you have. You know that coffee with that friend from college that you've been doing every week since 2008? And it's like, every time you see on the calendar, you're like, all right, we'll do it. You know, that's an extreme example. But is there a recurring meeting? You just need to say, you know what, this bore fruit once, but now it's just stealing resources from more important stuff. Maybe there's a relationship that needs to be pruned. Maybe there is a set of tasks or projects. You say, you know what, this is good, but not now. I need to prune it so I have space in my life for brilliance to emerge.

Sometimes something good has to die so something better can be born. Practice pruning. Make a list of your commitments, and ask which of these need to go away so something better can be born. Also, I encourage you to think whole life. We tend to compartment, compartmentalize our lives. And we think about, like, our work life and our private life, our personal life and our financial life and our friendships. And we think about these things as separate, airtight compartments. The reality is we sit at the center of every commitment we make.

And the commitment you make in your personal life affects your ability to bring emotional labor to your work life and vice versa. So I just encourage you to think about your life holistically. If you have a huge work season coming up, probably not the time for you to plan your friend's wedding. Okay, probably not. I'm just saying. Or to maybe even to coach your kids, Little League team or something if it's going to be a huge busy work season. But then there are going to be seasons when maybe you have a little bit of freedom and opportunity and you can, okay, this would be a good season for me to really tackle some of this stuff in my personal life I want to tackle. There's a rhythm to life.

Life is not about balance. It's about rhythm. It's about ebb and flow. So I encourage you to think about whole life, think about all of the commitments in your life and consider, am I trying to squeeze too much stuff into too narrow of a bandwidth? Manage your emotional labor, friends. If you want to produce a body of work that you can be proud of, manage your emotional labor. Make sense. All right. The fourth element is stimuli.

Focus, relationships, energy, stimuli. This is about the stuff that goes into our head. Steve Jobs once quipped that creativity is just connecting things. And. And that's largely true. Creativity is connecting dots in our world. The problem is that we often don't put good dots into our head. Right? We are less than purposeful about the kinds of stimuli that we routinely absorb.

So how do we begin to get around this? Well, we have to recognize that brilliance requires dots to connect. If you want to have brilliant ideas when it matters most, you need a deep well of reserve to draw from. So where does that come from? Dum, dum, dum. The first thing I encourage you to do is have a study plan. Now, I'm not talking about going back to your college, you know, bookstore and buying a trigonometry textbook. That's not what I mean. What I mean is, do you have any time set aside in your life for absorbing new ideas, for absorbing material, for reasons for studying, for putting dots into your head that can connect you, that can inspire you? See, we often confuse this with this, with this. I'm talking about absorbing ideas, thinking about those ideas, processing those ideas, considering how they apply to your work.

It's not just what you take in. It's how you internalize it. It's how you apply it. There's a guy named Dee Hawk who is the founder and chair emeritus of Visa. And he gave this kind of hierarchy of how we absorb, internalize, and apply information in our world. He said, everything begins with noise. There's a lot of noise in our world, and noise is not very useful. But noise becomes data when it achieves a cognitive pattern.

And data is somewhat useful, but not terribly useful because it doesn't really have any context or application. Data becomes information when combined with other data in a way that becomes meaningful. So if we have a bunch of data together that speak to a market segment or something like that. Okay, well, that's useful because it tells us something. It's descriptive of the market segment. That's great. But information becomes knowledge when combined with other information in a way that allows us to begin to make decisions. Okay, this is knowledge about a specific area.

But that's not even the pinnacle. Knowledge becomes understanding when we begin to think systemically because we have knowledge in different areas and we can combine it in a way that of a lot allows us to think more systemically. Oh, I saw this over here. And that kind of applies over here. That's understanding. But according to De Hawk, what we really want to get to is wisdom. Wisdom is when we not only understand what we can do, but we understand what we should do. Our job as creative pros is to turn noise into.

Into wisdom. That's what we're trying to do. But that requires intentional thought. Intentional study, absorbing thinking, processing, writing, journaling. That's what we're looking for. Do you have a discipline in your life of absorbing and processing stimuli? A next practice I encourage you to implement is to take better notes. Most of our notes are just facts and figures, and Bob said this, and Julie said that. But are you paying attention to that voice in your head, the little hunches that you have throughout the day? And you think, oh, I could never forget that.

That's such a great idea. I'll never forget it. And five minutes later you're thinking, what was the idea? Do you remember the idea? I didn't share it with anyone. We have to record everything, Every hunch, every insight, every little dot that we've connected because it might be relevant later. We need to learn to take better notes on ourself, on what we're observing in meetings. Okay. And then finally, I encourage you to do a stimulus dive. A stimulus dive means putting yourself in a position where you're experiencing the world in a new way.

Something like going to a conference like B2BMX. This is amazing. You get to be in an environment where you're just diving into stimulus for a couple of days. This is brilliant. But you can do this on your own. I've taken creative teams dumpster diving in New York City to find interesting things. By the way, I would not recommend that one. But just looking for creative stimulus, Right? We've gone out and taken photos and tried to put those photos together to tell a story.

We've done all kinds of things go out. If you're an introvert, go to a dance club. If you're an extrovert, go to a museum. And don't talk to anyone all day long. It's incredibly painful, but it teaches you to process the world in different ways. Discipline yourself to be off the grid and to put yourself in environments that challenge the rigidity of your perspective. Do a stimulus that make this a matter of discipline in your life. The final elements we have.

Focus, relationships, energy, stimuli. Hours. Hours. Hours is about how we spend our precious time. But here's the thing. We're very efficient with our time. We're not always so effective with our time, are we? See, brilliance emerges when we embrace inefficiency. All the managers in the room close your ears right now because we can easily measure efficiency in short intervals, but effectiveness is measured over longer intervals.

And that's why it's really difficult for us. See, value is created over the long term, but efficiency can be measured in the short term. But what do most organizations want? They want to know, how are we doing right now? Snapshot productivity versus interval productivity. So I want to give you just a couple of very inefficient but very effective practices you can personally apply in your life. The first is what I call back burner creating. Do you have anything? How many of you, by the way, how many of you have to solve problems and be creative at a moment's notice in your job? Okay, when was the last time you had something that you did in your work? Well, something creative that you weren't being paid for. Something that nobody was looking over your shoulder and judging. Do you ever engage in any kind of creative activity outside of what you're being paid for, outside of your create on demand role? This is what I mean by back burner creating in organizations.

This looks like, you know what? We're going to do some spec work just for the heck of it. We're going to get wild, we're going to get creative. We're going to do some spec work, create a specific proposal that's probably never going to see the light of day, but we're just going to do it because it's good. It exercises our creative muscles. And you know what? There might be something in there that actually applies that we can actually borrow and use that will create value for our customers. We may go in a direction we never would have thought of otherwise. But I encourage you to engage in this very inefficient activity of back burner creating. The second thing is idea time.

So Ideas are important, but where do ideas happen? We expect them to happen in the cracks and crevices of our lives, the cracks and crevices of our already busy schedule. But we don't dedicate time to generating ideas. I encourage you to put time on your calendar for thinking of ideas. Why don't we do this? Because we're afraid if we're sitting in our cube and our manager walks by and sees us and says, what are you working on? You're just staring at the wall of your cube. I'm generating ideas. But it doesn't look like you're doing anything. Exactly. Exactly Right.

We're afraid of what it's going to look like. But listen, if we want to be brilliant at a moment's notice, friends, it's going to require us to do things that maybe make us feel a little uncomfortable, and that may not pay off in the short term. You might spend five hours trying to generate ideas, and finally, at 4 hours and 55 minutes, boom, the brilliant insight emerges that creates value for the next two years of your organization. You don't know when it's gonna happen, but you can't just rely on reacting and responding and reflexive creativity. You need to discipline time in your life for the creative process. Okay, I know it's difficult. It is very difficult, but very necessary. So these are the five elements of rhythm, Focus, Relationships, Energy, stimuli, hours.

They awkwardly spell the word fresh. Sorry about that. Not my idea. That was my editor's idea. Originally, hours was time, and my editor said, right now you have fresh, and fresh is not very memorable. So we changed time to hours. Building practices in each of these areas is what prepares us, individually and also as teams, to be able to bring our best value to what we do every day. So the dirty little secret is if you want to be brilliant at a moment's not, you need to begin far upstream from the moment.

You need a brilliant idea. You do. You can only rely on talent for so long. So in just a couple of minutes, we have remaining, I want to ask what I think is a really important question for all of us as it relates to being prolific, brilliant, and healthy. Which is why. Why does this really matter? I mean, we're doing fine. I mean, especially those of us who maybe early in our career, we're like, I'm knocking it out of the park, man. I'm knocking it out of the park.

I'm doing great. You know, I'm coasting on youth and energy and talent, and everything's wonderful. Why does this matter? This is Not. This is not, friends, about squeaking out a little bit more work. This is not about just producing slightly better work for the people that you serve. It's not. It's not. It's about something much more important.

See, this is, again, this is about your body of work. This is about the delta that you're building. And each of us at some point is going to ask, did I produce the body of work I was capable of producing? Did I produce the value I was capable of producing on this planet? Or did I allow the forces of the create on demand world that caused me to settle in? Did I just go with the flow? See, because that big body of work, that big delta is comprised of a lot of little deltas, little decisions that we make every single day about where we put our focus, our time, our. Our energy, how we bring ourselves to our work. As Gretchen Rubin so eloquently put it, what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. It totally does. How you discipline yourself every day, the practices you put in your life are going to matter a lot more in the long term than big efforts of the will. They are.

So mediocrity doesn't just happen. It's chosen over time. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, I can't wait to crank out a steaming pile of crap today. Nobody does that. But it happens. It happens in little decisions that we make over time. To settle in, to compromise, to go with the flow. So brilliance demands discipline.

And from this room of accomplished professionals, I hear a collective no duh. So I'm going to amend this. It requires a very specific discipline. Brilliance demands the discipline of bravery, the discipline of bravery. Bravery is a discipline. Bravery is a discipline. I'm going to take it a step further, requires the bravery to find and operate in your sweet spot. There's a contribution you can make to your organization, to the customers you serve, that nobody around you can make.

Nobody around you can make. There's an area on the baseball bat called the sweet spot. If you hit the ball on the sweet spot, it's going to travel far greater distances that if you hit it even marginally off the sweet spot with the same amount of efforts, why it's called the sweet spot. You have a sweet spot. You have an area of maximum effectiveness, a place where you can create more value than anybody around you for the same amount of effort. But you don't find it by accident. You don't find it by going with the flow. You find it by building disciplines in your life and Bringing yourself fully to what you do by focusing, breaking away, being off the grid, managing your energy, putting stimuli in your life that allow you to connect dots other people don't even have in their head.

That, friends, is how you identify your sweet spot. It's how you step into your unique contribution. It's how you build a body of work you can be proud of. It is. One of my favorite thinkers is getting Thomas Merton. He was a mystic and monk cloistered outside of Louisville, Kentucky in the mid 20th century. He said some of the most profound things about creativity and life and business. He said this.

There can be an intense egoism in following everyone else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins. Saints as well as artists. They want quick success and they're in such a hurry to get it, they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity. They want quick success and they're in such a hurry to get it, they cannot take time to be true. To whom? To themselves.

They just copy whatever is expedient. They copy whatever is going to get them what they want fast enough. But in so doing, they sell out. They compromise their body of work. Friends, the price is too high. You have something unique to contribute to your organization, to your industry, to the world. You have a unique body of work to build. Will you have the courage, the bravery to build that body of work? Will you have the courage to swim up to do things nobody else is doing to build practices in your life that run counter to the expectations of the marketplace? Will you have the courage to do that? And one final thought for you.

About 16 years ago, I was in a meeting and the person leading the meeting was trying to help us navigate through what was a multi million dollar risk for this organization I was a part of. And he could, I think he could sense that some of us were, were a little bit nervous about what was involved with this decision and maybe starting to get a little, kind of starting to get cold feet. And so out of the blue he just said, hey, let me ask you a question. I'm like, okay. He said, what do you think is the most valuable land in the world? We're like, I don't know. Is that on page 10 of our spreadsheet? I don't know. Most valuable land in the world. That's weird.

He said, just go with me. So we start throwing out guesses. Oil fields of the Middle East? Wrong. Gold mines of South Africa, because our colleague was from South Africa. Wrong. Manhattan. Wrong. The Hyatt Regency at Gainey Ranch, Wrong.

So we threw out a bunch of guesses. And finally my colleague said, you're all wrong. We said, what do you think is the most valuable land in the world? And quoting the late Myles Monroe, friends, I'll never forget this. Quoting the late Miles Monroe, he said, I think the most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. Because in the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, all of the unreconciled relationships, all of the unexecuted business ideas, all of the unspoken intentions, all of the things people carried around in them their entire life. And they said, you know what? Tomorrow I'm going to get around to that. Tomorrow I'm going to send that email. Tomorrow I'm going to start on that project.

Tomorrow I'm going to introduce that idea. Tomorrow I'm going to take that risk. And they pushed it, and they pushed it into the future till one day they reached the bookend of their life and all of that value was buried with them, dead in the ground, never to be seen by human eyes. That's why it's the most valuable land in the world, because all of that value was buried with them. And that day I went back to my office and I wrote two words on an index card and I put those two words on the wall of my office and I put them in my notebook and they actually became the title of my second book. And those two words were, die empty. Because I want to know when I reach the bookend of my life. I'm not taking my best work to the grave.

I've done everything I can to build disciplines, practices into my life. So I'm producing the kind of value I'm capable of producing every day. I can point to a body of work and say, yes, that doesn't represent everything I wanted to do, but it represents the sum of total value, not the sum of total compromise in my life. Will you be able to say the same? Friends, I encourage you. Build disciplines, build practices. Focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, hours. Bring yourself fully to what you do. Every single day.

You have something unique to contribute. And if you are purposeful and if you are intentional, someday in the far distant future when they lay you in the ground, you can die empty of regret, but full of satisfaction for a life well lived. I think that's all any of us can ask for in the end. You got this. You do. Thank you very much.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that talk again from Scottsdale, Arizona. As I mentioned, if you'd like to explore having me come to your organization, your event, you can do so@todhenry.com speaking we'd love to talk to you about how I might be able to serve your team. Also, if you want to support the show, check out my books. They're available@toddhenry.com books or anywhere books are sold. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, may you be brave, focused and brilliant.