Paul Pape is an artist, designer, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the creative industry. He’s created thousands of personalized products for clients worldwide as well as companies such as Disney, Universal, and Nickelodeon. In recent years, he’s shifted to empowering creatives, companies and corporations, sharing his expertise and insights to help them embrace innovation, reverse the creativity crisis and make life and work FUN again. Paul talks with me about failure as something necessary to innovation—not something you did wrong; what we’ve learned from the pandemic, and what we’ve refused to learn; and the technological pandemic of boredom and doomscrolling, and what we can do to find inspiration outside of screens and devices (spoiler: it involves PLAY).
Read this week’s post, “Letting Go and Finding Flow,” here.
Episode breakdown:
00:00 Introduction
01:18 Intro to Paul’s creative and educational journey.
06:21 Disillusioned artist seeks better opportunities after MFA.
11:25 Thrive on process and problem-solving, not outcomes.
18:44 Creativity crisis: Innovation decline due to pressure.
23:16 Ownership fosters pride and individuality in work.
26:53 Uninterrupted work and flexible schedule were beneficial.
35:38 Short-term thinking limits long-term business growth.
38:48 Engage audience; leave wanting them to play.
44:03 Focus on interests, continually learn, and yield.
48:00 Prioritizing profits over addressing boredom and technology.
55:31 Encourage creative play with devices over mindlessness.
58:38 Hope: Augmented reality enhances life’s immediate engagement.
Paul Pape Show Links
Paul’s websites: www.paulpape.it
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Transcript
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. Paul Pape is an artist, designer, and entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the creative industry. He’s created thousands of personalized products for clients worldwide, as well as companies such as Disney, Universal, and Nickelodeon. In recent years, he’s shifted to empowering creatives, companies, and corporations, sharing his expertise and insights to help them embrace innovation, reverse the creativity crisis, and make life and work fun again.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:48]:
Paul talks with me about failure as something necessary to innovation, not something you did wrong, what we’ve learned from the pandemic and what we’ve refused to learn, and the technological pandemic of boredom and doomscrolling, and what we can do to find inspiration outside of screens and devices. Spoiler, it involves PLAY. Here’s my conversation with Paul Pape. Paul, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.
Paul Pape [00:01:15]:
Well, thank you for having me, Nancy. I appreciate it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:18]:
So I start everybody off with the same question, which is, were you a creative kid, or did you discover your creative side later on?
Paul Pape [00:01:26]:
Well, how deep do you think it’s gonna be here? I, I’m a give you my origin story, kinda like my Batman origin story here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:34]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:01:34]:
I came from an abusive home. And so as a child, I threw myself into education. When I found school, that was, like, the game changer for me. It became my church, my sanctuary, and so I really threw myself into education. But at the same time, I’m a very creative person, and I always have been. My imagination and, the ability to play for myself is really what was an escape from all of that when I was home. I spent many, many, many days sinking Luke Skywalker through the Dagobah, quicksand on the little Dagobah PlayStation when I was a kid. I mean, it was just one of those things.
Paul Pape [00:02:10]:
And so, oddly enough, I’m both. I’m a a creative and an, educated person, and so they usually don’t go together, but I’ve figured out how to make it work. So
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:20]:
So I’m gonna guess that your any any encouragement must have come from school, but I’m probably not from home?
Paul Pape [00:02:26]:
Well, it depends. Like, my family is very creative. My, my grandmother owned the 2nd largest doll museum in the United States, and she ran it out of her house. And my grandfather is the one who built the whole thing. And so he would do giant dioramas using things called apple head dolls where he’d carve head like, faces and apples Paul let them shrivel up, and then they would become the heads of the, things. And he’d create these things. And he was a painter and he could draw, and he’s a woodworker mechanic and all that. And then my mom is a super crafty person, and so we always had arts and crafts and such around our home growing up.
Paul Pape [00:03:00]:
But it was more we weren’t really well off, and so it was a lot of found material stuff. So I remember a lot of the projects when I was young being just out of whatever I could get within arm’s reach. Now I will say that my mom, she loves this thing. I have idle hand issues. I don’t like to sit still, and she used to do this thing where whenever I’d come to visit, she would put 3 random items on the table where she knew I was gonna sit just to see what I would do with them. And she always laughed to herself. I don’t and she eventually told me that’s what she would do, but it’s it’s just a you know? So found object art is is really kinda where I got it. But, yeah, family, it did inspire me a lot.
Paul Pape [00:03:32]:
I just think I got the reassurance or the, the okay to be who I was in school and that but I think it was more when I leaned into education because I could do no wrong if you were doing the schooling correctly. And and, ironically, I’m a lefty, and so the hardest problem that I had in school, especially elementary school, was the fact that I was left handed, but doing things from a right handed perspective because that’s how you’re taught as a as left Right. You know, everything is right handed. And so I failed handwriting because I wouldn’t turn my page far enough over or, those kind of things. And so it was usually the creative pursuits that I failed at at school as opposed to the educational things. But at home, you know, there was an environment that nurtured being creative, however that falls.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:20]:
That’s pretty cool. That’s very cool. So how did you eventually end up moving toward a creative career?
Paul Pape [00:04:32]:
So I went through school until I got to high school and I found theater. And so in in high school, I became an actor, and, I was casting Paul the leads because I didn’t get stage fright. I’ve got a really good presentational voice, and all that, but I’m a horrible actor because I can’t memorize lines. And so but because they didn’t have anybody else who was willing to step up to it, they kept casting me. And so then I went to undergrad, and I was like, I’m gonna be a theater major, and I just walked right into it. I’m day 1 theater major. And then within, like, 2 months, I was told by the the head of acting that they wouldn’t cast me in anything. And so, I was like, well, I’m still a major.
Paul Pape [00:05:10]:
I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it. And I met a man, who was the dean at the time, and he asked me if I wanted to learn everything about theater. And he meant it, and I said absolutely sure. And I learned everything from the maintenance to, like, rigging the electrical wiring to, stage management, directing, acting, and design. And, eventually, I fell into the design aspect of it. And I fell in love with scenic design, so I’d create the worlds of the plays. And I was really good at it. I won some really nice award, ended up going to graduate school for it.
Paul Pape [00:05:41]:
And then, when I finished graduate school, I was talking to a designer I was assisting who had all these shows on Broadway, and I asked him how it was to be at the apex of your career. And he told me it was horrible and that he he traveled too many months too many weeks out of the year. He was on the road. He paid for an apartment he was never in. He had a bunch of assistance just to keep up with the paperwork because in the states, it doesn’t pay that well. And so, he says if you ever wanna, like, lay down roots, this is not the job for you. And, ironically, I just talked to him, like, 4 days ago, and I was telling him this, and he’s like, I don’t remember everything He didn’t know this information. But it, like, really it, like, opened my eyes.
Paul Pape [00:06:21]:
And I and I I knew as I was assisting him, I assisted him on a lot of different shows, and I think he just saw that I had, like, a wanderlust that I, you know, that I wanted more than just this one thing. And so he gave me that advice, and it really kinda shook my world because I had just graduated with an MFA. And I’m like, now what? And, my wife is a costume designer. We met doing shows, and, she is still a costume designer 20 something years later, but I was kinda disillusioned by this whole thing. Because when you’re in school, it’s always unlimited funds, unlimited time, unlimited everything, but then the reality is you’ll make $300 doing 6 weeks worth of work. That’s not enough to pay your bills. And so I I thought, well, let’s see what else I can do. And I happen to be working on another show where I had to hand cut a bunch of tiny little chairs, and I got to thinking after making the 100th one that there’s gotta be a better way.
Paul Pape [00:07:14]:
So I went this is in early 2000. So I actually called Hallmark, the card creating company, and said, I noticed you have these laser cut greeting cards. Can that machine be used to make other things? And they’re like, yeah. Sure. Come on down. And so they had this warehouse sized machine that could laser cut paper. And so I designed tiny paper furniture that you could fold, called pop out furniture, and that was my first real, like, venture into entrepreneurship in a creative industry. And then from there, I went to I was a college professor for 3 years.
Paul Pape [00:07:48]:
I taught design in the same place I went to undergrad. I thought since I loved it here so much and I love education so much, why don’t I jump in and be a a professor? And then the curtain was pulled back, and I saw how it worked. Nope. And it was it was that was really eye opening because everything that I loved about school was there and in my hands. I that’s what I could dish out, but it was everything that I didn’t like about all other aspects of other jobs that was the back end of it. And I was working 14 to 16 hour days, 6 days a week for 3 years, and every annual review I got, said, if you only, you could apply yourself and be and do more. And I was like, wow. I don’t I don’t know how like, I was getting to school at 5 in the morning, and I would leave about 7, 8, 9 o’clock at night.
Paul Pape [00:08:35]:
And this is 6 days a week. And when you do theater, sometimes you’re there till midnight. And so, yeah, that was that was too much. And so I my last year there, I had a student who asked me if I could create a little figurine of him and his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. The Nintendo Wii had just come out, and so he wanted little Miis of him and his girlfriend. And so I made them for him as, you know, as I do, and he put it online. And this is before there was an online, before everybody had their own Instagrams or Facebooks or all that, and it got picked up by a bunch of nerd based blogs. And it took off.
Paul Pape [00:09:06]:
It went viral. And I started getting requests to make more of these. I’ve made over a1000. And so, I was making more on the side doing that than I was being a professor, and I was a lot happier. And so I asked my wife if she would let me quit being a professor and then try and do this for real. And she said, I’ll give you 1 year, and then I had my second viral thing happened about 4 months later. We made $50,000 in 2 weeks. And she’s like, okay.
Paul Pape [00:09:32]:
I think you can do this. That was 20 years ago. And I have a philosophy in life, which is bend, don’t break, which basically means that whenever a job opportunity if you’re familiar with improv at all, they have the yes and Mhmm. Very similar. And so when people would ask me, you know, hey. Can you make this? It’s a yes, and I’d figure it out later. And so that’s why when you look at the wall behind me, it’s so varied, and it’s because anytime anybody had something crazy that they didn’t know how to have made, I would step up and say, let me give it a shot. And that’s what led to working with Disney and Universal and Nickelodeon and all of these different places because when they get stuck, I live literally outside the box.
Paul Pape [00:10:10]:
And so they would call me up and say, is there a way to do this? And the answer is always yes, and we’ll figure it out.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:16]:
We’ll figure it out. Yeah. And for those of you who are are listening, there’s there’s there’s a a huge a huge wall that I can’t even see all of just just in this shot on Zoom, but Paul has shown me everything that’s behind him, and it is it is basically nerd paradise. There’s all sorts of stuff on on this wall that, you know, you could sit and stare at it for hours and probably not see all of it. So so, yeah, that’s, that’s where we’re that’s where he’s coming from, very literally.
Paul Pape [00:10:49]:
Literally, the nerd wall is behind me. Yes. It it is a Yeah. A billboard of inspiration in in in jobs that I’ve done. I mean, 20 years you don’t really think that 20 years is a very long time, to be doing the same thing. But when I look back at all the stuff that’s behind me, I’m like, yeah. That’s that’s a lot that’s a lot of mileage off of that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:08]:
That’s a lot. And I think, you know, and you can tell me if I’m wrong, but I have the feeling that the fact that you’re always saying yes and, and you’re you’re not sure what’s gonna come next, and so everything is different, probably makes that 20 years feel like it went by in no time at all. Absolutely.
Paul Pape [00:11:25]:
And I I know a lot of people, my wife included, are get very nervous when you don’t know what’s next. And she says I have a superpower that whenever we need money, it appears. And it’s just a a random thing that happens, but I I thrive on not knowing. One question I get asked a lot is what is your favorite thing you’ve ever made in 20 years? And I don’t really have a thing that I’ve made because for me, it’s the process. I’m a professional problem solver. I love to figure out how to do the thing. And so it’s the process into it because that feeds into the education and the imagination side of things. And so I’ve I’ve had my, you know, trials and tribulations with any of these projects, but for me, the the what I learned from it and how my skill set grows is really what inspires me to keep going.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:10]:
Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s always a new challenge. Right?
Paul Pape [00:12:14]:
Absolutely. There’s been some doozies. I worked for the The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and, when they call you, they literally need everything tomorrow. And I really wish I was exaggerating. The first time I ever worked with them, my wife was in labor when they called. She was we were in the hospital. She is going through labor. And they called me, and they they needed something the next day to give to Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
Paul Pape [00:12:36]:
And they wanted to know if I could make it happen. And my wife is literally, you know, going through contractions, and I just looked at her, and I’m like, so it’s The Tonight Show on the phone, and I was wondering, can I take this job? And, it was our 3rd kid. So she’s like, it’s our 3rd kid. We know the routine. Go do this. It’s an opportunity. And so now when and I’ve done things like I’ve designed the LEGO set for the tonight show where they turn the entire tonight show, say, into LEGO. I had to design that for them.
Paul Pape [00:13:05]:
I’ve done many awards for them, and, like, sometimes, they’ll Paul you up in the last for weird things. Like, we need 2 praying mantises playing double Dutch with bumblebees, and they need to be realistic in in actual size. And we need it by tomorrow or the day after. And I’m like I said, I’m in Nebraska, and they are not. And so everything I do, I have to ship to them. And so it’s it’s, always a challenge to meet the 6 o’clock FedEx deadline to be able to get it to them the very next day, and it’s it’s always a challenge. But I love it. It’s, you know, I thrive on on that kind of, well, I guess, pressure would be Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:13:42]:
Would be what you’d call it. But it’s fun.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:46]:
Yeah. Well and and I’m just imagining how many boxes of Lego you had to meet that FedEx deadline with.
Paul Pape [00:13:54]:
Oh, so many. So many. My kids will never want for Lego. That’s we’ll just Paul it that way. They just, because what we did was we I designed it. So if you’ve ever, like, been to the store and you’ve seen, like, the the Friends set or the Seinfeld set that they have that you can build, they basically wanted me to do the same thing, figure out how to build. And then what they did is I had to then draw it out so I knew how big one LEGO brick is in real life, and then they blew it up. So I sent them all the plans, and then they built a full scale version out of what looked like LEGO bricks, but they weren’t LEGO brick.
Paul Pape [00:14:28]:
And it was it was it was crazy just to try and because that’s not a one to one with Lego. It’s, like, 1.45, and it’s really weird to have to try and figure out the math on all this to make it look like the brick, but at the same time, has to be human sized so that they could play around it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:45]:
Yeah. I I think you may have just broken my brain on the math part.
Paul Pape [00:14:51]:
That’s the challenge, though, and I love it. I thrive on that. That’s fun.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:54]:
I mean, that would take me I was gonna say that would take me the till tomorrow part, but, no, it would take me way longer than that.
Paul Pape [00:15:03]:
That one, I I will say they gave me 4 days. They didn’t give me they gave me 4 days to figure that one out. So it wasn’t, like, instantaneous, but I’ve had some really some some doozies from them as as well as other companies. And it’s they think it’s impossible. And I love I love to be able to surprise people with being able to do something that is that seems impossible but can be made possible. And I’ve I’ve blown the socks off of some executives in some different boardrooms across the world, and they’re like, how do you and because I can come up with answers really first because I’ve been doing this for so long. You know? And Mhmm. So they don’t they don’t see the creative process.
Paul Pape [00:15:37]:
I teach it, though. And so when I get into it and I and I talk to students or now I talk to companies, corporations, and and, like, clients, like, actual creatives on how to harness this creative process, it’s it seems like magic, but it’s only because you don’t really understand the inner workings until I explain it. And then you’re like, oh, that’s how you got
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:56]:
Right. Right. Well and and I before before we get too far away from it, since you mentioned your kids, I am imagining you know, first of all, are are they the recipient of of many, many new and and exclusive things that no one else has seen?
Paul Pape [00:16:19]:
It here’s the funny thing about kids. Do you have I don’t know if you have kids, but, if you if you do, whatever you do in your life is so mundane to your children that it’s just the thing that you do.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:32]:
That’s true.
Paul Pape [00:16:33]:
And so my kids come down, and they see the nerd Paul, and they just they’ll just grab things off of it and play with it. And sometimes it comes back without a head or a hand, and then they put it back. My wife is a costume designer. Everyone’s like, Halloween must be the best. My kids are like, nah. We don’t care. I have a house, like a tree house I built in the backyard, and we call it the tree house, but it’s actually tree management. It’s got air conditioning and heating.
Paul Pape [00:16:54]:
It’s got a Wi Fi. It’s got fingerprint scanners, hardwood floors. It’s beautiful. It’s made of trees that support it that are actually made out of concrete, but they look like real trees. It’s beautiful, and the kids have never used it. That is because in when you are creative all the time, when you’re born into this, they it’s just they’re normal. Now I will say my kids are all very creative in their own right. They all have none of them wanna do it, my wife or I do.
Paul Pape [00:17:22]:
They wanna do their own thing, and we encourage it. You know, please, obviously
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:25]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:17:25]:
Whatever you want. Be creative. And we it was for us, it’s more about, like, I I said, I love the process. For us, it’s about giving them the fundamentals to let them understand that no matter what it is that you’re interested in doing, whatever the creative outlet is, and it doesn’t have to be art. Anything can be creative. Just throw yourself into it. Become the best at it that you can. And then, and then if you decide that you don’t wanna do it anymore, go do something else, and that that opportunity is always there.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:52]:
I think that is awesome. And, you know, totally, they should go do their own thing. I mean, that’s that’s the that’s the important thing. You know? Going and exploring and figuring it out for themselves.
Paul Pape [00:18:06]:
I teach them also that because one thing that I’ve, and this is one of the things I speak about is failure. Failure has gotten such bad rap lately because when we look at failure, we look at it as doing something wrong. And, actually, failure is the only thing that leads to innovation. It’s the only thing that leads to new ideas. And so I encourage my kids to try things without fear of failure or or we say failing creatively so that we kinda change the paradigm so that we don’t feel like it’s a negative because, you know, they’re in school. They’re like, oh, no. I failed this test. And so bad me, and then it’s like self flagellation.
Paul Pape [00:18:44]:
And even when you go into the business world, you know, go out into the real world, you know, if you’re not hitting your deadlines, if you’re not, you know, getting the bottom line low enough, all of these things, it’s failure, failure, failure. And then it’s fear of losing your job. We’ve gotten so far away from, like, innovating because we’re so concentrating on right answers and the bottom line that the kids are suffering from it, and we don’t have the innovation anymore that we used to have 50 years ago. There’s There’s something called the creativity crisis that I’ve been really looking into. And since the nineties, we’ve seen a 60% decrease in creativity in children. Trackable. This is, like, 60%, and the hardest hit are kindergarten to 3rd grade. Like, that’s the time when we should be the most creative, when we’re just playing all the time.
Paul Pape [00:19:28]:
And so we teach our kids, try it. And if you don’t like it, that’s okay. But you’ve tried it, fail at it. What did you learn from the failure? Because even if you learned that you just didn’t like it or that you didn’t fit with you, that’s that’s something you’ve learned. But I Mhmm. I find that whenever you’re trying something new, every time that you fail, there is a a nugget in there that progresses you forward. And it may not contribute to the thing that you’re making right now or the thing that you’re doing right now. It may be something that pays off 10, 15 years down the line.
Paul Pape [00:19:58]:
But you have that, and you’ve got the security in self that you know that it isn’t a mistake and that you can tuck that away and and pull it out later.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:07]:
That is such a massive gift to anyone of any age, but especially to a kid.
Paul Pape [00:20:12]:
Yep. I think so. And you should see my kid. My kids take advantage of it all the time. And our kid, like, their teachers are like, you guys are fearless. And it’s like, it’s not fear. It’s it’s not that they’re fearless. I mean, trust me.
Paul Pape [00:20:23]:
They’re scared of a lot of stuff. My they talk they have, like, crisis subconscious about growing up. They’re like, my my middle schooler, he’s getting he just graduated 6th grade today. He’s going into middle school. And the other day, he was sad. I’m like, what’s up, bud? And he’s like, oh, I was thinking about having to pay taxes. I’m like, you’re in 6th grade, dude. You’ve got time.
Paul Pape [00:20:41]:
It’s all good. Don’t worry about it yet. Like, you don’t need to have but but they aren’t they’re fearless when it comes to trying new things because they understand that there’s really, the only repercussion is the ones that we we throw on ourselves. Even if somebody says, oh my god. You failed at that. He’s like, yeah. I sure did. Okay.
Paul Pape [00:20:58]:
You know, it doesn’t hurt. It it once you get that mindset going, it doesn’t hurt anymore.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:03]:
Yeah. And and so many of us and I’m I’m, you know, thinking of places that I’ve worked as you’re talking. I’m like, you know, we want the same thing we had last year. Do it the same way we did it last year. And, you know, I’ve worked with graphic designers who are like, can I change the color slightly? It’s like, oh, no. It’s not black like it was last year. It’s like, oh, lord. You know? I mean and yet they’ll come in and they’ll say, well, we wanna do something different.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:34]:
But by different, what we really mean is we want it to be exactly the same as it was last year. Mhmm. Mhmm. And so, you know, the the whole opportunity to fail and to try new things just just isn’t there. So it’s really no wonder that we have a whole pile of adults who are like, ah, I can’t move half an inch in one direction because I’ll mess up and and I’ll lose my job and, you know, whatever. And I just I think that’s crazy, but you see it all the time. Yeah.
Paul Pape [00:22:04]:
Yeah. And so I try to instill I mean, the there’s 3 things that you can give a creative, whatever your creativity is, that will make them feel honored. You can give them more money. No business is doing that right now anyway. Mhmm. You can give them ownership, which I think is something that a lot more willing to try that basically gives people a little bit of wiggle room to try to make the job their own. I’m I’m a kid of the like, I grew up in the seventies, but I was high school in the nineties, so nineties is huge. There was a a a guy, Montel Jordan, who sang a song, this is how we do it.
Paul Pape [00:22:40]:
And it’s become like like, that’s how we do training videos anymore. It’s like we sit somebody down and say, this is how we do it, and this is how you’re going to do it. The problem is is whoever came up with that idea, when whoever they filmed to be the person who did it correctly, was given leeway to figure it out, to figure it out how best it works for them. And then what they they did is they then encapsulated that information, and and their boss came down and said, wow. You are super efficient at all of this. And they they said, you know, you’re really efficient at this. You’re really good at this. We wanna film you to be the person who teaches everyone else.
Paul Pape [00:23:16]:
And that person obviously is like, oh, that’s high praise. Of course, I will sit and video this. And then they do that, but then the next person has to be fit into a mold, and then that person has to be fit into the mold of the person before it. And by the time, you know, 4 or 5 generations of employees come through, whatever that job was, whatever made that person good at that job is gone because everyone’s trying to square peg round holes, and it doesn’t work anymore. And so ownership gives somebody the ability to say, this is the solution that we’re after, and this is where we’re at Paul all the parts that go to it. How do you get there, and can you get there efficiently? And once you do that, they then they have there’s a sense of pride in that. When you figure it out for yourself, you’ve got pride in in ownership of your position, and then you’re happier about it. You’ll come to work happier about it because this is how you do it, not how everyone else does.
Paul Pape [00:24:07]:
And then the the third thing is time. Give everyone their time back. And I really wish the pandemic everyone’s like, oh, the pandemic was horrible, and I think the pandemic was probably the best thing to happen to modern civilization because it proved something to us. We were stuck in this rut of the 9 to 5 that didn’t really start until after World War 2, where we go to work every single day, and it’s like babysitting for adults. We’ve got middle managers whose sole job is to make sure that you play in your playpen.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:38]:
Right.
Paul Pape [00:24:39]:
Then at 5 o’clock, you you’re given your snack break at noon. You’re giving you know, it’s like it’s just like day care for adults. And I have a good friend right now who he’s at a job, and he says, I have become a master of being at an 8 hour day and spending 1 hour getting my job done, kinda put a 100% done, and 7 hours of being on YouTube and not getting caught. And I’m like, that is a phenomenal waste of your time. He’s like, yes. But the management makes me be here. I have to. And so all of these people are going to these businesses to sit in these cubicles and to do their job when their job is done.
Paul Pape [00:25:15]:
And we found out that the job was done because the pandemic came. We had to sit at home, and then people are noticing, like, I can get my entire week’s worth of work done in 4 hours.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:25]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:25:26]:
Now I’m not gonna tell my boss that because then he’s only gonna pay me for 4 hours and or they’re gonna expect me to do another 36 hours worth of someone else’s job. So what we’re gonna do is Right. But when they’re not in your home monitoring you, then you had all this free time. And then humans decided, wait a minute. We don’t need to work 40 hours a week as long as I’m being paid for it. So that’s the third thing. It’s giving people their time back. So if as an employee or an employer, if you’ve got creatives, you can either give them ownership.
Paul Pape [00:25:54]:
You can give them more pay so that they can do the thing that you want them exactly the way you want them to, or give them their time back. Let them do the job and let them leave. And because the job is still being done.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:05]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:26:05]:
And and any of those 3 or combination of the of the of the the 3 of them works really well to give people the energy, the the want, and the desire to be there to do the job every day.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:19]:
Right. Yeah. I I think you’re absolutely right about that. I mean, definitely, there there was a an adjustment period to the whole being at home all the time thing, and I definitely remember the moment when I thought I was gonna go completely stir crazy. But, but, you know, what what has amazed me since then, because people people seem at least in in a large group, people seem to look back on that like it was terrible. And I’m sitting there thinking, no. I loved that. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:53]:
I loved it. I could do my own thing. I didn’t have people interrupting me and bothering me all the time, especially with, you know, useless things that were just distractions, which I think is part of why, oh, look, turns out we don’t need all this time to get the work done because nobody’s in my face constantly. But, you know, you you could go for a walk at lunch, you know, in your own neighborhood. You you could schedule things a little bit differently, and nobody was gonna have a problem with it. But, also, what blows my mind is the the places that, you know, when you went back in what, like, I think was the fall of 2021. At first, it was, so how many days a week are we still gonna get to be at home? But but nobody I mean, it it came back with all of the even if you got to stay at home for 2 or 3 days a week, it came back with all of the same talking points from before the pandemic as if none of it had happened about how, oh, our work is very collaborative, so we all have to be in the same place. And you’re like, I’m sorry.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:06]:
3 weeks ago, I was at home every single day, and and that was how it was for a year and a half.
Paul Pape [00:28:12]:
Yeah. And we
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:13]:
got all of our stuff done, and you never stopped telling us how it was better than it had ever been before. But now you say that we can’t do what we do if we’re not here. Yeah. Walking through playing the part, going through the motions of being in your space, it it just I don’t know. It blows my mind because it’s like, thought we learned something, but apparently, we didn’t learn something. Or more to the point, you don’t want to have learned something because you missed being able to micromanage the crap out of everybody.
Paul Pape [00:28:48]:
Daycare. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:50]:
Yeah. And and so you just despite the fact that you saw the results, you still never really believed that people could get these things done without you standing over them.
Paul Pape [00:29:01]:
Yep.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:02]:
Yeah. It’s crazy.
Paul Pape [00:29:04]:
And it’s also all the buildings that they own. They’re like, We’re paying rent on these things that we don’t need.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:09]:
Like, No,
Paul Pape [00:29:10]:
you don’t. And you don’t want to sell it because it’s such an asset to the business. I’m like, Well, but you’ve just discovered that you could Paul down to, like, 4 people in the building at any one time Paul all of your other employees. Like, PayPal is based in Omaha, Nebraska where I’m at. And they built this multi, multi, multimillion dollar facility that could house 1,000 of people. And during the pandemic, they gave everybody a laptop, and they closed that building. And the building’s not been opened. They’re like, we found out everyone can work with a $1,000 laptop that we give them from their house, and everyone’s happier, everyone’s getting the same Pape, the same benefits, why why not? We don’t need to be here.
Paul Pape [00:29:50]:
And what’s Right. Good is that you you air down middle management. I mean, I not to not to downplay middle managers out there, but it’s an an it’s an unnecessary ask when I mean, because we’re adults. We can self regulate. I mean, as much as we don’t wanna think that and there are people that during the pandemic, and and I know some of them personally, that had a hard time Yeah. The isolation. They are because we, as human species, we are social by nature. Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:30:20]:
And I think that that’s still necessary, but it’s the time is our most valuable asset because we can be given more money. We can be have money taken away. We have a finite amount of time. It’s an unknown quantity, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. And so when the pandemic came and we we figured out we could do our job quicker, we had more time to be us. We we had more of our life back.
Nancy Norbeck [00:30:43]:
Yeah.
Paul Pape [00:30:44]:
And so it’s that is the biggest stumbling block, I think, with bringing everyone back is that now you’re we we tasted the golden apple Yes. Of freedom, and then you’re like, alright. Now playtime’s over. Get back in here. And we’re all like, no. I know I can do exactly what I’m doing with more freedom. Can I do it? And a lot of people are quitting. A lot of people are quitting because they’ve been they’ve been told you are required to be back in the office.
Paul Pape [00:31:14]:
Not, nah. I know companies will hire me to not be in the office. Mhmm. Because that time thing, that time is so valuable to people. And it I mean, and if you think back to the pandemic, I don’t know how much you watch, like, social media and all that during the pandemic, but there were people who were coming up with super creative ways Oh, yeah. To make it look like they were working. Like, somebody figured out if you put a stopwatch underneath their mouse that the ticking secondhand made it look like the mouse was moving. And so their bosses who were you know, their middle management would check-in to make sure that the mouse was still moving for 8 hours a day.
Paul Pape [00:31:47]:
They were just like, yeah. Just set it on my watch, and then I went and watched Netflix because I’m already done with my job. Right. You know? And as humans, we are creative. I mean, that’s just we are the only species that we know of who are truly creative. The actual definition of creativity is to be able to use your imagination or to create new ideas, and that’s what we do. I mean, that is literally in our foundational being. And so when we’re confronted with something that we don’t wanna do, we will find creative solutions.
Paul Pape [00:32:18]:
And even when we find things that we want to do, we’ll find creative solutions to make it take longer. It’s because that’s just who we are as a species, and it’s just it’s been really interesting to see how post pandemic, how the majority of society is not willing to go back to the way it was. This is not how we
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:37]:
Yeah. I mean, people are doing it, but they’re not enjoying it. They’re not happy about it. And I think that the people who are forcing folks to be back in the office are really underestimating the effect that’s having on folks. And, you know, the the the metaphor that pops into my head is is Plato’s allegory of the cave. You know, we all got out of the cave. Right. And now you wanna tie me back up in the cave in front of the fire, and I don’t wanna be there because I know that there’s this other stuff outside the cave.
Paul Pape [00:33:04]:
Yep. Yep. I can live my life and do my job. That’s the that’s the you you can do both. You don’t need to work so much during the week that you only get 2 days off. Like, even if you went to a 3 day, 4 day work week, you still have 3 days off. You know? We like, we’ve we’ve conditioned ourselves just through repetition and because we use the think this is how I did it. This is how you should have to do it as well.
Paul Pape [00:33:29]:
You know? If I suffered when I did, you should suffer too. And that’s not like, as a teacher, your goal is to teach as much of the students so that they can bypass you. You want them to elevate past you. Whenever you do a job, it’s it’s the same thing. Whenever you have children, you hope that your children will succeed further than you did. And yet when it comes to work, like, nope. Like, we’re gonna all suffer the exact same way. We’re gonna stay nice and level.
Paul Pape [00:34:00]:
We don’t rock the boat. And it’s so weird that in every other aspect of our life, we’re all about elevation except when it comes to that, and then it’s stagnation.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:08]:
Yeah. Weird. Yeah. I I mean, it’s it’s like the ultimate fear of change. You know? Like, no. No. No. We want it to be exactly this way because this is what we know.
Paul Pape [00:34:18]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:18]:
And we say that we want you to come up with new things, but we only want you to come up with new things within this very narrow band of acceptable new thingness. And if it goes outside of that, no, no. We get it all has to stay the same.
Paul Pape [00:34:35]:
I mean, some of the best inventions that humankind has ever come up with happened by accident. Mhmm. Like, penicillin, the dude left cantaloupes out over the week a long weekend. I mean, that’s that’s the biggest mistake ever. You know? Post it notes. The guy was coming up with a permanent glue and came up with Post it notes, the least permanent glue you can come up with. Edward, or, Thomas Edison with a light bulb, 10,000 failures before he figured out how to get it correct. I we are just every vulcanized rubber is one of my favorites to talk about because they were trying to find a better shoe leather that wouldn’t wear out as much, and they found vulcanized rubber.
Paul Pape [00:35:09]:
It changed the industry. Until then, tires on your car were white, and it wasn’t actually in the vulcanization process where we added carbon into it that actually made it stronger. And now we have, you know, everything we’re like, that’s just what we’re used to completely by accident. Like, the great things and it’s because they were trying something, they failed astronomically, but they didn’t fail, feel bad, and throw it away. They failed, and we’re still conscious enough of it that they’re like, well, what is this? And they were curious. Yeah. And they they look at it. And but you’re right.
Paul Pape [00:35:38]:
That narrow band, mm-mm. They don’t want you to to look outside because what if something is better that’s out there? Well, it might take away or it might cost me something, cost the business something. But they they’re so shortsighted that it’s like, yeah. It might cost us something now, but if we elevate our profits down the road, is it worth taking the hit now? And, unfortunately, because of our limited timeline here on Earth, we don’t think 3, 4 generations down the line. We don’t think 1 generation down the line. We think of us right now until the day we die. Frank Lloyd Wright, one of my favorite architects that’s out there, he’s got standing or falling water. He’s got a it’s a beautiful area.
Paul Pape [00:36:17]:
If you’ve ever had a chance to go there and go look at it, go check it out. Beautiful. But he when he bought the place, he planted a bunch of trees. And they somebody had asked him. He says, oh, you’re planting all these trees. What happens when they get too big? He goes, I’ll be dead by then. That’s the next person’s problem. And now you go to see falling water, and it’s there’s no view anymore because there’s all these giant trees, and he was right.
Paul Pape [00:36:39]:
It’s not his problem. He did. You know? And Right. I think that if we would forward think just a little bit, that’s how we that’s how we get, you know, like, how we progress as a as a species, as as humankind.
Nancy Norbeck [00:36:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. We don’t we don’t tend to be as good at that. The closest we get is, I think, when we look at our kids and say, how should it be for them?
Paul Pape [00:37:03]:
You would think.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:03]:
You would hope. You would think. But but it doesn’t it doesn’t happen on on a large enough scale.
Paul Pape [00:37:09]:
It doesn’t. There’s a Group mentality is a big issue, unfortunately. You were talking earlier. You mentioned that, like, during the pandemic, we, as a group, all decided that that wasn’t working and and that we all need to, as a group, go back to doing this thing. And and that’s the truth. And mob mentality is a is an actual thing, and we wanna fit in because we are a social creature. And so as an individual, we’re like, I love being at home by myself during the pandemic because I got so much done. I got time to be by myself, whatever.
Paul Pape [00:37:37]:
But then when you see one person say, we need to come back, and then somebody else is like, I guess, and then everybody’s like, I guess too because they don’t wanna be left out. It’s that fear of missing out and and fear of not following the herd for fear of being left behind. But some of the most innovative creative people in the world throughout our entire history have been people who have walked outside that group.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:56]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:37:57]:
They’re aware of them. They can go in, do a little mixing around, and then come back out, and they don’t mind not being part of the herd. They can socialize with it. They’re not completely outside of it, but that ability to to phase in and out allowed them to be innovative in a way that most people aren’t.
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:16]:
Right. So when you go and you speak to corporate folks there are so many directions I could go in here right now. I’m I’m do you have much hope that they’ll actually listen?
Paul Pape [00:38:36]:
Oh my goodness. I’ve had people ask me, what’s the turnover rate of, like, them actually taking what you give them?
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:42]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:38:43]:
And I’m like, yeah, 5050. Like, I can tell more than
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:46]:
I would have thought.
Paul Pape [00:38:48]:
Because a lot of people who bring me in, they know what I’m coming in for, and so I think that benefits me. When you can tell within, like, the first 3 minutes of any speech as to whether or not they’re gonna take any of it to heart. A lot of it and public speaking is a is a weird profession because you’ve gotta excite them enough to want to be there because they’re usually 9 AM. They’re being forced to go to this convention or whatever. And so you’ve gotta excite them to be there. So you get out on stage, and you you wanna play a game, and you wanna make them laugh, and you wanna give something poignant and all this. But at the end of the day, I could scrap every bit of that as long as you would just do the one thing I want you to do. You know? And, like, the one thing that I leave is I want you all to play.
Paul Pape [00:39:33]:
I mean, like, if you think about it, when was the last time you actually just played for nothing? No stakes. No nothing. Just play. We don’t do that anymore, yet our children do it all the time, and we encourage them. Go outside and play. What does that mean? I don’t know. I don’t do it. It’s like, no.
Paul Pape [00:39:47]:
I I do
Nancy Norbeck [00:39:48]:
it at all. Out of my hair for a couple hours is what it means.
Paul Pape [00:39:51]:
Go entertain yourself. Yeah. We we don’t teach them how, and we don’t do it anymore ourselves. So what does that what does that mean? Well, now it’s this. You’ll pick this thing up and stare at it and let this be my entertainment. And it’s unfortunate. And so when I go out there, that’s the one thing I want anybody to take away. I want you to play.
Paul Pape [00:40:09]:
I want you to fail, and I want you to play. But, you know, just do those two things. The problem is that we think play is childish.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:17]:
Yeah.
Paul Pape [00:40:18]:
And it’s not it’s not because it’s that it’s in play that we innovate. I love to use the word innovate, and I say it a lot, but it’s it’s truly where it comes from. It’s when we let loose any of our inhibitions. One example that I like to give when I’m doing speeches is that as a baby, when we’re born, we nothing means anything. Like, language is all made up. You know, everything is make believe. And as soon as, like, our parents start to teach us, you know, from the very first thing, dada. You know? We are given a brick, and we lay that brick down.
Paul Pape [00:40:48]:
And as there that brick has constraints. This is dada, mama. And then as we go through our life, we’re constantly adding these bricks of education around ourselves. These are the structures of our life, and we build it up and up and up and up. And, eventually, we find ourselves in a box. And what we forgot to do was put a door or windows in it, And we are constrained within these limitations of rules that people have given us throughout our entire life, through education, job, all these different things. And we’re stuck inside this box. And what I try to teach people is you need to get out and play.
Paul Pape [00:41:22]:
You need to put a window in your in your bricked in house here so that you can step outside and actually see things in a lawless, rule less way. And there are very, very, very prolific people out there who have figured out that most of the brick wall or room that we build around ourselves are group mentality ideas. We don’t have to abide by them. And they figured out that they’re not going to, So they step outside of it, and they live their entire life with the box next to them. And so they have the rules. They understand the rules, but they’re not gonna live by it. But they’re not gonna buck the system so much that they’re ostracized. They just understand that those constraints that we put on everybody, like a 40 hour work week, is not necessary.
Paul Pape [00:42:09]:
A 4 hour work week can be a great thing, and it’s possible. You know? You don’t need to follow all of these strict rules, just enough to be able to fit in with society, but then you can live your literally your best life by not staying inside that box.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:26]:
Yeah. That’s a great metaphor. It was a great image because because yeah. I mean, and it’s it it is that. It’s the social pressure. It’s the you know, we are social creatures. We wanna fit into the group, and so you’re socialized to fit into that group. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the place for everybody, and it might be the place for fewer of us than we think.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:48]:
But but yeah.
Paul Pape [00:42:51]:
But we’re there. We’re we’re there.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:52]:
Yeah.
Paul Pape [00:42:53]:
It’s hard to unlearn. And that’s why I I say play. Play for me is actually it’s a it’s oh, now the word is just gonna escape my brain here. So it stands for something. P l a y stands for the it’s ponder, learn, apply, and yield. And ponder, I want you guys like, what I tell everybody is start a daily practice of play and ponder. I want you to use your imagination. Imagine new things.
Paul Pape [00:43:20]:
Imagine fixing something in your life that you use on a daily basis to make it better for you. Ponder these things. Imagine it. Just use your imagination and and go wild. You know? It doesn’t this is this is how we we innovate in our own lives. You know? Like, I’ve got my coffee cup, and I’m always drinking. I’m like, how can I make this better? You know? And I think of, like, 10 different ways that I can make it better. Some of them are impractical.
Paul Pape [00:43:40]:
Some of them would only be useful to myself. That’s okay. Then learning is something that it’s a lifelong thing. The day you stop learning is the day you start dying. It’s just you have to continue learning. And when I say learn, a lot of people instantly go, school. And learning is not school. I mean, this thing right here is the best device for learning, and you can dive into any rabbit hole that you want.
Paul Pape [00:44:03]:
And you can learn as much as the things that interest you, and you don’t need to be a generalist and and and super knowledgeable in everything to be really good at be at at anything. And so but constantly learn because our brains are really interesting machines in that it consumes everything that happens to us all day long. Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, it is taking it in, and it’s compromising it. And so when we have genius ideas, which comes into apply here, is when you take the learning stuff that you’ve done and the imagination stuff that you’ve done and you apply the 2 together to create something that actually could work, we we like to think that we have design divine inspiration where, like, God comes down and jiggles the gray matter in your brain, and that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that your imagination and the things that you’ve learned are being put together inside your brain. Yep. And this is what leads up to yield. And yield is one of the hardest things for people to do these days, especially because we’re conditioned not to, and, especially in the technological age that we’re in, is that you’ve gotta stop and give your brain time to decompress.
Paul Pape [00:45:14]:
You’ve gotta yield to not pick this up in doom scroll all day long to you know, when you go out in nature, yeah, it’s great to listen to music, but when was the last time you walked without music playing and just heard bird and bug sounds, you know, or the sound of your feet hitting pavement? It’s what I like to say is whenever you’re coming up with a brilliant idea or you’ve come up with an idea that you’re like, oh, that’s genius, it never happens when you’re in work, when you’re at the job, when you’re at the desk and you’re pouring over paperwork. It happens when you’re driving. It happens when you’re trying to fall asleep, when you’re in the shower. Shower thoughts
Nancy Norbeck [00:45:47]:
are a huge
Paul Pape [00:45:47]:
thing. And that’s because your brain is your primitive brain is preoccupied with a task that is mundane and easy, and we can do it in our sleep. And then what that allows is it allows for the creative side of your brain to actually form these ideas and to be able to, you know, put these things together. But if your brain is constantly active, it’s like a computer that’s running on overdrive all the time. And if you’ve ever been one of those people who’s fallen asleep scrolling through your phone, and then you wake up the next day and you’re exhausted, and it’s because your brain does not have the time to sort and process all that data that you’re throwing at it. And so while you might physically be asleep, your brain is not. And so you need to yield. Give yourself moments in which you just just live your life.
Paul Pape [00:46:33]:
Be inside here for a minute, you know, not in a device, not learning, not playing, not imagine, not any of those things. Just be. And then what you’ll find is that think ideas come quicker. You’re just like, oh, yeah. Because your brain’s got you know, the it’s now created these neural pathways that allow you to think through things a lot easier, and you can grab from this. So when I do that magic trick where some company calls me up and says, how do you do this magical thing? You know, how can I have one call me up? I I worked on this movie, called the creator. They were doing a promo event for it. And in it, there are these androids that and you knew that they were androids because they had a hole through their head.
Paul Pape [00:47:08]:
They had normal human face, but a big robot spine and a hole through their head. And, like, we wanna do a promotional item where we give everybody headphones, but we want it to look like the headphones make a hole through their head. And we can’t figure out how to do it. And instantly, I had the answer to it because I used to you know, like, a big fan. I’m a nerd, so I love magic as a kid. I worked with David Copperfield. I was like, what if we did an infinity mirror inside each of the headphones so when you look at it, you see a ring of light that goes on forever as if you’re looking through their head. And that, like, came to me instantly, and I pitch it to a room full of Disney execs, and they’re like, how did how did you come up with that? And that’s because of following the play practice.
Paul Pape [00:47:43]:
It’s literally that every day. And it’s just pulling from all of these random things. You wouldn’t think magic tricks would come into headphone design, but it works seamlessly. It it was so easy to to implement into that, and but it blows their minds. It becomes magic to them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:00]:
Yeah. Because they’re not they’re not doing any of that. They’re they’re saying, we want we want x, and it’s gonna make us this much money, and that’s the important thing. But but, you know, you’re you’re also reminding me, like, I I don’t think we know how to be bored anymore. No. You know? I mean, you you keep, you know, referencing the phone, and the phone, I think, is is the huge thing. And sometimes I say to myself, okay. But, you know, I would take books with me back when, you know, books were still a thing, and and you could, you know, I could stick 1 in a bag.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:34]:
And if I had to sit on a train or wait in a waiting room or whatever, I’d read the book. And is it really that different? But it is. Mhmm. You know? I mean, even if I am reading a book on my phone, the phone still is the the source of every possible distraction. You know, you know there’s other stuff you can do on it. With the book, it’s a book.
Paul Pape [00:48:58]:
That’s right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:59]:
You can read it or you can not read it, and that’s pretty much all you can do with it. But, you know, I I will sometimes, when I have to, like, you know, go to a doctor’s appointment, sit in the room, and wait for them, leave my phone on the other side of the room just to see what happens. And it’s usually maybe a minute before that part of me just wants to reach over and grab it and go get it, and I’m like, nope. It’s over there for a reason. So what are we gonna do instead? And it’s hard because we’ve forgotten how to do it.
Paul Pape [00:49:28]:
Yeah. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. No. Which is funny because, like, we’re alone with our thoughts 247. It’s the only it’s the only guest we can’t make leave. You know? And yet we wanna we wanna silence it. And it’s really interesting. If you take a if you take the time to listen to what that little voice is telling you, it’s it’s just trying to lead you to a better place.
Paul Pape [00:49:50]:
I mean, there obviously, there’s mental illness and such, and I don’t wanna I hate to generalize in that regard.
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:54]:
But Right.
Paul Pape [00:49:55]:
For the majority of people, the that voice is saying, why don’t you try the why don’t, you know, you are very happy when you’re doing this. Why aren’t you doing it? And you’re like, no. I’d rather see I’d rather doom scroll through Reddit or Instagram or whatever because I wanna find joy in what everyone else is doing rather than making my own. Because it’s too much work, you might Paul. You know, those kind of things. That that precondition Right. All there. We’re in our little brick house.
Paul Pape [00:50:20]:
And, it’s it it is amazing how like, my son I have I have a 9 year old, and he has every device known to man because that’s part of my job, you know, so I can have every gaming system, and he’s got his own computer, and he’s got LEGO forever. He’s got all his tools, and he’ll come out and he goes, I’m bored.
Nancy Norbeck [00:50:39]:
Right.
Paul Pape [00:50:40]:
And I’m like, you have everything at your disposal and the wide world outside, and yet you’re you say you’re bored. And it’s not that he’s bored. He’s lost the ability to self to self propel play. Like, he needs someone to say, this is the game that you’re gonna play, and these are the rules. This is the drawing like, he loves to draw, but he’s like, I don’t know what to draw. So tell me what to draw. And we’re all we’re all stuck now with this need for prompting rather than self prompting.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:11]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:51:11]:
It’s it’s a hard one to break because in school, it’s the same thing. What what is my assignment? Right. I gotta do this. Okay. And that’s what I’m working on, and you’ve got 15 minutes to do it, and then you’re done. Okay. Then what now now what? And that’s what we do, and we just conditioned ourselves to not be able to self, self direct. And
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:30]:
I I think we’ve been trained to believe that that we need to be given the prompt rather than the can coming up with our own. Like, that ours isn’t good enough.
Paul Pape [00:51:39]:
Mhmm.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:39]:
And so we need the one from the teacher or the manager or whoever. You know, I think I think that confidence gets trained out of us in that process.
Paul Pape [00:51:47]:
An authority figure. And yet you go talk to that authority figure, they have no idea what’s going on anymore than you. No clue. So it’s it’s it is interesting. And, I mean, if you can it’s we don’t like to retrain ourselves because it’s it’s work. And the one thing that we wanna avoid, and we’ll avoid it, is self you know, working on ourselves. We’ll avoid that forever, which is funny because then we’ll go to work and we’ll avoid doing our work at work as well. And it’s like if you just spent the time to actually, like, better yourself, we could all be in a better place.
Paul Pape [00:52:22]:
Like, I am a creative by career. This is my job. I love my job. And they say if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s not true. I work every day of my life. I just I’m not burdened by it to to the point that I it’s it’s a chore. It is work, but it is something that I I enjoy doing.
Paul Pape [00:52:41]:
And I think with, especially with, like, my kids, when when he asks for that prompt, I give I we’ll turn it around on him. Well, what do you think you should do? Well Mhmm. Oh, I’m bored. I don’t know what to do. Well, name 5 things in the house that you have that you could do. So we turn it around on him so that he’s forced to be the mediator to his own issues. And I think that it helps them to redefine the answer to that. Eventually, we just don’t hear from him at all because he’s like, I am bored.
Paul Pape [00:53:11]:
Oh, but I know I can go do this. And he swaps out what he’s doing all the time now, to just do random, random, random, random things. You know? And and I think that’s good because he’s not bored. He’s just short attention seeking. It is a different different issue altogether.
Nancy Norbeck [00:53:29]:
Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it’s funny because the the other thing that I have noticed with the phone and all of the social apps and everything, because I’m as likely to fall into that as anybody else, is that lately, I I’d sit there and I think, this is boring. Mhmm. You know? Like, I’m really, really aware that this is boring, and that there’s just this that it’s it’s I’ve trained myself to go and look and see what’s there even though, you know, even though with something that seems to start out as interesting within 20 seconds, I’m like, yeah. It’s it’s not. You know? And yet you still do it for a while before the this is boring takes over. And I think it’s because it’s just so easy.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:18]:
Convenient. It is the easiest thing to do. There is no friction. You just pick up the phone, and as long as you have an Internet connection, you think you have entertainment. You know? And and it’s kinda like there there was an ad, boy, a long time ago, probably at least 20 years ago, and it was probably for somebody like AOL where, you know, this guy in his pajamas at at his desk looking at his computer, and and it comes up, and it says, you have reached the end of the Internet. It’s like and the guy is sitting there going, what do I do now? Because the Internet became the source of entertainment.
Paul Pape [00:54:53]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:54:53]:
You know? We it’s it’s like I babysit my nephews, and it’s like, hi. There are board games. There is a soccer ball outside. There’s all of this other stuff, and you guys just wanna sit and stare at Minecraft on your iPad.
Paul Pape [00:55:08]:
Yep. Yep. And the the thing is is I’m not down on that though because my my my youngest, he loves his Paul of my kids have gone through that Pape. But I asked him what he’s doing on Minecraft, and I think that’s the that’s the key. My youngest, he creates stories. He’s a storyteller. And so he doesn’t have the tools to be able to make a motion picture, but he’s got Minecraft. And so he can Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:55:31]:
Little worlds and little scenes, and then we’ll be like, hey. What are you working on? He’s like, well, come here, and I’ll show you. And he’s like, this is this guy’s character. And he goes over to here, and this happens, and this happens. And I’m like, that’s an interesting way to use Minecraft as opposed to just mindlessly going through the world and and and doing whatever. I think that that is it if if we encourage that part of it instead of the you know, because devices, I don’t think, are inherently bad. It’s just that we we do find them to occupy every moment, every free moment because we’re afraid of being alone or bored, that I think that it is important that we encourage a specific type of play with those devices rather than just being the the time suck, the doom scroll that they all are. And don’t get me wrong.
Paul Pape [00:56:16]:
I’m I’m just as, you know, susceptible to the doom scroll as everyone else. I
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:22]:
Mhmm.
Paul Pape [00:56:23]:
My favorite thing is, is when I fly, I don’t like to pay for Internet on the flight because it’s 1, it rarely works. And then, 2, I just sit there, and I’m just, like, doing this. You know? The entire you’re doomscrolling. And sometimes I’ll just sit and stare and just Pape watch because it’s infinitely more interesting to me to to do that than it is to sit and and scroll through Instagram or or these other things. And it’s one saves me money, but I’m able to put that device away and just kind of
Nancy Norbeck [00:56:52]:
Yeah.
Paul Pape [00:56:52]:
Be around. And I’ve had some great ideas come to me while flying, staring out the window, watching clouds go by because my brain’s able to sort that information out and and come up with some Yeah. New things.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:03]:
It’s it’s like, you know, the whole driving the car being in the shower thing. Your brain is in that state where all of that stuff can come together.
Paul Pape [00:57:11]:
Yep.
Nancy Norbeck [00:57:12]:
That’s kind of like, you know, sitting at the airport watching all of the people around you is similar thing. Or you just, you know, tell people, go go to the mall and just listen to how people talk. And, of course, that’s not as much of a thing anymore. But No. But, yeah, I mean, there’s there are are ways to to go and and give your brain something to chew on without boring it to tears and ruining your eyes while you’re staring at a screen.
Paul Pape [00:57:43]:
Absolutely. But and we’ll get there. And I think, like, companies are moving to what’s called AR, which is augmented reality, where they don’t want you to hold the device. They wanna just kinda put it in your peripheral. And I think for a lot of the unfortunately, it’s all led by companies, and it’s all company bottom line. So they wanna just inundate your life with ads, which I think is sad. Mhmm. But if we could live our lives in in which we don’t have to be beholden to the square, we could actually have something that it you know, if something important happens where or we could turn it off, but we could it would then just be part of the peripheral.
Paul Pape [00:58:20]:
We’re still living our lives. Our heads aren’t down. We’re not staring at a device this way. We’re actually still entertaining the world that’s happening around us. But, eventually, you know, like, some things because we do want that distraction. We want to be connected. We want to see what the rest of the world is doing. And that’s because we are a communal species.
Paul Pape [00:58:38]:
We want you know, we’re a herd mentality type Mhmm. Thing, and so we want to be part of that. But at the same time, I think we we lose sight of the what’s going on right around us. And I’m hoping you know, I’m rainbows and unicorns guy. So I think with future tech, I would love for that part of it, that augmented reality, to give us the ability to live our lives an or not distracted by a a thing, an object that we have to carry with us. But instead, if we need a distraction, the distraction is, like, peripherally available so that we’re still in the moment. We’re still we when we walk across the street, we actually see if there’s traffic as opposed to staring at our screen, trying to get directions or whatnot. You know? We are still living our life, and that’s that’s for me, that’s the hope with augmented reality in in futurism, but we’ll see where we’ll see where it goes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:59:28]:
We will indeed. Well, that’s probably a pretty good place to stop.
Paul Pape [00:59:34]:
There you go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:59:34]:
I have really enjoyed this conversation. It’s been a lot of fun.
Paul Pape [00:59:38]:
Excellent. I have as well. So it’s been it’s always nice to talk about possibilities is a big thing for me. And I think that, especially with a creative lifestyle, with anybody who wants to be creative, it’s about possibilities and not telling ourselves that it’s not possible. That possibility is there, and it’s within grasp for anyone. You just have to be willing to try it and fail and accept that failure’s a possibility, but then try and try again. Don’t get hung up on it. And the possibilities are endless.
Paul Pape [01:00:12]:
So grasp it. Run for it. Have fun. You know? You get one shot.
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:15]:
Perfect. It’s perfect. Thank you so much.
Paul Pape [01:00:20]:
You’re welcome.
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:21]:
That’s this week’s episode. Thanks so much to Paul Pape for joining me and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this episode. There’s a link right in your podcast Pape, so it’s super easy and will only take a minute. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thank you so much. If this episode resonated with you or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners.
Nancy Norbeck [01:00:59]:
The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. 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.