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This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

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In this conversation, we’re joined by artist and writer Elin Petronella from Follow Your Gut to talk about intuition, energy, and what it really takes to build a joyful creative life over the long term.

Elin shares what it looks like to stay in business as an artist for more than a decade, across countries, life seasons, motherhood, burnout, and reinvention, without forcing herself into rigid systems that slowly drain the joy out of the work. At the center of the conversation is the idea that if you want to keep creating, you have to become ruthless about what works for you and what doesn’t.

We talk about why creators often cling to strategies that are hard but ineffective, while abandoning the things that feel easy and work. We unpack return on energy investment, how to balance “guaranteed” work with space for delusional experiments, and why knowing when something isn’t likely to work is just as important as optimism.

The conversation also explores shame around slowing down, pivoting, disappearing, or changing direction, and how external expectations can quietly push artists into building golden cages of their own design. Elin reflects on learning to trust her intuition again after burnout, recognizing when misalignment shows up as over-explaining, and why creating, privately or publicly, is often the fastest way back to clarity.

We dive into ecosystems, creative operating systems, and why some paths look chaotic from the outside but make perfect sense internally. We talk about building your own arbitrage instead of chasing trends, why originality isn’t something you find but something that emerges over time, and how everything you make eventually connects, even if it only makes sense in hindsight.

If you’re an artist or creator wrestling with consistency, visibility, pivots, or the fear that stepping off the hamster wheel will make everything collapse, this episode is a powerful reminder that alignment isn’t indulgent, it’s how you stay in the game.

Here are 5 clear, grounded, actionable takeaways that match the tone and substance of the conversation with Elin Petronella:

* Get ruthless about return on energy, not just money. Regularly name which activities drain you and which ones give energy back, even if they aren’t immediately profitable. Long-term sustainability depends on keeping energy-generating work in the mix.

* Balance guaranteed work with delusional experiments. Make sure part of your workload reliably pays the bills, then intentionally reserve space to try things that might not work. Creativity dies when either side crowds out the other.

* Treat over-explaining as a misalignment signal. If you find yourself constantly justifying a pivot or decision, pause. That urge often means you’re acting from conditioning instead of intuition.

* Stop forcing consistency across seasons. You’re allowed to disappear, slow down, or change mediums as your life changes. What looks chaotic from the outside often creates coherence over time.

* Keep creating, even when it’s private. Creation is how you stay connected to your intuition. If you stop making things altogether, clarity gets harder, not easier, to find.

* Listen on the app of your choice

This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In this conversation, we’re joined by artist and illustrator Adam Ming from Ten Minute Artist to talk about what it actually means to build a creative life that fits how you work, not how you think you should work.

Together, we explore the quiet tension many artists feel between joy, sustainability, growth, and why forcing yourself into someone else’s model is often the fastest path to burnout.

Using Adam’s experience as a working illustrator and creator, we unpack the myth that artists are fundamentally “different” from everyone else, and how that belief can quietly keep people stuck. Making art is creative, but sharing it, selling it, and building a life around it is still entrepreneurship. Once you radically accept that, everything gets clearer.

We talk through ideas like:

* why ease is often mistaken for cheating,

* how identifying your personal “magic trick” can stabilize both income and energy,

* the difference between how you operate day-to-day and how you actually grow,

* and why repeating what works isn’t selling out, it’s refinement.

The conversation also dives into scale paths, ecosystems, positive feedback loops, and why copying someone else’s strategy almost never works unless you share their temperament, constraints, and incentives. Growth isn’t about doing everything—it’s about doing the right few things, consistently, in a way that nourishes you.

If you’re an artist, writer, or creator who feels like you’re working hard but still swimming upstream, this episode offers a grounded reframe: build the way you’re built and let joy do the heavy lifting.

Here are 5 clear, actionable takeaways tailored to this conversation and suitable to drop at the end of the episode:

* Identify your “magic trick” and keep using it. Pay attention to the thing that consistently works for you—the action that feels easier and produces results. Don’t abandon it just because it feels repetitive or unglamorous.

* Separate how you operate from how you grow. How you like to work day-to-day isn’t always the same as how your work spreads. Figure out both, then design your strategy around that intersection.

* Stop copying people with different temperaments. If a strategy drains you, it’s probably not yours—even if it works for someone you admire. Growth models only work when they match your energy, constraints, and incentives.

* Cut the work that isn’t working. If something hasn’t produced a positive feedback loop after sustained effort, it’s not “discipline”—it’s drag. Let it go and reinvest that time into higher-leverage actions.

* Trust ease when it’s backed by results. Ease isn’t cheating. When something feels natural and moves the needle, that’s your signal to double down, not look for something harder.

* Listen on the app of your choice

This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In it, I sat down with Seth Werkheiser from SOCIAL MEDIA ESCAPE CLUB to talk about why social media is making people miserable, and how it’s not actually helping most of us build sustainable creative careers.

We talked a lot about:

* Why creators keep chasing scale before they’re ready for it

* Why people want the audience now without putting in the reps.

* Why “nobody cares” is actually one of the best places you can start.

* And why building something small, slow, and human often beats trying to impress strangers on the internet.

One of my favorite threads in this conversation was that musicians don’t build careers by going viral once. They build them by playing to five people on a Tuesday night, learning what works, getting better, and slowly expanding outward. That model works for authors, artists, and entrepreneurs too, but social media keeps convincing us to skip the middle.

We also dug into why email lists matter, why platforms always get worse over time, and why you should never confuse attention with access. At the end of the day, a thousand followers you can’t reach is worth far less than a hundred people who actually opted in.

At its core, this episode is about choosing work that compounds instead of work that drains you. It’s about trading performative growth for durable growth. And it’s about remembering that success is a trailing indicator, you only see it after the work has already been done.

If you’ve been feeling burned out, behind, or like you’re doing everything “right” but nothing is clicking, this conversation might help you recalibrate what actually matters—and where your energy is best spent.

Key takeaways

* “Nobody cares” is a gift. When the stakes are low, you get to practice, experiment, and make mistakes without pressure. That’s how you build skill and confidence before scale.

* Reps beat reach. Playing to five people, hosting a small Zoom call, or writing for a tiny list builds muscles that going viral never will.

* Success comes after the work, not before it. People don’t blow up out of nowhere—they just make the invisible work look sudden in hindsight.

* Attention isn’t the same as access. If you can’t reach your audience directly, you don’t actually have one.

* Energy exchange matters. If a platform consistently gives you less back than you put in, it will eventually drain your joy—no matter how “important” it seems.

* Build where you can leave without it damaging you. Platforms change. Owned channels travel with you.

If you want growth that actually feels good, start by asking a different question—not “How do I get bigger?” but “Where does my energy come back to me?”

That question changes everything.