Episode Transcript
Transcript:
Intro: This is words that move me, the podcast where movers and shakers, like you get the information and inspiration. You need to navigate your creative career with clarity and confidence. I am your host master mover, Dana Wilson. And if you're someone that loves to learn, laugh and is looking to rewrite the starving artist story, then sit tight, but don't stop moving cause you're in the right place.
Dana: Hello. Hello everybody. And welcome back to the podcast or welcome for the first time. If you're new, I am so excited that you are here. And as always, I am super jazzed about this episode. Like very jazzed about this episode. Um, today I want to talk about something that hasn't been addressed here on the podcast in quite a while, broadly creativity, but specifically creating something daily and here on the podcast, we call that doing daily. Now of course, before we do that, I do want to share a win and I want to hear yours. And I also want to tell you that I am wearing overalls today, not jingle bells. These are overalls just wanted to let you know this will be a very spirited episode because of my jingle bell overalls. Okay. Let's talk wins this week. My win is that I am so honored to be teaching for my dear friend, Tiler Peck's summer intensive. And I am not sure if enrollment is open, I will definitely find out. Um, and when I do, if it is open, I will absolutely link to that in the show notes. And I will brag loud and proud about it on all the socials so that if you are able to, you can enroll in those classes. I am simply super proud to be a part of this all star lineup. And I'm just very excited about this intensive. All right, that is my win. Now you go, what's going well in your world.
Congratulations. Keep crushing it. I'm jazzed for you. Okay. Let's get to it.
When I created this podcast, it was not my goal to create a community of daily doers. It was my goal to create a podcast about navigating a creative career. I had written a book of tips and tricks with notes and quotes, a bunch of things that I had collected along on my journey. And on January 1st, 2020, I was ready to. Now, here we are over six months later, living in very, very different circumstances, a global pandemic resulting in over 9 million cases and almost 500,000 deaths worldwide. COVID-19 also brought the US unemployment rate to 13.3% today, much higher in California I believe. Add civil unrest in response to police brutality and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and sadly. So, so many more. The rise of the black lives matter movement. The rise of awareness of other oppressed groups all over the world, the awakening of many to systemic racism and the call for anti-racism.
Okay. And now here we are. So way back in January feels like lifetimes ago. When I decided to create this podcast about navigating a creative career, a podcast about making it, I decided that the most important part of making it is making actually making it, making it a thing, making your thing. So I decided to make my first episode doing daily about my daily creative challenge. I took on a year of daily Instagram videos. I wound up going for much longer over 400 and some days. Now that was my first episode because I knew I'd be referencing it a lot throughout the podcast. Again, it wasn't my intention, but that episode sparked something and a community was born first, a handful, then a bundle, then a gaggle of artists doing daily. It was very, very cool to behold something super, super special. And I want to quickly shout out some of my daily doers.
We got @dinkadoingdailyWTMM we have @_maile_We have @greatgabyJum, @madisynsloane @sky_spiegel Michael @sydneycheri , @the_good_guy91 @rebekahwrangler @fridawson My mom, @stefawils @marcellasweeney I mean so many. I can't even list them all here in an episode and keep it under 45 minutes. But I was truly, truly inspired to see such a community growing around, doing daily.
Then the lockdown, the protests, the massive calls to action, the massive action. And the doers started to dwindle. Less people were sharing their daily project and this isn't good. And this isn't bad. This is neutral. Less people were sharing their daily projects on Instagram. And that is okay. But today I'd like to make the argument for why doing daily is important, especially right now in this crazy moment in history. So Yes, Read. Yes, Watch. Yes, Listen. Yes, Learn. Yes, Donate. But if self awareness and awareness of the world around you is your goal. Then I strongly recommend taking on a daily creative project as part of your regimen. Here's why
To make a creative work. You have to look both inside and outside. You must call on your imagination and you must take action. You must find your voice and use it. Even if all it speaks is questions. It's so, so important. So today I'm going to answer a lot of questions about doing daily and I'm going to be making the argument for being creative right now. And I don't mean right now, June, 2020. I mean, right now, whenever you are listening to this, I really hope that it sparks a voice inside of you. And I hope that when that spark speaks you, listen, I hope that you answer.
Why did I start doing daily? Well, I discovered a human being on Instagram named Adam Carpenter. He goes by @AdamSCarpenters. And I just thought he was the most delightful and charming and unusual and self motivated and in control of his silliness person that I had ever seen. Um, I looked forward to seeing his work every single day. I was just tickled by it. And then one day via the Instagram communications, I met him. I met my hero. It was the most surreal experience, especially for somebody who works with famous people often like this guy to me, was it. Um, and when we met, he challenged me to do a daily creative project of my own. And I simply couldn't say no. So that is why I started. Now, what was the most important thing about doing daily to me? At the time, it was learning the power of my imagination. I want to share a quote with you that I recently read in Glennon Doyle's book Untamed, which is rocking my world. Glennon says, quote, “discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you” and quote. So if you are a person that is discontent or unhappy with the current state of the world, then look to your imagination. Let that be a check engine light that you have something to do. And something to say, huge, huge part of daily doing for me, another part, a key factor was redistributing my creative authority back into my own hands. My career up to that point had largely been about other people's approval and other people's projects. Now, after years of bending myself to fit the breakdowns, nothing was as rewarding as answering to myself. Now, with hindsight, I can say that nothing is as rewarding as the community of doers that I met along the way. So you might be thinking right now, “Dana, a daily personal project sounds a little bit self centered and super time consuming. And isn't this a time where I should be selfless. Isn't this a time where I should be doing other things with my time.” Well, perhaps, but if you want to do big things, if you want to make big work, and if you want to make big change, then I suggest you start by taking small bites. This project doesn't need to be big. It doesn't need to be time consuming. You get to decide how much time you spend on it and you get to decide what you do. That's the beauty of it. That is special. Also what's super special is that when you learn to show up for yourself in little ways, every day, you learn how to show up for others in big ways forever. I like to ask the question, how can I prioritize myself so that I have more to give to others? A daily creative project is one of those ways.
Okay. A lot of people ask, what is the most important part of doing daily? Is it the creation of it? Is it the publication of it? Is it the reflection on it? Well, to that, I would say that creation and reflection are very closely linked while you're making you are making with the knowledge and the memory of everything you've made up to that point. I'm, I'm using lessons that I've learned and applying them to what I'm doing reflections of past work happened while I'm creating as well as after they've been shared. So it's kind of part of this bigger puzzle. The sharing itself is important to me because although it was interesting to learn how to receive such a quick feedback loop and to learn how an audience responds and what they respond to. It was also slightly misleading because I felt myself occasionally making work and making decisions based on what the audience might want opposed to making the work that I wanted to make. And sometimes by the way, there is overlap there, the audience wants the same thing that I want to make. And that's the sweet spot. That's great. But really my doing daily project was less about the sharing and more about the doing it. It was more about claiming authority of my creative life. So if you're thinking that it doesn't feel right to share a self centered project right now, great, make your project about something that does feel right to you. And if it's the sharing part that really rubs you wrong, I'd ask you to get down to the bottom of why. Make sure that you like your reason for not sharing. If you decide not to share and equally on the flip side, you should like your reason for sharing should you decide to share. Shouldn't just be because I said so,
All right, now, next question. How do you convince yourself to do on days where you really don't want to do this is such a great question on days that I don't want to do. I hear Toni Basil's voice in my head, Toni Basil, by the way, in case you do not know is a pillar of the street dance community. She's a member of the original lockers. She is one of the first to bring street dance to the mainstream and fuse it literally side by side with classical ballet. I'm linking by the way, to her Emmy nominated interpretation of Swan Lake in the show notes. This is a must watch, especially if you've been listening to the last couple of conversations I've had with Dominique Kelly, very, very important today, today, Toni Basil is 75 years old. And I'm going to go ahead and say that today she could roast any of you, which is bold because I know there are some pretty funky people listening, but I stand by my claim. I stand by my claim, not just because of all of her history, but because she dances every single day, she's still got it. And she's still getting better. Now, one day I asked Toni, “Basil, do you ever not want to dance?” And she said, sure, all the time. And then I said, “okay, so what do you do? How do you still show up and dance even when you don't want to?” And she said, quote, I just pretend to be someone who does want to dance and quote mind blown. Thank you Basil. Now to be a hundred percent honest, there were days when I was so motivated that I would make two movies. And then there were days when I wasn't making, as in creating or capturing, but I would be editing one thing or posting another thing, or, you know, maybe I'd be filming one thing and editing another. So it wasn't necessarily that I went through a full loop every single day. I didn't do the whole cycle from inception to creation, to curation. And by that, I mean like editing reshooting, et cetera. Um, and then sharing it wouldn't always be that whole cycle, but it would be at least one of those things.
Okay. Next question. Why is the daily part so important? Well, this is a dancer speaking. We get better at the things that we practice, right? The more I practice a double pirouette the better I get at it. And not only that, but a double pirouette, it becomes a triple and then four or five or six or seven. Now I believe that the creative habit gets stronger. The more you practice it and gets weaker, the less you practice it. So people say a lot of things about creativity and habits and what it takes to truly create one. I think I remember reading somewhere a magic number being 66. Like it takes 66 days of practice before a behavior becomes automatic. So that's certainly part of it. I don't know if that is truly a magic number or not, but I also found tremendous freedom in knowing that I would do it no matter what. I think that had my goal then to be creative three days a week, for example, then I might've started negotiating, which days, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday becomes, well, maybe not Sunday, but maybe Monday. And then Monday gets pushed back to Wednesday and then Wednesday gets pushed back to Friday. And all of a sudden it's been a week without any doing. Daily, doing left no room to negotiate with myself about whether or not I would do it. I just absolutely did it no matter what. And that built strong creative habits, it built them quick and it built them strong.
Now here's an interesting consideration. Do I think that work, you do on the clock for another entity, like a movie or a music video shoot, for example counts as you're doing daily? Well, I'm not saying that creative work on the clock, isn't creative or isn't helping to build creative habits, but during my year plus of daily making, I chose to create my daily project outside of my already pretty creative job, which was at the time being a background dancer on tour with JT on the 2020 experience. Now, of course the cast and crew, and occasionally the backdrop of tour would appear in my videos, but I kept a rule for myself that if I included my job in my work or in my project, if you will, it would be my job Plus. My job as a backup plus a twist or plus a different concept or a plus a gag or a gimmick or some sort of technical modification, et cetera. And that kept my focus on my authorship that kept the focus on the creative muscle.
Next question is keeping the doing the same every day important. In other words, if I decided to do a photo a day and then eventually changed my mind to painting a picture instead of taking a picture or doing a dance one day and a picture the next day, is that important to the project? Um, I won't say, I think that each doer can decide that for themselves. What I will say is that one would be wise to identify the weak spot in their process or their habit that needs the most strengthening and focus their creative efforts there. When I signed my imaginary contract with myself and agreed to my daily challenge, I was really, really good at having ideas.
I had ideas a mile a minute, but I wasn't very good at finishing them. I rarely shipped. I rarely shared. So for me, the doing was the shipping, the sharing, the putting out into the world. Now, if you're a person that shares with ease, then perhaps your challenge lies in the digging deep, or maybe it lies in the conceptualizing. It might show up as 365 ideas for projects or 365 short stories or 30 short stories. Maybe you want to be learning a new technical skill like video editing, for example, this is a very good time for dancers to understand how to edit video and capture by the way. Um, maybe you're a generalist who really wants to go deep on something like some specific style or even one specific move. Imagine an Instagram account where a person just did a pirouette at a day for an entire calendar year. And you get to watch them from being kind of okay at pirouettes or maybe even bad at doing periods. And then becoming really, really good at pirouettes over the course of a year. I would definitely follow that person. Now, your project doesn't have to be for an entire year. You get to name the terms of your contract. It's up to the doer to decide what you do and how long you do it. And you don't have to do it all alone. You have a whole community of daily doers right here. You can even do together. You can do together apart. That's the beauty that is truly the power of this. The power is that it is your power, your decision, your authority. And if you practice it, if you practice it daily, that can become your super power. Yes. Super powers.
So this episode is my pledge to nurture the doing daily community. Please mention us or use the #doingdailyWTMM there's two M's there #doingdailyWTMM in your doing daily posts on Instagram, because I would love to see what you're up to. I am here to encourage you and to be a part of this journey with you, and also to tell you right now that it is okay to start a daily project that turns into a weekly project that turns into a monthly project. It's okay to come back. It's okay to fumble a day. This is about making changes from the inside out. This is about persistence determination. This is about living a creative life by strengthening your creative habits.
All right. Thank you all so much for listening. I hope that if you haven't already, you go back and listen to episode one and honestly do not sleep on episode two. There's a lot of really good technical information in there about how I really physically actually made it through over a year of doing daily. Also a huge thank you to my team, Riley Higgins and Malia Baker for helping me keep this podcast, this community and myself together. I so appreciate you guys. Um, one other thing before I sign off, I want to make sure you guys are aware of an awesome doing daily resource. My team, and I have created an interactive PDF. We're calling it the doing daily diary. It helps keep you accountable, keep you on track and keep you learning about you're doing daily project that is available to you by becoming a words that move me member on Patreon to do that, just visit patreon.com/WTMMpodcast Definitely going to link to that in the show notes as well. I hope to see you there in my Patreon community. It's a really fun place for me to connect. Give you guys all sorts of extras. And of course for you all my daily doers to connect with each other. So head on over there, enjoy have a great creative day. And of course, Keep it funky
Thought you were done. No. Now I'm here to remind you that all of the important people, places and things mentioned in this episode can be found on my website, theDanawilson.com/podcast Finally, and most importantly, now you have a way to become a words that move me member. So kickball change over to patreon.com/WTMMpodcast to learn more and join. All right, everybody. Now I'm really
Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.
