Focused - 163: The Laws of Creativity, with Joey Cofone

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Baron Fig CEO Joey Cofone joins us to talk about creativity, embracing constraints, and finding your own way.

Welcome to Focus, the productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hey, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great, and I am very excited to be joined by Joey Caffone. Welcome to the Focus podcast, Joey. Mike, thanks, man. David, nice to meet you, see you, hang with you. Mike, I'm already super enthused, and I'm a little rough around the edges, and we're going to probably talk about why, which I'm excited to get into. Yeah. So the reason that we reached out to you,

Joey, is that you wrote this great book, The Laws of Creativity, which we're going to dive into. But great book, The Laws of Creativity, which we're going to dive into. But people may also be familiar with some of your other work. You run a company called Baron Fig. I want to tell us a little bit about what Baron Fig does. And we were chatting before the call about the genesis behind the name. I think that might be interesting for our listeners as well. Yeah, happy to dive in there. So I founded Baron Fig, a company that makes tools to help you do your best thinking way back in 2013. And it came from an interesting experience I noticed in design school where my fellow designers used two tools, a laptop and a notebook. The laptops were all the same, MacBooks, and the notebooks were all different, different sizes and brands. And so I wanted to explore that. And I did. I pretty much

dropped everything I was doing. And for five months, explored how to make the best notebook, put it on Kickstarter way back when Kickstarter was pretty new, actually. And we were looking for, I think it was 15 grand, but we did 168. And we thought, wow, we've got a company here. And so we launched it the following year. And now we have over 75 products shipped to 95 countries. And it's been just about 10 years that I've been doing it. So a lot has certainly changed. Now you asked about the name Baron Fig before the show

and I answered that the wanting to know is perhaps more interesting than the knowing. We used to have it on our website and we found that people enjoyed the mystery more than the answer, which is such is human nature. But the answer is Baron Fig was built on discipline and impulse, and we essentially used Apollo and Dionysus as the models. as the models. And so Baron is a derivative of the word soldier,

which relates to Apollo and discipline. And then Fig is a symbol of Dionysus. Slap it together, Baron Fig. And here we are. And that is the perfect introduction to the topic of creativity, which we're going to talk about today. Yeah, and as an owner of multiple Confidant notebooks, I'm really happy to have you on the show and talk to the guy who put this thing together that I use all the time.

Wow. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I'm excited to hear what you guys have to say, especially since you actually read the book, which I appreciate and I'm impressed by. Yeah. So the book is called The Laws of Creativity. You can get it now. It's a big book. What is it? About 436 pages. But it moves really fast. Thank you, Joey, for sending me the copy. And I read it over a course of like three days. It didn't take long at all because it's very good. It's about creativity, of and and and you have laws of creativity you break it down and but you also have nice stories you've told clearly you've

thought a lot about this stuff over the course of your life and and maybe we should start there let's tell us about you and creativity yeah there was there was a pivotal moment in my life when i was seven that changed everything for me. And I guess we all have that moment that you can look back and say, and this is why I do what I do. For me, I was seven years old. I walked into first grade and the teacher handed us a worksheet. We're probably all familiar with that scenario. You sit down, color it, cut it out, put it on the board, and you're good to go,

and it's up for the week. Well, I guess I took a while to color mine because I really wanted it to be the best because when I walked up to the board after cutting it out, my worm, although I used a different application of my Crayola colors, it still felt the same like all the other worms on the board. And so I could not face putting it up there. So I sulked back to my desk and the teacher said, is everything okay? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But of course it was absolutely not. I was devastated and I was actually close to tears. And I remember having my head in my hands thinking, what do I do? I don't want to put this up there. And I was looking down at my desk and there were the shards of paper lying there and a light bulb went off over my head.

And I realized that I could use those to my advantage. So I made three accessories, a necklace, a boom box, and a microphone that I drew on those shards, cut them out, put them on the worm. I put that on the board and I'll never forget, the teacher walked up behind me and said, I've never seen anything like it. And from that day forward, I was addicted to the feeling of creating something where someone could say, wow, I've never seen that before. And so fast forward and here we are, however many years later, where I essentially built a company around helping people find that feeling, exploring that more myself with all the products we make. And the book kind of turned into an inevitability. That's so heartwarming.

I mean, not everybody does have an origin story like that. And even, I think, more relevant, a lot of people have the opposite experience of going through the educational system where creativity gets drummed out of you. And that is where you started. I mean, I think that's special. Yeah. No, that's a good point. And you served up well a point that I wanted to make, which is a piece of data that we found early on when doing research for this book. So I thought, you know, what can I hang my hat on here and say, this is the problem I'm

solving. And actually, Andy Tallarico, who's an incredible compatriot at Baron Fig and does so many wonderful things, was helping me get this book off the ground by doing research. And she found a study that NASA did, which immediately launched me into the mission that I knew I was going to take. And that study found that 98% of kids are at the creative genius level at age five, but by 15 years old, it's only 12%. And by adulthood, it's just 2%. So when you go from 98 to 2%, that is a systemic, reliable result that shows something is very, very, very wrong. So for me, I wrote this book where it's, you know, I'm not going to teach you how to be creative. My goal is actually to teach you how to remember, because chances are, 98% likely, that you were creative. And so how do we get you back into the way you were thinking

when you were younger before it was hammered out of you? I love that statistic. One of my favorite quotes is by Hugh MacLeod mentions that everyone's born creative. Everyone's given a box of crayons in kindergarten. And the quote says that when you hit puberty, they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, et cetera, being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, I'd like my crayons back, please. I think that's exactly what you're saying. And it confirms essentially what I've believed is that everyone is born creative. We just lose our way. And so I feel your book is a great resource to help people

get back on that path. Now that we were kind of entering the space, I would love to hear both of you and your relation with that perspective. Did you feel that growing older, the comparison to your youth and now? Yes, yes. In fact, you have in the introduction three devastating perspectives taught by school systems. Authority is unquestionable. Man-made rules must be followed to a fault, and the end is visible from the start. And that struck a chord with me because I remember when I was in kindergarten, I was there for the first day, and the teacher's explaining everything that we're going to be doing. And apparently, my parents tell me that I raised my hand

and told the teacher, Mrs. Crum, if you would stop talking, we'd have time to do some of these things. Oh. So I feel I maybe expressed my frustration not in the correct way at that moment, but I felt a lot of the same sort of feelings that you were feeling with the worm and just never been one to really just follow the rules and go with the flow.

And I feel like creativity does require a little bit of rebellion. Yours was probably more positive than mine because you went back and figured out how to make a boombox, a microphone, and a necklace instead of confronting your teacher. But I feel like it's rooted in the same sort of thing. Yeah, I have a little sparky origin story too that's on the similar vein. In kindergarten, we had our Thanksgiving day, right? And because it was the 70s, the girls were making turkeys and the boys were making cardboard guns to go out and shoot the turkeys and um the teacher had drawn a picture on the board about okay this is how you cut the gun you know and and i got up and i said you're doing it wrong and she's like really because they the end of the gun was squared off.

And I had, as a little kid, seen all the pilgrim guns had a flare at the end. So I got up in front of the class and redrew the gun so everybody could see how it should be made. But that happens. I'll tell you, going through school, I was fortunate in that I was the beneficiary of some wonderful arts programs, primarily music, but also theater and some other things I did as a kid and going through the system that kept me creative, that kept those juices flowing. And now I'm a little bit older. I've got my gray hair and I've been in two careers. And I can tell you that the people most successful that I saw, I mean, for almost 30 years, I was a litigation attorney. The people who are best at other ones that have a creative spirit. And to the extent that the school system takes that out of you, we should be fighting for our

kids to get that back. Because I think it just changes the way you experience life and your effectiveness at whatever you choose to do whether it's being a plumber or a lawyer or an artist i think it really can make a difference yeah i agree it's it's all about facing the unknown when you're creating because the very nature of creativity is that you're doing something that that you don't know where it's going to end up you don't know what it is because until you do it it is not something that has necessarily been done that way which means the more comfortable you are with creativity the more comfortable you are with the unknown and life is just a collection of unknowns end capped with an unknown and so that it's

essentially dealing the better you are there the better you are at everything just like you said whether you're a plumber or a lawyer whatever it is and it's funny because so many people that you'll meet in life that are really good at something. You know, recently I met a doctor who's like one of the best at his thing and talking to him, I found out that he also likes to paint landscapes, you know, and it's like everybody who is good at something quite often you find they've got some little creative outlet and it's not necessarily as on the nose as painting, but they have something. And so many people have these little creative outlet. And it's not necessarily as on the nose as painting, but they have something. And so many people have these little creative outlets which keep them going. Yeah, how excellence in many fields are people who are excellent, I guess, have creative outlets.

I'm curious, the side hustle thing, I feel like that probably maps to something else you say in the introduction about rebellion being an inherent part of the creative act. How have you seen this play out in your own life, not just when you were seven with the worm activity, but just with everything that you've done with design and Baron Figg and even the writing process for this book. Yeah. Rebellion is inherent in almost every level of creativity, starting with the decision to express yourself at all. So I define creativity as the practice of ideas and the manifestation of creativity is self-expression. It's that easy. And when you are comfortable developing your ideas and you're comfortable expressing yourself, as we said, you tend to excel because you will say and do and ask things that may or may not work but when you do those things you learn so the first step in

rebellion and understanding that type of rebellion is is through weirdness which is why chapter one is be weird i love this one thank you i appreciate it. I agonized over chapter one and I probably will continue to for a long time. But the point I wanted to make there, and I do make hopefully, is that there's a curious thing that we human beings do. Let's just think about our daily life as a bubble, okay? We live inside our bubble and maybe it's 10 square miles, maybe it's 30, and it involves the people you see every day, the places you go, and where you spend 99% of your time. want people to fit in and we want to fit in. And that manifests very simply. I don't even have to prove it because it manifests when maybe in high school we said, oh, there's the weird kid or at the office, you know, someone will say, hey, welcome to your new job. You know, that person

over there is a little weird, you know, but you could have lunch with us. And what we're doing is we're banging people into conformity and the few brave souls who decide to express themselves become pariahs in our bubble. And I don't even think that's debatable. It's just how the average person, the average group of people, I should say, kind of operates. But here's where it gets interesting, is that the people that we admire, maybe even worship, those that are outside of our bubble are exceptionally weird. side of our bubble are exceptionally weird so i'm going to name a few people and it's not that i admire them or not but it's just examples such as elon musk is an odd character michael jackson odd character uh martha stewart it's quite odd but they are all incredibly successful and effective because they accept they've accepted that this is who they are and that they let that out and when you do that it becomes quite powerful because you are unlike

anyone else and so that is the first act of rebellion necessary to being creative is to accepting yourself and i know it does sound a little hokey. All right, Joey, is this a practical book or is this some sort of woo-woo type of thing? But everything that follows is enabled by simply saying, I am who I am. Absolutely. I don't think you could start it anywhere else, to be honest. Because in the first real section of the book, you talk about the laws of mindset. And you have this analogy that creativity is a piece of software. And to run it, you need the correct operating system.

Or said a different way, you need the right perspective. And this is the perspective change that needs to happen, had to happen for me. And I think it needs to happen for anybody else who aspires to be creative. In fact, when I describe myself online now, I use the term reluctant creative because I never really wanted to be creative, but eventually something had to come out of me and I had to be okay with putting something out there and taking a stand on something even if people didn't like it.

I'm a recovering people pleaser. That was really, really hard for me for the first several years. But you do get to the point where you just own your weirdness. And it's very freeing. Absolutely. You know, there, if there are listeners out there who maybe they're, they're thinking, all right, I'm about to turn this off or this isn't for me, or this is abstract and we're not getting aware. I do want to, I want to bring this into the, the, the mathematical. And my wife always says, don't do the math.

Don't do the math. Avoid the numbers because I am not, you know, a math whiz by any stretch, but screw it. Let's simply try this. So right now, when you are not attempting to be the person that you are, you're one in eight billion. just three of your interests and we put them together and we limit the quantity to a thousand each. So if I've got a book and a movie and a TV show and they're way more than a thousand, but for math's sake, we'll limit it. Those combinations equal a billion, which means instantly when you put those three things into whatever you create or however you express yourself, you go from one in eight billion to one in eight. And if we add a fourth thing with the same limitations and you add up those combinations, the permutations are one trillion, which is 128 times population of earth, which means you are actually provably

incredibly unique when you just start putting your interests into what you do or what you make. Does that make sense? It makes total sense to me. You got questions about this, David? No, I think it's great. And it's something that people tend to forget. I think the idea that you are a unique specimen, you either believe it or you don't. But it's so limiting if you don't. It really changes your life experience. So I'm going to put you on the spot here, Joey, and we can edit this out if you're not ready for this. But I literally just went through an exercise of this in an online writing course that I was taking. And they were telling people to figure out what your niche is and what are the three things, the intersection of the things that you want to be known for. So for me, what I landed on was intentional technology use, reluctant creativity, and faith-based productivity. And using those three things, I'm probably the only

person or very small sample size that overlaps those three things. Have you identified what those things are for you though? I don't think I've done it in that way. I focus mainly on creativity, but let's just do it. I'm going to wing it, because why not? I'm going to say practical creativity is in a sense of every chapter, there's 39 laws in this book, and in every chapter I add a practical section where I try to bring it down from the sky to the ground in a way that you can either mathematically prove it or test it pragmatically. So let's say practical creativity. accessible design where I'm not the designer who is obsessed about the tiny little shapes on the ligatures of this typeface. And that's not me. My message is how do things come together to

deliver a message that matters? So I'll say accessible design. And then the third one, which I'm only just now playing with, which is essentially something like playful humor, I think. There's some amount of silliness, and I think it does relate to maintaining a bit of a childhood outlook. And I'm not... I mentioned this at the top of the show. I'm not, I'm rough around the edges today because I usually go to bed at 8.30 at night. And we went to bed at midnight last night because we launched the book. We had a little event here in New York City. So you guys got the mellow Joey. But I think normally I'm off the wall and a little bit of a doofus in a way in which I just kind of enjoy letting it out and seeing where it goes.

So I would say those three things, practical creativity, accessible design, playful humor. I love it. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Indeed. Rapid growth for your business doesn't have to come with growing pains. When you have ambitious hiring goals, you need a partner to help you get there. You need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner where you can attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Don't spend hours on multiple job sites looking for candidates with the right skills

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place. So join more than 3 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. Indeed knows when you're growing your own business, you have to make every dollar count. That's why when you sponsor a job, you only pay for the quality applications from resumes in their database matching your job description. So visit Indeed.com slash Focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D, to start hiring now. Just go to I-N-D-E-E-D.com slash Focused. Indeed.com slash Focused. Terms and conditions apply. Cost per application pricing not available for everyone. Need to hire? You need Indeed. Our thanks to Indeed for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Joey, one of the things I like about the book is you really, like the way you get the information across. This is an information dense book. You know, you think creativity,

well, you know, he's going to tell you to make time to do something creative, but you get into the science of it. You get into kind of the inspiration for it, but also the practicality of how to become more creative. Because as you were saying earlier, I think all of us have this in us, but we're not sure how to connect the dots or the synapses in the brain. And you do such a good job of that. But you also go the next level with each rule. You've got stories and you've got a summary in each section too. I haven't seen many books that do that, where they summarize it for you right in the chapter. Tell us a little bit about the process of putting this book together

and how you came up with these innovations. First, I started by taking notes, what ended up being across 10 years, where anytime, you know, I told my business partner at the time, back in the day, I'm like, man, I got to write this book about creativity. And he was like, all right, dude, just take notes. And, you know, maybe one day it'll come together. And he was like, all right, dude, just take notes and, you know, maybe one day it'll, it'll come together. And that's what I did. So when, when the pandemic hit, like so many people, we got to do, got around to those things that, uh, we said we were going to do for a while. And for me, it was the book. And I whipped up a table of contents within a day, within a couple of hours, actually from the notes. And the table of contents is largely what I use as my guiding light, my map to make this book. But I had to find an editor, someone who could look at the book a bit more objectively, with more experience than

me. And so I went out and I leveraged so many contacts I'd built over the years of collaborating through Baron Fig, and I ended up talking to some incredible people. And one in particular I want to tell you all about is an editor who had edited one of the best-selling books on planet Earth at one time, a nonfiction book. And I told him about my book and I told him what I wanted to do. And he said to me, that makes no sense. I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, it's not creative. It's not, you know, I don't see the creativity. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he explained that in order to write this book, I needed to have doodles and surprises and handwritten things on the pages to example creativity. And this, I adamantly disagreed.

And this is the problem, I think, that we have had with creativity for so long. For some reason, although so many creative books out there are created in a way in which they feel like they have to express it. And my rebuttal was, well, let's call him John. All right, well, John, if I write a book about cooking, do the pages have to be edible? I don't understand. Why do you apply this restriction? I want to write a legitimate nonfiction book that is serious about the act of creativity and the practice of ideas. So long story short, I found an editor that was on board with that. And I went ahead and I took some advice from Malcolm Gladwell's masterclass, where he said that your number one job is to be interesting. And only then are people open

to being informed. So it was natural to me to start every chapter with a story that could entertain and be interesting out of the gate by telling stories that were examples of the laws. And only then would I break it down, and then I'd add some I think the way I wrote this book is it's kind of like it could be looked at as a reference or a dictionary of creativity. And so if you wanted to go back, if you'd read through it and you wanted to go back and be reminded, I thought, man, I don't want people to have to read this whole chapter again. And so I put in these summaries where they were, in my mind, really simple reminders of what you learned so that you could use this as a reference if you needed to get your ideas going. And that's how it all came together. I really like the format of the book, but I want to go back to something you said about the editor and how your approach was not quote unquote creative. Because I think this is something that I've struggled with. I play guitar and sing on the worship team at my church. And one of my favorite things to do in college was to write songs. And I quickly got discouraged because I would write something and then I would be listening to the radio and I would hear the chord progression or the melody line and I'd get upset because I just ripped it off from

somebody else. I can't come up with anything original. I guess I'm just not creative. So fast forward a bunch of years. I'm reading a whole bunch of books, and I stumble on Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. And essentially, he says that when you create something, it's the result of the dots that you've collected. If you want to change what you are creating, you need to change what you are collecting. And I like that you talk about that a lot in this book, the connecting of ideas.

I think that maybe is law number three, chapter three, thinking combinations. Yep. three thinking combinations. Yep. So from that moment forward, I basically got the realization that creativity is not this flash of inspiration. It is a formula. It is a science. And I feel that your book does a great job. I mean, there's a bunch of laws here, right? It's not just follow all of these steps, and then you will get the result. But I feel you do a real good job of speaking to the individual points that people are going to encounter in their creative journey with little nudges to keep them on the right track. Measuring against yourself.

Having fun. You know, you mentioned the playful humor idea in the last section. I feel like really what people need to do if they want to create anything, and your story of how you came about this with this book is kind of similar, I feel, is just keep going and trust the process. If you do the right things, kind of the result will take care of itself. Is that fair? It is fair. It is so fair. And all of what you're saying is so well said. Creativity is misunderstood. It's a fact at this point um for many reasons when i was writing the book people said to me you know are you going to teach us the magic and i would always

say no it's not magic it's i'm not going to teach you magic it's actually just like to me it's uh playing basketball or practicing law or being an architect. There's principles and a process, and when you do it, you get the result that you're generally looking for. And so the word creativity itself is a misnomer, unfortunately. It's leading people in the wrong direction because creativity is not about creating, it is about connecting and when you if we jumped to say chapter 10 just gather inspiration the law of the muse what you do there is it kind of talks to you about how inspiration works and how you can do active and passive inspiration or sometimes you know ideas strike you and that's passive inspiration and people think that now i have to wait around for that. And I can tell you right now that is absolutely not true. Provably so, because you

have writers and designers and illustrators and architects and so on and so forth, all these people who get paid to reliably deliver a creative result. And that is because they employ active inspiration which is essentially like you said going out and collecting ideas and when you do that you've very simply you know imagine you've got a little satchel on your hip and every time you encounter something interesting it takes the shape of a little cube and you toss it in your satchel and you know over time you've got this you know bulging satchel filled with blocks that those become the connecting blocks that you use to build ideas like we've established it's connecting and so the more you gather the higher the probability that you are just going to naturally

come across an idea because you have so many pieces to work with. But the very next chapter, chapter 11, is all about limitations. And I feel like this plays in here too, because when you're talking about inspiration and the act of creating from the outside in, it looks like you just got this idea out of nowhere and you turned it into something tangible a lot of times. And that's not really the case, as we sort of discussed. But then limit yourself. This is really about embracing the limitations. And I've noticed this myself because I'm a musician. There's 12 notes in the musical scale. And the more you have confines, the more creative you can be, especially if you're going

to sit down and jam with a bunch of people, you got to be in sync. You got to know this is the tempo and you can't just play whatever speed you want. And this is the key and you can't play whatever notes you want. Everyone's got to be in sync. But even on an individual level, this feels very contradictory, I feel, to the whole creative process. Because you kind of think like, well, I should have all of this inspiration. I should capture everything I come in contact with. Because who knows, that might be the seed of some great idea. But the more you do that, the less you actually get out of the things that you are collecting and putting in your satchel. Those limitations and having a defined number of Lego bricks to work with is what allows you to come up with the new combinations. Think of limitations like, how do I say this? Are you guys familiar with the paradox of choice?

Great. Like, how do I say this? Are you guys familiar with the paradox of choice? Mm-hmm. Great. The paradox of choice essentially says, you know, the more options you have, the less likely you are to choose one because it's overwhelming. And so you can collect a lot of options, but then you have to be, then you have to consciously limit them. All right. So that's why the chapters are back to back. Imagine I dropped you in a field and I'm a city boy, but let's, you know, I'm going to throw out 300 acres. I think it's big. In the middle of this 300 acre field, it's all fenced in and there's a gate. There's one gate. And I say, go find the gate. You're going to probably look around and be like, well, what direction do I go? you're going to probably look around and be like, well, what direction do I go?

And I'm going to say, good luck. You have a lot of options. Clearly, you have 360 degrees of options. But if I drop you in that same field, but there's a road now across the field, and I drop you at the beginning of the road, and I say, find the end of this road, there's only one direction to go. And that is the power of limitations, is that you, when you build the limitations for yourself, there tends to naturally be only one direction to go next. So by limiting yourself repeatedly, you can let the process, and you mentioned trust the process, you can let that process guide you. And there is trust that you have to do, and it doesn't guarantee you're going to get somewhere incredible, but it does guarantee you'll get somewhere, which then can help you get somewhere else and so on and so forth.

And that's important because you don't need to have the final destination in mind. You just need to know which direction the path is going. Absolutely. I think that is one of the big challenges for people is the lack of certainty, you know, kind of getting back to that loss of creativity from the beginning is, it's difficult when you get on these journeys and you don't know where you're going to end up. That's hard. Think of it this way is my favorite way to to simply lay it out for people who are listening and a little bit confused there

are thousands of cities on planet earth okay and chances are we have not been to to more than like one percent so there's 99 that we have never been there. They're relatively a complete mystery. Yet, if I said, you know, hey, have you guys been to Berlin by any chance? Have not. No, I have not either. Okay, great. Me neither. So let's use Berlin.

None of us really know what it's like at all. Maybe we Google it. But if I said, guys, we're going to Berlin, all three of us would know exactly how to get there. We'd know that we have to take a cab or our car to the airport. Would we get in a plane? And then we'd go and we'd land there and we'd follow signs and more roads and trains and buses and cabs and whatever it is to get us to Berlin. And so the creative process is exactly the same. The signs and the signposts and how you get there are completely reliable and parsable, even if you don't know what you're going to find at the end.

I like that analogy. Let me push back on it a little bit. Do you think you need to always have the destination in mind? Or is it enough to know, I'm in a small town in Wisconsin, so I have to drive to Milwaukee to get onto the plane. And once I get to Milwaukee, I'll find out the next destination. the next destination. I feel like that has been more accurate of my journey because when I started out, I had an idea. I want to be a creator. I want to write a book. And I did self-publish a book. But the thing that I landed on for me is the podcasts and the webinars and the video courses in it it's related it's kind of the adjacent possible right so the the actual process of writing is what allowed me to see those possibilities but along the way i discovered where i thought i was going isn't actually where i really wanted to go i think there's a macro and a micro effect of of this or a application of it and that there's the macro application where it's it's like our life journey is you know we go from one thing to the next and then we don't know the destination we know the next step and then there's the micro application

within those steps in which we probably have a little bit of a better idea like you said i wanted to write a song or i wanted to write a book. And so it does apply. As far as do we always need a city? Absolutely not. Sometimes we just need to point ourselves in a direction. And just by making that choice, we've already limited ourselves. We've already made decisions, which is a type of action to then help us eventually get to where we are going. And the way that really resonated with me is just the idea that part of the creative journey is to not necessarily know how things are going to end up. And this could be used in any context. It's not just drawing a landscape. It could be diagnosing a patient and working through the medical process. I guess the point I want to make for folks listening is that you can bring this into your everyday life.

And letting go of saying this has to end up in a special place that i already know where it is you're really you're quashing that creative spirit that could make whatever you're doing better and just consider that yeah well said we i think mentioned early on about how school teaches us to see the end from the beginning. And very practically speaking, when we're given a book to read and told to write a summary in three pages, or we're given geometry problems and told to outline the seven proofs, we are handed the end before we've ever started. And we get that our whole childhood. And then very often we get that when we enter the adult world and have assignments given to us by managers or bosses. And so, for most of our life, we are handed the finish line before we even begin. And that does a disservice to us when we want to go and actually

create something in which the finish line can only be uncovered by digging and digging means starting without knowing yeah and just the whole idea of being willing to stray off the path that really came to me throughout this whole book when you look at all of these rules the idea of creativity being a process where you can take side routes and we can all do that in our everyday lives, in our careers, in our relationships. If we keep our head down and don't notice those little side routes, we may miss out on some of the best things we can do in our lives. And the first step of that is being creative enough to be willing to take a step. So one other follow-up question to that then, Joey, is this process of writing the book.

I'm curious, what changed in terms of your vision for what this thing was going to be? When you first had the idea, I'm going to write this book, you had something in your mind. How is what you actually shipped different from that initial picture? the creative process and then how to rise above the rest. When I first started, even though I had all these notes and these laws, I imagined that what I was teaching, what I understood originally as my goal was to teach the creative process. Before I really wrote anything, I had a couple dozen interviews with particularly people who consider themselves quote-unquote

non-creative so they don't work in a creative profession and i discovered that the nasa fact held true that they they they were equipped uh and they had done it and that they actually understood the process more than they realized but the problem that I encountered across the board unanimously was their thinking about it and their approach to how to begin creating. So the ideas that we shared earlier about being weird and all the hesitations that I uncovered from people and what it would mean to truly disrupt and the misunderstanding of what creativity actually is. And so to answer your question, part one, the foundation, how to think creatively was not in the original plan, but it became a critical necessity because

I had to set the stage for the process that I wanted to teach. Because I run a company, I am a designer, I'm an action-oriented individual, I like to be productive. And so for me, jumping into the process was just the natural step. And I had to be reminded that there were all these perspectives that needed to be in place beforehand. And that was really cool to witness. I'm grateful that I realized it. And I really, really love those first seven chapters because I think they, even if you read the book and stopped there, I think if you employ some of the thinking that it teaches, you can have a more fulfilling life right away. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN.

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months for free of ExpressVPN. Our thanks to ExpressVPN at expressvpn.com slash focused once again for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of RelayFM. Joey, there's a lot of rules in here. Some of them I feel like i felt like we're pretty intuitive and some of them were not i feel like you probably had the same experience where is this stuff hard for you and and what are the laws that you have trouble remembering yeah i was in an interview and someone said what what law do you suck at and And I said, well, none of them, because I wrote the book. And the interviewer said, you're clearly pretty good at the law of arrogance. But there is one law that I am particularly challenged by, and it's chapter 32, which is expose yourself to new things. It's the law of adventure. And it's about routinely

venturing into the unknown so your pool of's the law of adventure. And it's about routinely venturing into the unknown so your pool of inspiration never grows stagnant. And my personal challenge is with half of this law. So I describe the types of exploration as adjacent exploration and remote exploration. And so adjacent exploration is what you do inside that bubble we discussed earlier. It's all the things you can learn inside of there. And remote exploration is all the things you learn outside the bubble, i.e. traveling. And I will be very honest, I am not a travel enthusiast. I'm not a very good traveler. I had a bad trip about six, seven years ago, and I ended up in the hospital in Japan. It was tough. I was going to a wedding.

I must've eaten something. I had to stop in South Korea. By the time I got to Japan, I went from the airport to the hospital. I stayed there for several hours. And then I stayed in bed in a hotel next to the hospital for three, four days and then flew home. And I did not reach the wedding. And it was mentally taxing. But what happened afterwards was really impactful for me and not in a good way. impactful for me and not in a good way. It's a few years later, maybe two years later, I had to go to China and I had a genuine panic attack, uh, when I landed and I had never had a panic attack. I'm not an anxious person. Uh, I don't get stressed easily. And it was extremely confusing because I didn't even have reservations in my consciousness.

This was all subconscious, some sort of trauma from the previous trip. And I could barely breathe. I didn't speak the language. I was stuck in the hotel. I could not leave that room. And I had to get myself back home. And I wrote in the book that I had to use a mantra, which I made on the spot. I am a champion. And I said that like, I think 19,000 times I did the math, how long the flight was like 16 hours

and how much I slept. And I just basically chased away the bad thoughts by filling my my mind with this mantra over and over again and so for me the the biggest challenge that i have and i'm still working through although i'm much better now and my wife i have to thank for that is the remote exploration part of this law and i i guess the only thing i can say is since then i've traveled uh i've i have employed the law of adventure and i push my bounds and when i'm you know nervous about whether i may be nervous i ask ariana to come with me and uh i get so much out of pushing that, not just for the creative results that can come from it, but as a human being that needs to suffer or change how I experience something. It's been quite rewarding, but it is very difficult. That's a good question. I have a question for you guys,

which I would love to hear since you read the book and i like i said i really appreciate that i would love to hear either a story that resonated with you or a law that happened to really strike a chord i've got a couple i've got a couple actually great book by the way. I don't know if I've said that yet, but this is the thing I like about this book is that it isn't whimsical. You know what I mean? So many of these books about creativity, like you were talking about with your the the editor. This is boots on the ground advice that you can use to become more creative. boots on the ground advice that you can use to become more creative. It, you know, it's not flowery, but it's, it's well told. But anyway, so two things in here that resonated with me,

section 17, create for yourself. I think that is something that's easy to lose track of. And myself included, right? I really, my best stuff is the stuff that I make to scratch my own itch. And you've got a story in there about Emily Dickinson. And, um, uh, and I always try to remember that. And sometimes I forget it. Right. Um, I, I am at a point I'm successful enough with what I do that I hear from a lot of people, things they want, and it's really natural for me to want to make what they want. But the best stuff I make is the stuff that I think that I really want to see exist in a world, and that is one that I needed to read. I've got a bunch of them.

So first of all, this is a shallow one, but you mention in Law 31, Push Mental Endurance, you tell the story of Harry Houdini. He's actually from the town I live in, in Appleton, Wisconsin. So that was interesting. I've been to the Harry Houdini Museum. Oh, cool. So I loved your story in there, not because it was telling me something that I was familiar with, but it kind of helped fill in some of the blanks around a character that I was already familiar with. Another story I really liked, though, was from number nine, Define the Problem, Jan Ernst Matzeliger. Yeah, I'd never heard this story before, but this was fascinating.

You mind if I just retell it shortly? Oh, go for it. Okay. So Jan was born to a slave mom who had foot injuries. Shoes were really expensive and took a job at a shoe factory in Massachusetts, identified the bottleneck, which was this lasting process, which I had never heard of before. That's the attaching the top and the sole of the shoes together. So Jan invented a machine that could produce 14 times more shoes than a human and made shoes more affordable for someone like Jan's mom. So I love the perspective you put on this with the question at the end. Essentially, what Jan did is they refined the question from how do I make shoe production cheaper to how do I make the lasting process faster?

And I feel like there's a big lesson to be learned there for me about asking the right question, recognizing what really is the problem that you're trying to solve here. It's so easy to look at the symptom and miss the real cause. So that was a really impactful part of the book for me. And then the other things I was, David asked the question, like, where is this hard for you? There were some that as I read this, I recognized these are hard for me. And those are the ones that tended to resonate with me. I would go home and just continue to think about them. So two specifically, one you kind of talked about already, 32, with the remote

exploration, I think is how you defined it. You have a statement in that chapter, which I didn't like, but it's true. Reading a book is not the same as a lived experience. I don't like to go places. I don't like to do things. Much rather sit at home and read the book, but that's not the same thing. And then let it go. Number 25, I tend to be a perfectionist. So it go. Number 25, I tend to be a perfectionist. So I'll tweak things and I'll edit things. And I got to fight this every single time I create anything, whether it's a podcast episode, a blog post, video course, whatever, just ship it. And then once you get it out there, that's when you can learn from the things that you did and do better for next time. It's the quantity that produces the quality.

Yeah, absolutely. And being aware of the diminishing returns over time to the point where you're not necessarily making something better, you're just making something different. Yep. And then recognizing it and being able to say, okay, I think it's time to hang my hat and say, this is good enough, okay, I think it's time to hang my hat and say, this is good enough.

Let's roll with it. I also really like section 35 about locating the present moment. I'm very much into meditation and intentionality and this stuff. I never really thought about it in terms of creativity, but it is there. never really thought about it in terms of creativity but it is there i mean obviously and and flow state really is kind of the ultimate you know expression of this but you've got to start somewhere and i thought addressing it in this book was was really great oh yeah thank you yeah flow state is is uh was an obsession of mine for a while. And it is essentially a meditative experience, connecting with the present so thoroughly

that time just falls by the wayside. Wow. Well, thank you guys for sharing. It is so early in the process of getting this book out in the world. And there are so few people that have read it yet that hearing this, I mean, you are all saying things that I have not heard before. And it's really neat to have people react to these ideas that have been stuck in my head for years and years. So thank

you for reading it and thank you for sharing. Well, it is a unique book about creativity. It's, and I think one of the most, it is the most useful book I've ever read about creativity. And you can get it now. Wow. High praise. Thank you. So where should people go to pick up your book? I would say, I would recommend folks go to Baron Fig and get it right there with uh so they can see joey's other products

yeah if you head over to barrenfig.com you can nab the book and check out all the other stuff if you'd like to learn a little more about the book or about me you could just go to joeycafon.com book and that'll also direct you to barren fig as well as ways you can get ebooks and those are the two spots. Go to one of those and you shall be fulfilled. I'm going to put out the plug. People know how I feel about physical books anyways, but this is a pretty phenomenal and beautiful physical book.

You've got a braided bookmark that's included. I like all the little touches like in the bottom of the pages. You show how many pages are left in the current chapter. It's high quality. It is definitely a Baron Fig book, and that is a compliment. It feels like it belongs alongside a confidant notebook, and I would encourage people, if you're not sure which version to get, get the physical book.

Yeah, I'll add to that, because I'm someone who usually prefers the digital book, as Mike knows. But I actually really enjoyed the process of this. And it was definitely, the intentionality rule was applied with the creation of this book. It's something nice to have on your shelf. And I think it's a great book, you know know when someone comes over and they're struggling with things to pull it off the shelf and say read rule 32 maybe that'll help you out yes yes i i imagine that i'd like to make a some sort of quiz on my site where um you know people can be prescribed a chapter a few chapters based on what their challenges are so So I'm with you on that. And thank you both for the compliments. I want to give a shout out to Jay Desai over at Baron Fig,

who is just a master at pulling these physical products out of my head and making them real in a way in which they are even better than my imagination sees them. All right. Joey, anywhere else people should go to check out your stuff? Just those two places. And of course, Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Joey Caffone.

And you can always say hello or share your challenges. And I'll tell you what chapter can help. Well, I am really pleased that you were able to get this out the door. I know that it's a ton of work. And but you really have something to share here. And thank you for sharing it with the world thank you guys appreciate it okay well that wraps it up today i want to thank our sponsors indeed and express vpn we are the focus podcast you can find us over at relay.fm focused if you

want to check it out in the forums you can go to talk.macpowerusers.com we have a special room there just for the Focus podcast. And we'll see you next time.