THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Matthew Dicks:
There are times when I’m working on something, whether it’s a book or a talk I’m going to give on a stage, or a story, or my business, whatever it is, where I just sort of… I’m either sick of it or I’m stuck. I can’t figure out the way to get around a problem. If I can just switch to a different project for a little while and continue to make progress, continue to feel like I’m making something useful, even if it’s not my primary thing, that’s an enormous help for people. I always get asked, “Why don’t you have writer’s block?” And I say, “Because if I ever get writer’s block, I just start something new.”
Speaker 2:
It’s the Inspiration Place Podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place Podcast, an art world inside a podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman:
Hello, there are, my friend. This is Miriam Schulman, your curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 203 of the Inspiration Place Podcast. I’m so grateful that you’re here. I have a question for you, are you good at dreaming about what you’re going to accomplish someday, but perhaps not so good at finding the time and getting started, or maybe there are things you love to do and you have trouble actually doing it? That’s why I love today’s guest, and so will you. In today’s interview, you’re going to discover why it’s good to be a chicken or even a goose. He has lots of strategies for living a productive, creative life, and none of them involve scheduling or batching, so I think you’re going to find this conversation very refreshing.
But before we get there, I wanted to make sure that you knew that I have four spots available inside the mastermind track of the Artist Incubator Program. If you’re looking for my personal help to sell more art and get more exposure through press opportunities, or maybe you’re looking to start an online class, or you have one and you want to figure out how to build your audience and really make things work, I’d love to help you. For over 20 years, I’ve sold my own art, promoted online classes. And after artists begged me for a way to show them how I did it, I created the Artist Incubator Program. In the Artist Incubator Program, I actually have two tracks. I have the self-study and the mastermind.
If you choose the self-study track, you have all the information you need to succeed. We do have some limited coaching available that way. But for those looking for more hand holding to navigate the ups and downs over their artist career and already have a track record of sales, then the mastermind track could be for you. The mastermind track is by application only. And like I said, you must already have a website and a track record of sales. To see if you qualify, head on over to SchulmanArt.com/biz. That’s biz as in the letter B-I-Z. Scroll down and make sure you hit the yellow apply now button. First, I’ll capture your name and email. And then on the next page, I’ll ask you a few questions about your studio practice and what you feel is holding you back.
Based on the answers to those questions, if you look like you could be a fit, I’ll invite you to a free consultation so that we can discuss your art practice in more depth and see if my program can help you. Now, I want you to know this is not a sales call. I only want artists to join my program if it’s right for them. Again, go to SchulmanArt.com/biz, as in the letter B-I-Z. And now on with the show. Today’s guest is the author of Someday Is Today and nine other books, a bestselling novelist, nationally recognized storyteller, and award-winning elementary school teacher. He teaches storytelling and communications at universities, corporate workplaces, and community organizations.
He’s won multiple Moth Grand Slam Story Competitions, and together with his wife created the organization Speak Up to help others share their stories. They also co-host the Speak Up Storytelling Podcast. He lives in Connecticut with his family. Please welcome to the Inspiration Place, Matthew Dicks. Well, Hey there, Matthew, welcome to the show.
Matthew Dicks:
Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here.
Miriam Schulman:
First of all, I have to ask you, because my daughter went to school in University of Hartford, so right in your backyard. She studied music ed. She wanted to know which elementary schools do you and your wife teach at?
Matthew Dicks:
Oh, well, I teach at Wolcott School in West Hartford, Connecticut. I’ve been there for 24 years. I’ve been in the same classroom for 21 of those years. My wife is now teaching at Webster Hill School, also in West Hartford. She teaches kindergarten, but we met at Wolcott School. We taught one room apart from each other and that’s how we get to know each other.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s so cool. Your wife, Alicia, is the one who is co-founder of the Speak Up organization. Is that correct?
Matthew Dicks:
Yes, she is. I’ve actually taught storytelling at the University of Hartford. I have a professor friend there who I’ve done a lot of work with over there.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh, cool! I don’t know any of the West Hartford schools, but my daughter knows all of them because her friends have done student teaching within the school system. She wanted to me to make sure I ask you that.
Matthew Dicks:
It’s been a wonderful career in an excellent school district.
Miriam Schulman:
Matthew does a lot of things, which is why he was asked, I guess, to write a book on… Would you call this productivity? What would you call your book?
Matthew Dicks:
Yeah, I guess I would call it sort of productivity in terms of not only time and method, but also mindset. I think as much as I focus in on the best use of time, I think I spend a lot of time on ideas like preserving your spirit and making sure that your mindset is properly focused and that you have goals and things like that. Ultimately, it’s making your dreams come true. Whether that dream is I want to build a chair someday, or I want to create stained glass, or I want to write a novel, whatever that dream is that you have, whatever you want to make or do in life, that’s what the book is designed to help you do.
Miriam Schulman:
What I really liked about it is I wouldn’t describe it as your typical productivity book. It was more about how to live a productive life. It definitely has a bent that I think creatives will appreciate. What I especially appreciate about you, Matthew, is that you’re just not afraid to tell people what you think.
Matthew Dicks:
It’s not always a good quality, my wife says, but sometimes it works out really well.
Miriam Schulman:
At the end of the book, I was like, “This guy is crazy. I have to talk to him.” I have a list of bullets that I want to go through. This is just to tease the audience. I’m going to go through them, and then you’re going to pick out of this like menu of things. We have eat a compliment sandwich, enemies list, sacred sleep, no TV in bedroom, repurposing challah, mortality motivation, hundred seconds shower, chickens, pigs, mice, eagles, and geese, be a criminal and carry a burglar bag. Those were my takeaways from your book.
Matthew Dicks:
That’s pretty good. I like that list a lot.
Miriam Schulman:
Which one do you want to start with?
Matthew Dicks:
Well, I guess the one that I always think is the easiest fix, at least in terms of gaining a lot of time back for a lot of people, is the sleep. I think it’s also the one that is less likely that people are going to do because it requires you breaking habits. But when I meet with people and they want to find ways to get more done, the first thing I narrow in on is on how they sleep. I believe in sleep. I believe it’s extremely important and you should sleep the appropriate amount of time that your body requires. Now, admittedly, I sleep a little less than most people. But typically when I drill down into someone’s sleep habits, what they qualify as sleep is really time spent in bed.
If we can actually spend our time in bed only sleeping and not tossing and turning and not doing terrible things like snooze alarming our lives away, or even waking up with an alarm is really not the ideal way to wake, if we can make our sleep more efficient, if we can sleep in a more productive way, we can actually spend less time in bed. Quite often when I’m working with someone, we can recapture an hour from their day that they’re spending in bed. An hour is enormous. Over the course of a year or a lifetime, an hour is a blessing. If you had a 25 hour day rather than a 24 hour day, that’s essentially what is happening if you get an hour back somewhere along the way.
Focusing in on your sleep and specifically treating your sleep as sacredly as it deserves to be can really garner enormous results.
Miriam Schulman:
I’ve really appreciated that section. I always thought that I treat sleep sacredly. I don’t have a TV in my bedroom, but I will share some things. I have changed since reading your book. First of all, we recently moved to New York City. When I lived in the suburbs, I always like to have the curtains and the windows open and wake up with the sun. Well, when you live in New York City, you have everyone’s light shining in into your bedroom. Now I’ve been drawing those drapes at night. Matthew, it’s made… It sounds like such a small thing. It’s made a huge difference.
Matthew Dicks:
Our bodies are supposed to sleep in the dark. I mean, before we had electricity, basically people’s sleep schedules were attuned to the sun. If it was seven o’clock at night and it was dark, you had a candle that could do very little for you, so you went to bed. Our bodies want to sleep in the dark. If we have to choose certain hours to sleep because of the way life is, we have to create an environment that matches what our bodies really want in terms of sleep.
Miriam Schulman:
The second tip that I found huge is you said the only thing that should be done in bed is sleep or sex and preferably just sleep.
Matthew Dicks:
Yes. Yeah. I really understand that when we get into our bed, we’re going to signal our bodies that we’re going to be doing something. The fewer things that our bodies believe we’re going to be doing, the more likely our body’s going to do what we want it to do. If my wife was here right now, she would tell you, I fall asleep every single night within a minute of getting into bed. There’s a bunch of things that go into that, including using white noise to trigger my brain that it is time to sleep and making sure I sleep at about the same time every single night, regardless of what is going on, and not reading in bed or doing really anything else in bed.
So that when I put my head on the pillow, my body understands there’s only one thing we really do in this place and it’s sleep. It’s going to help you fall asleep a lot faster.
Miriam Schulman:
I found not reading a bed has been a good change for me. What I’ve been doing is I do like to read to make myself sleepy, so I just read on the couch until I’m sleepy.
Matthew Dicks:
Yeah, that’s perfect. You can move it. Just move it to a chair next to the bed and you’re all set to go, but you don’t want your body to be thinking, are we going to be enjoying a beautiful plot and some wonderful characters, or are we going to be going to sleep? Because if you’re confusing your brain like that, you’re not able to achieve that sleep state that you want as quickly as possible.
Miriam Schulman:
Thank you. My sleep has been a lot better since then. I want to pick the next topic because I think it’s too much of a tease, all the animals that we’ve mentioned. There’s a whole list of the m.
Matthew Dicks:
Right.
Miriam Schulman:
Chickens, pigs, mice, eagles. Geese is the one I added, so you’ll have to ask me why I added geese to the list, but do you want to start with mice and eagles?
Matthew Dicks:
Oh yeah, mice and Eagles, yeah. One of the problems I think that creatives have… It’s not really a problem, but one of the limitations they often experience is because they’re creating things, they’re very attuned to details. And that makes sense. As a novelist, I have to be attuned to details. Every word I put on the page matters. There’s nothing wrong with being a mouse, which is you’re close to the ground, you’re in the grass, and you’re paying attention to the very small things. That is what creative people have to do to make good things. But at the same time, the eagle and the mouse come from the Native American spirit wheel. The Native Americans believe we had to sort of occupy every aspect of the wheel at certain times in our lives.
The eagle on that spirit wheel is the person who can fly above things and see the bigger picture. In my experience, what happens is most people who are creatives are mice. They’re so focused on the details, they’re not able to get above and figure out what is important and what is not important. When I’m working with people, I’m often saying things… I just said this to someone yesterday. I said, “You can produce something that’s 86% of what it could be in three days, or you could produce it at 100% but it’s going to take three months. Which really makes more sense?” In that particular case, it absolutely made sense to get to 86% in three days. But if we’re so attuned to the details, we sort of can’t get above it and figure out this is important, that is not important.
My wife is tragically a mouse. Now, that’s great because my house is well appointed. It’s well designed. She focuses on all of these little things that make my life beautiful. But then she gets trapped in things. I think the example in the book is she’s doing report cards and it’s taking her hours and hours and hours to complete her report cards, and it takes me about an hour. But our results end up being the same.
Miriam Schulman:
I told my daughter that, by the way, because she was working on the report cards for her school. She’s since graduated and she’s in the school system. I told her this exact thing. I was like, “You got to spend less time on those report cards.” She’s like writing them in English and in Spanish.
Matthew Dicks:
Well, the eagle tells you what do parents actually want on a report card. What I know parents want is, “Tell me you love my kid. Tell me you understand my kid. Tell me that you’re going to push my kid beyond where they are right now.” If I see those three things on a report card, I really don’t care about anything else. I know that almost every parent feels the same way. Whether you’re trying to figure out, well, did that kid achieve mastery in addition of fractions, or is he still like progressing? That doesn’t really matter. It’s never going to matter. Don’t focus in on those things. Allow those things to just wash away. That’s the difference between being an eagle and a mouse.
Miriam Schulman:
Now we’re ready to move on to more animals. I wanted to ask you this actually. You mentioned there’s the four spirits on that wheel. What are the other two spirits?
Matthew Dicks:
One is the bear and the bear understands other people. That is sort of like paying attention to the beings around you and absorbing their energy and figuring out what they need and what allows them to be successful. And then the other one, I think, is the wolf, and it’s the one that’s interior. That is understanding yourself, spending time thinking about yourself so that you can sort of make decisions in life that are actually decisions. I think tragically what most people do in life is they’re like water going down a mountain. They follow the path of least resistance.
If you don’t spend time thinking about yourself, where I am, who I am, where am I going, where do I actually want to go as opposed to where people in the universe are pushing me, if we don’t do that, we end up in places that we’re sort of wondering, how did we even get here? We got here because we didn’t think, because we didn’t make decisions in an active way that moved us through life. We allowed others to sort of move us in directions that perhaps we didn’t want to go.
Miriam Schulman:
And maybe doing some people pleasing along the way. Now, we’re still on the animals, I think we’re up to chickens and pigs.
Matthew Dicks:
Oh yes, chickens and pigs. It’s an aphorism or a phrase that’s been said quite often. It’s the idea that if a chicken and a pig go into business together in a restaurant, sort of a breakfast restaurant, that it’s better to be a pig because the pig is going to produce bacon, which means the pig has to die. The pig’s all in on the business. Whereas a chicken’s going to lay an egg, not really all in on the business. It’s sort of the implication that you want to be a pig because you really want to be all in on your project. You don’t want to sort of like have a foot in and a foot out. I think that’s a terrible way to be. I think that’s ridiculous. I tell people they should be chickens because you kind of want a lot of pots on the stove.
I don’t believe in going all in on one thing. Because if that one thing isn’t sort of working out for you, now you’re stuck. Now you’ve got the business that’s going out of business and you don’t know where to go next. For me, I’m always thinking of it in terms of percentages. I’ve got a book that’s due. It’s going to receive 60% of my attention. But I’ve got a book that I kind of want to write next and I sort of want to tinker with it, so I’m going to give that 5% of my creative attention. I’m working on building a business, and I’m going to give that business 30% of my attention. Rather than just sort of going all in on the one thing, I think that creative people can do themselves a lot of help, do a service to themselves, if they allow themselves to be tinkering away at a multitude of things.
It also allows you to get unstuck. There are times when I’m working on something, whether it’s a book, or a talk I’m going to give on a stage, or a story, or my business, whatever it is, where I just sort of… I’m either sick of it or I’m stuck. I can’t figure out the way to get around a problem. If I can just switch to a different project for a little while and continue to make progress, continue to feel like I’m making something useful, even if it’s not my primary thing, that’s an enormous help for people. I always get asked, “Why don’t you have writer’s block?” And I say, “Because if I ever get writer’s block, I just start something new. And if I get writer’s block on that, I start something new.”
I’m always working on like six projects, but they all eventually get done. The most important thing is I’m writing every day instead of staring at the screen.
Miriam Schulman:
You’re basically procrastinating with your other projects. Procrastinate this project with that one.
Matthew Dicks:
That’s pretty good. I’ve never thought of it that way. Yes. I would say rather than procrastinating, I am sort of doing work that I think creative people do that they don’t acknowledge the back of the brain work. I think we solve a lot of problems unconsciously when we allow those problems to move to the back. That’s what I do. I say, “I don’t know how to write my way out of this chapter. I’m going to move on to something else.” But I believe my brain somewhere in the back is still noodling away at it and it allows it to have the time it needs before it can come forward again.
Miriam Schulman:
It absolutely does. And that’s why sleep is so important because your brain is actually working through problems while you’re sleeping. I’m going to be sharing what the geese thing is all about. There was one technique in the book that I definitely took exception to, and that was the hundred second shower.
Matthew Dicks:
Well, it doesn’t…
Miriam Schulman:
Tell our friends what the hundred second shower is, and then I will tell them what geese has to do with it.
Matthew Dicks:
Sure. Yours doesn’t have to be a hundred seconds. I always acknowledge, I have a lot less hair than you and I just probably have fewer needs in the shower. I just took a shower right before we started talking. It was less than a hundred seconds. It’s just the idea that at the end of my life, when I look back on my life and I ask myself, “How did I spend my time,” I’m hoping that I can think I spent as little time in the shower as possible, because there were a lot better places to be and a lot better things to do. For me, it’s just the idea that if I can take a shower in a hundred seconds or less, then I am going to have more time to actually play with my son, work on my golf game, work on a book.
It’s just the desire to get the hell out of the shower as quickly as I can and get onto life in some meaningful way. Although in the book I do acknowledge sometimes I take a little bit longer of a shower, but if I’m in there working on a story or memorizing a poem and reciting it out loud, then I might take a little bit of a longer shower because I’m making some use of that time. But ultimately, I love to get out of the shower within a hundred seconds. How did geese play into this?
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, all right. I am not a fan of the hundred second shower. I am a fan of the 10 minute bath. I decided at the end of my life… I think I’m quoting Nora Ephron. She might have said this and I feel bad about my nap. I will not regret how much bath oil and products I have used at the end of my life. But I do want to share for our listeners who have not read your books, that Matthew likes to play golf, which is a time consuming game. I’m quite certain that I spend less time in the bathtub than you do on the golf course.
Matthew Dicks:
Yes, very true. But I actually think just about everyone in the world should be playing golf. When I play golf, I exercise because I carry my bag and it’s very good exercise. I spend time with my friends and none of us spend enough time with our friends.
Miriam Schulman:
True.
Matthew Dicks:
I also spend time in nature, and I know that our brain chemistry is such that the more time we spend looking at trees and grass and sky, the happier we are as people. I’m going to play golf on Friday, 18 holes. It’s going to take me four hours, but I’m going to spend four hours in nature with friends exercising. I don’t think there’s a better way to spend time than to do those three things simultaneously.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s a beautiful philosophy. Okay, I will now understand why you do the a hundred second shower. Where geese coming to play?
Matthew Dicks:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
You were mentioning chickens before. I believe that I am a goose. Not only a goose, but a golden goose.
Matthew Dicks:
Wow.
Miriam Schulman:
I have to protect myself. The way I treat the golden goose so beautifully so I can lay those golden eggs is things like the 10 minute bath, really treating myself with the type of care that I feel that I need to nurture myself. And there’s other things I do as well.
Matthew Dicks:
Well, the most important thing I think you said was if you’re at the end of your life and you’re looking back on it and you’re really pleased with the amount of time you spent in the bath and you feel good about it, I think that’s probably great. It wouldn’t be great if you looked back and thought, I didn’t accomplish my three greatest goals, but I do feel good about the bath. I think probably what will happen is you’ll think, I love those baths, but I didn’t really get the other things that I wanted to get done. But if it all works out at the end and you’re like, “I did what I wanted to do and I took some really good baths along the way,” that’s perfectly fine.
My fear is always that at the end of life, people are going to look back at the way they spent their time and they’re going to think they wasted it. I just discovered that. David Cassidy. His very last words he spoke to his daughter were, “So much wasted time.” And that’s David Cassidy.
Miriam Schulman:
Oh my goodness!
Matthew Dicks:
Who actually did things that we all know about and was world renowned. He looked back on his life and thought, “I wasted so much time,” and I just think that’s how most people feel.
Miriam Schulman:
I actually am like you. I would classify it differently though. Matthew in his book talks about the hundred year life plan. I call it mortality motivation. I do have, partly because my father died when I was five years old, so I do have this… And I think also a lot of us have this, or at least I know I do, have this feeling of I could die next year because of the pandemic. When I was writing my book… I wrote a book also… Kitty. There’s a very cute kitty on Matthew’s desk right now. When I was writing my book and the agent says, “Oh, it’ll come out in 2023,” I was like, “What are you talking about? I can be dead by then. We got to get it out now.” I definitely feel that mortality motivation that you talk about.
What is it that I want to accomplish? It’s not someday, which I know is not your favorite word. Those actually are two questions now we’re going to have to unpack. Why don’t you share with everybody about your hundred year plan?
Matthew Dicks:
Sure. When I was 21, I was the victim of an armed robbery. I was managing a McDonald’s restaurant. After closing, three men with guns broke into the store and ultimately I ended up on the floor with a gun to my head and they told me they were going to kill me. They started counting back from three. I was absolutely certain that I was about to die. These were men who the police had already told me had killed other people. I just thought for certain that I was at the end of my life. The thing that astounded me about that moment was that I didn’t feel afraid or angry or even sad. The only feeling I felt was regret. I thought, my God, I’m 21 years old and I have done nothing and they’re about to take my life.
Obviously I survived. They pulled the trigger, but there was no bullet in the gun. Since that day, truly, I’ve sort of been focused on making sure that I never experience that feeling of regret ever again. The strategy that I sort of came up with for myself is I understand what it’s like to be at the end of your life or to at least believe you’re at the end of your life. Now what I do is I imagine myself at a hundred. If I have a choice to make, how am I going to spend the next two hours? My wife goes out to get her hair done and my kids are at camp and I’m at home for two hours. I have choices. I can go play golf. I can work on a book. I could binge watch a television show. I could pet my cat.
I think that we’re terrible or unreliable when we’re making decisions in the moment. If I had a decision to make right now on how I would spend this very moment, I’d probably be playing golf and eating a cheeseburger. Those are two of my favorite things. But if I spend my entire life playing golf and eating a cheeseburger, I will not accomplish my goals. My children will not love me. My wife will leave me. Even my cat won’t like me, right? What I do is I ask the hundred year old version of myself. I imagine myself a hundred years old, lying in some deathbed, getting ready to move on. I ask him, I say, “How should I spend the next couple hours?” Because there’s wisdom at the end of our lives that we don’t have now.
I try to imagine that wisdom, that same wisdom that I felt on that restaurant floor. And that’s the person who I lean on in making decisions, and that person often says, “There’ll be plenty of time to watch television. I know you love it and I know the programming actually right now is high quality, but you probably should go outside because there’ll be a day when you can’t go outside. You should probably go for a swim because there’ll be a day when you can’t swim anymore. You should pet your cat because they only live for like 12 to 18 years. This television show that you think is important is not really that important. If you watch it today a year from now, you’ll probably forget most of it.
Why don’t you put that aside for now and go do something more productive?” I listen to that person as much as I can and it’s led to a much better life for me.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s really beautiful. You go to your future self and you ask your future self for advice.
Matthew Dicks:
Yeah, yeah, and then I listen, because I think a lot of people might ask and then binge watch Netflix, which sounds lovely because I love television. But as you know in my book, I don’t watch very much of it at all because I just choose better things, knowing television is always there for me when I can’t choose those better things anymore.
Miriam Schulman:
My listeners don’t know this I think about me, because I don’t really talk about it, but I watched very little television. We moved into the city about two months ago and my husband and I haven’t even hung our TV up yet. That’s how much we care about television. I don’t subscribe to HBO. Yeah, I’m sure there’s some really great shows on there, but I know that it doesn’t increase the value of my life. It’s not that I’m too cheap to pay for it. I just know that’s not what I want to get done right now. It’s not that I watch no TV. I mean, we will be hanging it back up. We will be watching reruns of Seinfeld yet again. But I’m pretty much militant about my… Compared to other people, they would say I’m extreme. Like I said, we own one TV and that’s it.
Matthew Dicks:
Well, the average American watches about six hours of television a day. I don’t know how they do it. As I told my wife that one, she said, “That’s like another job.”
Miriam Schulman:
Is that true even with the four hours of internet? I mean, is it like really six hours of TV plus four hours of internet? Or is it screens? That still blows my mind.
Matthew Dicks:
It’s TV because for every person like me and you who spend enormous amounts of time maybe on the internet, there’s a lot of people who sort of use it to shop and get all their entertainment from television. They prefer to sit in front of a large screen and watch something. I mean, there’s a reason why there’s 900 choices on the television right now because a lot of people are watching it. Again, I’m not a television snob. If it’s a Sunday in the fall, I’m definitely watching a football game. I watch the Celtics all the way through the playoffs.
My wife and I are in the middle of a TV show that we watch so infrequently that I can’t even remember the name of it and can’t actually remember what we’re watching, but we love it. Every time we get to sit down to watch it, we’re excited. It just doesn’t happen that often because we have better things to do.
Miriam Schulman:
We still have a couple of things on my bullet list. Speaking of your lovely wife, I love the challah philosophy.
Matthew Dicks:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
As a Jewish woman who knows about challah, let’s tell our listeners who don’t know anything about challah what it is and what you do with it.
Matthew Dicks:
Sure. Well, challah is bread, I’m not Jewish, but I was smart enough to marry a Jewish woman and she makes fantastic challah. The challah example that I used in the book is how my wife made I think it was three challahs, because she always bakes like in large quantities. It’s like she owns a bakery, but she only has us to feed. She took the challah that she made, I think it was pandemic challah, and we ate a loaf. And then we just couldn’t get through all of it because it’s bread. Ultimately, she started making other things with it. It became crotons. It becomes bread that we put on top of macaroni and cheese. She does all of these things. She turns what was once bread into all these other things.
Miriam Schulman:
And don’t forget French toast.
Matthew Dicks:
Oh, and French… Oh yeah, challah French toast is great.
Miriam Schulman:
Challah grilled cheese sandwiches. I’m sure that’s on your list too.
Matthew Dicks:
Yes. She really makes a variety, an enormous variety of things from this singular bread. I think it’s a lesson for creative people, because I think oftentimes what happens is we make something and then we think we’re done with it. We don’t try to find a second, third, or fourth life for it. I think when you make something, when you create something out of thin air, something that didn’t exist and now it exists because you put energy and effort and materials together in some meaningful way, whatever it is, I think you have an obligation as a creative person to try to make as much of it as you can.
Because it’s a miraculous thing to make something, whether it is challah, which is simply she took a lot of ingredients that didn’t look like bread turned it into bread, and then turned it into a multitude of other things, or it’s me who tells a joke on stage one night during a standup bit that eventually becomes a story, then becomes an article in a magazine and a chapter in my book. It’s the idea that we just deserve as creative people to ring out as much that we can from everything that we make and not to get fixated or fixed on the idea that this thing is one thing, but it is one thing and now what else can it be?
Miriam Schulman:
For visual artists, you’re painting is a print, is now licensed on products. If you create an Instagram post, you stick that in an email to your list. Maybe you use the words to create a Reel. You put that Reel on YouTube. You repurpose content.
Matthew Dicks:
Those repurposed ways that people use their content, the way they repurpose it is sometimes more effective or more successful at least than what it originally was. There’s great examples of painters who had their paintings turned into stamps, postage stamps, and nobody ever cared about the painting, but the postage stamp ended up on tens of millions of envelopes all over the world, earning the money, but also just getting people to look at work that they never would’ve looked at had it not become a postage stamp. Now, ideally, if you’re a painter, I think you probably want your painting to end up in a place that people will see for a very long time. But if it ends up on a postage stamp, that’s a pretty amazing thing too.
I think we have to just embrace those ideas and not shut ourselves off from the idea that this thing we made might become something else and something may be even more successful than what we originally envisioned.
Miriam Schulman:
We had so much to discuss. I decided to continue this conversation next week. Next week we’re going to discuss how to tell great stories. If you can’t wait until next week, then I suggest you check out Matthew’s books. We’ve linked both of them in the show notes, which you’ll find at SchulmanArt.com/203. The book we discussed this week is Someday Is Today. Next week we’re talking about his book Storyworthy. But before we go, Matthew, do you have any last words for our listeners about Someday Is Today before we call this podcast complete, which is actually very incomplete and will be continued?
Matthew Dicks:
I guess I’ll harken back to something I mentioned a little bit that I think is important. I think we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about other people, our spouses and partners and kids and neighbors and colleagues and clients and all of the people in our lives, our parents, and I don’t think we spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves. Just sitting down, clearing everything out and saying, “Who am I? Where am I today? Where do I want to go? Looking at the horizon and deciding what point we want to aim at. I always encourage people, you deserve to spend time thinking about just you.
And that means if you have to tell your spouse to go take a ride in the car, and you have to lock your children in the basement, and you have to throw your cat out the door, and you can sit on a couch for 10 minutes and not be distracted by a phone or a book or anything at all and just think about yourself and really how you’re feeling and what you want and what you need. I don’t think we do it. I think when we don’t do it, we end up with a life that’s led without decisions, a life that is sort of pushed along the way by forces others other than ourselves. I encourage your audience honestly for everyday to sit down for 10 minutes and just think about yourself and check in with yourself.
Because I just think when you do that, you’re going to make better decisions for yourself. You’re going to find yourself in a place that you really want to be in rather than a place where you kind of wonder, how did I get here? I think that’s the case for a lot of people.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. Okay. If you tune in next week, Matthew will be sharing some very specific strategy called homework for life, which I think will help with that. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Stay inspired.
Speaker 2:
Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at Facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram @SchulmanArt, and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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