S2EP9 Rethinking Finances for Creatives with Owais Lightwala

Ever felt overwhelmed by the 'M' word (money!)? 🙋‍♀️ As creatives, we often navigate a tricky relationship with finances. It's not just about the numbers; it's about the emotional baggage, the lack of formal training, and the unpredictable nature of our work. But what if we could change the narrative?

Today, I'm thrilled to have Owais Lightwala on the show. He's not just a tech startup founder, but also a professor, theater producer, and the director of a multidisciplinary performance hub. Owais shares his fascinating career journey and the inspiration behind his startup, SAI, a platform designed to empower creators to take control of their finances.

Key Takeaways:

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:00 Owais's Multifaceted Career: From Theater to Tech
• 06:30 The Unexpected Path: When Passion Meets Rebellion
• 09:00 The Birth of SAI: Empowering Creators Through Financial Control
• 13:30 The Unique Financial Challenges of the Creative Life
• 18:30 Breaking the Taboo: It's Okay Not to Be 'Good' with Money
• 24:30 The Juggling Act: Finding Balance in a Multi-Passionate Life
• 32:00 Embracing AI: The Future of Creativity & Opportunity
• 38:30 The Specialist vs. the Generalist: Finding Your Unique Value
• 43:00 Connect with Owais & SAI

This episode is also available on Youtube. Watch it here:

www.youtube.com/@bettyxcoach

About Owais: 

Owais Lightwala is a professor, entrepreneur and optimist. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University, focusing on entrepreneurship, leadership, and innovation in creative industries. He co-founded and leads Sai, a tech startup dedicated to revolutionizing how creatives manage their finances. Lightwala is also the founding Director of Chrysalis at the Creative School, a new multidisciplinary performance hub at TMU shaping the future of creative experiences. He has designed and led leadership training programs for the National Arts Centre and the Toronto Arts Council Leaders Lab (2023-2025). He used to be a theatre producer, most notably as the first Managing Director for Why Not Theatre, where he co-led the meteoric growth of the company and transformative projects like RISER and The Mahabharata. He was born in Pakistan, grew up in Dubai, and came to Canada as a teenager, which is why he doesn’t get most pop cultural references from the 90s. His bold strategic voice have been sought out by institutions like National Arts Centre, Canada Council for the Arts, and Canadian Heritage.  

Connect with Owais

Check out Sai 

https://sai.cx/

Website: https://owais.ca 

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lightwala

About Betty

Betty Xie is a creative and career coach for creatives. Her 1:1 coaching program has helped photographers, filmmakers, visual artists, arts leaders, and arts consultants to design and implement intentional growth in their practice so that they can make their art and make happier money. Check out her 1:1 coaching programs here: www.xiebetty.com/coaching

Subscribe to Passionate Enough, an e-newsletter for creative people refusing to compromise their life and wellbeing for aimless hustles. Be passionate enough and have a fulfilling career.

www.xiebetty.com/enews

*FREE Resource* Discover your creative career archetype today: https://www.xiebetty.com/quiz

Transcript

0:00

the majority of artists today and probably going forward, I think are going to be some kind of entrepreneur, whether or not they want to call themselves that, whether or not they like that idea, whether or not they agree with it, We live in a time that holding down one job title for a whole career is not possible anymore. At some point of our journey, we can expect a career reinvention is going to happen. So how do we embrace that? What does it take for us to navigate a career reinvention mindfully and sometimes even proactively? On this season of the Everyday Talent Podcast, we are talking about tales of reinvention. Tune in as we dive into this topic with fellow creatives and experts. Welcome to the Everyday Talent Podcast. This is your go to podcast for the most honest look into all things creative career related. I'm your host Betty. I'm a creative, a non profit consultant, and a career and business coach for creative people just like you. Welcome back to another episode of the Every Day Talent podcast. I'm your host Betty. Do you have a headache when it comes to managing your personal finance? Or let me be specific, when it comes to managing your taxes, uh, if you're a self employed creative, or even if you have a full time job and then you have a side hustle that you generate some income, You're likely to going to have this pain point. In my own experience, I had an unpleasant experience where I get the tax bill at the end of the tax year and get surprised by how much I needed to pay when I was feeling that I was already barely making ends meet as a creative person. I also have heard similar experiences from my clients and countless other creators. So imagine my delight when I came across this platform called SAI, a tech startup dedicated to revolutionizing how creators manage their finance. I was so excited that I reached out to the founder of SAI, Always Light, Wala. invited him to the podcast. I swear, this episode is not an advertisement. I'm genuinely interested in the story behind Sai. And when I talked with Owais, what I discovered was that he has a fascinating career. Other than being a tech startup founder, he's also a professor and the founding director of Crisalis at the Creative School, a new multidisciplinary performance hub at TMU here in Toronto. In addition, he used to be a theater producer. most notably as the first managing director for Why Not Theatre. In this episode, you're going to hear about Owai's story, his insights, and his beliefs on the importance of supporting creators, on managing their personal finance, and other hot takes on the current state of creative work. Welcome back to another episode of the everyday talent podcast. Today on the podcast with me, I have a special guest here. Owais Hi, Owais hello. So good to join you, Betty. Nice to have you here. Can you share with a little bit of, with the audience, what you do and how you come to do what you do? Um, these days, uh, my day job is assistant professor at the creative school at Toronto Metropolitan University, which is a lot of words to basically say. Um, I get paid to think and, um, teach people how to think. Uh, particularly the things that I am interested in, in my, in my day work are. Things around creative entrepreneurship. Um, how do we create opportunity for people to make sustainable businesses and living in in arts and culture and creativity? Um, anything to do with creative technology, specifically around AI and how that might transform our work and world for for the better. Um, and, uh, leadership and innovation as well as innovation. really intersect with entrepreneurship and, um, uh, the work I'm interested in there. So that's kind of my day, day role, but outside of that, I also am involved in a lot of projects myself. I have, uh, founded some tech companies, uh, some ideas there. I have, uh, been a, uh, theater producer for the majority of my career. I used to run a company called Wine Theatre, where I really kind of grew up in the art sector and learned about, uh, what the Canadian arts culture system was like. Is how it works. And, um, uh, you know, along with that company working with the folks there was really trying to develop a vision of what it could be and where we could take this country forward into a bold new future. So. That's a bit of a, uh, kinda professional introduction. And, um, my like, backstory before that is I, I an immigrant to Canada. I came here when I was 14. I was born in Pakistan actually, and grew up in Dubai, um, and then came to Canada as a teenager. So I don't really know where I belong.. It is, uh, it's kind of, uh, a mix. The two of us . Yeah. Like I have a. National identity and a birthplace where I've never lived, the place where I've lived the longest, um, uh, you know, it's Canada, but, uh, obviously, there's a sense of Canadian ness that I don't know if I will ever reach, um, uh, fully, and, uh, in growing up in Dubai, I had a childhood there, but, uh, It is a place that is very much for anybody who's not a, local citizen, very much a transient relationship. So, yeah, just a complicated relationship with, um, uh, the sense of being from somewhere and entity in that, that regard, which I think is in informing my, uh, perspectives on everything that I work on too is that, you know, we are, you know, fluid creatures and our, our sense of culture and identity is fluid and changing all the time. How do you think that cross cultural and also like, you the feeling of like, you belongs everywhere but also nowhere influenced your perspective on your career choices? I mean, it's interesting because I almost didn't have this career precisely because of my cultural background where no one in my family or my extended family or my extended extended family has ever had a career. in anything close to arts, culture, entertainment at all. So my family, my parents in particular really struggled with me wanting to go into theater as a young person and I think conveniently for my temperament and personality struggle that they had was exactly the reason I ended up doing it because Um, it became a rebellion for me against my, uh, kind of conformity that I've perceived in my community. So I don't have a career at all in the arts and, uh, in the sector precisely because my parents really did not want me to. And I wonder sometimes if they had just been like, whatever you do, you can't do computer engineering at Waterloo. I'm and You might working at Microsoft right now, you know, like, uh, is really, in terms of my, I, I, I, in my grade 12 graduating class, I had both the drama award and the computer science award, so I could have gone either way very easily. Hmm. It was a, it wasn't like a, it wasn't, definitely wasn't a childhood dream of mine to be an artistic, I did want to, I liked drawing when I was a kid, and there was a moment when I wanted to be an artist and my dad, I remember my dad saying to me, oh no, you don't want to be an artist. You want to be our, cause I drew a lot of cars. It was like, you want to be a car designer or car engineer. That's what you mean. There's no such thing as an artist. That's what you mean. I love how he kind of framed it there. Yeah. For you. Um, so it's interesting cause your interest, you said your interest were computer science and the arts. Now it's kind of a. Branding beautifully with the companies like we've signed. the company you found. Yeah. Can you tell, yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about that idea behind that? Yeah. The idea was basically, so when I joined the university in 2020, I just left my job at why not theater, which, uh, for anybody who's worked in nonprofit sector probably can relate that like working in the nonprofit art sector. Uh, and in the role that I was, which is a leadership role, it was a very, very All. consuming kind of role. So I never really had the capacity once I got kind of fully into the why not theater world to pursue anything, uh, seriously of my own kind of volition. And I was doing some dabbling in some projects here and there, but they were all very much performing arts related. Um, and, uh, had always kind of wanted to pursue something in technology since I was a kid. So it was an opportunity when I joined the university to like, Think Basically, they were like, you can do anything you want. You need to have a research kind of focus. Um, And think about what it is that you want to make now and what you want to learn about and what you want to do. And I was like, well, that's interesting. Cause I haven't had the opportunity to ask that question in a long time. Um, and what do I want to do right now? And obviously 2020 pandemic had just happened. The world was going through all this change. Um, in one of the round table discussions that was happening, um, where industry was gathering and. People were having their panic attacks about what to do next. Someone said something that struck me where they were like, you know, I I have no idea what this cash burn thing is. Everybody keeps saying like, what's your burn. I have no idea what that is. And I'm like freaking out. I don't know what's going to happen to my organization. And I remember clocking that and going, Oh yeah, this, like, cause at that point, you know, I had self taught myself as an arts manager, I'd self taught myself accounting, I'd self taught myself finance, I'd self taught myself how to run. The business. And, um, I just thought it was just hard for me because I had never really had any schooling and then realized the whole sector is kind of like that, where very few people in the sector go to any kind of business school or business training or finance training, there's a broad kind of gap in financial literacy and financial knowledge and, and, uh, understanding, uh, I think it's also a little bit like the kind of people that want to go into arts and culture. there's a bit of the orientation, let's say of the kinds of personal. We're attracted to creative fields. Um, they tend not to be the same people who go into accounting. So there's a bit of divergence there as well. So there was that moment and that got me initially interested in this idea that there might be something that, um, uh, we can do here. And then I was also looking for a technology project because I was, uh, wanting to get back into that. And I, I, I had this idea where I was like, you know, We have all this incredible technology now, and I've been very inspired by companies like Canva that have democratized things that used to be very difficult and very expensive. this, this happens to me all the time. Happened to me very recently too, where, you know, I'll be hiring an intern and someone will apply and say, they're a graphic designer and I'll say, Oh, really? What, what tools do you use? And they say, Oh, I use Canva premium. And I, I know what they mean. Uh, but it's fascinating to me that that term now that I can do graphic design is no longer something that requires people to have at the very least six months of some kind of training and very expensive Adobe license and like some kind of background in that, uh, literally almost anybody with a few hours and a Canva premium can, uh, call themselves a designer. that that kind of like accessibility of something that previously was so challenging, the technology made possible was also something that I was inspired by, and I was thinking to myself, is it possible to do this with finance? can the challenge of financial management be as easy as this can? Cause I did eventually do an MBA and I also took a hundred different MBA business courses and along the way. So I had to learn a lot of things. In order to get to the place where I got to, but, um, but I don't know that everybody else is going to, or has the time or the money or the capacity. And, uh, yeah, and that was kind of the seed ideas of bringing those things together, seeing in the sector, a widespread financial literacy gap, and then seeing the potential and technology to make things, Significantly more accessible, significantly more scalable than just me doing it for, which is the thing that like, I'd also done that a lot for a lot of friends and a lot of colleagues and a lot of professional work where I was a person who who would help them with that. And I was like, I don't, I can't scale. There's only so many hours in a day and then, and then I have to go to sleep, but a system, a software web app that could scale. People could actually, the more people that use it, actually, the better it would get rather than. the more people that text me, the worse I become at communicating. that was, that was kind of my starting point. I love it. I mean, like, in my outreach to you, inviting you to this podcast, I mentioned how, like, money is a topic that I think is, like, really, it's starting to change, but, like, it used to be, like, when I entered like it's, like, a taboo area that people don't talk about in the art sector. as, uh, creative like, you know, arts administrator and now in I see that coming up again and again for creators and the pain points are very specific and their orientations in the sector and the relationship with money is like has a specific kinds of relationship with money. So I'm curious in your research, as you design a product for SAI, what are something that you observe are the unique pain points experiences that creators might have money and tax and accounting. Yeah, it's so many things, but I'll distill it down to one big category of unique things to creatives is the thing I alluded to earlier where Creative people tend to come from artistic backgrounds and trainings and not from business backgrounds and trainings. And that's, you know, uh, because of that downstream, I think is a lot of, uh, just basic knowledge that they don't ever have the opportunity to learn. I don't think a lot of people realize when they sign up to go to OCAD or they sign up to go to theater school. That or even to pursue music or something like, I don't think a lot of people realize that like the majority of artists today and probably going forward, I think are going to be some kind of entrepreneur, whether or not they want to call themselves that, whether or not they like that idea, whether or not they agree with it, it's, you're basically going to be a small business. and it's interesting to me that, like, you know, they don't get any small business training or knowledge along the way. So there's that piece where, you know, the training and knowledge that they get is different from, the training knowledge you get in business school. Uh, the other big thing, I think, is that this industry is so immensely volatile and, um, kind of, Challenging to operate in because unlike the career of Veronica, actually a lot of accountants can just go to accounting school and then go get a job and maybe work at a couple of jobs over the course of their life. And then they retire and their financial situation is really just, do I make enough money to pay for the things I want to buy? Yes or no. You know, did I get a promotion this year? Yes or no, whatever. While the taxes are done, um, and for most creatives, uh, creatives, uh, and creative industries have a significantly higher percentage of people who are freelancers. Significantly higher percentage of people who are gig workers. Significantly higher percentage of people who are self employed and running small businesses. So, they actually have much more volatility, much more independence, much more, Um, kind of seasonal work, like the work is not as predictable than as other industries. you have this kind of industry that actually demands more business savvy and more financial savvy, but you had less training in it from the get go. Um, And that, that now compounds your situation. And then the other category that I realized was really unique to creative industries, like there's actually a lot of other industries and a lot of other spaces where, um, you know, this is their expertise. Like doctors are not particularly good at managing money. Their dentists aren't like there's, there's other places where people are, I think being. Not talking about money to your point is like a cultural universal social problem the difference is that a lot of other places i'd see people who don't know how to manage money have really good health so, you know people who are um you know not good at managing money in their businesses their businesses have and have accountants and finance people and bookkeepers and And and if you have a little bit of money Then you have wealth managers and you have portfolio people and you have like Uh, you know The bank will give you special treatment and call you and ask you how your investments are doing Like, so there's a level of support that they get because they have the resources to afford that support. The other thing that's unique about creative sector is very complex needs. With, without the money to get that kind of support, except for the top 1%. So like Taylor Swift is dealing with our money in the same way that like, you know, your average billionaire is probably, and there's probably a wealth management team and really smart people sitting around the room, figuring out how to invest her, uh, billions and billions of, of, uh, ticket sale money. But, but there's, there's very few Taylor Swift's or every Taylor Swift. There's a hundred thousand singer songwriters who are. Never going to make a living from their music. They're going to make their living from, bartending and serving and yoga teaching and everything else, but the actual thing. So they're. There's a it's a very it's a economy in the creative industries. That is very winner takes all Which is like a 1. 1 percent have basically a lot of the opportunity and a lot of the resources and the rest of the folks are in various degrees of struggle um, Which is different like there's no there's no superstar accountants really like there's no billionaire who's just You know, just, just solely accounting. Um, it gets a much more evenly distributed kind of work. So that's another, I think, attribute about the nature of the work in the industry that makes it just a perfect storm of like, you don't know very much about this, uh, because you weren't given any training in it. Your stuff is more complicated than other people's and you don't have the money to hire anybody to help you Wow. such a good, uh, synthesis. And, and, and I'm curious, like, I'm sure this comes out your research and talking to, uh, use like creatives and potential users of the product disbelief that like, sometimes you encounter like an artist or creative, they'd be like, I'm not good with money. And he speaks to like, mentioned that people in other sector might have They're not necessarily good with money either. Bye. often come up with this, Like either explicit or belief from creatives that money's too overwhelming for me. I'm not good with it To people who might have that thoughts right now. would you say to that? Ah, I I like this quote. Um, I forget whose it is It's one of those quotes that's like I think attributed to winston churchill or something but I have no idea who actually said it because Who knows what winston churchill actually said but the quote goes something like Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right. it's something that I try to live by, and I'm very careful about what stories I tell myself. because those stories will become And, um, and whether that story is a self affirming story of, I can do this or self negating story of I cannot do this. I do think it will be true over time because, uh, you will create a feedback loop for yourself. If you believe you can, then you're going to keep trying at it and you will fail initially, or you will struggle with it and then you'll get better and learn. And another kind of phrase that I use in my teaching is like, Confidence follows competence. So if you want to be confident in something, you have to get good at it, but in order to get good at something, you have to be bad at it first and you have to work at it. And yes, there's a lot working. Potentially against you in that, you know, it may not be, uh, as easy for a creative person who feels like their expertise is expressing words and feelings, um, or moving their body in beautiful ways. It may not feel like the analytical side of their brain is, is their strength, but, uh, I don't know that the level of financial illiteracy that is currently the average. Is actually. People's capacity. I think they are capable of more than they give themselves credit for. Um, because they are, like, I, I, my students are the best example. Like, they're super intelligent people. All kinds of opinions about all kinds of things. And then you put a budget in front of them and something clicks in their brain and they go, oh, danger, danger zone, do not engage. You're gonna, and I think this is the fault of our schooling and fault of our culture where we make people feel stupid so quickly. about things that they, uh, you know, I don't think it's their fault that they are not experts in. We need, we need to be taught things and we need them to be taught without judgment. Uh, but, but we rush to judge and we rush to make people feel stupid. So fear of judgment, I think, is keeping people away from taking some amount of initiative because it's never actually been easier. To learn, it's never actually been cheaper and more democratic to find information. All information is now free on the internet. Um, but you need to have the confidence in yourself that you can, that you can actually approach that subject and jump into it. Uh, and I, I, I don't know, it's, it's a very difficult problem. Like, I'm still trying to figure out how we can fit the culture on that particular front. Because I think it's a, It's a very dangerous thing that's taken hold for so many people. They've basically abdicated their sense of agency and power and giving over power to big corporations and banks that could care less about you. And are just going to take, take even more money from you because we've given ourselves up and said, Oh, I can't figure this out. So you can just. Just do whatever you want to me. Mm-Hmm. I think this is why the, the topic of like seemingly managing our expenses or is like linked to so many layers. just like, related to our leaps. It's related to our confidence. It's our upbringing. It's all interconnected. 99 percent that stuff. It's 99 percent emotional, psychological, personal. 1 percent of it is math. 1 percent of it is like, what are the formulas and what, how does interest rates work and, you know, what things are eligible and not eligible for taxes. That's not actually the hard stuff, I don't think. I think the hard stuff for people is like, I get anxiety when I think about money. Why? Because I don't make enough money, and when I realize I don't make enough money I feel shamed because my parents told me I wasn't gonna make enough money when I go into the arts and I should have just listened to them, and I'm not a good artist because I'm not successful. And if I was a good artist, I'd be making money and uh, you know, because I don't have enough money I have to hide this because I'm ashamed like this is vicious cycle that people get into nowhere in there Did I say the words tax exemption or deductions or like amortization? Like none of those things are actually the thing that I think are what's mostly going on for people. I think mostly it's the uh, the kind of cultural stigma shame That we have built around this, which mind you is like very strategic. Like it's very advantageous to a whole industry of people who make a lot of money People not being able to do, help themselves, like, there is a big business around that, so there's no incentive to help anybody. There's only incentive to make people feel even more worse, uh, make people feel even more scared. so that, you know, all these financial planners and brokers and whatever are, continue to stay in business. Yeah. Our anxiety with money is being capitalized further. Yeah. I never thought about that that way, but it's so true. Yeah. Let's turn this conversation point back to you about where you are at, because now you're like managing startup teaching at the university and you have many other projects. Like, how do you balance it all? Yeah, I was thinking about like how to answer this because I don't want to, uh, I don't want to lie and make it sound like I have it all figured out, um, because there's like an ideal balance that I'm trying to strive for. Maybe let me put it this way, I have an ideal balance that I am looking for and I'm constantly looking for it. Like, I don't know if I'll ever reach it. of the things I'm coming to terms with this year in particular is accepting and forgiving myself for fact that I have a bit of a kind of like fully on, fully off way of working. I, I was fully on in the first half of this year and I worked way too hard. Like it hours and with a level of, um, difficulty and anxiety and stress. Like I don't recommend to anybody, I don't recommend it for myself, but it was a bunch of choices that I had to make because of timing of where things landed and where projects ended and some things needed to happen. And I did some calculations and I said to myself, if I can make it through these four months. Um, I will have all these outcomes on the other side and then it cools down a bit and I, I think I can do it. And this is like informed by many, many, many years of, you overworking myself, being burnt out. you know, I, I've pushed, pushed against my own limits and then, and then that all that happened. And then by June I was definitely burnt out. I knew I was going to be and I was, and then I started clawing back and I've been like slowly chipping away. And now by July. I'm down to like basically like half a full work week at this point I'm about to go away next week and i'll be working very lightly and then i'm going away on vacation for a couple weeks like I'm i'm kind of just accepting the way that I sometimes have to work is like i'm either fully on Or just not really doing anything. Um, and I Struggled with that because I feel a lot of shame around it. Um, Because I i'm also living in the world that everybody is in where I feel like I should constantly be productive You And if I'm not maximizing every minute of every day that I'm awake doing work, pushing something forward, I'm, uh, failing somebody or myself or some notion of failure. Uh, so it's, it's, it's challenging, it's challenging to, to, to, you know, find that balance, but I try not to impose upon myself a sense of arbitrary balance. Thanks. There's one thing that has not worked out for me is like the idea that like, every day can be balanced and routine and every week will be exactly the same and I'll, you know, always clock out by this. Like, I find that actually more, um, stressful and, um, unhelpful to me at least to say, like, I can never work past 5 PM because then what I end up doing is just not being able to enjoy my evening because I know I have a deadline the next day. Like, some days I got to work late. What I do, though It's try to compensate for like the fluctuation. So if I have a busy week, a new thing I'm trying to do is like anytime I do a week long retreat or a week long conference or go somewhere to something that's like, I know I'm going to do 12 hour days. I try to my calendar the rest of the week, the next week coming back and it's just recovery time. I just like don't take any other meetings so that I can balance that out a bit. That's new for me. That's still me. Because I used to just, like, live my whole life, 12 hour days, 7 days a week, but, you know, that, that was my 20s, and even that, I think, the same thing applies for my life, like, I don't regret my 20s and working very hard, I actually think most people in their 20s are not working hard enough, because when you get older, and I see this in myself as I age a little bit, And I see definitely my parents who are, uh, you know, in their fifties and sixties, like your capacity is going to change over the course of your life. So you should work according to your capacity, not according to an arbitrary standard of like, well, a good workweek is 36. 5 hours. So that's what I should be doing. I actually am really glad that in my 20s, I achieved a lot. I made a lot of work. I did a, contributed a lot. I learned a lot. And now in my 30s, I'm actually not working anywhere close to the way I was in my, uh, 20s. And, uh, my priorities are shifting and, you know, once I have a family, they'll shift further. And like, I think, I think we, we need a little bit more of a, um, a flexible approach and a dynamic approach to understanding balance. And not this kind of rigidity that I hear in people because I have like 19 year old interns Sometimes we'll be like I can't whatever whatever i'm like Oh what i'm hearing is like you think you're doing some kind of like self care or like work life balance thing You're actually imposing it in such a rigid way That you're doing yourself a disservice. You're doing yourself, um, actually a disservice because you're not leaning into your, your own flexibility and your own individual capacity, which is going to be different. Like, different people have different strengths and weaknesses and capacities for how much they want to work, where they want to work on it. I know, I know this was supposed to be a personal question about me, but I can't help but opine about the state of Uh work life balance productivity and how we all are like talking about it it's it's too Generalized I find it's not personalized enough for different people and it's too uh obsessed with like a Perfection of a model that you must always maintain instead of Seasons, like, you know, bears sleep all through the winter, like, we could learn nature and seasons, and it's okay to go up and down, and not be so neurotically trying to control everything, that we can't, uh, we can't actually, we can't, I don't think we can succeed on that. Yeah. I think there is like, we time where like, we don't talk about burnout or balance at all. And now that's like become the new normal. And I'm like you said, there's seems to be grail. that is like, that is it. And that itself is also hear what you're saying. think more and more, and like some of the guests on this to it, is that the seasonality approach in the creative life is very important. And how to season and how those seasons ebb and flow looks very different for everybody. And what work you're doing, what are we talking about? Like, if, you know, right now, I just moved into a new place and we have to do a lot of renovations in this house. at the end of my burnout period, professionally, I went right into renovations and did a bathroom remodel. I worked like basically as soon as I was done my day job, I would come home and I would work for hours on the bathroom every day for two or three weeks. And to somebody that might look at that and go, Oh, you're working such long hours. And I was like, that was the most therapeutic thing for me because working on my bathroom was so completely different from what I do for my, my day job is like decisions. I have to convince people of things. I have to like think hard about making the right choice. So I have to. You know, listen, I have to argue. I like, it's a very mentally, um, emotionally taxing kind of work that I do. And then I got to come home and just like work with my hands and that work actually filled me. So, you know, different types of work for different people at different times are also not going. I just think we need something more sophisticated than counting hours and counting, uh, this, this way of thinking about work is doing. are doing, How that thing that you're doing affects you, whether it's filling you or draining you also depends on who you are and what, what the purpose of that work is, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, next for you? I know that you said you're about to take some breaks. the very immediate future. A little bit of break time is coming for the summer. I would like to enjoy some sunshine and water, but, um, I've already started seeding projects for the fall. I'm, I'm kind of moving more in the direction of artificial intelligence and the possibilities there it's building on the work I was doing with Cy and the kind of technological innovation there. One of the things I realized. Halfway through the process of the tax platform that we built that, uh, where AI was going now had made what we were building already obsolete and we hadn't even finished building it. it was too late at that point to like, throw all that out. So we kept going and put out the platform that we designed, but, but I, I'm interested in now taking a new approach and, uh, basically I'm moving more into the fields of how can we use artificial intelligence to actually serve us, because there's a lot of people in the art sector who I hear a lot of. Fear about, I feel there's a lot, they feel very threatened by it. They have a lot of strong feelings about AI in general. And 99 percent of people that I know or work with don't actually use it in any meaningful way. So I'm interested in like trying to bring it into practice and try to solve the actual problems we have. We have a massive labor crisis. We don't have enough people. Working in especially in the back end of things in arts and culture. We have a massive, uh, kind of, you know, crunch there because we don't have enough money as a sector to pay people more. The nonprofit sector in particular is shrinking and struggling. And I'm like, this is a great opportunity for some automation, some efficiency, some, growth in capacity, which is a thing that I know we've been working Talked to a lot about the sector and wanted but the the solution for growth was always more money, which was not So um, this is something that I I really believe that AI and the potential of AI in a very expansive sense not just like chat gpt, but all of the things that it is going to be able to do is going to be as revolutionary as the internet was for our culture for our society for the way we work for the way we organize It'll have all the downfalls and the pitfalls that people are afraid of. Of course, the internet was awful in a lot of ways. And like looking at what Twitter became in the end, like, I'm like, yeah, there's going to be some bad stuff. And at the same time, this conversation is possible right now because of the internet. Um, and so. I'm, I'm trying to focus on that, on the, the generative, productive possibilities of it, uh, because I don't think enough people are. I think there's more people trying very hard in, in vain, I think, to protest it, not even really, engage with it. They're just kind of Doubting at it tonight. I'm more curious about what it could do for us. That would maybe get us a little bit closer to the uh, Society that we were originally promised by the industrial revolution Which is that we will have so much surplus wealth and abundance that people will not need to be spend their whole lives Just working which was kind of you know, human condition for millennium um Yeah, so that's, that's the next phase for me. I think it's going to become more focused on entrepreneurship in AI creativity. I'm also doing stuff at the university. We're building a incubator for the future performance there, uh, in our 1200 seat theater called Chrysalis, which we put out our website. So it's real now, and, uh, that's another place where I'm very excited about bringing in artists, bringing in creators, bringing in, technologists to play and develop future, uh, Future forward thinking performance experiences in all kinds of mediums all kinds of disciplines all kinds of genres mostly with an interest in what is going to engage new audiences in new ways? Um, how can we innovation that will actually appeal to more different people? Because as someone whose family still doesn't find themselves interested in mainstream non profit arts and culture, I, I, that's, you know, going back to your first question about what my cultural perspectives offer me, like, I see 90 percent of my audience Canadians in this place we call Canada are not engaged in, uh, our, our Canadian arts and culture. we watch a lot of Hollywood and we listen to music from other places, but like, we don't have enough of our own. cultural creation or engagement here. So it's, it's a thing that I think is a, is a place where we need to do a lot more work. both bringing, we've, we've been doing a lot more work about diversifying kind of who the artists are and the voices are, but don't think it's been enough to bring in the new audience because interests have changed and times have changed and our attention has changed and our needs have changed from what we want from experiences like in Shakespeare's time. Um, Shakespeare was succession, it was literally, it was entertainment, it was popular, it was, uh, the only thing that people could do that they then talked about at the office the next day, and we are doing Shakespeare now for a very different reason. Um, and I don't think it's, it's anywhere close to having the cultural influence that succession is having right now. So, I'm kind of Curious about how the arts can, um, yeah, find, find a new way to influence and connect and engage with the people more broadly um, than it does currently. Yeah, you know one thing that struck me throughout this conversation and I hunched that you're a person like that it's like you're multi passionate and you can follow through with like some of the ideas that like that keeps evolving and It makes me want to you to speak to because I know that some of the audience of this podcast are also multi but I in my work with them I know that they some of them to be honest I have the difficulty of like feeling, well, if I always like, you know, develop different ideas and different cs, then I'm not focused do you say to that? this is great. I mean, I, I did your survey, uh, on your, your quiz on your website. So I, I feel like you, you, you've definitely thought about this more deeply than I have, but. I think, yeah, the world needs specialists and generalists in equal quantity where, uh, the job of a specialist is to kind of really, really, really go deep into something. And if you are a specialist, good on you. Um, I, I honestly, I envy people who are like, I'm the only person in the world who knows how to make shoes out of. foam that are, you know, used only by children in German opera. Like You're you'll be, you'll be always employed because there's only three of you in the world who do that thing. if you get mastery of that, awesome. But I think you need to have a kind of, um, the personality that has that kind of, um, monomaniacal focus to get, to become a specialist, because you need to put in your 10, 000 hours, then there's the generalists, which is the camp I am to, Uh, where I like to think of myself more of like, I know about 10, 000 things one inch deep and my expertise then is connecting dots and trying to bring from one area to another. Uh, what it also allows me to do is I, I'm particularly, I'm not really myself, uh, you know, an expert in any of the things, but what I'm good at is being able to communicate with experts because. What I find about a lot of specialists is they tend to be super geeky and sometimes they have a hard time communicating with anybody outside of their expertise. And I am good at talking to people like that. So I can take an expert from this domain, an expert from that domain, an expert in this other domain, I can help them kind of talk to each other and be a bit of a translator, a different domain expertise. And I, find that to be my contribution is like, I can bring those dots together and try to make something bigger happen of the whole. Because that generalization, you know, connecting energy is also very valuable. Otherwise you have a whole bunch of silos and lots of knowledge, but those things need to come together. Like all of the interesting innovations in our world, all the interesting, challenges in our world, all the interesting art in the world, all is the product of collaboration, but collaboration is, uh, I don't think something that just emerges because you put people in a room and it requires a lot of effort. careful stewardship because people are, we're just giant balls of ego. We have so much anxiety, insecurity, self esteem issues. We have our personal traumas and baggage that we bring. And like, we don't talk about any of that in our work. So it's, it requires a lot of, um, uh, Interpersonal ability, a lot of like analytical ability, a lot of capacity to hold these things and bring them together and problem solving ways that connect those things. So for me, at least the more that my interests diverge and go further and further in new directions, the more I feel like I've been able to be more valuable to everything that I do, because I have more domain knowledge to draw from. and I do it in a way that I, I think I try to respect the limits of that, like, claim to be, uh, an expert in something where I only have a passing knowledge of it. Um, because that's somebody else's job to be that, to be the representative of like, I know this thing very, very, very deeply. Um, but, if the world was just that, I think, I mean, it's one of the things I think wrong with, I just learned. This from a podcast, uh, there was a healthcare practitioner talking, a doc, doctor, I think, was talking about how the doc, the medical profession has become too specialized and there's not enough doctors whose job it is to connect the dots between specialists. And I'm like, yeah, I feel that like I dealing with a health thing right now, where I'm going back and forth between two doctors who for years have never spoken to each other. And I'm like, maybe you should just talk to each other instead of me being the mediator who has no knowledge whatsoever about medical, uh, you know, understandings. Um, maybe there should be someone whose role it is to like be a little bit less specialized. So there's, I think, I think there's a value to be had in, in not being hyper focused and there's a value to be had in being hyper focused, but you got to kind of commit to that. Like, if that's going to be your, your jam, Then own it and then be a very, very good dot connector. Be very, very good at, uh, curiosity and learning about things and, you know, bringing together different domains. That's so great. Um, yeah, there's in between the dots, we need stewarding that and facilitating much for sharing. Always, if people were to connect with you and, or they want to, connect with the site and learn more about how they can use that, uh, where can they find you and where can they find a Yeah, they can find Cy at Cy. cx, unfortunately, because we've passed tax season and it was a very, very busy tax season for us. We've closed sign ups for now and, uh, we're kind of figuring out our next steps with the platform for next year. But, uh, you can sign up for our newsletter there, at least. You'll find out what what happens next with that platform when when we're ready. Um, you can follow me by finding me at a waste dot C. A. Uh, and, Google me and find my my Twitter linked in that mostly post on linked in much more than on any kind of public platform. So if you're interested. If folks want to find me there and follow me there, then that would be the best way. Excellent. I will make sure that those links goes into the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your perspective in your story. My pleasure, Betty. It was great chatting with you and thank you so much for the space. Awesome. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode on the Everyday Talent Podcast. This is the go to podcast for the most candid takes on all things creative career related. If you like what you heard today, be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and or whatever platform you listen to podcasts. I also encourage you to share this episode with a creative friend. That will go a long way in helping us to support more creatives and make them feel seen. And if you're looking for more content, subscribe to my e newsletter Passionate Enough, where I share insights on how we can give ourselves permission to set up a career so that we are just passionate enough in what we do, make our art, and work to live rather than live to work. 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