Being creative can feel exhilarating—but it can also be frustrating, lonely, and downright exhausting. Sometimes the thing you care most about creating feels impossible to make. Sometimes you wonder whether anyone is listening. And sometimes the hardest part is continuing to create when the work isn't being recognized, appreciated, or even understood.

In this episode of The Golden Table, Jacob Chastain gets honest about the struggle of finding a creative outlet, trusting the creative process when it feels broken, and pushing through the resistance that inevitably comes with making something that matters. Drawing on Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, he explores the invisible forces that keep creative people from doing their best work—and why resistance might actually be evidence that the work is worth doing.

Because not every creative idea will be heard. Not every creative person will be appreciated. And not every piece of work will immediately find its audience.

But that doesn't mean you should stop creating.

Gather around the table for a conversation about creativity, resistance, frustration, and the courage to keep making the thing only you can make.

Support the show on Patreon for $1 and get bonus "after hours" podcasts to supplement the weekly podcast. Click here to join the table.

The book was supposed to be dead by now.

Kindle. Nook. iPad. E-books. Amazon. The collapse of Borders.

Around 2010, the future seemed obvious: physical books were disappearing, bookstores were doomed, and digital reading was going to replace print.

Except it didn't.

E-books won a place at the table. Audiobooks won a place at the table. And somehow, the physical book stayed.

So what happened?

And more importantly: what does that tell us about the future of education?

Today we're making many of the same predictions about schools. Online learning. Digital classrooms. AI. Virtual education. The idea that technology can make the traditional school obsolete.

But maybe we've confused replacing a tool with replacing the thing the tool was built to serve.

The Kindle didn't kill the book because a book was never just information printed on paper.

And maybe technology won't kill school because school was never just information delivered by a teacher.

This week on The Golden Table, we're talking about the death of the book that never happened—and what its survival might teach us about technology, education, teachers, classrooms, and what school is actually for.

Is it really a teacher's job to engage a student who has decided education has no value?

We start with a clip from last week's episode and a question that probably makes some educators uncomfortable: Where does a teacher's responsibility for student engagement actually end?

Then we take the conversation somewhere bigger: growth requires risk.

We say we want to grow, but how often do we keep consuming the same things, choosing the familiar, and staying comfortably inside what we already know?

That matters in education. It matters in our careers. And it matters in our lives.

Sometimes growth means trying something you might hate, failing at something you might love, or simply stepping outside the world you've built for yourself.

This week at the Golden Table: engagement, risk, boredom, education, and the danger of consuming the same old thing.

Pull up a chair.