R. Eric Thomas is a creative powerhouse. First, he’s masterful on stage not only as a storyteller, but also as the long running host of The Moth StorySlams in Philadelphia. Second, he writes for every possible medium — he’s a television writer for shows airing on Apple TV and FX; an award-winning playwright; and the author of several books, including the national bestsellers Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America and his latest book, Congratulations, The Best is Over! Many people first learned about Eric from his daily humor column on Elle.com “Eric Reads the News.” And as of July 1, he’s writing the nationally syndicated advice column “Asking Eric.” Here's the thing: Eric’s incredible career journey started with a Facebook post that went viral. But he's no overnight success. He was able to capitalize on that opportunity because he’d been preparing for years.
R. Eric Thomas is a creative powerhouse. First, he’s masterful on stage not only as a storyteller, but also as the long running host of The Moth StorySlams in Philadelphia. Second, he writes for every possible medium — he’s a television writer for shows airing on Apple TV and FX; an award-winning playwright; and the author of several books, including the national bestsellers Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America and his latest book, Congratulations, The Best is Over!
Many people first learned about Eric from his daily humor column on Elle.com “Eric Reads the News.” And as of July 1, he’s writing the nationally syndicated advice column “Asking Eric.”
Here's the thing: Eric’s incredible career journey started with a Facebook post that went viral. But he's no overnight success. He was able to capitalize on that opportunity because he’d been preparing for years.
Takeaways
Resources
Learn more about Eric's work including his new advice column "Asking Eric," here.
Check out The Moth and maybe tell a story!
View Eric's Creative Mornings Philadelphia talk (you can see the Facebook post!)
I'm R. Eric Thomas. I'm a writer and this is No Time to Be Timid.
Hey there, I'm Trisha Rose Burt and I want to ask you some questions. What creative work are you called to do but are too afraid to try? Is there a change you want to see happen in your community but you're waiting for someone else to step up and do it? Is fear of failure preventing you from starting new things that will make a difference to your life and to others. In this podcast, we look to artists to lead us and show us how they use creativity and courage to make changes in their lives and in the world. Pay close attention because this is no time to be timid.
Welcome to the last show of the season. Well, it's not really the last show because we're going to produce two bonus episodes after this one, but it's technically our last conversation for a bit with an artist who's bursting with creativity and courage. My guest, R. Eric Thomas, is a creative powerhouse. A few years ago, I saw him in action at a Moth corporate gig. I was telling a story. He was hosting the show and Eric is the long -running host of the Moth Story Slams in Philadelphia. So believe me, he is masterful on stage. And I said to myself, how do I become the person who is not always pointed at and yell and people yell gay at him? And I decided it was a problem with my masculinity. I just wasn't masculine enough. I had to be like more covert about being gay. I could be gay, but just sort of not like gay. Whatever that means. As I said, I was not quite where I needed to be yet as a person, but I was getting there. So I decided to do, I was like, well, what a masculine person, what would The Rock do? What would Vin Diesel do? And I decided to do the most masculine thing I could think of. I signed up to join the gay softball league in Philadelphia. I was like, this seems great. I was looking for wrestling, but they didn't have it.
But first and foremost, Eric calls himself a writer and he writes for every possible medium. He's a television writer writing for shows like Dickinson on Apple TV and Better Things on FX. He's an award winning playwright and he's the national bestselling author of the book Here for It or How to Save Your Soul in America. He also wrote Reclaiming Her Time, The Power of Maxine Waters with Helena Andrews Dyer, and his latest book, Congratulations, The Best is Over, was an instant USA Today bestseller. Many of you may know him from his column, Eric Reads the News, a daily humor column that he wrote for Elle .com that focused on pop culture and politics. And starting July 1st, he's writing the daily nationally syndicated advice column, Asking Eric and here's the thing, Eric's incredible career journey started with a Facebook post that went viral. In our conversation, Eric talks about how opportunities can come unexpectedly. So it's important to be prepared and ready to seize them. Something Eric knows about firsthand. Success usually comes from years of honing your craft. Perfection is rarely attainable, so grant yourself some grace. Libraries are places of endless discovery, no matter your age. And creativity is what brings us hope. Eric is the perfect person to close our season and launches into our creative work. And listen, if you haven't downloaded your No Time to Be Timid manifesto yet, go to my website, trisharoseburt.com/manifesto and download yours now. Okay, on to the conversation.
Hey Eric, thank you so much for joining the show. thank you for having me. It's been so long. It has been five years, five years ago in this month when we showed the moth stage. Yeah, yeah, incredible. And so what you've been hosting the moth for how long now? July is going to be my 10 year anniversary of hosting the moth. And you just did the moth ball though? I just did the moth ball. It was my second moth ball hosting and third time going to the Mothball, which I just love because it's a glamorous New York gala with storytellers and famous people. And it's very intimidating for me. It's a little bit of a hard gig because it's a gala. And so there's like, you got to hit your beats. And I run a, you know, I like to just like do a hangout show when I host and just like chit chatting. So when I'm like on a schedule that is tied to raising funds. I get stressed. Well, this is one thing I want to ask you because you excel on the page and you excel on the stage. Is there one that you prefer? I think I prefer the page. I am never more comfortable than I am in front of a microphone. It's truly the happiest place for me. People ask me a lot of times after they see me host the moth, do you do stand up? And I think I have that presence and that cadence when I'm in front of an audience, but I don't do stand up and I won't do stand up. I've done it like three or four times in my life. It doesn't feel good to me. And one of my first jobs was waiting tables in a comedy club in Baltimore. And so we would see all the big people come through, Louis Black, who was very kind, Pablo Francisco. You know, just everybody. Dave Chappelle, Dave Attell, other people with rhyming names. And, you know, different show every night, some of them exactly the same show every night. I learned a lot watching them. And I also learned that like, there is something psychologically about an audience that comes in and it's like, make me laugh. That breaks, like it breaks my whatever magic I have. Even though now I have built a career out of largely writing comedic things and so, but my brain, I actually haven't even really put that together now. It may ruin everything. But I think to myself like, it's okay if I don't open with a joke. Yeah, yeah. You know, we're both storytellers. Storytelling audiences are the nicest people in the world. Yeah, very much so. Because they're rooting for you. It's not like, okay, I paid a bunch of money, make me laugh. Just, it's a very different vibe. It's a very different vibe. It really is. Yeah. And I respect both. I love going to stand -up comedy shows and I love going to storytelling shows. And I love the vibe giving me permission to surprise you. Yeah. Yeah. With either humor or with vulnerability or both. Yeah. Yeah. So I was looking at all these wonderful, you know, kind of swimming around in your world and I came across the talk you gave for Creative Mornings Philadelphia that's a great one which I love. Tell the story of the Facebook posts that you made that sort of kicked you into gear. So I believe it was the weekend of July 4th, 2016. I'm like lying in bed scrolling through Facebook. I was a big active Facebook user at that point. And I had, you know, I had a pretty big following on Facebook. A lot of people who I didn't know would follow me because I would post, you know, funny little asides and commentary, little stories from my day. And I come across this photo of President Barack Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto from Mexico, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from Canada. And they're at, I think, the G8 or something like that. And they're walking down this red carpet together and they're all in these sharply cut suits, and it looks like a movie poster. And this is an era, you know, like this is many years ago in a very different political climate, but this was an era where it was like, we have attractive politicians. How fascinating, how fun, how unproblematic, you know, which I don't think for some people it did not feel like that then, and it doesn't feel like that in retrospect. But in any case, I wrote this long Facebook post about this photo. I was just like, I've never seen
a more amazing photo. This is like Tom Ford presents the Avengers. This is like an all male Sex and the City. On and on and on. And it went super viral. Something like 75 ,000 likes, which was more than I'd ever gotten at that point. Shares all over the place. And so continues to go viral across the weekend. So much so that BuzzFeed, which was much more active at that point.
wrote an article that was like, internet user posts hilarious caption to a photo of Barack Obama, you know, that way, that SEO friendly way. And I was like, great, I'm an internet user. I I'm on buzzfeed. Like they didn't, I think they maybe mentioned me once, but they did not reach out to me or anything like that, which was fine. But who did reach out to me was an editor at Elle Magazine named Leah Chernyakov. She's like, send me a message on Facebook Messenger. And I think it even went to like requests or something. And I like found it. And she was like, you know, this is hilarious. Would you want to do this every day? And I was like, what do you mean? And she's like, we're looking for a voice to like write a column in Elle. And so after that weekend, after the July 4th weekend, I started writing a daily column in Elle magazine, online, Elle.com and I was like, what am I doing? And also I was like, sure, whatever, this is fun. Because you had another job, right? Yeah. I was working full time as the assistant to the director of the department of dance at the university of the arts. And I just, I, you know, I was busy. I had work. And so I would get up in the morning and I would like figure out what I needed to write about. And I would write for an hour or two. And then I go to work. And then I got laid off in January of that year. I got married. So, you know, over the course of the next couple of months, I got married. The column kept going viral to the point where, like, I was like, this is a real thing. The election happened. I thought I was going to spend four years writing jokes about Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton, and that turned out not to be true. Representative Maxine Waters became a real household name because of her response to the election and so much so that I called her in one of the columns, I wrote that she was kind of like that auntie who always has like the tea on everybody and wants you to sit by them at family reunions. And that's the reason that the Auntie Maxine moniker came about and she adopted it. She was, at first I was like, I don't know. Hopefully this is okay with her. She invited me to do a rally with her in DC and it was called like Auntie Maxine's Tax Day Rally. my gosh. And it was me and another writer. And I was like, what am I doing here? And this all came from a Facebook post. So yeah, a little wild. But here's what I liked about what you were saying about the Facebook post, because it sounds like, overnight you got attention. Yeah. When in fact. Yeah. In your words, you'd been doing this, I love you had a line that said I'd been writing unsuccessful comedy for years. But that you had indeed been practicing your craft for a very long time. Well, that's the thing. The grind of a daily humor column about politics and pop culture was not specifically something that I knew how to do, but I had been writing daily on Facebook as you know, I had been, I had had a number of generally ignored blogs that occasionally, you know, the first few times I went viral, it was for blog posts. I have been hosting them the moth at that point for probably like five, six years. I had a relationship with comedic writing. I had a relationship with gauging an audience's reaction. I also had a relationship with the internet at a point when the internet was a little bit more up for grabs. If you had said, hey, apply for this job. I would never have, I wouldn't have applied. I was at that point quite underemployed, you know, like in terms of like my skills. And yet still managed to not make the cut for the layoffs. So whatever. But it was for the best because I didn't know quite what job I was preparing myself for, but I did know that I was following something that felt...
aligned with my gifts and my interests. But a lot of times, that doesn't mean money, that doesn't mean success, that just means that you are doing what you love. But one of the things I said in the Creative Mornings talk is that it's sort of like carrying an umbrella around, you know, because you don't know that it's gonna rain, but like, when it does rain, you wanna be prepared, because otherwise, you don't get to give that do over. And especially for creative careers, I think it's really important to always be ready. I was just having a conversation. I have a creative coach because everything is better if I have a creative coach and sort of talk through some things with him. And it's just becoming clear to me how all this work I did for fidelity investments a million years ago, billing my time in 15 minute increments is now playing out in some creative projects that I'm doing now. Like you just, you don't know that at the time you're actually, you know, preparing the soil or whatever metaphor we want to use for where you're headed. I loved what you said that while you were, you know, preparing and writing and doing everything you can, that this editor of Elle.com was also sort of looking and she had her vision and and like these two things were happening at the same time to sort of come together Yeah, that was really interesting. She was you know, she had said that she her vision for the site was to make it kind of a a brunch conversation where you have a little bit of politics and a little bit of fashion and pop culture and then you know something that felt chatty and voicy and Infused humor and I think that was so smart of her, I think she really read the industry correctly in that moment. And I love the idea that she was just like, all right, well, I, this is what I want. Let me figure out who can do this for me. And then she Facebook message a random person, you know, and it wasn't, I think, I'm sure I had a website at that point, but maybe I didn't actually like, you know, I'm Google -able at that point, but in a way that's like nothing says
this guy is ready for the New York -based internet verticals of the big name publishing companies. And it was a risk. It was a risk for her. It was a risk for me. But it really worked out. And it led to everything else in my career. The column led to me getting an agent. The agent led to me releasing my first book, which was a best seller. The column also led to, got me attention from television producers who were interested in, you know, my voice for TV and film. And I've since written for four different shows, two of which made it to the air. And everything came from that little Facebook post. It's kind of terrifying to me when I tell this story because it's like, what if it didn't happen? You know, like, it all goes, it's almost like I could wake up tomorrow and it all goes away. And I know that that doesn't mean I don't have the ability, but so much of this process has been iterative and so much of this process has been preparing and then walking through a door that you're like, Whoa, actually, okay. I'm this is, this is a growth edge for me. and, and then, and then growing into that space and then preparing for something that you don't know is coming next. And I'm now at a point in my caree where I am trying to prepare even more consciously. And that's been a little bit challenging. Just because it is sometimes easier just to do the thing you love and try and be good at it than it is to say like, hey, that's my goal, that star. I'm gonna get there and I'm gonna train like Rocky. It looks easy when Rocky does it, but let me tell you what, not so easy. I'm not. I can't get those raw eggs. That's the problem. And so I'll never be a success.
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Our first tenet of the No Time to Be Timid Manifesto is the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe. You just keep upping your game and upping your game and it opens a door and you walk through it. And I mean, and that's, that's what we do. I think now the further we get in our careers too is you just get more strategic, I guess is, you know, you just get more strategic and, and you, you know, you get more confidence as you go along. You made a comment one time that you start letting yourself do things imperfectly. What's your relationship with perfection now?
Oof. Yeah, I know, I talk a good game. No, I try to grant myself a lot of grace. I want to turn in the perfect first draft every time. And I also understand that rarely happens. It's interesting though, I work in multiple fields, newspapers and magazines, and then like TV film and books. In TV, film and books, there's so much revision, so many thoughts and hands are going into the manuscript before it gets to the public. With newspapers, especially with online, there are still hands and thoughts that go into it, but the speed is much quicker. And so it is the path from an idea is in my head to it's in front of people's eyes is sometimes very quick and that can be very dangerous. Like give me how much is very quick? Like two hours? Yeah, for Elle, it was, I'd write something, send it to my editor. They edit it in 10, 15 minutes, depending on, sometimes it was like, this just happened, we need to get it up. So I could write something, I get an idea to write something like about a tweet or something and it would be up within an hour.
Yeah, yeah, like sometimes you're doing award show commentary and you're doing like a 300, 400 word post about whatever, someone's gown or a speech, a viral speech moment and it's up, you want to be up like 10 minutes after it happened, tops. You write all the time. I don't know how you're eating because you write all the time. Is it whiplash to go from that different speed? Does it, do you set aside time? Like, do you go on a residency and write your play? What's your creative process like? You've got so many things going at one time. It's truly just like a matter of competing deadlines. Like, when I was writing the column for Elle, I knew that every day my primary task was to get that column out the door. And so sometimes it would, I would figure it out by 11 am have it written, and I'm like, great, now I can like, I can work on something else, you know? And then sometimes it would take to four or five o 'clock until I like found something to write about and got it together. And so then the whole day is essentially shot. Well, it's work. I was working all day, you know, but I haven't had a chance to like work on other things. Now it is less chaotic in that I do try to organize my days around blocks and assign those blocks to things that are due next. But also giving myself, and this is the thing I'm working on now, giving myself time to be like, this block is for reading this book that you need to read to think about for your play. That's the thing that I don't ever let myself have time for. I mean, yeah, I know there's just so much time when it's like, can you book yourself the time to be able to read that book? To read a book Eric, I mean to read a book. Yeah. And like, you know, it, and part of it's like, like for the job and part of it's for pleasure. And it's, it, it feels, I don't know how the tank gets filled up for everybody else. because I, I feel like, you know, I'm very sort of active. I, I go, you know, I go out to see plays and film and, You know, I do, I feel like I do read a fair amount and I still feel like the tank is just always a little bit empty. And I don't know what to do about that because there's also the financial imperative. Like I gotta make money. You know? I'm familiar with that one. Right, right. It's a weird concept. I'm trying it out. Okay. So talk to me about Ask Eric. Yeah. So,
It's a new advice column asking Eric is going to be in 120, well, I don't know the exact number, but it'll be in a number, a large number of newspapers nationwide starting July 1st. Ask Amy was an advice column that ran for 20 years. Amy Dickinson is retiring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, and before that, she took over for Ann Landers. For Ann Landers, right. So there is...
So when I explain to people, you know, like, and like, again, there's no replacing, I'm not replacing Amy and Amy didn't replace Ann, but there is a sort of baton passing. So the baton started with Ann Landers and landed somehow on my desk. I just love it. It's so fantastic. It's really thrilling to me. And it's so funny because when I was, so this is another, this is another umbrella thing. Two years ago, I was reached out to by Slate who they have an advice column called dear prudence. The writer of that advice column was going on to parental leave and they were looking for somebody to cover. I think about, I don't, I can't recall how much time to two months maybe. So they had me audition. I'm sure they had other people audition, you know, I wrote a couple of sample columns and, and then I got it and I did it and I learned a lot on the job. And I got a lot of feedback because the thing about advice columns, and maybe this is true of everything that's in the newspaper or whatnot, people get very upset with you when they don't agree with what you say. And they'll tell you about it. And that's fine. It is a different relationship that I'm used to. And I think that there is, sometimes advice columns have this kind of finger wagging position that I think maybe encourages people to wag their finger back at you. And my position is always, we're not gonna yell at each other. So anyway, two years go by, I think to myself, I would love to keep writing advice. That was really fun. I wanted to do it as an offshoot of my newsletter that I send out every week, but I couldn't quite figure out whether there was enough interest in my core readership of the newsletter and how to do it in a way that wasn't like, I have relationships with a lot of people who read my newsletter. There's thousands of people who read it, but like, you know, there's people who write in fairly frequently or comment. And so like, I would feel a little bit hesitant to send in some advice questions to somebody who could be like, this is you, right? So, you know, and like, but I have done it. I've done it to a friend of mine, JP Brammer writes in advice column. I wrote to him with a question. You just sort of have to like, put your trust in the Pact of Anonymity. The Tribune content agency reached out to me maybe four or five months ago, and I didn't know what I was auditioning for. They were like, we wanted to talk to you about writing for us. And I was like. Really? It was that vague? Yeah, it may have been advice. I think the initial email, I don't believe said advice. I think the initial email was like. Hey, are you interested in writing for us? But I got back to them and I was like, sure, yeah, I'll audition for whatever this is. And so I started writing some advice and they gave me some edits and I did it again. And then I had a couple of interviews and then they finally were like, they were like, we can tell you what this is now. And I was like, what do you mean? wow. Cause you just don't. Again, this is not a job I would have applied for. Because you think, well, they're not gonna want me. But it was a job that I had been preparing for for years, sort of unknowingly, but also with the intention. This isn't something that I was like, sure, I'll do that, whatever. I want to do it. I had wanted to do it on my own and I couldn't figure out the logistics.
You know, one of the other things I'm very interested in podcasting. I'm very lazy. I don't want to do it. but I have an idea for a podcast that I just keep coming back to as a sort of like little Zen garden. And I think that there's a part of what I'm doing. I don't know how, but I think that I'm preparing myself in some way. Now I don't know. I don't know what it looks like. Maybe never, maybe it's, maybe it's, I think it's a podcast and it actually turns into it's actually something else. I don't know. But I'm excited to find out what it is when I'm ready for it. But I just have to keep being ready and saying yes, I think, you know, but also saying yes judiciously, I struggle with that word, because you say yes to many things and then you're overextended and then you're unhappy. I mean, this is the recurring theme with you is just the readiness, you know? And I think for all of my listeners out there, you know, like when you're going, why am I doing this? And you can't really understand why you're doing it, but you know you want to do it, but nobody's asking you to do it, but you're still doing it anyway. It's like, because there's a reason why you're just getting yourself ready for whatever that thing is. I know you have a love affair with libraries and I would just love for you to talk a little bit about why you love libraries so much.
So when I was little, my mother would take me to the public library and we would borrow the maximum number of books that you're allowed. I think it was 30 books. And then, which felt like I was winning the lottery or the showcase showdown. And I would insist that we would read them all every night. So, and apparently my mother would read me like 30 books a night, you know, when I was like two, three years old which is just an incredible amount of dedication and energy. And so my mother, my parents, both created in me a love of reading and a love of books. And the library seemed to me to be a place of endless discovery. And as I got older, it was also a place of real freedom. I got to spend a lot of time after school in the library and it was a social space. It was a...It was a study space. It was a sanctuary. It was also a place where I could establish my own sense of taste. That extraordinary thing when you're like 13 years old and you're like, I have opinions about music. And pre -internet, I didn't have any money. So I couldn't go to the record store. But I could go to the library. Libraries have provided opportunity and hope and possibility for me at every stage of my life. And I think there's such extraordinarily dynamic spaces. I also love that there is, libraries were the first place that I was able to sort of like consider the idea of coming out and sort of think, what would it mean if I like was gay? Has there ever been anyone else who has been gay before? And in my life, I didn't know anyone.
You know? And so, but in a library, you can sort of ask that question and get that answer in a way that is safe and age appropriate. And that was, that was extraordinary for me. Yeah, that's really lovely. But one of the things that is so wonderful about your work and is so needed now is there is humor in it, but there is so much empathy and so much hope. Talk about
hope and the lifting up. It feels like you want to lift us up in the work that you're doing. And right now it's, you know, it's tricky. And so I'm hungry for artists and writers like you who are saying, it's tricky out there and here's the hope part of it all. Talk a little bit about what you feel like your responsibility is almost right now. Yeah, I think that I have always found writing and reading to be my lifelines out of some of my darkest moments. And I think of my space in life as directly related to the hope that creativity can engender in you, like in me as well. And like in the sense that like if we're not here to make something, whether it's artistic, whether it's family, whether it's
Whatever it is. If we're not here to create something that wasn't here before, then what are we here for? Are we only here for destruction? Are we only here for just to like be here? That to me is hopeless. And I have fought too hard to continue to be alive to not have hope. If I don't think that tomorrow there is some glimmer of something that I look forward to, then I don't really know why I got out of bed today. And I take that very seriously. And I don't think that hope is exclusively the domain of situations that feel stable or people who feel like they have all their ducks in order or only the good days. I think that hope exists probably most strongly. Well, maybe not most strongly, but it exists really strongly on the bad days. Because you go to bed and say tomorrow, tomorrow will be tomorrow. And I think the hope is that tomorrow will be better. But also the hope is that tomorrow will exist at all. And I don't take that lightly. So yeah, it's interesting because there have been times where it has has question has been like, are you, is your hope hope brand? And I'm like, I don't know. You know, like I can't. I can't sell you on it. I can't do a workshop on hope. Well, no. But I think, I'm not trying to close any income streams off, but I wouldn't. Always hustling. You're always hustling. In the midst of spreading the hope, we are also doing a little hustle. I'm with you. Yeah. But no, I'm not trying, I can't sell you hope.
And I've read and seen a lot of people who were like, I can, I can sell you hope. And I'm like, okay, well good for you. But I just want to be here in the hope with you because that for me helps me to feel hopeful. And it also is a sense that gives me a sense of community. Yeah. You know, I, I, we share a similar mission and you know, and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the podcast is what we're trying to do here is just put some beauty out there in the world. Right now, let's put some beauty out there, share artist stories who are making work that is movement is all forward, you know? And so that we can go, okay, all right, let's keep doing this. You know, let's keep doing this. Okay, so the name of this podcast is No Time to Be Timid. So I'm gonna ask you a question, then I ask all of my guests, which is, where do you need courage right now?
I think that I need courage in my authenticity, in showing up fully as myself. That is something that I've been working on in therapy a lot. That is something that I have a lot of questions around, considering that a lot of what I do is aversion of myself. And sometimes you don't need to be your full, the whole Kit and Kaboodle in everything. But where can I be the whole Kit and Kaboodle? Where can I give myself and others the gift of being fully myself? I think that sometimes it takes courage to be a lot. I think that sometimes we need to be a lot. We need to be everything that we are. And I think that can be a gift to people, even if it doesn't feel like it to us. We're just so glad you've been on the show, Eric. It was such a treat to have you here. Thank you. It was such a delight. Best of luck in everything you're doing moving forward. Thank you. Thanks.
What a gift Eric is to all of us. I'm just so tickled he was on the show, particularly since he's got so much on his creative plate with his column, Asking Eric, just launching. And like all of my guests, he made me think of some questions to ask. First, what are you doing to make sure you're ready if an unexpected opportunity comes along? Are you honing your craft as part of your preparation? Second, where do you go to get your questions answered? Follow Eric's lead and use the library. Read books. And last, are you creating something that wasn't here before? If you're paying any attention at all, you know that this world needs some hope. And using your creativity can engender hope in all of us. You can learn more about Eric and his work at rerictthomas .com. That's the letter R, erictthomas.com. And you can follow him on Instagram at reric. And that's O -U -R -E -R -I -C and make sure to check out his new advice column, Asking Eric.
If you're listening to this podcast, it's because you care about creativity and courage too. And believe like I do that this is no time to be timid. This year, I'm taking the no time to be timid message on the road and maybe you're part of the world needs to hear it. If you're looking to awaken boldness and creativity in your company or organization, I'd love to come speak to you. Let's have a conversation. Please reach out to me at booking@triciaroseburt.com
In this episode, Eric talked about creativity and hope. And in our next bonus episode, we'll be talking about creativity and kindness. I'll be telling a story about my husband's life -threatening hang gliding accident four years ago, which he miraculously survived, and the lessons it taught me about how to navigate this world. If you know my work, you know I usually tell small moment stories, so this is a big departure for me. And I've never told this story in front of an audience before.
But I've been telling you not to be timid all season long, so I figured I needed to follow my own advice and debut it on the show. So please join us, and I'd love your feedback on this story or just about the show in general. You can reach out to me at podcast@trisharoseburt .com anytime.
No Time to Be Timid is written and produced by me, Trisha Rose Burt. Our episodes are produced and scored by Adam Arnone of Echo Finch. And our theme music is Twist and Turns by the Paul Dunley Group. If you like what you hear, please spread the word, subscribe to the show and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. No Time to Be Timid is a presentation of I Will Be Good Productions.