Create the future.
Todd Henry is an international speaker, best-selling author, and advisor who focuses on creativity, productivity, and passion for work. He’s written numerous best-selling books, and his podcast, the Daily Creative, has been downloaded more than 20 million times since 2005.
As huge fans of Todd’s work, we’re excited to share this conversation with you! Tune in as we chat about creativity, AI, and the empowering future Todd hopes to help create for leaders and creative professionals everywhere.
David Bowman:
Welcome to Creating the Future. I’m David Bowman.
Evelyn Ritzi:
And I’m Evelyn Ritzi.
David:
And today we’re joined by one of our favorite voices in creative leadership, someone who helps us learn to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy every day. It’s Todd Henry. Todd.
Todd Henry:
Hey, no sound effects. Okay.
David:
Todd, you have such a fascinating background. It spans music to agency leadership to entrepreneurship. Walk us through your background and your career journey.
Todd:
Yeah. Um, I’ll, I’ll try to, I mean, it’s been 30 years, so I’ll try to be as, uh, you know, brief as I can, but, um, I, uh, I was born in 1970. Um, so I, uh, grew up, I was a lover of music, um, always loved music, always love, you know, creative endeavors. So I went to school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio to study marketing, but, um, I paid my way partially through school by performing music and thought, well, hey, this is kind of cool that I can actually go do something I love and people give me money for it. That’s kind of a cool thing that I’d never considered that growing up. Like you can actually go do work that you like and people will pay you for it. They didn’t pay me much for it, but at least I made money doing it. So after school, I decided I’m going to make a run at trying to be a musician full time. I did that for a few years as I tell everybody, including I did an interview with my buddy, Lionel Cartwright, about this on his podcast. I was as successful as you could be without being successful in the music business. Meaning I was playing tons of big shows and always like right on the verge of something really cool happening. and I won’t go into all the details, but, got to the point after several years where I realized like, know, Seth Godin talks about these two concepts of the dip and the cul-de-sac. And he said,
You don’t want to quit in a dip because a dip is just where it gets hard. But the cul-de-sac is where you notice I’m just kind of going around and around and around and around like year after year. And I realized after a handful of years, like I’m kind of in a cul-de-sac here. I’m going around and around and around. like, something’s going to break any minute. Something’s going to break. wasn’t cause I was, it was hard. was because I wasn’t willing to do the work. was just, nothing was changing. Right. So around that time I met, met a woman as the story goes and she convinced me music business, gainful employment and marrying an amazing woman. You can have two of the three, you can’t have all three. So I chose gainful employment, marrying an amazing woman through a series of circumstances ended up as a creative director for a nonprofit in Cincinnati where I grew a team and we were doing great work and really enjoying myself and was really struggling to try to figure out how do I keep my team like healthy and engaged. We were growing like crazy, doing tons of work. And as many people will know, Cincinnati has a strong presence of creative agencies, brand design firms, advertising, marketing, because of, you know, the presence of a couple of little companies called Procter & Gamble and Kroger. And at the time Macy’s was based here and you know, it’s kind of, you know, a couple of decent sized marketing firms, right? Little startups.
Todd:
And so I would get together with these, my friends from some of these brand design firms and agencies and say, hey, how are you keeping your people healthy? And they would say, what do you mean? We just burn through them and bring in a fresh crop. And I thought, well, that doesn’t feel right. Like just, and they’re like, well, know, hey, there’s always plenty of talent out there. And I thought, yeah, but if you’re not taking care of your talent, you know, over time, your culture is gonna devolve. And so I started experimenting with some things, started working pretty well.
Um, started sharing those with my friends and then right around that time, this thing called podcasting became a thing. This 2005. And I thought, well, Hey, I’ll start, I have an audio background because I did music. So, um, this is a great platform for me to experiment with sharing some ideas. So I did, I started a podcast called the accidental creative. Um, I put it on iTunes, which most people didn’t even know what that is now, but it was the precursor to Apple music and Apple podcasts and all that.
They had just launched a podcast directory where you could go in and search for podcasts. So I put it on iTunes and kind of forgot about it, honestly. And about a month later, there may be like three or four episodes I launched with, I came back about a month later looking for podcasts and there was a podcast called the Accidental Creative that was one of the top podcasts on iTunes. And my first thought honestly was, no, I stole somebody else’s idea. I can’t believe I didn’t check first to make sure there wasn’t already a podcast. And it was my podcast that was one of the top podcasts. And I thought, well, this is kind of interesting. It seems like there are a lot of people who want to have this conversation. So that happened for a few years. After a couple of years of doing this, I started getting invitations from companies, from leaders who were listening to the podcast, you know, from Mattel and Intel and Intuit and these amazing companies saying, hey, will you come spend some time with our team, just talking about these topics? So you don’t want to like just come share what you’re sharing on the podcast. This is the part of the story where it’s like, and then, and then US News and World Report did a feature article about my podcast. That’s kind of the, oh, well, and then like happens to everybody. And out of that came up, a literary agent approached me. We signed a book deal with Penguin Random House in 2009. And at that point I decided it’s time for me probably to go do this. Like this is what I need to be doing.
launched my business, the book, The Accidental Creative came out in 2011, fortunately did very well. And that was kind of the beginning of my scaling, getting to a point where I could go out and teach and speak. now for the last, I guess, 17 years, I’ve been traveling the world, teaching and speaking. I’m seven books in, have books in some like 18 languages now, which is great. yeah, so I teach and I speak about creativity leading talented people and how to do work with passion, how to be brave in the face of uncertainty. That’s primarily what I focus on and it’s been a real joy.
Evelyn:
I do want to talk about accidental creative because that’s the first book that David was like you need to read this one when I first started my job here and that was transformative for me so I do want to talk about creativity a bit and like how you define creative work because it might not be what what people think and maybe what you would say to folks who say well I’m not creative.
Todd:
Yeah. Um, so I would say, well, first of all, creativity is problem solving. So if you have to be creative, then congratulations, you are a, you know, you’re, if you have to solve problems, you’re a creative. mean, you are, um, especially if you have to solve problems under pressure. Um, all you’re doing is pattern forming. All you’re doing is finding connections, intuitive leaps between concepts. That’s what creativity is. And the designer does that one way, but a strategist does it a different way or, uh, you know, a writer or.
an entrepreneur or an engineer. mean, all of the, anybody who has to solve problems for a living is creative. And so that’s, you know, think we often conflate creativity in art. We think that because I don’t paint or I don’t make music that I’m not creative. Well, no, that’s, that’s not true at all. If you solve problems in any capacity, you face all of the same pressures and dynamics and pitfalls that the traditional quote unquote creatives face. You just face them in a different format in a different way. And so I think people do themselves a great disservice by saying I’m not creative because really what you’re doing is saying, well, none of this applies to me, but it does. You still feel fear of not getting it right. And that can sometimes prevent you from taking risks with your work. Well, that’s the same thing a designer feels when they’re thinking about making a non-intuitive suggestion for a design, whether that’s a strategy or an engineering project or whatever it is, you’re feeling those same dynamics. And so when you say I’m not creative, you’re selling yourself short and you’re also ignoring a huge part of what happens underneath the hood when you do your work, which is pattern forming, intuition and problem solving.
David:
Yeah, thinking back to it, there’s a book, Creativity, but it’s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, which everybody knows him from Flow, which is a masterful book.
Todd:
Yeah, right.
David:
But he’s got a different book titled Creativity and it talks a lot about, I think he interviews like a janitor who he terms as wildly creative, but based on his mindset and how he approaches his work. And I think it’s a great book, but it’s not an easy read. And I think your work makes that notion just so much more accessible, a little less academic and a lot more just everyday understandable.
Todd:
So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, well, we all stand on the shoulders of people like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, right? Because he is one of the preeminent researchers in this space. And when you say, you know, his book is a little more technical, it is a lot more technical. Whereas what I do is more anecdotal, right? His is coming from a research background, from a research perspective. so,
When I’m making suggestions, they’re often rooted in understanding of that research, but I’m not doing the primary research. Instead, I’m saying, Hey, you know, you and your teammate have to do this thing and this, and this thing happens, well, here’s how we deal with that. Right. and so I, I like you, that’s one of my favorite books of his actually, or one of my favorite, things I’ve read of his, cause he’s written a lot of papers and whatnot as well. and people often confuse the concept of flow too. I think people when people talk about flow, they just talk about, I was in the zone, I was cranking out so much work, but that’s not really what he means by flow. What flow means is that it’s just difficult, that it requires incredible focus and incredible, like it’s just maybe beyond your skillset to accomplish it. And yet it is accomplishable and it captures you and immerses you in a way that causes you to kind of lose track of time and your sense of.
Any other priority, right? And that’s when people tend to do their most contributive deep work to borrow a phrase from Cal Newport is when they’re in that state of flow, but that requires time and commitment. requires discipline to block off the space to do that. You don’t do that operating with what Linda Stone calls continuous partial attention. don’t do it with half your brain tied behind your back. You have to be fully immersed in it, which is why most people never experience that. So they’ll say, I was in flow. I cranked out so many emails today. No, you weren’t in flow. You were just, you were just cranking out work, which we all have to do. But flow is an entirely different thing because it engages parts of your brain that aren’t active when you’re doing the more administrative type work.
David:
One of the things you and I have talked about in just the various conversations is AI, right? And the various uses of it, what it can, can’t do. And I know a recent podcast episode you had really dealt with that a little bit. But when you think about that, why in this age of AI, why is creativity, creative thinking so important now, maybe more than ever?
Todd:
Yeah. Well, so we can, we can approach this from a couple of different levels. we can approach it from the practical business level and we can approach it from sort of, could call it the metaphysical level or the spiritual level. because I think there are answers on both fronts and I think they’re actually connected. It’s a circle, but, let’s, let’s call it from the metaphysical, from the spiritual level first, which is, I think that to create is a fundamentally human thing.
David: Yeah.
Todd:
It’s so human in fact that we have, we are now creating devices that can mimic that human capacity that no other being on earth has. No other being on earth contemplates its own mortality. No other being on earth can look at the environment and ask, what if, what if I built something over there? Now people will say, well, but beavers build dams. Yeah, but that’s biologically hardwired. Like beavers aren’t.
thinking, know, if we use oak instead of cedar, we could double the capacity of, know, they’re not, they’re not thinking straight. They’re just, they’re just doing what’s biologically normal for them. Right. whereas humans have this ability to counter entropy, to counter the dissolution of things in a way that no other being can. So I think.
From that standpoint, if we cease being creative, if we abdicate that creative mandate, I think we forfeit a part of our humanity. So, yay, on that happy note. So we have to keep creating or else we will forfeit our emotional being, our emotional soul. From a business perspective, we’re gonna get to a point pretty quickly where everything is reductive, where everything starts to feel vaguely familiar.
David:
Yeah
Todd:
Because AI, we call it generative AI, but it’s not really generating, it’s just pattern forming and using what it’s been trained on to form patterns. And so it feels new because it’s new to us, but it’s not new. And so I think that there’s always going to be a need for human intuition, for human taste, for humans to be able to,
to be able to exercise emotional logic, which is different from the kind of logic that comes out of machines. It comes out of AI. AI cannot do emotional logic. And by emotional logic, what I mean is a piece of work makes us feel a certain way. We have a reaction to it that’s rooted in our memories, that’s rooted in our aspirations. When we can tell that somebody has suffered for their work, it moves us in a way that you know, that we don’t often experience. So, you know, when I, when I hear things like Christopher Nolan doesn’t use CGI, he actually creates every single special effect that you see in any of his films. And he doesn’t use word processors to type his scripts. He, he has his scripts. He has physical copies that he hands to everybody for that. You these are his, and his notes are all pen and paper.
When I hear things like that, I’m like, I want to go see more of his films because there’s something, it’s not just the output, not just the product, but the process itself makes the work special. And so I think we’re going to see a tremendous use of AI for things like, and I just, today’s episode, podcast episode was with a couple of, one of the interviews was a couple of people who have started.
David (15:16.397)
Yeah.
Todd:
An AI for film editors to help them get through the grunt work of the early part of the process to get the quick edits faster so that they can use their intuition to do better creative work. Get the grunt work out of the way, use it like trucks, right? To help you like move the rocks. But then, okay, now I have to put the rocks in order. I think it’s gonna be a pushback against completely AI generated content in the next handful of years might take a while and not by everybody because some people are perfectly happy with AI generated slop They’re perfectly happy with it, but I think we’re be craving real human art Art that costs nothing means nothing If it doesn’t cost you something to make it if you just type the prompt it doesn’t really mean anything in the end So I think we’re gonna that’s always going to be it. There’s always going to be a desire for that
David:
Yeah.
Todd:
For friction. And by the way, that friction, sorry, I know I’m going on and on, but that friction is important as well. We move because of friction, cars move because of friction, music is made because of friction, whether it’s air rushing through something or vibration of strings, whatever it is, there’s friction that causes…
Art that causes sound that causes sensation and we’re trying to remove all the friction from our creative process But if we don’t have anything to push against then There is no art. There is nothing creative. So that would be my response is I think there we need to Yes offload the infrastructure parts of our work offload the grunt work. That’s fine But don’t offload the emotional logic. Don’t offload the the intuitive part of it because I think that’s what makes our work uniquely ours. And there’s gonna be more of a demand for that in the future.
David:
Yeah, it seems like AI is really good at delivering the expected answer, right? And I mean, based on its pattern recognition. And so that’s kind of what it’s about. And there are times when you want the expected answer, minus hallucinations. But where creativity shines, human creativity is, I’ve never seen that before. I’ve never thought, like that’s something I’ve never heard or seen.
Todd:
Mm-hmm.
David:
And that really is that uniquely human piece. I too, you mentioned the metaphysical, right? The very first word and verb in the Bible is created. And so if, you know, as a human notion, God is what we aspire to be, that represents perfection. Like, okay, well, that was the first thing our notion of God did was create. So there’s something in that deeper level to that where you’re really connecting with just something in the universe through that.
Todd:
Yeah. And I mean, if we, if we, if we want to get theological about it, we can also get theological about it and say that, you know, I mean, if you want to talk Genesis, you can say that, that, you know, man and woman are made in God’s image. and what does it mean to be made in God’s image? It means to be made with the attributes and the, qualities and the character, right. Or something about, so.
David:
Go then.
Todd:
If we know that in according to the Judeo-Christian heritage that God is a creator and if we know that humankind is made in the image of God, that means we are made as creators. We are wired as creators. There’s something about us that is unique. We are creators that we are able to generate from nothing. And so if we want, if we wanted to get on that road of being theological about it, we could say there is something fundamentally hardwired in us that is driven to create.
And when that drive to create is stagnant or when it’s taken away from us in some capacity that we feel the effects of that as humans. And so if we’re creating Andy Crouch, who I love as a philosopher and a tech expert and I had him on the podcast last year and he talked about AI. And he said, there are three things, three kinds of ways we can think about it. said there are tools.
He said, tools are great. Tools are like hammers. know, like I could hammer a nail with my hand, but it’s a whole lot easier if I have a hammer, right? It’s an extension of my capacity. So yes, I can try to hammer it with my hand, but a hammer gives me an extension of that capacity that makes it easier. Then he said there are instruments. An instrument gives us the ability to express our way, ourselves, our ideas in ways that we, that humans can’t. So think like a clarinet. I can imagine a clarinet solo, but I can’t make that sound with my body. But an instrument allows me to make that sound. Like an instrument gives me the capacity to do things I couldn’t do on my own. And then we have devices. Devices are like calculators, right? So I don’t know about you, but like when I was growing up, like we weren’t allowed to use a calculator in math class, we had to do the arithmetic in our head or we had to write it out.
David (20:21.335)
Yeah.
Todd:
And I was really good at doing that. I think at this point, it’s probably been 30 years since I’ve done math in my head, like hard math in my head, because I don’t have to. Why? Because I have a calculator with me everywhere I go. Well, what Andy would say is devices replace human capacities. And because we no longer have to, we no longer can. And I would say that’s true about me doing math. I would say if you gave me hard math to do in my head right now, I would struggle to do it. And the reason is,
I’m out of practice. I no longer can because I don’t have to anymore, right? I think the crossroads we are at with AI is we have to decide if we’re gonna use it like a tool, or we’re use it like an instrument, or we’re gonna use it like a device. I think there are creatives out there that are using it like a tool, which is fine, right? They’re using it to augment their capacity. Hey, take this thing and turn it into, give it 300 more words or something, right? That’s a tool. But the core of it was already written before.
An instrument, hey, give me seven things that I haven’t thought about that I probably should be exploring with this essay. my gosh, that’s really good. And then they go and they write the essay. That’s like using it as an instrument, right? It augments your capacity. helps you think about or express things that you would not have been able to do on your own. But then, it’s like, it’s like having a really great inspiring partner, right? Creative partner. Kevin Kelly called it an alien brain in an interview I did with him, right?
Or we could use it as a device, which is, hey, I have to write this 300 word thing, write it for me. There are times for that, for sure. I use AI to write my show notes for my podcast because honestly, like who cares? All it’s doing is describing what’s in the episode, but I would never use an AI avatar to interview my guests, right? I would never use an AI avatar to write my books or to be on videos of me. Why? Because
That’s the creative part of what I do. I’m using AI to describe the thing I already did. That’s fine. Like there’s nothing wrong with that, right? So I think we have to make a decision as creatives. Are we gonna use it as a tool, as an instrument or as a device? I think the highest use of AI right now is as an instrument. It’s to enable us to do things we couldn’t do on our own because we don’t have the capacity, the time, the energy, the focus to do it.
David:
Yeah.
Todd:
But AI gives us that ability because it augments our capacity. So I think that’s something we all need to be thinking about as leaders, as creative pros is how are we using it? And where are we using it? And where are we using it strategically?
Evelyn:
That’s a great perspective. I want to bring it back to another of our favorite books, is Herding Tigers, which is all about leading creative teams and working with creative people. And I feel like there’s some myths and just thoughts about quote unquote creative people and working with them and managing them. Are there any myths that you’d like to dispel?
Todd:
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the general, like one of the, one of the most frustrating things I experienced is like, creative is just flighty. They just, they just, they don’t want rules. They don’t want you to tell them what to do. And I think that that is a really damaging myth because first of all, you’re, can’t just lump a group and say creatives, right? Because like, again, we’re all creative and also like there are
healthy and unhealthy, functional and dysfunctional people in any category. So are there like creatives who are like, don’t give me any rules, man. Yeah, of course, of course there are, but also there are like bankers and lawyers who do that, right? So I think that’s one myth. The reality is most creative professionals that I know by the way, that’s important, creative, professional. There are two parts of that, creative, yay, we get to make things professional. You’re a mercenary. You’re making things for somebody else, right? Which means sometimes you’re gonna love what you make and sometimes you’re not, but your job is to do the thing that you’re hired to do. So most creative professionals that I know, they want boundaries. They want people to give them a sense of what to aim for because otherwise it’s like, I’m just spinning my wheels here, man. Trying to figure, I’m trying to get inside your head. I can’t figure out what you want. And there’s nothing more frustrating than working with a client who can’t even tell you what they want, right? They can’t even give you, they can’t even get you in the ballpark of what they want. And so I think that’s one of them is just creative pros often get a bad rap for pushing against authority, pushing against boundaries. But usually that’s because you won’t give me any direction and then I give you something and suddenly you come in and say, not that, go do this thing over here. And they’re like, wait, what? Like, you know, it’s, usually a reaction against.
bad leadership when I’ve seen it. But most creative professionals that I know are, they want boundaries. So that would be one big one, I think, is recognize that talented people need bounded autonomy, freedom within limits. They need boundaries to know where to focus their energy, but you need to give them freedom to think on their own and not try to control their process. And also not just coming at the end and say that’s not working for me. Try again, right? So you have to be leading them strategically influencing them throughout the process, but with clear direction.
David:
So one of the things you’ve written a lot about Todd is the idea of establishing like a creative rhythm. Talk a little bit, if you would, about like what are some of the daily rituals of the routines that you have that sort of get you in the place where you need to be to create consistently?
Todd:
Yeah, so there are five areas I wrote about in the Accidental Creative that form what I call creative rhythm. The first one is focus. Focus is about how you allocate your finite attention. We all have finite attention, so we have to choose very strategically where we’re gonna allocate that finite attention, which really comes down to how you define problems. A lot of us think we do projects. We don’t really do projects. We solve problems. That’s what we’re doing. And as we work, those problems get redefined.
So in that area, I’ll give you one example of a discipline I have right now that I didn’t even write about in the accidental creative, because this is a new, this is a new way of thinking about this for me. But I keep a list of what I call a list of tensions. most creative work is not about resolving tension. It’s about managing tension. Most leadership is not about resolving tension. It’s about managing tension. Those tensions are always going to be there. You’re always going to have a pushing a pole between deployment of resources and the quality of the work that you can do. How many resources should you deploy versus how great does this project need to be? That’s always a tension we’re gonna experience, right? Like how do we need to hire more people against this project or can we try to get fewer people to do more work, which means we have to move them away from other work.
It’s all about managing tension. So I keep a list of what I call a list of tensions and those are really problems I’m trying to solve. They’re open loops for me typically. And so that’s one way that I, and I review that every single morning. So this is my list of tensions. That’s one example of what that is in the book, in the book, the actual creative, talked about the importance of writing them, what I call your big three, which is a similar concept, which is what are the three most important open loops in your world right now and keep them in front of you. Consistently. the second area is relationships. We need other people in order to understand ourselves and in order to do our best work. But most of us aren’t very purposeful about building relationships in our life. So, it’s important that we have a discipline in our life of connecting with other people inviting input into our process, making sure that we’re not growing stagnant. the third area is energy management, which means managing our ability to bring what, what Lewis Hyde calls emotional labor to our work. all do labor, labor and mental labor, but emotional labor is discretionary energy that we bring to our work. and so I’m constantly looking at my list of priorities and asking myself what needs to be pruned. What good thing have I been doing that needs to go away? So something better could be born in its place, right? The fourth area is stimulus. So focus relationships, energy, stimulus or stimuli. These are the dots that we bring into our process to connect dots so that we can generate new ideas. Every single morning for the last 25 years, the first hour of my morning is sitting and reading and studying and thinking and writing and journaling and processing whatever I’m reading. And it could be anything. It could be. right now I’m reading a book called existentialism from Kierkegaard de Sartre, I think is what it’s called. it’s basically a book about existentialist philosophy. Does that mean I want to be an existentialist philosopher? No, but it fires my brain to think in new ways, right? It forces me to have to think about, I don’t know elements of my being that I don’t have to think about otherwise. So that would be one example of that. So You know, are you filling your mind with valuable stimulus consistently? And then finally hours, hours is about how we allocate our time. But most of us think about spending time. We don’t think about investing time. So do you have anything in your life where you’re investing in future returns? This can look like dedicating time for I did generation. I have blocks on my calendar every single week. Now, listen, I am immensely gift gifted in the sense that, I basically get to determine the work that I do which is a blessing and a curse because also nobody is telling me what to do. And so I pretty frequently make the wrong choices about what to work on because I do what is interesting to me, not what is going to provide for my family and build the business. So anyway, that said, we all need time where we’re investing in future returns. So I have regular time on my calendar every week where I am doing what I call basically strategy work or inventive work where I’m thinking, Hmm, what would I want? If I had all the resources I could ever want, what would I want to build? What would it, and one of the projects that came out of that is something that you’re both involved in creatively to round table, right? That was the result of me thinking about if, if really like, what would I want to make if I could make it? Well, I would want to make a community for.
leaders who feel alone and let them connect and you know and that came out of that sort of strategic thought time. So anyway focus, relationships, energy, stimuli, hours those are the five areas of rhythm and I encourage everybody listening to think about how they put a discipline in their life in each of those areas.
Evelyn:
Yeah, you brought it up briefly, but I want to talk about it a little bit more about the Creative Leader Roundtable and how it came to be, but maybe how it’s going so far, because we’re in the middle of it. It’s really exciting. We’re so thrilled to be a part of it.
Todd:
Yeah, well, we kind of just kicked off, And I’m intentionally keeping it small, smallish at the beginning because we need enough people for it to feel like there are enough voices, but we need it to be small enough where we can still build a culture and define what it is and kind of shape it before we scale it more. But it really came about because every single conversation I would have when I would go to speak at an organization or I’m talking to leaders in a pre-call for a speaking event because I do Handful of dozen speaking events a year and all over the world All of them revolve around this thing of like This is so great because we just never have anybody to talk to about this stuff and I’m like It’s so interesting to me that everybody keeps saying, we don’t have anybody to talk to about this stuff. And I’m like, you should meet the person I talked to yesterday who also told me the same thing. And so I just realized the reason is because we have, there are all kinds of groups like Vistage, which is a great group, but it’s for like CEOs of like reasonably large companies, or we have like YPO, but you have to like hit a certain mark to get in. You know, you have to have like a certain revenue mark or whatever. And then those are great organizations, but like, what about the creative director at an agency in Dayton, Ohio, or in Wichita, Kansas, or in whatever, where did they go? Who did they talk to? Let alone the unique work that they’re doing in the creative field. Who understands what they have to do every day? And so I just thought, wow, maybe somebody should create that. And I think part of the reason, honestly, somebody hasn’t created that is because…It’s a really hard group to reach. A, because, and I say this with all love, agencies are notoriously like hesitant to part with their money, with their resources when it comes to training and development. And I know not you, I’m not talking about the Ohlmann Group. Of course I’m not talking about that. But like, historically, like it’s just a really hard group to reach, right? Because they’re so busy and there’s so much on their plate. Which is exactly why they need it, but also why it’s so hard to reach them. So I think that’s a big reason why this is kind of a little unique in this space. And B, because anybody who was trying to start it was like basically trying to make a million bucks, you know, doing it. And so it’s like, well, if I can’t scale it to a certain point in a certain amount of time, then it’s not worth my effort. And I’m like, well, that’s, but that’s not why I’m doing it. I’m not, I mean, I hope it’s big and scales and whatever, that’d be fantastic.
But like I’m not primarily doing it just to make a bunch of money. I’m trying to do it because I see this real need that’s not being met. And I have incredible compassion for this group of people who have nobody to talk to. And I just want to connect them all and let them have conversation. And yeah, of course it’s my time. I have to make money, but like that’s not my primary concern. My primary concern is let’s just connect these people and let them have that conversation. So that was the impetus. And I think it’s gonna be really great before it’s all over. I think our first meetup went pretty well, feedback was pretty good and we’re gonna have some hiccups along the way but I’m very excited about it.
David:
Now it was, from my perspective, fantastic. And it was really interesting. There was enough difference between the folks in my group that it was interesting. You weren’t just talking to yourself, but there was so much, I don’t know if it’s empathy or sympathy, because we’re all dealing with the same things. And again, having somebody to talk to that’s living it and struggling with the same challenges. It’s just really, I don’t know, it’s affirming and just helpful, right? And just that ability to just talk through those things. It’s fantastic.
Todd:
100%. Like in part, part of it too, for me is like people ask me all the time, like what should I do? And I’m like, well, I’m happy to give you my opinion, but here’s a person right here who’s going through the same thing. And they’ve, why don’t you listen to what they have to say? Cause they’ve figured a couple of things out, right? Like we’re not sharing resources. Like, you know, it’s like if I was sitting at a table and you know, you had, you know, you had this terrible example, you had like a giant cup of water and I had a sandwich and that’s all we had. I’d be like, hey, I’ll give you half my sandwich if you give me half your cup of water, right? And then we both have a meal. I think there are a lot of people out there in the creative space who have like a sandwich or a cup of water. And they’re like, I just don’t, I want to share this with someone. I just don’t know who to share it with. And it’s a really weird analogy, but I think it, but I think it applies. Cause I think, you know, you have something to share with all the people in your group.
Todd:
That maybe they’ve never thought of before because they’ve never been in your shoes. You might have the unlock that completely changes the trajectory of their organization. So yeah, that’s my goal. I just want to connect a bunch of people and we’ll see what happens.
David:
Yeah, there was a lot of that dynamic and a lot of dynamic of just like, I got a glass water and no sandwich too. Like, okay, well we’re in this together.
Todd:
Right, Yeah. Anybody know a good sandwich shop? Right. Yeah, exactly.
David:
And if someone were interested in the Creative Leader Roundtable, where might they find some information about that, Todd?
Todd:
You can go to creativeleader.net and you can apply. We’re not actually accepting new members right now. As a matter of fact, we had, I think a hundred and something people apply. We only invited less than 25 to actually join this first round because we’re trying to keep it small and tight and focused at the beginning. But we will be inviting more people over the course of the year. we’ll probably, I imagine we won’t get any bigger than 50 this year. so we might double in size, but we’re not going to like quadruple in size this year. cause again, I’m trying to grow it strategically and make sure that we keep it at a, at a good, at a good pace as we grow, have the right people, not just a lot of people. That’s really important.
David:
So this question I suspect might be a hard question, but we’ll see. You’ve written several books that have really shaped how people think about creativity, about leadership, just really great stuff. I own all of them. I think I own all of them in print, Kindle, and Audible.
Todd: Hehehe.
David:
If you had to pick one that’s the most you, like this one is just near and dear to my heart. It just represents me in the best possible way so far. Which one would that be and why?
Todd Henry (39:07.726)
That’s a really hard, it is a really hard question to answer.
David:
It’s a Sophie’s choice.
Todd:
Kind of I mean it would be easy to say Daily Creative because it’s a reader that captures like so many little fragments I won’t say that one I Would say that the one I feel the most urgent about is the Brave Habit which is my latest book and the reason is that I really believe that right now There are a lot of people who know the right thing what they lack is the courage to do it under pressure and that applies in the business world that applies in our neighborhoods that applies in everything. Right. So I think that that’s the most urgent for me and the most personal message right now. and that’s really, the book is about integrity under pressure. It’s about like how to do the right thing, even when confronted with, you know, potential personal loss. But I would say the book that most expresses me is probably louder than words, which is ironically also my worst selling book of all of my books.
David:
Hey, I bought three, I did my part.
Todd Henry: Hey, well, thank you. You bought a third of all the copies that were sold now. I’m just kidding. and it’s funny when I say it was my worst selling book, like it still has sold more than like most business books that are released. but that book, that book was about how to identify and develop your unique voice, how to make your voice resonate in the marketplace. And I thought I was writing the one profile of person. And it turns out I was writing to an entirely different profile of person because that’s the book of all the books I’ve written. Even though it sold the worst, that more, like you’ve even called them famous people, well-known people have reached out to me and said, hey, thanks for writing this. This really helped me. This really helped me refine how I talk about what I do. It really refined how I present myself, really refined how I make my work matter, reconnected me with why I do what I do. So I wasn’t.
Like if I had set out to write a book that was targeted at like famous musicians or famous filmmakers or famous, you know, business leaders, I would have written a different book, but it turns out that’s the book that I wrote and I didn’t mean to. so I’m grateful for that. So I think that’s probably the one that most does that. Most resonates with who I am. and it should, it’s about finding your, ironically, it’s a book about how to make your voice resonate. And it sold the least of all my books.
David: Hahaha.
Todd:
But I think it did resonate deeply with the people who read it and that matters as much to me as anything.
Evelyn:
A lot of people, famous people, regular people like myself and David, we look to you for creative inspiration from books, podcasts. But when you need to refuel your creative tank, who or what are you looking to for inspiration?
Todd:
Yeah, I I do the same thing. I listen to podcasts, you know, I go out and I try to find interesting thinkers. I, as much as I can, try to go back to original sources or I try to go back to original thinkers from the past because I find that there’s a kind of zeitgeist, a recycling in the zeitgeist, you know, like I’m hearing, so funny, like I know that they’re not doing this on purpose, but like I’ll hear people share ideas that are like, just had this amazing thought and I’m like, yeah, I wrote about that like 20 years ago, you know, or whatever. Like I’ll hear that all the time. And I’m sure when I put my first books out, there probably was somebody reading them going, yeah, I was writing about this in 1978, you know? So there’s this kind of recycling that happens in the zeitgeist that where everybody thinks that they’re original, because it’s really about like, hey, pay attention to me more than it is about like contributing to original thought. So I go back to, that’s why I’m reading the existentialism book. Like I want to read what Dostoevsky was thinking about, you know, in the mid 1800s about culture and society. And, um, you know, I want to know more about, uh, how Kierkegaard saw, you know, the decline of Europe in the 1800s. so it’s, I don’t know. It’s just helpful to me to go back to those. Uh, one of my favorite writers of all time is a mystic and a monk from the mid-1900s Thomas Merton, who was cloistered outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and I think wrote some of the most profound stuff about life and art and creativity and business even. He wasn’t writing about business, but he was writing about business. And just really profound stuff that really just made me think in a new way about life and work and all that. So I try to look to those kind of voices because, A, their wisdom has stood the test of time. And B, it’s something I can react against that doesn’t feel contemporary, it doesn’t feel like a kindling that you throw on a fire and then kindling burns up pretty quickly. It feels more like a deep substantial log that you’re putting on the fire that’s going to burn for a while. So like everybody, I listened to, I listened to all the podcasts, right? he’s trying to absorb the zeitgeist, but when I really want to stop and think, I go back to as much as I can, like the original, not the original, but the, like the, the sources that have stood the test of time.
David:
One final question that we like to ask every one of our guests. What’s the future that you want to create?
Todd:
I believe that we, that all of us, the one thing that’s going to be required of us moving forward is going to be the discipline of bravery. And then we talked about them when I talked about, the brave habit, but, I want to create a world in which people are connected to one another in which they’re sharing their aspirations, their dreams and their ideals with one another in which they have a support group where that can help them accomplish that. And, in which people feel empowered to.
Express their ideas in a way that can resonate and serve the world around them and that could be through any medium It could be through any forum any whatever but I just want to create I want to create a world in which people don’t feel inhibited by their own fears by aimlessness that they’re rooted in their productive passion. They’re curious. They’re growing there. They understand who they are They’re not limited by fear. They’re connected to others, they’re leveraging their platform. That’s the future that I want to create. Cause I think that’s when everything gets beautiful is when we’re all operating in our area of productive passion. We’re all, we understand what we’re willing to suffer for. That’s when the world gets really beautiful.
David:
Amen, I love that. Well Todd, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. It’s fantastic.
Todd:
Great, thank you. Yeah, this is really fun. It’s been great getting to know both of you more and looking forward to seeing you in the round table. And thanks for all the great work that you do there.
