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🎙️ 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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Creativity isn’t a goal. It’s a way of living. But we’ve been told the opposite: that it’s about outcomes, milestones, getting ahead. And yet, the moment you believe that, you start trading life itself for the illusion of progress — the endless to-do lists, the constant measuring, the treadmill that feels like forward motion but keeps you stuck in place.
Now the modern internet tells us that to achieve a goal, you have to work harder than everyone else, suffer more than anyone else, and strip your life of the very things that make it worth living.
And, most of us fall into this trap. This idea of relentless hustling has become so mainstream that it feels almost unchallengeable. But the paradox is this: far more people quit their projects than complete them. Every year, many of us look back and cringe at the hopes we had at the beginning.
So what’s really going on?
The problem isn’t that you have a lack of motivation or even a lack of talent. The problem is that we’ve become an outcome-based culture. We’re taught: if I just achieve this, then that will happen. Therefore, motivation becomes tied entirely to reaching a particular end. You tell yourself: if I can bear the suffering long enough, I’ll get there. But reality doesn’t bend to your will. And as the goal drifts further away and the pain increases, you’re locked into an unlivable equation: the harder you chase, the less alive you feel. It’s not just that the goal is receding — it’s that life itself is vanishing in the pursuit.
And that’s the consequence of the lie we’re sold. If you subscribe to this Darwinian version of reality, you will only ever feel its harshness. You’ll miss the effervescent experience of living inside your potential, which, in my experience is where creative energy comes from.
So in this only goal-oriented pursuit, all the things that sustain you — fresh air, exercise, noticing the world, love, time away from the goal itself, companionship — get excluded. You cut yourself off from the very conditions that not just make life worth living, but from where breakthroughs are born.
It’s such a stupid idea that you have to be miserable to achieve anything. And if you never challenge it, you’ll never unlock another way of creating — and another way of living.
So let’s talk about the tension at the heart of creative life. On one side, creativity as a goal: something to achieve, to tick off, to win. On the other hand, creativity as a way of living: something to embody, nurture, and feed every day.
Too often, we’re told to sacrifice these things for the goal. Give them up now, and at the end of the rainbow, you’ll have them in infinite abundance. So you say no to dinners, to connection, to love. You live in obsession. And what happens: life itself becomes the sacrifice.
The lie you’re sold is that if you’re living now, you’re not living up to yourself. It’s the old Flagellant vision resurrected — the belief that you must punish and deny yourself to deserve God, or whatever dream you’re chasing. To my mind, hustle culture is Calvinism reborn as a dystopian Frankenstein, and it doesn’t just eat away at you — it gnaws at the very heart of society itself.
This isn’t about rejecting ambition. It’s about questioning the belief that total sacrifice is the only path to it.
We’ve come to believe we can cut the time frame to any goal by simply obsessing more and giving up more. But here’s the paradox: so many of the goals we’re chasing today aren’t even our own. They’ve been shaped by other people’s obsessions.
Take social media. A whole society hypnotised into spending a disproportionate amount of its hours on earth on the promise of a dream life. Yes, there’s an art to these games. But in the process, a part of your existence gets sold off to an algorithm designed to improve someone else’s. And before you even realise it, your dream has been turned into a commodity — packaged, priced, and handed back to you.
As such, there is a goal that is chased, and yet the more you obsess, the more it drifts away into the future. And that’s the strange irony at the heart of it all. If the treasure at the rainbow can never be reached, might it not be worthwhile to stop and enjoy the rainbow itself a while?
The consequence of chasing these goals — goals tied to outcomes we can’t really control — is that we split ourselves in two.
On one side, there’s the fantasy version of who we might become if we just never gave up.
On the other, the longer we chase, the more exhausted we become — and the less able we are to keep up with the pursuit.
And so the trap closes. Either you give up and feel crushed, a failure for not having the strength you thought everyone else had. Or you double down and sacrifice more. You hunger, you deny yourself joy, you swear you’ll show the world.
But life doesn’t care about your obsession. Even if you reach the goal, the validation will never fill the hole you were running from in the first place.
The paradox is that that hole, that part of you that never felt complete, will never be answered by the internet. It will only ever be answered by the one thing it takes away from you — the capacity to live more, and to experience life more deeply.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t push. Push and pull are part of the journey. I love my work, and I want more of it, not less. But if we never stop to ask who we are while we’re chasing the dream, who will we even be when we finally achieve it?
When I look at the madness of the world, I see everywhere a society that seems to be disconnecting from its humanity in favour over a digitalised self that wrests us away from that very humanity.
For me personally, on my recent road trip, I realised my creative life had become too fixed to deadlines, too attached to digital outputs, and not enough about the joy of creating itself. What I found on the road was that a certain tension lifted in me. I stopped trying to keep up with an impossible version of myself. My mind emptied, and new energy formed. It reminded me: your best work arrives not from forcing an unbudging future, but from daring to be more present, more alive, more committed to life as it is right before you.
Whereas hustle culture pushes obsession as its chief value, I think immersion is closer to the way I am trying to live.
You might ask, in any situation, how can I be in this more? And that applies to anything from a creative project to a relationship.
Here’s the difference between immersion and obsession. Obsession narrows life, strangles it. Immersion deepens life and expands it. When you immerse, creativity fuses with living. You notice more. You allow space for energy to replenish itself. And in that space, work arises of its own accord. You’re attracted to do the things that you love or imagine, rather than trying to keep up with them as boxes on your to-do list.
Over the last month, I didn’t push. I lived. And creativity found me anyway — not as an obligation, but as a form of joy.
It reminded me that creativity and life are in constant conversation. You don’t grow only by locking yourself to a goal — you grow through the way you live it. If you box creativity in, it withers. But if you live with it, it brings you alive.
So let me leave you with this: part of discovering your creative process is challenging the programming of the internet. To live your life fully — to love, to be present — doesn’t make you less. It makes you everything a person has the potential to be.
You’ll be told you have to sacrifice joy to achieve your dream. Don’t believe it. Otherwise, you’ll wake up trapped in a joyless existence, your identity bound not to who you are, but to whether your goal manifests.
You are not the outcome. You are the living being working toward it. The outcome doesn’t make you a failure or a success. How you live as you create — that is what defines you.
So whatever stage of your project or dream you’re at, stop obsessing over the vagary of the goal. Get down to the business of living itself. That is your birthright, and that is how you participate deeper in this one-time miracle we are born into. That is worth paying better attention to because, even as I speak, the clock is ticking.
Creativity isn’t a goal. It’s a way of living.