The Art of Being Happy: A Conversation with Andrew Matthews

Create Art Podcast Interview Andrew Matthews. Hello, friend.

This is Timothy Keem O'Brien, your head instigator with Create Art Podcast, where I bring to you my 30 years of experience in the arts and education world to help you tame your inner critic and create more than you consume. So, just recently, I got an email from Andrew Matthews on PodMatch. I use PodMatch to get great guests to bring to you my listener.

So that way we can, you know, not just listen to my voice all the time, but listen to other people who are artists and encourage you to go out there and create your art. But let me talk to you a little bit about Andrew here before we get into the interview. So Andrew is an Australian author and international speaker.

He has a lot of books out. He's got about 12 books out, including Being Happy, Follow your Heart and Bouncing Back, and he sold 8 million copies in 48 languages.

Now, he's also presented to over a thousand corporations in five continents on attitude, enjoying work and resilience. And he also speaks at universities and prisons all over the world.

Now, from the time that he emailed me to the time we actually did the interview, it was such a short time there. He did it right before he messaged me, right before the holidays here in the United States. And we interviewed at the beginning of the year.

And unfortunately, I didn't get to read his book. But as of today, as of as I'm recording this today, getting two of his books, Being Happy is one of them that I'm going to be getting.

And he's been doing this for over 30 years, so he really has a great vision for what he wants to do with his life and his artwork. And did I mention he lives in Australia? So the scheduling for this, initially I was like, oh, my gosh, how are you going to schedule this?

But he was extremely flexible and I really appreciate the insights that he brought in this interview.

So I want to get out of the way here and let you go ahead and listen to the two of us talk about his work and about his viewpoint and his philosophies. Without further ado, here's an interview with myself and Andrew Matthews. Andrew, how is it tomorrow?

Well, the sky is blue, which is. It's here tomorrow, Timothy. So yes, it should be blue skies for you tomorrow.

Excellent, excellent. And if you can give me the lottery numbers, I'd be much in your debt. We'll split the money. Well, Andrew, I want to.

Again, thank you for joining us on here. Wanted to start right into the questions here for you and One of the things, and I do have to confess, I haven't picked up your book yet.

It's on the way, I've got it shipped to me. But one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, you know, why do you choose to illustrate your self help books with a lot of cartoons?

I know myself, when I was having twins, I found a self help book that was called Being Prepared and it looked like a Boy Scouts manual and had a lot of images in it. And that really helped me. But why do you do that?

You know, when I was 25, I made this shocking discovery that the happiest people I knew had bigger problems than I did. And that was a big shock to me.

And that was what set me on this journey of trying to figure out what it is that happy people do and how could I be a bit more like them.

And I began reading a lot of books, maybe 200 or more Timothy, books about attitude, books about the subconscious, books about how we can be more successful. And I found a lot of them really boring. They would have often good information. But I had a background in drawing and painting.

I studied at the Art Students League of New York in the 1970s and I'd been drawing and cartooning ever since until I got really excited about personal development and the idea that we could actually improve our life by doing some simple things. So I thought, I've never seen a self help book with cartoons in it.

And maybe if I can write in simple language and if I can illustrate it with damn near a cartoon on every double page somewhere, I would create a book that people who don't like self help books would read. I would maybe create a book that people who don't read would read. And it turned out to be a useful strategy.

And many people began to read my books and discover things about self help and being happier that might never have picked up the books if they didn't find my books that had a little cartoon on the front and cartoons throughout.

That's awesome.

Do you find that you may, you probably answered this in that first answer, but do you find that people are more interested in the book because of the cartoons, because of the drawings and illustrations?

I do. And that translates also into corporate presentations.

So if I present to HSBC bank or Shell or Dell or Intel, I will take a big flip chart on stage and I will draw cartoons as I speak.

And there's like this collective sigh of relief that ah, at least we're not got, you know, at least we don't have the same kind of talking head that we've had in the rest of the conference, we can relax. And the thing is that we absorb information and we remember information that is connected to images.

And so what I'm seeking to do is connect an idea to an image.

For example, in my latest book, Bouncing Back right at the beginning, I've got a cartoon of a guy, he's climbing a mountain and the sweat's pouring off him and his dog is sweating and he looks like he's just about at it. And there's a caption there that says, what you thought was breaking you is probably making you.

And someone will see the expression on the guy's face and think, yeah, I feel pretty much like him. And maybe it is true that those things that we think are destroying us are actually preparing us for success and greater resilience.

So people, yeah, people say, I read your book being happy 30 years ago and there was a picture of an iceberg. And I still remember that cartoon and what it meant. And I carry that to this day. So people do connect ideas to the cartoons.

Absolutely. And I think a lot of us are of a visual learner.

We're very much nowadays, we're a very visual culture, you know, with our phones in our face half the time and, you know, YouTube and tick tock and all that kind of good stuff. We're definitely visual. So that. Do you find that you can tackle tougher topics, especially in the resilience field?

Because I actually, my day job is working in resilience a little bit. I deal more with finances than what I like to call the soft stuff. But is it easier to talk about those difficult topics with an illustration?

I think so. People fairly early get the idea that the fellow who wrote the book is the guy who created the cartoons.

So I sense that some readers will say, well, if he drew this funny cartoon, then he can't be all bad, or maybe he's. Maybe this is not going to be too sort of elevated or too complicated.

And so the other thing that I find is helpful in any kind of non fiction book is if you can have headings that break up the text so people can see a heading, they can see a cartoon. And they say, I just want to bite into this little bit. I just want to read these two paragraphs. And so it makes a book more inviting.

Because the thing is, Timothy, that most people are very comfortable with magazines and most people are not so comfortable with books.

And if you can make a book that's addressing a serious subject like bouncing back or happiness in hard times, if you can make that book seem a little bit more friendly and a bit more accessible, then suddenly you're reaching people who may otherwise have said, no, I don't want to concentrate that hard, or I don't want to have to struggle through something that is just like 50,000 words.

I have three unfinished novels going on right now.

So now I'm thinking I need to put some illustrations in there because there are a hundred thousand words and it's just a wall of words and nobody's going to, you know, read it. So I might have to tap you on the shoulder and go, can you give me some illustrations?

One thing I wanted to do is ask you about kind of your creative process. And mainly, you know, how does your creative process of writing differ from that creative process of drawing and painting?

How are those a little bit different?

Here's what I believe about writing. That we are essentially organizing words and making senses every hour of our life.

And so we are all very familiar with words and we have a way of communicating which works for us. And I share it from this point of view because I'm hoping that our listeners are going to say, yeah, that makes sense.

And I don't need to put writing on some kind of pedestal anymore. You all have a way of arranging words and using words and choosing words that works for you.

And when you sit down to write something, you don't need to change it. Maybe you need to clean it up, maybe you need to do it more carefully.

But what works for you when you're talking to your neighbour can work for you when you are writing a poem, or when you are writing an introduction to a book, or when you're writing your novel. And for me, with that kind of understanding, I've just got three rules for myself when I write and I don't make it any more complicated than that.

Number one is I want to write so a 12 year old can understand what I'm saying. I don't necessarily write for 12 year olds, but I want a 12 year old to understand the message.

Number two is I feel that there's a kind of a rhythm in any arrangement of sentences. And often it can be that we have a mixture of short sentences and long sentences.

So when you read it, you just say, this kind of feels nice as I read through this paragraph. The other thing I believe is that mostly shorter words are more powerful than big words.

And too many adjectives and too many adverbs just tend to take away the power of whatever we're writing. So the Fact is that when we were studying English in maybe grade school, our teachers were trying to get us to develop our vocabulary.

So anytime we use big words and unusual words, then our, our marks went up and we thought, this is terrific. But now that we have a vocabulary and we don't need to prove it to anyone, our readers don't really care how big our vocabulary is.

So for those of us who write or want to write for a living, keeping it simple, finding a rhythm, and not using too many adjectives and adverbs, I think is really helpful in creating something that is interesting and powerful. I contrast that with when I sit down to draw a cartoon or paint a portrait.

And that's not something that I've been doing every hour of my life since I was born. And I tend to give a lot more careful consideration to issues of composition and light on form and perspective and anatomy. And so I'm.

I draw upon all the mistakes I've made and some of the successes I've had in the last 50 years to create something.

I do a lot more thinking about my cartooning or my painting that I would have with my writing in terms of trying to figure it out and create a way through.

Can you describe to me like, a recent piece or project that was particularly challenging or rewarding, and that can be any of the 12 books that you have or any other works that you're working on right now?

One of the most challenging things was trying to get published in the initial instance. Timothy My first book, my first manuscript was a children's book. And I'd heard that it can be really difficult to get published.

So I had this genius strategy.

I thought rather than send my manuscript off to a publisher and wait and see if they liked it, I got a list of the biggest, most likely publishers in the world. And I created 60 versions of my manuscript, my children's book, And I sent them out all at once.

And I thought at least five are going to like it, or maybe three, and then I will choose. Okay? So I sent off these manuscripts all over the world. And within a couple of weeks I started to get the slips, the rejection slips.

And soon I had 10, and then 25 and 37 and 49 and 55 and 57. On 58, I'm 59 and 60 and 61. Somebody wrote to me twice and said, forget it.

And not only no, but we're going to tell you no twice.

So I thought, well, I probably need another book. And it was about then that I got excited about writing a, a self Help book, which was Being Happy.

And I sent that off to a much more selective group of publishers, 17, and they all said no.

Wow.

But publisher number 18, and many of them said, we don't, you know, we don't see why you're creating this self help book with cartoons in them. Publisher number 18 that I sent Being Happy to said we want more cartoons. We want to create this book that feels friendly and accessible.

And so I think I ended up drawing like 75 cartoons for being happy. And publisher number 18 sold 3 million copies of being Happy. So I learned a couple of things.

Number one is, yes, it can be difficult to get published, but keep doing what you love. There's a lot of reasons to write a book that are beyond whether or not it's a bestseller.

Certainly we get a sense to come to understand what it is that we love and what it is that we care about when we, what, what do we think is important and, and just, you know, if you never quit, then at some stage somebody is going to say yes. And here's the other thought, Timothy, that people don't know what they want until they see it.

And there weren't books about, there weren't even books about happiness back in 1988, but there certainly weren't self help books with cartoons in. And nobody was running around saying we need a self help book with cartoons in it.

But once it was out there, suddenly we found that a lot of people said this is really nice and this is a friendly book that I can give to a friend. So yes, people aren't very often. And that applies to all of us.

For those of you that are listening and you're saying is what I'm doing is, is this something that is going to be embraced and enjoyed? People don't know what they want until you create it.

Absolutely. And then you have to put it out to the audience. You have to put it out into the world so that that way they can discover it.

Because if you keep it to yourself, if I kept all these wonderful paintings to myself in my room here.

Yes.

Nobody would ever see them. But that's why we got to put it out there and have those rejection slips come in, have those 60 rejections. 61. You only not sent out 60.

That's why we need that to keep going because people will find us speaking about, you know, about that kind of in that vein for you, what does success look like? And that's, it's a lot of things for a lot of different people.

Some people want to be on the new York Times bestseller list, you know, for a year or two. But for you, what does that success look like?

Number one is that I'm able to do the things that I love. And there are many people who may have sold more books or they're many people who have made more money.

But for me, the joy of the creative process is what fires me up. Wanting to get up every day and say, I can create a cartoon or I can write a paragraph that is going to reach somebody or help somebody.

It'll mean something to me. Firstly, I've got to feel that, you know, this expresses an idea in a way that is useful and helpful and perhaps funny or witty.

For me, the value of it is that I can put ideas into a book or a newsletter and someone will read that and they will be encouraged. And so number one is being able to do the work that I love and I find meaningful.

The bonus for me is that because my books are now in 48 languages and I've been writing books for now 35 years, I'm fortunate that I get emails and messages from readers almost every day.

And so people will say, you know, like, I had a woman contact me from Singapore and she said, I was broke and I was living with my parents and I was sick and I went to the doctor and your book Being Happy was on the coffee table of the waiting room. And I got to read seven pages before the doctor called me in and I said, I've got to read that book.

And she said, I borrowed the money because I was $100,000 in debt. And suddenly I had a different attitude and I started cooking for my neighbors and charging them and then I started cooking for other people.

And she said, now I own a restaurant and I own a bakery and I have a multi million dollar business. And next time I was in Singapore, I went and ate in her Noosh noodle bar on the Singapore Esplanade. Just, just the most wonderful food.

So little stories like that make me want to get up every day and say, just one idea can change your life, can change our direction. It doesn't mean, of course, that I wrote something.

It doesn't mean that I changed their life, but it meant that something that I was maybe able to phrase in a different way, package. I guess what I do is package ideas with simple messages and cartoons. Someone will write to me and say, yeah, thank you.

That is awesome. You must have been reading my mind because my next question was going to be, how do you approach connecting with your audience?

But the story of the lady In Singapore. That's a book all in of itself right there.

I mean, gosh, are you maybe collecting some of these stories and perhaps that's, you know, book number 1413.

A number of these stories are in my latest book, Bouncing Back. For example, there was a guy from Mexico that called me with a help of a translator, anticipating that my Spanish would not be so good.

And he wanted to tell me that he read being happy. He was so inspired to set some goals that would make a difference to his life, that he rode a bicycle around the world.

And it took him two years to prepare for it and two years to ride around the world. And I think he went through 22 sets of bicycle tires and something like six bicycle seats and I don't know what else.

And he met Bill Clinton and Michael Jordan and Paulo Coelo and the Pope. And you know, just who, who would imagine.

I'm waiting for the joke on that. All four of those people walk into a bar.

Yeah. So who would imagine that someone reads a book and then goes and does that? So. And then often it's just other stories.

A woman wrote to me from my own state of Queensland in Australia and said, my husband, who never reads, picked up your book from our coffee table and started quoting you. And he's been happier ever since. Thank you. You know, it's little things like that.

That is awesome. And you know, that makes, that just encourages me to finish up my novels and finish up my work and get it out there and learn how to draw.

Speaking about learning how to draw, I have said it many times on the show here. I paint like a four year old on crack. That's kind of my, you know, that's my shtick. But I'm happy that I paint like a four year old on crack.

How do people go out there and learn how to draw? A, how to draw and then B, how to draw better.

Yeah. Okay. I preface this by the question is always, do you draw what you see? And it comes down to what our listeners want to do.

And so there was an incident that happened with my art teacher at the Art Students League where a woman, we were drawing life drawing and there was an attractive nude model. And a woman had faithfully drawn the very attractive nude model.

And there was a, a big black smudge mark right across her like naval belly button stomach. And he, the teacher was a little confused because it didn't seem to be on the model.

And then he looked up and there was a cat sitting on the skylight casting a shadow onto the model.

Wow.

And you know, obviously, you know, the, what we understand there is the artist is not always going to draw what the artist sees, because in that instance there was the classic example of something that you are better off leaving out. But in, in many, many cases, we don't draw so well because we draw what we think is there, we don't draw what we see.

One of the classic examples is you get maybe a mother that decides she wants to do a little portrait of her three year old and because she knows that the nose is the longest thing on the face, she draws this portrait of her three year old with what she knows instead of what she sees.

And the three year old looks about 40 because she's drawing the long nose which, which is not in front of her, but she's drawing what she, what she thinks.

And so if for those of our listeners who are saying, I would like to, you know, draw, I want to draw realism, I want to create a portrait that looks like my husband or my friend, it's always going back to this question of am I actually reproducing what is in front of me or am I seeming to draw what I know? And we have countless examples that where the hair meets the forehead is usually a very soft line.

But, but artists who are just beginning will make it a hard line. And the hair then looks like a wig or there is, there's no real line with where the lips meet the flesh.

But if we draw what we know, we put a line there and then we say, why doesn't it look like Timothy? So number one is that we become especially vigilant. Am I drawing what I know or am I drawing what I see?

And that never stops because we're always making assumptions which may not be entirely correct. The other thing that I would share is that when it comes to light and shade, there are really three shapes on which we build everything.

And we need to understand how the light moves on a sphere, how it moves from the light and into the dark and into the reflected light. And we need to understand how that same light moves on a cylinder, how it happens on a cube.

And everything that you ever draw is going to be a combination of those shapes. An arm is a cylinder. The top of the head is a sphere. The knee is in many ways a little bit like a cube. It's quite a square looking thing.

If we talk about body parts and a tree is a cylinder, and whether you're talking about Rembrandt or Vermeer Constable, it's all their knowledge comes back to this thorough understanding of how light moves on those three shapes.

I really tuned in with the first thing you were saying. We draw what we see.

The reason why I get into that is we had in my undergrad years, I took a intro to drawing class because I didn't want to draw stick figures anymore. I figured I was 20 some odd years old. I don't want to draw stick figures anymore. I want to learn how to draw. And we had this great instructor.

He was a transfer student from the uk. Played really loud techno music, really fast techno music throughout the whole class. Really loud. And his thing to us was draw what you see.

And he would take these chairs, put a tarp over them and he would say, draw that. And he. Every 10 minutes he would have a switch seats and we'd have to, you know, go to the next person seat and draw where they left off.

And I thought that was one of the greatest exercises to do because you're constantly moving around and you don't have time to process and judge kind of what you're seeing. You just have time to draw what you see right there in front of you. And is that kind of what you're talking about?

There is to suspend that judgment of what we accept as accepted beauty.

Yeah, that we make all kinds of assumptions. We make assumptions, for example, that shadows are brown or black, which they're not.

They tend to be in photographs, and photographs never do justice to the beauty of shadows. But a shadow is usually going to be a darker version of what the shadow is cast on. It's also going to be.

If a shadow is on a blue shirt, then the shadow will be a little bit warmer than the blue because there's less light to emphasize the bloom. If the shadow is on a red shirt, then the shadow will be cooler than the red shirt because there's less light to emphasize within the shadow.

So people who have been painting a little longer and have learned that shadows aren't brown or black, suddenly their paintings begin to sing because they now know that they don't paint what they believe it is. They paint what they see. It is.

That you know that, oh my gosh. Now I want to go do some paintings because I'm a big fan of Bob Ross.

I don't know if he's popular in Australia or not, but the way he does the shadows on his mountain, where he'll do the highlight, you know, in kind of a titanium white and then the. The shadow of the mountain is kind of a blue and a white. How you describe that. And I've been watching Bob Ross, for.

I would prefer not to say how many decades, but a number of decades and how you described it. Now, that all makes sense to me. I need to go get three copies of each and every one of your books. That's just the end of that. That.

No, but that really helps me out entirely.

It is so exciting when suddenly someone helps us to make a breakthrough and we move immediately to a different level because we understand something about shadows or. And it is always the basics, Timothy. It's. It's doing the basics better.

I mean, if you're on the tennis court, it's about your footwork and watching the ball. And if you're drawing a tree or a dog, then it's how well do you execute the basics?

And here's something that I would share, and it is that every one of us, whether we're writing something or whether we're drawing a landscape, there will be a point where we start to struggle, and we might start to have those little thoughts come into our mind. Well, obviously, Rembrandt could do this, because he was Rembrandt, or Vermeer could do this, or Hemingway could do this.

And it's then that we need to say to ourselves, this is not magic. There is a way to draw this nose. There is a way to write this first sentence that I haven't figured out yet. And I can figure it out.

And Rembrandt had the same paper and the same light and the same brushes and the same paint that I have. It is not magic. I will figure it out.

And we need to do that maybe sometimes a dozen times within the same painting, where we just knuckle down and we say, I can do this.

And I believe that people who turn their passion into their career are people who refuse to say, well, it's because, you know, it was Andy Warhol, he could do that. But I can't. No, you can do it.

Is the. Because I know, for me, being an artist, that magic that you speak of, I can't go to. My wife hates it. She's a theater person, too.

I can't go to a live theater show and not have notes for everything that happens.

I used to be a lighting designer, and I can tell when a lighting designer is trying to get me to look over here instead of over there or feel this way or feel that way. So the magic of not knowing that's happening, that's actually. That magic is gone from me, because I know how to do it. Yeah, I did it myself.

But is the magic then knowing that I can do that. Is that the magic, then, that. That you're going for as an artist?

Yes. Say, for example, let's take an example of.

We come across a painting hanging on a wall, and there is a stunning piece of sunlight coming through the clouds and illuminating something in the middle distance. And we think that is just, you know, it's just extraordinary. It's like it's done with something more than paint.

And we say, you know, it's almost like magic. How did they get that light to just sing?

And the fact is, what they did was, in the rest of the painting, there was no light, anything like that little patch in the middle distance. And not only that, all of the values in the whole painting were very, very close together.

So that when you have a fairly uniform kind of painting in its tonality, and then in that one piece in the middle distance, you introduce that burst of light coming through the clouds. It just blows your mind. But what happens when the first time we try to paint a painting that's going to have that kind of impact?

Then we're getting the titanium white, we're putting it everywhere. We think, you know, if a little bit works, then look what I can do on everything.

And it's a little bit like if you're shouting all the time, people can't hear you.

That's true. That is true. I love that. I love that. What is the ideal mindset to improve our artwork, or improve anything at all, for that matter?

But what mindset should we be in to get from a person that can draw a stick figure to somebody that can draw something that's worthy of being on the Sistine Chapel?

Well, if we love. First of all, we've got to love it, because there's going to be lots of roadblocks and lots of days when we think this is too hard.

So you just have to love it.

The adventure of learning and putting in our best effort, whether it's a book or a painting or a play or a piece of music, you've just got to feel that I'm blessed to be able to do this whenever I can.

Part of it is, as I mentioned earlier, not bowing down to other people that have achieved and say, well, they did it, because that's them and I'm only me and they're famous and I'm not. That there's a way to do this. Whatever it is I'm trying to do now, I haven't figured it out yet, but it's not magic. I can do that.

Part of it is if we can get around people who make their living doing what we want to do.

If your goal is to be a professional artist and you can spend a little extra time around a teacher or help them or assist them in classes, if you can assist somebody who's making a living at it, to set up an exhibition, if you want to be a professional musician and you can help another professional musician, go and set up and be there and cut their equipment. And if you can get the belief firstly, that everyday people make their living at this, that is the first step.

And then from that point you start to say, well, that can be me. And I can. I can be a published author or I can start to sell my paintings. So a lot of it is having that environment in that respect.

Timothy, I was very lucky because my father was a professional landscape painter for 30 years.

And some of the people I knew best growing up and as a young adult were people who made a living as an artist, as painting in oils, watercolors, landscapes. I knew that it was possible. So for me, I was not especially courageous. I just grew up knowing that people can do this.

And for those of us who aren't around other people who are making their living in the arts, it's important that we can get around people who are actually doing it. Not people that are just talking about it or people that we can see. These people are feeding their families doing this.

Something I picked up from that. Not people that are talking about it, but people that are actually doing it. I know my experiences. I've.

I went through academia, and there was a lot of talk through academia, and I have the student loans to prove it. I was there for so many years, and there's a lot of people talking about doing things, but not a lot of people actually going out and doing things.

And it was funny to me because I'm a theater guy. That's what my degree's in. And seeing other people talking about theater, but never going out and standing in front of a crowd or anything like that.

And that's something that this talk that we're having here is really resonating with me, is we need to surround ourselves with people that are actually doing versus talking.

Yeah. And therein lies one of the challenges of being surrounded with academia is that there are people who, I mean, they can make a living teaching it.

And we may see a parallel thing with. There's a lot of people that teach business that have never had one.

And I tell you what, when you have a business and you see, Timothy, I've never had a job. Not for one week of my life did I ever have a paycheck and that I'm 67 now, so I've never had a job. I'm 67.

And for all my life since I left the Art Students League of New York, I've been either painting or drawing or writing books or giving presentations or trying to figure out which project next was going to feed me. And, and you learn a lot about what's possible. And you also have to knuckle down and do the things that are going to feed you and pay the rent.

And when you are around people who are doing that, then you start to understand this is possible.

When you're out there and showing your work and, you know, either in a gallery or talking to somebody on a podcast, you know, that's living in Virginia under 3ft of snow, or somebody from Singapore, you know, writing into you and telling you about, hey, because of you, I, I have a restaurant now and I'm a millionaire now. What's the one question that you wish people would ask you about your work? And they rarely or never do.

You know, I don't know that I've ever. I don't know that I've ever had that thought. The thrill for me is that people read my books and enjoy my cartoons and take a message that helps them.

I so enjoy the process of writing.

And once I've written the book, then that's like, I've finished the main course, so now I can have the dessert, then I can do the cartoons, which is like the super fun bit of the exercise. And I just feel so blessed to be able to share ideas that have impacted me and tell stories about people that have inspired me.

And then people come back to me and, and say, this was really helpful. The one thing that people say that sometimes irritates me is they say to me, you are so talented. And I've been practicing drawing for 50 years.

And I think that explains why I can go on stage and draw a cartoon in a minute that people think is delightful. And even though I write very simply, I will still probably only write a page or two in a day.

And I will keep on rearranging that and inserting and deleting sentences until I have something that works. And it's way more about effort than any God given talent. It's much more about some kind of brute determination, I guess.

But it's not for my sake that I wish that they wouldn't say, you're so talented.

It's for their sake because I want people to understand that you see somebody who's maybe singing beautifully or painting beautifully, and it all seems to be flowing. It may be flowing, but there's an extraordinary amount of effort and preparation that went into that.

Do you think they are using the word talent or talented as an excuse for themselves to not try? Because, you know, they can look at you and go, you know, well, he's so talented. He's got 12 books out. And, you know, I could never do that.

And they're using that as an excuse versus putting in the work and writing 12 books.

Yes, I believe to a greater or lesser degree, many, many people say I haven't got the talent, and so I'm not going to try.

And if we go back to that drawing example, if you just spend an hour examining what it is that you see, was it Betty Edwards that wrote the book how to Draw on the Right side of the Brain, where you actually draw everything upside down, which is the perfect demonstration of how it is that we draw according to our assumptions. And most people will draw way better when they turn whatever it is they're drawing upside down. So, yes, that's the perfect example of.

It's not so much about talent, but our preconceptions.

Awesome. Awesome. Now, you've presented to, you know, thousands of corporations and, you know, it done big conventions and all that kind of stuff.

How does somebody. How do you go about doing that? I. I've. I've actually had two guests on this show here that do something similar to that, where they'll go to a.

Like a corporate meeting or something like that, and they will draw and they'll make illustrations for what's actually going on. But how do you get. How do you get a job? Well, not because you don't work a regular job, but how does somebody get involved in that?

How would, how do you. How did you start that?

Okay, well, that evolved when my books became popular. So as. As being Happy began to get traction, I would be initially invited into. Where my books first started selling was in Singapore.

So I'd be invited into, like, Hewlett Packard or a bunch of high schools to come and talk about some of the main principles in your book Being Happy. And so I learned early on that people really enjoyed associating those ideas with a cartoon.

So I would start with the little jumping guy on the COVID of my book, and I would draw that before, and maybe he'd be with a dog and, you know, something else, but I would draw that before I would even begin speaking. And so I walk on stage I play music and I draw a cartoon and people think, wow, this is, this is unusual. This is great.

And whether you're talking to brain surgeons or whether you're talking to maximum security prisoners, which I also speak to, there's this sigh of relief that says, this is going to be fun. This is different. And so what I will, what I will do is as I go through my.

And I'm talking about, for example, and resilience, taking responsibility and not blaming your mother for your happiness and why goals are helpful. And maybe gratitude is great because you can't be miserable. You can't be grateful and miserable at the same time.

Or some of these ideas that I'll be sharing, I'll be drawing on this big flip chart on stage and I usually start at the wrong end of the drawing. So they have no idea what it's going to be. And it keeps everyone engaged. And it's a nice way of presenting a keynote presentation.

That is awesome.

I actually have to do one of those keynote presentations in March for my day job, so I might be stealing some ideas from you there, borrowing, as we artists like to do from each other. Well, Andrew, this has been a fantastic conversation that we've had. I want to thank you so very much for joining me here on Create Art Podcast.

Is there any question that you wanted me to ask that I did not pop out for you?

Not at all, Timothy. This has been a delight.

What I would say is for those of our listeners who would like to see one of my cartoons, every two weeks I do a newsletter where I share a couple of sentences about being happier and include a cartoon.

So if you would like to have a look at that, then you can get my newsletter@AndrewMatthews.com that's my website and my books are all on Amazon in if you think I'd like to explore some of these ideas a little further. So books like Being Happy, follow your heart bouncing back on Amazon in both Kindle and Hard Copy. And a couple of them are also on Audible.

If you enjoy books with an Australian accent.

Who doesn't? If you don't enjoy books with an Australian accent, then don't listen to this podcast.

Well, Andrew, we will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes for all of our listeners here. Definitely. Everyone go check out all of Andrew's books and get on that newsletter for yourself.

And Andrew, again, thank you so very much for joining me here today. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

It's been such a pleasure, Timothy. Thanks So much.

All right, well, thanks for sticking around and taking a listen to that interview. I hope you got a lot of great ideas and a lot of great insights out of this interview.

And if you want want to go ahead and contact Andrew, all the links are in the show notes there for you. Definitely check out his newsletter and go buy a book or three or 12. You know, they make great stocking stuffers.

And if you don't know what else to do for somebody, go buy a book. So, as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I met Andrew through PodMatch.

And in the show notes, I do have my affiliate link with podmatch, and that's how I get such great guests on the show. And, you know, if you want to be a guest on multiple shows, not only this one, but on other shows, definitely check Pod Match Out.

You're going to be hooked up with some great hosts, and if you're a podcaster, you're going to get some great guests. Now, I do receive a tiny little bit of a commission for this, so I do need to disclose that to you.

But, you know, it's not something that, you know, I'm gonna quit my day job with. But, you know, I just. I like to be open and honest with you on that. So check out podmatch. If you are a guest.

If you're an artist, there's a ton of hosts out there that want to have you on their show. Or if you're a host, there's a ton of guests out there that you can get referred to, and you're gonna get people just like I got.

So definitely check it out for yourself. The next thing I like to talk about is making your podcast easier to share. And I do that through another group called Podcast Beacon.

And what that is is it's a little wristband that you can have imprinted with your logo on it, and all people have to do is wave their phone over that, over that wristband, and it'll take him, Take that person right to your website. So instead of handing out business cards or QR codes and all that stuff, definitely check out Podcast Beacon. Links are in the show notes.

Yes, I do receive a small commission from that if you use my affiliate link, but I wouldn't promote it unless I thought it was really worth your while. So if you're a podcaster out there needing to find a better way to share your podcast with folks, check out Podcast Beacon. All right?

And then talking about reaching out and sharing the podcast with folks. If you got something onto this podcast I definitely would love it if you shared it with a friend.

Maybe they are from Australia and they like books on resilience and being happy.

Whatever it is, feel free to go ahead and share this podcast episode with them or share the whole podcast with them, whichever is appropriate for you. You can reach out to me directly.

Timothyartpodcast.com I'd love to hear about what you're doing in your neck of the woods and your journey and I would love to have you on the show. That way we can share it with everybody.

So definitely reach out to me, let me know what you think and then also let me know what you think about the show. Is the music too long? Do I have too many guests? Not enough guests. Definitely let me know what, what you think about the show.

And there's another way you can do that. I'm actually running a survey. It's called the 2024 listener survey. I know we're in 2025. I'll eventually get around to changing that.

But the link is in the show notes there for you. Just takes a few minutes.

It helps me make this show a five star show without you having to, you know, go to your app and go, oh, hey, that's five stars. Maybe your app doesn't allow you to do that. It helps me make the show better for you and more what you want to hear.

Because that's what I'm here for for sure.

And speaking about sharing the show with a friend, I have another show called Find a Podcast about and that's where I help you outsmart the algorithm and find your next binge worthy podcast. You can find it at findapodcastabout xyz.

And for all of my projects you can check out my portfolio website and that's with my production company, TKB Podcast Studio. And that's where I help my clients through quiet professionalism, lead through the noise.

Go to the website tkbpodcaststudio.com and get all the information there. Okay? I want to thank Andrew Matthews again for his generosity of knowledge and spirit and enthusiasm about writing and about resilience.

And now it's time for me to let you go off into the world and do what you need to do. I'm going to go ahead and do what I need to do here today, but go out there, tame that inner critic.

Create more than you consume and go out there make some art for somebody you love. Yourself. I'll talk to you next time.