Have you ever shared a creative project that you felt really good about, only to have someone else’s casual criticism completely crush your joy and send you into a downward spiral?
In this week’s Report from the Creative Closet, I’m sharing a heartbreaking online post that has been on my mind all week. It’s from a grown man who tried music production, had fun, and loved his first creation—until a friend’s feedback convinced him he was terrible, leading him to believe that artists are “cowards and liars” who rely on genetic destiny rather than hard work.
We unpack this painful situation to look at how adult expectations act as a form of creative amputation, slicing us away from our own souls. I share why your creative practice requires you to protect your quiet “Jiminy Cricket” voice from the loudspeakers of external critics, why the Restorative Creativity Framework(TM) is designed to bring those dormant parts of you back to life, and why the Fifth Doctor’s “Brave heart” rule is the ultimate key to giving yourself permission to create badly.
I’m Nancy Norbeck, and I’m your Messy Muse Mentor. I help people feel alive again through curiosity and play.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The Zombie Effect: Why society’s rejection of adult play cuts us off from the external animal form of our souls.
- Jiminy Cricket vs. The Loudspeaker: How to keep external critiques from overriding your personal data and enjoyment.
- The Myth of Genetics: Why assuming creativity is a magical, effortless gift leads directly to despair, and how to embrace the slow process of learning.
- The Toddler’s Rage to Master: Why toddlers fall flat on their faces, laugh, and try again, and why adults lose the patience to do the same.
- Mark Cuban’s AI Mistake: Why iterating instantly with technology destroys the entire psychological benefit of the creative journey.
Ready to send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour? We get together once a month for a relaxed, co-working-style session where you can work on whatever you want—without any pressure to do it “right.” Join the Creativity Circle.
Episode breakdown:
0:00 The Creative Closet Report
0:37 The Heartbreak of Suppressed Creativity
2:30 Creative Amputation (Are we zombies?)
3:31 The Restorative Creativity Framework
5:07 Analyzing a Deeply Troubling Perspective
11:01 Hard Work vs. Raw Talent
12:50 How to fall and laugh like a toddler
19:34 Why Mark Cuban is wrong about AI
21:42 Reconnecting with your aliveness
Please note: The original Reddit post isn’t linked because I don’t want to direct traffic toward the person who wrote it or encourage anyone to contact or harass them. Please don’t try to track them down.
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Are Artists Actually Cowards and Liars? | Report from the Creative Closet #10
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Welcome to this week’s Report from the Creative Closet. You may notice that I am wearing the same t shirt that I was wearing last time, the Fifth Doctor. It says Brave Heart underneath, which you can’t see, but I am wearing that for a reason. And we’ll get to that in a second.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:31]:
But this week, I wanna share a post that I saw on Reddit recently, which is a little bit different for me. But it, it really struck a chord with me. I haven’t, it’s probably been close to a week and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. And I think that the person who posted this is probably not alone. And so I wanna share the post and one of the comments, and I wanna tell you what I think about it. So let’s just jump right into this. The post says, Reddit showed me that creativity is in abundance. Can’t go thirty seconds without seeing great fan art and music, yet I’m not allowed a single share of it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:14]:
Now I’m a grown man with a full time job, never had an artistic background or did any creative hobbies in my youth. Now in my old age, all I have to do is cut my losses. Just want a conversation about this. I can’t really talk to my creative friends about this because it’s already caused a lot of problems before. Now that is the whole initial post. And I read that and I thought that’s heartbreaking. And I know that this man is not alone. I know that he’s not because so many people have essentially been cut off from their creativity in our culture because we treat it like it’s this extra thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:58]:
Right? We treat it like it’s not important, especially after a certain age. Right? Kids are allowed to play, but adults aren’t supposed to wanna do that because we are adults now and we must be serious and we must never do anything that seems like play ever again, unless it is an acceptable hobby type thing. Right. And what’s the definition of an acceptable hobby type thing that depends from person to person, but there were certain things that, you know, get, get relegated, especially, you know, depends a little bit from different group to different group. But, you know, I mentioned somebody a couple years ago that I had met a guy who, you know, had big Lego collections and stuff like that. And they were like, oh, well that’s why he’s never been married. And I thought, woah, woah, hello, rude. How do you know? I mean, it seemed like a great guy to me, but people judge.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:54]:
Right? And it’s that kind of judgment that shuts people down and cuts them off from themselves. I tend to think of it, If you’re familiar with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, I tend to think of it a lot like what they do to some of the kids in those books, where they literally cut them off from the, the external animal form of their soul. It’s called a demon in the book. And there is this religious group that is literally like chopping off the connection between the, the external form of that soul and that child, and those kids walk around like zombies. And a lot of the time, that’s how we feel when we haven’t been allowed to do the creative thing that we love. And that’s exactly what I think of when I read a post like this, because this is this is how this post feels to me. And it’s it’s tragic to me. This this honestly is why I created the restorative creativity framework because so many of us through one means or another, it doesn’t have to be someone deliberately cutting us off.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:08]:
It could just be, we got so caught up in a career that we really loved that we lost touch with that part of ourselves. It could be that we ended up having to spend our time giving care and attention to someone else who really needed it that we really love and care about, and we didn’t object, you know, to that care. But we didn’t realize that in that process, we were losing ourselves. Could be all sorts of things. But the fact is that one day we wake up and we go, oh, wait, where did I go? Who the heck am I? I don’t remember anymore. And we need that reconnection because we wander around going, I something’s missing and I don’t know what it is. And the fact is when that happens, a lot of people and sales messages and things like that in the world will say, oh, you need this thing. It will turn you into this wonderful new thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:06]:
You’re a caterpillar, and it will turn you into a butterfly. You don’t need any of that. You don’t need to become somebody new. You just need to come back to life because that part of you has been dormant. And that’s what I think is going on with this person. Because we see that so often in so many places. And so, you know, I I followed this conversation and there’s, there’s a further comment where somebody asked, you know, for a little bit more detail. And he said, I’ve tried to become a music producer since 2023 in a Florida studio because my friend convinced me it was the way to go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:45]:
At first, I had a bit of fun because the first thing I made came out well in my opinion. And then I heard my friend’s thoughts realized how bad I’ve been doing That combined with cynicism and a lack of guidance made me develop a deep hatred for the software and some brand name thing itself. I now believe that artists are cowards and liars who attribute every success to nothing but hard work and skill. Meanwhile, anyone who is black pilled knows that not everyone is genetically destined to succeed. There’s so much going on in here. And as a reminder, I am a creativity coach. I am not a therapist. So some of this I’m pretty sure is beyond my pay grade.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:35]:
But there’s so much I see in here. I mean, first of all, I’ve tried to become a music producer because my friend convinced me it was the way to go. My first question about that was what what did you think was the way to go? What did you think was the way to go? And actually, before I even get to that, my first question from the first part is, you know, a lot of us define ourselves out of our own creativity. I’ve talked about this before. I I did a whole pep talk about it a couple years ago. Because I met an actor at a Doctor Who convention and invited them to come on the podcast and was astonished when they said, well, I don’t think I’m very creative, but I’m happy to come talk to you if you like. And I thought, wait, you’re you’re an actor and you don’t think you’re very creative. I thought really.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:24]:
And there was someone standing behind me who was echoing what I was thinking as I kind of, I, I actually think that I did the teacher looking over your glasses thing at them when they said this, because I was like, excuse, excuse me, really? You’re an actor and you don’t think you’re creative. Exactly. What do you think you do all day? I don’t think I put it quite that way, but I and no. I will not tell you who it was. But I was astonished. But so many people believe that creativity is one or two certain things. And depending on who you are, your definition could be a lot of people think it’s just drawing or painting. They really think it’s exactly that narrow.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:10]:
A lot of people think it has to be a particular art form and they might include acting or photography or dance or music, but some people really believe that it’s just drawing or painting. And, and there are definitions that vary within that, but I will bet you that this person has been doing all sorts of clever and creative problem solving every day of their lives because we’re human beings. We can’t survive without that. That if they have been collaborating with people in interesting ways and making a difference to those people coming up with ideas that those people wouldn’t have thought of all the time, and they’re not counting that as creativity. So, so that’s an issue, but, you know, my friend convinced me this was the way to go. What did you want? What did you want? This is part of why I believe creativity is the fastest path back to yourself because it forces you to figure out what you want, not what your friend thinks you should do. What what do you want when you pick up a box of crayons or or magic markers or colored pencils or paints or or whatever to do a creative experiment, you have to decide, do I want red or do I want blue? Do I want a straight line or a curved line? What do you want? And then the next sentence, at first, I had a bit of fun because the first thing I made came out well in my opinion. So so you thought it was good and you had fun with it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:39]:
That is data. That’s important data. Then then then I heard my friend’s thoughts. And see what happened right after that, realized how bad I’ve been doing. So somebody else’s opinion came in, overrode your opinion, and convinced you that you were a pile of shit is basically what that said. Even though you liked what you made. Yeah. That’s where the wheels fell off the wagon.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:22]:
So possibly this wasn’t the thing you wanted to do, but you gave it a try and it seemed to go well and you had fun with it. And then the critic came in and you let the critic come in on a loudspeaker and overwhelm the little Jiminy Cricket voice that said, hey, this was fun. And I enjoyed this and I thought this was cool. The critic’s voice should have been no louder than your little Jiminy Cricket voice, but because it came from somebody else, it suddenly was like this as opposed to the little Jiminy Cricket voice. Because we always assume that the critic or the friend, it’s the same thing, basically, because they’re not us, knows more than we do. And that killed everything and sent this person into a doom spiral. That just sounds beyond terrible. I mean, this sounds incredibly depressing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:22]:
And this is where I think this starts to enter territory that’s beyond my pay grade because this level of resentment and depression needs more help than I’m qualified to give. But I will say artists are not cowards and liars, and success does come from hard work and skill because it’s true that not everyone is genetically destined to succeed. Hardly anyone is genetically destined to succeed. Most of us succeed because we work our butts off. Because we find good teachers and mentors who help us take whatever raw talent we have. Because I think this person is confusing raw talent with skill with skill and hard work. And that that that raw talent is all you need to succeed. And assuming that it just happens by magic and that is not how this works.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:21]:
It’s not how it works in any creative pursuit. It’s not how it works if you, you know, are in business or engineering or anything that we don’t consider creative, even though engineering and business tend to be pretty creative too when you actually peel back the veneer. That’s just not how this works. If you think that the people on your TV screen and in art galleries and all of those places didn’t work their asses off to get there. Now sometimes that means that they were lucky and they landed in the right place at the right time. Like when I talked to Phil Segal recently and he literally landed in the right parking lot at the right moment and met the right person, but he still had to work his way up from being an intern. He still had to learn the ropes. He still had to become very good at what he did and work hard at it to end up where he got.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:14]:
He learned every single job behind the scenes in film and TV production. He was not genetically destined to succeed, and I’m sure he would tell you that himself. So this notion is is not correct. It’s just not correct. You have to work hard if you want to succeed in any kind of position, whether you would consider it a creative position or not. So we need to disabuse that notion right now. So where do you go from here? First of all, if you’re in this position and you are feeling this kind of resentment and depression and anger, I highly recommend that you talk to someone, a therapist of some variety to help you with that part, because you need to deal with that part or it will eat you alive. But beyond that, if you are feeling a pull toward some kind of creative activity, that is data.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:17]:
That is a desire inside you that wants to be expressed. And you have every right to follow that data and that pull. And my advice to you is to start with small steps because if you try to do anything, whether it is painting the Mona Lisa or renovating your house, going from zero to 60 in a single day, you’re gonna smash into a wall. You’re gonna hurt yourself either physically or psychologically or emotionally or, you know, in whatever way. So small steps, small steps do a number of really good things for you. I mean, they make it easier if you think about it. If you are climbing something, if you are climbing a ladder and every step is, you know, a foot apart or two feet apart is probably more practical, it’s a lot harder to climb those steps because they are bigger. It takes more effort and energy.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:19]:
If every step is, say, eight inches apart, that’s a whole lot easier to climb. You can climb that ladder a whole lot faster. Now, obviously, this will depend on your height. This is an example. Work with me here. K? So the other thing is you feel like you’ve accomplished more because you rack up those steps more quickly. And so you can look back and you can say, oh, look, I’ve done 10 steps today, as opposed to I’ve done two steps today, even though you might have gone the same distance. So psychologically that helps you out, but it also means that you you build momentum faster, and it’s just easier to do because it’s small steps.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:57]:
So anything that feels daunting to you is too big a step. That’s the first piece of advice. The second is self compassion. Right? We watch kids and and we think the kids just play all the time because kids don’t shit on themselves when they fall down. Right? If you watch, and I’ve talked about this before too, but it’s true. So it bears repeating. If you watch kids learning to walk, kids will take a step and fall flat on their faces because they haven’t figured out yet how to combine motion and balance. They will take that step.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:35]:
They will fall right down. They will laugh about it, unless they’ve hurt themselves, but even then they might laugh about it. They will pick themselves up, and they will do it again. And they will repeat that process until they learn how to combine those two things. Adults, though, adults don’t have the patience for that anymore because we’re used to having that skill already. But when you are trying to learn a new creative skill or any kind of skill, you don’t have that ability to combine different different capacities yet. You are learning it all over again. And kids keep going because they have this thing called the rage to master.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:14]:
They just wanna learn it. Right? They’re watching other people do it and they just wanna learn it. Adults have that rage to master, but they also have impatience and perfectionism and the tendency to compare themselves to everybody else. If you put kids who are learning to walk in a room full of other kids who are learning to walk, what they don’t do is sit there and go, Timmy’s walking already and I’m not. And have a fit about it. They pick themselves up and they keep going because they haven’t learned yet to compare themselves to everybody else. They don’t compare themselves to their mom. Who’s been walking for, you know, thirty years yet either.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:49]:
But adults do that all the time, and we we let it get in our way. So give yourself a break. Have some compassion for yourself. It’s gonna take some time. You are learning from the very, very, very beginning. You are learning from zero. And that’s why people talk about beginner’s mind. Because you have to go into it like you know nothing, recognize that you know nothing and treat yourself like you are that completely ignorant person because you are, and that’s okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:24]:
And it’s okay to remember that that’s okay. You’re not supposed to know everything about what you’re doing yet. If you knew that, you wouldn’t be starting from the beginning. Right? So it’s okay to give yourself a break to let it be a process. You will learn so much more if you slow down into the process and let yourself have that experience. Like, I know I know when the matrix came out, I wanted to be able to download a new language into my head instantaneously like they did in that movie too, or to be able to fly the helicopter and all the stuff that they could do. But if we could actually do that, we would deny ourselves everything that we learn from the process of learning. It just, it just doesn’t work that way.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:12]:
And this is why I am wearing this t shirt with the fifth doctor that says Brave Heart on it. Cause this is something that he said a lot. You have to be brave when you learn a new creative thing, If you’re not brave about it, because you have to be brave to try the thing and fall down lots of times. And if you don’t have that courage and that bravery, you’re gonna end up quitting. And if you tell yourself the wrong things about it, you’re gonna end up writing a post like this one. It’s not a reflection on you. It’s a reflection possibly on the kind of friends who made the comments that made you feel crappy about the work that you did on the first effort that you made where you had fun and you felt good about it. If you’d kept going, you still would have had fun.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:58]:
You would have learned more. You would have made something even better. That’s how it works. Learning is iterative. Creativity is iterative. This is why when I saw a post from Mark Cuban earlier this year about how creatives should love AI because it iterates so much more quickly, I thought that that destroys the whole point of the creative process for an awful lot of creative people, Mark, like you clearly haven’t ever really done much that’s creative in an artistic iterative sense, or you’d understand what a ridiculous comment that is for most creative people. If not all of them. Like that’s a completely tone deaf thing to say because we’re here to learn and have the experience of feeling good about ourselves as our skill set grows and as we can see that we’re making progress in what we’re doing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:43]:
That’s the point. And I feel really bad for this man that his friends deprived him of that. Maybe not intentionally, but they did. And it sounds like they destroyed his self confidence at the same time, and that’s tragic. Kinda makes me wonder about the friends, if I’m honest. But I don’t know them, so I I won’t I won’t judge. And the last thing I wanna leave you with is what’s your definition of success? Because to me, that experience, trying the thing, enjoying it, and being pretty pleased with that first result, that sounds like success to me. Maybe it’s not where you wanna be in ten years, but for day one, that sounds like success to me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:29]:
So, you know, how are you defining success? We all get to define that for ourselves. So my definition may not be yours, but I don’t think it should be I’m getting a Grammy after day one. Cause that’s not realistic for pretty much any pursuit. That’s going to lead you into despair and resentment and depression and no place. Good. So if you see yourself in any of this, I want you to know that you’re not alone. This happens to so many people. I want you to know there’s a way out.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:06]:
I built a framework to help with this and and it’s my passion to help people find themselves again through restorative creativity framework. That’s that’s what I’m all about. But whether that’s for you or not, I welcome you to this little corner of the Internet. If this is your kind of place, I hope that you will stick around, subscribe, come hang out here anytime you like, because that’s why I’m here. I’ve also got the Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle that meets every month. Would love to have you for that. It’s just a dedicated space to come and make sure that you get some time to come and do your thing, bring your project, come hang out with us, get to know us a little bit. It’s very easy to find wherever you are listening to or watching this episode, there will be a link.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:52]:
Come and join us. And, you know, I’m I’m Nancy. I am your MessyMuse mentor, and this is what I help people to do. You don’t have to become someone new. You just have to come back to life. And, you know, I hope in whatever way I can help you do that. So thanks for joining me here today in the Creative Closet, and I hope that I’ll see you here again next time. If you’re tired of thinking about answering a creative call but never actually doing it, Come join me for an hour and start feeling like yourself again.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:25]:
The Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle is a safe, welcoming, and encouraging environment where we send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp, where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. You can find it at the link in your podcast app. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.