Today we’re beginning a new podcast series called The Big Idea, in which we’ll cover the core concepts from each of Todd Henry’s first four books. This episode is devoted to the first book, The Accidental Creative.

Key ideas from this episode:

• The goal for create on demand professionals should be to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy in life and in work.
• If you don’t get the healthy piece right, you will eventually lose the prolific and brilliant piece as well.
• You need to be mindful of the assassins – dissonance, fear, expectation escalation – and build practices to help you avoid them.
• There are five key areas of creative rhythm – Focus, Relationships, Energy, Stimuli, Hours – that will help you sustain brilliant work over time.
• You should build checkpoints into your life to help you re-evaluate and adapt your rhythms as necessary from season to season.

Additional resources:

• You can listen to DJ Z-Trip’s re-mix of Adaptive Rhythms for an overview of the concept.
• How dissonace steals your creative edge.
• How expectation escalation keeps you in your comfort zone.
• Get your copy of The Accidental Creative.

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Today’s episode is sponsored by Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll. Visit Gusto.com/creative.

Music for the AC podcast is by Joshua Seurkamp. End remix is by DJ Z-Trip.