[00:00:00]
Shawn Buttner: Everyone makes mistakes, and that's true for creators, but mistakes aren't something that we should avoid or shun or feel bad about. And here's why. Mistakes and play are exactly the same. It's the trial and error that creates a happy accident that turns into the light bulb and changes society and the world forever.
After that, it's goofing around in a sense of fun that allows you. To get a particular new insight to connect to things that aren't necessarily similar, to make progress. Make that viral video, make that book hit The New York Times bestseller. That changes everything for yourself, for your family and your community.
Some examples of this in the real world are Jay Klaus, who runs a business called Creator Science, that he built a community around experimentation. We have Brandon Burchard, led the high performance movement [00:01:00] and talks about how high performance is improving yourself steadily without impacting your health and relationships.
And that's. What play is it? it's continuing to work on something and to make incremental improvements without losing that sense of joy. It's somebody, a YouTuber like Mark Applier who started being on YouTube because he wanted to make movies someday and has finally been able to do it through learning by doing, It's this sense of play that has changed it for all these creators. 'cause when we forget. To play. That's when we become inflexible. When things don't go our way, we don't have the creative thing that we made blow up in the way that we want to, or we're miserable in the work. Or we have a sense of perfectionism because it has to be just right.
and that pressure we put upon ourselves [00:02:00] causes stress causes. Numerous amounts of redos or whatnot. And ultimately if we don't address this sense of play or being allowed to try things and make mistakes, we end up quitting. 'cause we're not learning. We're not progressing and it's not fun. So what if we were more playful in our creations, And this is really an episode about how do you feel about your work and how you relate to your work.
In today's episode of Creators the Crush, we're going to talk about where high performing creators spend 70% of their time. We are going to talk about, and I'll provide a story of a creative band that you know and what they do with mistakes and trial and error. We'll have some takeaways from that story and then I have a quick challenge for you and then we'll wrap it up.
Okay? So in case you don't know, this [00:03:00] is the Creators That Crush Podcast, the show that helps struggling content creators find and level up their performance. I am your host. And certified high performance coach, Shawn Buttner. And, ultimately this show is combining my high performance coaching work, which is the process I'm certified in with helping content creators going out there and putting their good out into the world in a way that's sustainable, in a way that's happy, in a way that can do it confidently.
So I'm really excited to have you here right now.
jumping right into it. Most high level creators in my experience, spend at least 70% of their time goofing off. And what does that look like? It's playing around with new tools and technology. So AI has been the big hit the last couple years. playing around with chat GPT with the numerous tools that are blindingly coming out every day to help make your life as a creator a little bit better.
[00:04:00] And. so it could be that it could be playing around with a new type of graphics technology, or you, this is, this presentation's done in Figma, which why isn't it keynote? Why isn't it just a notion document like I was doing in some previous episodes? So if you're listening to this is also on YouTube.
Just wanna put that out there. But,I'm using Figma to help me talk through this idea for this episode, and it's just fun, right? So it's just playing around with different tools or techniques or formats like we're doing now. It could just be where is the fun in your work, right? sometimes, we will get to the story where we talk about it.
With this particular famous band, but what was striking about the story, as you'll hear, is just how much fun they were having being each other's company, making each other laugh, doing silly things, but it translated into the [00:05:00] work, and so that's why that's important. It could be stuff like running experiments, like I mentioned Jay Klaus and Creator Science, and he built.
His whole community are at, so it's 70% of his time in the community is then talking about how, things that they're trying in their creative businesses and their content creation learnings they've had and sharing those learnings and that's super fun and engaging. could just be trying new things, like things that maybe aren't super related.
years ago when Apple had those like candy colored Macs. They discovered how to do it by going into a, and, I might be misquoting this, but some type of plastic process that Apple was doing. They went, I think it was for the candy colored max, those big shell things. They went to candy factories to see how they mixed and made candy to make those colors for the plastic.
So completely unrelated industry. Some unique novel technologies [00:06:00] they were able to bring and create and update the Mac lineup 10 years ago.
Or just having new experiences. Sometimes you go to a show, you go to the A museum, you're out in your community and you just encounter an idea that. Lights you on fire. recently my wife and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw this exhibit that's been there for a while called the Visitors, which is this really cool like audio visual music setup.
I guess that's the theme of this episode secretly, but, from this Icelandic band, and I forget, I'm gonna mess up the guy's name so I won't say it, but. The exhibit's really cool because it's nine different screens. Each screen is a different room in this mansion and each of the musicians is in the room playing their instrument and they, it's just really cool, but it's a crazy experience that, got me thinking about how to make content for creators at Crush.
it's a very creative way of [00:07:00] presenting music,
How a famous band spent 70% of their time
---
Shawn Buttner: Let's get into this famous band and how they spent 70% of their time, and as we're talking through this, I want you to be thinking about maybe how you can apply this to your creative endeavors. Okay. It's a story about the Beatles
I'm fascinated with how the creative process works. And so when Get back, the documentary that was on Disney Plus, I believe, yeah, it's on the screen It was super fascinated and the Beatles are, have a special place in my heart 'cause it was my mom's favorite band slash obsession.
Like I remember. when I was five or six going, waking up after going to bed, having to use the bathroom in our like small two bedroom apartment that we shared and down the hallway seeing my mom sitting, next to the stereo with those big, like headphone cans on with the curly wire [00:08:00] plugged into the stereo at home.
Just whispering and singing Beatles songs 'cause she didn't wanna disturb the household. Because it's late at night. She was a night owl and so yeah, this music's burned into me and so watching this documentary with my wife Ashley and it was a amazing to see the process. So this show, in case you don't know, is documentary type footage that they took when they were recording the album.
Get Back. which is amazing but main takeaways from this is you see that 70% of the time that they spent was just trying to make each other laugh, right? They had some stuff to work on. They had a rough schedule. It was really interesting. They would, they had a very tight, show up at eight or 10 in the morning and go to five or whatever, nine to five type thing, and they have toast ready for 'em when they got there and all that.
and they would just sit in [00:09:00] that structure and so the time was bound in that particular way. But inside that time when they were in the studio together, it's them singing song like covering tons of different people's songs, right? They're working on an album, but they're playing other people's songs.
Just warm up and get loose. Get some ideas and then, singing songs with funny voices and just overall having a good time. Now during this documentary, George Harrison quits the band, I think in the middle of recording the album. And then they have to switch from this studio with some cool lights to the studio in, where they ran their record company.
which ultimately ends up with them playing on the roof, playing the album front to back in London on the roof of this, and the police come. It's really punk rock. Super cool.
this took them like two months. Double the amount of time they thought they were gonna need, but they got it right. And you could see [00:10:00] like the structure and how things formed for a lot of the songs that became super popular.
So highly recommend the documentary, and just checking out the creative process.
Takeaways
---
Shawn Buttner: What I took away from this is that 70% of the time the Beatles were goofing off 20% of the time they were actually doing the work, and 10% was half written songs that they brought to the group to kinda work through.
So 10% was, preparation. But what does this mean for creators and how can you crush it as a creator with this information in mind, I think we need to spend more time and play, and in that. There's not been a successful creator that I've studied that has not liked or had fun in some aspect of their business, right?
The people that are doing it just for the cold cash of it, tend to burn out and tend to quit. So they're not around, they're not there for a long time. So that there, what is the fun [00:11:00] in the work you do? they show up and do the work. They treat it like a profession, just like the Beatles did. But the set time that they came in, I believe it was like something like nine to five, and then you show up and you do the work, even though it was loose, it came in with loose ideas so that you were, didn't have everything but partly planned out, but they had the structure and framework for a lot of things that would become really big.
really big songs and they were present in the moment, right? There were emotions that flared, there's, George Harrison quit the band for a minute and then talked. They talked him down and they came back and they finished up the album and made some changes and just were reacting to each other in the moment, which was really cool from a creative standpoint.
Challenge + Wrap Up
---
Shawn Buttner: So the question is how much time are you spending each week playing as a creator, or how are you testing out new ideas, experimenting? just finding the [00:12:00] joy in the process of creating, because I think it's not enough, and this might not be feasible for everyone, but I think it's a valuable question to ask yourself.
What would happen if you spent 70% of your time. Goofing off in your creative business and showing off your personality or the things that you find funny about in the world. And I think that sense of levity is needed in the moment we're living through right now as I'm recording this and it's just good for connecting, right?
part of me goofing off has been me fiddling with how do I present this podcast in a video format that seems. More connected to who I am as a person, who Shawn is, right? and it's not because I'm like full of myself. honestly, like if I could do this without showing my face and maybe with one of those robot voices and I could feel good about doing that, I would.
But, I think part of me. [00:13:00] Showing my face on YouTube is to prove to you I'm not an AI robot and to not have that, Hey, this is an AI robot voice talking through slides. Like I don't think that's what we need in this moment. we need to trust that there's a human on the other side of the video, of the audio of the speaker you're listening to this show from.
That's me. Goofing off. And so that's your homework this week is to just think about if you were to implement in your day-to-day life, 70% more play, more exploring, more experimenting, more trial and error, what would you gain? What would you learn? And instead of making mistakes and just stopping debt in your tracks,
if you need help finding the fun in your creative life, I wanna let you know that I'm, I've started a new program to test out this framework for content creators [00:14:00] that combines this high performance studies with being a content creator. So you can sign up for a free 30 minute creator strategy session.
What you do is you submit one of the big struggles you're having in your creative business right now and we get on a call for 30 minutes. We just brainstorm and I have some set habits and a process that I can use to help you get through that struggle and get onto the next phase. And that's really all I'm get going after with that.
So no pitches after that. No. Hey, sign up for my coaching as me testing out this new process with you. So if you wanna check that out and join the creator strategy session, just go to Shawn Buttner.com linked in the show notes, and you'll see a button there to sign up for the 30 minute session. answer like three questions, schedule your call, and away we go.
Okay, so with that, I hope you love this episode of Creators the [00:15:00] Crush. Again, I'm your host, Shawn Buttner. If you would share this with three friends. and over here to my right, there's a video about creative purpose statements that you might enjoy if you thought about having fun, knowing your purpose and having clarity on that.
It can also help you feel motivated, so I thought it might be related. So go check out that video there again in the show notes too. And with that, we'll see you in the next episode of Creators that Crush.
