Grind Culture Breeds Grind Culture Results (VOICE NOTE)

Welcome back to The Creative Life Podcast

A quick note: this episode is a voice memo.
 
I've been deep in the trenches launching my first digital product and building out the solopreneur side of things — so this one came from the road, raw and unedited.

It came from a simple thought: Grind Culture Breeds Grind Culture Results

We've reached a point where grind culture has become the default operating system. And the results are everywhere: a world full of "meh." Average outputs. Exhausted people putting their mental bile into the ether because they're too depleted to make anything else.

Here's the truth I keep coming back to: the energy you bring to the work is the energy that ends up inside the work. When you make something, you crystallise a moment of your life. So what are you crystallising if you're running on fumes?

There's a time to lock in. I'm in one right now. But locking in is not the same as breaking yourself. Looking after yourself isn't a failure of ambition — it's the foundation of anything worth making.

In this episode, I draw on Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge — and Larry's beautiful answer when asked what he'll do with his life: "I'm going to loaf." What happened to loafing? What happened to the space where real creative power actually lives?

What you'll learn:

• 🌀 Why grind culture produces grind culture results — and floods the world with average
• ⚡ How the energy you input becomes the energy you output (especially in creative work)
• 🌿 Why rest, love, sleep, and friendship aren't distractions from the work — they are the work
• 📖 What Somerset Maugham's Larry teaches us about loafing as a creative discipline
• 💛 How to link being and doing — and let love define what you create

Go and do it with your full heart. But for cry out loud, look after yourself.

Let's get into it.

Jim

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What is The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft?

🎙️ The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft

This podcast is for creatives who’ve chosen the long road.

Each week, I take one aspect of the creative life — a breakthrough, a challenge, or a tool that’s helping me — and share what I’m learning from the inside.

I started the show because I couldn’t find what I needed: a companion for the real challenges of making art while building a life around it.

The podcast swings between the psychological traps we face and the practical tools that keep me going. It moves between mindset and method — but always comes back to how we keep showing up.

I’m Jim, your host. I’ve lived a long life in the arts — full of meteoric highs and humbling lows.
Here are a few stops from the journey:

🎸 Released 7 records — from major labels to van tours
🎥 Filmed 6 feature docs, screened at 200+ festivals
🧠 Built a creative business in Berlin since 2013
✍️ Top 1% on Substack for weekly consistency
📈 Raised nearly €100K for refugee & Ukraine war efforts
🎧 The Creative Life has hit the Apple Podcast charts

Thanks for being here,
Jim

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I think one of the things we forget is that grind culture produces grind culture results. You look at society and you look at the evocation, the manifestation of nonsense that’s out there, and then you look at the craziness of productivity culture and then you look at it with this "meh". It’s like there’s so much "meh-ness" everywhere. And hustle culture has taken over to such a degree that irrespective of what you're doing, you're expected to be in this locked-in zone. But the consequence is that everything becomes so average. Why? Because if you're exhausted, if you're at the absolute edge of your being at all times, what do you expect?

Look, there’s a time in life when you need to grind. There’s a time in life where you’ve got to lock in. I’m working on the release—my first digital product at the moment. I’m needing to lock in, I’m doing outrageously long days. But what is the reality behind all this? That the energy that you bring to something will result in the outputted energy. And especially when it comes to creative work, but not just creative work, because there’s creativity written into everything you do.

I’ve spent a lot of time vibe-coding a new project and it’s been five months and I’ve been working on it as a side project and a passion, getting locked into Claude and into Code and all of the rest. And it’s been wonderful, and there has been times when I’ve been grinding on it. But the thing is, the primary energy needs to be how you—what you bring to that that you’re attempting to do. And the output of that will always be written into what it—to how you’ve looked after yourself.

And this—I think this is sort of false narrative that looking after yourself or getting enough sleep or eating well or exercising or doing—seeing enough of your friends, loving, loving people that you love with all your damn heart—that that’s somehow risk—some type of sort of failing because you’re not actually working and you’re not grinding. And it’s fucking preposterous. Because if you look at any—any creative output, there is an energy that’s captured. That’s what happens when you make something: you’re crystallizing a moment in time, a moment of your life, everything you’re going through.

And of course, yes, it can mean rawness; of course it mean—sometimes it can be suffering, sometimes it can come out of madness or—or when you’re drunk or when you’re in pain, of course. But the principle remains that the outputted energy is affected by the inputted energy. And this notion that you have to do 15 hours, when eight of those are just staring blankly at a computer completely depressed, doing so little because you’re feeling dead inside, and then you’re spending time on the side probably putting out some terrible things on Twitter because that is what happens with half of society. People so exhausted that they get irritated and triggered and so they start putting this mental bile, this gunk, this seaweed inside themselves out into the ether. And it’s so average.

If that’s the consequence of all your grind culture, you know, what are you really thinking? I personally, I think of my favorite novel, you know, which is *The Razor’s Edge* by Somerset Maugham. And there’s one moment when the—the hero, the anti-hero, the guy who’s checking out of society because he feels something different in himself. He feels that there’s something different in the world, some raw creative power, some potential in him, something other than all of this trite that’s put out and that affects everyone. And what does he say? He says—someone says to him, they say to him, "You know, what are you going to do, Larry? What are you doing?" And he says, "I’m going to loaf. I’m going to loaf."

What happened to loafing? You know, there’s this idea that if you fill yourself to such a degree all the time, if you’re consuming content, if you’re fragmented, if you’re distracted, if you’re always busy, that you’re going to start tapping into something through the grind, through the pain, through the non-stopness. And it—it ignores that life has two sides to it. On the one side, there is doing, and there’s doing wonderful stuff and creating stuff—it doesn't matter whether it’s—whether it’s a product, whether it’s a website, whether it’s—whether it’s the Sistine Chapel, whether it’s *Pulp Fiction*, you know, whether it’s tapestry. You know, it doesn't matter what it is, there is the doing.

But what does it—is composed of? What’s—what’s composited within it? It is being. It is your capacity to take a breath and to think, and then beneath the feeling—beneath the thinking—to get to feeling. And then within here, to discover something: the breath, the capacity to take life in, to see it in its primary source as it was before you came and as it will be afterwards.

And that is the thing is you have the capacity, the potential within you that’s unspeakable and it’s beyond anything that you can even know at this point in your life. But if you keep filling your head up with all of this nonsense of grinding, of having to exist purely in pain in order to do something, you’re never going to get to that greater fulfillment. You know, the fulfillment that creates a Mother Teresa or—or—you know, or any of the great figures, you know, the Jesuses, the Buddhas, the great artists—whoever you’re thinking of. There always has to be in these people that really go beyond their time, this linking between being and of doing.

So go and do it with your full heart, but for cry out loud, look after yourself. Bring in the world, just feel it, let it go into you and then output it in the shape of love. Let love define that which you create in whatever you do. Hope you’re having a great day, guys. Much love.