 Today, I'm feeling unambiguously alive. So I thought we'd talk about motivation. I'm gonna talk about motivation from the perspective of someone who has always worked in creative industries, but working as an employee. So in some type of like corporate setting, what I'm going to share is based on a number of conversations that I've had with people working under those same circumstances. And hopefully it'll be helpful to you if you find yourself demotivated as a creative person in a corporate environment. So right now I'm in a new environment. I'm recently laid off. It's stressful, but it is a new environment. So there are a lot of unknown unknowns. And if you know me, you know that I can never spell this word right the first time. For creative people, this is a really great place to be. We love being in unknown, unknown territory. So our motivation at the start of something is extremely high. Just skyrocketing here. But with every new thing, eventually the map is a little bit more determined. You know what the nos are. You might know a little bit more about the personalities involved. And you hit this realm of known unknowns. We just talk about what a weird word that is. Now things start to change a little bit here. The trajectory starts to slow down a little bit until we eventually reach the creative's demise, known knowns. To flesh this out a bit, this is kind of like when you become the senior advice giver on a team. And you start telling people, well, that's probably not gonna happen because so-and-so doesn't like this thing. And we tried this thing. So there's a lot of scar tissue around this idea or this concept. And if it smells like that, then it's not gonna actually get all the way through. But you might have a semblance of hope if you get this person on board at the right time and you may be able to convince them if you show it off this way. See, the conversation takes a different tone. It's no longer about the work and what's possible. It's about what's not possible and the work that surrounds the work. Now there are some people who absolutely thrive in this environment. They love it. This is like the realm of like politicians maybe, execs presumably. I'm not saying they're all this way, but like this is an area where you're just like killing it. You know, all of the policies, all of the players, and you know how to maneuver inside of that system. But we're gonna talk about my line, this more like kind of creative line and what happens to people like us. We'll create a sad gray zone for this line. We'll call this the zone of short-term games. I talked quite a bit about this zone in a talk that I gave at Render ATL. I recommend watching it. If any of this resonates with you, I'll include a link below. Now demotivated by what is possible, the creative type starts to be motivated by what they can get away with. This can be anything like how many meetings can you skip? How many hours of video games can you play without anybody noticing? Or maybe even taking on contracts during the workday. Over the past handful of years in my career, I've learned that this is the most dangerous place that I could possibly be because these short-term games really do feel fun at the time. Now it's dangerous because of this lie that I tell myself which is with all of this time that I have by knowing all of the knowns, I could do something really cool and creative in the gaps. And I'm telling you right now that if you see yourself in this place, you think that you're here, you're actually probably here and this shit is gonna sap you dry. Now I'm a firm believer that you can't tell anyone anything, but I know that many of you have been in this place long enough with this being your vision or goal line that what I'm saying here really resonates. What do you do with that? Well, I think it's really hard to answer universally but I can tell you this. My experience has led me to believe that motivation is a leading indicator to burnout. Burnout doesn't happen here, I'm stoked. I'll work 80 hour weeks on my own stuff all day. And here, it drifts a little bit, but it's still great. Burnout fuel is when I'm lying to myself about which path I'm on. My motivation is dipping, but I keep telling myself that I should be on this line. You could almost call this, if you were content to say something really stupid, which I am, but you should be Delta. Hard to imagine anything stupider than that. I'm here, but I should be here. This gap in between is what kills you. And the longer that you play these short-term games, the worse it frigging gets. The only advice I can really give you is to watch out for it. To ask yourself, am I spending too much time in the land of should be? And if for too many days in a row, the answer is yes, gotta get the hell out. One of the beautiful transformative gifts of a layoff is that that decision is made for me, maybe at the start of that burnout phase instead of the end of it. Or if you're at on that graph, I'm wishing you inspirational, motivational days this month. If you wanna see the previous video in this layoff series, it's right up here. And if you wanna see just any other video by me, well, I think here's one. I'll see you later, bye.