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This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

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In this episode, we’re joined by education entrepreneur and writer Michael Simmons to explore a radically different way of thinking about work, learning, and growth.

We start with a deceptively simple question: What if making a living didn’t have to feel miserable? From there, the conversation opens into practical and philosophical territory. We talk about how many people you actually need to support a sustainable life, why fractional work and contracting are often safer than they look, and how entrepreneurship can offer more freedom than traditional employment if you approach it creatively.

Michael shares his own journey through ambition, burnout, and reinvention, including building a seven-figure education company in his twenties, and burning out because he didn’t enjoy the day-to-day work required to sustain it. That experience led to a major shift: choosing curiosity and energy as filters for what he works on, rather than goals alone. When he began writing only what he was genuinely excited about, everything changed—traction, resonance, and sustainability followed.

From there, we dig into deeper ideas about learning and expertise. We talk about why it’s no longer possible, or desirable, to know everything, and why the future belongs to people who understand distributed responsibility: recognizing both the keys you hold and the locks you don’t. Rather than idolizing lone experts or pretending everyone has all the answers, real progress happens when people bring their specific knowledge together.

The conversation moves fluidly between AI, intuition, education, and systems thinking, touching on why the things that feel like “cheating” are often your greatest strengths, how we add by subtraction as we mature, and why so many people are over-armored for battles they’re no longer fighting.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by how much there is to know, pressured to optimize yourself into exhaustion, or stuck believing work has to be hard to be valuable, this episode offers a generous reframe: you don’t need all the answers—you just need to know which ones are yours.

Here are 5 grounded, actionable takeaways from the conversation with Michael Simmons, written to land clearly at the end of the episode:

* Design your income around fewer people, not more. You don’t need thousands of customers to build a sustainable life. Explore models like fractional work, contracting, or high-trust relationships where a small number of people pay for deep value.

* Let curiosity be a filter, not a reward. If you consistently dread the daily actions required by your goals, something is misaligned. Prioritize work you’re genuinely curious about and energized by—momentum follows engagement.

* Trust the things that feel like “cheating.” The actions that feel easiest to you are often your highest leverage skills. If they work, double down instead of abandoning them for something harder.

* Stop trying to know everything and build relational intelligence instead. Expertise now lives in networks, not individuals. Focus on knowing what you know, knowing what you don’t, and knowing who to turn to when you need the missing pieces.

* Add by subtraction as you mature. Regularly audit the armor you’re still carrying from earlier seasons of your life or business. Keep what protects you now and consciously shed what no longer serves you.

* Listen on the app of your choice

This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In this conversation, we’re joined by artist and writer Elin Petronella from Follow Your Gut to talk about intuition, energy, and what it really takes to build a joyful creative life over the long term.

Elin shares what it looks like to stay in business as an artist for more than a decade, across countries, life seasons, motherhood, burnout, and reinvention, without forcing herself into rigid systems that slowly drain the joy out of the work. At the center of the conversation is the idea that if you want to keep creating, you have to become ruthless about what works for you and what doesn’t.

We talk about why creators often cling to strategies that are hard but ineffective, while abandoning the things that feel easy and work. We unpack return on energy investment, how to balance “guaranteed” work with space for delusional experiments, and why knowing when something isn’t likely to work is just as important as optimism.

The conversation also explores shame around slowing down, pivoting, disappearing, or changing direction, and how external expectations can quietly push artists into building golden cages of their own design. Elin reflects on learning to trust her intuition again after burnout, recognizing when misalignment shows up as over-explaining, and why creating, privately or publicly, is often the fastest way back to clarity.

We dive into ecosystems, creative operating systems, and why some paths look chaotic from the outside but make perfect sense internally. We talk about building your own arbitrage instead of chasing trends, why originality isn’t something you find but something that emerges over time, and how everything you make eventually connects, even if it only makes sense in hindsight.

If you’re an artist or creator wrestling with consistency, visibility, pivots, or the fear that stepping off the hamster wheel will make everything collapse, this episode is a powerful reminder that alignment isn’t indulgent, it’s how you stay in the game.

Here are 5 clear, grounded, actionable takeaways that match the tone and substance of the conversation with Elin Petronella:

* Get ruthless about return on energy, not just money. Regularly name which activities drain you and which ones give energy back, even if they aren’t immediately profitable. Long-term sustainability depends on keeping energy-generating work in the mix.

* Balance guaranteed work with delusional experiments. Make sure part of your workload reliably pays the bills, then intentionally reserve space to try things that might not work. Creativity dies when either side crowds out the other.

* Treat over-explaining as a misalignment signal. If you find yourself constantly justifying a pivot or decision, pause. That urge often means you’re acting from conditioning instead of intuition.

* Stop forcing consistency across seasons. You’re allowed to disappear, slow down, or change mediums as your life changes. What looks chaotic from the outside often creates coherence over time.

* Keep creating, even when it’s private. Creation is how you stay connected to your intuition. If you stop making things altogether, clarity gets harder, not easier, to find.

* Listen on the app of your choice

This episode is part of the January Joy(ful) Growth Club with Russell and Claire program I’m running with Claire Venus ✨. Join and get access to special challenge and interviews all month.

Join by clicking here.

In this conversation, we’re joined by artist and illustrator Adam Ming from Ten Minute Artist to talk about what it actually means to build a creative life that fits how you work, not how you think you should work.

Together, we explore the quiet tension many artists feel between joy, sustainability, growth, and why forcing yourself into someone else’s model is often the fastest path to burnout.

Using Adam’s experience as a working illustrator and creator, we unpack the myth that artists are fundamentally “different” from everyone else, and how that belief can quietly keep people stuck. Making art is creative, but sharing it, selling it, and building a life around it is still entrepreneurship. Once you radically accept that, everything gets clearer.

We talk through ideas like:

* why ease is often mistaken for cheating,

* how identifying your personal “magic trick” can stabilize both income and energy,

* the difference between how you operate day-to-day and how you actually grow,

* and why repeating what works isn’t selling out, it’s refinement.

The conversation also dives into scale paths, ecosystems, positive feedback loops, and why copying someone else’s strategy almost never works unless you share their temperament, constraints, and incentives. Growth isn’t about doing everything—it’s about doing the right few things, consistently, in a way that nourishes you.

If you’re an artist, writer, or creator who feels like you’re working hard but still swimming upstream, this episode offers a grounded reframe: build the way you’re built and let joy do the heavy lifting.

Here are 5 clear, actionable takeaways tailored to this conversation and suitable to drop at the end of the episode:

* Identify your “magic trick” and keep using it. Pay attention to the thing that consistently works for you—the action that feels easier and produces results. Don’t abandon it just because it feels repetitive or unglamorous.

* Separate how you operate from how you grow. How you like to work day-to-day isn’t always the same as how your work spreads. Figure out both, then design your strategy around that intersection.

* Stop copying people with different temperaments. If a strategy drains you, it’s probably not yours—even if it works for someone you admire. Growth models only work when they match your energy, constraints, and incentives.

* Cut the work that isn’t working. If something hasn’t produced a positive feedback loop after sustained effort, it’s not “discipline”—it’s drag. Let it go and reinvest that time into higher-leverage actions.

* Trust ease when it’s backed by results. Ease isn’t cheating. When something feels natural and moves the needle, that’s your signal to double down, not look for something harder.