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Welcome back to The Creative Life - with Jim Kroft

This week the world of content bludgeoned its way back into my life.

For most of 2026 I'd cut my output right down. I'd ended 2025 with a harsh diagnosis: I had allowed myself to become diluted by content. So this year was for skills, big projects, and starting the business.

Then the director of Mahalla asked me to film Berlin Art Week. I said yes. And for the next week, art and content clashed daily in my life; Inseparably bound, but utterly distinct.

In this episode I share the strategies I'm using — not to solve the tension between the two, but to better live inside it.

What we'll explore:

• 🚪 Why you have to say "no" to say "yes" — and why serious work sometimes means disappearing on the people you love
• 🤝 When to give yourself back to life — and the real cost: unlinking from your own momentum
• 🎩 Why content isn't artistic work — and how knowing which hat you're wearing protects the one from the other
• ⚡ Why I'm done making content like art — lighter, faster, looser: a living magazine of the work, not the work itself
• 🌗 Why I've stopped looking for peace — art and content as the gravity between the earth and the moon

I'm your host, Jim Kroft - let's dive in!

Jim Kroft Links:

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Outro Piano: Yehezkel Raz - As Long As In the Heart

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Welcome back to The Creative Life Podcast.

It's 23:43 on a Friday night. I'm in my studio in Mahalla. Nothing is scripted.

This is the first of a new format: the Post-it Note Sessions. My studio wall is covered in them — pink for content, blue for self, yellow for the practical. Every one is a note I wrote to keep myself moving through the hardest creative stretch I've had in years.

Tonight I take them down one by one and tell you what's actually been going on: the album, the writer's block, the book I didn't plan to write, and what I found in the dark.

What we'll explore:

• 🕳️ What the cave actually costs — Campbell turned down a professorship and read for five years. Why the dark always carries its opposite, and what it asks of you before it gives it up
• 🗝️ The one thing you can do — the "coulds" are what keep you frozen. There is always one action available. Do that, and it opens the next one
• 🎹 Do hard things — I'm learning piano in my forties and it's a disaster. Why building a new language is the only way to say the new thing
• 🐦 Scene by scene — the Anne Lamott principle that got me writing again when I had one hour a day and a book that could take ten years
• 📌 Share your journey. What are you working on? — two questions that dissolve the content block, and why your life is far more interesting than you think it is

If you're stuck, if you're between things, if the world has gone quiet on you — this one's for you.

Let's get into it.

All music in this episode is mine — stream it on Spotify.

Jim Kroft Links:

YouTube | Newsletter | Spotify | Instagram | X

Join the newsletter on Substack:
The Creative Life

Digital Product:
The Substack Workstation

Welcome back to The Creative Life Podcast

A year ago I decided to virtually stop making content. No podcast, no YouTube, no Instagram.

The reason was simple: I was talking about my journey more than I was living it.

This episode is the story of what happened in the silence. I gave up alcohol and doubled my energy. I built a business I never set out to build. I refused to release my album into the digital void — and nearly lost my mind making the book that grew out of it. And one cold night at Mahalla, I tore my voice on a final take that took my touring plans with it.

If you sense the life you're living has drifted from the one you set out to make, this one is for you.

What's inside:

• 🥃 Why I quit drinking — and how one hard change doubled my energy when every day counts
• 🎙️ The moment I realised I'd become a content creator instead of an artist
• 🛠️ How stepping away led to a solopreneur business and my first product
• 💿 Why I rejected a 100% digital release — and what standing for that has cost me
• 🎤 The night at Mahalla that ended my touring plans — and why I'm finishing the work anyway

I don't know if we ever really arrive in the future. But we can make it different from the path we assumed we were on.

Because if there's one thing I know, it's this: you have to find your way back into your own story.

I'm your host, Jim Kroft - let's dive in!

All music in this episode is mine — stream it on Spotify.

Jim Kroft Links:

YouTube | Newsletter | Spotify | Instagram | X