Execute! Creativity Applies to Improving Everything You Do with Thorsten Overgaard & Jason Mehl

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here with Thorsten Overgaard. He's in Mount Blanc on his way to Istanbul. Thanks for spending some time, Thorsten.

You're most welcome.

And here with award winning sculptor from Denver, Jason Mail. Thanks, Jason, for joining in on this, talking about creativity.

Yeah, thank you, Larry.

And you know, the thing about creativity is you're unleashing a power that, that's inside you. You're unleashing ability, ideas and things inside you. And the great thing about it is that it applies to improving everything you do. Eating, you know, how you spend your time, not just what you do as a career or whatever, but it's just, you know, your enjoyment, where you live, the clothes you wear, the people you associate with. All of these things are influenced by your creativity. And it goes back to the idea that everything can be improved, which means everything can be more satisfying to you. Everything that you're doing and involved in can be more rewarding to you. And finding those breakthroughs is what keeps the electricity and the freshness coming into your life. And so you, you know, don't be afraid to challenge yourself to, to move forward. And when it comes to the execution, you know, I've had this attitude, you know, people would get on and they'll speak from stage, you know, training things, and they talk about, it's one thing to tell people to work, you know, you to talk about you've got to work hard. But I'm never impressed when people tell me they work hard because that tells me they're proud of themselves for working hard, which means they're stupid because you gotta, you gotta work hard no matter what you do in life, if you're gonna be independent, if you're gonna, you know, the hardest working people with the toughest jobs are the lowest paid people, you know, minimum wage. So when you, you brag to me that you're a hard, I'm a hard worker. You know, it's just like, can't you come up with anything else? You know, that's what you're noticing about your effort as you go through the day, that you're a hard worker. You know, into my mind, I've just always written them off as, you know, I'm listening to a knucklehead, you know, and so hard work is a given. The whole thing is, what's that? Where's that hard work going to take you? You know, what are you going to get from your hard work? You know, that's where your focus should be. And that's what ignites, you know, that's what cranks the creativity engine in you in a. As you go through the day, when you get up in the morning, you know, in the middle of the day, the end of the day, when you're tired, when you're energetic, when you're at a party with this, that the other. What keeps that creativity coming out is moving forward. You know, what can I get out of this? What does it, you know, you meet a person, what does this person know that I need to know? You know, everybody knows something you need to know. So if you approach it like that, like every interaction can yield a benefit to you if you're paying attention. And so when it comes to the execution, what jumps out to, you know, you to moving forward, doing something new, meeting new people, trying new things, pushing boundaries.

So yes, what we're talking, talking about, it's the third episode we talk about competence is observing, deciding and executing. And now we talk about executing. It's true. You have, in some cultures or whatever, you have the idea that you have to work hard. It's almost like the sooner you die, the better because then you work really hard. And that's not the thing you could say the result of work should be products that you can exchange for money or goodwill or something, you know, and it's very funny, just as you say that I haven't thought about that before. Let's go into my book. But my mother, she was making curtains. So When I was 10, my mom and dad divorced and we moved to. Me and my brother and her moved to a house that had to be renovated. So one thing was she built this big, fairly big room to make curtains. And she would go to work like 6, 6:30 in the morning, and she would often work to 10 o'. Clock. So it's like when we were hungry, she'd just say, like, here, go buy some food. And so we had to learn to cook ourselves. So you just doing that all day. And I thought about it. I mean, she died here some months ago, which we talked a lot before she died. So that's really cool in many ways. But when she died, she had a house with 28 rooms. And I remember back when I was like 14, 15 she made as much a year as a CEO just doing that. And you could say that was basically what she figured out somehow from her parents or whatever. She figured out if there's something. If I do this thing and I make this much money, I'll just keep doing a lot of it. And that's basically what she did. She worked home, hang out with us. He had the freedom to smoke a lot of cigarettes, and you could take a break and go in the garden, and she could take a day off, but she just did a lot of it, you know? And you could say, sometimes I have people say, wow, you're like the most active person I know. Like, I see you all the time working, and I don't feel like it's work because I'm just. I'm just always carrying a camera, taking photos, and then I make articles and stuff. It doesn't feel like work to me, but I do produce a lot. And I. And I have this thing that when. When I do something, I finish it so I can actually exchange it. You know, I don't leave ideas around, and then I don't finish it because it wasn't. It wasn't a good idea. And I didn't mean to talk this long. Was actually. Say one thing more. Because when you asked me about participating in this podcast about creativity, I looked at, okay, creativity is the ability to observe, decide, and execute. That's something. If you break it up, everybody can do it. And I sat down in Paris one morning. I was just sitting on the street drinking coffee in a cafe, and then I started thinking, I should write something about this. The ability to observe. And what is observe? And one of the things you have to be able to do is to just stay put and observe. Because people usually, they get an idea and they start executing it, but then they run out of time or they haven't thought it through, and then they give it up. So one of the points is actually no. You have to sit still and observe. And you look at your idea and you decide, and you said no, and you look a little bit more and you make some other decision. And suddenly you have something like this seems like a workable concept, and you have a plan for what you're going to execute, and then you go to execute. And the very interesting thing about this was that as I thought this, I got the idea. I'm going to do a story about this. I'm going to do a story about how you have to observe first and have. You have to sit still. And then it led into I'm going to write a story where it's a story in Paris, but so it's actually going to be a fiction story where this is part of it, and you follow the work of making the fixed story in observe, decide, execute over several days. So that's going to be another book that's going to be on the podcast. But that is actually a key thing that. I mean, if you don't observe and you don't decide anything and you just go execute, you're going to work yourself to debt. So you want to be brilliant. You have to observe and make some good observations and. And then make some great decisions. That this is how I'm going to trick this and do this really smart. And then you execute it and you can even have other people do it for you, but it has to be executed.

Yeah, there's. There's a thing about. You can't sit about, think about it forever, but you got to think about it long enough to where you can make a serious effort about it. And we would have people that would come into meetings, recruiting meetings. They're delirious with joy. You know, they're. They've never seen anything like this. You know, I'm the greatest speaker they ever heard this and the other. And then you never see them again. And. Or they, you know, maybe they last one day. And so obviously, these are people that have tried 400 different things in their life. You know, they've never allowed themselves to think it through. But the people who sat out there and ask you a lot of tough questions, they wanted to follow up here that the other. And then when they came in now, they stayed and they lasted, you know, they worked, you know, and so, Jason, you got. You want to jump in on that? Yeah.

And so what Thorsten said about observing and executing and actually finishing some things or as many things as you can. Right. You can't execute them all. But at the same time, you want to allow yourself multiple passions because one passion can feed another.

Yeah.

You may decide that passion is just a passion. You're not going to try to reach some ultimate goal within that passion, like, say you're exploring music on or something else. Allow yourself that growth.

And.

And then that also helps prevent burnout. Because something I see with a lot of people in many professions is their path is so singular, their focus is so singular that it just leads to burnout. Even with artists, I see artists that are so focused on one thing that they don't love it anymore. And you and I talk a lot, Larry, about Experimenting, trying new things, new mediums, like, don't just do one thing. One thing can be your main focus, but you need some other side projects to keep that inspiration alive.

Yeah, you got to have a focus, but you can't let it become a rut.

Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it.

Yeah. You can also, I mean. Yeah, I mean, actually, Jason, you have an interesting thing that you, you have set up that you have a thinking, thinking chair and a music chair or whatever. But just to think that you sit down and you almost say, okay, this is here. I'm just going to sit and think. That's just observing. Like you're observing your own thoughts and ideas that come up and, and you're not doing anything. Like you say, if you sat in your workshop and did the thinking, then you, then you would get an idea and you would go execute immediately. And then you would end up, oh, that was wrong, you know, So I really like this idea of dividing it into different things. And then I think, yeah, exactly like that. It is like three steps, you know, and if you take, for example, photography, extremely important that you observe first because people just take a camera and they, they basically just go, execute, execute, execute. Then you get, what's the point? You don't get. You're not in control. To be in control, you have to observe first and see, wow, that's a picture. And you decide, I'm going to take it or I'm not going to take it or this is how I'm going to take it. And then you take it and then you go up, search or more and you do the next one. That's basically the steps of it. And most people, they get a camera, that most people get a camera and then they start executing and it's like getting a computer. You start writing a book, but you haven't thought about anything and you haven't lived. Like, what are you going to write? You know, you can just sit and hammer on the keyboard, but nothing is going to come out of it. So.

Well, the thing is also, that's really how you improve things though, because when you write your books or you write your books, you know, you get your first thought. You really don't know the whole thing. But you know, the three step process is to like get the first version done, then you kind of repeat it again, you observe it, you decide what adjustments need to go, then you run through that again and, and it's like rinse and repeat basically. And every time you do that, you refine your product Until. And people say all the time, when do you know when you're done? You know, I can painting. That's the number one, appears to be the one of the top questions you get in painting. Like, when do you know you're done? It's like, yeah, you just know, you know, you know, and the inspiration like I had, it's like, when you're done with people, it's like, I have no more interest in this person. I'm done here. I'm gonna move on.

You just know that could be a nice feeling. Yeah, too. Yeah. But it's also, I mean, this thing with burning out or something, I mean. Yeah, I don't know what that is. I mean, I mean, that's also a matter of inspiration, because it's fun. You could say that. Yeah. My. My thing is, is photography. And. Yeah. And it started with a camera and somehow an interest in making pictures that I thought, oh, this is something I can do. This is fun. And there's a lot of technical things around it back then when it was a dark room and so on. And somehow it all. It all was very interesting to me. And you look at my business today, I mean, I went through working from. For Get Image and Associated Press, like the biggest picture agency and some of the biggest newspapers, and I don't work for anybody anymore, as you can see. I'm not a traditional photographer in that way. But everything I do is photography. I travel the world, take photos, I tease photography. I write books about photography. I put them on my website. And you can say, I make bags and accessories for photographers in Italy and leather, and I make metal things in Hong Kong for the lens shades. And here in Paris, I put in my postcards with photos into different hotels. So it's all photography, but it's not how it started out. It changed, you know, and that's also an ability to change and stay within somehow your interest or talent and see, how can I expand this one way? You can expand. You can make more of the same, but you could also make different types of it, you know?

Well, you know, the greatest golfer is Jack Nickel. Nicholas and Tiger woods, of course. But Nicholas, early in his career, he started designing courses. He started. He bought McGregor Golf, I think, and he started designing golf clubs and clothing. You know, he had his clothing line, he had this, that and the other. Arnold Palmer did the same thing, you know, but the big thing was he was designing golf courses and all that. So people said, jack, you could have probably had a much more success, even as amazingly successful as your career was you probably could have had a much even more success, more wins, you know, won more majors and more tournaments if you had not diverted yourself, you know. And he said, well, on the other side of that, he said, if I hadn't started doing all these other things, which is like you getting them to designing the leather goods and this, that the other, he said, if I had not let myself do that, I would have probably quit golf 15 years ago and been done with it, you know.

Yeah.

And so allowing yourself to pursue other things allows you to refresh yourself and bring other things back into your original passion, which you're, you know, really the best at, you know, and go ahead, Jason. You got.

Oh yeah. And then it also allows for editing and self correcting. So whenever you're pursuing other things and you have a goal for one idea that you're working on and you step away for a minute, you come back in and you're seeing it a new way, you're seeing it with fresh eyes. And this allows you to pick up on things that when you're in the trenches, just hammering through, fighting through this.

Yeah.

You may not notice until you step away for a second. And so getting in a habit of just switching gears between things and then coming back and self correcting gives you.

Fresh eyes, a different perspective. And so what about one last thing I want to hear, hear you talk about? What about deadlines. There's a certain thing, you know, in photography and in painting, a lot of the created creative things, it just won't work. You can't like get creativity on demand, you know, that's why you set, you give yourself time, but at some point you got to move to. And you, you mentioned it, we got to finish this thing, you know, we thought about it. We mess with it, let's get it done, you know, because I don't want to be revising it 15 years later. So talk about the importance of deadlines and when deadlines kick in. Hey, listen, there's a lot of information.

Online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others.

Move up, well, I mean. I mean, early on in my career, when I did advertising and also when I did photography for newspaper and stuff and magazines, you have a deadline. Also writing articles for magazines, you have a deadline and say, that's good training and getting stuff done. And I mean, these days I don't feel like. I mean, yeah, I set my own deadline. I mean, my deadline is that it has to be finished. I decide I'm going to finish this thing, and by when, you know, it's not like, indefinite. It's like, no, I want to finish it. And almost like, as soon as possible, I can finish it, then I can get on with something else, you know? And I also know that if you decide to do something and you start on it and then you drop it again to do it later, then it's not fun doing it anymore. You have to do it while it's fun, while you have the purpose to do it.

You know, I think that. I think you. You nailed it right there. Inspiration has a shelf life, you know.

The thing it does, I mean it. But also purpose, you know, I mean, the thing if you really do something that you want to do that you see, wow, this is awesome, then. I don't know if you can say that, but then that is a fuel that gives a lot of energy to do it. It's much better than somebody else tells you what to do or what you should be doing or what you shouldn't do. The thing. You get an idea, well, I really want to do this. That's. That gives a lot of jet engine power, you know. Then you go do it, you know, and use that energy. You. If you save it for later, it's just going to be work. It's going to be something on a checklist that you have to do, and it's not fun anymore and you forgot why you're doing it anyways, you know?

Yeah. Isn't this part of it? You start to get ideas in your mind of other things you want to start working on. You know, it's like, want to clear. I got to clear this. This is fun. I got to clear it up because I'm excited now about moving on to these other projects or doing these other things. And. Yeah, that has a lot to do with it.

That's very much me. I mean, I. Yeah, it's just very much of me that I would not leave something undone, like. And. But I do know, you could say when I write books, I divide them up in chapters. So I get an idea for one chapter and I do it and I finished that chapter. And it's very important to finish it because I know if I don't finish it, I can't remember next time I look at it, what it was doing. So it's lost, you know, and it's not fun doing something. You can't remember why you're doing it, but you just have to finish it. And of course, you get ideas while you're doing one thing, you get other ideas, and somehow you can. You can hold on to it. You know, it's not like you have to do it now because you can actually. It's funny how you can monetize. You can actually finish one idea while you're still developing the next one, and then when you're done with that one, you move on to the next one. But I have. I don't know, I just have always had in my life, things have to be finished. I don't have this thing that can do it later or I don't have to. It's. No, I just have to be a finished product, you know, it's almost like I have to bring it to market to sell it, you know, So I have that, you know. And it's funny, we were just driving today. I don't know why we were talking about that, but I'll just show you the view here again. So, Jason, you can see this is a mountain behind me. I don't know why I don't feel like climbing them when I see them, but I do get why people would climb them. And we drove and we said, this is an interesting example of something that you do, because if you want to walk or climb up to a spot, you know, when you have arrived, there's no doubt about it. And it might be hard and may take long or it may take short, or there's a different way of doing it, but you have to get there. That was the point. And, you know, if you didn't do it, you know, and you go on a treadmill and you say, I'm going to run for 30 minutes. Just not the same, you know. But climbing up a mountain or walking up a mountain is there's a goal you have to achieve. And when you've been. When you go up there and you can see, I did it, you know, I haven't done it, but I only done rock clamping.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing I may do a little differently from other people, too, is I. With my different things that I'm pursuing. At the same time, there's always one that has the most Energy that I'll have. It's usually staggered, a new idea forming ones that are in the process of making. Some of my process takes a lot of time, and there is downtime in it, so it allows for me to work on other projects at the same time that either are or aren't related. But there's always something coming to completion. So there's that excitement, and there's always new ideas forming. So there's always that excitement, too. And I feel like I don't miss the process in the middle. Like, I'm not. I will lose interest in some things and not finish them. But that's just because I had too many ideas in the first place.

Place. Right.

But then also making myself pursue unrelated passions at least a little bit each day. So I might take off for an hour and go climbing or a couple hours and go mountain biking. During that time, I'm thinking about what I want to do as soon as I get back, and it kind of fuels that fire. And now there's other times where the project. I might be going 24 hours without sleep because it must finish. This idea needs to get out, and I'm able to.

Yeah, there's a productivity. I mean, every project has a pipeline of sequences that it has to go through. And, you know, when you're writing books, doing ebooks, you control them all as much, except for your time. You know, interruptions or workshops and travel or quarantine, you know, adjusting for things like that. Whereas in Jason's world, he's got the foundries and the backlog of the foundries to deal with. So. But each. Each project has its own pipeline. And what I've always liked of looking at goals is to not look at a goal as one flower. You might start off with one big one you want, but I think of lots of kind of like a bouquet of flowers. This is pretty. That's fun. This is exciting.

And.

And you just try and have lots of, you know, have something exciting to look forward to in every area of your life, and it's a matter, you know, you can't work on them all at once. But when you get stalled in one area, there's always something, you know, beautiful and exciting right there you've already thought of and set up, and you just kind of move over there. And that's how you wind up being so productive. Because I know with people, with you, you know, people say, how does he do all the workshops? And how does he analyze all these cameras and lenses and write these technical things? And he interviews with the people at Leica. And then he, you know, and then he's putting out products and designing and so, you know, with all the courses that you put up. But I know how it works. You got a bunch of things you work on when you stalled here. You know, the light bulb goes on over there. You know, it's just like pushing a chapter forward or, you know, you don't have to finish the whole book, but you just get a chapter, you know, the next chapter I want to get is that one and pretty.

Yeah, but it's also, I mean. Yeah, but I think it's also like that you should have. It's almost like if you don't have it, you should clean out your life. You should have. Everything you do excites you. So, I mean, I will go. I can get excited like in Paris. Like I want to go down and have coffee and just sit and write on a notepad. And then later I gonna go somewhere else. I'm gonna sit and edit and then I'm gonna go out and photograph. And then I'm gonna go to a shop and buy something. And everything I do is something that excites me. And sometimes it's also exciting that something you want to do that you're gonna put it away for two days, that you want to go shopping, but you're going to do it in two days because first you're going to do these things. And also I think a lot of energy like that. I don't waste my energy. So. So I. I maintain energy all the time to do what I want to do. So I mean, I wouldn't walk around in the middle of the day in sunshine because it's going to make me tired, you know, and the light is not good enough to take photos anyway. So I'll go somewhere else where I can preserve my energy and. And do something else, you know. But everything I do excites me. It's very few things I do that doesn't excite me. And that's. You could say, if you don't feel like that, you should change your life to where it does excite you.

Well, there's been a lot of fun, incredibly powerful insights on making magic happen in your life continually and being excited, you know, a way to bring that excitement in. Into your life, which is really living, you know, because if you. You make a lot of money and you're all stressed out, that's not really living, you know, it's the excitement of accomplishment and doing the things with that you want to do with people. You want to do where you want to do it. And that keeping that flow of excitement coursing through your body, you know, that's comes that, you know, you're in charge of that. You're in charge of your life. You're only going to be here in a short period of time. So creativity is the way you can get that electricity to course through your veins.

Hopefully this is.

We got people stirred up about turning themselves loose in this area. Jason, you want to have a final word and then we'll go over and get a final comment from Thorsten.

Sure. So, Larry, you said something earlier, actually, it was a flower analogy about having all of these different things bloom.

Yeah.

And then there's something else I want to add to that, because when you see something bloom and an idea makes it to fruition and it's extremely exciting, it doesn't have to be the end. You can make that same plant, that same idea bloom repeatedly.

Right? Yeah.

The process can continue and the bloom will be different each time.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, Thorsten, you. Hey, this has been fun. I've enjoyed it.

Hope you've. Yeah, it's always fun.

Hope you've had a good time and we've got a lot of great ideas. You want to give a last word, final comment to the people listening?

Well, we could say this thing that. That you finished something. There was something in the thing that Jason said before that it's almost like you break your things up in cycles. You can actually finish so you can get on with the next thing and you can say, that's one of the traps of being creative or being an artist or being an entrepreneur is that each thing you do is a process. So it means it goes through steps. And when you're done with it, you know more about how to do it than when you began. And that's usually where self validation comes in. Because now you can see how. How incomplete your work is, because now you know how to do it better. But that doesn't count. You just finish what you did and you push it out for sale in a gallery, whatever you're doing, and then you go make the next thing then proof version. And maybe you do it faster also, you know, so that's how you work as an artist. The wrong thing is to invalidate yourself and say, no, I'm gonna wait till I make it perfect and then I'm gonna launch it.

Because then you.

You don't make any money for 10 years, you know, and you don't make any art. And if you look historically you will see that most photographers made the masterpieces when they were young and unexperienced. Bob Dylan wrote his best stuff. Most people agree when he was young. And the same with Henry Kippersong. He made his masterpiece when he was 21. He only had a camera for two years and he photographed for 30 years or 45 years and he didn't make a bigger masterpiece. So don't disregard, like, don't take the things that you do and say, no, this is not what I actually wanted to do, or it's not great enough. I don't have enough experience and people are going to laugh at me. No, just put it out and you can say, somebody's going to buy it. Maybe later they'll pay more for it, for something else you do, but you just put that thing out and move on to the next one. That's really important in executing things.

Yeah. Because you're, you know, your great work is going to come when you're most excited, not when you're most educated, you know, and they had.

Education usually works the other way, I don't know, but education.

We were at a big meeting one time, we had a. I was on a panel, four guys at the top. There's about 500 people asking questions. One guy got up and asked fella next to me, Mike Sharp, he said, how did you were able to maintain your enthusiasm, you know, in spite of all the details and licensing and training and technical blah, blah. How did you keep yourself as excited and moving forward in the business and not look, you know, not get, you know, just beat down by that? He said, he said, well, I never bothered to learn a whole lot about the business to begin with. He just got. He just focused on the excitement of it and what it would do for you and how great it would be and how great this work, you know, he focused on the benefits of it rather than the underbelly, you know, and that's what. You know.

Yeah, you could say curious. Yeah. I mean, curiosity is better than education, you know, because if you're curious about something, you're studying, you're learning about it, you know, and if you sit in a university or anywhere else and you're not interested or you're not curious about it, then you just. It's basically Chinese school. You're just learning what the book says, but you're not actually taking it in, you know, so. So it's better just be curious and whatever about you find.

Yeah, I got a suggestion for you in the book. Use curiosity. Curiosity is better than education as a chapter.

That's true. Yeah.

Because that's very profound. Very profound.

Delegate, delegate. The things that don't inspire you if you're able to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also get, get where you could hire that off and delegate that stuff so you could stay.

I think that's, I think that's true for all three of us, that we have been very curious about how to do things, you know, so in that way we studied a lot, but we didn't go to a school to study, but we just studied life and other people. You know, you get into and you see, how do I do? When you get. Sometimes you go talk to people, you go look, you read a book about them, something that you're curious. How did I do it? Or how do you do that? You know, and that's the same. That's the university of life, you know, so that's another quote for the book.

You don't have to be in a university to be learning. And it's not just a four year project, it's a lifetime project, you know, learning. So this has been great. Thorsten, thanks so much. Thanks, Jason.

Yes, thank you, thank you.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now. And in order to move up as fast as possible, I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go.