Ep 21: Prolific and Healthy

In this episode, John talks about the tension between being prolific and being healthy. Full-time music is hard work. It takes discipline, consistency, sacrifice, and the willingness to keep showing up. But artists can easily drift into a dangerous “publish or perish” mentality where the pressure to do more, more, more at all times slowly starts eating away at their mental health, relationships, identity, and sense of peace. 

Ironically, the obsession with constant output often leaves us exhausted, disconnected, and less creative in the long run. John unpacks some honest thoughts about ambition, burnout, work addiction, and the fear of slowing down, while also offering practical and healthy ways musicians can keep chasing excellence without losing their minds, their humanity, or their souls in the process.

Transcript

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You are listening to the Gig to Live Podcast. Welcome everyone. I'm John Folsom. I'm a full-time working musician. This podcast is about building a music life that holds up over time. It's practical, enjoyable, sometimes uncomfortable, but it's always about helping you stay in the game and actually enjoy the life that you're building. We'll meet some wonderful working musicians from time to time. So whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this for years, you're in the right spot. This podcast is for you. Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. You know, I've done everything I can to soundproof my studio today, but the birds are very active outside my window. So if you hear them today, they're just going to be part of our listening landscape. Just enjoy the sounds of nature if you hear them in the background. Let's start with a story today. When I was 19, I went to college and I was a failure. It was horrible. That is because, in large part, my wife and I got married when we were 19. And so it was really hard to go to school being a newlywed, you know. And then not too long after I was in school, my wife got pregnant and we had a baby on the way. And it was time to just quit all that nonsense and get to work. So I returned to college when we had two children. I went back as a married student with two children, and we moved to Portland, Oregon, and I went to school. When I was in college as a married student with two kids, I worked for one of my professors. I graded papers and I did some filing for him. And yes, I am that old. He still had paper filing cabinets. I did other office work for him too, but one day I'm sitting with him and another professor, and they were talking about the stress of working in academia and the pressure that they had on them to perform, to write articles for journals, uh, to write articles for the university. Now, my professor told me the rule was publish or perish. And that stuck in my mind for up until this day. I remember that hitting hard when I heard that. Not only had they gone to school for a bajillion years to teach at the collegiate level, not only did they do continuing education, not only did they have a demanding job, but they also had to keep performing to show that they were worthy of the job that they had earned. And years later, I would find myself working for a very large organization that had some of the same unwritten expectations. A lot of organizations depend on employees constantly creating content for things like grants and patents, and they have conference presentations they need to do, things of that nature. But it's a bit different in the creative fields like music. In music, whether you're performing or recording material or both, that publish or perish sentiment is more about relevance in the music community, uh, marketability for venues. The fact that the audience always expects creatives to keep turning out new content, you know, that's going to blow their mind at every turn. They expect artists to keep changing things up to wow them all the time. And publish or perish has a negative connotation for sure, right? There's a lot of fear and pressure wrapped up in that phrase. The creative who is driven by the publish or parish mentality feels the weight over time in really unhealthy ways. The funny thing is, the onlookers, the people who consume the content that we are creating, they never see the struggle that the creative is going through. They don't know that the musician who's constantly turning out new content or playing 150 or 200 plus shows a year is struggling not only to survive, but struggling with a mental game where they think they have to become uh or they may become irrelevant and outdated and no longer viable. And onlookers, when they see a hardworking musician or anybody who's working hard in life, we we applaud them. And they may even call an artist prolific or hardworking or awe-inspiring. The audience looks on, they see a successful musician and they say things like, Man, you are killing it. Keep doing what you're doing, or you know how to work it, or wow, it looks like you are living the dream. But oftentimes, if we pull back the curtain on the mighty wizard, uh then we find somebody who's mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, overbooking or taking bad gigs out of fear, someone who gets super anxious when there is a blank spot on the calendar. The audience sees someone who's successful and hard working, but the musician may be drowning. We like to applaud hard work when we see it in someone else. And, you know, I mean, hard work in and of itself is not bad, not at all. We certainly don't want to have the opposite problem and become lazy. But the toxic desire to keep doing more and to never slow down for fear of fading away is the kind of motivation that leads to burnout and anxiety and depression and unhealthy dependence on alcohol or other things that might help us escape, strained relationships, and a life that can look really impressive in public, but it's unraveling in private. So, no, Def Leopard, it's not better to burn out than fade away. I think there are external and internal forces that are always at work that create unhealthy scenarios for the musician when it comes to workload. There's forces that work against us from the outside, like things that are out of our control, and then there's some self-induced behaviors and habits and tendencies and maybe predispositions that don't make it easy on us. For example, uh, an external force might just be the system that we live in, right? The system that we live in trains us to be driven by more. More is sold to us as progress, right? Safety, relevance, identity. More is sold to us as proof that we matter. And that is friggin' scary. More followers, more money, more gigs, more fans, more views, more likes, more reposts, more streams, more praise. More becomes the yardstick. And then there's internal forces at work that can be unhealthy. Like some of us have the performance gene, and I don't mean performance like what we do on the weekend, I mean performance as the drive to achieve or the drive to accomplish or gain points. And I think creatives are often addicted to achieve things that are beyond, beyond what anyone expects, beyond our own abilities. And then when we achieve those things and people are blown away at what we can accomplish, then it becomes a new standard for us, and it becomes a thing that we're judged by. And if we fall below our own mark that we set, which can be incredibly high already, then people start to wonder if we're okay. You know, why are they slipping? Because we aren't setting new standards of excellence. But the person who has the performance drive, let's be honest, they're not really interested in excellence. It's it's more about perfection for us. And I say us on purpose because I've got this. Some of us want to appear to be perfect and flawless and faultless. So some of us have that performance gene. Some of us have the internal drive gene. So some just feel the need to go, go, go. And beneath the drive can be things like the need to control things, or maybe we feel incompetent in some area of our life, and we feel like we need to compensate for that area by showing the world that we can work circles around them. That was actually a motto of mine for many years. I used to tell people who worked for me, I dare you to outwork me. Now, there were some good things about that, but there were some really bad things about that. Some of us have emotional baggage as a motivator. Uh, maybe we feel guilty if we aren't pushing. And I'll raise my hand and say this has been a big one for me over the course of my life. Feeling like people are watching me if I take a break and wondering what I'm doing slowing down. Even if no one ever says or does anything to make me feel that way, I feel that way. Sometimes we just cook it up on our own because of something else that lies beneath the surface that doesn't let us slow down. You know, maybe it's our family of origin, maybe our family put scars on us. Maybe we were beat up in school. Maybe we've been disappointed by others, and now we don't want to do the same to the people that we love. We could be compensating for any number of things, and working seems to calm the noise a bit for us. We could be avoiding something that needs attention. We could be addicted to being needed or wanted. I think personality types are also something that shapes us sometimes in unhealthy ways. If you've ever taken a personality test, I love taking them by the way, I think they're fun. Uh, and I don't mean one of those clickbait silly ones that come up in pop-up ads, but a legit personality test like Myers Briggs, or if you've ever done work with the Enneagram, then you start to really learn how our personalities steer us. Uh, I don't think personality types are a prescription of how we act or react, but they can certainly help us in understanding ourselves and avoiding pitfalls, especially if we're working with people who are, you know, just opposed to our personality. If we look at those charts and graphs and we see, uh-oh, the person that I'm leading in this organization uh is, you know, diametrically opposed to everything I believe, uh, and our personalities are constantly clashing. It's good to know how our own personalities shape us so that we can work better with people and we can avoid pitfalls. Personality types are also not permissioned to behave in certain ways or to cement habits that are unhealthy. I I told a story in one of my books about a guy I used to work with who was extremely difficult to work with. And in one of our conflict situations, he told me, you know, you and I just have different personality types. And I told him that asshole was not a personality type. Not one of my finest moments, but it was true. I also think that if our models uh growing up, you know, if people in our family and those who surrounded us uh were workaholics, highly driven people that didn't know when to take a break, then it's easy to follow that same pattern. If you grew up in a home where mom or dad were never home because of their job, or they were always at someone else's back and call, then chances are you are going to do the same. But I believe there is hope. You don't have to choose between being prolific and being healthy. It's possible to create at a high level and still remain sane. It's possible to take pride in your work ethic and still rest your body and your mind. And with all that, I would like to offer up to you a top ten list today. Drumroll, please. The top 10 ways to be prolific and healthy. I still like the word prolific because it sounds like an artist's word. I struggled finding the right word that meant we're actually doing good work in appropriate amounts, you know, stretching and growing, but not crossing the line, whatever that line might be for us. And it's different for everyone. Productive was a word I tossed around. It kind of gets there, but it still has the connotation of hard labor to me. Maybe efficient, I thought could work. How to be efficient and healthy. Maybe that works better, but all the words seem like some leadership book that I and I didn't want to sound that rigid and mechanical, uh, have that assembly line kind of feel. So I think we all know what I mean, right? When I say prolific. So I'm gonna stick with prolific. And we'll start with number one today in this list just because. Why not? Number one, do some self-discovery work. Self-discovery is a process and it's hard. I'm not gonna lie, it's difficult. We learn a lot about ourselves in the process of doing the hard work, and it's not always pretty, but it can be incredibly freeing. Counselors and therapists, life editors, family, they can all help in the process if we invite the right people to the party, where there's complete trust, but also doing a ton of reading and spending time alone in silence and asking ourselves the tough questions can be helpful. You know, questions like why do I have to work so hard? Why do I feel guilty when I stop? Who am I comparing myself to? Why do I feel the need to win? What drains me? What lies have I believed about myself? Where do I thrive? When do I feel the most healthy? Those are good questions to ask. The Enneagram has been super healthy for me and helpful to know what it looks like when I'm at my best and also all the ways that things can go astray. Uh, so I become self-aware. And I highly recommend diving into the Enneagram. There's a ton of books on the Enneagram. I recommend it because of the self-discovery aspect of it. It doesn't label you as much as help you to find the tools that you need to navigate based on the way that you're shaped. Books like The Essential Enneagram and The Road Back to You are two easily accessible books that I recommend. So do some self-discovery work. Number two, define enough. Many of us don't want to define what enough is because it may put an end to our fantasy. You know, the big stages, the constant attention, the hit song, whatever the case is. The dream may be amazing and worth chasing after, but if the dream starts carving out parts of our souls, then eventually our bodies are gonna get the invoice and it may be costly. If it feels broken right now, write down how you feel about your energy level, your relationships, your health, your headspace, your your goals, your creative satisfaction, progress, finances, peace, joy. Do you feel joy? If not, when was the last time you felt joy? Ask yourself how much money is enough? And is the current plan working? Ask what you are no longer willing to sacrifice and lower the bar where you need to. Imagine yourself ten years down the road and ask if I were doing the very thing that I'm doing right now, would it work ten years from now when I'm ten years older? Or is this pace unsustainable? Are my goals too lofty? Are they unrealistic? You may find that you don't need to change a thing here. But you know, maybe some of us will ask these questions and find we only want to work harder. But I really believe that if we're springing leaks somewhere, that this process can be a helpful shift for us. So define enough. Number three, schedule your rest. Our rest time needs to be sacred. Rest is one of those tools in our toolbox for longevity. I think in the West we can learn a lot from other cultures and countries. You don't have to look too far to find that, man, the West has a problem. In the West, we look at rest as a necessity, something that happens when we just can't go on anymore. Work till you drop. Or maybe we look at rest as a reward for working super hard. But sometimes we even mock rest as laziness. But in other parts of the world, rest is seen sometimes as responsibility, uh, spiritual practice, as a pillar of life and health. This is huge in India and other parts of Asia. I've always loved the Jewish concept of rest. While the days of the week are named and numbered in the Hebrew calendar, you know, day one, day two, the seventh day is only referred to as Shabbat. It's a weekly holiday. It's a time where anything considered work ceases. You cease from any attempt to manipulate your environment and simply exist and be present. It has obvious religious implications, but but it's not something you just do to please God in that system. It's something they believe was set aside for you. A forced rest, yes, built into the rhythm of life. And if you spend any time researching Jewish concepts of rest, then you'll see that it's not only weekly. The seven-day cycle is not the only one. There's other cycles of rest for agriculture and for the economy. Man, I love it. Here in the West, we generally regard rest as something we do when we can get to it or when our bodies give out. This one took a long time for me. I used to pat myself on the back for running circles around other people and outworking everyone. It was a badge of honor, but not anymore. Not anymore. I'm still incredibly driven, but I've made it my habit to schedule and to not feel bad about rest. It's an amazing, refreshing, rejuvenating thing to plan on and to look forward to regular rest. But it has to become a practice. In order for your body to rewire itself, the rest has to be real and it has to be regular. Do some reading on On the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight part of us, or the uh parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest recovery repair part of us, you'll see that our bodies shift into recover mode, uh recovery mode faster, and they reduce the chronic stress when we rest regularly. Of course, we will have seasons that are more difficult than others, but that's even more reason to plan for rest. So, number three, schedule that rest, kids. Number four, schedule your play. Play and rest are almost equally important to the musician and to any human. Our bodies feel the exhaustion when we don't rest, but they also feel the stress when we don't play. I don't think that burnout stems from lack of rest. I think it actually stems more from lack of play. Stress doesn't come simply from you know not slowing down. Stress comes from not having time to recreate. Or, you know, take that word apart to recreate. True play is all about pleasure. It's all about joy. True play has one purpose: it's to feel good and to enjoy life. There are countless articles and books about the benefits of play for our bodies, our minds, our souls, our relationships, our innovation, our creativity, our social well-being. They all improve with play. Now we know this instinctively. Play was a non-negotiable for us as kids, but play gets beaten out of us over time. Man, schedule your play. Number five, repeat the mantra, I am not what I do. I am not what I do. I am not what I do. I am not my songs, I am not my stage presence. I am not my social media content. I am not how fans perceive me. I'm not the one with a full calendar. I'm not the one who demands top dollar. I'm not a musician at my core. I am a human being. I live, I work, and I play with other humans. When our identities are tied too closely to what we do or how we perform, then we start to need the work to prove something to ourselves. And it's a vicious cycle because we end up getting exhausted because of the publish or perish mentality. The exhaustion leads to depression, and depression leads to bad habits, and bad habits lead to hating ourselves. And the only cure we tell ourselves is to produce more. The production silences the bad voices, but only for a while. That dopamine rush is the drug we need to make us feel worthwhile, and then we start to get exhausted and it starts all over again. And we may not feel the effects right away, but then we start to microdose our anxiety and our depression, and it eats away slowly at our true identity. So say it with me. I am not what I do. Number six, retrain your control issues. What, you have them? Am I talking to you or am I talking to me? I'm talking to me, but I might be talking to you. Not all unhealthy work habits stem for control, but this is a big one. It's because work is one of the more controllable things in our lives. Speaking very generally, right? I used to paint houses for my dad as a young person, and it was super fulfilling. The house looked bad, I made it look good, the people were happy. I controlled the outcome most of the time, unless it was a super difficult client. But for the most part, my hard work paid off. When the job was over, I got paid. I felt fulfilled, I was in control. Control feels good. Control becomes another drug. In college, I was an overachiever. Like I said, I returned to college as a married student and a father. I had something to prove. And I knew I could control my grades to some degree. So I worked extremely hard because I was driven by perfection and control. And if you're in my family and you're listening to this right now, then you can forward past this story because you've heard me tell it a million times. But here it is. I was in a class where I was getting phenomenal? That's a hard word to say. I was getting phenomenal grades. Good thing I wasn't graded on pronouncing that word. I was pretty proud of my GPA. And I got a call one day from one of my favorite professors, and I was very excited because I just knew he was going to tell me how amazing I was. He asked if I could come talk to him in his office, and I strutted up to his office so proud. And he said to me, You are getting a 97% in my class. It may have even been like a 97 point something. And I smiled ear to ear and I said, Yes, sir, I am. And he told me it was one of the highest grades anyone had ever received in his class. And again, I smiled, big old stupid grin. But then what he said next would change the course of history for me. He looked at me and he said, Something in your life has to be suffering. I know what it takes to get that kind of grade in my class. You are married. You have kids. What is suffering? At the time I didn't know what was suffering. I was blinded by the thrill of being such a mind-blowing student. He said to me, uh, I would like you to skip some assignments in my class. Oh man, my jaw just dropped. He said, I'd like to show you how to get a C in my class. C is average. C is passing. There is nothing wrong with a C. I feel like every student at your stage of life should be getting a C in my class. I I didn't know how to react. I didn't want a C. I told him I would settle for a B, and he he laughed at that, and he pulled out the syllabus and he told me what assignments he wanted me to skip. He said, I can't make you do this, but I think that you're gonna thank me one day if you do this. And you know what? My goodness, he was right in so many ways. Something was suffering at that time. It was my mental health. You know, I was killing myself to succeed. I got so little rest. I was developing physical, you know, health issues. And quite frankly, I was putting a strain on my marriage and I didn't know it. My teacher was training me to retrain my control issues by allowing something to not be perfect, by allowing something to slide. And it's a lesson that still helps me. Some examples for us as musicians might be turning down gigs that we could take and recommending someone else, playing a less rehearsed song live, taking a request that we wouldn't normally take because it isn't our vibe, and learning to let it, you know, kind of mess up our perfectly curated set list. So I think this is a really good one. Retrain your control issues. Number seven, play the game, what's the worst thing that could happen? My wife and I have played this game our whole lives. Usually, when we're contemplating big life changes or we're anticipating some looming change on the horizon, you play out all the scenarios in your head about the worst things that could happen if you made a change. And usually you find all the possible scenarios have solutions and pivots, and they aren't as bad as your anxiety makes them out to be. It's like the Tom Petty says in his song Crawling Back to You, he says, I'm so tired of being tired. Sure as night will follow day, and most things I worry about never happen anyway. When you sit with someone else that you trust and you play this game, it's usually more honest. You usually surface things you didn't think through. What's the worst thing that could happen if I no longer worked out of town? If I took one less gig a week, if I dropped a venue from the roster, if I took a month off to recoup, if I no longer took weekday gigs, if I tried no Friday gigs for a season. Talk through all the scenarios and what you can do to shure up the loose ends and ask if the change is worth it, and it often is. Helping yourself get out in front of your own fallout is healthy and it helps you make wise decisions for the future. Number eight is this. Practice gratitude. I find when I make a physical list of the things that I'm thankful for, or I hear myself saying them out loud, my contentment increases dramatically and I slow my role. Not right away, you know, it's not like I say it and boom, I'm a changed man. I mean, over time, if you're in the habit. When I feel anxious, when I feel nervous or uncertain, when I feel like I'm not enough, like I'm not chi achieving enough, I'm not accomplishing enough, my default now is to start talking to myself about how good I have it. If the more, more, more voice fuels me in unhealthy ways, then naming and recognizing the comforts that are here and already attainable and ready to enjoy both the tangible and the intangible. The practice of gratitude is surely the antidote. Number nine. Practice exposure therapy. This is about deliberately practicing doing less or less perfect or less complete, and proving to your brain that nothing falls apart when you do this. If you're a perfectionist like me, you will hate this. But it's scientific and it's used in therapy all the time, especially for those who are obsessive, compulsive like me. For the overworked publish or perish musician. Lock your phone in the safe for a night. You know what? You're gonna miss a text. You're gonna miss a call, maybe. Turn off your computer and put it in a case at night. You know, you're gonna miss an email. You're gonna maybe miss a gig lead. Play a set list of your least polished songs. Guess what? You may feel out of sorts, and it may be not as good as you want. But the texts, the emails, the messages, the gig leads, they're all going to be there later. You might miss one, but there's another one around the corner, and everyone is going to have a great time at your show, and they won't know that you didn't play your signature songs for that evening. In my final example of exposure therapy, I am going to stop my list here. I know. At top nine. I know I said top ten, but guess what? Nine is good. We had a good time, right? It's not going to kill me. It's certainly not going to kill you. We were still prolific today, and this is healthy. Stay creative. Stay after it. Stay.